My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-28

I guess there are many sways to create contrasts...

JF Martin on Glass

👨🏻‍💻 13 post(s) 🙂
🏞️ 4 photo(s) shared 😔
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👤 Personal

1️⃣ After a refreshing three-week hiatus, courtesy of a wonderful vacation in Croatia, I'm thrilled to dive back into my writing activities and bring you this newsletter. The trip was fantastic and provided a much-needed escape from my digital routine. I hope you enjoy this lighter-than-usual edition.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I'm exploring iPadOS 18 on my M4 iPad Pro and iOS 18 on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I like it so far, but spotting the differences is hard unless you know where to look. On the iPad, Stage Manager is still... Stage Manager and I kept it turned off because it's not as useful on the iPad without an external monitor as on the Mac. The fun stuff will only ship early next year, though. 2️⃣ Google is no longer indexing website content by default, according to this blog post. I don't know since when but I find this to be highly problematic. We all know that Google's search results quality isn’t what it used to be, but this decision seems to accelerate Google's relevancy. Yet, how does someone get on the map? 3️⃣ Matt Birchler talks about social network behaviour when it comes to posts containing links to external websites:

“It's been generally accepted over the years that platforms like Twitter and Meta (Facebook, Threads, Instagram) are more likely to surface posts that don't include any links to external sites.” — Matt Birchler

I had no idea social networks operated in such a manner, and now that I do, I'm glad I'm not on any of those platforms. I've always believed that algorithm-based timelines are toxic and should be regulated. However, as a creator, how do you promote your work on the open web? More than ever, I feel the need for an open web.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I brought a book with me on my trip to Croatia, but I never even opened it. This is typical of me—always finding something more engaging than reading. There's definitely something off about that.

Personal computers, enterprise software, and entertainment are perfect examples of the U.S. coming up with newer use cases for those technologies, leading to their future mutations. China’s manufacturing and logistics focus has helped it take the lead in many markets that need manufacturing scale. Robotics, with AI, is simply the leading edge of that expertise. — Om Malik on the rise of applied robotics in manufacturing in China

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ Don't miss my blog posts monthly summary generated and sent to subscribers on July 1st. 2️⃣ My Digital Legacy Management Guide was completed just before my vacations. It was a great little project, and I have managed to sell one copy of it via Gumroad so far. If this is something that might interest you, have a peek here. 3️⃣ Why am I predominantly citing the same sources or authors? What does this reveal about my reading habits? 4️⃣ On Friday, I shared a hot take about the worldwide computer outage. I first wrote it in French then used Craft AI assistant to translate it in English. Again, I should use this workflow more often as it helps me write and publish faster, especially when current events are unfolding at a fast pace.

Introducing Writebook

You know, it’s really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems. But it’s surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or…

The makers of HEY Mail at 37Signals are launching Writebook, a self-publishing service for online books. I like this quite a lot, and it gave me some ideas, but having to install this thing myself, even if it is simple, as they say, is a bit of a dealbreaker for me. But I applaud the initiative.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Now that I know which camera settings are required, NEF files can normally be browsed in Mac Finder. My photo processing workflow using Photomator is a bit simpler, but there are still some hurdles: Photomator on my M4 iPad Pro is far from stable. I’m feeding the company support team to figure out what is happening. Problems range from the inability to save the current editing session to strange behaviour when browsing, opening and closing files. Restarting Photomator helps, but after a few minutes, the problems start again. For now, I have decided to limit my usage of Photomator on my iPad. 2️⃣ I took close to 900 photos using my Nikon and many hundreds more with my iPhone during my trip to Croatia. There was a clear decreasing trend toward the end of the trip of taking fewer and fewer pictures. One possible reason was the unbearable temperatures aggravated by high humidity. 3️⃣ Is film photography more ageless than digital photography? Someone thinks so. 4️⃣ Photomator support for new RAW image formats keeps expanding, and it is good news because until now, I have had to set up my Nikon Zf to create less optimized RAW files (bigger).

