The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-17

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I'm going on a two-week vacation and will be back on May 24. Don't expect the next newsletter edition before that. 2️⃣ You should expect more photo posts and travelling notes on my blog.

"Treat AI like your highly productive assistant who must be aggressively micromanaged" — Medium Newsletter

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ More like this. I hope more and more bloggers or website owners will stop cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter (X) and Thread. I consider these place as digital cancer triggers and we must stop feeding them with our precious content. 2️⃣ Don't miss my April blog posts digest. This is a monthly summary of all my blog posts on Micro.blog.

"In keeping with our desire to model the behavior we want to see in the world, we have stopped posting TidBITS to X/Twitter and Facebook in protest against the harm they cause to civil society. Many other channels remain available, including Bluesky and Mastodon." — TidBITS

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Was photography discovered or invented? That's a great question Nuno Alves on Medium (paywall) asked and tentatively answered the question, which I reproduce a few interesting takeaways here below. 2️⃣ Here this week’s newly discovered photographer: Tolar Armitt on Glass. He offers many photos with a strange vibe to them, like this one or that one.

Because our purpose, intent and mindset influence how we shoot.

• If you see photography primarily as a discovery, you may lean toward minimal interference — embracing spontaneity, shooting in natural light, and prioritizing authenticity.
• If you view photography as an invention, you might focus on creative control — constructing scenes, mastering post-processing, and seeing the camera as a tool for transformation.
• But if you recognise the hybrid nature of photography, you can embrace both: letting moments unfold naturally while still using your creative vision to shape the final outcome.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ The upcoming iPhone 17 Air will be really thin. Impressively thin. While we wait for this new iPhone, the Apple Watch turned 10. Basic Apple Guy made a great visual and posted a retrospective of his Apple Watch usage. 2️⃣ Great retrospective of Apple's calculator app, here on Medium (potentially paywalled article). I think with iOS 18, Apple finally nailed its design, but before that, the best calculator design was with iPhone OS in 2007. 3️⃣ Apple made a lot of money again in their last quarter, which ended in March 2025. Don’t miss SixColors’ detailed report if you are interested. 4️⃣ Apple is losing the fight against anti-steering rules. They lose more than money; they also lose credibility and tarnish their brand and the developer mindset. It’s very damaging, and they must change course on that. 5️⃣ Do you rearrange icons on your iPad Home Screen often? How is your experience in general? Have you ever met this strange and frustrating experience? I did, and it’s baffling that Apple seems unable to fix it. Or did they try?

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I finally sat down and spent some time trying and learning Realmac Software Elements to build a website. For the first time ever, here is a screenshot of an early design as seen from within the app. I finally managed to cross the inflection point of the app learning curve, where things start to click with me and make sense. I love this app and the team behind it, which is very supportive of people currently testing it. For my first project, I'm building my personal landing page, which is currently built with Craft, but will be replaced with the new website. I'm really in the early stage of this project.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Perplexity AI goes where Siri can't. It’s impressive. Now the question is: will Apple ever allow the iPhone to replace Siri with another assistant? Maybe. Could Apple ever replace or remove the Siri name to standardize on “Apple Intelligence”? How would we invoke the assistant, then? 2️⃣ Fastmail keeps improving. I love it. 3️⃣ Raycast for iOS is now available! A quick demonstration is available right here. It's not the whole Raycast experience you have on the Mac, but some of it. If you are a Raycast Pro subscriber, you'll get access to all your Raycast Notes because they sync across platforms! Very handy. I use Raycast Notes at work to jot down ideas and meeting notes that I later paste into Notion. 4️⃣ Inoreader recently launched another feature: Intelligent Reports, which allows summaries of RSS feed articles based on ChatGPT Mini4o model. Selecting articles in feeds enables the prompt for summarization or other requests. The feature commands an add-on fee on top of the monthly subscription. I’m still considering my options here.

“With Intelligence reports, you can select multiple articles at once and instantly generate summaries, extract key points, compare sentiment, or run custom prompts. Once created, reports can be saved as new articles, ready to annotate, export, or share.” — Inoreader press release

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I made a video about Micro.blog: How to interact with the social web from Micro.blog. I’ve waited a long time to do this video because it's a rather complex subject for a simple platform like Micro.blog. 2️⃣ Meet Slate, a brand new car company. Their truck design is light years ahead of Tesla Cybertruck. Customization and simplification are the foundations of their value proposition. I wish them success. 3️⃣ Apple created a video on how to use Apple Invites, an app for iCloud+ subscribers, to build event invitations. I took advantage of Apple Invites recently to prepare a special event to celebrate my wife's birthday and the end of our home renovation project. It's rather fun to create and manage events with it, but it's still a 1.0 app with some rough edges. Invites isn’t available for the iPad, another baffling treatment to the iPad platform. Come on, Apple, you can do better than this!

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Manuel Moreale shared a thought about the use of AI in a creative context. I wrote back to him to share a quick take on that. I do use AI for many purposes in different contexts. In my personal life, AI helps improve my writing (my mother language is French) or get a very specific image (as an amateur photographer, I prefer to share my work, not AI’s work). Back to Manuel’s post, I would consider myself among those who value more the process than the end product but not by a wide margin. I often share my thoughts on my creative workflows because I like to write about the tools that I depend on. But I value the final results because I’m always aiming to bring quality (over quantity). This newsletter is a testament of this. 2️⃣ Speaking of using AI to generate images, the one below was created with ChatGPT and follows a short-lived trend that recently emerged. I wanted to try it myself and got that. It’s rather impressive but also tinted with some goofiness. 3️⃣ Is Shopify CEO out of his mind. According to him, there won’t be any new hires without proof AI can’t do the job. If AI is the only solution to your problems, my guess is that your product sucks or will do very soon. Some tech companies are simply out of their mind. This is brutal.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Forget about Tesla, Slate cars look very impressive. Highly customizable through a spectacular web interface. Their website is really cool. This truck looks so much better than Tesla Cybertruck. 2️⃣ One last comment about Realmac Software Elements: it is going to be a powerful blogging tool. Watch here.

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇪🇺 💪🏻

This newsletter edition is also available as a Craft shared document here. An index of past editions can be found here. This week's edition is based on template version 1.7.4 — Sun, Feb 23 and was put together with ❤️ mostly on an M2 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft Docs and many supporting subscriptions! If you like this newsletter, please consider supporting me via PayPal or becoming a supporter by visiting my Ko-fi!