vanderwal.net

A New Chapter for Apple

Growing up on the West Coast, with a good chunk in Northern California, Apple was always present. The framing of personal computing was continually through the lens of what Steve Jobs was talking about on the news and local Northern California interviews. I had friends with Apple IIs and Macs, while I used the family Osbourne Executive (yes the business case study). I followed Apple through Jobs leaving and returning (along with closely following Next Computer). I picked up my first personal Mac in January 2002 (My TiBook Arrived) and have been fully onboard since.

When Steve Jobs passed and Tim Cook took over, that was a big change for me. But things improved for the most part. Apple grew and products kept getting better, particularly after Jony Ive left and Apple Silicon arrived. Cook had to deal with a lot of garbage, but has kept Apple functioning and doing extremely well. Supply chain is a beast at scale and things stayed on course and mostly weathered the RAM chip shortages.

With John Ternus starting as of today in the CEO role, I’m looking forward to what he brings. With the hardware just released for Mac Mini and Studio and the really good upgrade routing through the beats for OS 27 Ternus should be off to a good start. I am looking forward to seeing how this chapter plays out.

A Wrap to Blaugust

I’m looking back at August 2026 and Blaugust that started with the post Going in on Blaugust on August 1st, which I didn’t intend to be the first post, but it was in August (sort of, but more in a moment on that). With this overview of Blaugust I’ve had 42 posts in 31 days.

Many years ago I had a much higher number of posts per month, but that slowed and posts got longer. When I went in on Blaugust it was aiming at 31 posts in August. I figured that was an achievable goal. I didn’t intend on blogging every day and within the first couple of weeks I already had a buffer and was ahead of the one post per day rate. There were a few days (maybe 2 or 3) where I didn’t get a post in on the stated date on the blog, but all but one I had a post not long after that date is marked on my blog post.

One oddity I noticed is that my posting date and time are based on UTC not my local time and date. At some point with my current host I had my date and time in sync with my location. It really doesn’t matter that the date and time aren’t in sync. This is how the initial post wasn’t posted when I was in August yet, but was marked as such. I will take the 42 posts in the month as that seems to be a good answer. For years when my site was hosted in Australia the date and time posted was often quite off my location (except for a trip to Australia) and the posting time was fine for those reading in Austrailia.

What Was Learned from Blaugust?

As stated in another post or two this month, getting the workflow smoothed out and just getting the habit anchored was a good outcome. I had hoped to get a few of the longer and more complicated pieces posted that are in my blogfodder list, which would likely post on Personal InfoCloud. Some of those longer posts are much closer to now being finished. One I was working on today I thought would be ready to post today, but that wasn’t going to make it.

I need to sort out the workflow for the Personal InfoCloud as it is on WordPress and the block interface, which adds friction that doesn’t need to be there. But, with a few post for Personal InfoCloud nearly ready I should have a few workflow tests to hone that process as well.

I have a large list of blogfodder with posts that are mostly done needing tweaks and edits and I had hoped to get those through the process and posted, finally. But, the majority of the posts came from something at the front of mind and considered, written, edited, and posted in one flow. About a quarter of the posts were in the blogfodder list, or adjacent to something on the list.

Will the Pace of Posting Continue?

I’m not sure if a daily post pace or higher, will continue, but it may. I have some longer more complicated posts that will slow the pace. But, getting smaller posts out as things come to mind has a flow that works and that will likely keep some of the pace that has been essential to Blaugust.

With the posts to Personal InfoCloud, I’m likely going to write a shorter post pointing to it from here, or may post in both places and point to Personal InfoCloud version from here.

Things I Noticed

With Blaugust posting I had forgotten that my main blog page shows posts for the month, but also has a set minimum number of posts for the blog homepage. With a full month at a time makes for a long scroll when there are many posts. I was really wanting to work through some of the steps to move the structure of the blog to collections, Pagination Chronology Fix :: Lab :: vanderwal.net, but the time wasn’t there to tackle it.

Living in my site had me notice quite a few UI bugs that I fixed. I also found some page structure issues across the site and tackled those as well.

And…

Here’s to September with no theme, but focusing the usual focus things.

