Since sharing some thoughts on the default apps blogging trend yesterday, I have had a few emails from some people, which is always nice, asking about even the few apps I did highlight. So I thought I would concede that perhaps even my setup might be interesting and share my homescreen for the first time since 2021.
I don’t like to have many apps on my actual homescreen, as that tends to prompt me into usage that I don’t want to have. All the apps on the last two rows are to encourage me to do something useful, or the apps that I use the most but won’t trick me into engaging with them longer than needed.
Day One - I journal as much as I can. Although the Apple App shows good promise, it doesn’t live up to Day One yet.
Apple Notes - I use Apple Notes for everything, and I think you should too. Even more so now that iOS17 is out.
LIghtroom - I use this to edit all of my photos, be it mobile or with a real camera.
Matter - The best read it later services I have tried. I can save articles, videos, and podcasts that will also be transcribed for me to use the information later.
Ulysses - I mess around trying to replace it every so often, I can’t.
micro.blog - Speaks for itself, it’s where this post was published!
Brain.fm - I tried to hack my creativity and inspiration, and I love this app for background noise in my headphones when I am working.
ChatGPT - this is a recent dalliance with LLM’s to aid my working life. I used Claude in Notion for a while, but nothing comes close to GPT4. You’ll notice some images created with Dall.e 3 creeping in to my blog too.
If you have any more questions about apps, feel free to ask, using the buttons below. The orange app with the white squiggle on it is where I book my martial arts classes, I can’t find the source of the wallpaper so can’t distribute it I am afraid. Apart from that, I think everything is pretty boring.
I love a good blogging trend, me. I don’t always join in with them, but this time around it has even brought Andy Nicolaides out of retirement. So I thought about sharing mine. Deciding against it in the end because I don’t have much to share, but as I said yesterday, I have embraced the fact that I have to have a good think about why first.
This trend is sharing the default apps we are using. Nothing more. It asks very little of a person, but we all know that it says a lot about us instead. I’ve seen some replies similar to “what an Apple fanboy” but in the general sense, we are all searching for that special needle in a haystack “Ah Hah” moment of finding something new.
We are constantly told that technology improvements are not exciting any more. I would disagree, particularly currently, due to augmented reality and AI promising a different computer interaction paradigm. There is some admission though that most new products don’t scratch the itch they used to. The days of massive improvement when a new OS came out, or my Android faithful will remember waiting for a new ROM release was enough excitement to keep you up at night.
Now, particularly in the apps space, everything seems like the last one that went before it and very little improvement to be found. Unless, of course, you can dig through the recommendations of those with a similar use cases to you and find out what they are using. I have avoided such a process, and read very few of them because I know I will find an app, and be off down a rabbit hole and spend more time moving things around.
As such, I tend to stick to default apps unless I hit a ceiling. Apps like Fantastical sit in place of Apple calendar because it displays information better for working and time blocking. Todoist manages my tasks because it is easer to get them in and schedule them around. Take away my working life, and none of these types of apps make sense for me to use. The only shout-out I could possibly give is for Matter - but again, it is very niche and expensive if you’re not into saving lots of content.
I apologise for being boring, I wish you all the best in finding new and exciting things. Don’t spend too much money but enjoy yourselves!
Bar a couple of months in early 2022, I have been working from home now for more than three years. It’s a great existence, means in can concentrate better, look after my beloved dog and also be around for my family in the school holidays. I would however like to mention that it can be a bit lonely at times and I want to change that no my contract is fully remote.
One of the reasons I went with a 16” MacBook this time was the idea that I could work a bit better away from home, and as my m3 pro was delivered yesterday, off I went. I wouldn’t feel myself if I didn’t have a bit of think about why I wanted to go though. SO it took me a couple of hours to talk myself into it.
I didn’t want this to be an adventure of ego. You’ve seen the people I am talking about. MacBook Pro out, headphones on, not really doing much but want to be seen with their shiny laptop. I would rather not be one of those people. I definitely wasn’t going to out to show off my new Space Black MacBook. I don’t think.
Anyway. I wasn’t alone. It appears that everyone does this. I went to a nice local family run place called Kitchen and Coffee that brews nice drinks and the tables were awash with MacBooks. Just MacBooks. No other type of computer to be seen, which, I thought was weird. No other Space Black ones, I checked. Twice. Certainly, not showing off, I think.
I don’t feel uncomfortable opening this massive machine and typing away on what seems to be the same size keyboard as my old 14” but dwarfed by speakers on either side that are throwing off my typing. I hadn’t realised just how much of my finger placement was dependent on feeling the sides of my laptop with my hands, and I am conscious of hitting the ginormous trackpad, so my wrists hurt already.
