All Publications by Numeric Citizen

Thinking out loud here: one way Apple could retain more talent could be to start innovating again, maybe? ¹

I spent the last few days putting together a workflow to help me write those year-in-review articles. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s the right time to start working on this. I documented my workflow in this Craft document and submitted to the #winter_challenge on Slack. Hint: my first real use case for MCP.

Parker Ortolani on taking a chance of Tony Fadell to replace Tim Cook. At first, Tony Fadell seems like the obvious candidate, but I worry that we may be under the spell of a certain nostalgia in thinking he would be the perfect choice, as Parker points out. The world is no longer what it was in the days of Steve Jobs and his close collaborators. Apple is no longer what it once was either, and that is partly what many people criticize the company for. John Ternus is a product engineer, not a designer, and putting design back at the center of the process as it was in the Steve Jobs era may be a more restorative idea—and in that sense, yes, perhaps Fadell would be a good choice.

Yep, Ghost is cool. RSS too. The open web, yup, cool, too. Alcove, probably. But, yeah, come on, John. So well said by Manual Moreale. Why announce this on X, but not on Mastodon or even Ghost blog, I mean, you own this fuckin place!?

https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/come-on-john

Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.

I don’t really believe in vibe coding, especially the scaling of it for complex systems, even more for maintaining code. But I certainly wish I could use vibe coding to write Apple Shortcuts. Apple must do something about its Shortcuts editor. It’s cumbersome, buggy as hell. Having a textual representation, a la Apple Script, would be so cool.

Louie Mantia on Steve Lemay:

I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.

What we’re going to see from Apple in the next twelve months is probably set in stone (except Siri or Apple Intelligence, maybe). I don’t expect a revolution in that short time frame.

I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. We should remain critical of this overflow of passion and the promised revolution; by doing so, we might help avoid the potential bubble that increasingly seems to be forming right under our noses.

Me to my wife: “Big news today, Apple is losing their designer lead. He’s joining Meta.” My wife: “WTF is there to design at Meta?”.

I love her. 😍

I believe in talents renewal and in new dynamics to favor new ideas, new ways at seeing problems and challenges. It’s a new opportunity even if the guy taking over has been at Apple for a long time. Bye bye Dye.

My thought of the day: no matter what technology we put in place or trick we invent, and we tried many (Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, et al.) there will never be this perfect social network we are hoping for. Why? Because humans can be really messy. That is why.

I don’t like the idea that a service like ChatGPT tries to present itself as a friend, an agent, or a human. With instructions, I can ask it to avoid this type of behavior. But I like the service’s appearance to be warm. Perhaps that’s why I prefer Anthropic’s Claude. Claude, even though it’s a proper name, presents itself better; its visual style seems friendlier to me. I feel like this is a contradiction.

I asked Claude about this possible contradiction. Here’s what he responded:

“I don’t think it’s actually a contradiction. You’re distinguishing between two different things: false intimacy (an AI pretending to be your friend or a person) versus pleasant design (a warm, welcoming aesthetic and tone). Wanting the latter without the former is perfectly coherent—it’s the difference between a tool that’s agreeable to use and a tool that’s trying to deceive you about its nature.”

Thanks, Claude.

I’m experimenting with Claude for a month because I want to test MCP connections with Craft. ChatGPT does support MCP connections but the experience is not as mature as configuring an MCP connection with Claude. Claude is not cheap: pricing is similar to ChatGPT’s but plan usage limits are easy to reach.

I decided to support this movement, which requires putting a badge on our content to mark it as made by a human. Here's the badge because it is fully human-made. 😎

https://notbyai.fyi

The piece) from Disassociated about being “freed from personal websites” thanks to algorithms and timelines really resonated with me. I’ve long believed that platforms are killing the web; they are not the web.

I recently asked my son if he had ever considered having his own personal website—a blog, having a place outside the usual platforms. His immediate response was, “But what about discoverability?” Why I think that everything comes down to that: It’s always about beating the algorithms (hello SEO) so that we are “discovered”. I always believed about my own existence without the need of any algorithm. Same with my wife: she knows about my websites but rarely visit them. She’s always talking about discoverability too, thinking that there is no future if I’m not one those platforms. She couldn’t be more wrong. And yet… Platforms have obscured the open web, plain and simple.

This led me to a question that keeps circling in my mind: if we go back 50 years, how accurately did newspapers reflect reality? And how different is our situation today? Yes, the speed and reach of information are radically different now, but consider people who read only one newspaper—like my father did when I was young. Weren’t they also shaped, if not manipulated, by that publication’s editorial line?

Disclaimer: I feel my feelings are well reflected in those few words… it’s complicated.

Three years of ChatGPT. Time flies. A few thoughts on that are mandatory it seems. ChatGPT certainly turned things upside down not only for me as a writer but for many creators. The entire software industry also was turned things even more upside down. It’s hard to imagine what would have been software roadmaps or new features pipelines without generative AI. See? We almost forgot about what it was like before ChatGPT. Can’t imagine where things are going. Generative AI integration into apps and user experience is the next frontier where things will be interesting to watch.

Finally received the right Paperlike version for my iPad. Installed without any bubbles. I get the feeling that it transforms my iPad screen into one with a nano texture, but at a fraction of the cost. 🤓😏

I’m at the coffee shop. Again. Now attacking work on something else which might be really time-consuming. 👀

I made a new video about the latest release of Craft (v3.3.1), which I think it’s a game-changer. Long live to Craft!

I happen to spend more and more time on Ghost Network tab to see who’s subscribing to my blog, reply to comments, etc. That’s really cool.

As much as I love Tinylytics, I wish there was some basic analytics on Micro.blog, just like Bear’s. I should update my Micro.blog wish list. If @manton don’t want to spend time working on this, maybe he could find a way to integrate a Tinylytics dashboard inside Micro.blog? 🙏🏻

I found a video of mine in my archives showing a full edit session with Snapseed on my iPad. The resulting image was part of an old blog posts collection called The Perfect Imperfection series initially on Instagram and later on Exposure. Sadly, this photo collection no longer exists because I closed both my Instagram and Exposure account. You’ll understand why I chose this naming when you see the resulting image. Enjoy the short ride here in the video below.

The problem is that I have too many ideas, there is too many things that I’d like to work on, there is not enough time.

Riccardo Mori wrote a long piece about feeling disconnected from technology, a term he prefers over “blazé” or “bored.” His story resonated deeply with me; we seem to share not only a similar tech journey but many of the same sentiments. He articulated things I hadn’t been able to pinpoint myself. Well worth your time.

This time it’s not fatigue, but disconnection

AI benchmarks remind me of CD writers back in the day where you could upgrade a 32X CD burner to a 48X one, but the speed difference was minimal in practice.

I'm openly sharing when I use generative AI as a writer or creator; I did so this morning. Remember, I'm an open blogger.

Some believe that using AI for writing articles is lazy, not creative, and that you don’t earn the credit for doing it. I disagree. Or, it depends. Here’s a personal experiment.

This week, I shared an article about digital sovereignty with my professional network on LinkedIn. Even if I used ChatGPT to write the article, I spent days on it, or, more specifically, I spent days creating and testing different prompts. The article was written in French, then later translated into English and shared on my blog (see “On Digital Sovereignty and Strategic Realism”).

In this meta blog post, I want to share the final prompt that led to the article. Please note that the final response from ChatGPT was manually modified before being posted. Here’s the prompt below followed with some comments.

I would like you to write an article of no more than 1500 words on the topic of digital sovereignty, a subject that is currently highly relevant both in Québec and around the world. This article will be read by information technology and cybersecurity professionals. It should offer a clear-eyed perspective on the issues and challenges related to the pursuit of digital sovereignty for organizations and governments. The article should not be alarmist, but realistic and critical, with the goal of prompting reflection among readers.

Here is how the article should be structured: an introductory section that provides context, followed by a section explaining why digital sovereignty is essential but not a fully realistic target in absolute terms; we must remain pragmatic. Then, a section offering potential solutions or realistic strategies that large organizations should adopt, especially if they are critical to society.

The article should conclude with open questions inviting readers to reflect and comment in order to spark a constructive conversation. Use the following elements to build the article. Reuse the provided links as references.

• Over the past five years, a series of international, political, and technological events has forced us to examine the notion of digital sovereignty (a few examples: the rise of the GAFAM giants, the Snowden affair, the U.S. Patriot Act and Cloud Act, recent U.S. elections, mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, etc.).
• What exactly is digital sovereignty? “Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of a state, an organization, or an individual to control and manage its data, digital infrastructures, and technologies in order to ensure its strategic autonomy and security in the digital space.”
• It is the ability to fully exercise one’s rights and choices in the digital domain without being subject to external constraints.
• Major outages from several cloud service providers have occurred, the most notable being:
• AWS (October 20, 2025: Revealing the Cascading Impacts of the AWS Outage – Ookla)
• A Microsoft Azure outage (October 29, 2025: Microsoft Azure Outage: How the World’s Second-Largest Cloud Platform Went Down – ThinkCloudly)
• And more recently, a Cloudflare outage (November 18, 2025: Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025)
• Another outage occurred last year, on July 19, 2024, when a problematic update from CrowdStrike caused widespread service failures (2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages – Wikipedia)
• These outages strongly remind us of our deep dependence on cloud services and technology in general, both personally and within organizations.
• We need to reflect and attempt to find viable answers and strategies to these questions: Are we well prepared? Do mitigation solutions exist? Is digital sovereignty only about data?
• Is digital sovereignty a mirage? Are we not always dependent on something beyond our control? We must keep in mind that:
• Complexity and cost: Developing sovereign solutions (cloud, software, artificial intelligence) requires massive investments.
• Global interdependence: Digital value chains are globalized, making total autonomy difficult, if not impossible.
• Risk of protectionism: Some fear that digital sovereignty could be used as a pretext for trade barriers.
• Clearly, digital sovereignty is not merely about using or not using cloud computing, or choosing which cloud to use; it is much broader than that.
• I really like this quote, and it must be integrated into the article: “Digital sovereignty is neither a luxury nor a technological gimmick. It is a pillar of resilience and democracy.” — Le Devoir: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/936699/parlons-souverainete
• I believe we need to accept the fact that we will never have full control over our digital destiny. Therefore, we must adopt mitigation and exit strategies to reduce dependency links.
• We must maintain a message of independence toward major industry players so that they understand they are not alone, even if they are powerful. We need to be strategic, give ourselves the means to stay agile, and diversify.

As you can see, the prompt is nearly as long as the final product. It took me a dozen tries to see what ChatGPT could create. After each try, I would modify and add instructions to the prompt. Oh, and I searched for references myself. In short, this was a multi-day effort. Am I a lazy guy? You tell me.

As an IT professional, I like to reflect on specific issues that can have big impacts on organizations and society. This article was first written in French and shared with my professional network on LinkedIn.

Digital sovereignty has, in just a few years, become a central issue for governments, enterprises, and even individuals. Long confined to academic debates, the concept has now become a strategic concern in light of an undeniable reality: our growing dependence on global digital infrastructures.

Recent events illustrate this vulnerability. The rise of the GAFAM giants, the revelations of the Snowden affair, the implications of the U.S. Patriot Act and Cloud Act, and the alleged interference in U.S. elections have all highlighted the risks associated with the concentration of digital power. Added to this are far more concrete technical incidents:

• AWS outage – October 20, 2025 (details)
• Microsoft Azure outage – October 29, 2025 (details)
• Cloudflare outage – November 18, 2025 (details)

Not to mention the problematic CrowdStrike update in July 2024, which crippled critical services in banks and airports (Wikipedia, among other sources).

These events are not anecdotal: they reveal a systemic dependence affecting our organizations and, by extension, individuals. The question is no longer “Should we be concerned?” but rather “How do we prepare?”

Why Digital Sovereignty Is Essential

Digital sovereignty is defined as “the ability of a state, an organization, or an individual to control and manage its data, digital infrastructures, and technologies in order to ensure its strategic autonomy and security in the digital space.” It involves the ability to exercise one’s rights and choices without external constraints.

This autonomy is critical for three key reasons:

Security and resilience: Data is a strategic asset. Exposure to foreign jurisdictions can create legal and operational risks.

Decision-making autonomy: Without control over infrastructures, room for maneuver during crises is severely limited.

Preservation of democracy: As Le Devoir aptly states:

“Digital sovereignty is neither a luxury nor a technological gimmick. It is a pillar of resilience and democracy.”

However, seeking total autonomy is unrealistic. Digital value chains are globalized, and the costs required to develop sovereign solutions—cloud platforms, AI systems, software—are immense. Moreover, an overly protectionist approach could hinder innovation and harm competitiveness.

Pragmatism and Strategies

We must accept a core reality: we will never have full control over our digital destiny. Global interdependence is structural. Rather than pursuing absolute independence, we should take a pragmatic approach focused on reducing risks and diversifying dependencies.

This approach requires concrete strategies, along with significant time, financial investment, human resources, and strong governance. Digital sovereignty is not a quick fix; it is a long-term strategic initiative. And it extends far beyond saying “we’ll choose this local cloud provider for our organizational needs.” It is much deeper and more complex.

Key Measures for a Strategy Aimed at Greater Digital Sovereignty

• Diversify providers to avoid overreliance on a single cloud player. Diversification reduces systemic risk related to outages or contractual disruptions.
• Strengthen contractual clauses to include exit mechanisms and data portability requirements. A clearly defined exit strategy is essential for preserving flexibility.
• Hybridize infrastructures by combining public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions. A hybrid approach allows organizations to retain control over sensitive data while benefiting from the scalability of major providers.
• Invest in skills to operate hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Digital sovereignty depends as much on technology as on the expertise of the teams managing it.
• Adopt open and interoperable standards wherever possible to reduce technological lock-in (the notorious vendor lock-in) and facilitate system and data portability.
• Enhance local cybersecurity by deploying sovereign solutions for critical functions such as authentication and encryption.
• Participate in regional initiatives such as sovereign cloud projects in Europe or Québec to pool efforts and investments.

These measures will not provide total sovereignty, but they significantly reduce vulnerability and increase resilience. They also send an important and necessary signal to major industry players: organizations are not condemned to absolute dependency.

Open Questions for Reflection

Is digital sovereignty an achievable objective, or a strategic mirage? Are we ready to invest heavily to reduce our dependencies? How do we reconcile economic openness with digital autonomy? And above all: what degree of sovereignty is truly necessary to safeguard resilience and democracy?

Because I love the web and believe in an algorithm-free timelines and consumption platforms (like this blog, for example), I think this initiative, called Dealgorithmed, by Manual Moreale, is more than needed. Please subscribe. I did, both to the newsletter and the RSS feed.

https://buttondown.com/dealgorithmed

For the first time since I own an iPhone, I decided to get a screen protector. I went with a matte version from Ambison, and I like not only the feel to the touch but also the way it affects screen content sharpness. It may make the display a little less sharp, but I find that the matte finish actually complements the general look of Liquid Glass, especially for icons. Isn’t that strange?

From time to time, I consider subscribing to The Verge. This week is one of those moments. The subscription is currently 40% off the regular yearly price, down to 35 dollars. This would be the first time I would pay to get tech news. 🤔

Blogging in the enterprise is not a thing apparently, even with a headcount of 58K people. I spent some time today in Viva Engage communities to see if some people were there for blogging, even with a corporate mindset, but nothing. It seems that only corporate-related communities are allowed. Too bad.

Feeling a little bit frustrated this morning: discovered a rather significant scratch on my Apple Watch screen. 🤦🏻‍♂️😒 Now all my portable devices have a scratch on the screen: my iPhone 15 Pro Max and my M4 iPad Pro. It’s the time since I own Apple devices that this happens. Never had a single scratch before! Fuck. 😢😟😩😢

There is this thing called Typefully, a web service for writing posts that can be sent to multiple platforms at once, similar to Buffer and... Micro.blog. Typefully was born in the good old days of Twitter and has since expanded to support Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. I still prefer Micro.blog because I can have my own digital corner with it called a website.

According to ChatGPT:

Typefully is a clean, AI-assisted writing and scheduling tool that helps you draft, publish, and analyze multi-platform social posts and threads with minimal friction.

https://typefully.com

Here's something that I forgot that I knew about: Freewrite writing devices. If you want a distraction-free, minimalistic writing experience, that's something you might want to consider. These devices are not exactly cheap, but I find the design and purpose idea rather courageous in today's world.

https://getfreewrite.com/

I have two completely different personalities: one for work and one as a creator. I switch between them with such ease; it's fascinating. I keep these two worlds fully separate. Each week, I spend 35 hours at work and probably as much in my creative space. I change from one to the other by flipping my brain mode. At work, I completely forget about my other self. And vice versa. It's fun. 👥

👤 Personal {#newsletter}

1️⃣ I'm sorry if this edition is late. I was on vacation for a week and didn't gather enough content to put together a new edition until recently. 2️⃣ I have also been busy recently testing a new version of Craft, which required more of my time than usual. This version is a significant shift, which prompted me to allocate more of my free time than usual. Things should return to normal once this version is out.

