Stephen is unavailable this week, so Rosemary Orchard returns to Mac Power Users to check in on the new Shortcuts updates and Rose’s new medication tracking app, Capsule.
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In this third installment of the MacSparky Labs Book Club, we discussed Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments. This is the edited version of our first session.
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One of my favorite people in the Apple Community is Sal Soghoian, formerly with Apple and now a free-agent automation sensei. One thing a lot of folks don’t know about Sal is that he is a Berklee trained guitarist and ridiculously talented.
Sal has a YouTube channel, Playing the Coda, where he shares some of his music. The trick here is that in nearly all of these tracks he is simultaneously playing the melody and the bass line. At once. On one Guitar. Watch closely. Here’s is George’s Blues.
The Opal C1 Webcam is meant to be the webcam everybody actually wants to use. It\’s got tons of software features and a better lens system than anything you\’d find in most (all?) other webcams. It\’s time for me to kick the tires…
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We recently had a MacSparky Labs Jam Session about careers. There was a lot of good advice shared, along with some common threads amongst many of the Labs members.
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Join Mike and me on this episode of Focused where we discuss the role of friction and where we choose to add it into our own focused workflows.
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There are new Apple Betas. Hooray!? Let’s discuss.… This is a post for the MacSparky Labs Pathfinder members. Care to join? If you’re already a member, you can log in here.
We’ve been hearing for a few weeks now that Apple is considering using a third party LLM for Siri, particularly Claude. I understand this is not usually the Apple way of solving a problem like this, but at least for the short term, it seems the right move.
I have no doubt that Apple will eventually have its own perfectly acceptable model to drive Siri, but at this point we just need Siri to work flawlessly. And if using someone else’s model for a year or two is how we get that, than I say get out the checkbook.
On this Mac Power Users feedback episode, Stephen and I answer listener questions about Apple’s current betas, revisit networking, dictation, email, going paperless, and more. This one really hits all the classic MPU topics.
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There’s a new browser war heating up, and it’s all about artificial intelligence. Google—assuming they’re allowed to keep Chrome—is quickly turning it into an artificial intelligence-based browser experience. They’re not alone, though.
Firefox is adding experimental AI-powered link previews. Safari already has some basic artificial intelligence features. (And hopefully, we’ll learn that there are many more next week.) The Browser Company is discontinuing the ARC browser in favor of its new, unreleased browser, Dia, which will also rely heavily on artificial intelligence features.
It doesn’t surprise me that artificial intelligence will upend not only traditional search but also traditional browsing. I don’t think anyone is clear yet what that means.
But we can expect a lot of interesting experiments to show up in browsers over the next few years as it shakes out. If you’ve been using the same browser for a long time, this may be the time to get curious about some new competitors. In this case, I’m taking my own medicine, as I’ve been running ARC, until its recent cancellation announcement, and Brave, which is my favorite chromium-based browser. I think I’m going to even have to spend some time with Chrome. Interesting times.