A Few Things Learned on Saturday (updated 10/5/20)

Posted on by dudley228
By Jason Harris

The biggest thing I learned today was about a rip off subscription for the app, Cartoonme. It was advertised to me when I was on Instagram. It looked interesting. I have used similar apps like Prisma, which seems similar to Cartoonme. I liked trying out new apps, so I downloaded it. I quickly deleted it when I noticed it has a subscription model. I particularly don’t like subscriptions, but I have paid the subscription price for apps like Ulysses and Drafts, to name a few. The subscription price for Cartoonme is $8.99 a week. Let me say that again, $8.99 a week. That is $467.48 for the year. They have a three-day free trial, but I wasn’t taking a chance with this app, which is why I delete it.

My deletion brought me to the other thing I learned. It is about iOS 14. Last week, I decided to finally hide some of my app pages. I left a few open slots for new apps on the pages. I thought this is where I thought Cartoonme would go. It didn’t. I thought that was weird. I did find it in the app in the “Recently Added” folder in the App Library. This is where I was also able to delete it. So far, I don’t see how it’s possible to send an app to the pages you want to see without unhiding all the pages and moving the app to one of your pages you can see. It would be nice to be able to move an app to a page you want or to even move it to a folder you want it to go in.

Thanks to the AppleInsider podcast. There is a setting in Settings and under Home Screen where you can check off if you want a new app to go to the App Library or Add to a Home Screen.

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Pictures for the Facebook Challenge

Posted on by dudley228

Back in November, there was a 7-day challenge on Facebook, “Seven days. Seven black-and-white photos of my life. No explanations,” where people had to share black and white photos of your life. The only rules were that the pictures couldn’t have people in it and you couldn’t explain the pictures.

There is an author, Stacey Longo, who participated in the challenge then wrote a blog post about the pictures she posted. You can find her blog entry here.

I decided to post all the pictures I used in the challenge in this blog post. I will also post ones that never got used. When I decided to do the challenge, I started thinking about what types of pictures I could take.

I took all the photos on my iPhone 8 Plus and changed the color on them through the native photo app on the phone. I did use the Metapho app to strip the meta data off the photos.

The seventh day I posted two pictures. The pictures were of the same object, but I liked both of them. For me, it’s tough to decide what ones to use.

There is one picture I had taken for the challenge that was never used because the turtle pictures took its place. The below picture was taken in Hamden, Connecticut during my travels as a merchandiser and was never processed for the challenge.

I love taking pictures with my phone. Sometimes, I wish there were more reasons to do just that. I love it when these types of events come up.

Beware of Information within the Flixster app (updated 12/4/17)

Posted on by dudley228

The other day I was using the Flixster app to see if Justice League was playing at some local theaters.

I noticed two things with the app. The first thing was that my theater settings had been changed to only show “ticketing theaters.” This probably came about with the recent update to the app.

The second thing I noticed is the worse offender. Somehow certain movies are not showing up in the app. Two theaters I was checking in the app were not listing Justice League as one of the theater’s options. You would think that maybe the theater hadn’t updated the listings. This wasn’t the case. Coco which came out this week was listed at those theaters. I had to go to the theater’s websites to find out if the Justice League was playing there. It looks like Flixster can’t be trusted with its information. I will have to find another app to get my movie information from.

Editor’s note:

I noticed this weekend that my local theater’s listings had Justice League in them. Maybe the issue or problem has been fixed.

Gboard is a Great Keyboard

Posted on by dudley228

I started using Gboard a few weeks ago after hearing about this iOS keyboard on a podcast. I believe it was episode #131 of Connected.

I had heard about Gboard when it was first released back in February of 2016. I didn’t try it then. I didn’t care to. I looked down on it because of one of its features. The feature was glide typing. I thought this way of typing was useless. I was wrong. I absolutely love glide typing. It’s not perfect all the time, but overall it works for me.

Another thing that comes in handy with this keyboard is the ability to conduct searches. Someone mentions a song on Facebook and you can find the YouTube video of that song to share it on the person’s post.

The keyboard also has a dark theme. This is the one I use so I know what keyboard is installed in those incidences where I’m not using Gboard.

I love this keyboard. I would suggest everyone give Gboard a try. Here is a Cult of Mac article stating “10 things you should know about Google’s Gboard keyboard,” you

The keyboard was updated last month. You can read a Mac Stories article about it here.

Pastebot for Mac Beta

Posted on by dudley228

I found out yesterday that Tapbots, the team behind a number of great apps like Tweetbot, Calcbot, and Weightbot (I still use Weightbot even though it hasn’t been updated in a long time and isn’t even available in the App Store any longer) has released the beta for their Pastebot for Mac app. Pastebot is a clipboard app that “stores a history of all your copies.”
I’m hoping to see the Tapbots team produce a version of this app for iOS again. There was a Pastebot app for iOS back in 2010. You can read the MacWorld Pastebot for iOS review here. I used it on a daily basis. Once it became buggy, I had to delete it. I keep hoping for the apps return.

If you want to try out the Pastebot for Mac beta, click here. -Jason Harris