August as a Reading Measurement

The the rear bumper of August approaches to pass as I realize I still haven’t put in reading time with the Mick Herron’s 6th and 7th books in the Slough House series: Joe Country and Slough House. The clock is ticking as this next season of Slow Horses - Season 6 - Wikipedia on Apple TV in a little over two weeks. Season 6 combines the two books into the one season, which the bits I know about the books is they rather different like shirt and trousers, and not a pair of socks.

I deeply enjoy the TV series, but I think I enjoy the books even more (and I like the TV series a lot as it is one of my favorite shows on). I find the books entertaining and engrossing, much like a John LeCarré book, but with brilliant humor woven in. I found I can’t read the Slough House books in public as I laugh and giggle out loud and look like a lunatic trying to hold it all in.

I have had a few books going at once of late, which is sometimes helpful and fine, but at the moment hasn’t been. I’m mostly gutting the 6 or 7 books that follow me around home with snippets of reading from the split stack from whichever my whim momentarily rest upon. I have Joe Country in the stack and a postcard nestled in about 50 pages in. I am still in the setup and catching up with character phase. I’m not sure where I’ve set the book Slough House, but I should sort that out. Joe Country is just about the spot where things will take off in a Herron book and that means I will rip through what follows. I just need to sit with it with more than 10 to 15 minutes of reading time available.

Markdown Apps Loosely Joined

I recently posted about the different web browsers I regularly use, My Browser Family, and it makes sense to go through my different apps I use for Markdown in a similar way. My use is very closely tied to my Small Apps Loosely Joined mindset (part of the Shift Happed series on Personal InfoCloud). “Small apps loosely joined” focusses on having a core adaptable data structure (like markdown) and use different apps with written content where the app has helpful capabilities that are needed in a workflow or to focus on a type of work as a step in a workflow. Much like a woodworker picks up different tools to perform different tasks and doesn’t use a saw or chisel for all tasks, the small apps loosely joined model is similar. This works and has worked insanely well for 15+ years that I’ve leaned heavily on markdown.

I end up in markdown discussions rather easily it seems. The way I have taken notes in text apps with asterisks or dashes for bullets and the octothorp (you know, this thing #) for headings goes a long way back for me (starting somewhere in the 1990s). When I came across markdown in the early 2000s, after I had looked at and tried Textile Markup, but markdown didn’t fully connect. It echoed what I had done and offered more, but at the time I didn’t see the advantage of the added capabilities.

In 2010 and 2011 I started to shift much of my note taking and writing away from apps that were siloed and lock-in models. The flow from notes from a meeting, to my personal notes and annotations, and on to writing that gets shared out was a series of less than optimal apps that all had lock-in and heavy friction. Microsoft products not only had intentional lock-in but were continually buggy. I loved (and still do) Scrivener for writing longer pieces in it due to its managing notes and scraps related to the longer writing piece, but getting things in, as well as getting things out into my various sharing / publishing workflows had a lot of friction. At this time my parents were sick and passed on. When my mom passed my laptop hard drive took it as a hint and it too left the living world. I had everything backed up and I was working off the back up drive hanging off my Mac, and was waiting on a hard drive replacement, but needed something for notes for meetings (with banks, lawyers, and so much more) that I could move across everything. I nabbed an iPad for that mobility to take to meetings have files move across and back to my Mac. This tipped me into a full markdown life.

Like Many, Not All Markdown Goes to the Web

Markdown started by John Gruber to be an easy means of writing with light structure, while maintaining decent readability and to fit his model notes, which Textile didn’t fully fit. John created markdown and the markdown conversion to HTML as a matched set. Over the years many write markdown that gets converted to HTML, but around 2010 I’d see people were using markdown that never was converted to HTML. Markdown was what they wrote in as it was highly portable and editable from any text tool or markdown app and not in buggy and lock-in software. I noticed this in San Francisco on a trip where I stopped in a couple law offices to visit friends and the receptionist and legal assistants were mostly using markdown. This surprised me, as it wasn’t something I expected. Largely markdown for writing has been in tech adjacent roles and organizations. Later year seeing high school kids and college kids using markdown for their notes and paper drafts, then pasting to Google Docs was really impressive with the deftness they worked and how they managed everything. (A funny sidenote is many who went through school this way were appalled that Microsoft Word didn’t natively understand markdown). Markdown isn’t the parent’s use case any longer.

