Wrapping Up and Future Discussions

Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Decagon and Mercury Weather. I'm John Voriz and I have Federico Vitici with me. Hey, Federico . And we're back remotely. We are back to our usual. It's not as fancy, I got to say sitting here in my home office. I really don't think so . The chair's comfortable, but the chair's nice, but not as nice. Not as nice. I mean, look, you can't it's hard to beat the studio at Hard to be the multi billion dollar corporation you're saying? Yes, yes, yes. This is nice for, you know, guy who works from home, not for billion dollar company. Trillion doll ar company. I have to agree. Obviously, I wanted to thank all of the people who tuned in existing listeners, new listeners who followed our W WC coverage , both on Mac stories and on App Stories, I want to thank obviously Apple for the opportunity again to record in the podcast studio and interviewing some of the ADA winners and finalists. And I want to give a shout out to Jonathan and Devon for holding the Ford Mac Stories as we were at the conference . We were there busy between briefings and sessions and podcasts and I was just catching up yesterday on their excellent coverage. They truly did an outstanding job this year with a classic Mac Stories overview style and they were fast, they were thorough. So shout out to Jonathan and Devon for doing the hard work . We obviously came back first of all exhausted . Second, happy because we worked together . And third, I would say processing information . And we're here kind of to talk about the information that hopefully we have somewhat processed , I will say at this point. Yeah, I would say somewhat because I mean, it is kind of , as you said, I think it's probably hard to imagine from home what it's like when we're at Apple Park, but we had roughly twelve to thirteen hour days of briefings and recordings and things like that. And there was downtime in between here and there . But distances between point A and point B in Apple Park are far enough and there's enough going on that you rarely have a lot of spare time in reality between one thing and another . And when you do , you're sitting over at the visitor center and there are very few times you get to say hello to people you know during this because you're being carted around so much that a lot of that time is spent socializing not actually working. But yeah, it was it was a great trip and you and I have been digesting things. I went from San Francisco to Philadelphia, which I'm going to talk about a little bit on unwind maybe, but I didn't get home till Saturday night and have been ever since then playing catch up both on things I neglected while I was gone, but also just absorbing all the information that we took in at the briefings and also what's been published by App le and that sort of thing. Yeah, so let me ask you , I mean, obviously same . Where are you running the betas at the moment? I am running the betas on my MacBook Pro the MacBook Pro S review because in I think in large part because of Apple frames because since I'm using an As thirty two inch display with my Mac studio that doesn't really work for that. So I'd like to have at least some great screenshots of the full computer that I can use Apple frame shortcut for. But there my iPad Pro , both the iPhone six teen E that I'm using as a webcam right now, which I had with me in Coopertino, that was the only device that I actually loaded the beta on while I was away . And on my everyday carry seventeen Pro Max now too. , okay. But most of those things weren't installed until Sunday, you know, as we record this like three or four days ago, so I'm indexing all over the place. Okay , I have it everywhere except Vision OS and TVOS I don't have it. Well, so it's on my iPhone seventeen Pro , MacBook Pro , an Apple Watch Ultra three and iPad Pro, obviously. So also upgraded the iPhone Air while I was at WWC. I think I'm going to have to restore that to IOS twenty six, if anything, because I need a point of comparison for taking screenshot s and comparing them back with IOS twenty seven. So I think I'm gonna wipe my air and put a clean installation of twenty six. I don't know if you can also pick it up from the microphone or behind me but a thunderstorm just started in the middle of June in Rome. Oh, I think I heard a little something yeah. Yeah, so you heard the rumbling of the thunder . So that's as I'm recording these, I'm also if you see me looking around and you're watching the video version, it's because I'm keeping an eye on my dogs. I was gonna say we might hear Zelda ginger soon too. It's usually ginger and I can see ginger just walking around the house. That's what she does when she starts getting scared. So see we'll how these goes. They should go on. So I'm still in the scene myself . I saw nine to five Mac published an article a couple of days ago about like how to check what completion percentage your different devices are in terms of indexing. And it involves like plugging in a device via USB into your Mac and opening the console, enabling the debug messages. And in the debug