Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest
Numeric Citizen Blog
Woah, that was an intensive month! 😅
Thought of the day: if only we spent as much time on great rollouts (Apple) than we do on really bad ones (X)… oh wait, we do actually! Seriously, I’m tired of those comments about X…
2023-08-02 ∞Yesterday, we went to visit the botanical garden of Puerto De La Cruz forgetting to bring my big camera with me, only with my iPhone. At first, I was wary that I would miss photo opportunities, but in the end, that wasn’t the case. Judging by the initial view of my photos, the iPhone wonderfully met the challenge. This garden was definitively a place for macro-photography! BTW, if you ever visite Tenerife, it's a great place to visit and it is damn cheap.
2023-08-03 ∞Tenerife, in many ways, reminds me of Hawaii. Vegetation, volcano, photography opportunities and the weather, all contribute to this feeling. I would say that it's the European-style version of Hawaii.
2023-08-03 ∞Thought of the day: Tenerife beauties and greatness make me feel humbled as a living species.
2023-08-03 ∞Apple Can’t Kill Siri Just Like That
And gone is Microsoft Cortana. What a weird name that was (Bard is not better in that respect). Some are suggesting Apple should do the same with Siri. I don’t think so because Apple has no apparent alternative to Siri, so they cannot just dump Siri because others are dumping their assistant. They do because they actively work on alternatives. Microsoft is clear in that respect and already shows what the alternatives are. Siri is a high-value brand name. Apple should build any next-generation AI-based tool to replace or complement the current back-end.
2023-08-04 ∞Musk reminds me of Trump when he says he wants to have a conversation with Tim Cook about the App Store’s 30% cut on whatever shit they allow to sell through X.com. Just like Trump walking to the room in Ukraine or Russia and solving the Ukraine war in a day. What a pair of clowns these guys can be.
2023-08-04 ∞The Post-COVID iPad Era
Apple's services help other Apple lines of products soften their respective crashes. COVID and work-from-home, learn-from-home was a boon for the iPad and Apple will suffer the post-COVID for quite some time. Knowing the longer-than-usual replacement cycle of the iPad, recovery is not for tomorrow. Great summary by Six Colors.
2023-08-04 ∞If all goes well today, I should be able to make it to a site with many abandoned buildings. this could be a great photo opportunity. This would be the first site outside Canada where I practice urban exploration (aka "urbex"). Feeling excited. 😀
2023-08-04 ∞Surprisingly useful during travel. This is Series 8 with watchOS 10 beta 4.
It is with sadness that I’m spending the last few hours of my full day in Tenerife. It was a great nine days trip to a country that I knew nothing about. Over the course of my stay, I managed to complete the full circle of the island. The south shore is much warmer and more humid than the north shore. Tenerife is a Spain territory and it's a good thing! I love Spain food so much!
2023-08-05 ∞Adding Bookmarks to my Blog
I decided to expose my Micro.blog bookmarks, in the spirit of the “open blogger” movement (“I’m an open Blogger”), I think it’s a good thing to let other people know a portion of what I find interesting. The recently introduced tags for bookmarks is an indication that the premium feature continues to grow in functionality and usefulness. I'm happy with that. I didn't play with the formatting, leaving the default one in place.
2023-08-05 ∞Each passage in an airport is a reminder of how useful Flighty can be.
Each passage in an airport is a reminder how bad signs design and positioning can be. Is there any airport designer on earth?
2023-08-06 ∞Spending the rest of the day at a hotel near the Newark airport. Hotels like this one are dull x 1000.😞 Our next flight is very early tomorrow morning, leaving no time to go to Manhattan for dinner, sadly.😒 UberEat for lunch tonight, Indian food, which we love a lot! 😊 Should be arriving home in the middle of Monday morning. A quick shower and hop go to work!
2023-08-06 ∞I want to stay in my holiday bubble and live a life of sun, sea sand and little to no worries. Source: Greg Morris - Back To Work
I return to work, tomorrow at noon. I can relate to what Greg was feeling.
