Creative summary

My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-07

Another busy week for me, both personally and at work. Yet, I managed to do some interesting things.

JF Martin

Feb 25, 2024 — 9 min read

A popular photo that I published during the week on Pixelfed

👨🏻‍💻 32 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 15 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ I've been quite busy at work in the last two weeks. So much that I had to do some overtime, which I hate to do for many reasons. I'm stuck with a project that is getting started, and I’m deeply involved in this. I hope that before early March, everything will be fine, and I will move on to something else.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ Walknotes is an interesting blog that I discovered through the ooh.directory. A guy takes notes while doing his daily walks in south London, UK, and posts them weekly. Occasionally, I visit the ooh.directory to discover new blogs. Sometimes, I make great discoveries like this one.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Here is a great read for someone like me who builds this weekly newsletter: “How to Plan Your Week’. I’m happy to report that I'm pretty much in line with all the recommendations in the article. Each Sunday, I conclude my weekly creative summary, giving me a sense of accomplishment, next I prepare the next week using a template in Things 3 and set three main goals for the week. It's a very simple workflow but an effective one for me. 2️⃣ A very touching read that came out of nowhere. I didn’t expect this. I'm still searching as to why. I wrote and sent him an email. He responded. Is this the beginning of a digital relationship?
The goal is to spend as much time as possible helping people, ditching social media and going online with personal websites. — Manual Moreale

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I unexpectedly spent some time writing a new article for the numericcitizen.me blog. The subject? My version of the Apple Performance card, edition 2023. It's my first edition, written in response of not being invited to answer the official questionaire sent to more popular Apple pundits. This writing project wasn't planned for the week and it took me less time that I would normally expect.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I play a game with Glass from time to time, mainly during the weekends. I go to the website and start browsing photographers. Whenever I find great images, I show appreciation and subscribe to their feed. It's fun. Glass is full of great photographers. I'm impressed each time I do this. 2️⃣ Photomator 3.3 with an integrated file browser is now out. This update is a major one for me because since leaving Adobe Lightroom, the only support for editing photos was Photomator with Apple iCloud Photos Library. Now, I can directly edit with images stored on my Synology NAS or an SD card from my Nikon camera. Pixelmator Pro has also been updated to support the new Photomator release.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ The SixColors Report Card for 2023 is out. It's a lengthy report about Apple’s performance in many areas (hardware, software, services, corporate citizenship, etc.). The iPad and the Watch, lacking meaningful updates in over a year, have a declining sentiment. Hardware quality and reliability are top-notch. 2️⃣ I wrote my performance report, too.

“The iMessage service is not so good that it makes the iPhone more attractive to customers. It’s the iPhone that makes _iMessage_attractive. The iPhone gives iMessage its cachet, not the other way around.” — John Siracusa

“Apple needs to get serious about the iPad again in 2024 with both hardware and software, and I hope they will deliver on this front.” — Federico Viticci in SixColors Report Card for 2023

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ A few years ago, I tried tracking my time at the office using the Timing app. It wasn't something imposed by the office but a personal initiative. I wanted to know where I spent my time, and it helped me fill out the official time sheet. Timing was an excellent app for doing detailed tracking. I was impressed by its capabilities. But eventually, I left that job and stopped using Timing. I kept receiving promotional emails from time to time. It happened this week. It occurred to me that I could explore the possibility of restarting tracking my time with the app for my creative hobbies. I started a 30-day trial to experiment with it. It's pretty different than Timery with Toggl, and the goal of this trial will be to determine if I could replace them altogether. The one downside would be that I would only track my time when I use devices other than my Mac, which I do pretty often (about 10%-20% of the time, according to the following graph. Tracked time is much more granular with Timing (it is fundamentally based on the app I'm using). Tracking of tasks and projects is a semi-manual process. It doesn't mean that I don't like it, but suffice to say that I would have to adapt my tracking habits. One main benefit would be having a much more precise tracking overall, something I want if I ever switch. My current subscription to Toggl is valid until September, which is quite far. I'll see how it goes and report here as necessary. For this 30-day trial, I'll keep using both methods.

Time tracking results for the current week using Timing.app. It’s quite different tha tracking my time with Timery. It’s more refined yet less telling about my writing activities. For example, I spent more than five hours in Craft during the week, mostly for writing this creative summary newsletter edition but using Timery, this task is specifically tracked because it’s a manual process. Timing doesn’t know what I’m doing, only the apps I’m using.

Tracking time on my MacBook Air should be enough to get a rough idea of how I’m spending time.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ iA Presenter 1.2 came out with a slew of fixes and additions. I don’t use this app as much as I should. I did a few times while recording YouTube videos to act as cue cards. An iPad version is coming out soon. All the release details are here. 2️⃣ Updating old content is a good idea when conditions that lead to writing an article change. This is the case with my article about choosing which app to use and the considerations that go into application selection. Consider the case of Raindrop.io. I decided to stop using it because of the maker's ties with Russia. Since then, I saw a comment on my blog post from the developer asking me to consider updating my post since he no longer lives in Russia and his business has since moved out of Russia, too. I updated my article accordingly.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I'm working on a new video to go with the next release of Craft, but I cannot share it yet. Stay tuned. 2️⃣ I'm postponing my next video about Micro.blog until early March until the month of February is complete. Many things were announced, and I need to prepare my video accordingly. Again, stay tuned for that one too.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I watched the documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop” on Netflix, which offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the making of the “We Are The World” song. I highly recommend this documentary if you are an avid fan of the eighties. This newsletter is about creative work and the tribulations that lie around it. This documentary goes to great lengths to show what it was like to reunite a bunch of big stars around a creative project like this. Lionel Richie was animating the American Music Awards that day and then recorded the song during the whole night after the AMA. Many were obviously exhausted after this. It’s fascinating. Many artists are no longer with us (Prince, who didn't show up, Micheal Jackson, Ray Charles, etc.). So many talented people.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ On Wednesday, Micro.blog introduced a complete rework of their subscription plans. As the announcement explains, premium subscribers can now have up to five blogs. This announcement made me consider moving my metablog hosted via Craft shared documents to a new blog hosted on Micro.blog. This way, I could lower my Craft subscription costs while consolidating under one platform. The other benefit would be the addition of RSS feed support, which my current meta blog doesn’t provide. I would move my data by exporting individual documents to Micro.blog. But the problem is each document would instantly create and appear as a new post. Not ideal. I could silently migrate my content, and once completed, I could redirect my domain name to point to the newly migrated content and start sharing from there. There is a lot to think about, and I’m looking forward to doing this in the upcoming months. 2️⃣ Using Ulysses, I did a dry run of the export, import and edit process. It works, but it is tedious. I guess it would also be the right time to update my content. There is a markdown files import option on Micro.blog, but I haven't tested this option yet. I prefer the manual workflow as I have more control over it. 3️⃣ This summer I'm going to Croatia for the first time. It's a three-week trip that I'm really looking forward to. I'm wondering about possibly creating a travel journal like I did for my trip to Italy. I won’t use Craft this time if I proceed with this project. But what else can I use then?

I wish you a great week!

💡

This newsletter edition is also available as a Craft shared document here. This week's edition is based on template version 1.2— 2024-02-18 and was put together with ❤️ on a 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft and many subscriptions! Support my work (Paypal) 🙏🏻