Don’t bother reading too much into the latest Apple financial numbers. They’re not too bad. What you should be paying attention to is this:

Apple is eliminating one of its most high-profile executive positions. According to a new report today, Apple is eliminating the role of “industrial design chief” as part of a broader shake-up. This role was once held by Jony Ive, and most recently held by Evans Hankey.

More specifically:

Under this new structure, the design team will report to Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams. Source: Apple is eliminating its iconic ‘industrial design chief’ position

This comment by one of the 9To5Mac staff members is not reassuring at all:

I think it’s important to keep in mind, however, that Williams has been involved with the design team for several years at this point. Hankey has reported to Williams since 2019. The difference now is that the middle ground between Williams and the rest of the design team is being removed.

Maybe Hankey saw this coming and couldn’t adhere to this direction. Here’s my take: ops are taking over Apple, and design is no longer the top priority. It is utterly troubling to read rumours of Williams possibly replacing Cook which looks like being more of the same if you ask me. Maybe Williams has more design experience, but not as a first-party involvement. Troubling.

I recently took a taxi ride to leave the airport as Uber taxis were unavailable and plagued with longer than usual delays. We were directed to the traditional taxi lines. I couldn’t use an app on my iPhone to call a taxi instead.

Boy, it was a trip in the past. The taxi driver had no Google or Waze open to know where to go, only his memory and his knowledge of the city. The taxi timer was this old and ugly box installed on his car dash, partially blocking his view.

It was disorienting not to get any feedback about how long the trip would go, what was the best road alternatives along the way, and not having a driver reputation score.

You would think that Uber would kick the butt of taxi companies so they evolve the customer experience and get their shit together to build a competitive experience, but no. They seem to have given up a long time ago.

My message to taxi companies: enjoy the ride while it last.

I don’t know if anyone knows about this free web tool by Adobe: Enhance Voice (link), but it is really impressive (@MattBirchler knows about it). Here is what I’d like to do: find a way to integrate this tool into my video production workflow.

So, I’m producing YouTube videos with ScreenFlow (my YouTube Channel). So far, I’m ok with the results, but I think my voice, and the sound in general, could be improved (I’m using the Blue Yeti Microphone, but Adobe Enhance Voice is really impressive).

So, how can I:

1. Do my recording sessions as usual
2. Do my video montage as usual
3. Extract the audio track
4. Use Adobe Enhance Voice to re-process the audio track
5. Replace the audio track in my Screenflow document
6. Export the final video

Step 3 and 5 are not possible in the current release of Screenflow. Any suggestion of tools I could use instead?

Here’s what I know or already use:

• Permute allows for easy conversion of audio files, including converting video files into the audio-only version.
• QuickTime Player can export the audio track only out of a video file.
• I know how to use iMovie.
• I’m a happy user of Audio Hijack
• I don’t really want to get rid of Screenflow. LumaFusion, FinalCut Pro, etc., maybe could do the job here, but it would be ok if I could find a simple utility that can replace the audio track easily instead.

This question has been posted to the Screenflow Telestream forum.

Update #1: corrected a few typos but added the solution using iMovie. Here’s the solution.

1. Do my recording sessions as usual
2. Do my video montage as usual and export the video
3. Extract the audio track using Permute in .MP3 format
4. Use Adobe Enhance Voice to re-process the audio track
5. Convert .WAV into .MP3
6. Launch iMovie and create a new Project
7. Import the produced video in step 2
8. Detach the audio track and delete it
9. Add the enhanced version of the audio track
10. Export the final video using iMovie’s share option

Voilà!

Update #2: there is a major issue with this process, the video and audio are not in sync over time, even though both files are of the same duration. This is not something easy to fix. Back to the drawing board. 😒

There’s this question that keeps popping up in my mind all the time since I’m being more active on Micro.blog. Why am I getting way more interactions with others on Micro.blog compared to Twitter? What am I doing differently? I write about the same subjects, albeit maybe more frequently. I think I have a few possible explanations.

First, Twitter is full of bots. Twitter is a dumpster. I suspect many people or organizations are simply cross-posting stuff on Twitter without real human beings behind the content. I did exactly that myself via Buffer for a few years. Optimizing exposure by scheduling posts at the “right” time was the idea. A bot worked for me.

Second, and this is probably the most probable reason: algorithmic timeline. The Twitter engine is tuned to generate higher engagement. The more you engage, the higher the probability that your content will appear on people’s timelines. If you’re well-known, again, the higher the likelihood that you will make it to the timeline of others.

I’m not well-known. I didn’t engage that much with others. Both made me a near-nobody on Twitter. So I didn’t get exposure, hence the lack of engagement with my content.

Third, there is just too much noise on Twitter to get noticed. My content competes against the rest of the Twittosphere. My context was noise for others, hence the lack of feedback, comments, and interactions.

Here on Micro.blog? Night and day. I’m not a star, far from it. But I get a sense that some people are paying attention.

Thanks for that anyway. 🤗

Today I spent some time in Matter to read a few articles. I went to the Staff Picks section, noticed those tweets between articles and remembered Matter's decision to leave the social portion in their early days. They preferred to go the Twitter route instead. That was before the Elon Musk fiasco. As you might expect, it was a deception for me, and I preferred Matter to build its own thing instead. I actually like to comment on articles and share my thoughts on them within the Matter sphere. Oh well… 

How ironic things can sometimes be. I think the Matter team made a significant strategic error by dropping the social portion of their initial offerings, and they should reconsider their decision.

This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why.

First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not.

For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. In that specific case, it’s clear that a subscription makes sense. So we must help the developers pay their bills, right?

Things get more controversial when the developers charge for a subscription, even though no backend services are required. Why would the developers go with a subscription model, then, you might ask? Well, this is where I want to chime in. The developers may not have to pay hosting costs, but what about their development time? It is as if we value infrastructure costs more than craftmanship time. It should not be this way.

I’m willing to pay for software or service using a subscription if the product comes with updates regularly. Matt has shown Tweetbot as an example. Well, this isn’t the best example because Tweetbot rarely gets any updates; it doesn’t fit my criteria for using a subscription. CleanShot X, absolutely yes. I recognize, through my subscription, not only the value of the service but the time it took to put it together and keep it running fine. I’m willing to support the developer for that through a subscription.

We pay 5$ for a drink that takes less than a minute to prepare at Starbucks. Why is it so hard to pay for developers' time, spending weeks or months writing great software? Also, we must try to consider not only backend bills when deciding that a subscription is ok; craftmanship is something to pay for too.

In recent months, we’ve seen the addition of many AI-based features in apps like Notion and Craft, two apps that I know pretty well. Now I’m wondering if it would be a good idea that Apple integrates such features at the operating system level. Just like we can double tap a word in a text and get its definition from the dictionary, wouldn’t be cool if we could select a whole text and ask for a summary or anything involving the selected content? Apple would have to decide which AI sources to use or provide users a choice, just like for search engines. Any apps manipulating text would instantly benefit from this added capabilities. Your thoughts?

Which platform is best for photographer between Flickr and Twitter if you have about the same number of followers on both? You might think it’s Flickr? According to this experiment, you get 2x more exposure on Twitter, but you get 2x more engagement on Flickr. Things get even better on Flickr if your photo gets selected for Flickr Explore page.

The “views” count definition is not clear but I would think that Twitter’s definition is a wide one (I don’t trust them for being honest about anything). A tweet could get a view count if it goes through an API without guarantee of human actually seeing the picture.

Personally, I prefer engagement over views. This is something to expect I guess from a photo-sharing service like Flickr or Glass. Finally, this is an indication of Twitter being an empty promise for photographers.

Here’s a great visual recollection of a trip to Italy back in 2011, when Steve Jobs died. Great images. Gentle words. It’s not only about the iPhone as a great camera, but about Italy, a place I visited last summer, and how it felt to be there when Steve death made the news. Must see and read.

The DMA holds the promise to return Apple to an earlier age without these gluttonous service and tax aspirations driving seemingly every major decision at the company. The EU just might make Apple lovable again by outlawing their monopolistic excesses. What a twist. Source: Apple’s big monopoly loss comes curtesy of the EU

For once, I agree with David Heinemeier Hansson. Apple’s arrogance is slowly killing all the magic.

To celebrate my calculator app PCalc turning 30 today, I've written up all the history I can still remember:

http://pcalc.com/thirty

There's also a rare 30%-off sale, which runs until midnight tonight, PST:

Mac:
https://pcalc.com/store/pcalcmac

iOS:
https://pcalc.com/store/pcalc

A big thanks to everybody who has used PCalc during the last three decades!

I never bought PCalc but for as long I’ve been following the Apple story, PCalc always was somewhere to be seen in a magazine, on the web or an App Store. What a great way to learn, explore over the years.

It’s the time of the year where I start to think of my upcoming year from a content creation perspective and as someone who likes to try new things. Here are a few things that I’m going to explore. First, as a subscriber of SoundCloud, I’m finding it hard to find content for my DJ mixing experimentation. More often than not, those publishing content on SoundCloud wants you to buy  what's available on Beatport. Someone told me recently to use Beatport instead. I may switch from SoundCloud to Beatport for 2023. Second, I’ll continue my slow migration from Smugmug to my Exposure page. Smugmug was good but didn’t fit well with what I expected from a modern photo-sharing service. Third, I finally found a use case for recording videos with CleanShot. I’ll use it to add short video clips showing how to use specific features and tricks in Craft. Those clips will be added to The Craft Bible (a website dedicated to Craft, the document writing app) and will come as a complement to my YouTube channel. It’s fun to be full of projects.

Can you believe it? As an amateur photographer, I’m leaving my Nikon D750 home for my upcoming trip to Brasil. This trip certainly classifies itself as a once-in-a-lifetime event, yet I won’t bring my camera with me. There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ll be on a cruise ship for most of my twelve-day trip. Second, I don’t feel it’s secure to bring such gear to some parts of Rio or Sao Polo when we go off-board. Third, it’s tough to beat the convenience of an iPhone 13 Pro in the pocket. The Nikon bag with all my lenses feels quite heavy at times. I’ll see when I return home if I made the right decision.

Thanks to all who replied to my question regarding Mastodon. What a great community over here! Never had this in fifteen years on Twitter. 😊

Here are a few takeaways (many may be obvious, duh!). 

1. Just like for emails, one cannot "reserve" a username in the Mastodon-friendly world. Makes sense.
2. Registering with a specific instance (or server) is mandatory just like opening an account with an email provider. 
3. Using a custom domain that I own is something I should consider doing. 
4. I should probably go ahead with my custom domain name for Micro.blog before doing anything related to Mastodon. 
5. Setting my websites (I do have a few) to display my Mastodon username or profile is a good idea too. 
6. Setting my Mastodon profile to display my website is another good practice.
7. Finding an instance I can relate to is probably the most daunting task if my research is any indication. I didn’t find any so far. 
8. I still don’t understand how a Micro.blog compatible Mastodon name is helping in any of this. 
9. Having a registered account on a Mastodon won’t do much for me. I already get everything I want on Micro.blog. People can follow me from their Mastodon instance, and I can, too, from Micro.blog. 
10. Thinking about all this on Christmas day shows that I don’t have a life! LOL

Anyway, happy holidays to you all! 👋

I got a pleasant surprise under the tree for this Christmas🎄: AirPods Pro 2. Some observations: I would say the clicking sound when closing the lid is different, with a bit lower tonality. The setup experience is top-notch, of course. Sound quality is definitively upgraded with more present bass and deeper sound. Noise cancellation is better too. I’ll have to experience it in a noisy place like an airplane tomorrow. For my next trip, I will leave my AirPods Max behind (they are too big for sleeping on the plane) and use the new, much lighter ones and easier to travel with.

When I read articles like this one from The Washington Post about Elon Musk’s current tenure at Twitter, I think about Steve Jobs's tenure at Pixar. Both are quite different leaders, but I think Steve Jobs had a much more positive impact on Pixar than Musk on Twitter. My comparison comes from the belief that Steve could be seen as a jerk or be very hard on people. Elon is certainly seen and behaves like a real jerk. His leadership image is being tarnished every single day. 

This morning, I visited IFTTT and Zapier to turn off ten applets which were using Twitter. My About page was updated to remove references to my Twitter accounts. While at it, I removed all references to Medium and GetRevue since they are no longer used.

I still have to figure out how I will follow people on Twitter who are valuable (there are a few) but refuse to move elsewhere. I might use  News Explorer to follow them, cutting the noise because I refrain from using a Twitter client. It’s not a perfect solution because I would get all their replies which makes things noisy. Speaking of Twitter clients (Twitter & Tweetbot), these were removed from my devices too.

It is one of the most comprehensive digital cleanups I ever did since 2007. For the upcoming year: I’ll focus on the open web services and tools for publishing most of my content. There are a few exceptions: YouTube and WordPress.com.

I may sound a bit extremist.

Closing out my working session with my office for the holidays. What a year it was. Now is the time to finally get ready for Christmas and everything that comes with it. Next, on December 26th, we’re leaving Canada for Brasil and our first cruise trip in five years! 😅

The next victim of my "digital cleanup" will be my Medium account. Even though I stopped writing original content there a while ago, I currently get a few cents a month of revenue, maybe a few dollars when I’m lucky. It’s tough to expand the readership over there. My revenue used to be enough to pay for my Partner Program annual membership, but not anymore.  All in all, the time has come to move on.

I finally tested a FaceTime call with my iPhone 13 Pro and the Belkin iPhone mount with my M1 MacBook Air running macOS Ventura. The setup was easy. iPhone automatically detected as a possible camera source within FaceTime. The image quality was obviously top-notch. The sound was great too. The tabletop feature required a bit of tweaking but eventually led to good (but not “top-notch”) results.

The only problem is the weight of the combined iPhone 13 Pro with a case and the Belkin mount: the screen panel of my MacBook tends to move back during the call. Oops. 🤣

I receive more user feedback or interactions in a day here on Micro.blog than in an entire month on Twitter. On top of that, the quality is 100x higher too.

Think about that for a second.

Thank you guys!

Earlier this year, back in May I think, I started a subscription to Write.as. Why? I was curious about this platform for writers and there was a special for a five-year subscription. So, why not! Then I started to write about my reactions to the war in Ukraine. I wrote maybe a dozen of posts on this subject. I had to let go my feelings. Then I stopped. But I still follow the news about this senseless war. I’m still in state of mixed feelings ranging from feeling helpless, frustrated, desperate, raging, etc.

Now, I don’t know what to do. Should I continue writing on Write.as or move my written frustrations elsewhere? Here? I don’t know. Enabling posts import to my timeline from the Write.as RSS feed might be a good solution.

Tell me what you think about dilemma.

As per my current analysis and preparation for leaving Twitter, here’s what I’m going to lose.

• Access to product announcements, most of which I track because they are part of my workflows (Examples: Glass, Unsplash, Substack, Opal, Readwise, and 90 more). This could be hard to replace, not all websites support RSS feeds.
• Access to some public services status messages like special events or some type of alerts.
• Two of my Brews on Mailbrew that are entirely based on Twitter content will need to be deleted.
• Interaction with people following me who won’t leave Twitter to go elsewhere. I rarely get replies, though. Not a big loss.
• According to [my Plausible page](https://plausible.io/numericcitizen.micro.blog), 50% of visitors coming from non-direct sources are coming from Twitter. One way to mitigate this is by enabling RSS feeds and letting people no in advance other ways to get in touch.
• Quite a few of my published articles or blog posts refer to my tweets as links or embed. They won’t show up anymore when I turnoff public access to my tweets. That's not cool.

Write.as and Fediverse support (or lack of):

Write.as doesn't render the URLs of both the toot and the PeerTube video. The HTML embedding code does work, but the rendered video is not responsive and doesn't blend well with the page on mobile.

Updated my last Mac to macOS Ventura and discovered something super useful when using Stage Manager. If you want to have an application always visible, make sure to select “Assign To: All Desktops” from the application icon in the Dock. This is particularly useful with the Finder so we can easily do drag & drop of a file into the active window; the Finder needs to always be available for this to be possible.

I think it is essential to elaborate on why I will close my Twitter accounts in 2023. This is not something to do lightly. So, after much thought, here are my five main reasons.

1. I disagree with the values and views as they are expressed by its new owner: Elon Musk. Even if he resigns, it won’t matter much. Elon Musk has broken too many things since he became the owner. Twitter is a broken platform and cannot be trusted.
2. I no longer want to feed the beast (user tracking, advertising networks, algorithm-based timelines). I won’t pay to get rid of 50% of the ads or whatever Musk decides to ask for.
3. I no longer trust Twitter’s sustainability and ability to thrive in the future. Twitter has become a loser in my digital landscape. If anything, Twitter has become the other wake-up call for the toxicity of a centralized web. The time has come for decentralizing the Internet.
4. Twitter doesn’t add significant unique value to my digital life anyway. Most of what I’m getting from Twitter can be found elsewhere.
5. Before I decided to close my accounts, I wanted to focus on one of my two accounts anyway (numericcitizen) instead of apple_observer, but it doesn’t have enough traction to warrant the efforts for the change.

What are your reasons?

I just spent part of my morning installing Windows 10 version 22H2 on a virtual machine with VMware Fusion 12 on my recently acquired 2013 Mac Pro. God, it’s been a long time since I experienced the Windows installation process. It is so freaking slow (way faster to install a Linux machine, BTW) and with so many reboots. I still prefer Apple’s macOS in that respect.

After six weeks of waiting, I finally got this little LED-based display called “Tidbyt”, a reference, I guess, to the old Lite-Brite game which came out in 1967 (I had one when I was a child).

Tidbyt is an intelligent wireless LED-based panel that displays content configured from the Tidbyt app available on a smartphone. Physically, the device feels high quality and well-designed and is framed with real wood, reminiscent of mid-century furniture.

Content is configured using applets that you put together on a canvas. The display content will switch from one applet to another in the order defined on the canvas. Applets can be set to display only on a specific schedule, but the scheduling options are rather limited. It’s very simple to set this up.

Once the display is plugged into power via its USB-C cable, it will wait for the configuration to be done from the smartphone, a six-step process. Bluetooth is required to detect the display, and a Wifi network is required for the display to get its data from the Internet.

The applets catalogue is growing but still is relatively limited. Thanks to an SDK and open APIs, developers constantly add new ones. The display is bright and can be adjusted according to a manual setting or time of the day. There is a night mode, too, if you want to put the device in one bedroom.

The screen resolution seemed low at first, but from a distance, it is surprisingly good, enough to display small images.

All in all, the Tidbyt makes a great addition to my home office, and people at work have already noticed it during Teams meetings and are asking questions about this little thing sitting on the shelf behind me.

On Twitter, you can get notified when someone starts following you. Sounds great until it isn’t. You know, many people will start following others to get attention about their existence, hoping to get a follow back. It’s easy to know they are seeking your attention because after a few days they will unfollow you. I always despised this behaviour. For this reason, I prefer Micro.blog’s lack of notifications when someone starts to follow me. I don’t pay attention.

After watching a recent video from Matt Birchler about Rewind, a constant screen recording utility for the Mac, I was excited to give my email address and get onboard the waiting list for early access to the app. I got my invite a few days ago. As much as I would like to test this app, here's this deal-breaker for me: 20 US$ per month to get on the early access program, no thank you. Why?

I understand Rewind is still in beta, but the developer wants me to pay for testing the application. Shouldn’t it be the other way around so I get a rebate when the app goes out of beta? I mean, even with a 30-day “trial” I still can’t get over this. If it’s 20 US$ a month now for the early access, what will be the price of the final product then? Even more expansive?

Rewind makes me think of CleanShot, and I find Rewind’s pricing overly expansive if I think about the scope of both apps. 

Rewind is a great idea, even if it pauses many security risks, but I’ll pass for now.

I could save more than a whopping 400$ annually by shutting down my Twitter accounts. Thanks to the potential removal of a few service subscriptions from my workflow and potentially unjustified without Twitter in my digital life: Buffer, Typefully, Mailbrew. 

It’s incredible how thinking about my Twitter reliance makes me realize so many things on so many levels in my content creation workflow.

The longer you’ve been on Twitter (I joined in 2007), the more likely that most of your followers are inactive accounts. My guesstimate would be that less than 1% of my followers are actually active, and even fewer actually care about what I’m saying or posting. So why on earth, give a damn?

I’m in violation of Twitter’s guidelines because I do promote content coming from other social platforms. I do use Linktree and have my Linktr.ee URL set on @numericcitizen.

This new "Promotion of alternative social platforms policy" on Twitter deserves memorializing for the pure idiocy of it.

I would love @manton to speak out about how the current Twitter turmoils, people flocking to Mastodon, and the ability to follow people over there right from my Micro.blog feed is increasing Micro.blog engagement, subscriptions and general usage. Personally, I’m much more active than before.

Is this true?

12 years ago, Twitter’s office used a Mac Mini to tunnel into the servers. One day, an IT guy found it in the closet.

“Anyone know who owns this?”

“Unplug it. Someone will show up.”

Everyone lost access to servers. Huge crisis. It became known as the “Load Bearing Mac Mini.”

I finally found how to reconfigure my Mailbrew account to log in without using Twitter. Good thing. I don’t log in often in Mailbrew, but this morning I learned that I’d need to adjust many things when I close my Twitter account. As an example, this newsletter setup will need to be revisited to remove any references to Twitter as a data source.

Mailbrew is an excellent tool for generating newsletters, but it hasn’t been updated for quite a while (October of 2021, according to the change log). The developers behind Mailbrew are too busy working on their other product: Typefully, a web service for writing Twitter threads. I’m subscribing to both services. Typefully was cool when it launched but being entirely dependent on Twitter puts them in danger IMHO. I don’t use Typefully much, preferring Buffer for scheduling cross-posted content to Twitter, something Typefully doesn’t support. 

It’s sad to see Mailbrew coming to a halt. Typefully will go down the drain with my Twitter account closure next year.

If I look back at my software usage in 2022, three stars stand out:

1. Raycast
2. Things 3
3. Screenflow

Things 3 returned after more than a year of trying Apple Reminders and Craft Daily notes. It was a futile exercise. Things 3 is beautifully supporting my content creator workflow. Managing to-dos has never been so enjoyable.

Screenflow is essential to my YouTube video creation workflow. I don’t use FinalCut Pro, Luma Fusion or anything that sophisticated. I could use Screenshot screen recording too, but Screenflow is really the simplest and most focused video creation app out there that clicks with me.

I love using great software.

According to media and users on Twitter:

Many Twitter users added a Mastodon profile link into their bios as the Twitter alternative picked up steam. Now, any links to blocked Mastodon servers are disabled and accompanied by the text “Warning: this link may be unsafe.

And

Twitter on Thursday evening suddenly suspended several high-profile journalists who cover the platform and Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world, who acquired the company just a few months ago.

Hours after the suspensions took hold, Musk faced off with one of the journalists he suspended in a Twitter Space audio discussion before an audience of more than 30,000 listeners. The suspended journalist, along with several others, found a backdoor way onto the platform through the website's audio function.

“You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That's it,” Musk said, explaining his latest policy to the group, before he left minutes after having joined the discussion.

Wow. What a shit show. After suspending targeted individual accounts, now it appears it is getting more systematic. Is there an employee at Twitter capable of saying no to Musk even if it means being fired? Or is Musk at the command and personally disabling those accounts? 

Twitter is turning into USSR with a fake free-speech proponent leader.

Just got my notice for the Hand Mirror update today. The latest release offers a paid version, for which I gladly paid. Why? Hand Mirror is a great example of useful software with attributes of the work of great craftsmanship. It was an instant buy because of this. The onboarding screen is simply gorgeous. 

Apple’s rumored 15-inch ‌MacBook Air‌ is expected to feature the same general design as the 13-inch ‌MacBook Air‌ that was released in 2022 with flat edges, a large Force Touch trackpad, a keyboard with function keys, and more. It will also likely include a MagSafe charging port, upgraded speaker system, and a 1080p camera. Source: 15.5-Inch MacBook Air Expected to Launch in Spring 2023 - MacRumors

This year, as an M1 MacBook Air owner, I decided to skip the M2 MacBook Air. The differences aren’t significant enough for me to upgrade, performance and design-wise. But getting a bigger display in a light package without going to the Pro line is a different story. It won’t come cheap, for sure. Count me in the line up.

Exit plans are important. My Twitter exit planning reminds me that we all should have some sort of exit plan for anything we use and depend on online. Every building has an emergency exit plan. Businesses who subscribe to cloud-based services need to plan their exit in case they no longer like their cloud provider. The same should be planned for using services like Twitter. Having a plan is one thing but maintaining it is quite another. I’m learning my lesson the hard way my friends. More to come soon.

Whenever I want to go to Twitter, I should remember that Twitter is mostly a big dump of content originating from other places. So, why not consume content at the source instead? In my journey to a Twitter-free world, I’ll need to rebuild my habits of visiting the following places:

* Techmeme: for consuming news;

* RSS Reader: for consuming news and articles;

* Telegram: for consuming news;

* Mailbrew: for consuming content;

* Hackernews: for discovering content;

* Reddit: for consuming content, exploring and discovering new content;

A special mention about Mailbrew is required here: a portion of the content generated in my private newsletters comes from Twitter. I’ll need to revisit this sooner than later. Thankfully, Mailbrew supports RSS feeds as a content source. But then, maybe using my RSS reader will render Mailbrew mostly useless? 

Bloomberg:

Apple to Allow Outside App Stores in Overhaul Spurred by EU Laws.

Boom. If true, it’s massive. I can imagine Apple's engineering efforts to make it happen for WWDC 2023. I wrote earlier this year that I  changed my mind about sideloading apps on the iPhone. I still stand with my change of heart. I expect the iPhone experience to suffer with increased complexity for ordinary users. Not by much, but somehow, things will have to change to accommodate new workflows. It’s not an easy task to keep things simple. I trust Apple to find a good compromise. 

I don’t expect to use apps installed from other sources, except if there is a significant pricing difference or if it’s a unique app not available otherwise. 

Freeform, the visual and collaborative application from Apple, is finally out for the iPad, the Mac and… I spent some time with it on the iPad and found it enjoyable and deceptively minimalistic. On the Mac, once updated to Ventura 13.1, Freeform can be used to continue working on the content, albeit with a different set of tools, since there is no Apple Pencil support over there. One question is, why is the tools palette on the iPad different from the one with Apple Notes? I mean, there are pencils or crayons that I prefer on Notes over the available choices in Freemform’s palette. Following is a comparison of both. At the top is the Apple Notes tools palette. At the bottom is Apple’s Freeform. The latter seems a bit childish, too simplistic. I really wish there were more pencil types. 

Other than that, I didn’t test the collaborative work with someone else. I see Freemore as more for individualistic creative work. I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever make good use of it. Certainly not at work, as we’re more of a “Microsoft” business. Time will tell. 

After much thinking and due to recent events on Elon Musk’s Twitter, I’m starting to put together a plan for phasing Twitter out of my digital life entirely. The journey will be long, and I made it to be one of my goals for 2023.

Twitter is well entrenched in my digital life. One example of this is the Mailbrew service that I’m subscribing to: sign in requires my Twitter account. Duh. Lots of generated newsletter content is pulled off Twitter. Duh.

I’ll need to be methodical in pursuing a better digital world. I’ll learn a lot about along the way and probably reconsider many aspects of my digital workflows.

From now on, I’ll use the “Qwitter” category for these posts.

[@anildash@mastodon.cloud](https://micro.blog/anildash@mastodon.cloud) I've been improving our ActivityPub support in Micro.blog. Just posted a video earlier today that you might find interesting: www.youtube.com/watch

I recently wrote my satisfaction about Readdle’s Documents.app on-boarding experience on the iPad. Now I’m reading about Spark’s cleverness take on emails. Without being as opinionated as Hey.com, Spark is a serious professional email client. Readdle’s home is Ukraine 🇺🇦 too. I’m considering integrating both software in my toolset. All good reasons to show some support to them.

I’m not a Qwitter. I don’t think I’ll ever close my Twitter account. But, there will be a day where I no longer post original content on Twitter, only cross-posting stuff from other sources. That day, I’ll refer to Twitter as the TwitterDump™.

Well, I almost forgot about it. Today I received my invite to start testing Post.news; another potential exit door from Twitter.

From what I’m seeing, there is already quite a few people in there and I like the posting experience so far. It’s way easier to setup than anything Mastodon-related. Yeah, I know, it’s not the “federated” & “open web” et al., but hey, it’s not Elon Musk’s Twitter!

This week, a new Mac joined the family. The 2013 Mac Pro. I always dreamed of owning one. It’s probably one of the most singular Macs Apple has ever designed. Yes, it has limited expansion. Yes, it is not the Pro Mac that the pros wanted back in 2013. Yes, you need to unplug everything from the machine to open it up. It’s borderline baffling. But this hardware piece, just like the monolith in the 2001 Space Odyssey movie, seems to come from an alien planet, far from earth. Once plugged in and turned on, you can hear it barely humming, just like in any space station depicted in science fiction movies. 

I’m starting to use this Mac Pro for a project that requires an Intel processor. You can read about it here if you are curious.

It’s good to see Glass introduce new methods for discovering photos on its platform. I would love to see percentages relative to each camera and smartphone brand. Searching by lenses tells us that Nikon is way behind Canon regarding diversity and representation. Can’t wait for Glass’s next move. 

For the first in years, I just bought something from eBay. Man, this website design sucks and seems to date back to the early web. Is there anyone who cares about design at eBay? Anyway, they do care about security, though. Upon logging in with my password this morning, there was a popup asking me if I wanted to get rid of my password. I thought it was the eBay website that was about to turn on the Touch ID but instead asked me to confirm the passkey creation. It took me a confirmation with my finger on the Touch ID sensor on my M1 MacBook, and voilà, no more password required! That’s super cool.

Because native software is cool. Because indie developers are cool. Because it supports Micro.blog but not Twitter. Because it is cheap. Because it’s a small company. Because their new Micropost (markdown) editor is nice, perfect for posting on Micro.blog. It is frictionless. Micropost & micro.blog, any coincidence? Mmmm.

Anyways… it’s a great update that I’m currently testing. Returning to normal programming.

Written from the couch, on my M1 MacBook Air.

I read about so many people flocking to Mastodon, leaving Twitter behind. I actually started to see a definitive decline in my followers number. Something is really going on. I myself started to think about the possibility of leaving the platform too. Just like I did with Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr, only to leave a place where my content is simply cross-posted from another source without a real and active presence of mine. Twitter could be next. Really. I could live without the traffic influx from Twitter, which represents about 15% of all my visitors.

There is one thing that it would be hard for me to leave behind, though. If it wasn’t about the war in Ukraine, it would be an easy decision. The problem is that I follow a few people and news sources that diffuse their content on Twitter. Is there a Twitter equivalent for this type of small blips of nano content? I don’t see that in Mastodon yet. RSS feeds are not a platform but transport. The next Twitter has yet to emerge.

There we have it, a new iPad, a new iPad Pro, joining a growing and more confusing iPad lineup than ever. I won’t repeat the best comments from MacStories (“Apple Announces Strange New iPad and iPad Pro Lineup“) and Six Colors (“The iPad’s erratic odyssey continues”). How are this week’s announcements influencing my buying decisions?

I’m currently using a 2018 11-inches iPad Pro. Going to the 2022 M2 iPad Pro would be a significant step, at least from a processing power perspective. Should I stay on the 11-inches size or go to the 12.9-inches version and get a big screen upgrade? Using this new iPad as a photo-processing machine and as a second screen to any of my Mac would undoubtedly support the bigger iPad. But what a weird setup this would make to use a much-better secondary screen like the 12.9-inches iPad Pro on a 2020 M1-based MacBook Air machine. There is no comparison to be made.

In its video clip of fewer than five minutes, Apple is positioning the latest iPad Pro weirdly and surprisingly: the best machine to experience the “exciting” Stage Manager. What a strange way to present the iPad Pro. It will undoubtedly help but having to buy an expensive iPad to get a different and questionable way to multitask on a tablet is doubtful.

Oh, and what a missed opportunity to have Freeform ready simultaneously and present it as the best way to collaborate in a creative environment! We will have to wait until “later this year” to come to get a sense of Apple’s vision of collaborative work. Oh, and Final Cut is still MIA. Instead, Apple continues to rely on third-party apps to show how powerful the iPad Pro actually is. Thanks to DaVinci Resolve or Affinity, when they ship their new beast of software. Later. Eventually.

I don’t know why but my feeling is that the 2022 iPad Pro is only a transition machine, and the real deal will be next year’s update. Oh, and these keyboard choices are as strange as all the rest.

I’m unsettled. 🤔

The Adobe Max conference was held this week. With each conference comes a slew of new application update releases. I’m not really into Adobe ecosystem except for using Adobe Lightroom on the Mac and the iPad Pro. This is my main photo processing engine, coupled with the excellent Pixelmator Pro. For About a year, Adobe spent some of its development money to “augment” Lightroom, a photo-processing application, with video-processing features. Why? I don’t get it. I don’t want it.

As Adobe is adding video-processing features to Lightroom, I fear they are making it less focused and slowly becoming a bloated piece of software, on the outside but also the inside. Adobe Lightroom’s mission was to start over and make a new solid foundation apart from its aging Adobe Lightroom Classic.

I want Adobe to focus on photography; they already have video-processing apps like Adobe Premiere!

I’d love Adobe to focus on making the camera feature compete with a dedicated camera app like Apple’s camera app or Halide or Camera+. I cannot remember when the last release of Adobe touched this portion of Lightroom in significant ways. Why is it important? As a subscriber of an Adobe photography plan, I would use the Lightroom camera more, and my images would directly go to the Adobe Cloud, just like the Apple camera app saved photos in iCloud. It would be so much more convenient. I prefer Adobe cloud for my RAW images instead of having to transit my RAW photos through the Apple Photos library. The more Adobe improves the built-in camera module of Lightroom, the more I’ll stay within Lightroom while in a photography moment.

What. The. Fuck.

This podcast example about a fake interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs is a blatant example of where some more thoughts should take place before putting high tech to work. What is the purpose of this? Is this a tech demo or some bad-taste proof-of-concept? It’s not hard to imagine how it could derail in the future when used in politically-heated contexts. Oh, and no, I didn’t waste my time listening to this garbage, and I won’t share the link to this podcast, either.

Image credits: generated using Dall-E with the following phrase: “an hand drawn Mac computer that never existed digital art”

As I write this, rumours are pointing to an imminent release of some updated iPads today. What is novel this time is not the CPU to be used, the screen attributes, or the long-awaited app called Freeform. What is novel is the fact that there won’t be an Apple event for the announcement but a few well-crafted press releases. Apple judges the updates as not worth tech pundits’ time, flight to Cupertino, or even a secret press briefing.

I would argue that we are officially entering the iPad commodity era. Thanks to Apple, who neglected to show the iPad’s true potential with a ported version of powerful apps like Final Cut Pro, a real multitasking experience, the iPad is becoming a mundane device. Putting an M2 processor in it won’t change the story here. Freeform, a low-profile app that Apple quickly demonstrated at the WWDC conference last June, won’t probably appeal to many, being late in the game of collaborative work and creativity. Even long-time bloggers and iPad believers like Matt Birchler are no longer waiting for the iPad to ignite the personal computing segment.

We will see shortly if Apple has a few surprises in-store today.

Photo credits: Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

In case you didn’t know, I’m a big fan of Apple (from the corporation, the products to the company’s history). Here’s a little secret: I maintain a document of possible upgrade paths for all my current Apple products. It’s fun. Yes, I’m a bit crazy.

Each year, during the fall, Apple releases a slew of new products. Each year, I spend some time updating my document to reflect my analysis of possible product upgrades. Take the iPhone for example. I’m currently using last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. I’m super happy with but I’m pondering the idea of upgrading to the iPhone 14 Pro Max. So, I list all the reasons why I should do it and all the reasons why I should refrain from doing the upgrade. It’s the same drill for my aging 2018 11-inches iPad Pro. Or my Apple Watch Series 6. It’s quite fun and educative because for each product, I spend quite some time studying it and pondering their technical advances over my current product. It’s really fun. And crazy.

This year, it’s a bit different for some reasons. There’s still nothing in the Apple tech landscape that could trigger a purchase. Not yet. Rumours about an upcoming iPad Pro refresh and a more powerful Mac mini with an M2 are aplenty. Things could change in a few weeks.

But, seriously, what is more fun than anything else is the waiting game. Pleases come while waiting for something to happen. I read somewhere that people who wait patiently to get something are more happy in life than those who succumb rapidly to fill their immediate needs. I must be quite happy then.

