Yury Molodtsov

The Age of the Polymath

Thu, 14 May 2026 20:19:00 +0000

I’ve tried working in so many areas. I used to code and wanted to become a developer. I did a bit of design. I love photography. I did venture investing. The outcome of this is a career as a generalist. And being a little bit of everything sometimes felt like a disadvantage because the world rewarded the people around who went deep on something.

It turned out the breadth was useful anyway. I could talk to anyone and translate the ideas between engineers, executives, and reporters. That’s what I’m doing daily working in comms. But I always wondered what I would have built if I’d just picked one thing.

Not anymore. Because using AI and agentic engineering to their full potential requires having at least the basics of all those skills simultaneously. The things I knew a little about — code, design, copy, marketing — suddenly composed and compounded.

“An app designed by a developer” has been a meme for a reason. You’ve likely seen them and used them. They exist because developers know how to code and build software, even if they don’t know how to design it. As long as the app was uniquely useful, people would take it anyway. Meanwhile, designers couldn’t build much on their own. PMs can’t do much without either role.

With AI, the breadth of knowledge finally pays off. What matters is having ideas and applying taste, Rick Rubin-style. You no longer have to be an expert in all of these areas. But you must come up with ideas to build, and it’s up to you how great they turn out.

In my view, vibe-coded apps can be extremely polished and pleasant to use. In fact, far better than 90% of the software you might have on your computer or in your browser. Apple’s platforms have long had a culture of small, polished apps and tools, but even those are quite rare these days. And most web apps are quite primitive, especially in the B2B space, which is why companies like Linear have been so successful.

For the best result, it definitely helps to know what NextJS, Tailwind, Postgres, and many other words mean. Agents can make all the choices for you, but if you can’t evaluate them, there could be issues.

Any time I’m building a new side project these days, I get it to a place where I’d feel great releasing it to the public, even if it’s just for myself. I just can’t do it any other way. That means a polished UI, animated interactions, fine-tuned light and dark modes, beautiful custom icons, etc. I use these apps daily, so I want them to be great.

I only stop short of releasing the app when there are specific reasons. I’m writing this post in Elsendo, a web-based note-taking app I created with shareable links. That implies both server costs and an infinite potential for illegal content from piracy to CSAM. That’s not something I want to deal with in a free app and since it’s minimal, I’m not sure many people would pay for this, although the new owner of Evernote presumably believes it’s worth $250 a year. But I wanted this exact thing for years, nobody built it and now I have it. It’s open source.

Gathering fascinating bits and links is my favorite thing ever, which is why I’ve recently built Mimir, a knowledge management app that aggregates articles, links, highlights, and more in one app. It has browser extensions and connects to X and Readwise APIs. Add Stripe, and it’d be ready to go. But it’s too heavily inspired by a few existing tools, plus I want ultimate freedom in how it will work. So it’s just for me.

This is the best part about building your own apps. Need a feature? You don’t have to wait or pester the developer, who likely has other ideas. Just build it. Some are harder than others but there’s a good chance the agent will do this for you. And running such an app for yourself isn’t a big burden. Occasionally, you see a bug and fix it. Over time, there are fewer and fewer of them. Or none.

Most of my things are public. Since the previous post on this, I launched Syndicator, my intelligent RSS reader (think of it as a modern Google Reader replacement). And there are smaller tools and utilities, like a fast natural language timezones converter or MacPod, a virtual iPod that controls music on your Mac’s screen. I love reading Hacker News sometimes but never liked their 2000-era website or any of the third-party clients, so I built Hack and Cheese.

Some of those were built in 30 minutes on a Sunday evening. I usually had to spend more time on polishing in the next days but I continue using it, so polishing, adding obvious features, and fixing bugs is a good way to spend time for me. Because I actually enjoy this process a lot!

Here are some things I learned.

***

Models. Opus and Codex have never been closer, but Opus still excels in design. It’s a pricier option in terms of limits, so you can ask Opus to plan the app and create visual mockups of the interface, then ask Codex to build on top of them. Without supervision and hand-holding, it adds too many gradients, uniform buttons, useless text labels, and other noise.

Agents. I read about people who just build things with OpenClaw and don’t understand how they do it. Yesterday, I finally pulled the trigger on building my own little Pinterest and decided I’d just give it to OpenClaw. Despite using the same GPT 5.5 model as Codex, it ignored my mockups and made extremely silly choices, like wiring the context menu buttons to a POST delete request. Claude Code or Codex would never do something like this, so use them — the harness matters a lot.

Serverless. Vercel and Netlify are great platforms for little web apps because they are essentially free until you get big (but also rapidly become very expensive afterward, so be careful). You will also have to pay for most additional features, sometimes quite basic ones, like a database. Most of my side projects are hosted there.

VPS. Don’t be afraid of the VPS. Agents can set everything up and help you manage them. I recommend Hetzner because it is roughly three times cheaper than DigitalOcean today. Be mindful that the default agent behavior can expose vulnerabilities through open ports and user-accessible APIs. And on a VPS, all those problems will be exploited. The first time I launched a server, it was taken over by a mining bot in about 10 minutes. My best practices for deployments are in agents.md now. Push your agent to think about it and close the ports.

You can also take any local agent or OpenClaw and ask it to pentest your app. Then use this report to fix things.

***

The rise of agents poses many interesting questions we can’t answer yet. For one, it definitely seems that the value of these vibe-coded apps is unproven. Some become more popular than others and get engagement, but as a few creators noted on X, competing is extremely difficult because “competitors” can copy most of your features the next day. Everyone is building a Markdown editor these days (I also have my own). Yes, it’s become easier for you, but also for everyone else. So you can only win through superior distribution, attention to detail, or by making apps that do truly complicated things nobody can repeat with two prompts.

Scalability is another question. Every other month, Vercel generates a social media story about some creator getting a crazy bill, and then the CEO has to come down personally and void it. But the apps at least scale and work. If you create something that gets millions of users as a monolith on a VPS or AWS, can agents help you scale it?

Finally, we’re seeing more and more people in all roles being pushed to contribute to the codebase. Designers, PMs, and non-technical CEOs themselves are getting into development. It will clearly become an expectation for most people in tech companies, but does it mean the wall around software development as a role will become more permeable as well, or not?

And will the next Notion or Linear start as a vibe-coded product or is it always going to be limited to people building personal projects or adding features to existing ones?

It’s an extremely interesting and exciting time. Especially for polymaths. I know the word was (is) overused in Silicon Valley and is too generous for this concept, but no better word exists. And yes, there are true polymaths out there, people who can build delightful full-stack apps with great design and copy without any AI and I’m fascinated by their ability.

But if you’ve always known just a little code, a little design, a little writing — this is a great moment for you. Because you don’t need to know how to write code, you just need to know what code can do.

We’re in the age of the polymath.

Readr, Safari-like Reading Mode for Chrome

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:24:00 +0000

One thing that Safari does well is its Reading Mode. The people who built it are brilliant, and no other browser can truly match the beauty and seamlessness. But I prefer Dia (or any other Chromium-based browser to Safari, really). They don’t have it. Chrome presumably got an update, but so far, I’m still not seeing it.

Which is why a few months ago, I built and released Readr, a reader mode extension for Chrome. I’ve been using it basically every day since then and made countless tweaks and optimizations. I really enjoy the place where it is right now.

Readr extracts the core text from most web pages, with images, videos and other media content. It’s not perfect but any time I find a website where it fails I dig in and figure out the heuristics to fix it.

The extension also works on Twitter and transforms any threads into articles that you can easily skim with no UI noise. And in the last update, I added support for YouTube. Readr can now extract chapters and transcripts with clickable timer marks from videos that have those. It’s great for long podcasts where you want to find something specific and jump straight to that place.

Readr is available on the Chrome Web Store.

Why I've Built Syndicator

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:20:00 +0000

Over the last two months, I’ve done all my news reading through Syndicator. It’s an app I built, and I’m releasing it to the public now.

Syndicator is a ranked, personalized reading app. It pulls news sites, blogs, YouTube videos and Substacks into one place, then learns from what you actually read, skip, save, and share.

Algorithms have a bad rep, but I 100% believe they can be fantastic when they’re optimized to help you. I don’t want the app to be “engaging”. I want you to open it, scan everything that happened, and close it for the day. Follow everything, miss nothing.

No folders, no tedious manual organization. Just read and save what you’re interested in, and Syndicator will adjust on the fly. It also groups overlapping coverage so you can compare framing across outlets.

Syndicator is designed to provide a great reading experience. It can distill pages and show you just their text. Supports keyboard shortcuts for all key actions. And it can be installed on desktop or mobile as a Progressive Web App.

You can make your profile public and follow other people. The articles and posts they share end up right in your feed. And your profile even has its own RSS — it’s basically a linklog. Here’s my profile.

Syndicator is free in beta. Sign up here!

Shiori, A Novel Bookmarking App

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:14:00 +0000

Bookmarking apps are a cursed category. So many attempts, so many failures. Remember Pocket? Omnivore? All buried under the sands of indifference.

