The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2024-52

Some highlights of my digital contribution activities for 2024.
👨🏻‍💻 A few hundred posts (more than 750 on Micro.blog alone!) 😃
🏞️ Many hundred photos shared 😃
📺 16 YouTube videos published 😃
This is the last edition of 2024. Happy New Year, and see you for the next edition in early 2025. Did you know that you can send me wishes using my blog’s guestbook?
The following graph shows the total page views to numericcitizen.me for 2024 compared to 2023 (light gray line). The trend was positive for most of 2024 but again points downwards near the end of 2024, returning to the 2023 level.

👤 Personal

1️⃣ It's the time of the year when we look back and wonder what has been done and what hasn't. According to my 2024 Flighty Passport, I travelled quite a lot. I love those visual summaries. Raycast is giving one to subscribers, too. See below below. 2️⃣ The following quote could apply to anyone, not just products. 3️⃣ My 2024 year in review is out, just in time! It was a rather busy year.

"To know what a product is means knowing what it is not. It took me years to figure this out." — Manton Reece

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ If Legos are your thing (either now or in your childhood), and user interface and user experience are also your thing, please don't miss this article about control panel design found in different Lego sets. I didn't know you could have such a level of detail in a seemingly mundane Lego block. 2️⃣ Flipboard is on the verge of launching a new service that looks like a Tapestry competitor: a social feed aggregator called Surf. I put my name on the waiting list. As a Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS feed consumer, I'm looking for this type of app with excitement. Om Malik, in his article on Crazy Stupid Tech blog, shares some thoughts and hopes about Surf. It's really looking promising. 3️⃣ Speaking of Tapestry, the application development is nearly complete. As a Kickstarter backer of this project, I received my perks and discovered that my name is on the credits page. I didn’t remember that it was part of the perks. That's nice. I'm still not convinced by the overall visual design of Tapestry. Another challenge is configuring multiple feeds, some much more noisy than others, like in the following example where The Verge is massively taking over my timeline. The lack of a native Mac version of Tapestry is also surprising, but I think it will end in 2025.

Flipboard launches Surf, a new app for browsing the open social web | TechCrunch

Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to

TechCrunchSarah Perez

📖 Reading

1️⃣ The Verge is launching a subscription. At first, it looks like a good idea if you are one of their readers. The consequence is that most stories will be paywalled and RSS feeds truncated. Those paying for the subscription should expect to see ads, but beautiful ones, if such a thing exists. Until I read this in their announcement, I considered subscribing. But not, thanks. Just like Jarrod, I'm very skeptical. Manuel Moreale, too. According to him, the number of ads shown to subscribers should be zero. I love his link post; don't miss it. 2️⃣ After reading two recent blog posts by Manuel Moreale, I published a linkpost about them, which sparked a conversation that didn't go well. If only I knew in advance. I'll continue reading his blog, but these posts reminded me about my subscription, so I decided to pause that. Manuel responded both privately and publicly to my linkpost. Judging by his reaction, I'm not sure he appreciated it, and then I felt terrible about all this. I should have remembered that he likes email conversations… not everything is worth sharing publicly.

“Books are like seeds.They can lie dormant for centuries, but they may also produce flowers in the most unpromising soil. These books are the repositories of the knowledge of our species and of our long evolutionary journey from genes to brains to books." — Carl Sagan

“I still think that using ChatGPT to search information is a waste of time. If I have to come up with an extremely detailed prompt to nudge ChatGPT into a meaningful response AND I still have to verify its response by checking the sources, then I'll just do a traditional web search and collate the info myself. I’ve been doing this for ages and got faster and better over time. I prefer to train myself than the AI.” — Riccardo Mori

