My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024/01

A lonely relic of the past, still working, but unused.

JF Martin on Glass

Welcome to the first edition of 2024! I wish you a happy new year. Now, I’m back and have many updates to share with you. Enjoy this ride!

👨🏻‍💻 27 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 15 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 1 YouTube video published 😃

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ My holiday break was highly appreciated. I needed to take a break from this newsletter and other creative projects. It doesn't mean I didn't have some ideas and thoughts for the future, but I wasn't actively working on something. After spending a few days with my family, we went to the Dominican Republic for a week. It's my third visit to this beautiful country. It was a wonderful trip until the very last moments, when we spent 90 minutes in a taxi heading to the airport while talking with the driver about serious subjects like religion, poverty, science, and climate change, to name a few. What a nice guy. I gave him a very good tip for this experience.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ The following discovery is more like a re-discovery. Someone on Micro.blog shared an Apple Shortcut that acts like an image uploader for Micro.blog. The shortcut will return the URL to the uploaded file, which can be used anywhere. This simple process means that Micro.blog can be used as a simple image hosting service, just like other services like Backblaze (when used with DropShare). This is something I'll consider in the near future because I wonder if this setup could be used instead of my current file-sharing setup involving DropShare and BackBlaze. Decision, decision, decision. 🤔

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I read many articles in my Omnivore save-for-later queue during my holiday break. Reading more is one of my goals for the year. I hope to continue that habit. I'm trying to visit Omnivore a few times a week. But, I recently discovered an issue with Omnivore's ability to synchronize text highlights with Readwise. I posted a bug report on Discord, and sure enough, it's an issue, but I'm not sure when it will be fixed. I'm unsure if the feature will resume where it left off since the last successful synchronization. Annoying.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ My writing projects queue is low. I had two major articles in the works. One is about my migration experience from Adobe Lightroom to Photomator, which is now completed and published. The other concerns the technical implications of newly imposed security rules at the office and how they will affect my work-from-home setup. I’m mostly done with that one. A third is about securing an Apple ecosystem using different tools and services. 2️⃣ The week's events prompted me to write two posts on numericcitizen.me compulsively, something that I rarely do. One post is about Apple's tough year ahead, and another is about Apple Vision, their new headset. Maybe I'm getting better at spontaneous writing. 3️⃣ I read a few articles and comments recently about the possible resurgence of blogs. Some people have been blogging since the early days in a compulsive matter. I started in 2009 but interrupted my journey a few times, which I regret.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a “social network for writers.” I love what it came up with.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I started actively working on my migration from Adobe Lightroom to Photomator near the end of 2023 and finally completed the process this week. I'll save more than 300 CAN$ a year because of this. It was one of my goals for 2024, as reported on my personal landing page. I wrote a detailed article about the migration process and some discoveries I made. Check it out. 2️⃣ My next summer vacation will be in Croatia for three weeks. As for my trip to Italy, I will bring my big camera gear. I would be sad to miss photo opportunities by leaving my real camera at home. 3️⃣ I returned to reading my photography-related news feeds, discovering that DPreview is still alive but seems to publish much less than before. Petapixel seems to be the place to go. I'm reading both. 4️⃣ One of my published photos from my profile made it to the category highlight on Glass. I'm super happy that my work is being noticed on Glass. 😃 5️⃣ In December, I started beta testing an app called Globetrotter that I find well-designed and valuable. Globetrotter allows you to browse your photo library in a different way than what Apple provides. The base canvas is a map with photos positioned according to their GPS coordinates. From there, you move around and explore your library. Statistics show how many places and countries you visited, how many landmarks you saw, etc. It's a great way to browse your photos. See the exhibits section below for two screenshots.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ After watching this documentary about Tim Cook, I was prompted to write my thoughts about the upcoming year for Apple. It won't be an easy one, for sure. Spoiler alert: regulation, anti-trust investigations. 