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State of the Apps for 2021
Few things have changed over the last 12 months since I wrote the last version of this post. I’ve managed to continue using Firefox for both work and personal use and hardly touch Chrome at all anymore.
We’re still rocking a PiHole to block ads at home, and can’t see this changing anytime soon. I am looking into ways to use the PiHole outside of home, but I think it would just be easier to use something like NextDNS.
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The things I use every day in 2020 - Apps & Services
Firefox In the last year, I moved my personal stuff away from Gmail and Google Calendar (see Fastmail below) so it felt fitting to try a life without Chrome as well. Firefox is not as fast as Chrome, but it more than does everything I need it to. Plus, it helps with stopping the google monopoly of the web.
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I used to use Notion, but didn’t use the advanced features like the inbuilt database tools enough to justify the cost.
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InfluxDB to Exist.io - Logging Gaming Time
Getting as much data into Exist as I can is important to me. So far this year I’ve built integrations for…
Gaming Time Pages Read (via iOS Shortcuts) Money Spent (using the Monzo API) This post details how I am tracking gaming time. I found a method around Christmas 2019 that lets you retrieve accurate playtime from your Nintendo Switch via the parental controls app/feature. This was cool, but I don’t always play things on my Switch, so we had to go deeper!
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Logging pages read to Exist.io via Shortcuts
I was messing around with the Exist.IO API over the weekend to see what I could build. I noticed that there was a ‘Pages read’ attribute that I could post to.
Perfect! I then wondered how easily I could build an iOS app that would let me submit that each day (Spoiler: quite a lot of work) however, I remembered that Shortcuts was a thing and decided to see if it was possible to use a shortcut to post to an API.
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An update to how I use Exist.io (Android Edition)
Twelve months ago I wrote a blog post that explained how I used Exist.io with all the various services and hardware that I owned. That was iPhone centric, but I now use a Galaxy Note 8 so there has been some fairly major changes to my workflow. Read on…!
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The biggest change was obviously changing from iOS to Android. The Exist app on android is just as great as the iPhone version so this was no big deal.
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Life Tracking with Exist
I’ve built up quite a collection of health and fitness apps over the last few years. MyFitnessPal (MFP) tracks my eating habits, Withings tracks my weight, my Apple Watch monitors my heart rate & my activities.
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All that data! So many apps to view it all. Well, not really. Thanks to Apple Health and everything starting to talk to each other, all these disparate services can share their wealth of data with each other.