Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest
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« Apple Readies WWDC Stream on YouTube Ahead of Keynote Next Week » — MacRumors
Remember when people were reporting banners being put on display at the Moscone Center and the Internet went wild simply at the look of the banner content?
2025-06-02 ∞Acquired. 🤩 cc @BasicAppleGuy@mastodon.social
2025-06-02 ∞
The timing is right, and it’s a clever blog post that explains why Inoreader is a great read-later solution, without mentioning or referring to Pocket. Following the announcement of Pocket demise, people are looking at alternatives and rarely Inoreader get mentioned. With this blog post, they make their case. I do use Inoreader as a read-later service, too. It’s quite capable.
2025-06-03 ∞According to Gruber, with some extrapolation, The Mac could be the one to lose the most with this upcoming Apple UI design unification:
2025-06-03 ∞The last thing MacOS needs is more transparency/translucency than it already has.
Physicality: the new age of UI
Overall, one can imagine a rounding and softening of the interface through translucent materials looking pretty great.
There are many thoughtful ideas in this post and I hope Apple will come up with something similar.
2025-06-04 ∞I’m not a gamer. I’m not the typical guy who freaks about Nintendo. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Kind of tired of those posts about the DS2. 🙄
2025-06-05 ∞Due to some important professional changes, I canceled my Fantastical subscription. It’s a great app that I would recommend anytime, but my current situation no longer justifies the expense. I’ll share more info about all this soon.
2025-06-05 ∞Wow, MacRumors is posting a new article for each individual leak, coming from today’s rather lengthy Gurman report about next week’s announcements. I mean, come on, guys! Do a single write up and we’re ok with it!
2025-06-06 ∞Listening to the Vergecast right now and oh boy, Apple is losing the mind share of so many people right now… developers (been lioke this for a few years now), tech pundits (for what it’s worth) and… ordinary users (partially, thanks to AI stuff).
2025-06-06 ∞HyperCard was such a novelty when it launched. It was something so “out of this place”. I spent so many hours with HyperCard, trying to find use cases for it, just so I could experience the stack metaphor. Thanks Bill. RIP.
2025-06-07 ∞Sadly, I’ll be on the road tomorrow during the WWDC Keynote. I’ll probably put the event stream on my phone and listen to the audio only while driving. My colleague will learn how passionate someone can be about Apple. 🤭
2025-06-08 ∞A lot of developers might be pissed off by Apple and not willing to invest the required resources to adopt the new UI… but I want to make it clear to all developers: I’ll reconsider my app usage based on those who don’t adopt the new UI. Nothing is permanent in this world. #wwdc25
2025-06-09 ∞Apple is so careful about accessibility in general, I find it surprising that they come out with something like Liquid Glass which seems to break many usability rules like legibility. 👀😵💫
2025-06-10 ∞Well, iPadOS 26 beta 1 is rather buggy and feels more unfinished than expected.
2025-06-11 ∞Liquid Glass current state in beta1 is challenging the definition of content readability. I’m seriously hoping that this will improve before final release later this fall.
2025-06-11 ∞While the iPadOS 26 beta 1 is very buggy, after watching this video, I’m very tempted to install macOS Tahoe beta1 on my M2 MacBook Air. Would love to get feedback about stability compared to iPadOS.
2025-06-13 ∞I’m officially starting a new job in less than two weeks. As I clean up my belongings at my current employer, I’m amazed by how much content I’ve gathered and created over the past seven years. Most of it, about 80%, is now worthless.
2025-06-13 ∞My days of using Notion for work are counted. I started using Notion in 2023, but I realize that I should have started well before that. Sadly, I won’t be allowed to use such “non-standard” tool at my next job. The standard is: Microsoft 365 + Confluence. 🥴
2025-06-13 ∞Since I have two Macs (M4 Mac mini + M2 MacBook Air), I think I’m going to install macOS Tahoe on my MBA just to kick the tires and see how good or bad things are… I hope it’s better than on my iPad.