messages you can see like Siri completion state or something . And yesterday my iPhone was like ninety six percent and it hasn't moved. So I'm not sure what's going on. Also ninety six percent, it sounds like it's almost done, right? And yet, oh boy, that's a really loud thunder. John, I really hope I don't know with power . I hope so too. Well, you know, we'll improvise if that happens. We'll improvise So I was saying like you would think the ninety six percent is a high percentage . And yet my series still is unable to like read my reminders or my calendar events or like find messages. Like none of the retrieval actions are working . Not even like recent messages or something like that. Nothing is working. I can create reminders. I can create events , I can create timers, but retrieving stuff not working. Yeah, no, I've mostly been working I haven't spent a lot of time with Siri yet. I have been trying things like , oh the other day I was on Instagram and I saw a restaurant that I thought I wanted to keep I wanted to save it in Apple Maps as a guide because it's in a town a few hours away and I thought next time we go there for like a weekend trip I'd maybe try the restaurant . So I copied the address , had, you know, tamped the contextual menu button for Siri and Siri found it, show me showed me a map , but I couldn't tap the map. I think there are little things like that that I think Apple needs to kind of tighten down a little bit. You know, it gave me buttons to do things like create directions to get to the restaurant or to call the restaurant, but all I wanted to do was to open the Apple maps with that pin there so I could save it to a guide for that town. And that wasn't possible . I think overall though , I so've been thinking a lot about Siri AI and the new features of Apple Intelligence and the things you will be able to do with Siri . And even though it's broken for me right now, I know that it's working for other people. And I keep coming back to this thought that while Apple has now created an agent and I don't think I will replace my Kodax and Kodax mobile setup anytime soon . I think once it's working , the new series AI will probably eat into my usage of a regular chat bot . And like, and I don't want to say that I'm just gonna outright replace Chat GPT , because especially for some countries where you just want to you just want to dive deep into a research on a topic that requires something like a heavy thinking model or Ch PT Pro. ChPT Pro continues to be like in a league of its own when it comes to like just thinking and thinking and reading sources and going back and evaluating those sources again . Yeah, or for some connectors that might not be available via App and Tense, right? Right, right. So I don't think that Siri AI will replace like when I'm doing some research about my next I don't know WiFi seven router that requires opening up a lot of pages. I don't think Siri AI is meant to replace that But for like quick medium difficulty questions , I think I will probably just default to Siri AI at this point . Also the unknown for me at this point , again, because it's not working is what happens once Siri AI can really tap into all of my collection of third party apps and apps that I have on my phone. Like what happens when the personal cont act stuff is actually working ? And I have this tool that can search my eye messages, search my emails, search my tasks, search my notes. Like what happens what happens at that point? Because it's not something that I've ever experienced , right? I've always realized I've started using things like Notion, for example and spark because that was my only way to bring AI into tools that had some kind of native equivalent on Apple platforms. What happens when any native iOS or iPadOS app can be integrated with that? And I think for simple stuff, it's really fantastic. I mean, the other day , another example of the few times I've used it so far is I took a screenshot of something again on Instagram that was like a schedule for a run club at a local coffee shop. And it was and instead of creating the calendar event myself, I took that screenshot, I fed it to Siri AI and it very quickly created a recurring reminder for me for when they do that do that run club. So that was, I mean, it's that's a small thing and it's only calling one app, but I think it is very useful. And I think you're right about the context in which I'll use it. I've very often like if I've got a really big project going on, whether it's in something like Codex or Claude Code . I will use the other one, the chat bot of the other one as kind of my overflow. I'll leave, you know, I'll save all my tokens for the coding project that I'm doing . And I'll use the other one for just day to day little things, whether it's small research projects or adding one off reminders or calendar events or other things like that. And I can very well see that going me using Siri AI for that almost exclusively because it's so nicely baked right into the system and is relatively fast too from what I've seen so far. I mean, you know, all this stuff that we're talking about is all