“When the things that matter most become monthly fees rather than assets, our relationship to society changes.” — Jenna Park in “America is one big subscription service”

🗺️ Discoveries {#apple #applerumor}

1️⃣ This could be the best and most surprising video of the year! Discovered on Mastodon, available on YouTube! This guy has a lot of talent, that’s for sure. It's a fake Apple Event happening in March of next year, announcing already heavily rumoured products. I'll let you watch yourself. I wonder if Apple has become too predictable, which allows people to create these videos. 2️⃣ I discovered a new blog: disassociated—a great article about a possible (and desirable) comeback of personal blogs. I certainly hope so.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing {#aiwriting}

1️⃣ iA Writer has introduced a new feature called Authorship that visually distinguishes AI-generated text from human-written content, allowing users to identify and improve upon AI contributions in their documents easily. The implementation is simple yet effective, if demo clips are any indication. It's the first instance of such an idea I've seen. I wish Ulysses would do something like that. 2️⃣ As reported by CBC, Alberta is considering using AI to write a new law. Yep, you read it right. What can go wrong you might say? This is the first known occurence of such stupid idea.

🌄 Photography {#iphone #unsplash #creativity}

1️⃣ In “Becoming an iPhone Photographer”, Lee Peterson reflects on his diminishing use of his mirrorless camera while using the iPhone more. This gradual change enabled him to be more careful and appreciative of his iPhone as a camera, thereby providing greater flexibility. 2️⃣ A reflective exploration of whether AI can create meaningful art, arguing that true artistic value still depends on human intention and interpretation, by Robert Adams. 3️⃣ Finnish photographer Juha Tanhua creates striking “space-like” images by photographing gasoline and oil puddles in parking lots. Although the photos resemble astrophotography—galaxies, nebulae, comets—they are captured by pointing the camera downward at iridescent spills on asphalt, often after rain. Tanhua has pursued this project since 2005, treating these puddles as a hidden microcosm and later enhancing contrast to emphasize their cosmic appearance. 4️⃣ The Unsplash Awards, 2025 edition, is full of gems. The architecture category is always my favourite but most categories contain great and sometimes touching images. That's why photography as art exists: for touching people.

🍎 Apple & Tech {#macintosh #applesilicon}

1️⃣ Recently, Apple Silicon crossed the fifth anniversary mark. Here's a good comparison between an M1 and an M5 from MacRumors. What a ride, and I get the feeling that Apple is far from done with this processor. Apple Silicon is probably the most profound enabler of any transformation the Mac has undergone since its inception. More from MacSparky. 2️⃣ Apple has big plans for the Mac in 2026, but it appears that the Mac Pro might not be part of them. 3️⃣ Apple invited some developers to share their story about adopting Liquid Glass for their apps. My experience, as documented here, is that the outcomes of Liquid Glass adoption vary quite a lot—great examples include Craft and Ulysses. 4️⃣ Backblaze’s Q3 2025 Drive Stats report reveals an overall annualized failure rate of 1.55% across 328,348 drives. That's a lot of drives. Interesting to see drive stats by brand and sizes. This could influence my buying decision if I were to replace drives in my Synology NAS. 5️⃣ I love ChatGPT Atlas even more since they released an update that adds vertical tabs, just like the ARC Browser. But Microsoft might be wrong with its approach to AI with Edge. I don't really like Microsoft Edge, and I don't really like Copilot in general because I've been forced to use it at work, and it's not impressive. They use ChatGPT services in the back-end, but somehow Microsoft manage to create an inferior experience compared to ChatGPT. 6️⃣ Apple's macOS Tahoe icons are a departure from Mac history. As for iOS, the trend goes downhill. Most of the new icons represent a decline in design quality. John Gruber feels rather critical about that, too. The Safari icon, before and after. It's not an improvement. 7️⃣ Is the lack of Windows support on Apple Silicon Macs hurting Apple after 5 years? Well, I don't think so. I guess I changed my mind. What is hurting the Mac is the Electron development framework and web technologies, because fewer and fewer developers are using Mac-native APIs and prefer multi-platform toolkits.

"The first five years of Apple silicon are now the five best years in the Mac’s history." — Jason Snell in “How five years of Apple silicon transformed the Mac”

“iPadOS has got more feature improvements in 26.1 and 26.2 than the entire previous three years of Stage Manager” — Steve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon

🚧 Special projects {#craft #mcp}

1️⃣ I've been spending quite some time reorganizing a vast portion of my content in Craft to better take advantage of Craft’s upcoming APIs and MCP support. I created a large collection of all the video production documents, which allowed me to prompt my collection for metrics like average video duration (collection can’t summarize columns or properties yet). And sure enough, the Craft Assistant returned with a valid answer! 2️⃣ Speaking of MCP, did you know that the Day One journaling app on the Mac supports MCP? Here's the documentation.

📱 Apps & Services {#apps}

1️⃣ Apple announces finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. Besides Acorn, an image processing app, I don't know any of these apps. To me, this year's selection is meagre. 2️⃣ According to an Apple-commissioned study, the EU’s Digital Markets Act didn't bring down app prices. Who knew! 3️⃣ Folder Quick Look is a macOS app that you must install right now. Preview folder and archive contents (ZIP, RAR, and more) instantly in macOS Quick Look. Just select a folder and press the Space bar. Version 1.5 added support for image thumbnails if the folder contains image files. See the following screenshot: a folder called “background images" is previewed.

📺 YouTube {#stevejobs #bloggerlife #design}

1️⃣ Great and unpublished until recently interview with Steve Jobs, in the early days of Pixar. This guy had so many great insights. 2️⃣ Tiago Forte needs a break—a short video from him explaining what's going on for him in the next few months. 3️⃣ Apple calls it the 'Spinning Wait Cursor.' We, the users, call it the Spinning Beach Ball of Death—an interesting story behind this iconic UI element of the Mac.

🌟 Miscellaneous {#tech #ai}

1️⃣ CloudFlare’s major outage is one of many from internet hyperscalers recently. They didn't wait long to explain what happened and offered their apologies. I read most of the text, and as John Gruber said, it's the best way to address this public relations nightmare. More than ever, those failures show how dependent we are on internet technologies. 2️⃣ I see a trend where more and more people are using on-device LLM for their generative AI use cases. These LLMs require a significant amount of memory and processing power. My next MacBook and iPad Pro upgrade will undoubtedly take this into account. MacStories tested the latest M5 iPad with a local LLM and found that Apple’s claims about the upgraded neural engine are valid. The M5 iPad Pro (or M5 MacBook Pro) is a powerhouse for running local LLMs. More details and charts here. 3️⃣ This newsletter could have been called “The Ephemeral Digital Garden". 4️⃣ For this edition, I made a tweak: tags are now part of each section's header between {}. Please tell me if you prefer it that way. I do.

🔮 Looking forward {#weather #ai}

1️⃣ I always wondered how artificial intelligence techniques could help weather forecasting. People tend to see weather forecasting based on large mathematical models being run on powerful computers. Things might be changing, thanks to Google's WeatherNext 2, a Google DeepMind model. Forecasts take a fraction of the time to produce. For once, AI can be synonymous with power efficiency. We'll take it.

👉🏻 Main 🌟 Meta 🌟 Blips 🌟 Blog 👀

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

I decided to add access to older blips on the main page because I think that deleted content is not good for humanity. Those blips were never deleted, only removed from public view, but you had to know the link to access them. Now you know. 😊

Cool use case of AI for coding: to learn and put something together quickly to test concepts and ideas.

Link:https://chrisenns.com/2025/11/raindrop-io-links-to-buttondown-newsletter/

I'm feeling satisfied with many things right now: my content creation workflow, the tools (both physical and software) my toolset and many micro workflows.

This blog post is a test for a possible new set of blog posts where I would write a short description to accompany a link I find interesting. A post would include a "→ Links 🔗" followed by a brief description of a few words. Where should those short posts be hosted? I also wonder if this would compete with my newsletter, which already includes many links. Maybe those links, instead of getting their own domain like "links.numericcitizen.me" could go right here on "blips.numericcitizen.me"? After all, a short blog post to share a link is in fact a blip, right?

It's Friday, on the eve of a blank and fresh new weekend. I am reflecting on creative possibilities.

I want to create a new YouTube video about Craft or even about Scribbles.page because I like the service more and more. When I like something, I want to talk about it. But I'm far from ready to produce any video: no firm idea, no script, no material, no nothing. 😔

I want to spend some time at my local coffee shop to finish the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. It's been three weeks since the last edition. Speaking of the newsletter, I have failed to increase the readership in the last few years. I'm sure what to do. Because I'm not on platforms like Substack, I use Ghost, and readership is stagnant, even with the addition of Fediverse support.

I have many errands to do, which usually breaks the creative mood. 😒

Do you have plans for this weekend?

I've been a subscriber Plausible Analytics for many years, but when Tinylytics came out, I wanted to give it a try and show support to its developer. I'm not a power user of website analytics. I like Plausible, but at the current rate of improvement, the wind is starting to turn, and I'm considering dropping it. I have a few more weeks left on my Plausible subscription before making a final decision.

👤 Personal

#blogging

1️⃣ I'm taking a one-week vacation and will be right back in mid-November. This is why this edition is a little bit early (Friday instead of Sunday). 2️⃣ A very touching personal story from Manton, the developer behind Micro.blog. I can relate. Planting a tree is such a good idea. I wish I had done the same when my parents passed away, but I don’t have the space to do this at my house. 🌳🏡 3️⃣ An unexpected comment on Mastodon from someone who read an article I shared a while ago about being an open blogger.

🗺️ Discoveries

#chatgpt #appleshortcuts

1️⃣ I discovered that ChatGPT can help me have a better understanding of Apple Shortcuts. I’ve been writing shortcuts for a while, but my success has been relatively low. The writing experience is bad and getting the intended results is a challenge. I recently shared that writing and debugging shortcuts can be a frustrating experience. Thanks to ChatGPT’s explanations and examples, I have a much more positive view now. Moreover, ChatGPT can generate a text form of a shortcut. If the app developers diligently created shortcuts support in their app, I can ask ChatGPT to consider apps such as AnyBox and Paste.app, and their respective intents. It's not perfect, but it's a great way to learn building shortcuts.

"Grokipedia is not a 'Wikipedia competitor.' It is a fully robotic regurgitation machine designed to protect the ego of the world’s wealthiest man." — 404 Media

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#bloggerlife

1️⃣ Over the past month, my writing circled around two big currents: Apple’s evolving (and often exasperating) platform experience—especially on iPad—and a fast-rising reliance on AI-driven tools, led by ChatGPT Atlas. In between, I explored creator tooling, App Store governance, and a few cultural notes. What follows is a concise guide to the month: key themes, notable controversies, the apps and services that surfaced most, and the big takeaways shaping my workflows and outlook.

🌄 Photography

#glass #lightroom

1️⃣ Glass gave a small behind-the-scenes look at the engine, helping them manage the platform. It's interesting, but I wanted to know much more than they were willing to share. A video would have been a good idea. 2️⃣ Adobe launched Lightroom Classic 15, which comes with a bunch of AI-related stuff. Who knew! I'm no longer using Adobe products for processing my photos, but I wanted to pass that information along, just in case you depend on it! This video has all the details. 3️⃣ Meanwhile, we are still waiting for Apple to provide meaningful updates to Photmator and Pixelmator Pro. 4️⃣ On Unsplash, bookmarks are now replacing likes. They made an announcement about it. Speaking of Unsplash, here's a great picture from Zetong. I wonder how much post-processing was involved in that one. 👀

🍎 Apple & Tech

#appstore #apple #appletv

1️⃣ If you plan to get a new pair of Apple AirPods Pro 3 and are a frequent flyer, consider reading this blog post from BasicAppleGuy, who experienced weird noises during a flight while wearing a pair of the shiny new devices. 2️⃣ Apple made a lot of money in 2025. Apple reported record fourth-quarter 2025 results, with $102.5 billion in revenue driven by strong sales of iPhones and services, achieving double-digit year-over-year growth in earnings. Quite impressive. Jason Snell notes that Apple’s “values” messaging has shifted from human-focused themes, such as education, diversity, and social equity, to industrial priorities, including U.S. manufacturing, recycling, and AI investment—reflecting a move from moral activism to economic and technological nationalism. 3️⃣ Apple is marking the 10th anniversary of the Apple TV HD, Siri Remote, and tvOS launch, which introduced apps, gaming, and a new vision for Apple TV that reshaped the platform but never fully met its ambitious goals. Apple TV, the streaming service, not the hardware device, has a new introductory video that plays at the start of a movie, for example. I like it. It’s more colourful, but the sound seems too subtle to me. 4️⃣ Did you know you can browse the Apple App Store using your favourite browser? Yes, but please note that this is only for browsing, not for downloading the app. When sharing a link to an app with someone, the person clicking on it will likely see the web version rather than being directed to the App Store. Have a look for yourself here. Apple also offers a web version of Apple Music, in case you didn't know.

🚧 Special projects

#craft #openai #mcp

1️⃣ Since the start of the following Craft beta round, I started testing MCP with Craft via ChatGPT. So far, I find it relatively simple to set up, but much more complex to think about all the implications for my content organization. The beta period should last all of November. I'm guessing things might change a bit and improve. This will allow me to settle on my workflow.

“Less isn’t more. Less is more honest.” — from the Design Lovers YouTube video channel

📱 Apps & Services

#digitalcreation #appleservices

1️⃣ At Canva’s keynote, Ash Hewson unveiled the all-new Affinity — a unified, high-performance design app combining vector, pixel, and layout tools under one roof — and announced that it’s now free forever for everyone, including future updates, with optional Canva AI integration that respects user privacy. I downloaded the app but didn't install it. I'm curious about the photo-processing module, otherwise this is not really for me. 2️⃣ A recent 9to5Mac story highlights how Apple’s Family Sharing can be exploited by abusive ex-partners, as only the account organizer holds full control—leaving custodial parents powerless to move children’s accounts or prevent tracking, with Apple support unable to intervene. The case underscores the need for dual-organizer roles and stronger safeguards in shared digital ecosystems. 3️⃣ I posted an update about my current content creation ecosystem. It was long overdue. People rejoiced. Not really, nobody noticed. You can see the overview diagram below.

📺 YouTube

#weather #apple #design

1️⃣ Flying through the eye of Melissa hurricane. Astonishingly quiet. And frightening. They do that for research and weahter forecasting. 2️⃣ Forest City, a completely abandoned ghost city, near Singapore. Let’s take a ride to this place through this video. 3️⃣ An intriguing and informative video about design and how it might explain many of Apple's design pivots in the last 20 years.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#ai

1️⃣ A valid comment about coding vs software engineering from Matt Birchler. Generative AI is not about software engineering help, just yet. 2️⃣ Are you bored sometimes and find yourself endlessly scrolling your Instagram timeline or TikTok? Here are a few ideas for you to consider instead. I especially like this one: “Scroll through your photo timeline and browse past photos and memories.” 3️⃣ One last thing, if you aren’t able to play videos inside this document (the Craft version), this is a known issue and you must go to the website instead.

🔮 Looking forward

#automation #workflow

1️⃣ In the next few weeks, I want to spend more time explorer Apple Shortcuts. I feel they are a gateway to very powerful and customizable workflows. As Craft is also gaining much-wanted features related to AI (MCP, API), Shortcuts could play an important role here.

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

It has been a while since my last update in March 2025. Here’s a summary of the changes.

• I removed Brief.news because I no longer think it will replace Mailbrew.
• I removed Mailbrew because I no longer depend on it to consume Internet content. I tried to replace it with Inoreader email digests, but it didn’t work as I wrote here.
• I decided to add ChatGPT Atlas because I now have a solid use case for it: articles summarization and analysis, as I explained in this YouTube video. This means Perplexity didn’t stay from my previous update. I’m focusing and want to settle on OpenAI for the foreseeable future.
• My new personal landing page, which is mostly complete, has replaced the one previously hosted on Craft public documents.
• I also made several visual tweaks to make it cleaner and more visually appealing.

The pace of updates slowed considerably in the last two years. It’s a good thing, and it means I can focus more on content and less on tooling.

Spooky night... ha ha ha haaaaah

👤 Personal

#foodforthoughts
1️⃣ Fall has settled in for good now. It’s my favorite season—summer trails just behind—but autumn carries a particular weight for me. The air thins and sharpens, and with it comes that familiar blend of melancholy and nostalgia. The colors are louder even as the days grow quieter; leaves flare into brief brilliance before letting go, and I can’t help but read a lesson in that. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember: a gentle ache for what’s passing, paired with gratitude for the beauty of the in‑between. 2️⃣ Autumn is a hinge, a clean, deliberate turning toward colder, whiter days. The rituals arrive—warmer layers by the door, earlier sunsets at the window, steam rising from a mug. Each small change is a marker in the slow migration from abundance to rest. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to this season: I like transitions. They make time visible. They invite reflection without demanding conclusions. In fall, I feel both the closing of one chapter and the quiet drafting of the next, and I’m content to linger in that corridor where everything is briefly both.