And I can see why. It’s a hard category to break through and an even harder one to make sustainable. Users want the service, but hardly anybody wants to pay for it. Readwise Reader, which I’ve used for the last 3 years, has achieved a lot, but it also costs a lot and still feels like opening an airplane control panel sometimes. Safari technically has a Reading List, but I never figured out how to actually archive items in it.

Which is why I was really enamoured by Shiori, a new app from Brian Lovin. On the surface, it seems extremely simplistic, but as Steve Jobs said, “design is how it works”, and Shiori operates very uniquely.

On the surface, it’s just a list of links that you saved. There’s no text extraction other than a minimum distilled description. Click a link and read it in the browser. Which might already be a good environment for this. You can turn on Safari’s Reading Mode or if you use Chrome, feel free to install Readr, my reader mode extension that simulates it. But Shiori does know what’s inside those links. You can use its AI to chat with any link or all of them, ask questions, or summarize.

If a website from which you saved the link has an RSS feed, you can subscribe to all updates right within Shiori and get new articles. Found a Substack post that you liked? You can follow the author right from there. It’s a beautiful reimagination of the feed. Very few people use RSS these days, and even fewer know what it is. Shiori makes it simple. This is what I mean by a truly beautiful, unique design. Not just the way this app looks, but how it actually works, its features, their logic, the interactions.

And if you prefer email newsletters, Shiori provides you with a personal address that you can forward anything to, either separate emails or set up a filter for entire categories, and read them inside the app. You can also just upload files, like a PDF.

Bookmarking tweets on X is like stuffing factoids into a file cabinet. You will never open it again. Shiori auto-saves new X bookmarks and summarizes them so you can easily remember the context. And there’s a global search on top of this.

Shiori doesn’t necessarily have apps, but it’s a Progressive Web App that you can install in Chrome and Safari and on iOS and Android. And there’s a Chrome Extension and an iOS shortcut that make saving new links seamless.

You can import links to Shiori and you can export data from it if needed; there’s also a Notion connector. And, as a truly modern app, it has an MCP server that you can connect to your agent (like Claude Code) and do whatever you want with those links.

Shiori offers a generous free tier with unlimited links, along with two paid tiers. Here’s what’s locked behind each of them:

$3: richer content extraction, such as YouTube transcripts, file upload, audio transcription, and color themes
$10: AI chat, X bookmarks auto-sync, Notion sync, email forwarding

I still use Readwise Reader, since my entire history is saved there, along with specific quotes and highlights, which are then resurfaced through Readwise — this is probably the most important part that ensures I actually learn something from this hoarding. But now I mostly use it for long-form texts I wanted to read sometime and prefer Shiori for everything else, such as the links I find for Five Finds.

The Sad State of Web Browsers

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 12:54:44 +0000

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re doing so through a web browser—one of the most critical pieces of software on your device. Browsers have morphed from just one of the apps into the backbone of modern computing. Web apps like Google Docs, Notion, Figma, and Slack have effectively turned them into operating systems in their own right, handling everything from work to creativity to communication. And yet, despite their importance, most browsers feel stuck in a time warp, unable to keep pace with this reality. A few years ago, I was optimistic about the future of browsing. Now? I’m not so sure.

Some of you might ask what I’m even talking about. 3 billion people use Chrome are are just fine with it. But in my view, browsers are stuck(I wrote that story 5 years ago). Most of them are still about browsing webpages, not apps, and Chrome, curiously, hasn’t evolved its “Chrome” (the part of the app around the content) much since its inception.

Back in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I had high hopes. New players like Mighty, Sidekick, and Arc emerged, promising to rethink what a browser could be. Mighty tried to offload rendering to the cloud for speed, Sidekick aimed to streamline workflows for busy executives, and Arc has become a beloved tool by many tech enthusiasts. Built by The Browser Company, Arc didn’t just tweak the edges of the browser experience; it tore up the blueprint and started over. It treated the web like a workspace, with a sidebar for pinned apps and persistent documents, Spaces that separated different contexts, and a UI that felt like it was designed for using the web apps, not just surfing the web. For me and many others, it was a breath of fresh air.

But Arc’s story didn’t end happily. Today, it’s effectively on life support. The Browser Company has shifted focus to a new project called Dia, an AI-first browser set to launch in 2025. Arc’s bold UI was too unfamiliar for the average user, and despite its cult following among tech nerds (myself included), it never broke through to the mainstream. Also, there still was a question of how they’d make money. Free browsers are the norm, and without a clear business model, even the most innovative ideas can die. Dia’s AI-first approach sounds intriguing, but we know nothing about it yet.

Meanwhile, Chrome reigns supreme. Google’s browser commands over 60% of the global market. But let’s be honest—its UI is a fossil. Pinned tabs and a horizontal tab bar? That’s it? Look, if somebody has 50 open tabs that are condensed into tiny squares with icons, it means your UI paradigm has failed. The only meaningful update in a decade was tab groups, which feel like a half-hearted nod to the organization since Google asks you to keep them persistent and eliminates them as soon as the last tab is closed. Want to separate work from personal? Tread carefully or spend time recreating these groups–forever. Chrome’s reading mode is a joke—buried in a clunky sidebar that looks like an afterthought. Chrome wins in terms of its ecosystem and developer adoption. But even here, they faltered by switching to Manifest V3 and killing multiple extensions in the process, from UBlock to simple little utilities.

Chrome's Reading Mode is just mockery.

On iOS, it’s even worse. The Chrome team seems uninterested in building for iPhones and iPads, leaving users with a second-class experience (although Chrome on Android isn’t that much better). Many people are saying that Google has no interest because they’re forced to use WebKit there, but I don’t buy it. Nothing prevents them from providing a great overall user experience and taking over users this way. 35% viewers of my blog use Safari, and most of these come from iOS.

Chrome’s main issue is the fact Google’s priority isn’t your browsing experience—it’s search and ads. That’s it.

Then there’s Safari. I’ll give it credit: the UI is nice, much nicer than Chrome. Native tab groups work great (frankly, this wasn’t true for about 3 major OS version after their release) and are persistent, the reading list syncs seamlessly across devices, and it feels like it was built with care. But Safari stumbles where it matters most—web app compatibility. Some modern web tools choke on Safari’s WebKit engine, forcing users back to Chrome. Apple also insists on treating extensions like Mac apps which shrinks the ecosystem–many great tools just aren’t available. Even extensions like 1Password struggle with inconsistent performance. Safari’s a dream for casual browsing, but for power users, it’s a beautiful cage.

Safari is the best if you're satisfied with it the way it is.

One pet peeve is that Safari doesn’t have a shortcut to switch between two recent tabs. Actually, Chrome doesn’t. But Chrome at least have an extension.

The Chrome forks—Edge and Brave—offer some relief, but they’re not the ultimate solution. Microsoft Edge started strong, but over time, it got bloated with Microsoft’s usual baggage—ads, forced Bing integration, and a nagging sense that it’s trying to sell you something they don’t even understand themselves. Brave feels gimmicky to a lot of people because of its focus on crypto, but it innovates in terms of the UI and provides a somewhat polished experience.

What about Firefox? Once a beacon of open-source hope, it’s now a shadow of its former self with less than 2% of the market share. I just hope that the bonuses of the Mozilla Foundation’s executives are tied to that number. Now, a new browser called Zen has stepped in as an Arc replacement by leveraging Gecko, Firefox’s engine. But Zen inherits the usual open-source baggage: rough edges, inconsistent performance, and the perpetual question of longevity. Open-source projects aimed at consumers often struggle with polish and funding—Zen’s no exception.

This brings us to the core problem: browsers are hard. We’ve been conditioned to expect them for free, which leaves development in the hands of tech giants with their agendas. Google wants to direct you to Google Search, Apple wants you locked into its ecosystem, and Microsoft wants to push its services. Smaller players like The Browser Company or Zen’s creators can’t compete without a sustainable model. Mighty shut down in 2023, Sidekick faded into obscurity, and Arc’s fate feels sealed.

So where does that leave us? In a pretty sad place. Browsers are the most important apps on our devices, yet they’re either coasting on inertia (Chrome), hampered by ecosystem quirks (Safari), or fighting an uphill battle (everyone else). Arc showed us what’s possible when someone dares to rethink the UI for a web-first world, but its retreat proves how tough it is to break through. Edge and Brave merely tweak the Chrome formula, and Zen tries to resurrect Firefox’s spirit.

But we might have a new browser war on our hands. AI companies have figured out that to own the consumer endpoint, they have to become browsers themselves. Probably for the same reason I outlined in the beginning—browsers are the OS. Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, recently announced plans for Comet, an AI-driven browser. OpenAI has also hinted at browser ambitions and launched Operator, their web-focused AI agent. And even though the Arc’s team has largely abandoned their mobile app, I still use their AI search sometimes—it’s pretty good, and for certain use cases, whether it’s shopping for gearо or getting walkthrough tips for my current game, it’s still better than Perplexity. Most importantly, AI providers actually do have a business model—charge subscriptions to your heavy users. Most likely, they will find a way to generate money for free users as well. So they will have both incentives and the means to support an entire browser.

