As WWDC is just a few days away, I’m thinking about how this past year has gone. I quit my job in January of this year. I haven’t paid close attention to Apple since November of 2024. Of course I’ve tried some of the latest AI features, but mostly only things that I use passively, like message summaries and improvements to Siri. I haven’t used anything that’s been a game changer for me. The most notable feature has been the change to mail that creates categories automatically and makes it much easier to view important email before junk. I imagine though that these features have been around in Gmail for a long time.

Overall I would say the past year went as I expected, a lot of hype for what AI could be, but ultimately this year didn’t deliver anything revolutionary. I’m still excited for the ways that Apple can work AI into its operating systems. The ability to have ChatGPT-like capabilities that operate on my personal data is obviously compelling. Something like using Siri to find photos of my son at a specific age and location. I just tried this running 18.5 and Siri confidently reported photos found on the web of someone who shares my son’s name. Siri has no idea who Raleigh is or that he’s my son.

I think one of the pitfalls of Apple’s stance on privacy (which I still appreciate and agree with), is that they deliberately do not share much information across their own apps and systems. I desperately want my Apple devices to know and understand more details about me. I don’t want to have to set my “home” address in the Maps app, while having to also set it in my contact card (side note, I find it odd to have a contact card for myself). When I search for “home” in the maps app, it still shows me an address I lived at more than 10 years ago, despite my contact card having my current home address. It’s not obvious, or intuitive, where this information needs to be set for it to be available across any app.

But anyway, back to AI specific features. I’m hopeful that Apple will create more advanced AI frameworks for integrating features into native apps. I would love to be able to do things like automate some of the mundane and routine tasks I do like downloading and saving credit card statements and receipts. It doesn’t seem that far off to be able to use AI to script tasks like these. Or use it to select a set of files and perform the same operation on them, like rename all of these files with the prefix “Raleigh” and append the date the file was created. I’m sure there are relatively easy ways to script things like this, but not for the average person.

Other system-level features I’ve imagined are security features that allow someone to verify the authenticity of an email or rank the likelihood of a phishing attempt and provide feedback on how to proceed with caution. These wouldn’t affect me directly, but I have aging parents and other family that would benefit from features like these. AI is going to allow scammers to get much better at scamming, and Apple needs to be prepared to fight that.

I’m still frustrated with the photos app. I appreciate that it has albums and shared albums, and finally the ability to return these albums in search results, but I still struggle to find photos from the distant past. It’s wonderful at finding text identified in images, but it’s not so great at finding an image at a specific location of a given subject. A more free-form ability to query like “My son in San Diego around 18 months old” - this is how all search on macOS and iOS need to work, searching in plain language rather than structured queries that are still necessary in most apps.

Another thing that’s slowly grown more annoying are the differences between iOS and macOS. I’ve always appreciated the aspects of macOS that allow me to work more efficiently than I could on my iPhone. Things like building a spreadsheet or working on a Sketchup model, I can’t imagine even attempting on my iPhone. But there are so many subtle differences between the two platforms that seem to be growing more numerous with each OS release. Granted, there are many ways in which the two platforms are converging, there are still many ways that they feel disconnected. Things like where files go when they’re downloaded on iOS vs macOS. On my iPhone, they end up in the iCloud downloads folder, but on my Mac they end up in a separate downloads folder. I’m sure there’s a setting for this, but I haven’t looked. Just the name of the two file browsers alone gets me sometimes. I find myself typing “files” into spotlight search to open the application, and when I don’t see the familiar icon, I remember it’s “finder” that I’m looking for.

There are some apps that having a different, more capable interface completely makes sense to me. I don’t really need access to most of the editing features in Numbers from my iPhone, but instead I want the application to prioritize efficient data entry/collection on the go. For the most part it does that, but there could be many improvements still that would allow small business to use Numbers for things like forms, new customer intake, etc.

