The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-26

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I took the Micro.blog Question Challenge, and shared my answers. It was fun and part of a trend. 2️⃣ Personal and touching stories like this one always captivate me. Every health-related blog post from bloggers I follow catches my attention. I read them as if they could happen to me or someone close to me. It's as if I'm learning how to navigate those enduring experiences. 3️⃣ I ran an experiment recently. I paid a designer at Iconfactory to create a pixelart version of one of my recent photos. I asked one of my sons for his opinion, and his feedback astonished me. He asked why I didn’t use Photoshop or another app to do "the same”. I tried with Acorn and Pixelmator. See the results below. I'm still thinking of use cases for this new avatar. I like it.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ This website is so cool. If you like design, graphics, art, and fonts, please give it a try. Discovered via this other nice website. And another one. The web is still full of nice gems. 2️⃣ Not something that I discovered myself, but this guy found quite an easter egg in the PowerMac G3 ROM image. Sadly, this practice of putting such things in computer ROMs was ended by Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple. Too bad. 3️⃣ Did you know there is a simple solution to backing up your iCloud Photos library to a local personal device? It's a solution made by Synology. I didn't know it was so simple. Now, I wonder if this solution still works when the web access is disabled, something required if you plan to used Apple Advancded Data Protection, as documented in my guide here.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ While testing Dia, I visited Medium.com and gathered all the recent articles I had written about going freelance. Then, I asked Dia a few questions to summarize my articles, and eventually, I wrote a follow-up article using different prompts (free for you, my dear readers!). Compared to using ChatGPT, it would have been more tedious, for sure, but how often do I see myself in this type of context for writing an article? Not that often.

"Some publishers are seeing up to a 50% loss in traffic, thanks to AI overviews." — Adam Tinworth on One Man & His Blog

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Computational photography, Adobe’s version. No strings attached. It's called “Project Indigo". Get it there, on the App Store. Warning: your iPhone will turn red hot while using the app. This app aims to address extreme lighting conditions, which smartphones often struggle to handle. 2️⃣ Glass now offers a new email summary to its subscribers, listing newcomers to the platform. It's a great way to discover new photographers. 3️⃣ , so many great photos in this photo series by Amanda Powell, on Glass and here, on her website. ❤️ 😍 4️⃣ Photos of Apple's headquarters in California during the WWDC25 conference. Notably, all photos were taken using an original iPhone. There is something different in these photos that we don't see these days. Worth a look. 5️⃣ Quiet and relaxing tones from Jenn, on Glass. That image with the moon is splendid! 6️⃣ This article from DReview reviews top Instagram alternatives for photographers, highlighting platforms like Flickr, 500px, VSCO, and Glass that offer better image quality, community engagement, and creative control. It also explores niche options like Vero and Pixelfed for those seeking algorithm-free or decentralized experiences. My personal favourite: Glass, Pixelfed.

🍎 Apple & Tech

1️⃣ All the Bento boxes for everything Apple announced during WWDC25. I love these. 2️⃣ Apple on Miniature Calendar. It's rather lovely. Can we buy one of these? They look so real! 3️⃣ Frederico Vicci for MacStories experimented with Apple Foundation Models that come with iOS, and he came out both impressed and with many unanswered questions. I find it intriguing and full of potential for my use cases. For example, I do have a shortcut that extracts today's analytics from Plausible (I wrote an article about this). I could pass the answer to Apple Intelligence and ask for a text summary, something that I get with Tinylytics. See an example below. 4️⃣ The Beta 2 of iPadOS 26 isn't better, it might be worse. I installed it on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the max brightness of the screen is probably 50% of what it can be, and there is no way to bring it back. This sucks, but that's the price to pay for beta testing developer releases. Feedback report submitted. 5️⃣ Apple, dear Apple, stop doing that. Are we paying over $1,000 for a phone with ads? 6️⃣ Can Apple fix the Finder icon, which happens to be, in fact, the Mac face? It depends. This newsletter edition’s header image comes from Michael Flarup. 7️⃣ Here's an excellent summary by 9to5Mac of all Apple Intelligence features coming to the iPhone this fall with iOS 26. 8️⃣ MacOS icons history files is something you don't want to miss, as BasicAppleGuy has put it together. One thing is clear from this collection of icons, organized by app: the design trend doesn't create better-looking icons, quite the opposite. Look at the Maps and App Store icons; the 2025 versions appear fuzzy.

