The Present and Hypothetical Future Siri

This week, John Gruber wrote a post about how Siri is becoming more useful to him. I think John’s right, Siri is a lot better. Although I am definitely looking at this from the vantage point of a Siri fanboy. I liked it from the beginning. I dictate often and like to think I’m pretty good at it. I’m actually dictating these words right now in Drafts on my iPhone. I’ve watched Siri grow up to a certain extent. Those people who gave up on it at the beginning are missing out. You should understand that like some other Apple terms (iCloud, for instance), Siri has several components.

Siri Dictation

This is the easiest bit. You speak and Siri returns your words as text. With iOS 8, Siri dictation got the ability to return your words as (or very shortly after) you say them. This was the single biggest improvement to Siri yet. With pre-iOS 8 Siri, you’d dictate your words and, only after you finished, would the recording grind through Apple’s servers and return words, at least theoretically. Sometimes it would just blink and silently mock you. Even if you have no interest in asking Siri how to bury a dead body, tapping the little microphone button and speaking to your iOS device (or Mac) to make words appear can be liberating. I recommend trying it for three days. It’s a game changer.

Siri the Intelligent Assistant

Then there is the entirely separate Siri that you ask to do something, like set a timer. This version of Siri has two jobs: 1) figure out what you just said, and; 2) figure out what you want it to do. Even if Siri gets all the words right in step 1, it still has a new and unique opportunity to fail in step 2. I think Siri has improved at phase 2 as much as it has improved at phase 1. I also think this improvement could only have come from Apple shipping Siri and letting millions of people bang up against it. While Siri is hardly perfect, it is damn useful.

Siri on the Mac

Apple has put dictation on the Mac with recent version of the Mac OS. It is, in some ways superior than Siri dictation in iOS, in that it no longer requires an Internet connection, assuming you enable enhanced dictation. However, Apple has yet to bring the Intelligent Assistant to the Mac. Dan Moren thinks they should and I agree. As someone who spends a lot of time behind a Mac, I’d love to be able to ask about the weather, set a timer, or do a simple web search with my voice. As Home Kit gets legs, it’d push more than few of my buttons to also be able to turn down the lights are start a playlist with my voice. I particularly agree with Dan’s desire for hypothetical Mac Siri to let users set the custom trigger phrase. Using “Hey Siri” leads to way too many hijinks as it is. If instead I could set my own unique phrase, I could make it something less likely to go off unexpectedly. For those of us that give our Macs names, it would also let us have a little fun. “Good Day Thelonious, What’s the weather going to be tomorrow?”

Dream Mac

I realize that every middle-aged nerd on the Internet has already linked this concept Mac from Curved/labs but, honestly, how could I resist?

∞
 


Omni Productivity Apps Going Universal on iOS

Ken Case, on behalf of the Omni Group announced that they are going to be making all of their productivity applications, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan to the iPhone this quarter. This will be a universal build so you don’t have to buy it again if you’ve already purchased the iPad version. Omni even has a plan to take care of users that have already bought both versions of OmniFocus for the iPad and iPhone. It seems more clear than ever that the app business model of charging separately for iPad and iPhone applications is going the way of the Dodo.

I can’t wait to see how these apps look on the new iPhones. These are the kinds of apps I was most interested in seeing on the iPhone when Apple announced the larger iPhone 6 plus. I use OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle so often that this move will make the plus size iPhone a lot more appealing to me with the next upgrade. 

 

Apple Home Kit

The Verge did a nice post-CES write up on the state of Home Kit. In principle, it sounds pretty appealing to me as an Apple device user. It also sounds like it isn’t completely ready yet either. I’ve been a little surprised at how slow Home Kit has been to roll out. It was announced at WWDC  and you still can’t buy Home Kit enabled devices. I suspect this has to do with dialing in the API’s and making deals with the hardware manufacturers. As soon as Apple announced Home Kit, I stopped buying third party automation devices. I’d like to see how this plays out before investing any more. 

In some ways, the home automation racket feels a lot to me like early computers where there was no clear winner and it seemed like everyone wanted to get into the game. Right now, I don’t think anyone has an idea where this is all heading.

My guess is that ultimately Home Kit devices will include a slight premium but will be much easier to use from an iOS device than their competitors. You’ll even be able to use Siri to control your devices. (However, according to the Verge, to use Siri from offsite, you’ll also need an AppleTV.) My inner twelve-year-old would love talking to my Apple Watch at the Airport and turning off lights at my home.

