Numeric Citizen Space

👤 Personal

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

🗺️ Discoveries

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

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

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

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

🌄 Photography

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

🍎 Apple & Tech

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

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

macOS Icon History — Basic Apple Guy

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

Basic Apple GuyBasicAppleGuy

🚧 Special projects

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

Who is Numeric Citizen?

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

Who Is Numeric Citizen?

📱 Apps & Services

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

📺 YouTube

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

🌟 Miscellaneous

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

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

🔮 Looking forward

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

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

👤 Personal

1️⃣ Here's some important personal news: I'm getting a new job! Starting June 23th, I'll be taking a new position at one of Canada's largest banks. My previous job change was in 2018. This pivot means adopting a new set of digital tools and processes, something I always pay attention too. Not everything is for the best (I'm losing my Mac and I'm getting a Windows PC 😭), but overall, this is a new chapter for my IT career. It might be my last, too. I’m very excited for this.

🗺️ Discoveries1

1️⃣ I recently discovered the Dezeen web magazine, but I don't recall exactly how I came across this website. Dezeen is a leading online magazine about architecture, interiors, and design. You can find articles about architecture, interior design and much more. One thing that I observed: some design mockups of future architectural projects are so realistic, it’s mind-blowing. 2️⃣ Is Kagi simply a front-end to traditional search engines like Google? 👀 According to their documentation, it certainly appears to be the case, which is perplexing. I'm paying for Kagi because I think it offers great value and doesn't built their business of users tracking to serves ads. Why is Google allowing their service to be consumed with API calls from services like Kagi, bypassing their ads serving business?

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ I knew Bill Atkinson was a photographer, but I had never quite seen his work. Now we can. He was a multi-talented guy. 2️⃣ Glass introduced a pretty handy feature to help other Glass members discover who is new on the platform. An email is sent with a handful of new members so that other photographers can discover them. Speaking of Glass, if you plan to join Glass, you’ll get a 10$ rebate on your first year by using this link. You are welcome.

🍎 Apple & Tech

1️⃣ Who's going to WWDC25? Super cool visuals and stats from the makers of Flighty showing attendees’ origins. People must be using Flighty to register and track their flights. 2️⃣ Apple is a large corporation with the goal of making money. They make a lot. Beyond buying their products, they don't need us, Apple fans. That's what Dan Moren from MacWorld's column Stay Foolish is arguing in his last article. 3️⃣ Is Apple's software that bad? I fail to back the idea that Apple's OSes are bad or worse than they used to be. I rarely experience the type of things reported in that article. Last year's Apple record cards from SixColors seems to disagree and find improvements across the board. Yet, I do see many inconsistencies across the board, though. I believe that Apple software is often developed in silos, and designers may not communicate effectively with each other, or perhaps they don't use their software sufficiently to identify glaring problems. Apple is working to redo their UI across the board. Will that be enough to polish the many rough edges? I'm not convinced at this time. 4️⃣ Matt Gemmell switched to the Mac after being iPad-only for more than eight years. Why the switch? He found many limitations with the iPad that were hindering his productivity. Multitasking is one of them. Again, Apple is about to unveil a completely revamped multitasking feature; will that be enough? Is the Mac perfect? Matt mentions how needy the Mac can be with all those security-related notifications and prompts, as well as Safari needing too much management. Is iPadOS 26 changing his mind? Time will tell. 6️⃣ The vibe before WWDC is not very positive. 7️⃣ Basic Apple Guy created a bingo card to measure his predictions for the keynote.

John Siracusa, writing at Hypercritical:

As far as I’m concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple’s leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened.

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ I expect a lot of my apps to adopt Apple's Liquid Glass interface metaphor. Why? Because they are constantly updated to add new features, fix bugs and adopt new Apple software technologies. In other words, I don't use or depend on abandonware. 2️⃣ Kagi search now has 50K subscribers, a significant milestone. I'm one of them. 3️⃣ I'm still unsure how to save must-read articles. Suppose I see something interesting while scrolling my Micro.blog timeline, then I'll use the bookmarking features. If I'm browsing the web with the ARC browser, I might save in Inoreader or use a web clipper to save into a Craft document. I don't think I'll ever find a solution to this.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I'm not a computer games player, but No Man's Sky on the Nintendo Switch 2 looks stunning. I wish I had the time and curiosity to try these games. 2️⃣ Forest fires are still raging in central Canada, as you can see in this video. 3️⃣ Marques Brownlee offers his thoughts on WWDC25 and Liquid Glass, as well as Snazzy Labs, in his always funny videos. 4️⃣ Don't miss this remastered video of Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford. 5️⃣ Video of Craig Federighi on iPadOS 26 and why there is no macOS for iPad.

🌟 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Bill Atkinson passed away. RIP. Seems like he died from a similar sickness to Steve Jobs’: pancreatic cancer. 😢 he was a great programmer who worked on the Mac’s internal drawing routines called QuickDraw. He was the creator of HyperCard. And a great photographer, too. See him posing with Steve Jobs. 2️⃣ The Apple & Tech section is full of tidbits, and I have no more room for WWDC comments and notes, so here they are. 3️⃣ Liquid Glass, the fundamental visual attributes and behaviours at the center of Apple's OSes redesign, is officially out, and comments about it are also available. As expected, people are divided (did I say 'divided’?), but the general sentiment seems to be that it's not as bad as iOS 7 was in 2013, and Apple still has some time ahead to tweak things a bit here and there. I do like most of it, as experienced on my M4 iPad Pro, but the biggest problem is readability. In many situations, readability is much worse. While waiting for Apple to fix things, you can tone down a few attributes. In any case, this critique is certainly worth a look. 4️⃣ Apple was relatively silent about Siri, but talked about Apple Intelligence more than expected, but in a clever way. AI-based features are prevalent throughout Apple's operating systems. Taken as a whole, they form a sizeable chunk of Apple's new improvements. The one thing missing is generative AI content, which I expect Apple doesn't want to replicate as-is, just like they don’t develop a web search engine. 5️⃣ Stay foolish, stay hungry speech by Steve Jobs, 20th anniversary.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Before WWDC25 Keynote: Can Apple turn the vibes around this year at WWDC? Things look bad right now, and something big has to happen, and it's not on the AI front. After the WWDC25 keynote: Apple made strides with all its OSes, while explaining that Apple Intelligence is still a work in progress. Not everyone is happy, but Apple still comes out in a slightly better shape this year, thanks to things like opening up on-device models to third-party developers.

“The last thing MacOS needs is more transparency/translucency than it already has." — Sebastiaan De With in “Physicality: the new age of UI”

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

I don’t have a typical article to share this year before the WWDC conference, but I do have many thoughts lingering in my head that I want to share with you. Here they are, in no particular order.

• I think it’s time for Tim Cook to step down. There are many reasons behind this thought. He is way too focused on everything except the products. He’s not a product guy but an operations guy. I don’t listen to him when he is presenting during a keynote. Those words aren’t his words. It's fake and redundant. I have so many grievances about Tim that it would merit its own article. Maybe later.
• This is a conference for developers and yet I feel Apple doesn’t really care about them or they care about the wrong things. They fake openness and attention. The one thing they pay attention to is their bottom line, which is money. I hope developers won’t feel too much abandoned after this year’s conference. They probably will because the hill is steep and Apple is not moving in the right direction to fix the many issues.
• Apple is sending the wrong message. I don’t care if Apple execs are not attending Gruber’s show. Past years shows were merely entertaining and a rewording of things we already knew. Gruber fails to ask the hard questions because if he does, Apple will push back. This year they did, probably because of his article about Apple Intelligence fiasco. So Apple is backing off. This add credence to my theory that The Talk Show is a show, not a real conversation. What is real is the message that Apple is sending: they are afraid to face the tough questions. Apple lacks confidence. They made a big mistake last year at the WWDC24 keynote and they don’t want to admit it.
• The rumour is that Apple will show us some visual unification between all of their platforms, and they will change the numbering scheme. Will it be enough to forget about the lingering problems Apple has on its plate? Certainly not. I view this redesign as one of the most significant undertakings by Apple since the introduction of iOS 7 in 2013. We will live with this for the next ten years. It better be good.
• If Apple is poised to unify the user interface of its operating systems, which one will lose the most of its unique personality? Which one will gain the most?
• On the AI front, Apple appears stagnant, stuck in its past successes. Even if you don’t use AI or trust AI or expect to use AI in the future, perception by the tech pundits is that Apple is losing, and at the speed things are going, it will be hard to fight back and make a place under the sun. It’s Apple, they have the money, they have the people, but they have principles that hinder their advances. Something has to give if we want to see Apple truly move forward. Meanwhile, I hope Apple will stay mum about its Apple Intelligence journey. Let them do their magic. I'm patient because I have alternatives like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Kagi. One question: Is Apple using Private Cloud Compute in any way, or was it tied to an unfinished Apple Intelligence feature?
• I don’t expect any hardware announcement. In fact, I don't want to see new hardware. Anyway, I’m not buying anything Apple this year, it’s a way for me to manifest my disdain for Apple’s support of the orange clown at the Office since January 20th.
• Is the perception of falling behind in the AI field so widespread among the general public, beyond just tech pundits? I don’t think so. That narrative belongs to the tech press and pundits. Personally, I’m not particularly concerned about Apple’s advancements in AI, but I do care that Image Playground is one of the worst designs Apple has created.
• I don’t have a wish list for iOS or iPadOS. These are mature and a commodity now. Anything more powerful than what they currently provide is intended for the Mac. I stopped complaining about Stage Manager. Apple will figure that one out eventually. I stopped using Shortcuts because of its multi-platform nature; it's not my thing and is utterly buggy, and I'm not good at using it. Eventually, Apple will integrate AI into the mix, and I’ll likely ask anything via a prompt. In a few years from now, I guess.
• With all these thoughts, I would summarize my interests in this year WWDC to be limited to: the UI redesign across platforms, how much they remove or add to each of them and developers reactions to what Apple won’t do or announce.

Anyhow, we will see soon enough if I’m being realistic or cynical, or both. I might update this article if other thoughts come to my mind before WWDC.

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I'm back from a two-week vacation where I tried to stay disconnected. As with any vacation, I took many pictures, which are being processed, at a rather slow pace; a few each day. I started sharing some of them on my Glass profile page, if you are curious. 2️⃣ I like the following quote of Jony Ive.

“What we make stands testament to who we are.” — Jony Ive, in an interview at Stripe Sessions

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I recently discovered Framework as a PC manufacturer, and I must say that I’m between impressed and highly intrigued. Is this the future of personal computers? Why isn't Apple trying its take on these? They could put an environmental spin to this. Framework joins Microsoft as another company that tries a bit harder to innovate and buck the trend in device form factor designs.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ After returning from vacation, I first wrote a blog post, and it felt so good to be back at it again. Writing is liberating and helps me move forward with my life. That blog post had nothing really special, rather mundane, I would say. Yet, it was one of the many markers that I like to drop in this digital universe.

“Everyone can and everyone should write. Writing is good for us. Writing is human. There is nothing that makes someone a writer and someone else not a writer other than the act of writing. So please, sit yourself down and write if you want to write.” — Sarah Olson

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ In this section, I often share a newly discovered photographer, usually on Glass. While searching for a new one, I wondered about the criteria at play when looking for an unknown photographer. Do I select one because they create the same kind of images that I do? Or am I selecting one because he does images that I wish I could do? Or am I being picky because I see photos I wish to share with myself and become famous? Who knows? 2️⃣ Do you depend on camera reviews before buying a new camera? Om Malik critiques the integrity of camera reviews, arguing that they are often biased and driven by marketing hype rather than genuine user experience, particularly highlighting the Fuji X half camera as an example of style over substance. I do read a lot of them, but Om Malik’s blog post is a reminder that we should take them with a grain of salt and consider the context behind why reviews are created. 3️⃣ Many photographers are frustrated with Instagram's algorithmic feed, over-commercialization, and excessive ads, prompting the search for alternatives. This DPReview article compares many popular alternatives, including VSCO, Flickr, and Glass, among others. You probably know that I'm a big fan of Glass.🌟. 4️⃣ Be sure to visit Om Malik's iPhone camera specs comparison blog post. He put together this table to show, in part, how the iPhone camera evolved over the years. It's rather impressive what Apple can cram into such a small device. What's next for the iPhone this year? Who knows.