2025-06-13 ∞The size of the OS install on iPadOS 26 was 2x bigger than on M2 MacBook Air. Surprising. Update: it’s about 2 GB less.
2025-06-13 ∞I’m curious about people’s appreciation level of Apple Liquid Glass by age group. Younger people probably don’t care or like it because it’s flashy but as they will get older they might change their mind because of the lack of readability. And by then Apple will probably be back with a more opaque design. 🤭
2025-06-14 ∞In macOS Tahoe beta1 Finder, some app icons exhibit gray inset (Things icon for example in this screenshot). Weird. Speaking of the Finder, things feels janky in beta1.
2025-06-14 ∞
Look at the Finder’s window top. 😵💫 Not exactly the best overall visual effects. As in the real world, seeing through glass can lead to weird things, just like here. BTW, CleanShot X edit window top bar isn’t working on macOS Tahoe beta1. Beware.
2025-06-14 ∞
I’m happy to see real windows coming to iPadOS 26 but with it comes manual windows management. Opening an app does open it full screen, but resizing is required and sometimes the resizing is guided by constant centering of the window until it is moved elsewhere. Hard to describe but it adds interaction complexity.
2025-06-14 ∞It appears that Apple’s Freeform didn’t get any attention in this year updates… am I missing something? Still a stunning app, though.
2025-06-14 ∞Where can I find the videos of an interviewer pressing Apple executives about their strained relationship with the developer community? There is no one to be found, actually. Even Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal avoids this topic. It was a conference for developers! Instead, everyone focused on questions about Apple Intelligence, Siri, and Liquid Glass. Is this a lack of courage, laziness or simply being afraid not to be able to talk to Apple execs in the future? 🤔
2025-06-15 ∞There are many positive and some less favorable aspects in Apple’s first betas and Liquid Glass. I’m eager to see how much Apple will improve them before the official release. Will they remain stubborn, or will they show openness and make meaningful adjustments? How much can they change without appearing to compromise their design principles?
2025-06-15 ∞One of Liquid Glass’s foundational principles is to prioritize user content, at least to my knowledge. However, my experience so far has been the opposite: Liquid Glass is often “in your face” and takes center stage.
2025-06-15 ∞From 2009 to 2013, I was learning building iPhone apps as a hobbyist developer and created a few apps sold on the App Store1. This is how I learned Objective-C. It was before Swift, the iPad and Catalyst. Fast-forward to today, I wonder how my learning experience would have been if generative AI was around.
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I made about $5000 doing so. Not bad. ↩
Starting with my new job next week, I won’t be able to use LucidChart anymore and that makes me sad. LucidChart is such a pleasure to use and has been supporting my creativity for a few years until this week. The next best thing is Apple Freeform, but I won’t have access to this either. Hello Microsoft Visio. 🙄
2025-06-17 ∞Testing iPadOS 26 with external display right now and boy this release makes the iPad THE computer we were all waiting for. Well, maybe not everybody… works really great so far.
2025-06-17 ∞Invoking the notifications center with iPadOS 26 while using an external display will blank out the external display and bring the notifications on the iPad screen only. I’m not sure this is the final behaviour. I don’t like it at all.
2025-06-17 ∞So, now that we have Liquid Glass on all Apple operating systems, who lost the most of its personality? The Mac or the iPad?
2025-06-17 ∞I'm Already Feeling The Upcoming Loss
The last time I used a Windows PC was with Windows 10 sometimes around 2020. Since then, Windows 11 came out with a few major releases along with it. I’ll have to relearn so many small things to flex my muscles memory. Also, and it’s probably the biggest lost: so many small utilities like Raycast, CleanShot X, Paste, PopClip and so many more that were making me much more productive are gone with Windows 11. Am I going to survive?
2025-06-17 ∞Well, I’m going to drop Mailbrew because of the lack of updates to the service in recent years. I’ll try to replace that with Inoreader, a service I already depend on. Otherwise, I might give a look at Digest.