2️⃣ Apple finally confirmed the availability of their Apple Vision Pro. Here are my thoughts. I'm getting mildly excited about the Apple Vison Pro launch, even if it’s unavailable in Canada. Yet, I don't like the idea of people wearing this thing on the face as we are already too often hooked to our screens.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I started digging deeper into the PARA method by reading articles and watching Tiego Forte videos. I plan to see how to adapt my workflow to adopt this information management method. I'll eventually create a video explaining how Craft can be used with the PARA method. Surprisingly, my current way of managing and storing my digital assets in Craft is similar to the PARA method.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Photomator 3.3 on the Mac is currently in beta and brings a highly awaited feature: a file browser. Up to now, Photomator has always worked with Apple's Photos to store photos. It's no longer the case. Now, we can browse files anywhere and open them directly in Photomator. The file browser was available on the iPad and iPhone but was missing on the Mac. This addition helps the transition from Adobe Lightroom to Photomator for my photo processing needs. 2️⃣ Zavala, an outliner for Mac and iPad, received important updates during the holidays after a long silence. I use Zavala occasionally when working on long projects where I must first organize my thoughts. This made me happy. 3️⃣ I've been using Kagi Search since last November, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. I decided to pay for a one-year subscription. Then, I read these comments on Micro.blog about the partnership between Kagi and Brave, and share search results. The problem, apparently, is Brave’s CEO, which happens to support anti-gay marriage, among other things. Some people decided to cancel their Kagi subscription. I think It's overkill, as I wrote at length here. It's not an easy call to make, but I like this point of view. 4️⃣ iA Presenter for iPad and iPhone is coming soon as it is currently in beta. My use cases of this presentation app are rather limited, but I love it when I use it on the Mac. 5️⃣ HEY Calendar is finally out, and I don’t really like it. Judge for yourself by watching their walkthrough video. 6️⃣ I started a monthly subscription (very cheap) to Up Ahead iPhone app after watching this video from Matt Birchler. It's a nice and joyful app to use. 7️⃣ I’ve been testing a shortcut recently, which uploads files to Micro.blog and returns the URL pointing to that file. It's the same thing I get with DropShare and Backblaze, making me wonder If I need to keep that Dropshare setup, even if it is free.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ On January 1, six months later than I was hoping, I finally reached the 1K subscribers mark on my YouTube channel! My video release cadence is much lower than at the beginning of my journey as a YouTuber. The number of new subscribers decreased accordingly. 2️⃣ I should do more collaborative projects. I had the pleasure and the honour to be invited to a live stream session with a friend to talk about Craft. It was exciting to talk about one of my best apps at the center of my workflow. It's in French, so if you can, use Google Translate! I briefly mentioned how Craft compares to Notion and made a few remarks about data portability. I love to do these recordings. I think it's one of many to come! 3️⃣ Matt Birchler wrote an interesting article that I relate to quite a lot as a creator. It's this idea that when we try too hard to do great things, like producing videos for YouTube, we get in our way and hinder our creativity. Sometimes, trying it without too much thinking and preparation is better. As I'm writing this, I know that I'll produce a new video about Micro.blog, and I spent quite some time in preparation. I hope it will make a difference in content quality. 4️⃣ I created a 14m 10s video explaining how to create and manage pages and redirects with Micro.blog hosting service. It's the first video of 2024.
Fascinating (or depressing) fact: it took me about 4 hours to create a 14m 10s video. 👀🤔

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Professor Niklaus Wirth died. Who was he? He was the creator of the Pascal computer language. He was 89. Pascal is a synonym of my early days in computer science. It's one of the first languages that I learned on TRS-80 computers and later on the Macintosh. If I remember correctly, Pascal was the first high-level language to be available on the Mac. Just like Manton Reece remembers, I have great memories of my time at school learning Pascal. John Gruber commenting on Wirth's passing. 2️⃣ I tweaked my blog website, updating the theme plugins and narrowing the content visually. Also spent some time updating my meta website with content validation and updates to my toolset.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I’m trying to convince someone to do an interview or have a recorded discussion about creativity. This guy is super creative, has a great photo style, and travels a lot. He is a freelance worker, too. It's quite a lot of things to talk about. I want to do something like the one I made with the founder of Micro.blog, Manton Reece. When he agrees, I'll share more news about this. If he reads this newsletter, he will recognize himself. 🙂

I wish you a great week!

Exhibits 👀