Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
-
After finding an old document in Notion where my text highlights from Matter were saved, I was curious about Matter, the reader-later service that I once used a while back before trying Omnivore. Their website still refers to “Twitter”, not “X”, their last post on their X account dates back to 2023. I cannot find a Mastodon account. KI can’t find a changelog either. Is this thing still alive?
-
Who's Right? Apple Intelligence or Grammarly
While working on the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter, I wanted to proofread and rewrite some text portions. I first started with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools then pasted the results into Craft. Grammarly instantly took the ball and verified the pasted text, highlighting everything wrong that needed some attention. Is Apple Writing Tools sloppy or Grammarly too picky? Writing in English is not an easy thing for me to do. And it’s not easy for generative AI either, apparently. From what I understand, Grammarly tries to be less wordy and is very iterative in its text proofing execution.
Here is the final tweaked version:
1️⃣ First and foremost, I want to extend my warmest wishes for a prosperous and fulfilling new year. I genuinely hope you find success and happiness in your professional and personal endeavors. 2️⃣ Secondly, this marks the inaugural edition of this newsletter for 2025, and I’ve decided to introduce a few changes. Firstly, I’ve decided to eliminate the summary at the beginning of each newsletter. This section provided an overview of the number of blog posts, photos, and other content I’ve shared since the previous edition. While I appreciate the interest in these statistics, I believe it’s unnecessary to brag about them, and it takes a significant amount of time to maintain and update this information. I’ve also officially decided to retire the podcasts section from my newsletter. While I enjoy podcasts, I don’t find them particularly relevant to my current content creation schedule, and I believe it’s not worth dedicating time and resources to them.
-
Where The Social Web Fails
Dislike buttons on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter, should come with a mandatory “here’s why I don’t like this” explanation text field. In this specific case, 2 people out of 18 didn’t like my video. Why? How can I improve myself if you don’t tell me what’s wrong? This is the part of social web that I feel doesn’t work.
-
How many people signed up for micro.one are coming from micro.blog? And why? Me by curiosity but I don’t want to take the place of someone else who is entirely new to micro.blog. Dilemma.
-
Any Final Cut Pro users here? What advice would you give to someone who knows about Screenflow for recording his YouTube videos but is looking for something more powerful… mostly doing screen recording with my face as a médaillon…
-
Something acting up since early morning on my Ghost hosted blog. Every few hours, I get a new registered subscriber to the free tier of my newsletter using a randomized name but a real user email address. 😕🤨
-
New Bluesky subscribers rush seems to be easing because I’m stuck at 153 followers for the last week!
-
In recent days I’ve been thinking and imagining what could be a useful and powerful WebClipper for Craft. I’ve built a shared document for that purpose. Have a look.
-
This is the last edition of the year of What’s Up with Micro.blog. I hope that you find it useful. cc @manton
-
I’ve been playing with iA Presenter 1.4 again this morning. I like what I’m seeing with the share presentation online feature (example here). Now, I have to wonder: what is my use case for this? I always come down to this question when trying new features, new apps or new services.
-
Why doesn’t the Arc Browser provide Kagi search as a default search engine option? 🤔
-
This weekend, I’m going to record and publish the next edition of the “What’s Up with Micro.blog” series. The last edition was shared last August. Don’t miss it!
-
Microsoft Teams for iPad is probably the buggiest app of all when used with an external display. So many weird UI behaviors. It might Apple’s fault, too.
-
Just bought Soulver 3 for iPad as a big fan of this app for the Mac. I cannot live without it on my iPad today while at work. Not cheap but so well done. I wish I couldd export a sheet into Excel with all the values and formulas transposed for me.
-
This post is for testing purposes only. Please ignore as I’m testing Ghost ActivityPub feature. If everything goes as advertised, I should see this post from the Ghost Admin page, under the ActivityPub section.
-
Look what we’ve got here. Can you tell what is happening here? 👀
-
I don’t know why I’m paying for Ivory, I’m not often on Mastodon, much more often here and on Bluesky.
-
I’m still exploring ways to monetize my experience with Craft. After creating The Craft Bible, now it’s Craft Support Call. I don’t expect much from this, but I’m curious to see how it goes if I ever get one request.
-
When writing, I start in Craft and then export to Ulysses for final review and online posting. It works great, but I’m not always satisfied with Ulysses, which sometimes feels overwhelming. Enter iA Writer, an app that I remember using in its early days and that I liked for its simplicity. This blog post from Greg Morris reminds me of the perpetual questioning of my decision to settle on Ulysses.
This morning, I decided to download a trial of iA Writer. The first thing I checked was which publishing platforms it supports. To my surprise, it supports all the ones I depend on: Ghost, Micro.blog, and, to a lesser extent, Medium.
This blog post was written on my 15-inch M2 MacBook Air using iA Writer trial edition. Sadly, iA Writer couldn’t post as draft, so I had to manually copy and paste the content into a blank post on Micro.blog.
My Ulysses subscription ends on March 25th, 2025, but this publishing bug is a deal-breaker for now. Back to Ulysses.