Header photo credits: Photo by Zhiyue on Unsplash

A recent Twitter thread about the possible iPhone Dynamic Island inception by Matt Birchler caught my attention a few days ago but couldn’t find the required time to write my take.

How long could Dynamic Island have been in gestation at Apple? A few weeks, a few months? I think this has been in the works for quite some time. Besides the visual appearance, the API goes with it and needs a design period too. I’m sure Matt understands and knows about that. I would argue that Apple worked on this way before this year’s announcement. Best integration between hardware and software takes time because of how Apple is internally structured. Secrecy plays a significant role in making things longer to achieve too. Apple plan’s for the long run, and I think the pill shape was set in stone last year.

The second thing that caught my attention is this: How long will Dynamic Island be with us? What if Apple can make the camera disappear under the iPhone’s display? Would this make Dynamic Island pointless? No. My take is that the feature is here for the long run, even though the camera and all other sensors could disappear entirely. Apple is training us to accept Dynamic Island as a fundamental part of the iPhone experience. We may even expect the feature to be the de facto standard of the best iPhone user experience. I don’t think we will revert to the previous design that Dynamic Island is taking care of. The black pill share could be dynamically removed when not required but could then pop up to respond to the current context dictated by the user interaction.

The Dynamic Island is such a terrible name but the feature in itself is brilliant, so Apple.

The way I see it, there is nothing in an updated MacBook Pro line with M2 processors and a tweaked iPad Pro line to warrant a keynote. There has to be something special, really special. iPadOS 16.1, macOS Ventura aren’t enough. The rumoured Mac Pro? Maybe, but no signals on its imminent release either. An updated Apple TV hardware? Nah. A larger MacBook Air (like 15")? Why now? That is why I agree with Gurman’s view and the next product release will go through a set of press releases later in October.

Tweetbot hasn’t been updated for over 6 months, I thought a subscription was going to mean more frequent updates? Source: Letting my Glass and Tweetbot subscriptions expire – LJPUK:

This blog post triggered the following thoughts.

The movement to subscriptions in the software landscape is MASSIVE but is far from being a guarantee of more frequent updates from the developers. I’m utterly infuriated when I see a yearly subscription for a small utility with a limited scope when no “lifetime” options are offered with reasonable pricing. Many devs are lazy, and greedy and send you a big middle finger.

MacRumors in iPhone 14 Pro Owners Complain of ‘Slow’ Camera App - MacRumors:

Affected users are seeing the Camera app take four to five seconds to activate after the Camera app icon is tapped, with the problem occurring after the camera has been opened once already.

Coupled with other issues related to the camera and AirDrop, even though I’ll probably upgrade to the 14 Pro Max, I’ll gladly wait a few months before taking the plunge. But, fixes are coming very soon, apparently.

iFixit writing about the internal redesign of the iPhone 14 in “The iPhone 14 Feature Apple Didn’t Tell You About”:

This is the most substantial iPhone redesign since the X. It’s hard to understate how big a change this is. For a reference point, Samsung hasn’t changed their phone architecture since 2015.

So, with the biggest update in years, we’re upgrading the iPhone 14 to a repairability score of 7 out of 10. That’s the best score we’ve given an iPhone since the iPhone 7. This is the most repairable iPhone in years.

Who wrote that smartphones, iPhone in particular, have peeked? A fundamental redesign of the iPhone to make it more repairable seems not only a good move but a much-needed change of thinking. If Apple is serious about environment protection and carbon footprint, they not only have to think about the choice of materials but also the way iPhones are built so they are more easily fixed. Kudos to Apple. Why this design is only for the iPhone 14, not the Pro, is a mystery to me.

The more I look at reviews, watch YouTube videos and visit Apple.com, the more I realize that considering my current hardware setup, there aren’t many reasons to upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro (currently with 13 Pro), the Apple Series 8 (currently with Series 6) or the AirPods Pro 2 (currently the original Pro version). The Apple Watch Ultra could be a reason, but I’m not the target customer for that one.

Waiting for October releases and going to the Apple Store tomorrow. Just for fun.

So, I’ve been testing iOS 16 since its early beta stage, and I love it so much. One of the best features is the customizable Lock Screen. But it also creates an issue, the same with Apple Watch watch faces: how to decide which widgets to use and place in those limited slots. There are more and more widgets available each day, but the space is so constrained. I cannot find a strategy to create a Lock Screen that I’m fully satisfied with. I end up creating many of them, but switching among them isn’t smooth, except if they are linked to a focus mode. It’s not a first-world problem, but it is annoying. I’m left with a sense of constant dissatisfaction.

Here’s an interesting post by Gruber about Android vs iPhone’s relative popularity in different places around the world. I have some observations to share from my experience.

After spending three weeks in Italy for vacation, from what I could see, there was a lot of iPhone around me independently of the place I visited. Sure I saw many Android phone users too. But a majority were iPhone users. Regarding Android’s relative popularity in Germany and France, I would consider the possibility of an aversion for what Apple represents (an “American icon”) in those countries as a partial explanation. Maybe it’s not cool to support an American company like Apple?

Another interesting fact: WhatsApp is THE messaging service app people seem to use the most. iMessage isn’t popular in Italy, it seems.

Next week, Apple will release a bunch of new iPhone and Apple Watch. I think it’s the first time I feel so detached from this media event. I’ll still be in Italy on vacation. The “Far out” event will happen at 19:00 local time. I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch the keynote live since I’ll probably be having dinner or visiting a village. I don’t want to impose a stay at the apartment for that. I’ll watch the YouTube video when I’m back at the apartment.

I paid a quick visit to the Apple Store yesterday to get a pack of AirTags and give another look at the M2 MacBook Air, especially the Midnight colour version. In principle, this colour is gorgeous, but in practice, I don’t think I would go with this colour if I were to upgrade to the M2 MacBook Air. It’s really a fingerprints magnet. I know my fingers can be “oily” at times, which would be even worse than in this picture. I like the idea of having black keyboard keys on a dark frame (like the MacBook Pro). Too bad. Another reason to postpone any upgrade plans.

I want to chime in here, following the publication of this article from Om Malik about AirTags. I’m leaving for Italy in a few days. Knowing how bad the airport experience can get and reading those stories about airline companies' inability to keep up and keep losing track of customers’ luggage, AirTags can make a big difference. I’m going to double-down on AirTags. I already own four, and I’ll buy another four before leaving, so I get my base covered. AirTags already saved me a lot of trouble in the past on more than one occasion by reminding me that I left something behind. It’s well worth the money.

I started another experiment: a photo diary of my upcoming trip to Italy. I’ll be using Craft for this. My objective is simple: testing Craft for photography-related work. I explain why and how I will do it in much more detail on the website. Here’s the link.

Interesting fact: I rarely look at pictures of the places I’m going to visit. I could go online and look at many images of Milan, for example, or all the other places I’ll be visiting starting next week, but I don’t. My trips are organized by my wife. She’s the one doing the scouting and spends hours looking at where we’re going. I’m the guy who spends hours post-processing images I’ll be taking during the trip, making our trip live forever.

Telegram’s CEO, M. Pavel Durov, complains that Apple is making his life harder than necessary by having to wait for the review process to complete its job. When Apple finally accepts the update but requires him to remove the Telemoji package, he goes on to say:

… this will motivate Telegram to make Telemoji even more “unique and recognizable.”

He sounds like a whining baby. Thanks to Apple, Mr. Durov now gets the idea and his team will have to return to their drawing board and be more creative.

Following my post earlier this week, I finally found my publishing workflow for my vacation in Italy. From time to time, I’ll write a story on my Photo Legend Series. Glass will be for regular publishing of my best shots of the day. I’ll use Craft to build a photo diary, it’s part of another project. I’ll share the link when I’m ready. Finally, Micro.blog will receive posts from my blog and Glass via the RSS cross-posting feature. What I think will be my best photos of the vacation will go to Unsplash and Smugmug when I return from vacation and after post-processing them in Lightroom. Unsplash will only get a few of them, while the full set will go to my Smugmug page.

I’m sorry, Dropzone, you’re good but not that useful. I mean, for such a narrow-usage utility, I’m not going to pay that much monthly. I’m the one who buys and rent software but come on. It’s becoming ridiculous. Provide a lifetime contribution, and I’ll make the deal. You’re a feature, not a product. Delete. 😞

A recent post from MereCivilian about subscribing to a fast Internet service triggered this one. Here are a few reasons for having fast Internet at home:

1. You’re many people (four or more) living under the same roof who are active Internet users;
2. You’re many users who are doing streaming at the same time;
3. You’re downloading or uploading really big files all the time;
4. You’re playing online games;

Other than that, high-speed internet is useless as each micro-transaction (small HTTPS requests) won’t benefit from the bandwidth available. In other words, a 100K web page on a 100 Mbits or 400 Mbits or 1000 Mbits link will take about the same time to load and render within your browser. Finally, consider the DNS service, which plays a big role in the latency involved while browsing the Internet.

This could be the best thing to come to Ghost in a long time: Ghost Explorer. And there is more coming next week, apparently 🤔. For someone who left Substack for Ghost more than a year ago, this is something that I was missing on Ghost. Now, it is much easier to get discovered. I guess. It remains to be seen if this will change the bottom line for me, though.

I’m two weeks away from a long trip to Italy, and I’m wondering about posting photos while on the trip, but where? Since I’m not active on Facebook or Instagram but have a SmugMug and Glass account, what will I do? My Glass and SmugMug accounts aren’t for photo journaling, after all. I’m very selective with those. Maybe I could create posts in my Photo Legend series on Ghost? Could I try experimenting with Craft and adding photos to a shared page? Unfortunately, Craft isn’t the best app for images. Craft is much more about written words. What about posting here, on Micro.blog, using Sunlit? Decision, decision, decision. 🤔

But, fundamentally, who cares about my trip to Italy? 😉

Color Options for All iPhone 14 Models: Everything We Know - MacRumors If iPhone 14 colour options are reduced compared to the iPhone 13 lineup, I think it’s because Apple is trying to reduce manufacturing options in a time of highly constrained manufacturing capacity. New colours could later be introduced like they did for the purple option this year.

In The Weight Of Creativity – On my Om, Om Malik thinks about camera gears weight during trips. I’m on the verge of going to Italy for a three weeks vacation, and I’ll have to decide about the content of my camera backpack. As the iPhone is taking a more prominent role in photography, there are fewer incentives to bring heavy gear with me.

For many reasons that I’m aware of, I forgot that the iPad is the best device for reading and collecting information tidbits that are fueling my content creation workflow. The iPad enables me to effortlessly annotate and store content into Craft using a Shortcut. In fact, unsurprisingly, the iPad actually is a devide that invites reading sessions into my morning routine. I should use my iPad more often; I’ll probably read more consequently.

It is surprising and fascinating that we seem to skip Flickr or 500px as a replacement for Instagram when thinking like this about Instagram possible replacements. Those platforms should take advantage of the Instagram pivot to something other than photos. They don’t and they are missing an occasion to reinvent themselves. I’m a paid user of Glass and Smugmug, and I love them.

Regarding the lack of Boot Camp on Apple Silicon Macs: I think that the lack of Windows support on Apple Silicon machines is hurting some buyers, me included. I’d like to be able to run Windows on a Mac, because of my job in IT. I came close to buying a Mac Pro to run VMware stuff. But who’s really at fault here, Apple or … Microsoft? Linux is another story, though. I’m not fully aware of current Linux compatibility with Apple Silicon, but I think it’s slowly coming. Oh, and don’t even try to mention Windows ARM to me. This thing won’t run on Apple Silicon Macs unless Microsoft and Apple actively cooperate on this.

About the updated design of the media player on the iPhone with iOS 16 beta 4: this enhancement in iOS 16 illustrated by Six Colors is real. At first, I didn’t like the loss of the little and reassuring nob, but now the interface feels cleaner and yet shows some affordance as we now know what these lines are for.

Woah, I just paid a visit to my stats for Micro.blog. This year, I’ve got only 84 posts published; the lowest since 2019. It’s a bit sad because I like the platform, its values and the community. It’s not the first time I have lamented the lack of time elasticity. I have too many projects and fall into many rabbit holes. At the very least, I could tweak my routine to visit and post once a week. Vacations are a month away, but this could be the occasion to spend more time here.

We’re currently experiencing a major and nationwide cellular network outage here in Canada 🇨🇦, thanks to Rogers telecommunication company. It’s been going on since early this morning. Everything seems affected in one way or another: phone calls, internet access, emergency calls via 911, travellers, banking services via Interac, and lots of public non-urgent services, just to name a few. We will need a few days to comprehend the ramifications of what happened. It’s a major event illustrating that big telco companies concentration like we endure here in Canada isn’t a good thing. Also a good (and sad) example of how badly we’re dependent on technologies for everything.

I felt in a rabbit hole with these YouTube videos production. Either it’s because Craft is such a great application to talk about, or I’m just discovering the subtleties of the video medium, and I like it a lot. Or it could be both. Either way, I have much less time to write and publish here or on other publishing platforms.

If you aren’t aware yet, I recently started a YouTube channel about Craft. I’ll definitively write an article on my metablog about my adventure. I’m learning a lot.

Since early June, I’ve been quite busy working and producing YouTube videos about Craft which left me no time for posting here. As seen in the following graph, YouTube videos production is now the lion share of my spare time schedule. 👀

I expect things to return to normal in the coming weeks as my recording and producing setup is complete. Creating videos takes about 2-3 hours of my time. Subjects that I want to tackle will eventually dry out. If you are wondering what’s those videos are really about, feel free to pay a visit to my YouTube Channel. Tell me what you think here or over there in the comments!

Recently, during a discussion in a meeting at work, a colleague of mine was expressing his frustration about the fact that one of our customers was using Macs in its business. He went on saying the Mac is such a pain to manage and is an immature platform in the business world compared to Windows PC. I couldn’t help myself to tell him he couldn’t be farther than the truth.

Here’s the thing: of course, management tools and services are aplenty on the Windows platform. Why is that? Well, because it needs so much attention, so they can keep working! Just think of security-related software needed to keep hackers away from your machine full of security holes, thanks to Windows.

It was a “🙄” moment for sure. I think I’m on earth on a mission: to debunk false perceptions about the Mac.

WWDC is around the corner. It’s usually the time of the year when tech pundits will work hard on their wish list for the next major revision of Apple’s iOS 16 and iPadOS 16. I typically do that myself. This year, though, I’ll skip the whole thing. Apple’s core operating systems are mature, low-hanging fruits are scarce. At this maturity stage, it seems that expressing our desires is more and more a matter of preferences, or interpretation of what could be better user experiences. I may sound bored. Maybe I am. Sure, I’d like improvements to the iPad like full external monitor support, but then what? Apple owns the agenda, decides how to move the needle and protect its bottom line. The rest is pure noise.

Some weeks are busier than others for software or service updates. This week saw meaningful updates to many applications that I used daily.

• Craft version got bumped to 2.2, a controversial update. Using the updated Share Page feature, my Craft wish list was completely reworked. According to the Craft community channels on Slack, people would rather prefer to see the core experience to be refined and straighten up. I’m one of them. It seems to me that there are many unfinished core features within Craft that are in need of attention. For example, the Share Page is super useful but we still miss the use of custom domain names or notifications from people who post comments. It’s not a deal-breaker but it is annoying and frustrating.
• Matter, the new kid on the block in the read-later service space was updated too. The team behind Matter made a decision to focus more the product by dropping the social portion of it. Good move. The new update makes a lot of sense and is a joy to use on all Apple platforms.
• Microsoft updated the beta version of Teams for Apple Silicon, latest public build May, 19th. Previous release provided a very buggy in-conference experience. According to people on Reddit, it seems to be fixed. I didn’t try it yet.
• Apple’s platforms received a slew of updates. I was eagerly awaiting the Studio Display 15.5 firmware. I did a comparison of the image quality that I posted on Twitter. It’s not perfect but it’s a noticeable upgrade. Some more detailed video on the update.
• Finally, I wanted to mention something about Glass. It wasn’t updated this week, but I had a chance to sit with the team behind Glass in a Zoom Q&A session. It was a nice talk. We had a chance to voice our delights or wishes for where the product should go next.

I’m currently working on a proof-of-concept to migrate one of my website to Craft using the application’s SharePage feature. The beauty of this solution is the simple fact that the content of the documents are always readily available on the web. Once the root document has been shared, there’s nothing more to do on my part. It’s the most frictionless experience to date. I find this powerful and satisfying.

First, I got back to Pocket and paid for the subscription. Then I added Readwise. Then I found Matter, and fell in love with it. I’m not sure why. I’m still waiting for Readwise Reader application. While waiting for it, what’s the point of Readwise, again? News Explorer is my go-to application for most of my readings via RSS feeds; I can save links as favourites, but I never do so. My reading workflow is in a total state of flux.

Which application or service should I use to bookmark articles that I want to read later? What should I prioritize in such application: organization of links or the reading experience? How is that fact that I collect more than I read should change my application selection? Comparing applications like Matter, Pocket, and Raindrop.io, I find many common features, which brings confusion to me. Matter seems better for reading, but Raindrop.io more complete at organizing links collections. Why can’t I have both in the same application? Craft is my goto application for drafting and writing my articles, but can save links with nice previews. Craft is lacking tags to organize objects and doesn’t offer a reading experience as it doesn’t save content from a link. Craft is of no help here in my reading workflow. And what about highlights, how do I create them and make use of them later? Matter is good at creating highlights, Raindrop.io recently added highlight support too, but that’s it. Oh, and RSS readers like Reeder or News Explorer can save links and add tags too. Finally, I wish I could find a great text highlighting extension for Safari, after all, it’s my goto browser.

To some degree, read later applications or services are still maturing, no solution is complete. This explains that, I guess.

Help, please. 😫

Photo by Javier Esteban on Unsplash

I’m back on Telegram, after closing my account about a year ago. I wrote about the reasons why on my story published on Micro.blog. Since the start of the criminal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian, I found out quickly that a lot of information about the conflict is being published on Telegram. I decided to come back and open a new account.

I read on Mr. Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. Some compare him to Elon Musk. He’s opinionated, just like Musk. He has his views on Apple and technology. He seems to advocate user privacy protection. Furthermore, he flew from Russia because he refused to cooperate with the government, which was asking to leak information from Telegram users.

A few words on Telegram, my usage, its design and the application. It’s available on most of the Apple platforms, including the Mac. I like its design a lot. I don’t use it for chatting, only to receive messages from channels where comments aren’t enabled.

Only fools don’t change their mind.

In a recent article from Josh Ginter for The Newsprint, If found the idea of having a separate computer for work and one for creative activities interesting and I’m close to feeling the same about my personal and work life. I do most of my work on an M1 Mac mini, while my creative work is done on an M1 MacBook Air. My iPad is used as a second screen on my Mac mini or for some photo processing stuff with Adobe Lightroom. The distinction between two worlds gets blurry when you consider how the cloud brings those two worlds closer to each other. If you are like me and use a single Apple ID for all your Apple services, as soon as you set up iCloud on both computers, you’ll get access to the same “virtual space and digital content” on both machines. This is where the idea of two separate computers becomes blurry and probably more of a theory.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

I recently wrote an article about where the iPad should go from here. On the subject of iPadOS, looking at this article on Behance from Parker Ortolani, here are the few interesting ideas that caught my attention:

• The updated Dock with the ability to move an application window to an external display.
• Still on the Dock, the frequently used applications replaced with standard folders (like downloaded items).
• Stacks in the Dock, just like on macOS.
• Home Screen icon placements can include things like Shortcuts, or files.
• Studio Mode for external display full support. My number one request.
• Addition of Preview from macOS would be super useful for more pro-like workflows. Same with the addition of Dictionary. It would be super useful for content creators like me.

WWDC 2022 is around the corner, starting another round of updates for iPadOs over the coming year.

I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Those ads took the form of notifications, but also big popups taking the whole screen within the application. It was so intrusive, it wasn’t always clear how to dismiss the ad to return to the actual trip details.

I understand the idea of integrating two different services from the same company, but doing so at the expense of a great user experience with the basic feature of the application is not the way to go with me. Even Apple sometimes seems to be going in that direction. Not good.

After spending some time cleanup my office this today, I found these in my drawers and other places. I no longer use these. Do you? I know some people here on Micro.blog do. I don’t which I find fascinating because I did a lot in my younger times. Before the computers.

Now that I’m finally having my dedicated room in the house for working, I’m wondering about returning to podcasting (I used to have a podcast, in French) or even testing the YouTuber world (even though I wrote in the past that I’ll never be a YouTuber). Why is that?

First, a dedicated room is mandatory to be able to record without being disrupted too much. Second, sound quality would probably be much better than recording in an open space. Third, I could create a better background because my room is decorated to my personal tastes.

But is this enough to convince myself to seriously consider getting back to audio or video content creation? I have all the tools: a great MacBook Air, a Mac mini, an Apple Studio Display, a good microphone, a NAS for archiving purposes, etc. Yet, I’m not really good at audio or video production, and it’s very time-consuming for me. I would certainly learn a lot while working hard at this. Moreover, should I do this in my native language which is French or do it in English, which I’m not perfectly fluent with? Maybe I could try to do it together with other podcasters (I know a few of them). Too many questions, not many answers.

Photo credit: Will Francis on Unsplash.

If you are wondering what’s up with me, I’m on vacation for a week. I’m not only taking a break from work, my office, but also from blogging. Expect a return to normal programming next week.

Written on my iPad, somewhere on a sandy beach in Mexico 😃😛

Thanks to MacRumors, as reported today, I didn’t know today was the fifth anniversary of a special meeting between Apple’s top brass and select journalists to talk about Apple’s plans with the pro users and their commitment to the Mac.

At the time, we didn’t know how serious Apple’s upcoming pivot would be. In retrospective, Apple delivered and then some. It is simply a tour-de-force to flip the Mac product line upside down and bring power efficient, mighty and beautiful Mac designs. The Mac transition to Apple Silicon is probably the most important change to come to the Mac line since its inception in 1984.

I can’t wait to see what the next ten years will be made of.

This weekend I did some cleanup in my old papers and documents. I found an old bank account statement where I can see a withdraw transaction to help me pay for my Macintosh 128K in 1985: 3460.75 CAN$. 🤑 Ouch. I did some research to better document the time when I had a Macintosh SE while studying at the university and remembered about using Think Pascal, Prototyper and ResEdit to build a floppy disks indexer. That was before the Internet. It was so much fun. It’s gives you an idea how old I am. 😜

It’s March 2022. Spring is finally here. Moreover, among us, Apple Silicon, first announced in June 2020 and massively available since November 2020. Furthermore, also available is Center Stage, a new feature introduced with the 2021 iPad Pro and now available on the MacBook Pro and more recently the Apple Studio display.

Here’s the thing. Microsoft Teams, currently at version 1.5 still isn’t supporting Center Stage and worst, Apple Silicon. Running Teams on any recent Mac is an execrable experience: slow, bad image quality (compared to Zoom for example) and consume far too much memory. How is it possible for a company the size of Microsoft who’s so slow to move and fix Teams? I don’t buy the argument about Teams being built with the Electron framework. The latter already supports the M1 chip. Microsoft is supposedly working on Teams version 2.0 which will be presumably built on WebView2. They’ve been working on this since June of last year.

It’s highly frustrating. Sorry for the bad mood, but Teams is one of the most used application for work giving me the right to vent my frustration.

Dear iOS developers, dear @Substack, when building screenshots for the App Store, show us your software, not the device on which it is running. Thank you. With love. The Direction.

Well, after a promising start, following reviews of the Apple Studio display, it seems that I’ll put my buying decision on hold. As I wrote, one of the reasons why I’m considering this display is the integrated camera and speakers for a better video conference experience. It appears image quality is not good at all, judging by the examples posted online. It’s close to being a deal breaker.

Apparently, the Apple Studio display is running a version of iOS 15.4. Yep, sounds overkill, and yet, it’s the case, according to Gruber. Apple is promising a software update to fix the problem and bring image quality on par with the iPad Pro equipped with the same camera and essentially using th same software to enable Center Stage.

Here’s something: when we look at preview integrated cameras in MacBook Pro or the iMac and find the image quality to be bad, we try to excuse Apple of fitting a camera in a too-thin enclosure. But we know it’s not enough to explain the issue of image quality. Software is the problem. Look no further than the iPhone for an example.

As soon as:

1. I can go to an Apple Store to see the Apple Studio display for myself;
2. Normal people are publishing their reviews and comment on their experience with the display;
3. Apple fixes the camera image quality with an update to the display operating system;

Then, I’ll make a final decision. Now, I can’t wait to see in action the software upgrade process on this thing.

Benjamin Mayo in Apple Introduces Mac Studio:

“…the introduction of a brand new model of Mac is precisely the best time to do something entirely new.”

And

“The Mac Studio is a boring box with rounded corners, and has no party tricks to speak of. The trashcan was a truly wild, out-there, design.”

I share the same sentiment. A new form-factor is a rare thing from Apple. An elongated Mac mini doesn’t do justice the Mac Studio interior, even less to its name. Another missed opportunity. I guess “real pros” doesn’t give a damn about all of this.

On March 13th, in 2020, the world flipped, my world flipped. So many things are different now. This short blog post is about reflecting on the last two years and how they became the foundation for what is to come in my life.

Time flies and making judicious decisions is more important than ever. Working from home is important. I’ll never return full time at the office. Even if I move to another job, working from home is now a requirement. Visiting customers for the sake of shaking hands no longer make sense to me. There has to be more than this. The price is too high to pay: wasted time.

Traveling is more important than ever too; that’s the only way for me to do more photography. Something that I didn’t do much in the last two years. This visual work posted in April of 2020 was the trigger to write this blog post. I’m sad about this because photography is my most important source of inspiration and my biggest creativity playground after writing. Still on the travel subject, I can envision traveling abroad for more than two weeks now and splitting my time between leisure and remote work. Leaving for a month or more is now possible.

Speaking of writing, I’ll probably continue to write but probably not as much as in the last two years. A more balanced life is taking place and will take away some of my writing time. It’s ok. It’s also part of making better choices.

The last two years of COVID-19, the more and more frequent climate disturbances and the recent events in Europe are telling me this: the world is more than ever in a constant state of emergency. I better learn how to cope with this otherwise I’m not finished at being in constant consternation mood while reading the news.

Thanks for reading this. I know your time is precious too and you made the decision to read this short piece.

It’s now official. Apple will host another virtual event next week, on March 8th. It’s the first Apple event of 2022, but it’s far from being the first real event of 2022. Current events happening in Ukraine are troubling and make me pause on a lot of things. Apple-related stuff is one of these. I’m not in the mood for that. My thoughts and energy are diverted, seized. I don’t care if it’s a new iPhone SE, a beefed up Mac mini or whatever else. These look so irrelevant in this incredible and terrible era. Low interest indeed.

I asked for this since the beginning of the Ukrainian war (on Twitter: first here, then here, then here), and today Apple delivered. Apple’s products are no longer being sold through its online store. While the App Store is still working apparently, I’m ok with their decision. On top of that, Apple will donate money, twice the amount that employees will give to help Ukrainians. It’s a good move, the only move, without using real arms, to make an impact. It’s even more powerful when many companies are doing exactly the same.

Yep, finally.

I don’t know about you but I find current events in Ukraine very disturbing and distracting. As much as I’m happy to see Russia being more and more isolated every hour, I can see its leader being more and more pissed off and willing to commit the worst. The world seems to go in a spiralling direction toward even more violence and hard to resolve situations.

The news of the Russian criminal invasion of its sovereign neighbour, Ukraine, is appalling. Putin and his regime is committing an aggression that shall be punished, at the right time, at the right place with the right means. I cannot believe that we’re seeing such an invasion in Europe, in 2022. What’s next? Who’s next? We’re all going to suffer at various degrees from this utterly criminal invasion. I pay no respect to Putin, his government, his propaganda machine and every single Russian who support this aggression. This is an act of war against democracy.

No wonder why Ukraine wanted to stay in NATO camp, because Russia is simply an antidemocratic land. Democratic governments and systems are far from perfect, but they are the least imperfect solution.

For now, I’m sending my positive waves of support to the Ukrainians community of Montreal, Canada. I cannot wait for the next demonstration, so I can show my full support of the Ukrainians.

Hitler must be so proud.

If you own a desktop Mac, you probably use an external drive for Time Machine. If you use a portable Mac, most likely not, and according to the Tidbits article, you’re not alone. The portability of the Mac is hindered by having an external drive hooked permanently. I, personally, have a different strategy: I use a Synology NAS DS720+ with Time Machine enabled to do my backups over the wireless network. It works perfectly, but I don’t do a full backup of my MacBook Air. Files that are part of iCloud Drive are excluded (read more here, you’ll find out why it’s a good idea). In fact, most of the files are excluded, except a few critical folders, outside the scope of any cloud syncing services. Applications aren’t backed up either (easy to recover in case of lost). Backups are small but are just what I need to protect my work.

Even after reading this excellent article by the guy behind Halide, I’m still mystified by Apple’s ProRAW format. The question that keeps popping up in my mind is: if computational photography processing is involved in creating the ProRAW file (in DNG format), how can we still call this a variant of a RAW image?

Photo credit: Jason Strull on Unsplash

Today, I finally saw the Dune movie, by the Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve. As a Canadian myself I’m so proud of him! It’s not a movie review, far from it. Let me just say that when I think about this movie, the word “equilibrium” comes to my mind. The movie is well balanced: storyline, intrigue, visual effects (visual effects serving the story), music, Dune’s world imaginary world. But the best for me were those “ornithopters”. Wow, they were sooooo cool! Can’t wait for the next part.

Have you seen the movie? What do you think of it?

From 1993 to 1994, I owned a PowerBook Duo 210 sporting a trackball, a low-profile keyboard and a grayscale screen. I didn’t like the trackball as the pointing device. The keyboard wasn’t that great either. But, it was small, highly portable. Coupled with the Duo Dock and an external monitor, it was a cool and novel setup. It’s been a long time ago. This article was written using a M1 MacBook Air, in a coffee shop.

Why is Carrot Weather so popular? I’m a weather enthusiast and I like trying new weather-related applications. I use many all year long, but Carrot Weather is not part of my application arsenal. They recently introduced updated weather maps, but to get a sense of them, I would need to subscribe for a year subscription. Most of the interesting features are available in the premium tier. I like the maps feature, but I wonder how better they will get compared to the ones that I’m already using in MyRadar. iOS 15 brought a significant update to the weather too, but I find the maps lacking radar resolution.

If there are users of Carrot Weather subscription, tell me more, tell my why it is so nice?

Going back in time on previously published content can be the source of a few smiles. My oldest post on my main blog is about Micro.blog. Here is an excerpt:

This morning I found out the existence of a blogging platform called Micro.blog. Something very special. Very lean. Very light. Without ads. Leaner than WordPress. Yet capable. Close to Twitter but with less clutter.

It’s funny. It’s not about introducing my blog or something like “hello” world.

Well, well, well, it seems that data portability among CMS is an issue. Who knew! I’m trying to find an easy way to move a few posts from my WordPress blog into my Ghost website. Exporting data from WordPress seems like an all-or-nothing situation. There are a few plugins available for this. The problem is that the content isn’t easily imported into Ghost. The latter does have a plugin, but it doesn’t support selecting posts. I don’t want to do this manually.

Any idea or suggestions?

Update 2022-02-16: There is a follow-up to my quest, read all the details here

According to this year’s Six Colors Report Card, relationships between Apple and its developers' community is in terrible shape. The trend isn’t looking good either.

Marco Arment said, “Apple’s tightening grip on App Store fees, attempts to reach into other parts of businesses that they don’t deserve, and extremely entitled and galling statements on the matter continue to be distasteful and extremely damaging to their reputation. It seems like a huge strategic blunder to inflame developer relations, generate bad PR, invite more regulatory scrutiny, and risk governments imposing much worse changes for such a small percentage of their revenue.”

Is Apple still able to read the room temperature, or it is blind because of its financial successes? For once, I think Apple should copy Microsoft’s leadership.

As reported in my previous blog post, I had a chance to perform a “tech refresh” of my sister’s WiFi installation at her house. As a satisfied user of Ubiquiti product, the Dream Machine, I suggested to go with a lower end model, the Amplify HD. She has a big two levels home, with numerous rooms that poses a challenge for good wireless connectivity. It was a delightful experience, from the unpacking to final configuration. It’s a beautiful device with an informative display.

The setup was simple. Turning off the AirPort Express after taking note of the SSID, so I could reuse it with the same password. This prevents the reconfiguration of every device connecting to the WiFi with an already known SSID-password combination. After the initial power up sequence, the router will ask the user to download the configuration application from the App Store. An account has to be created with Ubiquity. Thankfully, Sign In with Apple is available.

The next phase happens on the iPhone with an initial discovery over Bluetooth. The setup process is quick and flawless. As expected, a firmware update was waiting to be applied. During the update process, it was the right rime to deploy the two WiFi extenders, in strategic places where the WiFi signals used to be weak. Once completed, I could name each devices with a more meaningful name, to represent where were each device. All in all, the process took less than 30 minutes. It’s a very Apple-like experience. The following table shows the situation before and after the new router. Numbers speaks for themselves.

Mission accomplished. Another happy customer. I came back with the old AirPort Extreme. No idea what to do with it.

In mid-2020, I wrote about my experience of replacing an aging Apple AirPort Extreme with an Ubiquiti’s Dream Machine. Today, I’m kind of repeating the experience, but this time with the Amplify HD router, also from Ubiquiti, for my sister. Don’t expect a complete review, but expect a post with a few observations. My sister is having weak WiFi issues in her house and I suggested her to get the kit to form a mesh network. I’ll be taking measure before and after to see if it brings meaningful improvements in her big house. Stay tuned.

I’m a big fan of Apple’s Sidecar. I frequently use it for work. When Apple announced Universal Control at the 2021 WWDC keynote, I was blown away by the technical challenge it might have represented for Apple’s engineers. It really makes for great demos. Then, I started to wonder if this feature would enable new workflows, and I failed to find meaningful ones. With Sidecar, the iPad acts like a passive device most of the time, and I’m happy with this configuration. Then, following the release of iOS 15.4b1, videos (like this one from MacRumors) demonstrating Universal Control in action started to pop up. I changed my mind.

Under a Universal Control configuration, the iPad acts like an intelligent extension of the Mac desktop. It’s like Sidecar Pro Max (just kidding here). The iPad becomes a second computing device readily available to the Mac. The user simply and seamlessly can take advantage of this second screen in a matter where the computing power of the device adds up to the Mac, the screen, the system memory. It’s absolutely clever.

I can see myself using Craft on the MacBook Air and Ulysses on the iPad Pro, all using the MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad. Or vice versa. Clever. Really.

I’m considering updating my M1 MacBook Air and my iPad Pro to this beta.

Consider this recent article from 9to5Mac: Concept: How Apple could turn HomePod mini into a delightful and adorable smart display - 9to5Mac.

Please, stop thinking that a screen on the HomePod mini makes sense because it just doesn’t. Why? Well, by looking at where we put these devices in our house, most of the time, you wouldn’t be able to see the screen from a distance. What Apple really wishes is that you buy an iPad mini with a Smart Folio cover for that purpose.

I find it surprisingly hard to find a simple MP3 player for an iPhone these days. I mean, just a simple application capable of downloading an MP3 file locally on the device with good playback controls, simple library management, nothing fancy. Readdle’s Documents (which I know very well) and EverMusic seem to be popular options. Documents offers a good user experience, albeit its multipurpose mission with documents management.

(I’m a moderate consumer of Soundcloud (paid subscription) and use Downie to download files from the service. Those files are stored on my DS720+ Synology NAS.)

What’s your experience in playing MP3 files on your iPhone? I’m curious.

Well, it’s the time of the month where I start to work on the next edition of my monthly newsletter (it’s free BTW). I spend about ten to fifteen hours each month to put this together using my past readings and discoveries, Craft and Ulysses. Each time, it’s a pleasure to create. I think I should put together an article about the workflow I use to create each newsletter. Would you find this interesting?

I’m nearly done with my Notion to Craft migration. I know I’ve been lazy; I’ve been using Craft for many months while my old content was still sitting there in Notion. While doing the migration, I realized, again, that I don’t really like Notion’s handling of a document. It just feels unnatural and quirky. Export options are very limited, which makes my job much harder. I’m also losing some metadata along the way (and database content too). I don’t have high hopes for a Craft eXtension to support Notion’s API to help users do this kind of rich content migration. I expect to finish the migration in the coming days.

