In addition to week 50, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 51 and 52, 2023:

  • 🖼 Many new iPhone wallpapers made the rounds: Gameboy style, iPod style. On Reddit, there are some simpler versions available for free (Original, iPod Mini), and moreover, Basic Apple Guy has recently released some very nice ones, Aurora Gradient and Ugly Christmas Sweater Wallpapers (Mac Edition), and just published his Rewind 2023: Wallpapers.

  • 📝 Blake released a web app for omg.lol: write.omg.lol - A simple notepad in your browser backed by omg.lol’s Pastebin feature.

  • 🖥️ Found this on baty.net: So you got Setapp… make the most of it: A Terminal script, “which will tell you what apps you have that also have a Setapp version”. This way you can “contribute part of the monthly subscription fee you’re already paying to the developers of the apps you love”.

  • ✏️ Canion posted about another nice-looking plain text/markdown note-taking app I had never heard of before: Notebooks. I now use Obsidian with its Dataview plugin and Actions for Obsidian so intensively that I can’t imagine switching, but in principle, native macOS/iOS apps of this kind are extremely welcome.

  • 🎵 Installed Tuneful - a native macOS menu bar playback control app for Spotify and Apple Music.

  • 🖊️ Sindre Sorhus has released just another new app: Memo Widget - Sticky notes on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, and desktop.

  • 🎉 KeyJerk Reactions lets you bind the new macOS' Video reactions via a nice UI or a script.

  • 🔗 Bookmarked SharePal - Lightning speed sharing. Add. Organize. Share. I don’t have a specific use case for this app yet, but should it come to that, I now have an idea of how I could make the task easier.

  • 🌏 This one looks interesting: ‎Globetrotter - “a location-based travel photos app, providing a fast and fun way to share your travel highlights with your friends and family”. Now I just need to get around more, which is not so easy for a household that doesn’t own a car and for some reason doesn’t fly.

  • 📱 Additional apps for iOS, many of which with a free lifetime license thanks to the Indie App Santa promotion: Cheatsheet, Joy, Keybot, Mindr, Peaks, Photo Route, Pretty Progress, and Replica. It remains to be seen which of these I will actually use on a regular basis.1

  • 📱 I installed ‎finity on my iPhone and enjoyed playing it now and then during some trips over the Christmas holidays.

  • 🎮 Finished Super Mario Advance (Super Mario Bros. 2 port for GBA) on my Analogue Pocket.

  • 😈 Started playing Diablo 4. I absolutely do not understand yet what one has to do here and especially when and why, but I enjoy it so far ;-)

  • 🕹 I checked out ‎Resident Evil 4 on my M2 MacBook Pro and was pleasantly surprised at how well and smoothly it plays. I imagine I see clear differences to the PS5 version I already own, but if I didn’t, it could have been a good purchase for the Mac as well. (I’m not sure if it’s such a clever idea to sell games that have been available for established gaming consoles for years to “real” gamers, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Apple.)

  • 🤖 Funko Box- So many of them almost everywhere. Awesome; did not let Microsoft Designer create my own, though.

  • 💿 I’ve signed up to Album Of The Day and enjoy the daily recommendations so far.

  • 🎙 I’ve deleted Overcast and moved to Apple Podcasts.app. Just added only a few shows back in. I’ll try to listen to less Podcasts at 1,0 x speed and more music.

  • 📖 I read the countless annual reviews and outlooks2 with great interest and was pleased about the (perceived) renaissance of blogging. Of course, a large part of this was due to Rob’s App Defaults overview page, which now offers > 300 individual blogs as RSS feeds for simple import into your own feed reader.

  • 🥰 Speaking of it, my Hemispheric Views Defaults Laptop Sticker arrived.

  • 🍿 Watched Barbie (2023) with the family. Was fun!

  • 🙏 Thank you for reading my Weeknotes in 2023! I didn’t quite manage to consistently follow through on the resolution I made at the beginning of the year to write down a few things each week, was briefly on the verge of giving up entirely, and still find it a bit odd, but I had a lot of fun with it. I registered with omg.lol at the beginning of 2023, moved my then only a few weeks old Mastodon account to social.lol, and became a member of micro.blog. I am very happy to have discovered this part of the net. I have actually gotten to know several people who have become dear to me, even though I do not know them personally. Thank you for that! It actually made the year 2023 better, although otherwise, it wasn’t really a year I look back on with much joy. So, I wish everyone a Happy New Year, stay healthy, and see you soon. Looking forward to it!

  1. Keybot is definitely pretty high up on the list. ↩︎

  2. way too many to list them here, sorry 🤷‍♂️ ↩︎