Category: iPad

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AI AI: Large Language Models Apple iOS iPad iPadOS iPhone Mac

Masterstroke: Apple’s Private Cloud Compute

I was traveling on Monday so I wasn’t able to tune into the Apple WWDC 2024 keynote until later in the day. When I did, I skipped through the first hour (with the various OS updates) and went immediately to the discussion of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s name for the application of generative artificial intelligence. I was blown away.

I expected Apple to leverage its unique privacy-protecting access to our data stored securely on our mobile devices – but I didn’t expect the technical elegance that Apple applied to its approach.

Apple’s AI discussion reminded me of a similar feeling I had back when Apple Pay was introduced. As someone who had grown up in the credit card industry working at Visa and being a “techie” who enjoyed following technology developments, I could see the piece parts to a mobile payment solution based on contactless/NFC technology. But I didn’t anticipate the elegance with which Apple applied the technology as well as the creativity it brought to the business aspects of working with the payment card industry to introduce perhaps the best possible mobile payment solution.

Utilizing our private information with locally executed machine learning models makes logical sense. The challenge is how to do so when the compute or memory resources required of the model are beyond the capabilities of the mobile device. That’s where Apple’s invention of Private Cloud Compute provides the answer. And it’s brilliantly architected to provide access to those resources in a privacy protecting fashion.

We don’t yet have any access to these new Apple AI capabilities – and the proof will be in the pudding when we do – but the promise laid out by Apple in Monday’s keynote is very exciting. I’m looking forward to seeing how well Apple executes on its very differentiated approach.

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iOS iOS Shortcuts iPad iPadOS iPhone YouTube

Capturing Ideas

Have the winter blues got you yearning for something more?

As winter rains descend upon Northern California once again, I find myself embracing the cozy ambiance indoors while embarking on a journey of discovery amidst the inclement weather. Instead of succumbing to the lull of hibernation, I’ve delved into a world of newfound inspiration and innovation, primarily through the vast expanse of online resources.

Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some of my recent discoveries here. Perhaps you’ll find something of value from what I’ve found! Included is a nifty tip below for quickly capturing fleeting ideas during the day, creative uses of ChatGPT, a series on how some great authors actually write, a field guide on personal productivity, an online course of developing your PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system, and more. Let’s get started…

A couple of years ago, I was hardly aware of YouTube. Once in a while I’d see a video returned in one of my Google searches – often for help in fixing something or another. Somewhere along the way, I discovered all of the content on YouTube – and, in particular, the value of YouTube Premium which enables uninterrupted and background YouTube video playback..

Now, YouTube is my spare time enjoyment channel – where I discover new creators sharing new ideas and stimulating conversations. Have you discovered any hidden gems online during your rainy days? Share your discoveries in the comments below! Here are a couple of my recent delights:

Have you ever lost a great idea in a blink? Rich Bowlin has a great YouTube channel that is a goldmine with down-to-earth, straightforward how-to videos about using iPhones and iPads.

Inspired by one of his videos on the use of shortcuts, I built one that captures fleeting ideas with just two taps on the back of my iPhone! Imagine never losing another one of my brilliant thoughts again! I can quickly enter text about the idea which it appends to a daily note for today – or creates a daily note for today if it hasn’t already been created. Later, when I have time, I can open that note and be immediately reminded of my fleeting ideas from early that day. Here’s Rich’s video where he describes his approach.

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Applications Drafts iOS iPad iPadOS iPhone Mac Productivity Tools Utilities

Drafts – a tool for idea capture

I’ve been using this handy utility for a few years now – but increasingly so over the last year. It’s kind of magical in the functionality it provides. While there are other good note taking apps – including Apple’s Notes app – Drafts is especially useful for capturing spur of the moment ideas for later processing. The developer describes Drafts as “where text starts. Quickly capture text and send it almost anywhere.”

Because Drafts is available everywhere in the Apple ecosystem – Mac, iPad, iPhone and Watch – it’s universally available whenever you need it. Apple Notes is mostly everywhere – but weirdly not on the Watch.

The way that Drafts works is simple but takes a bit of learning to grow accustomed to using it regularly. When you open Drafts on the Mac or iOS/iPadOS, it opens as a blank note – waiting for you to enter something. It’s designed for that quick capture – type in some text – or dictate it – and away you go. Sometime later you can come back to Drafts and review all of the notes you’ve captured – and decide what you want to do with each one.

