You may (or may not) have noticed the impending arrival of Facebook Meta Instagram's new social app. Well, it's now officially coming out on the 6th of July, and it's called Threads.

The main rumour was that this new app would support ActivityPub, which is an open protocol that Mastodon is based on. This has led to all sorts of reactions. From people completely opposed to anything from Meta connecting to the Fediverse, and wanting to block it from their instance. To people that are excited about the potential of the new users that it would bring to the degenerated social network world.

I'd say I'm somewhere near the more optimistic end. Because, there is clearly space in the market for a new short-form text-based social network, and if it's backed by Instagram, then it stands a good chance of surviving. Or at least gaining enough attention to make it viable in the short term.

Regarding ActivityPub and the Fediverse, my opinion is that if Threads fully supports the protocol, then that is surely a good thing. Because, apart from major social networks simply not existing, having them work with an open standard is surely a pretty cool thing.

I do not doubt that some people will not want to have their instance to connect to Threads. This is a totally valid opinion, and I'm sure there will still be options for this.

However, I'm guessing a lot of Mastodon instances won't block Threads. Which means, if you know people that didn't make the jump to Mastodon, you may now be able to communicate with them this way.

Either way, it's a curious situation that a major platform like Instagram would even think about integrating with something open and decentralised. And I look forward to seeing what happens as a result of this.

Humane:

The connected and intelligent clothing-based wearable device uses a range of sensors that enable contextual and ambient compute interactions.

Even though we've only come across very minimal press releases, and a short TED Talk, this device has already peaked my curiosity in a way that no other product has.

Sure, this product could a total disaster. But it could also be the next step in personal computers. The range of potential is huge.

I have so many questions about it, but for once I'm just allowing myself to be a little excited.

Marc, from atthis.link, writing about digital minimalism in the context of a phone, and the experience of using a budget Android phone (Nokia C2 2E):

A few months on and the C2 is the most fun I’ve had with a smartphone since I got my first one over a decade ago.Using a phone that’s this budget I don’t feel constrained, I feel focused. There’s just enough space that I can install the odd app I only use occasionally but not so much that anything that vaguely takes my interest can be installed. Battery life is better than expected but just short enough to make every unlock mindful of its purpose. In the rare moments where web pages or apps lag, it’s a reminder that this is probably something better done on a desktop. And to top it off, in a strange twist, this will also be a phone with the best chance of longevity given that replacing the battery is as simple as popping the back off.

The whole piece was interesting, because I for one, haven't thought about digital The whole piece was interesting, because I for one, haven't thought about digital minimalism in regards to phones. Except for using fewer apps. But this is more about being constrained physically.

And it sort of resonates with me, because a while ago I decided to use an iPhone 7. And I also found it to constrain me with what I could do. It was a smaller screen, the battery life wasn't that good, and it was running an old OS, so some modern apps wouldn't run on it.

Despite that, I would also say I felt more focused because of the constraints. It slimmed down the list of tasks that I felt the phone would be useful for and made it more of a tool for specific uses.

I eventually went back to using an iPhone 13 Pro, but the idea of using a more lean device still interests me.

Text Shot, the app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, has never and currently does not collect, use, or interact with at all, any personal and private information stored on the device.

There is absolutely no need for Text Shot to ever interact with anything, apart from any text input that is provided to the application for the purposes of generating images, and for that reason alone, there has never been any intention to use personal or private information.

Date Effective: 1st July 2023

I just came across this great list of command line tools for macOS by Saurabh, and to be honest, I had never heard of quite a few of them.

For example, who knew about textutil that can convert text documents between types like txt, html, docx, etc?

Or also a tool like networkQuality that can measure your internet speed? It even gives you a great readable output like this:

Downlink: capacity 105.573 Mbps, responsiveness 64 RPM - Uplink: capacity 6.886
Downlink: capacity 103.467 Mbps, responsiveness 64 RPM - Uplink: capacity 6.880
Downlink: capacity 100.457 Mbps, responsiveness 64 RPM - Uplink: capacity 6.890
[...]
==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 8.511 Mbps
Downlink capacity: 20.053 Mbps
Responsiveness: Low (67 RPM)
Idle Latency: 36.917 milliseconds

If you use the command line at all on your Mac, I recommend at least giving this list a once over.