The apps that probably have me thinking more about the differences between iOS and macOS are apps like Health and Journal which don’t even exist on macOS. I think the shame here is that Apple has been advancing the frameworks and multi-platform capabilities of Xcode that are supposed to make developing an application that targets multiple platforms much easier. At some point I think Apple needs to draw a hard line that their own internal new apps are available upon initial release on all platforms. It’s difficult to make that a hard requirement, but I think it’s a worthwhile goal to continue to advance Xcode and related development tools and frameworks to ensure they only get better and easier in terms of developing for all platforms. I believe Apple will get there, and I think SwiftUI is what will get us there. SwiftUI still has a long ways to go in terms of architecting an application. From my experience, it’s made developing a single page UI very easy, but it lacks an intuitive way of navigating and providing data across an entire application.

All of this to say, I’m still excited and hopeful for the ways in which Apple will continue to innovate and evolve their platforms. I’m not all that concerned that Siri and AI capabilities seem far behind the leading edge because I know the privacy aspects of Apple’s approach make keeping up with the industry far more challenging, but also much more “sticky” once they get to where they’re going. Having the best of AI integrated seamlessly into the devices you use every day is far more useful than opening separate apps. I should say though, as excited as I am for what’s possible, I’ve never been more interested in trying an Android phone. My hunch is that a lot of what I’m hoping for is already available in some ways on Android. I just appreciate the syncing of data between my iPhone and Mac too much to bother trying Android. The last thing I want is to have use Google’s web apps to interact with data on my phone. There are very few web apps that I enjoy using the way I do a great native app on iOS or my mac.

Some other things I’m hoping to see, not necessarily at this next WWDC:

• Improvements to the Home app and related frameworks. I still struggle with implementing sensible automations for our HVAC system. It’s possible, it should be easier.
• An iPhone Ultra. I want a phone that can run multiple days with heavy use on a single charge. I don’t care if it’s bigger and heavier.
• Improvements to Apple Watch. I regret to say that the watch is probably my least favorite Apple product. Its workout features aren’t any better than competing products, coupled with poor battery life, it just isn’t that compelling to me. I might feel differently if there was a companion product that just did the vitals measurements. Something I could wear around my ankle or something so that I can charge my watch at night and still record sleep metrics.

I’m really excited about Apple’s WWDC announcements. Anyone who remotely follows Apple would know that AI was expected to be the main event at this year’s conference. I was not really paying close attention to the speculation and news leading up to the event, partially because I didn’t have much time with our 9 month-old, and partially because I wanted to experience the keynote with an open mind.

I was really pleased to see how deeply integrated their new AI features are across many apps and aspects of their operating systems. In some ways I think they’re promising a lot that probably won’t live up to expectation initially, but I do think this is laying the right ground-work for the future. What has made Apple so successful is integrating great ideas and technologies into their products in ways that make complex technologies easier to use. I was also surprised how deeply integrated these AI changes are just one year after their ground-breaking Vision Pro and spacial computing announcement. Although, I do find these new AI capabilities to be far more compelling because the impact is across their entire product line.

Vision Pro is incredible in it’s own right, and stunning how well it works (from what I’ve heard), but it just doesn’t have the immediate main stream application that the rest of their product line does. And I think that’s ok. I think spacial commuting is going to unlock a variety of new innovations and improvements in a number of industries and I’m very excited to see the changes over the coming years.

To me, one of the most compelling fundamental changes that they’re making is how Siri is going to gain a better sense of context. The lack of context is one of the primary reasons Siri is not a go-to for more tasks, but I understand why this hasn’t existed up until now. Apple’s privacy-by-design ensures that our personal information isn’t stored in ways that it can easily be leaked or stolen. When Siri was first implemented, most of the capabilities were server-side, meaning Siri started with very little, if any, personal information to utilize when responding to requests or attempting to infer meaning/context.

Others building competing virtual assistants could easily surpass Siri in capability by simply using and storing more personal data from users. And to be honest, this made for great experiences with other services. But the lack or privacy focus or unclear business/monetization models of other companies has left me mostly uninterested in fully investing in alternative product ecosystems.

