Zach Phillips, on the ephemeral nature of modern manufacturing:

“They don’t build them like they used to.”

The idea that materials used to be expensive and labor cheap (or free/enslaved) tries to explain this, but it’s much better explained by the fact that maximization of profit has no interest in building something that lasts.

The past few years of my collecting creative tools has been focused on those things that just “can’t” be built anymore, not because there aren’t the people with the skills and desire to build excellent tools, but because the economic system won’t support those who build them.

Overall build-quality and longevity are two things that I think are lacking in a lot of modern products.

One of my favourite YouTubers, Jake Wright, is a software engineer at Monzo, and he tends to make very interesting videos about how he works. He made a video earlier this year showing how he'd been working from home due to the pandemic.

However, like most of us software engineers. he's been working from home ever since. And he's created a follow up video going through an entire work day, which I just found it fascinating.

Michael Zhang, writing for PetaPixel:

Here’s something you may not have known about the 1800s wet plate collodion photography process: it can make certain tattoos disappear in photos. It’s a curious phenomenon that photographer Michael Bradley used for his portrait project Puaki.

“The idea was first sparked when I saw some wet plate collodion images from photographers around the world who had shot people with tattoos,” Bradley tells PetaPixel. “I had been shooting on the wet plate collodion method for a few months and was looking for a long-term project when I saw these images of people with tattoo’s and noticed that some faded away depending on the color of that tattoo.

“I noticed that the green/blue shades looked like they were most likely to disappear, especially on someone with slightly darker skin, and this sparked the idea.”

Michael Bradley produced some incredible photos, and the comparisons are astounding. The tattoos disappear as if by magic, all because the wet colldion process is sensitive to only blue and ultraviolet light.

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Cover Photo: Gary Shane Te Ruki © Michael Bradley

Unfortunately, I've decided to remove Qwiki from sale.

If you weren't aware, Qwiki was a Mac app that placed Wikipedia in your menu bar. It was pretty simple, you could search for a page, view a page, and there were a few methods to export links from the app.

Qwiki was first released in June 2016 and received updates until November 2019. At that point, I was relatively happy with the app, since it was only ever meant to be a minimal way to quickly search Wikipedia.

However, as time has gone on, the codebase has become stale, and the app, in general, doesn't feel at home on the more recent versions of macOS.

I've felt for a while that I shouldn't be offering an app that isn't being maintained, but my thoughts were that while people still used it, there could still be more that could get value from it. But after receiving a few support requests asking for Catalina, mainly around the text appearing too small, small icon resolution, and a few more things, I can't continue to make that excuse anymore. So therefore if I have no plans to ever update the app, I can't ask people to pay money for it.

I toyed with the idea of just making it free, but I still think a free app needs to be of a certain standard, and to a point, maintained.

This means that I now only have one app, Text Case, although it is available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. I do have plans to work on a new project this year, but nothing is in the works just yet.

Text Case 2021.3 is a relatively small update, but it brings a few features that users have been desperate for, ever since the major 2021.1 release.

That update introduced the concept of building custom flows, but the flow creator was quite restricted. For example you couldn't easily reorder formats, and also for more complex formats that required custom parameters, there wasn't a way to edit these parameters afterwards.

Fortunately this update fixes both of those limitations. So you can both reorder and edit formats in the flow creator UI.

Additionally to those improvements, I also spent time rewriting the title case logic. That's not going to be something anyone directly cares about. But it allowed me to orient the title case formats around defined rules, and therefore made the process of adding new variants much easier.

Therefore, I've added four new title case variants:

• AMA Title Case (American Medical Association)
• Bluebook Title Case
• New York Times Title Case
• Wikipedia Title Case

This means that Text Case now supports 9 different title case variants. Which if you're interested in, you may want to read the post I wrote recently "The Various Types of Title Case" where I go into detail on all nine.

To top it all off, there is one more new format, Italics. Which means you can now do Bold, Italics, and Bold-Italics in the app.

Download

This update is available right now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!

I wrote last month about showing your perspective and owning your biases. It’s something I’ve continually thought more about since transitioning this blog to become more personal, rather than try to attempt to write generalised reviews or present this site as a source for news.

Before I may have written about an interesting app in a general sense, explained its features, and analyses the pros and cons. But now I tend to write more about my own experiences with an app, good or bad.

I used to think that this type of review wasn’t worth writing, since if I’m writing about myself then it probably won’t apply to a massive audience. But I realised that when I was reading other people’s writing, while I was usually interested in the topic itself, I found the most value when the author made it personal and provided their own perspective. And that’s what I’m trying to do with my own writing.

Now when writing about a topic, I remind myself that if anyone reads my blog, they’re probably not coming here as their primary source of news. So I may as well make it personal because what else have I got? I’ve only got access to one perspective. My own.

Continuing my quest to find the perfect writing app, I turned to TAIO (Text all in One). It's been touted as the next best writing app, with it's modern design, and extensive built-in automation support.