Could this spark the next browser war? We’ll see. If so, we as users will definitely benefit from more competition.

Omnivore is Dead: Where to Go Next

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:37:42 +0000

Omnivore was the best read-later app for most people. It was quite modern yet had a generous free tier. Yesterday the team informed the world that they got acquihired by ElevenLabs. The app will go offline and all the data will be deleted by November 15th.

It’s sad but almost should have been expected. Read-later apps are an extremely niche product, so you must be able to monetize a very small customer base successfully. I suppose the Omnivore team couldn’t, precisely because most people were drawn to the app because it was “free”.

Omnivore famously was open source. This should work as a cautionary tale for blindly trusting the “open source” label. All it means is that the code repo is out there. For this to become a viable service, someone needs to invest resources into developing it, paying server costs, and shipping mobile apps. And while subreddits are filled with people asking anyone to do this, I doubt that it will happen or be more successful than the Omnivore itself (why would it?).

Productivity apps exist in a limbo. The basic functionality is usually covered by the OS and the browser, such as the Safari Reading List. And there are only so many people who require more, and even fewer of them will be ready to pay you $5/$10/$15 in perpetuity.

What are your options if you’re looking for another app?

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is a powerful read-later app from Readwise. It is a service that collects all the highlights you left in Kindle, Apple Books, and various apps to send daily or weekly digests and remind you about the stuff you read and found important or interesting.

The biggest downside for most people is it costs $10 a month. At the same time, Readwise seems to be the only company in this game that has built a viable business you can expect to have at least some longevity. Ultimately, if you aren’t paying for a service, don’t be surprised when it dies.

This is the best app of this kind. If anything, it might have too many features for my liking, although it’s highly customizable. And the integration with Readwise is the best part. Hoarding text like a squirrel is pretty useless unless you learn something. Readwise constantly reminds you about your highlights. Sometimes I get an email and reread the article where it came from, often with a fresh perspective.

Readwise also added the import support for the Omnivore format, so request that backup before November 15th.

Matter

Matter is another read-later app closer to a modern take on minimalist Instapaper. It’s pretty good and has a free tier. In 2022, they moved most of the features behind a paid plan, but it’s really hard to decipher what they offer right now. There’s a $15-a-month subscription (with a steep annual discount) that offers advanced AI transcription, better speech generation for articles, and integrations with other services.

Unfortunately, it always seemed like the app would follow the Omnivore path, but it is still chugging along five years in. You might like it if you want something simple.

GoodLinks

GoodLinks is a read-later app for the Apple ecosystem and this is its entire differentiator. First, you get native apps for MacOS and iOS, which is awesome. Another advantage of the Apple ecosystem is that instead of running servers, developers can simply use CloudKit, which absolves a lot of costs and complexity, enabling single developers and small teams to build apps like these.

It was recently updated and now supports highlights, which was the biggest problem for me. However, it also shifted from a one-time payment to a subscription model. You pay $9.99 for the base app, and then some features are gated behind GoodLinks Premium, which adds $4.99.

Pocket or Instapaper

For the love of God, stop using these old dinosaurs. Well, I’ve actually heard that Instapaper has received meaningful updates, but I definitely wouldn’t trust Mozilla to make Pocket a great service.

Built-in Apps

Finally, you can simply use built-in apps. Safari has Reading List that integrates with Apple Notes and allows you to create your own free Readwise if needed. Chrome and other browsers also have rudimentary reading lists you can use.

The Ode to Apple Notes

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 17:38:26 +0000

When I got my first MacBook in 2014, the thing that impressed me the most was how many built-in apps MacOS had and how good a lot of them actually were.

Windows wasn’t like this and we were used to installing third-party apps for literally everything: a proper browser surfing the web, something to listen to music and watch videos, Nero Burning ROM (of course). When I used Windows XP, I had to use an app for dialing dial-up internet, because the native one was so much worse.

Apple showed me a different world, where default apps are good enough for most people. Safari was much better than Internet Explorer. Pages and Numbers are great for personal use (and I have used the former for many years without lawyers noticing). I’m still not a fan of Mail.app but many people use it just fine. Finally, you get Reminders and Notes.

And all these apps have improved dramatically since then. To the point where you could use them almost exclusively. If Jack Dorsey can run two public companies with Apple Notes, I’m sure you can do something useful, too!

jack dorsey (@jack) is forever goated to run twitter (and square) thru just his notes app. pic.twitter.com/tH0ZtiwDhe
— gaurav (@gaxrav) August 30, 2024

Yes, they aren’t groundbreaking, but you can always be sure these apps will be there and continue developing. As a bonus, there are no separate subscriptions.

Apple Notes is one of the most powerful apps in Apple’s ecosystem. It’s become increasingly complex, powered by features like tags, internal links, rich previews, and good search with OCR. And it’s still easy to pick up and use. You’d be hard-pressed to find a comparable alternative; they are usually much simpler or much more complex (like Obsidian).

This is where the famous meme comes from.

Some lesser-known features expand the functionality even further. For example, if you use Safari for browsing, you can create your own personal Readwise for free. Select any text you want to highlight and save it as a Quick Note.

And the next time you open that URL in Safari, the highlight will be there! You can keep such notes in a separate folder, and you can categorize them or run a search to find something in partilcular.

You can clip literally anything to Notes. There are iOS shortcuts to save entire articles. You can paste images, like charts, and then easily find them by any label thanks to OCR. I have an entire folder dedicated to stuff likes this.

Until Apple improves Journal, Notes is a better way to keep a diary. Again, just create a separate folder. And while you can’t icons for folders, you can just add an emoji at the beginning of its name.

As long as your partner or family members also use iPhones, you can easily share notes to plan trips, create wishlists, or collect important numbers and addresses. Maybe you love Notion, but I can assure you, most people around you would find Notes much more approachable.

That’s the catch with Apple’s ecosystem. It works best when you go all-in and it’s not always an option. I prefer Arc for work and use a bunch of other third-party apps like Things 3. Still, many of them are exclusive to MacOS and iOS.

For the areas where Notes might fall short, there’s ProNotes. It’s an extension that adds multiple features, including Markdown support, slash commands, a formatting bar, an omnibar search, bidirectional links, and templates. It’s only on MacOS, of course, but this is where you also need these features the most.

***

Other apps are also extremely capable.

Safari gets a lot of hate but it is a very well-rounded browser. Compared to Chrome, it provides a seamless experience and feature parity between platforms. Safari’s implementation of Tab Groups is also much better than Chrome’s, mostly because they’re persistent, and like tabs, they sync very well between platforms. There’s a built-in Reading List that replaces the need for Pocket or Instapaper (Readwise Reader is better, but not everyone needs it). The new tab page is actually useful and doesn’t try to show you news. Safari might struggle with heavier web apps, but most people won’t notice any issues.

Reminders have turned into a very capable task manager. Before spending money on Todoist, TickTick or something else, give it a try. You can have multiple lists, repeatable tasks with subtasks, tags, and location-based reminders. And shared lists are the easiest way to keep a single grocery list with your partner or plan your entire life if you’re one of these people. And there are third-party apps that improve the functionality of Reminders, like Reminders MenuBar, which lets you quickly access the app and add new tasks.

iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia also get a dedicated Passwords app that removes most of the need for third-party services like 1Password or Bitwarden. I just wish it happened years ago.

Why Arc is The Best Browser

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 14:17:41 +0000

Arc is an alternative Chrome-based browser with a unique interface. It’s become so popular that The Verge reports on pretty minor updates. I switched to it quite early and haven’t looked back.

Browsers are the most important apps we have on our computers right now. Whether you like it or not, the application layer has shifted to the web. But as I wrote back in 2020, browsers haven’t caught up.

Look at Google Chrome right now. It’s essentially the same browser that launched in 2008. The only recent major update was Tab Groups, which happened in 2020 and they are still subpar. For one, groups aren’t persistent and I can’t understand the logic behind this. You create a “Work” group, open a bunch of tabs, close them… and the group disappears. Want to “work” again? Create it, name it, and choose the color. Every time.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome was invented for web surfing: it lets you open a bunch of almost static web pages and read their content. Now, we have entire apps like Figma, Linear, and Spotify running in web browsers, and Chrome’s interface hasn’t been adapted at all. All Chrome can offer is pinning them as tabs. No considerations have been made to help people manage their tabs.

The development of Chrome’s interface was also remarkably slow and inconsistent. Chrome on Android would get Reading List, iOS wouldn’t, and it’d then take them years to bring this to the desktop and set up syncing. I’ve just tried Chrome’s current Read Mode on desktop, and it can only show you text side-by-side with a page for some reason.

You can also turn PWAs into “desktop” apps. But this option is a bit hidden, and most of Google’s own apps, except Photos and Maps, don’t support it. Where are PWAs for Gmail, Calendar, and Docs? I suppose Google would prefer you to use Chrome, where you’re always a click away from Google Search and its ads.

