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.
Apps
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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.
EnsĹŤ is a writing tool that helps you enter a state of flow.
Basically, you write, and EnsĹŤ only allows you to see the most recent lines you've typed. The previous words become invisible so you're not tempted go back and make changes. The Backspace button on your keyboard works, but the arrows don't. So, if you are tempted to go back, you're deleting, not moving the cursor to make changes.
Done writing? Hit the download button in the top left of the screen and a txt file of what you've written drops into your documents folder. Easy-peasy.
It's free on the web, or there's a pay-for-it app. The only thing missing is a Dark Mode.