Today markdown for me only has around 20% that gets turned into HTML. Most are notes and documents that stay in markdown or turned into Google Docs, PDFs, text in Keynote presentations, and much more. Markdown is incredibly flexible with just enough structure to get converted as needed.

At First Many Apps Only Sort of Joined

This 2011 timeframe was the heyday of small light markdown apps. I picked up many apps and found a few that worked well. I was knee-deep in the markdown matrix table that Brett Terpstra maintained that showed the markdown app and the capabilities and compared what seemed like well over 60 apps. I used Simplenote, Byword, 1Writer, Ulysses, and Bear notes quite a bit and have kept them around but don’t use them as much due to friction for where and how they keep markdown files and some interfaces didn’t evolve. I also have used Working Copy, Git on iOS on Mac and iOS (iPad) for working on larger documents across devices and with others.

Moving to Less Friction for Markdown Loosely Joined

Apps that stayed around and were added in respected where I kept my notes and work. Most of the notes and writing stayed in a notes directory, but also were in project work. My notes directory on my Mac was linked out to iCloud so I could have access from my iPad or other devices. For a long stretch my basic notes app on my Mac was NVAlt, which allowed for tagging the markdown files, which meant that while they lived in my notes directory, I could aggregate all project work in the project folders, other media, and notes all with a file tag on Mac. This was fine until NVAlt stopped opening.

My Menagerie of Markdown Apps Now

My markdown notes that NVAlt sat over (which also included a folder from Notional use) had a few thousand notes when it stopped opening. But, the markdown notes weren’t owned and controlled by NVAlt and I could use nearly any markdown app I had to open and edit them. I wanted something very close to NVAlt.

Obsidian

In June 2020, after trying to find a replacement for how I worked with NVAlt I tried a few apps, but the one standout was Obsidian which slid perfectly into the exact role that NVAlt had for me. This role was to sit over the directory of notes and oversee them, but functionality on top of the markdown notes. Obsidian added even more capabilities (which most of my other markdown apps also adopted portions of over time). Obsidian is where my daily notes, drafts of longer pieces, meeting notes, and so much more go. Everything is relatively findable and refindable through backlinks (wikilinks) that are bridges between notes (but also with a plug-in Strange New Worlds - Obsidian Plugin I can see what other notes link to the note I’m linking to, and part of the magic is the note I’m pointing to doesn’t need to exist to see those links), tags to aggregate related notes with that tag, and search.

The other great advantage of Obsidian is transclusion, where one note can be added in as a view into another note. I can start a note in a meeting note or a daily note, then highlight a section and extract that section as its own note, but then transclude that note back in to show it where it was. This extraction and transclusion allows for that one piece of notes to mature and / or be included as a transclusion into other notes. The transclusions can also bring in a sub-heading into another note to show the section in the sub-heading. (I have a longer take on how and why I don’t use zettelkasten, which is similar to what I learned going into college for how to have far better study habits and write papers far more easily, but it also broke contextual understanding and really broke multiple contextual relationships).

iA Writer

My longer form markdown writing app is iA Writer. Often an idea for writing will start as something small in Obsidian (often in a larger note) and gets fleshed out a little there. But, when it starts getting longer I will extract it as its own note and then pick it up in iA Writer to take it farther. I love iA Writer as the interface is quite plain and it is just me and words and minimal structure. I often will create sub-headings early in longer pieces as outline structure to be filled in. Then it is just writing. The iA Writer app also has some light grammar checking (which fits my needs well), a quick preview to see your work as output that has some design and layout in the UI. It can be turned into a very minimal interface as well with focus on the line your cursor is on and just a few lines around that active line.

By and large, iA Writer replaced Scrivener and Ulysses as my longer writing app. The segmentation and notes capability in these other apps have made their way in as sort of similar forms into iA Writer (not everything, but enough for me). What largely caused iA Writer to replace the other two was very little friction getting my writing out into other outputs. Dragging the proxy icon to Marked (now Marked 3) is all that I need to get to HTML, styled PDF, or Word.

