Two cents on Apple

A thorough overview of iOS 12 Shortcuts was published today by the contagiously enthusiastic Federico Viticci. Together with last week's article on iMore by Matt Cassinelli it tells you all you could ever want to know about how Siri Shortcuts will work for users, for devs, and how it compares to the pre-acquisition Workflow app. I wanted to offer 7 thoughts on where Shortcuts might go from here. First of all, macOS Shortcuts . With UIKit on Mac next year, Apple is pushing iOS developers to port their iOS apps to its power platform. It would be strange for automation, a typical power user feature, to not be transferrable from iOS to macOS. It would make sense for Apple to try to make Shorcuts macOS compatible by WWDC19, in for iOS devs porting their apps to macOS. That said, the technical challenges are also significant as the underlying technologies and interprocess communication models are quite different. One key question on macOS Shortcuts will be how they will handle ex...

I wrote an earlier post about face tagging in Photos and the challenge for users to work through their library and get everything tagged right. I promised then also some thoughts on how the face recognition algorithms themselves could maybe be improved. I continue to think that improving the user workflow around face tagging is actually more important than improving the algorithms, but there's no reason not to fight on both fronts. Mainly, the trouble comes from the fact that my kids look alike. Photos can easily recognize the difference between my own face and my wife's, but it can't tell apart my 2-year old (let's call him S) from my 4-year old (let's call him T). I've come across many (hundreds) of photos where S was tagged T, and have come to notice the things that help me as a human tell the faces apart where the Vision API falls short. First off, the big one: what mostly confuses Photos is that in the 2-year old pictures of T when he was 2, he looks v...

Face tagging in Photos frustrates me sometimes. I know everyone uses apps like Photos differently and cares about different things. My wife & I mainly use Photos to keep track of the family photo library (around 30k pics over 10 years). About half come from iPhones, the rest Canon or Nikon. We curate out the bad or redundant, but err on the side of keeping more (not every shot has to be a masterpiece). We crop and tweak, but aren't heavy editors. We do albums for vacations or events (~10 albums per year) and do one photobook per year. And we feel strongly about having everything facetagged and geotagged correctly. Caring about facetagging is where frustrations come from. The machine learning algorithm's suggestions aren't perfect (I'll write a separate post about that), but that doesn't bother me too much. Such algorithms will never tag everything right: you can't expect an AI to know which kid is behind a Batman mask or who that person is with their b...

There's been talk for a few years now about Xcode potentially coming to iOS. Playgrounds could obviously be a step in that direction (although Apple could also use it just to give people a taste of Swift, and then convert them to macOS). Some people have well-founded doubts about whether iPad will ever be the right environment for development. As for me, it's #1 on my personal WWDC 2018 wishlist. Talking to people online and IRL, I thought I'd write out some thoughts around why Apple should do this, and why I think they haven't done it yet. -- First: why would Apple, from a business point of view, want Xcode to exist on iOS? It is undeniably a significant investment of time and resources. Apple would be right in asking "where's the return?" in order to prioritize it against other ideas. Will it bring be an influx of new developers or have most people with an interest in app development already bought a Mac? If there is untapped market potential, wil...

Plenty of reports today that Apple is getting closer to its long stated goal of creating its own original television content. Basically expanding the Apple Music formula into movies and television, to compete with the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon. I really don't like this. Tech ecosystems are getting more sticky every year. Once all your contacts / photos / music are synced across all your devices in either the Apple or the Google / Samsung ecosystem, it becomes increasingly hard to switch. Do we want that ecosystem stickiness expanding into content? Let's think about what the next step might be. Is it that hard to imagine HBO launching Game of Thrones a day early exclusively on Apple devices? Netflix launching the new season on Daredevil exclusively on Samsung Smart TVs? A Disney-Apple alliance bringing Marvel movies early on Apple devices? Warner Bros responding by bringing DC movies early to Android devices? HBO offering John Oliver's political commen...

This one is off-topic so I'll keep it short. I read another article this week that tried to explain how Facebook's influence on the 2016 election was overstated, and just a fixable side effect of Facebook's real, more innocent core business model. Really? Facebook is a platform that generates revenue by letting advertisers send targeted messages based on its users' personal information. Organisations pay Facebook money to influence its users into doing things the organisations hope will make their investments worthwhile. The fact that domestic and foreign political interests want to tap into that power should not be a surprise to anyone. This is not a side-effect of the core business model - this IS the core business model.