very much a beta right now. So we can't really judge it one way or the other, especially since it's developer beta one, but I've been I've been pleasantly surprised by it and I think that for some people there I think, there are going to be a lot of people kind of on the fence where I'm like, I'm always wondering should I drop one of my subscriptions for an AI service? Should I drop chat, GPT, should I drop clot? I did. I'm down to only one again. Yeah , and I'm on both right now still. And I feel like with enough stuff from, for instance , notion, but also Siri AI, those are going to fill the gap s in ways that probably make it a lot easier to drop down to just one, which I think is good because I mean, I'm happy about it because those are expensive subscriptions. But yeah, it's kind of interesting. Yeah, and I mean, I know I also said that Apple is not making an agent, right? Which they are not. They said they have the foundation to potentially build more agent features in the future . But if you think about it , once we have a Siri AI that can connect to any app on your device , even though the model may not be as smart as a GPT five point five or five point six or God forbid if it ever comes back a fable class model . But isn't a Siri AI that can work with any app for data creation and data retrieval a kind of agent that is also in your device. Like I know it's not going off on its own and it's not going to work in the background and it's always going to require your manual inp ut, but it's like the beginning. It's like the glimpse of an agent, if you will. Oh, yeah, it is. I think it is. I mean, they are, they're doing tool calling in the sense that it's accessing your on device . Yes. And so memories in the sense that they have personal context . Right, exactly, exactly. And while it's not traditional memory like you would find in, you know, Chat GPT or Quad, it's similar and I think that over time those kind of things will probably evolve in Siri AI as well. I've already started hearing the hot tight takes that , well, you know, Apple's already behind again because they're not doing agents and things. And I kind of feel like they're okay for now. I really do. I feel like Siri AI is a very big step forward . It is limited in a lot of ways, but it's not that 's not to say it's not useful either. I mean, it's very useful from what I can tell and that's only going to get better over time. So I don't think like if you're a programmer and you want to put an agent on a loop and create a compiler like Federico is doing. And having Codex running is mathing as we see. He's had he's had Codex running in a loop for what twenty hours or something. As we're recording this, it's twenty four hours and in thirty nine minutes. Yeah, so no, Siri AI's not going to do that . But it's also not necessary that it does that. And we can talk a little bit about what's in X code maybe too, but that's okay. I mean, there's plenty of uses for AI in Apple intelligence, like with Siri AI, that are day to day things that you were probably already doing in Chat GPT or Quad already, or maybe Notion or some other app , and Siri is going to be a capable way of doing those things, I think. Yeah . This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Dekagon. If your team is dealing with more support tickets, more channels, and higher expectations from customers , you've probably thought about using AI for customer support , and you've probably seen how limited or time consuming most options are . That's where Decagon comes in. Decagon helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat , email, voice and SMS . They're available twenty four seven feel natural to talk to and can resolve customer requests on their own , so businesses can keep up with the requests without losing their personal touch. 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AI slash app stories. Our thanks to Decagon for their support of the show. Enough about Siri Ai, John. I want to hear your hottest takes just the hottest. All right, none of the warm, tepid stuff. Okay , about Golden Gate and the liquid glass adjustments this year. My hottest . You were not a Tahoe hater . No, I was not. My I would say my general stance on Tahoe that was that what I didn't like was that it was inconsist ent and I think Apple's you know, I have a lot of corners of the OS to still look at. I do like what Apple's done with the toolbars ,especially . The toolbars actually stand out better from the backgrounds of the windows, which I think was definitely a problem in some apps. I don't care about the sidebar. I was okay with the sidebar. I know a lot of people didn't like how the sidebar seemed like a window sitting on top of the window that was think it looks better now or just you don't have an opinion . I don't think it looks better . I just think it looks different Okay, I think it's okay. I don't have a problem I was looking for. Yeah, I mean, look , I would have been if that had been an if what is in the beta today had been in Tahoe when it was released, I would have been fine, I would have been fine with it . But I actually like the