🍎 Apple & Tech

1️⃣ Apple seems to be dormant these days when it comes to AI. So much is happening around them that they seem to be retracting, lost in their glorious past, while OpenAI is buying Jony Ive's io to create what comes next. While I’m highly skeptical about their prospects, I don't want them to fail because I want Apple to be the one that shows it can reinvent itself. I don't want them to be the next Humane with their DOA AI pin. 2️⃣ Apple will switch to a new numbering scheme for their OS releases, starting this WWDC. They will use a year-based numbering system, such as iOS 26 or macOS 26. They might tweak it to macOS ‘26, which I would prefer. The change will take some time to get used to. This reminds me of Microsoft. Now, will we ever see the iPhone 26? Who knows. More details in this YouTube video. 3️⃣ Apple is the gatekeeper. I believe that the iPhone is a much bigger target from a cybersecurity perspective than the Mac, hence Apple's desire to keep the App Store closed as it is currently. Many people disagree. I'm on the fence. Even if there were a third-party App Store, I wouldn't install apps from it unless they came from a well-known and highly reputable developer. 4️⃣ The twentieth-anniversary iPhone will be a slab of glass, more or less. What happens if you put a case on such an iPhone? 5️⃣ The Apple Watch turned 10, already! Great visuals from Basic Apple Guy, again! 6️⃣ Why do so many people think fonts just feel better on a Mac than a PC? It boils down to rendering philosophy. Apple products display text true to how the design would appear in print, whereas Microsoft opts to focus on precise pixel placement (Kartscrut). 7️⃣ WWDC is just around the corner, and we will get a pre-recorded video or an infomercial. Just like Matt, I want them to return to live events. 8️⃣ If you are curious about Apple CarPlay Ultra, here's a quick look. I'm not in the market for a new car, but I must say that I wish my next car would support this, which seems unlikely because not many car brands are supporting it.

“I hope it really is, because I’d hate to see this team lose credibility in the way Humane — also stacked with ex-Apple talent — did. Theirs is not the roadmap I’d want to see followed.” — Jarrod Blundy

“In the 1990s, I was a teenager learning to program the Mac while complaining about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Now I admire Bill and complain about Apple.” — Manton Reece

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ If you've been following along, I'm still working on my new website with Elements. Things are going nicely with the help of the developers, who are answering many questions on their forums. I'm expecting to launch this website later this summer. I shared a preview and a link to the website on my Ko-fi page so that my supporters can get a sneak peek. If you become a supporter, then you'll get access to the post with the link! 👀 😉

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Paste, the best clipboard manager app on the Mac, was upgraded to version 5 and introduced pinboards sharing built on iCloud collaboration features. While I don't plan to use this feature, I still use Paste daily and couldn't live without it. 2️⃣ Another new and great update to CleanShot X, well exposed by Matt Bircher in his YouTube video. 3️⃣ Pocket, the read-later service, is being shut down by its owner, Mozilla. I stopped using Pocket a while ago when I wanted to test other solutions, such as Matter and Readwise, and decided to focus on Inoreader for my reading needs. 4️⃣ Speaking of Inoreader, another addition to this powerful service has just arrived: support for Raindrop.io integration. This means that any article you are reading can be saved in the Raindrop.io bookmarking service. That's cool and all, but I left Raindrop.io a long time ago, after the war in Ukraine began, and decided to use Anybox instead. Yet, it's another nice addition to Inoreader.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Drones keep improving. This is the latest dji mavic 4 Pro. I want one. 2️⃣ Sam (OpenAI) and Jony (LoveFrom, io) had a conversation. Or was it two monologues? Or too hyperbolic dialogue? I wish them well, but this hype-ish video is not a good start, or rather, a small red flag. Read the OpenAI press release. 3️⃣ That building in New York City is empty! Why is that? Here's why. You'll learn a lot about the iconic Flatiron Building. 👀

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Why do all electric vehicles have the same design? Riccardo Mori says yes. I'm tempted to compare this situation with smartphones: they look more or less the same, don’t they? Is this the price to pay for becoming a commodity? 2️⃣ In other news, I ordered a bunch of Apple Silicon Inside stickers from Basic Apple Guy and told him. He responded by saying thank you and added a few extras to the shipment. I’m eager to see what's in store! I can't stress enough how hard this person is working on their Apple-related tasks. 3️⃣ Password hygiene is vital to keep your security posture in good shape. Mike Rockwell put together a complete guide to managing your passwords and accounts effectively and securely.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Apple’s top-level execs won’t take part in Gruber’s Live at WWDC show like they did in the past ten years. No explanation was given, but it appears that Apple might not be happy with Gruber's take on Apple Intelligence. Is Apple pissed off? Maybe. What I find sad is that not only does Apple no longer host live keynotes, but they also now refuse to engage in live conversations after the recorded event. I really miss live events. Is this a one-time-only thing so Apple can get its affairs in order before returning next year? Who knows. Apple seems to lack confidence by not returning to live events. Can you imagine if developers were to boo Apple execs when talking about Apple Intelligence on stage? Still looking forward to the next WWDC keynote, though, albeit with some apprehension.

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

👤 Personal

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

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

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

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

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

🌄 Photography

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

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

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

🍎 Apple

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

🚧 Special projects

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

📱 Apps & Services

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

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

📺 YouTube

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

💎 Miscellaneous

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

🔮 Looking forward

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

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

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

👤 Personal

1️⃣ Now that my home improvement project is (mostly) behind me, I’m turning my attention to my creative hobbies. I'd like returning to DJing, just for fun. I’d like to spend more time doing photography. In both cases, I have the required geared, I'm only lacking some motivation.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I discovered this blog, Brilliantcrank, after reading a link post. I couldn’t help but share my feelings. 2️⃣ According to this report from WIRED, large language models are out, and small language models are in, thanks to their many advantages and use cases. They take fewer resources to run, hence their capability to run on a small device like an iPhone, and they help bring more focused responses in niche domains. Part of their training uses synthetic data from large language models. 3️⃣ As this blog post explains, Manuel Moreale is taking over blogroll.org, a giant curated blogroll: "manually curated list of 643 fine personal & independent blogs and sites that are updated regularly.” I didn't know the existence of blogroll.org until I read a post from Manton Reece on my Micro.blog timeline. I feel that human curation is needed more than ever in today's internet. Otherwise, everything would fall behind an algorithm. You can find me as a supporter on the list of blogs.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ From January 2025 to mid-April, I lived in an apartment while my home was undergoing a significant renovation. I took advantage of the occasion to test cutting the cord and relied entirely on Apple TV to watch TV and other video content. I shared my experience in this article. The experience wasn't quite what I expected. 2️⃣ Medium shared how they approach AI for writing content. I find their take reasonable, but I wonder how hard they are applying it because I feel that a lot of content is written with LLM. Maybe it's being delegated to the publication’s owners and surfaced articles by the editorial team. Who knows. Scott Lamb reacted to the article by sharing his usual declaration that goes with the work he shares, which I decided to keep for myself: “I ideate and draft content in a text editor, refine it with the aid of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly and revise it to reflect my intended message.”

"I don’t delete my blog posts… even when it would be easier for me if I did. For longer posts I might add a note at the end to correct something, but most of the time I let it stand, or hope that replies on the post are enough clarification. The blog as a whole is the work." — Manton Reece

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ AI-generated imagery is eating into the photo licensing revenue turf, and rather quickly. Services like Unsplash, which offer a vast amount of free-of-charge photos, also provide a subscription, which could be affected in the long run. I considerably reduced my use of Unsplash stock imagery for my blog posts, preferring to use either my own photos or AI-generated ones. 2️⃣ Pixelfed now supports filters to customize your experience better. I added two filters to filter out birds and macro photography shots. 3️⃣ Going out for a photowalk with your son in London seems like a good plan. That's exactly what Greg Morris did recently; he shared a video about this. They made some really great shots together! 4️⃣ This week's photographer discovery: Carl Greenwood on Glass: essentially monochromatic photos, but many little gems. Then, I discovered Giles Thurston, another great photographer followed by Carl Greenwood. Glass is such a great place for photography lovers.

Carl Greenwood on Glass Photography Community

Carl Greenwood. Monochrome Photographer who is new to this platform and I also have a Vero account. No website, yet.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Is the iPhone 16 Pro immune to tariffs? Nope. Sorry, yes. Thanks to a clever strategy by Apple, iPhones were imported from India in massive numbers before the tariffs went into effect. Then Trump changed his mind. But still, Apple will not increase the price. Oh, and by the time this edition went out, Trump again decided to exempt Apple's devices from import tariffs. For now. 2️⃣ Apple Search Ads is now called Apple Ads. According to M. G. Siegler, this could point to a significant expansion of their ad business into other areas like Apple Maps and Apple TV. I'm not too fond of this predicted trend. Apple is a premium brand, and ads are the opposite of being premium. I don't want to see ads in Apple Maps, Apple TV or, who knows, macOS Settings app. Because of ads, I no longer visit Apple News; they ruin the reading experience. It just looks and feels cheap. 3️⃣ If recent reports are believed, Apple's Siri development seems to suffer from constant chaos. Was it under pressure for cost-cutting from Apple's past CFO? Maybe. The net effect is that Siri and Apple Intelligence are far behind what is currently possible from stand-alone services. 4️⃣ Rumours of iPadOS 19 call for Apple to fix some long-standing issues which prevent the iPad from acting and feeling like a modern computing device. It is not close enough to what we've got on desktop computers like the Mac. Fifth time a charm?

"The iPhone is in many ways the ultimate symbol of the age of globalized supply chains."

"When Apple says ‘this is something only Apple can do’ it often means that they just won't allow third parties to do it." — Gui Rambo on Mastodon

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ Many of my projects are related to managing changes in apps and services because my needs change. I went from HEY Mail to Fastmail. I went from WordPress to Ghost. I when from Blot to Craft and Micro.blog. Like Matt Birchler said: “Everything will change one day."

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Parker Ortolani argues that the Microsoft Edge browser is now good enough to replace the Arc Browser from the Browser Company. I use Microsoft Edge at the office, but I didn't spend much time trying to customize it to my liking. The only extension that I use is the iCloud Keychain. Maybe I should give it a more serious look because the Arc Browser is on the verge of becoming another abandonware. 2️⃣ If you want to tweak the menubar on your Mac and bring visual memories of macOS Maverick, Catalina or Tiger, now you can with this nifty utility: Lickable Menu Bar. I chose the Maverick version because of the nice gradient when in dark mode. 3️⃣ In a recent update, Craft introduced support for syncing Readwise highlights into a Craft collection. I tested the feature to import my Readwise content, and it works as advertised. My collection size is just under a thousand items, and I feel Craft lags while working with such an extensive collection. This Craft addition came when I decided to drop Readwise because of my lack of use cases, preferring to focus on Inoreader for my reading workflow.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Notion Mail is finally out! This video from Notion shows that Microsoft, with Microsoft 365, is sleeping on the job. I'm not a fan of Notion Mail being a client to Gmail, but I applaud the courage they have for trying something in this crowded and mature space. As a recent switcher to Fastmail, should I consider Notion Mail? Nope. I don't see the big thing in Notion Mail for me to switch, nothing compared to what I had when I switched from HEY Mail. 2️⃣ The Steve Jobs Archive is on YouTube. Just found out recently, thanks to a post by Michael Steeber.

Steve Jobs Archive

The Steve Jobs Archive is the authoritative home for Steve’s story and a resource for new generations eager to make their own mark. Our publications, programs, and collections provide people with the inspiration to think different, the tools to make something wonderful, and the confidence to put it out there.

YouTube

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I tried ChatGPT image generation to create a pixel art version of my business profile photo. Not bad. The first iteration was the best; subsequent iterations were not as good. I don't have a great face for a computer-generated image of me. Apple's Image Playground proves it, but ChatGPT too. 2️⃣ Synology makes it harder for clients to decide which drive to put in their Synology NAS. In recently introduced models, Synology will be restricting HDD models that can be used in these units for maximum performance, compatibility and durability, at least so they say. Is this a marketing trick to maximize revenues? Is Synology following Apple's vertical integration models? It certainly looks like it, and people aren't happy at all. I own a DS720+ model and don't plan to upgrade anytime soon, but when I do, this will impact my choices. 3️⃣ Do you close all apps on your iPhone? While LJPUK still do it, I never did that because, first it's a waste of my time, second, by the time you close them all, you are wasting battery power and, third, you fight against the logic of leaving apps active and returning to them in a snap instead of the iPhone having to relaunch the app when you return to it which takes longer. 4️⃣ ChatGPT now keeps past conversations to build a profile or memory of its user and learn from it. It might sound bad but this helps make ChatGPT more personal in its way of interacting with the user. You can prompt ChatGPT to describe yourself. I asked “Describe me based on past conversations". Results are troubling.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Neptune, a TikTok alternative, is on the verge of launching. I'm not really into this digital medium because they are a time waster for me. The fact that Neptune isn't associated with Meta or Google is a win right there. Curious to see where it goes. 2️⃣ Realmac Software continues working on Elements, and they recently gave an early look at a feature that I'm really looking forward to: blogging support! From the video below, you can see the feature in action. It's a bit rough on the edges and convoluted, but the idea of using a native website builder app for blogging is exciting. This could potentially partially replace Craft for some use cases.

