Things Logbook 2023 01 14 08 24 56 2x

Thought of the Saturday morning: I like the principle of logging my digital life activities, especially my actions leading to content publishing. The Logbook in Things 3 and Dayone and IFTTT greatly help here. [Rewind](https://www.rewind.ai) would be fantastic on the Mac, but it is way too expensive. 

PS. What you are seeing in the screenshot is my actual logbook in Things 3. 

👉🏻 Well, that was fast: @numericcitizen@techhub.social 😎

Reasons why I joined this Mastodon instance. 1) I like the name “techhub.social”. 2) It’s operated by a Canadian. 3) He speaks french and has a Ukrainian flag on his profile.. 4) I’ll be able to see the interaction between Micro.blog and a Mastodon instance.

Micro.blog will stay my home, but I’ll experiment with Mastodon, even though I said and wrote that I would focus this year. Damn.

What's Really Behind a Subscription Fee?

This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why.

First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not.

For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. In that specific case, it’s clear that a subscription makes sense. So we must help the developers pay their bills, right?

Things get more controversial when the developers charge for a subscription, even though no backend services are required. Why would the developers go with a subscription model, then, you might ask? Well, this is where I want to chime in. The developers may not have to pay hosting costs, but what about their development time? It is as if we value infrastructure costs more than craftmanship time. It should not be this way.

I’m willing to pay for software or service using a subscription if the product comes with updates regularly. Matt has shown Tweetbot as an example. Well, this isn’t the best example because Tweetbot rarely gets any updates; it doesn’t fit my criteria for using a subscription. CleanShot X, absolutely yes. I recognize, through my subscription, not only the value of the service but the time it took to put it together and keep it running fine. I’m willing to support the developer for that through a subscription.

We pay 5$ for a drink that takes less than a minute to prepare at Starbucks. Why is it so hard to pay for developers’ time, spending weeks or months writing great software? Also, we must try to consider not only backend bills when deciding that a subscription is ok; craftmanship is something to pay for too.

And now Twitter suspends third-party app? Really? Another good reason to GTF of this platform. I’m so happy to be Twitter free now. Even though I find Tapbots a bit lazy in updating its apps (the macOS app hasn’t been updated for quite a while the last time I checked), they are great ones.

Safari counternotions  counternotions mastodon social  Mastodon 2023 01 12 15 29 35 2x

Something will have to happen in 2023 in the Mastodon world. I would love to join (even though I said I wouldn’t). Now that I’m starting to get it, to understand all this is about, I fail miserably at finding an instance that I can join and fit my content publishing desires. 

I still can’t believe how different the interaction I get here, on Micro.blog, compared to what I used to (not) get on Twitter. It is night and day, literally. I’m blown away 🤯 by the quality of responses I got to some of my posts and the discussion that this sometimes triggers. I do get in touch with people here that I never thought was possible on Twitter, even thought we were following each other over there, thanks to Mastodon and Micro.blog “talking to each other.” I’m so appreciative of this digital community. 😃

I really like how Substack is evolving as a platform for content creators, especially for writers. I kept my account open after moving from Substack to Ghost.org. You may disagree with the fact that you don’t really own the content or whatever, but Substack is evolving quite a bit. If I compare the features set when it started and today, it is night and day. They are really killing it. As a member of Substack (free) and Ghost (paid), I would say Substack > Ghost.

I would really like to find a niche use case for Substack. And I thought that 2023 was the year of focusing more.

As we can see, while there are definite improvements in Windows 11’s design consistency, they are somewhat superficial (but still more thorough than those that were introduced with Windows 10), and there still is plenty of room for improvement. However, compared to Windows 10, at least most of the “casual” UI is somewhat consistent.

In 2023 Windows 11 will reportedly get 3 of the new “moment” updates, which are supposed to bring in new features and UI fixes. Not only that, but Microsoft is thought to be working on decoupling the UI elements from the rest of the OS even further, so we should probably see more improvements more quickly. Source: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11? – NTDEV

The conclusion of this excellent article about Windows 11 UI design inconsistencies is a bit off compared to the rest of the article. You really have to have a look for yourself. Windows, as it is shipping today, contains a plethora of previous-generation UI design languages, all packed together. When I look at macOS, I fail to find any similar example. Now, my question: why can Apple change everything in the UI (like when they introduced macOS BigSur) and not keep old UI designs? What is Apple doing differently? Is macOS easier to maintain than Windows? Or is it because Microsoft simply doesn’t care enough?