Jeff Perry on the Ghost blogging platform, and his experiences using it on an iPad:

Aside from moving Tablet Habit to a newsletter format, I also moved the entire website from WordPress hosting on EasyWP to Ghost. As an iOS user, I was worried Ghost would be an inferior product on the iPad and iPhone compared to the desktop. I am pleased to say my worry was for nothing.

I wanted to share my perspective on using Ghost on the iPad and how I think Ghost can improve this going forward.

I use Ghost to host this blog and my newsletter, so it's good to see someone else enjoying it. Jeff's experience seems to match up with mine, it's a great service, but it can still be improved in a few ways like he mentions.

One of the big reasons why I think I'll stick with Ghost is the member/newsletter support. Without that integration, I could imagine switching back to WordPress in the future. But for now, everything seems pretty good here.

One of the best things about Fujifilm cameras is the built-in film simulation modes, which give you various monochrome options, Astia, Velvia, Provia, and more. I find that they aren't too harsh, and seems to mostly improve the look of my photos. They aren't applied to the RAW file, so it doesn't take anything away from the image.

However, there's also an "Advanced Filter" mode, which gives you some more filters and effects. Although they are a lot more obtrusive. There's quite a few, including partial colour filters, soft focus, and pop colour. But the one I have the most fun with is "Toy Camera". The description it gives is "Create shaded borders as taken by toycameras. (nostalgic effect)".

I can't say it will produce the most professional photos, but as a person that enjoys retro camera apps on the iPhone, such as Dispo, Huji, and Hipstamatic, it's fun to have it directly in my real camera too.

Here are a few quick examples:

I'll have to give the other filters a try now, and I'll see what I can get when I can actually leave my house and go somewhere interesting.

Jordan Middler, writing for The Social on the BBC:

Do you think you’re the very best, like no one ever was? Caught them all? Maybe even you know the Pokerap off by heart? You might think you’re a regular Gary Oak, but there’s plenty about the original Pokémon games that a lot of Ace Trainers don’t know. So here are a few facts about the world’s largest entertainment property that may surprise you.

He's got a few surprises that you might not know, such as Pokémon names that were changed, and a possibility of a different mascot.

As part of my challenge to find my ideal writing app, I turned to Werdsmith to see if it could handle my writing needs.

Werdsmith piqued my interest with claims about it being your “personal, portable writers studio”, it’s multiple themes, and “formats for every writer”. Initially, it seemed like it would be an app only for people like screenwriters, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.

Sadly I was at least partially correct, it does indeed feel that Werdsmith is designed for a certain type of writer, and one that doesn’t seem to include myself.

Organising Your Writing

The first part of Werdsmith that made me think that the app wasn’t for me was the very simple document organisation.

There are two sections, ideas and projects. Writing starts as an idea, and then you can convert it to a project later on. This rather simple organisation makes me think that the app is best used with a minimal amount of projects. So not one that can be used with a large collection of well-organised documents.

Writing

The writing experience in Werdsmith is certainly distraction-free, the interface is quite minimal, and leaves you with just your writing.

However, the Markdown support is pretty lacking, and so are the formatting options in general. You have two headers, bold, italics, and quotes. So not exactly many options to choose from. Not even lists or images.

In addition to the formatting options, you have the option to set an overall format for the document. There are four to choose from, which I think shows the designed purposes of the app. The formats are text, novel, screenplay, or poem. I assume the text format was meant to be the one for general-purpose writing, but I honestly think it may as well not be there.

Export Options

There are export options, so it’s possible to use that to either move documents around or use it to trigger various automations. It’s rather simple, as it just exports the title and text contents of a document, but at least it’s there.

Final Thoughts

This review isn’t as detailed as it would have been if I had tried it out for a longer period, but that essentially shows how far I got with the app.

I’m not a novel or screenplay writer, so I can’t comment on how well it performs for what seems to be the target user, but I can say that it’s not the app for me. The document organisation, writing experience, and markdown support are all things that disappointed me. So while I may have liked other parts of Werdsmith, the fundamentals just didn’t click with me.

So it looks like I’ll be checking out another writing app, which I think will be 1Writer.

The way I play games is a bit different to most I think. Since while I tend to play games a lot, I don't particularly care about playing new games. I have three games that I play regularly, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and whatever version of FIFA I have. I've played these games for many many years, and I just don't get the urge to try out new stories or see how good a game looks, or even just see what everyone else is enjoying.