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

I’ve been a devoted Apple TV user since it first launched back in 2006. But earlier this year, a major home renovation project forced me to temporarily relocate to an apartment—cutting me off from my cable TV provider since the start of 2025. Now, I’m counting down the days until I can move back home and reconnect to traditional cable. Why? Because after nearly two decades of evolution, Apple TV still isn’t delivering the experience I expected.

So, what’s it really like to rely solely on Apple TV in 2025, leaving cable behind entirely? After three months of going all-in on Apple’s set-top box, I’ve got thoughts—here’s what I’ve learned.

• My YouTube content consumption dramatically increased, not only for watching my preferred channels but also for consuming news-related content. I wasn’t expecting that. Thankfully, I’m a paid subscriber, so I don’t get to see ads.
• Image quality varies significantly between each source. Apple content stands out as the best, while most others offer the bare minimum. When watching highly dynamic content, the image becomes blurry and pixelated, which is not ideal for a 4K TV.
• I mostly never use the “Up Next” feature because not all content providers are supporting it. Did Apple lose its power or attractiveness to bring developers support for even basic features like this? I think so. Continue reading to learn about the consequences.
• Interacting with an Apple TV means a lot of time is spent clicking and sliding through the Apple TV user interface. A simple wrong gesture can be fatal and break the browsing, watching or listening experience. Navigating the tvOS user interface is finicky not only for beginners but for experienced users, too. It is frustrating. Siri doesn’t really help here because of its high failure rate.
• There’s no universal way to watch live TV; each TV channel app offers a unique way to access the current broadcast. Some apps don’t even provide live broadcast access; they only allow you to watch past TV shows. It’s not tvOS’s fault, but Apple’s.
• Very few apps offer an on-screen TV guide. The TV guide is usually hard to find and requires numerous clicks to access. Additionally, no TV provider allows for the recording of scheduled TV shows. I believe this is an opportunity missed by Apple to provide a standardized way for displaying TV schedules.
• Apple’s tvOS doesn’t offer live TV feeds aggregation, which Google does via the live TV grid named “FAST TV”. I understand that this service would mostly fix the TV guide issue mentioned previously and could be a complementary offer to “Up Next”. Is Apple reading this?
• As you might expect, there is no “switching channels action” to view what is currently available on different TV providers. You can probably tell how old I am now. I suppose this is not an issue for younger consumers. I suspect the younger generation no longer watches TV, so they can’t compare.
• Content navigation is a nightmare because not all Apple TV app developers follow the Human Interface Guide from Apple. The YouTube app is probably the worst. You never really know when the “back” button will dismiss some UI elements or bring you back to the home screen.
• My TV provider in Montreal, Videotron, doesn’t fully support the TV Provider feature. Only Helix subscription plans and their most recent offerings are supported. Illico is unavailable through the Apple TV, only on their aging set-top box. I don't want to “upgrade" or switch to Helix because it comes with its WiFi router, which I don't like; I want to keep control of that essential piece of equipment.
• App reviews for TV providers are barely making the 2-star mark. People don’t like them, apparently. Now you better know why.

"This project has always been a puzzle. Yes, Apple builds services to drive iPhone sales, but those services always produce revenue and support themselves as well. Meanwhile, Apple services are either essential for Apple to have (iCloud, Music, Maps), or try to solve problems for users in some uniquely Apple way (Fitness, the credit card). Apple TV does none of this. It doesn’t solve any problem, it does nothing different and Apple adds nothing. All that Apple contributes is money: Eddie Cue flies down to LA and buys LA stuff from LA people. Some of the shows are good, yes, but that has nothing to do with Apple. Worse, it doesn’t even drive device sales - almost no-one watches the shows and you can watch them on competitors’ devices anyway. As I and many others have said - why does this exist?" – Benedict Evans about the Apple TV

My general feeling is that the Apple TV, and tvOS for that matter, doesn’t need a more powerful CPU or a new navigational trick, it might need a more profound rethinking. But even if Apple does it, will TV providers or, more importantly, developers step in? I don’t think so.

Final question: How much of the current fragmented state of the Apple TV content consumption experience is due to the content being spread out and streamed through so many “channel apps”? Is FAST TV a solution to this? It’s undoubtedly a subject up for debate.

Note: right before publishing this article, SixColors published a comparison of TV streamers that goes along the same lines as my thoughts.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I discovered a few weeks ago: Fastmail, a great email service that I switched to from HEY Mail. I shared my experience of switching to Fastmail in this article. If you want to unify all your mailboxes, Fastmail is the best discovery you'll ever make this week! 2️⃣ This article from Informations Architects discusses the gradual shift from traditional, heavily formatted word processing applications like Microsoft Word to simpler, more focused writing tools that utilize Markdown, emphasizing how this change promotes clarity in writing and reduces the distractions of excessive formatting. Speaking of Markdown, check out this online Markdown text editor.

"Why are we sending our kids to a school that looks like a Microsoft ad? To prepare them for the future. Does equipping children with Office tools truly serve this purpose or does it serve the purpose of cementing a life in the products of a software monopolist?" — Informations Architects

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I wrote an article about privacy and data protection for Apple users. It's a different kind of project, and I shared a behind-the-scene look about it here. Then, I wrote another article following an unexpected refusal to submit an article for Medium. Even with generative AI, writing these days is more complicated than ever, not easier. Don't be fooled. 2️⃣ I’d like to write a new version of “The Rotten Side of Tim Cook’s Apple” following Gruber's piece about something rotten at Apple. I just don't know where to start. 3️⃣ Don't miss my monthly summary on Micro.blog.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ This article discusses the importance of creating a hierarchical keyword system in Lightroom to enhance image organization and searchability. Photographers can efficiently manage their growing collections by categorizing keywords into parent-child relationships. The principles exposed in this article can apply to any app or service that supports tags. 2️⃣ Celebrating life is probably the best way to describe Lindsay Lee Giroux's work. I found her on Glass while surfing for photographers that don't fall into the usual photographic style category I like the most. Her visual style is colorful, joyful, and authentic. Those are the words that come to my mind when browsing her profile. She also has a beautiful online portfolio. 3️⃣ This video explores how to recreate the nostalgic look of film photography using just an iPhone, without needing a film camera. Using the Moment app for manual controls and RAW shooting, along with ND filters to mimic slower shutter speeds, they embrace imperfections that give photos a more authentic film feel. They edit using Dehancer, an app that simulates classic film stocks and effects like grain and halation, achieving surprisingly convincing results. While they acknowledge that mobile photography can’t fully replace the experience of shooting film, it’s a fun, accessible, and affordable way to capture a similar aesthetic.

Lindsay Lee Giroux on Glass Photography Community

Lindsay Lee Giroux. Monocular Photographer 📷 • Autistic • Mom to 5 • Lightseeker • Storyteller • Timekeeper • Photographing the Authentic, Beauty, & Magic in Every Day ✨

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ A stark warning from an app developer: in “Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” Brian Irace warns that at this rate, it's faster to write an app using generative AI than go through the current App Store approval process. Something is wrong here. I'm getting nervous about Apple these days. 2️⃣ WWDC25 invites are out and look rather uninspiring. I'm not too fond of this glassy look for the “25” portion of the WWDC25. Judge yourself with the artwork below. 3️⃣ Remember Swift Playground? I’ve been wondering how this app could evolve in the context of generative AI. Is it still relevant without any coding assistant based on generative AI? Beyond support for machine learning-related integration, I don't see anything related to generative AI and LLM model integration. Am I missing something? 4️⃣ iOS 19 redesign looks more gorgeous by the leak! 😍 If the project code name is Solarium, it somewhat adds credence to the rumors. The use of the glass material metaphor for the UI also makes sense to me because it goes with the fact that we interact with our devices through the glass surface. 5️⃣ Before we get to iOS 19, we're getting iOS 18.4 (and all other .4 releases) with quite a few new features and tweaks. It's the time of the year when iOS feels the most stable and finished, just two months before the next WWDC. 6️⃣ Apple released iOS 16.7.11 with security fixes for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Yep, for iPhone 8 and iPhone X. 7️⃣ iOS 18.5 beta is out; nothing worth calling your mom..

Mac

The most powerful Mac laptops and desktops ever. Supercharged by Apple silicon. MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro.

Apple

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I recently finished copying my blog posts from the Craft-hosted documents to Micro.blog. The goal was to reduce my dependence on Craft and better align with open platforms like Micro.blog for hosting and sharing my content. The blog posts can be found here. The efforts were probably too high compared to the content value, but I needed to keep my content publicly available. You never know when something might be useful for someone.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Inoreader got a big Q1 quarter full of updates, and they said that Q2 will be even more significant. I'm not holding my breath too much. Still, Inoreader received many meaningful updates, making this service even better and more valuable to me. 2️⃣ I’ve been testing ChatGPT's new image generation capabilities, which are based on the 4o model. Compared to Apple’s Image Playground, it is awe-inspiring. I understand that ChatGPT is much less constrained than Apple's solution, which runs on the device, yet why would people waste their time with Apple's solution? I tested this on two images: one is based on my avatar, the other is from an image of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone. 3️⃣ Craft announced Chaps, a new application that is somewhat hard to describe. It's like a conversational app between you and apps or services. I would have called it Chapps instead for a better and more obvious reference to chat + apps. I'm not sure how useful this will be in my workflow. The demonstrated use cases aren't very enticing to me. I prefer a chat client with my Craft content where I could ask questions like “Show me a list of recently updated documents” or “What is the XYZ document about?”. Also, Craft is a small team, and I hope their development resources are not diluted too much. As I wrote to someone on Reddit, there are still many unfinished and "work-in-progress" things in Craft that need attention. From their announcement: “Think of Chaps as a place to build smart, AI-powered agents each dedicated to a specific area or workflow of your life, helping you simplify tasks and focus on what genuinely matters.”.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ I’ve been watching "Adolescence" recently, a poignant four-episode Netflix series. One thing that struck me was the filming: all episodes are shot in one continuous sequence. The following YouTube video shows how it was done. Impressive.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ In a recent blog post, Michael Flarup reflects on the decline of creative freedom in design, particularly following Dribbble's new restrictions that limit designers' ability to showcase their work and connect with clients outside the platform. In case you didn't know, Michael Flarup is a Danish designer and entrepreneur who runs Northplay game studio, Pixelresort design studio, and the Apply Pixels resource platform; known for his expertise in app icon design and as an international keynote speaker. 2️⃣ Are Apple and Google headed in the same direction? The article from Om Malik critiques Google's decline from a once-innovative tech leader to a company plagued by corporate indifference and bureaucratic stagnation, highlighting its struggles to adapt to changing user expectations and competition in the AI landscape. 3️⃣ Apple owes France some money over ATT. That’s too bad. I thought the EU, along with GDPR, was siding with users. It's not the case. Gruber's take on this. Is France going to use that money to finance unforeseen military expenses, thanks to MAGA and Trump, who are saying: fuck you, EU? I don't know, but it won't hurt to get some extra money. 4️⃣ Here’s a great April Fools from Basic Apple Guy.

“AI can produce code that works initially but falls apart under pressure, and only a good developer knows how to turn an AI’s output into something that stands the test of time” — Pete Sena on Medium

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ I’ve been busy more than usual in recent weeks, thanks to our home improvement project, which has been ongoing since early January. The dust should start to settle virtually and for real, and I should return to a regular schedule until I leave for a two-week vacation in Europe. 2️⃣ The iPhone 17 Pro mockup is getting more and more detailed. I’ve been a happy owner of the 11 Pro, 13 Pro and now the 15 Pro, but I will skip the 17 Pro for political and economic reasons. Anyway, I'm super happy with my 15 Pro Max; I don't see why I would change.