raised sidebar. That'll be my hottest take is that I'm a I will probably you can revert to it, I think , and I think I will do that. Can I think you can a terminal command or something? There may be. Someone told me that and so I haven't checked it out yet, so I may be going out on a limb here, but if I can, I will. That's what I will say. Interesting, interesting. I think it's they're doing the right thing and obviously not if you thought going to W WC that Apple would just scrap liquid glass and say, nevermind JK . Yeah . We're going back to whatever version of Aqua we had before. Like they were not going to do that . There's obviously too much , too much on the line in terms of money and resources and and, you know , you cannot just undo the kind of major redesign that they did last year . But I thought I saved this line in my notes during the keynote that they were pretty, pretty clear about the fact that with any major redesign , you shoot for a goal and maybe you overshoot for that goal and then over time you go back and you refine and you know I'm reminded of this all timer from John Gruber originally published on Mac World . And then I think you can now find it on their Infireball, this article from many years ago called This is how Apple Rolls . This is what they do. They introduce something and then they refine, they refine, they're refined. This is actually what I appreciate maybe most about Apple compared to other tech companies for better or worse and they don't have a perfect track record but on average, like average, I think, is that they introduce something and that and then they refine it over time. And maybe it's not the following year, maybe it's a couple of years, but usually they don't just leave something untouched. Sure you can, point out some exceptions to this theory, but if you average that out over the many things that Apple introduces in terms of software, you can see that they have a almost like an internal policy of introducing something and then rolling with it, refining , adjusting, fixing issues. And they're doing this with liquid glass. And I think they're doing in an interesting way where they are tweaking at a system level , stuff like how the light is refracted and how the material actually responds to light and colors and contrast. But also they're trying to mitigate some of the criticism which they have heard from both sides , both the people who absolutely hated Liby glass and the people who said, No, you were actually doing the right thing in beta one. I want the super glass . And so Apple is saying, you know what, fine, we'll give you a slider. And I think that's actually a nice way to put it under the sort of the umbrella of customization. It's actually a clever way to handle the criticism coming on both sides so that actually you can make both sides happy with a slider. That's a good idea. Yeah, I do too. I mean, look, we should have a check in on the slider. Where are you on the slider? Where do you think I am on the slider? You're at full liquid glass. Yeah, boy. So am I fully left. I told you I was gonna be like at twenty five percent. I did it and I was like, nah all the way . Yo man, I mean what's the tinted? The fully tinted, come on. No, no, no , live a little and then obviously like I'm joking, but like there are some serious concerns for accessibility and like people who cannot read what's on screen with Luka Glass enabled. So there had to be a setting and this is this is the right way to do it. You can and also as I wrote in my review last year , there are some like if you set aside the material, this was a whole section of my review. If you set aside the material, the focus of liquid glass on compact UI elements , things that minimize, things that expand , things that are collapsed, and then you can show them again , that will only come in handy once you have an iPhone that can fold and unfold and maybe it's a smaller phone than usual and you want to make sure that you have that kind of contextual UI where the UI can be there but also get out of your point of view . Especially if in a year and a half or something you're introducing you're introducing glasses that will sit on your on your face and show you some kind of minimized UI . So they're probably playing the long game with liquid glass here and I think I think they're doing their thing their right thing in sticking to their guns here and just rolling with it. Yeah, I think so too. I'm a fan of liquid glass, especially on the iPad and the iPhone. And I like that I can adjust it. I mean, maybe there even day to day, there may just be some days where you're like, oh I don't have the energy to try to read the liquid I'm feeling tinted. I'm feeling tinted today or maybe somebody likes tinting more when they're in dark mode and they switch it up. I wish you could automate that actually. I thought about that too. I wish you could have an action that you tie maybe to a focus mode or maybe to a dark mode trigger that lets you automate your liquid glass . Your fun mode in your buttoned up mode. Fun mode like I don't care, just make it look sexy for screenshots and then back to