🗺️ Discoveries

#ai #design
1️⃣ Do you know Charles Addams? He was a popular cartoonist. I love his drawing style and tried to replicate it using ChatGPT. It came out pretty beautifully. In recent months, I found a few drawing styles that I really like. Another example is the one you can find on the "The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-36”. I created a document where I gathered the ChatGPT prompts and samples of these so I can reproduce them easily. 2️⃣ Here's a blog post from Microsoft explaining the evolution of the Microsoft 365 iconography redesign. I like this kind of blog post, but Microsoft trying to convey their motivation around AI and Copilot seems like a stretch. Generally speaking, I see the new icon versions as an improved version. I cannot say the same about Apple's recent icon version centered around Liquid Glass.

“If the strengths of A.I. are to truly be harnessed, the tech industry should stop focusing so heavily on these one-size-fits-all tools, and instead concentrate on narrow, specialized A.I. tools engineered for particular problems. (...). Humanity would be better served by labs devoting more resources on building specialized tools for science, medicine, technology and education.” — Gary Marcus in Is AGI the right goal for AI?

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#journaling
1️⃣ Most of my writing these days goes into building this newsletter and posting on my blog. 2️⃣ Recently, I started writing in Craft Daily notes. I always like to document what I'm doing. I do this at work all the time in Microsoft OneNote. Every day, I create a new note in a dedicated notebook and write a one-liner about the completed task. Now, I do this at home do document what I'm doing with a computer. It's fun.

🌄 Photography

#source/reddit #nikon #iphone17
1️⃣ We can find great photographers on Reddit, like /unlicensedliensed. Who knew? 2️⃣ Is it worth upgrading to the iPhone 17 Pro? A great article tries to answer a very common question. Coming from an iPhone 15 Pro Max, I would say, no, not at the cost Apple charges for that. Waiting until 2026 to upgrade. 3️⃣ In this video, the author compares the iPhone 17 Pro to the 16 Pro and the Canon R5. You will be surprised by his observations. 4️⃣ Rumors about the next year’s iPhone 18 are ramping up. Next year, we could see the most significant change to iPhone cameras in a long time. 5️⃣ Nikon is about to add a grain effect to my Nikon Zf camera via a firmware update! Cool, but no date given! 6️⃣ It's still too early to tell if the iPhone Air will succeed for Apple. Nonetheless, Tyler Stalman is looking at it from a photographer's perspective. He shares a few details about the iPhone Air‘s photography capabilities that make it stand out from the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#applesilicon #ai #apple #tech #ipad #macos
1️⃣ M5 → M5 iPad Pro → 14” MacBook Pro. 2️⃣ Apple has experienced a series of significant exits from its AI division, which poses a challenge to its ability to compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The departure of Ke Yang, who was recently appointed to lead a team focused on enhancing Siri's capabilities, underscores this issue. 3️⃣ An astute observation from Matt Bircher about Apple marketing photo of the M5 iPad Pro. Apple presents the new M5 iPad Pro like a real laptop, while they present the new M5 MacBook Pro like a computer running a single app. 4️⃣ The new M5 iPad Pro is a bigger upgrade than it seems. Thanks to MacRumors for this upgrade highlight. 5️⃣ This AWS downtime is a reminder how dependent other service providers are. When AWS goes down, even if it's only an AWS region, many things falls apart (the list of web services that were impacted is too long to post here). 6️⃣ I know this company, Quilicot, they have a store less than 2 km from my home, in Montreal, Canada. They made it to the Apple Small Business mini website. I did notice the use of Macs in their boutique. I thought it was a great design fit with the type and brand of bikes they sell. 7️⃣ Finding the next Apple CEO won’t be an easy task if you ask Parker Ortolani. While I agree that finding a new CEO for Apple is not a small endeavour, I don't agree with him on all requirements, especially #2.

🚧 Special projects

#workflow #reading
1️⃣ I spent quite some time recently putting together a solid and durable article reading workflow based on Craft & ChatGPT. I'm really satisfied with it so far, and I'll probably create a YouTube video about this. The workflow also applies to watching YouTube videos, for which I want to summarize and extract as much information as possible. 2️⃣ Also, I finally found a way to use Craft Daily notes as shown in this short video demonstration.

📱 Apps & Services

#app/cleanshot #app/raycast #service/fastmail
1️⃣ CleanShot Cloud and CleanShot X now support user comments on shared screenshots. Judge for yourself in this screenshot example. 2️⃣ Raycast continues its expansion on the iPhone with the introduction of an iOS keyboard. Raycast's iOS keyboard update streamlines workflows. Explore tabs for recents, AI, dictation, quick links, and snippets. See all the details here. 3️⃣ Fastmail now offers a Mac app. Well, it's one of those web wrappers based on the Electron framework. It's not great. It even feels slower than the web version! The positive thing about having this app, though, is getting native notifications and the offline mode. Please make no mistake, I'm still a satisfied user of this service.

📺 YouTube

#service/youtube
1️⃣ I've just noticed that YouTube appears to offer an "Ask" button for each video, as shown in this screenshot. I tried it twice and found the summary quite clear and helpful. The consequence is profound: I didn't watch the videos. As someone who creates videos, I'm pondering the implications for me and all other video creators. 2️⃣ Growing a small tree can be cool and relaxing. Watch it here. 3️⃣ Can we become friends with spiders? Maybe.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#openai #ai #sora
1️⃣ I finally got into Sora and tried it to create cameos with a few prompts. My first cameo was impressive, but the following ones weren’t. I'm not sure that I want to waste too much time (and energy) on this thing. 2️⃣ The header image of this newsletter edition with an Apple logo was taken from another website that writes about Apple and uses a lot of AI-generated artwork. I didn’t ask his permission. Typically, if it were something he created himself, I would have asked for permission to use it.

🔮 Looking forward

#openai #aibrowser
1️⃣ OpenAI released the ChatGPT Atlas browser. It's yet another Chromium-based browser with “some AI” stuff glued on top of it. It is joining Comet and Dia. It's becoming a crowded space. Strangely enough, Google is relatively slow at adding AI to its Chrome browser, I mean, in an obvious and readily accessible way. Nonetheless, I shared a few thoughts about my first hours using Atlas. As someone who tried both Comet and Dia, neither of them clicked with me; Atlas is another story—looking forward to seeing how it will influence my workflows. 2️⃣ As reported by Marcus Mendes from 9to5Mac, Apple is developing a new framework in iOS 26.1 that enables third-party photo apps to perform seamless background uploads of images, enhancing reliability and user experience. This could be a game-changer for secure and reliable photo library backups on your Apple devices. I don't do those but provided with an fully supported mechanism, I would do it!

“Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.” — Anil Dash in The Majority AI View

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

UFO - Take 2. It's a matter of perspective.

UFO.

As a Craft power user, I still need Ulysses to complete my writing and publishing workflow. I made a video about this.

👤 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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Oldies.

This week, I decided to add Screen Studio to my YouTube recording workflow. Screen Studio brings simplicity for recording more dynamic screen sequences. Everything Screen Studio does can be done in ScreenFlow, but it requires significantly more manual work. But Screen Studio has a severe limitation: we cannot merge recorded sequences. That’s why I’m keeping ScreenFlow.

In summary, my workflow proceeds as follows: individual sequences are recorded in Screen Studio, exported as .mp4 files, and then imported into ScreenFlow to be assembled into a complete video sequence, which includes the intro and outro sequences with background music. Chapter markers are also added in ScreenFlow before final export. Finally, video subtitles are created using Whisper Transcription and exported as an .srt file, which is compatible with YouTube Studio.

Overall, I do spend more time on video rendering, but I think it’s worth it. Lastly, disk space consumption is way higher than before, with 2x-3x more space consumed than with ScreenFlow alone. Ouch.

One more thing: Screen Studio is the only app that makes the M4 Mac mini fan run at full speed. I wonder if Screen Studio uses Apple Metal technology?

🗺️ Discoveries

ubiquity #tech #blogger #discovery

1️⃣ Ubiquity released a new set of home NAS to compete against Ugreen, Qnap and Synology. As a fan of this brand, I would consider buying one of these to replace my aging Synology NAS 720+. It's a dead-simple device for basic needs. It won't compete against Synology on the operating system features set, of course. But I think many users don't need all those features, so a UNAS 2 would fill all the requirements for storing backups and files. I'll keep an eye on these devices. Who knew that one day you would read 'Ubiquity' and 'Synology' in the same sentence about NAS? 2️⃣ While browsing YouTube, I came across this video about a backpack traveller in Afghanistan. I watched it and was fascinated by his experience and… courage. I discovered this guy had a website, which I visited extensively. First, I'm happy to see younger guys not only having an Instagram and TikTok account but also a traditional website and a blog. It's refreshing to see. He maintains a YouTube channel documenting his numerous experiences during his road trips. I subscribed.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

generativeai #ai #app/applejournal

1️⃣ Thanks to generative AI, writing is a changing landscape. In full transparency, I wrote a blog post detailing the process that lead to writing this piece about Apple. 2️⃣ I like to write when I'm on vacation. I wanted to test Apple Journal this summer. I did and shared my numerous observations. If you are a Day One user, keep it that way. If you are still curious, go ahead and try Apple Journal.

🌄 Photography

techreview #iphone17 #digg #glass/discovery

1️⃣ Austin Mann reviews the latest iPhone, from a photographer's perspective. As always, you'll find astute comments on iPhone's capabilities for serious photography journeys. As a bonus, you'll get to see some seriously good photos! 2️⃣ I tested photo posting on Digg with this photo. You might not be able to visit this link, though. Digg is still in beta. I’m not even sure Digg is the right place for posting photos, but hey, why not give it a try? I like testing new platforms. 3️⃣ You should never miss the review of the newest iPhone from the maker of Halide, the alternative camera app. 4️⃣ Another iPhone 17 Pro review, this one from Tyler Stalman and this one from Petapixel. I love these photographer-oriented takes. I relate so much more to these types of reviews than any tech pundit-tech-influencerish reviews. 5️⃣ One of the few things that I wish I could use from the recent iPhone (from 2024 up to now): photographic styles as explained and demonstrated in this video. 6️⃣ I still have my Substack page, but I don't really use it. I recently spent more time trying to see what type of content was being published on my timeline, and I stumbled upon this photographer. Wow! I don't think Substack is the best place for sharing photos. Thankfully, the photographer also has a personal website. His name is Damian Ward. I love those trees. 7️⃣ Another discovery on Glass: André. And looking at André's following, I discovered Cam Hunt, a New York-based photographer. He made so many beautiful and well-engineered visual compositions. Must see. 👀

🍎 Apple & Tech

ipad #ipados26 #stevejobs

1️⃣ If you are an “iPad-only” user and want to understand better or take advantage of iPadOS 26 multitasking, this video from Snazzy Labs tells it all. It’s a must-watch. And no, it’s not about the old Mac vs iPad debate, don't be deceived by the video thumbnail! 2️⃣ I'm still using my good old iPhone 15 Pro Max, and with this year's iPhone 17 Pro, you have to ask yourself: should I upgrade? The answer lies in this short post by Ryan Crhistoffel: no. 3️⃣ Another great iPadOS 26 video that you should consider watching. The iPadOS 26 release this year really does unleash the iPad. Finally. 4️⃣ If you are curious about the latest iPhone internals, don't miss this video showing the disassembly of the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. It's really impressive what they can fit inside such small devices. The main logic board is so small! 5️⃣ I wrote a rather lengthy piece on Apple failures (and you can have a behind-the-scenes look at this writing project). 6️⃣ I came to the conclusion that using the iPad with iPadOS 26's multitasking without an external monitor should be done with Stage Manager enabled. With an external monitor, using the new and flexible windowing system might be a better experience. But remember, flexibility always comes at a cost: mandatory window management. For some reason, it's not as fluid on the iPad as on the Mac. Cue the following videos down below for a full picture. 7️⃣ “Your presentation is pedantic and boring.” Steve Jobs, as reported here by Ken Segall, about Apple's latest keynote. I don't know what to say. On one hand, I wish Apple would return to live presentations, but on the other hand, I love the technically perfect presentations they always put together. It's the only infomercial that I can't tolerate from start to end. 8️⃣ Apple likes to control and own the whole technology stack, and the iPhone Air line certainly proves it, as this interview from CBNC explains it: Apple pitched iPhone Air as a hardware design leap and proof of its deeper silicon self-reliance. The A19 Pro with GPU-embedded neural accelerators is positioned as Apple’s real AI play—on-device, private, and developer-friendly—while the N1 and C1X chips mark a near-total takeover of the iPhone’s silicon stack. But Wall Street is still waiting for a more compelling “AI vision,” beyond chip-level plumbing.

🚧 Special projects

app/screenstudio

1️⃣ I decided to subscribe to Screen Studio, a screen recording app. It will join ScreenFlow, another screen recording app that I'm using to create my YouTube videos. Screen Studio offers an easier and more intuitive recording experience for zooming into content in post-production. ScreenFlow supports that too, but the method never really clicked with me and takes way more time to get decent results. Screen Studio lacks basic video editing features, which is why I keep ScreenFlow around. I'll use both of them to create videos. Here's my first video involving Screen Studio 2️⃣ I had issues this week with one of my websites and had to request support from the hosting service, Chillidog Hosting. It's not entirely clear what the problem was, but it was probably related to a bad interaction with CloudFlare. However, in any case, the response I received from the support staff was rapid and stellar.

📱 Apps & Services

#service/news #service/kagi
1️⃣ The enshitification of Google is complete as shown in the “Googling Stuff” image below. That's why I'm not using Google, but Kagi instead. It's not free, but it keeps me from becoming insane. 2️⃣ After adding a News section, Kagi has now released an iPad and iPhone app: Kagi News. It's simple, to the point. Must download.

📺 YouTube

ai #aibubble

1️⃣ In this video, a startup company has a hard time finding talent in the AI-related field, while other companies are laying off software engineers because of productivity gains, thanks to AI. 😳 Additionally, a significant amount of attention appears to be devoted to prompt engineering. 2️⃣ Would you like a touchscreen MacBook? The debate is still raging.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#ads

1️⃣ Ads are everywhere, even on a fridge near you. 😳 I bought a Samsung fridge a few years ago, and there is no chance this will happen again. It was a piece of crap that I sold as soon as I could after my home renovations. It was so noisy, I could barely stand it. Now, I'm the proud owner of an LG fridge, probably the most silent fridge I've ever owned. 2️⃣ Speaking of ads, OpenAI is looking at more revenue streams, and ads are one of them. I'm unsure how these ads would be introduced and experienced from an end-user perspective. However, it certainly marks a possible turning point in OpenAI/ChatGPT enshitification, as I wrote here. Remember: ads always involve some form of user tracking.

🔮 Looking forward

#service/chatgpt

1️⃣ OpenAI just announced ChatGPT Pulse, and I can't wait to try it out. Curated news every day? I'll take it. I hope it's something similar to Kagi News. People like Manton Reece seem to like it. The only issue is that I'm asking so many questions about various topics. I wonder how well ChatGPT Pulse will be able to come up with something coherent. 2️⃣ Ten years from now, Apple might be doing Frosted Glass, replacing Liquid Glass. Seen on Reddit. 3️⃣ The AI bubble will burst sooner than later, harder than everyone seems to think.

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

This past summer, I gave Apple’s Journal app a real-world test drive. For two months, I documented my stay in a lakeside chalet, exploring its strengths and weaknesses. For context, I’ve been using the third-party app Day One for many years, although not primarily for journaling purposes. In my case, Day One serves as an automatic repository for my published content, which shaped my expectations for Apple’s offering.

Why This Experiment Mattered

For nearly two years, Apple Journal existed as an iPhone-only app, which felt odd for a tool meant for writing. With macOS Tahoe and iPadOS 26, the app finally expanded to the Mac and iPad. This long delay raised questions about why Apple kept it limited for so long. During my experiment, I skipped Apple’s suggested prompts and wrote freely, capturing my own reflections. The promise of Journal is straightforward: a lightweight, Apple-native journaling tool designed for those already invested in the ecosystem.

Where Journal Shines

Apple Journal’s most appealing quality is its ability to enrich entries with digital artifacts. Photos, audio snippets, and GPS coordinates can all be woven into a single note, turning entries into miniature multimedia capsules. During my stay, I recorded many audio clips of natural sounds to preserve magical moments, which became one of the app’s most enjoyable features. I also appreciated being able to assign an entry to more than one journal at once. Overall, the concept is inviting: a minimal, approachable journaling space with just enough flexibility to capture moments quickly.

