💡 Today, I want to share the newest addition to my digital publishing space: my metablog, hosted on Micro.blog. This isn’t entirely new; another version is already in place, but it is hosted as a series of Craft-shared documents. What I’m sharing today is hosted on Micro.blog using the recently introduced increase in the number of blogs you can have with a single premium account¹. From this migration, my metablog will gain RSS feed support, enable POSSE, and be closer to my online community here on Micro.blog, but also on Mastodon and Bluesky.

One last thing: this is a work-in-progress, a build-in-public thing. I’m slowly transposing most of my content to this new home, one post at a time. You’ll know it because of cross-posting and the RSS feed provided that you subscribe. 👈🏻 Some posts date back to 2020, but you might be surprised by discovering a few gems.

It’s Sunday, and you know the drill: it’s time to share my latest edition of the weekly creative summary. It’s mostly complete, so this week’s edition partially follows the “build in public” movement. I wonder if I should start sharing the document at the beginning of the process so that you can see the whole creation process as I’m working on the current edition. What do you think?

I’ve been doing these summaries since last September and enjoy putting them together. It’s issue number 22. Enjoy. The email version is coming out later today.

Built with care and love on 100% recycled electrons.

We let Putin’s regime invade Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing. In 2022, Ukraine and the world, to a certain degree, paid the price of our inaction by letting Putin’s criminals do it again, but on a much larger scale. Today marks a sad anniversary and reminds us how costly our hesitation in providing what Ukraine really needs to make a dent in this conflict. I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, and I feel frustrated by our slow and timid reactions. I know that we, the West, did spend quite a lot to help, but we need to do much more than that to kick out those criminals and to make the Russian regime think again the next time they envision invading a free country.

Finally, the prospect of the Trump return as a president makes the future look even darker. The United States influence in the political and diplomatic space around the world looks to be diminishing like the snow under the sun. Trump won’t reverse this trend. Who’s taking over?

As I wrote earlier today, I’ve been wondering about a possible use case for Scribbles¹. It took me about 5 minutes to get my idea, and it is called Blips, Numeric Citizen Blips, to be more precise². Blips will enable me to share… short blips of my digital life. I should be fun, noisy at times. But not too much. Enjoy. Or not. 🙃

I have been a happy user of Apple Safari for the last decade. If possible, I prefer using Apple’s browser, thanks to its privacy protection and features. If something doesn’t work in Safari, I will try Firefox. I’ll do everything possible to skip Google Chrome. I use Microsoft Edge because of its integration with Microsoft 365 at work. But Safari is never too far, just in case. It’s now my fall-back plan. Why this change? Because of the Arc Browser, which is now my main browser.

I’m the type of user who always tries to find a use case for an app that I really like, even if it is superseded with a better one. I love Craft. I always use it in my creative hobbies, but I found a great use case for Notion at work. I like Apple Reminder for family-related tasks but use Things 3 for my creative hobbies. I like Apple Calendar for my personal life but prefer Fantastical for the office. I keep both. I like HEY mail but must use Outlook at the office.

This constant duality in my choices about which app to use sometimes looks like psychological trouble. 😬🤷🏻‍♂️

When I look at the Apple Vision Pro, I see a device with many software and hardware technologies that Apple took years to create, develop and refine. They did it in plain sight with the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac. Each of these devices played a significant role as a test bed for what would come next, a portion of what we can find in the Vision Pro. I can see many examples: windows management introduced on the iPad via the Stage Manager paved the way for window management on the Vision Pro, Three-dimensional and object placement in an augmented reality view in the Apple Store app when placing a virtual Mac on a physical desk, LiDAR Scanner with FaceID paved the way to Personas, continuity on all Apple OSes, and so much more set the playground for a robust ecosystem that takes all its meaning in the Vision Pro. And there are probably hundreds of more technologies that I cannot see. I guess the Apple Vision Pro was in development for a decade at Apple, and with each new feature Apple put into their devices, the headset benefitted from it.

I just completed recording my next YouTube video (my YouTube channel), which will come out early next week. It’s probably the one I’m the most proud of at many levels. The release will match the release of a new version of an app that I like a lot 🤫. Technically, the sound is good. I’me using Bezels to demo the app on the iPad and the iPhone, a first for me. The video structure seems logical and should help the viewers in learning new things. Can’t wait to share that one. I hope it will get the attention I’m hoping for. 🤞🏻

Of all people who reviewed or are now active users of the Apple Vision Pro, some are mentioning, rightfully, that this is not about AR¹ but 95% about VR². Apple doesn’t want to admit it, but this is a VR headset. Why is that? Is is because it is “easier”³ to recreate something from the ground up (the virtual world enabled by visionOS) than taking the reality and adding meaningful and useful stuff to it? I see much more limited use case for augmented reality than for virtual reality. It might change in the future, now that people are now exposed to it through other people using the headset sharing their experience.

I’m wondering about this upcoming Micro.blog “big new feature” quite often. What new feature could require its own section on the left sidebar? What could mandate the release of companion apps on iOS and Android? Let’s try to think about it for a minute.

So, MB already covers text (as blog posts), more generic content (as pages), photos, books, newsletters, and podcasts. What’s missing here? Videos? Movies? Something else? Could Podcast be more explicitly exposed where the Transcript section becomes Podcast? Is MB building its own podcasting player app? Or a podcast recorder? Can AI play a role in this new feature?

But what else is missing from Micro.blog? Instant messaging? I own a Wavelength group of Micro.blog users. The group is currently hosting 50 users. Here’s the invite link. Near real-time interactions are something I wish Micro.blog had for supporting discussions about specific events¹. Frankly, instant messaging is probably the closest thing I can think of that would require a dedicated section and a dedicated set of apps on mobile devices.

Your thoughts? Please join in! 🙏🏻

I have this thought right now as I’m watching the first reviews of the Apple Vision Pro: it is utterly fascinating to see all the basic technological elements (both hardware and software¹) that are at play here and put together in this headset. Besides a product still looking for its use cases, I find this product to be the most ambitious one to be launched by Apple to date. Bravo for trying. And I’m pretty sure it’s only the beginning. You bet Apple is going to iterate on this for quite some time. I feel excited for this thing.