Apple was the first to bring the desktop operating system to the masses with the mouse.
They gave us simple music searching with the clickwheel, and then they managed to rise the
computer with multi-touch on the iPhone.
But all of these magical interfaces require us to touch our computer, so then they introduced
hands-free interaction with Siri. But it wasn't magical.
Because what Apple showed us at this year's WWDC could meaningfully change how you interact
with the computer. Wow, that was so cool!
So I don't know if you've heard of AI, but it actually stands for Apple Intelligence.
Tim Cook introduced AI by really reining in expectation and establishing a set of core
values behind it. It's not about taking your job, but bringing together all the disparate parts of your device
so that something like Siri can finally become useful.
So for instance, Siri gets on-device screen awareness and in-app actions.
This means you can continuously direct Siri to perform actions in and between apps, perhaps
even faster than if you were to tap away yourself.
This is going to bring us closer to realizing our vision in which Siri moves through the
system in concert with you. This is not easy stuff to just get right, and to help things along, Apple created an
app-intense API for developers to integrate into their apps.
For us users, Apple Intelligence is designed to know our personal context, so if someone
scheduled a time to hang out with you in a text, Siri can reference that even if it's
not in your calendar. Though it should be, so ask for it to be added.
Siri up until now has felt like a decaying entity, constantly prompting web results at
the easiest queries. Siri, does the LTT Store sell tall clothes?
They do sell tall clothes, which is great. How long is the film jobs?
It's given me the runtime for an Indian film called the film. Now how long is jobs?
The answer I found is 6 feet. Here's what I found.
I found this on the web. Because Apple doesn't do live demos anymore, we only really get to see what is effectively
a concept video, so how all this works in practice is still a big question mark.
Probably one of the craziest things you could ever do is a voice recognition demo on stage
in front of an audience. There's a lot of possibility here, but I'm curious how it will feel once a capability
wall gets hit. Like Apple, I've been a bit skeptical about this whole AI thing.
I'm too much of a control freak to trust a computer model to make decisions for me.
Image generation? Eh, it's cool, but I can usually tell an image that has been generated, which kind
of kills the satisfaction. And so Apple has implemented a pretty simple generator that sticks to making illustrations.
They showed mostly the animation style, which looks like it's arguably the worst.
Much better is custom GenMoji, taking the uni out of Unicode.
Here's a question. Would you use a GenMoji that looks like you or stick with Memoji?
Comment your favorite below. As a writer, I'm especially skeptical about the writing tools, though you might find it
great. AI can summarize or completely rewrite anything you've written in any app.
Me.
This tech stuff can be useful even if you're not writing though.
Like how mail will now summarize incoming messages in your inbox before you click on
them. It can also summarize long emails too. Though be careful, because what if you miss an important point the sender included in
the message? What if that person is being sarcastic? Like what do you say?
Oh sorry, I missed that because I read the summary.
Apple talked a lot about privacy with their implementation of AI.
For instance, it's only available on the more powerful chips so they can do as much
processing on device as possible, which is great.
But for everything else, they'll be sending only the relevant info to get processed on
their private cloud compute. This all sounds good, but the industry has robbed so much goodwill that it'll take a
lawyer combing through the endless user policies to actually make me feel secure.
So everything else? Just about every operating system got touched, but not as much as I'd hoped.
For instance, I've been using the new powerful iPad Pro and I'm still frustrated by iPad
OS. All they announced was a floating tab bar, which won't help much.
On the other hand, I'm pleased to report that there's finally a calculator.
It's only taken 14 years so maybe there's hope for everything else?
But it's not just a button calculator. People struggling with their math homework can use math notes, which lets you scribble
out your formulas and doesn't the calculations for you.
Need or still, if you have any variables, it'll figure out their context and update
the results if you make any changes to the numbers.
It's the magic of Excel brought to the old style math on the page.
Here's another small thing that took forever. iOS will now let you place your app icons anywhere on the home screen.
Yes, it's finally happened. And if you're feeling weird, you can tint all your app icons to match.
Perfect for making your apps hard to find and your app icons uglier.
You can do all this from your Mac too, as continuity will now let you see and control
your iPhone remotely. Notifications will appear on your desktop and files can be easily transferred over for
when your phone's out of reach.
Does this mean the iPhone has mouse support now?
Cause that'd be crazy. It was a pretty light event when it comes to features.
They spent some time showing off the photos app redesign. Great for those of you who have committed to iCloud Photos, but mainly keeps up the
boring screenshots and document photos out of your life photos more assertively.
I'm excited to see how the new MailApps categories feature will tame and organize all my emails
has been getting really stressful lately in there. Oh yeah!
And the Vision Pro. They didn't really have much to say about it other than showing off a few apps on the
device, which I'm curious to try now. The big thing was really with photos and videos.
For instance, they'll now try and turn your 2D photos into 3D spatial photos.
And there's progress on the spatial video workflows too. You can actually get a lens for a Canon camera or a Blackmagic camera now and edit and export
spatial videos. As a video creator, it's something I'm interested in trying.
However, as of now, they'll only be distributed in the Vimeo app.
If we do make a spatial video, you're going to have to get a Vision Pro to watch it.
I don't make the rules, but don't worry, it's coming to more countries this summer.
Okay, so what was missed?
Not much actually, but I still want a journal app for at least the iPad.
I want iPad apps to behave predictably when using a mouse and trackpad, and I want buttons
to look like buttons. Thanks for waiting so long for this Mac Address.
I'm actually going to explain what happened in the next video, so stay tuned for that.
I'm curious in the comments below what WWC announcements really stuck out to you.
Health stuff on the watch?