Successor to the late Sequel Pro, it still manages to be an unapologetically macOS application and a powerful database manager. Easy to use, responsive, stable. All the frequent stuff you need to do is in the UI, plus of course you can write your own queries when you need to. It can connect directly to a MySQL/MariaDB database or set up its own SSH tunnel.
Sequel Ace and its predecessor are the only database GUIs Iâve actually liked rather than merely tolerated. If it ran on Linux, or if it could talk to Microsoft SQL Server, itâs the only one I would use. Itâs that good.
Ecosia is a non-profit search provider that uses renewable energy to power their servers and partners with local environmental organizations, most visibly (but not only) to plant trees. Ethical Consumer rates it 11, but notes that it depends on the lower-rated Google and Microsoft.
Search Engine
â â â â â
The quality of Ecosiaâs search results seems comparable to DuckDuckGo. Which is to say: at least itâs better than Google Search since Google started prioritizing keeping you on its site over sending you where you want. Both add a layer on top of Bing, Google, and specialized site results (ex: pulling travel info from TripAdvisor), remixing them with their own priorities. Not surprisingly, for Ecosia this includes things like climate assessment and ecology. They donât track your search history unless you actively opt into personalized results.
Also like DDG, theyâre working on their own search index to reduce dependence on the big two. Itâs still more private than searching Google or Bing directly, but itâs not their focus: Ecosia is more interested in minimizing and counteracting the environmental costs of the internet.
Using Ecosia by Default
Some web browsers already have Ecosia in their list of search engines, so you just have to choose it. For those that donât, thereâs a Chromium/Firefox extension to add it, or you can add it manually using this URL in your search settings:
https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=%s
Desktop Web Browser
â â â ââ
Another Chromium skin. It doesnât seem to add much else compared to the basic browser, and there doesnât seem to be any sync functionality (though Floccus works for bookmarks). But at least it doesnât add a bunch of stuff I donât want like Opera, Brave or Edge, and itâs ahead of Ungoogled Chromium in completeness and installing/updating.
I do appreciate that I can turn off embeds like the âLog in with Googleâ prompts that plague websites these days. (OK, I can log in with Google, but if I donât want to â especially if I already have a login on this site â the pop-up is useless and annoying.)
Stripped-down Chromium with an ad blocker. No option to move the toolbar down to the bottom where I can actually reach it with my thumb, but then I canât do that in Chrome either. Iâd rather use Vivaldi or Firefox (or one of its derivatives) with Ecosia as the default search engine.
A simple mono recording app where the audio stays on your phone. No ads, no subscriptions, no remotely-generated transcripts, just basic recording.
Iâve found it useful for making quick voice notes I can come back to later, and for recording audio observations for iNaturalist when I can hear, but canât see noisy animals. It should work for longer recordings too: thereâs no time limit as far as I can tell.
Thereâs a setting to start recording as soon as you launch the app, and a widget in case you want one-click recording sometimes, and some simple options for choosing a bitrate and file format (M4A, MP3, or Ogg).
Wallabag is a service for saving articles you find on the web to read later. Itâs built on open-source software that you can run yourself if you want (but you donât have to). Not as polished as Pocket, but you know itâs not using your saved bookmarks to train a recommendation engine.
And now that Pocket is shutting down, itâs worth taking a look at switching.
Setup is a bit clunky, even using the hosted service at wallabag.it, and itâs not quite as good as Pocket at extracting the content of an article. This varies according to site, of course. Sites like this one that just show you the article will work better than sites that break into the middle with a 12-image carousel and a âsign up to read moreâŠâ dialog or a redirect through CloudFlare.
You can also export articles to various formats ranging from plain text to PDF or ePub. So if you have a super-long article you want to read on an e-reader later on â or a group of articles? Easy!
At first, the web app ran quickly, but itâs been a lot slower lately. Two things happened around the same time: Mozilla announced it was closing Pocket, and I imported 15 years of Pocket archives (without cleaning the export first). I donât know if theyâre getting substantially more usage, or if itâs just that my account ballooned from a couple hundred items to over 25,000.
