Apps & Services

The RSS feed for Apps & Services.
  • Ghost offers a new default theme: Source. 👀 And I kind of digg it a lot! Will have to investigate further this weekend.

  • The “new” Microsoft Teams is now available on Mac. Gosh, that is not ready for prime time, at least on macOS Sonoma. Going back to the Classic version.

  • I spent the early morning on Gumroad to set up something… 👀

  • Got an email this morning from Mailbrew about an issue (resolved since then) of logging into the service. So, there is life, apparently! They said they have a “team” working on the next features… 🤔 I would love to see this service thrive instead of being an abandonware. 🙏🏻

  • Announcing "My Reading Workflow Explained"

    I’m finally publishing the details surrounding my reading workflow. It’s been long in the making. More than a year. The reason? Because this workflow was full of moving parts. One example: is the read-later service. First, it was Pocket, then came Matter, Readwise, to finally settle on … read more

  • Why doesn’t the “Switch To Profile” menu item always appear in Safari 17.0? I can’t understand what triggers this option to show up. Is this a bug?

  • What a Strange iCloud Drive Bug!

    I have a folder named “Noto” in my iCloud Drive folder that keeps populating empty folders inside of it, on all my devices. Noto is a note-taking app that I tried in Feb. 2020. Today, I found out that I had more than 30K empty folders sitting there. I deleted the folders from my Mac … read more

  • Currently testing Safari profiles. I kind of like it so far. Still exploring. Currently devising work from personal life. I will probably create one for my YouTube video recording sessions too. Are you using Safari profiles? Are you using Safari at all, I might ask?

  • I’ve been working on my reading workflow for many months. I’m very close to publishing an article about it. While waiting for it, along the way, I created a comparison of the following read-later services:

    • Matter
    • Pocket
    • Raindrop.io
    • Readwise Reader
    • Omnivore

    You can download it here: https://go.numericcitizen.me/pFscoL0x. Any comments, suggestions?

  • When adding widgets on macOS Sonoma, there should be a visual cue telling me which widgets are coming from the iPhone vs from installed apps on my Mac. This screenshot shows two Dayone instances, and Fitness Totals is on my iPhone.☝🏻

  • Rewind is nice, but this is such a resource hog. Battery life is miserable since I run this thing on my MacBook Air. Is it worth it, just for a few possible queries a month?1


    1. I fail to see more than 2-3 use cases so far. ↩︎

  • What happens when you run Micro.blog.app and the web app side by side? Here is a peek at Activity Monitor on the memory consumption tab. There’s the native app. Fine. But, for each web app, Sonoma seems to spin three other processes (Graphics, Networking, and some root process using the web app URL name). Fascinating. Native apps don’t consume as much memory.

  • Already at Four Web Apps in My Dock, and You?

    So far, I have created four web apps on my Dock in Sonoma: Micro.blog1, Pixelfed2, Tinylytics, and Omnivore. I like this a lot3. For Omnivore, the web app provides a better experience than the “native” app, which is probably not really native4. What other apps could I set in my Dock … read more

  • Testing a post from Micro.blog as a web app 1 running on macOS Sonoma.


    1. Is this how we should call a web page saved in the macOS Dock? ↩︎

  • The Mac is the last platform to get my trust for an upgrade of macOS. I do iPhone and iPad in a heartbeat, but the Mac, no. I wait a few weeks so that my must-have apps receive updates. I don’t want to ruin anything by upgrading to Sonoma so soon. I’ll probably wait until November.

  • I’ve recently been using Apple’s Freeform for different articles I’m working on. I’m really falling in love with this app. It’s a sleeper hit for me. Its apparent simplicity shouldn’t put you off. Freeform is capable of supporting the creation of rather sophisticated diagrams. I really feel Apple’s designers brought all their craftsmanship and attention to detail here. Everything feels in the right place.

  • I read in recent days that the Craft team is supposedly very interested and invested in AI for Craft. I’m not sure if this is good news. Notes and document-writing apps should focus on the core experience and capabilities to support the writing process. Today, I don’t see AI at the core for most people (yet). AI should be a complementary feature. There are so many things to be improves and fixed in Craft; I’m afraid they spend too much time on the AI stuff while neglecting the bugs and highly requested basic features, again.😔

  • I finally found THE use case for the Action Button: running a shortcut1 to 1) take a screen capture and 2) run the Apple Frame shortcut. It’s super handy. The camera already has a button on the screen that is easier to grab when I want to take a picture.


    1. Haptly named “Action Button”. ↩︎

  • Here is a weird one: I’m using iCloud+ Custom Domain with an email address (hello@numericcitizen.me). Mail on iOS 17 doesn’t allow me to set the “From:” as the email address for this custom domain. It’s only possible on iCloud.com. Am I missing something?

  • I Rarely Visit the App Store

    I opened the App Store this Monday to see how Apple would promote new app releases supporting iOS 17. Then I realized that I rarely open the App Store except to go and get app updates. When was the last time I went to browse the productivity category? When did I last browse the store for popular … read more