Marked (now Marked 3)

The Marked app, which is now in its 3rd major version, is the markdown conversion and clean-up app of choice. Marked has a lot of different capabilities, including proofing, writing statistics (like readability score and much more), writing support with proof reading, linting, and support for a wide set of markdown capabilities. Everything for using Marked for converting markdown to other formats is quite customizable and rather straight forward if you have some skills.

MarkEdit

The MarkEdit. app is one app I use as my default markdown file opener. It is like Mac’s TextEdit app, but focuses on markdown. It shows all of the markdown marks in plain sight. I find the showing everything raw is a good thing for review and understanding structure quickly.

I receive markdown files from others quite a bit, I also have access to other’s Obsidian vaults, and I have many markdown files that are spread all around my Mac and cloud environments. When opening one of these from search or a link I want to keep it outside of my Obsidian so they don’t get included and intermingled. This is really helpful reading and editing other’s shared Obsidian vaults as I can open, read, edit, and then close it while keeping clear of my Obsidian. If I want to copy something from my notes in Obsidian to another’s Obsidian, the two apps for two different environments look different, which helps reduce errors.

BBEdit

Another plain interface for markdown I use is BBEdit by Bare Bones Software, which supports markdown, but is the jack-of-all-trades text and basic coding tool. BBEdit is a go to for a lot of different text and coding needs where clearing out the cruft of an IDE or app is needed. I often open markdown documents in BBEdit when there are a lot of consistent text modifications I need to make. I have pulled in large outlines I have made in markdown and I need to do much work with nested levels in the outline.

Drafts App

I use Drafts for text and idea capture when I am away from my Mac. Everything from quick atomic notes (like where I parked, name of a book mentioned when at coffee, etc.). Drafts has long had solid voice-to-text for all Apple devices (iPhone, Watch, iPad, Mac) so it a great capture application. Drafts also has a highly adaptable capability for what to do with the note once captured, like sending it to my notes directory that Obsidian sits over. It is fully markdown capable. I can take a voice-to-text note on my Watch when driving, or invoke Siri and have it open Drafts to a blank not and tap the mic and leave a voice-to-text note that automatically is save and I can open it when I park and add some markdown elements and use and action to send it off to Obsidian, text message, or so many different end points.

iPad Apps

I started using markdown heavily, largely because my Mac hard drive crashed and I was taking notes on an iPad. I’ve gone through a lot of different iPad apps for markdown.

I have Obsidian, iA Writer, and Drafts, which I use pretty much the same way as how I use them on the Mac. Obsidian on iPad is a bit more limited, but still good for capture and modifications of notes in the directories I have it sitting over. I have Drafts always available as a slideover option off to the right of the screen.

I have Editorial for iOS as a relatively plain markdown editor. I don’t use it as much as I used to, but good to know it is there and it is quite capable.

The iPad also has small focussed apps for certain tasks. I use TextCase for changing capitalization in notes. I use Terminology by Agile Tortoise, which is the same developer as Drafts, as a really good reference tool when writing on iPad.

Trying a Couple Apps

There are a couple of apps that I’ve been trying on Mac, which may have a place. The first is Lettera, which is a markdown editor for Mac by the makers of Bear, which is currently in a limited beta. When I was using Bear notes app I loved the interface as it was clean, but what I didn’t like about Bear was the lock-in of notes in the app, as there was too much friction to use a note outside of Bear. Lettera is the markdown editor that is free of Bear. It still seems to default to a Lettera folder in iCloud, but opens markdown notes from anywhere. This may be a better reading and annotation app (it has easy to use callouts) for some of the uses I’ve used MarkEdit.

The other app is one I’m trying again as I used it 8 years ago (or so) when it was in beta and free, but became fragile, buggy, and would crash. It looked good and was rather simple. They changed from the free app to a paid app with the same name. I ended up with two versions with the same app with the icon and it was difficult to discern which was the flakey app and which was the good. Once the good version became pay, so I had neither working. This was Typora. In recent months many new to markdown have been talking about Typora and I get asked about it. Today I finally downloaded it again after deleting both of my instances of it a few years ago.