Feeds and Automation
Both incoming and outgoing feeds are supported. You can set it up to follow RSS/Atom feeds to add posts to your reading list. And in the website config, you can enable full-text feeds for unread, archived, starred, or all articles so you can read them in any feed reader. Outgoing feeds include any tags youâve added, but not annotations.
This also means you can use feeds for automation: You can use another service to aggregate keyword searches, and as long as the results are readable as a feed, you can pipe that into Wallabag. Or pull from a blog, or a Fediverse account, or anything else that generates a feed. For example, Iâve got it automatically adding anything tagged ToRead on my Postmarks by following the /tagged/toread.xml feed. Wallabag doesnât use the tags from the source, unfortunately.
Or you can use Wallabag as a source, using IFTTT to send your starred items to another bookmarks service, or build a linkblog out of articles youâve given a particular tag, or create a draft post. You wonât want to just give out your starred feed URL, because all of your outgoing feeds have the same access token.
Another cool feature for automation is tag rules: Like custom email filters, you can create rules to automatically tag articles based on the title, estimated reading length, content, and various other elements. This is especially useful when following feeds.
Browser Integration
Chromium/Firefox Browser Add-Ons
Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers that support WebExtensions (and Orion!) can use the Wallabagger extension to save an article from the toolbar. (Here it is at the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-Ons. And Edge Add-Ons if thatâs your thing.) It also lets you add tags if you want, and it can (usually) extract the content from the view youâre looking at, which helps with paywalls and login walls. (Otherwise the Wallabag service doesnât necessarily have access to your logged-in view.)
Setting it up needs API keys, and the UI doesnât make it clear when itâs actually ready to use. Once youâve got it working, though, you can save it to a file and load that config in the extension on another device or browser. Mostly.
Safari Extension
Safari can use the Wallabag QuickSave extension (App Store), which is similar but just silently adds the page. You can always add tags later on.
Though I did have trouble setting it up on my old home MacBook: the setup window was twice as high as the screen, with all the fields way down at the bottom. I had to use the overview to see what field was selected, return to the window, type or paste, hit tab, repeat until I could validate my credentials.
Bookmarklet
Other browsers like Falkon can use the bookmarklet, which you can find on the web app in the âHowtoâ section under your account menu. (Here it is on Wallabag.it.) Though I find myself missing that drop-down option for adding a link directly instead of browsing to it first.
Mobile
The Wallabag Android app handles offline sync well once you enable the right settings. I have it set to run a âfastâ auto-sync every 12 hours and on start, with the separate auto-sync for local changes, and the âdeleted article sweepâ after fast sync. One problem reared its head after I imported around 25,000 articles: That sweep can take minutes now, and local actions have to wait for it to finish before theyâll upload.
Not only can I read articles while offline, I can share a link from my email app to Wallabag while offline, and as with Pocket, itâll add the article once the device is connected again. Iâm still trying to determine under what circumstances it actually caches images, since Iâm still seeing placeholders after enabling âPut article images in cache.â It also has a theme specifically designed for e-ink displays, which is a big help on the Boox Poke3 I use as an eReader.
The mobile app doesnât seem to have a way to manually tell it to try re-fetching the content of an article.
Text to speech is at least OK for listening in the car. I havenât used it enough recently to know whether it has the same kinds of oddities in Pocketâs speech back in the day!
I assume the iOS app is similar at least, but Iâve never had the opportunity to use it.
I recently read a review of Frigoligo, another Android app, that has me thinking I should give it a try also. (TODO)
Other Apps
The website view works well installed to a desktop as a progressive web app (PWA) using browsers that support it. Links open in the app, which isnât necessarily what I want all the time.
