No forewords, let‘s go.

Apps and Internet

I got rid of Dropbox again. I was only using it to sync my 1Password fault across different Macs and iOS. I wanted to switch it to iCloud Drive when I started thinking…1Password contains all of my sensitive information and I was storing it on cloud servers. Yes, it‘s encrypted with a strong master password, but all of a sudden I was absolutely uncomfortable with this idea. I turned off cloud sync and moved to the folder based sync option with Wifi-Sync for iOS devices. Between the Macs, I now use ChronoSync to keep the fault file in sync.

Development

I was looking for a very particular¹ plain text editor App on macOS for a very long time. I noticed my requirements are actually pretty simple and I started to develop it myself. So let me introduce Plainy. I recommend to not touch it in this state. It‘s only useful for me right now as I now the limitations and the quirks to use it. So far developing a Mac App has been great. The frameworks are a little more complex compared to iOS but still are very familiar and super powerful. I love it. I don‘t plan to release as a real standalone product for now, but we will see.

Open Web

I‘m giving indy microblogging another try. Head over to micro.hartl.co to consume my Twitter like content. I don‘t know…I was reading about Aaron Swartz again this week and it always reminds me of the importance of the open web, standards and not being controlled by huge companies.

Yea, this ended on a positive note, right? See you next week.

As I spent the whole week at the pool, the beach, or near the tallest building in the world, this Weekly will be the shortest so far.

Reading

I finished reading Sleeping Giants. It was very light and easy too read. A Good choice for a vacation book when you want to turn off your head. For my taste, the science part was often glossed over. I had the feeling that understanding a base-8 number systems was the hardest problem the scientists had to solve.

For the rest, here are a few images from Dubai:

See you next week!

Hello! I‘m writing this while sitting a meter away from the pool and 5 meters away from the sea, facing the inner side of a huge, palm-like, human-made structure in the Arabian gulf. I believe when humanity will be able to travel to remote planets just for vacation purposes, the destinations will resemble Dubai. Hmm, maybe the color of the sky and the water might be different.

Gadgets - Macbook Pro 2017

There were loads of discussions about the „new“¹ Macbook Pro again and coincidently this was the first week that I used the new Macbook Pro 2017 15 inch as my work laptop. So far I really love this machine. I notice the size and weight difference, as I carry it for over an hour every day. In theory, I would prefer the 13-inch model, but it‘s just not powerful enough. The ports are also no problem for me. I noticed I don‘t plugin stuff into my laptop that often. I bought two USB A to C adapters and that‘s fine for now. I also really like the feel of the new keyboard. I‘m now just a little bit scared of dust getting inside the keys and ruining it. This feeling will disappear after a few months of using it without issues. No thoughts about the Touch Bar. I remap ESC to Caps-Lock, so no changes here.

Apps and Games - Combined this week

As there wasn’t any real new App I was obsessed with, I’m going to mention a game here: Flipflop.

Flipflop is Solitaire built for your phone, not for your table.

I never really enjoyed Solitaire but this game makes it fast and fun. Other than that…yea… I played a lot of Rocket League, as usual. With this new Macbook, I might actually try to install Windows using Bootcamp and play PUBG.

Watching

Justice League. It wasn’t the worst DC movie I’ve seen but nowhere close to Wonder Woman or any Marvel movie.

Development

I really enjoyed Dave DeLong’s “A Better MVC”series. While learning Android I try to reflect back to iOS development as much as I can. App architecture is a hot topic on both platforms. Even though this series focuses around on iOS, it might be valuable for all mobile developers.

Drinking

Loads of water. It’s really hot here.

And with this. See you next week.

And here we go for the second Weekly. I planned to write a lot more during the week for this but somehow only was able to capture a few notes. That’s fine. There is enough time to do it now.

Gadgets - Hello Android

This week was the first time in over 5 since I have used an Android phone for more than 1 minute. I’m using a Moto G5 as my second phone now, just to get to know the operating system, the design language, and the usage patterns. I have to say Android got a LOT better over the last 60 months, who would have guessed. This phone costs around 150€ and it’s deeply impressive what it offers for this price. I still think a lot of choices Android makes are strange but that’s fine, everyone can choose.

Development - Hello Android

Since the official announcement of Android Studio 3 with official Kotlin support, I got interested in learning a little bit of native Android development. I started with this short Youtube tutorial series from Brian Voong just to get to know the basics. I think he is also an iOS developer and therefore speaks a familiar language! I have to say Android Studio is very powerful but…it’s just not a native Mac App. The App feels and looks different, especially how default key commands or modal windows are handled. On the other hand, you will get used to it. I’m looking forward building and submitting my first Android App.

