Creative summary

My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024-30

I skipped last week’s edition because I was working on other things. I’m back!

JF Martin

Aug 4, 2024 — 11 min read

A popular photo that I published during the week on Glass

👨🏻‍💻 31 posts 😃
🏞️ 12 photos shared 😃
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 1 YouTube video published 😃
This week’s edition covers a two-week range of activities

👤 Personal

1️⃣ It's been three weeks since I returned from vacation, and I now feel up to speed with my creative hobby. I've written several blog posts and processed most of my Nikon Z f photos. I've started sharing many of them on Pixelfed and Glass, but it will take time to go through all of my best ones. 2️⃣ Recently, I was chilling with my partner in our pool. We were both silent and were enjoying the present moment. After a while, I broke the silence by saying I had nothing to say. Yep, that is so me. My partner said the same. This silence felt heavy to me without knowing why, as if I always had something to say. Why this constant pressure to fill our spaces with words and images? The following quote is spot on:

“Most of us aren’t self-aware enough to realize that the more we speak, the less we say.” — Om Malik

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I always find it sad to see content like this website disappear from the internet. There should be an official place for hosting this content, at no cost. Such a place could be founded by users, companies, and government agencies so that we can keep some memory of genuinely helpful and widely respected websites like AppleVis (no link is shared here because the link will become broken soon).

📖 Reading

1️⃣ I've read a few interesting tidbits in the past two weeks. I stumbled upon this blog while browsing my Micro.blog timeline. Someone shared a link to a post from this blog, and I decided to check it out. To my delight, I found it quite interesting. The blog covers various topics, including blogging, technology, and the open web. Another blog discovery: this one talks about tech but touches on other subjects, too. 2️⃣ I finally got Omnivore Digest to work, and it's really great. 3️⃣ Here are two quotes that I think are worth sharing with you:

In ‘Surely Microsoft Isn’t Blaming EU for Its Problems?’, Om Malik writes:

“…regulators are so woefully out of touch with actual technology that they not only fail to understand how it all works, but they can’t even contemplate unintended consequences of their regulations.”

Jeff Perry on Google’s exclusive access deal to Reddit content for indexing:

“This could set a precedent for other sites like Hacker News and Pinterest to start searching for the highest bidder to make their content exclusive on another search engine. Eventually other sites might do the same in hopes to thwart the serial scraping of their content for AI models to learn from and make a few bucks in the process. It is just another byproduct of the Enshittification of the web.” — Jeff Perry

A challenge for so many of us these days:

“One of my favorite hobbies used to be reading books. Now, it feels impossible to read one page without having to backtrack and read that page again (and sometimes...again) because I have no idea what I just read. My mind is unable to keep focus.” — Veronique blog

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ Do real-life people know I'm writing stuff online, on a personal blog? That's the interesting question this blog post tried to answer and elaborate on. Very few of my friends and colleagues know what I'm doing online. I’m rather shy about it, and I'm not sure why. I prefer to write about whatever subjects I want without feeling judged by someone who knows me. 2️⃣ I tried to summarize and share my observations about using the iPad Pro with an external display. It's a new possibility since I upgraded to an M4 iPad Pro a few weeks ago, and I thought it was more interesting than writing another iPad Pro review. 3️⃣ I read an article about the aftermath of Meta blocking news sharing in Canada. After a year, we have a better idea of the consequences, which aren't what people thought they would be. That being said, I'm utterly frustrated by Meta's behaviour regarding fake news. They still allow them to spread like wildfire. 4️⃣ Asking ChatGPT what a specific blog post I will publish means is useful. This idea came from Manton, and I tried it. It really helps my writing. It is different than asking, "Improve my writing.” 5️⃣ Writing can be easy for some, but it might be challenging for others, like for him. Motivation might be lacking, too. As a blogger, I believe both are true: hard work and motivation are sometimes scarce. I often tell myself to write in order just to help me organize my ideas, perfect them, and learn something from them, not for others. 6️⃣ Don’t miss my monthly post digest published on August 1st!

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I'm done processing my travel photos from my travel to Croatia. It always takes me quite a while to process the last few remaining shots. Those aren't necessarily the best ones, but they still provide helpful visual data points. 2️⃣ I discovered this amateur photographer on Glass last week. Sara has quite a few visual gems. 3️⃣ Glass is about to introduce a new and highly requested feature: support for photo series! Here is an example from one of Glass’ founders. According to their preview, the series has a description, a photo count, and a Mansory-style grid. I can't wait to try them out with a few of my photos. I'm holding off sharing some of my photos until they go live.

Remember the movie “The Day After” back in the eighties? Well, I do and these four images made me think about it.

Series are coming to Glass and here is an example.

That series of images is superb, especially the one with shadows of kids playing in water vapour.

If you want a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the making of Kino, a video recording app for the iPhone, this article tells it all. Must read.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Apple Maps is (finally) available in beta on the web. From my experience, it’s a relatively solid first version, and I’m glad to have one more option to get away from Google. 2️⃣ I'm choosing not to upgrade my iPhone this year. Still, I'll likely consider it next year, especially given the intriguing rumours surrounding the upcoming models. The iPhone 17 Slim (or whatever name it adopts) appears unusual and fascinating. Could this signify a new direction in the evolution of the iPhone? 3️⃣ Apple is tweaking their Apple Intelligence release schedule: nothing will come publicly before iOS 18.1. It may sound bad, but I prefer Apple to take the time to make it good. Apple doesn't have the leisure to fuck it up because Siri is living on borrowed time. 4️⃣ Speaking of which, Apple Intelligence officially enters beta for developers, and according to this video, initial feature sets seem to work relatively smoothly. I decided to install iPadOS 18.1 on my iPad Pro to give it a shot myself. The onboarding experience is relatively polished. In less than fifteen minutes, I officially entered the Apple Intelligence beta. My experience with Apple's app is rather positive, while my experience with third-party apps is a mixed bag. Some text proofing works with Craft in specific conditions, and I get better results in Ulysses. Yet, developers will have to work on providing a better experience in their respective applications. It will take time for all this stuff to mature, get to Canada, and support the French Canadian language. 5️⃣ Apple made a lot of money in their last quarter. Services are the star of the quarter with a big jump. All the charts are available in this SixColors post.

