Cocooning, really?

Are we ready for a new social network? Do we need this? Judging by their website, the nice design of Cocoon certainly looks enticing. But do we need this? It will take a lot of traction to make people leave Facebook or other well established data-ungry players. I certainly hope new players to come in and shake this rotten industry. Judge for yourself. cocoon.com

Things I look for when evaluating an app for my own use

When evaluating a new app for my own use, the first things I look for are (in no particular order): update frequency, update notes quality, user ratings, multi-platform support (macOS, iOS, iPad support), sync mecanism used, one-time purchase vs subscription based, web service backend. I may elaborate on this subject on a longer blog post in the near future. Currently using this against Raindrop.io apps.apple.com/app/id102…

On foldable devices...

Nobody asked for these phones… you are trying too hard. To all smartphone companies: fix your software, stop tracking us without our consent, stop selling our data, be transparent with each updates and the “feature” they bring, implement rules against tracking features that comes in most apps these days and end up on your App Stores, etc. . twitter.com/mondoir/s…

On Medium as a platform for bloggers

For those wonder about using Medium as a publishing platform. Here is a summary for my last four publications. See the difference when a story gets approved? The last three stories were not approved for publication behind their paywall. Not cool. It is a hit or miss and so you don’t want to build too much confidence in the platform to help build any form of sustainable revenue, even small.

here is a really dopey idea

Apple should introduce another type of subscription: pay-per-use. Pricing would be based on the time spent on-screen, down to a second resolution. Pricing would be based on dime fractions, payable on demand, monthly or yearly. Exemple: five minutes of an app usage @ $ 0.00001 would cost 1.08 yearly. That is an extreme example for sure. But you get the idea, right? Don’t throw rocks at me if Apple ever see and then implement this! 🤫🙃

Where is the date of publication?

Here is something that I notice quite often while browsing the web: the lack of a publish date on articles, blog posts, etc. While living in the age of fast content consumption, where content relevance is depleting fast, it seems important, more than ever, to put a publishing date. I know we can sometimes infer the date from the URL but to me it isn’t the right way to do it.

A content creators, If we suspect content we publish will age well, let’s put a publishing date on it! If we do think this is ephemeral stuff, a publishing date helps put some context for the content. Makes sense?

it all comes down to compromise

When so many apps are available for a specific task, choosing one can be a nightmare. Recently, my focus was to select a new calendar app following the release of Fantastical update. I finally settled on the one that I use for a few years now: Calendar 5. The same is happening right now with RSS readers. But this time, I’’m switching from the excellent Reeder app to News Explorer. The latter is not perfect but from a functional point of view, it is an improvement. More on this soon.