back to boring look . Now , do you want to talk about XCode? We've been, I think we were together. We were in the XCode session . We were. And you know, you and I overall, we had a lot of wishes this year and a lot of them didn't come true, but a lot of them did, especially when it came to Apple intelligence and automation in general. And I think one of the ones that I really didn't expect necessarily happen did, which is bringing agents into Xcode in kind of a codex like way because there's just a new view in X code where you can switch from looking at your raw code to having an interaction with an agent. You know, before today in MacOS twenty six three or five, I think it was they added Apple added agents to the sidebar and you could have a conversation there and edit code there , but it was still very much the XCO app was dominated by a viewer for the files that you're working on. Now you can switch to a mode that is very much like having a conversation with an agent about what your goals are for the app you're working on and then watch it as it starts making edits and interact with it, make changes, you know, interrupt it, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's like we have Codex at home . It's very much that. But it looked nice. And I mean, it's built into Excode and I think Apple felt and saw because most people think, Oh, Apple is behind. They have no idea. I don't think engineers working at Apple live in this bubble where they have no access to tech blogs or social media . They are seeing how 're not just web development, how software development is changing. It is. I'm turning away from a static IDE to a more, like it or not, a gentic workflow. Yeah. And I've talked to a bunch of developers who aren't using X code at all anymore. They're doing all of their coding through the terminal or through the Codex Mac app . Yeah . And so I think they're going in the right direction with this . You could argue that you can probably get more done with the Codex app with the Codex hardness that is in the Codex application by open AI instead of the Codex model and the hardness that you have in XCode, but there are other benefits to Xcode. I think for example, one of the one of the most interesting things that they have done is replacing the simulator with the device hub. And being able to have access to multiple devices in the hub and being able to simul ate interactions and different states of your app as it's installed on an iPhone or an iPad , right? And do you remember during the EXCOT briefing , you know, they were demoing Xcode and they showed when they got to the part where they're showing how you can now resize if you are an iPhone app developer. You can now resize iPhone apps and test multiple layouts for their iPhone apps. Yeah. And so the presenter said, Yes, you can now resize your iPhone app if you want to test landscape mode, for example. And I couldn't help it. I just said, sure . You're right, exactly. No, it's obviously and that's one of the many signs pointing at a foldable phone you see it, right? Yeah, another good, another big one is the , you know, the ability to mirror your iPhone on your Mac that that is resizable now too. That's resizable. IPhone apps can be resized to landscape on the iPad , which by the way, you know, the answer to this question, John, do you know if that if that feature like the whole resizing feature, whether it's iPhone mirroring or iPad , compatibility mode? Yeah, do you know if it requires an IOS twenty seven iPhone app or if your existing IOS twenty six iPhone app already supports landscape mode, can you already resize that? I don't know. I haven't tried that with one. There are . I mean, you have iPhone mirroring on your Mac. I cannot use it because go . Oh, I forgot. Oh, wow. Yeah, because mirroring, that's like wait, hold on, do I have some sort of lock in? I mean, I can open it. Hold on, I can open. So my setup is weird in a bunch of bunch of ways. In a bunch of ways. I am geographically speaking in Italy. I have an Italian iCloud account I am not connected to a VPN , but I am using a US app store account and my device region is set to United States and my device language is set to English. So it's like I can launch most things I have access to Siri AI, but stuff like iPhone mirroring, for example, says connection interrupted . So it's like I can launch it, but it's like then it thinks about it and it's like nobody are immunity right now. Yeah, I can't actually run it right now on my Tahoe Mac because my iPhone is on twenty seven and those two are incompatible. There's a lot of little things like that in the beta right now where if you're on a mixed setup between old and new, they don't work quite seamlessly as they normally do. I think it's worth mentioning too, Federico about Excode is that Apple has developed a bunch of skills. A lot of the engineers at Apple have put together skills for different aspects of development, whether it's design or working on various aspects of Swift, different APIs. I haven't dug through those a lot yet, but you know, that was a thing that a lot of the community was starting to