I’ve put a complication for Drafts on my Apple Watch face so that with one tap I can open Drafts and begin capturing an idea using dictation on the Watch. After I’ve captured my idea, Drafts on the Watch will sync the note containing my new idea via iCloud and make it available to Drafts apps running on my other devices – Mac, iPhone, or iPad – where I can open it later and decide what to do with it. For example, if I have an idea for an email I need to send or a blog post I want to write, I can capture those initial thoughts using Drafts and later go back and “revise and extend” those thoughts as I choose – and then send that final version of the text out via email or into my blog application. It doesn’t get any handier.

Drafts has a number of additional features that continue to evolve as the developer releases new versions and as members of the Drafts community contribute actions and themes which extend the functionality of the app.

Drafts is no youngster – this month the developer is celebrating the app’s 10th anniversary. The app is available for free – but the advanced features require a Pro subscription which is available on a special deal this month (through April 2022) for $4.99 for the first year.

I’m a big fan of Drafts – and a Pro subscriber. It’s become a regular part of my daily tech life. I’m such a fan that I just wanted to highlight how useful it is to me – thus this post – which itself began on Drafts! Perhaps you’ll find Drafts a useful tool as well if you’re an Apple user.

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Art and Artists iPad iPhone 8 Plus Monterey Bay Photography Textures

Mobile Photography on Monterey Bay

I recently drove to Monterey to join my friend and painter Don Neff while he was doing plein air painting as part of the 2018 Carmel Art Festival. Don took us to one of his favorite spots along the Monterey Bay coastline – Perkins Park in Pacific Grove.

Don and I caught up on old times as he was painting a small 6×8 inch canvas for the show.

As I was sitting with Don, we watched the sun play with the fog bank – creating some beautiful and ever changing lighting on the bay. There was a single fishing boat out – seemed to be turning circles in the middle of the bay. I captured a few shots with my iPhone 8 Plus including this one:

Later, when I was home, I began playing with this image using some of the iOS photo editing apps that I’ve collected (don’t ask how many I have!). One of my favorites for landscape (or seascape!) scenes is called Distressed FX. This app is available on both the iPhone and iPad. It allows you to simply experiment adding both color and texture effects to an image. With this image, I cropped it to a square format and then, using Distressed FX, added the sky and a subtle texture overlay. The result is startling beautiful – and way different from the original! [Update 5/29/18: Here’s a good introductory tutorial about Distressed FX.]

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Black and White Fujifilm X70 iPad Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X70 San Francisco/California

Photo Editing on my iPad – Bay Bridge

San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge

Today I took a video workshop with Karen Klinedinst teaching me techniques for editing images on my iPhone and iPad. While I’ve had many of the apps she walked me through already installed on my iPhone and iPad, I hadn’t spent the time to learn how to use them. Karen took the time to walk me through them – and I came away inspired to try doing more image editing and creative processing on my iPhone and iPad.

This afternoon I grabbed my iPad and tried a few of the techniques she taught me – resulting in this image. Originally shot a few weeks ago with the Fujifilm X70, I used Snapseed and Photoshop Fix on my iPad to create this monochrome version. Snapseed does a superb job with black and white conversion – and Photoshop Fix has a superb healing brush tool. A great combination for this image!

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Film Filoli Fujifilm X100S Gardens iPad Lightroom Photography Photography - Fujifilm X100S Photoshop CC VSCO Film

Back to the Garden

The Garden - Filoli - 2013

I made a quick visit to Filoli this morning on a very warm day here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wanted to try out a new Toshiba FlashAir SD Card in my Fujifilm X100S. I have the 8GB version of the card – Toshiba has just announced a 16GB version which is also faster (Class 10 vs Class 6) – but it’s not yet available.

My goal today was to be able to take some shots, upload them from the camera to my iPad mini, do a couple of quick edits and then upload them as a new set to Flickr. Everything worked fine РI shot 28 images (before the heat got to me!) and headed into the caf̩ to upload them off the camera to the iPad and then on to Flickr. All told, it took me about a half hour to do this Рroughly 1 minute per image. The combination of moving these 6-7 MB Jpeg files around twice took longer than I expected (the FlashAir uses WiFi to the iPad mini and on the iPad I was using the Flickr app to upload over Verizon LTE cellular.

In any case, mission accomplished! <a href="Derrick Story likes to call this combination the “nimble photographer”. Not sure I felt very nimble today in the heat – but it was fun and a walk in Filoli – even a short one – is always a lift for the spirit!