“Nikon users can enjoy previewing and editing photos taken using High Efficiency (HE) and High Efficiency Star (HE*) compression algorithms. These algorithms are designed to maintain high image quality while significantly reducing file sizes, making RAW photos faster to open and easier to store.”

Greg Morris

Re-editing old thrown out photos and found a good one.

Greg Morris

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ If you want to buy a new Mac, consider looking at this tool made by Apple to help you decide which Mac model is best for you. I tried it by describing what I was doing with my Mac and was offered a 13-inch MacBook Air. The most limiting factor was probably my budget, with a maximum of 1500$. 2️⃣ A guy entered the Apple Campus right on time for the WWDC24 conference and filmed himself during his little journey on Apple Park. I love those videos because they cover something that no other videos do when covering WWDC. Oh, and I can’t get enough of Apple Park videos! 3️⃣ Ads are coming to Apple News? Probably, and it is too bad. 4️⃣ visionOS and Peak Apple by Manton Reece: He is right. We will see small innovations and great tweaks to already good products, but that’s what it is about for Apple. Is Apple intelligence the next Apple? Too early to tell. 5️⃣ This is how it looks when someone is tired of Apple, the big tech corporation it has become. There is some value in Morri’s take. 6️⃣ I’m looking forward to the redesign of the Photos app of iOS 18. As reported by MacStories, Apple executives explain some of the reasons behind the redesign. 7️⃣ Nothing, the company that tries hard to create unique smartphone designs, is at it again and has developed the CMF Phone 1. Besides the utterly dull moniker, the design of this smartphone is unique and very nice. Not only is the hardware different, but the operating system UI is different, too, which creates a unique combo. I wish Apple tried harder to divert their design away from the iPhone.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Ghost is progressing toward adding ActivityPub support to its platform. I can't wait for this to go live, but we are probably many weeks, if not months, before the official release. Why is it so cool? Well, people on Fediverse might become followers of my website without going through the usual Ghost sign-up process to receive updates and even reply with a comment to an article. 2️⃣ Wavelength, the messaging service that John Gruber was proud to support, is no longer operating. I had the opportunity to try it, and I really liked it. They quickly added AI to their platform so that you could include an AI bot in a conversation to ask questions. I tried to create a group of active users from Micro.blog, we were fifty at its peak, but the group wasn't active. 3️⃣ This is not directly related to creativity, but this past Friday, a major computer bug was affecting many computers worldwide. It was a dark Friday. I shared some thoughts about it.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Here is a very touching video from Tiego Forte about his next moves in his personal life. This guy impresses me a lot with the things his has done and shared online. For a creative person like me, I find him inspiring.

Back in the eighties and nineties, I was an avid fan of Michael Jackson’s music and videos. His exceptional talent in both music and dance captivated me. This one-minute video features two street dancers performing to the tune of "P.Y.T." It brings back wonderful memories and showcases some truly remarkable dancing.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ If you want to celebrate the small and personal web, made possible by individual creators, you might be interested in this. Tinyawards is all about finding and spreading the word about little website gems that put a more human flavour to the web. 2️⃣ Free access is not the same as free to use according to Viticci of MacStories referring to AI bot scrapping website during AI models training. Agree? Yes. Yet, personally, I don’t care too much about AI bots using my content for training purposes. 3️⃣ The tiny house that I'd like to own and live in. 4️⃣ I’m dubious about Microsoft’s AI boss and his views on using the open web for models training. I’m not ok with this view of the open web. I’m ok with my content for model training but I’m not ok with this view. I don’t know why and it seems contradictory. Don’t miss Manuel Moreale’s reactions to Microsoft AI boss.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I definitely need to restart creating YouTube videos. My next project is a three-part course on Craft, and I might start working on it this weekend.

I wish you a great week!

📅 Meta

My Weekly Creative Summaries Index