develop. You could go to GitHub and find a bunch of indie developers who were putting together skills and plugins and things for iOS, iPad OS, Mac development. And now Apple has done that, which I think has the side benefit of essentially creating more documentation where maybe there wasn't as much in place before, which is also a nice thing. Yeah , yeah. I think they're moving in the right direction with XCOD. I feel like at some point they, will probably need to have an answer to the fact that people are just now creating apps from their iPhones and their iPads using stuff like Codex Mobile or maybe to an extent clot code remote control . Just this morning I saw somebody put out like an open source project called Skim with a Q. Oh yeah I saw that. That lets you build and install iPhone apps on your phone directly from Codex Mobile by basically hijacking the installation process with a mobile web with a mobile web page that you're serving from a nearby computer. Wild things are happening with Codex Mobile access. And so I think at some point , there will need to be some kind of Excode remote or Xcode mobile thing because like we're seeing this now. The pace of app store submissions from developers is only accelerating . And all of these tools, I mean, AI used to be AI assisted development. Now it's just AI development, right? It's not even assisted anymore. And now we're seeing developers do it all from their iPhones, even and then they're submitting to the app store directly from their phone, even. So I think at some point maybe next year, there will need to be an answer from Apple when it comes to a mobile native development workflow, but not this year . But they're moving in the right direction No, so when I was at WWC, I had a developer show me a very complex swift UI app on the iPhone that was one hundred percent developed from that iPhone, which was wild . Wild, wild . This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Mercury Weather Mercury Weather is a thoughtfully designed weather app that shows all of the essential weather details at a glance. It has a gorgeous, colorful interface that dynamically adapts to the conditions with a warm orange palette on a sunn y day, icy tones on a cold day, and deep blue for a rainy night . 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Yeah, we should . Yeah, we haven't really gone through that too much , and I know you've been have you tried them yet like from the CLI or anything like that? Just briefly for like thirty seconds to see if it was working. So there are now two foundation models so you can use the on device one and the private cloud compute one. But notably, if you see the news, only developers, developers can access the PC model , but only developers who have apps on the app store with less than two million downloads. Right. And that's not like two million downloads like in the past year. Two million downloads cumulative over their app store history Yeah, yeah. And I think that that should change to something like over a change over a period of time. I mean, the way I think they blameed it was that it's designed to be for small developers, indie developers and medium sized companies and not a replacement for the AI tools that big companies are using, you know, companies like Google or Amazon or Facebook or something like that. And I get it. I mean, I think that there's probably, I think they're hedging their bet s on their compute needs and the cost and all of that kind of thing . And I think two million downloads covers the vast universe of apps already, even if it's cumulative, it'll cover very large percentage of the apps out there. But I do feel like that probably needs to be loosened up a little bit for people who have lots of apps and have been successful across a number of apps because cumulative doesn't seem like the right way to go for me to me. I think it should be more like active users or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Downloads is a bad proxy for active users. It is. And we can speculate that's maybe due to Apple having concerns about the infrastructure . You know, Apple has never so far in the past couple of years, Apple has never had to worry about compute , right? Right. All of these companies that are so hungry for compute . And I mean looking especially at open a thropic, anthropic was able to roll out , you know, incre ased usage for Claude and maybe to an extent Fable and Mythos five , only because they got a sweet deal from Ax i and William Musk . A sweet deal for one point two B ill a month deal . That's a, you know, two hundred K NVIA GPU. That's a steel if you think about it . But not like Apple never had to worry about being hungry for computers because yeah, nobody was using Apple Intelligence, right? But now these models they seem to be pretty good. Like not I wouldn't say they are state of the art model models . But you don't always need state of the art is the thing, right? Exactly, exactly. And I think if you're a developer and you're thinking about like, oh, okay, I want to have some AI features in my apps , why don't I just use the foundational models? We've