blog.holgerkrupp.de

Author: _holger

  • Apple is optimising my desktop pictures away.

    Apples Photos app is the standard app a lot of Mac users organize their photos. It’s well integrated in macOS and iOS, it syncs the photos between all devices sharing an appleID. Not only the photos shot with an iPhone are but also photos shot with other cameras and imported via Photos (btw a really bad name for an app if you want to write an article about it and about the photos storred in the app called Photos). I’m organizing all my photos in Photos. My database contains currently about 35000 photos and 900 videos. A lot of these photos are “big” raw files (in my case about 30MB per photo), most of the videos are 4K. As apple has huge prices on their storrage options within their devices and because I want the security of a) having my photos available from all the devices and b) backed up externally (this is not my only external backup), I use iCloud Photo Library. I’m currently storring 691GB of photos and videos in iCloud.

    This amount of data neither fits my iPhone (128GB), nor my TouchBar Pro (512GB). Therefore I’m using a function called “Optimized Storrage” on all devices. This function storres only thumbnails and recently used photos locally on the device and deletes the full resolution images from the Mac after they have been transfered to iCloud. It’s a clever system leaving me with about 75GB of storrage used for my photos on my Mac.

    Now to something else: I like to customize my MacBook Desktop with personal photos I’ve took somewhere around the world. Those photos can be selected directly out of the Photos app. To find the nicest pictures, I’m marking those with a heart or ‘favorites’ function within Photos and have a condenced selection of photos to select my desktop background from.

    No I’ve noticed two things: My desktop pictures often change from the one selected to standard pictures provided with macOS. In addition not all my favorite photos where available within the menu to select the background from. Sometimes it happens, when I wanted to change from a standard picture to a different one, the picture disapears and only a questionmark is remaining in the selection panel.

    So what’s happening here? After some investigation within my photo library I’ve noticed that the pictures I’ve previously selected (out of my favorites) were ‘optimized’ to iCloud and no longer available locally within my TouchBar Pro. Therefore macOS can’t find and use them as background images anylonger.

    I don’t know why apple wouldn’t program an exception in their ‘storrage optimization routine’ to not optimized favorites (as most people might want to have them available all the time) and especially not delete images that are used by another part of the operating system. I understand that thirdparty apps can’t see which photo has been selected as background images, but Photos is a first party app integrated in the OS, it should be able to do a bit more than other apps and should avoid this behavior.

    A radar (bug report within apples bug reporting system) has been filed for this on June 2nd.

  • Bogotá

    Meinen Urlaub 2018 starte ich in einer Boeing 787 um meinen ersten Reise-vlog zu filmen. Hier einige Eindrücke vom Flug und meinem ersten Tag in Bogotá.

  • Likes and hates on Facebook

    Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

    in the last years we have seen a growing amount of hate comments on social media. Facebook has acknowledged this and tries to perform some counter measurements.

    In addition Facebook introduced different kind of „likes“ for posts and comments. One of those shows anger about a post. It’s a nice way to see how people feel about the content of a post.

    Before clicking on a post, one can already see how many people reacted to a post and Facebook shows what kind of reaction people give to a post.

    Unfortunately the little smilies are not scaled in accordance to the percentage of people reaction in the one or other way.

    Let me give you an example: this post about how a tv host collected money for the league battle of a sea rescue team in Europe got a lot of reactions. There were some likes, hearts and angry people. You might think the reactions are spread more or less equality between the people reacting.

    If you open the article the view is the same, if you click on the reactions, you‘ll see that 401 people liked, 82 loved and only one person hated the post.

    This is misleading and makes people think the hate about the post is equally represented as likes and hearts.

    Dear Mark, please change this. Make the hate symbol 400 times smaller than the like. Make it invisible if it’s not an equal number compared to other reactions. Let’s show the haters, that their hate is not a widely accepted opinion.

    Let’s make the world a better place.

  • New App: GPXExporter

    New App: GPXExporter

    Yeah, another app. A friend told me about Fog of World. That’s an app tracking where in the world you have been and how much of the earth you have seen. It’s a super cool concept and really cool app. Unfortunately it only uncovers the earth from the first start of that app. The developer has thought about it and allows import from other apps in the form of gpx files. So if you track your sports (runs, bike rides, skiing,…) you can export the data and import them into Fog of World. Unfortunately I’ve been to a lot of places where I haven’t done any sports or recorded any tracks. But I took photos. A lot of my photos contain GPS information. So I wanted to create a tool to export the location data form those pictures and import them in Fog of World. And exactly that’s what GPXExporter does. It takes location information from photos and exports a GPX file which can be imported in Fog of World or other apps.