2023-08-06 ∞Rumors of an M3-based MacBook Air are already being shared... which I find surprising and troubling as I'm going to pick up my brand new M2 15-inch MacBook Air this Thursday. I know the drill... and yet... Sigh.
2023-08-06 ∞Sketch, the Mac vector app used by over a million people, recently invited me to adjudicate their most recent #SketchDesignChallenge. But not wanting to miss out on the fun (even though I can't win because I am a judge... whatever...), I still booted up the app and created a widget of my own: Widget Radio. Source: Widget Radio — Basic Apple Guy
I follow Basic Apple Guy since his beginning. The quality of his work never ceases to impress me. He is so good that he was invited by the makers of Sketch! And boy did I like the iPod radio feature!
2023-08-06 ∞Just went through the security at Newark Airport’s new terminal A. Boy the scanners are so cool. The personal see our bags in 3D and can swipe the thing on a big screen! Impressive. Very efficient but technology has limits and that might explain why the guy wanted to open my bag for further inspection. 🤨😱🕵🏻
2023-08-07 ∞There is a lot to say about this new terminal A. Chairs with integrated cup holders, accessible charging ports (USB-A, USB-C, std power outlet), big information display panels with clear directions, easy to ear speakers, etc. I love this place! Remaining problem: too low temperature everywhere we go in the US. They are crazy to set temperature at 70-72F. It is fucking too cold!!! And not environmentally friendly.
Back home. 😀 I have so many things to work on. It’s a typical return from vacation mood.
Two used, two more to go. I accidentally dropped my Apple Pencil on the floor while getting my iPad in a security tray at the airport. Just like for toasts, they always fall on the wrong side. 😩
It took Adobe Lightroom on my iPad Pro all morning to upload all my 350 photos to Adobe's cloud. That is SLOWWWW! How does semi-pro photographers (or even amateurs) endure this? My upload experience always has been consistently slow with Adobe's products. Am I alone?
2023-08-07 ∞My Non-Review of Apple's Latest Betas
Earlier this summer, when Apple's OSes were at Beta 3, I installed iPadOS 17 on my iPad to test the latest improvements and additions to a maligned OS. Maybe I was bored too. I started gathering my notes, thinking that it would be part of a mini review. Then I upgraded my iPhone because my experience with iPadOS 17 was good for a beta. Then I upgraded both of my Apple Watch (Series 4 and Series 8). Then my two Apple TVs. All is good, and generally speaking, these are all great improvements to what can be considered a set of mature OSes. I tried to put my observations together, but I don't think it's worth it. Besides having the general impression of getting a new Apple Watch, thanks to Apple, who dare to revisit many fundamental aspects of the UI and many micro-interactions with watchOS 10, for all other platforms, most of the changes are great and show that Apple is headed in the right direction. Your mileage may vary, and this is ok. The end.
2023-08-07 ∞Thought of the day: sometimes, what you decide not to do is as important as what you decide to do! For bloggers and writers, for me at least, writing is fundamental to my existence, publishing and sharing, a lot less. I have many unfinished pieces that probably will never be shared with the world. And that is ok.
2023-08-07 ∞Apple Should Introduce FlightPlay™
Recently, while on a flight with United from Tenerife to Newark, I played with the infotainment screen in front of me. These infotainment systems really improved in recent years. Screens are bigger, speed is much faster, and interaction has improved quite a bit. Some of these systems look like iPad-in-the-seat, literally. It occurred to me that Apple while offering CarPlay, could try to find a way to create a version for flight infotainment systems. Let's call it FlightPlay because Flighty is already used, and AirPlay, too!
I want each plane to offer a complete set of flight data, ready to be consumed by my iPad or iPhone while in flight via a local wifi network. The iPhone or the iPad would then turn into a special StandBy mode where data would be visually presented dynamically, allowing for great interactions with the user. Modern devices have so much powerful CPU, the interaction would be much more fluid and enjoyable. The data provided would be based on a standard model and would provide speed, altitude, current destination, path, atmosphere metrics (temp, headwind speed, etc.), and so much more. The airplane company could directly provide TV shows, music, etc., to our devices. The same would be for games. But Apple could also allow consumption of locally stored content from the device itself. I can imagine Apple's designers working on a great graphical dashboard.
