Creative summary

My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-19

After a short break, I’m happy to resume my weekly creative summaries! This one is about a trip, a new iPad and processing images and my job.

JF Martin

May 19, 2024 — 8 min read

One of my recently processed photos — Nice, France

👨🏻‍💻 88 posts 😃
🏞️ 21 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 One YouTube video published 😃
These cover a four-week period since the last weekly newsletter.

👤 Personal

1️⃣ Friday night, I talked with my wife about my job and future. I shared with her that I sometimes contemplate the idea of changing jobs. She brought up the idea of freelancing instead of working for a company. At first, this idea didn’t resonate too much with me. I'm not this type of entrepreneur. That being said, I can see many advantages to this type of professional life: having a say on which type of client I want to work for, deciding when I want to take vacations or take a break, deciding which apps, services and tools that I use to support my work. The latter is an important one. Being confined in the Microsoft 365 world is depressing. Anyway, it's something that I need to continue thinking about, for sure.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I discovered the difficulties of moving off Photomator edit files (with the corresponding .DNG file) from the MacBook Air to an iPad. It appears that Photomator cannot open the .edit files. I posted my question on the Photomator community on the Pixelmator website. My move off Adobe is simple, but there are ramifications to this move that I still feel today. Catalog management and automatic syncing across devices are commodities but must-haves. 2️⃣ I discovered this blog thanks to a blogroll. It's fun to discover new bloggers.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ A post that made me rethink my online presence: am I sharing too much? Am I sharing the right thing? One thing that I often notice: when I'm sharing personal things about me, my challenges, my struggles (yes, sometimes I do write about those), this usually triggers the most feedback. 2️⃣ I'm trying to use more and more Omnivore as a read-later service. This week, I checked what's new on Discord’s Omnivore channel and discovered that Omnivore now offers a content digest feature. Every day, Omnivore can generate a summary of your recently added articles, thanks to some AI magic, and send it to your inbox, Omnivore account, or the Omnivore iPhone app. I read a few of them, and they are absolutely time-savers.

“...the more power we’re given, the more some people feel the need to get back to a more intimate space, a space where things move slower, where connections and interactions are given time to develop.” — Manual Moreale

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ During my one-week trip to the French Riviera, I was reminded that writing while travelling, for me at least, is not something that I'm good at. Non-standard schedules prompted by the desire to visit places and do things while exploring a new part of the world don’t allow me to sit down and write. The only thing that endured shuffled schedules is doing photography. 2️⃣ I finished writing my Craft release report for version 2.8, which came out during the week. Those reports are fun to produce but are available only to the Craft Bible 2.0 subscribers. 3️⃣ I shared some thoughts about every iPad I owned since 2010.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I took many pictures using my brand new Nikon Zf during my trip last week. The experience shows that I made the right buying decision. There is something special and satisfying when taking pictures with this camera. I'm not an expert at digital cameras, but I wouldn't be surprised by the Nikon Zf becoming one of the best digital cameras in recent times. I'll have to upload and process my images using a less-than-optimal photo-processing workflow with Synology Photos and Photomator. 2️⃣ I took fewer images with my iPhone during that trip due to owning the Nikon Zf. 3️⃣ I'll have to consider selling my Nikon D750 on eBay now. 4️⃣ Unsplash keeps diversifying itself with the announcement of support for illustrations. That's cool. I'm still using Unsplash occasionally, even if ChatGPT can generate a lot of stuff that would fit the illustrative purpose. 5️⃣ I discovered a new street photographer on Glass: Leanne Staples. 6️⃣ I didn't share many photos this week; I was too busy processing my next batch of images.