It hasn't been long since Text Shot was released, but it's already time for the first update.

There is now some basic Markdown support for bold and italic text. Which means you can emphasise certain words and phrases.

You can also now choose different fonts for the highlight and the title/URL.

And there's also a bunch of optimisations that have been made to the text shot generation, so it should be a bit faster, more efficient, and stable.

If you haven't already, you can find Text Shot for iOS and macOS on the App Store.

Ever since I rebuilt Text Case around the concept of user-built flows, I've always been missing one key part of the original version, the list of all of the formats with instant previews. It might have been long, and maybe with big bits of text it took a second or two to transform into every format. But it was really useful to not only transform text quickly, but to also see it in various formats at once.

That's why, I've decided to add back that feature, but in a new slightly new guise.

There's now a new "Scratchpad" tab in Text Case, which allows you to enter text at the top, and then see the results of it being formatted using all of your custom flows, and also every single format available in Text Case!

At the same time, there's also a new button in the Flows section to add a single Format. This is when you want to have your own custom list of formats, but you don't really want to build a full flow.

And I couldn't stop there without also adding a few extra colour options for flows, and also some extra visual tweaks all throughout the app.

You can find Text Case on the App Store and the Mac App Store.

Although I'd say I'm primarily a Mac user, I do tend to go back and forth occasionally between macOS and Linux. And while Linux isn't a singular OS, there are a lot of common features that I've used on various Linux installations that I really wish would be better supported on macOS.

I wrote about tiling window managers on macOS back in 2021, which is one of said features. And it's one that I find makes working a lot more efficient and organised.

However, to really get the best out of a tiling window manager, I think you also need to have good a workspace manager. On macOS that comes in the form of Spaces. And while that may let you use multiple fixed workspaces, I find the implementation a bit lacking

You can configure Spaces to have a fixed number of "Desktops" always enabled, and to have them not continuously change order (which is a stupid default option in my opinion).

However, there are a few things that you can't do with Spaces:

• Give each workspace a name.
• Associate a workspace to an application.
• Efficiently move windows between workspaces.
• Quickly move back and forward between workspaces.

The main problem I have with spaces is the speed of navigation. Because when I mean I want to move between workspaces, I want it to be instant. I don't want animations between workspaces. I want to quickly switch, and carry on with what I'm doing.

Except with Spaces, you'll get a short panning animation as you move to another space (with Reduce motion it becomes a fade instead). It's not that long, but it's enough to make me pause what I'm doing. It's enough to just slightly irritate me.

Any keyboard shortcuts are also bound to the same animations.

It might not seem like a big complaint. But these types of small hinderances, are part of what makes me keep going back to Linux. The one thing universally I hate about using technology is when I feel like I'm being slowed down. Especially, when it's just to show me a nice animation.

---

You can do a bit more if you use Amethyst (which is what I use for a tiling window manager). That lets you configure keyboard shortcuts to move windows around, but it doesn't deal with moving your focus between workspaces.

After really an unforgivable amount of time, it's finally time for my app, Text Shot to be available on the App Store.

It's a universal application (iOS/iPadOS/macOS) that lets you take snippets of text from anywhere (although it's designed for web pages), and to generate beautiful shareable images.

Like these:

All of the functionality is also available within the Shortcuts app, which means you can tie it into much more complex automations.

You can read more about Text Shot on the website.

Download

Text Shot is available right now on the App Store as a fixed price (£2.99/$2.99/€2.99), and is one single purchase for all platforms.

I just wrote about my recent experience with shooting film, and I already have something else to say about it.

Because I noticed something, the apparent lower quality of film photos doesn't bother me at all. If anything, I'd say the soft focus, harsh shadows, blown-out highlights, and of course, the grain, gives the photo character.

After I got my scans back, I noticed that I wasn't drawn to edit them that much. Whereas with the RAW files from my mirrorless camera, I'm sucked into changing the entire aesthetic and fiddling with any slider or number I can.

It was probably the first significant moment when I started thinking of photography as an art form.

I've seen photos before and been amazed by them, in a whole bunch of ways, but there's something visceral about film that I can't quite explain.