Is anybody at Apple reading this? What are you waiting for?
Decided to move PocketCast on my first iPhone homescreen so that I increase my podcasts listening. I under utilize this great app for which I’m a subscriber. I’m not sure it will move the needle.
2023-08-08 ∞Yep. 😎
On Apple's Migration Assistant
Ok, can we agree that Apple's Migration Assistant is magical? 🤯 After the new Mac got updated, it was required to match the version of the source Mac. It took about 45 minutes to transfer 375GB of data (with a peak speed of 650MB/s over Thunderbolt 4 cable), and boom. Of course, I had all those required permissions to be set again. But, wow, writing this on my brand new 15-inch MacBook Air this morning. It was my first experience with this process of getting a new Mac set up. I already feel at home on this machine.
I just enabled cross-posting from Micro.blog to my Pixelfed account. I'm not sure I'll use it, simply because I don't post that many photos here. I prefer to use a dedicated service for photography. But who knows, it might come in handy at some point. Thanks, @manton, for being so quick to add these features!
2023-08-09 ∞I think I'll use my previous MacBook Air to test Sonoma this week-end before returning it to Apple! Who knows what will break.
2023-08-09 ∞Running beta5 of Sonoma on my soon-to-be returned MacBook Air. I'm not so sure this thing is quite ready yet. I'll wait a few more betas before installing Sonoma on my new MacBook Air.
2023-08-09 ∞Every single day, I read a new post by Pixelfed about upcoming features, additions or redesign. The list is too long to write here (and to build!). All apps are in beta. It's a maturing platform / service for sure, but man, ship it already, stop the talk!
2023-08-10 ∞I don't like these two "disconnected" visual elements: the menu bar from the dropdown menu. The highlighted portion of the menu bar and the menu itself. There, I said it. On a positive note: on recent MacBook Air like mine, I love the rounded screen corners.
I'm thinking of creating an email address like hello@numericcitizen.me using iCloud+. I'm not sure it's worth the hassle, though. I'll had to tweak the setup a bit for it to work with my current DNS settings at CloudFlare.
2023-08-11 ∞I decided to add a small collection of mini reviews that I read from time to time to my digital garden. The first two to make it to the collection: Matt Birchler’s comments about Ulysses and possible free and similar alternatives. The second is Manton’s comments on text editors for developers or other text manipulation.
2023-08-13 ∞On Being Locked Out of an Apple ID Account
Being locked out of an Apple ID account is probably one of the worst nightmares I could imagine. This story (Reddit link) makes me pause for a bit. If you spend some time reading the comments thread, it seems the original poster doesn't tell the whole story. There are some grey zones here. Nonetheless, the possibility of losing complete access to my previously purchased and subscribed content is really something that I wouldn't want. I would feel helpless.
Mike Rockwell's comment on the subject:
I hope we’re nearing a future where you can realistically use an iPhone without an Apple ID at all — replacing all of Apple’s services, including the App Store, with independent alternatives.
Mike's wishes are not going to be fulfilled anytime soon. Even with alternative authentication mechanisms and third-party stores, the prospect of losing access to previously purchased content is real. Somehow I think the government should step in and ask companies to provide secure content recovery means.
2023-08-13 ∞Say hello to hello@numericcitizen.me!. Finally decided to spend some time making my hello@numericcitizen.me work using the iCloud+ Custom Mail domain. Works great so far. Come and say hi!
2023-08-13 ∞It's funny and cool how I'm slowly but surely rebuilding my social graph with people who fled X to Mastodon and Pixelfed. I feel at home again.
2023-08-14 ∞Creating a Custom Branded File Sharing Service for Free mattlangford.comReader: mattlangford.com
Thanks to @Mtt, I completed my version in about an hour.
2023-08-15 ∞I made many updates to my Complete Content Creator Toolset to reflect recent additions and removals. If you are curious about the apps and services that I'm using, this is the place to watch!
2023-08-15 ∞If US legal institutions cannot take down Trump, then this country is in a dire situation.