If you want to see how this newsletter is put together, watch this YouTube video.

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

Over the past few years, Apple has introduced numerous improvements and new features to help their customers enhance their security posture. Apple recognizes that, in today's world, support for data protection and privacy is more than ever a significant differentiating factor. In 2024, I had the idea to write a guide for Apple product users to provide a comprehensive overview of available features and their interconnections. It goes without saying that although Apple's ecosystem enjoys a reputation for being more approachable than other ecosystems, it remains confusing or even difficult for the average person to navigate cybersecurity topics.

Little by little, I began researching existing articles and references. I eventually realized that a guide like the one I envisioned didn't exist in the form I imagined. My research allowed me to gather numerous support articles from Apple and several articles published alongside new versions of iOS. For example, the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature has garnered much interest and even controversy, resulting in many related articles.

However, by the end of 2024, I realized that writing this guide was a more substantial task than I had initially imagined. I knew how the topics would be organized, grouped, and detailed. I knew I had to target the general public, keeping the content high-level to remain understandable to the majority. Thus, I did not want to delve too deeply into the "how-to" specifics. The core idea was to present an overview of all available features while including some best practice advice.

In October 2024, ChatGPT launched its conversational writing feature, ChatGPT Canvas. After watching demo videos and reading articles about this feature, I wondered if using it could help me write this security guide. I first tested the tool with fictional topics to gauge its power and flexibility in supporting writing. I decided to take a chance with a real scenario by using it to create the skeleton of my guide. An easy starting point with ChatGPT in this context was uploading PDFs of the references I had gathered during my research to feed into the subsequent steps.

After several hours of "conversation" with ChatGPT Canvas, I achieved approximately 80% of what I initially envisioned. It was significantly faster and more efficient than if I had written it from scratch, especially given the many research hours I had accumulated. From there, I switched to my preferred writing application to refine the text further. I revised several sentences, removed redundant sections, restructured topic sequences, added elements like basic definitions to clarify concepts for readers, and even created a comprehensive diagram using Apple Freeform to accompany the text and visually connect all the concepts covered. Ultimately, I am quite proud of the final result.

I published the article on this website and a post on my blog explaining the writing context. Within days, it became one of the most-viewed articles (in the top 3), and I received positive feedback.

This weekend, I decided to publish it on Medium by submitting it to the Mac O'Clock publication. The publication's editor politely declined, citing that the text was written with the assistance of AI. He was not wrong. I explained my approach, but he maintained his decision nonetheless. While I can't blame him, this refusal has made me reflect deeply, raising the question: at what point does using AI cause the research and writing process to lose its personal touch, diminishing the value or authenticity of the resulting work?

I continue to believe that my guide addresses a significant gap in existing literature and provides unique value. I am convinced that readers who take the time to read through the guide and implement even a few of the presented tips or services will significantly enhance their security posture. Isn't that a positive outcome?

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence in the creative process significantly disrupts both creation itself and our expectations of those contributing to human knowledge. We haven't finished asking ourselves questions—myself included. Overall, the experience has been positive and helped me evolve as a creator.

This text was initially written in French, my native language, and then translated into English using the ChatGPT 4.5 LLM model. Does it lose its value because of this? You tell me.

Privacy and security are crucial aspects of our digital lives, and Apple devices offer strong built-in protections that anyone can and should use. Even if you're not technically inclined, there are straightforward ways to safeguard your personal data and privacy. This guide is designed for non-technical users and everyone to read, highlighting essential practices to help you stay safe online by leveraging Apple's powerful yet user-friendly tools.

I wanted to write something easy to understand so that people could easily take advantage of it. Consider looking at the following diagram to get an overview of the building blocks that will increase your security posture. This diagram should help you learn how they relate to your digital ecosystem based on Apple technologies.

What Is a Security Posture?

In the cybersecurity realm, a "security posture" refers to the overall security status of an organization, system, or individual based on its resources, capabilities, and policies. This concept encompasses the readiness and ability to predict, prevent, and respond to various cyber threats. When applied to an individual, a security posture includes all the measures and practices one adopts to protect their personal digital environment, maintain data privacy, and ensure safe interactions online. These practices involve using strong passwords, enabling two-factor authentication, regularly updating devices and software, and being aware of phishing attempts, among other things.

In the context of Apple users, security posture involves using the built-in tools and resources that Apple provides to enhance digital security. Apple devices generally come equipped with user-friendly features designed to protect personal information, such as biometric authentication (like Face ID or Touch ID), encrypted messaging through iMessage, and privacy settings that limit what apps can access personal data. Even individuals who are not technically inclined can reinforce their security posture by taking advantage of these features. For example, they can easily activate two-factor authentication for their Apple Account to add an extra layer of security or manage their privacy settings to control which apps have access to location data or personal contacts.

By understanding and applying these digital security fundamentals, individuals can significantly enhance their security posture. It is about leveraging tools that are readily available and following best practices to protect one's digital presence effectively. This approach safeguards personal information and provides peace of mind while navigating the digital world.

Now, let’s dig into this in more detail.

Regularly Update Your Devices

Keeping your devices up-to-date ensures you benefit from Apple's latest security enhancements and privacy improvements. Regular updates address known vulnerabilities, significantly reducing your risk from cyber threats, malware, and unauthorized access. Updates often include improvements to device performance and stability alongside critical security patches. Apple's automatic software updates make it easy to maintain optimal security without needing to check for new versions manually. Staying updated is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to safeguard your personal data and device integrity.

If you own an old device, Apple often keep releasing security-related updates and you are good to go, but when Apple stop releasing those updates, consider upgrading your device. Also, if you don’t want to update to the newest major release, Apple makes security-related updates available for the previous major releases. For example, while iOS 18 is the current major release, you can select to stay on iOS 17 and apply the latest minor release if you want. That way, you keep your security posture in good shape.

Physical Device Security

Protecting your devices physically is as important as digital security. Avoid leaving your devices unattended in public spaces to minimize theft or unauthorized access. Consider using privacy screen protectors in public areas to prevent others from viewing your screen. Additionally, be cautious when using accessories or chargers from unknown sources to prevent potential security risks.

Using accessories or chargers from unknown sources can pose significant cybersecurity risks to your digital devices. Firstly, counterfeit or uncertified chargers might not adhere to the stringent safety standards set by manufacturers like Apple, potentially leading to device malfunctions or physical damage. Beyond physical risks, these unauthorized accessories can also harbor malicious software or hardware designed to compromise your device. For instance, they could be used to deliver malware, which might allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to your device, steal personal data, or even control your device remotely. These risks underscore the importance of using only trusted and certified accessories. There are documented cases of malicious charger cables that proved to pose serious security risks. It’s not science fiction, it’s real.

“The Forbes article warns Apple users about the risks of using unfamiliar charging cables, highlighting a specific type known as the “O.MG Cable.” This cable resembles standard USB-C or Lightning cables but contains embedded hardware that can remotely access and control connected devices over Wi-Fi. Once plugged in, it can execute commands, potentially compromising personal data and device security.”

Use Strong and Unique Passwords

Protect your devices and accounts by choosing strong, unique passwords and passcodes. Avoid using simple or easily guessable unlock codes like "123456" or birth dates. Instead, enable Touch ID or Face ID whenever available for enhanced security. Apple doesn’t keep your fingerprints; don’t worry about that.

Apple provides tools like iCloud Keychain to help create and securely store complex passwords, making your accounts harder to compromise.Those passwords then sync across all your Apple devices, offering seamless protection. Apple recently created a dedicated password management app called “Passwords” that is very capable and free to use. It's available in iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Consider giving it a look. Other password management apps or services includes 1Password, Bitwarden, Keeper, just to name a few of them. Here’s an article comparing them.

Enable Two-Factor Authentication

Use two-factor authentication (2FA) whenever possible to add an extra layer of security to your accounts. Apple’s built-in two-factor authentication protects your Apple Account by requiring a second form of verification—typically a code sent to your trusted devices. This significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access, even if your password is compromised. Apple Passwords app supports enabling two factors authentication for accounts that support it. I highly encourage you to us this because it’s more secure and for many websites, the integration with Apple Safari is seamless. Give it a try. 

“2FA stands for two-factor authentication. It is an extra layer of security used to ensure that only the person who owns an account can access it, even if someone knows the password. Two-factor authentication typically requires a password and a second piece of information, such as a code sent to a phone, to verify the user's identity.”

Use "Sign In With Apple" for Enhanced Privacy

Using "Sign In With Apple" provides significant privacy and security advantages over traditional email and password authentication. This feature allows you to sign in to apps and websites quickly and securely without sharing your personal email or creating multiple passwords. Apple generates unique random email addresses to keep your personal email private, helping reduce spam and enhance your online privacy.

Complementary to this, Apple Passkeys offer a secure, passwordless authentication method that uses biometric verification (Touch ID or Face ID) for accessing apps and websites. While "Sign In With Apple" simplifies registration and keeps your email private, Passkeys completely eliminate the need for passwords, providing an even higher level of security and convenience. Together, these two methods greatly reduce your vulnerability to password-related threats, making your digital experience both safer and easier.

Pay attention from time to time to the Apple device account list, where you’ll see a list of all your devices where you signed in. Do you recognize all the devices in that list? If so, remove them as soon as possible.

Prepare for Account Recovery

It's essential to have measures in place to recover your Apple Account if you forget your password. An Apple Account always have a password, even if you use Passkeys. Apple provides an Account Recovery option that allows you to designate trusted contacts who can assist you in regaining access. Alternatively, you can set up a Recovery Key as an additional layer of security, ensuring you can quickly and securely regain control of your account.

A recovery key serves as an additional security measure for your Apple account, providing you with a backup option to regain access if you ever forget your password or lose access to your trusted devices. The recovery key is a randomly generated 28-character code that you must keep safe and accessible, as Apple does not store a copy of it. The purpose of the recovery key is to ensure that you have a secure and private method to reclaim control of your account. Setting up a recovery key strengthens your account's overall security and protects against unauthorized access. Remember that if you enable a recovery key, you'll be responsible for maintaining access to it, as neither Apple nor anyone else can help you recover your account if both your password and recovery key are unavailable.

To add recovery contacts to your Apple account, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings: Begin by opening the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on Your Name: At the top of the Settings menu, you'll see your name or Apple ID. Tap on it to access your Apple ID settings.
3. Select Password & Security: Within your Apple ID settings, tap on "Password & Security" to proceed.
4. Choose Account Recovery: In the Password & Security section, look for "Account Recovery" and select it.
5. Add Recovery Contact: Tap on "Add Recovery Contact." Follow the on-screen instructions to choose a trusted contact from your list of contacts. This person should ideally be someone you trust and can easily reach if you need help recovering your account.
6. Notify Your Contact: Once you've added the contact, they will receive a notification to confirm that they've been added as a recovery contact.

By following these steps, you enhance your security posture by ensuring you have a trusted person who can assist in regaining access to your Apple account if needed.

Set Up Your Digital Legacy

Preparing your digital legacy is important to ensure your family or trusted contacts can access your devices and personal data after you pass away. Apple's Digital Legacy feature allows you to designate specific individuals as legacy contacts. These trusted contacts receive secure access to your devices, photos, notes, messages, and other critical information stored in your Apple Account after your passing. Setting this up helps ensure that your digital memories, documents, and important data remain accessible to those who matter most during challenging times, while also ensuring your privacy and security remain respected.

You can add up to five Legacy Contacts from your Apple devices:

On iPhone or iPad:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap your name at the top to access your Apple ID.
3. Select Password & Security.
4. Tap Legacy Contact and then Add Legacy Contact.
5. Choose a contact from your Contacts list or Family Sharing group, or enter their email/phone number.
6. Share the Access Key with the contact via Messages or print/save it for future use.

Enable Device Tracking and Protection Features

Apple’s "Find My" feature is essential for locating lost or stolen devices. Activating this feature helps protect your data by allowing you to remotely lock or erase your device, minimizing unauthorized access. "Find My" also uses end-to-end encryption, ensuring your location data remains private. Additionally, Activation Lock, part of "Find My," makes stolen devices unusable by unauthorized users. Activation Lock requires your Apple Account credentials to disable "Find My," reactivate, or erase the device, making it significantly harder for thieves to profit from stolen devices. It also provides peace of mind that your personal information won't fall into the wrong hands, even if the device is physically compromised.

