March 17, 2021 8:30pm

Numeric Citizen

Honestly, I like these Intel ads with Justin Long. The one with the dongle, at the very end, is priceless. These ads are fun. Not as fun as the “originals”, though, but still. Intel hits the nerves. Intel is playing the Apple playbook, simple as that. It’s an interesting moment, a blip, in the advertising world. Nothing more. Will it make a difference? I doubt it.

March 17, 2021 8:02am

Numeric Citizen

Want to know what Craft is capable of as a website publishing tool? Take a look. Move around the site, you’ll get a better idea of its navigation structure and feature. I love this app.

March 14, 2021 8:41am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

What does the iMac Pro and the HomePod, two entirely different products, have in common? It’s not the fact that they are no longer being sold. The iMac Pro and the HomePod were created by Apple when they were caught off guard by market trends. In the case of the iMac Pro, Apple tried to answer pro users who were demanding a replacement to the aging trash can Mac Pro. Apple didn’t read the temperature room correctly. They acted urgently and responded with the wrong answer, the iMac Pro. The right answer would have been to fix the Mac Pro instead by creating another more modern version of the expandable Mac Pro, which they finally did later in 2019. The HomePod was created when Apple (finally) realized the smart speakers market was a thing. Apple misread the room temperature again with a high-end smart speaker which wasn’t that smart but sounded good. In such a market, pricing is everything.

Apple is at its best when they create products they want to use for themselves, just like they did with the iPhone. The Apple Car is such a thing really exists), the AR glasses (if such a thing really exists) are a potential case of such products. The Apple Watch was also built on the same principles of the iPhone: something they really want to use themselves.

I own two HomePod, paired together and two HomePod mini, placed in two different rooms. I love them all, but I prefer the mini for hard to explain reasons. It is sad to see the HomePro go. It could have played so differently.

What’s the next Apple product to be killed? The iPod touch?

Afterthought: what is Apple comes out with a new HomePod with an integrated wifi 6 router and maybe some storage, something along the line of the AirPort Extreme a few years ago? A new HomePod mini could also be released with wifi extender built-in. I would buy that in a heartbeat.

Image credit: Basic Apple Guy. I love this guy’s blog.

March 13, 2021 9:13am

Numeric Citizen

For those who didn’t know, I have two newsletters. One available from Substack available at https://numericcitizien.substack.com on a monthly basis and the other one entirely made with Mailbrew. On every Saturday morning, a newsletter is built using the RSS feeds of my blogs as a source to create a summary of all my publications in the last week. So, take a look at the latest issue of “Numeric Citizen Newsletter”. There are currently 30 subscribers to this newsletter.

If you plan to subscribe to Mailbrew to build your own newsletter, please, do me a favour and consider using the affiliated link to do so.

March 11, 2021 9:08pm

Numeric Citizen

Greg Morris on digital consumerism:

The level of consumerism and marketing tricks being used to sell apps and services is growing over time. They all promise to fix that gap in your work life, just like adverts promise to fix the one in your love life, or improve your happiness, or whatever it is. It’s all lies.

I cannot talk for others, but for me, when I’m jumping on another service or a new app, it’s because it offers a seizable improvement. Going from Notion to Craft is my latest example of such move. I’ll elaborate on this at length in a feature post in the very near future.

I recently wrote “Are we digital nomads?” My answer is yes. It seems we cannot stay in one place for a very long time, looking for the new, the latest and greatest, all the time. We’re bored. This is what it is. Form takes over function. Or is it? Again, my blogger workflow is full of moving parts and I consider it is an ongoing experiment.

March 7, 2021 8:18am

Numeric Citizen

WebP image format goal, according to Google:

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

I’ve seen more and more WebP images in recent months when I try to download an image from Safari. It’s frustrating. It’s not a standard. Making the web load faster so tracking scripts can run more easily, that the reason behind all those “initiatives” from Google. WebP is a terrible idea. AMP pages was a terrible idea. And FLOC is a terrible idea. Google is full of terrible ideas. Even for searching, Google is bad. Boy, I hate Google.

I’ve been using WebP Converter recently.

March 4, 2021 3:49pm

Numeric Citizen

They flipped the switch to ON. HEY World is LIVE! I’m so glad, curious and already excited to use this other channel to share my written content with the world. I’m already thinking about my first post on this new platform. Furthermore, I think this addition brings even more value to an already useful service, on which I depend every single day. Recently, I asked: How many websites can a blogger have? Well, as soon as a newcomer doesn’t add too much friction when publishing content, it’s ok to have many. HEY World seems to be such a service. Count me in.

March 4, 2021 8:35am

Numeric Citizen

Anyone here using Mastodon? If yes, why? Should I cross-post from here? Which one should I join? Tell me more. I’m not really aquainted with this platform.

March 4, 2021 7:42am

Numeric Citizen

I recently published a long piece about transforming your Twitter experience by using Twitter lists instead of following a bunch of accounts. As noted in the article, one side effect of this approach is that services that look for your Twitter account’s list of people you follow won’t really work. That’s the case for a new service called “Spoonbill”.

