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.

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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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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! 🙏🏻

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

[@Gaby](https://micro.blog/Gaby) I get a morning email digest from Mailbrew with my Twitter timeline and funnel YouTube and Reddit into RSS. The social apps are filled with recommendations and features designed to keep you “engaged”. But there’s always an actual bottom to my unread emails and RSS feeds.

Throughout the day, the only types of apps I “just check” are email, RSS, and my Micro.blog client. Micro.blog gets a pass because it seems to be filled with genuinely good people that post things that make me happy — at least that’s what I see in my timeline. :)

This setup gives me more time to read my read later items, to write, and work on other projects that actually accomplish something.

Here is a great way to put Mailbrew to work and help us create free time in our busy schedules.

Today, I tested HEY World. This is my non-review. It could have worked great, but it’s not ready yet. One could say “Nice try, buddy”.

I love their response to my test message. One thing stands out from their response, though:

“For now, HEY World is just an experiment. …

“Assuming there’s demand, we’ll begin opening it up for more people soon. And then, hopefully, for all HEY for You customers. Personal blogs will finally be as easy as sending an email.”

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Twitter announces paid Super Follows to let you charge for tweets

More shit like this and I guess Twitter will be my next one to quit.

The beginning of the end for me and Twitter?

After reading “Ghost on the iPad, a Review” from Tablet Habit, I tried to remember my experience when I tried the service myself. It wasn’t a good one for the thing I wanted to do with it: create a photography-oriented blog.

In recent days, it seems that the “Ghost” name is gaining traction in the blogging arena. I have to wonder if Ghost is better at this than what I experienced for photography. I don’t think I’ll try it again, but I think they do have one killer feature that other platforms don’t have: the combination of a blogging platform and a newsletter publishing tool. They really look to be well integrated.

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Owning media > streaming services

On paper, yes, but how do you cope in a "streaming-only" world?

How many websites a blogger can have? Good question. I do have (too?) many, each filling their own niche. On that subject, something caught my attention yesterday in the public announcement of HEY’s experiment: “Hello, World!”. Jason Fried explaining why he never had a blog:

“It was primarily because setting up a personal blog was just too much of a hassle. It felt formal, it required yet another tool, yet another place to write, yet another platform to pay for just one feature. I had to pick a template, I had to think up a name, I had to make the relationship official.”

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Indeed.

Writing is fun.

Steve would have been 66 years old today. Even if I love what Apple has become over the years since he died, I miss him dearly. What a great picture of him. It is nice to see Apple and Tim Cook paying a small tribute each year.

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