Consistently Back Up Your Data

Regularly backing up your data protects against data loss from device theft, accidental deletion, or hardware failure. Apple's iCloud Backup simplifies this process, providing secure, encrypted backups. You can select exactly which data—such as photos, messages, documents, or apps—you wish to include or exclude from backups. This granular control allows you to minimize storage space consumption in your iCloud account while ensuring critical data remains protected.

Additionally, for Mac users, Time Machine offers a reliable backup solution using external physical drives, which should ideally be stored in safe, secure places to prevent theft, damage, or unauthorized access. This approach also provides customizable backup options to fit your specific needs, ensuring you have full control over which data is protected and how frequently backups occur.

Enable Advanced Data Protection

Apple’s Advanced Data Protection provides end-to-end encryption for your iCloud data, ensuring only you can access your sensitive information. This powerful, free feature significantly enhances your privacy by protecting photos, notes, messages, backups, and more from unauthorized access, even in the event of a security breach. While this feature might not be available in all countries or supported on older devices running earlier operating systems, you should seriously consider enabling it wherever possible for the ultimate protection of your data.

You must have a valid Recovery Contact or a Recovery Key set up before enabling Advanced Data Protection.

• Recovery Contact: A trusted person who can help you recover your data if you lose access.
• Recovery Key: A 28-character code you must securely store. If you lose both your devices and recovery key, Apple cannot recover your data.

When you enable Advanced Data Protection, iCloud web access must be disabled for additional security. This means you won't be able to access your iCloud data through a web browser, adding an extra layer of protection against unauthorized access. While this may limit some convenience, the trade-off results in a more secure environment for your personal information. You can learn about this in this Apple support article.

Manage App Permissions Carefully

Be cautious about granting apps unnecessary permissions. Regularly review and limit access to sensitive information such as your location, contacts, photos, camera, and microphone. Apple’s App Privacy Report feature gives you detailed insight into how frequently and when specific apps access sensitive information or device features, such as your location, contacts, camera, microphone, or network connections. By reviewing this report, you can easily identify apps that might be unnecessarily accessing your personal data, enabling you to better manage app permissions and significantly enhance your privacy and security.

Protect Your Browsing Activity

Safari, Apple’s built-in browser, provides robust privacy features like Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which automatically blocks trackers and prevents advertisers and websites from following your online activities across the web. This helps maintain your online anonymity and reduces targeted advertising. Additionally, iCloud+ includes Private Relay, a privacy-focused service that encrypts your internet traffic and hides your IP address. Private Relay routes your internet requests through two separate servers, ensuring neither Apple nor your internet provider can view your browsing activity, greatly enhancing your privacy and protection against network tracking.

Using Safari's Private Browsing mode is another effective way to enhance your privacy online. When enabled, Private Browsing prevents your browser from recording your browsing history, searches, and cookies, ensuring that no trace of your activity remains on your device. While Private Browsing doesn't make you completely anonymous to websites or your internet provider, it provides an additional layer of privacy protection, especially useful when accessing sensitive information or when using shared devices.

Understand App Tracking Transparency

Apple's App Tracking Transparency, often referred to “ATT”, empowers you to control which apps can track your activity across other apps and websites for targeted advertising or data-sharing purposes. It'a different feature than Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari. With App Tracking Transparency, apps must explicitly request your permission before tracking you, allowing you to decide which apps, if any, you wish to grant this access. This feature significantly reduces unwanted tracking, protects your personal information, and enhances your online privacy. I always answer “Ask App Not to Track”.

Secure Your Connection on Public Networks

When using public Wi-Fi, your data could be vulnerable to interception. Although it's an older technology, a trusted VPN provides a highly secure and private experience by encrypting your internet connection and hiding your online activity. Apple’s iCloud+ Private Relay offers additional modern protection by routing your internet traffic through two separate relays, further safeguarding your privacy even on unsecured networks. Using both technologies can significantly enhance your online safety and privacy.

Use iMessage for Secure Communication

Using Apple's iMessage service provides significant security and privacy advantages compared to standard text messaging. iMessage encrypts your messages end-to-end, ensuring only you and your intended recipient can read your conversations. Additionally, Apple has introduced iMessage Contact Key Verification, a feature that enables users—particularly those at higher risk—to verify they are communicating securely with the intended person and not an unauthorized third party. This adds another layer of security, helping you confidently protect your sensitive conversations from potential eavesdropping or interception.

Stay Alert to Phishing and Scams

Awareness of phishing scams—deceptive emails, messages, or links designed to trick you into revealing personal information—is vital. Apple provides built-in protection against known phishing sites through Safari's Fraudulent Website Warning, a feature designed to protect you by identifying and alerting you when you attempt to visit deceptive or malicious websites. This helps prevent phishing scams, malware downloads, and other potential online threats by providing a clear warning, allowing you to navigate away from harmful content safely. Remember, Apple will never ask for your sensitive details via unsolicited messages.

Get to know and control your data

If you want to know what Apple knows about you, you can visit privacy.apple.com website. From there, you’ll be able to download a copy of everything Apple is collecting about you. If you plan of moving some of your data to a third-party service, you’ll probably be able to do so from this website, too (like migrating to Google Photos). Finally, if for any reason you want to disable your Apple account or even delete it, that’s the place to go, too.

Embrace a Privacy-Focused Mindset

Maintaining privacy and security on your Apple devices comes down to staying informed and practicing good digital hygiene. By consistently using Apple's privacy tools—such as iCloud+, App Privacy Reports, Advanced Data Protection, Digital Legacy, Activation Lock, and device encryption—you significantly strengthen your digital security and safeguard your personal privacy.

Many Apple-provided services and features are also available from third-parties. You can have a great security posture by using other solutions for browsing the web, storing your passwords. Some features are unique to Apple and benefit from a tight integration with iOS, macOS and Safari browser. If you want to know more about Apple’s unique privacy-related features, consider visiting this Apple mini website.

I hope you found this article informative. If you enjoy my work and want to support what I do, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi or send a little something via PayPal. Every bit helps and is truly appreciated—thank you for your support!

👤 Personal

1️⃣ This week, I’ve been working on a case study for a job interview. It requires quite a bit of analysis and synthesis. I didn't know which presentation software that I would use. I didn’t want to use my Microsoft 365 license just so that some admin could see the documents I was working on. Apple Keynote could have been used for that, but since they might require a copy of my presentation, Keynote is probably not a good idea either (even if I can export the presentation content quickly). I decided to do my presentation using Google Slides for the first time. It's not as bad as I initially thought. 2️⃣ Someone sent me 15$ over my PayPal account and said, “Thank you.” The problem is that I don't know for what! My PayPal link is all over the place, and I can’t say for sure where this comes from. Anyway, if you are the one who sent me this and read this newsletter, well, thank you, too! 3️⃣ Got an email from a reader telling me he was subscribing to my blog and put it on a list called “pay attention.” It made me smile. 😃

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ Scott Knaster is starting a newsletter. This is my re-discovery this week. He wrote a lot about Mac programming in the mid-eighties and later worked for 4th Dimension, founded by Guy Kawasaki, a database and programming software. I remember having one of his books to program the Mac. He was (and still is) a renowned technical writer; his books were must-haves then. I said hi to him! 2️⃣ Another fantastic and mesmerizing wallpaper collection from BasicAppleGuy: waterways.

Waterways Wallpaper Collection — Basic Apple Guy

Introducing Waterways, a fluid wallpaper collection for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone inspired by water.

Basic Apple GuyBasicAppleGuy

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I shared a long article about my HEY Mail to Fastmail migration project last week. I mainly spent a week executing this project, and writing the article took me a weekend. It's one of my favourite things to do because it involves more technical writing than usual, which I do professionally. I'm not a technical writer per se, but I do love to write about technical stuff. 2️⃣ This article from Manuel Moreale explores the balance between sharing personal experiences and maintaining a curated online presence, raising the question of whether it's important also to reveal struggles and vulnerabilities to foster connection and understanding among readers. I noticed that when I shared more personal stuff on my websites, I often got more feedback than usual. 3️⃣ Om Malik announces the launch of his new "Daily Blog" on his website, which serves as a curated website section for sharing interesting links, graphics, and quotes reminiscent of his previous blogging style while aiming to provide a more organized and frequent way to share content separate from his main articles.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Found this great photographer from Dubai named "Florian.” Many impressive photos of the Dubai city center and the surroundings. 2️⃣ Another discovery in photography is this superb website from Jon Dayton, acting like a showcase of his best work. Must see. Discovered through this Bluesky starter pack. 3️⃣ I probably wrote in the past that I'm not on Instagram or any Meta platforms, but I find Bluesky to be a great place for photographers. More and more photographers are joining. Bluesky offers a great way to quickly discover new artists by searching for starter packs or custom feeds like this one. 4️⃣ Andy Ferguson on DPRewview shares his thoughts about using the Nikon Zf camera. He likes the camera’s retro feel, which reminds him of film cameras. I own that camera myself, and I must say that it is the best camera I have ever owned and used.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ Conversations around Apple's upcoming redesign of all their OSes are heating up. The redesign of iOS 7 is still fresh in my memory because I was traumatized. I’m also questioning the real motivations behind this. What about those Catalyst-based apps like Craft? Will they adapt quickly, or is this a dead end for them? How many more developers will choose to go with webapps instead and don't bother redesigning their apps? 2️⃣ John Gruber, a long-time Apple observer, took a rare path recently, sharing a critical view about Apple's handling of Apple Intelligence. The article critiques Apple's recent announcement to delay the rollout of ambitious "more personalized Siri" features within their Apple Intelligence initiative, highlighting a troubling trend of overpromising and underdelivering that threatens the company's hard-earned credibility. 3️⃣ The Shape of Everything blog has an article that suggests that Apple could enhance its AI initiatives by creating a semantic index that allows developers to access user data through fine-grained permissions, fostering innovation and personalized applications on its platforms. I love this idea, and it's a great way for Apple to delegate some of the burden. 4️⃣ Parker Ortolani argues that Apple should return to live keynotes for WWDC 2025 to rebuild customer trust and demonstrate confidence in its new offerings, emphasizing the importance of human connection over high production values. The pre-recorded format symbolizes Apple's lack of human touch and confidence. 5️⃣ How do you make sure that iOS becomes like Windows? Ask the EU. 🙄

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ Not specifically about a project but I wanted to work on an update to my content creator ecosystem. I’ve been using Apple Keynote for many years to maintain a diagram showing all the pieces that are part of my digital world that I depend on. You can see the diagram below and read this short description here. 2️⃣ A quick update on my journey to migrate all my passwords to Apple Passwords: a few account using two-factor authentication were still sitting in Authy but I finally moved them out to Apple Passwords. The process is simple but tedious: on each account, the 2FA feature must first be disabled, then re-enabled using Apple Passwords. A new set of recovery codes are also generated to go with this and is stored in the note fields inside Apple Passwords. I deleted Authy from all my devices and closed my account using their website. I’m 100% on Apple Passwords now and couldn’t be happier. 3️⃣ Speaking of passwords, I’ve been working on a special article on how to protect your data and privacy in the Apple world. I’m mostly done with this and it should be out this coming week.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Here's an intriguing app: HS People that I discovered recently (but didn't test myself). According to the HS People website, this app, still in beta, will help you keep track of people-related information tidbits like when you met them, what did you discuss, where were you when you met them, etc. I can see app to be valuable for sales people who wants to establish a more personal relationship with their prospects or clients. I wonder if the app can take advantage of Apple Photos’ People albums, where it could gather people-related photos to be referrenced or imported into HS People. 2️⃣ Ghost is now officially available in the fediverse by making their fediverse support available in beta. My fediverse handle over there is: @index@numericcitizen.me if you want to interact with me through Mastodon or other fediverse-compatible platforms. I just find my fediverse handle naming scheme a little bit weird with this “index” prefix.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was on the SXSW recent edition for an interview. She talks about many things like Bluesky’s future, foundations, monetization, and ecosystem in this wide-ranging subject interview. If you are intrigued by Bluesky, it’s certainly interesting to watch. 2️⃣ Was there ever a television show in which graphic design or branding played a significant role? If you are a fan of Severance, don't miss this video explaining how the TV show uses typography and how it depends on fundamental design principles. The television show Severance masterfully uses graphic design and typography as tools of control and psychological manipulation, with its dual logos and carefully chosen fonts reinforcing the eerie corporate dystopia and cult-like authority that define its world. 3️⃣ The video explores how Severance uses color to enhance storytelling, with blue representing Lumen’s control and conformity, green reinforcing its branding, red symbolizing rebellion and the outside world, and purple hinting at the blending of innie and outie realities, showcasing the meticulous visual design and color grading that deepen the show’s narrative and themes. I learned quite a few things watching this: not only about Severance but about color theory.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Apple TV+ Severance TV series is hugely popular. We can find many YouTube videos explaining all kinds of things to understand the series better (see above!). I'm watching many of them because the storytelling is quite complex. Maybe I'm too old, but I like the vice in this series. It's so... Apple-like. If you are a big fan of Severance, you can even buy some unofficial merch on Gumroad. 2️⃣ Someone reached out to me this past week about my apparent use of an AI-generated header image for this article on my main website. When I wrote this article, I aimed to include an illustration that depicts the convergence of emails into a focal point, a mailbox. I chose to try ChatGPT DALL-E and got that image. Back to my reader, who mentioned that many could perceive this negatively, I wasn’t sure how to respond to this feedback. I often use my images or those from Unsplash. Which is worse: stock photography or DALL-E? I always try to strike a balance. If one of my images does the job, like for this newsletter edition or this edition, I'm super happy because It's a way to showcase my work as an amateur photographer. Here's an example where I select a stock image from Unsplash. In the end, here is how I responded.