Where It Falls Short

The limitations became obvious just as quickly. Setting a location for an entry felt unnecessarily cumbersome, and the lack of organizational tools, such as tags, left me wanting more structure. Export options are minimal, making archiving or migrating entries difficult. Even the sharing extension from Photos.app seems half-finished—I could add an image and a short note, but I couldn’t pick which journal to save it to, adjust the entry date, or set the location without later editing in Journal. Simple tasks, like setting the location, required too many clicks.

There are also peculiar restrictions. Each entry allows only thirteen images, with little control over how they appear in the mosaic. On the Mac and iPad, Journal looks and behaves like a stretched iPhone app, ignoring the design conventions of those platforms. Built with SwiftUI, it resembles Apple’s Passwords app: functional but uninspiring. It feels more like a prototype promoted to a product than a tool carefully designed from the ground up.

The Bigger Picture

Journal also highlights a broader trend in Apple’s recent software. Many of the company’s new cross-platform apps are built with the same design language, which often strips them of personality. Whether on iPhone, iPad, or Mac, they tend to look and behave in nearly identical ways. This uniformity makes them predictable but also bland, as if individuality and platform-specific strengths were sacrificed for the sake of consistency.

It’s a striking contrast with Apple’s earlier era, when apps like iPhoto or GarageBand felt unmistakably tailored to the Mac, and Notes or Messages carried design touches unique to iOS. Those differences once gave each platform its own character. Today, that sense of distinct identity has been smoothed out, leaving Journal to feel competent but visually and experientially indistinguishable from Apple’s other recent apps.

A Paradoxical Verdict

Ultimately, Apple Journal is suitable for lightweight use cases and will appeal to those who are firmly within Apple’s ecosystem. It delivers a taste of multimedia journaling with minimal effort, but its shortcomings are difficult to overlook. Journaling is an intensely personal act, and yet Journal feels oddly impersonal and underdeveloped, more like a summer side project than a finished creative tool. For newcomers, it might be enough. For those who depend on richer features or structured content archives, it will likely remain a curiosity rather than a serious option.

In my own case, I may be spoiled by years of using Day One, which I’ll probably continue to rely on as my central archive. Yet I can imagine returning to Journal during another trip, drawn by its simplicity. That paradox—balancing the pull of a powerful archive against the charm of a lightweight companion—captures the strange, in-between space Apple Journal occupies today.

I’ve long wanted to write an article like this one. However, as Apple continued to add to its list of failures, poor Apple, I kept pushing back the deadline. This summer, however, the timing was right. Here’s what I did differently this time.

A few months ago, I started gathering a list of Apple’s failures in a Craft document. I wanted to cover the period from when Tim Cook took over as Apple’s leader, following Steve Jobs’ passing, up until now. For each failure, I wrote a summary that included a description, some context, and a list of potential collateral damage to Apple’s reputation and brand. Then, I turned to ChatGPT for help.

I set up a space to upload files, one for each failure, and began a separate “conversation” to explore areas I hadn’t already covered. This process took a few weeks. I’d revisit one of the failures every other day and continue the conversation until I was satisfied.

Next, I started creating a first draft based on all the conversations in this ChatGPT writing project. It took many prompts to refine the base content before exporting it as a Markdown file. Then, I set up a new conversation, uploaded the file, and asked ChatGPT to continue working on the article, this time in canvas mode. It took many more iterations and manual edits to finish around 85% of the writing process.

After that, I imported the text back into Craft and kept adding relevant facts and comments. As I went along, I started searching for photos that could illustrate each section. I used Kagi Search for all my image searches. For each photo, I wrote a brief caption that gave a unique perspective on the failure it was highlighting.

It’s also worth noting the role of Grammarly. As I finished writing in Craft, I used Grammarly to rephrase parts I didn’t quite like. I ended up keeping around half of Grammarly’s suggested rephrases.

In summary, generative AI was a significant contributor to my writing, either through the use of ChatGPT or with Grammarly’s constant supervision. I’m not sure how I should feel about this, nor how you should think about it, now that you know. Make no mistake, the original writing project idea is mine. The selection of Apple’s failures is mine. The starting point of research is mine. The selection of images is mine. Supervision of ChatGPT’s contribution is mine. But is the final product mine? Anyway, complete transparency, now you know.

Tim Cook has been Apple's CEO since Steve Jobs’ passing, and he's been at the helm longer than Jobs was. Is Tim Cook’s Apple more likely to fail? I first explored this question in “The Rotten Side of Tim Cook’s Apple”. Today's tech landscape looks very different from the one under Steve Jobs’ leadership. As a global company, Apple faces pressure not only from a technological standpoint but also from a political one – an area that's largely out of its control. This is a unique challenge for Tim Cook's Apple. In this article, I want to highlight key failures that have occurred since Tim Cook became CEO of what's now the world's biggest and most influential tech company. The list is presented in no particular order.

2013 Trash Mac Pro

Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro—nicknamed the “trash can” for its striking cylindrical design—was initially hailed as a futuristic engineering showcase, but it quickly became a cautionary tale of form winning over function. Professionals who depended on modular, expandable systems for video editing, 3D rendering, and scientific computing were frustrated by the lack of internal expansion, reliance on external peripherals, and limited upgrade paths compared to the tower-style Mac Pro before it. This move mirrored Apple’s broader push toward sealed, minimalist hardware, such as MacBooks with fewer ports, which gave the impression that the company had lost touch with the needs of its pro audience. Over time, the backlash became so strong that Apple publicly admitted it had miscalculated. They found themselves in a thermal corner. In 2017, the company formed a dedicated “Pro Workflow” team and recommitted to building truly modular systems, a pivot that culminated in the 2019 Mac Pro tower—a clear signal that Apple had learned from its misstep and was willing to correct course for the professional market.

“I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. … Being able to put larger single GPUs required a different system architecture and more thermal capacity than that system was designed to accommodate.” — Craig Federighi

This whole saga shows Apple’s pendulum swing: from prioritizing bold design statements that alienated core users, to re-embracing pragmatism and function when it mattered most. The scars of the 2013 Mac Pro still echo today in how carefully Apple frames its “pro” products.

The 2013 Mac Pro hurt Apple’s standing with professionals by prioritizing design over function, offering no internal expansion and quickly becoming obsolete, which led many creative and technical users to abandon the platform or freeze purchases. The years of neglect that followed reinforced the perception that Apple no longer cared about pro workflows, damaging trust in its “pro” brand. Eventually, the backlash forced Apple into a rare public admission of failure, the creation of a Pro Workflow Team, and the launch of the modular 2019 Mac Pro—an expensive course correction that still serves as a cautionary reminder whenever Apple introduces new professional hardware.

Butterfly Keyboard

Apple’s butterfly keyboard, introduced in 2015 with the ultra-thin MacBook, was designed to allow slimmer laptops and promised more stable, precise typing thanks to a new low-profile mechanism. In practice, it quickly became infamous for reliability issues: dust or debris could disable keys, repairs often required replacing the entire top case, and the shallow key travel felt unsatisfying to many typists. Despite several revisions with membranes and tweaks, problems persisted across MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models from 2015 to 2019, leading to lawsuits and a public repair program. Apple finally abandoned the design in 2020, returning to a more traditional scissor-switch “Magic Keyboard,” and the butterfly keyboard is now remembered as one of the company’s most notorious hardware missteps. This design failure and the time it took for Apple to fix it is a testament of how stubborn Apple can be.

MacBook Touch Bar

Apple introduced the Touch Bar in 2016 as a dynamic OLED strip replacing the MacBook Pro’s function keys, promising customizable, context-sensitive controls for apps. Despite some clever uses in Apple’s own software, adoption lagged, professionals disliked losing tactile keys—especially Escape—and the feature quickly became a symbol of Apple prioritizing form over function during the controversial butterfly keyboard era. By 2019 Apple backtracked by restoring a physical Escape key, and in 2021 it removed the Touch Bar entirely with the redesigned MacBook Pro, later discontinuing the last model that carried it in 2023. Today it’s remembered as a bold but short-lived experiment that never matched the reliability and simplicity of physical keys.

Siri Rebuild

Apple acquired Siri in 2011 with big promises of a futuristic voice assistant, but it quickly fell behind Google and Amazon due to limited functionality, slow improvements, and Apple’s restrictive, closed approach. Despite efforts like SiriKit and the HomePod, Siri remained narrowly useful, mostly for setting timers or simple tasks, while rivals built richer ecosystems. Apple’s focus on privacy limited data collection, slowing AI progress, and controversies like human review of audio recordings further hurt trust. Internal disorganization and shifting leadership compounded the stagnation. By the time generative AI reshaped expectations in 2022, Siri seemed outdated. With Apple Intelligence announced in 2024, Apple is finally trying to reinvent Siri with generative AI, but it faces the challenge of overcoming a decade-long reputation for underperformance.

Siri is holding back Apple’s other products like the HomePod where the only way to interact with the device is through voice. Other unannounced products like the HomePod with a screen still under development is also being delayed because of Siri not powerful or flexible enough to support more complex use cases.

Apple’s failure to rebuild Siri has created multiple long-term problems: it damaged Apple’s brand by making Siri a weak link in the “it just works” promise; left Apple behind rivals in smart assistants and AI leadership despite an early start; prevented Siri from becoming the true hub of Apple’s ecosystem; slowed innovation due to legacy technical debt; discouraged developers with overly restrictive APIs; and revealed cultural limits in Apple’s closed, privacy-first approach that hinder bold reinvention. Together, these issues make Siri a strategic liability in the generative AI era.

Apple’s investment in Apple Intelligence somewhat reduced the focus on Siri, but not for good reasons.

Apple Intelligence

Apple has offered numerous AI-based features for years—like image recognition in Photos, predictive typing, Siri suggestions, and health insights—all built on advanced machine learning. Yet with the announcement of Apple Intelligence, Apple unintentionally downplayed these existing capabilities, creating the perception that it was only now entering the AI space. That perception isn’t entirely wrong: while Apple excels at practical, on-device machine learning, it has lagged in generative AI, where rivals have moved faster and louder. This gap explains why Apple Intelligence feels both like a fresh start and a catch-up move at the same time.

For search, Apple made a deal with Google. But generative AI, Apple is still pondering its options, apparently. Time goes fast and rivals are already harder and harder to catch up. This lost opportunity doesn’t make Apple a leader it used to be. Sure, it has never been the first in a market, and they want to build for the best, not for the most. Yet, Apple will need to make the calls; otherwise, they keep adding failures that eventually will add up and make people reconsider their commitment to the ecosystem as generative AI use cases mature and become even more pervasive.

Apple Intelligence might not be the failure in itself, but the rollout was.

Ads

Apple, once revered for iconic ads, has recently stumbled with several high-profile missteps: the 2024 iPad Pro “Crush!” ad drew backlash for symbolically destroying creative tools; a 2025 long-form Mac video called “The Parent Presentation” was mocked as cringeworthy and quickly pulled; an iPhone 16 ad overstated Siri’s AI features, triggering a false-advertising lawsuit; a Thailand-set spot was criticized for cultural stereotyping; and even a “Shot on iPhone, Drawn on iPad” billboard in Miami caused ridicule for an accidental sexual image. These incidents highlight Apple’s growing struggle with tone, cultural sensitivity, and messaging clarity—leading to public apologies, legal trouble, and questions about whether the company has lost the sharp creative instinct that once defined its marketing.

Apple Vision Pro

Apple’s Vision Pro dazzled as a technical marvel—with ultra-high-resolution displays, custom silicon, and advanced spatial computing—but failed to gain traction because its $3,499 price tag far outweighed its everyday utility, the ecosystem lacked killer apps, and the device remained heavy, isolating, and awkward for long use. Market readiness wasn’t there: people already had cheaper, more social alternatives for productivity and entertainment. Vision Pro ultimately proved what’s possible but not yet desirable, serving more as a stepping stone toward future, lighter, more affordable headsets than as a mainstream success.

Apple’s Vision Pro launch highlighted a striking disconnect between the company’s ambitions and the broader tech landscape shaped by the rise of generative AI. While Apple poured resources into unveiling a $3,499 mixed-reality headset—an impressive feat of engineering but with limited use cases and narrow appeal—the world was embracing generative AI tools that were inexpensive, widely accessible, and instantly transformative for work, creativity, and communication. This contrast made Apple look out of step: instead of spearheading the most disruptive shift in technology since the iPhone, it seemed focused on a hardware marvel that solved no urgent problem. Generative AI became the cultural and technological conversation, while Vision Pro remained an expensive curiosity. As a result, Apple’s reputation as the company that defines the future felt diminished; rather than being the pioneer of the next computing wave, it looked cautious, sidelined, and almost irrelevant in the very moment when intelligence—not hardware—was driving innovation forward.

Is Apple making another mistake by still not offering a solution in the smart glasses market? Time is definitely running out. I wonder if Apple’s design team should start thinking outside the box and give it a real shot, while scaling back their efforts on Apple Vision Pro.

Camera Control

Apple’s new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 was pitched as a breakthrough but is seen by many as unnecessary, fiddly, and awkwardly placed; it’s imprecise compared to on-screen controls, inconsistent in behavior, missing key features like focus lock, and in some cases buggy. While some enthusiasts value the tactile feel for quick exposure or style adjustments, most users find it over-engineered for a problem that didn’t exist, echoing the fate of past Apple missteps like the Touch Bar. Rumors that Apple may drop the feature entirely by the iPhone 18 suggest it could be a short-lived experiment rather than a lasting innovation.

Apple’s Camera Control button is widely seen as over-engineering—a complex, niche feature trying to fix what wasn’t broken. While it offers some benefits for power users, most find it awkward, imprecise, and unnecessary compared to familiar touch controls, making Apple look out of touch by investing in a flashy gimmick instead of practical improvements like battery life or better zoom.

Developer relations

Apple often portrays developers as partners in creating the beautiful apps and services that define its ecosystem, but many developers no longer buy into that message. The company built one of the most profitable software platforms in history, yet strict App Store control, high commissions, limited API access, and unpredictable rules have left the community feeling more constrained than valued. While Apple insists its policies protect users and ensure quality, developers increasingly view them as self-serving. Legal fights like Epic Games’ lawsuit and mounting global regulation have forced Apple to ease some restrictions, but trust has eroded, leaving developers torn between the opportunities Apple enables and the control it continues to impose.

Apple’s strained relations with developers are increasingly hurting the adoption of new technologies like the Vision Pro and the Liquid Glass UI, because both rely on strong third-party support to succeed. The Vision Pro risks becoming a niche gadget without a vibrant app ecosystem, while a major UI redesign falters if developers are slow to update their apps, leaving Apple’s own software polished but the wider experience inconsistent. Years of strict App Store rules, high fees, and limited flexibility have eroded trust, so instead of rushing to embrace Apple’s latest platforms, many developers now hesitate, weakening the momentum that once made Apple’s innovations instantly transformative.

iOS 7 Flat Design

In 2013, Apple’s iOS 7 redesign replaced skeuomorphism with a flat, minimalist look of thin fonts, neon colors, and heavy translucency, but the abrupt shift was widely criticized by users for poor readability, confusing navigation, and motion-inducing animations, while developers resented the sudden need to overhaul apps without clear guidance. The backlash pushed Apple to gradually tone it down in later releases by adding bolder typography, clearer buttons, and faster animations, ultimately finding a more balanced design. In hindsight, Apple should have anticipated the problems—accessibility issues, developer disruption, and the risks of radical minimalism already seen elsewhere—making iOS 7 a case where bold aesthetics temporarily outweighed usability and trust.

The iOS 7 redesign shook Apple’s brand image in ways both positive and negative. On one hand, it signaled a break from the skeuomorphic past and positioned Apple as modern and forward-looking at a time when Android was catching up in features and design. On the other hand, the jarring minimalism and usability missteps undermined Apple’s reputation for polish, coherence, and user-friendly design—the very traits that had set it apart. For some, iOS 7 felt rushed and experimental rather than the “it just works” standard people expected.

The absence of a strong design visionary like Steve Jobs likely amplified these issues. Jobs had an instinct for balance between radical simplicity and human usability, often tempering extremes. Without that central taste-making force, design leadership fell to Jony Ive, who, while a brilliant hardware designer, pushed iOS toward an aesthetic purity that sometimes ignored practical concerns. Jobs was known for rejecting ideas until they aligned with both beauty and usability; his presence might have reined in the more abstract, fashion-driven elements of iOS 7 and insisted on a redesign that felt bold but still unmistakably Apple.

The episode illustrates how a brand built on design excellence can stumble when the internal check—the person or culture that balances vision with pragmatism—goes missing. Apple recovered, but iOS 7 was a reminder that design revolutions carry brand risks if they outpace user trust.

