Apps

The Art of Fauna is a puzzle app for iPhone and iPad that is wonderfully satisfying.

The other day I got an email from Tyler Ibrahim, one of the creators of Pools, a new app for "personal and intentional sharing – social but not social media." It's available for iPhone and Android.

I gave it a look and it appears to be an interesting take on many of the functions social media offers but absent many of the functions that make social media awful. For instance, there's no followers or following. There's likes and hearts, but only the person who posted the thing you're liking or hearting can see your reactions, thus eliminating the performance aspect of social media. If you comment on something, you can make it so only certain people can see the comment, or only the person who created the post, and your comment cannot be viewed by people you're not already connected to.

Since there's no following/followers, there's also no way to search for users. That means no one can find you on Pools. The only people you're connected to are those you send an invite to — or those who you accept an invite link from.

There's also no algorithm. You see things when you choose to in the order they're posted.

The app is new so things may change, but they seem dedicated to the anti-social media stance they're launching with.

I'm not an app developer, but I had a similar idea years ago when I launched Volver. I was looking for an app that would allow one-to-group posting and I was mostly thinking of businesses who want to reveal things to their customers and have a way for customers to respond, but not a way for customers to connect to one another. I don't believe Pools has this function, but perhaps it's something they'll consider in the future.

For many years, I was an Android user. I could not find a decent music app for the platform, though I tried many. In 2023, I switched to iPhone because i wanted to use an Apple Watch for tracking sleep and other health metrics and you need an iPhone to use an Apple Watch.

Though I think Android is unquestionably a better-designed platform, Apple does have one (and only one) great music app: Albums, which is one more than Android. It functions fine in the free version but at $25 per year for the Premium version, I think it's well worth supporting.

The other day, Crucial Tracks posted a how-to: Finding New Releases Using the Albums App which is worth checking out if you use Albums.

Foto is a relatively new app for iPhone and Android that works similar to how Instagram worked before it got plagued with ads, commercialism, and other things that complicated its simplicity. Some differences:

• Foto claims it will always be ad-free
• Foto does not crop your photos or force an aspect-ratio on you
• No video
• Not owned by a billionaire
• Publishes a Roadmap of upcoming features
• Has free and paid-tiers

Matt Haughey's got a blog post called A Guide to Using Signal for Government Workers, but it works as a guide for anyone and spells out in a simple-to-understand single page why you should be using Signal.

If you don't know Signal, it's like WhatsApp except it's run by a non-profit, not a billionaire (WhatsApp and Messenger are owned by Facebook). It's a free communication app that works world-wide and runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac desktops. Unlike Apple's iMessage Signal messages are always encrypted, which means no one (not even Signal) has access to them and they're therefor subpoena-proof.

Free. Encrypted. No billionaires or nasty corporations.

I'm a big fan of the Arc web brower, but I'm tempted to check out Horse, which has a different approach. Watch this 90-second video for an explanation.

Glance Back offers a unique take "journaling":

With this Chrome extension, once a day at random when you open a new tab, Glance Back will quickly snap a photo of you and inquire: “What are you thinking about?”. Once you type your answer and press enter, the photo and thought will be collectively saved to your history of glances, cumulatively creating an archive of moments you share with your screen.

In My Machine and Me, Greta Rainbow chronicles a year of using Glance Back for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

My time-lapse is documentation of a working woman slowly aging. An accumulation in lockstep with decay, and my screen is a grave marker. I’m getting better at writing, here. I’m deepening my frown lines, here.

Rewind is an Android and iOS app that allows you to explore music by year. You pick a year and it takes you to the year's highlights where you can sample tracks. At the bottom of each track are buttons to jump to music services where the track is available (Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube Music). I don't subscribe to any of those services, but when I clicked the Youtube Music icon, it just took me to the track on Youtube, which I could then play in full without payment.

For instance, I chose 1968, and was presented with these tracks, among many, many others:

It'll also show you the top 100 songs of the year and you can click on them to preview and then jump to it in the apps.

Pretty neat.

Ev Williams (one of the creators of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium) on his new app, Mozi:

Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.

Mozi claims to be a private social network that connects you to people you already know via your contacts list. This may seem a little counterintuitive, but here's a true example from my own life:

I lived in a small town called Oliva, Spain, from September through November, 2017. In the summer of 2018, when I was living in Culver City, CA, I saw a photo on social media of a friend I'd drifted apart from and hadn't seen in 20 years. That photo was taken in Gandia, Spain, in October, 2017. Gandia is the neighboring town to Oliva and my friend was staying just 2KM away from where I was living. In fact, in those months, while I was hiking through Orange Groves, we were closer to one another than we are when we're both home in Toronto.

Had Mozi existed back then — and we'd both been using it — we would have been alerted to each other's presence and been able to make plans to meet.

I'm not normally someone to evangelize for social media, but I do find the purpose of Mozi to be useful and am therefore giving it a shot. At the moment it's only available for iPhone (there's an Android waitlist) and it's pretty much pointless unless your contacts are on it, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see what happens.

I've been using the Merlin Bird ID App a lot lately and have been surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of it. So I'm recommending you download it for yourself.

I mostly use it to identify birds I can hear but not see during my morning dog walks. Just yesterday in High Park I ID'd a Easter Screech Owl and a Red-shouldered Hawk, both uncommon in the area.

You can download the free app on the Merlin site.