garrett

garrett , 2 months ago

whoBIRD

An app that recognizes birds singing near you, all on device, and has an option to show a photo of the bird too. It's exclusive to F-Droid (not on Google Play), and the only bird recognizing app I know of that does it all immediately on your device (without sending it to a server).
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whobird/

Organic Maps

Highly detailed OpenStreetMap maps local on your device. Wonderful for walking directions, as it has on-device routing and maps out walking pathways (which is something that even Google Maps does not do well)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

AntennaPod

The best podcast client also happens to be Free Software and on F-Droid.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

HeliBoard

This is the best FOSS keyboard that's under active maintenance. It even supports swiping, but that requires a non-free binary library from Google. (Maintained fork of OpenBoard.)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/helium314.keyboard/

Breezy Weather

Good weather app that has so many details (including pollen too) and fetches from multiple sources. It looks great as well.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.breezyweather/

garrett , 2 months ago

Oh, nice! Then there are two great FOSS keyboard under maintenance again! Thanks for mentioning that.

garrett , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Merlin wasn't available here when I checked at some point in time (last year?)

whoBIRD does use BirtNET, from Cornell, so it's basically the same backend (although it may be an older version).

I recently tried out Merlin (which is now available here) and it's amazing. It's definitely more featureful than whoBIRD, although both have the core "recognize bird directly using your phone" features.

For anyone OK with non-FOSS apps, Merlin is great. For anyone who wants a FOSS app for bird detection, whoBIRD is still pretty good.

Either way, identifying apps using ones phone is nice. 👍 Big things to Cornell for making the ML for both of these apps.

garrett , 4 months ago

It certainly is a differentiator: uBlock Origin already works best on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox

And when Manifest v3 is fully enforced in Chromium (current date is slated to be July 2024), then the more restricted uBlock Origin Lite would need to be used instead.

(I'm not sure if Arc will fully adopt v3, but they might not have a choice at some point in time.)

The Lite version still works well considering all the restrictions, but has a lot of limitations:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-1507539114

• Filter lists update only when the extension updates (no fetching up to date lists from servers)

• Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3's limited filter syntax
• No crafting your own filters (thus no element picker)
• No strict-blocked pages
• No per-site switches
• No dynamic filtering
• No importing external lists

TL;DR: The way uBlock Origin works on Firefox right now is already better, but if Arc has to go along with Manifest v3 in Chromium in a few months, then it'll be even more of a differentiator.

It also looks like they're even thinking about rolling out their own tracker blocker (instead of using uBlock Origin) as a result of the Manifest v3 changes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/wiki/index/#wiki_how_will_arc_handle_the_transition_from_manifest_v2_to_manifest_v3.3F

https://twitter.com/joshm/status/1728926780600508716

We're rolling our own native @arcinternet
Ad & Tracker Blocker in 2024 (since Chrome is restricting them)...

Any creative ideas for how we can go above and beyond, and reimagine the category?

Remove GDPR/Cookie Consents? What else?