Why is the trackpad so massive though? There’s no reason for it. No added benefit or increased functionality. It’s just there to fill the space, what a weird design choice. Now I am staring at my laptop weirdly, and I am conscious people are looking. The good thing is that it seems to reject my palms resting on it, so no false touches to report as yet.
Just as I am starting to think this purchase was a mistake and running through my options to return it and buy a smaller version, I realise the size of the screen. I have two windows open side by side and can see both of them perfectly. Who would have thought that 2-inches of screen size make such a difference. I never once thought my old one was small, but this is positively mind-bending. Perhaps I was right all along and this will enable me to work outside the house more.
Perhaps more coffee shop adventures to come. I need to find a quieter place though.
Every so often I get stuck between a few bits of content I consume and suddenly an idea clicks. It might take a while to flesh it out, and work out if I haven’t got things backwards and just have some kind of frequency illusion of ideas. This one clicked straight away. Whilst listening to The Verge cast from last Friday, I suddenly realised that Google and SEO could be ruining blogging.
That statement is a little hyperbolic, but bear with me here. For me to try to explain myself, I need to pull in from the various bloggers that seem to systematically have a cyclical but at the times the appearance of an existential criss. We all, my self included, wonder why we bother writing any more. That’s because we are told this activity is, and should be, winnable.
You too, can live off the income from adverts, be sent nice things for free and reach the top of Google if you just sacrifice these things. Write about these topics, or think this way, or SEO your words beyond recognition. That’s how you win blogging and get loads of clicks. When blogging doesn’t need winning, it only leads to a sense of why bother putting this out into the world.
I understand that the idea that every post you publish needs to have a utility to the world is ridiculous. Whilst at the same time, by stopping and looking around online at the content farms and self-professed “winners” it is also a completely understandable reaction to have. At times, I feel like my blog has to look and function a certain way, so I can somehow be “of use” to the rest of the web. When in reality no one searches my posts, no one clicks the pagination, and that’s absolutely fine.
This isn’t another don’t do it for others, do it for yourself post - there are enough of them online. It’s a realisation that one of the backbones of the web, Google search ranking, and to a certain extent, social media, has ruined so much of it. There are a huge number of people still blogging and not giving a damn, but many more that don’t bother because of these feelings.
Perhaps we are edging our way back towards a better social web that encourages blogging more, or perhaps this is just wishful thinking. One thing I am certain of is that a lot of blogging has been ruined already, and it will take a concerted effort from us all to build it back up again.
Think way back to 2016. The X-Files came back after 14 years, a 4-inch lock of John Lennon’s hair sold for $35,000 and there was a baby born with DNA from three parents. Weirdness all around, especially on the Apple campus. They were convinced the iPad was the future of computing, deep into “what’s a computer” thinking yet still produced laptops with 3-year-old chips in them. Whilst everyone pointed towards a touchscreen Mac, they instead gave users a weird strip you could interact with and took away their function keys.
You can theorise the motives for this for longer than the Touch Bar should have existed. It lasted for at least double its realistic life span and was finally killed at Apple’s Scary Fast event last week. I bought one as soon as it was released, partly because I was desperate for an upgrade from my aging 2012 version, and partly because I was interested in where the Touch Bar would go. Convinced that Apple would turn this into a new interaction paradigm, and oh how wrong could I have been?
Looking back, I don’t think my confidence was completely unfounded. Apple has a history of being brave, this was the year of #courage after all. Even more so when it came to computing, and they usually got it right, or forced everyone else to concede. Whichever way it happened, my expectation was that the Touch Bar would become a selling point of the Mac. Unfortunately for Apple, they forgot that users who buy their ‘pro’ laptops, rely on the function keys — especially the doubled sized one marked escape.
The issue wasn’t that the Touch Bar was there, although questions of its utility dominated early reviews, it was that it now took multiple taps and more concentration to do simple tasks. Your use case may vary, but that was something I could put up with had the Touch Bar shown a real use case outside gimmicky scrubbing through timelines or swiping through photos. It felt half-baked at best, and thrown in to appease users demanding more from their Macs.
Some people believe this was to refresh the line before the real improvements of the M1 chip brought. However, hindsight is always 20/20. I think in reality, Apple saw this as a quick, easy fix to satiate those asking for touchscreens, as well as a perfect aid to the second generation butterfly keyboards. Unfortunately it appeared as a gimmick, got little to no support from Apple, and remained as a gimmick through its life span.
Honestly, I think it’s a shame that poor implementation ruined a semi-good idea. Apple clearly thought that this was going to catch on because the life span indicates so. My understanding is that production and lack of sales supported the entry-level MacBook having one for so long due to the cost of inventory. The design and production of the Touch Bar would make a great story, one we will continue to talk about for years to come. I can only dream of what would have been had they just put it above the function keys instead.