“The great part about iPad's new windowing model is that you can't hide from it if you're a developer. Users are going to window your apps, layouts are going to be resized, and your menu bar is going to be investigated.” — stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social

macOS Icon History — Basic Apple Guy

Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.

Basic Apple GuyBasicAppleGuy

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website is finally publicly available. This project took me way more time than I thought it would. I learned quite a lot about Realmac Software Elements, which, by the way, should be available very s,oon, if it’s not already the case. Anyway, from now on, I'll continue to update my website as I learn new tricks or think of new content for it.

Who is Numeric Citizen?

This website is about explaning who is Numeric Citizen by sharing details about passions, projects, goals and hobbies.

Who Is Numeric Citizen?

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ It must be a good feeling to see Apple implement support for the Markdown format in Apple Notes. That's what Gruber, the creator of Markdown, must be feeling. 2️⃣ I tried the Browser Company’s new browser: Dia. I'm not so sure if this is for me. I find it hard to leave the ARC Browser behind. I might return to Safari anyway. Anyway, I think the company could have added the conversational part to their ARC Browser instead, just like Microsoft added Copilot to their Edge browser. You can learn more about Dia in this article from Tidbits. Apparently, I'll need to switch to something else. Returning to Safari is currently out of the question due to the limited support for browser extensions. 3️⃣ Greg Morris, the developer behind the excellent “Micro Social” app, tested the water with Apple Liquid Glass and the updated human interface guidelines. I like what I'm seeing. The feature “Catch Me Up,” which summarizes long conversations using Apple’s on-device large language model (LLM), is demonstrated with a conversation between me and another person.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Here's a funny ad from Apple. Sorry, Apple retired the ad before this newsletter edition could go out. It was about your parents. Kids want Mac for college. It wasn't that good, anyway. When I was in college, I paid for my Mac with my hardly earned money. I didn't ask my parents to contribute because I already knew the answer. Before this newsletter went out to your mailbox, Apple pulled the ad for an unknown reason. I'll keep the link, just in case. Gruber's reaction. Apple seems to be lacking basic judgment these days: everyone is stupid, the teachers, the students, and employees using Apple Intelligence to write basic emails. Gosh. 2️⃣ Liquid Glass is now official, and it's worth watching this video if you want to better understand it. Then come back here and read the following article by Sebastiaan de With, the creator of Halide, the camera app. The article discusses the anticipated comprehensive redesign of Apple's operating systems, emphasizing a shift towards a more physical and dynamic user interface that reflects real-world materials, potentially marking a significant evolution in design akin to the transformative changes seen with iOS 7. Sebastiaan was close and yet far from what Apple is doing with Liquid Glass. 3️⃣ Snazzy Laps 3D-printed a Macintosh! Yes, and it works! Fantastic job! In twenty years, will we be able to 3D print an iMac? I doubt it, thanks to Apple security measures like TouchID, secure Enclave, authenticated boot images, etc. 4️⃣ The Mac turned 40, I almost forgot to share that one video.

🌟 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Thanks to AI, and ChatGPT, we are becoming increasingly lazy and relying less on critical thinking. Who knew. 🤦🏻‍♂️ 2️⃣ As mentioned by this report from 9to5Mac, Reddit is being spammed with AI-generated content. Injecting content promoting products or services into Reddit so that AI training is influenced in a way to make these products come out in prompt output. What a clusterfuck. Is this the new SEO?

"Why are investing so many resources in trying to make ‘AI’ smarter instead of investing more resources in trying to make PEOPLE smarter?" — Riccardo Mori

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ I'm looking forward to the day Apple stops their fuckin ads on their pricey devices. This would mean Apple wouldn't track you while you are using their Wallet. They are tracking you with their Wallet as you are reading this. 2️⃣ I'm looking forward to using the upcoming Glass app with Liquid Glass UI applied to it, as shown in this short clip. 3️⃣ We're getting closer and closer to the iPhone fall release, and this video gives all the details of what to expect. I won't be upgrading my iPhone 15 Pro Max this year, but I think this could be of interest to you.

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