Now, Chrome isn’t the only browser. But Firefox’s UI is not too different. Safari has its own issues, but at least it offers a cohesive experience. You get a complete browser out of the box, with a fantastic Reading Mode (still best in class), a synced Reading List, and much better Tab Groups. Now, because Apple isn’t great at cloud, the two previous features just stopped working properly for me for a few major MacOS versions, but right now, they do work. Plus, browser extensions are quite important to me, and even though Safari adopted the same standard as Chrome and Firefox, developers still need to do separate work to distribute them.

But at its core, Safari can only offer pinned tabs (which are incredibly small squares). It can also suddenly kill your Google Meet tab with an active call because it “consumes too many resources” (this happened to me).

I often hear the claim that companies don’t need to invest in their iOS browsers because they still have to use Safari’s Webkit. I don’t buy it at all. For one, Brave has been pretty good at creating a nice experience across all platforms, as I outlined in a different post.

What Makes Arc Different

Arc became the first credible and ambitious attempt to reinvent web browsing that was actually able to get traction. It wasn’t the only one or the first one. I listed some options here. Some of them died, some dragged on.

Arc’s most important part is its sidebar. And vertical tabs! At first, you might feel like you’re losing too much space. But most websites right now don’t take as much width anyway, except for the likes of Webflow or Figma. Everything else looks fine, even on a 13’ MacBook. In return, you can keep lots of tabs open and still see most of the titles. Out of major browsers, only Edge and Brave offer vertical tabs now.

In the sidebar, you get three distinctive groups of tabs.

The first is for the favorites, but I mostly use it for applications: email, calendar, Spotify, Notion, Readwise Reader, Google Docs, and anything I use constantly. When you close such a tab, its instance is terminated, but the icon stays there in the same position as a bookmark. Mouse targets are generous and don’t take up too much space.

Next go the bookmarks. Anything you’d like to have handy, but now you get the titles. And you can put them in folders. One of the adoption hurdles for Arc is that it doesn’t get traditional separate Bookmarks, so I put mine right here. The persistence is also there.

Only then do you get traditional tabs that you lose when you close them. Arc treats them so harshly that they are automatically closed after some time, which can’t be more than a month (a bit excessive if you ask me).

On top of this, Arc offers Spaces, which are essentially tab groups. You can create multiple spaces that would share your Favorites but have dedicated Bookmarks and Tabs. I have one for primary browsing, one for sales, one for reading the media and one for software development.

There’s a joke that there are two groups of people. The first has no more than 5 tabs, the second has no less than two hundred. Arc is perfect for both, but especially for tab hoarders.

On top of this, Arc offers multiple quality-of-life improvements:

You can switch between tabs in a loop with a quick preview, just like you switch between apps with Cmd-Tab (Alt-Tab).
The autocomplete in the new tab popover prioritizes currently opened tabs, so you can switch by typing part of their name.
There’s a shortcut to copy the current URL, which I probably use 20 times a day.
You can click a button and sort all of your opened tabs by categories, creating order out of chaos.
You get little custom benefits, like picture-in-picture for Google Meet, always available media controls, countdowns to your next meeting with Google or Notion Calendar, etc.

One criticism I sometimes hear about Arc is that it’s based on Chromium. Nobody cares. Chromium is the most advanced browsing engine, powering most apps people use. And it’s definitely not IE6, especially not the one I remember. IE6 was a bad browser that held the entire web development industry hostage. Chrome was the first to implement many standards. It won. Give up.

Then, we have the obvious challenge of monetization. Safari has Apple, Chrome has Google, Mozilla has… erm, Google, and Brave has their own ads on the blockchain. Arc is built by the Browsing Company, a venture-backed startup that needs to grow and either IPO (seems ambitious) or sell. The only way I see this happening is a subscription for advanced features, probably with a team collaboration angle.

But I’ve worked with a company utilizing this exact path and can say it’s not easy. Arc indeed got a great PMF score from me, but I’m wondering if they will be able to offer such compelling features enough that people would pay.

I have to say, I don't know what I'd use if @arcinternet disappeared tomorrow

Would be extremely disappointed
— Yury Molodtsov ⚡️ (@y_molodtsov) October 24, 2023

***

I haven’t been this excited about the browser in a long time. But at the end of the day, we have just one outlier, and I wish Arc all the best.

My Default Apps

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:04:58 +0000

I saw this post on Matt Birchler’s blog and thought it was an excellent format to share what apps and services I use daily. You can check out posts from other people here.

✉️ Mail service: Gmail
📬 Mail client: Superhuman
✅ Tasks: Things 3
📰 RSS service: Feedly
📲 RSS client: Reeder
🗞️ News: ~~Artifact~~
📚 Books: Amazon Kindle
⌨️ Launcher: Raycast
☁️ Cloud storage: iCloud + OneDrive
🌅 Photo library: iCloud
🤳🏻 Photo editing: Capture One + Darkroom
🌐 Web browser: Arc on Mac, Safari on iPhone and iPad
📆 Calendar: Cron
📖 Reading: Readwise Reader
🌤️ Weather: Carrot Weather
🎙️ Podcasts: Overcast
🎶 Music: Spotify
🛹 Clipboard manager: Raycast
🔐 Passwords: 1Password
💸 Budgeting: Numbers
💬 Transcriptions: MacWhisper
🐘 Mastodon: Mona
🍿 Movie discovery/tracking: Sequel
🌮 Recipes: Mela
🖼️ Screenshots: CleanShot X
📝 Notes: Apple Notes
✈️ Flight tracking: App in the Air
📦 Package tracking: Parcel

Updated on Sep 17, 2024

Why Superhuman Is Worth $30

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 10:09:35 +0000

Superhuman is a productivity-focused email app initially designed for founders and executives that has massively expanded its focus since then. Its “the fastest email experience ever made” tagline is well-deserved. It’s also known as an email app that charges $30 a month and amassed over 200,000 on its waitlist, which made many people believe it’s obnoxious.

I’ve been a user of Superhuman since its early days (in fact, we invested in the company). I think it’s indispensable for people who deal with email a lot. This is enabled by many different things, forming a unique software experience I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Superhuman is fast. It’s a web app, but it’s the fastest web app I have ever seen. I mostly use it as a pinned tab, and there’s an Electron wrapper if you need one. All interactions are rapid yet smooth. But it goes deeper. Superhuman breaks the age-old concept of GUI and consciously eliminates UI elements like menus and buttons unless they’re critical. Instead, it pushes you to learn keyboard shortcuts and operate like a power user. In case you forgot or if you need to access a rare, more convoluted function, there’s a powerful Cmd-K Command Bar that has become a standard for powerful productivity-focused apps. And Superhuman’s natural language processing is genuinely one of the best.

As a result, the app is clean and streamlined. It’s almost impossible to miss an important email. One of my friends working in VC said this was the reason he’s paying for Superhuman, simply because missing a particular email could become a major problem for them one day. And if you need to deal with something later, it has fantastic Remind Me functionality.

Superhuman has a self-explanatory Split Inbox feature, allowing you to filter all emails into dedicated folders. If you’re asking how this is different from Gmail labels, you should understand that a) all splits are right in your face at all times, and b) you can cycle between them with one keystroke. It’s more similar to Gmail categories like Forums or Social, except you can create them yourself and as many as you need.

I have specific categories for calendar invites, emails related to our recruiting efforts, finances, pitching conversations, and others.

One thing many apps miss the mark with is their mobile apps. Superhuman doesn’t. Its iOS and Android apps are, of course, different, but they have all the necessary functionality for you to do things on the go.

***

Everything I described above can be helpful for anyone dealing with email. Now, one of the reasons I’m willing to pay that much is specifically because I use Superhuman in my work when pitching stories and announcements to journalists. It was just as relevant when I was talking to founders, other investors, and Limited Partners when I worked in VC. And it could come in handy for many other areas.

Superhuman has Read Status tracking. It even started a controversy a few years ago, which, in my opinion, was way overblown (but it’s good they removed IP and geography tracking from it). Now, one aspect of pitching reporters is that they get a ton of emails and rarely reply. If I see that they read my pitch and ignored it, I don’t have to follow up. Of course, there is similar functionality in other email apps (which aren’t free as well) and Gmail extensions like Mailtrack. But these extensions never integrate well. This was one of the original ideas behind Superhuman. Its founders built and sold Rapportive, a Gmail extension connecting with LinkedIn, and realized that many people used half a dozen of similar extensions at any time. Superhuman is a brand-new app that comes with these functions baked in.

And then there are little things they never even boast about. For instance, if you worked with Gmail a lot, you know its text formatting is a mess. You write something in Google Docs, paste it into Gmail, it looks completely natural, and you send it only for the receiver to get an email with a giant font you never intended (sometimes it only breaks in mobile Gmail which is even worse). Cleaning all the formatting could help, but what if you need the text to use bold/italic and links? When you paste text into Superhuman, it preserves that and removes font and size inconsistencies. The entire app is filled with these wonderful little things.

***

Is Superhuman perfect? No. For me, there are still issues. The primary one is the pace of development. The team shifted focus to money-making audiences of enterprise clients, sales teams, and Outlook users; as a result, the app has barely seen any improvements for the single-player mode in years, with AI being the only major update.