The current Typora has a lot of capabilities now, far beyond what it used to have. It has a similar interface, until you open settings then it has a lot of customizations. Typora can now cover a lot of ground. Much of it is covered in other apps I have, but I may find my current model of having different apps for different uses that are incredibly good for the purpose I use them is my preferred way of working. Having different apps helps me focus on what I am doing in that app to the markdown file and the task and focus needed from me for that task. To get to the same thing in Typora I would have to go to settings and make changes to keep that focus, but the context of the different app isn’t there. Moving between apps I will also keep the markdown file in multiple apps and see an edit in one instantly show in all the other apps (what good magic is this). Typora nice interface with additions for math UI (through LaTex) and charts (through Mermaid) may be a draw to keep it around.

Tech Learning and Reference Resources

This week I picked up another Humble Bundle collection of tech books (Humble Bundle Book Sales) and this round was for python, Rust, and data. The Humble Bundle offers are incredibly inexpensive and offer both PDF and ebook versions of each book in the bundle. I really like having the PDFs on my local drive for quick searching in and across them. But, I also pull the ebooks into Apple Books app for highlighting and annotation notes (both of them get captured by Readwise / Reader for me and added into a folder in Obsidian for linking to and from). Additionally the book purchases in Humble Bundle donate to causes, which is an added benefit.

The other resource I use a lot is the O’Reilly Media Platform which has not only all O’Reilly Media books, but also around 200 other providers and their books and media. It has courses, webinars, conference videos (transcribed so searchable), video training from many different providers, certification materials, and much more. It isn’t inexpensive, but it is about the price of a half or full day conference, but packed with far more content and available for the year. The coverage is not only technology related, but finance, economics, sciences, and more. I’m not personally a big fan of formal training sessions, but most of the ones I’ve been to that O’Reilly has put on have been better than anything I’ve had from any company-provided provided content.

Zeef Returning

One of the things that has been bringing enjoyment lately is seeing ZEEF coming back to life. It self-describes as: “Curated links, found by algorithms, sifted by people”. I’ve used the new version and have found it more responsive and a bit easier to use.

I have set up a curator page in the new Zeef at Thomas Vander Wal | ZEEF. If you are new to Zeef and didn’t catch it the first time around, it is a different perspective on saved and shared links. Where things like Delicious and Pinboard focus on an abundance of links which the users tags as they go, which provides a folksonomy / folksonomy - defined of terms from the bookmarker’s output, Zeef has a focus on categories on a curator’s page and the links the curator believes are appropriate for that term. From a folksonomy perspective the person adding the tag / category is very clear (which is essential), the group of links has the category, and the links are the objects being tagged / categorized. Different people have different perspectives as we each have multiple contexts from our lives and everybody has a unique set of those contexts.

This early resurfacing of Zeef is still a work in progress, but has some nice new additions. One of the pieces I like is, curators having the option of adding a “why” to the links for a term. This “why” I find valuable as knowing why a curator added a link to their collection provides increased value for those reading the collections. On my page I have started a category collection for folksonomy and I’ve captured an initial three links in the section and I’m showing an expanded the entry for the Ontology of Folksonomy (from Tom Gruber) that shows the “Curator’s Note” and the “Why” reasoning I added. The Curator’s Note provides a definition opportunity and there the link fits, whereas the “Why” is the curator’s insight as to why they believe it is worth including.

Prior Zeef Mentions

The first version of Zeef was something I enjoyed, but didn’t take full advantage of, but I had ideas of how to expand my curated sets. I was looking at it for how to handle Blogfodder and Linkfodder. I also was thinking it could help with managing What to do with Podcast Favorites.

Looking Forward to Zeef As It Move Forward

This new version of Zeef is something I am looking forward to seeing grow and get used again. I think there is a place for having solid curation of links and resources. I’ve been thinking about how Zeef could be the community space to find resources centrally, like things captured on people’s personal sites in their slash pages (slash pages) which they keep on their site, but have a place to discover centrally.