“Can you be deported for what you say?” — CNN Title on their main page recently.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Is generative AI transforming the web search business to the point where Google search is no longer a destination but a feature embedded in something else? According to Om Malik, yes. With services like Perplexity, searching the web is becoming more conversational and personally, I really think that's the future of the web, at least for search use cases. I use this often at work (I'm a fan of Perplexity). 2️⃣ Severance season 2 is complete, and it was quite a ride. It is such a strange show. I should probably rewatch the whole thing from scratch. Thankfully, there is a season 3 coming up... eventually. I can't wait.

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

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I have always believed that computers and software are powerful tools for empowerment. To me, AI appears to be a layer of less tangible on top of that, but significantly enhancing that power. That's my feeling when I'm ChatGPT or, more recently, Perplexity. 2️⃣ The last few weeks have been awful on the news side, and I got sucked in more than once into the news feed, reducing the free time for writing and doing other more creative stuff.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ In the last two weeks, I discovered Fastmail, an email service provider that is cool, nice, effective and powerful enough to replace HEY Mail, at least for me. Read all the details in this article.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ My monthly blog posts digest for February is out! 2️⃣ We live in challenging times on multiple fronts, and I can sense the collective anxiety in the air. Beyond my own feelings, there’s a tension that seems to linger everywhere. Talking about it helps, and so does writing. Putting concerns, frustrations, and misunderstandings into words is one way I try to make sense of it all. I often share my thoughts—sometimes rants—on figures like Trump, Musk, and Putin, and the impact they have on the world around us. At times, I feel powerless, but writing offers a small measure of relief. It’s like trying to scream without making a sound.

“Posting won’t be enough to get us out of fascism, but it might help some people to get through it. So please, everyone, don’t be discouraged; and don’t stop posting.” - Martin McCallion's personal site.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Glass made a significant architecture rework of their image processing pipeline: better image compression with an adaptive pipeline, image protection against AI training, better load times with distributed caching, etc. More details in this article, which is well worth reading. 2️⃣ Did Apple know that Adobe Photoshop for iPhone was coming when they bought Pixelmator? 3️⃣ Foto is a new photo-sharing service, à la Glass. That's intriguing, but I see many similarities between them. 4️⃣ Sigma launched a new camera, among other things, called BF. It has a futuristic but strange look. I'm wondering how good it is to handle with such sharp edges. According to this review from Petapixel, no.

BF | CAMERAS | PRODUCTS | Sigma

This page is about Sigma’s BF.

Sigma

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ As reminded by MacRumors, Steve Jobs would have been 70 on Mon, Feb 24. 2️⃣ Apple announced its intention to invest a lot of money in the US, I mean, A LOT! New data centers, improvements to current infrastructures, and new education centers are among the listed investments. Was this a deal between Tim Cook and the orange clown so that Apple is not subject to the 10% import tariffs on the iPhone? Call me a cynic if you want, but the timing is dubious. 3️⃣ Another iPhone 17-related leak. This time, it's the CAD designs. 4️⃣ Twenty-five years of MacRumors! Wow! 5️⃣ As reported by MacRumors, Apple made a breakthrough with the design of the upcoming foldable iPhone so that there is no apparent crease. The next step is reducing the thickness of any upcoming foldable iPhone, and the solution might reside in the upcoming iPhone 17 Air. All addressed challenges to make the iPhone 17 Air as thin as possible; it's a step toward a thinner foldable iPhone. 6️⃣ The next Apple silicon moment is here. That's incredible. I first thought Apple would not offer a suitable wireless modem when rumours floated that they would produce their modem. And Apple is already working on the next-generation modem and their WiFi chip! 7️⃣ Do you like Apple's recent advertising? I'm not sure of the ones about genmojis billboards or short videos on YouTube about the iPhone 16e. I'm probably not the target audience. This is Apple today: targeting so many different audiences where I rarely fit in. 8️⃣ Apple is apparently going forward with AI-generated review summaries. Can we expect something in line with on-device notification summaries? Maybe. Many reviews are badly phrased, to thr point of being hard to decipher. It will be interesting to see how Apple’s strategy fares here.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ After reading this blog post from Lou Plummer about leaving Google Gmail, I decided to take a similar journey but for HEY Mail. I already set the goal of reconsidering my use of HEY Mail, thanks to my values not aligning with 37Signals’ leadership values. The problem is: where should I go? Email is still central to my digital life, and moving things around should be carefully considered. I registered with Fastmail and started the 30-day free trial. The first step will be to replace my native HEY mail address with Fastmail’s, and the second step will redirect all my newsletter subscriptions to Inoreader. I rarely use the HEY Mail newsletter reading experience, so that one is a no-brainer. After a quick search in Apple's Passwords app, I'll need to convert 37 accounts to a different email address, which is manageable. Some of my accounts are no longer required, so I am reducing the list slightly. It's a great time to do some cleanup, too. Next, I will migrate my Gmail account by importing my mailbox. The only problem is that I need to be a paying subscriber to Fastmail to convert my email addresses. Fastmail prohibits, for security reasons, the use of confirmation emails while being on the free trial.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Inoreader's improvement streak continues. As reported on their blog, website tracking was vastly improved this time. 2️⃣ Apple continues to update Photomator and Pixelmator, but release notes are terse. This is the second update since Apple took over and officially marked Photomator as an Apple-branded app. Not much was shared on both releases regarding what was updated or fixed. I hope this is not a trend. 3️⃣ A new newsletter is born: AppAddict. Lou Plummer, a prolific app reviewer, is putting it together! I discovered a few apps because of his work! It's nice to see the next step for him. 4️⃣ I think I will cancel my subscription to Readwise, which is due for renewal on April 1st. I don't actively use this service besides letting it store some text highlights coming from Micro.blog or Inoreader. I’ve been using Readwise for five years. That's a lot of money. You can visit my current active subscription page here. 5️⃣ Here is a good question by 9to5Mac: are my application download decisions influenced by the app privacy label? Short answer: no. I rarely consult them. 6️⃣ Notion keeps improving all the time. I use it every day for the job, and I wish I could use it for more use cases. 7️⃣ Have you wondered which audio transcription tool is better? Look no further than this report from Tidbits. I happen to have both Audio Hijack and MacWhisper. I prefer the latter.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Remember Skype? It's going offline in May because of a decreasing user base. Skype was among my first experiences of connecting to the Internet. I wasn't fond of the app design and rigging bell, but it was unique and enabled the start of something that would eventually become much bigger. 2️⃣ I created a new video about a browser extension with Craft. It's a web clipper missing from Craft after five years of being available. 3️⃣ Digg is coming back soon! Yep! Cue the promo video now!

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Following this report, it’s clear that we should reconsider our admiration for Musk because his current actions are wrong on so many levels. The latest issue concerns Grok. He is doing the same thing the Chinese government is doing with DeepSeek, except the censorship targets are Trump and him. 2️⃣ I started using Perplexity recently because I'm trying to diversify my dependency on generative AI tools. I'm using it at work and I really like what I'm getting from my many searches. It's the next-generation web search engine! 3️⃣ Someone likes my numericcitizen.me website! 🥰. 4️⃣ There is a new version of the Ubiquiti Dream Router! Early in the COVID pandemic, I replaced my aging Apple Airport Extreme for the Dream Router, and I was happy about it. I'm still happy! But this new edition seems like a solid upgrade and it is relatively cheap! This might be my only serious tech upgrade for 2025!

Social media in 2025: why creatives are ditching ‘rented’ spaces for owned platforms

Fed up with Facebook, Instagram, and X? Creatives in 2025 are reclaiming control, ditching social media for owned platforms that foster independence and authenticity. We’ve been talking for some t…

Creative BoomTom May

In 2025, many creatives are leaving social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, opting for "owned" platforms like personal websites, newsletters, and blogs. This shift is driven by concerns over privacy, algorithm changes, and a desire for more control and authenticity. Creatives are tired of giving their content and energy to platforms that benefit large corporations. While transitioning to owned platforms presents challenges like visibility, many adopt hybrid approaches, using SEO, email newsletters, and community building to connect with their audience. This movement signals a potential end to social media's dominance, with a resurgence of independent online spaces where creators have full control. Some creatives even focus on in-person meetups and closed communities. The key message is that the future of creative expression lies in building your own platform rather than being a product of someone else's.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ I'm looking forward to enjoying using Fastmail even more! 2️⃣ I'm also paying attention to the consequences of Apple’s announcement of the new Apple Intelligence Siri delay.

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

Why I decided to leave HEY Mail

I started using HEY Mail in July 2020, right in the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a refreshing albeit controversial take on emails by controversial founders. As I wrote here, my primary motivation for paying for email was to use a converged and unified mailbox for my Google, iCloud and, believe it or not, Yahoo email accounts. HEY Mail had features like Paper Trail and The Feed that made a difference for me. I still love those features, but something else drove me away from HEY Mail: the CEO and founder of 37Signals, the maker of HEY Mail (and Basecamp, another controversial product). As I wrote here, recent articles shared by DHH triggered me to reconsider my HEY Mail usage. This article is not about revisiting past controversies. It is about sharing my experience and details about migrating to a new unified mailbox: Fastmail. My goal with this article is to help others understand that migrating off HEY Mail is not as complicated as it seems by explaining how I did it.

In the coming sections, I explain how I migrated from HEY Mail to Fastmail without losing HEY Mail features: unified inbox, the Feed, the paper trail, and the screened-out mail filtering. I’ll also explain how I overcame a few unexpected challenges and share details about the many benefits of this migration. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The migration strategy

Before migrating, I wanted to buy a new domain name for use with Fastmail. After spending some time with Cloudflare’s domain name search, I finally settled on a simple one. That domain could be used in addition to the one I get by subscribing to Fastmail. I selected fastmail.ca (instead of .com) because it clarifies that I’m a Canadian. Now that I have a brand new domain name for my new email home, it’s time to move to the next step, starting the migration process.

The migration strategy was simple: migrate my less-used email accounts first (Yahoo) to test the entire migration process without affecting my daily email usage. For each migrated email account, email forwarding was disabled both at the source email account and within the HEY Mail configuration. Then, the next email account to migrate was Google’s Gmail. It’s also important to note that the goal was not to close my Google account but to migrate my Gmail account content. Making a difference between an authentication account and the email service that might be tied to it is essential. The “Sign in with Google" and “Sign in with Apple” are still part of my daily digital life. I have always preferred to use “Sign in with Apple” over Google’s offering. However, there are services that I cannot let go of that are tied to my Google account. The other important thing to consider is that I only focus on email migration. I prefer to keep those under Apple’s iCloud umbrella, just like I’m not migrating my notes from Apple Notes to Fastmail’s notes. My calendaring needs are fulfilled with Apple’s Calendar, which is stored in iCloud.

Migrating an email account involves different steps and configuration details. Just like when I migrated to HEY Mail in 2020, the same strategy applies here: I chose not to delete emails from the original mailbox; I’m only forwarding them to the unified mailbox. Also important: being able to send an email under one of my email account is essential too. I rarely used my unified email address when writing emails. Fastmail, just like HEY Mail was, is only used a single place to read and write emails, nothing more, nothing less. You might have another strategy and Fastmail will probably be able to support your use case. For example, you might want to delete the original email and keep everything inside Fastmail. That’s fine too. Fastmail is very flexible.