Music - Japandroids

On a recent episode of Do By Friday Alex mentioned the band Japandroids and I immediately fell in love with them. All their stuff on Apple Music was my tune for the week.

Playing - Back to Rocket League

Yes, yes I was playing a lot of Destiny until the end of the last week. I hit the level cap and was improving my gear but then, a flip switched and I lost interested. I’ll defiantly check out the game again when the next content, hits but for now there is nothing to do in the game that’s interesting to me.

I started playing more Rocket League again this week, especially with the big championship happening this weekend.

Watching

I just saw Murder on the Orient Express (2017). I liked it, beautiful pictures and I didn’t know the plot. Entertaining!

Apps

The App I enjoyed this week the most was Ulysses again. After moving my diary to this App, I was able to get into a nice habit of writing a few lines in the morning. I hope it continues!

Until next week!

I’m really enjoying the format of Matt Alexander’s weekly newsletter. I wanted to do something similar for a very long time and this is my first shot at it.

It’s the iPhone X week! It seems like Apple changed it’s PR strategy and small Youtubers got access to the new phone before big Media publications. I thought it was very interesting and will target new audiences, but I very much missed all the deep reviews from people that used the phones for several days. I still need to wait a few weeks before my iPhone X arrives to join the Animoji-Karaoke-Party.

Apps:

Apollo

I still enjoy this App a lot. It’s now my second most used iOS App on my phone behind Tweetbot. Reddit in general has a bad rep in the Apple circle, but there is so much interesting, funny and thought-provoking content on it. I still need to write a roundup of subreddits I read.

Goodbye DayOne

I moved away from DayOne, again. I’m just not happy how DayOne 2 feels on the iPhone and the Mac. Version 2 still feels slow to use compared the it’s predecessor. In addition, I’m increasingly not happy to store my most private thoughts on a random server I don’t control. Therefore I updated my little script to convert the DayOne entries into separate .textbundle files. Those files are now imported into Ulysses as external files. I would not recommend to use this script for yourself, but it converted my 700 entries just fine.

Listening:

Kettcar - Ich vs. Wir

I was listening to this Album a lot. It’s good German alternative/indie with slight political lyrics. If that’s your thing, give it a try.

Wheel bearings

Finally I listened to a lot episodes of the Wheel bearings podcasts. Please, If you like cars and thinking about the future of cars g, listen to it!

Playing

I was a very enthusiastic gamer between the age 8-18. I remember spending countless days and weeks in World of Warcraft or playing the original Counter Strike. For 7 years I didn’t spend much time with games that aren’t fun little iOS games. This changed by the end of last year with the discovery of Rocket League. I bought a Playstation 4 and played this game exclusively for a whole year. Now I started playing Destiny 2 and I enjoy it so much. It’s a MMO like World of Warcraft is but it feels so much lighter. I don’t have to farm for weeks just to be a little competitive in a PvP match or grind for a month to just hit the level cap. I’m already looking forward to the extensions!

Watching

Thor: Ragnarok

Saw this one on the launch day in Europe. I enjoyed it for what it was. A fun mixture between a standard Thor movie and SciFi mashup à la Guardians of the Galaxy.

Drinking

I’m still working hard to improve my homemade Old Fashioned. I can assure you that the second one has always been better than the first.

For more than two years now I’m an active reader on Reddit. I can post about all the subreddits I follow in a future post. Until now, Narwhal was my Reddit App of choice. Yesterday I discovered Apollo through this nice article on MacStories.

The App has all features you would expect from a Reddit client, but in addition feels extremely well made. All animations and interactions are super smooth. The whole design and experience feels 100% true to iOS. It really is a poster child of an App. The last time an App felt this true to the platform for me, was when Tweetie 1 was released!

Please, if you are interested in Reddit Apps, give this a try!

Yesterday I picked up my new Apple Watch 38mm Series 3 non-LTE¹. Here in Berlin at the Apple Store, there was a surprising big queue outside for the new watches and phones. This time I chose the silver aluminium model with the fog sport band. There are no real design differences to my old original Apple Watch Sport but the speed of the device is a game changer. Finally Apps open fast and the UI is responsive. I will continue wearing my watch for at least 22 hours a day and I hope this model will again last me for over 2 years.

After the Golden Master release of Xcode 9, my whole Twitter timeline was full of bad jokes about the Xcode reliability and links to isxcodestableyet.com. I’m using Xcode 9 since the first beta every day in my main job and it was the smoothest beta cycle I ever witnessed. Xcode 9 introduces so many great new features and I was incredibly happy to rename Xcode to Xcode 8 and install the GM of Xcode 9!