An interesting talk about doing self-portraits and acting. Wonders images in this video and on her Glass profile page.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Apple finally released their updated and spec-bumped iPads. From the rather fat iPad Air (which weighs more than the new Pro) to the rather ultra-thin iPad Pro (which Apple prefers instead of making the battery bigger), we've got something new to shew on for a while. From my readings, reactions and sentiments are a mixed bag. I'll have to wait for the review to see if this holds. 2️⃣ I’ve been contemplating getting the iPad Pro with the nano-textured screen. One reason is the expectation that using an Apple Pencil on this matte surface would help create a paper-like experience when writing and drawing. I have not seen a comment about this in commentary posts published since the Apple keynote. But there is one problem: I'll have to go with the 1TB model to get the nano-textured display, which is above my storage needs and costs much more. The good side is that I get the fastest iPad Pro, with 10 CPU cores instead of nine. Coming from a 2018 iPad Pro, according to Apple, I can expect a tablet to be up to 10x faster. 3️⃣ When I sold my old iPad Pro, I discovered I was missing the iPad form factor. The full-screen-only device fills a void in my computing usage spectrum. I can't wait to get a new one. 4️⃣ Is Apple getting more and more conservative? This post from Om Malik about the Crushed! ad and how Apple can no longer make too many mistakes in the public space, which makes me think that Apple is becoming increasingly conservative. Just like DHH wrote, I'm too starting to hate the mainstream mega-corporation that Apple has become. And it's partly my fault as an avid consumer of Apple products. 5️⃣ All reviews and unboxing videos about the latest iPad are listed in the following MacRumors article. It’s a must-read if you are about to buy one of these new iPads. Get ready to learn that the iPad hardware is great, but iPadOS is not. Tiring. That said, Federico Viticci has some valid concrete points. Ok, enough about the iPad.

“An iPad does everything and nothing well. It’s the eternal teenager of computers that doesn’t want to grow up and commit.” — Oliver Reichenstein

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Craft v2.8.0 came out and brings a slew of unexpected additions and quality-of-life improvements. Watch my release video here. 2️⃣ iA Presenter will soon allow sharing presentations online with automatic device formatting. So, depending on the device visiting the presentation, the content will automatically adjust to the screen size. I could see this feature being useful for some of my upcoming projects. Imagine having an online presentation introducing a concept or a feature to complement a shared document in Craft. 3️⃣ I spent some time testing a screen recording app called Screen Studio. One feature that I think is cool is the support for automatic zooming of the screen content tied to the mouse pointer's position. Screenflow doesn't support that; it has to be done manually with Screenflow video transitions and actions added to a portion of the video recording stream. Yet, Screen Studio seems very minimalistic in features; I'll pass on that for now. 4️⃣ OpenAI made a few important announcements that are too important not to mention in this newsletter. Is the ChatGPT bot too flirty now? That might be the case. MacGPT already supports the OpenAI GPT4o model! 5️⃣ CleanShot 4.7 came out with many new features and tweaks. It's one of my favourite Mac utilities.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ My “What's new in Craft v2.8.0” video was released along with the official app release. From research to recording and post-recording processing, it took me about 3 hours to produce this video. Am I being too slow at this? I wish the Craft team would refer to my video in their release notes. It's not going to happen. 2️⃣ For the second time, I asked one of the Craft team members if I could do a recorded interview with one of their team members. I didn't get a no but didn't get a yes, either. I did one such interview with Manton Reece, the Micro.blog founder, and I found myself at ease doing this type of video. My fingers are crossed for the next one.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I recently bought a magazine about home decoration and improvement projects to find design ideas for my upcoming home improvement project. I cannot remember the last time I bought a high-quality magazine. Although the web has profoundly changed our content consumption sources, holding a high-quality magazine in our hands is still satisfying. 2️⃣ Yesterday was the Micro.camp event, and I attended most of it. It was fun and not perfect, which is part of the Micro.blog fun. At one point, when Manton was ready to show the audience two new features, he found out that his Mac requested permission to share his screen with Zoom, and the latter had to be restarted, which would put an end to the session. It was embarrassing and funny for him, provided we don't take this too seriously.

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 1.2.5— 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!