    During the development I found out that Fog or World doesn’t like single places (way- or trackpoints) but only repeats ‘real’ tracks. Therefore I had to cheat a bit and put two points where only one should be. So I implemented a jiggle feature which places a second point about 1cm next to the original point. And TADA! it works quite well, as you can see on the header image of this blog post.

    You can also export the gpx file to any other iOS app that supports the import of gpx files as well as saving it to iCloud Files, Dropbox or other file syncing services using the iOS Share sheet.

    The app looks ugly, it has an ugly icon and only limited functionality. But what it should do, it does. Instead of keeping it for myself I’m giving it to you for one Euro/Dollar/….

    And be sure, your location data or your photos are not transferred and used for advertisement. No, you pay $1/1€ and that’s it. No back door. No hidden functionality, no bull shit. Just gpx creation.

    Download here from the App Store.

  • Bildungsurlaub 2018

    Bildungsurlaub 2018

    Alle zwei Jahre ist wieder soweit und ich erweitere meinen Urlaub mit Bildungsurlaub. In 14 Bundesländern Deutschlands (nicht in Bayern und Sachsen) existiert diese besondere Urlaubsform, bei dem Arbeitnehmer zusätzliche Urlaubstage zur Weiterbildung gewährt werden. In Hamburg, wo ich lebe und arbeite, kann ich zwei Jahre des Bildungsurlaub von 5 Tagen pro Jahr kombinieren und so 10 weitere freie Tage bekommen. Diese habe ich in den letzten Jahren genutzt um Spanisch zu lernen. Auch in diesem Jahr werde ich dies nutzen. Statt nach Mexiko, wie in den vorherigen Jahren, geht es dieses Jahr nach Kolumbien. Zusammen mit einigen normalen Urlaubstagen werde ich 3 1/2 Wochen in Südamerika verbringen. (more…)

  • Currywurst, Grafitti und Computerspiele.

    Currywurst, Grafitti und Computerspiele.

    In Berlin finden sich, ähnlich wie in Hamburg, viele kleine Museen. Bei einem Kurztrip nach Berlin besuchte ich zwei dieser Museen.

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  • SecondClock 1.2

    SecondClock 1.2

    Today I’ve submitted an update for SecondClock to the Mac App Store. I was thinking about this update for a long time, had different versions running and I’m still thinking if it’s the right thing to do, but I believe that it makes the usage of the App easier and is therefore a benefit for new and old users.

    The old version used a list of all Timezones macOS is providing using an API (knownTimeZoneNames). This is nice, as it covers all timezones, but it makes it difficult to find the timezone a specific city. In addition I had a long popup button (dropdown) to select the timezone. I wanted to improve this.

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  • Goodbye Google Ads

    I’ve decided to strap google ads (Admob) from my PhotoSort App (the only App of mine which used google ads). I’ve integrated google ads in Photosort back in September 2017. I’ve earned with google ads 0,00€ so far. Google ads is collecting data about the user with no added value for my app.

    My app will still remain free with a Tier 2 (2,29€/1,99£/$1,99) in-app purchase. Instead of loading ads from a google server, I will just present a notice to support the development.

    Less creepy bullshit without any benefit, but more awareness to support your local app developer.

     

    You can download PhotoSort on the iOS App Store for free.

    The new Version without Google Ads is version 1.8.6 and has been submitted to the App Store review on April 1st 2018 (not a joke).

     

  • Hurghada

    Hurghada

    Eine meiner Kolleginnen hat mich auf die Idee gebracht zum tauchen doch mal nach Ägypten zu fliegen. Die Hotels in Hurghada am Roten Meer bieten fast alle All-inclusive Service. Obwohl ich normalerweise immer individuell buche und auch von All-inclusive Bettenburgen absehe, habe ich dieses Mal mit TUI gebucht. Das erste Mal. So musste ich mir am Flughafen kein Taxi suchen, sondern wurde von der Reisegesellschaft direkt zum Hotel gefahren. Das ist ein ganz netter Service, bringt aber Wartezeiten auf Mitreisende im Bus mit sich.

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  • Barcelona 2018

    Barcelona 2018

    Es ist schon fast eine Tradition geworden, dass ich zum Halbmarathon nach Barcelona fliege. Vor zwei Jahren, als ich noch in Toulouse lebte, war ich das erste Mal für diesen Lauf in Katalonien. Die Stadt lieben gelernt habe ich bei meinem ersten Besuch zu meinem Geburtstag 2012.

    Mir gefällt der Mix aus alten Gassen im gotischen Viertel, dem Strand, den quadratischen Häuserbocks, dem Mix aus alt und neu.

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