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ Writing is about remembering. That's why I wrote this series about every Mac I ever owned. I recently shared the latest addition to the series, remembering the M1 Mac mini. Using this device for four years was a lovely ride. 2️⃣ Just write, he said. Oops, he wrote. 3️⃣ Manuel Moreale created his People & Blogs account on Bluesky. Plus, he made a Bluesky starter pack with P&B guests. You can find me in it. The thing about the Bluesky starter pack is that I would pin them to my profile rather than follow every member. Thankfully, he also created a list you can pin to your home. Bluesky is cool. 4️⃣ I published an update to my content creator workflows and digital tools right before Christmas. It might be worth a look if you are curious about the apps and services I depend on to create and share my stories and articles. 5️⃣ Buttondown, the service for publishing newsletters, posted a valuable resource for creators: a pricing calculator for the service costs based on the monthly subscription price and the number of paid and free subscribers. I'm using Ghost. It's not the cheapest option, but it's not the most expensive either. Creators might select Ghost because of its newsletter feature. I chose Ghost as a web-hosting service, which also comes with a newsletter service that wasn't possible on WordPress. 6️⃣ Writing regularly can be challenging. Lou Plummer shared a blog post about fifty ideas for writing blog posts. I like idea #38. 7️⃣ I shared some thoughts about Medium. Medium readers and writers are covered in this article.

“Started working on a blog post today and had to actually go do some research to make sure I was right. This is a benefit of occasional long-form writing. It’s a way to refine how you feel about something, learning a bunch in the process." — Manton Reece

“Substack has to convince you to start a paid publication. It has to push people towards paywalling as much content as possible because that’s how it makes money.” — Manuel Moreale

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I got an email notification recently from Unsplash that one of my photos crossed the 10K downloads mark. Cool. 2️⃣ Glass doesn’t get enough credit and exposure, in my view. I’m happy for them to see Petapixel cover their recent additions to the service: photo series. 3️⃣ AOWS (Adrian Vila on Patreon) shared many photos like this one taken during a short trip to the desert in the US Southwest. Watch the video he made documenting his time spent there. 4️⃣ Great wallpaper here discovered on Glass (subscription required). 5️⃣ My Pixelfed usage is constantly decreasing.

Castles in the Sky, a Series by Julian — Glass

A collection of castles and similar old structures

Fav Photos Found in 2024: 50 Photos by 50 Photographers

We went back through every single photography feature from the past 12 months and chose 50 photos by 50 photographers to represent the range of talent we uncovered this year!

BOOOOOOOM!Staff

“Flickr, once a pioneering photo-sharing platform, has seen its prominence wane due to competition from Instagram and Facebook, along with mismanagement during its Yahoo ownership. Now under SmugMug, it offers features like ad-free browsing, high-quality image display, metadata retention, and a desktop-first design that appeal to photographers dissatisfied with modern social media. While its community groups and interaction levels have diminished, Flickr remains a viable platform for archiving, portfolios, and sharing high-quality images. Renewed interest suggests it may yet attract a new generation, though high subscription costs and limited updates pose challenges to a full resurgence.”

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ For Apple history fans, don't miss this documentary about the iPhone 4 prototype leak in 2010. Great story. Unexpected twist. Recommended. 2️⃣ Denny Henke, the author behind Beardy Guy Creative, seems to like Apple Image Playground. He shares his thoughts about it and some great results. I'm not that successful with it so far. I wish he would have shared his prompts with each image. Here is one of my experiments below using keywords such as “computer, fireworks, work, starry night, sci-fi”. 3️⃣ Image Playground is part of Apple Intelligence. Another feature that comes with it is a notifications summary. I have mixed results with it, and it seems that the BBC doesn't like it. They complained to Apple over misleading shooting headlines. Oops. 4️⃣ For the techy guys, the Timac blog published the annual review of programming languages used by Apple to assemble what we call “iOS,” this time covering the iOS 18 release. Swift and SwiftUI are slowly but surely taking over and could become the most used languages by Apple engineers when writing software. As an IT professional who knows a few things about software development, I find it surprising that Swift, a high-level language, can write low-level software around the Secure Enclave—another surprise: UIKit-based binaries are still growing but at a much lower pace than Swift. I would expect UIkit usage to decrease instead. Strange. 5️⃣ Basic Apple Guy published his Apple 2024 year in review, which is well worth a read. 6️⃣ One more thing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Great take on how Apple fared in 2024. 7️⃣ Why Apple doesn’t make a search engine? Eddy Cue explained why, and MacRumors summarized it.

