As you know, Twitter came out with « Fleets », its clone of Snapshat’s Stories. People don’t really like it. Or do they? My timeline is constantly filled with my followers posting fleets. I guess some do like them. I decided to give it a serious try. I think they add another dimension to Twitter that I happen to find interesting for highlighting purposes. It’s simple to use, just enough design flexibility. There are is one drawback: they only show up on the iPhone (not the iPad or the web), which I find strange and somewhat arbitrary.

Following are screenshots of my experiment. Let’s see where it goes from here.

Let’s play a game. One of your customer calls you and ask for a meeting (virtual or in person). Before answering this request, you have to look at your calendar to see your free/busy time. It’s a time consuming and error prone process. What if your favorite calendaring app could generate a map of your weekly schedule with all sensible information masked out, like in the following example (made with Fantastical). This could be sent as a PDF file to the customer, would save a lot of time. It’s surprising that, to my knowledge, no calendaring app offer this option. I would pay to get this.

I’m a user of Timing for Mac, and recently the app got updated in order to support macOS Big Sur. The update brings a fresh and entirely new app icon to better fit the visual style of Big Sur, and I love it 😍. The icon has been designed by Matthew Skiles. Looking on his Twitter profile, I discovered two interesting web sites: https://www.macosicongallery.com/ and https://www.iosicongallery.com/. These are catalogs of the best icons for macOS and iOS of well known apps. Check them out. These sites made me realize how much we lost in design quality over the years, great icons are hard to come by these days.

Well, I can breath a little bit better now that this clown is on the way out. Good riddance. As a Canadian, I’m so happy to see this clown go. If there was a way to start fixing 2020, it would be it. Yeah, I know, he won’t concede victory, he probably won’t do a concession speech. Who cares.. we knew all that, already. Now, let’s hope Americans start to unite a little bit and fix their shit, because, it’s pretty ugly out there.

I rarely if ever post political stuff here. As a Canadian, my sincere hope is that the American people make the furst step in order to put an end to this endless nightmare.

On a side note: I’m using  News to follow election night. So far, I like what Apple is doing here. Results are quick to be reflected on the maps, which can be drilled down up to the state level.

Another wonderful and really useful widget is finally available for iOS 14 and iPadOS 14: a precipitation radar. I’m a big fan of MyRadar but the app wasn’t yet updated to support widgets. Widget Radar, which is free by the way, is simple and minimalist yet effective. It is proudly sitting on my homes creen now, on the weather page.

Side note: Weatherline is another useful weather app, but it doesn’t allow the placement of the radar image as a widget, yet.

After much writing and compositing, the third edition of the Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter is out! I’m quite happy with the end results. It’s getting better with each release. It’s still free. Can’t wait to build the next edition!

Please, read, share and like! 👈🏻 🙏🏻

Comments are welcomed!

I’ve been thinking of something really wild recently, for me at least: replacing my 2017 21.5 inches iMac with a Mac Pro. Here is why.

I work in IT (information technologies) as a data center related technology architect. Server virtualization, storage area networks, networking technologies are at the center of my professional universe. In the coming months, I’ll have to invest in self-training and experimentations a lot around VMware-related products and services. How can I do that efficiently while working from home? Here comes the Mac Pro idea.

In order to be able to run many virtual machines, a powerful physical computer is required: lots of memory, powerful CPU (more than 6 cores) and fast storage. My current iMac doesn’t meet these basic requirements (it is maxed out at 32 GB of RAM and it has a relatively modest CPU). A Mac Pro with the following specs would easily meet the challenge: at least 128 GB of fast memory, 8 cores CPU, builtin SSD and expandability.

Virtualization will required VMware Fusion Pro running on top of macOS. Then, the sky is the limit as I can then install ESXi hypervisor which will allow me to branch into more complex setup. This type of environment do require a lot of memory (a typical VM is about 4-16 GB each) and multi-cores CPU. Installing ESXi directly on the Mac Pro is not an option as I will need to have macOS running for all other tasks (I’m not even sure if it is att all possible).

How do I get there? Well, I’m still thinking about how I’ll buy that machine and get the additional RAM (I won’t go with Apple’s because $$$). Stay tuned.

Technical datasheet can be found on Apple’s website, right here in PDF format. I don’t want to switch to a Windows machine BTW, I’m too much invested in Apple’s ecosystem for that to happen.

The venerable RSS reader app « Reeder » turned to version 5 yesterday. I don’t know how I missed that one. Maybe because I moved from Reeder to News Explorer. I pay a lot of respect to the developer of Reeder. I’ve been using it for a long time. I wanted to have a look at version 5 so I bought it. Here is why.

Widgets. News Explorer hasn’t been updated to support them yet. Reeder now does. I love them. Read Later. Sending URLs to Reeder Read later is interesting and provides a better experience than in Safari Read Later. Tracking my own RSS feed for quality control. Oh and Shortcuts are also supported, something News Explorer don’t.

I think I’ll have to update my blogger workflow. 🤔

If you have a Mac, many battery-powered Apple devices, you need AirBuddy. Version has been in the works for a very long time and it is a major update. I’m so anxious to get my AirBuddy updated!

We don’t get to see this level of craft on computers these days. This reminds me how dire the macOS native application landscape has become over the years. With macOS Big, Catalyst, Apple Silicon Macs and universal binaries, one can hope for a brighter future.

Am I alone who think the AirBuddy logo is upside down?