When I got home, I transferred the images off the SD card into Lightroom 5 and then did some editing using VSCO Film presets. A bit of dodging and burning in Photoshop CC, a quick border addition, and this image was finished.

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Black and White Cuba iPad iPhone 5 Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Portraiture Travel

Sketching in Havana

In the Market (Sketch) - Havana - 2013
In the Market (Sketch) – Havana – 2013

Over breakfast this morning, I stumbled across a recommendation for the iOS application (both iPad and iPhone) My Sketch – which costs $1.99. I installed it and tried it out on one of my recent photos – which took all of about 30 seconds for me to complete and save! I liked the look of the pencil sketch lines coming into the image very much like the rays of light behind him actually did at the time I shot the image.

See more of my shots from Havana and Cuba here.

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iPad Nikon Photography Photography - Nikon D600 Travel

Crafting an iPad Wallpaper – On South Beach

Easy Rider - Miami Beach - 2013

There’s something about some photos that just grab you. When Doug Kaye and I were exploring South Pointe Park and the beach heading north from there in late January 2013, we came across this bicycle, probably one of the local rentals, hitched up to a post right on the beach. Wow. You start thinking that it’s one of those special moments – where it doesn’t get better than this. So, you take the shot.

As I was looking back at this image today, I thought that it might be a good candidate for an iPad wallpaper – for my lock screen. Seeing it brings me back to that lovely morning – just walking up the beach, a peaceful easy feeling indeed.

So, I decided to try making it into an iPad wallpaper image for my lock screen. I pulled it into a 2048×2048 square image at 264 dpi (for iPad’s with a Retina Display) in Photoshop CS6. I adjust the image placement for the rotation that the iPad does between portrait and landscape – brought down the highlights a bit and then tucked in my contact information.

Here’s a generic version of the result:

Bike at the Beach-iPad Wallpaper-generic

I made a similar image a few years ago – which has been my iPad’s lock screen image from then until today.

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iPad iPhone 5 Journaling Living Mac

Congrats to Day One – 2012 Mac App of the Year

Back in September, I wrote about how an app had worked its way into my daily life. That app is Day One – a personal journaling app that works on my Mac, iPhone and iPad – and syncs across all three using iCloud (in my case) or Dropbox. Day One was just declared by Apple to be the 2012 Mac App of the Year – a very well deserved award in my view!

Congratulations to the small Day One team for creating such a great application that I use every day to capture those more personal moments, observations, and insights. I’ve got almost 350 entries in my Day One journal – since I started using it in early June following surgery. Day One’s cross-device sync’ing just works – and makes journaling anywhere so quick and easy. And the results are beautiful.

Highly recommended!

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Apple Business iPad Payments

Free Tablets!

2012 12 04 12 55 30 Snapseed

One of my favorite podcasts is Critical Path with Horace Dediu. Horace’s also the guy behind Asymco.com, a great blog about asymmetric competition, Apple, mobile in general, and more. He uses data to drive his analysis into otherwise lightly explored areas. Always a great read and an insightful podcast! He’s got an Asymconf conference coming up in late January at IBM’s Almaden Research Center – I’d be there if I could but I’ll be heading to Havana, Cuba for a photography workshop the week of his conference.

On a recent show, Horace talked about the evolution of tablets and how different companies were pursuing their objectives in the tablet market. At the high end, with classically high profit margins, is Apple with its iPad family. At the other end is Amazon.com and Google who both appear to be willing to settle for much lower margins on their base hardware products.

This discussion made me wonder what the endgame in tablets might be. We’ve got these two examples – Apple at the high end with a tablet (and associated ecosystem) generating lovely margins. At the other end, we’ve got others who are opting to price their tablets close to cost – viewing them as razors and expecting to make their real revenues from how those tablets are used to purchase content.

And then this article showed up a few days back – about how the Financial Times was crossing the threshold – giving away a free Nexus 7 tablet to new US digital or print subscribers. This feels like a slippery slope…

Pushing this discussion to an extreme, might we some day see free tablets from others – provided to us by those who would love to enable us for commerce within their particular ecosystem – and who might benefit from the additional signals such a tablet might provide from our browsing/searching/shopping history? Those signals – spanning across our interests as we read, search, shop, etc. – are valuable, aren’t they?

I’ve been thinking we’re moving into a post-card world with the capabilities our smartphones bring. Might a free tablet strategy fit in sometime soon? Where will mine come from? From Amazon? From Apple? From Google? A card issuer? A card network like Visa or MasterCard or American Express – or PayPal – or someone else? Maybe from my mobile carrier?

What do you think?