Importing an email account is relatively simple: you select the service provider, authenticate with the service and then select how to proceed. My migration is based on importing the email, and enabling email composition from the source account (which requires credentials). For iCloud accounts, an app-specific password must be created first. The reason is simple: you don’t need to provide the entire email and password credentials for this to work, only an app-specific password which is a little more secure.

Migrating a custom email domain out of iCloud+

Fastmail offers a simple way to use a custom domain for your email account. Because of this, I decided to migrate my hello@numericcitizen.me email address hosted on iCloud+ to Fastmail. You didn’t you know that you can use iCloud+ with a custom email domain? Yep, that's right, but migrating this email address to Fastmail was a bit challenging because custom email domains with iCloud+ are managed only on the iCloud website. If you happen to use Advanced Data Protection too, this is where it becomes tricky.

Having Apple Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is cool and nice but can make managing iCloud+ Custom domains a pain. As a reminder, to use ADP, you must turn off iCloud web access. As soon as this is turned off, you can no longer manage your iCloud+ custom email domains. To complete my migration to Fastmail, so that I could write and respond from that custom email address from Fastmail, I first had to remove that domain from iCloud+, but it's only possible on the iCloud website. To do that, ADP must be turned off. Once done, I can re-enable iCloud website access, then remove the custom email domain. After some cleaning up of Apple-related DNS records at my DNS registrar, I can re-enable ADP and disable iCloud website. Only then I can go on Fastmail Settings and configure my custom email domain for use within Fastmail.

In summary, here are the required steps

1. Disable Advanced Data Protection
2. Re-enable iCloud web access
3. Login to icloud.com and remove the custom email address.
4. Remove any Apple-related DNS records from your custom domain on your domain name provider (it should be about ive entries)
5. Disable iCloud web access
6. Re-enable Advanced Data Protection
7. On Fastmail, add your custom domain and add the DNS records as required by Fastmail
8. Next, on Fastmail custom domain panel, add an alias for the portion before the “@“ sign.
9. Wait about an hour (depending of the DNS zone TTL value which often defaults to one hour)
10. Your custom mail domain is now operational under Fastmail hosting services!

At this point, you can use your custom domain name email with Fastmail. Now, when writing an email in Fastmail, I can select to send it from five different email addresses.

Using Fastmail labels

Fastmail offers two ways to organize emails: by using folders or labels. You can switch between the two at any time. I decided to use labels, which Apple Mail doesn’t provide, but HEY Mail did. Labels are essential to Fastmail, especially when creating email rules and automagically doing stuff with each incoming email. I depend on Fastmail labels to replace HEY Mail Screener and Paper Trail. By using labels in combination with Fastmail Contact Groups, it does the trick of replacing one of the most valuable features of HEY Mail. Here is how I did it.

The first label use case is to assign a label on each email to identify their source account. This way, I can quickly see all the emails coming from my Gmail or iCloud. The other use case is for marking all the imported emails from the HEY Mail account when I imported the mbox file. Now, keep reading to learn about my HEY Mail import experience.

Importing email archives from HEY Mail mbox files

Even if my HEY Mail account contained duplicates of all my source email accounts, I exported my data from HEY Mail to import the data into Fastmail. The process is simple but took a while to complete, both on the HEY Mail and Fastmail sides. I had 2.8 GB worth of emails (close to 20K, to be precise). The idea is to have one place to search all my email archives. I wasn’t sure how my emails would end up in my Fastmail account, but thankfully, the import panel lets you select a label to assign for each imported email. The one downside of this migration is that the Imbox, Feed and Paper Trail containers are lost: all emails are tagged with the same label. The problem is not on the Fastmail side: HEY Mail should have provided a way to export those in separate mbox files. Beyond that issue, all my emails were imported flawlessly in about an hour.

Which email service supports exporting data in mbox files?

Several email services and tools support exporting data in MBOX file format. Here are the most notable ones:

• Gmail: Gmail allows users to export emails in MBOX format via Google Takeout. This is a free and straightforward method to download all or selected emails from your Gmail account.
• Apple Mail: If you use macOS, Apple Mail provides a built-in feature to export mailboxes directly to MBOX format. This is ideal for small inboxes and ensures data security.
• Thunderbird: Thunderbird, an open-source email client, supports exporting emails in MBOX format for any email provider. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, making it a versatile solution.
• Office 365 (via Thunderbird): While Office 365 doesn’t natively support MBOX exports, users can set up their accounts in Thunderbird and save emails as MBOX files. Alternatively, third-party tools are available for this purpose.
• https://www.systoolsgroup.com/how-to/export-gmail-emails-to-mbox-file-stepwise/
• https://www.goodbyemail.com/how_to_export_any_email_inbox_to_mbox
• https://itsupport.umd.edu/itsupport/?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0011940
• https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mail/mlhlp1030/mac
• https://www.migrateemails.com/blog/export-office-365-to-mbox/

Replicating “The Feed” feature

HEY Mail comes with The Feed, where you can read newsletters. The problem with The Feed is that it never improved since the original launch of HEYT Mail. The reading experience is nothing special. You can’t compare The Feed to any read-later service. Instead, I diverted all my newsletter subscriptions to the excellent Inoreader service. Now, I’m reading my newsletter in a genuine feed reader through an RSS feed. Problem solved.

Replicating “The Screener” functionality

For some context, the HEY Mail Screener feature allows for triaging incoming emails. Those I don’t want to keep are rejected now and in the future. Anything else will be accepted. The idea is to mark incoming emails from unknown sources to be screened. I use labels and a contact group to replace the screener functionality in HEY Mail. Let’s say you receive an email from “noreply@apple.com” for the first time. It is labelled as “Screener” using the email rule: assign the Screener label if an email is not part of that contacts group. When reviewing those emails, I add the email source address to a contact group called “Well-known Sources” and remove the “Screener” label.

Replicating the Paper Trail functionality

Replicating the HEY Mail Paper trail feature follows the same principles as the Screener feature. A contact group called “Paper Trail” contains all the email source addresses for which I want to assign a label called “Paper Trail”. A mail rule is then required to process all incoming emails by following this logic: any email from a contact who is a member of the “Paper Trail” contact group is assigned the “Paper Trail” label. This is what the following screenshot shows.

From Bubble Up to Snooze

What appears to be novel features in HEY Mail can easily be replaced by something else in Fastmail. The HEY Mail bubble-up feature might have a fancy name but in fact, it’s the equivalent of Fastmail snooze action. If you want to see an email popup the next day, just hit snooze and select the right configuration options. Simple.

A few things left behind

I didn’t migrate everything during this migration process. As I said earlier, I didn’t migrate my calendar. My HEY Mail Contacts were migrated a bit by accident. They were first exported from HEY Mail into an 18 MB file; when I tried to import them into Fastmail, I was expecting a screen to confirm the process and maybe get a chance to set up a contact group for them, which I didn’t get. As a reminder, that contact list was automatically built by HEY Mail over time using the screener feature each time I accepted or rejected an email source. The nice thing about this import, though, is when I select a contact, I get a list of all the related emails from my imported archive. That’s super handy.

HEY Mail Clips weren’t migrated. Those clips were created while reading newsletters. They are lovely in theory, but they serve little purpose once made. They can’t be exported in Markdown, for example. These information tidbits now live in Inoreader, where I spend most of my reading time. This feature has never been updated since its inception, which I find deplorable. Companies quickly add stuff, but improving on them later is often another matter.

Another thing that is left behind is HEY Mail Collections. These were created to group related emails together. I rarely used that functionality; it won’t be missed, but I liked how they were presented, as shown below.

The last thing left behind is HEY Mail workflows. I experimented with this feature for a while to process subscription notification emails coming off Gumroad. A workflow allows for assigning a state to an email. That state can change to reflect a status. Think of this as a Kanban board, but for emails. Workflows was a good start but lacked some essential capabilities that are really useful for my needs. Leaving this behind won’t cause any significant issues.

Some extra Fastmail goodies

Beyond using Fastmail as a unified mailbox, some other goodies come with the service. File-sharing is one of them. A Fastmail subscription comes with a 10 GB storage quota to start. When sharing photos, I can share them as a simple but cute mini website. I can create mini websites tied to a specific folder in your Fastmail files storage. Try visiting an example I put together here. This could become handy and even replace Dropshare, which uses a different backend storage service. Fastmail even provides visitor logs. This is something to think about.

Unexpected but positive consequences

Just like moving from one password manager to another, moving from one email provider to another is the right time to do some cleanup and revisit some strategies. During this migration process, I closed many unused services. I chose to delete my Yahoo account, too. That one was a special use case. My Yahoo account was used to authenticate to my Flickr account, which I decided to close, too. It didn’t have content anyway. This digital cleanup is very satisfying.

The migration was the occasion to remember that an email account is often closely tied to an authentication account. One such example is my Google account or my iCloud account. Both are tied to an email. Unsurprisingly, if you open an account on a web service that offers to sign in with Google or Apple, the associated email will be used to communicate with you by email. My Google account is an authentication account, but I need to link it to my Fastmail account to receive things like YouTube notifications for my YouTube channel. Because I’m a YouTube subscriber, I cannot close my Google account. But again, this was not the main goal for moving to Fastmail.

Some online services I’m using were configured to use my HEY Mail address, which made my migration a bit more challenging for a few services. Some of those accounts were no longer used, so I decided to close them. However, I replaced my account with Fastmail for services like Synology alerting. Not all services use the same workflow for changing the primary email used for authenticating. Some services even make it especially hard. The worst cases are Slack and Bloomberg, which gave me another reason to hate these services as if I didn’t have enough.

Searching for emails is fast and flexible. It’s so much better than anything HEY Mail ever provided. The web interface is clean, adaptable and quick to interact with.

One last thing: Fastmail doesn’t provide a native Mac client. I’m still considering my options. The web client is so good that I can use it instead of a native Mac app. For now, I’m using the web app, which works great. Time will tell.

Am I going to miss HEY Mail?

The short answer is no. While HEY Mail offers a client for all platforms, they are built on the Electron framework and lack basic OS features support like iOS rich notifications. After five years, HEY Mail developers never bothered adding support for these, which allows a user to hit reply right from the notification, which Fastmail supports. HEY Calendar came out last year, and it never really clicked with me. If you think HEY Mail is opinionated, wait until you use HEY Calendar. Again, my primary use case for HEY Mail was for the unified mailbox, so I prefer to keep my calendaring stuff on iCloud. HEY World was a unique HEY Mail proposition: to be able to blog effortlessly. I did use it for a while but eventually decided to move to something more powerful, as I wrote back in 2021. Finally, the one thing that I will really miss is the widgets on the iPhone: they were useful and well-designed for the iPhone as well as for the iPad and the Mac. Fastmail doesn’t support this iOS feature, which is sad. 😔

Concluding remarks

My journey with HEY Mail lasted nearly five years. My subscription will end this coming October. Until then, I'll monitor my HEY mail account to ensure everything is fine. HEY Mail was great when it first started, but it was becoming too hard for me to support the guys behind the service with my hard-earned money. It's called “voting with your money.” I'm done with them; they probably don’t care, and anyone working at 37Signals will never read this article. That's fine. But if anyone ever reads this, please tell your bosses to f∗ off. Thank you. One last thing: Fastmail is cheaper, faster and much more capable.

Finally, I wasn’t paid by Fastmail for writing and sharing this article, but if you are considering joining Fastmail, please do it using this referral link. I'll earn a few dollars. Thank you. If you find this helpful article, please consider supporting me and show your appreciation via my Ko-fi page!