…and I’ll move out of 1Password. It’s on my to-do list for 2022. Gruber’s article is a reminder that time is ticking. I’m just being too lazy to move my stuff out of 1Password and put that in Apple’s Keychain. It takes time, which is a rare resource for me.

I don’t like 1Password’s direction. It seems to me that going the enterprise way is counterproductive for the average users. Corporations and individuals don’t share the same objectives. Why do you think Microsoft is making Teams for personal use?

I want this so much. We have to voice our desire to get back the Dashboard on macOS. As explained by 512px a long time ago:

Jobs pitched widgets as mini-apps that let you look up a quick bit of information without ruining your workflow or train of thought. They allowed for quick interactions. They were present when you needed them, and disappeared when you didn’t.

Why try to imagine new solutions to fix the widgets conundrum on macOS? The Dashboard was the only good solution where you could put widgets anywhere on the screen, then invoke them as needed. Dear Apple, are you reading this? 🥺🙏🏻

Let’s enjoy one more time the Dashboard in its full glory.

Consider the previous annotated screenshot from Matter. Way too many applications have the same design issue. Why, in 2022, developers cannot fix these wasted space? I see that the content is of the same width if the iPad is used in portrait or landscape orientation. Why not adjust width dynamically? Is it that hard?

Apple’s Messages app, why does it only support iMessage and SMS? iChat had support for AIM, Yahoo Messanger, ICQ, and XMPP. Why hasn’t Apple gone beyond the blue and green bubbles, introducing support for additional protocols with more message bubble colors?

Apple likes control. They didn’t have it with those protocols. How could they implement things like CSAM?

Source: The Green Bubble Myth - Initial Charge

As you probably know, I’m a big fan of Craft. This application is really at the center of everything I do online, as thoroughly documented in my blogger workflow. That being said, I always keep an eye open for competing services, thanks to my Twitter list “Apps & Services”. Notion is one of them. Before Craft, there was Notion, which I loved too. But it felt too complicated or overkill for my needs. Craft is nowhere near Notion in terms of features. There is no comparison, even though I wrote one. Really. Yet, according to their recent tweets, Notion has been on a roll lately, adding features, tweaking things or rewriting a portion of the user experience like the text editing engine. So, where am I going with this?

It is tempting to think: what if I came back to Notion? I still have my account, after all. Things always look better on the other side of the fence, right? The thing is the speed of evolution of Craft, while being considered at a fast pace by some, I’m realistic, and I would argue the contrary. The team behind Craft is surely a fraction of Notion’s. Basic things are hard to come by. Said another way, my expectations aren’t met as fast as I wished. Take this week’s update, which was released earlier this week. While I’m happy to see improvements, there is not much to talk about. The release notes starts by the possibility to “star” a document, so it is easier to find in the navigation bar on the left. The second thing on the list is some improvements to the display of backlinks at the end of a page. While being welcomed by many, it’s not exactly mind-blowing. Sure it is a dot dot release (v2.0.3), but I was expecting so much more, as documented in my Craft wish list. Craft eXtensions, announced with the 2.0 release at the end of 2021 sure looks full of potential, but my expectations lean toward Craft’s core experience, which I find somewhat lacking.

I think I’m being overly demanding. Patience is a virtue.

I always liked electronic music, but I’m not a musician. In recent moths, I’ve been exploring the world of DJing. It’s a way for me to feel that I can do music without deep knowledge of musical theory. It’s a fascinating world.

Last year I bought a Pioneer DDJ-400 controller for use with my Mac mini. There is two major roadblocks in my experience so far: finding good quality tracks to mix and selecting the best DJ app. I want to draw your attention to the software side of my story.

Some well known DJ apps are Rekordbox, Serato and DJay. My understanding is that in recent years, software makers all switched to subscription models. Application like Rekordbox will “unlock” some of its features while being used with certain DJ controller models, but to get the whole thing, you have to subscribe to some plan. It’s irritating for someone like me who’s just trying to learn and experiment. But there is another problem: applications design sucks. Rekordbox and Serato are visually terrible. On the Mac, these apps really feels like aliens coming from… I don’t know… even on Windows they probably look aliens. The best looking application is Algoriddim’s Djay, by far. Problem is, the application is lacking many features. For now, my conclusion is that It appears that we cannot have both fully featured applications with a great design.

A few days ago, I wrote a small commentary post regarding the WSJ article on Apple’s iMessage, its effects on the crowd of young iPhone users, and how Apple is being evil. Man, it’s a pale and superficial perspective compared to Gruber’s view of the article, and the controversy that followed. Must read, if this short-lived controversy is picking up your curiosity.

Apple finally published the numbers of people who upgraded to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. While the percentages show the vast majority of users upgraded their devices, there are more people than with previous years who didn’t. It’s probably Apple’s fault.

With iOS 15, Apple is no longer forcing users to adopt the latest release to get the latest security updates. A user running iOS 14.7 can stay there as long as he can apply the security patches made available for that version. It’s an entirely new approach for Apple. I wonder why Apple made that change. I think I found one big reason.

If you compare Apple’s ecosystem to Android, Apple has a clear advantage here by being able to move the needle much faster for releases adoption, until now. In a single year, Apple can transform its ecosystem of users by adding features that are quickly making their way into people’s devices. By allowing users to stay on previous releases, Apple is shooting itself in the foot. Now they seem to change their mind, though. Apple could be changing his mind. As reported by MacRumors:

iOS 15‌ used to be listed as an optional update on devices running iOS 14, but now it is front and center on devices that still have iOS 14, and it is the only available update option as Apple has now stopped making security updates available for devices running iOS 14. Those who want the latest security fixes need to upgrade to ‌iOS 15‌, as all devices capable of running iOS 14 also support ‌iOS 15‌.

I think it’s the right move for Apple, since they tend to support old devices longer than other manufacturers. Apple could tweak iOS to be less aggressive is upgrading to the latest release by introducing delays in a random manner. Users eager to upgrade can do so manually, others would randomly get a notification suggesting the availability of the newer release. As time passes, those notifications would increase in frequency. This new behaviour will probably never come to like and not be enough. Here is why.

There might be another reason behind this change of mind on Apple’s part. Look at antitrust regulations looming on the horizon all around the world. Apple is probably making sure that all users adopt the latest release faster to comply with possible new regulations imposed by lawmakers, which would need to trigger changes to the operating system.

It was written on the walls: my subscription to 500px is coming to an end next week, and I won’t renew. It was a nice ride for sure, but Smugmug + Glass took over. Sure, comparing those services isn’t fair. For my needs, 500px doesn’t fit anymore. Another reason is the fact that I’m not taking as many photos as I used to, thanks to the pandemic.

I’ll keep my 500px account but in “read-only” mode for the year to come.

Om Malik writing on the iPhone fifteen anniversary and the carrier companies at the time (emphasis is mine):

These were wireless walled gardens crammed with absolutely rotten apps, games, and everything from mobile backgrounds to ringtones. They were an opportunity for carriers to nickel-and-dime their customers and extracted mafia-like fees from startups. Source: Looking back: iPhone & its impact on mobile industry & us. – On my Om

I have great admiration for Mr. Malik, but a lot of people, especially developers, would jump in right here and use the same paragraph to describe Apple and its App Store today. You may agree or not with them. I mostly don’t.

Somehow, I missed David Sparks' observations regarding the Wallpaper feature of Apple’s Design Team (emphasis is mine):

Instead of quoting Steve Jobs, I would have preferred an explanation from Alan Dye about his philosophy of user interface design and what his north star is when he does his work. I’d like him to make his case. If he explained the thinking behind this minimal approach, it might make more sense. Maybe this article was never meant to be that kind of deep dive on design philosophy, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Indeed. I’m not fond of Alan Dye’s work.

Source: The Wallpaper* Feature on the Apple Design Team and a Missed Opportunity - MacSparky

Jim Novell & Stephen Hackett both have valid points against Apple’s Photos Memory feature. I would another one: memories are created on a very aggressive schedule. There are way too many; I miss most of them. I don’t know if this is related to the fact that my library contains more than 42K images or if other factors come into play here. There should be a way to reduce the frequency.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal created a concerted reactions chain from news sites and people on Twitter. In “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble”, the WSJ article paints Apple as using highly questionable tactics to keep its users locked in iMessage messaging service. I want to share my thoughts on this.

Peer pressure among teens isn’t a new phenomenon, far from it. Way before the Internet became accessible, when I was a teen myself, I vividly remember the feeling of not wearing the same brand of clothes as my friends. The problem here is teen’s social behaviour, not the technology. They are the one to blame if they reject people using non iMessage messaging service. I would argue that Apple as nothing to do with this. Sure, they like the stickiness of their platform, but I wouldn’t say it’s the defining goal when they add features to it.

Of course, Apple can’t provide the dot-dot-dot feedback showing people who are actually writing a response to a text message because the SMS standard doesn’t provide that. Duh.

When Mr. Hiroshi Lockheimer from Google refers to “standards” in one of his tweets to fix the interoperability issues of messaging platforms like iMessage, I wonder what standards he is referring to, Google’s RCS. And if this standard is actually a standard, why is it so hard to take off? Why are messaging services like Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, etc.?

I would also argue that, for a company like Apple, the ecosystem stickiness is part of their differentiating factor. Of course, iMessage plays a major role here. For a company like Google, where massively providing free services with ads, the more people who get to use your services, the more revenues you get. It’s their differentiating factor. It’s easy to say: Apple should open up their messaging service.

My anecdotal experience is to the effect that when something breaks in the conversation between an iPhone user and an Android users, they usually go with Messenger or WhatsApp. People still have access to many alternatives.

WSJ’s article is a prime example that finding the right angle to portray Apple as the devil in the room attracts numerous clicks.

I’ve been working in information technologies for nearly three decades. Finding competent people has always been a challenge. Keeping them too. But, in recent years, the situation has become simply critical, to the point where businesses are deeply impacted: delayed projects, abandoned initiatives, high pressures on other people, stress, etc. Businesses’ bottom line if at stake here.

The news of the departure of one of the directors behind Apple’s transition from Intel to Apple’s own silicon, Mr. Jeff Wilcox, for its Mac product line is sad but probably just the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn’t read too much into this. I can imagine a team of many hundred engineers working on this program. People come, people go. Apple must cope with this. One could argue that when there are empty seats to fill, it becomes an opportunity for others to move in and try to be their best.

There are an infinite number of reasons why people leave a company. For Apple, the challenge is probably to stay attractive in a sea of opportunities for engineers. Apple cannot please everyone, all the time. I guess salaries is one of many other factors that come into play here. Apple is a legendary company where countless people would like to work there, me included. Pressure most be high in many key positions. Yet, the reward must be satisfying. I guess Mr. Wilcox has done what he thought could be done and succeeded. It’s often the good time to move on, and try something else while being at the top of their game.

I’m a big fan of curves, but up until now, I didn’t really know how to take advantage of them. 🙃 Enter this short tutorial for Pixelmator Pro. 😂 You’ll learn how to use the curves adjustment to tweak colours and luminance of any photos. I usually prefer to use sliders just because up until now I didn’t really get how to use the curves. Now, thanks to this tutorial, I have a much better idea. Many more tutorials are available on the Pixelmator Pro YouTube channel.

The production quality of these tutorials is impeccable. I really love Pixelmator in general, and I always thought this photo processing application could have been done by Apple, when they cared enough about making one, back in the days. This isn’t a paid advertisement. I’m just being enthusiastic about great native macOS applications. 😌

Kuo has also said that the iPhone 14 Max, or whatever it ultimately ends up being called, will be priced at under $900. For comparison’s sake, the current iPhone lineup’s “Max” only includes the 6.7-inch iPhone 13 Pro Max, which is priced at $1,099.

I highly doubt that Apple will reduce the price of the top-of-the-line model of their iPhone line-up. Why would they do that? This would put pressure on lower-end models to go down in price too. Non sense.

The Surprise Me! plugin for Micro.blog is undoubtedly a lot of fun to play with. It will pick a random post from this blog out of 1578 posts published since 2018. It’s a fun way to resurface old yet still relevant content. Try it! I wonder how many hours of my life were used to write and publish all that stuff?

Remember when people claimed Java would replace all computer languages? Maybe you remember when tech pundits told us that network computers would replace Windows PC? Or what about those who said that netbooks would replace laptops? Why some people consider the tech world to be a place where technologies always get replaced with another one? I tend to view the tech world as a space where several waves hitting the shores. Not everything disappears with each wave, and most of the time, technologies keep adding up.

What will replace the iPhone, you might ask? For me, nothing will replace the iPhone. But, according to Kelly Evans, the iPhone is going away. I don’t think her article will age well. Is she really thinking that a vast majority of people will wear goggles and stop buying smartphones? Really? Is she serious, or am I missing something in her writing?

As much as I despise articles who pretend to predict a product failure on day one, I hate articles who predict success of an unannounced product like Apple’s AR headset.

I should create a Craft document where I store those articles with a date attached to them, like five years from now, and get back to them to see how well the prediction came to be.

First, consider this announcement from Samsung:

“In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator, a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place.”

What? Why is there so much talk around NFTs these days? What problems do they solve? What am I missing? This short Twitter thread makes me think that I’m not missing a lot, and that I should probably move on. Nothing to see here. Yet, how long before platforms like Unsplash steps in? 🤦🏻‍♂️

Here is an update following yesterday’s post about getting caught by COVID. I thought that I had been infected because of my symptoms. We all did a quick test after posting my article. The results came up positive for one of my friends, but everyone else was negative, including me. It could be false negatives, but I highly doubt it, except if we didn’t do the test correctly.

How am I feeling 24 hours later? I had a not-so-good night with a sour throat. It was like if I had a fever, my body felt heavy. That’s a strange feeling. We still have two quick tests on hand, which we’ll probably use before going back home today. We’ll probably go to a clinic to get a PCR test, but long lines of people are waiting to get tested, which is discouraging. I should probably just declare myself as positive.

The thing about COVID is that not everything is clear-cut, far from it. There is a lot of confusion, especially in this fifth wave with Omicron. We didn’t really know what to do with a single test coming out as positive. We spent the last week together, with the Omicron variant, It’s pretty sure we would become infected. My friends thought of leaving early but changed their minds because we all had very mild symptoms because we were all fully vaccinated. So we didn’t feel the need to panic or worry too much.

Our holiday vacation is ending on a sour note, to say the least. 😒

After close to two years of relentless fight to protect myself from COVID-19, after following all the government’s sanitary rules and telling others how it is important to get vaccinated, It appears that the virus won over me.

We had this “get together week” planned for a long time, with friends. We were six. Everyone limited their contacts to the minimum in the week before, in accordance to the rules in place at the time. Yet, the virus got in. One of my friend got infected probably following a quick visit to their family for a gift exchange. They stayed half an hour then left. It was enough, apparently to get infected. So they came to this vacation week with us, without knowing they would bring the virus with them. I’m not angry. I’m resigned.

I’m not feeling that bad as I write and publish this post. I have very few secretions, but I feel my lung irritated and I cough sometimes. No fever. No out-of-ordinary fatigue. My sleep is unaffected. It’s seems to be in line with people who got two vaccines. I’m hoping this will stay that way for the coming days.

Now, I’ll have to tell my kids that I got it in a social gathering that I asked them well too often not to do with their friends. That’s the hardest part. Guilt. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The real cost of Crypto. We need to stop buying into this shit and fast. Why is it so hard to think about these “side effects” when creating new technologies? I recently wrote about not getting into Crypto, NFTs, web3 because I’m probably just getting old. I know just enough to understand the costs of the technology behind and how bad it is for the planet.

What if I documented all Apple computers I ever actively used or owned? For each of them, there is a story worth remembering and to write (like this one from 1986), the general context of its use, what software did I use on it at the time, how I bought it, how long did I own it and which new computer replaced it? There is even a ten-years pause where I left the Apple bandwagon to switch to the other side. What happened? Why?

Using the excellent and must-have utility, MacTracker, which I should have included in my post “The Perfect Apple Enthusiast — Find Out Where You Stand”, I started to process of going back in times. It won’t be easy to go back forty years back, but it’s worth it. I want this article to be as complete as possible and fun to read, full of high-quality pictures. Be patient, it will be a long journey.

For no apparent reason, I started a photo series of this little guy in all sorts of visual contexts. I’m using an album to store them all. I’m currently at 23 photos of him. He’s so cute, isn’t he? I got my inspiration from someone here on Micro.blog who did the same in recent months. I can’t remember who, though. So who knows where this is headed. It’s the time of the year for frivolous projects. 😂

Finally was able to finish season 2 of The Servant on Apple TV+ yesterday, just in time for the third season. What a weird story. The only occasion I can spend time watching TV series is during the holidays. Using AirPods Max for the listening experience is pure magic; nobody in the living gets distracted by the TV, and the sound quality is impressive. Now, I should finish For All Mankind Season 2.

To all of you, even though I don’t know you personally, since I spend quite some time here all year long reading your posts, I kind of feel familiarity. It’s like being part of a small community. I like this a lot. It’s something not possible on Twitter. So, I want to wish you a merry Christmas to all of you. Take care of you, of your family and your friends. 🎄

First day of holiday vacations. I’m not into Christmas at all this year. It’s the kind of day where I should work on my many writing projects or even do some photo processing! Yet, I feel in a lethargic state. I’m barely able to finish my newsletter. I’m unable to organize myself. Reading seems the best option. Or Netflix. I feel guilty for doing nothing useful. At least, I was able to express myself on this. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Well, I’m not a video guy. I prefer photography. My experience with Vimeo is coming to an end. I won’t renew my subscription. I’ll keep my account but returning to the free tier will remove many of my previously published content. This prompts me to remove some content from my main blog too. Deleting content is something that I don’t like to do. It’s like putting hard work, countless hours of work down the drain. 😔

You can have a look at my Vimeo profile if you are curious.

Matt Birchler blog post about his interest for Glass’s fading out:

I was very high on Glass, a new photo sharing app this summer, but my enthusiasm for it has dropped in perfect sync with the temperature dropping here in the Midwest since then.

Lee Peterson blog post about his interest is so low that he canceled his Glass subscription:

I still feel it was a bad slope to start down by adding appreciation and I’ve cancelled my subscription.

Finally, Andy Nicolaides on Twitter thinking out loud about the introduction of “appreciation” (a term used instead of “likes”):

I’m not one of the folks that wasn’t a big fit of Glass adding the likes / appreciation function, but I’ll tell you this much, in my small case study of one, it’s completely killed off any comments I used to receive.

Let’s be honest: Glass has been alive for less than four months. They kept updating the service since the beginning to improve the experience and discoverability. They didn’t fall in the “me too” trap yet. Aren’t we expecting too much too soon from such a small organization? Should we expect them to come out with the right recipe on day one? Could this be much more difficult to be different and yet familiar in the crowded space of on-line photo sharing? I would argue that your feed is as good as the people you follow. Sure, Glass needs to attract great photographers. I suspect they are working on it as I write this. People are busy. Living in a pandemic put a lot of stress on everybody and cancelled so many opportunities for doing photography, but it created others too. It wasn’t the best moment to launch such a service, and yet, they’ve done a great job so far.

I do have a subscription to Glass (my profile page here) and I’m willing to be patient here. I have a goal of posting at least one picture a week, even though I have another place to do so, on Smugmug (my profile page here).

I love the iPad. Apple’s Notes.app in dark mode is 😍. You’re currently seeing a brainstorm of ideas for an upcoming blog post in early 2022. The subject? Can you tell just by looking at my notes? Hint: It’s a meta blog post. Another hint: https://numericcitizen.io.

Yes, I know, my handwriting sucks. 🤦🏻‍♂️😔😉

Surprising to see Snapseed being updated since it is owned by Google. I use this photo processing application to create the posts in the Perfect Imperfection Series on my Smugmug account. If Google was to kill this app, it would probably put an end to my photo series. I tried to find other apps to replace Snapseed but failed to find something that comes close. Now, why is Google even bother maintaining Snapseed? How does it fit their business model?

I want to chime in on a series of posts by Matt Birchler (on his YouTube channel) and Andy Nicolaides (on his The Dent website) regarding the iPad. The question is clear: is the iPad still exciting?

It all depends on the use case. I came to realize in 2021 that the iPad (even in its Pro incarnation) cannot be as powerful and effective in my workflow as the MacBook Air. Besides creating content, is the iPad Pro still relevant? You bet! There is nothing beating the feeling of tearing the iPad from its Magic Keyboard and sitting on the couch for reading or browsing the web. Every single time, I enjoy the experience in all its glory, if such a thing can be said. The other use case that I came to appreciate is Sidecar. The iPad Pro, even in its 11” size, proves to be a superb and useful second screen to my Mac mini. And using the iPad with its Magic Keyboard, when I’m on the go, is still a superb experience, as long as I set my expectations accordingly.

With iPadOS 15, Apple did address a few more low-hanging fruits from a software perspective. There is still a lot to accomplish, but more than ever I feel Apple is giving the iPad the attention it deserves.

In summary, the iPad can be super exciting, it all comes down to its use case. For me, it still is, when I use it.

I think it’s worth it and it’s important. The transaction was easy (Apple Pay), which makes a big difference. Consider this an impulsive buy.

Directly from Craft, a peek at four articles that I’m currently working on, almost ready for publication! 👀👨🏻‍💻

I dare you to meet me in my Digital Garden! 🏡

I remember working on “A Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacy”, one of the cited challenges was to get access to the deceased person’s online data. I provided ways and a methodology to get ready for their numeric legacy. With iOS 15’s Legacy Contacts, Apple is making it much easier. The setup process takes less than 2 minutes to complete. An access key and a death certificate are required to ask Apple to let the legacy contacts to gain access to the online data. At long last, big tech companies now consider important to let people surviving people to keep access to deceased people in a simple and secure way. I can see countless headaches being prevented with this feature, first promised at WWDC last June. Bravo to Apple.

The previous screenshots show the release notes, as seen on an iPhone. I just can’t believe Apple cannot fix the font size. It’s been like this life forever. It’s all in the details, Apple, in the details. Gosh.

The most interesting thing for me is the App Privacy Report, which I love. As an IT guy in my professional life, I like to see what’s going on in my devices. App Privacy Report is a great way to show this to me.

Notifications Summary has a refined design. The summary goes edge-to-edge with the screen. It’s a bit weird. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature. Yet, I like to see more information in the summary as each notification offers expanded content.

As a side note, apparently, Apple won’t release Universal Control this year. I couldn’t care less because I don’t see this as useful in my current workflow. Maybe there is something to Universal Control that I don’t get.

Wallpaper by Basic Apple Guy.

If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you probably know by now that I’m a big fan of Unsplash (“My Growing Love Affair with Unsplash”). I’ve been using Unsplash constantly to find and use pictures in many of my posts (when I cannot find one of mines that fit the post subject). My contributions slowed a bit in the last year because I spend more time building my online presence on Smugmug (my Smugmug page) and more recently on Glass (my profile on Glass).

This week, the picture above has been selected to be featured in the architecture category. I’m honoured. You can see my featured photo in the architecture category right now. The last time that I’ve been unsplashed was less than a year ago, I wrote about it on my main blog: OMG — I’ve Been Unsplashed!.

To see all of my contributions to Unsplash, visit my profile page. The expression of “being Unsplash” is a creation of mine. 😂

Surprise! Today, Glass introduced something I thought would never come: Like! Oops, Appreciation (Announcement on Twitter)! In summary: they are private. They are note at the forefront of the experience. They don’t propels algorithms. They aren’t used to sell targeted ads. They are merely a check box in a database. They are gentle. They are a gift. The team behind Glass is showing sign of lucidity. I like what’s I’m seeing since the start of this special place.

So, as expected, yesterday Micro.blog introduced support for newsletters in the premium subscription tier. The official announcement follows:

Today we’re announcing a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: email newsletters. Micro.blog can now manage, letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. It’s deeply integrated into Micro.blog and works great for collecting multiple microblog posts together automatically.

Here is why I upgraded my subscription plan almost instantly after the news came out.

First, I’m a big fan of Micro.blog as a publishing platform and also of its foundational principles. I’m totally ok with paying a monthly fee of $10 to support the team behind—I want the platform to thrive. Second, adding support for newsletters is a great idea. Not everyone is using an RSS feed reader or like to read content through a browser. Everyone uses email clients! It’s important to provide different ways of communicating content to the readers. Newsletters are making a comeback.

Enabling newsletter is dead simple as shown below. I chose the weekly newsletter containing all the posts for the past week. Email go out at 9AM, local time, each Saturday morning. It’s a good way to start the weekend, isn’t it?

As you can see, the settings are quite simple. There is no formatting option (yet). Having a choice between all text vs excerpt would be a useful one. Speaking of formatting, one thing that I’m curious about, though: how does one newsletter look like? I couldn’t find an example in the documentation. Furthermore, how can we preview the next newsletter issue? It seems that, in case the first option is selected (one email for each post), the author has 30 minutes after posting to preview the email as explained here:

@timapple The preview works the same for the weekly and monthly option except it only creates it 30 minutes before it’s ready to send. Micro.blog will send you a preview email automatically with a link to edit it then. — Manton Reece https://micro.blog/manton/12238527

How does Micro.blog newsletter feature fit in my workflow? Micro.blog newsletter joins two other services that I depend on: Mailbrew to create something very similar in nature to Micro.blog offering and Ghost for my monthly newsletter (previously on Substack). On Mailbrew though, my summary newsletter also brings in content published on other platforms (WordPress, Blot, Ghost, Smugmug, etc.). It’s the ultimate weekly posts summary newsletter. Ghost, for my introspection newsletter, is like Substack, but better. I see Micro.blog offering as being a convenient way for my readers to get my content into their mailbox. It won’t replace Mailbrew or Ghost, obviously.

By subscribing to the premium tier, I also get a few goodies that could prove to be useful: bookmarking archiving and highlighting. The former allows for the bookmarking of a post on my timeline. The latter allows me to highlight some text while reading a bookmarked post or URL. Highlighted text can be conveniently used to create a link post easily. One thing that I would love to see is a browser extension for selecting text in any website. I’m not holding my breath, though.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this addition to an already great service for content creators like me. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly digest! So, to those who subscribe, I guess this post is the first to get through the newsletter feature of Micro.blog!

Don’t miss the YouTube video explaining the feature.

Apparently, it looks like tomorrow, Micro.blog is going to add support for newsletters. A few weeks ago, I can’t remember exactly, Manton posted a screenshot (which I can no longer find) where a “newsletter” item was shown on the left sidebar on the Micro.blog main site.

I’m very curious about Micro.blog take on newsletter. Micro.blog is all about simplicity without being too simplistic. If the feature is available to entry-level paid tier, I’m might enable it and use it myself. Right now, I’m using Mailbrew to gather all my published posts via the RSS feed to generate a newsletter. There is one thing though, are we starting to feel a bit of newsletters fatigue?

Can’t wait for tomorrow.

The photo thumbnails are from a personal trip to Austria in 1998. When I look back at these photos, I have to come to a conclusion that my photographic style didn’t really change in 30 years. It feels a bit depressing. It is basically revolving about architecture, nature. Very rarely about people, these are too hard to capture; I don’t have a good sense of timing, and I’m shy. I’m rarely doing street photography. The only addition to my subjects in recent years is urban exploration. Do we come into this world with a pre-determined photographic style?

Here is my Glass page.

And my SmugMug page.

Oh and my Unsplash page!

Boooooo… Well, it looks like I changed my mind. I didn’t remember that I wrote this blog post following the release of Ghost 4.0. At the time, I didn’t see the benefit, but now, it’s quite another story. I really love Ghost and I think I made the right choice for a few significant reasons:

1. Ghost comes with APIs, which enable all sort of possibilities to improve my workflow.
2. Ghost editor is much more powerful than Substack’s. This week, they started to release new cards type: GIF and Button. They promise another ten before Christmas! Yeah!
3. I prefer Ghost’s design in general over Substack.

In case you didn’t know, my newsletter website is reachable here: https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog

I’m currently testing Synology as a storage solution for all my non-personal, non-photographic digital assets that I often use to complement my blog posts. After testing Synology Moments, their previous solution for photo management on DSM 6.2, Synology Photos in DSM 7.x is a step in the right direction, a big improvement. I like what I’m seeing. It’s fast. The ability to use folders as well as albums to organize my collection is a big plus. I’ve yet to find a bug. There is an iPad version of their Synology Photos. It’s not perfect but it works. Lacking is support iPad multitasking, which is a shame but not a deal-breaker.

In order to test this solution, I’m using my DS720+ running DSM7 beta inside a virtual machine. DSM Virtual Machine Manager allows the execution of a Virtual DSM which is very cool for testing future releases of their software. I’m impressed by the relative speed of this setup running on 6 GB of RAM, 2 x 6 TB SATA drives and a Samsung M2 NVMe 512 GB cache drive.

Stay tuned for more.

Readdle software released an update to PDF Expert with support for Apple’s SharePlay. Using FaceTime, up to 32 people can share and annotate a PDF. According to the documented workflow on The MacObserver website, while in a FaceTime call, opening a PDF file with PDF Expert enables the SharePlay feature.

I tried the SharePlay experience using Music and screen sharing to see how easy the SharePlay workflow is to master. Each of my test with Apple Music ended up with a popup saying the selected content couldn’t be shared (probably controlled by the owner of the music track-not surprising at all). With screen sharing, I had more success and the feature worked as expected.

I think this is all cool and SharePlay brings Apple’s ecosystem closer to what is possible within Zoom or Teams.

What I’d like to see is more application support for SharePlay. Apple’s Keynote would be another winner where people could watch the same presentation together. I find it surprising that’s not already the case. Maybe an upcoming update to iWork will fix that.

l’ll definitively play with this more in the coming days because I think SharePlay has a lot o potential, especially in the business space.

On my iPad Pro, in split-screen view: on the left, Lightroom. On the right, Apple’s Photos. Same photo in DNG format (ProRAW) edited with available features and possibilities of each application. Lightroom wins, obviously. Recent update to Lightroom adds editing masks which makes a big difference in achieving desired results. Picture taken with iPhone 13 Pro. On the beach. While in vacation. Cheers. 😎🍹

My current status — spending quality time on vacations in Tulum, Mexico. It’s the first trip for more than 22 months. After so many sacrifices, time has come to say: enough, let’s enjoy life. 😎🌅

I’m done putting the final touches to my new home, a place where I continue sharing my newsletter and publish new posts under the Friday Notes and Photo Legend Series. Instead of using Substack, I’m now on Ghost(Pro). And I love it! I hope you stay with me in this transition.

Considering bookmarking this link: https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog or adding it to your favourite RSS reader: https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog/rss/.

When I got my first AirTags, I was anxious to get this wallet from this KickStarter project: “Snapback Slim Air - A Wallet for AirTags”. This is my Snapback Slim Air. With the AirTag inserted.

Can you see the problem? The AirTag hardly stays in place and has the tendency to pop out of its place. Not great at all. I always found the fitting to be so so. Then, today I got an email from KickStarter with the following promotional photo. Can you see what I’m doing wrong?

I happen to insert my AirTag the wrong side. Duh! The white side (the best looking one IMHO) must be inside and the silver side exposed outside. Ooops. Here’s the result.

As you can see, the fitting is a bit better but not that much better. I’m already looking for alternatives. Any suggestions?

So, YouTube will remove the dislike button soon from its platform. In one of his recent video, the popular YouTuber, Marques Brownlee, expresses his dissatisfaction about Google’s decision. His view echos mine. I’m not a big consumer of YouTube content, but when I do spend time there, I want to spend it on good quality content. The like / dislike ratio is an important indicator for me, and I suspect it is for many people.

We heard during the experiment that some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform.

I think the content creators should play a bigger role in all this: let them decide. The same way a blogger can turn off the comment section at the end of each blog post, people’s reactions on each video could be turned off by the author’s decision. In fact, I would argue that the ultimate decision to allow likes and dislikes should be held by the content creators. Simple as that. Make it an opt-in or opt-out default, but put the decision in creator’s hands. I would go as far as saying that the counters could stay private to the author if he or she decides so.

To me, one of the best rewarding indicator is the one that shows how far users are watching videos. They may agree or disagree, but as soon as they watch most of it, anything else is irrelevant.

I wonder if this decision by YouTube better serves their interests. I mean, without any ratio indicator, users have no choice but to start to play the video to decide if it is worth the time. This simple change makes people spend more time on the platform. Or is it the other way around and users will instead look at the comments to get a better idea of the video quality? I doubt it, as reading takes too much time to decide. People are busy, their attention span is short, a quick glance at the like dislike ratio is the way to go.

Once the decision to let people react to a video is made, then the platform could finally make it available only if the user watch “most of” the video. That no rocket science. There are probably other tricks that could be played to better control what’s going on in user’s reactions. But at this stage, it seems closer to be only implementation details.

As for the creator’s mental health issue, again, I would argue that if they tend to rely too much on the likes to feel rewarded, they could turn off the option. That’s something that could help others in dealing with this.

Glass, a photo sharing service, didn’t provide a like button from day one and doesn’t plan to add one. Is it good? Well, it depends. One thing is clear, from the comments I’m seeing posted by others, I have to ask myself: what is the difference between getting dozens of “I love it” or hitting the “like” button? Not much.

Photo credit: Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

A story by MacRumors reports Tim Cook’s answer about not being able to sideload applications on the iPhone is not restricting customers choice. Here’s the beginning of Tim Cook’s answer:

“I think that people have that choice today, Andrew, if you want to sideload, you can buy an Android phone.”

Tim Cook’s answer reminds me of another one. Steve Jobs once said that if you want porn on a phone, just buy an Android phone. Apple’s stance is fascinating. You want shit? There’s Android for that.

Photo credits: Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Even though I’m using Ulysses for most of my writings, after reading the “A Complete Ulysses Writing Workflow”, it gave me the idea of revisiting the way I organize my content in Craft. As shown in the previous screenshot, my content is now organized following a similar flow often seen on Kansan boards. As you might expect, everything start in the Inbox folder then eventually get “promoted” to the next folder, according to the content’s maturity. I like this a lot—it’s much cleaner than before. I should have known better, as I experienced the Kanban method a few years ago at work.

Here is a situation for which I’m searching for a solution. Let’s say I’m going out with my iPhone 13 Pro to take a few pictures outside. After a while, I notice that all the pictures that I was shooting were in ProRAW format. What if the lighting conditions were great that day and my photos didn’t require post-processing of any kind besides the iPhone’s own processing? How can I convert from ProRAW to their optimized JPEG counterparts and keep them in my iCloud Photo Library? Such process would decrease image size by a factor of ten.

I cannot find an answer for this seemingly easy question. So far, it all comes down to exporting the photos from Apple’s Photos application and then reimporting them. Such process needs to be followed by the deletion of all the original photos to prevent duplicates. There has to be a better way. Shortcuts, on iOS or macOS doesn’t provide any solutions as far as I can tell. Why is such thing not possible? If you happen to have a solution for this, please let me know.

The other day I was looking at my iPhone battery consumption only to find out that the Exposure notifications feature was consuming close to 10% of the power on a 24 hours period. It’s not the first that I see Exposure Notifications to take so much juice out of my iPhone battery. I’m not alone, apparently, according to a Google search with the “exposure notifications battery drain” keywords.

The question is simple: considering that I’m fully vaccinated, considering the state of the pandemic here in Canada, considering that hardly any people actually enter their test results if found positive, why should I continue to care about having this turned on? I think I could turn it off.

I’m feeling pretty happy again this week-end as I managed to do everything that I was sitting in my blogger’s to do list (which is setup every Sunday in Craft). What you’re seeing in my summary newsletter here is only part of my content creator story.

This seemingly insignificant box used to be sold by Apple and contained ten single-sided floppy disks. Those were meant to be used in a Macintosh computer. I had a bunch of them but somehow managed to keep an empty box. It was a great time.

Each floppy contained a whopping 400 KB of storage for a single-sided version. At one point we could get them for 70$ a piece. It was expansive compared to 5 1/4 inches flexible floppy disks that contained either 160 KB or 360 KB that were typically used in IBM PCs. From a design perspective, Apple’s floppy disks were rigid, smaller, sturdier and dust proof, hence a higher asking price.

After a successful initial launch, categories support addition, now here is profile page support. Glass is maturing, one step at a time. The web experience wasn’t part of the initial launch and I think it is fine. This is my profile page. Works great on iPhone, and on iPad which is cool. To join, you need to download the application. Works great on iPhone, not available on iPad. Oops. Next? Like support? I don’t think so. Hoping to meet you there!