2025-06-17 ∞It seems I overlooked that Inoreader can’t send email summaries of RSS feeds on the Pro plan; an Enterprise plan is necessary. That’s disappointing. I’ll search for alternatives to replace Mailbrew, then. 🤔
2025-06-17 ∞Because of iPadOS 26, I can see a future where I could get rid of my Macs and focus on the iPad as the main computer beside my iPhone. Of course, I would probably switch to a larger size if that was the case. Using an iPad with an external monitor now makes much more sense and no longer a gimmicky thing.
2025-06-18 ∞Directly from... Raycast!
Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!! Just kidding, I’m testing a blog post from Raycast. Sounds cool, right? Yes, it is!
2025-06-18 ∞I mentioned earlier this week that I began exploring alternatives to Mailbrew. Digest seems to be a similar service. It appears to be a clone of Mailbrew. The thing is, it looks like abandonware, too.
2025-06-19 ∞Today, I placed my order to have my face processed through Iconfactory’s pixelated portrait service. I’m eager to see what they come up with. Maybe I’ll update my avatar that I’ve been using for so many years?
2025-06-19 ∞Is this a plain website? Is this a digital garden? Is this a landing page? No, it’s ”Who Is Numeric Citizen?” A newly launched personal landing page where you can learn about him and his creative journey. Learn all the details (what, why, how) by visiting the website! I’ll meet you there.
2025-06-20 ∞It’s funny how I treat my online assets like my websites. I think of these like software or apps. That is why I maintain change logs for them, just like app release notes. You can find one here, and one there. It’s fun.
2025-06-21 ∞Unpopular opinion: The Browser Company should have made Dia a part of the Arc Browser. I don’t see the need for a new paradigm to achieve what Dia is trying to do as a stand-alone app. Plus, how come a browser company rely on someone else’s browser engine to do its thing? My understanding is that Dia is built on Chromium, just like the Arc Browser.
2025-06-22 ∞I prefer Apple to build a partnership with Perplexity instead of buying them outright. By partnering with them, Perplexity would join ChaptGPT as a third-party source of AI, helping Apple remain AI agnostic. If they buy Perplexity, they would close the loop, which is bad in the long term for them. I want Apple to remain open and bring as many AI partners as possible.
2025-06-22 ∞I’m eagerly anticipating the release of beta 2 of iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 from Apple this week. I’m particularly interested in seeing how much the Liquid Glass feature will be toned down, if at all. I won’t lose faith until the public beta is available.
2025-06-22 ∞Micro.blog Question Challenge
Jim Mitchell, on his blog:
As is customary after posting my own, I’m extending the challenge to Numeric Citizen (@numericcitizen) and David Johnson (@crossingthethreshold) to answer the same questions:
Here are my answers!
- Why did you start a blog in the first place? It was when Apple had iWeb, part of MobileMe. It was a family thing only. iWeb died, so did my blog. Eventually, I returned to blogging on Blogger, now part of Google, while developing iPhone apps in 2009. It lasted until 2013. Then it all died. I returned to blogging in 2015, using WordPress, then migrated to Ghost and Micro.blog; both serve different purposes. The rest is history.
- Have you blogged on other platforms before? Yes, all in all, I experimented with iWeb, Blogger, WordPress, Micro.blog, Write.as, Substack, Medium. Am I missing one? Oh yeah, Scribble.pages! Sorry, Vincent!
- Why did you choose Micro.blog? Back in 2018, when it launched. Initially, I wasn’t sure about it and viewed it as an experiment (I shared some thoughts about this). I went all in during COVID. Couldn’t be happier.
- Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another application? It depends. Most of the time, I wrote on the web editor, but with recent updates to the Mac app, I do it more and more on the Mac app. Oh, MarsEdit is also one app that I use, from time to time.
- When do you feel most inspired to write? All the time, mainly in the mornings when my head is still pristine (can’t tell if this is something we can write!)
- Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? Most of the time, I write and then publish, especially on Micro.blog. For longer posts, I let it simmer for a while.