Keep updated on your friends’ and family members’ bios, websites, locations, and names.

Spoonbill will send you a summary of changes that occurred on Twitter’s bio of people you follow. I wonder if this service can be tweaked to use Twitter’s lists instead. What about Mailbrew, maybe they could come up with a similar feature, which would be really cool.

In the meantime, I’m not coming back to following two thousands people.

March 3, 2021 9:12pm

Numeric Citizen

In a surprising move, Apple starting today allows people to export their iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos. Why not provide a download to a local computer, outside the Photos app. I can see many use cases for doing so: backup purposes or simply to dump photos in a structure of directories for archiving purposes.

March 2, 2021 8:44am

Numeric Citizen

Calling for @help here @manton : can you point me to a simple guide or instructions sequence for adding a complete h-card to my microb.blog? Thanks a lot!

March 2, 2021 8:19am

Numeric Citizen

After spending so many hours trying to understand the requirements to set up my online presence to support the IndieWeb movement… I’m close to just giving up. I fail to get the whole picture and none of the sites that I look at has a complete explanation that corresponds to my use case. Gosh. I’ll put this aside for a while and eventually come back to this. Maybe.

March 1, 2021 9:25pm

Numeric Citizen

I often read the word “Quill” in here but never really paid too much attention, until now. Quill allows for posting content to your blog from a simple web page. You knew that, already, right? Not me. Sorry for the interruption, normal programming to return in 3, 2, 1. Thank you.

March 1, 2021 5:53pm

Numeric Citizen

Breaking news from 9To5Mac, but official announcement here:

In recent months, we were approached by a buyer. They saw the uniqueness of Weather Line and the strong foundation we’ve built. While we aren’t able to provide further details on their future plans for the app, we hope you can understand, and will look forward to it.

I’m kind of in shock right now. I recently posted an article about my “go-to” weather applications. Weather Line wasn’t part of the line up, but I did have it installed on my iPhone, and I’m currently a paying subscriber. Too bad to see the application go. But, why? The same happened to Spend Stack recently.

What’s going on? How many developers invoked paid subscription model as being the only road to sustainability? Does it work or not? Is this the start of a new trend? There is something going on here.

When, as users, invest money and time in using applications or service, the last thing we want is to see our beloved apps go like this. I’m currently heavily investing in Craft (coming from Notion). What if the same happens to Craft?

March 1, 2021 2:49pm

Numeric Citizen

This shouldn’t be this way. Thanks to the numerous ads, my YouTube experience was a calculated nightmare. As my usage grew in the last few weeks because of my daytime job, my time on YouTube felt light a nightmare with no end. I decided to put an end to all this by subscribing to YouTube Premium. I feel in full contradiction to my values.

YouTube Premium so much better. But it shouldn’t be this way. Yet, it is. I feel that I’m sleeping with the enemy. Tell me that it is ok, will you?

March 1, 2021 7:49am

Numeric Citizen

Here is the current state of yet to be updated apps to fully support Apple Silicon Macs. It’s been close to six months now and yet, those apps aren’t yet universal. Surprising to see things like 1Password 7 still not there yet. Notion, an Electron-based app, not surprising. The Mac client for HEY hasn’t been updated for a while. Many of those apps are subscription-based, a model toward development sustainability. Can we say they are failing to meet their obligations, now?

February 28, 2021 8:51pm

Numeric Citizen

Two very telling graphs from Apple’s development portal:

A few takeouts. First, iOS 13 is close to become a bad souvenir. Second, people keeping their iPad longer, it is reflected in the percentage of people still using devices with iPadOS prior to version 13.

February 28, 2021 8:24am

Numeric Citizen

Today, I would like to do a quick poll among my blogger / writer friends here on Micro.blog. How did the pandemic influence your writing habits? Do you write more? Less? What could be the reasons behind the change of habit?

To help you out and start the thread, I’ll answer to my own poll. The pandemic brought me closer to be what we call “a writer”. I write a lot more. I do put more efforts into each piece. I use more tools to help me. My research goes deeper. I have many pieces in the works, all the time. I spend around 5-10 hours for writing each week.

Now, why do I write more? Because there is less noise in my life in general, thanks to the restrictions (no travels, curfew, work from home: no commute). This “silence” created a pool of free time. My creativity took over. So, I write. And I love it.

Tell me your story? Let’s discuss.

February 27, 2021 11:12am

Numeric Citizen

This is what I call a VERY productive Saturday.: three articles published (on Medium, on Numeric Citizen I/O, and on my Numeric Citizen Blog) and a monthly newsletter went out! 😎 Time for a break. 🏃Oh, and thank you for reading my stuff! 🙏🏻

February 27, 2021 9:41am

Numeric Citizen

For those who likes newsletters, I’ve got one too! It’a about Apple, photography, privacy and climate change, in that order! https://numericcitizen.substack.com/p/2021-02