 

PDFpen Version 7 and Videos

Today Smile released version 7 of PDFpen for the Mac. I’ve been using the beta and particularly like some of the new features:

Signatures Tool

You can now add a signature field and then later sign a document using your track pad.

OCR Layer Support

I’ve always known of the mythical OCR layer in PDF files. Now PDFpen can display it. With PDFpenPro, you can even proofread and make changes to the underlying text layer. Boom.

Context Sensitive Editing Tools

Select some text, right click, apply.

Retaining Object Properties

I like my circles orange and my boxes red. Now PDFpen remembers that.

Export to Excel, PowerPoint, PDF/A

PDFpenPro added the ability to export to Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF/A. This is in addition to the export to Word feature that already exists.

I liked the beta so much that I agreed to make some videos for Smile that you can find right here. Below is my “What’s New” video.

Flic for Camera Roll Sorting


I’ve never been happy with the built-in camera roll sorting tools. When I take photos with my phone I usually squeeze off three or four of any shot in hopes that I’ll get that one where nobody has their eyes closed or the baby is particularly cute or whatever. The trouble is that sorting through those images in the Photos app is difficult. The thumbnail images are too small and it is difficult figuring out ones to keep. This has resulted, more than once, in my deleting the wrong image. This past weekend I decided I’d deleted the wrong picture for the last time and I went looking in the App Store and discovered Flic.

Flick displays the images from your camera roll one at a time. You flick the keepers to the right and the trash to the left. The images are about 3/4 their full size but if you tap them, they blow up even bigger. Using this app, I was able to make quick work of the images in my camera roll over the past month. The app also keeps a running tab of how much space you are recovering with your deletions. Now that I have an easy way to sort camera roll photos, I expect I’ll be taking even more pictures on my iPhone.

∞

Jazz Friday: The Girl from Ipanema


In 1963, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto started a bossa nova sensation in jazz with their Getz/Gilberto album (iTunes)(Wikipedia). People went crazy for this album and particularly its first track, The Girl from Ipanema.

This is a rare jazz song that entered the pop charts, peaking at number 5. While the song is not nearly as edgy as some of my other Jazz Friday recommendations, The Girl From Ipanema (and most of the rest of this album) is still great music. Stan Getz, who had some serious jazz chops, seemed to just get the type of throaty, understated solo required by bossa nova. Moreover, I think Astrud Gilberto’s vocals are perfect for bossa nova. From the too-much-information department, I fell in love with Astrud Gilberto the first time I heard her voice. To this day I have never seen her picture because there is no way she could live up to the image in my my mind. Happy Friday everybody.

Be Careful What You Wish For

This week, Marco Arment kicked off some fascinating dialog about Apple’s software development. Put simply, a lot of people are concerned Apple is running too fast with yearly release cycles and appears to be stumbling as a result. I think there is a lot of merit to these arguments. I’ve experienced some of these stumbles myself as of late.

There is one point, however, I’ve not seen stated about these challenges that I think is worth mention. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of home screen posts and one of the standard questions I ask is what my contributor would do different if they were running Apple. I don’t have exact numbers but can attest that by far, before iOS 8 the biggest request was better app sharing and communication between devices. Indeed, some people were arguing Apple was doomed because they weren’t moving forward on these issues.

With iOS 8 and Yosemite, Apple delivered on these requests in a big way. We got extensions, keyboards, handoff, and a host of other new features. I love (and use) these features daily. Because a lot of these features involve communications between my Mac and iOS devices, these features require updates to both the Mac and iOS operating systems. Put simply, the only way this could all work is if Apple stuck its neck out with significant changes to both systems.

While it’s easy to say, “I wish they’d taken a year off on the Mac”, that comes at a cost of functionality. We wouldn’t have these cool features if they hadn’t done the update. Maybe, in hindsight, that was a mistake by Apple adding so much but don’t forget how many people were talking about how stale and “closed” iOS was before iOS 8 arrived. I sympathize for the Apple engineers sitting somewhere right now, thinking they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. I, personally, think they did the right thing pushing forward with iOS 8 and Yosemite. I’m willing to deal with a few hiccups in exchange for these new features. 

While Marco may indeed be right and perhaps Apple should slow down the Mac OS release cycles, I don’t see how Apple had any choice in 2014 once they decided to give us the inter-operatability we’ve all been banging on about for years.