2023-08-15 ∞An Observation About the Photos From IPPAWARDS Winners of 2023
I forgot to linkpost to the IPPAWARDS winners of 2023. Lot's of great photos. Really. Twenty photos come from the iPhone 12 series (which came out in 2020). Five from the iPhone 13 series and another five from the iPhone 7 (which came out in 2016). Only four from the iPhone 14 series. What can we conclude from this? It doesn't matter which camera you've got. The best one is the one you've got with you at the right place and time. Period.
In case you didn't know, the iPhone 15 is coming soon.
2023-08-16 ∞★ Holy Hell, Trump Did Use Twitter Direct Messages, There Were ‘Many’ of Them, and the Special Counsel Now Has Them
<p class="postarchived_links">Reader: mastodon.social daringfireball.net
https://daringfireball.net/2023/08/holyhelltrumpdidusedms
The situation with Trump and his extensive use of Twitter and how Twitter responded to the search warrant/court order confirms that leaving Twitter was one of my best decision in a long time. Twitter's actions to protect Trump are disgusting (telling him that there is a search warrant targeting his use of the platform). I cannot, in good faith, be on such platforms.
2023-08-16 ∞The Apple Way
I just went through the complete process of an Apple Trade-In for the return of my "old" 13-inch MacBook Air after getting my brand new 15-inch MacBook Air. I'm super impressed by the logistics behind all of it and how the user (me) is guided in the process. The final step was to cancel the AppleCare+ that I originally bought with my old device. Took a 5 min call from somewhere in Texas. The call was automatically initiated from a web form I filled out by selecting a few options. Got a confirmation email before the call and after stating the actual amount of the refund. All done. Great user experience. The next time will be for the replacement of my iPhone 13 Pro with the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro. 😃
2023-08-16 ∞Finding a well-designed, non-bulky, sturdy iPhone bike holder seems mission impossible. Searching this on Amazon is even harder, with all the paid sponsors/scammers filling all possible space. The one from Peak Design product seems great, but I will have to wait for the iPhone 15 Pro Max case to come out!
2023-08-16 ∞Dear Original iMac, I Barely Knew You
Happy 25th anniversary, iMac! As I started documenting in my series about remembering every Mac I ever owned, in 1998, I wasn't invested in Apple's ecosystem at all. I was a "PC" guy because of my job. Right before the iMac came out, I got rid of my Power Mac 7100 in 1996. I barely saw the iMac in stores or public spaces where a computer was made available for things like web surfing. What an iconic but somewhat weird-retro-style computer.
Isn't the starting point of USB ports for the masses? Thanks, Apple.
I'd love to buy one of these, simply because it's a great object of art and design.
Trying to post one or two or more of my pictures to Pixelfed every day so that I can move out of Smugmug by next year. It's tedious, but it's fun because I chose to add textual context to each image whenever possible. This wasn't possible on Smugmug. 😅
2023-08-18 ∞Powerful hurricane Hilary headed toward the US southwest. Always impressive to see this from space. Less interesting is getting hit by it if you're in this region.
Today marks the day I'm returning to the regular schedule for YouTube video production. Next videos in the pipeline: an update about the lack of meaningful updates to Craft in recent months and what this could possibly mean for Craft users. Then, working with Categories and Tags in Micro.blog. Busy week-end. 😅
2023-08-19 ∞A commentary video about Craft updates while waiting for the next wow moments for Craft. An update is supposedly coming out this week. My expectations are low. {{< youtube "jvOnh-YAOhs" >}}
2023-08-20 ∞I'm back with a new video about Micro.blog. This time, I explore the use of Categories and Tags. I hope you find it useful to better make use of Micro.blog features. Enjoy. Comments welcome, here or on my YouTube channel. Next up, something about... podcasts 👀. Stay tuned. 😀 {{< youtube "7CBuyup9M6Q" >}}
2023-08-20 ∞There are effectively no success stories for Glass’s current business model. Small clones of Instagram and Twitter usually fail. To break out, there has to be something fundamentally different. For Micro.blog, the answer is simple: we are a social network but our business is blog hosting, a proven model. For Glass, the answer is less clear: they care deeply about photography, community, and design. I think the founders deserve a lot of credit for creating something beautiful. Is that enough?