Liquid Glass

Apple’s “Liquid Glass” design language today echoes some of the same risks we saw with iOS 7. On paper, it’s visually striking: translucent panels, layered depth, and glossy fluid-like elements meant to showcase Apple’s technical prowess. But the danger is déjà vu—pushing aesthetic novelty ahead of clarity and usability. As with iOS 7’s thin fonts and neon gradients, Liquid Glass risks overwhelming users with visual flash that can obscure hierarchy, reduce contrast, and fatigue the eye. Apple is again trying to distinguish itself at a moment when competitors lean toward functional minimalism, but in doing so, it could alienate users who prize Apple for clarity and predictability, not just spectacle.

Steve Jobs’s absence still matters. Jony Ive’s departure left a design culture that sometimes oscillates between engineering-driven ambition and marketing-driven showmanship, without a central “taste filter” to ensure balance. Liquid Glass could repeat the iOS 7 cycle—an impressive but polarizing look that Apple must later tone down once usability complaints pile up. The lesson of iOS 7 was that Apple should evolve its design, not shock users with extremes. If history repeats itself, Liquid Glass could again be a short-lived overcorrection before Apple returns to a calmer middle ground.

Over the course of summer 2025, I abundantly covered Apple’s Liquid Glass and created a dedicated website for it; it might be worth a visit. Now, let’s pray that the next few months and maybe years will undo Liquid Glass, at least, partially. That’s certainly my hope.

Fixing the iPad or Breaking Its Simplicity?

When it first launched in 2010, the iPad was presented as a “third device” between the iPhone and Mac—great for media, browsing, and casual apps, but deliberately limited. For years, iPads had strong processors (often rivalling Mac laptops) but were constrained by iPadOS, which treated them like oversized iPhones. No multi-window multitasking, limited external storage, clumsy file management, and no real professional apps kept the iPad from being the productivity powerhouse its hardware could have supported.

Apple began to loosen the reins in 2019 with iPadOS, which split the platform from iOS and added features like split-screen multitasking, better file handling, external drive support, and later, Stage Manager for desktop-like workflows. Still, performance outpaced software: M-series chips were dropped into iPads, but the OS didn’t allow users to fully exploit that power.

With iPadOS 26, the balance finally shifted. Apple leaned into the iPad’s potential as a real hybrid: far more capable multitasking, improved external monitor support, better keyboard/mouse integration, and powerful pro-level apps that tap into the same chipsets found in Macs. In short, Apple stopped treating the iPad as a “Mac alternative” to protect the Mac and began letting it grow into its own identity—lightweight, touch-first, but no longer artificially hobbled. But did Apple break the iPad’s elegance and simplicity by bringing real-computer realities to the tablet? It remains to be seen.

The Slow and Agonizing Death of macOS

macOS once stood apart, a computing environment defined by depth, flexibility, and a long tradition of user-centric design choices that treated the Mac as a world of its own. Over time, though, Apple’s pursuit of consistency across platforms has blurred the Mac’s identity. With the arrival of design cues and UI metaphors borrowed from iOS and iPadOS, macOS has grown sleeker but flatter, often at the cost of the rich textures, discoverability, and idiosyncratic polish that made it special. The soul of the Mac—its sense of being unapologetically different from touch-first devices—feels eroded.

Part of this shift is cultural and technical. Swift was marketed as the modern replacement for Objective-C, but its elegance also nudged developers into Apple’s ecosystem-wide way of thinking: one language, one vision, all platforms unified. SwiftUI, in turn, took this further. By abstracting the interface layer into declarative building blocks, it became easier to design an app that looks and behaves consistently across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. But “consistently” here often meant “like iOS,” with macOS features trimmed down or awkwardly reshaped to fit the mobile-first model. What was once a developer culture of building “Mac-like apps” gave way to a culture of making apps that could stretch to any Apple device.

Catalyst was Apple’s most explicit signal of intent: let iPad apps run on the Mac, even if they felt clumsy on the desktop. It was supposed to bolster the Mac software ecosystem, but in practice it diluted it. Mac users—long accustomed to apps that embraced multitasking, menus, and keyboard-driven workflows—found themselves staring at windowed iPad software with oversized buttons and simplified interfaces. Instead of preserving what made Mac apps distinct, Catalyst encouraged a lowest-common-denominator approach, flattening the Mac into yet another pane of glass in Apple’s multi-device strategy.

What’s left is a sense that macOS is morphing into a derivative product, its uniqueness sacrificed in the name of uniformity. The once sharp boundary between desktop and mobile has been eroded, not by elevating the iPad to the Mac’s level of productivity, but by pulling the Mac closer to the iPad’s constraints. The Mac hasn’t disappeared, but its soul—that sense of being a computer first, not a cousin to a phone—feels increasingly faint.

The irony is that Apple could have chosen differently. Swift, SwiftUI, and Catalyst could have been tools to expand the Mac’s vocabulary, allowing it to influence iOS and iPadOS as much as the other way around. Instead, the gravitational pull has been one-sided. macOS survives, but as a reflection of Apple’s broader ecosystem rather than a leader in defining what personal computing can be.

PC Gaming

Apple’s failure to gain momentum in PC gaming stems from a repeating cycle of flashy pushes with little follow-through, compounded by a pivotal fallout with NVIDIA. From Marathon in the ’90s to Intel Macs and Boot Camp in the 2000s, Metal in the 2010s, and Apple Silicon with the Game Porting Toolkit in the 2020s, each initiative stalled because of limited developer interest and a small player base. The breakdown of Apple’s relationship with NVIDIA after the 2008 GPU failures cut Macs off from the dominant GPU ecosystem and its strong developer ties, leaving Apple dependent on AMD and later its own GPUs, both lacking NVIDIA’s industry clout. Combined with Apple’s priorities—design, productivity, and iOS gaming profits over high-end graphics—the result is a self-reinforcing loop: too few gamers attract too few developers, keeping Mac gaming as a showcase rather than a serious platform.

Oh, and Apple Arcade, even after more than five years in operation, didn’t really help move the needle.

Failure to Return to Live Events

In “While We Wait for the Next Apple Infomercial”, I shared some thoughts about Apple’s decision to keep broadcasting pre-recorded events instead of going live. Today’s Apple might look lacking in confidence by staying away from these more dynamic and human-oriented events.

Is Apple Losing Its Way?

Looking at these failures in a focused article like this, we have to wonder: has Apple lost its way? Apple made mistakes under Steve Jobs. Were we more lenient with them when they were the underdog in the tech industry? Probably. As Apple grows to its current size, it’s no surprise we've become more critical. Apple often claims to lead by example, not just by appearance. Historical failures prove the contrary.

👤 Personal

#cablecutter #weather
1️⃣ After being a cable TV subscriber for many decades, I decided to ditch cable and switch to an Apple TV-only setup. Although my experience with Apple TV isn't ideal for consuming TV content (as I explained in this article), it's still the best option. It'll save me over $1,000 a year, more than enough to pay for an updated Apple TV when it comes out later this fall. 2️⃣ September is my favourite month of the year because of its cooler temperatures during the day and night. 3️⃣ I had a tough time selecting this edition's header image. I finally found one on Unsplash from Taiki Ishikawa. I chose that one because it's a good illustration of what is going on in our schools these days with smartphone usage: isolation. It's a good thing that more and more schools are starting to ban smartphones. The experience from this is that people likes it more than expected.

🗺️ Discoveries

#mymind #apps #macos
1️⃣ MyMind isn’t exactly unknown to me, but I recently started testing the water with it. I like what I'm seeing, but I'm not sure if I need for this. I have never been a long-time user of Bookmaring apps. 2️⃣ While BasicAppleGuy is building a macOS icon history collection, 512 Pixels had a macOS Screenshot library that I wasn’t aware. It's about as extensive as you can expect. 3️⃣ Thanks to Cloudflare, we can see how much internet traffic AI bots are generating while scraping websites. It's fascinating. 4️⃣ Here's one of the coolest websites that I’ve seen in a long time! It's for geeks, but it's worth a visit: PostHog.com.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#generativeai
1️⃣ Tiago Forte seems to be all in with generative AI in his latest video. At first, I thought his use of Claude for writing essays was clever. Then, I started to ask myself: Is he promoting modern writing, or is this entirely different, a new kind of writing that should use a different word? I don't know, but I'm not able to call that writing. 2️⃣ Don't miss the Numeric Citizen Blog Posts digest for August. 3️⃣ I find myself more and more starting new blog posts in French, then asking Grammarly to translate them into English. My mother language is French, and for me, this is helpful to break language barriers more easily. It's easier to get my ideas and thoughts out there. I'm fine with this workflow which involves generative AI. 4️⃣ Is AI changing our language? Yes.

🌄 Photography

pixelfed #iphone17 #unsplash
1️⃣ By rolling out ‘Stories’, Pixelfed is diluting my interest in the platform. 2️⃣ Tyler Stalman offers his views about the new iPhone 17 and iPhone Air. From a photography standpoint, the iPhone continues to advance and, maybe, lead the market. Time will tell, reviews will confirm or not. In any case, Stalman always offers great insights. 3️⃣ I've submitted a new photo to my Unsplash account. It's been a long time. For some reason, I've been an upstick in downloads of my most popular photos. I'm curious in what context these downloads are being used.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#tablet #tech
1️⃣ I like what Remarkable is doing with their tablets. Here is the new Paper Pro Move. In a whole dominated by a few companies, it's reassuring to see others trying to move the needle, even in niche markets. 2️⃣ While waiting for the next Apple keynote, I shared my perspective on these media events. 3️⃣ BasicAppleGuy wrote a good take on the upcoming Apple keynote, centered around the usual bingo card. His perspective is overwhelmingly positive compared to mine, but both are valid. 4️⃣ Apple's Awe Dropping event revealed many nice new devices. Jarrod Blundy gathered his reactions during the presentation. BasicAppleGuy posted an Awe Dropping Recep. Jason Snell wrote a great piece, too. All in all, this event marks a shift: Apple is levelling up the “regular” iPhone and Watch experience, increasingly differentiating on design and ecosystem integration rather than purely hardware exclusivity. Oh, Parker Ortolani wasn't convinced by the recorded event quality and the less-than-stellar Watch upgrades, yet he will get an iPhone 17 Pro. Orange. Greg Morris thinks the whole thing was a little bit weird. I wouldn't call it weird, but tired. 5️⃣ In the article "Apple is finally a carmaker" by Joe Rosensteel, the author draws an intriguing parallel between Apple's iPhones and automobiles, suggesting that the evolution of smartphones mirrors the automotive industry in terms of product updates, consumer behavior, and market saturation. 6️⃣ Want stickers for your new iPhone? Have a look at Basic Apple Guy’s A19 Inside stickers! They are cheap and beautiful.

🚧 Special projects

#newsletter
1️⃣ My subscription trial to Inoreader's Email digest concluded and I can say that it's not a replacement for Mailbrew.

📱 Apps & Services

#inoreader #ai #instagram #metaacquisition
1️⃣ Inoreader just introduced a game-changer for YouTube and Podcast consumption. For each video or podcast episode, you can request a written transcript, a topic list, or a full article. The topic list allows users to skip to a specific point in the content just by typing on a specific segment, while the article is a summary generated from the content. After testing it for a few videos, I must admit that these additions could radically change how I consume video and podcasts. I wrote a recap of my experience. 2️⃣ Instagram, after 15 years of existence, finally recognizes the iPad as a viable platform, so they released an iPad app. Just passing the information here. I'm not on Instagram. However, you know, Instagram is no longer Instagram. 3️⃣ Atlassian, the maker of Confluence and Jira, among other things, will acquire the Browser Company. It's probably more positive than negative. 4️⃣ Notion now offers offline mode. This is a game-changer for Notion users and has been a request for years. Happy for this to be a reality now. All the details here. By the way, Thomas Frank, a YouTuber dedicated to Notion, is a model for me to follow when it comes to explaining and giving constructive feedback about a product. 5️⃣ You can now save posts on Bluesky with the new bookmarking feature. Welcome to 2025, Bluesky. 6️⃣ Kagi Summarize for iPad and iPhone is out. Summarize any articles right from your browser. Handy.

“If the macOS 26 betas are any indication, Apple still has a lot of work left to make Tahoe amazing. I'm hoping they take their time and wait until later in the fall to ship the next great version of macOS. Acorn is going to take this approach at any rate. My goal is to make Acorn feel at home in macOS Tahoe, but still retain its own personality as well.” — The Shape of Everything blog

📺 YouTube

apple #iphone17 #applerumor
1️⃣ Funny guy. He's really strecthing his luck with this fake iPhone video. 2️⃣ If you are an Apple Safari user, you must watch this video showing all the power user features that you must know about to take advantage of better. 3️⃣ Notion supports offline mode. This has been requested for many years, and people rejoice. This video explains the new features and the many fine prints and limitations.

🌟 Miscellaneous

productivity
1️⃣ I love those articles where the author talks about the tools he or she is using, dropping or evaluating and how they fit in their workflows. This one is from The Platformer, a well-known author. He talks about Capacities, Recall, AI, among other things. 2️⃣ I recently used ChatGPT to help me edit a redirect instructions file for one of my websites. I needed to add an instruction for redirecting a specific URL that was pointing to a nonexistent page. I know a bit about YAML files but not about redirections, so ChatGPT helped me in this. It worked like a breeze. There are many areas of maintaining a website that require such a tool to help me fix issues, and I find this super helpful. I feel empowered.

🔮 Looking forward

climatechange #weather #liquidglass #applerumor
1️⃣ Speaking of the weather app icon (see previous section), as reported by CNN, it appears that North America will see a warmer-than-normal fall season. After the summer, fall is my favourite season. 2️⃣ Now that all Apple operating systems are release candidates, Apple has opened the gate for developers to submit their app updates to take advantage of them. Here's a prediction: the adoption of Liquid Glass will vary a lot from one developer to another based on UI challenges to fit the new mould, or disdain to adopt a new but controversial visual language. This could translate into a lack of consistency, more than ever before, on your beloved devices. We'll see how it plays out. 3️⃣ Now that the iPhone 17 is out, it's time to look at the iPhone 18 rumors. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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

Inoreader has long been a reliable choice for RSS power users like me. I wrote about it because it’s part of my reading workflow. Its new Email Digest feature attempts to extend the platform beyond feed reading by letting you package content into regular email updates. After experimenting with it, thinking that it could replace Mailbrew, I’ve gathered a few observations on what works, where it struggles, and how it is positioned compared to Mailbrew.

What It Brings to the Table

Put simply, Inoreader’s Email Digest allows you to build email summaries of RSS feeds. It’s nothing new, and Inoreader has had this capability for a long time.

The most notable addition is the option to add an AI-generated digest summary. Instead of receiving a raw list of articles, you can craft a custom prompt and let AI create an overview of the day’s or week’s content. This flexibility is powerful—whether you want a simple executive-style briefing or a more narrative recap.

Building digests themselves is straightforward with a special digest editor (see screenshot below). You can pull in any feed in your account or even bundle a group of feeds stored in a folder. For high-velocity feeds, the AI summary becomes especially useful; it condenses overwhelming flows into something you can actually act on. The ability to tailor the summary prompt makes this system surprisingly adaptable.

Tips for Getting the Best Out of It

While experimenting, I found that those tips will make the experience smoother:

• Stick to slow feeds with low-frequency updates; otherwise, your digests risk ballooning into inbox-clogging monsters.
• Be ruthless in feed selection. Too many inputs, and the digest loses its clarity.
• Think in terms of focused themes. A digest that gathers photos from top Glass photographers or curates posts from a handful of trusted bloggers works better than a broad “everything I follow” bundle. There is a limit of five digests in my current subscription trial. You can have more if you pay even more. 

Where It Falls Short

The feature feels like a new iteration of something familiar, but the design is still limited in several key areas:

• No AI summaries for individual articles. The feature only works at the digest level or section level.
• Subscription friction. Others can’t directly subscribe to your digest; they must be invited manually, which feels tedious and clunky.
• No highlight support. Text highlights can’t be surfaced into digests, cutting off a potential use case for curated quotes.
• RSS dependency. While Mailbrew once connected to non-RSS sources like Twitter or email, Inoreader keeps you tied to feeds. This narrows the diversity of information you can pull in.
• Individual, not public. You can’t share your digest as a public newsletter with a URL; it’s designed for personal inbox delivery only.
• Poor fit for visual content. There’s no thumbnail-only view, so image-heavy feeds don’t translate well into digest form.
• Limited layout options. A denser, list-based layout would better handle text-heavy digests, but overall information density remains modest.

The AI Factor

The AI digest capability deserves special mention. It’s the feature that differentiates Inoreader from the older, more manual Mailbrew approach. The ability to tweak the prompt gives users fine control over tone and output style.

Want a corporate executive-style memo? You can write a prompt that frames it that way. Prefer a friendly, conversational recap? Adjust accordingly. In this sense, the digest becomes an editor you can shape.

Still, the lack of AI at the individual article level feels like a missed opportunity. Imagine opening your inbox and seeing one-paragraph AI summaries for each key article in your digest. That would reduce the need to click through everything while still surfacing value.