Linux Desktop / GNOME:Read it Later (on Flatpak) is fairly basic: It lists your unread, starred or archived articles and you can read them in the app. You can also add an article, or move articles between these lists. Links in articles open in your default web browser. Other than that, thereâs no support for tagging, search, or any other features that would help you find a specific article if youâre using Wallabag for more than just âread this thing I saw yesterday.â On the plus side, it does seem to keep articles cached when you go offline, which would make it useful for Linux laptops, tablets, or your desktop if you live somewhere with unreliable internet access.
Some others that I want to try out, but havenât yet:
Wallabag is able to import from bookmarks, Pinboard, Instapaper, Pocket and a few other backup formats. You can even import your Delicious archives if you still have them!
Tip: Clean up the list before importing it if you can! Especially if youâve been using the other service as long as Iâve been using Pocket (more than a decade). I now have thousands of âsavedâ articles that Wallabag canât retrieve because of new paywalls or site deaths. And quite a few that I only really cared about short term. HTML and CSV exports are usually one line per item, which makes it easy. But donât try messing with a JSON file unless you really know what youâre doing.
It used to be possible to import directly from Pocketâs servers, but that stopped working sometime during 2024.
For a while, the workaround was to rearrange Pocketâs CSV export to match Instapaperâs column order. This had the downside that it wouldnât import fields that Instapaper wouldnât give you, like the unread/archive status or the date you added an item. Thatâs how I ended up with 25,000 âunreadâ articles, all ânewâ on the day I imported them!
To Wallabagâs credit, it was able to do an import of that size, and even the mobile app still runs smoothly between syncs!
Iâve been using Pocket for ages to offload âHey, this looks interestingâ articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time. And when I say âages,â I mean it: I was using it back when it was still called Read It Later, long before Mozilla bought it.
It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
Feedly talks to it easily. Back when I used Feedly, I even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping âSave for Laterâ on the tablet will add an article to Pocket. This also helped make up a bit for Feedlyâs lack of offline access.
Speaking of IFTTT and online services I donât use anymore, for a while I had it set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also added it to Delicious.
The Android app will accept shares even if thereâs no network connection, then sync up when itâs online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at homeâŠor the next time Iâm out somewhere, after itâs synced.
Kobo eReaders can connect to Pocket and you can read your saved articles on something thatâs actually designed for reading.
You can save pages to Pocket using a browser extension for all the major desktop browser types, including Chromium, Firefox and Safari. For others, you can get a bookmarklet from getPocket.com/add while logged in. And just share a URL or page to the mobile app.
Mission Creep
For a while, Pocket had a ârecommendâ button, which let you add a page to a public feed. I thought this was great! It meant I could use one service for bookmarks, saving to read later, and linkblogging!
Eventually Mozilla discontinued manual ârecommendationsâ in favor of an automatic recommendation engine based on what you saved, and what other people were saving. (And sponsored articles, of course.) Your saved articles were âprivateâ from other users, but not from the engine.
A lot of people only know Pocket as âthat annoying thing that shows me sponsored articles when I launch Firefox.â These days Iâm never sure how much theyâre using my bookmarking to train that engine.
And while self-reinforcing algorithms geared toward engagement may be good for the dopamine hits (and a convienient channel to add sponsored articles), itâs not too helpful in the long run.
I finally gave Wallabag a try. Itâs not as polished, but I feel more confident about what itâs doing with my data, and if I really want to, I can host my own server. Plus Wallabag still works on my Poke3 e-reader. I havenât been able to get Pocket to log in on it since it stopped syncing and I reinstalled the app.
Speech Oddities
For a while I used the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. Even in the mid-2010s the voice was fairly decent, despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms.
There were a few oddities, though:
# is always read as âhash.â This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. âBatman Hash 123â just sounds wrong.
Italics areâŠalwaysâŠemphasis, and presented byâŠpausingâŠrather than changing tone. This makes itâŠawkwardâŠfor anything involving lots of titles.
It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and canât always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like âtah-kay-down notice,â (takedown) âlink-uh-dinâ (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or âpohs terminalâ (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out âI-triple-E,â so I imagine itâs got a dictionary for special cases.