We just blew in from Cape May, and I have some things to write about that trip. In the meantime, here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

Image Playground

iOS 18.2 dropped for me Saturday morning, and with it came Image Playground. I’ve been pretty excited about Image Playgrounds for two reasons. First, my inner prankster was dying to create a Christmas elf from a picture of Rhonda and show it to her. Secondly, and more seriously, is that I like to use these image generators for written communications in lieu of stock art. I have never done any kind of work for anyone with a stock photos account, and I find this more satisfying than looking for images without watermarks or worse. I do have a device with an 18.2 beta on it, and so while I was able to try out Image Playgrounds late Friday night, the official release is much more polished.

And interesting direction Apple took with Image Playgrounds is that you have to start with an image from your photo library: it won’t create an image of a person based on your written (or spoken) input. On the other hand, Image Playgrounds takes your input–no matter how innocuous or impersonal–and translates it so profoundly that it doesn’t much resemble the starting image. This jibes with Apple’s public statement on photos, which is that they are digital representations of something that happened.

Smart Folders in Notes

I’ve taken to using Notes for all of my note taking again; essentially, my setup always involves some kind of task list manager, a notes app, and an email application (not webmail). There’s a lot of ancillary software and utilities that I run, too, but that’s the core of my setup.

I recently noticed the Smart Folders feature available in Notes, and I was excited to use them to good end (showing the notes I’ve edited over the last couple of days, irrespective of filing). But they bring me a touch of nostalgia, too, for they remind me of the smart playlists in iTunes. I still have a bunch of them that don’t auto-update anymore.

The Johnny Decimal System

I read about this digital file system organization scheme on Reddit. I’ve been using the Para method to organize my digital files, and I like it plenty, but I have found organizing by Home/Work/Professional to be a challenge in that the structure tends to want to impose itself everywhere within Para if you use it in one place. This system reminds me a bit of the very cool Dendron projects I adopted for a while.