"I really think Apple should get out of the ads business, starting with the App Store. I find it corrupting, ugly, distasteful, and most of all an anti-premium experience." — The Shape of Everything

"All of the marketing and positioning from Apple for this phone revolved about Apple Intelligence, and the few Apple Intelligence features they're released so far are pretty bad: notification summaries are a meme, the image generation is atrocious, the UI for writing tools makes Grammarly look like the most refined software in the world, and Siri got a glow up in animation only, but remains just as useful as she's been for years. Oh, and from what I can tell from surveys and my own personal group of family and friends, none of these features have any real traction" — Matt Birchler in his 2024 iPhone report card. Ouch.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I finally made it to the Ghost ActivityPub beta. So far, it's not working well; It seems broken. I'm looking forward to testing the integration with Micro.blog and Mastodon when the bugs get fixed. 2️⃣ I started redesigning my company's website. The first step is to document the current website content structure using Mindnote Next. I'll use a beta version of RealMac software's Elements for this project. I can't wait to try my hands on this. It will be the first time I'm designing a website from scratch. It will be fun. I'll probably give a try at redesigning Micro.blog website, too.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Dear Apple, what are the apps of the year? See the Apple announcement in the Newsroom. I'm not using any winning apps, except Lumy, but on the iPhone, not the Apple Watch. Surprisingly, Lightroom is among the winners. Who knew. 2️⃣ Ghost, the service where this newsletter is published, keeps improving. They added the ability to set a custom font to the website, which I use to make a change. This website's heading font and body fonts have been tweaked a little. Also, comments received an update with the sorting option and quick replies. Finally, ActivityPub, a protocol at the base of the Fediverse, is now in beta on my website. It's still buggy, but the idea that someone on Mastodon could follow my blog and reply to an article using their Mastodon account is really cool. 3️⃣ iA Presenter 1.4 was released with presentation sharing where users can share their presentations online. It's cool to have this integrated into the app. You can find the announcement here. Speaking of presentations, Information Architect also published a blog post on how to create structured presentations. Of course, it's even better when it is done using iA Presenter! The article barely mentions it, which is good, so it doesn't look like a marketing plug. 4️⃣ Halide 3.0 is coming in 2025 with a few tent pole features like colour grading, new HDR processing and a complete redesign. Their blog post tells it all. I'm not a Halide user, but I admire what this company does in the crowded camera apps category. 5️⃣ Colin Devroe shared an article about how he uses AnyBox, a great bookmark manager, that I use myself. I must admit that his process of managing his collection is clever. Please give it a look.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ To conclude 2024, I produced two videos: Craft 2024 year in review, and the other about Micro. The blog's new features have been introduced in the last few months. I won't have the same recording environment in the coming months as I'm temporarily moving out of my house: A home improvement project starts in early January.

“when a new phone comes out, or there’s an interesting camera I want to take a look at, YouTube is where I head to find video reviews. However, I think most of that is because web searching is so broken that it’s the only place I can reliably find what I am looking for. To me YouTube is transactional. I want to watch a few reviews of a new gadget, and that’s the place to find them all in one place.” — Greg Morris

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ If I could write one thing to remember for the year ahead: own your data, and use open platforms. Instagram is not such a platform. Meta cutting off API access to DayOne reminds me of third-party Twitter clients being cut off by Twitter back in the day.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Well, that is it, folks! We made it to the end of 2024! I'm really looking forward to continuing this newsletter in 2025. I hope you enjoyed the ride so far as much as I did putting this together.

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