When I was a kid, the only thing I played was Pokémon games on my Game Boy Colour, and to be honest, I'd happily play through them all again today. So obviously I play Pokémon GO every now and then. Especially with the current "Kanto Tour" happening.

As for anything else, I have a Nintendo Switch and I've played a few games on that. But again, the games have just been a few Pokémon games and Animal Crossing.

Sometimes I think I should try out something new, and see if the games other people are enjoying are worth it. But then I remember that I really don't care, and if I did start playing them, I'd most likely only try it for a day and then never touch them again.

I wonder if this will ever change, or will I be 80 years old and still playing Pokémon Yellow?

This post is part of the warmup week for the March Blogging Challenge, the theme today is Play.

Two things made me want to write about my writing setup today, the fact that my Craft trial is ending today, and also the theme for the blogging challenge warmup week.

Before I go too deep into my thoughts around Craft, I’ll go over my current setup, and how I write.

As for devices, I write either on my MacBook Pro or my iPad Pro. My preference is the iPad, but the only keyboard I use is my mechanical keyboard, and that requires me to be sitting at my desk in my office. So that’s why I’m still split across two devices. And also why I’m desperately waiting for Apple’s next event, because I’ll hopefully be ordering a new iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard.

Regarding the apps, this has been slowly getting simpler, with my writing happening in either Craft or iA Writer (more on that in a moment). I use my own app Text Case to handle various text transformations, and also a custom app I built for myself to expose the Ghost API to a few Shortcuts to enable me to publish from any app.

When I publish my writing, this is done via my Ghost blog which handles my blog and my monthly newsletter. Occasionally I also add a featured image to a post, and these either come from myself or from the integration with Unsplash. I’m also starting to use Micro.blog again, so I might have to start thinking about that within the context of writing apps soon. But for now I’m using Gluon and the website for my Micro.blog reading and writing.

Now to explain the two apps. For quite some time I’ve been using iA Writer as my writing app, but a few weeks ago I decided to give Craft a go. I’d already been using Craft for general notes and research, but I experimented with using it as a blogging tool.

Now my free trial of Craft is a day away from expiring, and I needed top make the decision whether I wanted to continue with it, and pay the £44.99 a year subscription fee. While I’ve been happy with Craft, there are some flaws. So it’s probably best for me to stop now, and see what other options are available before locking in the year subscription.

As for writing for my blog, I’m thinking about checking out 1Writer, Werdsmith, and possibly Drafts. But I’m still undecided what other app will be the new home for my personal notes and research material. If you have any recommendations, then I’d love to hear them.

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This post is part of the warmup week for the March Blogging Challenge, the theme today is Setup.

Accessory
noun

an extra piece of equipment that is useful but not essential or that can be added to something else as a decoration

When you think of the word “accessory” in the context of technology, you’ll probably be drawn to accessories for various devices. But I think you can apply the word to the devices themselves. Especially to the smartphone. They can be very useful devices, but at the same time are completely non-essential. Although our uses suggest the opposite.

In my opinion, we treat the smartphone too much as our lens through which we see and experience the world. To a point where we forget to see the world through our own eyes.

It might not seem like a problem to most people, using our phones a lot, since they can be fun, and they can also be pretty useful tools. But we can also fall into various traps where we end up doomscrolling for hours on end, where the smartphone has taken control and is now using you. And that’s not going to go well. Because we all know the internet and social networks especially, are simply cesspits of throwaway opinions, misinformation, fuel for confirmation bias, and an endless stream of people wearing digital disguises trying to make themselves look clever or aspirational.

I’ve got a lot of opinions about the various problems with social media, and the effect it has on people, but I’ll have to save that for another day.

I don’t think we should all rush to quit using social media because it can be used in a good way, but we should take a lot of what we find on our devices and the internet with a large grain of salt. Not everything you experience through your devices is indicative of the real world.

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This post is part of the warmup week for the March Blogging Challenge, the theme today is Accessories.

Throughout the many years of having a blog, I’ve tackled the idea of growth in a few different ways. For example, reposting the same content to multiple places in order for it to be viewed more, or taking the one post and sharing on as many social networks as possible, and even attempting to change my content to what the analytics told me that people liked.

My theory behind all of these actions was to try and grow the number of visitors to my blog and to increase the number of people that would read my writing. And in a lot of cases, I wanted readership to go up, because then I would get a higher amount of money from advertising, possibly even end up with sponsorships, and be able to dedicate more time to my writing.