- What’s your favorite post on your blog? So hard to tell because what I write is so short. The whole thing is what I’m most proud of: having the time and the gut to think and write about anything away from big platforms, it’s something to be proud of IMO.
- Any future plans for your blog? Since last year, I decided to focus more on what I already have. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So, Micro.blog forever! For now. I recently launched “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website with the idea to replace another website built using Craft. 🤭
Thanks for calling me out on that, @jimmitchell ! How about @abc ? Will he catch the call?
2025-06-22 ∞Today, I tested my LG UltraFine 4K monitor on my wife’s Windows 11 laptop, but the monitor wouldn’t power up, and the Windows Device Manager also failed to recognize it. This means I’ll probably need a USB hub to go with my future work laptop if I want to use that monitor. I’ll probably buy a new monitor specially for my work laptop, since the company will be paying for it.
2025-06-22 ∞Too stupid to wait, upgrading my iPhone 15 Pro Max to beta 2. 🫣
2025-06-23 ∞I can confirm that beta2 doesn’t bring much fixes, on the iPad, at least. In fact, it might be worse than beta1. Investigating… 😐😑
2025-06-23 ∞How many options and switches do we have today in Settings.app, on all platforms, because Apple had to step back… as a recent example, on macOS, we now have “Menu Bar \ Show Menu Bar Background” so that we can get our dear and readable menu bar… Settings is getting bloated with options that are the consequences of Apple’s indecision in UI design.
2025-06-23 ∞Never take your Mac for granted. Did my first day at my new job and got my new Windows laptop. Quite a beefy one for that mather: 32 GB of RAM, 500 GB of NVMe SSD and an i5 Intel CPU, large display. Yet, running Windows 11, this thing can be so slow and battery life never gets past 1.5 hours. Less than two hours!!! What is this HPE Probook? About 25% of CPU is spend on security-related processes… AT ALL THE FUCKIN time!
2025-06-24 ∞☝🏻 Glass > Liquid Glass.
2025-06-24 ∞I’m happy that, in Canada, we don’t have Apple Pay (yet?) because otherwise we would be flooded by ads in the Wallet app. 🤦🏻♂️
2025-06-24 ∞With this year’s Apple OS releases, all Apple apps appear to have a similar look. Is this expected? Where’s the fun? Does everything need to be identical to be more approachable?
2025-06-24 ∞My new Windows PC laptop at the office makes me realize that the best Office 365 experience (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, OneNote) is on a PC, not on a Mac, which will always be a second citizen for Microsoft.
2025-06-26 ∞I’m starting to like Windows 11 and Office 365 more than I expected. Who knew? OneNote is a solid note-taking app, and Outlook Tasks is also solid.
2025-06-27 ∞This article points to an interesting prospect about the future of the Mac menu bar usage: we could see a possible migration of Mac utilities from menu bar items to the Control Center, thanks to the introduction of third-party Control Center applets. Provided developers add support for these, we will probably see a reduction on menu bar items, freeing much space in the menu bar. This might explain why Apple added the menu bar transparent mode.
2025-06-29 ∞Under macOS Tahoe, I decided to remove any menu items that have a Control Center equivalent. Is this the start of a trend? I hope developers will add support for Control Center when it ships.
2025-06-29 ∞
One of the fun things when starting a new job with a new set of digital tools is to rethink old habits and change what was broken. Information classifications and tasks management are seeing a big rethink which is, of course, highly tied to Microsoft 365 tools (To Do, OneNote, Outlook and their tied integration).
2025-06-30 ∞Having to immerse myself in a different digital ecosystem, specifically Microsoft’s, helps me appreciate the strengths of both Apple and Microsoft. Does this mean I should consider switching to Android? I’ll leave that for you to guess. 🤭
2025-06-30 ∞According to MacRumors: New MacBook With A18 Pro Chip Spotted in Apple Code
That is interesting. I want Apple to be funky on this one with a unique design proposition. Obviously they are going after the Chromebook market here, if rumors are true.
2025-07-01 ∞