Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
-
I initially thought Micro.one would be a suitable platform for my new French blog, but after spending the entire weekend experimenting with it, I’ve already realized that I miss two essential features from the full Micro.blog experience: personal notes and support for newsletters. 🤦🏻♂️
-
Here is a funny one: the Get Info box for an exported image from Apple Photos. The image was indeed touched up with Apple Intelligence’s Cleanup tool. 🤫
-
Ghost 6 to include ActivityPub, later this year. I can’t wait for that, and I’m even happier of having left WordPress last year for Ghost. There is still a lot of work to be done, for sure, but I’m patient for that one.
-
Idea of the day for @manton : what if people could submit a blog post for inclusion in the Discovery section? Users could be allowed to submit one per week or per month. The “moderator” could then decide to release it or not. If not, it could provide a reason to the original poster. Just an idea.
-
TikTok is a modern digital plague. Good riddance. To those who were depending solely on it, it’s a lesson: diversity is the key.
-
Raycast Focus is nice until you realize that it doesn’t integrate with macOS Focus modes and can’t start an automation like a shortcut to turn off other things so that we can really be focusing. 🤷🏻♂️
-
Pixelfed finally gets the attention from the public. The release of their mobile app and the general negative sentiment toward Meta’s offerings are two key factors here. I hope they can keep up with the load.
-
Using ChatGPT latest feature: scheduled tasks, you can schedule a daily summarization of an RSS feed content each morning. That’s cool and actually useful.
-
Micro.one is the seed for something bigger
Today, I think I finally found a real use case for Micro.one. I bought my domain and set up my account. It was rather quick and easy. If I had let Micro.one set up my domain name for me, it would have been even easier.
I think the ingredients of Micro.one are all there for an accessible solution for those who want to get out of Meta or other silos and start owning their little space on the web, free of tracking, free of ads, and built on open software technologies. Of course, Micro.one isn’t the only service of its kind. But it does offer the right feature set to be an open and federated web citizen.
I feel an overwhelming desire to explore and savor this type of web content even further. I believe that sharing my passion for this subject matter could potentially ignite a similar level of enthusiasm in those around me. Even if it doesn’t, if people are genuinely curious enough to inquire about the reasons behind my enthusiasm, it’s a positive development, potentially marking the beginning of something more substantial. After all, who knows what the future holds?
I’ll share more in the near future.
-
Started something new with Micro.one… but in French this time… seems the Micro.blog branding is never too far… which is confusing. One question for @manton: can you check why uploading an image doesn’t work (clicking the button starts the upload, but it never completes), and the “Post” button for posting something doesn’t work either.
-
I’m seeing more and more online stores using Shop.app for shipment tracking. It’s great to have a consolidated view of all the shipments (better than Parcel? Or what used to be Delivery?). I wish Apple would go further in that space, even including buying receipts to be standardized and electronics-only.
-
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.