I also really like the idea of having researchers and professionals curate their list of categorized resources. One thing I really enjoy this time of year are syllabi for courses and to see reading lists for new sources, but also how professors frame the accretion of understanding build over a semester (for those professors that share these openly).

Enjoying Nebula

It may have been some point during the COVID lockdown that I stumbled upon Nebula / Nebula TV, or as a service bundled into Curiosity Stream. I found Nebula had quite a few of the quality YouTube creators I have long enjoyed and it is ad free. Nebula is creator owned. I had been following Sam Denby and Wendover Productions - Wikipedia on YouTube for a while, and its more witty, “Half as Interesting” which are core parts of Nebula. I also found some of the urbanist and productivity creators that don’t annoy me as well (most productivity creators have a narrow set of things they actually understand well, and then falls off sharply).

In watching Nebula I stumbled onto Jet Lag: The Game (Jet Lag: The Game - Wikipedia). I have found this a blast to watch. It is also on YouTube, but releases a week earlier on Nebula and no ads. There are other travel and travel travel-adjacent shows that are also as enjoyable as well.

In the last year I’ve been finding I’ve been watching a fair amount of the news and finance news channels on Nebula. Many of the people on screen are younger than mainstream tv similar services, but incredibly well prepared and knowledgeable.

Every mention of Nebula and then friends watch it they ask why I didn’t tell them about it sooner. So, this is now your sooner.

I still catch an hour or so of various YouTube each day for good content and decent creator shows. I should do a run down of what I consistently like there.

Honey, The Thing Ate My Blog

In the past few months I’ve looked at the history of my blog analytically and captured some of it in, Personal Blog Data Analysis - Looking at 25 Years :: Off the Top, and I could see the changes in posts over time. I used to joke that “Twitter ate my blog”, as what I was posting on my site, was going into Twitter and not my site. Looking at the analysis that transition is clear. I have my archive of tweets from my three accounts (my main one turned private and two public accounts with one more work-related and the other responses to others and tracking sports).

Twitter vs. Blog

During that time posting to Twitter, my posts grew less frequent, but also longer. Twitter helped me write shorter sentences as it started with just 140 characters available. During this time I was still also keeping regular notes in text in my Notes directory. I most often used NVAlt that allowed for tagging the note file and it had really good search for the Notes directory that predated my using NVAlt by 10+ years (I started keeping notes there in 2003 in text, OmniOutliner, and HTML, but shifted to mostly text until about 2010 when it was a mix of text and markdown).

As my use of Twitter dwindled and conversations I had been having there moved to back channels and topic-focused groups, my blog post didn’t come back. The ideas and content had outlets, but that wasn’t my blog.

Notes Stayed Local

In June 2020 I had been trying to find a new notes app that worked similarly to NVAlt, which had stopped opening in the prior year. I had a few text and markdown apps I used to add notes to my normal location (one was Notional, which I used for about a year). I tried Notion for a short bit, but not having local notes and it being cloud only made it a serious no go for me. I tried Logseq, a couple apps heavily focused on zettelkasten, and I tried Obsidian. Obsidian stuck for a lot of reasons, but the most important was I just set it to watch over my existing Notes directory and just keep going. The ability to use backlinks / wikilinks, tags, and transclude notes was a great fit.

I went back to a daily note pattern using my Daily Dump set of sections as prompts for quick access to an area in the note to capture ideas and notes around things found, worked on, and ideas I cared about. The ability to have concept pages and hubs that linked back to everything related, make notes in my Daily Dump and then highlight a section and extract it out as its own separate note and bring a transclusion (see it in another context) back into the Daily Dump and other relevant concept pages, was magical.

It became the note platform I’ve long wanted. I was capturing and making notes in it a lot. Notes could easily turn into blog posts. But, they weren’t turning into blog posts they just stayed notes. “Obsidian ate my blog” became my tongue-in-cheek joke. But, it was pretty much what happened.

I was writing in my notes, much like I used to blog. From short snippets to longer worked-through ideas and concepts. It was pretty much (and still is) all in my notes that Obsidian sits over.

