The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-41

👤 Personal

#newsletter #stevejobs
1️⃣ Do you like this newsletter? Have you been reading it for a while? You know what would be cool? If you could say “Hello” (hello@numericcitizen.me) or show your appreciation with a small tip, see below for the way you can do it. Thanks a lot. 2️⃣ Steve Jobs passed away 14 years ago. I often think of him and his legacy. Today's Apple is vastly different from the one he left behind. Would he be proud? Probably. Probably not. We will never know.

"AI and other current trends are replacing human social relationships with solitary, one-sided interactions with machines, replacing family, friends, lovers and pets with products. This is the dangerous megatrend of the century and nobody is talking about it." — Mike Elgan

🗺️ Discoveries

#rss #openai #webtech
1️⃣ Iconfactory's Ged Maheux is an artist at work as seen in this time-lapse video. It's so cool to see how an artist is building an image. 2️⃣ An intriguing blog post about blogs, RSS and feeds: Blogfeeds.net is a small web project promoting a return to the open web through personal blogs and RSS feeds instead of social networks. It encourages people to share their writing on their own sites and list the blogs they follow, creating a decentralized and human-scaled network for discovering new voices — a modern revival of the classic blogroll idea. 3️⃣ I think OpenAI just announced is a game-changer. “What you’re going to see for the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system.” — Nick Turley from OpenAI

“There will be new AI-assisted reading tools, too, including a feature called Story So Far that generates a spoiler-free recap of a book up to the point you’ve read”. — The Verge about recent ebook announcements from Amazon

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#blogging
1️⃣ If you are curious about my blogging activities for September, don't miss the Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest. This edition covers Apple’s controversial Liquid Glass redesign, the uneven quality of recent OS updates, experiments with AI-powered knowledge tools like MyMind and Recall, skepticism toward incremental iPhone 17 upgrades, concerns over the sustainability of AI business models, Microsoft Copilot’s growing role in education, ethical issues surrounding tech leaders, frustrations with iPad multitasking, personal workflow refinements on macOS, and user backlash to Apple’s new design direction.

🌄 Photography

#glass/discovery
1️⃣ I like it when tech reviewers spend the time to create gorgeous images to go with their review. Here, great images of the iPhone Air by Josh Ginter. 2️⃣ Here's a great photographer on Glass: Chuck Rubin. You'll find some intriguing photos like this one on his profile page. 3️⃣ Still on Glass, here's a collection of architectural and highly processed photos. I love this one. Don't miss his “Darkitecture" series, too. Superb. I wish I could see a time-lapse of his proto-editing process.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#liquidglass #ipad #macos #apple
1️⃣ Another critique of Apple Liquid Glass, this time by Nick Heer. As the article puts it, Liquid Glass is a solution to a problem Apple created for itself. The author wonders if the change is primarily branding or the start of a deeper convergence across Apple platforms, and voices concern that the current release feels under-polished and inconsistent rather than fully mature. 2️⃣ Well, someone is looking to become famous by leaking the next iPad Pro equipped with an M5 processor, some more RAM and a better GPU. The rest seems unchanged. I’m still happy with my M4 iPad Pro. 3️⃣ If you think Liquid Glass consumes more power, you are right. But, enabling Reduce Transparency to tone down Liquid Glass consumes even more power. WTF! 4️⃣ I hope Apple will resist UK government demands about iCloud backdoors. If they say yes in UK, how can they say no to the rest of the world? 5️⃣ I came across that on Reddit recently, and it illustrates the current state of menus and the menubar on the Mac. It's useful to compare what we used to have on macOS High Sierra. Why are menus like floating panels? Is Apple preparing for future UI changes, where menus could be rearranged and moved away from the menu bar? 👀 6️⃣ Who is going to replace Tim Cook when he retires? I’ll bet on John Ternus, but I also wish they would select someone from the software side. 7️⃣ Among all the pictures of Steve Jobs, this one is one of my favorites. I find people’s offices endlessly interesting because of what they reveal. My late father worked from home, and I would often go downstairs to see what he was doing. His workspace was lively, much like the scene in the picture of Steve Jobs’ office. Basic Apple Guy recently shared this picture among a few others.

