2024-11-22 08:08:42
The one and only Niléane on MacStories: Horse Browser Tries Its Hooves at a New Take on Tabs
As you may have noticed in my screen recordings, when you start fresh with a new trail, the browser’s window is occupied by a large, 3D-animated horse that follows your mouse cursor.
I bought this browser because weird browsers are kinda my thing, but honestly it hasn’t clicked with me at all. I maybe should have seen this coming when I saw these reasons given for why other browsers suck on the delightful horse.browser:
I actually disagree with all of those complaints, so I guess it’s no surprise that this didn’t click for me. It’s worth a look, if only for the wildly quirky vibes, though. Just maybe not a purchase for most folks.
2024-11-22 05:30:39
Matt Rosoff writing for TechCrunch: Marissa Mayer Just Laid Out a Possible Business Model for Ad-Supported AI Chatbots
In the AI era, Mayer imagines that when people ask about tickets for a specific concert, “they actually want to see exactly what seats are available, where they are in the stadium, the pricing. They want that information synthesized in much the way they see it synthesized in generative AI. And so I think it means that advertisers are going to have to partner even more closely with Google and other search engines to allow their wares to really be showcased and synthesized with the answer.”
I can’t help but find it a bit funny to hear all the people going “ads and SEO ruined the web and now we need AI to synthesize all the data people made in that ecosystem so we can present it in a new ecosystem that’s nicer,” are now realizing that ads would be great for monetizing in this new world as well.
Also not that the AI hype crowd is interested, but you don’t need AI to synthesize available seats and pricing…that’s remarkably easy to do in an API, an API that surely already exists on the ticketing website so they can display their own data. The fact they haven’t given that API to search engines to use freely is a business choice.
2024-11-20 21:05:12
In which I try to explain why I find Digital Foundry so compelling in a way Apple fans might appreciate.
2024-11-16 02:00:00
One of the things that bothers me about how many people use their computers in the modern era is in how they feel like they need to baby them.
I think a lot of people feel like they need to baby their phone more than they do. Apple introduced optimized charging several years ago, which does quite a bit to play with charging behaviors so that it helps avoid the problems caused by things that used to hurt laptops. Like I said, if you do it and like it, carry on, but do with eyes open and knowing what trade-offs you’re making.
Well, today I was using my Mac, which is a 14” MacBook Pro that I use almost exclusively in clamshell mode connected to my monitor, and I noticed my battery indicated in the menu bar wasn’t completely full. I clicked into it and saw that it was capped at 80% and there was a message that indicated that the computer knew I basically never used it on battery power. At some point, and I don’t know how long it took to learn this about me, but it decided that holding the charge around 80% was best for me long term. And of course, if I’m in a situation where I am going to be on battery for a long time and need the extra juice, I can tell it to charge up right now. Love it.
This is exactly the sort of thing OS developers have been working on for the past decade or more to help do the right thing to maintain your device without you needing to fuss around yourself. All Apple computers and phones these days have optimized charging that works to preserve your battery performance in the long run. On iPhones that means waiting until right before you wake up to top off your battery when charging overnight, and with Macs it means recognizing when someone is on power all the time and letting the battery fluctuate at lower charge levels so it’s not always capped out.
As I said in the linked quote above, I am fine with people doing whatever they want with their devices, but I would again just make sure they’re doing it with eyes open. Do they need to carry the mental weight of tracking how much their phone is charging so they can take it off the charger at the right time? Do they need to live with less battery life in a new phone so that it might perform better a few years down the road? Do they need to force close all their apps to do whatever they find that useful to accomplish? Maybe! But I’m positive there are tons of people who do these things just because it’s what they used to do on old computers and they feel they need to do now. This feature of macOS protecting my battery for me as someone who almost never unplugs was a nice surprise, and is simply an example of why I don’t need to baby my Mac to protect the battery.
2024-11-15 00:56:31
Ryan Christoffel writing for: Apple’s Hitting Its AI Stride Right as Competition Is Slowing
It happens all the time. Tech giants ship exciting new technology while Apple’s projects stay veiled in R&D, leading to the constant narrative that the company is ‘behind’ in that area.
With AI, that story may have actually had some truth to it—but things are starting to change.
Apple shipped major AI features to potentially hundreds of millions of devices with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 last month.
And:
Before the end of the year, I have no doubt Apple’s AI features—especially what’s coming in 18.2—will become more mainstream than any other existing AI product.
We will see what happens, but I have to be honest and say this feels like a very Apple-centric view of things. ChatGPT is famously the fastest growing product of all time, reaching 100 million users, despite having zero system integration on any platform (that would come later), in like a month and a half. Today, ChatGPT is more than doubling its usage from the same time last year and their website is likely one of the 10 most visited sites in the world. And that’s just their web traffic, many millions more use ChatGPT from their top-ranked iOS and Android app as well as inside one of the thousands of integrations other software has built ChatGPT into.
I’m not saying Apple’s features will have a dozen users or anything, but I would challenge anyone who thinks Apple’s LLM features will be more “mainstream” then ChatGPT “before the end of the year” to validate that next month. If more people know about and have used Image Playground than ChatGPT by then, I’ll eat an AirPod.