But I wonder, where is photography headed from here? Surely, computational photography will play a big role in the short term. In my opinion, smartphones are not the future of photography, but they are hinting at where standalone, interchangeable lens cameras have to go in the next few years. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next. Source: Where is photography headed? — aows

What if Canon or Nikon were developing computational photography features in their cameras, just like Apple does for its iPhone? Imagine a “real” lens, a much bigger CCD captor, algorithms coupled with machine learning running on a powerful CPU. I wonder if this is the only way for Canon and Nikon to survive.

I’m still learning new things about shooting in ProRAW on my iPhone 13 Pro. The latest tidbits that I learned is not directly related to ProRAW usage, but to a setting in Halide related to photo capture modes.

When using what is called “Pro+” setting, Halide will take two photos for each shot. One is taken in HEIC format, the other is taken in ProRAW. Both photos are tied together and stored in Apple’s Photos library as one image. Here is the thing that I learned: when browsing previously taken photos from within Halide, metadata is shown in two different panels: HEIC and DNG (see above screenshots). Each component is taking a certain amount of space. The former being the smallest one. The latter, being the ProRAW version, is usually ten times bigger. But, when browsing the same photo in Photos, only the HEIC size is shown, as depicted in the following screenshot.

In summary, for pictures taken with Halide’s Pro+ format, don’t be deceived by Apple’s Photos showing only the HEIC size. The actual space consumed by this image is actually the sum of the HEIC part + ProRAW part (in DNG). That’s big, for only one image. Is it worth it? It depends, as I recently wrote about this.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Apple’s ProRAW. I know, I’m late to the party. Image size can be as much as 10x the size of a jpeg. I think that for non-edge cases (optimal lighting), ProRAW “cost” isn’t worth it. Also, ProRAW images taken with Halide are much smaller than using Apple’s camera app, for reasons I still don’t understand.

Timery received a major addition in this week’s update: REPORTS! As I wrote recently, I’m tracking the time I spend on my blogging and content creation activities. Timery is my go-to client for Toggl, a time tracking service. Having access to reports within the application, instead of heading to the Toogl’s website is really helpful. Now, looking forward for Timery to support macOS Monterey’s Shortcuts!

The less than an hour Unleashed event took place yesterday, I was there… watching on my Mac mini. I had these observations.

• The opening sequence with the man in its garage building a song based on sound from Apple devices, like the Mac startup sound was different, some sort of Mac celebration. Is this garage setup intentional and a reference to Apple’s beginnings? Probably.
• Today, I would argue that Apple completed 80% of its transition to its Apple Silicon. The Mac Pro will probably be the last to get the Apple Silicon treatment. What a monster it will be. We’ll probably get a bigger iMac and beeper Mac mini meanwhile. 2022.
• There is not much not to like in Apple’s MacBook Pro announcement. These MacBook Pro are technical marvels. Lots of “speeds and feeds” for sure but hey, that was for the pros, right?
• The M1 Pro / M1 Max branding makes me think of Intel’s.
• The notch… comes with a bonus, more screen estate. Is there room to complain? I wonder how good apps with many menus will look like. Yet, with all the hardware prowess Apple is capable of, I still wonder why they cannot put the FaceTime camera in the bezel, even that thin. Center Stage? Nope. Requires a better camera for that.
• I’m not looking to buy a new MacBook or any Apple devices for that matter. I’m super happy with my M1 Mac mini and M1 MacBook Air. But, a friend of mine ordered the 14”. Can’t wait to have his comments.
• This design changes are more or less subtile and it is quite interesting to note that it is reminiscent of the PowerBook G4 Titanium. I love it.
• The keyboard, without the Touch Bar, with its black background, looks so… pro. I love it. The best combination to me is with the silver version of the MacBook Pro, the contrast is even higher, more pro.
• Now, am I alone to think that the iMac / Mac mini could be the next to receive the M1 Pro and M1 Max treatment?
• The ProMotion display, which is based on the Liquid Retina Display, looks impressive. We’ll see what the reviewers have to say next week.

Another solid virtual event for Apple. Oh, Voice plan for Music? That was weird. I don’t get it. I thought Siri was bad as an interface to search for music. Apple must have a different take with that one. Now, the big question, is there any new stuff left for Apple this year? I think so. And that’s ok.

We went to the movies yesterday night. The first time in two years. “No Time To Die” was good. As much as other types of business has evolved in this time frame, buying tickets, bad quality lighting, flaky sound systems are still part of my usual subpar experience at the movies. No wonder why this is a dying business.

Matt Bircher on the lack of “Like” on Glass:

Maybe this is a terrible idea and I’m in the minority here, but I really do think that I would enjoy the app more if I was able to give lower-friction reactions to people’s photos. I still like Glass quite a bit, and I browse it everyday, but I do often feel like I don’t have the energy to comment on all the photos I like, and that’s a shame.

Lee Peterson’s take on his blog:

Not having follower counts and likes is a great way to stop the comparison to others and help to reduce the stress of feeling bad about myself for not making engaging content.

It’s not an easy thing to consider. Matt’s point of view also echos mine. If Glass added likes, does that put them on the path of Instagram, ads, and algorithm-based feed? I don’t think so. Glass is a paid service. That’s the key.

What if the decision of enabling likes was delegated to the photographer posting photos? I would enable it, Matt probably would too, but not Lee. The same goes for seeing and showing the followers count on the profile page. What if those decisions were put in the hands of the content creator? Let the platform have it builtin and the content creator decide what to do with it. Twitter’s Revue offers such a feature of showing the subscribers count on the Revue profile page. I like it, and it is enabled, even though I only have two subscribers.

On Micro.blog, the situation is pretty much the same. We don’t get likes to our posts, we don’t get to see how many followers we’ve got. I made requests to the guy behind Micro.blog for the ability to see the followers count on Micro.blog without much success. This data could be made private, and we could enable to show it on our profile page.

Why is the platform the only one making those decisions? Let the content creators decide. You can find me on Glass under the Numericcitizen moniker, here is one of my shared photo.

Google, recently on Twitter, announcing their adoption of Apple’s UIKit design language instead of using their Material design:

“Does a switch really need to be built custom in alignment with a generic design system? Or might it be sufficient to simply use the system solution and move on?”

I don’t buy Google’s explanation. Google is trying to say that UIKit wasn’t good enough for them, so they went their own way. Bullshit. The other way to look at this: building native apps is a better way to go than trying to build apps on unifying frameworks.

Today, Vanmoof announced their latest e-bike, the Vanmoof V model. The announcement video, reminiscent of Apple’s product reveals, is light on details. The singular design, in white, is both intriguing and looks heavy on the look. Some specs are impressive, on paper. But, there is something absolutely troubling: the V model is going to ship near the end of 2022. Yep, in more than a year. What is going on here? What this premature announcement could mean for Vanmoof? Well, obviously they are trying to gain mind share among potential e-bike buyers, and they are afraid to lose market share.

We’ll be developing the VanMoof V over the upcoming year, and will keep you updated with news and features as the bike comes to life.

Can you imagine if Apple were to announce a new flagship product iteration, the next iPhone, more than a year in advance? I wonder if Vanmoof is aware of the Osborne effect. 🧐

I’m on my way back home from a weekend in the Niagara Falls region. I put my iPhone 13 Pro to the test. I’m quite happy with my experience. Most of my photos are in ProRAW format. I’m not sure how I’ll process them: with Pixelmator? Lightroom CC? If the latter, the import process is putting me on the break instead of a more integrated experience with Pixelmator.

Been thinking about Notion recently. Before using Craft, I was a fan of Notion. I spent a few moments today on Notion to make some cleanup. I think I’m still a fan. Craft feels better for me as a writer tool. Yet, Notion is features rich. They keep improving it. I don’t know if they do it at a faster pace than Craft. They are certainly more mature. The team behind Craft being smaller, they don’t have the same resources. Many features are missing. But there is something to it that is missing in Notion. Craft being native on the Mac (it’s a Catalyst app), it makes a big difference. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on Notion. Who knows if I’ll come back.

Pocket. Refind. Readwise. Matter. Safari Read Later. When is this going to stop, so I can make up my mind? If you do a search on my Micro.blog page, you’ll see how tormented I can be about saving web stuff stuff to read later. I’m not very good at reading later. Yet, I’m eager to read more. I’m watching Readwise Reader to come out (I signed up for an early access), but just yesterday I stumbled on Matter, which looks really interesting, but still a bit limited.

After many weeks of trying, I finally sold my 2017 21.5 inches iMac. Even though Apple is currently selling M1 iMac at a competitive price, I thought that it would be easier to get rid of my Mac. It was a maxed out configuration, which helped me ask for a higher than usual price compared to other sellers. Yet, it wasn’t easy. As you might guess, I’m not the only one trying to sell an Intel-based iMac.

The next device put on sale was my iPhone 11 Pro with 256 GB of storage. One week before the officiel launch of the iPhone 13 Pro, I put up my older iPhone for sale. I got quite a few people interested in it, but the problem was the price they were willing to offer. It was way under my asking price, closer to what Apple is offering as a trade-in value. I think this is part of the problem. Many people are looking to get rid of their older devices to help pay for the new one, but potential buyers are comparing to what Apple is offering, which shouldn’t be used to fix the value of the second hand iPhone. Apple will refurbish the device or recycle it. This cannot be used as a comparison. After a week of getting my trade-in kit, I decided to return my iPhone instead of bothering to sell it.

When I bought my MacBook Air back in August, it came with a free pair of AirPods. I didn’t need them, so I put them on sale too. That one was easy to sell, though. It took less than half a day to find someone willing to get them.

It’s true that Apple hardware keep their resale value, but I think it’s not what it used to be. Apple is no longer the underdog, their devices are everywhere, which puts pressure on pricing.

What’s I’d like to see come in Canada is the iPhone upgrade program available in the US. I think I would pay a monthly price to always get the newer iPhone.

This podcast episode from MacStories featuring Viticci triggered quite a few reactions. Why? Because of these two sentences in the first moments of the episode talking about the iPad mini:

“You wouldn’t want to read/or watch a review by someone who is not a professional reviewer. It wouldn’t be enjoyable.”

Yep. Viticci said that. In “The value of a non-reviewer’s perspective” from Mere Civilian:

”I agree, a review from a person who does not write for a living may not be enjoyable. However, I strongly disagree with the first sentence. “

What? Really? Then, I read this reaction from Lee Peterson on his blog:

”MacStories posts some great stuff but not everyone wants to read long articles, some like smaller easy to digest articles from independent writers, I like to think I do that here. I get to the point and try to respect my audiences time, does that make my opinion invalid or not enjoyable?”

And here is my response. Viticci comments make him look full of himself. Period. I’m happy for him if he can live from writing reviews. I would rather read review from real end-users because the point is to get comments and observations from real use case scenarios. Sure, I like reviews from Marques Brownlee because he has well-balanced and critical point of views on a lot of stuff. It also touches the subject of what makes someone a blogger or a writer. If you write constantly, then you are a writer. Are you Shakespeare? Probably not. There is a starting point for everyone. Some will fall along the road, others will thrive. I tend to think of reviews by professionnel reviewers as synthetic reviews, where there is a lot of speed and feed talk. At some point, we want to go beyond that and have comments coming from experience. So, sure, I’d like to read comments from pilots about the real usefulness of the iPad mini. They are the one who can make a judgment on the subject.

Last year I wrote “I’m not an audiophile, but here are my thoughts on Apple’s AirPods Max” which is not of “review” but a collection of observations. I concluded with this:

”So, do I like the sound quality of my AirPods Max? Yes. Do they sound better than my Bose QC25? Yes. By a wide margin compared with the price difference with my Bose Q25? No. But, hey, they are wireless, convenient, comfier, have transparency mode, spatial audio and they fit within Apple’s walled garden.”

Is there any value in this? I think so. Should Viticci care? Certainly not. I do have genuine thoughts and opinions, and this is my ultimate right to share them with the world for exactly what they are: thoughts and observations. Nothing more, nothing less.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Today Apple is publishing an article on its newsroom website about all the new thing that comes with Maps in iOS 15. There is a lot to like in this update, like the 3D detailed views in some major cities like San Francisco. These 3D views remind me of SimCity, a game on which I’ve spent countless hours playing. Maps as matured over the years, following the iterative nature of Apple’s approach to everything they do. Some don’t like it, others see the value in it. I’m one of those who think this is the best approach as each iteration helps build the next one with good cumulative experience. Today’s Maps, nine year later after a rocky start, in 2012, is impressive and as good as other popular alternatives, in my area at least.

Microsoft’s announcements this week are nothing less than impressive. Microsoft is showing courage. Their Surface are striking. These things will probably be hot as hell (pun intended, thanks to Intel Inside). I’m hoping users will have a better experience than many of my colleague who had their Surface replaced in the last year because of over heating issues. Stylus On the surface (pun intended) may not work as well as the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Apple is at their best in that regard. Yet, we have to give them credits for what they are doing. They are iterating with more than incremental updates. They try new things. It’s interesting to see Microsoft aligning itself with Apple strategy: vertical integration (hardware + software: Windows) with a yearly release schedule. Designed for Windows 11. Well done.

Now, looking forward to Apple’s next announcement: the MacBook Pro “redesign”. Don’t expect anything close to what Microsoft is doing. But expect Apple to reintroduce the HDMI port and the SD Card reader. According the latest leaks.

Of course the memo from Tim Cook about leakers is being leaked. It’s funny to read a leaked memo from Tim Cook expressing his concern and frustration about leakers working within Apple. After reading it, I do think part of the message is for outside leakers too, knowing the memo would be… leaked.

Compared to last’s year iOS 14, early numbers show a much slower adoption rate for iOS 15. The problem? Last year was about the iPhone experience getting widgets. That’s a very material change. This year? Even if widgets now come to the iPad, it is far less reaching than it was on the iPhone. Things like focus modes are not as flashy as widgets but are damn useful, to me at least.

After a long summer of beta releases, today we get to see the final releases of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Are you feeling as excited as a few years ago at the same time? Personally, even if I think those are great iterative updates, I don’t. There is less to grab by developers it seems. I’m not expecting exciting new releases for any of my apps. What about yours?

I don’t know who got the idea at AppleInsider of putting video auto-play right in the middle of every articles, but this doesn’t enable a great reading experience. Even worst, scrolling the page to the bottom while reading will put the video in the bottom right corner on top of the content. It makes me wonder if I should stop reading their content altogether. Ads are bad but this is even worst. It’s not a good reading experience at all. Please, reconsider. Thanks. A long time reader.

If you think that this year’s updates from Apple are meh, I think, either you didn’t pay attention during the keynote or you’re simply bored. You may not like the iterative nature of Apple under Tim Cook, maybe you forgot to remember that the smartphone (and to some degree) the smartwatch are mature products. Since Apple is paying attention to what the majority of people actually care about, improving battery life, adding more storage, keeping prices steady, not having to wait three months to get a new device, stop expecting folding iPhone to prove Apple is still innovating.

There, I said it.

One of the best recent take on the possible future of the App Store.

Regarding IAP purchases:

Most apps will be required to also offer IAP side-by-side with any external methods

…

Many games will offer both IAP and external purchases, with the external choice offering a discount, bonus gems, extra loot boxes, or other manipulative tricks to optimize the profitability of casino games for children

…

External purchase methods will evolve to be almost as convenient as IAP

…

The payment-fraud doomsday scenarios argued by Apple and many fans mostly won’t happen

Now, App Store side-loading and alternative App Stores:

Facebook would soon have apps that bypassed App Review installed on the majority of iPhones in the world.

…

Without the threat of App Review to keep them in check, Facebook’s apps would become even more monstrous than they already are.

…

Alternative app stores would be even worse. Rather than offering individual apps via side-loading, Facebook could offer just one: The Facebook App Store.

…

Maybe Google would bring the Play Store to iOS and offer a unified SDK to develop a single codebase for iOS and Android, effectively making every app feel like an Android app

…

Media conglomerates that own many big-name properties, like Disney, might each have their own app stores for their high-profile apps.

…

Most developers would probably need to start submitting our apps to multiple app stores, each with its own rules, metadata, technical requirements, capabilities, approval delays, payment processing, stats, crash reports, ads, promotion methods, and user reviews.

In a few words: what a fucking mess.

I don’t expect side-loading or alternative app stores to become possible, and I’m relieved, because that is not a future I want for iOS.

I’m not so sure this won’t happen, but I’m sure that’s something I don’t want too. If only Apple could better read the room’s temperature and budge a tad.

In a recent announcement by Readwise.io:

We’re now in position to reimagine aspects of the digital reading experience itself, from how you annotate a document, to how you navigate. Readwise as you know it today isn’t going anywhere, but this is our future.

And:

With the new Readwise reading app, not only will these resurfacing and syncing features not go away, they will be enhanced through tight integration into the reading experience.

There is much more to digest on their published essay. They’ve been thinking about this for a while and judging from a few screenshots, their reading app seems compelling and well done. I’m hoping they will support Safari’s extensions. RSS feeds will be supported too. Sadly, it will probably be another Electron-based app. We’ll see if this doesn’t affect too much the experience.

I’ve been a subscriber of Readwise.io for a while, but I must admit that I’m not taking advantage of it as much as I would have liked. It does get synced with my Pocket account, but that’s about it. Oh, and my saved quotes get resurfaced in my Mailbrew summary newsletter, which is cool.

I’ve subscribed to their private beta testers waiting list and I can’t wait to try it out. If all goes well and is up to what they say on their blog post, this could entirely replace Pocket for me.

So, you’ve got an e-Bike. Good for you. I’m jealous. You’ve got an Apple Watch too. Good for you, just like me. Now you want to go for a ride and record this activity with your Apple Watch. Which activity type will you select? Selecting Bike will probably record wrong data as you can move much faster than a regular bike and getting lower than normal heartbeat rate. Should Apple provide another type of biking activity?

Photo by Wolfram Bölte on Unsplash

John Gruber on Apple’s lack of courage regarding vaccination of their employees:

So where’s Apple on this? Why isn’t Apple requiring proof of vaccination for employees, including for retail employees and customers? Why reserve courageous decisions only for removing headphone jacks?

Boom.

Photo by Marisol Benitez on Unsplash

I was at the office. A normal day. It was a perfect sunny and more than usual mild September day. Blue sky. Then the news struck. At first, I didn’t understand what was actually happening. The internet went slow, to the point of becoming unusable. My colleagues started to leave their desks. We all turned to the TV set in the employees cafeteria. It was such a unique accident, we all thought. Then, the second plane, which marked a turning point in our history of modern barbarism. We are still trying to recover from it. I think of this day so often, each time with deception and bitterness because we didn’t learned the right lessons.

Side note: I find the American society fascinating. They seems to treat those who died on 9-11 differently then those who die each year from guns. The latter are more than three times those who died on 9-11. Each year. The US spent close to 6 000 billions dollars on war since 2001. It didn’t fix anything. How much do they spend on guns to try to fix this problem? Fascinating indeed.

Photo by Magnus Olsson on Unsplash

This is the Opal webcam. For the Mac. Made by Apple people. Can’t wait to try this out. Not cheap, though. Not ready yet either.

Consider this screenshot of the Medium.app updates streak. It’s not a joke. At least one update a week for reimagining their app. I used to like Medium but their app, probably a major conduit to their content, is broken on the iPad and it never gets fixed (mainly layout issues).

How are we supposed to take online publishers seriously when for months they let bugs hinder the user experience of… reading their content? I greatly reduced my use of Medium for reading content, partly because of this.

VMware:

Due to various challenges of COVID-19 and the recent announcement from Apple on their transition away from x86 to Apple Silicon, VMware will no longer pursue hardware certification for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 for ESXi.

This is sad news and probably not a surprising news. In early 2020, I came close to buy an entry-level Mac Pro in order to build a lab-in-a-box for experimenting different environments and software, all related to my work. I started this thread on my blog about my SDDCbox project, and was nearly ready to make the decision. Somehow, priorities shifted and I dropped my project entirely.

It is one thing to see new apps being non-native to the Mac, like 1Password 8 and maybe the upcoming Readwise Reader app, but it is another when a major player like VMware no longer consider the Mac as a viable platform for things like ESXi. Apple’s transition to its own silicon has obviously something to do with it. The Mac has never been more popular than today, yet, on the software side, I feel there is a “malaise”.

Just in time for the upcoming Apple event, my rumours site has been updated to reflect the most recent rumours. New iPhone. New Apple Watch. New AirPods. iOS 15. iPadOS 15. No MacBook Pro updates. That is all.

Here is a picture of my 2020 MacBook Air that I recently bought. I wanted to use it as a banner somewhere, but this visual defect on the Apple logo put an end to my intention. Then, I started to think how bad things go for Apple these days and I came to the conclusion that this scratch perfectly illustrates the current status of Apple as a symbol. What a useless post. 🙂🤦🏻‍♂️

In recent days or weeks, rumours are rampant on the updated design of the Apple Watch: bigger but flatter screen, boxier design are the main themes, with no new health sensors. I’m not so sure about the boxy design. It’s ok for the iPad or the iPhone but for a watch? To me, it could make it less approachable, less jewelry. We’ll see in a few weeks. There is one thing that I’d like to point out about the Series 7: Apple is not only presumably launching an updated design, they are creating a new price point. The bigger screen helps legitimate this. They have been doing this since Tim Cook is CEO.

Five publications each month. Four Friday notes posts, one monthly newsletter. Some new subscribers. No comments. A lot of fun at writing and publishing these posts. I’m writing for myself. I don’t feel the pressure of regular writing schedules. It’s easier than I thought. The more I do it, easier it becomes. Substack is a slowly evolving publishing platform. I wish it was a bit more like Twitter’s Revue. Anyways. https://numericcitizen.substack.com.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

South Korea today passed a bill that bans Apple and Google from requiring developers to use their own respective in-app purchasing systems, allowing developers to charge users using third-party payment methods

Now what? How will Apple respond? Will they create a different version of iOS for South Korea? Can they simply appeal this law, if such a thing is possible? How is this going to help other countries and parties to go after Apple’s practices? How much time will Apple be given to change its practices? Three months? A year? South Korea is probably a small market for Apple compared to other places in the world, but this new law seems like a tsunami in the making.

Funny and fascinating to see that 95% of the time, the four energy-efficient CPU cores are doing all the legwork on my M1 MacBook Air. I rarely see the performance cores doing work for a long time.

I’m using NextDNS.io for a better web experience… not the same but it does a great job of making the web more privacy friendly and a lot faster too. Too bad that we will have to wait for iOS 15.1 or later for iCloud Private Relay. Each year there are features that get dropped from the initial release… remember iMessage in the cloud, anyone?

Just got this yesterday. You know what this mean, right? Well, maybe not. Anyway, I’m a bit late to the MacBook Air party, but this thing is probably THE best Mac Apple ever made. It’s not the best Air Apple ever made, though. A tad too big probably, yet so powerful. And this keyboard… a real and trusty keyboard. 🥰

I’m working on an essay about my new adventure in the MacBook Air land. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t happen too often but when it does, I feel very proud about it. One of my blog post about the story of 1Password 8 going Electron  on https://numericcitizen.me received a backlink from Michael Tsai (look for “JF Martin” and you’ll see the excerpt).

Mr. Tsai does a tremendous work with his link posts in general. I can imagine how much work he puts into this each day.I would love to have a peek at his blogger workflow.

Gruber writing about how Apple mostly fixed Safari 15 on iPhone with beta 6 (emphasis is mine):

The unusual part is that we got to see Apple’s design process play out in public. The Safari team has been kept busy this summer. (There has to be one hell of backstory here, right?) There was a certain pessimism amongst some who perceived the problems with the original iOS 15 Safari design, simply because Apple seldom makes drastic UI changes between their unveiling at WWDC in June, and when they officially ship in the fall. But seldom isn’t never.

I’d love to read the behind-the-scene-story about this “in public” design process that we all witnessed. The Safari team surely scrambled to fix the design issues between beta 1 and beta 6… or was just all planned in advance? I bet on the former. The whole saga was unusual for Apple. They look less confident from a design perspective.

I love Safari 15 in beta 6. They nailed it, and it is an improvement compared to the pre-iOS 15 implementation.

iOS 15 beta 6 is out and Apple is making great progress with Safari on iPhone. For me, they finally hit the right notes. I think that’s the design they should have included since day one of iOS 15. Yet, I find it funny to see Apple put a new option in settings for those who prefer the pre-iOS 15 release. I guess it’s another case of “If you can’t decide which design is the best, just add another option in Settings so the user decide.”

SharePlay, ID Cards, App Privacy Report, Custom email domain, detailed 3D navigation in CarPlay, Legacy Contacts, Universal Control won’t ship with iOS 15.0 this fall. We’ll have to wait for an update later, like 15.1, 15.2 or even later. That’s a lot of stuff missing the deadline. I was looking forward to Legacy Contacts and Universal control… Apple is often a waiting game.

A successful Apple investor, Paul Lane, had advice to give to other Apple investors, as reported on PED: buy Apple gear to return some money to Apple as a sign of appreciation and support. That’s the most bizarre advice I ever heard of from an investor. I would expect something along the line: buy low, sell high. I, personally, own a few Apple shares and a lot of their products. Yet, I don’t feel invested in a mission to show my support to Apple, either by buying shares or their products.

After an emotional week-end, long in coming, today I’m doing all the things I love the most: doing computer stuff — writing in a coffee shop — feeling like a real blogger — doing some photo processing — walking — biking. I know time will fly.

Life is good. Those days are so rare. I’m enjoying every single minutes of it. Work resumes tomorrow.

Photo by karl chor on Unsplash

Parker Ortolani for 9to5Mac published a two-parts concept on a future version of macOS named Mammoth.

macOS Big Sur did a great job of refining the Mac desktop, but it didn’t fundamentally change any of its behavior. We’d like to see that change with the next version of macOS. With Monterey being mostly full of small refinements rather than big ideas, we’d expect Mammoth to be a monstrous release.

I’m using one of his screen design that pertains to widgets improvements. I recently wrote about those and Apple’s sad design decision to keep them in the notifications center for Big and Monterey. I think Ortolani’s design is interesting and plausible. Freedom of placement certainly makes the experience more satisfying. It’s so true they liberated widgets on iPad with iPadOS 15.

There is so much work going into these visual essays. I mean, there are release notes too! I often considered people doing these mockups has being Apple’s cheap labour. I wonder if Apple’s designers notice those.

Dear Apple, as an owner of an M1 Mac mini, a MacBook Air and an iMac, don’t you think that I’m entitled for an explanation about what does this update fix? I think I do.

I got the new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. I chose the one without the numeric keypad; the desk space being scarce. Setting this thing up took one minute. I had to read the (slim) manual as I wasn’t sure how the pairing would work: connect the keyboard to my M1 Mac mini with the provided USB-C to Lightning cable, quickly press the M1 Mac mini power button two times to trigger the setup process for Touch ID configuration (Bluetooth is automatically configured). The Touch ID setup screen looks similar to the one on the iPhone when settings up Touch ID for the first time. It’s one of the best Apple keyboard; keys feeling is similar to the previous generation. Touch ID is the star of the show here, and I love it. Only works with M1 Macs. This Magic Keyboard brings to the Mini, a feature otherwise only available to the MacBooks (and the M1 iMac). That’s why I bought the keyboard. It’s not cheap, but convenience has a price for Apple.

There is so much to think or write about a simple “Store” tab. Something so “obvious” can lead to weird design decisions, even for Apple. I love this (rare) blog post from Ken Segall.

Sarcasm ON: “I’m feeling inspired by Apple’s new way of thinking. It’s liberating. Who needs “Apple” when you have “Store”? Generic is just so much easier, don’t you think?" - Ken Segall

To be honest, I don’t remember when there was a dedicated Store section on the Apple.com website. Apple brought it back, leaving “Buy” buttons scattered around every single product pages. It is now so much easier to buy something from Apple these days.

Sarcasm OFF

Yesterday, Apple made some changes to their website with the introduction of a new Store tab at the top of their website. Not only that, but the store design has been completely redone. I find it a bit disorienting at first, but after a few minutes, I think the elements and general reorganization make sense; I find it easier to navigate in general. Apple chose the horizontal scrolling sections instead of going vertical. I’m not always sure this is the best way to go, though. The bouncing effect is inconsistent, it’s there while going to the right but not when hitting the limit on the left. AirTags have their section, which is surprising for such a small device.

It’s interesting to note that Apple’s top navigation bar is now spanning a store, physical products, services, support, search, and a shopping cart.

Apple is getting ready for this fall slew of new products. Oh, one of the first thing I noticed is that the Magic Keyboard With Touch ID that is bundled with the 24” iMac is now sold separately. I ordered one for my M1 Mac mini. It will take less space on my desk and Touch ID will so much more convenient for the mini. One last thing: convenience has a price: 179 CAN$. Ouch.

It is light, fast and an absolute design gem. Small, but not too small. It runs a powerful operating system. It’s highly portable. It is venerable. It is a rare “species”. There is something really special about it. Furthermore, it has a real keyboard that I can trust. Battery life is good. It is out of the way. It’s the perfect device for writing and blogging.

It’s a 2013 11” MacBook Air.

I’ll explain in the coming week or so.

Matt Birchler had an interesting blog post this week about a screenshot of his 2013 iPhone home screen. There are a few interesting things to note. In 2013, it was the arrival of the controversial iOS 7 redesign. It’s interesting to look at the Camera+ icon design which was still not updated for the new style. The dock design style was pretty basic and felt out of place. A few apps are not longer among us these days: Path (which was really a great design example) but most of the third-party apps are still available today.

I wish I had kept screen shots of previous home screen arrangements in the past. Something that I have kept is many screen shots of my password manager user interface dating back pre-iOS 7 era. Here is an example below. When I saw iOS 7, I didn’t have the courage to rework my design. The development of my app stopped right there. I made five thousands dollars with this adventure, between 2009 and 2013. Now I’m using a combinaison of 1Password and Apple’s passwords vault.

Apple is slowly but surely getting there with this release of beta 4 of iPadOS 15 and Safari 15. I like what I’m seeing, on the iPad. Yet, “when you don’t know what is best, just add an option to Settings so the user can decide” strategy seems to be the way to go this time. You know what’s my choice, don’t you?

I’m going to jump in because on macOS, I don’t see the change as controversial as on iOS 15. I find it surprising that Apple seeks feedback on the new design. It’s a good thing but also surprising has they tend to do their thing alone. Now, they look a bit in distress while searching for a solution.

Again, Matt Birchler:

technology and improved general productivity always had the promise of letting us work less, and yet today we work more than ever and have less than before Source: A Four Day Work Week? Yes, Please!

I sure wish we had this four days work week. I cannot see the day it will become reality. The problem in IT where I work, there is a worsening trend of a lack of qualified people for many IT fields. This trend puts pressure on those who are qualified to do more working hours.

Matt Birchler writing about Apple ecosystem stickiness:

“As I buy more and more Apple products, all of those Apple products get better. My iPhone is more valuable because of the HomePod Mini I AirPlay my podcast to while I’m working. My iPad gets more valuable because it has seamless file sync with my Mac. Reminders is better because it works with Siri in a way no other app is allowed. The list goes on. But this is of course also a bit of a trap. I can’t really get an Android phone, even if I think I would enjoy it more than my iPhone, because then my HomePods become worse, my Mac gets worse, my iPad gets worse, and my Apple services get worse. Because each additional Apple product makes all my other Apple products better, likewise removing something from that mix brings down everything else.”

You cannot use an Apple Watch with an Android smartphone. In Apple’s garden, every product has an extension that takes the form of a service or another physical product from Apple. Did we forget that once upon a time we made a switch from platforms like Windows or OS/2? When a new offering is really making a difference, we tend to switch. Back in the days, a Windows PC was an island, leaving it for the Mac meant that you had to re-buy new software, a few accessories. All things equal, the switch wasn’t necessarily funny. Today’s digital world is quite different, for sure, but pose a similar kind of challenge when switching.

Photo by Miguel Tomás on Unsplash

I’ve been using Photos in iPadOS 15 since beta 2 and I must say that Apple is in fact offering a major update to their photos application. Beyong the updated Stories automatic creation and management improvements, face recognition has become quite impressive. According to a published article by Apple, people faces should be more detectable and recognizable in more extreme conditions. I can confirm this is actually the case. A large number of new photos were surfaced by Photos’ improved algorithms which brings more potential content for new stories creation. Managing tagged faces is easier too and provides a refined experience overvall. Photos enhancements in iPadOS 15 is a big reason to upgrade.

I’m finally done moving Adobe Lightroom Classic from my iMac to my M1 Mac mini. A few takeaways: it’s a tricky process involving many folders to copy (presets, settings, photos, catalog, etc.). Lightroom is bad at managing digital assets when things need to be reorganized. The Apple Silicon optimized version is faster but not as much as I thought it would be. My Mac mini never stop to impress me, it’s such a fast device. I’m close to being able to put my 2017 iMac for sale.

I’m planning to go big screen this fall with the iPhone 13 Pro (12s?) Max (I currently own an iPhone 11 Pro). I never owned the biggest iPhone (Plus or Max). There is one thing that makes me pause: information density of the Max seems about the same if not a bit higher compared to the non-Max model. There are six row of icons on the home screen on both models (Max and non-Max), which is kind of lame. Am I getting this wrong?

I’ll be getting a old 2013 MacBook Air for one of my son to replace an aging Chromebook that I bought about two years ago. Think about it. This eight years old MacBook Air is faster, much better design, much better screen quality, more memory and will be able to run macOS Big Sur and all other apps like iWorks et al. I find this incredible that we can read and hear people saying Apple gear is expansive and that is under Apple’s obsolescence progamming. I call this bullshit.

I waited for close to a year for Castro to bring its podcasts app to the iPad. Today, with the announcement of Automattic buying Pocket Cast, it came back on my radar. It didn’t take too long to make the switch. Pocket Cast is a real multi-platform player, feature rich and has an as good design as the other players. After Tumblr, DayOne, now Pocket Cast, I want to give it a try and see how Automattic will build on it. Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying it.

Microsoft announced their PC in the cloud offerings this week. While it is probably based on their previous offering, Windows Virtual Desktop service, it does look like a milestone to me. I’ve been in IT for more than 25 years. I saw the migration from the mainframe to the client-server applications architecture. After that, it was about virtualization taking over with the popular VMware hypervisor. In the last five years, I saw the cloud taking over the IT world. The latter has a much more profound impact than any trend I witnessed or was part of in my career.

PC in the cloud is only offered to business customers, for now. I can see Microsoft offering the service to the general public in a not too distant future. I’ll probably subscribe to an instance for my personal needs. Being able to run the PC in a browser means being able to use it on any of my current Apple devices, from the M1 Mac mini to my iPad Pro. This is something Apple will never enable itself, certainly not within Safari. The future looks interesting.

We are in the dark age (not dark mode!) of user interface design for sure. We get excited for new animated UI elements (example here), but overall, delight has been lost in translation a long time ago. As Mike Rockwell is a link post say:

“I can’t really identify anything that I’ll be nostalgic for in ten or twenty years.”

I wouldn’t go back to pre-iOS 7 days but there has to be some delightful in-between degree of crafted user interface that had some real joyful elements in them. Apple is not the only one at fault here. It looks like it is a design trend spanning many mediums (print, TV, web, etc.).

Has the industry decided that our devices have reached a level of maturity that warrants making everything minimal, sterile, and utilitarian to help “do work” and “get stuff done”?

Excellent question, Tyler Hall.

Wow, that one is close to being hilarious. Big tech companies are the target of hate these days. Google was hit by another antitrust lawsuit by no less than 36 states about their handling of applications side loading on Android. In summary, it is so cumbersome to side load an app on Android, thanks to security measures, that it makes it hard for competing App Store to compete.

Google makes the sideloading process unnecessarily cumbersome and impractical by adding superfluous, misleading, and discouraging security warnings and by deterring users by requiring them to grant permission multiple times for a single app installation (discussed in more detail in Sections I.C. and I.D. below). The effect of Google’s conduct is to practically eliminate competition in Android app distribution.

Android is supposedly more permissive than Apple’s App Store and yet, it looks like it’s not enough. This lawsuit is a prime example on why I don’t like the current trend. People want more open platforms but it’s never enough. If Apple is ever forced to make profound changes to their App Store business, it will be the beginning of a worrisome trend that I prefer wouldn’t happen. I recently wrote about not wanting another Android platform. Now, I should say that I don’t want another Windows platform disguised in a mobile device. To me, it is scary and close in nature to the same problem of who should own encryption keys. Raging ransomeware cyberattacks are signs of what is coming on mobile devices if we open them up too much, just like Windows.