“Apple keeps doing things that make us all feel sick. Removing ICEBlock is just the latest and it won’t be the last. So I am sympathetic to the idea of making web apps, and my brain goes there more often. And if I could solve the problems of money and of protecting users, I’d be way more inclined." — Brent Simmons on his blog.

📱 Apps & Services

#microblog #appdevelopment #service/kagi
1️⃣ Sad to see Greg Morris stopping the development of Micro Social, a Micro.blog client. I was an early supporter, and I still have it on my iPhone’s home screen. Micro Social offered one of the best experiences of Micro.blog to the point of wondering if Manton Reece could buy it outright. I highly doubt it will happen. Greg could sell or, even better, open-source Micro Social source code! Greg misinterpreted my blog post on this topic. I decided to leave it at that. 2️⃣ Apple will have some competition from Adobe with Adobe Premiere coming to the iPhone and iPad. I played with it, and it is simpler to use than iMovie and certainly easier than Final Cut Pro for iPad. It’s mostly free, as some features require (yet) another subscription. Pass. 3️⃣ Kagi News is officially out, and it’s as good as you might think. I’m a fan and visit the news site once a day, as intended. No algorithm, no tracking. But a lot of AI-generated content. 4️⃣ Can you imagine Apple opening up to Fediverse with support for its own Mastodon instance? No? Me neither. The AltStore Mastodon instance is available here. The AltStore keep expanding, too. 5️⃣ Did you notice that Apple's iWork still doesn't support Liquid Glass? It's been more than a month since OSes 26 were released. Maybe not everyone at Apple was ready for Liquid Glass. 6️⃣ No more Clips, according to Apple. From the start, Clips felt like an experiment. Like Ping. Apple isn't good at social. 7️⃣ Want to learn about the best RSS readers in 2025? Here you go.

📺 YouTube

#openai #design #tech #iphone
1️⃣ OpenAI is on a roll and is introducing yet another product: Sora. That’s incredible, but it’s also probably utterly very costly from an energy consumption point of view. I expect Sora to become a challenger to TikTok, in its own way. Additionally, it is expected that Sora will become the best deepfake engine ever created. 😳 2️⃣ Filming bullet impact at 20 million frames per second. That's impossibly incredible. Cue this video. 3️⃣ Design is how it works. It took me some time to really understand this statement by Steve Jobs, recently used to launch the new iPhone 17. Now I understand. Nice promotional video by Apple. 4️⃣ Introducing Frame 3, a humanoid-like robot. It looks great, it seems to perform really well. But the question is: do we really need this? 5️⃣ This story, “Behind The Glass,” offers a peek at the original iPhone development, right from those who were working on that thing. Fascinating.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#iphone
1️⃣ Someone created a map of iPhone screen bezels, starting with the iPhone 11 to today’s iPhone. The thinnest bezel goes to the iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro Max with 1.36 mm. The thickest bezel goes to the iPhone 11 with 3.37 mm. 2️⃣ When a long-time developers like Brent Simmons thinks about web apps instead of native apps, Apple is in trouble. Would you prefer NetNewsWire to be a web app instead of a native one for your iPhone?

🔮 Looking forward

#windows #microsoft
1️⃣ Windows 2030? Reading this article makes me think about Apple. Hoffman points to many issues in Windows that also apply to Apple. As a full-time user of Windows 11 at work (sigh), I encounter numerous annoyances in this operating environment. You would think that Windows is a mature operating system? Nope. It doesn't always feel like that. Copilot mentions are everywhere. The Copilot app is buggy as hell.

“I don’t need AI in Windows. I need an operating system that works.” — Chris Hoffman from Computerworld

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