The Daily Notes Out to Blog

I run analytics on my Obsidian notes and I’m creating and touching 10 to 20 different notes a day. Some of these, thanks to Blaugust, have been turning into blog posts, which was my intent with Blaugust. But, I also have been fleshing things out that started as blog post ideas and I flesh them out in my “Thoughts” section of my Daily Dump note (just like this one is). This new idea blog posting isn’t helping work through my large (over 100 notes) that are flagged as “blogfodder”. Many of the blogfodder ideas are half-done and sitting for months or years. Others have been nearly fully drafted and need an edit. Some have been stuck because the post (in my belief) needs another post or two to set the foundation for the post that to be shared out (I realize this as I go to point to a post that doesn’t exist, as it is only regular content in Keynote for workshops, presentations, and work engagement foundation setting).

I’m starting to work through the some of the blogfodder. But, I’m working on my daily notes becoming blog posts more regularly. Blaugust has been helping move from notes to post. When Blaugust wraps I need to see where all of this lands.

Vibe Markets Don’t Always Rhyme with Good Product

My recent Four Cornerstones of Development post (which I found the initial blog mention on a March 2001 archive page - Off the Top :: March 2001 and later on mention I’m working on an essay on it, which I somewhat remember having a publication ask me to write it for them, but no longer exists) was surfacing in discussion a bit lately when talking with those building quick things for themselves that they had used LLM for coding (as well as much of the interaction and visual design), which is viable for personal use for a stretch and then you hit the reliable, maintainable, repeatable thresholds of pain.

Ooh! This Looks Interesting

But, I’ve looked at a quite a few of these projects (not those that aren’t really products) as they initially seem like they would solve a use case gap I have. But, I saw a video for an app that was pitched and it hit a long-standing need I had that has heavy friction. It was an app that linked to Glaze, which is a product / service from Raycast. I read through the information about Glaze and thought this could be “interesting”. I had trouble finding the app that caught my interest as the Glaze app marketplace is a mess. I finally found the app, looked at the descriptions and images and figured I’d give it a go. I found I had to download the Glaze app to seemingly run the app I wanted within Glaze. This was less than optimal putting a silo wrapper around apps, that has never worked well and there is a long and abundant history of attempts at this poor model. (An app with scripts and workflows that can be added through a marketplace / gallery like Raycast or Alfred is a good model, but full apps that is a very different story).

The Needed Perspective Framing (Likely to be skipped to preserve a rant)

I’m not adverse to people using coding assistance, but there is a lot more to building an app or script than just code (and often being a developer or engineer helps keep the AI coding assistance in check as they can resurface long gone poor practices that are abundant in the training material). Not having background in development nor product management nor design creates a lot of gaps and little depth to know if something is actually good or not.

I’ve Seen this Movie Before and …

I opened Glaze and got the app I had interest in set up, and it was slow, not well considered with limited functionality that would be helpful for a basic app in the genre it sat in. The hope I had was shot, I was rather disappointed (it happens a lot) with the level of a “proof of concept” build that only examines is something possible to let you then you interrogate the hell out of it to figure out what is wrong and how to improve it before you get to the prototype or alpha version. I shut the app and won’t open it again.

I looked at other apps in Glaze. All I looked at had the same level of quality (or I should say lack of quality and basic understanding of what an app is, let alone what a product is).

I jumped to the four cornerstones, as I would on something I was building or running a product group that is creating and developing. Things were sort of usable, but half a cornerstone doesn’t get you very far. There is a lot to know and understand beside an interface that does something and I haven’t found AI services that fill much of this ground that needs to be covered in a solid manner. They can help code decently on small-ish projects (and slightly larger) and get okay (yet often problematic) interfaces. But, the other considerations and forward-looking needs to plan for or at a minimum consider so to account for future adaptation are missing or not supported well. The person building has to bring that understanding with them to drive this to a decent outcome.

Creating an app seems easy but there is a lot that should be considered and accounted for in the process, even for something simple. Putting out what will soon be abandoned ware with a “developer” / creator that didn’t quite ship something solid and left it at that, and not to return.

