283 karma · joined July 14, 2014
1. What is under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella and what isn’t? There were a lot of AI features shown before that branding was brought up, I think. 2. The only supported iPhone is the iPhone 15 Pro? But any M1 iPad? Does this mean “Apple Intelligence” or all AI features announced? For instance… 3. For instance, is private cloud compute only available on iPhone 15 Pro?
“Do you see a ‘forget satellite’ button?”
Might still be worth a shot on personal devices, but with the say Safari syncs history across devices via iCloud, I'm not so sure…
Is it still demonstrably better than other reading apps (Reeder, Instapaper, etc.) without the plugin?
Adobe XD : Sketch :: Shasta : Descript (https://www.descript.com), right down to the advertising style
I think the reason people aren't terribly aware of Animate, and why there isn't a competitor product—whether open source or commercial—with a big name is that we don't need/want it. I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but last I checked most web traffic was coming from mobile devices, and heavy, high-gloss interactions akin to what Flash afforded and what could be accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what people want in their mobile browsing experience. They want fast. WASM/WebGL may be pretty efficient, and may be the best way to accomplish the sorts of things Flash was used for in much more efficient ways, but they're still not the best way to render text with a few buttons and images (i.e. a typical web page). The use-cases that had us reaching for Flash in the "aughts" just don't come up very often in web development these days.
When users DO want heavy, high-gloss interactive content, they're going to the App Store/Google Play to find it, not the web. This gives the developers the choice of building those experiences with WASM/WebGL if they like, but the vast majority are choosing native SDKs or a game engines. Against those options the WASM/WebGL offering is just not competitive, yet (the APIs, tooling, community is just not as good, yet).
TLDR: No shock here, if you think about it long enough, but the answer I found was empathy. This professional relationship between designer and engineer (which I've found through many interviews—formal and informal—to be the same for architect and engineer, stage designer and carpentry shop, etc.) is still a human relationship. It's easy for a lot of people to forget that, or to think that professional relationships don't require emotional intelligence/work/etc.
Fairly early in my career as a front-end engineer I landed at a fancy advertising agency. We built high-end interactive marketing sites for big names. We had a lot of hot-shot designers who were VERY excited about themselves, and were, frankly, watching Mad Men a little too closely and drawing the wrong inspiration. It was quite easy for me to start blaming them for the parts of the design -> engineering hand-off process that weren't working. Their designs seemed to ignore the constraints of the technology, the budget, the schedule, etc. And several of them jerks who would quickly throw the engineers under the bus and say "the engineering team at the last place I worked could have done this in a week."
Then one day I started a new project with a new designer. He dropped by my desk with design specifications that contained all the info I normally had to go spelunking into design source documents to try to ascertain myself. This guy had put them all in one place for me to make it easy. I was shocked. I noticed something that wasn't technically feasible in the design right away, and thought I'd test the waters. "Could we do this differently? The technology won't allow this exactly because of [blah blah blah]." He listened. He asked if we could both think about it a little longer, him thinking of alternative designs and me seeing if there was some approach I hadn't thought of that might make it possible.
The next time I spoke with him, as he was about to walk away, I said, "Hey, quick question… how come you're not an asshole?"
I'm so glad I asked.
I've already gone on a while, so I'll try to summarize. Essentially, he told me a story from his days in art school. Final exams, which for his art program meant turning in a lot of finished graphic design projects, which meant getting a lot of digital artwork printed, which meant going to a print shop and handing over all the money left in his bank account and then just sitting there for hours waiting for the prints, realizing that he had not control over what happened at this point. Did the printer install the fonts the way he'd asked? Were the color spaces configured correctly? Did the printer know what they were doing? Were they any good? There wasn't going to be any time to re-print (let alone enough money to pay for that), so his final exam was completely in the hands of this printer.
"That's how we often feel working with engineers." He said. "We turn over to you design files that we're proud of. They're beautiful. Then we just have to wait and see, a lot of the time, what actually ends up getting shipped. Often what shows up doesn't resemble our designs. The wrong fonts, the wrong colors, padding, margins. Sometimes the layout itself isn't even close. And we're powerless to do anything about it, and if we speak up too loud we're called prima donnas."
I immediately realized how I'd been complicit in this pattern so many times. How many times had I totally missed things like padding/margins that didn't matter to me because my untrained eye couldn't even see the difference unless it was pointed out to me? How many times had I said "eh, good enough" rather than trying a little harder, or going back to the designer to see if we could find a middle-ground?
I thought of the design specs he'd dropped off and how helpful they were. I realized that the only way forward was to mimic his style: respect for each others' disciplines, empathy for the struggles that each of us had in our work, dedication to work together—to set each other up for success and put the quality of the work before our own personal convenience.
For me that approach got me jobs I thought I would never qualify for. I got so good working with designers I became one. I've worked as a front-end engineer, a design technologist (hybrid designer-developer), and even as a straight up lead designer (UX/interaction design) for the past 15 years. My career has been rewarding (getting to go to/speak at conferences around the world, getting to co-author an O'Reilly book, etc.) beyond any dreams I had early on, and I think I owe so much of it to that designer and his lesson in empathy.
This is a side-note that might be as important (or more so) than the main thread. Why was I able to empathize with him so quickly, instead of getting defensive, as was my wont at the time (and still is more often than I'd like)? I think the key was the STORY he told. It's so easy for us to drop ourselves into a story as the main character. When he told that story, I was the art student frustrated with the printer. When the tables turned and I realized I was actually the printer in this story, it was a powerful moment because I had put myself in the designer's place. My defensive instincts were coming out in defense of the main character of the story (me as the designer).
Anyone have any recommendations for similar apps—i.e. apps that are focused on architecture/industrial design (not character modeling) that don't expect you to do CAD as soon as anything gets interesting?