In preparing to move off my 2017 Intel iMac (and put if for sale), I must make sure to re-install remaining applications on my M1 Mac mini. Photography-related apps were the last to be updated for the M1 chip. Lightroom CC is now fully optimized, but none of the Skylum apps I was (rarely) using: Luminar 4 and Aurora 2019 HDR. After spending some time on their support forums, I found out that none of their apps are optimized for the M1 chip. I had to make the call: bye bye Skylum. I barely knew you.

If a software vendor like Skylum is unable to update their apps in a timely matter, more than a year after the M1 chip has been announced, I give up. It is sad because these are the kind of applications that would take advantage of the power of the M1 chip. Too bad. My photography workflow will focus on Adobe applications, for good or for worse.

The next step for Apple is to design for repairability which goes beyond recycling. AirPods are the worst example of this. When the battery life on these is reached, there is no practical way to replace them without throwing it to the trash and buying a new one. So for me, the right to repair goes way beyond having a choice of where I’m going to take a device for repair. It is about buying a device that was designed for and built to use recycled materials, but also it is about buying a device that can be repaired for basic things like battery replacement.

So Richard Branson went to space. Next, Jeff Bezos. And then, what? Is there any scientific purposes in these flights to space? Nope, not directly at least. Is this a publicity stunt? Yes and no. I’m not at ease seeing billionnaires spending their pretty money on something that don’t bring value to a community except for themselve. Oh, they want to start a new commercial flight in space business apparently, for billionaires:

Branson’s flight — which came just nine days before Amazon bilionaire Jeff Bezos is slated to rocket into suborbital space aboard his own company’s spacecraft — is a landmark moment for the commercial space industry. The up-and-coming sector has for years been seeking to make suborbital space tourism (a relatively simple straight-up-and-down flight, as opposed to orbiting the Earth for longer periods) a viable business with the aim of allowing thousands of people to experience the adrenaline rush and sweeping views of our home planet that such flights can offer.

Is there a better way to spend our resources to see the burning planet from space? Gosh.

Since last year, I’ve been making a major cleanup of my Twitter account. I came from following more than 2000 people down to less than 300… and my goal is to drop below 100. I’m slowly getting there. Here are a few take outs from this major cleanup of my accounts following list.

First, there are a lot of stale accounts on Twitter, which tends to artificially increase “followship”. It looks like people stopped tweeting a while ago — they left the building. Second, a bunch of accounts were iPhone developers that I started following during my indie developer era, back in 2009-2013. My interests have since then shifted to writing and blogging. I no longer need to get in touch with the developers community. Third, and this coud be the most troubling take out: Twitter has become less and less useful in my numeric life. Articles readings happens more and more though RSS feeds and Mailbrew. So, what’s left for me from Twitter? Getting reactions from people during specials events, related to Apple’s announcements. That’s pretty much it.

A recent poll ran by 9To5Mac gives surprising results about what people would like to see if Touch Id is to return to the iPhone. Touch ID under the screen wins popular favour… personally, I would prefer Touch ID to go on the power button, just like the iPad Air because it is easily accessible while holding the phone.

For those like me who despise Safari redesign in iPadOS 15 & iOS 15: here is simple trick to better cope with Safari redesign: keep the number of open tab to ONE. Why do you think Apple thought it was a good idea to include a “Close Other Tabs” in the popup menu while pressing the address bar? With on,y one tab open, this is close to what we had before.

I keep thinking of this phrase from Phil Schiller who once said:

“whenever we make a change we do it from a position of strength rather than weakness.”.

The window has closed a long time ago for Apple and they find themselves in a weakness position. I thought Mr. Schiller was still partly involved in the App Store related decisions.

InitialCharge:

The only one that stands to lose anything in this scenario is Apple and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to convince us that side-loading is inherently bad. But they’re wrong.Source: Apple’s Head of Privacy Doubles Down on Anti-Sideloading Stance - Initial Charge

I’m a bit late on this one but, let say Apple does go ahead and allow for side loading of apps. Besides the proliferation of App Stores, what will we get in this scenario that we don’t get today? Proponents of applications sideloading are always shy on providing the real long term benefits of such opening. Let me guess: lower prices for apps? Faster install? Better layout App Stores? Apps that use private APIs? What examples of previsouly missed innovations that we get with side-loading? Apps that can trick differently users in thinking they are safe? Or is this choices for the sake of choice?

In the following screenshot taken this morning on my iPad screen, how many ellipsis signs to you catch? I highlighted them for you to make it easier. To all developers, to all designers, to Apple: please, stop this shit NOW and find a better way, use your imagination, stop being lazy at design. Thank you.

If you’ve been paying attention in recent months, did you know that you can have a peek at my upcoming blog posts that I’m working on? Thanks to Craft, You can peak at a selection of drafts, ideas, reference lists, etc. I give a name to this: open writing. Think of this as being this observer looking at a painter while he or she is painting a new artwork.👨🏻‍💻

What would be super cool is if someone interacted with this by posting comments… which is something Craft makes possible.

Dave Mark for LoopInsight:

Did the pandemic make a foundational change to the way we think about where we do our jobs? Or was this a blip, with a slow slide back to the old ways?

I certainly hope that we won’t return massively to the old days. For Apple, it looks like the pandemic was a blip and employees will need to be back at the office at least three days a week. It’s a corporate culture thing, which doesn’t get amended easily. Now, for employees not wanted to return to the previous model, even partially, they could become poaching targets by other companies where remote work is fundamental to them. This is where Apple could have to open up more.

What if nobody at Google knows exactly what their data hungry engine is all about? I mean, what if nobody has a global picture, so nobody can say “oh my god, it’s terrible, we must stop it!”. This makes me think of the nazis in second world war: very few had a global picture of what was really going on. It was devised this way so it was easier to “manage” and keep the machine humming.

So Windows 11 is a thing. Is it a revolution to Windows? Maybe, maybe not. It depends if you can install it on your PC, which is far from certain. But let’s say you can, how deep goes the UI refresh? Is it like it was for Windows 10 which was supposedly a redesign of Windows 8 which was tweaks to Windows 7 UI that came before it. Here is a simple question: Did Microsoft really clean up the Windows UI mess that it has become over the years? I don’t care too much about windows transparency level, toolbars, icons. Getting rid of UI legacy feels a more useful and laudable endeavour.

While reading a recent article from Basic Apple Guy about News+, there is this illustration that shows how far Apple News icon has come since its beginnings. I have included the illustration here. It shows how bad design has become in the last five to ten years. That is really depressing to see. As much as things like AR and LiDAR technology help bring real world and virtual world closer together, UI design seems to go the opposite direction. Why is that? When will that trend stop and maybe revert a bit? Why can’t we get visually joyful icons anymore? Is it a matter of design costs being too high?

So, I took the plunge and installed iPadOS 15 beta2 on my iPad Pro. A few observations. It’s beta and it shows. Home screen and widgets placement is janky. One springboard crash so far. All my apps are working just fine. Battery life is taking a hit. Text recognition in pictures is jaw breaking and open up all sort of new use cases. The QuickNote feature is a nice addition that will complement my blogger workflow. QuickNotes appear as regular notes on iOS 14. The loupe is back, thanks god, but I think refinements are needed: it is hard to distinguish from the surrounding text. I completely redone my home screen arrangment. I didn’t setup Focus modes yet as I’m not done with home screens setup yet, both are tied together. I love the new notifications design. I’m really liking iPadOS 15 so far. I use App Library a lot, much more than on my iPhone. 1x1 Widgets are replacing application icons on my first home screen page and I love it! Reordering of home pages is alone enough to justify upgrading! Didn’t use the new multitasking a lot yet, just played a bit with it and it’s a good improvement. Alt-tab in split-view will switch focus between the apps, welcome in 2021. Unpopular opinion: I kind of like Safari’s new design, not sure if this will hold true on the iPhone, though. I love the new keyboard overlay at the bottom of the screen; it is no longer as wide as the screen. I like the refreshed design of the shortcuts editor and the suggestions. That’s it for now. Back to home pages setup.

Pool Western Digital My Book Live NAS owners… many of them woke up to find out that their content was gone from their devices. Apparently, hackers came in by using an unpatched vulnerability on devices where the last update was issued in 2015 by Western Digital. This brings me to ask the following questions: were those devices directly connected on the internet? If yes, that dumb. If this was a known vulnerability, why WD didn’t issue a patch? Companies should be required to publish security-only fixes for far longer than they do right now. I’m sorry but 2015 isn’t that old for such a type of devices. Finally, I personally own a Synology NAS, obviously not directly connected on the Internet, yet, I have to wonder if it is still secure. I’m planning on enabling 2FA to add another layer of protection, though.

I’m on vacation. I have some time to spare. My vacation time is spent between my home and a rented chalet. The iPad Pro and my iPhone 11 Pro are my main devices. Beta 2 came late this week and reports are starting to come in. In summary, lot’s of fixes, a bit faster and apparently no big show stopper. I’m mostly using Craft these days and Apple’s stock apps like Reminders and Notes. What could go wrong?

My situation is similar to James Rogers’ from iPadInsight. Last year, I went all in with iOS 14 betas on my iPad and iPhone. This year? I’m a bit more caution. I’m looking to test iPadOS more than anything. As I write this, I get a feeling that I’m trying to convince myself of either waiting for the public beta of simply live dangerously and make the plunge. But what happens in Photos memories on non-upgraded devices? What about Messages in the cloud? What if I create a new reminder item on iOS 15 but want to check it off on a non-iOS 15 device? So many questions… Help me with this.

I know that I should put some time in writing my next issue of my monthly newsletter instead of writing this microblog post. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Just got an idea: have a look at the release notes and see if there are any deal breaker in there. Stay tuned. 😅

Benjamin Mayo on FaceTime 15 in the landscape of collaboration tools like Zoom and Teams:

FaceTime is more like an add-on of Messages, competing against WhatsApp and traditional phone calls if anything. You also see this in how each service handles identity; Zoom and Teams have abstracted user accounts, whereas on FaceTime you connect by sharing your personal phone number or email address — information that you only want to give out to close friends. Source: FaceTime in iOS 15 — Benjamin Mayo

Surprisingly, to use FaceTime, you need to give very personal information like your phone number of your email address… while other competing platform has abstracted that account information a long time ago. FaceTime links represent a step in the right direction, as sharing a link is enough for others to get onboard. Time will tell if this proves to be enough in the enterprise.

This Safari redesign concept misses the point of Apple’s decision to redesign Safari on iPhone. Apple’s intention was two-fold: provide a better navigation on the iPhone with the thumb and bring the navigation model of switching across open websites closer to switching between apps. Apple’s intention were good but where they fail is to provide the exact same design for things like opened tabs the same across all screen sizes. It’s probably not needed on the Mac, it’s good on the iPad but messy on the iPhone. I wonder how Apple will backtrack on this one and when.

This blog post by Gruber is probably one of its best. He annotates Apple’s publication regarding Anti-Sideloading White Paper. You may disagree with him (I do agree with him), he points to very solid arguments.

By having side-loading available, I can already see a bunch of lazy-scammy developers who will skip the App Store because, you know, it’s a pain in the ass to deal with these app reviews… so let’s drop a bin file with a download link on a Facebook page, that should be just “good enough”. Oh and clusless IT guys who will require those apps to be downloaded because, you know, they are mandatory for this or that… schools would probably be the first in line…. wake up guys, we don’t need this shitty world.

This is one of the many reasons why I love Apple. They put so much money into this building restoration, it is mind blowing. The amounf of efforts that went into renovating this historic site is beyond any public-founded projects could have done. This brings me to this interesting question by Basic Apple Guy:

(…) should corporations be allowed to get their hands on this historic architecture and turn them into private businesses? Rightly or wrongly, the fact of the matter is that many governments don’t prioritize or have the means to prioritize the extensive work required to take on this scale of restoration.

I tend to have a polarizing view on anything related to architecture. My father was an architect and so I’m profoundly sensitive on the subject. Yes corporation can take over abandoned historic buildings as long as they do it under the supervision of an urbanism council or something like it. Here, Apple transformed a building into a store but each time Apple chose to do it in a gentle way. I mean, it is barely noticeable from the outside that this is an Apple Store. It’s a very respectful way to do it.

Now that Darkroom officially supports iOS Shortcuts (and will support Shortcuts on Monterey this fall), I can’t wait to get Pixelmator to do the same, as this is my go-to alternative to Lightroom CC for photos editing on the iPad. I like Darkroom by the way but I do have to make choices. Screenshot from MacStories.

As I wrote in this essay, we don’t need another Android platform. I understand Apple being on a PR blitz. I know Apple is holding a contradictory position when talking about the iPhone and the Mac. It is well documented that side-loading doesn’t fix the lack of choice issue, quite the opposite actually. I don’t accept the idea of weakening a platform in the name of “choice” for a minority of techy guys.

I’ve been working hard in recent days to reinvent the way I use my Apple devices. The idea being to focus more, be more efficient, increase my experience quality and better grasb how and where I spend time as a blogger and content creator. Tools involved? Toggl, Timery, Shortcuts and Automation. The trigger? iOS 15. 🤓🤷🏻‍♂️

According to a survey by SellCell, people aren’t too much excited for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Without trying to read too much in these numbers, I think the next major revision of Apple’s flagship operating systems will grow on people when they start to use them.

There are some profound changes like focus modes that has the potential to change the way we use our iPhone or iPad. It’s hard to judge this feature just by looking at YouTube videos. The new focus mode certainly requires a bit of setup and tuning but me feeling is that it will have a much profound impact on users than what multi-users support could have brought to the table.

As we are probably getting iOS 15 beta 2 this week (today?), here is a probable schedule for this summer betas. RED colour is for developer betas, blue is for public betas. We should get 8 betas for developers, first public beta set for July 7th. Let’s see if these guesses are good or not.

I always thought that politicians and their aides don’t really have clues about technology in general. If you want to fuck up something in tech, ask the politicians. This is exactly what could happen if these antitrust legislation proposal become laws.

Imagine that: you take out your brand new iPhone out of its box, turn it on only to be welcomed with an empty screen, no builtin apps, just a simple “Hello”. In the name of what: competition. Developers like the one behind Basecamp and HEY would be so happy, because in this hypothetic world they would feel in better position to compete against Apple. What a bunch of retards.

I just wish this type of legislation would be in effect in the US, so that here in Canada, we would continue to get the standard iPhone experience.

Great Safari 15 critic here. I didn’t test the new Safari design yet, but eventually I will (probably when public beta is released). Apple made bold moves with this new design. I’m afraid that, if they change something or revert some of the design decisions, it will come in iOS 16, and present it as the next big thing in internet browser experience. That’s typical of Apple.

Intel may see its market share fall to a new low next year, in large part thanks to Apple’s decision to move away from using Intel processors in its Mac computers and instead use Apple silicon. Source: Intel Processor Market Share May Fall to New Low Next Year Due to Apple Silicon - MacRumors

How much Apple business did represent to Intel overall numbers before the Apple Silicon transition started? My feeling is that it wasn’t that big. Ten pourcent, maybe? If Intel share numbers are falling, Apple is not the only culprit in my view. The move to mobile-only devices like smartphones which are not based on Intel’s chip is the culprit.

But the thread running through everything was that if you buy an Apple device, it’s yours. And it’s you. And if you buy, well, anything else, you’re just a slab of meat holding a slab of glass through which the internet will manipulate and extract data from you any way it wants. So, yeah, the garden’s walls may be high, but Apple says that’s only to keep you safe.

— David PierceSource: Apple defends the walled garden - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

Many would argue the since you cannot install apps from outside the App Store, your iPhone isn’t really yours. Others would argue that since you don’t have a choice but go to Apple to get “your” iPhone repaired, your iPhone isn’t really yours. what is “your” take on this?

I’m a bit late to the party but this use of Apple’s App Clip technology is clever: point your iPhone to the Apple Watch band package, an App Clip will pop up on your phone to help you get the matching Watch Face. Cool. Great case of Apple eating its own dog food, and showing a great integration experience.

This blog post from Michael Tsai paints a very terrible picture of macOS Big Sur. Unstable, weird design decisions, lot’s of issues in Apple’s Mail, etc. Sounds like the worst macOS incarnation of all time. Personnally, I don’t experience many issues with macOS Big Sur, but I do feel it’s a weird design overall. The next release, macOS Montery, doesn’t appear to fix bad design choices… I’m thinking about widgets handling and notifications dismissal.

The more I read and learn about the upcoming “Focus” feature in Apple’s upcoming OS updates, the more I think it could be a transformative feature in experiencing Apple’s devices. The combinaison of notifications and home page configurations assigned to each focus mode has powerful implications. Even though I’m not on the beta train right now, I’m already at work designing the different focus modes I plan to use on my devices. As you might expect, I’ll be writing a detailed blog post about this in the future.

This take from Gruber “App Store: The Schiller Cut” has a sour taste following the WWDC keynote and Platforms state of the union. Did Apple announce something this week to appease developers relations? Nope. Will they announce something in the coming weeks in regard to App Store commissions? Who knows. If they do, they will do it in a position of weakness:

If someday down the road we will be changing 70/30, then I think the question moves from “if” to “when” and “how”. I’m not suggesting we do anything differently today, only that whenever we make a change we do it from a position of strength rather than weakness. That we use any such change to our advantage if possible. And thinking about this long in advance can only help to look at an eventual change as an opportunity (with developers, press, customers, etc). — Phil Schiller in 2011

They missed the opportunity this year. Apple is in a weak position and I don’t see how this could change anytime soon.

To run an internal version of iOS, each employee must first install a special profile on the device — just as we do for downloading beta versions. However, each profile sent to employees determines which of these features will be enabled for each person working on new versions of iOS and possibly other Apple operating systems as well.

Source: Apple doubles down on secrecy with a new way to hide iOS 15 features from engineers - 9to5Mac

With Adobe finally releasing Lightroom Classic for Apple Silicon Macs, This could enable me to move off my 2017 21.5” Intel Mac for once. The prospect of Lightroom catalogs and data migration is not enchanting though. There the issues of plugins migration too. Is it time for me to go all-in cloud with Lightroom CC only? Not sure it is the right time either.

I have a few incentives for selling my iMac: one being to help me finance a shiny new 2021 12.9” iPad Pro with 1 TB of RAM. This could serve as my iPadOS 15 test bed for the second half of summer. I still have quite some time to think about all this as these devices are back-ordered for at least the second half of July.

You thoughts?

After publishing my essay on what I was hoping Apple would do in response to the developers community, Matt Birchler wrote a small response regarding my assertion about payments processing platform being a limited feature in the grand scheme of things. It appears I was wrong. Thanks to Matt blog post, I have a better view of what goes behind the scene here.

That being said, Apple’s payment processing service within the App Store serves Apple’s purposes and is the one that is very narrow, very focused. It’s a good thing. I’m not sure Apple has to compete against this industry. Allowing third-party payment processing services would need to focus on the minimum in order to protect privacy or help guarantee that privacy is in good hands. It’s an attainable goal.

If Apple ups the game with iPadOS 15 (background tasks, better multitasking, external monitor support, etc.), we could see a situation where iPadOS crawls on lower or mid-range iPad while working like a breeze on the iPad Pro. Could Apple limit certain features to the high end only? Quite possibly. Your thoughts?

Consider the previous screenshot showing the popup menu when selecting a word in a document. This menu hasn’t been touched since iOS 3, if I remember correctly. Tomorrow, as we are about to get a peek at iPadOS 15 and iOS 15, I’m wondering if there are better ways to display such a menu. Consider a few design problems and possible improvements.

This menu doesn’t scale well; it isn’t exactly elegant. In some situations, we have to scroll through its options which is not always obvious and is tricky to do with the finger without selecting the option at touch and scroll time. Also, this design involves too much finder travel to my taste; I would prefer a more condensed version. The design is flat and doesn’t allow for hierarchical grouping of options which could help is situations where many options are available. The design is flat and is not as distinctive as it could be. Adding some depth, contour line would help.

Do you have any suggestions on how Apple could improve on this?

The Thunderbolt display is now a vintage product for Apple. When I look at this beautiful monitor, I’m thinking about the recently introduced redesigned iMac. Many people would have preferred to see the iMac chin disappear. We should know better and see this is a distinctive design attribute of the iMac which make it look different than from a simple monitor. It’s an important visual differentiation factor in my opinion. The iMac is not a simple monitor.

I like how Micro.blog stacks up against Twitter’s subscription. $5: Micro.blog hosting, photos, use your own domain name, categories, bookmarks, themes, CSS, plug-ins, bookshelves, standalone pages, native apps, open APIs. $3: undo tweet, thread viewer, free Twitter features.

Indeed.

Here is why I won’t subscribe anytime soon (another reason on top of many, btw):

But what is interesting is one thing that you won’t get with Twitter Blue: an ad-free experience. Advertising is still the biggest chunk of Twitter’s revenue, and they’re not going to replace that with direct subscriptions anytime soon. Source: Twitter Blue subscription launches in Australia, Canada – Six Colors

Paying to be a beta-tester and give feedback? Can you imagine paying to get beta releases of Apple’s OSes? No way.

This CAD view of the iPhone 13 shows a bigger than usual camera assembly on the front of the iPhone. It’s massive. Not sure what to make out of this leak. Good news for photography enthusiasts?

Don’t you find it weird and contradictory to see Apple investing so much in accessibility features at the operating system level yet they thought it was a good idea to remove the loupe in text selection interactions? Is this a typical “one team not talking to the other”? Please, Apple, bring back the loop in iOS 15. Thanks.

Another solid update to Craft released today. This time, Calendar view was added for those who would like to take daily notes or write meeting notes as this update integrates with Apple’s calendars.

If you pay attention to the Craft’s update page, you’ll see Craft rapidly evolving over time. Who knows what’s next for this essential tool in my blogger and writer workflow.

Oh, and Craft has made it to the Apple Design Awards finalist! Congrats to them!

Time is running out to those using and depending on Google Photos for their online photo library storage needs. The free tier is now capped at 15GB for new stuff added. That’s small. Why not consider moving to iCloud Photo Library if you are already invested into Apple ecosystem? And, if privacy protection is something you care about, now is the best time to switch.

I hate it when people subscribe to my stuff, to my blog, my newsletters, or whatever, just to grab my attention and wish that I’ll follow them back. That is not the way I operate or think. I’m looking for real content, enlightenment, creativity, singularity. I rarely follow back someone unless they meet what I’m looking for online. Just saying.

An easy way to differentiate yourself from the crowd is to persevere with your journey of publishing your stuff out there. There are countless authors who started something only to stop after a while. Be the one who continue and keep it going. Regularity and continuity are key factors to build your online presence. I guarantee you that people will come and stick around if you meet these goals.

I’ve been more silent than usual in recent days. That’s because I was busy building up my new home for posting online my best photos. I’m also writing about my experience while doing so. As you wait for the whys and hows, here is a peek. Hope you enjoy.

https://numericcitizen.smugmug.com/

Multi-Tasking on the iPad is Actually Pretty Great - The Newsprint:

Slide Over is genuinely convenient. Certain apps work better than others inside the Slide Over deck, and when they’re optimized, their convenience is unmatched. I keep a calculator app in Slide Over at all times, I keep an iteration of all messaging apps in Slide Over, and I like to keep an iteration of the Files app available at all times. These kinds of “in-and-out” apps are exceptional for Slide Over.

At least one person really likes multitasking on iPadOS. The thing about the Slide over feature is that it requires setting it up. It doesn’t happen “just like that”. I rarely find the right app to use in the Slide over view… I need to “bring it in” and this is where the experience falls apart. This is where I want to see Apple improve things.

Apple’s Troubling Relationship With China - Initial Charge

This problem isn’t unique to Apple. Most, if not all, of the major companies whose products and services we interact with each day are being influenced by China. And I expect that influence is growing with each day that passes. If you’re in favor of freedom, liberty, and individual rights, you should be concerned about this.

It’s refreshing to see that Apple isn’t the only one where its products are made and a lot of them are sold to. What can we do instead of just bashing on Apple?

There is apparently no money to be done from having apps on Android; all money being on the iPhone side. So developers are asking for their share of revenues from Apple, by reducing their commission, urging Apple to open up the App Store, weakening the security model along the way, making the user experience worse, making iOS experience more like… Android… we have a full circle.

Daring Fireball: The 2021 M1 iPad Pros:

The elephant in the room is iPadOS. It’s just not good enough. In the same way that Intel’s chips were holding back Macs, iPadOS has been holding back iPad Pros. With Intel chips, the hardware was holding back the Mac platform. With iPads, it’s the software holding the platform back. This hardware is indisputably amazing, and iPadOS is fine for casual use. But it still feels like I’m trying to do fine detail work while wearing oven mitts for my day-to-day work.

I like Gruber’s introduction in his review of the M1 iPad Pro. But his review echos other reviews. Nearly all M1 iPad Pro reviews that I have read note the same issue: iPadOS lacks maturity to sustain iPad Pro aspirations. Can’t wait for Apple’s WWDC in three weeks.

According to circulating rumours, the Apple Series 7 will go through a small redesign. The Series 4 introduced a bigger screen but the overall shape stayed the same. This time, a more boxy look is expected. I’m not sure that I like what I’m seeing here on this mock-up. To me, the Apple Watch would loses some of its iconic traits. If this boxy design allows for more internal space, hence probably more sensors or new features, better battery life, so be it.

I wonder when Apple will fix the issue of tiny release notes, on the iPhone. I can’t remember since when the issue started, but it’s been a very long time. It’s all the details, Apple, all the details.

To support users with limited mobility, Apple is introducing a revolutionary new accessibility feature for Apple Watch. AssistiveTouch for watchOS allows users with upper body limb differences to enjoy the benefits of Apple Watch without ever having to touch the display or controls.

Source: Apple previews powerful software updates designed for people with disabilities - Apple

The demo on Apple’s Newsroom website is really impressive. Surprisingly, it looks like the feature will work on recent Apple Watch generations (Series 4 and up).

One question: why announce these initiatives now? We’re 17 days away from WWDC. Looks like WWDC will have more room to announce even more exciting stuff. 😀

Another question: if you look at the following screenshot taken from today’s announcement, we can see that table cells are narrower than what we have on iOS 14. Is this a first glimpse of what is coming in iOS 15? I certainly hope so because it looks much better, friendlier. It reminds me of the pre-iOS 7 era.

First:

Apple is very efficient at pursuing their business model, which is based on selling overpriced, obsolete hardware to customers locked in their ecosystem," Durov wrote. “Every time I have to use an iPhone to test our iOS app I feel like I’m thrown back into the Middle Ages. The iPhone’s 60Hz displays can’t compete with the 120Hz displays of modern Android phones that support much smoother animations.

And:

Durov added that the worst part about Apple’s technology is not “clunkier devices or outdated hardware,” but that users who have an iPhone are a “digital slave of Apple.”

”You are only allowed to use apps that Apple lets you install via their App Store, and you can only use Apple’s iCloud to natively back up your data,” he said.

“It’s no wonder that Apple’s totalitarian approach is so appreciated by the Communist Party of China, which – thanks to Apple – now has complete control over the apps and data of all of its citizens who rely on iPhones.”

Source: Telegram founder says iPhone users are digital slaves | AppleInsider.

Mr. Durov can go to hell. Typical talk from an Android guy. Nobody his forcing him to develop for the iPhone. Nobody. He is a digital slave of Apple himself. I can’t stand this attitude and I’m voting with my digital means: closing my Telegram account.

For the new MacBook Pros, Apple is planning two different chips, codenamed Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Die: both include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores for a total of 10, but will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations.

Source: Apple (AAPL) Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps With Faster Chips - Bloomberg(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-18/apple-readies-macbook-pro-macbook-air-revamps-with-faster-chips)

The “one chip SKU to rule them all” won’t last forever it seems. Apple will take advantage of its ability to decide what goes in its chips to help differentiate each models within the same product line. We already witness this with the 7-core vs 8-core variant of the M1 chip in the 2021 iMac, but this variability will increase over time. My hope is that Apple doesn’t try to hard to be greedy with this strategy and keep the product’s differentiation simple to grasp.

The keyboard flaked out on me once. I wanted to spend time testing the Touch ID button, so I moved an application to the Trash, which requires authentication. That worked. Then I tried to move the app back to the Applications folder, and … Touch ID just didn’t work. After 30 seconds of trying, I realized the whole keyboard just wasn’t working. I turned the keyboard off and on again, and boom, everything has been normal since — including Touch ID recognizing my finger very quickly.

Source: Daring Fireball: The 24-Inch M1 iMac(https://daringfireball.net/2021/05/the_24_inch_m1_imac)

Ah, ah, another moment of Apple’s Bluetooth device not working as expected. Since I got my 2017 21.5” iMac, I’ve experienced unstable Bluetooth connectivity with Apple’s mouse and keyboard. I don’t know when it started, if it’s related to a certain release of macOS, but it is happening all the time. The worst part is the mouse being jerky while moving on the screen. Bluetooth’s instabilities also impact my AirPods usage with the Mac. My AirPods simply drops from receiving the Mac audio while in Zoom meetings. It is infuriating. Eventually, I need to reboot the Mac to reset the Bluetooth stack.

When I got the M1 Mac mini, I thought Bluetooth connectivity issues would be a thing of the past. I couldn’t be more wrong. It was worst. The mouse and the keyboard are both having instabilities. They need to be turned off and on to temporarily fix the problem, but eventually the Mac needs a full reboot. Again, this is exasperating. It is a well documented issue which macOS 11.1 and 11.2 tried to fix but the problems still happen, albeit a bit less often.

There is something wrong with Apple’s Bluetooth implementation in general. Is it the driver, the firmware, the chip, a combination of these that is at fault? I don’t know but the fact that this shiny new iMac with the wireless keyboard with TouchID stops working like Gruber experienced is not a good sign.

I know a lot of people are concerned that the white bezel surrounding the display will be distracting. In practice, I found that it just disappears. If there can be such a thing as a muted white — a white that most certainly looks white, not light gray, but yet not white white, this white is that white. I didn’t need time to get used to it

Source: Daring Fireball: The 24-Inch M1 iMac(https://daringfireball.net/2021/05/the_24_inch_m1_imac)

There is a lot of talk regarding the white bezel of the new iMac. I still don’t know what to think about them. They make it look like if there was a white masking tape all around the display. But the thing is, considering the fact that Apple’s macOS overall user interface is so “white-ish” in general, this should help make the bezel kind of disappear in reality and just be an extension of the user interface.

The iPad is a mighty device considering its form-factor. Many people are asking for Apple to make Xcode available for the iPad. I wonder: who are asking for this? Are they serious developers or just hobbyists? I would find it surprising if it was the former because there can be so many tools besides Xcode that is needed I order to build an app, and not all those things are available on the iPad. Serious developers would need to bring in a Mac to complete the development picture. If this is the hobbyists, does it even matter?

Would it be the full version of Xcode or a diminutive version? If it is the latter, what kind of apps would it be able to create, and what are the others it wouldn’t? Would it be Swift-only with SwiftUI? If that’s the case, are we in the “tech proof of concept” territory or if it is a viable path going forward? What would iPadOS 15 need to make Xcode for iPad a viable solution? Better file management? External monitor support? A link to a Mac for certain tasks and features? Is the 12.9” iPad Pro the only supported device or is the 11” version be supported too?

If you are a developer reading this post, would you use Xcode for iPad to build your apps if Apple made it available?

Can’t wait for Apple’s embargo to be lifted this week so we can get a better appreciation of the 12.0" 2021 iPad Pro. Some people got their device, early. I’ll never be able to get an XDR display from Apple, but the one that within an iPad, seems a bargain. The possibility of getting this device just increased a bit.

Parker Ortolani for 9to5Mac:

But what if you could add other kinds of things to your Home Screen too? (…) Apple could add the same ‘Add to Home Screen’ button to the share sheet in Music, in Podcasts, in News, and in TV. Each content type could have a distinct shape for differentiation. Albums, podcasts and publications could have more squared off icons. Magazines could be more narrow to show off covers. TV Shows and movies could use the same artwork that appears in app.

Frankly, I love this idea. On the iPad, it could be the ultimate playground to play with this feature, thanks to the device size. I can see me adding all kind of stuff like my wife iMessage contact, an RSS feed to my favourite content creators, a shortcut to a podcast or an Apple Music playlist or artist. So much possibilities.

The idea of adding all sort of content on the home screen is not new, yet on iOS and iPadOS, current design feels really restricted. We are ready to go to the next phase in evolution. I want freedom in folder size and placement, I want Apple Watch complication-style widgets. I want freedom. Apple, by any chance, are you listening?

Consider this added to my WWDC, iOS and iPadOS 15 wish list.

Nope. Better chance next time. No easy way to ask for help either. Tried different variations of the RSS feed URL. Nope, doesn’t work. There is no option to expert from within HEY either. As you can see, looking for some easy way out of HEY World. 👨🏻‍💻

I recently noted that I’m spending much more time on Mailbrew website for my newsletters reading rather than in HEY Feed. Why is that? Well, I think there are a few sticky features in Mailbrew that helps me better process information tidbits. First, the reading experience is great. The “Read” button next to a URL will bring a nicely formatted version of an article from a URL. Second, A “save” button is handily available for me to use if I want to keep a piece of information for later use. My collection of saved items is growing by the day. There’s also the Save to Mailbrew bookmarklet that comes handy. The website on the iPad is also a joyful experience.

Mailbrew update schedule is pretty fast and brings many small improvements on a constant flow. Now, if only there was a highlighting feature it would make Mailbrew reading experience a perfect fit for my workflow.

By the way, thanks to Mailbrew, you can get a weekly summary of all my publications here.

“I upended my life for Apple. I sold my WA residence which I built with my own hands, relocated myself, shut down any public media presence and future writing aspirations, and resolved to build my career at Apple for years to come,”

Well, now that he has been fired, he is complaining on Twitter that Apple knew in advance… maybe, maybe not. My gut feeling is that the C-Level knew, but not the upper management. When it came to their attention, they acted in accordance to their well-known values.

Source: Antonio Garcia Martinez says Apple fired him, company was ‘well aware’ of his writing | AppleInsider

Mr. Martinez Twitter thread is here.

(…) there are only 17k Watch apps: like Amazon’s Alexa, the Apple Watch is a huge success but has largely failed as an app platform. Source: Benedict Evans' takeaways from the first week of Epic vs. Apple | Philip Elmer‑DeWitt

Only 17K apps for the Apple Watch?? Calling this a failure is a bit surprising. The Watch is a narrow platform compared to the iPhone, the iPad or the Mac. I don’t expect as many apps to be available for the Watch. This form-factor isn’t obviously suitable for a lot of applications categories. I think 17K apps is quite a lot actually because I don’t get a sense of it when I browse the App Store from the Apple Watch itself or from my iPhone. This is where Apple is failing: discovery of Watch apps is miserable, just like it is in general on Apple’s App Store.

One of the cooless by-product of the Apple strategy is the unification of the processing unit among its product lines, leaving the form-factor the unique differenciation attribute.

Previously there were many people who wanted a laptop, but ended up buying a desktop because it would be more powerful. Now the only choice the customer has to make is whether they prefer the MacBook or iMac form-factor, because the internal hardware is the same in each. Source: Apple execs praises how M1 enables same performance for different devices in interview - 9to5Mac

Apple’s macOS Big Notifications Center is probably the most frustrating, infuriating and un-Apple experience of all. Man this thing is badly designed. Who at Apple think it ok? He or she is a C player! Hoping for major re-work for macOS 12. There, I said it. 🤬

Browsers look more and more like operating systems. Apple knows this, and they are probably afraid for their App Store business.

This article from Alex Russell of Infrequently Notes is very convincing: Apple purposely delay implementation of new web standards to refrain developers to build web applications. New web standards are enablers for new kinds of web applications with richer features set. Those richer apps could go against Apple’s App Store profitable business. No wonder why so many people are using alternative browsers to Safari. But that’s not all. Since Apple, in general is a big player, its influence is unquestionably high, the lack of support from them for so many basic and essential web standards discourage new application opportunities. That’s too bad and makes me wonder how sites like Mailbrew who offers a web application could improve if all browsers, including Safari would support most web standards. Mailbrew is already good on the iPad, closely mimicking a native application, yet I wonder.

Can we hope for changes at the next WWDC conference?

Apple is under so much pressure on so many fronts these days. It is so fashionable to put pressure on them. The App Store is one big target. I’m getting tired of people wishing for changes that I don’t want to become reality. Sure Apple is far from perfect, yet, people should be careful for what they wish for. I decided to express my voice and started to write on the subject. It will be controversial, but it will be honest and true to my beliefs and wishes. I don’t really care if I’m right or wrong. I expect to publish my article just before WWDC. Stay tuned.

