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.