Longer posts

February 1, 2021 9:01pm

Numeric Citizen

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!

February 1, 2021 2:24pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 31, 2021 9:09pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 30, 2021 9:50pm

Numeric Citizen

Really insightful score card report from Six Colors. Take out for me: Apple TV is the new 2013 Mac Pro.

January 30, 2021 10:24am

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 28, 2021 8:11am

Numeric Citizen

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

January 27, 2021 8:52pm

Numeric Citizen

Please, do yourself a favour and go to this website, a snowflake generator. If you like winter, it will make you smile a bit.

January 27, 2021 8:22am

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 26, 2021 9:12pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 26, 2021 8:22am

Numeric Citizen

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. 😃

January 24, 2021 5:02pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 24, 2021 4:55pm

Numeric Citizen

… I want to scream, I want to puke. Not Tim Cook’s best gift.

January 24, 2021 10:48am

Numeric Citizen

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”

January 22, 2021 9:25pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 21, 2021 8:02am

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 19, 2021 9:02pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 19, 2021 8:44pm

Numeric Citizen

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. 🤓

January 18, 2021 8:38pm

Numeric Citizen

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.

January 17, 2021 9:02pm

Numeric Citizen

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?

January 17, 2021 5:29pm

Numeric Citizen

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.