Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

Works well with multiple accounts. Easy to set up with Gmail or with any IMAP-based email provider. Handles both light and dark mode, and is good at detecting when a message was designed for a larger screen and adjusting the layout so you can read it.

But it tracks you more than it should. In particular, any outgoing links are modified to route through Google’s servers first. And I have no idea what else it might be doing with info it gets from my other email accounts – never mind what they do with the actual Gmail account!

Between that, and just generally trying to reduce my dependence on Google, I’ve switched to using K-9 with a third-party email account.

The “Simple Mobile Tools” suite used to be a great source of basic apps that didn’t slurp up your data, clog up your apps with advertising, or charge exorbitant prices. They aren’t anymore.

At the end of 2023, the suite was sold to ZipoApps, a company known for acquiring existing apps and bloating them with all of those things. (Their TrustPilot reviews are an interesting mix of 5-stars from devs who sold them their apps, and 1-stars from customers complaining about unauthorized charges.)

Fortunately, the apps were GPL-licensed.

Forked!

Fossify forked the entire suite, cleaning up anything that’s not compatible license-wise, re-branding the original privacy-focused apps and picking up development.

The forked apps started making their way into F-Droid a week or two ago. The calendar, file manager and gallery were the first.

That was a relief. Back when I started moving my calendars from Google to Nextcloud, I settled on Simple Calendar. That went out the window when I read about the sale. I used Google Calendar for a few weeks – it least I knew what they were collecting – and installed Fossify Calendar as soon as I could do so without side-loading it.

Not Simple Anymore

In the meantime, ZipoApps has indeed started destroying the apps they bought, judging by the reviews. The top one for Simple Calendar today:

It originally said there would be a one-time payment of 2.99 after the free trial. I thought I’d gladly pay that so I continued to use it. When the trial was up I was given the option to buy not for the single payment of 2.99 but for $15/week! The app itself is exactly what I want over other calendars I’ve tried. And I would pay for adless, but over $2/day is insane. Banner ads would be tolerable but it has video ads when opening the app and adding an event. Wish I’d read the reviews.

(Emphasis added.) Before the sale, Simple Mobile Calendar did in fact have a single one-time payment option of a couple of dollars. $2.99 at the most.

The company replied:

Sorry to hear that the price for the Premium subscription seems high to you. Please, note that the App on the Premium version opens up many exciting features and opportunities for you and it is definitely worth the price. The Premium version has no ads. Thank you!

“Seems” high"? $15/week for a simple calendar is exorbitant.

Video advertisements on a basic tool are insane.

And who knows how much data they’re sucking up from your device and probably selling?

I hate this sort of business that purchases something only to strip it for parts and sell off the broken pieces at inflated prices. Destroying things for short-term gain only works until you run out of stuff to destroy and have to start over again. Building something? That’s got long-term potential.

It’s especially galling since the whole purpose of Simple Mobile Tools was to not do this.

Fossify Roll-Out

The Fossify apps are continuing to roll out on F-Droid and the Google Play Store. Update: As of April 2024, File Manager, SMS Messenger, Phone, Contacts, Voice Recorder, Calendar and Music Player are available on both, with Gallery and Clock on F-Droid and in beta testing on Google Play.

My Experience Using the Apps

I’ve extensively used:

• Contacts works great with phone, texting and email apps.
• Calendar also works well for scheduling and reminders.
• Voice Recorder is good for taking audio “notes” and then following up on them later.

And I’ve used the following off and on, but not enough to have a good sense of how well they work:

• File Manager
• Music Player
• Gallery

Geary is really lightweight but still feels modern, so it’s a good email client for lower-end hardware. IMAP features are basic, but 90% of what most people will need, most of the time. Plain text email, formatted email, moving messages around, multiple accounts, etc. Comparable to Apple Mail on a Mac, but for Linux.

It’s just email, and assumes you have another application for contacts and calendars. (Think of it in terms of the classic Unix philosophy of using multiple tools, each of which does one thing well.)

Unfortunately there’s still that remaining 10% for which you’ll probably need your mail provider’s web interface or something more complete like Thunderbird, but Geary is plenty for most day-to-day use.

GNOME-ish

Geary is built to run on a GNOME desktop, but it can run just fine on others as long as the services it needs are available. (Folks for contacts, a keyring for passwords, and gnome-online-accounts for some email providers) And if you want to manage your contacts, you’ll need another application for that. I’ve got Geary and GNOME Contacts running quite happily on LXQt without any other GNOME applications.

Though I did have to temporarily install GNOME to configure Gmail access.

Similar to A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, but a tighter story, with better-defined secondary characters and internal story logic.

Again there’s a young apprentice with small, oddly specific magical abilities, who gets drawn into a caper, blamed for it, and finds herself as the only person who can resolve it, and has to both stretch her magic and convince the adults around to help her (and let her help them).

This time the magic is art. Paintings and drawings, if done the right way with the right details by by someone with the right ability, can become magical objects. Rosa was born into a family of Illuminators. A very eccentric family. Each with their own eccentricity. And that’s before she encounters the magical talking crow (who is very taken with shiny objects) and the malicious creature he was guarding.

The stakes are more personal: the Scarling has it specifically out for the Mandolini family. But there’s a clear potential for it to spiral out of control. Like Mona, Rosa makes mistakes, but again they’re believable mistakes. And in this book the adults have character reasons for finally believing her, not just plot reasons.

There’s a lot of mischief and magic, though only one mandrake as I recall. And because Rosa doesn’t need to leave home on her hero’s journey like Oliver (Minor Mage) or Mona, everyone in her family takes part in the story instead of just being window dressing for the framing sequence.

It’s aimed at kids, yes: kids who appreciate not being talked down to. And it’s written so that adults will have fun with it too.

More of T. Kingfisher’s kids’ books at her official website.

Fluent Reader is a simple, no-nonsense, modern-looking feed reader that runs locally on your desktop, so it can’t track you the way a web application could. It works great out of the box, and offers multiple ways to view posts including a grid-based card view which sets it apart from most news readers. Preferences are simple, and the only external action is to open an article in your default web browser, but you can set up rules for each feed. Displaying a QR code of the article URL so you can open it on a phone is a nice touch.

It’s an Electron app (with all the pros and cons that entails), so it can run on Windows, macOS and Linux. Available from both the Microsoft and Apple app stores, as an installer, or as a Flatpak for Linux.

Cloud sync is supported for a single account through any of FeedBin, Inoreader, Nextcloud News or anything using the Google Reader API.

I prefer the clean UI over RSSGuard’s complexity. But sometimes I find it a bit too simplified. I think NewsFlash (Linux) and NetNewsWire (macOS) hit a bit closer to the “as simple as possible and no simpler” mark. But they’re all in the same ballpark. And NetNewsWire doesn’t support Nextcloud (yet?).

Unfortunately I’ve had intermittent sync issues with Nextcloud on all three operating systems. (That’s critical bug #2.) I haven’t been able to determine whether the problem is with my server or with some of the feeds I follow, but I did report the bug as a starting point. But because of that, I can’t really recommend it for use with Nextcloud News.

Mobile

There is a corresponding Fluent Reader Lite app for both iOS and Android, but I haven’t tried it out yet.