There are things I’d love to see in Superhuman. One is more advanced attachments search and management functionality, similar to what you can find in Outlook and Hey. I often had issues finding “that lost version of the agreement signed by both sides”. Certain aspects of the email workflow remain the same as they were a decade ago and I don’t believe they can’t be improved.

The main reason Superhuman is able to charge so much for an email app is that there isn’t any real competition. Mac users can try out Mimestream, a lovely Gmail client with a native app available on a much cheaper subscription. But it has no iOS app and probably won’t have one any time soon. Apple’s Mail.app is conceptually outdated and a bit slow since it relies on IMAP. Gmail’s iOS app is barebones. Outlook for iOS is actually nice, but it had the same bugs driving me crazy for several years, and the desktop version is much more convoluted. Spark was OK but wasn’t that much better, and I lost my outgoing emails on too many occasions for me to trust it again. Twobird is an interesting newer entrant, but I’ve seen so many services emerge and die over the years I don’t have much confidence yet.

Frankly, there isn’t a single iOS-capable email app I could recommend to someone. And this is pathetic.

The truth of the matter is building a capable email app is incredibly difficult. Creating a sustainable business on top of one is even more challenging. At least Superhuman seems to be doing both of these things together.

If you want to try it, here’s my referral link.

Web Apps Are Better Than No Apps

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:10:31 +0000

There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this idea too religiously.

First, what is a native app? It’s an app built using the native frameworks of a platform. For MacOS it could be SwiftUI. Such apps leverage the native platform’s interface, including windows, buttons, text areas, and everything else. They look right and familiar, and they behave this way. And most of the time, they’re smooth and fast. Historically, this has been the way to build applications for any platform.

But the Web has advanced so much from the early pages with hyperlinks that it’s now a platform for applications. Modern JavaScript runtimes, reactive frameworks (e.g. React), and platform APIs allow developers to use web technologies to build apps running on desktop operating systems. And this has largely become the preferred way to create new apps by now. If you use Slack, Notion, Spotify, or Todoist, then you’ve seen it. Their desktop applications are effectively just wrappers, usually built with a technology called Electron (Spotify isn’t though). And people hate Electron.

Here are the main problems people point out in web apps.

***

Memory consumption

Each Electron app basically carries a large part of Google Chrome in it and has to keep it running. Naturally, this isn’t great for memory consumption. Of course, Notion is a complex app by itself, but in comparison, the native app for Apple Notes usually takes around just 120Mb for me.

This particular problem is impossibly difficult to solve. In fact, you might save a bit of resources by simply running all the same apps in your browser, since it will at least be able to share some resources and offload tabs when they’re needed.

They might be slow

Electron apps are known to be slow. There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++.

Still, in my experience, this isn’t necessarily the defining characteristic of a web app. Superhuman is insanely quick. Todoist is also seamless enough. While VS Code is sluggish, it still performs better than Atom did. Unfortunately, such apps are rare exceptions. Yes, the foundations are indeed slower, but at least some people are capable of writing quick web apps.

Feel free to share positive examples you’re aware of.

They have unique UI

Since web apps can’t just use the components provided by the operating system, they have to recreate everything from scratch. And this creates a lot of burden for developers and, I think, lowers the quality floor. Creating beautiful, compelling apps is possible, but it requires so much work. People building native apps get it all “for free”. In fact, this could be one of the reasons Apple still has such a vibrant ecosystem of great artisanal apps since developers can build most things out of nice ready-made components.

This also means users often must learn your app’s UI instead of relying on their muscle memory.

***

I’ve been focusing on desktop, but the same is happening on mobile, albeit at a smaller scale. Tools like React Native allow developers to build apps for iOS and Android. I’d say the “experience gap” is a bit larger on mobile. Notion famously started introducing more native components in their app, which instantly made it quicker and nicer to use. Still, their apps are largely web-based, which limits their functionality. For instance, it’s quite difficult to implement complete offline mode (Notion caches recently seen pages but nothing else).

Basecamp has a particularly good visual example of how this works, even though they use quite a “basic” approach.

***

Web apps are here to stay. There are fewer and fewer artisanal Mac apps these days, even though sometimes a jewel appears out of thin air, as it happened with Craft. Quite unusually, they have native apps for all of Apple’s platforms and a web app with the same functionality, which is useful for people on Windows, ChromeOS, or Linux.

Native apps do feel great. But they have their own challenges. The first and the most important one is making them cross-platform. If you’re a small developer, you might not have enough resources for this. And if you’re a big company, you don’t want to struggle to keep all your apps’ development in sync. Building a web app and wrapping it with Electron ends up being the most reasonable approach for most people.

So most of the time, our choice isn’t between native and web apps. You either have that useful app or you don’t because it didn’t make much sense for the developer. And while I like native apps and enjoy them when I have such an option, I’d rather have a web app than nothing.

If I use the app all the time, I’d want it to be at least quick (and ideally, native). But if I need it occasionally, I’d be OK with pretty much anything, as long as it’s useful and there’s nothing better. Also, we have seen evidence it’s humanly possible to build quick web apps. The fact most people don’t bother is a different question.

Sorry, But Google Meet Is Better Than Zoom

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 10:38:46 +0000

It seems that we’re finally getting out of this weird period of collective gaslighting where people tried to convince everyone Zoom was the best conference app out there.

I prefer Google Meet. It’s just better. I understand it was terrible pre-COVID as if Googlers never used it themselves. But they’ve caught up in a major way since then. Now it’s a very competent web app that gets out of your way and lets you talk to people. You open the link, and you’re right in the call. Meet doesn’t ask you to update anything.

Look, I’ve been working remotely since 2014. We used to have calls with the US, and most of the time, people would suggest calling their cell (despite the terrible voice quality). Then I started noticing Uber Conference and GoToMeeting, which were a bit clunky but at least used VoIP to provide clear voices.

When Zoom appeared, it made things simpler, in large part by simply becoming a common standard first for the tech industry and then for everyone else. As long as you had the app installed, you could quickly join the call, and most importantly, it was reasonable to expect your invitees wouldn’t freak out because of this link.

But Zoom was never great. It still has a very clunky and ugly interface for scheduling and calls. Try quickly figuring out how to share the invite link when you’re already on the call. And the best option to schedule a call was using Zoom add-ons in Google Calendar or another app. Try doing it from the web or in the app, it’s like a flight control system.

The worst part about Zoom is its nature as a native app. I have no idea who decided it’d be a good idea to check for updates when you open it 30 seconds before the meeting and then block you from joining the call until it’s done. Zoom does have a web app, but it doesn’t want you to use it and hides the very possibility (most people don’t even know it exists). Why does a simple app need blocking updates so often? Oh wait, it’s no longer as simple as it was.

Zoom is worth $20Bn now and was over $160Bn at its peak. Between its annoying install prompts, forgetting you’re logged in, and the add-ons nobody asked for, there’s a simple truth that Zoom’s functionality is a commodity. If you run a company, you already pay for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, which provide your employees with email, calendars, and video calls. So Zoom is desperately trying to justify its valuation and its entire existence by introducing things you don’t really need from it. I had to get Zoom Premium a few days ago, and it was almost $15 per user. That’s a lot of money for basic functionality you can find practically everywhere. And I’m not talking about their advanced features for webinars and such, most users don’t need this.

Zoom is going down the road of Dropbox. A company that once packaged known tech in a nice way and grew on it only to realize their product has become a commodity and every tech giant has a better-integrated version. So Dropbox decided to build features that would help justify companies paying for it and, in the process, ruined the experience for regular people (I pay for OneDrive now).

Right now, Zoom is very far from that old idea of an app that lets you simply join calls in one click. And despite all Google’s fumbles in messaging, Meet is just that. I know people have problems with Microsoft Teams, but I visited meetings that used Teams and it was fine. Again, no need to install anything, just open the link in your browser and click “Join”.

We also haven’t seen too much innovation in the space. Personally, I don’t like video calls too much (especially because I like to pace when I think). The only innovation we’ve seen is switching from big rectangles to smaller circles, which might be quite nice since it removes a little bit of anxiety and you don’t feel glued to the camera as much. SpatialChat is a good example, they’ve also tried putting everyone on a virtual plane so you can move between discussions as if you were in a room.

It seems to be quite difficult to build a successful startup in this space. I’ve seen Whereby that since shifted into offering whitelabel calls to other products. And there’s Around, which was acquired by Miro, and focuses on remote and hybrid teams that have to collaborate a lot while also supporting conventional calls.

But don’t tell me Zoom is the best, please.

Finalist: A Simpler To-do App

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 21:39:31 +0000

MacStories ↗

Finalist is a new iPhone and iPad task manager that combines elements of note-taking apps, Kanban boards, and calendar apps in a unique and interesting way. The result is a lightweight app that’s simple and quick to use but unlikely to replace a fully-featured task manager for most users. Finalist is organized into three primary tabs: ‘Today,’ ‘Monthly,’ and ‘Lists.’ From the Today tab, you can add tasks simply by tapping on the screen and starting to type. It’s a lot like creating a checklist in Apple Notes.

