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What Are They Gonna Do Now? What a Waste!
One quick question tonight: those people who worked for a government agency in the US and got laid-off by DOGE or anyone close to them or because of them, what are they doing now? Where will they find their purpose? I’m thinking about the scientists, social workers, phycologists, Are they going to work for the private sector or simply increase the unemployment rate? I mean, there are so many human dramas unfolding right now.
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Om Malik on Apple in today’s world:
Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse.
Much worse.
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Gruber:
“Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle.”
We may not know for sure whether such a meeting will occur or has already occurred. I believe it won’t happen for one simple reason: Tim Cook is not focused on products.
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Remember when many tech pundits (and ordinary users, too) were saying that Apple wasn’t really good at services? How about this updated version: Apple isn’t really good at AI.
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Tim Has to Go - Part Deux
I’ve been an Apple fan since 1983, and everyone I know—my friends, colleagues, and family—understands my enthusiasm for the brand. Recently, they’ve been calling me more than ever to ask about my thoughts on Tim Cook’s support for Trump. “Apple is becoming like the others; what do you think?” they all inquire. I struggle to express my sadness about this situation. Tim’s poor judgment in supporting the Trump presidency is disappointing. I hope he regrets his decision. Until then, I want him to step down. It’s as simple as that.
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It's Time for Tim to Go
The latest post from @gruber@mastodon.social about the delay of Apple Intelligence and the ongoing fiasco serves as a reminder that Apple needs to change soon. It’s another big red flag something is rotten at Apple. Should I mention that Tim Cook’s financial support for the Trump presidential inauguration, whether personal or not, was another mistake? Apple could have and should have acted differently than Meta, Amazon, and others. They did not. We had all the warning signs regarding Trump, and now Tim is associated with this nonsense. There is no possible excuse. It was a poor decision on Tim’s part.
I believe it’s time for Tim Cook to take responsibility and step down.
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Another Frustrating Thing with 2024 iPad Pro
I love my 2024 iPad Pro, but there is a clear regression in hardware+software for palm rest detection. Each time I put my hand on the screen when taking notes using the Apple Pencil in Apple Notes, the content scrolls up, sometimes not by much, but sometimes quite a lot… I always need to lift my hand, reposition the content and try again. This is utterly frustrating; this is something that I never experienced with my 2018 iPad Pro… this is something that Apple used to be good at.
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My Updated Defaults as of 2025-03-12
So many things changed since my previous update.
- ✉️ Mail Client: Fastmail
- 📨 Mail Server: Fastmail
- 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes
- ✅ To-Do: Things 3
- 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
- 📚 Photo Management: Photos.app + Photomator
- 🗓️ Calendar: Calendar.app (Personal Life) + Fantastical.app (Work Life)
- 🗄️ Cloud file storage: iCloud
- 📰 RSS: Reeder connected to Inoreader
- 📇 Contacts: Contacts
- 🕸️ Browser: Mobile Safari + ARC Browser on Mac
- 🧠 AI: ChatGPT + Perplexity
- 🔎 Search: Kagi Search
- 💬 Chat: iMessage (WhatsApp when abroad)
- 🔖 Bookmarks: AnyBox
- 👓 Read It Later: Inoreader
- 📜 Word Processing: Ulysses, Craft
- 📊 Spreadsheets: Numbers
- 🛝 Presentations: Keynote
- 🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders
- 🧑🍳 Meal Planning: None
- 💰 Budgeting & Personal Finance: Numbers
- 🗞️ News: La Presse (Apple News for English news)
- 🎶 Music: Apple Music
- 🎧 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
- 🔐 Password Management: iCloud Keychain & Apple Passwords
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I don’t know how to feel about the rumored visual redesign of Apple’s upcoming OSes summer releases… I’m still traumatized by the iOS 7 redesign. Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s a reminder. What I do know is that I like visionOS visuals quite a lot and having that trickled down to the iPhone would be cool. Unifying macOS look and feel with mobile OSes? Not so sure. I also don’t want gamification of these OSes. I know that a younger generation is slowly taking over, and that is fine, but…
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For me, Siri evolution, or the lack of evolution, is so tied to Tim Cook’s tenure. A lack of decisiveness from him and his close team led to resources spoiling on the Titan project and to some degree to the maligned Apple Vision Pro. Not all is lost and I agree with this post from Basic Apple Guy, but time is running out and this is another red flag for Tim Cook.