Comparing to Mailbrew’s Legacy

For those who used Mailbrew, comparisons are inevitable. Mailbrew positioned itself as a more open aggregator, pulling in sources beyond RSS—like newsletters, social feeds, and even custom integrations. That made it attractive for people who wanted a single pipeline for all kinds of digital content.

Inoreader, by contrast, is firmly rooted in RSS. This makes sense given its history, but it means digests risk becoming siloed. You’re essentially reformatting what you already follow in Inoreader, not extending into new territory. Where Mailbrew felt like a bridge between web services, Inoreader’s digests feel like a refinement of its core.

The trade-off is clear: more flexibility in AI summaries, less breadth in inputs.

Who Is It For?

The real question is audience. Right now, Email Digests feel best suited for:

• Personal knowledge management. If you want a private way to keep track of narrow topics, this could prove to be a good fit.
• Focused theme projects. For example, building a digest of photography blogs or tracking long-form writing on technology.
• Workflow aids. Professionals who want an inbox-friendly recap of industry news will enjoy email digests in Inoreader..

But if you’re looking to build a public audience, this isn’t it—at least not yet. There’s no shareable digest URL, no way to position yourself as a curator with a following.

Looking Ahead

The framework is there for something bigger. If Inoreader eventually opens up public-facing digests, adds highlight integration, and experiments with denser layouts, the feature could evolve into a strong alternative to dedicated newsletter tools.

Until then, it’s best thought of as an individual productivity enhancement, not a replacement for Mailbrew.

Final Thoughts

Inoreader’s Email Digest feature showcases flexibility in design, particularly with its AI prompt customization, but this comes with trade-offs in source diversity and some constraints around layout. Unlike Mailbrew, which is free, Inoreader charges an additional $7 a month to an existing Pro subscription. That’s a tough sell unless the feature becomes central to your workflow. I don’t think it’s my case.

For individual users, the tool may feel more like a nice experiment than an essential upgrade. In its current state, it’s best suited for tightly curated, personal digests rather than broader sharing or community-driven newsletters.

Apple’s decision to stick with prerecorded product events, even after the pandemic, marks a telling change in the company’s relationship with its audience. What began in 2020 as a necessary adaptation to COVID’s restrictions has now calcified into a new standard: glossy, hyper-produced keynote videos that often feel more like extended commercials than moments of genuine product unveiling.

There was a time when Apple events carried the electricity of live theater. The stage, the crowd’s reaction, the occasional glitch, and the “one more thing” reveal all gave a sense of immediacy and authenticity. These moments weren’t just about products; they were about performance, anticipation, and the human connection between Apple’s leadership and its community of fans, developers, and journalists. The collective gasp when the first iPhone was shown, or the applause at a surprise Mac announcement, reinforced Apple’s image as more than just a tech company—it was a cultural force.

By contrast, today’s prerecorded format sacrifices that spark. The videos are technically flawless—smooth camera work, sweeping drone shots, and transitions as sharp as the edges of an iPhone 16 Pro—but they are emotionally flat. The spontaneity is gone, replaced by carefully staged presentations in Apple Park’s immaculate spaces. It feels less like a conversation with the audience and more like a meticulously edited sales pitch. For a company that has long prided itself on forging emotional bonds with its users, these events come across as curiously sterile, closer to an overproduced advertisement than a cultural moment.

This format underscores a shift in priorities: Apple is choosing control over connection. In a prerecorded video, nothing is left to chance—no awkward demos, no technical hiccups, no embarrassing headlines about stage mishaps. Yet in sanding down those imperfections, Apple has also stripped away the soul. What remains is a beautifully lit infomercial: visually impressive but emotionally hollow.

The consequences go beyond presentation style. The mythos of the Apple keynote—once a cornerstone of the company’s brand identity—risks fading into irrelevance. Once communal experiences, these events are now solitary viewings. Apple may see efficiency in this change, but longtime followers sense a loss of magic. Compounding this decline is Apple’s growing reliance on “speeds and feeds,” where processor benchmarks, camera megapixels, and battery life numbers take center stage over vision and storytelling. This emphasis on specs drains the sense of theater, reducing the events to technical briefings rather than cultural milestones.

Adding to the problem is the constant stream of leaks before each keynote. Caused in part by Apple’s ever-expanding supply chain, these leaks strip away surprise. By the time Tim Cook or his colleagues appear on screen, the audience often already knows the headline announcements, leaving little room for splash or excitement.

This challenge is compounded by the state of the smartphone market itself. With iPhone launches taking place in a saturated and commoditized industry, it has become increasingly challenging to impress audiences or showcase trend-setting innovations. Even meaningful upgrades can feel incremental, which further dulls the impact of prerecorded events that lack the electricity of live presentation.

Ultimately, this evolution mirrors a larger tension within Apple: the balance between perfection and humanity. In chasing the former, the company risks losing the latter. Without that human element, Apple’s keynotes resemble the very corporate product demos Steve Jobs once mocked—technically competent but devoid of wonder.

As Apple prepares to unveil the iPhone 17, these dynamics are on full display. Leaks have already set expectations, the market is saturated, and the event itself will likely be another polished video designed for efficiency rather than excitement. If the past is any indication, the iPhone 17 launch may fail to reignite the magic, leaving Apple to grapple with a growing perception that its most iconic stage has lost its power to surprise and inspire.

I’m still hoping for something different this time, but I’m realistic.

Too beautiful, it breaks glass.

👤 Personal

#chatgpt
1️⃣ I recently had a passionate discussion about using ChatGPT as a life coach or acting as a psychologist. Someone I know has a lot of fun using ChatGPT whenever she faces an issue and wants to explore possible solutions. I have a problem with this practice. The argument revolved around the idea that ChatGPT “acts” in much the same way as a psychologist who has completed university studies, adheres to a school of thought, and also uses their own values, experience, and beliefs for giving advice. And as in a therapy session, it is always up to the patient to judge the advice they receive and decide whether to adopt it or not. Having a relatively clear understanding of how generative artificial intelligence works, I find it particularly troubling that people consider ChatGPT as a psychologist. It’s troubling.

🗺️ Discoveries

#security #passkeys #passwordmanager #uidesign #workspace #design
1️⃣ Apparently, people don't like or understand passkeys. As someone who uses Apple Passwords for password management, I don't face the same challenges as those who rely on third-party solutions. Nonetheless, this article sheds some light on the usage and adoption of passkeys. 2️⃣ I you'd like to see other creative people’s work setup, pay a visit to the Workspaces website. You'll find plenty of them there, and you might find some inspiration to improve your own work environment. 3️⃣ Another great website discovery: Making Software, “a reference manual for people who design and build software.” This is mind-blowing! The quality of illustrations is quite up there. Sadly, the website doesn't offer an RSS feed. 🙁

“If people want to use AI as those services, it’s easily accessible to them without building it into the browser. But I think the concept of building it into the browser is typically for the sake of collecting information. And that’s not what we are about as a company, and we don’t think that’s what the web should be about.” - The makers of the Vivaldi browser

Found on LinkedIn (emphasis is mine):

“Bilingual cloud consultant (French and English) with over 20 years of experience in IT, specializing in hybrid infrastructure, cloud migration, automation, backup, and disaster recovery. Recognized expert in transforming complex environments into simple, secure, and scalable architectures on AWS, Azure, and VMware. Daily user of generative AI tools to accelerate delivery timelines, enhance quality, and structure service delivery. Acts as a strategic advisor and trusted technology partner for organizations looking to modernize their operations or migrate to the cloud.”

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#apps #review
1️⃣ I started working on a piece about Apple Journal. It might take a long time before it sees the light, but stay tuned.

🌄 Photography

#instagram #lightroom #glass
1️⃣ How much shit can Meta fit into Instagram before quitting? I wonder. For many years now, Instagram is no longer the Instagram we loved and cherished. 2️⃣ Where are the female photographers? I mean, browsing the discovery tab on Glass, you'll find that 95% of photographers are male! Why is that? 3️⃣ Glass is now offering a Lightroom Classic Plugin! This means that once photo processing is done, users can publish from within Lightroom directly to Glass! How convenient this is! Sadly, I’m no longer an Adobe subscriber! Sigh. 4️⃣ Speaking of Glass, I published a new series: Clouds & Sun. It's about clouds and sun! I realized that I do have many photos covering these subjects and wanted to put them together. 5️⃣ Speaking of clouds: I made a surprising photographer discovery this past week: Clifford Beshers. He shares his photos on Micro.blog, many of which are about clouds! I love this one! 6️⃣ Here's a strange observation in Photomator's files handling. 7️⃣ Mohammad Awadh won one of the IPA 2025 awards. You'll find the best architectural photographs that you’ve ever seen. I wish my late father could see those images because he was a professional architect.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#liquidglass
1️⃣ We are getting close to the final release of iOS 26 with Liquid Glass, and it seems that Apple has frozen Liquid Glass. This is it, guys. Liquid Glass is still broken. Instead of unifying all Apple OSes, it does the opposite. The Mac is less Liquid Glassy, and the iPhone is in its most intense state. Why is that? Now, macOS feels unfinished. How can Apple, with all its resources, be so wrong about something so fundamental to its past journey? 2️⃣ Google make an infomercial for their new Google Pixel devices? Beyond the strangeness of the show format, there are undoubtedly great phones. Take the Google Pixel watch; it looks better than the Apple Watch, for sure. It looks like... a watch. See the YouTube section below for a quick video. One thing that stood out while watching videos about Google's latest device was how much easier Android is to read than iOS. 3️⃣ A new generation of developers and designers is entering businesses like Apple. One thing that seems clear is that perhaps the younger developers didn't learn to use (and appreciate) the Mac as a computing platform. When they started to work on cross-platform development tools and languages like SwiftUI, did they fully understand every platform across the spectrum? I'm not so sure. This also translates into challenges, I suppose, when thinking and designing Apple Liquid Glass—something to consider. 4️⃣ Something Is Wrong. 5️⃣ Are you excited for the iPhone Fold? 6️⃣ Apple lost its way in icon design. See some exhibits here.

“We're going to see an Apple Watch at the September event that looks the same as the original from a decade ago, with a several-year-old SoC inside, with few capabilities that original didn't have. You still can't have the watch face you really want, because it's not your watch, it's Apple's watch. What a waste” — Steve Troughton-Smith

🚧 Special projects

#newsletter #experiment #mailbrew
1️⃣ Under my project of finding a replacement for Mailbrew, I've been testing Inoreader Email Digests for a few days now. This feature enables users to create newsletters based on feeds and articles. The editor is surprisingly flexible and powerful, but comes with some missing capabilities. I'll keep exploring Inoreader Email Digest in the coming days, and I should be able to write more about my experience. One problem is that this feature isn't free and requires an upgrade to my current subscription. See the next section for more information about this service.

📱 Apps & Services

#openai #notion #aibrowser #utility #tot #raycast #mailbrew #inoreader
1️⃣ What if OpenAI bought Notion? Parker Ortolani thinks so. I think it would provide OpenAI with relatively quick access to business-related software and a lot of data. The only issue is that, as of my last check, Notion Mail is a client or a front-end to Google Mail. I'm not sure Google would love this to happen. They would rather let a player like Notion tap into their users than a direct competitor in the AI space, such as OpenAI. 2️⃣ Comet and Dia, two AI browsers, continue to receive updates. I'm still experimenting with them, and I'm still not convinced about their usefulness in any of my workflows. 3️⃣ Before using Raycast Notes, I was using Tot and very much liked it, but found it to be too limited in the number of notes I could store. Tot 2 is now available, but it appears to have the same limitation. I'm curious to see how it will adopt Liquid Glass, if it ever does. Perhaps it's for version 2.1. 4️⃣ Inoreader launched a redesigned email digest functionality. After reading the official announcement, I thought it could replace Mailbrew, an email digest service that is no longer being developed, as I first mentioned in this edition of my Creative Summary newsletter, edition 2023-37. I request a trial, as email digests aren’t free and require a subscription upgrade. 5️⃣ iA Presenter 1.5 for iPhone and iPad is out! If you plan to create and give presentations on the go, you might want to take a look.

📺 YouTube

#llms #generativeai
1️⃣ Curious about how LLMs in generative works and how they are put together, watch this short video from the Computer History Museum. Very well done. You might watch it more than once so that you better understand. 2️⃣ Demo of MacPaint draws awes from the crowd. It's still fascinating to see how far we have come since those times. 3️⃣ Google launched the Google Pixel 10, among other things. Just like Microsoft with their Surface, I respect Google for what they are doing. But AI is taking too much space in these products. I'm not sure everything is useful. Cue Marques Brownlee quick overview of these new phones. Oh, and they announced a new smart watch, too. We shouldn't dismiss round smart watches. I like those.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#vibecoding #techtrends #techhistory
1️⃣ From 2009 to 2013, I was doing experimental iPhone app development and shipped three apps on the App Store. I made about $5K. At that time, building an app meant using Xcode, Interface Builder and Objective-C. Fast forward today, and I wonder how my journey as a hobbyist developer would be different with generative AI and vibe coding. I find this post from Matt Birchler interesting in that respect. 2️⃣ According to a post by Niccolo Conte, 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices while 40% comes from desktop computers. The article shows how that trend has evolved since 2009. It's fascinating, but it doesn't align with the visitor analytics I've seen for my various websites. A majority of people are coming from the desktop. I wouldn't be surprised if visitors were older generations, too. 3️⃣ If you are old enough to be in the older generations, you might remember dot matrix printers? Maybe you even had one? Do you remember the font appearance? Take a look here (Spend some time exploring the website, which features a retro-style. Pretty clever). 4️⃣ Another good read from Riccardo Mori: Smoke Break. Community. Awareness. AI. Individualism. He made me think.

🔮 Looking forward

#iphone17
1️⃣ The September launch for the iPhone 17 is coming soon, but what can we expect for a product that is now more than mature? Another infomercial? I'm not really looking into it as I wrote here, in this depressing blog post.

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

Last of a trilogy. See previous two posts.

A more focused street photography example (see previous post). #blackandwhite #blackandwhitephotography #streetphotography

I'm not really good at street photography... am I?

The door.

I have always been torn between creating text-only quotes and image-based quotes. Text-only quotes are easier to resurface and index, while image-based quotes are more visually appealing. You’re preference?

I made a little update to my reading workflow, especially the part for newsletter. Look in the table on this page and sort by date to locate the most recent update.

While searching for blog posts on numericcitizen.me, I discovered a few duplicates and some that were no longer relevant. I removed the duplicates, likely caused by previous migration processes, and decided to unpublish the outdated posts. There seems to be a debate about whether we should delete past publications. Some argue that all blog posts, regardless of relevance, reflect our identity and showcase what we once considered important. Others believe that removing irrelevant posts, which they refer to as noise, helps the remaining content stand out. As I agree to both arguments, I’m allowing myself to do some cleanup, from time to time, and it’s ok.

Important additions to my generative AI usage rules: use more than one service, try paid version to get better results, prioritize cloud-based services. More details here.

👤 Personal

#supportukraine #ukrainewar #war
1️⃣ I don’t often discuss non-technical topics in this newsletter, but now feels like the right time. Since the war in Ukraine began, I have been closely following the news. Almost every day, I check various news platforms, mostly European ones, to understand the current situation. I feel personally affected by this conflict, just as I do by the war in Gaza. I tend to side with the vulnerable. The events in Ukraine, along with the recent meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska, are disheartening and frankly appalling. We have the worst U.S. president in history, and he is the least capable leader to address this crisis. It’s frustrating, and I am not optimistic about the outcome.
Conflicts like this may be thousands of kilometres away, but their ripples cross borders easily. War has a way of collapsing the illusion of distance. Economic instability, energy crises, mass displacement of people, and geopolitical shifts are not contained by geography. Global news makes every tragedy visible and immediate, and empathy doesn’t stop at a country’s edge. Seeing lives torn apart—even if I don’t know these people personally—reminds me that our shared humanity means their suffering is not isolated from my own sense of safety and justice. Wars shape the world we all have to live in, and ignoring them is just another way of letting them shape it for the worse.

🗺️ Discoveries

#apple #macintosh
1️⃣ Is MacSurfer Headline News back? It certainly seems so. Does that ring a few bells? It does for me. Bookmarked because it used to be my home page in Netscape on my Power Macintosh 6100. I would pay visit a few times a day to get all the latest news about Apple. Good memories, indeed.

