As I mentioned on NPC, over the past year or so, I’ve embarked on a project that’s more or less complete now: I’ve been slowly digitizing my entire collection of old videogames for various platforms, converting all of them to files that I’ve meticulously organized in folders and archived in Dropbox. The process of how...
Working with Web APIs in Shortcuts: My Collection of Shortcuts for the Todoist API
A few months ago, I realized that Reminders wouldn’t be able to scale to my new professional life in 2025. You see, this year we’re planning to expand and diversify MacStories even further, launching projects that have been years in the making as well as trying some new things that we recently thought of. New...
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Thoughts on Covering AI Our Way
John
AppStories Episode 422 - Thoughts on Covering AI Our Way
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35:55
35:55
This week, Federico and John say goodbye to the AppStories+ pre-show and hello to the new post-show. Then, for the main event, they update listeners on how MacStories plans to cover AI news and tools.
Listening to Safari Articles as a Reading Time-Saver Tool
As part of moving the MacStories Weekly newsletter back to its original delivery date of Friday (which I’m very happy we did), last week I realized that I didn’t plan my schedule carefully enough to account for the fact that I’d have one less day to edit the team’s stories. Specifically, I wanted to send...
Gemini 2.0 and LLMs Integrated with Apps
Busy day at Google today: the company rolled out version 2.0 of its Gemini AI assistant (previously announced in December) with a variety of new and updated models to more users. From the Google blog:
Today, we’re making the updated Gemini 2.0 Flash generally available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Developers can now build production applications with 2.0 Flash.
We’re also releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro, our best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts. It is available in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, and in the Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users.
We’re releasing a new model, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient model yet, in public preview in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.
Finally, 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental will be available to Gemini app users in the model dropdown on desktop and mobile.
The Many Purposes of Timeline Apps for the Open Web
Writing at The Verge following the release of The Iconfactory’s new app Tapestry, David Pierce perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the idea of “timeline apps” (a name that I’m totally going to steal, thanks David):
What I like even more, though, is the idea behind Tapestry. There’s actually a whole genre of apps like this one, which I’ve taken to calling “timeline apps.” So far, in addition to Tapestry, there’s Reeder, Unread, Feeeed, Surf, and a few others. They all have slightly different interface and feature ideas, but they all have the same basic premise: that pretty much everything on the internet is just feeds. And that you might want a better place to read them.
[…]
These apps can also take some getting used to. If you’re coming from an RSS reader, where everything has the same format — headline, image, intro, link — a timeline app will look hopelessly chaotic. If you’re coming from social, where everything moves impossibly fast and there’s more to see every time you pull to refresh, the timeline you curate is guaranteed to feel boring by comparison.
I have a somewhat peculiar stance on this new breed of timeline apps, and since I’ve never written about them on MacStories before, allow me to clarify and share some recent developments in my workflow while I’m at it.
Six Colors’ Apple in 2024 Report Card
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Average scores from the 2024 Six Colors report card. Source: Six Colors.
For the past 10 years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an “Apple report card” – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.
The 2024 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has been published, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for the different categories here.
I’m grateful that Jason invited me to take part again and share my thoughts on Apple’s 2024. As you’ll see from my comments below, last year represented the end of an interesting transition period for me: after years of experiments, I settled on the iPad Pro as my main computer. Despite my personal enthusiasm, however, the overall iPad story remained frustrating with its peculiar mix of phenomenal M4 hardware and stagnant software. The iPhone lineup impressed me with its hardware (across all models), though I’m still wishing for that elusive foldable form factor. I was very surprised by the AirPods 4, and while Vision Pro initially showed incredible promise, I found myself not using it that much by the end of the year.
I’ve prepared the full text of my responses for the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.
Life Tracking, Journaling, and the Vision Pro with Devon Dundee
AppStories Episode 421 - Life Tracking, Journaling, and the Vision Pro with Devon Dundee
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34:04
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This week, Federico and John are joined by Devon Dundee of the Magic Rays of Light podcast to talk about his approaches to life tracking and journaling and how the Apple Vision Pro has become his primary computer.
My Obsidian Setup, Part 11: My New Dashboard Note and Its Dataview Queries
In last week’s return of my Obsidian Setup series, I shared the details of my new daily note workflow. As I wrote, embracing the practice of daily notes is something very new to the way I work, but since I started doing it two months ago, I haven’t stopped –and I’m seeing the benefits of...