It May be an Idea Farm

There are a lot of great ideas in Glaze, but the lack of quality has me deleting the Glaze and adding a reminder to not go back. The deletion of Glaze took around 2 hours as the thorough app deletion tools I have were getting errors from many components claiming deletion was not permitted. This often happens when an app is running, but the app had been quit. It has been a long time since I’ve had to go through rounds of rebooting my Mac to rip out stubborn poor app remnants.

Know What You are Getting In To

There are people who have been building good niche products that have used AI to help fill gaps. Most of them have a lot of experience with UI, UX, product, and/or development to know what needs to be done at least at a basic level. Not all of them have worked through all four cornerstones, but they have considered them, and have lived through the hell from not considering and/or working through the cornerstones.

Adjusting Daily Aggregation for Less Friction

Sunday I hit a point where my daily automations (which I layout in part here - My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View in my morning process and weekly process) and placing the outputs into my Daily Dump note sections was really making for a lot of friction in my note taking / note making. Additionally, it was breaking focus and holding my concentration on what I was trying to capture in my note’s sections.

How Daily Dump Notes are Setup

My Daily Dump has 14 sections: Plans, Thoughts, Review, Read, Talked With, Listened, Watched, Productivity, Worked, Learned, Played, Ate, Health, Bought, and Added to a wishlist.

The intent with the subheads in my note is to quickly jump to the section as I run across something or am thinking through and idea or concept and capture the thoughts or what I consumed and ideas from it, so I can get back to it later in my notes. But, since this is markdown and in Obsidian I can take the notes with its subheading and text, extract it, and then transclude it (move it out and link it back in to show it in another note). But, having each day’s note relatively clean (the exception is the Plans section for things brewing and on the front burner to do are moved from the prior day’s note to the current day’s with a python script that keeps the completed tasks on the prior day and removes things not completed and moved them to today).

Friction from Adding Aggregation to the Sections

The daily aggregations pulled in things captured from various reading and copying or favoriting tasks that get automatically captured in Instapaper and Pinboard, as well as all the files I created and modified. I also have notes from Drafts that I capture on the go and tagged to get pulled in aggregated, as well as a list of things I watched online that I want to track, but also list of videos watched where I’ve captured the transcript in Readwise I may want to review (and likely do a further clean-up step).

All of this was getting aggregated into collective notes by type and transcluded into the relevant groups in my Daily Dump note. This added a lot of friction to the intent of my Daily Dump for quick easy drop into a section and capture a note and then after sort out how I may handle it. Add to this, Sunday my Weekly Review runs and captures all of this from the week and compiles it into one note so with a heat map at the top so I can review it to see what I’ve been doing and find things to cut back on or put focus on for the upcoming week. The Weekly Review was transcluded into Productivity, which is ironic as all of this adding of aggregation transclusions was making me really unproductive.

The Fix to Bring Back Focus and Quick Capture

On Sunday I had enough of the friction and took time to sort out a solution. I liked the capture and the ability to scan through and find things I need to continue working on or make a change on, but having it in my quick capture notes area made it tough.

I added a “Review” section just under Plans and now all aggregations and transclusions go there. The best part is when I’m not reviewing it, a heading in Obsidian can be collapsed, which gives me focus on everything else.

On Sunday I did a quick manual restructuring of my note by putting everything aggregated into the Review section and then collapsed it. This was a magical focus trick.

Updating the Python Script that Automates Transclusion

Sunday I did the first edit of the python script that takes the aggregations notes created earlier in the moring and transcludes them in and repointed them to not go into the other categories, but all go into Review. This hasn’t run perfectly yesterday nor today (it works when I trigger it to run manually, but not from the trigger to run the script), but it is getting closer.

Protecting Focus is Key

Protecting focus and being able to quickly shift focus and be productive is key and has been something I’ve been working to do since I was a kid. Over the years I’ve learned the distractions and how to pull focus and calm back in. Removing the friction from abundance of information already in where I needed clean space to quickly capture created the large problem.

Now my big next step is sorting out the time to actually get a good weekly review done from what I’ve aggregated. The capture has been really good, but I just need to get better about protecting time on Sunday (or move this to Saturday) so I can sit and focus on what was done, what I can reduce and what needs focus to get done.