I played with Apple’s Maps Places feature, as shown in the following video. It’s nice, but it’s not exactly intuitive. There are many missing features, like setting a path between places and adding photos to a place within the guide, from the Photos.app for example to name a few. Also, it’s not clear if a shared guide gets updated if new places are added, or places are removed.

I updated my toolset website today1 with three additions under consideration: Digest2, Lazy3 and Heptabase4. The statuses of my current projects were also updated. Thanks for paying a visit.

  1. Use the table of content at the top of the site to locate the right section. Convenient, heh? ↩︎

  2. To replace Mailbrew. ↩︎

  3. A super-charged “save-for-later” service. Could replace Omnivore or complement it. I put myself on their waiting list. ↩︎

  4. A hard-to-define service / apps for supporting research. Could complement Craft. Or not. Another subscription. Gush. ↩︎

One Podcast, Three Looks

From left to right: Overcast, Pocket Cast, Apple Podcast

I always subscribe to my own content distribution channels for quality control purposes 1. I’m using Overcast, Pocket Cast and Apple Podcast to display my latest podcast episode. In these screenshots, I selected the info button to display the episode details. I’m a paid subscriber of Pocket Cast. I prefer the Pocket Cast display, but it has a caching issue as it doesn’t get the latest podcast artwork, but the other two do2. Bold text is missing on Apple Podcast for some reason. The overcast look is… mildly ugly.

  1. This blog post looks like a mini-plug for my podcast. It is. ↩︎

  2. The artwork display issue is also present on the web version of the Pocket Cast player. ↩︎

On Dark Sky and Apple's Weather

A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece

The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app.

Great analysis of the now-defunct Dark Sky weather app. I’m a bit late on that one. I don’t remember using Dark Sky because I think it wasn’t working in Canada. I’m not sure about this. Once Apple took over and brought the redesigned weather app with iOS 16, we could visually feel the Dark Sky’s influence on it. But Apple being Apple, they dropped a few things here and there and made a few things their own. I tend to use Carrot Weather more, but recently, I deep-dived into Apple’s Weather, and frankly, they did a good job. Yet, there was something unique in Dark Sky that I don’t feel in Apple’s offerings. Is it too close to the Yahoo Weather look & feel? Maybe.

Learned Something New Today

Today, while reading this blog post, I found out that we could have a “popup” note inline in a blog post. I was curious and asked the author, who gladly responded with all the required information to do the same on my blog. A plugin is required, which I gladly installed in a snap1. This blog post is a test of that feature2. The day I learn something which in turn helps me improve one of my things, is a great day. 😊 I love this community so much! 🫶🏻

  1. You can find it here, on Gitbub. ↩︎

  2. Thanks to @dandycat for your help. ↩︎

Craft Docs vs CleanShot: two different apps in different categories and two philosophies of asking for user feedback. Craft is closed, and opaque while CleanShot is outgoing and openly asks for “what we should work on next”. I’m a subscriber of CleanShot Cloud, and yes, I want a few improvements. If only Craft would change their mind…

Pilot Episode #2 — Testing, Testing, Testing, 1-2-3

This is the second pilot episode of my brand-new podcast (“Thoughts & Tribulations of a compulsive creator”). I made many changes to the recording setup. I like the results. 😊 My support templates are ready (one in Screenflow, Things and Craft) for the first real episode that should be coming soon. One last note: I discovered yesterday that Microblog will automatically generate a transcript of each episode. This is so cool! 🤯