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I'm actually quite excited by this, or at least the potential of this. The first and most exciting part of this is the ability to have a 'day in the life' cons
by npunt 4y ago
I'm actually quite excited by this, or at least the potential of this.
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 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou
- martin_drapeau 4y agoI hope journaling can help Siri/iOS be much smarter. For instance, it should know the podcast app I am using and when I put in my AirPods and press/say Play, just play the last podcast I had open - not the music app which I never use. I shouldn't have to configure that. The OS should just know.
- npunt 4y ago100%, somehow iOS/MacOS do exactly the wrong thing when it comes to handling audio streams. Two more: 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)_/¯
- CharlesW 4y ago> 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. This must be vehicle- or Audible-specific, because my complaint is exactly the opposite: My phone continues playing the last thing played, which is often not what I want. For example: When connecting to my car in the morning, the iPhone continues playing my sleep noise instead of one of my preferred choices for that Bluetooth context — music or podcasts. It sort of astounds me that annoyances like this can persist for years. EDIT: Whoa! I did some digging based on this conversation and, at some point, Apple added the ability to trigger an Automation in response to connecting to a specific Bluetooth device. Maybe this will help you too, @npunt?
- npunt 4y agoOoh thanks I'll take a look!
- 4y ago