On Apple’s Shortcuts notifications: I second this! Notifications are not needed for most of us and should be silenced in iOS 15. At least, provide an option to make it quieter. I like the idea of a status bar indicator, just like the localization services when they are trigerred.

Apple Shortcuts Is Great, but It Needs a Notification Toggle - Initial Charge

I’m so proud of people right now: medias are reporting that 96% of them chose to protect their basic right for online privacy. I wasn’t expecting that many people to select the “Ask Not To Track” option. This is a game changer. This should serve as a clear message to businesses with business models essentially based on personal data mining and online profiling without user consent. Enough is enough. For those who are ok with hyper targeted ads, fine, but not at this cost. I salute Apple for moving forward with this feature in iOS 14.5. Coupled with services like NextDNS, I’m starting to see quite an improvement in my web surfing experience and being more at ease doing so.

Those who selected “Allow” probably didn’t know what it was all about.

Ken Segall on Apple’s stubborn attitude:

“It’s disappointing that the modern Apple is so willing to stonewall, and that it can take an inexcusably long time to set things right.”

Mr. Segall piece is baffling. Taken together, those bad apples make Apple look terrible at design. Apple is opinionated and takes bold risks when designing new products and services. This comes at a cost, occasionally. Apple is far from perfect, but they should know that quickly admitting when they fail makes the mistakes more easily forgiven.

What Apple product currently shipping that has baffling design flaws for which Apple doesn’t seem to care fixing, beside the Magic Mouse? I don’t see that many as they silently fixed most of them in recent years.

Photo credit: Maria Teneva / Unsplash

That’s a serious question. I mean, we do have Lightroom CC for M1 Macs… (performance is good but not stellar compared to Intel version. There’s still work to be done by Adobe to take performance further). The absence of the optimized Lightroom Classic version is troubling. What does it mean about Lr or even Adobe? Is Adobe relying too much on cross-platforms libraries or components that are much harder to re-compile for the M1 chip? I find this fascinating that such a big company is falling behind compared to much smaller players… I’m thinking about Pixelmator here.

I’m waiting for this optimized version to complete my migration from Intel iMac to the M1 Mac mini.

Surprisingly, Apple’s Night Shift does not help in any way to fall asleep, according to a study. Intuitively, I thought of the opposite. When Apple launched this feature, in 2016, they said it would help. It seems it’s not the case after all. Will they backtrack and remove the feature in a future version? I highly doubt it. Many people do like this feature (I do on the iPhone, I hate it on the Mac), others like @Gruber don’t. What I don’t like is when the feature is in action, opening Photos abruptly turn the visual effect off. The effect is brutal as the screen turns blueish and cold because of the contrasting mode. I would prefer a more gentle disabling of the feature.

One evidence taken out of the Epic vs Apple trial yesterday, the above email. This email from Mr. Schiller shows how unhappy he was with scam apps being #1 on the App Store. His numerous questions are expressing frustrations. He saw what we keep seeing all too often today, nine years later. So, where are the reviewers? What value are they adding to the user experience’s bottom line? Apple could strictly rely on machine-based curation only instead, but they prefer the added touch of human-based curation for the editorial content. Does it make a real difference? On the surface maybe. With the scale of the App Store, cracks are obviously possible, hence bas actors are taking advantage of them, to create scams one after another.

Apple doesn’t look good because some of their arguments aren’t backed with proven and irrefutable facts. As a gatekeeper of the quality on the App Store, Apple is failing. Big time. From scams apps to badly designed ones, to never updated ones, beneath the front page surface, the App Store feels and look like a junkyard.

Got my four pack of AirTags. Unboxing is simple. Nice to hold and feel in the hands. Easily scratched. Setup is so Apple-esq. Love em! Keys. Backpack. Wallet. On for my wife. For her wallet. Obviously. Tested the Find My to locate my items. Works great. Will report back if I ever lose one of my things and find it back. For real. Can’t wait to use them for traveling.

I never bought so many applications and utilities or subscribed to so many services since the beginning of the pandemic. For the latter, I had to use Apple’s Number just to keep track of all of them😳🤪. Because I’m working from home since March 2020, my work-related expanses are close to zero. I don’t go buy a coffee or snacks in the middle of the workday as I used to. I don’t buy transportation titles anymore. I no longer commute. Furthermore, I no longer travel. My home office setup upgrade is complete. This mean that I have more to spend on something else. I’m more inclined to buy digital goods. Some are impulse buys. That’s why I invested in many macOS applications and utilities which gave me the idea of writing this article “Tips & Tricks & Utilities for Boosting Your Productivity with Apple’s macOS Big Sur”.

I don’t know if a return to normal will push me to cancel any of my applications or utilities subscriptions. I don’t think so as I think they are needed and useful to my blogger workflow. I return to this commuting world as I’ll keep working from home forever. I’m not alone and this makes me wonder how profound changes caused by this pandemic could be on so many economic levels.

It’s been a quiet week-end in term of content creation; I took a small break. As the week-end come to an end, I decided to spend some time in creating a web page using Craft. This web page is about my Apple purchase plans. It’s part of my Digital Garden. As you’ll see, my next Apple device is coming tomorrow: AirTags. I bought a four pack. Can’t wait to try these small wonders.

Happy end of week-end.

TGIF! 🙏🏻 It’s a rainy Friday here. Friday is a slow and strange day for me as a blogger and content creator. I should go more often on Flipboard. In a way, Ello makes me think of Micro.blog. It’s been a long time since my publishing pipeline has been that low. I’m catching up, I guess. My Micro.blog feed is quieter than usual; is the Ulysses effect already fading? I’m not a good podcasts listener. I won’t get my four-pack AirTag today. I didn’t order the Apple TV 4K with updated remote; don’t know when I will. That’s a great question.

The way I look at this upcoming M1 iPad Pro is, according to this interview with some Apple’s top brass, Apple thinks that, by building a powerful iPad (not referred as a tablet), developers will find a way to take advantage of it. Like the old saying: build it and they will come. Did Apple create performance headroom for themselves too, not just for third-party developers? Apple certainly wants some form of future proofing with this year’s iterative design. I’m still pondering the idea of buying such big iPad while keeping my “older” 2018 11” iPad Pro, it will depends of iPadOS 15.

This is not an ad. I promise. I finally decided to enable NextDNS on all my devices and subscribed to their yearly plan after testing it on my iOS devices. The last configuration applied was on my M1 Mac mini. Oh boy, surfing the web feels like the internet back in the days. Places like CNN or iPhoneInCanada or MacRumors are now without any ads and are crazy fast to load. Now, I can see content without distraction. I feel that I’m back to the 2005 Internet. I feel that I’m winning, for once. Numeric life can be good, thanks to NextDNS.

My next newsletter issue is nearly done. On Substack, I’m not a big name in the blogger sphere or a journalist dropping from places like the New York Times. Yet, I enjoy putting together this monthly newsletter, and I generally like the end results. Subscribers are staying and keep increasing over time. It’s a good sign, I guess. Are you one of them? https://numericcitizen.substack.com

To all my followers, have an successful Apple update day! This one has been long in coming! Don’t forget to disable app tracking as soon as you can. Best way to say “🖕🏻” to Facebook et al. Now turning to iOS 14.6 beta which seems to bring new devices support only (2021 iPad Pro).

According to the infamous Bloomberg (remember the Big Hack story?), iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 will bring two much requested features. One is, for the iPhone presumably, is a redesigned Lock Screen. I’m in for that one. In fact, I would prefer a customizable Lock Screen, more than a redesign. But, the most interesting part is regarding the iPad. At long least, Apple is about to bring the full widgets experience on the iPad. YES! I do have high hopes for that one. Having full liberty on widgets placement on the iPad screen will be transformative. Even better if they support some form of minimal interactions with the applications behind them. Can’t wait for WWDC 21.

This is one of those days where it will be hard to stay focused, thanks to the first Apple Event of 2021. I’ve got a pretty busy schedule at work, so I won’t be able to catch the live feed with full attention this time around. I know that all these notifications will spoil the show. Rumours and leaks already made a great job already, though. But, what if there is “one more thing”?

Tonight, I’ll catch it all up, partially knowing most of the takeaways. It will be weird. Who likes to go see a movie knowing the story line in advance? I hate that. 😒

Today I woke up with this idea of hating Facebook and everything they represents. For those who know me, this is nothing new. But today is one of those days where I despise Facebook more than ever.

Let’s face it, again: Facebook has made massive data collection an ordinary thing. Facebook normalized global surveillance a mundane fact. Facebook is killing the pillars of democracy without fanfare. Facebook has turned most of us a beast feeders. Facebook gave voice to those who should have been silenced because of their toxic and extremist thoughts. Facebook is the source of social cancer.

One day, we will wake up. I hope. 😔

From time to time, I use the « HEY World Shuffle » URL to trigger the display of a randomly chosen HEY World user website. It’s funny as I never know what discovery I’ll make. I see a lot of users who made their first try of the service in its early days by sending random thoughts. The vast majority of users didn’t bother to continue but a few did, and there are a few gems to discover. I’m slowly building a list of HEY World bloggers, like a blog roll, by subscribing through RSS feeds. It is fun. That being said, the question is: was HEY World a fad? The jury is still out on that one. Yet, I see a lot of potential growth in features for this service. Will the owners care to make them happen?

I wish there would be a “Reply to the author” button on HEY World user website. As it is now, I cannot find an easy and quick way to respond to a past post. I prefer to consume HEY World content through RSS feeds, not by subscribing via email.

I’m on HEY World, by the way. https://world.hey.com/jf.m. ☝🏻👋🏻

iPhone is getting fatter and fatter (#apple #jonyive)

Since Jony Ive left Apple, a few years ago, the iPhone design adopted an opposite trend of becoming fatter and fatter. It’s not a night and day difference but there is a trend. It is a welcomed one because this gives Apple more “room” to improve the cameras and the battery life. Speaking of the cameras, did you see the camera assembly protuberance on the CAD designs? It is getting bigger too, that I don’t like.

Tonight, using Craft, I’m writing my next piece for “Numeric Citizen I/O” on my 2018 11’’ iPad Pro with the Apple Magic Keyboard. I’m being this multitasking guy as I’m constantly switching between Craft, Soundcloud, Twitter, Safari, Ulysses, etc. Then, suddenly, my thoughts goes toward imagining what can Apple do to make me upgrade to the next iPad Pro.

You see, my current setup is near perfect for my needs and my current use cases. I’m far from maximizing this iPad’s potential. So, ask me again, why should I upgrade to what’s coming next week? I cannot see anything. Maybe Apple has a few well hidden cards, just waiting to be played, one by one at next week’s virtual event. We shall see soon.

At long last, Apple is calling the first virtual event of 2021 for next week. I have mixed up feelings about this one. AirTags, if they are real, aren’t game changer and really are complementary to anything Apple is doing these days.

I wrote a few times that for the iPad, the next major step won’t come in the form of hardware upgrades but in software, with iPadOS 15. And this, happens every year on June at the WWDC conference. So, unless there is a last minute surprise from Apple’s updated iPad Pro, my attention will be for the next WWDC, not this spring event.

Oh, about this rumoured iMac redesign, THIS I will be looking forward to it, but somehow, I think it is more a WWDC thing than anything else.

Consider the following App Store screenshot of a recently introduced game in the Apple Arcades service.

Reviews of this game are really bad because the game doesn’t load on people’s devices. Does Apple really test their stuff before putting them out? Tim Cook et al. brags all the time about being a mandatory gatekeeper for iPhone security and quality control with the App Store. In this illustrative case, and there are many others, Apple is failing big time to play his role. I just can’t understand why this shit is possible.

I rarely comment on rumours from highly speculative reports, but this report from MacRumors is different:

“The Apple Music for Artists app now features a simpler, streamlined icon with a pinkish red music logo rather than the multicolored logo that was used before. The icon also has an embossed look that makes it stand out from other Apple icons.”

and

“App Store Connect in October was updated with a refreshed icon that’s similar to the ‌Apple Music‌ for Artists icon, which means Apple has now updated two app icons with this new design.”

The simple fact that two icons got updated with similar look at several months interval could signal a trend leading to the upcoming design update with iOS 15. I much prefer the right version of these icons, particularly the embossed design. This 3D effect adds some depth and dynamism to the design, and yes I like the fine line marking the icon boundaries.

I wouldn’t be surprised if those two icons were part of an A/B testing program, within Apple. Second, what Apple has done with macOS Big Sur was only the beginning destined to encompass all platforms, in some form or another (icon design wise).

There is a lot to like in the recent Tim Cook’s interview with Kara Swisher (link to Podcast). It’s a must-listen. Here are a few observations and remarks.

1. I love Tim Cook’s stance on issues like privacy protection. But at the same time, I have a hard time understanding how Apple can continue to sign a search deal with Google while advocating privacy protection. This is simply unsustainable and hard to defend if you ask me. I know… $$$. Yet… will they ever try to make their search engine or buy one like DuckDuckGo and kick Google out as the default search engine? That would be such a powerful message to send.
2. Today, Apple under Tim Cook, has never been so well positioned to represent the best corporate defender of many of my core values: privacy protection, careful attention to details in design, openness to diversity, environment protection, sustainable development, great user experiences. Apple is not perfect, far from it. Yet, there is nothing like them these days.
3. Tim Cook is candidly answering the question of where he sees himself in ten years from now. I wonder what are the plans for his or her successor? Does he and Apple’s upper management actively put as much thought into it as Steve Jobs did in his last few years at Apple? I wonder and I hope this is the case.
4. This interview maybe seen as a bit self-serving, yet it is what it is. We, Apple’s customers like me, pay Apple to make calls on issues like encryption and privacy protection, environmental protection, etc. That’s the way I see my voting dollars anyway. As soon as I like most of their calls, I’ll be fine and be one of their customer. I dearly hope it stays that way because alternatives are scarce to say the least.
5. Is Apple playing the same rules for ALL developers? I doubt it. Is Apple’s curation of the App Store perfect? Far from it: 80% of the stuff in there is pure junk.

I think it is important to stay critical about Apple. We must keep them on their toes.

In a word: Pocket. I’ve been rediscovering this application in recent days, and I’m loving it a lot. I no longer read articles within Safari or News Explorer. As soon as I think the article is interesting, I save it to Pocket and continue from there. The reading experience is simple and is frictionless. Being able to tag and highlight each article helps me organize and add value to my readings. Above all, Pocket will become a repository of all my past readings. The recommend feature creates some exposure for the authors. Each of my recommendation is accompanied by some text. I love it.

You can have a look at my Pocket profile here. Enjoy.

Today, I’m remembering things like Turbo Pascal, TRS-80, ResEdit, 6502, LDA #$69, Inside Macintosh, Z-80, TI 99-4A, Logo, Commodore 64, Apple //c, ATZ modem command, eWorld, POKE 63280,0, COBOL 85, PDP-11, Choplifter, Broderbund, Multiplan, 4th Dimension, Sprites, Omni Database, Think Thank, Mac Draw, PageMaker.

These are some of the most significant souvenirs of numeric artifacts of my past numeric life. What are yours?

Today, I have come to realize that, since its introduction, I didn’t see the iPhone 12 lineup in person. It’s the first time that I didn’t go to an Apple Store to see, manipulate and experience a new Apple product release. How big is the Max? How small is the mini? What about this new edge? The same goes for the Mac Pro.

The pandemic has really put a dent in our lives in some unexpected ways, big and small. But, do I really miss something? After all, the iPhone 12 is the return of the beloved iPhone 5, which I owned. I guess I’ll have to wait for the iPhone 13 or whatever it is called.

I’m no musicien. I know barely nothing about music theory. Yet, I always wanted to do some form of music. Synthesizer would be my instrument if I was to do music. Yet, I’ve been fascinated by music, especially electronic music since I was a teenager. I’m a big listener of techno and house music. Recently, I started to use my iPad while exercising on the treadmill to play video on YouTube of DJ doing mixes. This got me curious about the equipments and software DJs are relying on. I downloaded Algoriddim’s Djay app and stared to play with it on my iPad. I was really excited. I started to read more about the world of music mixing. So, I learned about DJ mixer, controllers, DJ software, music sources, digital record pools, file formats, MIDI, etc. Then, yesterday, unexpectedly, while visiting a music instruments store to see these equipments in person, I bought a Pioneer DDJ-400, a pair of small speakers, went home, enabled a trial of Djay Pro AI on my iPad Pro and started to plug all the pieces together. I feel like it’s Christmas time. Will see where it goes from here. Expect more details on my endeavour soon.

Apple just kicked off the 2021 season of high expectations, endless wishes lists, criticism, betas, crashes, deception, no-show products, expected hardware refreshes, iPad deceptions, etc. Again, this year, it will be a digital-only version, thanks to the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. I’m happy with that. As I wrote in the past, my hope is that this type of event stays digital. I’ve never been to a real WWDC so I don’t miss anything.

Now, trying to read into WWDC’s announcement art: sure, there is this reference to last year’s Craig Federighi with its MacBook Air, but it is also clear to me that Apple is set to announce their AR Glasses. Yep. Remember, you read it here first guys. 😜

Friday thinking… I find is so refreshing to be able to have decent conversations on the open web. There is no drama here, everything seems so… simple. It brings back some confidence about human’s capabilities to engage in respectful conversations…. That’s be because there are lots of nice guys here on Micro.blog… it is lacking elsewhere (no finger pointing here, I won’t name a platform… but, well, ya know, right?).

Returning to normal programming.

How funny is that? It seems Intel is applying its “tick-tock strategy” to its relationship with Apple. One week, Intel is slamming Apple’s M1 Macs with highly questionable ads featuring Justin Long, the week after Intel is luring Apple’s business to make their future processors.

So obviously you’ve seen some of the competitive energies resume because there’s a lot of great innovation to be done, and we haven’t seen PC demand at this level for a decade and a half. The world needs more of that, and there is competitive fun going on with Apple and the Mac ecosystem” — Gelsinger

I don’t know if this competitive landscape is fun like Gelsinger is mentioning, maybe we could ask Tim Cook?

AppleInsider:

Apple needs to release new products to compete in the home. Be it an “Apple TV 6” or “HomeHub,” something needs to change the customer’s perspective in order to get traction in the space.

The article fails to mention a feature a HomePod replacement could and should include: home networking. I wrote about this many times. Apple left home networking market at a time where it was transitioning to WIFI 6 and home automation really started to pick up pace, thanks to things like HomeKit.

Mesh networking is something critical these days with the new work-from-home trend caused by the pandemic. Only Apple could create an easy to use networking product, à la Ubiquity or something like the AirPort product line. Speakers like the HomePod mini could evolve to be mesh extenders. I don’t really care if this product does have a screen or multiple mics. Sure it has to be HomeKit integrated. No, I don’T want it to be a successor to the Apple TV. Pricing would be too out of control. It has to be a separate product.

Leaving the home networking space could be one of the worst Apple decision in recent years. We keep seeing the consequences of it now.

Image credit: taken from AppleInsider’s article.

From BuzzFeed:

Executives at Instagram are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing app that can be used by children under the age of 13, according to an internal company post obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Sorry for the bad words, but this is beyond any shit ever spit out by Facebook. They literally scrap anything they touch: Instagram, WhatsApp, society. WTF are Facebook’s Instagram leadership thinking? I’m so tired of this shit! I’m utterly angry! Now, since those people can’t figure out reality, what’s good, what’s bad, this message is for parents: RESIST! You hold the destiny of your children, just say NO! Don’t allow your children on social networks. Period. Enough, already.

According to 9to5Mac, users from Russia, upon setup of their brand-new iPhone:

Apple users will see a dialog box upon initial setup of new devices that features web browsers, antivirus, messenger, email clients, and more to be installed by default. The list of apps is provided by the government.

At first, I thought it was a bad decision from Apple, to allow this to happen. Bending to state laws from a country like Russia doesn’t look good. Who’s next? China? What about smartphone carriers?

The headlines are scarier than the reality, though. Users will be able to uninstall those state-sponsored apps. Otherwise, it is easy to imagine many scenarios like the dreaded PC bloatware we had to endure in the nineties from Microsoft’s OEMs. Or even worse, what about state surveillance applications? How will Apple say no to those? Are PCs subject to the same requirements? If not, why?

On the flip side, I can see some situations where apps could be suggested that would make sense, like contact tracing apps. It could have made a difference if we had this feature implemented before the pandemic. Another case is to suggest a government sponsored app that gives access to services sponsored by the government (immigration, finance, security, etc.). Finally, what are those apps that will make the list when setting up a new iPhone in Russia? I hope someone will share their experience once the law comes into effect.

Photo credits: Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Well, rumours abound, changes to the Apple Store options for the iMac, the demise of the iMac Pro, something is really going on with the iMac line. As Apple is currently in the midst of their transition to a full Apple Silicon future for the Mac, we may find what’s coming next, sooner than later.

I always loved the iMac because it is the most truthful version of the Mac original vision. I owned a 24” 2005 white iMac, then a 2007 aluminum version before my current 2017 iMac, on which I work on every weekday, for my day time work. I’m really looking forward for Apple to inject a new dose of design language in general, but especially for the iMac. The chin, the bezels, the rounded back all feel quite dated and tired. The ultimate form factor is to get a screen, nothing more. Think of it like a big iPad Pro on a svelte stand. The next design has to be iconic. It should differentiate itself from the current iPad Pro or the ProDisplay XDR. Apple’s industrial design team must enter new territories, they have to put a clear mark on Jony Ive’s era. Everything in Apple’s current Mac product lines look and feel like Jony Ive’s team work. We are due for a new beginning.

Will this new machine come in April? I feel like Apple should use a more important event like WWDC or one of the fall keynote to release such a landmark product. Current movements on the Apple Store and recent discoveries in Apple’s latest beta software points to a sooner than later release. We shall see very soon, I guess.

Thought of the day: read later lists are useless for me. I tend to forget about the items I save in them. It was true with Instalaper, Pocket, Safari and now Reeder. I don’t read more because I save things in them. The trick for me is to read it now or else. Simple. The longer I wait to pick an article out of these lists, the less likely I will read it. So, I end up with a mass of unread and expired content. Are you more successful than me?

As reported by MacRumors:

“Apple has tested ‌iPad‌ Pros with a Thunderbolt connector that would make them compatible with additional external monitors, hard drives, and peripherals, plus it brings faster data syncing speeds. Apple’s Mac machines have featured Thunderbolt technology for years now, but current ‌iPad Pro‌ and iPad Air models have standard USB-C ports.”

Such an iPad feature has to come with much improved operating system support for external devices, like external monitors, which is currently very limited under iPadOS 14.4. Expect an iPadOS 14.5 surprise support (something along he line of mouse support with iPadOS 13.4 at around the same time last year) or iPad 15 with profound improvements compared to iPadOS 14 which was limited in new features.

Personally, the key for a possible upgrade from my 2018 iPadPro lies in the software, not only the hardware. Also, rumours all points to the 12.9” iPad Pro, what about the 11”? I highly wish that Apple will make the 11”, just a smaller version of the 12.9” version.

Honestly, I like these Intel ads with Justin Long. The one with the dongle, at the very end, is priceless. These ads are fun. Not as fun as the “originals”, though, but still. Intel hits the nerves. Intel is playing the Apple playbook, simple as that. It’s an interesting moment, a blip, in the advertising world. Nothing more. Will it make a difference? I doubt it.

What does the iMac Pro and the HomePod, two entirely different products, have in common? It’s not the fact that they are no longer being sold. The iMac Pro and the HomePod were created by Apple when they were caught off guard by market trends. In the case of the iMac Pro, Apple tried to answer pro users who were demanding a replacement to the aging trash can Mac Pro. Apple didn’t read the temperature room correctly. They acted urgently and responded with the wrong answer, the iMac Pro. The right answer would have been to fix the Mac Pro instead by creating another more modern version of the expandable Mac Pro, which they finally did later in 2019. The HomePod was created when Apple (finally) realized the smart speakers market was a thing. Apple misread the room temperature again with a high-end smart speaker which wasn’t that smart but sounded good. In such a market, pricing is everything.

Apple is at its best when they create products they want to use for themselves, just like they did with the iPhone. The Apple Car is such a thing really exists), the AR glasses (if such a thing really exists) are a potential case of such products. The Apple Watch was also built on the same principles of the iPhone: something they really want to use themselves.

I own two HomePod, paired together and two HomePod mini, placed in two different rooms. I love them all, but I prefer the mini for hard to explain reasons. It is sad to see the HomePro go. It could have played so differently.

What’s the next Apple product to be killed? The iPod touch?

Afterthought: what is Apple comes out with a new HomePod with an integrated wifi 6 router and maybe some storage, something along the line of the AirPort Extreme a few years ago? A new HomePod mini could also be released with wifi extender built-in. I would buy that in a heartbeat.

Image credit: Basic Apple Guy. I love this guy’s blog.

For those who didn’t know, I have two newsletters. One available from Substack available at https://numericcitizien.substack.com on a monthly basis and the other one entirely made with Mailbrew. On every Saturday morning, a newsletter is built using the RSS feeds of my blogs as a source to create a summary of all my publications in the last week. So, take a look at the latest issue of “Numeric Citizen Newsletter”. There are currently 30 subscribers to this newsletter.

If you plan to subscribe to Mailbrew to build your own newsletter, please, do me a favour and consider using the affiliated link to do so.

Greg Morris on digital consumerism:

The level of consumerism and marketing tricks being used to sell apps and services is growing over time. They all promise to fix that gap in your work life, just like adverts promise to fix the one in your love life, or improve your happiness, or whatever it is. It’s all lies.

I cannot talk for others, but for me, when I’m jumping on another service or a new app, it’s because it offers a seizable improvement. Going from Notion to Craft is my latest example of such move. I’ll elaborate on this at length in a feature post in the very near future.

I recently wrote “Are we digital nomads?” My answer is yes. It seems we cannot stay in one place for a very long time, looking for the new, the latest and greatest, all the time. We’re bored. This is what it is. Form takes over function. Or is it? Again, my blogger workflow is full of moving parts and I consider it is an ongoing experiment.

WebP image format goal, according to Google:

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

I’ve seen more and more WebP images in recent months when I try to download an image from Safari. It’s frustrating. It’s not a standard. Making the web load faster so tracking scripts can run more easily, that the reason behind all those “initiatives” from Google. WebP is a terrible idea. AMP pages was a terrible idea. And FLOC is a terrible idea. Google is full of terrible ideas. Even for searching, Google is bad. Boy, I hate Google.

I’ve been using WebP Converter recently.

They flipped the switch to ON. HEY World is LIVE! I’m so glad, curious and already excited to use this other channel to share my written content with the world. I’m already thinking about my first post on this new platform. Furthermore, I think this addition brings even more value to an already useful service, on which I depend every single day. Recently, I asked: How many websites can a blogger have? Well, as soon as a newcomer doesn’t add too much friction when publishing content, it’s ok to have many. HEY World seems to be such a service. Count me in.

I recently published a long piece about transforming your Twitter experience by using Twitter lists instead of following a bunch of accounts. As noted in the article, one side effect of this approach is that services that look for your Twitter account’s list of people you follow won’t really work. That’s the case for a new service called “Spoonbill”.

Keep updated on your friends' and family members' bios, websites, locations, and names.

Spoonbill will send you a summary of changes that occurred on Twitter’s bio of people you follow. I wonder if this service can be tweaked to use Twitter’s lists instead. What about Mailbrew, maybe they could come up with a similar feature, which would be really cool.

In the meantime, I’m not coming back to following two thousands people.

In a surprising move, Apple starting today allows people to export their iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos. Why not provide a download to a local computer, outside the Photos app. I can see many use cases for doing so: backup purposes or simply to dump photos in a structure of directories for archiving purposes.

Breaking news from 9To5Mac, but official announcement here:

In recent months, we were approached by a buyer. They saw the uniqueness of Weather Line and the strong foundation we’ve built. While we aren’t able to provide further details on their future plans for the app, we hope you can understand, and will look forward to it.

I’m kind of in shock right now. I recently posted an article about my “go-to” weather applications. Weather Line wasn’t part of the line up, but I did have it installed on my iPhone, and I’m currently a paying subscriber. Too bad to see the application go. But, why? The same happened to Spend Stack recently.

What’s going on? How many developers invoked paid subscription model as being the only road to sustainability? Does it work or not? Is this the start of a new trend? There is something going on here.

When, as users, invest money and time in using applications or service, the last thing we want is to see our beloved apps go like this. I’m currently heavily investing in Craft (coming from Notion). What if the same happens to Craft?

This shouldn’t be this way. Thanks to the numerous ads, my YouTube experience was a calculated nightmare. As my usage grew in the last few weeks because of my daytime job, my time on YouTube felt light a nightmare with no end. I decided to put an end to all this by subscribing to YouTube Premium. I feel in full contradiction to my values.

YouTube Premium so much better. But it shouldn’t be this way. Yet, it is. I feel that I’m sleeping with the enemy. Tell me that it is ok, will you?

Here is the current state of yet to be updated apps to fully support Apple Silicon Macs. It’s been close to six months now and yet, those apps aren’t yet universal. Surprising to see things like 1Password 7 still not there yet. Notion, an Electron-based app, not surprising. The Mac client for HEY hasn’t been updated for a while. Many of those apps are subscription-based, a model toward development sustainability. Can we say they are failing to meet their obligations, now?

Two very telling graphs from Apple’s development portal:

A few takeouts. First, iOS 13 is close to become a bad souvenir. Second, people keeping their iPad longer, it is reflected in the percentage of people still using devices with iPadOS prior to version 13.

Today, I would like to do a quick poll among my blogger / writer friends here on Micro.blog. How did the pandemic influence your writing habits? Do you write more? Less? What could be the reasons behind the change of habit?

To help you out and start the thread, I’ll answer to my own poll. The pandemic brought me closer to be what we call “a writer”. I write a lot more. I do put more efforts into each piece. I use more tools to help me. My research goes deeper. I have many pieces in the works, all the time. I spend around 5-10 hours for writing each week.

Now, why do I write more? Because there is less noise in my life in general, thanks to the restrictions (no travels, curfew, work from home: no commute). This “silence” created a pool of free time. My creativity took over. So, I write. And I love it.

Tell me your story? Let’s discuss.

Today, I tested HEY World. This is my non-review. It could have worked great, but it’s not ready yet. One could say “Nice try, buddy”.

I love their response to my test message. One thing stands out from their response, though:

“For now, HEY World is just an experiment. …

“Assuming there’s demand, we’ll begin opening it up for more people soon. And then, hopefully, for all HEY for You customers. Personal blogs will finally be as easy as sending an email.”

It seems to me that they are on the fence. They already have their tag line. They keep the door wide open. Could it be closer than we think or want to say it?

Now, what I’d like to see is how many emails like mine they get each day and what are they saying?

If they actually turn the switch on, count me in. I’ll find a use of it. For sure.

After reading “Ghost on the iPad, a Review” from Tablet Habit, I tried to remember my experience when I tried the service myself. It wasn’t a good one for the thing I wanted to do with it: create a photography-oriented blog.

In recent days, it seems that the “Ghost” name is gaining traction in the blogging arena. I have to wonder if Ghost is better at this than what I experienced for photography. I don’t think I’ll try it again, but I think they do have one killer feature that other platforms don’t have: the combination of a blogging platform and a newsletter publishing tool. They really look to be well integrated.

One could argue that the difference between blogging or sending a newsletter is small (Think of HEY, World). I could easily agree. But sometimes, the actual implementation of the integration between those two features can make a real difference.

I’m currently using Substack for my monthly newsletter (Numeric Citizen Introspection Newsletter) and WordPress as well as Micro.blog more my blogging needs. Sometimes, I do wish there would be less friction when I’m publishing my work. A single platform doing all of this in a basic manner would be certainly very enticing.

How many websites a blogger can have? Good question. I do have (too?) many, each filling their own niche. On that subject, something caught my attention yesterday in the public announcement of HEY’s experiment: “Hello, World!”. Jason Fried explaining why he never had a blog:

“It was primarily because setting up a personal blog was just too much of a hassle. It felt formal, it required yet another tool, yet another place to write, yet another platform to pay for just one feature. I had to pick a template, I had to think up a name, I had to make the relationship official.”

Sure, setting up a blog can be a hassle. For me, it is some kind of challenge and an exercise in creativity. This brings me to something I want to share with you. I’ve been working on something new in the last few days. I’m very excited about it. I started a “metablog”. Yes, another place to publish content. What is it? Well, it is a blog about blogging.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about the word “meta”:

Any subject can be said to have a metatheory, a theoretical consideration of its properties, such as its foundations, methods, form and utility, on a higher level of abstraction. In linguistics, a grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself).

Why do I feel the need to create yet another numeric space? Well, I believe in focused channels in general. I wanted a dedicated space for writing about being a blogger, using tools and services to put things together and out to the world. In other words, it is more about the “how” than anything else. I believe people like to get a look behind the curtain. I certainly do. So, I created this space where I’ll post my updates to my blogger workflow, in more detail.

So, there you have it: Numeric Citizen I/O. You’ll be able to comment on each individual post (I’m using Commento, a privacy-friendly commenting service.). I dearly encourage you to engage in discussion, ask questions or leave your comments. Thanks for visiting!

Steve would have been 66 years old today. Even if I love what Apple has become over the years since he died, I miss him dearly. What a great picture of him. It is nice to see Apple and Tim Cook paying a small tribute each year.

Each day, it seems there is always something new happening in the world of newsletters. When it’s not someone famous who joins Substack, a company out of nowhere offers a brilliant idea built around supporting newsletters in one way or the other. I’m thinking of Hey in particular.

“Email is the internet’s oldest instant self-publishing platform. Except you have to define a small audience every time you write. But what if you didn’t? What if you could just email the web to reach the world? Introducing the HEY World experiment” - Jason Fried from HEY

Yesterday, the company behind the popular HEY email client tentatively announced a new service for their customers. The idea behind is to allow any HEY users to create newsletters and publish them just by sending them to world@hey.com. The service would then post these newsletters on the web, complete with the author’s name. A simple static page, no tracking, no nothing more. I call this: simply brilliant.

The service is not currently available, only in some form of alpha-stage for internal use only. They announced it to read the room and see if there is some interest in something like this that could become some soft of hyper-distributed publishing platform.

I’m personally interested in this kind of service simply because it removes friction in the publishing process. What could be simpler than just writing the newsletter like we do with emails and then hit “send”!? Simply brilliant. For the reader, they can subscribe by email or by using the available RSS feed.

You can read the announcement here. I like the simplicity of this implementation. Very clean. Very lean. I’m in love. Too bad this isn’t available — yet.

9to5Mac published a nice comparison between the iPad Air and the 2020 iPad Pro. The latter still hold the crown with its 120Hz ProMotion display and LiDAR. Rumours are pointing to an update for the Pro line in March. The question that comes to my mind is: what’s missing from the iPad Pro, from the hardware point of view? I mean, speed, screen, form factor are just close to “perfect”. The main challenge for the iPad line is on the software side. To me, iPadOS 15 and Apple willingness to cross boundaries can’t come soon enough. Better multitasking and external screen support would really help fix long standing issues with the iPad.

My go-to email client got an update today. Hey version 1.2 brings a few tweaks in the compose mode. In recent weeks, updates are more frequent as they finally delivered support for corporate email. Now, the other thing I’d like to see is a collapsible view in the feed view. I don’t see how pinch-to-zoom can be added without implementing the opposite to bring a collapsed view.

In my quest to better understand the full potential of note taking application « Craft », I’ve come up to something different, a website about Apple’s related rumours. You can hit this link to have a look. You can leave comments, no registration required. Enjoy.

In the last few months, on Twitter and on Micro.blog, I’ve been witnessing something that takes the shape of a small phenomenon: people are moving from one place to another in the digital space. Many are writing about their experience of moving from one hosting site to another. Some are leaving WordPress to return to Ghost. Others are proudly putting together their hosting solutions. The same happens in the newsletters hosting space: people are leaving Mailchimp to go to Substack or Revue. People are looking to get better return on their investment both in time and money. Others are simply trying to optimize their blogging workflow. There is a myriad of reasons why people decide to leave a place for another one.

I find these numeric movements quite fascinating. Are you one of those guys?

So I started another experiment involving Blot.im. For those who don’t know Blot.im, it is a static web site generator that seems popular among the crowd here. On paper, the process of publishing is very simple: you drag and drop files on a specific folder on your computer and they get instantly published on the web. Sound great, right? That’s what I thought.

