> It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends.
Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.
Only until Tim Cook reverses that trend. “Services” revenue has been growing like crazy and will continue to do so as Apple pursues ever more aggressive strategies to shove ads in our faces.
Steve Jobs’ last mistake was appointing as CEO someone who cares about money this much over good products.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/02/apple-services-re...
But the fact that today I still cannot use a different web-browser engine than the iOS one is appalling. I cannot change the Photos app for an app that offers native integration with my Synology. I am forced to go through iCloud.
For others, it's important to have the ability to use their device in ways that aren't 100% controlled by a single company. It's about having a choice and having alternate options. Large platform providers going "we know what is good for you" has been a major setback for personal computing over the last decade or two, and it's sad that so many consumers are enthusiastically accepting it as the new norm.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/all-the-things-apple-sherl...
(Mind you I’m not a fan of general software patents, but that’s what’s needed if you don’t want this to happen to software.)
"Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss" — The Who
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+lyrics+meet+the+new+boss...
At first I read the headline and thought this was dumb, but maybe it will be more like a simple social media app that’s less about mass news stories and more about people you care about (kinda like Facebook back in the OG days)
"It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends."
That could be really useful for tracking down illegal immigrants, gays, and politicians meeting with lobbyists.
Do we have any records of Apple doing this previously?
Well I dont disagree with most of the points, considering I was the first few on HN to rally about their so called privacy stand / fundamental human right, but
>Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes
I seriously seriously doubt. As much as I like to shit on Apple, I think the worst they do is to hold all the Data for themselves and build an Advertising platform. Unless that is what you mean by being sold for marketing purposes, which is what most of HN thinks during 2017 - 2022. And that is a generalisation of US / Free World only. They might very likely hand those Data to some government.
iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted unless you find and change multiple different settings that few people know about: files, photos, notes, texts, full copies of laptop’s and phone’s storage…
I’d take a bet that 99% of the time Apple or a local regime wants to read iCloud user data, they can.
You forgot the last part: then we'll learn Apple has been granting near-automatic access to any three-letter agency that wants to read your journal.
I’d prefer a FOSS phone ecosystem, but sometimes pragmatism wins out.
If you don't want Apple's services then neither iOS nor MacOS can satisfactorily work for you. Their products are built on the assumption that you will immerse or have immersed yourself completely in their ecosystem, trying to use one on its own is a horrible experience.
Nice, so even if users wanted to benefit from competition between Apple's and others' services, they can't because Apple blesses their software on iOS in ways that others' aren't.
BUT, I still prefer Google Maps, non-Safari browsers, Spotify over Apple Music, Feedly/my browser over Apple News.
I agree that it’s problematic that apps made by the OS developer receive preferential treatment, but I haven’t personally found that to mean that the experience is better than third party apps.
In every situation, it makes more sense to segment and triage private APIs for a promotion to a public API with user-friendly permission prompts and controls to protect the user's data.
The first and most exciting part of this is the ability to have a 'day in the life' consolidated ledger of our activities on device, across all app experiences. The ability to log our lives and add our own thoughts on top of it is important for self-reflection and for the many moments we want to recall using temporal cues and in context (I remember I was talking to Joseph and then saw a really cool webpage).
A lot of the time the act of journaling is writing about the activity that has transpired on/through our devices (who we spoke with, what we did, etc), yet currently there is no affordance to link these together. We may add a note in a calendar event to remind ourselves of what happened, or rely on our memory, but just to look back at our day we have to cobble together a mix of calendar, notes, messages, etc; it's all a very disjointed experience.
A consolidated journal/ledger of the day with the ability to write atop it is essentially the user-facing version of what a future AI assistant would see and present to users. A good assistant would not just do tasks but solicit our feelings and attune to us, which is essentially 'journaling' when brought into UI form.
This whole product is frankly quite a bit overdue.
The second value-add of this idea is tying journaling closer to Health. Health journaling is essential to managing chronic conditions, as its value is primarily retrospective discovery of trends. There's a lot of sub-par health journaling solutions out there, and none do a good job weaving themselves into the context of Health data. I hope to see this use case in this initiative.
The history of our usage of devices has always remained a largely unexplored area of computing, and one of the major divergences between how people see the world and how computers present the world to us. Bringing history back to us in human-consumable form is important to get this sense back. The only other initiative that I see taking on this need is rewind.ai, which is quite exciting and I'm guessing is on Apple's short list of potential acquisitions.
Finally this seems like the next step in the feature trajectory of adding context to our device usage. The first feature in this trajectory was Apple's Shared with You framework [1], which is about adding contextual data tags to activity (E.g. seeing a webpage in Safari showing at the top that it's shared by your friend Joseph, which reminds you of why its relevant).
(FWIW I've spent the last year designing an OS for a new tablet platform with journaling as a central experience)
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou
1. when you turn on your car and it connects to iPhone via BT, it just starts playing what was last played in Apple Music, even if you were most recently listening to an Audible book and had paused it before.