“Just as people can visit your Ghost website in any browser, subscribe with any feed reader, or receive newsletters in any email client, they can now follow your Ghost publication from any social web client.” — Ghost 6.0 Announcement

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#substack
1️⃣ This stuff about using AI coming from Tiago Forte is pure non sense. I mean, this guy built a career around writing, among other things. Now, he suggests that he doesn’t have to write all his stuff, but AI could do it for him. Really. 2️⃣ Substack again made the news with bad actors. Someone put together a website explaining why and how to leave Substack. I left a while ago, but my account is still active. I do pay a visit to Substack once in a while. But I never publish anything. I’m following one guy: Scott Knaster. He is cool. He wrote many books about Macintosh computer programming back in the day. He is a great writer. As Om Malik writes, you can dislike Substack, but we must acknowledge the positive impact such a platform can have on attracting readers. This is something that, as a writer and blogger, I must consider at some point. Ghost is making some positive and bold moves with Ghost 6, and I’ve seen readership improvements since then. 3️⃣ It's been a while since I wrote and published a lengthy article about Apple. Although there is always something to discuss regarding Apple, I believe others provide more valuable insights than I could offer.

“Beginners believe that fancy, wordy language impresses readers. Professionals know that writing is a form of communication, and communication should be as straightforward as possible.” — Maria Cassano

🌄 Photography

#glass/discovery #glass/series #glass/search
1️⃣ I continue to collect incredible sunset photos from my rented chalet. I brought my Nikon camera with me recently and spent the night on the lake shore to take pictures of the descending sun. Sadly, I forgot my SD card reader, so I can't share anything yet. 2️⃣ Some great photos in this series from Kali Alcuns on Glass. 3️⃣ The last full moon was on August 9th. I found many photos of the full moon by doing this search on Glass. 4️⃣ Eric mörschel's website is so singular and fantastic. So many great things about this photography-focused website. Don't miss his galleries. I made this discovery via his profile page on Glass.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#macostahoe #beta5 #beta6 #liquidglass
1️⃣ Beta5 of macOS Tahoe brings a new hard drive icon, which is more in line with modern SSDs. I like it. It's far from perfect, but it is significantly better than the previous spinning drive device. Compare the two with this Basic Apple Guy post. 2️⃣ Another disgusting move by Apple's Tim Cook. Come on. 3️⃣ Did Parker Ortolani find the right answer to Liquid Glass woes? I have some doubts. Yet, I like his idea. 4️⃣ Beta 6 of Apple's operating systems was released and improves some of Liquid Glass, but doesn’t fix everything. I think Apple painted itself in a corner with Liquid Glass. 5️⃣ Apple is working on an entirely new operating system, according to a report — something to go along with the new HomePod with a screen. Joining the already crowded product lines, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and macOS, this would become the seventh operating system for Apple to support (excluding HomePod here, it's probably a faceless tvOS). That's a lot, even if the core is iOS.

"One of the main issues with liquid glass is legibility, there’s a sense that despite liquid glass supposedly being designed to promote your content that it actually occludes it.” — Parker Ortolani

🚧 Special projects

#webdesign
1️⃣ I always have many special projects on my plate, but I'm not alone. Basic Apple Guy recently made a significant and nice website redesign. I love it. I love everything this guy is doing. I'm a fan and should probably pick a few of his ideas for my personal landing page. 2️⃣ Speaking of my projects, I started wondering if I could create a custom theme plugin for Micro.blog using Vibe coding. I recently asked the question and received a few encouraging answers, prompting me to try it. Out of curiosity, I tried the following prompt with ChatGPT (paid version): “I'm wondering about creating a theme plugin for Micro.blog, a web hosting service based on Hugo. Do you think it would be difficult to do with your help?” The answer blew me away. I then continued the conversation for a while, and I can see that it wouldn't be that difficult. I would need to feed ChatGPT with a few websites I like to create a mood board, and then it would handle the necessary steps to get a plugin from GitHub that I can install. It’s incredible what we can do these days. I'll keep thinking about it.

📱 Apps & Services

#grammarly #languagetool #subscription
1️⃣ I thought that I could cancel Grammarly and replace it with LanguageTools, but I must admit that I'm doing the wrong thing here. LanguageTools doesn't support as many apps as Grammarly does, Craft being one of them. Grammarly is so expensive, though. 2️⃣ Ghost v6 is out, and numericcitizen.me is now running on it. Just like Chris Enns, I'm rather happy with this release. Most of the improvements are for people like me, the blogger, for the readers, it's unnoticeable, primarily, except for the addition of fediverse support. You can follow me through your favourite Mastodon-compatible client or from Micro.blog. 3️⃣ Mindnote with on-device Apple model responding to queries and automatically drawing the answer? That looks cool.

“And the thing I love the most about sticking with tools for the long run is that you get to know the people behind them, and you learn to appreciate those individuals and what they do. That is especially true in my case because most of the tools I use are built by either small teams or single developers" — Manuel Moreale

📺 YouTube

#carplay #science #applerumor
1️⃣ Maques Brownlee reviews CarPlay Ultra. I'm even more skeptical about CarPlay Ultra after watching this video. I'll probably get my first full EV in the next 2-3 years. My next car will likely not support CarPlay Ultra. Modern car companies (Rivian, Tesla) are seeing the car as a software story, and they won't let Apple take over the car experience. The time for Apple to get an easy pass on the car dashboard is over, sadly. 2️⃣ Could Apple be right with Liquid Glass? 3️⃣ No, Apple is wrong, Liquid Glass does compete with our attention. 4️⃣ A touching video about... the scale of time. 5️⃣ Apparently, we got the wrong iPhone 17 Pro rumours wrong, and this guy knows what is really coming to the iPhone Pro line.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#foodforthoughts
1️⃣ I like the following chain of thoughts about the space we make for technologies in our lives.

"We’ve normalized overconsumption ( and it’s killing your creativity). We can’t even eat without watching YouTube. We can’t go for a walk without listening to music. We can’t go to the toilet without without scrolling reels. There’s no breathing room for your mind, instead it’s a never ending stream of dopamine. How do you expect to create something great when all you ever do is consume? Give yourself a little space." Source.

LLMs lack mental modeling skills:

• Key Limitation: LLMs can't maintain clear mental models.
• Software Engineering Loop: Effective engineers iterate through requirements and code.
• Current Usefulness: LLMs assist with code generation and documentation.
• Future Potential: Improvements needed for complex tasks.

Source.

🔮 Looking forward

#vibecoding #ai
1️⃣ Building software through vibe coding and generative AI can be mind-blowing, like in this example from Parker. Stephen Robles did some vibe coding too and will soon ship his app (or is it his app, really?) to the App Store! 2️⃣ Why is 2027 pivotal for AI? Some people think that we will enter an era of dystopia because of AI, which is acting as an amplifier of humans’ worst sides. 3️⃣ What are we losing to AI? That's a good question from Jose M. on his blog. We are so busy experimenting with AI that we don't spend the required time to think about this question. I have the feeling that we’re giving away too much in return. And this could be our downfall. 4️⃣ Since GPT-5 came out, it had a somewhat controversial launch, in part because of the marginal improvements perceived by its users. As mentioned by Tidbits in this article, the good thing is that now we don’t have to decide which model to use for each prompt. It's now done automatically. I call this an improvement. 5️⃣ Realistic, realtime, 3D worlds. All done with AI. Mind blown. Again. The game industry should be afraid. 6️⃣ Yes, I'm tired of talking about AI, too.

I’m Tired of Talking About AI

I don’t want to talk about LLMs anymore.

Paddy Carver

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

When I read about vibe coding to quickly create app mockups or even shipping an app to the App Store, I wonder if I could use genAI to vibe code a theme plugin for Micro.blog. That would allow me to use a unique visual theme inspired by my visual branding.

A great wallpaper for iOS 26.

The Who Is Numeric Citizen? website has moved from Cloudflare’s Workers app to Chillidog Hosting. This change was necessary to support PHP, which is required for Elements CMS. Additionally, the publishing workflow is now more straightforward since I no longer need to use a GitHub repository, which was necessary for hosting a static website on Cloudflare. It is rare to simplify a workflow while adding more features, in this case, PHP to implement a CMS component on the News page.

The migration process was relatively simple, thanks to Chillidog support, which was fantastic BTW. The process involved republishing my website using a new configuration publishing setup, which pointed to Chillidog. The setup was straightforward because Chillidog is familiar with Elements, which allows you to download a configuration settings file directly into Elements for setting up the FTP connection. Once republished, I made a DNS change at CloudFlare to replace a CNAME record with an A record to one of Chillidog’s servers. After 15 minutes, it was a done deal.

I’m getting ready to use the upcoming Elements CMS feature when it becomes stable enough for production use. Today, I pushed out a big update to “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website where I decided to split the Highlights section into four as I’m expecting them to grow over time. As for the CMS feature, it will require a change of my hosting solution. The website is currently hosted on Cloudflare as a worker-based app. I’ll first move the content to Chillidog hosting first, then I’ll start adding the CMS feature in those areas: site news, redo the best articles section and add a tech wish list as CMS entries.

My main website, numericcitizen.me, is now officially using Ghost 6 which was released today. It was a short and painless process to upgrade. While Ghost.org will grandfather current plans, I discovered a price increase for my subscription tier (Creator), going from $25/month to $29/month. It seems that under my current plan, I can get all the juiced up analytics, which is nice. Yet, Ghost.org is a pricey service for a blogger like me.

Because I’m getting email inquiries many times a week for SEO improvement offers, link insertion, ads, etc. I decided to create my official response for these sketchy offers. I hope they understand the message, provided that they read it, of course, which I highly doubt. It’s probably a lost cause.

👤 Personal

#youtuber #youtuberecording

1️⃣ Since July 1st, I’ve been spending more than half the time at a rented country house at about one hour and a half of Montréal, Canada. This place is gorgeous and I have the pleasure to work from there a few days per week and spend all my weekends over there, too. I can’t count how many dozens sunset photos I made because our house is right on the lake shore, facing west. In short, I’m enjoying my time here. Because of this, I don’t really use my M4 Mac mini at home and can’t record any new videos for my YouTube channel. I miss that a lot, but I do prepare a few new ones that I’ll record sometime in September.

🗺️ Discoveries

#Perplexity #Browser #ai #comet #experiment #ipad #ipados26 #company/openai

1️⃣ Got a chance to get an invite for Perplexity's Comet browser and tried it on a few YouTube videos. I can see a trend here. 2️⃣ If you are an iPad user or consider becoming one, consider starting to follow Journeys Through Glass where Chris Hannah tries to revive his iPad usage, thanks to iPadOS 26. 3️⃣ OpenAI launched the study mode for students. On paper, it seems incredible and all. Think about it: you have a teacher at your disposal anytime, anywhere, for as long as you want. Not sure about a math problem? Solve it with ChatGPT! I wonder if we are also introducing a tool that could make students even lazier or even more tempted to cheat. OpenAI is moving so fast these days. Before Study Mode, they introduced Agents, which is another category of AI tools in itself. Dislaimer: I'm a paying subscrber to ChatGPT Plus.

tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World

France, 2 Rue de lOrne, Colombelles recorded by Nicolas Germain.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#bloggerlife #blogging #web #ai #experiment

1️⃣ Edition #100 of the People & Blog series from Manual Moreale is now available. The web isn't boring. Just pay attention. 2️⃣ I decided to contribute to my company's blog to write an article about the upcoming releases of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 and how they might impact device usage. My general outline is mostly complete, but now I have to decide whether to use ChatGPT in Canvas mode to continue or take the traditional route and write it out myself. I decided to kick the can and tried ChatGPT Canvas. I'm rather pleasantly surprised by the results. I'll tweak the text, but it helps to move faster, much faster. Yet, the quote below is a reminder that writing is a necessary process that should remain owned by humans. 3️⃣ I was recently wondering why I don't write long-form articles anymore. After giving much thought, I came to the conclusion that I'm still writing, but for another type of content. Maintaining this newsletter requires some time, as well as this living document about Apple Liquid Glass failures. Additionally, rebuilding a personal landing page using an unfamiliar app had an impact. All in all, I'm still quite active from a creativity perspective, albeit in a different way, and I should feel okay about it. 4️⃣ Don't miss my July blog posts digest, from Micro.blog, if you don't subscribe to the digest newsletter. Here's a summary: “The August 1, 2025 Numeric Citizen newsletter shares a moment of inspiration from a scenic view and ongoing frustration with iPadOS 26 beta 4. External display support remains unreliable, with UI glitches in Control Center and window handling. Liquid Glass still feels unpolished. No in-depth articles this time—just personal notes and quick observations.” — ChatGPT summarization. 5️⃣ I'm leaving Medium, here is why.

« (…) to me, the most important element of writing isn’t what you put on the page, it’s how the process of putting something on the page alters your thoughts... » — M.G. Siegler

🌄 Photography

#minimalism

1️⃣ I've been renting a country house since July 1st and just realized that I didn't bring my Nikon camera once. It's a great place to make sunset photos, but then what? 2️⃣ Here's a nice visual find on Glass, from Jules: Strange in the City. You'll see a very moody and strange atmosphere surrounding the city buildings. Really nice. 3️⃣ Here's another superb one, found on Mastodon, from Lou Plummer. I like minimalism in photography.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#microsoft #stevejobs #timcook #iphone17

1️⃣ Microsoft is firing a few thousand employees. Yep. They aren't exactly struggling, but they are looking forward and think that people who helped build Microsoft as it is today are no longer needed. It's a big middle finger to human decency if you ask me. Oh, and yes, they think that AI is the future, so they need people who are now embracing it, for good or for bad. 2️⃣ Is this the first sight of the iPhone 17 Pro in the wild? It could be. 3️⃣ Apple made a lot of money during their 2025Q3 quarter, which ended in June. Great highlights from MacRumors. 4️⃣ Apple launched the Apple Care One in the US. If you are curious to know if it is better than keeping your current Apple Care protection plans, head to this online calculator: iCare. Results might surprise you, as they did in a simulation I ran, even though I'm not in the US. I would barely save any money. 5️⃣ Tim Cook's tenure at Apple is now as long as Steve Jobs’ has been, as documented on Pixel Envy. I'm not sure this is a good thing or not. 6️⃣ It took 17 years to sell three billion iPhones.

“macOS and iPadOS are definitely merging. macOS is looking more and more like iPadOabout whether it is better than your current Apple Care protection plans, check outS, and iPadOS is looking more and more like macOS.” — @tekphloyd@social.lol

🚧 Special projects

#workflow #youtuberecording #apps

1️⃣ I decided to revamp a portion of my supporting documents for my YouTube video production. First, I'll revisit all my Craft documents to add tags. Second, I'll reorganize my usage of Play, a YouTube video collector for Mac, iPad and iPhone. It's a fantastic app that plays a small but valuable role in supporting my creative process. One of the things I want to do is synchronize my list of YouTube channel subscriptions with the ones stored in Play. While doing this, I'm reconsidering all my current subscriptions.

📱 Apps & Services

#utility #ipad #ipados26

1️⃣ The debate “native apps” vs “web apps" still rages. Can web apps be more secure than native apps? Provided that people don't enable permissions to access location and contacts, I disagree. 2️⃣ Are you looking to back up your iCloud Photos? Parashute Backup seems to do it straightforwardly and elegantly. It's on my list of apps to try. 3️⃣ Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. Poor Apple. Now that Apple has made the iPad a real computer, people are complaining that the iPad is no longer... an iPad. 🤦🏻‍♂️ 🤷🏻‍♂️ 4️⃣ Do you know Iconfactory? They are the makers behind many apps, like Tapestry, among many others. They decided to put some of their apps for sale because they lack the resources to update them. One thing I was curious about is that they have an app called Wallaroom, a wallpaper app. According to one of its founders, the company has been creating wallpapers since 1999! I didn't know that. I love that one, that one, and that one. And they keep doing them in the age of cheap and soulless wallpapers. They have the guts to keep them coming. Bravo. Oh, and they do a lot of icons, too, which is why the company is named that way, I guess.

📺 YouTube

#ipados26 #foldablephones #uidesign #android

1️⃣ Can Apple do better next year with the iPhone Fold? 2️⃣ Marques hails iPadOS 26 as the long‑awaited shift that finally lets the iPad feel like a true laptop — spotlighting freely resizable and movable windows, a Mac‑style menu bar, full cursor support, an expanded dock with folders, and a built‑in Preview app, turning the multitasking workflow into a real productivity environment. 3️⃣ The video compares Google’s Material 3 Expressive and Apple’s Liquid Glass design systems, arguing that Material 3 offers a more user-friendly, expressive, and accessible UI, while Apple’s approach prioritizes aesthetics over usability.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#experiment #ai #perplexity #writing #craft

1️⃣ Starting with this newsletter edition, I'm experimenting with the upcoming support for tags in Craft. Each section now sports tags describing the themes covered. It should help a bit the reader who is glancing at the content and it helps me organize my content. 2️⃣ I ran an experiment with Perplexity AI, which was triggered by this blog post from Andrew Canion on Micro.blog. It was fun. The next step is to ask Perplexity AI to imagine and write the next article for me. I tried. But to respect my dear readers, I decided not to publish it. 3️⃣ Here's a reminder that this experiment of live cataloging Liquid Glass failures and oops is still going on. 4️⃣ This article from Om Malik gives me clear reasons why I hate Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

🔮 Looking forward

#aisummary #ai #company/google #company/meta

1️⃣ People are less likely, much less likely in fact, to click a link when searching on the web with an AI summary at the top. Google is offering this, and Microsoft is too. This means fewer visits to the website and less ad revenue. By adding an AI mode in Google, I wonder what Google is thinking: do they prefer to lose ad revenue over losing visitors to their search services altogether? I do refer a lot to these AI summaries, and yep, I don’t usually go further than this. 2️⃣ It seems that, according to this post, the next major release of Ghost, the website hosting platform, is launching this upcoming week or the week after! I can't wait to see what’s in store! FYI, numericcitizen.me where this newsletter is published is hosted on Ghost.org.