My recent enthusiasm for Pixelfed comes down to being a good alternative to Instagram, open and not afflicted by a toxic business model. It might become a good alternative to Glass too if the latter doesn't open up a little bit more to the modern world, post Meta-as-we-know-it.
2023-08-20 ∞As a subscriber to Pocket Cast, I would love to be able to use the iPad version on my Apple Silicon Mac. It's currently not possible. Yes, there is a web version, but an app is much better. Overcast, a very popular alternative, is available for the Mac but is not native. But I'm ok with that; it's better than nothing. How much effort does it require to make an iPad app available on the Mac without having to depend on Catalyst? 🤔
2023-08-20 ∞This week, I am getting an appointment for a screen replacement on my iPhone 13 Pro (under my paid AppleCare warranty). Three highly visible scratches are bugging me big time: the trade-in value is reduced by 485 CAN$ (at the worst timing possible: iPhone 15 Ultra is approaching😩), and I always focus on the scratches when looking at my iPhone screen. 🫣 AppleCare can be a good investment.
2023-08-21 ∞It was fun but a bit more challenging to record and share my first podcast episode yesterday. Editing in Ferrite is hard on the iPhone. It would be much better on the iPad or the Mac. For some reason, talking to a microphone feels less natural than recording myself on camera for a YouTube video. 🤷🏻♂️When I shared this thought with my wife yesterday, she responded: recording yourself on camera, then delete the video track! 😳🤯 I like her.
2023-08-22 ∞Tempted to install macOS Sonoma Beta 6 on my shiny new 15-inch MacBook Air... I like to be at the cutting edge of software releases... on iPhone, iPad, Watch and Apple TV, betas have been rock solid for me so far (the worst is the iPad). Any advice here besides "you're mileage may vary", "go ahead at your own risk", etc.?
2023-08-22 ∞Craft Docs vs CleanShot: two different apps in different categories and two philosophies of asking for user feedback. Craft is closed, and opaque while CleanShot is outgoing and openly asks for "what we should work on next". I'm a subscriber of CleanShot Cloud, and yes, I want a few improvements. If only Craft would change their mind...
I decided to stop cross-posting my photos from Glass to my Mastodon account as I feel this is not the right community/instance for my photos. I prefer to enable cross-posting from Glass to Pixelfed, which I forgot to enable. Now, all is good. 📷
2023-08-23 ∞“At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At age 40, we don't care what they think of us. At age 60, we discover they haven't been thinking of us at all.” — Ann Landers
2023-08-23 ∞Learned Something New Today
Today, while reading this blog post, I found out that we could have a "popup" note inline in a blog post. I was curious and asked the author, who gladly responded with all the required information to do the same on my blog. A plugin is required, which I gladly installed in a snap1. This blog post is a test of that feature2. The day I learn something which in turn helps me improve one of my things, is a great day. 😊 I love this community so much! 🫶🏻
2023-08-23 ∞I glanced at photographers and photos on Glass this morning and realized that most photographers are men. Is it reflective of the photographers' community in general? Photography is a men's world?? I'd love to see more women because of their different sensibilities.
I’ve been working on this for my podcast. You can tell that I’m no graphic designer. 😆
Working at the office today. Summer vacations are still ongoing hence so few people here. It’s always a reminder of the covid pandemic. This place used to be much more lively. Everything still feels different. 😒 We will never get back to pre-2020 world.
2023-08-24 ∞I'm probably the only one, but I liked the Touch Bar on my 2017 MacBook Pro at work. 🤷🏻♂️
Am I alone who happens to get the iPhone keyboard displayed on the iPad instead of the full-size keyboard? My wife experienced the same thing many times. We don't know how to make this thing revert to the normal size keyboard. Easy to make it disappear, but when it comes back, it's still the small version. Very annoying to type on this.
I'm a big fan of AnyBox (YouTube video) and in the latest update (v1.27), information density increased a bit. I love it. 😍
On Dark Sky and Apple's Weather
A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece
The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app.