I don’t expect Apple to catch up to competitors in terms of feature-parity and capabilities. I think it’s partly why they chose to partner with OpenAI for a segment of their AI offerings, but I do think Apple’s privacy-centered approach and attention to detail and user-experience when integrating capabilities into products will make future AI features and capabilities compelling for many years to come.

I can’t wait to try some of these new features in the coming OS releases. I’m fairly certain my expectations will be a bit higher than the intial version of these features can deliver, but it’s an exciting start nonetheless. I think it’s also impressive that they followed up last year's huge announcement with something equally, if not more impactful. I can only imagine the engineering efforts that went in to Vision Pro. The system wide integration of AI features seems equally massive in scale to me, (which I say with little knowledge of how Apple is organized and achieves these massive goals).

There were a number of other interesting changes coming in the next OS’s that I’m excited to see as well. I was happy to see Journal is getting a few new features. I was really worried they wouldn’t continue to develop Journal given how little recognition it received at last year’s WWDC. The search function alone is enough to get me to make a complete switch from Day One (sorry Day One, I really like what you guys have done, but the the integration Apple offers with photos, workouts, location, etc. including limitless photos and video attachments, is simply unparalleled).

And a number of other new features like scheduled messages, sending messages/SMS via satellite, automatic email categorization and summaries, safari digest view, tap to pay with Apple Cash (unfortunately still likely to be underutilized until this is a cross-platform standard), the Vitals app, custom data stores for Core Data (long overdue), and custom control widgets among a host of other small, but compelling improvements and features.

With all of these new capabilities, on top of many existing features and services that could benefit from further development, I hope that next year is less focused on the “next big thing” and a lot more focused on continued refinements and polishing. I can only imagine how difficult it is to continue to build high quality products and services at the scale Apple operates today. I find it amazing and hope to see them continue this legacy for many decades to come.

Other resources and links:

• This is a wonderful short video highlighting the changes coming in iOS 18.
• An article on WWDC24 highlights).

Last year I was lucky enough to attend WWDC for the first time. I really enjoyed the opportunity to see Apple's Infinite Loop campus. It's absolutely stunning.

One of the rumored announcements leading up to the event was the Apple Journal. I was excited when I first heard news that they were going to be announcing a journalling app at WWDC23. Over the years, I've found Day One to be a fantastic app for journaling, but I really wanted to see a fundamentally different way of linking to content from my journal.

Most content, like photos and videos, are obviously copied when imported into Day One. That seemed like a potential waste of storage to me. I don't really want or need multiple copies of the content I'm writing about. What I thought made more sense, was a simple link between the journal entry and the content. Similar to the way an <img> tag works in a web browser. The HTML doesn't contain the image, but instead the browser fetches the images (likely from a CDN) when rendered. An added benefit of linking is the ability to indicate in another app (take photos for example) that a journal entry exists for a specific piece of content, and allow the user to jump right to that entry.

Naturally, when I heard Apple had been working on a Journaling app, I knew they had to be working on an interesting way of including or linking to content already on my iPhone. I was excited to see what they came up with.

When Apple announced Journal at WWDC I was delighted to see the specifics of how it worked. The ability to start an entry from all sorts of data already on your iPhone, from phone calls with friends and family, trips to new places, workouts, and photos, there was so much more content than I had imagined. I was both surprised, and disappointed, that no one clapped after this segment of the keynote. While a journaling app is nothing new, I thought the framework and foundation they showcased was really compelling. While I'm sure the app is still making copies of most content, the potential for deep linking to content already on the phone seems much more likely now.

After the announcement, I patiently waited months for the new app to show up in an OS release. Six months after it was announced, I finally got to try it first-hand.

It took some time before there were any relevant entry suggestions to pick from, but once the data was available, I found that it did make it easy to start an entry about something I was already interested in writing about. Whether it was a phone call with a friend I hadn't talked to in a while, a trip to a new restaurant, or photos of my son, I found Journaling to be a little more effortless and fun (minus the lack of a physical keyboard of course).