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

Because Diagrams for Mac seems to fall in the category of abandonware, if the latest blog post date is any indication, I decided to drop if from my tool set. The app wasn’t updated since macOS Monterey in 2022. Too bad, it was a rather promising diagramming tool.

Based on the visible articles and sections on Numeric Citizen Space, the following key themes are consistently emerging across the blog:

• Apple, Technology & Ecosystem:
  Many articles reflect a strong focus on Apple products, services, and software (e.g., iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Apple TV, Apple Intelligence, security for Apple users). The author frequently shares both news reactions and first-hand experiences, offering a personal, sometimes critical, lens on Apple’s direction, new features, and design changes (such as the “Liquid Glass” redesign).
• Personal Tech Commentary:
  The writing is highly opinionated and direct—note statements like “Until Apple fixes this shit, I hate Liquid Glass. There, I said it.” The blog contains frank appraisals of technology’s impact on user experience, the frustrations and joys of new tech, and reflections on trends shaping the digital landscape.
• Digital Productivity & Workflow:
  Articles often address the author’s evolving setup for digital work and life. This includes notes on app migrations (like “Migrating from HEY Mail to Fastmail”), email workflow, RSS feeds, and tech adoption or abandonment (e.g., “Fastmail to replace HEY Mail, for me at least.”).
• Ephemeral Scrapbook:
  The recurring “Ephemeral Scrapbook” editions act almost like a digital journal or digest, combining personal observations, cultural commentary, small tech discoveries, and reactions to world events in a semi-stream-of-consciousness or microblog fashion.
• Cultural and Social Commentary:
  Pieces reflect on broader cultural or generational topics—such as design trends, media consumption (e.g., Apple TV’s promise/unfulfilled potential), and generational comparisons (“Generation X: The Best of Both Worlds”).
• AI & Generative Technologies:
  There’s direct engagement with generative AI’s effects on creativity, writing, and workflow (see “Crossing the AI Threshold: When Does Writing Stop Being Yours?” and thoughts on LLMs/SLMs). The author considers what “ownership” means in the age of AI-generated content and tools.
• Privacy, Security & Digital Ethics:
  Several articles discuss practical and principled approaches to privacy and digital security, especially for Apple device users.
• Change & Experimentation:
  The writer documents experiments, transitions, reactions to new releases, and honest joy/frustration with how tech is evolving—often with a “digital nomad” attitude.

In summary:
The Numeric Citizen Space is a personal, opinion-driven chronicle of technology, especially Apple, with a strong focus on the impact of design choices, workflow changes, productivity tools, digital privacy, culture, and the messy process of adapting to new tech. The blog’s tone is candid, introspective, and frequently critical, blending personal experience with broader commentary.

1. https://numericcitizen.me/

I’m trying out the new generative AI-based analytics from Tinylytics, and I’m very impressed. Here’s an example for my main website. To my knowledge, that’s a first for website analytics and I hope that Plausible will take a look at this because it’s really useful. Plus, Tinylytics allows you to create your own prompt and see a different take than the one generated by default.

I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been dedicating more time to learning Realmac Software Elements. I plan to create a few websites for fun. The first will be a new landing page to replace the current one shared with Craft Docs (look here). The second will be my professional website, which I’ll use when I transition to a freelance career. Ironically, the third will be a rework of my current employer’s corporate website, which I find quite unattractive.

So far, it’s a rather exciting journey. Elements is an excellent Mac app, and the team behind it offers a stellar presence on their support forums. This adds to the excitement of being part of a small club trying to build a new app. Elements is still in beta and should launch this year. You should see this video on YouTube showing the app’s user interface.

My experience with Elements reminds me of Apple’s iWeb website editor, which was part of the initial MobileMe rollout. However, Elements is much more powerful and geared toward a different crowd. The learning curve is much steeper, but it is reasonable for a guy like me. Elements is built around Tailwind CSS. I don’t know CSS or Tailwind CSS, but Elements hides its complexity.

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework created by Adam Wathan and the team at Tailwind Labs in 2017. Designed to streamline web development, it provides a comprehensive set of low-level utility classes that allow developers to style elements directly in their HTML without writing custom CSS. This approach enables rapid prototyping and highly customizable designs, making Tailwind CSS a popular choice for developers seeking efficiency and flexibility in building modern web interfaces.

As soon as my first project matures enough, I’ll share more about it.

I finally completed the replication of content from the Craft-hosted website to Micro.blog-hosted website. I initiated this migration to reduce my dependency on Craft to host such content. Numeric Citizen I/O still points to Craft-hosted website (https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta), but 95% of the content is now available on Micro.blog via meta.numericcitizen.me.

Am I leaving Craft behind, not anytime soon, but I’m certainly continuing to consolidate my online presence under more open platforms.

In the blogging space, “open” can mean different things depending on who you ask. There are open-source tools and services. Opening yourself up while blogging is another example. Giving a behind-the-scenes look at your workflows is another. Furthermore, being an open blogger also means a desire to write about writing and blogging.

Open blogging, a new movement (my creation 😃), also means creating, maintaining and sharing a digital garden. It contains many things, such as a list of upcoming blog posts, work-in-progress articles, never-published articles, and other digital artifacts, all accessible just by following links within the digital garden. You can even peek at my website’s analytics, too, thanks to Plausible. It’s all there. Just be curious.

Being an open blogger also means using open-source tools and services whenever possible. Such services include Ghost, GitHub, Plausible, and Micro.blog. I believe that basic, foundational tools and platforms aren’t well served when big corporations own them. Oh, did I mention being part of Fediverse is also part of my platform choices?

Supporting open-source initiatives like Plausible, Commento, and Ghost is an act of support for web openness. I subscribed to all those services because it’s like defending a principle (and because they’re of great value, too!).

On a more personal note, I openly share my anxieties about the challenges of being a blogger, writer, and content creator. Isn’t the website hosting this article, its mission after all? If you’re someone who reads all my content, on all the platforms I use, you can build a pretty good picture of who I am, what’s my values, my interests, my challenges. Each website fills a specific niche, but taken together, they form a web of content reflecting my interests in life.

I like writing about my experiences. Did you know that between 2009 and 2013, I was developing iPhone applications? While doing so, I attempted to maintain a blog about it. I wrote and published articles about my experience and the lessons I learned from iPhone intricacies. Today, I would like to write about blogging and share my experience with the applications and services I use for that purpose. I like doing this so much that I created this website about it: Numeric Citizen I/O. I maintain a meta-blog that exposes the behind-the-scenes of my workflow. Different context, same objectives. It’s my small contribution to this complicated world.

Thanks for reading.

In October 2024, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Canvas, designed to enhance the writing experience. Before ChatGPT Canvas, one writing approach using ChatGPT involved compiling these references into a ChatGPT project, then starting the writing process by using a first prompt, followed by another, and so forth. With ChatGPT Canvas, the approach promised to be more user-friendly, more interactive, more natural.

I wondered which writing project I could use to test this new conversational experience. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write about the data protection and privacy features offered by Apple’s ecosystem for iPhone and Mac users. I had already started gathering references from Apple’s support website and elsewhere on the internet. It was the perfect use case for this experiment.

ChatGPT Canvas starts off with a prompt, as usual, but now you include the term “canvas” in the request. The rest of the experience unfolds in an interface split into two sections: on the left side is the writing conversation, and on the right is the evolving draft. ChatGPT Canvas lets you interactively edit sections of text by selecting them first before requesting modifications. It’s highly interactive; somewhat like working with an editor in real-time. It’s very stimulating.

With “Protecting Your Digital Life: Privacy and Security Measures for Apple Users”, I had the opportunity to fully test this experience with my previously mentioned article project. ChatGPT was central to this writing project, but I also revised certain parts by removing or adding some content and by adding details that ChatGPT didn’t consider important enough to include. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely better than what I would have written from scratch. I hope you enjoy reading it, and that you find the article informative. PS, the diagram is mine, not ChatGPT’s.

Some cleanup: Readwise is gone. Supporting services are now grouped at the bottom. Corrected a few typos. I made some visual adjustments to make things a little bit cleaner and easier to visualize, especially for website miniatures. I renamed the diagram to reflect the notion of an ecosystem instead of a workflow.

Many additions: each enhanced service with generative AI features is marked as such with a little brain icon. That’s the case for Inoreader, Craft and Grammarly. All my Micro.blog-hosted websites are now indicated. Since adhering to POSSE principles, I added the Fediverse and Bluesky icons and drew the cross-posting arrow lines to them.

A high-resolution version of this diagram is available here.

What is POSSE

The POSSE principle stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” It is a content distribution strategy often recommended for writers, bloggers, and publishers. The primary idea is to first publish your content on a platform you control, such as your personal website or blog, and then syndicate or share that content on other platforms like social media, Medium, or different online communities.

Here are some key points about the POSSE principle:

1. Ownership and Control: By publishing on your own site first, you maintain control over your content and ensure it exists in a space you own. This helps protect your work from the risks of platform changes or shutdowns.
2. Centralized Content: Your website becomes the central hub where all your content is stored and can be accessed by your audience.
3. Traffic and SEO: By driving traffic to your own site, you can improve your website’s SEO, increase your audience, and potentially monetize traffic through ads, affiliate links, or direct sales.
4. Syndication: After publishing on your own site, you can share your content with a wider audience by syndicating it to other platforms. This strategy helps reach readers who might not visit your site directly.
5. Preservation: Content publishing on third-party platforms may be subject to their rules and policies. Publishing first on your own site ensures your content is preserved and remains unchanged regardless of policy changes elsewhere.

The POSSE principle is popular among creators who value long-term control over their work and want to build a sustainable and direct relationship with their audience.

This blog post idea was triggered by a similar post on from HeyDingus blog. Consider this a complement to my written interview on People & Blogs.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It was back in 2009 when I decided to share my journey of learning to develop applications for the iPhone and the App Store. I wanted to write about this because it has been instrumental in aiding me in retaining information and organizing my thoughts in my mind. Moreover, writing has proven to be an effective tool for problem-solving.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

The first blogging platform was iWeb but it was more for sharing personal news with my family members, it was before Facebook and the like. More seriously, it was in Blogger, now part of Google. What a terrible writing platform it was. I eventually migrated my content to WordPress.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Following Blogger, it was Squarespace for a little while then I moved my stuff on WordPress and now on Ghost and Micro.blog. Oh, and I almost forgot Scribble.pages. I know, that’s a lot, but each of them serve its own purpose.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I’m 99% of the time writing locally and hit publish after a dozen of iterations and some serious proofreading (manual, with Grammarly and ChatGPT).

When do you feel most inspired to write?

In the mornings, my mind feels unusually quiet and peaceful.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I let things simmer for quite a while for long pieces. Otherwise it’s a rather short-cycle process, mostly for short-form writing.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Too hard to tell.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I’m super happy with my setup as it is now. I have all the things in place and I want to focus on that for 2025. There is always room for some tweaks and enhancements but overall, I’m settled for a while.

It’s been quite a long time since my previous content creator workflow update, more than a year actually, back in November 2023. With 2024 coming to an end, it’s time for a detailed update. First, consider the following overall diagram, then continue reading.

Outlining purposes: Zavala, a free open-source outliner, is nearly perfect for outlining YouTube video production. I don’t do detailed scripting before recording videos, but I like to create the outline. I was using Zavala until the release of Mindnote Next, but this might change. Mindnote is a superbly designed mind-mapping application that also supports the creation of outlines, which are more beautiful than those created in Zavala. One of Zavala’s strengths is that it is free but also easily exports a document into Craft via a simple drag-and-drop. I will see how it goes in 2025.

Presentation purposes: iA Presenter offers a unique approach to presentation creation. I rarely use presentation software outside of my day job, but when I do, it supports me while recording a YouTube video. A recent update to iA Presenter introduced an online presentation sharing feature that works really well and is beautifully implemented. For 2025, I’ll try to take advantage of this. iA Presenter is such a unique take on a very old software category I must keep trying to find a use for it.

Website site analytics: Tinylytics joins Plausible in my toolset. I was happy with Plausible until this year, but the developer of Tinylytics is also the developer of Scribble.pages, a blog hosting service I really like. I decided to subscribe to Tinylytics as a support gesture for all his hard work building simple yet valuable web services.

Web bookmark management: I’m happy to introduce Anybox. Sure, it’s not raindrop.io, but it’s a great native Mac app, also available on the iPad and the iPhone. That’s all I need. My collection has less than four hundred bookmarks, all organized using folders and tags. It’s nothing fancy but practical.

RSS feeds publishing: FeedPress is a simple yet effective way for adding a unified feed in front of all my different websites (Ghost, Micro.blog, Scribbles, Medium). Also, I offer an RSS megafeed that encompasses all my other individual RSS feeds, which can be found here: https://feeds.numericcitizen.me. The added value of using FeedPress is to enable RSS feed analytics, which other publishing platforms like Micro.blog, for example, won’t provide.

Podcasting purposes: Micro.blog is now my podcast hosting service of choice. The feature is built-in and very simple to configure and use. There are two ways for me to share a podcast episode: either use the narrated post feature of Micro.blog or use a traditional workflow, build an audio file using Screenflow, post-process it in Adobe Podcast, and convert it from WAV to MP3 using Permute before uploading the audio file to Micro.blog.

Files-hosting and cloud storage service: Dropshare will upload a file to Backblaze cloud storage, and Short.io will shorten the resulting URL. All my files are shared under the following domain name: https://go.numericcitizen.me, using my custom branding. Here is an example: https://go.numericcitizen.me/PLx2st2Y. This workflow was implemented in 2024 and works well. The only thing is that I don’t use it often enough, and it can compete with CleanShot Cloud, which I use more often when sharing screenshots or short video clips. Those media files are using the following URL: cloud.numericcitizen.me.

Specialized blog hosting: Micro.blog. I created a metablog on Micro.blog using one of the five blogs in my Micro.blog subscription. As you can conclude, I’m increasing my foothold on Micro.blog because it is cheap, effective and unique on the market.

Read-later service: I removed Omnivore because the service is no longer being developed, and I decided to focus on Inoreader instead. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a cheaper one. I still depend on Readwise to sync text highlights from Inoreader.

Another blog hosting service, Scribbles, was. I’m using it to host short-form posts called Blips or longer ones using the /Now spirit under the following URL: https://blips.numericctizen.me.

One-page website hosting: Numeric Citizen Hub on Micro.blog has replaced my Linktr.ee page. I’m again focusing on Micro.blog for many of my online publishing needs while saving some money along the way. This one-page website is for hosting my visitor card, sort of. Micro.blog offers support for one-page websites, so I’m taking advantage of this.

When saving bookmarks on Miicro.blog, I take advantage of text highlights while reading the article that Micro.blog is keeping from the bookmark. Text highlights are synced to Readwise, too.

Website for my supporters: For prople who wants to show their support for my work, I have built a Ko-fi page that can be reached here: https://ko-fi.com/numericcitizen. It was created for the one dollars a month club initiative from Manuel Moreale. I’m one of his supporter.

Document writing and editing needs: Craft & Ulysses. Both apps are still at the center of my publishing needs. More than ever, I depend on Craft to gather my thoughts and notes, research, and write. Ultimately, content is exported into Ulysses for publishing to either Ghost, Micro.blog or, more recently, Medium.

Behind-the-scenes newcomers: Apple Freeform plays a more prominent role in helping me create diagrams. Freeform is joining Mindnote and Keynote for creating visual content when needed.

These are gone: All my domain name registrations are now entirely moved to Cloudflare, and gone is GoDaddy. Omnivore is being phased out by its developers; it’s gone, too.

Until next time

The continuous evolution of toolsets reflects the dynamic nature of technology and the diverse needs of users. No toolset is flawless, and each comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. This notion is evident in your evolving content creator workflow, where you adapt and integrate new tools, illustrating digital tools’ perpetual state of change. For 2025, I don’t expect too much change in my workflows. Don’t forget to visit my complete content creator toolset if you are curious about the individual tools that I’m using.

This document is also available as a Craft shared document.

I spent some time this morning to visit my documented tool set on my metablog to make some updates.

This morning, I added a guestbook to my blog. Please, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while or if you just came by, take a moment to sign it! 🙏🏻