“In a few years, people will not remember exactly when the various Apple Intelligence components were released. However, they will remember whether or not they worked.” From MacSparky

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I started and completed reworking how my weekly newsletter editions are created and stored within Craft. I used Craft Daily notes initially, but I recently changed my mind because of a few issues. The problem was that I needed to transpose all the content of past editions into a newly created Craft document while preserving all the shared links. It was easy to do but rather tedious. This doesn't bring much value in the end, but as a perfectionist, it makes a difference in my mind. The index page now looks gorgeous.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ OpenAI announced searchGPT. SearchGPT will compete against Google and Bing, the owners of which are Microsoft, a significant investor in ChatGPT. For now, ladies and gentlemen, the good news is that there won't be ads… and results will probably be as good if not better because of this! 2️⃣ I made a video with my thoughts and observations on a teaser about « Project Powerful,» the codename for a future Craft release. 3️⃣ Vernissage for Pixelfed becomes Impressia for Pixelfed. 4️⃣ Unread is now available on the Mac, and I tested it again to see if I like it better than Reeder. I’m not sure. 5️⃣ iStats Menu 7 just launched, and it's a significant upgrade! Everything has been redone, and it just looks gorgeous. I’ve used iStats Menu on my main computer since version 3 but not on my MacBook Air, where I used Stats instead, a free utility. I wonder if I should upgrade to a multi-license version to use it everywhere. 6️⃣ That’s a weird question on Reddit (Reddit is so full of weirdos anyway) regarding the future of Culture Code’s and Things 3, their well-regarded task management app. As a big fan of Culture Code’s Things 3, I don’t see why this question pops up now. The application is frequently updated, and most users seem happy with it. Sure, Things 4 is still being discussed by many, but without official words from the developer, I don’t see that as an issue. 7️⃣I’ve been testing Tapestry recently since it came out in beta, and I must say that I’m a bit disappointed. I suspect an issue with this type of application: content velocity can flood any timeline, rendering the experience similar to scrolling any timeline without much-added value. It’s still early in the application development, but … we will see. My sentiment doesn’t fall in line with Manton’s.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ This animation depicts a concerning view of global CO2 emissions over a few days. The pulsating nature of the emissions results from the day-night cycle. We can clearly see industrial zones all over the eastern portion of the US with some denser spots with a lot of emissions.

The video discusses the desire among many users to run macOS on an iPad, highlighting the limitations of iPadOS compared to macOS despite the iPad's powerful hardware. Leading up to WWDC, there were hopes for significant updates to iPadOS, but instead, only minor features like a calculator app were introduced. The author experimented with running macOS on an iPad using screen mirroring via Sidecar, which allowed for some use of macOS apps with the Apple Pencil, but noted the experience was less than ideal due to the lack of touch optimization.
The discussion also includes insights from developer Riley Testut, who explains the technical challenges of porting macOS apps to iPadOS and the potential of Apple's Catalyst framework for making iPad apps available on Mac. Nilay Patel of The Verge provides a business perspective, suggesting that Apple's reluctance to merge macOS and iPadOS is driven by financial incentives, particularly the revenue from the App Store, which would be disrupted if macOS were available on iPads.
Ultimately, the video concludes that while the hardware is capable, Apple's decision to keep iPadOS and macOS separate is likely a strategic choice to maintain control over app distribution and revenue. The iPad may continue to receive updates that make it more like a laptop, but it won't replace macOS anytime soon.

Here’s a video about a superb video recording app called Kino. I share this here because I think this app exemplifies application design and attention to detail. If video recording is your thing, consider looking at Kino!

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Food for thoughts, here.

"AI is not human, and behind its programmatic simulation of human speech and artificial emotional intelligence, it’s just a machine with all the humanity of a toaster." — Mike Elgan

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ I'm on the waitlist to experiment with SearchGPT. There are 10K slots. I'm not sure I'll make it. 2️⃣ Craft is coming with something really cool and powerful that will transform my use of Craft in many ways. I have so many things to think about. This will require some massive time investment but it will be worth it! Stay tuned.

OpenAI has launched SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine designed to compete with Google and Bing. Unlike traditional search engines, SearchGPT provides conversational summaries of search results, including citations and links to original sources. This prototype is currently available to a select group of users and publishers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic, ensuring proper content attribution and fostering positive relationships with content creators.
SearchGPT integrates OpenAI's AI models with real-time web searches, offering not only text but also visual answers, such as AI-generated videos and images. This feature aims to enhance the search experience, especially for visual learners. OpenAI plans to eventually integrate these search capabilities into ChatGPT, potentially making it a more powerful tool for users.

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 1.4 — Thu, Aug 1 and was put together with ❤️ on a 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft Docs and many supporting subscriptions! Support my work (Paypal) or become a supporter with Ko-fi!