I wrote about all the ways people build their own task managers ranging from a single entry in Apple Notes to over-complicated setups in Personal Knowledge Managements tools Roam Research and Obsidian.

I don’t think Finalist is for me, but I’m sure it could work for so many people out there. Simpler solutions are often the best but it’s still useful to keep some kind of structure and treat tasks as objects, not just rows of text.

The app is free and available on all Apple’s platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS (as it seems).

Omnivore Review: An Underrated Read-Later App

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 16:14:58 +0000

Omnivore is an open-source read-later app. And that’s the first thing that differentiates it. Of course, consumers don’t really care when things are open source, but this potentially allows other developers to fork it if the original team abandons the app (which seems to be a running theme in this space).

Omnivore was launched in 2021, and despite this I’ve only seen maybe a few reviews of it, and almost zero mention on top tech blogs. Which is weird, because it’s a good app.

Its design is reminiscent of Pocket, but it’s much friendlier.

Omnivore does all the expected things and then some. It has a Progressive Web App (PWA) you can install through Chrome-like browsers on your desktop. And it has competent mobile apps. It also has browser extensions for everything from Safari and Firefox to Chrome, Edge, and Arc you use to save the currently opened page for later.

You can tag saved pages with labels and Omnivore has a pretty advanced search tool, which even allows you to save certain queries to reuse them later. And of course you have highlights, which I find incredibly important for a read-later app.

While reading things is nice and useful, it’s unlikely you will go into this heap of old stories to freshen up your memory. So I use highlights to save the most important bits and then put them somewhere. Readwise is an app lots of people use, but there are other, more custom options.

Omnivore doesn’t yet have an integration with Readwise. But it syncs with Obsidian and Logseq. And there’s an API developers can tap into to build custom integrations. Many people use Obsidian or other apps like this as their knowledge platform and Omnivore should work nicely with it.

Omnivore also allows you to read email newsletters right in the app. There are several ways to do this. It gives you a custom email address, and you can either forward all emails from certain addresses (like Substack to it), or do it manually when you go through your inbox.

There’s a beta feature called “Rules” which allows you to build complex workflow to categorize incoming stories that should work well with email subscriptions specifically.

Now, the most important aspect of a read-later app is its reading experience’s quality. And I’d say it’s quite great.

The parser is very capable. It does make mistakes when scraping a webpage sometimes, but fortunately, all that I’ve seen were about excessive content, like a doubled intro or a cover image. While this might be annoying, it’s much better than losing content. Overall, the scraper is probably not as good as the ones you can find in Reader or Matter.

In addition to articles, you can save entire Twitter threads and PDFs, so everything is stored in one place regardless of its source. And if you’re on the go, you can listen to saved pages using text-to-speech, which I found to be OK (but I don’t use such feature too often, so I might not know what’s the ceiling here).

You can get all these things in Matter, which is also quite minimal. But the free version of Matter is way too limited. And you can’t access Readwise Reader at all if you don’t pay. It also looks way more complex, which might not be your thing – I seem to like it, but even I myself sometimes want something more serene. And Reader does feel like work.

Right now, Omnivore is free. The team relies on donations from its users and plans to implement paid features down the road. In their statements, they say that none of the current features will be paywalled. Which is good for users, although I’m wondering whether this will allow them to convert enough people into paying customer down the road – the core functionality seems more than sufficient for most. At least they aren’t venture-backed, so there’s no pressure for rapid growth, but I hope they will Omnivore this into a stable thriving business.

Updated on Oct 31, 2024

Omnivore has been shut down. I recommend switching to Readwise Reader.

I Wish Bear Hadn’t Wasted Years

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 22:36:59 +0000

Bear 2.0

Bear is a Markdown-centered note-taking app for the Apple ecosystem. It was first released back in 2016 during a very different era. Apple Notes were barebones compared to what they’re right now. They still used IMAP to sync your docs, a protocol designer for email with no support for differential changes! That’s why many people jumped from Evernote to Bear. It was slick, fast and kept your content portable.

Just recently, they released the long-promised Bear 2.0. Unfortunately, I think they lost most of their users along the way. See, the question of when the Bear 2.0 would come out became a meme in r/bearapp. Because it took the development team a few years to make this new updated version, while the original one barely changed.

During this time, one of the clear leaders in the notes space has turned into an oddity, still loved by its core users, but unable to get too much attention. We’ve seen tremendous improvements in Apple Notes and then the rise of the networked-thought like Roam Research and Obsidian, to digital-native document apps like Notion and Craft. And maybe it was largely a fad. But it’s hard not to see how far these apps have progressed.

Bear missed all of the excitement. And this makes me a little bit sad. I was a fan. I used it every day. But it was hard to stay loyal when I saw new shiny apps and everything they could have provided. I moved to Apple Notes, because even they were a bit better at some moment, and then tried a whole bunch of options, settling with Workflowy, until I ended up in Craft, where I’m drafting this post now.

Bear underwent this ordeal to radically rebuild their editor and enable things like tables and extended Markdown. It’s almost a case study on how tech debt might cripple your product. In some ways, they’re still catching up to Apple Notes. It’s great they’re offering a search for text on images, but Apple Notes got it in 2019.

Apple Notes

Comparing them right now, I see that Bear might have a few things going for it. First, links aren’t orange, which is a plus. And I truly love typing things in Markdown, even though it took me a long time to get there. Also, the only way to create a rich preview in Apple Notes is by sharing a link from Safari (which I don’t even use). There are always these weird and useless lock-ins with Apple products.

But at least with Apple, I know they will continue working on their app. In fact, both Apple Notes and Reminders are some of the most-improved apps in the Apple ecosystem (I know it hasn’t been true for all of them). On the other hand, Сraft has so much more to offer (even though it costs only a bit more annually). It’s a native app both on iOS and MacOS. It’s also centered on Markdown. And its pace of innovation has been tremendous. I specifically like the omnibar you can see in most apps right now, which allows you to switch between notes instantly. Or the ability to quickly share a note via a public link (the fact notes already look like beautiful websites helps a lot). To me, this is now table stakes.

Craft raised over $20M from VCs, which helps to employ a larger team. Still, they put themselves on a path of searching for more users and pricier use cases that (hopefully for them) leads to acquisition. I don’t know what will happen next. Evernote was bad before, but seemingly going to a crash after its latest acquisition. That’s why it’s important to be able to export your notes, and Markdown is a great format for this purpose. So many apps and tools can read it. There are two exporters for Apple Notes that allow you to get your content in Markdown, even with attachments. And then you can go anywhere. Worst case scenario, there always will be plain-text apps supporting it, like Obsidian.

Also, I’m not even sure I need to keep all the notes I ever drafted in my current app. As Dan Shipper noted:

It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage.

Writing things down is often more important than the act of storing them. I want to preserve my journal or lists of good places to visit in certain cities, but most of the other stuff, personal and work-related, is quite ephemeral. It’s almost like the message history with your friends. You think you want to preserve it, but if you actually scroll to the beginning of your friendship all those years ago, you’ll cringe a little.

There hasn’t been a better time to note applications and your choices are almost limitless. I like how the Bear team built a business around an artisan app for the Apple ecosystem. Not many people try to do it these days. If you want a simple note-taking app, Apple Notes will likely fit your goals, but if they don’t, try Bear.

***

Things 3, my favorite task manager, has basically the same problem. Its subreddit is filled with questions about the next version, it hasn’t received any meaningful updates, yet still lacks proper support for recurring tasks or attachments. In some way, Things 3 and Bear are very similar, as they have their cult followings due to their uniqueness on the market.

Touch the Glass: Finding a Better Home for Your Photos

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 21:10:00 +0100

Since Flickr made many terrible product decisions to alienate its customer base and Instagram decided they’re on to copy TikTok now, many photographers have been struggling to find a good place to post their photos online. You can find numerous Reddit posts with people wondering the same question.

The common thread you can see there is that there’s definitely not a single option the majority prefers.

Flickr was that option. The go-to photography website where everyone kept their own portfolio and caught up on the best photos posted in the community. They got too greedy. Or, they failed to deliver on mobile and correctly estimated the falling popularity of professional photography.

VSCO emerged as a more premium alternative as Instagram created the “VSCO Girl” phenomenon and is now trying to reinvent itself. 500px was popular for a minute and still seems to have a lively community, but it isn’t really mentioned in photographers’ conversations too often.

The common thread here is these apps either don’t target professional photographers or want you to pay up so much that they cripple the free tier.

Glass is the latest attempt to build a dedicated app and a community for photographers. It’s a subscription-based app available on iOS, Android, and desktop. The entire service is circled around photos – those are front and center.

The photos are glorious here. And the app itself feels quite nice. Some friction points exist, but I wonder if they’re intentional or accidental. For instance, if you want to upload multiple photos, you must do it individually. It’s not the best experience when you’re trying to put three, but I guess it prevents people from posting 20 in a row.