After a while of not exactly getting very far, I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to try and “grow” my blog. But instead, I should just keep going, sharing a link to Twitter, and possibly one or two more places depending on the content. Because that way, if anyone liked my writing, there’s a chance they might share a link somewhere, and the growth would be more organic and sustainable.

I wrote recently about leaning into your own perspective when writing, and it comes from a similar thought process I had when thinking about growth, and deciding where I want to take this blog in the long term. I essentially took a step back and examined my situation. I wasn’t making any money really on the blog through advertising, not much more than paying for the hosting and domain name. I wasn’t particularly interested in running a blog dedicated to a certain topic or audience. And I started to not care if people liked what I was writing.

That made me think, if money isn’t going to be a significant factor in any decision, and I have no desire to write for a specific audience, then I may as well just write for myself. Then if people like what I write about, then great, and if not then it doesn’t particularly matter. Because if I decide that I want to write for this blog for another 10 years, and the idea of making a living from my blog isn’t realistic, then I think it’s a much better decision to focus on what I want to write about, and my own perspective that I can share. Rather than trying to fit in with everyone else, and create nonsense posts that don’t interest me or anyone else.

So to wrap up, I think my attitude towards growth has evolved from simply wanting a huge audience, to wanting an audience for the benefits of making a living, to just not caring about it at all. That’s not to say I don’t want people to read my writing, I’m just not writing with the goal of gaining more readers. That job is up to the quality of my work alone.

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This post is part of the warmup week for the March Blogging Challenge, the theme today is Growth.

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Photo: (Markus Spiske / Unsplash)

As much as I’m a fan of automation, I can’t say I’ve ever done much of it on the Mac. When I was very young, I used Windows computers and wrote quite a few batch scripts, but nothing that complex. When I switched to a Mac, I didn’t really have the need for automation, or at least I wasn’t aware of how it could benefit me. It only really clicked for me on iOS with Workflow Shortcuts.

As I’ve been a programmer for quite a few years, I have made a few tools for myself in the past. But weirdly never any automation. I’ve checked out Keyboard Maestro and Text Expander before, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think they were that interesting. The most I’ve done is set up Hazel to move screenshots into a certain folder, and to empty the trash when it gets to a certain size.

But even the minimal experiences of automation I've done on the Mac have been after I was really introduced to the concept of automation over on the iPad. And while I think Shortcuts can be improved in so many ways, I much prefer the simplicity of any Mac automation tool.

I think the problem comes from myself never really being a “power user” of the Mac. I’ve used it as a tool for school work, to develop software, and to play games. I don’t use Automator, I can’t be bothered to write scripts, and in general, I’ve never felt I needed anything automated. It’s also why Text Case for Mac has only just gained support for Services because I don’t use them myself.

Perhaps I should at some point attempt to try out automation on the Mac again, but I’d think it has to be a third-party tool, rather than anything built-in. But what I’d really want is for Shortcuts to come to the Mac. It would obviously need to work slightly differently, but I still think that it would provide a much more user-friendly experience than anything like Automator.

This may be incorrect, but at least my perception of automation on the Mac has always been something that’s only done by really professional users, or people with super complex workflows. But on iOS, automation is something that anyone can do.

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This post is part of the warmup week for the March Blogging Challenge, the theme today is Automation.

Youtuber David Dobrik has a camera app that I've only just discovered called Dispo, which is essentially trying to mimic a disposable camera.

The idea is that you use Dispo to take photos, but you then have to wait until your photos are 'developed' to actually see them. Luckily you don't have to wait that long, with the photos being available at 9 am the next day. But there is a kind of lottery when it comes to how your photo will look since it also applies filters to make it seem more like a photo from a disposable camera.

A deeper reason behind the 9 am wait is to combat the kind of instant gratification we've all come to expect when taking photos, and to try and stay in the moment, rather than taking 100 photos and constantly looking over them to see if they're "perfect". To be honest, I understand that angle, but I'm not exactly sure if this app will make much difference in that respect.

There is a 2.0 version that's currently in beta, and while I'm not lucky enough to be testing it, it seems like it will be a pretty major upgrade. It will be interesting to see if they can take this simple camera app to something bigger. Maybe it's going to try and be the Instagram of the past that we all loved?

As for actual photos, I haven't exactly been out much recently, so I haven't been able to take any interesting photos. But here are a few that have already been "developed".