My goal with Blot.im is to do some “meta blogging”; a place where I could write about the tools, services and my blogger workflow. So I registered a new domain with GoDaddy: numericcitizen.io. Then, I opened my Blot.im account and stated experimenting. The initial setup is pretty simple. And then challenges pretty quickly started to emerge.

First, I wanted my new domain to point my Blot.im domain. Tried to follow the Blot.im instructions to make it work but all attempts failed. GoDaddy doesn’t support ALIAS DNS records as Blot.im ask me to create. I asked for help from Blot.im support. Still a work in progress.

Second, I chose to use Git as the “client” to push content on the service because I don’t want to use Dropbox, a service I despise. By using Git, I need a Git client on my Mac. I’m tentatively settled on Nova. So far so good. After cloning the Git repo from Blot.im to my local machine, I can then use Ulysses to write my posts and push them with Nova. The workflow is very geeky: create .MD file in Ulysses, “commit” within Nova then hit “push” to publish. Not as seamless as I would like. But here another issue: inserting images with a Markdown file is not as easy as it seems. Again, trying to figure out instructions on Blot.im site doesn’t work. The other thing is that if you drop an image within a folder, it will trigger Blot.im to create its own blog post, something that I don’t want. Not cool. Again, I’m asking support to help me here with this supposedly trivial task.

Third, I would like to use Github as the source of truth. Setting up a new repo is simple and cloning it to my local machine too. But, now, how do I make Blot.im to use the Github repo as the source of content? Again, trying to figure out Blot.im instructions but failing to make it work. Still trying to figure that out.

Fourth, tweaking the visual appearance is not as easy as I would have liked. There is a theme editor and I still need to be pretty knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. I did fork one of the theme to make it mine and started to do some tweak but it is a painful trial-and-error process.

All in all, I’m far from positive about Blot.im right now. I spent way too much time on these issues. I’m not sure where this is all going. If you are using Blot.im, please, do me a favour and chime in!

I’m still new to the Indieweb world. Today, I’m learning about webmentions. I like the idea of linking reactions back to the origin. So, after enabling a plugin on my main blog, I’m trying to link back to one of my recent post and see what happens. One day, I wrote “The Journey is the Reward”. I don’t post personal things very often. Thanks for your feedback.

I’m in love with Micro.blog. It’s simple, not too busy. Based on open web standards. But today, I’m a bit frustrated with the bad sad of being too simple. My most important grievance is the lack of design flexibility. Built-in themes are too basics and unappealing. You have to be a HTML and CSS expert to try to figure out how to make simple tweaks. This frustration is behind my recent desire to look elsewhere for hosting the whole thing. I’m willing to invest quite a bit of my time to gin control of the appearance of my online presence. I’m patient. The guys behind Micro.blog are working on the next features and I hope they will address some of my complaints.

It all started with the idea of tweaking my micro.blog visual theme. I don’t like it, but this is the best that I could find from the included themes. After reading for a while and seeing people writing about their blogger workflow, I found out that Micro.blog is using Hugo, a static website generator. Then I started to learn about Hugo by searching for introduction videos on YouTube. Then, I learned about Hugo themes and how they are constructed, and at the center of how a website is displayed. Since static websites need a place to be stored, GIT and Github came into the picture. So, I started to read about GIT and Github. Git and Hugo both can be installed on my Mac mini to locally create content and generate a microblog from that. It a great experimentation place to learn and dig a bit deeper. Github is also a place to find new Hugo-based visual themes. Then I learned that I can import one of those themes on my machine so can change the visual appearance of my local Hugo microblog. Then, came the idea of publishing this content on the web, on Github, for free. To close the loop, services are available to take Github content and generate a static website, again using Hugo, behind a domain name of my choice. Then came the question: why do I need Microblog then? I could own the whole widget! It’s not that simple.

All this because I’m not satisfied with my current Micro.blog visual appearance. The next step is to dig within Micro.blog custom templates and see how I can update them. I’ll have to refresh my memory about HTML and learn a bit of CSS. The latter seems a bit an arid subject. Oh well.

Thought of the day for @manton and @jean: there is something that could be improved regarding micro.blog: opening up the evolution and improvement roadmap of the platform. I do appreciate when a service do put out their roadmaps so the community get a better look at where things will be going in the future. Mailbrew, Plausible and Craft are very vocal about their future plans, you just have to find the place where they talk about it.

So, where is Micro.blog heading? In particular, how do you plan to expand on themes support and customizability? Why the web editor doesn’t allow support for Grammarly? Do you plan an opt-in option to see how many followers a user have? Those are just a few questions that I have regarding Micro.blog future plans. Thanks in advance.

As much as you can like to work on the iPad, there are edge cases where the iPad falls short. Since I got an Apple Silicon powered Mac, and thanks to many nifty Mac utilities, I rediscovered what it really means to be productive and efficient on a computer platform. This blog post by Matt Birchler is an example of an edge case being better served by a traditional yet powerful computer.

On the subject of small and focused Mac productivity utilities, The list of application purchases I made since moving to this Mac mini is pretty long. Here it goes, in no particular order.

• HazeOver
• Unclutter
• Keysmith
• Bartender 4
• DefaultFolder
• Hush
• StopTheMaddness
• Alfred
• Hazel
• CheatSheet
• PopClip
• Downie
• Permute
• SafariMarkdownLinker

There is something those utilities have in common: in one way or another, they augment the macOS experience. Such things are not quite possible, yet, on the iPad.

As reported by MacRumors, the next major revision of the iPhone looks promising for me:

“Weinbach claims that the always-on display will look like a “toned down Lock screen,” where the clock and battery charge are always visible, and past notifications are shown through “a bar and icons.” When users receive a notification, the notification will “pop up normally except that the screen will not entirely light up.” Instead, “it will display it just like you’re used to right now, except dimmed down and only temporarily,” according to the leaker.”

An always-on display is on top of my wish list. How would Apple take advantage of this, at iOS level, is more interesting. Then comes the return of the Touch-ID. I would love to see go in the power button. A smaller notch? What notch?

As shown above, 9to5Mac ran a poll where more than 7000 people chose what feature are the most interesting to them. The return of Touch ID was #1 request at the time of casting my vote. Does COVID-19 have something to do with it?

Last year I skipped iPhone 12. This year, with iPhone 13, things could be different.

Here are two simple but very useful tricks using an iPhone with a U1 chip, iOS 14.4 and an HomePod mini.

Trick #1: set a timer with Siri on your HomePod mini to, let’s say, 10 minutes. Then, bring your iPhone close to the HomePod mini, the iPhone will show how much time is left on the timer (make sure the iPhone screen is on).

Trick #2: let’s say music is playing on your HomePod mini, and that you want to, silently, see what’s playing. Again, bring your iPhone close to the HomePod mini, the iPhone will show the currently playing title.

What a great example of: the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. This is Apple at it’s best.

It is a bit of a sad day: I decided to delete the excellent expense tracking app Spend Stack from my devices and revert to using a simple Numbers spreadsheet to track my subscriptions. Why did I delete this app?

First, the developer sold the app to somebody else. Since last September, no more updates. Second, there is no clear roadmap announcements by the new owner. Nothing. I can’t rely on ephemeral applications even for simple things.

Sadly, this is something that happens all the time these days. Some developers are building great stuff but on the wrong business model. Others are just finding new priorities in their life which have side effects on their personal development projects.

I’m back to Apple’s Numbers and a simple spreadsheet. Sometimes, the best is still in the most basic form and function.

I dug out my ancient Inside Macintosh reference books from storage. Remember when Apple’s developer documentation came as paper books? Volumes I-III on the original Mac APIs, IV on Mac Plus, V on color Macs, and the truly massive volume VI on System 7. 📚

Yes, the title says it all: I’m looking for new friends to follow on Micro.blog. After my big Twitter cleanup, the noise in my numeric life has dramatically decreased. I feel zen and I think this is what Micro.blog is all about: a zen place to meet virtual friends sharing the same passions.

So, I’m looking for friend suggestions. Let’s call this “the community-fed referrals day!”. To help you make such referrals, please do remember about my passions: Apple, photography, privacy protection and climate change.

This brings me to something that I’d like to see improved about Micro.blog: discoverability. When looking to discover new people to follow, we do see a posts count on each user profile, but we don’t know « how recent » the last post is. We know about stale accounts on Twitter, I don’t want to follow stale accounts here. Next, I’d like to see some kind of « behind the scene » analysis of how someone could be interesting for me. I do understand that this is entering a dangerous territory of « algorithm fed reality ». I guess it is har to strike a balance in that respect. Finally, the categories are lacking a bit of breath. Where is “Tech” or “Privacy” or “Climate”?

So, I’m waiting for your referrals. Thanks for taking some of your time to do so. 🙂

I don’t know what happened to my Twitter usage. It fell off the cliff recently. Since I’ve completed my Twitter experience transformation as fully documented here, I barely open Twitter once a day. Do I miss it? Nope. Why? Probably because I’m getting a distant view by using Mailbrew which draws the most relevant tweets for me on a daily basis.

Here is a simple one: Apple, please, no.

I don’t get the idea of such product. The audience for this seems to be too small for Apple. I do understand that Apple research in VR can have broader ramifications, but to build such a limited appeal product for the mass, I don’t get it.

I think Apple’s interests has much more potential in augmented reality products, services or features. Their work is already bearing fruit with AirPods spatial audio and transparency mode. These are much more appealing to the mass than a VR headset.

Apple Maps is so much better than it was when it first launched back in 2012. It’s my go-to apps when in comes to finding my way. I never use Google Maps. Over the years, Apple upped its game. Recently, Apple added the detailed mapping and the look around feature for Canada, and it made such a big difference. But how much different? Well, look no further than Justino Beirne’s latest essay: “WHY DOESN’T “LOOK AROUND” COVER MORE AREAS?”. It is a massive piece of work detailing Apple’s every advances regarding its mapping efforts. I wonder if anyone at Apple ever looked at his work. It’s just mind blowing how much details and analysis goes into this essay.

Greg Morris recently on his blog about trying hard as a blogger to make something out of all this:

“I asked, I’m giving, and I am still blogging — now more than ever.”

Strangely, pure coincidence I guess, I wrote this last week-end “The journey is the Reward” in which I said:

“It doesn’t really matter if nobody comes and reads my stuff here or there. What matters is the process and the thinking that took place behind my writing. It’s all the small moments where I had to pause, think, read, learn and write. It’s about feeling creative. Alive. The rest is just another tiny drop in the numeric ocean. A few will taste it, and most won’t. That’s the life of a blogger and a writer in a sea of abundance. So, I’ll keep doing it, no matter what.”

The journey is really the reward for me.

I think Intel could have done better than this in a world without the M1 chip. But the problem is that the M1 chip is among us. Obviously, the carefully selected benchmarks results are published to people who doesn’t know about Apple. It’s an issue of perception manipulation. Apple is only getting started. Intel is freaking out and look desperate. 2021 will make matters even worse.

Another one with a look of desperation: Facebook because of iOS 14.4 tracking exposure to the users.

Matt Birchler is writing yet another post about the iPad. The last paragraph (emphasis is mine):

“We live in a world where we’re surrounded by computers. People have a home computer, a work computer, a phone, a watch, a smart TV, and smart speakers. Hell, even the iPad’s harshest critics often have one that they use for watching video and playing games. The iPad is the only device in that list that some people mandate has feature parity with another item on that list.”

That is so true. I never thought about it this way. Why do we need to constantly compare the iPad to other computing devices to find its legitimacy? For me, the iPad is one of the best computing device of all time. There is nothing like it, it is singular.

According to a recent small survey by AppleInsider, 53% of apps are running natively on M1-powered Macs. What about the remaining 47%? Well:

“Without native support, they’re run in Rosetta 2 emulation. That may conceivably turn out to mean that they run faster than they did on old Intel hardware, but it’s not why you’ve bought an Apple Silicon Mac.”

One of the problem is that Apple’s Rosetta 2 is too good at running non-native apps. It’s so good that they can run faster than on an Intel-powered Mac.

A lot of things are on developer’s shoulders. There are enthusiastic developers and then there are the lazy one. The former rush to add M1 support for their apps even if the performance gain is negligible. The latter either doesn’t care, think it’s good enough or they don’t have full control of the software stack they use to build their apps. Think about the Electron framework. It does support the M1-powered Macs. Developers need to upgrade their apps to take advantage of the latest Apple technologies. An example if the email client for HEY. The last update came in September of last year.

As someone who use both, native and non-native apps, on my M1-powered Mac mini, I don’t see much difference, most of the time. Apps like Lightroom CC or Pixelmator Pro do show a big improvement in many operations. But for the rest? Again, Rosetta 2 is doing a marvellous job and the whole experience on Big Sur with M1 is really good.

It’s becoming quite frustrating to see Apple’s Safari not being supported for browser extensions. Safari is now reportedly supporting standard web extensions but with an Apple twist making it cumbersome for developers to add support. Apple being Apple, I think it is related to the requirement of having to download an application in order to be able to expose an extension to Safari’s engine. Thanks to privacy protection, Apple is forcing the game here, but this has real consequences.

Since running macOS Big Sur, I quite often get these “Unable to Download App” error when trying to update my apps on my M1-based Mac mini. I need to try a few times or even reboot the machine in order to fix this issue. The app is being downloaded, but the installation phase is failing at the very end. Version 11.2 of Big Sur didn’t fix the issue. And it’s not related to an app being open or in use.

Is anyone getting these too? It’s kind of annoying.

Here is something absolutely fascinating and surprising to me. According to my main blog’s visitors statistics, thanks to my recent switch to Plausible, over the last thirty days, the distribution of devices type used to visit my blog puts the tablet far behind the desktop, the laptop and the smartphone. One would think the tablet form factor to be much more popular.

The iPad is massively popular. I’m still in love with this form factor after all these years. These numbers doesn’t jive.

After the release yesterday of macOS Big Sur 11.2, Apple today released the first beta of macOS Big Sur 11.3. It does look like macOS is following the trails of iOS with updates that brings many small features, improvements and tweaks. We’re not used to that, as before Big Sur, macOS updates used to be mostly about bug fixes. I’m happy to see Apple change course for macOS, if this update is any indication.

iOS 14.5 beta 1 is out today with a slew of new features and small tweaks. Unlocking your iPhone while wearing a face mask, thanks to your Apple Watch, falls in the category of “finally” moments. In the tweaks category, the Apple logo of an iPad booting up iPadOS “finally” follows the device’s orientation. Updates to Apple Card too to support shared cards. Now, if only this could come to Canada!

I like to see other people talk about their own writing or blogging workflows. Here’s an interesting tidbit from Greg Morris about using Apple’s Shortcut to publish to WordPress:

“Shortcuts is a really robust way to publish to WordPress and not have to use the WordPress app or third-party app.”

Apple’s Shortcuts are also an important part of my blogger workflow. Since I’m using Ulysses, which supports publishing directly to WordPress, I don’t need a shortcut for that. But for many other small things, it is a valuable tool in my arsenal. Shortcuts are an interesting technology within the iOS and iPadOS ecosystem.

From John Gruber’s Apple report card:

“I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that _ Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group_. Exhibit A: What MacOS 11 Big Sur has done to document proxy icons. Arguably it looks better to hide them. (I disagree, but I can see the counterargument.) Inarguably, they work far worse now — harder to use for people who use them, and much harder to discover for people who don’t yet know about them.”

Gruber often has an effective way of putting out his take on Apple’s issues. If you look and use macOS Big Sur for a while, you should get a feel that only the visual parts were redesigned, not the way it works in response to the user behaviour. Big difference.

Really insightful score card report from Six Colors. Take out for me: Apple TV is the new 2013 Mac Pro.

This morning I got the most recent update to the venerable photo sharing service: Flickr. The only addition to this update, support for iOS 14 widgets. Finally! It’s quite a change from the usual “Bug fixes and improvements.”. Even if I’m no longer actively using Flickr, I was happy to see that widgets were finally supported. So, I frantically updated the apps to have a look at the possibilities. What a let down. Sure, all three sizes are supported, but we cannot change any widget settings! How about being able to set the source for pictures or even stats or anything! Nope. I call this pathetic.

No wonder why I left Flickr and services like Unsplash took over the world. Over the years and during its tumultuous history, Flickr was a series of promises left without real and deep actions to transform the platform. They brag about having two million groups. It takes just a few minutes to see that a vast majority of these groups are ghost towns. And don’t get me started with the general design of the app and the website.

Today, January 28th, is data privacy day. I didn’t know that. Now I know, thanks to Mr. Phillip Schiller. I paid a visit to Apple’s privacy web page. What I found is a super nicely designed page with highlights of Apple’s ecosystem privacy focused features. To me, Apple’s privacy stance is a product, not a feature.

“Privacy is a fundamental human right. At Apple, it’s also one of our core values. Your devices are important to so many parts of your life. What you share from those experiences, and who you share it with, should be up to you. We design Apple products to protect your privacy and give you control over your information. It’s not always easy. But that’s the kind of innovation we believe in.” — Apple

Please, do yourself a favour and go to this website, a snowflake generator. If you like winter, it will make you smile a bit.

Apple made mandatory privacy protection “nutrition” labels on its App Store. One guy refuses to update its apps since then: Google. Maybe they are even worst than Facebook if such a thing is even possible. Was Google caught by surprise? Highly impossible. They had many months to prepare for that. When your business model highly depends on sucking all users data, it’s hard to escape suspicion.

Really nice update (and unexpected) to my preferred Twitter client. Tweetbot version 6 received a refreshed design, full support for Twitter APIs v2 and cleans up unsupported features with latest APIs. Tweetbot startup is much faster than Twitter’s client and exposes a few features that aren’t available otherwise. Design-wise, Tweetbot contains a lot of nice touches throughout the app. Compared to that, Twitter’s own client feels uninspired.

Like a growing number of apps recently introduced or updated, Tweetbot 6 now is subscription-based. I expect a few angry users but I’m not one of them. I find the pricing quite reasonable. I chose to go with the yearly subscription at 50% price reduction, a no brainer to me.

Tweetbot has recently returned as my go to Twitter client during my recent Twitter reset and I’m very happy with it.

Someone stoled my most recent article. I hate when this happens. I guess my article was good enough for this guy to bother.

This morning, I got a pingback on WordPress for an article being published elsewhere as shown below.

Someone copied my latest article “The Ultimate Twitter Tips and Tricks for Mastering Your Twitter Experience”. By doing so, he forgot to remove one of the URL pointing back to another previously published article, “My Review of Mailbrew: a Powerful and Time-Saving Internet Information Aggregator”, I was notified via a pingback. I paid a visit to the “publisher” and sure enough, 90% of my article was reproduced. The guy removed the screenshots but left the captions (weird). The title was modified too. The conclusion was removed. Here is what I wrote to the “published”:

I also posted the same thing on the comment section but comments being moderate, I don’t think the guy will republish them. I will see what happens. This is the second time this happens to me.

Meanwhile, The Startup magazine on Medium accepted my article submission. More than 750K followers can see it from the magazine homepage. 😃

A recent article by Benedict Evans exposes how hard it is to “fix” social networks.

“The internet and then social platforms break a lot of our definitions of different kinds of speech, and yet somehow Facebook / Google / Twitter are supposed to recreate that whole 200-year tapestry of implicit structures and consensus, and answer all of those questions, from office parks in the San Francisco Bay Area, for both the USA and Myanmar, right now. We want them to Fix It, but we don’t actually know what that means.”

I often think about issues that platforms like Facebook brings to our society. I don’t pretend to have any solution. I can’t quite define what Facebook is actually from a societal point of view. That being said, a lack of definition and understanding cannot prevent me to wish for things to be done differently. And I have one simple wish.

I want the eradication of algorithm-based feeds. I want them to be regulated, prohibited even. At the very least, it should be an opt-in “feature”. I want the return of chronological feeds. No tweaks, no tricks, nothing more. Nothing less. I want all people to have a look at the same reality. Two people having the exact same followers and following the same guys should give the same timeline. Period.

Without hyper-manipulated feeds, we have to wonder about the usefulness of all gathered data about us and our behaviours. Maybe ads targeting doesn’t make as much sense in tact hypothetical context.

If two people don’t see the same thing, it’s because the choice was made by an individual wishing to control his or her exposure, not by a corporation’s algorithm or an arbitrary group of people.

That’s my wish. Let’s try it and see if things change for the better.

… I want to scream, I want to puke. Not Tim Cook’s best gift.

I just published one of my most difficult to write article in a long time. It is about transforming your Twitter experience to make it more focused, enjoyable, tailored to your personal interests. I’ve been working on it for the last few months. Along the way of writing this long piece, my Twitter experience was profoundly changed. I’m pretty happy with the end results. If you’re on Twitter, consider giving a look to this guide. Hope you’ll like it.

“The Ultimate Twitter Tips and Tricks for Mastering Your Twitter Experience”

I’m always curious to try new things, especially in the numeric world. In the case of Clubhouse, I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I’m curious to try it out, anyway. I wonder how it will compare to Twitter’s Spaces, currently in limited beta. Now, waiting for an invite.

In “A Love Letter to the Link Post”, CJ Chilvers lament the lost of link posts from the blogosphere. Link posts marked the debut of so many websites raison d’être back in the nineties:

“At that time, they weren’t even called blogs. You’d simply update the front page of your website every day with a few interesting links you discovered since the day before.”

I love link posts. I follow many bloggers just to have a peek at their discoveries and comments about them. A big portion of my monthly Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter is built around sharing a curated content of links that I find interesting. They generally fit within the boundaries of my deep interests. Link posts within newsletters = 🥰

In summary := Link posts > comments on a social network.

First, do me a favour, watch this YouTube video (less than 8 minutes of your time), then come back. You probably know that I’m working in IT as my official day jobs. I’ve been working on a project in the last 18 months to assist and direct one of our customer to implement a disaster recovery plan. This is not a trivial thing, generally speaking. In that particular case, it was an exercise of extreme frustration all along. If you did watch this YouTube video, this is me, the expert. So spot on. No wonder IT projects can’t be finished on time with so many bozos around the table.

iFixit completed their usual teardown of one of Apple’s latest product. This time, the AirPods Max were taken apart. This thing is so complicated! No wonder why we pay $550 for. It is fascinating to see how such a device from the outside is so complicated in the inside. This makes me think of the Apple Pencil exterior beauty but interior complexity. I still love mine, even if I’m not an audiophile. 🤓

What a pleasant surprise today: a big update to Craft was released. Version 1.2.2 brings a lot of improvements on the table. This release should have been numbered version 1.3, not 1.2.2! All platforms (iPad and macOS) received attention and improvements. One of the most important thing for me being the addition of direct export to Ulysses, DayOne, OmniFocus among others. We could already export in TextBundle or PDF and Word but these exports options, I feel my data can freely move out of the platform. My blogger workflow is simplified.

I’m still working on my review of Craft by the way. It takes longer than I would have liked. Stay tuned.

Bye bye dear TouchBar. Hello MagSafe power connector. Here’s some more ports. Rumours are pointing toward the same thing. Apple will revert many of its controversial decision of the last five years. Many will be pleased. Function is winning over form. I think Apple is following the trend they started with the 2019 Mac Pro which essentially erasing five years of non sense with the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple is fully back to the Mac. And down on earth, with all of us.

Clearly, actual creatives and professionals disagree with Apple’s soul-searching because if all of these rumors come to fruition, Apple will be returning to what was already considered the MacBook Pro’s zenith. Coupled with Apple Silicon and Apple could experience Mac growth that it ceded to PC laptops during these past years of stumbling. — Raymond Wong for Input magazine

Something we won’t get, though: a touch screen. We can’t have it all, right?

Since getting my Apple Series 6 last fall (see my review here), my heart readings aren’t working as expected. I’m not alone who is experiencing this problem (just google it!). During a workout, heartbeats readings are not available for the first 5 to 10 minutes into the workout. On a 30-minute workout, it can make a big difference.

I think I found a way to greatly improve the heartbeats readings. Simply by wearing my Apple Watch as shown on the picture above. I must say that it is not perfect. As shown below, I do get a few minutes of lost readings, though, but not as much as before. The problem could be related to the presence on some fur on my front arm. Also, always making sure the Apple Watch band is tied close enough to the wrist is a must.

Are you experiencing the same issue? Let me know if you permanently fixed it.

Let’s start with a quote from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (as reported by The Oregonian)

“We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino. We have to be that good, in the future."

The fundamental problem with Intel is that they will never make the whole widget (the products) like Apple does. That’s the key for insanely great products. Intel’s CPU are small enablers at best. The vertical integration of the whole stack (hardware, OS, apps, services) makes what Apple is all about. There is no way for Intel to emulate that by cooperating with hundreds of OEMs.

Sorry, Pat, nice try.

DHH on Twitter seems happy that the messaging app, Signal, finally has its moment. I don’t really know about Signal, but I do know about another one, Telegram. Now that Parler is out of this world, I’m wondering if people prefer Signal over Telegram. Is Signal more secure than Telegram? According to this website, Telegram, is apparently not as secure as its maker pretends it is.

Now, I’m wonder how these movements between messaging platforms would be affected if Apple decided to make iMessage cross-platform: on iOS, on macOS, on the web and on Android. Maybe this year the dynamic is different enough for Apple to make the move? Are they afraid that people will leave the iPhone if iMessage is available on Android? What is more sticky for the Apple ecosystem: the Music app or iMessage? In my opinion, iMessage is much more powerful than Music for keeping people inside Apple’s walled garden.

Reminder, you can find me on Telegram here.

The latest report from MacRumors about Apple’s upcoming MacBook Pro redesign is quite interesting and intriguing.

First, the removal of the TouchBar and the return of the MagSafe technology is utterly surprising. If this is the case, Apple would be undoing five years of design decisions. A side effect of the TouchBar removal would be a more competitive pricing of the MacBook Pro line.

Second, the rumour about Apple opting for an all-out flat edge design makes me think the new MacBook Pro would be similar to two iPad Pro linked together with a hinge. Obviously, the screen parts would be thinner than the lower body of the MacBook Pro. Intriguing.

Now, if these rumours materialize, to me, it would mean that the current 13” MacBook Pro would be no longer necessary with a 14” model in its place. If that’s the case, the 13” MacBook Pro was only a transition and temporary move from Apple.

We are at the beginning of another exciting year for Apple.

I like this quote from Ken Segall:

“In 2005, Apple moved to Intel to gain equality. In 2020, it’s moved away from Intel to gain superiority."

I remember so well when Apple announced their move in 2005. It is a privilege to have witnessed all these big Apple’s moments. Many interesting thoughts about these transformative transitions in this article. Must read.

Mailbrew received a big update this week. The change log is pretty extensive. The most important change is that the home page and the whole user experience for that matter is now more about reading your digests than the brews edit view. I like this change a lot. Digests are presented in the order they were received. You can go from one issue to another easily for a specific brew. You can also select a specific brew to see associated digests. The reading experience is better overall compared to HEY’s Feed view. The only missing thing is a “save clip” option.

Beside links to external content, within a digest, when it is appropriate, there is a button for entering a reader view. In this view, a minimalist browser will let the reader immerse himself to limit distractions. It reminds me of the Safari reader view. There is always the save button available to put aside an article in case you don’t have time to read it at the moment. Mailbrew provides a separate list for those saved items.

There are a ton of other small change and improvements. Sharing our brews is easier. Sharing a digest also is closer at hand. All in all, this is a solid update to an already excellent service. You can read my initial review of Mailbrew here. If you want to subscribe, please do me a favour and use this link.

This is a test with (redacted) currently in alpha, which introduces support for posting to Micro.blog. I’m a big user of (redacted). This new feature alone could significantly enhance and simplified my blogger workflow. I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time. When the update is ready, on iPad or the Mac, it means that I’ll be able to start the initial writing in Craft, then export to (redacted) using the TextBundle format, finish the editing in (redacted), then publish to Micro.blog. On the Mac, the same sequence applies, rendering MarsEdit unnecessary. How cool is that? Optimizing my workflow is very satisfying. 😎👨🏻‍💻

_This is a first post with (redacted), things could break. _

At long last, relief is in sight. My M1 Mac mini is not able to keep a stable Bluetooth connection with Apple’s Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse. It’s very frustrating. While waiting for a permanent fix, I’m using a USB PC mouse, and I keep my Magic Keyboard connected via a USB-C to lightning cable connected on my LG Ultra Fine 4K monitor. What a messy experience for such a small performance wonder.

Thanks to the small wonder, the M1 chip and the Apple silicon transition, Mac sales are booming. According to a recent IDC report, Mac sales are up by nearly 30% compared to the same period, a year ago. Apple’s market share increased globally by 1%, which is quite impressive for Apple.

My take: I have the feeling that we ain’t see nothing yet. As the work-from-home trend continues, with the rest of the MacBook Pro line still to transition to the M1 chip, a long-awaited redesiged iMac, 2021 could be a monster year for the Mac and Apple. And beyong 2021 and the pandemic? Ask Horace Dediu.

What does it take to be a hood programmer? Or better yet, what does it take to like programming hence writing or reading algorithms? Math? Language? Arts? A combination? When I started in computer science at the University, my friends thought that I was good at maths. It wasn’t the case. Before deciding which field I would like to study, I was afraid of computer science, thinking myself that we had to be really good with mathematics. My experience shows that it is not the case. I’m average at maths but good at programming and in computer science in general. Is it surprising? According to this article, no. In fact, computer programming isn’t the same thing as doing maths from a brain activity perspective. It is more like something very demanding where a totally different part of the brain is solicited. Fascinating. It may (or may not) explain why you can be good in computer science but not as good in mathematics. Who knows.

By having a better understanding of what parts of the brain are solicited, we may find common ground with other disciplines. It is really hard to attract people in computer science and knowing what it takes from a brain perspective could help direct efforts of recruiting the right people who will like to read and write algorythms but are not good at maths!

Alan Ralph, in a blog post, exposes ten reasons why he loves RSS feeds. I agree on all accounts. When I look closer, it all comes down to: control. Control is something we don’t have these days on social networks and social media. We live in a numeric world full of algorithmically-generated feeds and content. We lose control of our feeds. George Orwell was right.

RSS feed, a simple and open standard, is the key, within an RSS reader, of a more open and user-centered and mostly ads-free Internet. RSS feeds are important.

Thirteen years already. Gosh, time flies. Steve Jobs announces the iPhone. One of his best presentation. I remember it so well. At that time, I was a huge user (and fan) of the Blackberry. After using a RIM two-way pager for a while, I upgraded to Blackberry with a bigger screen with a monochrome display. But, with the iPhone, I knew, deep within me, this would be a real game-changer. My feelings were the same as with the launch of the Macintosh. What I didn’t know, though, was how profound and long-lasting the iPhone-effect would be on the rest of the tech world. We still feel its effect these days. I had to wait until the iPhone 3GS, in 2009, to get my hands on one for my personal use. I was still using a Blackberry for the office. Yep, I had two smartphones with me all the time.

What’s out for 2021? These “Connect with Facebook” screen. Please, stop doing that. It’s 2021. If a service, in order to create a new account, offers a “Connect with Facebook”, it is a no go for me, no mather if alternatives are provided. Facebook is like cancer. Period.

Unsplash started the year 2021 with a bang; they are introducing a visual search feature. How cool is that! Use cases for this feature are aplenty. Imagine you come across a great picture on Unsplash and would like to see if there are any more variants of it. Here comes the new visual search feature. Here is another one that could be a game-changer. Suppose you happen to find a picture online that is tied by a very restrictive license. Copy this image URL and paste it in the visual search of Unsplash to see if there are any similar pictures. Voilà! As the Unsplash library doubles every year, the probability of finding an alternative image increases. Lastly, the visual search feature helps you determine if a specific image on the way comes from Unsplash. It is useful to find the creator of the image when no credits are given.

Next week marks the end of a three-week vacation. I’m lucky. Three weeks where I forgot about my work and became a full-time blogger, writer, content creator. Time flies. There is a need for normality, I guess, and this means returning to work.

Expect a less frequent publishing schedule. Don’t worry; I won’t go very far, thanks to our new confinement and curfew starting this very Saturday. Oh well.

Today, I decided to remove my Friday Notes stories from Medium paywall. In other words, you can read them without paying a penny to Medium. They can be found here, in my Numeric Citizen Tidbits Newsletter. Please, if you like ‘em, give ‘em some hands claps! Thanks.

In his predictions for iPad in 2021, iPadInsight puts multi-user support on top of its list for iPadOS 15 without mentionning a real use case beyond the obvious. Let me explain.

Do we ask multi-user support on iPad because it is something we take for granted on “traditional” computers? Or is because there is a real use case for that feature, beyond the classroom or the conference room? Does the multi-user support solve the problem of your friend borrowing your iPad while keeping him or her from seeing your stuff?

Enabling multi-user support on the iPad has profound implications. How would the instant-on, instant-use experience be impacted by having multi-user enabled? Is the security enclave capable of holding more than one user FaceID? How iCloud Drive data be handled if users both have their data in icloud, the same way as on macOS? What about apps collections being different from one user to the other, how the iPad homescreen change upon logoff-logon? How fast? What kind of pressure does this feature put on the iPad system memory? Would this feature enabled on the Pro line only?

For me, the iPad is a personal device, just like the iPhone. Apple likes it this way, for their bottom line. That’s my guess.

Here is another wild one: Microsoft is reportedly working on making Outlook a progressive web application for all platforms. Progressive web application isn’t new and Microsoft already makes a version of Outlook in this format. What is new is that it would replace all native versions of the Outlook client: no more are native versions of Outlook for Windows or the Mac.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad news. I’m always wary about cross-platform tech. There is always something lost in translation. The other question that comes to my mind, why is Microsoft moving way from native applications in its ecosystem?

Yet, not all is lost, a good side effect of this move would be to reduce memory consumption on the client. As use can see in this tweet, the native version of Outlook can use large chunk of your computer memory.

With patents like this, we can see clearly into Apple’s vision for the future of the iPhone. Apple is committed to remove the Lightning port from its iPhone line. I don’t expect them to go through USB-C. This is Apple. By adding more ways to charge without contacts, Apple removes the friction points off the user experience in a world of port-less iPhone.

If only Microsoft could finish the job started with Windows 7. Windows 10 user interface is a bunch of previously used visual elements that Microsoft doesn’t care to clean up. For example, consider the computer settings area. On the surface, the iconography speaks the recent visual langague defined by Microsoft. But, as you try to go deeper to change a less frequently used setting, you’re back to a pre-Windows 10 era. I don’t believe Microsoft will do this “major” refresh as recently reported by Windows Central, not in a way they refused to do in the last ten years, anyway.

As a side note, colour me Apple fanboy if you want, but many pundits will grumble when Apple is actually refreshing the user interface like they did with macOS Big Sur (or iOS 7, remember?). At least, it is either consistently clean or consistently ugly, depending of your aestheticism tastes. You won’t as easily find a macOS Yosemite visual asset in macOS Big Sur or even macOS Catalina. Inconsistencies do exist in macOS but they are usually limited to very specific visual tweaks (like to trafic lights placements).

I got this notification in the Wordpress.app this morning. Six years already. Over the years, I became a paying subcriber of their Business plan. Automattic offers great support when you need it. But in the least year or so, I noticed a change in the way they do business with us, paying members. There are a lot of reminders about additional services available to us. which aren’t free, by the way. They keep advertising their ExactMetrics service that I don’t need with tricks that I don’t appreciate as shown in the second screen shot above. Recently, they started to advertise WordPress courses on the main admin page on WordPress.com. I really don’t like the trend. And this story by Alan Ralph doesn’t help either.

I want to pick from this blog post from Initial Charge. I remember a small story when the iPad came out in 2010. After a few days of playing with it, I went to the office to show it to a few of my coworkers when I got my iPad. After a few minutes of demonstration, I got two remarks. One was about the lack of a USB port. The second was about the lack of support for Flash-enabled websites. On that one complaint, I remember arguing about the simple fact that moving your mouse cursor around would trigger some flash-based animations like making a button bigger or showing up a menu on many websites. There was no such thing as a “mouseover” event on the iPad, so those websites that were dependant on this would break the interaction experience. At this very moment, I thought Adobe Flash was doomed. More than ten years to get rid of this crasp. That was long.

Paolo Amoroso writes on his blog:

Back in the early days of blogging, the tech press bashed RSS out of existence as it was supposedly too complex for ordinary users. To the point new bloggers don't even know what RSS is, some recent blogging platforms don't support RSS, and the blogs of new startups sometimes don't provide RSS feeds.

It’s a shame in a world where open standards are on the way out. RSS feeds are another important part of Podcasts, another open standard where big tech would like to monetize, i.e. make it proprietary.