👤 Personal

1️⃣ In light of the troubling daily news that we endure, I started a new training program, which makes me an aspiring peace supremacist and democracy propagandist. I'm so into this that I decided to update my Micro.blog profile page description and will probably make the change elsewhere (on Bluesky, for example). 2️⃣ I’ve been spending quite some time recently trying to follow the news. There is so much happening, and it goes too fast. It's hard to comprehend what is happening and how the world changes. I would lie, saying that it doesn't affect my morale. It does. 3️⃣ I’m afraid because of this and what comes next, even as a Canadian. But, not all is lost as some people still are lucid enough and willing enough, sorry, not afraid to call out names and stupidity when they see it.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ A new blog discovered this week, Labnotes, thanks to my Micro.blog timeline. The blog is hosted on Ghost and, as such, offers to subscribe. I prefer to read it through RSS. This guy maintains a newsletter reminiscent of mine but a lot more chaotic, which is not a problem, per se.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ I'm someone who writes a lot. I wrote for a blog. I write for journaling. I write in my personal life and my professional life. I write reports. I write analysis. I write strategies. I write blog posts. Overall, most of my writings will be short-lived. A year from now, what I wrote this week at the office won't have much value. This newsletter edition won't have much value a year from now, either. But, trying to find a meaning to all this writing, I would argue that each piece I write is a little piece put together to help me become who I am. I'm one of those who think that problem solving must involve a lot of writing. I'm also one who considers that writing helps digest and retain information. Writing might also help me understand what is happening in this troubled world. Writing is essential to my existence. 2️⃣ Speaking of writing, if you are one of those like me who likes to write and would like to start a blog, consider looking at this comprehensive comparison of blogging platforms. It might be the best time investment for you today.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ We had two major snowstorms in the last weeks here in Montreal, dumping 74 cm of snow, and it was a great opportunity for me to go out for a few walks and snap a few pictures. Here are my best ones. 2️⃣ What a great photographer, Mike Schaffner on Glass. When I started scrolling through his photo catalog, I couldn’t get enough and wanted to scroll and scroll so that my enjoyment wouldn’t stop. Such a talented and inspiring guy. 3️⃣ The original Macintosh design is timeless. Great photographer series on Reddit.

“All empires end, but I really can't convince myself that Instagram will stop being the place for photographers anytime soon. There are just too many people there. Momentum is hard to stop. Time will tell, and I will likely be proved wrong. But that day seems like a long way off.” — Andy Adams

Mike Schaffner on Glass Photography Community

Mike Schaffner. Photographer (primarily BNW) & Blogger ( https://mikeschaffnerphotography.com/ ). All photos are mine. No AI.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ I’m not excited for the iPhone SE or 16E or whatever. Am I excited about the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro? Neither. I plan to skip this year’s upgrade cycle for non-technical reasons, also known as political reasons. Meanwhile, enjoy the following mockups. I dig them, but Matt doesn’t. 2️⃣ Gone are product Red at Apple. Gone is the TouchID home button on the iPhone. Gone are the non-OLED screens in the iPhone lineup. Gone is the iPhone SE, and the last iPhone with a lightning port is gone. Welcome to the new no-frills iPhone 16e and new confusion. A new star is born: the Apple C1 chip. For many reasons, introducing the C1 chip is the most interesting thing Apple has done in a while. If they can release a competitive chip in performance while making a difference with battery life, I think Apple has a winner here. Could this mean Apple will introduce cellular capabilities to future MacBook Pro, for example? I would bet yes on this. 3️⃣ Apple will retire Advanced Data Protection from the UK because they don't want to create the requested backdoor for the government. I applaud this move because otherwise, this would go against Apple's privacy protection message. 4️⃣ Is Apple prepping a new accessory category? Hints found in iOS 18.4 beta 1. The HomePad? The iPadPod? The HomePod, the real one, this time? Who knows.

“What Apple managed to assemble is a sandwich of uninterestingness and raise its final price to $599. They discontinued a line of iPhone models that was ‘midrange with personality’, and released something that isn’t distinctive in any way, its price positioning makes it difficult to recommend” — Riccardo Mori

« But Apple is a pretty terrible Google, just as Google is a pretty terrible Apple » — Marco Arment replying to Jeff Johnson

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ After much thinking in recent weeks, I finally found the project that I’ll be doing with Realmac Software’s Elements: I will recreate and rework in its entirety my about.numericcitizen.me mini website. This website is currently done with Craft and published and shared as a single document using Craft’s built in publishing capabilities. It was easy to start but I’m not satisfied at all, even after a small redesign late last year. To ease the transition, I’m going to use another subdomain: whois.numericcitizen.me. The first steps is to setup this subdomain, create a place on GitHub and link my Cloudflare page to it. Elements will publish locally, I’ll then commit the files to my GitHub repository then CloudFlare will pick them up from there. It’s my current understanding of the process, this might change further down the road. Meanwhile, you can have a quick look at the future website structure with the following mind map.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Grok, a new generative AI service from one of the Musk businesses. I’ll pass. I pass anything that might be coming from Musk. 2️⃣ Feeling frustrated not seeing one of my photos posted on Micro.blog not being cross-posted to Pixelfed, I vented my frustration. Someone responded with a suggestion to look at Echofeed. I did reluctantly but found that Pixelfed is not part of the supported services. I’ll stay with Micro.blog even when posting to Pixelfed, but I’ll submit my issues to Manton in due time. 3️⃣ Realmac Software Elements website builder is inching closer to an official release by opening the beta to all. Official website right here.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Impressive new app for the Apple Vision Pro. 2️⃣ Another app for but for MacOS: it's an app launcher. Intriguing. 3️⃣ Eight hours of Severance music. Yep, eight hours of background music from the Apple TV+ show.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ I renamed the Gulf of Mexico because I could. You should probably do the same; it's therapeutic. 2️⃣ You're missing the point if you spend more time setting up productivity systems than actually working. It is a good video about Sam Altman’s productivity method. I should repeat this in my head more often. 🤦🏻‍♂️

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ Apple released a new round of betas for all their platforms. Of all the additions, I can't find anything noteworthy in iOS 18.4 beta 1 that will make my digital life easier, so I'm now looking at iOS 18.5 when it comes out, probably around May or early June, when the promised reinvented Siri will be introduced.

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

👤 Personal

1️⃣ I always put my actions in line with my beliefs. After a recent controversial post from the founder of 37Signals, DHH, the company behind HEY Mail, I will vote with my money. This coming October, I'm going to let my subscription expire. Praising Musk for what he has done with his companies is one thing, but praising him to do the same to the government, even if I'm not an American, it's another. You don't run a government like a startup. If the way Musk "processed" Twitter acquisition is any indication, it's time to show some resistance and say, enough. So, I have over six months to switch back to Apple Mail and switch a few accounts to use another email address. It's painful, but resisting is never easy.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ Every day since January 20, 2025, I'm discovering how fucked up we are, and how doomed the world is. I'm not calling any names, but you probably already know what I'm referring to. 2️⃣ Here's a sad discovery (via Gruber) about a software developer who succombed to his cancer: Martin Pilkington. We are not eternal; this is a reminder that we should always think to be ready for this to some degree.

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ You can read last month's blog post right here on Micro.blog monthly digest. 2️⃣ As someone of Generation X, I feel privileged and wanted to write about our unique position in recent human history. I shared some of my thoughts. It's unusual for me to write and share this kind of article on my main blog. I might try republishing it on Medium to see if it gets any traction. 3️⃣ Here is an excellent piece about writing. I’m following her on Micro.blog, and she seems like a funny person I’d like to meet in person to see if my mental model of her holds up in reality.

“Writing means you have to trust what you say has enough weight on its own to matter to someone who reads it.” — Annie Mueller

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ This week's photographer discovery on Glass is a profile from “jnnman”. As a passionate black-and-white photographer, this profile is simply sublime. I love her work—my favorite one. Speaking of B&W photography, here is another great photo from AOWS.

“Color is descriptive. Black and White is interpretive. My life is already too complicated, so I stick to Black and White. It's enough.” - Elliott Erwitt

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ It's been a few months since Apple acquired Pixelmator. So far, the company is still releasing updates for each app. As Gruber said, Apple tends to do right with acquired apps. Will it age well into 2025? 2️⃣ If you live in the EU, you are now able to get your hands on the first porn app, but you'll have to get it through the AltStore, not the App Store. Users enjoy it, but Apple is not enjoying it while wondering about kids’ safety in this dark world. Meanwhile, in North America, we have Apple Intelligence. Apple is happy about it, but users aren't enjoying it. Oh well. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 3️⃣ In this video from “ThisIsE”, someone visited Apple Park, or what is publicly possible to visit. It's another testament to this place's greatness and is on my bucket list if I ever return to California. I don't see that happening before 2028, thanks to the orange clown administration and politics against Canada. 4️⃣ Leaking information about unreleased products at Apple isn’t a good idea. A leaker had to share that he was sorry. The story fails to explain why Aude leaked information to the press. It would have been interesting to learn. 5️⃣ It's been a year since the Apple Vision Pro was officially available for sale. The following video paints a balanced picture of using the Apple Vision Pro for a year. I would get one if money were no object, but that's untrue. I still think it is a marvelous piece of technology at the wrong time. 6️⃣ I found this unknown (to me at least) interview of Steve Jobs over iChat, the precursor of FaceTime. The interview took place during what appears to be a Comcast business conference in 2008. Worth a watch. 7️⃣ Tell me if you remember iTools, and I'll guess your age. 😝

Aude’s apology, on X:
“I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.”

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I don’t have any meaningful projects at the moment. However, I have something in the works about privacy protection using Apple devices and services. I’ve had this project on my to-do list for quite a while. I recently decided to come back to it using the ChatGPT Projects feature. The idea is to upload PDF documents of Apple support articles and other web references around this subject and figure out an angle to write about this. My goal is to help other Apple users learn how to increase their awareness of security features so they can increase their security posture. I want this article to be easy to understand and accessible. I think this subject is not well-covered. 2️⃣ As I'm writing this, an idea came up: converting my digital legacy management template from Craft to Notion and selling it on the Notion store. Stay tuned for more on that one as soon as I hear back from Notion.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Tapestry 1.0 is finally out! I was one of the backers on Kickstarter, and I'm happy that they reached this milestone. I've tried Tapestry during the development phase, but the design is not for me. I prefer something like Reeder (the old and the new version). I might continue trying it to see if the design grows on me. Only time will tell. The reactions are vastly positive for the most part, with a few exceptions. Many are comparing Tapestry to Reeder, and for good reason: they bring a single feed by combining multiple sources. You can find reactions and comments from other people right here. 2️⃣ Is Apple's new “Invites" app a hint at what iOS 19 could look like? Probably for some first-party apps that require a more immersive experience like the Camera app. 3️⃣ Do you know about HyperDeck, an iPad and Mac app for creating presentations? I had it installed on my iPad, but the beta expired. The website is still up, but it was last updated in 2020. I think it’s no longer being developed, which is sad. HyperDeck and iA Presenter try to let the user focus on content, not the presentation formatting. 4️⃣ Micro.blog got a new third-party client for the iPhone: Micro Social. I like what I’m seeing. 5️⃣ I’m still a big fan of Inoreader, but I have a few wishes for it. 6️⃣ Don't be fooled, the ARC Browser is officially making it to the abandonware. Weekly releases mainly focus on updating the Chromium engine without any new features.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ OpenAI is getting a new logo? According to this short video, yes. I like the visuals in this animated clip. It reminds me of a video from Apple a few years ago about “A thousand no’s for every yes". Sadly, the video is no longer available, but you can read about it here. 2️⃣ I recently spent some time cleaning up my YouTube channel subscriptions; I followed way too many YouTube channels, many of which became inactive. I’m trying to be more selective this year on many levels. This is one example. This channels management also clarifies which content I want to see and consume in Reeder, a feed reader that allows multiple sources like RSS or YouTube channels. 3️⃣ I stumbled on a video about another intriguing game called « Foundation ». While the game looks great, it does seem to require quite some reading and managing to get things going. It’s not for me, and I prefer to consider games like Tiny Glade. Civilization VII is in the « not for me » category, thanks to a demanding gameplay.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ According to a report from The Washington Post, the UK government demands that Apple create a global iCloud encryption backdoor (no link to paywalled content). Yep, you read it right. This is an unprecedented demand, and I wish Apple would get out of the UK market instead of giving up on this. 2️⃣ Another great wallpaper set from Basic Apple Guy. Worth downloading them all! 3️⃣ Is OpenAI turning slowly into Apple? Rumors about the development of its first custom-made silicon ship are true, and it might be the case, yes. Why? The idea is that controlling the whole technological stack, just as Apple does, brings many benefits. 4️⃣ There is Intel Inside stickers, and now there are Apple Silicon stickers. Available for purchase from Basic Apple Guy.

“Apple Watch is turning more into a fitness tracker that happens to show the time, and away from serving as a proper watch.” — John Gruber is his Apple 2024 Report Card.

🔮 Looking forward

1️⃣ A troubling possibility, right under the US citizens’ noses, by Dave Winer. 2️⃣ Is this the iPhone 17 Pro? Really? Why? Change for the sake of change?

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 💪🏻