The app is missing many of the features that make Day One such a great journaling app. And while I certainly don't expect Apple to include the same capabilities in future versions, there are some must-haves for it to be more widely adopted. Things like support for iPad and Mac, search, calendar/grid views, and rich-text/formatting, to name a few.

If Apple continues to develop Journal into its full potential, I believe it has the potential to be something that is cherished by many users. I do worry a little that the negative feedback and the current disinterest of so many potential users may stifle further development, but I can't think of any apps Apple has released that they no longer support. I can think of features (like the social network they tried to create within iTunes, called iTunes Ping), but I can't think of an entire app that they've killed (thankfully). I hope this precedent remains true.

When I wrote this, I decided to check out the current ratings in the App Store. While I was not surprised by the 3.3 average, I was a bit surprised by the number of reviews, 3,300. I was also surprised to find that it's on-par with some of Apple's other more recent apps, such as Health (3.1 stars and 5,100 ratings) and Fitness (2.9 stars and 6,500 ratings).

All three of these apps are relatively complex. They're dealing with data across multiple devices/sensors, have developer frameworks for interacting with the data they store, and probably most important, they naturally inspire a wide range of desired features and capabilities. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to develop these in a way that works for the vast majority of users.

I will continue to use Journal for now and I'm looking forward to what Apple has in store for the next release.

Over the years, I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog. My biggest impediment was the concern that making my thoughts publicly available could have negative impacts on my personal and professional relationships. Recently I finally decided to let that concern go for a couple reasons. A) I have no idea if I will even keep up with writing regularly, and B) if I'm writing about things that truly interest me, what better way can I connect with other people who share the same interests?

I've admired the work that Jon Gruber does at Daring Fireball for years now. I appreciate the aesthetics of his website and podcast, The Talk Show. Most ad-supported websites these days seem cluttered with ads and try to cram content in seemingly every available space. Most Podcasts have distracting intro/outro music or other production qualities that take away from the content itself. Jon successfully jettisons all but the essential qualities of a blog and podcast. It's a big part of why I continue to read and listen to his content. Not to mention, he created Markdown, which I'm using right now to write this post.

His work has inspired my own goals of have having a simple website or blog, free of the frills and distractions of modern websites and web frameworks. I considered popular frameworks like Wordpress knowing that if most people use them, they will be supported for years to come. However, I felt compelled to start with only the essentials. The thought of building my own blog from scratch sounded like an intriguing challenge, but as a software engineer, I know how easy it is to underestimate the complexity of new projects. And my interested in web development has diminished over the years, in favor of native app development. I struggled to find something open-source and also extremely lightweight. Something without a database or any other dependencies other than a simple web server, like Apache.

My search didn't turn up what I was looking for. The more I searched, the more I questioned why a blog framework couldn't be dead-simple, yet flexible enough to extend with some simple programming. I decided to make something simple using Node and Express since I've used them in the past and found them both painless to get running, and ubiquitous enough that there are plenty of tools and resources available.

In just a few hours I came up with something I'm moderately happy with that gets me started. It certainly won't scale well the way it's implemented, but I know that absolutely no one will be reading this anytime soon. If one day I'm lucky enough to find success in my writing, I will sort out the scaling problems or make the decision to switch to another framework in the future. For now, I not only appreciate the simplicity of how my blog is implemented, I also take a little pride in understanding how it works and knowing I can relatively easily customize it further as I go.

I registered my domain through hover and I'm hosting on AWS Lightsail using an instance preconfigured with Node.js. I used sftp to copy my content to the appropriate directory, ran npm install, configured the Apache configuration files, configured DNS records via the Lightsail console, and had a site up and running within about 2 hours. All that's left is to create an SSL certificate so I can server over https.

Edit: Adding an SSL certificate turned out to be incredibly easy with Bitnami's built-in tool that was included with the Lightsail instance I created. They have a guide here.

