Creative summary

My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-16

This week’s edition is the last one before going on a cruise ship next week. See you in two weeks!

JF Martin

Apr 28, 2024 — 8 min read

A popular photo that I published during the week on Pixelfed.

👨🏻‍💻 26 posts 😃
🏞️ 11 photos shared 🙂
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 Two YouTube videos published 😃

👤 Personal

1️⃣ This week dragged on creatively. This office event ate up a lot of my free time. After it wrapped up, I was pretty tired. I ended up feeling somewhat passive, just chilling with some reading and watching stuff without overthinking it. 2️⃣ Because of all this, it appears that I won't be able to complete and publish this weekly edition this week, and I'll have to wait until next week, right before leaving for my trip in Europe. It's Friday night, and as I'm writing this, I might find a way to complete it before Sunday night. 3️⃣ It's Sunday and I'm good to go with this week's edition! 😃

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ A small discovery: Did you know you can invoke an Apple Shortcut using a URL Scheme? For example, the following can be inserted into a Craft document to call the “Get Weather for Craft” shortcut: "shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Get Weather for Craft&input=[input]&text=[text]”. What is strange is that the string for the shortcut name can have spaces without having to be put between quotes. 2️⃣ I discovered Song.link, a web service for sharing links to your favourite songs. It seems pretty nice and free! 3️⃣ I discovered this blog while walking in the forest. Then, I added a new step on my personal creator dashboard so that I could try to find new blogs as often as possible in my daily routine.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I've been following the news from Ukraine more closely in recent weeks. The lack of support from the US and its impacts on the battlefield were evident in the news. Things will improve soon, I guess, after military support starts to flow again toward Ukraine. This war will be a long one.

“You don’t have to be a content creator to have a website.” — Ana Rodrigues

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I relate to the following quote from Manuel Moreale. 2️⃣ I wonder if my writing habits are a way for me to evade some internal demons. I should think more about this because this is a recurring theme of thoughts. 3️⃣ I vented a bit of my frustration with Microsoft 365.

“The more I write on this site, the more I realize that what I’m trying to do is to connect” — Manuel Moreale

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I took 371 photos this week at an annual event my office is holding to kick off the new year. I quite like it, more than I initially thought. Taking pictures of people is not my cup of tea, but it felt great this time. My colleagues didn't know I was an amateur photographer. My Nikon Zf retro look intrigued many, and people thought it was a film camera! One of my colleagues working in a remote branch in the US felt that I was a paid photographer, not an IT guy. On the last day, I gave a presentation about technology trends, and he was shocked that I was, in fact, one of his colleagues! He said, “Well, I might have seen the most tech-savvy photographer I saw!”. That was funny. 2️⃣ A good image tells a story, and image selection for a presentation is crucial to augmenting the message. Good article from Mylene, who is writing for IA, the makers of iA Writer and iA Presenter.

A great image that I came across this week. Black & white is hard to beat.

A new photographer that I’m following on Glass. His photography style around street photography is lovely.

“Quality AI content requires human intervention to infuse it with meaning and authenticity.” — Mylene writing for iA blog

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ How many new iPads will we get this year? Three? Five? This Reddit post says five. 2️⃣ Basic Apple Guy is celebrating his blog's anniversary: four years. This guy’s creativity is simply mind-blowing. Apple is at the center of this constant expression of creativity. Over the past four years, I have bought four T-shirts from him, and I'm wearing one as I write this. I'm not sure exactly what this guy is doing for real work, but he certainly has a talent for graphic design. Some of his pieces probably required many hundred hours of hard work. Bravo for him. 3️⃣ Apple will be holding a special event on May 7th, which certainly looks to be about the iPad, but I might not be able to watch it as I'll be on a cruise ship then. I'll catch up on the news when I return on May 10th. 4️⃣ Many Apple users reported being locked out of their Apple ID this week. The only way to fix the issue was to reset the password, requiring re-authentication on all Apple devices. That's bad and makes me wary of being tied so much to Apple these days. What if I lose access to my Apple ID? I would lose so much.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Ghost is adopting ActivityPub, and I shared my enthusiasm about it. It will be a long journey, but we should get all this in 2024. 2️⃣ I'm still looking to optimize my photo processing workflow. This time, I'm trying to find a good photo browser for Mac. I don't really like Adobe Bridge, and I don't want anything beyond converting RAW files into DNG. Apple Finder isn’t powerful enough. ApolloOne seems a contender. I tried it for a few moments. Seems reasonable, but good enough? The design is a little on the “uninspired" side. One thing with ApolloOne: you can rate and tag each image, but I wonder how this metadata is being saved. 3️⃣ Scribbles.page keeps getting better and better! I love it.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I love Arc Browser, too, Matt! Here's a short video to learn why. 2️⃣ My YouTube channel has 1148 followers. I didn't know what to expect when I started doing videos about Craft and other things I like to discuss. The pace is lower than when I started, but I prefer doing less if the content is better. Last Sunday, I shared a new one about using Craft to build a dashboard for my creative activities. Craft is not Notion when creating such content, but I managed to set up something useful.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Manuel Moreale is writing about doing self-promotion as a blogger. He seems to be debating with himself about the good or bad of doing self-promotion. Another guy is also questioning the whole idea of asking for support. Should he ask for some support from his readers or not? Personally, I ask for support from time to time. I try to do it with moderation. Yet, we shouldn't be shy of doing it when it is done with taste and politely. 2️⃣ Today, Saturday, I went to a craft and local products market. I bought some stuff there, including a handmade greeting card. I like to support local creators. Looking at what these creators do makes me think of myself, except I have nothing to sell but everything to give.

“The days of getting a social network to grow by importing an address book are gone — instead, it is about using, reusing, and using the social graph again to launch new products.” — Om Malik

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ The future of AI in video production looks more and more scary. Take a look. 2️⃣ I'm increasingly interested in Apple's upcoming foray into generative AI for its operating systems, probably within Siri. I hope Apple will use iMessage as a way to interact with Siri augmented capabilities. Wavelength, a messaging service, does exactly that.

This is a screenshot of the Wavelength messaging app’s main window. On the left sidebar, we can see “AI,” which can answer any request, just like talking to someone. I like this type of integration.

“Be quick to praise, but slow to criticize.” — Matt Birchler

I wish you a great week!

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This newsletter edition is also available as a Craft shared document here. This week's edition is based on template version 1.2.5— 2024-04-17 and was put together with ❤️ on a 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft and many subscriptions! Support my work (Paypal) or become a supporter with Ko-fi!