Part of the problem with such communities is that you can’t just find your friends or invite others. Glass definitely has a community. I simply posted photos there and started getting “appreciations” (that’s what they call likes) and even comments.

(You can look at my profile here)

Your photos showcase EXIF information (unless you manually erased it). Helpful to get the context behind the shot and how it was taken. You can also search for photos shot on particular equipment.

Probably one of my favorite features is the Public Profile. When you enable it, Glass gives you a link anyone can access to see your photos without having an account. And this webpage is gorgeous.

***

And now we’re coming to the key question I have about Glass. Social platforms are now trying to find alternative business models and testing out subscriptions. Glass heavily focused on “No advertising”. Instead, you pay $5 a month or $30 each year. I think the subscription model doesn’t make sense for general-purpose social networks, which must attract everyone to keep their network effects alive. But niche social apps targeting a specific affluent audience seem to fit a subscription product well.

Glass is fair in its business model. There’s a trial period, but there’s no free tier. But I fear that for an app focusing on social content, it’s an even worse lock-in than anything done by Meta.

Subscriptions for social apps are the ultimate lock-in

Let’s be clear, I’m not holding this against Glass. But your account effectively becomes a hostage.

As soon as you stop paying, the Public Profile is disabled, and the clock starts ticking. And then they delete all your photos. You can export, sure, but where would you import them?

And that’s why I’m hesitant to continue using Glass despite all the positive stuff. Because then I’m bound to pay for it forever or lose everything I’ve put and built there. And this is not a good feeling.

Considering this, it might make more sense to simply pay for hosting your photos on a blog so you’re the only owner. Or use the platform you can abandon at any time without feeling guilty. That’s why I started a microblog as my personal online journal with a separate photo page and also put some of them on 500px.

Raindrop Review: Better Bookmarks For Twitter And YouTube

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:12:10 +0000

Twitter, YouTube, and many other services have built-in bookmarks and playlists encouraging you to save content for later. I encourage you to try using a third-party service instead of them. Raindrop is a great alternative.

Platforms want to lock you down, and it’s easy to save everything right there, but you will likely end up with an endless stream of saved notes you will never revisit.

The main problem with Twitter bookmarks is that they are not very user-friendly. It is difficult to find the tweets you have bookmarked, as they are not organized in any manner. There is no way to search for bookmarked tweets, making it even more difficult to quickly find the tweets you have marked for future use. And most importantly, if the author deletes the original tweet, you will be left with nothing.

YouTube playlists have similar problems. Yes, YouTube provides you with folders, and you can use playlists as intended, although I wonder how important that functionality is. But if the video is deleted, you won’t even be able to figure out what it was, as there’s no title. And you can’t search through your playlists.

Enter Raindrop.

Raindrop is an all-in-one bookmark manager that lets you save any pieces of content, from links and entire articles to tweets, YouTube videos, and separate images. You can organize everything with folders or tags. On top of that, Raindrop provides a powerful search. It can even be used as a read-later app.

If you pay for the subscription, Raindrop will parse all text from saved pages and save a permanent copy – forever. Even if the original website is gone, you can still access it.

All of that functionality allows you to bookmark tweets and YouTube videos, organize them, and find specific pieces via search.

Raindrop has great apps for the web, Mac, and iOS. You can save anything with a public link using browser extensions and iOS share sheet. That is an important limitation. Instagram is probably one of the largest offenders with its “Saved” functionality. Yes, you can save a link to an Instagram post, but Raindrop won’t be able to parse anything via this link or save any descriptions. That’s why I don’t like when people share recipes on Instagram – but you can save everything manually if you are willing to spend more time.

I find Raindrop extremely useful for saving any kind of guides, tutorials, great services, and utilities I might need one day, libraries of content, and design mock-ups – everything I don’t need daily but might require later. Even its free version is extremely capable.

***

Raindrop gives you control over your bookmarks, allows you to export them if needed, and integrates with Zapier if you want to build a complicated workflow. You can even share collections with a public link accessible to anyone.

How to Read Newsletters In An App

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 14:50:14 +0000

Media publications and individual authors have largely moved to email newsletters, the only semi-direct which is accessible to regular users and doesn’t leave them at the mercy of Facebook or Twitter. Yet email apps haven’t really caught up to this (with a few notable exceptions, such as Hey and Big Mail). They force you to read long written pieces in the same interface as that cold intro from Chad.

You might be too busy for a few weeks, and then you end up with hundreds of emails, causing fatigue as you feel overwhelmed by their sheer number. Or you might be getting too many of them every day. Also, not every issue might necessarily be interesting for you. And ultimately, hunting for this small grey Unsubscribe link isn’t fun at all.

Thankfully, there are better alternatives. You just need to use another app.

***

How to Collect Newsletters

If you’re using Gmail, one thing I’d encourage you to do is to use aliases for email newsletters. Meaning if your email is name@gmail.com, use name+news@gmail.com to subscribe to any newsletter. Then you’d be able to create rules based on this address to quickly categorize, mark or forward them and adjust your workflow on the fly.

Sometimes newsletters won’t let yo use an alias, but it doesn’t happen that often. So far I’ve only seen Morning Brew do this.

What options do you have for reading emails? Some of them are single-purpose; in other cases, you have an app that can host your newsletters in addition to its core functionality. It might be a good option if you’re using one already.

Feedbin

Feedbin is a very powerful online RSS reader. It allows users to subscribe to various news sites and other content sources and automatically receive updates when new content is posted. Most importantly, it gives you a personal email address you could use to forward all of your newsletters into Feedbin and read them there right along with your RSS subscriptions. Feedbin is $5 a month, and it’s a great service overall.

Feedbin has a very powerful web version and good mobile apps. But you can also use a third-party RSS app to connect to it. Although reading newsletters will be a bit less pleasant this way – most RSS readers will try to parse newsletters, and results may vary.

Other RSS readers, such as Feedly or Inoreader, also provide similar functionality on their more expensive tiers.

My review of Feedbin is here.

Mailbrew

Mailbrew is an email curation and newsletter subscription tool heavily inspired by Hey. Forward your newsletters to Mailbrew, and then you will have an interface very similar to The Feed. You can also build custom weekly and daily emails that could deliver digests of fresh newsletters to your inbox so you can choose which ones you want to read.

I use this approach now, and I find it quite useful. Here’s why:

You can see the beginning of each newsletter issue and can decide if you want to open it and read the full content.
There’s no need to archive or mark previous issues, so less fatigue.
You can also quickly share a particular issue with someone simply by using the link.
Mailbrew remembers where you left off.

Since Evan Williams bought Mailbrew, it became free, but I suppose we can’t be sure of its future.

My review of Mailbrew is here. It was updated since, but the core features are pretty much the same.

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is an app that helps people save and review the highlights and notes they take from books, articles, and other sources. It also allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and process newsletters in a single interface.

I’d recommend you be careful about signing up for many authors and publications using Reader, as it can quickly become overwhelming. Also, it tries to process newsletters into text, and sometimes it might not work that well, especially on heavily formatted pieces. But it’s a good option for a few key writers you always want to read. And you get all other features: highlighting, tagging, it remembers where you left off.

Reader is my favorite read-later service at the moment, partly because it’s great and partly because it’s natively integrated into Readwise, which I used even before. The cost for Reader hasn’t been announced yet, but the full Readwise subscription is $7.99.

My quick review of Readwise Reader is here.

Matter

Matter is a modern clean-looking app that focuses on helping you follow your favorite writers wherever they read. In addition to traditional publications and RSS feeds, this includes email subscriptions, like Substack or anything else. Some of the features you’d likely need are behind an $8/month subscription. In addition to the mobile app it’s also available on the web.

I previously covered both Reader and Matter as read-later apps, and this article remains useful. While Feedbin is a more traditional RSS reader that can handle other stuff, Matter is like a modern version of Pocket/Instapaper, while Readwise Reader is something between a reading list and a research tool.

Stoop

Stoop is a mobile app designed specifically to help you read newsletters. This is the one option I used the least. The entire experience is very mobile-focused, but they also have a web beta now.

I have concerns about Stoop as it seems their iOS app hasn’t been updated in two years. Seems it’s still working, so I thought I had to mention this as an option.

Stoop costs $10 a year.

How to Start Your Blog

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 17:17:45 +0000

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place? This particular blog is more like a series of essays I wanted to get out. I also have another blog which is more like an online journal of my life. I was never able to have an actual journal on paper or use apps like Day One. But when it’s online, and other people can see it, I get an incentive to share more, even though I still mostly write for myself.

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

First, here are things I’d like to have in the ideal world:

Modern and minimalist yet functional design
Markdown support to ensure the content is portable
Accessible via mobile
Photo galleries for particular posts and the blog itself
Email subscriptions
Affordable enough, so you don’t care about running it forever
Effortless backups
Connected to your personal domain

Turns out, it’s hard to find all of these things combined. Pricing is important to me at the ideological level. I can afford to pay $10+ a month, but I’m more likely to start wondering if I need to continue unless I suddenly have a very popular blog on my hands.

In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable. Especially if you want anything more than a series of relatively long text-focused posts. Choose the one you like the most and stick with it as long as possible.