Great analysis of the now-defunct Dark Sky weather app. I'm a bit late on that one. I don't remember using Dark Sky because I think it wasn't working in Canada. I'm not sure about this. Once Apple took over and brought the redesigned weather app with iOS 16, we could visually feel the Dark Sky's influence on it. But Apple being Apple, they dropped a few things here and there and made a few things their own. I tend to use Carrot Weather more, but recently, I deep-dived into Apple's Weather, and frankly, they did a good job. Yet, there was something unique in Dark Sky that I don't feel in Apple's offerings. Is it too close to the Yahoo Weather look & feel? Maybe.
2023-08-25 ∞Snell, Gruber, Birchler, and I all agree about the iPad's limits. When we hit one of its limits, it becomes a reason to reconsider. When I started using the MacBook Air, it was when I accepted the simple fact that I would be more productive on the Mac than on the iPad. I love the iPad. This is the device I bring with me on travel, but I do know perfectly that some tasks will need to wait until I return home.
2023-08-25 ∞One Podcast, Three Looks
I always subscribe to my own content distribution channels for quality control purposes 1. I’m using Overcast, Pocket Cast and Apple Podcast to display my latest podcast episode. In these screenshots, I selected the info button to display the episode details. I’m a paid subscriber of Pocket Cast. I prefer the Pocket Cast display, but it has a caching issue as it doesn’t get the latest podcast artwork, but the other two do2. Bold text is missing on Apple Podcast for some reason. The overcast look is… mildly ugly.
I updated my toolset website today1 with three additions under consideration: Digest2, Lazy3 and Heptabase4. The statuses of my current projects were also updated. Thanks for paying a visit.
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Use the table of content at the top of the site to locate the right section. Convenient, heh? ↩
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To replace Mailbrew. ↩
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A super-charged “save-for-later” service. Could replace Omnivore or complement it. I put myself on their waiting list. ↩
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A hard-to-define service / apps for supporting research. Could complement Craft. Or not. Another subscription. Gush. ↩
This morning, I updated my online About page1, taking some ideas from Brian Lovin’s website. The page was built entirely with Craft’s shared document and custom domain name2. I wonder if this is something that Micro.blog should expand on and be added to the premium subscription. Cc @manton
In a world where we all struggle with how much we use our devices (let’s be real, we mean our phones), I think it’s kinda nice to have some places that just give up and tell us, “my dude, you’ve read it all, go do something else.” Source: Let the internet run out
I relate to this thought so much. Sometimes, enough is just... enough.
2023-08-27 ∞
I played with Apple’s Maps Places feature, as shown in the following video. It’s nice, but it’s not exactly intuitive. There are many missing features, like setting a path between places and adding photos to a place within the guide, from the Photos.app for example to name a few. Also, it’s not clear if a shared guide gets updated if new places are added, or places are removed.
{{< youtube "07Bq3diduMP43j0O" >}}
2023-08-27 ∞Finally Settled on Blog Post Visual Attributes
After so many years of blogging, I think I have finally settled on the styling of each blog post. 😅 I like to emphasize key words with bold, making it easier to detect what this post is all about. Next is the use of emojis to make things a bit less serious and more approachable.🙂 Next is the selective use of Micro.blog’s post title for longer and more significant posts.1 😜 More recently, I started using footnotes because they add another dimension to the reading experience and are displayed in a nice popup on the site.2
Waiting for the iPhone 15 Ultra
I’m really looking forward to the iPhone 15 Ultra👀. Coming from the iPhone 13 Pro, I skipped the 14 Pro1; I expect the camera improvements to be tangible. The telephoto lens could see the most significant improvements driving sales of the Ultra to new territories2. Using a periscope architecture, telephoto could jump from 3x to 6x or more. This could be the last thing that makes me sell my Nikon D7503. The softer and rounder edges and titanium finish might make this iPhone the best design of all time4. And, finally, USB-C will certainly simplify charging the damn thing! I wonder if I’ll still be able to use my Lightning Lavalier microphone using a Lightning-to-USB-C adaptor.🤔
It will be my first “Max” iPhone. Apparently, I’m on a stretch of going for the bigger screens5.