Amoroso continues:

The readers who subscribe to your RSS feed always see all of your posts. No matter what Google, Facebook, or Twitter decide.

A long time ago I decided my blogs feeds would push the complete content of the articles. As I don’t have ads on my blogs, I don’t really care if the readers consume the content from the RSS feed only. RSS feeds are conduits who escape any algorithm-based feeds. It’s the most direct connexion between a blogger and their readers.

For the best part, Amaroso nails it:

They are the readers you want. The superfans who share your work. They may be bloggers themselves and link to your posts from theirs, or enable other opportunities such as guest blogging or podcast interviews. Those few RSS subscribers are much more engaged and valuable than the many who don’t even click links on social media.

If you know how to use RSS, you’re my best friend, you are more then welcome.

You can find my main blog feed here. For my micro blog, the feed is here. Hope you enjoy.

Writing is an important part of my life. It’s all about feeling creative, thinking, taking a pause of everything else. As a blogger, I like when people stop by and take the time to read my blog articles and then response with a comment. It doesn’t happen as often as I would like. I would say, one percent of my visitors will do it.

For 2021, I decided to set a new goal for myself: stopping by, taking the time to drop a meaningful comment on a blog post or an article from someone else. I call this goal writer engagement. Some platforms are easier to interact with than others. I like both Medium and Substack for this. Responding to an article or a newsletter is just a few clicks away.

So, today, I dropped two comments. One comment to a post from MG Siegler about writing more often on medium. The other comment about a way to consider the iPhone 12 Pro Max as a tool for photography, from a too technical point of view.

So, will you drop a comment today? Feel free to engage too and maybe start a conversation, why not!

The year 2020 came to an end without me posting my personal year in review. You might wonder why. I read many reviews in the last few days. Most of them are delightful to read as they contain gems about personal lessons learned, personal discoveries, etc. To write those reviews, you have to be prepared for that particular intention to write about it later. Without notes, it’s nearly impossible and takes too much time to prepare. It also would be too easy to miss essential tidbits.

What about 2021? Good news, for 2021, I want to be ready. Now it’s the best time to get organized. All year long, I’ll be using the excellent notes taking application called Craft. I already started to put things down. The picture at the top of this post is a glimpse at my journaling space structure, where personal notes will be confined all year long. I’ll use a monthly section for each domain or theme I want to touch on in this future year in review. I’ll see where it goes.

Alan Ralph on Why I Use Pinboard As My Reading List

I’ve mentioned before that I use Pinboard for bookmarking webpages of interest so that I can refer to them later. I realize this might seem like an odd choice, given that there are more obvious candidates such as Pocket or Instapaper, so I’ve decided to summarize my reasoning

I could add other apps and services like Raindrop (which I tried) or even Notion (which I love) as places to save bookmarks. It’s tempting to use more focused tools to fill a very specific part of a workflow. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of preference or workflow optimization (you can read about my recent workflow update).

Brent Simmons trying to determine where the US should get back to normal. After some maths, he asks:

“(Is any of my math wrong? There’s no point in being overly-precise here — but please tell me if I’ve made some error that changes things significantly.)”

I’m afraid his maths are right, even if they aren’t precise. Things could change, though, after Biden is officially in his Office. Even though, change of government takes a lot of time in the US.

I said it in the past: COVID-19 shows how weak the US is as a country to fight this non military war.

In What to do about Apple devices and iCloud content when the owner dies from AppleInsider, there are so many unanswered questions. For example, are the requirements from Apple different from one country to another? Something critical when someone dies, having access to his or her smartphone with a PIN. Without it, the challenge is close to impossible to meet. That is one of the many requirements explained in A Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacy.

Two times today, I had to restart my M1 Mac mini because of the bluetooth devices being unresponsive. macOS 11.1 came out late in December without a fix to this issue. My hope is that this can be fixed via a firmware update from Apple. I’m not alone. No fix in sight. Very frustrating. 🤬

From Basic Apple Guy’s top 5 of 2020:

“I appreciated the stewardship Apple has taken this year in balancing their product interests while also supporting the fight to respond to COVID-19.”

Two things. First, Apple’s response to COVID-19 was and continue to be faultless. Some governments should take notes. Second, the closing-reopening-closing dance of their physical stores didn’t impact their bottom line, not in a significant way, apparently. In a way, Apple is not only making and selling products, they are the product, it’s not only how they look, it’s how they work.

About Microsoft being Years Late to a Party They Tried to Start on iPadInsight:

“According to a recent Bloomberg report, Microsoft is finally getting into the custom silicon business. It looks like they are starting down this road primarily to aid their cloud and server business, but it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have future plans to bring these new ARM-based chips to their Surface Pro X and other future models, replacing Qualcomm’s SQ1 and 2 processors.“

and

“The $10,000 question is, why did Microsoft wait this long? Why did they bother messing around with Qualcomm to produce ARM chips for the Surface Pro X only to get mediocre results from a chip that still isn’t fine tuned to both the hardware and Windows 10? Those results were completely and totally predictable. They took the easy way out and the Surface Pro X, while a really slick looking device, isn’t going anywhere because of it. Who wants to pay more and still have to make compromises in both performance and compatibility?”

Maybe Microsoft didn’t want to piss off Intel?

Basic Apple Guy on DayOne, a popular journaling app:

“My current journaling habit is to make one entry per day, typically at night. However, I may add multiple timestamps to the entry throughout the day to capture a specific occurrence or thought. This daily journal is currently on a 2,668-day streak, with 4,325 total entries, and 3,297 photos.”

A streak of 2,668-day to capture thoughts, events, etc., manually? Consider me impressed. I used to write my thoughts too in DayOne, but eventually I stopped as I couldn’t keep up because of all my writing projects. Yet, I found a way to keep using DayOne, by automatically documenting my numeric life. I wrote a piece about it in 2018 that is still absolutely valid today: “Documenting my Numeric Life”. I’m using IFTTT as the engine to push updates into my many journals, inside DayOne. Works like a charm.

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

“on Substack, the most successful newsletters are almost always written by people who have already cultivated an audience at traditional publications or built up a following elsewhere.”

and

Substack is a natural fit for the influencer, the pundit, the personality, and the political contrarian.

Starting from scratch on Substack is quite a challenge. From the graph shown above, this is the curve of my subscribers count. It plateaued. The new reader feature coupled with the discovery tab didn’t move the needle at all. We have to wonder if Substack is just a clique in disguise.

You can read my past newsletters by visiting my Substack page. Be sure to subscribe, it’s free!

According to an article from MacRumors, LG is rolling out a software update to its 2018 Smart TVs to enable AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support. I personally own a 2016 model and I don’t expect to receive such update anytime soon. As a software-only solution, I don’t see why they couldn’t make it happen for 2016 models too. When you think about Apple supporting iPhone models dating back to 2015 with iOS 14, we have to wonder who’s playing programmed obsolescence here. As someone who’s looking to upgrade its 2016 LG Smart TV to a 2020 model, which will support HDR, Dolby Atmos, AirPlay 2, HomeKit and have a 120 Hz refresh rate, I don’t appreciate LG approach to brand loyalty building.

According to Goldman Sachs, Apple doesn’t care about the car itself. I don’t care either. I’m fed up of these rumours. M.G. Siegler is fed up too according to a recent Medium article. Period. Enough. A car is the least personal product Apple could ever make. Apple’s products are about exhencing experience, life.

I can see Apple investing in in-car experience and selling it to cars manufacturers. But wait, there is a big gotcha: cars manufacturers doesn’t care about the user experience. Maybe Tesla, but that’s it. I cannot see them coming in drove to Apple to add the “Apple Experience” as an option anytime soon.

Mailbrew shared a blog post about the services they use internally for their needs. As a die hard fan of Mailbrew (see my profile here), it’s interesting to see what SaaS they use for their internal use. Especially interesting to me, Plausible, a privacy-friendly analytics. I’m currently using Google Analytics which is free but, you know, it’s Google and it’s too complex for my needs. On the eve of a new year, it would be a nice time to start fresh in that regards. I’m currently testing the service as I write this! I never thought closing my Google analytics account could be a thing. Every new year is the occasion to do things differently, don’t you think?

Someone on Twitter thinks iOS 14.3 mediaplayer control is a nod to the iPod Classic. I think this redesign was introduced in iOS 14.2. Up until now, it didn’t came to my mind the design was similar to the iPod Classic. Nonetheless, it a step up compared to the previous version both in design and features. As Gruber puts it, it’s probably the best way to layout music controls on a small screen.

When the original iMac came out, in 1998, a first tangible and public sign of Steve Jobs return at Apple, I was perplexed yet intrigued. It was so unique compared to everything else, just like for the original Mac, in 1984. There was a retro look to this machine that was seducing to me, especially when looking at it right in front of it. I never owned the iMac G3 and any of the following designs. I came back to the Mac in 2005 after a 10 years pause. This concludes the long series of “20 Macs for 2020” from SixColors.

Yesterday I had my first real experience with the Disney+ streaming service on my Apple TV 4K. In a word: wow! I wanted to see the latest movie from Pixal: Soul. I decided to try Disney+ for the occasion. It’s the best streaming experience I ever had. From the mandatory signup process to browsing content and watching movies, I’m sold. Rightfully, Apple named the Disney+ Apple TV app the best of 2020. Not only Disney knows how to create great movies, they also know how to create great user experience for the Apple TV. Apple should take some notes here. Google, with its crappy YouTube app should just start over. Now the 9$ a month question: will I keep the Disney+ subscription?

Benjamin Mayo on Apple Fitness+ Launches

“They did a good job with this. It’s not a deeply technical proposition but sometimes simple ideas and good execution are all you need. Fitness+ is high quality and well produced workout videos overlaid with live metrics readouts from a connected Watch. Straightforward, technologically trivial, but effective.”

I started to use the service since day one. For now, I’m doing treadmill workouts ranging from 10 min to 30 min. I like the whole thing so far. The next thing I’d like to try is the dance workouts.

In 2020, we started to get a better peek at Apple’s labs, at least, this is what Apple wanted us to believe. My question: was this setup a real lab or was it entirely made up? I tend to think they were real. If that’s the case, in this particular image, can you spot a very old Macintosh?

Original image from Unsplash, the wishes are from me. LOL. Done with Adobe Spark Post.

Every year, a few days before Christmas, I spend some time to create all my own and original Christmas cards for my beloved ones. It’s a pretty simple process involving two different apps. One is Unsplash and the other is Adobe Spark Post. I usually start by browsing Unsplash for finding the right photo for inspiration. Once I settle on one picture, I download it and launch Adobe Spark to create the initial montage. I make sure to reserve some space for the best wishes text. This year, I’ll do things a bit differently as my cards will be digital-only. I’ll send them via iMessage. Some people would prefer to have a printed version, but 2020 being… well… 2020, I’ll go ahead with a digital version only.

I’m a big fan of Adobe Spark Post. For some reason, I don’t see a lot of noise around it on the web. I use it for many other things than creating Christmas cards, as the picture above can show. You can read my review of Adobe Spark Post here on my main blog.

After installing Lightroom CC on my M1 Mac mini, I spent some time with the Discovery feature. It’s a place where you can see other photographer’s photo edits. I find it fascinating and very helpful in learning how artists decide to process their photos. There are probably as many ways to edit a photo as there are photographers. The discovery feature has been introduced this year and can be very addictive. Be aware.

You can one of my many edit session by hitting this link.

ProRaw and the Gradual Gradation of Grays – On my Om:

When reviewing these images on a big iMac Pro screen, I was gob-smacked by the details that were visible to the naked eye. I was able to get my shades of black and whiter whites from the files. The gradual gradation of grays is part of my editing process, and I didn’t need to do anything much to achieve that. You can feel the fog dancing among the trees. You can feel the sunshine trying to fight its way through the damp.

Man, I wish I had an iPhone 12 Pro Max, right now. From this article, my favourite pictures are the ones with trees, proudly standing. And yes, black & white is often my favourite way to look at a scene. The pictures above are mine.

I have too many projects on my plate to complete and experiments that I want to try. Today, I’m thinking about subscribing to Vimeo, again. I used to have an active account where I would publish photo processing session recordings with voice over. These sessions are still available by the way (one example here). I stopped doing those because they were time consuming to create and publish.

Subscribing to Vimeo’s first paying tier is not cheap. I know what you’re thinking, why not use YouTube which is free!? First, I don’t like YouTube and the business model behind it. I don’t like to depend on Google for my stuff. Vimeo is better in my opinion as a video content platform, for what I want to do. I prefer their embedded video player compared to YouTube’s. I don’t want ads on my feed and on my content. For all these reasons, Vimeo > YouTube.

My Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/numericcitizen

Now you know. 😎

I’m mostly done with the re-installation of all my most used and mandatory apps on my Mac mini. To give you an idea of my apps collection, here is a screenshot of my applications folder. Most are universal apps or Apple Silicon only.

I’m curious, what is yours?

As more and more applications get the universal binary treatment to support M1 Macs, my iMac usage outside of my daytime job has decreased significantly. The list of apps that I cannot use on my M1 Mac mini is shrinking every week. It’s a good sign. Things are moving faster than I initially thought. Yesterday, I decided to let go the weird idea of not installing Intel-only applications on my M1 Mac mini, and everything is really working just fine.

I’m currently writing a piece about the tools and services I use to help me be more efficient in my blogger workflow. Currently looking at Shortcut Bar - Instant Access on the Mac App Store. I had this utility in my list that I never bought but the features are exactly what I would like to get. Is there any alternatives to this utility? It’s a bit on the expansive side and is not yet updated for M1 Macs and Big Sur look and feel.

Can you believe it, up until today, I was still resisting the installation of any non-native applications on my M1-based Mac mini. I refrained myself from letting in any Rosetta-dependant apps to run. I shouldn’t have made a big story about this non-issue, but it’s was more psychological than anything else.

The list of non-native apps is small, but it started to negatively affect my ability to complete specific tasks. These apps waiting in line were: SafariMarkdownLinker (Safari Extension), Grammarly (Safari Extension), Adobe Creative Cloud installer (required to install the native version of Lightroom CC), 1Password.

Today, I finally let it go and went ahead with installing these remaining pieces of my application landscape. I feel good, and everything is working just fine, as expected.

Today, unexpectedly and for the first timr, I had a chance to experience Twitter’s Space. It’s a virtual room of twitter users who can speak to each other. When there is an open space, a small icon appear at the top of your timeline among twitter fleets. Tapping on it allows you to enter the space. By default your mic is disabled. You have to request permission first in order to be able to speak. There is a speaker who controls people’s requests to speak. People who are listener can react using emojis. It’s pretty interesting, much more interesting than audio tweets in fact.

I spent maybe ten minutes chatting with the space owner about things like COVID-19, confinement in Christmas time and how to use Twitter space. Others in the room were just listeners. It was pretty cool. I can see myself using this instead of doing a podcast for example. It’s easier to setup up, doesn’t require a distribution platform to maintain. I could setup a space to talk about Apple, photography, privacy or climate change. Can’t wait to try it out with my followers, once the feature officially rollout.

What happens with your numeric assets when you die? I mean, think of your online presence: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Where all that stuff ends up a few years after you die? That’s the type of question “Where Does Our Data Go When We Die?” tries to answer. It’s something that I find interesting and a big challenge, something that I wrote about in my piece titled “A Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacy”. Long read yet very important subject.

From “ProRAW Is Here!" By Austin Mann:

I suggest turning on ProRAW when you are shooting in extreme conditions of any kinds (extremely low light, extremely high dynamic range with super bright highlights and dark shadows, mixed light temperatures, and so on). Also, use ProRAW if you plan on enlarging the images (on screen or in print).

ProRAW is about extending the possible scenarios where you can take great looking pictures. Just like in traditional photography gear, adding different lenses allow for more possibilities. It’s incredible how far iPhone photography has come since 2007. I’ll have to wait for fall of 2021 before being able to take advantage of all this as I’m not planning to upgrade to the iPhone 12 Pro. If all goes well, I should be able to bring a shinny iPhone 13 (or whatever name they give for next’s year iPhone) with me on my next trip to Europe, on October of 2021.

Introducing my new avatar for 2021. It was made by hyxcreations, available on Fivrr. I wanted something along the lines of this one. I’m very happy of the end results. It is a blend of the previous avatar and the other one I use for @numericcitizen, my official Twitter account.

Expect a slow rollout over the next few weeks. ☺️

Is this new? I mean the format in which Apple is presenting the current iOS and iPadOS usage? The last time I paid attention to this, Apple was using a pie chart. I prefer this level of details. A few thoughts about these numbers are in order.

First, iPhone users are quicker to update their devices compared to iPad users. Second, Apple makes a clear distinction between devices recently introduced (in the last four years) from the rest. In both categories, the numbers shows that a vast majority of users adopt the latest release of the operating system. Third, even though people keeps their device longer than before, Apple keep supporting older devices (older than four years). All of this helps keeping the adoption rate at very high levels. Kudos to Apple.

These numbers also tell another story: Apple’s shear power over its install base is impressive. Apple has the ability to move it in new directions pretty quickly as users are quick to embrace new features, either by buying new devices or by updating their current ones because they are still supported by Apple. Will 2021 bring a different tone to this story with iOS 15? Maybe, maybe not.

Here is an issue that I ran into yesterday with “Sign in with Apple”. I suspect I’m not alone in that situation.

The excellent website building tool, Universe, came out with an update that introduces Sign-in with Apple. After updating the application on my iPad, I launch the app. I’m welcomed with a sign-in screen. The Sign-in with Apple option is prominently displayed. I tap on it. I’m then presented with the typical panel to decide if I expose my real email address and my real name. Now the troubles begin.

I’m already a user of Universe, which email did I use to create my initial account? I can’t remember. What if I choose the wrong one? I try one of my email address that I decided to reveal. Hit sign-in; after a few seconds of working progress, I’m met with welcome screen for new users. Duh. I’m trying to get back, to no avail.

This issue reveals a big flaw in Sign in with Apple: when you are already a user of a service, switching to the more secure sign-in option makes it hard to associate this login to your existing account. I ran into the same issue with most of the services where I tried to make the switch. I suspect this is hindering the adoption of an otherwise secure upgrade to traditional authentication service. Too bad.

Yesterday Apple launched their latest service offering: Fitness+. I gave it a try, and I fell in love. The first step was to update all my supported devices: the iPhone, my Apple Watch and my Apple TV. After spending a few minutes glancing at the different type of workouts, I elected to do a twenty minutes treadmill workout using my iPhone and my AirPods Pro. For this session, Jamie-Ray was my coach. As you can see, I think I made pretty well. I liked everything about the experience, from onboarding to the actual workout session with on-screen feedbacks and the finale. The music choice was good too! After my session, I gave a look at the Apple TV Fitness application. Upon launching the app, you have to select the Apple Watch associated with the person who will interact with the service. One note, if your Apple Watch name is too long, spacing on the screen won’t allow you to easily see which Apple Watch is which; you’ll have to wait so see the text to scroll, it’s a bit of an annoyance. I checked a few workout previews and sure enough, the video quality is exceptional on the Apple TV 4K.

All in all, this is a great start for Fitness+. It’s probably the best example of the whole being larger than the sum of its part. The combination of great devices, great content, great user experience, impeccable execution are the ingredients and enablers for the best experience. Bravo Apple.

Oh, I’ll try to exercise five to six days a week.

Thanks to all the teams at Apple for putting this App privacy feature together. Just like food labels, application labels were long overdue. Apple is far from perfect, I wrote about that a few weeks ago, but at the very least they do move the needle quite a bit. Bravo.

What happens when an M1 Mac starts up? – The Eclectic Light Company:

You can learn a great deal from the unified log entries of a system startup, and that for an M1 Mac is even more fascinating for the insights it gives into the hardware in the M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). These were obtained from an M1 MacBook Pro with 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores running macOS 11.0.1 fairly clean, and in full Secure Boot.

I always liked low level stuff in computers. I learned 6502 assembly language (if we can call this a “language”) when I was a teenager. If you’re into these type of things, it is a fascinating short read that opens the door to what is going on in your M1 Mac.

Who knew COVID-19 would have a very positive side effect on me. It started on March 13th of 2020, and it’s still going on nearly uninterrupted. What is it? I have more time than ever to focus on my writing and publishing activities. Why?

As I’m working from home from mi-March of this year, I no longer have to commute. I save countless hours per week just because of this. On top of that, consider many activities on the weekend that no longer can take place because of the on-and-off restrictions in place.

I never wrote or published as much stuff in the last nine months as in the last year or so. I have a lot of projects in my head, small and more significant. I did spend quite a lot as I no longer travelling on software, services, work-from-home equipment. I also have more time for reading than before, it makes a difference.

COVID-19 is transformative at the society level but also a personal level. There are things that I don’t want to return when COVID-19 is no longer among us. Time is a precious resource, once you have it, you don’t want to mess with it.

Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than a Quadra 700 (even in 2020) | Ars Technica:

The '040 was a substantial upgrade over the '030 that had previously been used by Apple. It featured 1.2 million transistors, over four times as many as its predecessor. This processor increased the L1 cache size by a factor of eight to 4096 bytes, and it was the first 68k processor to have an on-board floating-point unit (FPU). While not without its drawbacks, the '040 processor was an obvious candidate for Apple's next line of premium workstations at the time. And this line would become known as “Quadra,” starting with the Quadra 700 and 900 models in late 1991.

In 1990-1991, I was working for an Apple authorized dealer. I remember the Quadra line, in particular, the 700. It was the most popular machine among desktop publisher. It was fast. I liked its vertical and boxy look. It was different. What is interesting is the description of the Motorola 68040 processor. Compare this to the Apple Silicon, it’s simply unbelievable. The M1 chip comes from an alien world.

Recently I spent more time than usual on YouTube for different reasons: to look at AirPods Max first impressions, to learn more about Synology DSM 7.0 beta, etc. After a while, it’s easy to see a trend that bugs me: design uniformity across the board. See the previous image gathers a few popular YouTubers channel content pages. They all look about the same or at least designed by the same designer. On top of that, there seems to be a trend where the weider you look, the better. When did that trend start?

Published by BasicAppleGuy, a short survey of his experience with MacOS Snow Leopard, back in 2009. I remember Steve Jobs talking about this release of MacOS as a pause in new features introduction in order to build the foundations for the next decade of MacOS (now spelled macOS). In fact, I would argue that, no new flashy feature was a new feature in itself. Something Apple could do these days. Their operating systems are muc more complex and feature rich, Apple is not standing still either. I cannot see them doing this.

For a while, I used to maintain a table of measures related to Apple that were in four categories: Finance, Products, Expectations, Market Landscape. Each attributes had his own ponderation. I wold give a scope from 0 to 10 on each of them. A formula would calculate something call the Health Index. I would revisit this table four times a year. It was obviously totally subjective but it was fun to do. Today, their score would be 9.140 out of 10. Not bad.

Wait for the previous gif to load and animate. What the fusk is wrong with the owners of iPhone in Canada website? This animated gif shows how wrong the web can become. There are 21 trackers on this website. The more trackers, the more ads, the less content there is. What a pity. For this reason, I don’t visit their website, I only subscribe to their RSS feed and Safari notifications. They should know that at some point, they cross the inflexion point where too much is like not enough.

During my digital assets cleanup this weekend as I’m preparing a move to Synology, I came across this screenshot of my iPad running iOS 6. Looking carefully to this image, it’s fascinating to see all the things we lost since then. First, many of those apps no longer exist. Second, design.

Enjoy in all its glory.

When you get an update from the App Store stating a size of, let’s say 179.4 MB, this doesn’t represent the actual amount of data that will be downloaded. In fact, depending of your device, the size will be much smaller. If you want to see this in action, turn on Low Data Mode. Then, go to the App Store and download an application update and look at the actual size of the download in the alert box. Tadam!

I use to keep a time of all the news and announcements emanating from Apple, Cupertino. It was fun but time-consuming. I failed to find a good use of it, so I stopped updating it. Maybe I should have continued, as a blogger, it could have been really useful.

At long last, Apple’s detailed maps is now available for Canada! Not only we get more details in maps and better driving directions, we also get guides and the look around which is, in my opinion, way better designed than Google’s street view. I wasn’t expected them but they are certainly nice bonuses! Detailed maps were first introduced in iOS 13, more than a year ago.

Now, if only we can get rid of COVID-19, I may start to use Maps more frequently. 😔

Ernie Smith writing on Tedium about the hackintosh necessity in a world with the M1 chip for the Mac:

”I hope, now that Apple has a chip architecture that doesn’t get in the way, it ramps up its industrial design … and more importantly, it reads the reviews and iterates more thoughtfully and consistently.”

That’s exactly what I’m hoping too. The iMac and the MacBook design in general were highly influenced by the thermal pressure the Intel chip was imposing. The next iMac design revision will certainly take advantage of the Apple Silicon low thermal dissipation and put Apple in a more creative mode when it comes to imagining what a desktop computer should be.

Now it’s official, Apple is no longer accepting blogs on their news platform, Apple News. I got my rejection mail today (read about my original submission). I understand Apple News as being a… news platform, yet I think Apple is missing an opportunity here. Why? One word: Substack. Another word: Medium. Apple could have done to the written space what they did for the audio world with podcasts. Apple could have created a special place on Apple News for individual writers, not only bloggers per se. This would have been a message of inclusion, diversity and openess. Instead, Apple is again sending a message about begin a walled garden, exclusion, elitism. Too bad.

Fridays are always slow, it seems. Are people simply taking time off social networks, blogs, etc.? Maybe. In any case, I want to send a “have a nice week-end” to my dear readers and followers. 👈🏻 I do have a lot on my plate for this week-end: writing, writing, writing. And some time off too.

Photo credit: Jonas Jacobsson / Unsplash.

I use Apple’s Notes app to jot some ideas, all the time. When the concept is clear in my head, I go ahead and select my tool for the next phase. In this case, it was Apple’s Keynote which proves to provide a quite capable environment for diagramming. The subject: how I process information that eventually will enable me to write blog posts. More details here.

Wanted to give a try to Lightroom CC on my new and still pure Mac mini (no Rosetta installed). Guess what? The creative cloud installer needs Rosetta as it is not yet native. I know, it’s no big deal, it will be fine. If that wasn’t enough, Adobe installers put a lot of things on your system that I don’t like. Then, I remembered about “Suspicious Package” utility which inspect an installer and show what it is actually doing. But, again, this software has yet to come in a universal binary. It will be hard to resist longer.

The AirPods Max is exactly the kind of product that needs a visit to the Apple Store before making a final buying decision. Photos don’t always do justice to Apple’s colour choices and textures. The weight of the AirPods Max are also an important factor to consider if you plan to wear them for long period of time. In other words, I’ll wait to buy one of these, if at all. Demand will ease, production will catch up and eventually we’ll be able to return to Apple Stores, like we used to, a not so long time ago.

I’m currently trying a few iOS or iPadOS apps on my M1 Mac mini. I came across the Castro Podcast player for with I pay a subscription. Castro doesn’t support the iPad, yet, which is a bummer. On Big Sur, the application looks like what we used to have on very old versions of MacOS: Desk Accessories. Depending of your age, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I kind of like the use of small apps like this.

From Chris Best, Substack CEO: “Something that we think about a lot is readers tell us, ‘Hey, I’m subscribed to six different Substacks now, and I want to read them all, and it sucks that they’re in my email inbox along with all my other stuff,’" 😳🤦🏻‍♂️

A reader app from Substack would certainly be a good idea. I’m already on the private beta. I wonder if Mr. Best knows about Mailbrew? Or Hey? While waiting for such a reader app, Mailbrew is certainly capable of doing just that: consolidating newsletters in one place. Read my review of Mailbrew on my blog. https://linktr.ee/numericcitizen

Adobe Lightroom 4.1 is now available with native M1 support. We didn’t see a lot of comments about the speed increase beside Apple’s during their “One More Thing” special event. Adobe’s software on the Mac is not always the best in class in regards to pure performance. So, this release for the M1 chip will hopefully bring a meaningful increase in performance. I didn’t test it yet on my M1 Mac mini as I’m still slowly installing my stuff, one app at a time. I’ll certainly report on that subject later in the month. Stay tuned.

There is a maximum of 25 combinaisons available. Someone on MacRumors forums posted an image of them all. To get a different color, you’ll have to lay more money on the table. Anyway, I expect Apple will sell a boat load of these in the coming months. Are you planning of buying the new AirPods Max?

Many were expecting an update to the aging and expansive Apple TV 4K. Instead, we got a brand new retro-looking and expensive AirPods Max. I can see people already calling out how absurd it is, and the lack of charger or any cables, bla bla bla. Put that aside and enjoy their lovely retro look. Oh, and since their ear cushion can be replaced, I guess they don’t have to match the colour of the over-ear “cups”, right?… Lots of possibilities here. Shipping dates are already slipping in 2021… expect to see them everywhere next summer, when covid is behind us (most of it) and people can return to a simili normal life.

As an IT guy, looking at what Synology has in store for 2021 makes me pretty excited. I wrote about that yesterday but I took a deeper look at what is coming in DSM 7.0, their NAS operating system. I didn’t pay too much attention to their photo management software that comes with a Synology NAS, but that might change. In my blogger workflow, there is something I can optimize is the use of a photo management to store all my screen shots, stock photos, visual assets, etc. Synology Photos could be the tool I was looking for for a long time. I don’t want to use Apple’s Photos application as I don’t really like to see screenshots intermixed with family pictures. If Synology Photos is as solid as it looks, if their mobile application is much improved to their current version, I’ll certainly give it a serious try. On top of that, this photo feature also enable remote access to the photo library. Very interesting.

I’ve been shopping around for a home NAS for a long time and only made the plunge this year. After much thinking and reading, I settled on Synology because I saw a mature company offering mature products with a solid reputation. Again, DSM 7.0 brings a lot of new features and improvements which makes me feel happy about my choice of going with them. Can’t wait to try what’s new.

Jordan Singer on Twitter posted this picture showing the iPhone with iPhoneOS 1.0 side by side with an iPhone 12 running iOS 14.0. The original iPhone home screen design was durable and endured the test of time. Some people will find it depressing to see so little changes but I do think it is a sign of an initial good design. iOS 14 brought the most significant upgrade, even more profound than the iOS 7 disaster.

I’ve been using a Synology DS720+ NAS for a few months now and boy do I like it! On my blogger to do list is a review of this device. The breath of features never stop to impress me. I’m a big fan. I use it for archiving, space reclamation on my Mac and much more. It’s fast and reliable as I had a chance to test the repair feature after losing a hard drive (yes, already!). It worked flawlessly.

This week, Synology will make DSM 7.0 available for beta testers, the braves. Looking at the announcement web page, it looks like a massive update. Refreshed screens, more cloud integration, admin rights delegation and added feature like Active Insight will certainly be exciting additions. One question: I think Synology is about to add a subscription for this, which I’m not sure I’ll pay for, depending of its usefulness in its final form. We’ll see.

See that UI of the iPhone when you receive a call while being on another with someone else? Pretty confusing, right? You stress out to understand what to do while hoping you’ll have enough time to not miss the call. it is a stressful user experience. Why is Apple not giving any attention to this very specific UI is beyond me. They made notable change in iOS 14 with the notification-like interface for incoming calls, which was more than welcomed.

The way I came over this challenge is to concentrate on the icon labels instead of the icon itself. It does help a lot in my case.

An article today by the infamous Bloomberg news site reports that Apple is working on much more powerful Apple Silicon chips for higher end machines like the Mac Pro and the iMac. We all know 2020 was in fact the entry point for next year’s act two of this transition. From what we can read in the article, Apple could make high-end PC obsolete from a RAW power perspective with as many as 32 cores. Does anybody wonder if Intel has good sleep these days?

I’m currently using an iMac with a 23.7” LG UltraFine 4K external monitor (read my review here). With the M1 Mac mini coming today, this setup will have to change. The LG screen will transit to the Mac mini and I’ll lose the pleasure of the second screen working environment. Using the macOS virtual desktop feature is nice but not always the best solution when working on many different things at once. This is where Apple’s Sidecar comes into play. Prior to this, I rarely used Sidecar, but not anymore. I’ll use it with the Mac mini or the iMac, depending of the current work session. As a bonus, I get to use a “soft" Touch Bar at the bottom of the display, which is cool because I love the Touch Bar.

Over the last two years, I expanded my online presence. Maybe a bit too much; it’s hard to keep up. I came across something interesting recently: Linktr.ee. According to their website, the purpose of the service is to “Connect audiences to all of your content with just one link”. It’s exactly a case of “you don’t know you need it until you see it!”. Building the mini-website is quick and easy. There are enough layout options to make your page look like your own. I opted for the paying tier which enables more design choices and better analytics. Hope you like it and pay a visit to learn the breath of my online presence. I think of it as some form of a modern business card.

I started to replace my links to the following one which makes things simpler in places like my Twitter profile page. Check it out: https://linktr.ee/numericcitizen

My home router got an update this week, version 1.8.3. I’ve been running the Unifi Dream Machine since spring without any issues. This update was long in the works and highly expected. Among the changes, a redesigned and simplified controller dashboard with real-time statistics which are really helpful. The device management UI also received a redesign. Some of the previously available information has been removed or moved around. CPU, Memory consumption and internal temperature are higher than before (around +10%-30%), though. Overall, its’a solid update. Oh, and it is running an 4 cores ARM processor.

Remember, this router replaced an aging Apple AirPort Extreme. If you are still looking for a great home router, please, do yourself a favor and buy this one. This post is not sponsored.

How do you get ready for an M1 Mac mini when you’re a power user of a 2017 21.5" Intel-based iMac? First, I know the M1 Mac mini speed will make the iMac seem slow in comparison. That, I’m ready. I’ll keep my iMac for a while as my gateway to my legacy software and apps for my work. Second, upon the first boot of the Mac mini, I’ll set it up as a brand new machine. No Time Machine restore. I can’t remember the last time I started fresh on a new Mac. I’ll depend on Apple’s iCloud to bring back all my stuff on my 1 TB SSD drive. Then, I’ll meticulously pick which app will make the cut for installation on this shiny and speedy machine. I’m building a list of universal apps I want to install on it, but I’ll also need the help of the excellent website, “Is Apple Silicon Ready?”. Only “Universal” apps will be allowed on it. Even if Rosetta 2 is a technical marvel, I don’t want it to contaminate my Mac. I want the pure M1 Mac experience. Oh, one last thing, if an application’s icon is not good enough, I can search for a better one of places like https://macosicons.com/ and https://www.macosicongallery.com/ or Michael Flarup’s excellent icons pack.

According to Deliveries, my M1 Mac mini will arrive this Monday.

As you know, Twitter came out with « Fleets », its clone of Snapshat’s Stories. People don’t really like it. Or do they? My timeline is constantly filled with my followers posting fleets. I guess some do like them. I decided to give it a serious try. I think they add another dimension to Twitter that I happen to find interesting for highlighting purposes. It’s simple to use, just enough design flexibility. There are is one drawback: they only show up on the iPhone (not the iPad or the web), which I find strange and somewhat arbitrary.

Following are screenshots of my experiment. Let’s see where it goes from here.

Let’s play a game. One of your customer calls you and ask for a meeting (virtual or in person). Before answering this request, you have to look at your calendar to see your free/busy time. It’s a time consuming and error prone process. What if your favorite calendaring app could generate a map of your weekly schedule with all sensible information masked out, like in the following example (made with Fantastical). This could be sent as a PDF file to the customer, would save a lot of time. It’s surprising that, to my knowledge, no calendaring app offer this option. I would pay to get this.

Gruber publishes a piece today about how hard it can be for some people to accept that Apple is yet again did the unthinkable.

This one is simply priceless: “Intel and AMD have learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make decent PC chips. Apple hasn’t just magically figured this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

It’s a liberal transposition of a famous quote on how Apple, a PC guy, just can’t walk in and make a great phone. With the M1 chip, yes, Apple just walked in and did it. Again.

Many pundits were quick to jump the gun on software compatibility issues, the translation layer called Rosetta, the meager 8 GB of RAM, the lack of ports, etc. As proven by the numerous independent reviews, none of these “issues” are affecting the value of what Apple just did.

It will take a few years before Intel and their friends finally realize what just happened in late 2020 and recover from it. Years.

Following this statement from Microsoft, here is one question for you, Microsoft: why haven’t they thought, at the very beginning, that this Office 365 feature wasn’t a good idea to begin with? Here is another question: Who do you think you are to devise a “Microsoft Productivity Score”? “a tool that helps organizations measure and manage the adoption of Microsoft 365” — Microsoft

There is a difference in semantic here: measuring adoption vs measuring productivity score. What is “being productive” anyway? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.