2. Another is when you're playing music and then open a YouTube video. The pause button on the keyboard should pause the music (in the background) not the video (in the foreground), yet Apple insists on a simple foreground=control rule.
Apple OSes just have no mental model for what we want to be playing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If I were building a v1 of this iOS journal, I'd do the following:
1. Consolidated daily and weekly ledgers in a nice UI, basically a much fancier version of one of those generated Photos albums. Lets us scroll through to see our day with objects representing the activities across all the different apps we used.
2. Ability to attach a journal/note on anything in those ledgers, both individual objects (e.g. photos, a health reading, a convo in messages) and the overall day/week.
3. Reuse Notes' UX and formatting for these journals. No need to link between notes for v1, that's a power user feature.
4. Ability to attach journal entry from within individual app experiences like Health, Notes, Calendars, Photos, etc (possibly via Share Sheet, but perhaps more embedded), as well as link back to the main ledger when there are journals attached to those objects.
Honestly hearing that Apple is doing this makes me want to join them and work on this product. In my eyes, journaling needs to be an OS-level experience, because greater affordances for self-reflection are a core part of developing better executive function. Making reflection just another app competing against all the other apps and addictions and bullshit that our devices provide is a disservice to our sense of agency and self-determination; journaling and reflection need to sit atop these experiences.
Forget UI and all that. 4G modem and an OS that displays UI for calling and texting with formally verified E2E encryption for both with no plans to offer any features outside of this period! I would buy that in a heartbeat.
You and not many other people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if the app doesn't do any correlation, it will be very helpful to have the data collected into HealthKit so your health care provider has good data to work with.
(No connection other than being a very happy customer.)
Unfortunately, it seems somehow broken. When I tried adding a meal, it just failed silently.
To me this looks like laying the groundwork for centralizing the most relevant and important information about yourself, which so crucially includes the contexts you are in! and are so often painstaking to actually record in detail when journalling manually. For what purpose? I genuinely think this leads to a Siri that's finally useful in a way that leapfrogs everything and everyone else out there. Think GPT-4(+) with an insane amount of detail and context tailored to you, and (hopefully!) executed in a way that re-affirms Apple's stated commitment to privacy and security.
I have only the most cursory understanding of ML technology but have obviously been trying to follow along with everything pretty much since DALLE-2 made such a splash. With some of the impressive performance shown in smaller models, sometimes with different quantization, I think that Apple Neural Engine silicon might be getting more attention soon... okay, "soon" is probably over-optimistic. But – in September '22 I asked online about running Stable Diffusion[0] on M1 chips on iPad, since I was able to run it on an M1 Mac Mini. The 8-ball said "outlook not so good," and yet by November 8th liuliu had it running on _iPhone_[1]. These are truly interesting times.
[0] I know this is not a 1:1 comparison. But Llama ran on my MacBook without any CoreML optimization. Maybe there will be a tier of requests that could be handled by a smaller model on-device, and more complex stuff heads to the datacenter. I am an amateur at best; don't listen to me.
[1] https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-mo...
If Apple does go this route, I feel like they're setting themselves up for disruption. Someone else (hell, maybe even Meta) will do it better, and Apple's implementation will hold on by the thread of native integration it uses. It's not a bad or new situation, but I'm going to bet that Apple will hamstring themselves by locking competitors out. Especially if the current pace of model development keeps up.
I have to think they wouldn't mobilize some of their capital reserves if need be in order to avoid missing this wave. Part of me thinks that's the only reasonable cause for Siri being so terribly useless for so long— that it's because they have a "leapfrog" up their sleeves. I acknowledge this is a pretty heavy cope though.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230420002004/https://blogs.mic...
For those who don't know, journalling apps universally suck. Especially when it comes to security.
Day One, the canonically recommended app, doesn't even locally encrypt their entries, so basically anybody can access it despite the veneer of a password on the app.
I guess it's much harder to compete with companies you are dependent on for your platform (Adobe and Microsoft) than with small developers of small tools.
With office suite I guess you mean Pages, Numbers, etc? How have those been abandoned? What are you missing?
Seeing Apple implement this has me torn between a feeling of unfairness and excitement. Like why wasn’t I allowed to do this myself? But now that it’s here, do I use it? It has everything I wanted and it’s highly unlikely for Apple to shut down the app and burn their users.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinio...
I guess we need a Digital Markets Act 2 because I thought that's the type of stuff it was supposed to mitigate. This type of thing gets me endlessly pissed off at Apple. Guess how difficult and bug-ridden it is to synchronize files without iCloud (at least it's possible at all!).
Apple Notes introduces neural-engine powered "Clippy"?
If this replaces the standard Notes app I'll wager there'll be a lot of backlash. People like Notes because it's the equivalent of Notepad on Windows - fast and un-fussy, your classic 'dumb' app.
I see a parallel between a journaling app and HealthKit[2], where the latter is like basically a health and exercise journal for things like step counts[3] and medications[4]. It could follow a similar trajectory and eventually be made available as an API to third-party apps.
[1](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity)
[2](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit)
[3](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...)
[4](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...)
