Freeform, the visual and collaborative application from Apple, is finally out for the iPad, the Mac and… I spent some time with it on the iPad and found it enjoyable and deceptively minimalistic. On the Mac, once updated to Ventura 13.1, Freeform can be used to continue working on the content, albeit with a different set of tools, since there is no Apple Pencil support over there. One question is, why is the tools palette on the iPad different from the one with Apple Notes? I mean, there are pencils or crayons that I prefer on Notes over the available choices in Freemform’s palette. Following is a comparison of both. At the top is the Apple Notes tools palette. At the bottom is Apple’s Freeform. The latter seems a bit childish, too simplistic. I really wish there were more pencil types. 

Other than that, I didn’t test the collaborative work with someone else. I see Freemore as more for individualistic creative work. I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever make good use of it. Certainly not at work, as we’re more of a “Microsoft” business. Time will tell. 

This week, a new Mac joined the family. The 2013 Mac Pro. I always dreamed of owning one. It’s probably one of the most singular Macs Apple has ever designed. Yes, it has limited expansion. Yes, it is not the Pro Mac that the pros wanted back in 2013. Yes, you need to unplug everything from the machine to open it up. It’s borderline baffling. But this hardware piece, just like the monolith in the 2001 Space Odyssey movie, seems to come from an alien planet, far from earth. Once plugged in and turned on, you can hear it barely humming, just like in any space station depicted in science fiction movies. 

I’m starting to use this Mac Pro for a project that requires an Intel processor. You can read about it here if you are curious.

It’s good to see Glass introduce new methods for discovering photos on its platform. I would love to see percentages relative to each camera and smartphone brand. Searching by lenses tells us that Nikon is way behind Canon regarding diversity and representation. Can’t wait for Glass’s next move. 

The Adobe Max conference was held this week. With each conference comes a slew of new application update releases. I’m not really into Adobe ecosystem except for using Adobe Lightroom on the Mac and the iPad Pro. This is my main photo processing engine, coupled with the excellent Pixelmator Pro. For About a year, Adobe spent some of its development money to “augment” Lightroom, a photo-processing application, with video-processing features. Why? I don’t get it. I don’t want it.

As Adobe is adding video-processing features to Lightroom, I fear they are making it less focused and slowly becoming a bloated piece of software, on the outside but also the inside. Adobe Lightroom’s mission was to start over and make a new solid foundation apart from its aging Adobe Lightroom Classic.

I want Adobe to focus on photography; they already have video-processing apps like Adobe Premiere!

I’d love Adobe to focus on making the camera feature compete with a dedicated camera app like Apple’s camera app or Halide or Camera+. I cannot remember when the last release of Adobe touched this portion of Lightroom in significant ways. Why is it important? As a subscriber of an Adobe photography plan, I would use the Lightroom camera more, and my images would directly go to the Adobe Cloud, just like the Apple camera app saved photos in iCloud. It would be so much more convenient. I prefer Adobe cloud for my RAW images instead of having to transit my RAW photos through the Apple Photos library. The more Adobe improves the built-in camera module of Lightroom, the more I’ll stay within Lightroom while in a photography moment.

A recent Twitter thread about the possible iPhone Dynamic Island inception by Matt Birchler caught my attention a few days ago but couldn’t find the required time to write my take.

How long could Dynamic Island have been in gestation at Apple? A few weeks, a few months? I think this has been in the works for quite some time. Besides the visual appearance, the API goes with it and needs a design period too. I’m sure Matt understands and knows about that. I would argue that Apple worked on this way before this year’s announcement. Best integration between hardware and software takes time because of how Apple is internally structured. Secrecy plays a significant role in making things longer to achieve too. Apple plan’s for the long run, and I think the pill shape was set in stone last year.

The second thing that caught my attention is this: How long will Dynamic Island be with us? What if Apple can make the camera disappear under the iPhone’s display? Would this make Dynamic Island pointless? No. My take is that the feature is here for the long run, even though the camera and all other sensors could disappear entirely. Apple is training us to accept Dynamic Island as a fundamental part of the iPhone experience. We may even expect the feature to be the de facto standard of the best iPhone user experience. I don’t think we will revert to the previous design that Dynamic Island is taking care of. The black pill share could be dynamically removed when not required but could then pop up to respond to the current context dictated by the user interaction.

The Dynamic Island is such a terrible name but the feature in itself is brilliant, so Apple.

I want to chime in here, following the publication of this article from Om Malik about AirTags. I’m leaving for Italy in a few days. Knowing how bad the airport experience can get and reading those stories about airline companies’ inability to keep up and keep losing track of customers’ luggage, AirTags can make a big difference. I’m going to double-down on AirTags. I already own four, and I’ll buy another four before leaving, so I get my base covered. AirTags already saved me a lot of trouble in the past on more than one occasion by reminding me that I left something behind. It’s well worth the money.

I started another experiment: a photo diary of my upcoming trip to Italy. I’ll be using Craft for this. My objective is simple: testing Craft for photography-related work. I explain why and how I will do it in much more detail on the website. Here’s the link.