I must admit, that clearly I didn't do my research very well. Because as much as I love the level of appearance customisation, and the overall structure to the app, I did not realise that it is not available for Mac.

The developers are working on a macOS version, but don't plan on releasing it anytime soon. That's good news, and means I'll probably look at it again once it's out. Since by then I assume the overall product would have matured even more.

It's unfortunate, since I think TAIO has a lot of potential. But I really want to use one app across all of my devices. So for now I'll be going back to iA Writer.

That will be it for a while I think. I'll spend the next few days putting together some thoughts on what I took from the past few experiments. But I expect that I'll be sticking with iA Writer for a while.

At the start of last month, I released a major update to my app, Text Case. It got some good reviews, and that helped boost sales, which I'm very grateful for. But as you would expect, after a week or so, the initial surge ended, and it went dropped to a stable level every day.

But I was looking at the app analytics section App Store Connect one day and I saw a huge amount of impressions on the macOS version. It was around 1 million impressions, where usually it would be around a thousand a month.

In the end, it was around 3 million:

I immediately thought it meant that my app must have been linked somewhere popular, or that it was featured in the App Store. Turns out it was the latter. Text Case was in fact featured in the "Apps and Games We Love Right Now" section.

I started thinking that this could mean a sudden increase in downloads because so many people would know about the app.

But as it turned out, there may have been a small increase, where the sales didn't drop off as fast as it would have done without the feature, but it wasn't what I was expecting.

Below is the number of units during the same period as the above impressions (February):

After a while thinking about this experience, I've come to the conclusion that this just shows how much word-of-mouth and direct recommendations work, compared to simply being visible on the app store. If a few reviews can have the same impact as millions of impressions, then they must be pretty effective.

For a while, I always imagined that simply being featured could push an app to get a large number of sales. Maybe it's because Text Case is a particularly niche app, but I think this proves that directly reaching people that would benefit from your app is the best way to grow sales.

Maybe this won't surprise anyone, but it's a perspective that a few people may find interesting, so I thought I'd share.

Greg Morris, writing about how you should write. Not how you should write, but how you should just write, and write however you want, wherever you want:

While you are worrying about everyone else’s opinions on the correct way to do things, you’re not writing. While you’re casting aspersions on other people that do not do things what you consider is the correct way, you’re not writing either. There is enough room on the internet for everyone to publish, and not feel like they don’t fit. There is no way you should be writing, no perfect blogging for you to be doing, and no advise that needs giving.

I would suggest that although there are positives and negatives to some decisions when it comes to writing, for example you might a certain app fits you well, or maybe a specific platform is better suited. These decisions are refinements, and can be done once you’ve started writing. Because the most important part about writing isn’t where you’re doing it, the tools your using, or the look of your blog, it’s the process of writing itself.

As you may or may not know, I’m currently in the process of finding the right writing app for me. I’ve tested many in the past, but so far I’ve experimented with Craft, Werdsmith, and now 1Writer.

The short answer is that it’s yet another app that doesn’t quite fit what I want.

In some ways it seems similar to iA Writer (which is my default app I use as a fallback) in that it has a utilitarian design, and has good Markdown support. And it doesn’t just support Markdown and convert it to rich text, you view the formatting as you write, which is something I prefer, and is something that apps like Craft lack.

One thing I really liked was that you can add external file providers to your library, so this allowed me to use the same folder I use for iA Writer. It’s one of the nice touches that I want in a writing app, because I want everything to have a level of flexibility so I’m not stuck in any specific process.

Flexibility is also a reason why I’m moving away from 1Writer, since I would prefer better automation support, either in the form of dedicated Shortcut actions or at least a URL scheme. A lot of my writing starts off with a shortcut to generate a basic template or link post, and while there is a Share extension, I’d prefer to have this fully automated.

The final reason why I’m not continuing with 1Writer is that it’s only available on iOS, and while I do most of my writing on my iPad, I still write a decent amount on my Mac. Which meant I was using iA Writer on my Mac and 1Writer on my iPad, and I think that’s a rather pointless scenario when iA Writer is available itself on iOS.

So, again I’m left with another app crossed off, but this past week has helped me to redefine what I want in a writing app. I want it to be flexible regarding putting data into the app, and also taking it out and publishing my writing to my blog. I want an app that shows me the raw Markdown, possibly with a few visible formats like bold/italic, but I want to see the raw file as I write it. And I also want this app to be available on macOS and iOS. There are a few other things I would like, but these few points are what I’m setting as a standard going forward.

I’ve got one more app lined up in my experimentation, and that is TAIO. It’s a relatively new app, and I’ve waited to see some opinions of others before I give it a go. Iv’e seen some optimistic opinions on it, so that is where I will head next. After TAIO, I think is when my my decision will be made. As of right now, I’d say I’m heading back to iA Writer, but we’ll see.