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The Unexpected Challenge of Moving a Custom Domain From iCloud+ to Fastmail
Did you know that you can use iCloud+ with a custom email domain? Yep, that’s right. This is what I was doing for hello @ numericcitizen.me until this week when I started my migration to Fastmail. But there is one challenge that I didn’t expect: I wanted to bring this custom email to Fastmail, too. Custom email domains with iCloud+ is managed only on the iCloud website.
Having Apple Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is cool and nice but can make managing iCloud+ Custom domains a pain. As a reminder, to use ADP, you must turn off iCloud web access. I’m not really sure why. As soon as this is turned off, you can no longer manage your custom email domains that you might have configured for use with iCloud+. To complete my migration to Fastmail, so that I could write and respond from that custom email address from Fastmail, I first had to remove that domain from iCloud+, but it’s only possible on the iCloud website. To do that, ADP must be turned off. Once done, you can re-enable iCloud website access, then remove the custom email domain. After some cleaning up of Apple-related DNS records, you can re-enable ADP and disable iCloud website. Only then I can go on Fastmail Settings and configure my custom email domain.
Now you know.
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Breaking news: Intelligent Siri delayed. Is it time to sue Apple for all those who bought the “Built for Apple Intelligence” cool aid?
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Now that my migration from HEY Mail to Fastmail is essentially completed, I started writing an article about the whys, the hows and the gotchas. That’s the type of article that I love to put together. It will take time, but it will be well worth my time. My goals are to help others quit HEY Mail because it’s a great way to send a message to their owners. I’ll use the Fastmail referral program to get some form of potential compensation to pay for the service (I hope). While you wait for that article, I’ll share my referral link here and tell you this: if you are on the fence, trust me, Fastmail is really good.
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And just like that, AI summaries arrives in Inoreader and they are called Inoreader Intelligence! While you can’t ask to generate summaries automatically for a specific RSS feed (yet?), the addition of manually triggered customizable summaries is super handy.
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From time to time, while scrolling through my Micro.blog timeline, I’ll pause, read a particular post, peak at someone’s profile and previous posts, remember that this guy exists and wonder why in the first place I was following him or her. Then I sometimes hit the unfollow. Why do I think this is some sort of failure ?
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Migration to Fastmail Going FAST
Spent a few hours in Fastmail to get it ready to fully replace my HEY Mail subscription. Got my new email domain name set up in Cloudflare. The Screener functionality that I liked in HEY is now fully operational and is based on a Contacts Group. The Paper Trail is also set up and based on another Contacts group. Basically, if an email uses a contact not in the Screener, it will be moved in The Screener label. The same happens for the Paper trail. If I want a specific email to go to the Paper Trail, the contact is created and added to the right contacts group. One email account (Gmail) has been configured for Fastmail to pull content from it (no need to use email forwarding, so everything is configured from Fastmail. My Gmail account is a low-volume account so that I can tweak things before connecting my primary email accounts (both are Apple-provided).
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I’m not sure if I’ll actually need to set up a paid subscription to Fastmail, maybe paying for one month will be needed to fully evaluate the capabilities, though, but from my current experiment with this service so far, I must say that I really like what I’m seeing. It’s certainly fast.
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While browsing Substack yesterday and this morning, I stumbled upon a writer from Ukraine that I’m eager to follow. Isn’t it surprising that I can’t subscribe to his content via an RSS feed? I’m quite impressed by how this platform is so tightly controlled. It’s too bad.
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Emails Shuffle
I’m making progress in cleaning up my email mess. I closed my Yahoo Mail account, which I only used for Flickr when the authentication backend moved from Flickr to Yahoo1. I closed two Gmail accounts: one of the two was used when I was developing iPhone apps between 2009 and 2013. This means I have three fewer email redirections for HEY Mail. Most of my newsletter subscriptions are now redirected to Inoreader, which is another dependency removed from HEY Mail.
So, what’s left in HEY Mail? Two email redirections: one .me email account1 and my primary iCloud mail account. These are my biggest email accounts. Of course, I also have my HEY Mail account that I use in a few dozen places. That’s the last part to move out. The question is: which email account should I use instead of my HEY Mail? Is this where Fastmail comes into play? Or should I merge them into one of my Apple-hosted mail accounts? If I choose the latter, I don’t see the point of using Fastmail unless I want to replicate the Paper Trail functionality of HEY Mail. Even then, Apple’s latest updates to Mail offer something similar. I should probably try the latest betas on my Mac and see how well it performs. Stay tuned for the next update on my emails shuffle.
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There is something so satisfying in closing online accounts and deleting data. It’s really hard to explain. This process only happens when moving things around (like moving from one email provider to another).
