This TED talk was not what I was expecting. Instead of a flashy demo of the product we got a foundation and principles for building Ai driven devices. I have a lot of questions but here are my initial thoughts.

Video link: youtu.be/gMsQO5u7-…

The good.

First, I thought this was a typo but Humane references “Ai” instead of “AI”. Is there a difference? Is “Ai” not an acronym forArtificial Intelligence? Maybe this is the name of the product. Ai. And the next version could be Aii. It is probably explained somewhere but I haven’t bothered to look.

Second, I like the idea of technology being transparent. I think society as a whole can benefit with more face to face interaction without a screen in between. I also relate to this especially after recently attending my daughters’ piano recital and recording it on my phone but wanting to also just be present and enjoy the moment .

Third, I agree that AI (Ai?) will transform our lives in ways we can’t imagine right now. I think the demo showcasing the translation into French using his own voice and manner of speaking was impressive and much more personal than a generic assistant like Siri or Google Assistant. This also demonstrated the ability for the technology to be less visible and obtrusive during a human to human interaction.

The demo about personalized recommendations was also interesting in that each user will have their own Ai and it will learn and evolve to make better recommendations for the individual. This reinforces Humane’s Ai principles of security, privacy, and trust.

The bad.

Everything above sounds great. However, when I think of how this will fit into my life I don’t see it. What does this replace? My iPhone? My MacBook? My Apple Watch? Or is this something in addition to those things that replaces some of my “compute” experience when I’m around people?

The demos didn’t demonstrate privacy as commands had to be spoken out loud. That is much less private to speak a sentence out load than to silently type it into a message. And while summarizing emails is helpful for prioritizing - it doesn’t reduce the number of emails I need to reply to in a thoughtful manner.

The end.

I feel the truly revolutionary AI powered device will be on the face with glasses. Glasses with an earpiece can take us so much further along the path to replacing a phone while improving our social interactions securely and privately. Maybe it is my lack of imagination but I just can’t see a place in my life for Humane’s Ai based on what was demoed.

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails. It is a free ebook available in a variety of different formats.

I am excited to read this book and mark it up. It is a great way to understand Steve’s way of working, thinking, and writing.

I recently listened to an episode of ATP where they discussed how Gmail works differently than a regular IMAP email account.

In Gmail, messages are labeled. You can set as many labels as you want on a message and those labels are a way of filtering messages later. This has the advantage over a folder structure where the message can only exist in one folder at a time.

I’ve used Gmail since it was an invite only beta. I used labels a lot to categorize my messages. But when the iPhone came out I started using Mail.app and pretty much stopped using labels. Almost 15 years later, I’ve realized that I don’t miss labeled messages and that I almost never go back to look at old messages in the folders/labels. In fact, I rarely look for messages older than a few months and a quick search in my archive turns anything up almost instantly.

Everyone has their way of organizing and my way is to have three buckets for incoming messages:

1. Inbox
2. Archive
3. Deleted

For outgoing messages I have:

1. Drafts
2. Sent

I don’t use any other folder structure than those. Search is so good these days that I don’t manually dig for messages anymore.

I hope you don’t either.

Update: It is worth noting that I separate my roles with separate email accounts. For instance, my work email is completely separate from my personal email. I’ve found this helps me separate my roles logically instead of funneling everything into a single email account and then dividing it up with folders/labels.

Lately I’ve had a few discussions about mobile applications technologies. There are many options available, native Swift and Kotlin, and multi-platform React.js, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform. Personally, I am adamant about using the tools and languages that are native to the platform. There are tradeoffs with any choice but for me it comes down to caring and the effects this choice has on the culture and team.

What do I mean by caring? Sure, everyone on any team wants to create a quality app. But for me caring goes far beyond passing requirements. For me, coding is a form of art - like writing a story or poem. It has structure and form. It can be beautiful, clean, and elegant. And I’m not talking about GUI – I’m talking about the code! One of the reasons I love writing Ruby code is that it is easier to reach that goal. Caring about how the code looks and is organized may seem over the top but guess what? It matters. Ruby attracted people who had those same values and it created a wonderful community. I’ve found a similar community in iOS and Swift projects - partly because they are all heavy Apple users – but there is a connection in those groups about creating something that isn’t just beautiful on the outside but is elegant, understandable, and maintainable under the covers too.

Continuing with the art analogy, if an artist is creating a poster to frame and hang on the wall what kind of paper and drawing tools would they use? A torn out large lined sheet of notebook paper and a broken pencil?!? No! They would use a heavy feathered card stock with a fountain pen or quality brushes or markers. They care about the medium and the tools because they care to create something that doesn’t simply pass the requirements.

When we choose to use the lowest common denominator languages and tools to save on “resources” then we shouldn’t expect to build a team that cares deeply about the app. We get out what we put in. The app will be fine but not great. And it will never be an insanely great app.

Today marks 10 years since Steve Jobs passed away. When my kids feel unsure of themselves I use the quote below to encourage them to be better and grow beyond their expectations.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Apple has a nice remembrance video on their homepage today that also includes this quote.

Update: the video is now posted on YouTube - youtu.be/CeSAjK2CB…

As I watched the 2020 WWDC Keynote I started seeing patterns in some of the features that were unveiled.

First is SwiftUI. Last year SwiftUI was revealed as a cross (Apple) platform way to write UI code. It significantly eases support for basic things that reside on all Apple platforms including light/dark mode, accessibility handlers, translation, and UI layouts.

Second is the new multi-platform Xcode template. It makes it easy to start building and maintaining apps for iPhone, iPad, and macOS.

Third, is App Clips. App Clips are parts of an app, the demonstrated example is a parking meter app. You may be in a new city and need to park but don’t want to spend 5-10 minutes downloading the app, creating an account, etc when you may never use that app again. With app clips you get just the experience of paying for the parking spot without permanently downloading an app.

Lastly, is the new UI for macOS. It is much more visually similar to iPad OS in many ways. They build off of each other while remaining structurally different. I think that Apple isn’t converging the platforms so much as they are creating a consistent design language across all of their platforms - which brings me to the point of all of this - what is the next platform?

The semi-obvious answer is the much rumored Apple AR Glasses. SwiftUI allows you to write cross platform UI code that can be ported to a new platform and then customized for that platform with less effort than writing a new platform specific app. The Xcode template gets you further along that path by separating UI code while sharing underlying network and application logic. App Clips seems like the perfect fit for Apple AR Glasses on the go. You want lightweight apps that can be used nearly instantaneously for a specific interaction. And the unified design language of macOS/tvOS/iOS/iPadOS will make the next platform instantly recognizable and more intuitive.

Apple is putting the pieces together for their next big platform right under our noses.