2025.02.04.

2025.01.24.

Bookmarked “RIFT Notes”

Quickly capture your thoughts and find them later.

  • Always ready to capture

  • Message-like interface

  • Instant-search, grep-like results view

  • Syncs .md files to your iCloud

  • Markdown syntax highlighting

  • Sweet retro look ’n feel, color themes

  • (inspiration: SCRL component/style)

  • View your notes on a map

Interesting app, which also uses the chat-based UI we seen with Strflow and Gibberish. I really like the design of this one, feels retro.

Also, it saves notes as simple Markdown files, which can be moved around, so there is no proprietary database.

Previously:

2025.01.07.

Drafts alternatives

I still use Drafts and am not planning to switch, but in recent years, I’ve seen a couple of nice quick-capture app alternatives pop up. Since I just stumbled upon the new version of Funnel, I thought I would share some quick thought-capture apps.

  • Funnel
    • It captures text, transcribes voice, and even uses Shazam, which is pretty nice. Unfortunately, it is available only on iPhones.
  • Bebop
    • It is optimized for text file capturing, but it can be a pretty nice tool if you have a file-based system with The Archive. Again, iPhone only.
  • Capture
    • This seems to be the most interesting alternative to Drafts since it works on most Apple platforms (no Watch, though) and can capture stuff into a timeline-like format.

2025.01.06.

I just love the Gibberish UI for drafting ideas

I subscribed to Gibberish again. It’s a pretty simple app with a weird idea: you can write blog posts by typing out your thoughts in a text messaging-style UI. Each message represents a paragraph.

Why that’s great? The messaging UI somehow triggers me to spit ideas into a chat thread, which I can revise later. Well, the “revise later” part is not the strongest suit of Gibberish, but creating the first draft is the best I found for me.

I just love this chat UI for capturing ideas. It’s not coincidental that people text themselves a lot. Also, it just makes sense how the app calls drafts “thoughts” and published stuff “posts.” I love small touches like this.

Though these are not posts, and I’m not writing a blog here, since I have to publish a post to get the “Copy Post Text” menu working, I figured, why the hell not? I’m not going to share the URL of my Gibberish “blog” since it is just a side effect of using the app “wrong,” but because I love this way of drafting things, I’m going to keep it around. I don’t care if people find it.

Since I’m using the app just kinda right (I don’t care about the blogging part), I wish it was just a private thing that syncs over iCloud (or whatever) with better support for exporting my “thoughts” into other apps like Drafts. As mentioned, I only publish my posts there to get the “Copy Text” option working.

So, essentially, I just want an app that I can use to ramble about stuff and then export to revise the content somewhere else. Gibberish would be an awesome app for collecting thoughts without having a blog behind it.

2024.09.01.

Maybe I should try Setapp. My Hookmark subscription is expiring soon, and it would be cheaper to use Setapp than just trying to subscribe to Hookmark directly.

From a UX point of view, Hookmark has this weird and confusing licensing behavior. I have to pick a specific license file, which I always mix up, and I don’t know… It’s just confusing…

I assume on Setapp, it works as long as I pay for the subscription.

I would also have access to Ulysses, since it is also available on Setapp.

I’m unsure how Setapp works on iOS, though. I should look into that.

2024.08.28.

2024.01.05.

2023.12.17.

2023.12.12.

Follow-up on Apple and journaling:

I like the Journal app, even if it’s barebones as all 1.0 apps usually are. Since I mostly use default Apple apps, the recommendation feature works well for me.

It is a good base for more advanced features in the future (I guess we see nothing new until the next WWDC).

I’m going to keep Everlog around as an archive though.

2023.12.09.

2023.12.08.

Read “What I Miss Most About the iPod”

Little things like this have me thinking more and more about the control I have over my music library. I love having access to any song at any time. But, at the same time, I want more control. Apple could easily allow for smart playlist stacks to exist on the cloud. I’d have nothing to write about at that point. But, as we’ve seen with Sony lately, Apple could take away content at any point, even if you paid for it in their store. It would be a much more expensive route to maintain a physical CD collection that I then rip into a media library.

I still maintain my local music library in the Music app and buy music from the iTunes Store, Beatport, and sometimes CDs from Discogs (which I rip later).

At one point I even turned off iCloud Music Library and synced my music locally, which is still pretty cool, since it’s free and completely peer-to-peer. On the other hand, your music library turns into read-only mode, so I can’t edit my synced playlists on the device, which sucks (if I remember correctly, I can edit new playlists on the device).

I currently have iCloud Music Library turned on, but I always archive music files separately before importing them, and I also keep my library backed up by Time Machine. The problem with this approach is I have 3 Macs, so I have to pay attention to which one is holding the original song since iCloud Music Library doesn’t upload the original file but rather fetches the song from the iTunes Store. To avoid this problem, I basically keep a master library on my 16-inch MacBook Pro since I use that the most; all other devices are using the iCloud Music Library directly.

The iTunes Music Library and cloud streaming destroyed all of this, primarily because it wouldn’t allow syncing of smart playlists built off other smart playlists.

I tried this, and smart playlists based on top of other smart playlists are not synced to iOS devices. I couldn’t check if it syncs between Macs, which I want to know.

2023.09.18.

Download iOS icons for Safari web apps using Shortcuts

I love how you can save web apps into separate apps via Safari in Sonoma like you can with Fluid.

Safari tries to fetch the default icon, but sometimes it’s not that pretty or it’s even in a wrong aspect ratio. Finding proper app icons is hard, but a lot of web apps have iOS versions, so why not use their icons?

I created a shortcut, which lets you search the App Store and download the raw app icon. Now you can also use the proper iOS style icon for the web app.

You can download the shortcut from here.

Here’s a video on how you can use it.

2021.02.23.

Testing Craft for my Zettelkasten with external folders

Yesterday I installed the latest version of Craft. I waited for iCloud sync because I’m very conservative about where I sync my stuff, and Craft only had its sync server.

The update released yesterday makes it possible to add external folders from iCloud Drive or even offline folders. It is a start, although I was expecting full CloudKit sync, not just an external folder.

It still has some issues and bugs related to syncing. I migrated my Zettelkasten from DEVONthink to Craft; it has about 150 notes right now. I installed Craft on all of my devices, and I’m still experiencing sync errors.

It seems like Craft is stuck in a state where it stops updating files from the iCloud Drive folder I set as a space. I have to reload the folder every time I change something, which is annoying.

The app itself is lovely, way better to use for Zettelkastens than DEVONthink on iOS. I like the initial experience, but syncing problems doesn’t make me trust in the app. I saw the developers are responsive and fix stuff quickly, so I’m hopeful. Until then, I keep testing Craft and see how it will change my habit of writing into my Zettelkasten.

2021.01.31.