Longer posts

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. 📚

I did some 68000 assembly using my 512Ke Mac back in the days. Can't remember what was the development environment, though. And I remember these Inside Apple Macintosh books so well. That was a lot of stuff to learn. Time flies.

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.