A few weeks ago, I was on Clockwise #604, and one of the questions was, “WWDC is about a month away. What is one feature you are hoping to see in one of the OS updates?” I thought this was an interesting question, not just on its merits alone, but because I was on Clockwise #552 a year ago when essentially the same question was asked.
I keep a running list of ideas for articles for the NosillaCast using the text editor/organizer app Bear. Often, these ideas are recorded just as a title, but many times I actually start writing the article in depth, but never finish. I may lose interest, I may just forget that I was even working on the article, or sometimes I get partway through and realize the story isn’t interesting after all.
This week, I sat down to start writing for the show and thought I’d scroll through my ideas, and stumbled across something funny. I had started an article elaborating on my answer to the Clockwise question a full year ago and never finished. I thought it would be fun to finish the article and see where Apple may have made progress and where they haven’t.
The first thing to point out is that last year’s question was very specifically what enhancements we would like to see in Apple’s built-in apps on iOS through the use of AI. I’m not going to rehash the disappointing stumble that has been Apple Intelligence, but it’s a little hard to step around.
Apple Photos
I’m a big user of Apple Photos with over 100K images and videos synced across my devices. One of my beefs with Apple is that Photos doesn’t have feature parity between macOS and iOS. I have many thoughts on all of the places the two versions differ, but the main one where AI could help is with findability of specific photos. To aid in findability, I organize my images using titles, tags, captions, albums, smart albums, and folders, but I still have trouble finding things. In my unfinished wishlist for 2024, I suggested Apple could let me search using natural language with AI.
It would be awesome if I could ask it to “create an album with photos taken last weekend, but only the ones I took at Lindsay’s house that had one or both of my grandchildren in them.”
While I’m not normally good at seeing the future, Apple promised that very thing in the keynote in 2024. They said we’d be able to ask, “Show me photos of Stacey in her red coat in New York.” I still want that magical world to exist, but it doesn’t yet.
Calendar
I also had an AI angle for Calendar a year ago. I wanted to be able to ask for several things sequentially that were related. The example I gave was:
Hey S-Lady – move this weekend’s Programming By Stealth appointment from Saturday to Sunday and send a notification to Bart about it, and make sure to remind me to work out early on Sunday. Then add a reminder for the Tuesday before when I get home to start working on my homework.
At WWDC in 2024, they described a scenario that was very much in the vein of my little dream. They said you’d be able to ask S-Lady, “When is my mom’s flight landing?” from an email, and then “What’s our lunch plan?” from a text message, and then “How long will it take to get there from the airport?”
The dream is still alive, but I’m not sure I’d really trust any AI to do all this, even the good ones that are out there today. So I’m ok if they don’t get around to this one any time soon.
Messages
A year ago, when I started writing about my hopes and dreams for WWDC, I went on a long rant about how much I dislike Apple Messages. One of my beefs with Messages is that you can’t search within a message thread. You can only search all messages sent and received. One of the (many) reasons I choose Telegram as a texting client is that it supports search within a thread. It seems to me that you would need AI to make search more functional in Messages, but perhaps if they’re heck-bend on Apple Intelligence, they could use it to solve this problem.
What if I could ask Messages to show me all conversations I had with my friend Diane where we mentioned the character Jock from the TV show Dallas, but only the ones where we referred to when he died on the show. Apple spent time dancing around on stage about the “send later” feature in Messages, but didn’t directly address my request. They did include crawling your Messages using Apple Intelligence in their example about meeting up with mom for lunch, so maybe there’s hope yet.
Or, they could just make a better search for Messages, and I’d be happier.
App Store
I think search inside many apps made by Apple could be improved with AI, but the primary places I had hoped to see it arrive was in the App Store. For example, one of my big pet peeves is that even though I’m subscribed to Apple Arcade, I can’t search with a filter of Arcade-only results.
I wanted to be able to ask it to show me “Arcade-only math games designed to improve arithmetic skills for 10-year-olds with 4 or more stars.” I mean the games have 4 stars, not the kids.
The good news is that just recently, Apple did start allowing you to specify Apple Arcade in your search, so that’s awesome. For example, you can search for “Mahjong in Apple Arcade” and after an ad to buy another mahjong game, you’ll see Titan+ in Apple Arcade, which is followed by a bunch of solitaire games, but at least they’re from Arcade. I’m not sure that counts as AI, though, does it? It could just be a better filter.
I tried my more advanced search, and while it did come back with math games that were 4 stars and above, the results weren’t limited to Apple Arcade games. I tried different permutations of the request and had no better luck.
The entire data set of every app, description, and rating in the App Store isn’t that big, compared to what AI is ingesting on the entire Internet, so in comparison, this shouldn’t be all that high of a stretch goal.
Home
Should we even talk about HomeKit? My mom always told me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
A year ago, I tried to only come up with constructive ideas of where AI could help, but I’m honestly not sure any amount of AI would help fix the root problems with home automation in general. For completeness, though, let’s finish the exercise.
My first thought was that AI could help us create the automation rules for our homes. “When I come home, unlock the front door, turn on the hallway lights, and start playing some smooth jazz on the speakers in the living room.” In theory, you can do that by hand in the Home App, but it’s a real bear to create.
Even if AI could create the rule for you, we’re so far from it working because invariably the S-Lady would respond with, “Some of your devices are not responding, and I’m too lazy to tell you which ones.”
I think that’s my biggest problem with Home Automation – the unreliability. When it works, it’s glorious, but so often it randomly doesn’t. I have heard people talk about why golf is addictive, because sometimes you make the most amazing shot, and you keep hoping it will happen again someday. Home Automation is kind of like that.
Maps
The Maps app from Apple had a rocky start, but it’s now my go-to for travel planning and finding out exactly where a country is on a map. Geography was not my strong suit! When it comes to AI, last year I asked for one thing, and I didn’t get it.
Let’s say I want to send flowers to Lindsay the Daughter. I want to ask Maps to show me local florists near her house. It should be able to do that because it knows what a florist is, it has lists of them everywhere, and it knows where Lindsay lives. Unlike many of my other demands, this is something I want to do all the time.
I asked Maps this question, and it showed me a list of florists in Cleveland. Lindsay doesn’t live in Cleveland. If I first search for Lindsay by name, Maps zooms right to her home. If I then search for “florists”, it zooms out a bit and shows me the florists near her home. So, how hard would it be for Apple Intelligence to put those two pieces together? Seems like an easy win.
With many things like this, we can point to where Google can do it, but guess what? Google Maps can’t execute this maneuver either.
Bottom Line
This hasn’t been an exhaustive list of everything I’d like to hear from WWDC in a few weeks, but I enjoyed going back to my wish list from a year ago and checking in on whether Apple had advanced my personal causes any further.