Another Day, Another Discovery: TimeStory

After Anybox earlier this week, now is the turn of TimeStory to make its debut on my list of apps under consideration. About TimeStory, from the application’s website:

TimeStory is a Mac app for illustrating events on a timeline, designed to help you easily create plans and roadmaps, capture history, tell stories, and more.

I spent quite some time today on a project at work using TimeStory. I’m blown away by the simplicity and the craftsmanship that went into this app. It’s very focused, which makes it easy to learn. At every step of my experimentation with the app, I was met with an evident interaction and response from TimeStory. I built something that took me a few hours instead of days in MS Project. Consider me impressed.

I’m on the seven-day free trial. I’ll probably buy the app for two reasons: it brought me real added value in my workflow, joy, and some rewards along the way. Also, I can see a few use cases in my personal numeric life, for my Apple Rumours hub, for example.

We need more apps like this. Very focused, not trying to impress with undeeded features. On the Mac only. Native: AppKit + Swift. No subscription.

Oh, and I love TimeStory’s About page. It’s always interesting to learn about the behind-the-scenes story of an app. I hope this app continues to evolve and improve for as long as possible.

😅 Moving all my newsletter subscriptions to Inoreader (instead of Hey Mail) for a better reading and annotation experience. Unsubscribing to many along the way. That’s one of the many benefits of switching to Inoreader. Hey Mail isn’t that good for reading newsletters after all, when you compare it to other solutions (including Matter, Readwise Reader, etc.). Substack doesn’t make it easy to change the subscription email, BTW. 👨‍💻

Massive migration going on right now… to Anybox. I’m in love with this little app. Currently moving out my bookmarks from Craft. Next up will be Safari. Thankfully, Anybox can import Safari-exported bookmark files.

I’m always anxious when I use an app built and maintained by a single guy, as seems to be the case for Anybox.

I want to share a little follow-up to my previous post regarding Anybox. As much as I like what I see in this nifty little app, it must replace something else to make the cut (Raindrop.io?). It must help improve an existing portion of my workflow (putting my monthly newsletter together - possible initial use case). It must make a real difference, not only add a new stopgap.

Another day, another rabbit hole. This time, meet Anybox, a bookmark manager for macOS, iOS and iPadOS. I’ve been playing with it on macOS and I really like what I’m seeing. It’s a bit nerdy, but I do like it a lot. Everything I tried or wonder if it could do was met with a “ah” or “ooooh”. PopClip integration, easy integration with Things 3, data portability secured (lots of import & export formats), great user interface, Safari extension support. The list goes on and on.

Now, the only thing is to try to find a real use case for it. I’ve been using Craft for the most part for bookmarks collection, so my need for an app like Anybox is still unclear. Stay tuned on that one.

Is this another solution in search of a problem? 🤔

Got this for the Apple Studio Display and iPhone 13 Pro. With macOS Ventura Camera Continuity, it works much better than I thought. It works great with Microsoft Teams. Best way to add Center Stage to Microsoft Teams (using the Control Center settings while the camera is on). No latency. Surprising how low the battery power consumption is. It would have been nice if the iPhone mount could also recharge the iPhone, though.

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Testing Micro.blog Bookmarking Feature

For the first time today, I diligently tested Micro.blog’s bookmarking feature. I don’t know if this is a popular feature among MB users, but I wonder if I should find a place for MB bookmarks in my workflow. Let’s see a typical workflow.

So, I start reading an article from my now favourite RSS reader: Inoreader. I decide to open the source website and use the bookmarklet to save the page into MB bookmarks. After a few minutes, MB diligently created a readable article archive stripped of all the noise. Think of it as an MB version of Instapaper.

I open the newly created archive and start my reading. I find an interesting or very valuable passage that I select in the browser. MB shows a very gentle overlay titled “Highlight”. I click on it, and sure enough, the text gets highlighted. But that’s not all.

MB can display a list of all my highlights. If I find a highlight that I want to create a linkpost for, I simply click the “New post” button underneath it. And voilà, I can start writing my linkpost right there.

Moreover, MB offers a simple way to save a bookmark by entering the article’s URL into the provided field at the top of the “Bookmarks” section on the MB website. Very handy.

Bookmarks can be embedded in a blog post too. Just click “Embed” underneath a specific bookmark.

The only downside, for now, is the lack of data portability: bookmarks and highlights can’t be saved or exported outside MB.

The bookmarking feature is part of the Premium subscription tier.

Writing Shouldn’t Be Hard

We now live in a world of multimodal communications, and how we communicate is changing. The omnipresence of devices in our lives — smartphones to computers, means most of our conversations and communications happen through text. We have replaced so much of our face-to-face interaction with the written word. Teams, Slack and Discords, are part of our daily lives now. As the volume of text in our lives increases, we need tools that help facilitate and perhaps improve how we write and how fast we write.

Am I alone in having the feeling that people no longer read?

Apple pays $12.1 mln fine for alleged app market abuse in Russia - Antimonopoly Service

U.S. tech giant Apple has paid a 906 million rouble ($12.12 million) fine in a Russian antitrust case alleging abuse of its dominance in the mobile apps market, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) said on Monday.

First, where is the money going once paid by Apple? The current situation in Ukraine mandates more scrutiny. Personally, I would have shut down the App Store altogether in this market. Plain and simple as well as give a middle finger instead of paying the fine. But that’s me.