WordPress

The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page. Generally, WordPress can fit most of these requirements, but the paid hosted options are usually slightly more expensive and geared toward professional bloggers and content creators. Well, they’re targeted at businesses that can mentally afford to spend much more.

WordPress even supports Markdown and has countless plugins for photo galleries. The basic tier is €8 unless you pay annually, but it doesn’t include backups – for those, you’d need to pay €25 a month for the Business subscription.

The look of most WordPress blogs is just very dated and immediately recognizable. Of course, there are thousands of themes, but very few were meticulously designed, and building one yourself is no easy challenge. And you’ll need to self-host or pay for the higher tier again.

Webflow

Webflow is fantastic for corporate blogs as it allows managers to adjust not just the content but the website itself quickly. But such blogs aren’t really portable, and the CMS tier is quite expensive, so it’s not a great option. I’d skip it.

Ghost

Ghost is basically the modern WordPress in terms of its prevalence. Ghost is much more simple and straightforward, yet it comes at the cost of customizations. More recently, the platform has shifted its focus toward paid communities and newsletters. While it’s still possible to simply run a personal blog, Ghost’s official catalog has about two or free themes that fit this purpose, and it became even harder to find something suitable with modern updates like dark mode. And it’ll be bugging your readers to subscribe with an annoying button. And you can’t really change any major settings or adjust the website in a major way.

But if this particular look works for you, it could actually be a great option. Ghost is likely to stick around, supports Markdown (in a more convoluted way now). Also, please note that their support on mobile is intermittent at best, they had mobile apps working a few years ago but it doesn’t seem to be solid right now.

Ghost was known for the high price of their managed instance at $25, but recently they introduced a new Starter package at $9 (these prices are for the annual tier). But the Starter package is even more limited in terms of options, such as themes.

Thankfully, just like WordPress, you can run Ghost on your own instance. Most people recommend a $6 DigitalOcean droplet (plus the price of backups).

Hugo and Other Static Blogs

Static site generators (SSG) compile your content and design into static HTML pages that can be easily served online with minimal effort. Hugo is probably the most popular right now, but there are also Jekyll, Gatsby, Hexo, VuePress, and others.

With SSG you usually keep all the content in a GitHub repo and use Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages to compile and serve the website. This isn’t the most consumer-friendly option, and it definitely helps to have developer experience. But this enables effortless backups.

There are a few ways to write content with SSG. The most low level is by writing Markdown directly using any text editor and making commits to GitHub. You could technically even do this on iOS with certain apps. If you also want to upload images for your posts, this immediately gets complicated. People often recommend content management systems that run on a third-party service, let you write posts and publish them, such as NetlifyCMS or Forestry. In my experience, they are quite clunky and certainly not mobile-friendly.

Email subscriptions are hard to set up, although you can use a third-party service like Buttondown or MailChimp to serve emails based on the RSS feed.

FYI, this blog runs on Hugo and Forestry but this only makes sense because I don’t post too often. To me it simply was the most straightforward option which gave me the most control and fantastic portability in case I switch to another platform later.

Micro.blog

Micro.blog is a service for microblogging combined with a social platform. In fact, it runs on managed Hugo instances coupled with an online CMS, mobile and desktop apps, and an ecosystem of other apps and services. You also get access to a social layer of Micro.blog’s users who can leave comments and respond to your posts.

Micro.blog costs at least $5 a month. You can participate in the community for free and broadcast your posts from other platforms through RSS or ActivityPub, but hosting is only available on paid plans. The top $10 plan also gives you email newsletters and digests of your content.

The apps aren’t perfect, and the experience is sometimes a little bit rough, but it’s one of the best options for your online journal. Imagine having your own private Twitter, Instagram, and a long-form blog on a single website. That’s Micro.blog for you.

If something happens to Micro.blog as a project or if you want to leave it, you can always just deploy your blog as a standalone Hugo instance. And it allows you to tweak basically anything in your blog.

My other blog actually runs on Micro.blog because I post more often and quite often use my phone for this. Just like with plain Hugo, I had to intervene in the underlying code quite a few times to make it work nicely for my goals.

Tumblr

Tumblr, a once popular social network, is now also owned by the same company as WordPress. In my opinion, it was always an underrated blog platform, specially tailored to personal online journals.

Tumblr blogs are very customizable – in addition to choosing a theme, you can edit its code directly. And it supports a range of different post categories: long texts, images, quotes, etc. Finally, it’s free and, to my surprise, allows you to connect your own domain. Email newsletters are only available if you serve via a third-party service and RSS.

Any disadvantages? People will know it’s a Tumblr blog.

Substack

Substack positions itself as the newsletter platform, but at the end of the day, you still have a website with posts. The design is basically standardized and very recognizable, and your readers are constantly pushed to subscribe to the point of churn.

Also, there’s the very question of the kind of content people expect on Substack. I’ve seen some people using it for their personal blogs, but they’re certainly in the minority.

Managed Platforms

There are several less popular managed platforms for personal blogging, such as Write.as, Proseful, Blot, Bear, and others.

Most of these are projects led by enthusiasts, so there’s always a good chance they will get tired and have to sunset the platform. This is a risk that you have to always keep in mind and think about backups and export options.

Write.as and Profesul are both simple and stylish blogging platforms. Write.as has a dedicated Snap.as project for photo galleries. Bear promotes itself as the most minimal blog platform. And Blot can look very different but deploys from a Dropbox/Drive folder or a GitHub repo. Unfortunately, in my experience none of these tools are truly polished, you’re facing rough edges all the time.

***

Figure out what features you definitely need and which ones are just nice-to-have. See what is used by the blogs you like and follow. Although you might end up surprised with their technical choices, but it’d still be a good reference of what you might be able to achieve with each option.

Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough.

Switch to a Modern Read-Later App Already

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 20:02:28 +0000

Read–later apps are simultaneously popular and outdated. A lot of people use them. They’re now embedded right in our browsers and there’s a couple of age-old names, but if you’re still using any of these options you should reconsider.

Safari introduced Reading List back in iOS 5. It has barely seen any updates. Chrome is still to offer a consistent user experience on different platforms – try syncing your saved pages to Chrome on iOS.

Pocket and Instapaper have been household names in that space and have practically created it. Pocket was bought by Mozilla in 2017, Marco Arment sold Instapaper in 2013. Both apps haven’t been improved in any major way in recent years, yet still want to charge a subscription to access locked features.

If you’re using any of these apps, you don’t know where the industry edge is. Here are some of the common problems they have.

Bad text parsing

The most important part of a read-later app is actually parsing articles to produce a clean-looking page. In the ideal world, it should be able to handle not just webpages, but also PDFs, tweets, and arbitrary links well.

Hard to process

Reading is great, but the app should help you preserve the knowledge. Notes, highlights, categorization – and a way to extract and recall all of this. You think of these apps as your ultimate storage of knowledge, but it’s just an archive of articles you will never open again.

Doesn’t help you read

One of the common problems people experience is they eventually turn their read-later app into a dumpster filled with old stories they never bothered to get through, start feeling bad and simply delete it. A perfect app helps you find what you can read at any moment or archive if it’s not really important. Or turn an article into a podcast you could listen on the go.

I have used two options I wanted to tell more about.

Matter

Matter is a modern, clean read-later app that started as a social reading service and then pivoted. It has a great parser and augments Chrome (and Chrome-based browsers) with a much better reading mode (Safari excels here). Has options to export your highlights to Readwise and Notion. Available only on the web and iOS for now. They’ve just announced their pricing, which will be $8 a month to access advanced features: HD text-to-speech, fluid highlighting, and note-taking, integrations, full-text search. In my opinion, these are essentials, but you can definitely use the free version as well.

Readwise Reader

Readwise is a service that collects all the highlights you left in Kindle, Apple Books, and various apps to send daily or weekly digests and remind you about the stuff you read and found important or interesting.

Readwise built Reader, their take on a modern read-later app, and this became my go-to option. This is a great business move, as it increases the value of Readwise itself (which I previously paid for already) and reliably locks me in.

Reader is an omnivore. It takes webpages, tweets, PDFs, you name it. Then you read, make notes, and leave highlights, which end up in your storage and regularly get surfaced back to you, along with anything you read in books.

The app makes reading feel like work, but the kind of work you enjoy. Almost turns it into a game. Reader has an extremely customizable home view to help you choose the next thing to read. Or save for later and avoid the clutter. They’ve also integrated GPT-3 to summarize texts or let you ask questions about their content.

The cost for Reader hasn’t been announced yet, but the full Readwise subscription is $7.99.

Other Options

There is a few other apps I’d suggest trying out in case you’re not the fans of two preceding options. The one I heard about just recently is Omnivore. It seems to be open source and the core features are free. Hope they will build a good business out of it. If you’re fully committed to Apply, you might try GoodLinks. It’s a pretty good app, but all integration should happen on device and there are no higlights.

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Honestly, at this point, it doesn’t matter much. At least stop using Pocket or Instapaper. The new apps have been getting so much better.