Yesterday I started thinking about starting a blog. It’s stemming from the fact that I rarely find articles that are in-line with my point of view on certain ideas. Lately it’s been Apple’s announcements. When they announced the iPhone 15 last Tuesday, there were a bunch of headlines about how underwhelming the launch was, how Apple isn’t innovating anymore, or that “the age of the iPhone” is over now that Vision Pro” was announced. I kept scanning the headlines looking for something that conveyed a different perspective, but nothing came.

Jon Gruber had a much different perspective than the average headline, but still missed a larger point that I felt was important. And that is, Apple’s iPhone, as much as it’s their bread-and-butter as far as revenue, is only one part in a larger ecosystem of devices that users find compelling. It’s the fact that their products and services work great together that keep people coming back. Or at least that’s what keeps me coming back.

I have rarely, if ever, compared an iPhone to any other phone spec for spec. I’m not looking for the fastest processor, the most memory, the biggest and brightest screen, or even the best camera. I don’t need to because I’ve been using iPhones for over a decade now and I’m very happy with how they perform. I know each year most specs get a little bit better and the photos I can take today are far superior to the photos I captured 10 years ago. I don’t really expect my camera to be dramatically better every year. If I did, I would essentially have to admit that the photos I’m taking today are likely inferior and almost aren’t even worth taking. Most photography is about memories and emotion, much mores so than megapixels. After all, plenty of people still hand out polaroid cameras at weddings because there’s simply something nostalgic about those cute little photographs they produce.

Year after year, iPhones have gotten better and more integral to my life. Features like Apple Wallet, Apple Health, and HomeKit have slowly, but steadily become part of my daily routine. And I’m mostly content with how they work. Of course I think they all have room for improvement, but my experience with Apple’s products leaves me with little doubt that they will slowly, but surely continue to improve and refine these products as well. For instance, Driver’s licenses are available in Apple Wallet in some states, and I’m confident the feature will be available in California soon. That’s one less card I have to carry around, and more importantly, one less thing to lose since I won’t need to carry it with me most days.

More healthcare providers are starting to integrate with Apple Health, making it easier for me to have my medical records available when visiting different doctors or medical clinics.

Each year, when Apple announces its updates to the iPhone, I don’t wonder how it compares with the latest Android phone and whether this will be the year I try a different type of phone. If Apple made literally zero improvements to the iPhone 15 this year over the iPhone 14, I would likely still buy it because I’ve been using an iPhone 12 for almost 3 years now. The battery performance has degraded (which is simply a characteristic of modern Lithium-ion batteries) and it’s gotten a little beat-up and scratched over the years. I was interested in the new dynamic island, the always-on display, and the video stabilization improvements they made over the last 3 years, so I would probably still upgrade to get those.

Until Apple stops innovating across most of its product lineup, I don’t see any reason I would seriously consider switching to another brand. I would have to reconsider every aspect of how I use my electronics together. Not that everything I do isn’t possible with other services, I know they are because Android couldn’t compete if they weren’t. Until there's a very compelling reason to do so, one that Apple will clearly not match in the near future, I can’t imagine going through the learning curve of trying something new for photo syncing, phone and laptop backups, tap-to-pay, password management, contact migration, home control/automation, health data, etc. If I'm going to do that, I'm going to be very sure I'm not going back.

And I haven’t even mentioned all the little things I enjoy about how Apple’s products work together. How my text messages are available on whichever device I pick up, whether I'm working on my MacBook in the middle of the day, or reading before bed on my iPhad in the evening, how I can easily share and receive WiFi passwords with other iPhone users, how easy it is to pair AirPods and how they seamlessly transfer their connection to the device I’m actively using. Perhaps I should have started this post by simply listing all of the products and services I find useful and compelling. The things that make me feel pretty confident that I’ll be staying in the Apple ecosystem for the foreseeable future.

Here's a link to Apple's announcement.