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Augmented Reality Ducks

Favorites Sep 30, 2021

I do know that fourteen years into iOS, people still ducking hate autocorrect. Especially when you find your ducking text messages littered with ducks. There’s just no ducking way around it. Short of adding a fake contact to your address book named Dr. Duck Ducking McDucker, autocorrect seems ducking incapable of learning everyone’s favorite bit of profanity.

That got me thinking earlier today. What’s going to happen when Apple finally leads us into that next frontier of human / computer interaction? What happens when our day-to-day reality becomes augmented with live information and our physical and digital worlds merge even closer together?

What happens if Apple takes autocorrect’s prudish vocabulary into AR? If they dared to try and censor the real world, how would that look?

A Computer Company

Favorites Aug 06, 2021

Things I want a computer company to be Things I don’t want a computer company to be Things I’m purposefully not putting on a list The problem with all of the above, is that there aren’t any computer companies left.

The Title

Favorites Jul 20, 2021

This is something I’ve long intuited based on my own web browsing habits but never really put into words. When I stop and think about it, modern web browsers drive me crazy by limiting tabs to a maximum width because that width is almost never enough to show the full page title.

Well, except one web browser: Safari.

If Safari on macOS Monterey is heading in a similar direction where web page titles are going to be even more truncated, that’s going to make me sad. I guess we should do something about it.

MeetingBuddy

Uncategorized Jul 19, 2021

A few weeks ago I built a niche little app idea dubbed MeetingBuddy. You choose a target app from a pre-defined list (or pick any app on your Mac) and a time interval and MeetingBuddy starts screenshotting that app’s windows.

Each recording session goes into its own folder where all of the screenshots are organized by date. But! while this is all going on, MeetingBuddy is also OCR-ing any text found in the screenshots and storing that alongside each image in a sidecar file.

You end up with a folder of recordings for each session. Images and their corresponding text contents.

Why is this useful? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure that it is just yet. But here’s what I’ve been using it for.

Delight on a Grand Scale

Favorites Jul 10, 2021

I’m trying very hard not to fall into the trap of being yet another old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn, but I struggle to find delight on a grand scale in modern software. Every incremental step, year over year (from all companies, this isn’t just about Apple), seems to be focused on removing emotion and affection from our devices rather than finding ways to strengthen that bond.

Three Things Again

Uncategorized Jun 26, 2021

The point of today’s post is that while I’ve been using Three Things myself for a year now, a very nice person was kind enough to email me last week and let me know that the version posted online had expired. My bad.

Here’s an updated build.

Also, this new version comes with an experimental new feature: iCalendar syncing!

This Only Happens Here

Uncategorized Jun 25, 2021

My five year old, driving home from daycare today, unprompted: I know what lockdown is. Like when we had to stay home for a long time last year? It’s when we turn the lights off and lock the door and hide in the fire room because a bad guy is coming. Pause. But, daddy. Why do bad guys have swords…