Today I spent some time in Matter to read a few articles. I went to the Staff Picks section, noticed those tweets between articles and remembered Matter's decision to leave the social portion in their early days. They preferred to go the Twitter route instead. That was before the Elon Musk fiasco. As you might expect, it was a deception for me, and I preferred Matter to build its own thing instead. Continue reading →

“With the popularity of HomePod mini, we’ve seen growing interest in even more powerful acoustics achievable in a larger HomePod. We’re thrilled to bring the next generation of HomePod to customers around the world.” Source: Apple introduces the new HomePod with breakthrough sound and intelligence - Apple

What?? Am I dreaming? It really seems to be the same device from the exterior. Still expansive. Still wireless only. Old Bluetooth (5.0).

I’m dropping this here. It’s a matter of time. Mark my words.

One of the nice surprises about this morning’s announcements is the addition of two more USB-C ports to the Mac mini and the addition of a configuration with M2 Pro in a small package like the mini. This narrows the gap between a Mac Studio and a Mac mini. Oh, and up to three monitors are supported!

An M1 Mac mini owner. 🤔

My latest project… explaining this thing… harder than I originally thought. 😅

Today, for some reason, I decided to delve into the Write.as “ecosystem”. I’ve been subscribing to this writing service for nearly a year, I post from time to time like I did yesterday. I’m not so sure to grasp all of it. To get started, I went into Craft, and through the Craft Assistant, I asked a few questions (since ChatGPT seems overloaded). I got surprisingly good results, enough to get some context around the write.freely project. Then, I started a diagram illustrating all the components of the platform. This will become a blog post for sure. Today, I have a better understanding of this project.

What I want to emphasize here is the help that a service like ChatGPT (through an app) can bring to kick-start a small project like this. I’m blown away. But I’m staying critical too. More on that eventually.

This blog post was written by me.

While on Twitter, I was a fan of Tweetbot. Now that I'm on Mastodon (I have an account but don't plan to be very active for now), I feel at home with Ivory, their new client, still in beta. I wish they were doing a Micro.blog client. I would pay more to get it than I paid for Tweetbot.

cc ivory@tapbots.social

Thought of the Saturday morning: I like the principle of logging my digital life activities, especially my actions leading to content publishing. The Logbook in Things 3 and Dayone and IFTTT greatly help here. [Rewind](https://www.rewind.ai) would be fantastic on the Mac, but it is way too expensive. 

PS. What you are seeing in the screenshot is my actual logbook in Things 3. 

Something will have to happen in 2023 in the Mastodon world. I would love to join (even though I said I wouldn’t). Now that I’m starting to get it, to understand all this is about, I fail miserably at finding an instance that I can join and fit my content publishing desires. 

Must watch video about the iPhone photography quality. Are the photos shot on the latest iPhone 14 Pro better than other high-end phones?? Are they the best ones? There is no universal answer for sure, but I find iPhone photos to be overly processed by Apple"s “magic sauce” called: software or, better yet, computational photography.

Has anyone noticed this weird behaviour in Apple’s Photos app when browsing images shot in RAW format? Let’s say you shoot a photo in RAW and then switch to Apple’s Photos app. Tapping on the thumbnail brings up the image, and after a few seconds, the image gets changed to a lower-quality version. Contrast is lost, and exposure is somewhat lowered. The result is a dull image. My possible explanation is that the thumbnail is a JPEG post-processed interpretation of the RAW image that is presented in the UI. When tapping on the thumbnail, the RAW version gets uncompressed and presented, which replaces the full-size JPEG preview version, hence the image quality degradation. 

Do you have a similar understanding, or do you have another explanation?

I cannot count how often I select an image, thinking it will look nice as wallpaper. Most of the time, it sucks. Would it be cool if Apple added a smart album with selected photos based on their potential to be great as wallpaper? This could be something done using on-device AI, just like face recognition.

Can someone tell me what this iCloud Drive status means? I don’t appear to have any synchronization issue and yet, the icon seems to indicate the opposite. A special thanks to Apple here for the obscurity of their UI. 🫤

During my trip to South America, I decided to shoot every photo in RAW (using iPhone 13 Pro). If the picture isn’t worth editing or publishing, I can easily use my “RAW to JPEG” shortcut to convert the image into JPEG and delete the RAW version. If the photo has real potential, I leave it in RAW for later editing in either Apple Photos, Pixelmator or Lightroom, depending of the editing required. Those photos are added to a dedicated album, for easy retrieval. I no longer use Camera+, Halide or Lightroom Camera module. I want the iCloud Photos library integration.

This one for @maique from Punta Del Este. 😉

Editing the framing of a photo in Apple Photos.app is tricky. Initial framing suggested by Photos.app is always tight compared to the maximum possible. I generally prefer to relax Apple’s assumptions here. This is something important when working with relatively low resolution images at 12 MP, the native resolution of my iPhone 13 Pro.

AirTags can be quite useful and… stressful to track. Here we are in the plane quite ready to depart and yet my main luggage is still in the airport. 😵‍💫🫣

Technology shouldn’t create anxiety like this.

Which platform is best for photographer between Flickr and Twitter if you have about the same number of followers on both? You might think it’s Flickr? According to this experiment, you get 2x more exposure on Twitter, but you get 2x more engagement on Flickr. Things get even better on Flickr if your photo gets selected for Flickr Explore page. The “views” count definition is not clear but I would think that Twitter’s definition is a wide one (I don’t trust them for being honest about anything). Continue reading →

Here’s a great visual recollection of a trip to Italy back in 2011, when Steve Jobs died. Great images. Gentle words. It’s not only about the iPhone as a great camera, but about Italy, a place I visited last summer, and how it felt to be there when Steve death made the news. Must see and read. Continue reading →

Would buy an iPad in a vending machine at the airport? The model was a 64 GB iPad latest model at 599 CAN$. Same price as in Apple Store.