I made a big cleanup in my Shortcuts this morning. Boy, do I feel this app needs so much more work to be enjoyable to use. Can Apple fix this mess? Editing a long shortcut is not optimal. There should be a compressed or text-only mode with inline hyperlinks for variables and actions. Syncing is broken—no debugging option. There should be a way to turn off a shortcut so it doesn’t appear in places like share sheets. I wish Apple spent more time on Shortcuts than they do on Swift Playground. Oh, is Apple going to enable creating Shortcuts using GenAI? That would be really cool. 👀🤔

On Single-Purpose Device Attractiveness

This week during a work meeting with my office colleagues, one of them was using a “remarkable” tablet to take notes. I was sitting right next to him and could see the tablet in action. I must say I was impressed. It’s certain that a “remarkable” tablet offers very limited functionality compared to an iPad, but it raises the following question: Should Apple consider going back to creating single-purpose devices? For example, the iPhone killed the iPod, but I think if Apple re-entered the market with a new line of iPods, it would be very popular. And I think the same would be true for a note-taking tablet.

Lots of meetings today at the office. Used my iPad Pro all the time for note-taking. It’s such a wonderful and mighty device for that purpose. Even with iPadOS limitations. I’m excited for the next iteration. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next to this platform.

Yesterday, while writing and editing a report for one of our clients, I used ChatGPT for two different use cases. One use case was to ask for a summarization of what “firmware” is and how critical it is. The second use case is to define the pillars of a data management and governance policy in the enterprise. On that one, I asked for more details about managing unstructured data. The ChatGPT results were mind-blowing. I know a lot about this specific IT field, and I could validate the correctness of the answers. I saved a lot of time because of ChatGPT.

But what about my ethics?

Should I write a disclaimer in this report that says GenAI was used to put together some portions of this report? Is the client ready and mature enough to read this disclaimer? Will he understand that ChatGPT is in fact like an assistant to whom I asked to summarize what a data governance policy is? How do I cite my sources?

Today is the kind of day where I feel that I’m in a constantly moving mode: from Craft to Micro.blog or Bear 2. Closing this subscription, starting a new one. And all this for what? Content preservation? Data silos fighting? It’s exhausting.

On Apple Car Project Cancellation - It Did Make Any Sense Anyway

This whole Apple Car didn’t make any sense to me. It’s not Apple. A car is not a personal device. A personal device is a phone. A computer. Or a bike. One positive byproduct of this car journey is probably the birth of CarPlay 2.0, which was probably worked within the Apple Car project. But then, what else? AI? Maybe. I’m reading that the AI portion of the project will be folded into the other AI team(s) within Apple. It’s good because Apple needs all it can get in AI to stay relevant in that field and imagine the future beyond Siri.

The Craft team is introducing collaborative whiteboards to Craft. I tested the feature and made a video about it.

A Metablog That You Can Follow via RSS

💡 Today, I want to share the newest addition to my digital publishing space: my metablog, hosted on Micro.blog. This isn’t entirely new; another version is already in place, but it is hosted as a series of Craft-shared documents. What I’m sharing today is hosted on Micro.blog using the recently introduced increase in the number of blogs you can have with a single premium account1. From this migration, my metablog will gain RSS feed support, enable POSSE, and be closer to my online community here on Micro.blog, but also on Mastodon and Bluesky.

One last thing: this is a work-in-progress, a build-in-public thing. I’m slowly transposing most of my content to this new home, one post at a time. You’ll know it because of cross-posting and the RSS feed provided that you subscribe. 👈🏻 Some posts date back to 2020, but you might be surprised by discovering a few gems.

  1. I’m using two, and I’ll probably stop there. I promise. ↩︎

Thought of the day: Micro.blog is probably the most fun and flexible thing on the open web these days that I can play with. It is approachable which in itself is a great quality. It is a creativity “unleasher”. When something is fun, I want more of it. I want to spread the word and share my excitement. 👊🏻

Finalizing This Week's Creative Summary — Plus: An Idea

It’s Sunday, and you know the drill: it’s time to share my latest edition of the weekly creative summary. It’s mostly complete, so this week’s edition partially follows the “build in public” movement. I wonder if I should start sharing the document at the beginning of the process so that you can see the whole creation process as I’m working on the current edition. What do you think?

I’ve been doing these summaries since last September and enjoy putting them together. It’s issue number 22. Enjoy. The email version is coming out later today.

Built with care and love on 100% recycled electrons.