It‘s now 24 hours after the big iPhone keynote. Nothing that was revealed yesterday came as a big surprise, but still, it was one of my favorite keynotes in quite some time. The whole keynote had a throw-back Steve Jobs theme that I really enjoyed. All revealed products look like awesome upgrades to the product line. Even the iPhone 8, standing in the shadow of the X, will be appealing to a lot of people thanks to it‘s price, refreshed design and new features.

What I‘m planning to get? Probably a new Apple Watch 3 without LTE and an iPhone X!

Today is the day of Apple‘s big iPhone Keynote. Thanks to unimaginable big software leaks from inside Apple, it feels like we already know everything about the new iPhone X. But I‘m still excited about the event. We know the features and hardware specifications but not know how the new hardware really works, how it will impact the way we use and handle this device, and more importantly, what it will enable us to do in the future.

The iPhone nowadays is my main computer, I use it for work, entertainment, communication and carry it all the time from the moment I leave my bed. I even just deployed this new site using Transmit for iOS on my phone.

I can‘t wait for the event today, to learn about the future of the iPhone in a big, complete picture and no longer try to reason about scattered, small pieces that were leaked over the last weeks!

Update December 2017: I moved back to my old Jekyll system. I slowly migrate all the old existing micro posts to micro.hartl.co.

I want to give this site/blog yet another restart. All recent post I have published here were microblog posts. I hoped it would give this site more activity and content. In the end it destroyed the structure of the site and made it less appealing for me to work on it. Also the move to Jekyll maybe wasn’t the best decision. Especially when writing with an iPad, a web interface is very useful. I was able to publish on the go, but editing and making bigger changes was very uncomfortable with all the workflows and hacks.

I’m now giving Kirby a test run. Even though it’s PHP, the structure of the whole CMS is very simple and it’s completely database-free!

All posts are still accessibly using the direct links and I’ll slowly migrate only the necessary posts to the new system. While doing this I’m also translating the German ones to English!

I plan to do more personal entries, no more micro blogposts and every now and the some technology commentary.

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.

I’m now crossposting my micro blog entries to my Mastadon profile. Pefect time to be interested in micro blogging with Mastadon growing like crazy an Micro.blog around the corner.

Back to English: I moved all my text based Workflow.app workflows back to Editorial. Feels more futureproof at the moment.

Vorab: Ich dachte es wäre eine nette Idee wöchentlich meine Spotify Discover Weekly Playlist hier einzubinden:

Notiz-Apps sind scheinbar eine nichtendende Geschichte für mich. Montag hab ich auf der Arbeit mein OneNote geöffnet um ein paar handschriftliche Notizen zu machen und habe festgestellt, dass die App auf allen Geräten quälend langsam wurde. Ich hatte lediglich ein paar dutzend Notizen abgespeichert. Dieser Zustand war für mich nicht hinzunehmen und ich habe somit alle privaten Notizen wieder komplett zu Bear geschoben. Das Problem mit handschriftlichen Notizen bestand aber weiter und ich habe mir nochmal Notability und GoodNotes angesehen. Die OCR-Technik von GoodNotes ist beeindruckend, im Ganzen gefällt mir die Struktur und das Design von Notability aber besser.

Freitagabend bin ich dann durch Federico Viticci auf die App Notebooks aufmerksam geworden. In ihr können Dateien aller Art in Ordnerstrukturen verwaltet und durchsucht werden. Zudem arbeitet sie direkt auf dem Dropbox-Dateisystem, d.h ich kann mit anderen Apps Dateien in Notebooks ablegen, bearbeiten und vor allem direkt davon ein Backup erstellen. Ich habe GoodNotes nun so eingestellt, dass es PDFs von handschriftlichen Notizen direkt zu Notebooks absichert. Markdown-Dateien erstelle ich zuerst noch immer in Bear aber werden, wenn sie nicht mehr ununterbrochen bearbeitet werden, auch in den Notebooks-Ordner abgelegt. Zu diesem ganzen Thema sollte ich wahrscheinlich einen extra Post schreiben…

Leider finde ich momentan keine Zeit um ein wenig an meinen Wochenrückblicken zu schreiben. In der letzten Woche habe ich mit Episode 1 von Do by Friday begonnen und höre mich seitdem durch den ganzen Katalog. Manchmal brauch ich Abstand von den gleichen Tech-Themen und dieser Podcast schafft das ganz gut. Ich benutzte weiterhin OneNote und komme immer mehr in die Routine wirklich alles aufzuschreiben. Diese Post ist mal wieder komplett auf iOS geschrieben und veröffentlicht. Ich habe dafür nur ein paar neue Workflows geschrieben, die mir die nötigen Templates für Jekyll generieren. Ich habe ein bisschen weiter an Pinsta entwickelt und bin noch immer fest dahinter, in 1-2 Wochen eine kleine Beta zu starten.