Episode 02 — I’m an Iterative Type of Guy
While writing my next edition of the Friday Notes newsletter (#107), I realized that writing has never been a one-stretch thing for me. It takes countless writing iterations before getting things done. In this episode, I share my anxieties 😰 about writing in general ✍🏻. Plus, a few words about my expectations for the upcoming Apple Event “Wonderlust”! 👀
Links
- Jean-Louis Gassée's "Monday Note" newsletter https://mondaynote.com/.
- Be Inc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Inc.
Some of my Expectations for Apple’s Upcoming “Wonderlust” Event
This is going to be about the iPhone, mostly. The iPhone 15, to be more precise. Of course. Apple will probably talk a lot about the A17 because of its new 3nm manufacturing process, ensuring some battery power savings while bringing faster processing. This will be welcomed for an always-on display device since the iPhone 14 Pro performance in that respect is not as good as it used to be. Will the A17 be Bionic? Something else? I trust Apple’s marketing cracks about this.
The titanium finish on the Pro line, a first for the iPhone, but something the Apple Watch is already sporting, will get some attention too. Maybe more than the A17. I’m looking forward to it because I wouldn’t say I like the current finish on the iPhone 14 Pro1. I hate it, actually. Thanks to my iPhone case, it’s a non-issue. If the Apple invite is any indication of the upcoming titanium colour finish, I’m in love already!
But the star of the iPhone 15 show will be the Ultra with the periscope lens, bringing telephoto photography beyond the 3x optic possibilities for the first time. This is what I’m waiting for. I expect an Apple twist to it.
I expect some updates about the Apple Vision Pro2. Apple will probably talk3 about how excited developers are for the device and remind us about how it will change the world4. Something on the gaming front could be in the cards, too, thanks to the game porting toolkit introduced at the WWDC conference. Are Macs finally good at gaming? Is a software trick enough?
And then what else? The Apple Watch will get updates, but not the redesign we are starting to hear about for 2024. The Ultra 2 is probably not for me. But we will learn about it, for sure.
Macs? Crickets.
This is what I expect for the upcoming “Wonderlust” event.
This morning 🌅, inspired by @maique and @gr36, I decided to create a weekly summary of my creative work and everything that surrounds or supports it. It's really fun to put together and helps have an introspection about the things I do and use. The first edition is going out this coming Sunday, Sept 3th, directly on Numeric Citizen Space1. Just one day before my birthday! 😃🎂🧁
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I will probably send it by email as a newsletter, too. So, if you prefer, subscribe now! ↩
I'm spending way too much time designing the layout of my upcoming weekly creative summary😅. I decided to post it on my Ghost-based and share the document directly from Craft. It will be fun to see how it goes. 👀
2023-08-31 ∞Has putting Apple silicon in the iPad set unrealistic expectations?
The Mac feels too much like a computer that has felt too overwhelming and the iPad is like the smartphone they have already been using.
At some point in the more or less distant future, the iPad form factor will take over. Just like cars took over trucks a long time ago. Just like most people use a smartphone as their main computer or as their only computer, the iPad will eventually be regarded as "a real computer", the only computer, if people are willing to add something on top of their iPhone. One day.
2023-08-31 ∞Om Malik on Threads capabilities in regards to sharing and consuming photo content: Threads, Twitter, & Social Photos
The design is particularly conducive to viewing photos. The white space, the way the photos are rendered, and the styling of photo collections enhance the overall presentation. The vibe on Threads is the polar opposite. Even John Gruber, a long-time critic of Facebook, has been vocal in his appreciation of this new product from the same company. It’s surprising to see him overlooking the poor privacy-related track record of the Facebook family.
and
Still, Threads offers photos and photographers a second chance to find a home beyond a dying Instagram.
I deeply respect Mr. Malik😒, but there is zero chance that fancy web design will erase Meta's business practices and business model. I refuse to consider Threads as an alternative to Instagram. It's a matter of time before Threads becomes another Instagram-type platform. Just wait for it. Now, excuse me, I have some photos to post on Glass and Pixelfed. Thank you. 😜
2023-08-31 ∞