I can’t stress enough how Apple’s Freeform is a joy to use. Is this a sleeper hit? If you don’t use it, do yourself a favour and try it. It’s the most intuitive, frictionless diagramming app out there on the Mac. And the iPad.

Apple’s Siri, AI and Next’s Year’s OS Releases

I don’t know if Apple is working on LLM stuff; they probably do, they probably do work on improving Siri, too, if such a thing is possible in the current incarnation of its fundamentals. But, judging by the rapidity of other companies introducing AI features mainly based on LLM models, I don’t expect it would be so hard for Apple to do the same with Siri. But only if Apple accepts to work with CharGPT-back end for a short-term solution. This could be a transitory path in my mind. Because Apple being Apple, they probably would want to put their twist on this: better privacy protection, for example. They like to control the whole stack. That’s perhaps why they are, apparently, investing massively in their one training infrastructure, which would be they accept the fact that on-device training is too limited, even with powerful Apple silicon. It could prove to be a long journey. I don’t expect too much for next year’s OSes. It will be interesting to see where Apple is headed with this AI thing next year.

Meanwhile, when I’m asking Siri queries today, I cannot help but feel the tech is antiquated compared to what we can do with Whisper and the like today.

Image: Dall-E.

What Happened to the Shortcuts Editor?

I’ve been working with Apple Shortcuts editor recently1, on my iPhone and on my iPad, and boy, what a shocking experience! This editor is nearly unworkable, thanks to scrolling sluggishness, object ordering bugs, object variables becoming empty, constant freezes, keyboard masking input fields, changes not being saved and plain and simple editor crashes. 😤 What is happening with this, Apple?2 I can’t believe Viticci is able to endure this for all his work around shortcuts.

  1. I’m working on something new, involving Plausible APIs, Charty for iPhone, and Apple Shortcuts. Stay tuned for that one. ↩︎

  2. I don’t expect a response from Apple, of course. ↩︎

Shot on iPhone. Edited on Mac.

This short behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s “Scary Fast” event is the highlight of a marketing masterpiece.

First, Apple, a highly-respected company for producing top-quality new product announcements, released new iPhones capable of high-quality filming in September. Next, in October, the company made another top-notch production and announced the first M3-based Macs. Not to be missed, and that is the key here, they slip the following at the very last moment of the presentation:

This event was shot on iPhone and edited on Mac.

What better way to make a point? Brilliant. Well done, Apple.

I love my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I feel that the creative world is at my fingertips. I feel empowered.