seen over the past year developers just using the previous on device small foundation model for some really interesting things. Yeah, and they've been very successful and done a good job. They've done a good job. If you take a small model, you don't need to have a giant one trillion model if you just want to do some basic tax processing. Yeah, it totally depends on what you're doing. And I know from my standpoint, when I've been building things for myself, a lot of times I go straight to something like Cloud Haiku because Cloud Haiku can do a lot of things like sort lists and do text processing and do categorization and that sort of thing at a very low price and you're not going to use something like Opus for that because it would just cost you too much money. And using these Apple ones , you've got you've got them at no cost, which is great. I'm going to plan I to, you know, try to substitute these CLI tools here for some of the stuff I'm already using Quad Hyku for. I want to see how they compare side by side. Yeah. And I mean now you get to choose between core and core advanced, core advanced being the one that's running on PC . I also want to give a shout out to the CLI. I think they've done a really nice job with the FM . That's the command that you need to run in the terminal. If you want to use the Apple Foundation models CLI and they have a nice logo. They have a nice Apple foundation logo in the CLI and you can choose you can do FM, I'm doing it now, FM available, for example, and it shows me a system model available. That's the on device one. And the PC model is also available. You can and it's very nicely done if you're a developer and like this is your first sort of entryway to the Apple Foundation models, right? You can install the CLI, you can just tinker with it and you can see, okay, is this the, you know, you give it some text . Is this the right kind of model for my app before I actually build the integration for my app ? You can just tinker with the CLI and see what it does. Also worth noting is that if you're a developer and you're thinking, well, I want to use the Apple Foundation models, but then you run into limits, right? Maybe there's some complicated task that either core or core advanced cannot do . But you've written all of these foundation models code in your apps . What are you going to do? You're just going to throw it away replace it once again with manual API calls to open AI or anthropic. Well, there's an answer now. And there's something that I actually theorized many months ago on Mac sorries, which is Apple is giving you a native bridge in the Foundation models API to use either Gemini from Google or Cloud Bianthropic NO OPENA AI attention via the Foundation model API . So you can just swap the Apple models for a new native bridge to Anthropic and to Google Gemini using the Apple framework. That's what they call CoreAI, right? I think it's what it is exactly. It's part of the foundational models framework and you can just, you know, you can you have to provide your own API key, obviously , but that allows you to just keep the code consistent and have maybe a UI in your app that lets the user choose do you want to use the own device Apple mod el? Do you want to use the Apple Cloud model on PCC or do you want to fall back to Google Gemini or Anthropic? Or do you want to actually I don't know compare multiple models going at once? And if you're a developer, you can just keep using the Apple API. It's very cool. Yeah, it's very nice and it allows developers to do other things too. Like if you could be using one of those other models and put in your code, well, I don't want to do this if I go above X thousands of dollars of API tokens and then fall back to the free models or there's different things you can do and because they're all interoperable , it's not that code doesn't have to change. You don't have to have like two entirely different code paths for each AI model. You can just have one set of code and then call using these APIs, which is nice. Yeah, I just asked the found ational model on PC from the CLI summarized this article from MaxSource and it actually did it . It actually summarized an article of mine. So I don't know. I think it's going to be interesting to play around with the new models. I haven't spent a lot of time with them not either. But I think we're going to see even more apps this year, especially because of the inclusion of PCC integrate with Apple Intelligence and the foundational models framework even more so than last year . Is there anything else that change your mind? Yeah, I think we should talk briefly about some of the image stuff that Apple's doing with ADM that's what they're doing for this feature for changing the perspective in photos as well as doing more realistic image playgrounds. And I mean, image playgrounds is not, I don't think it's that interesting to talk about it. I mean, it's image playgrounds, but more photorealistic is pretty much the bottom line . But I think that the shifting the images and the more advanced cleanup tools are fascinating because you know where Apple, I think, is trying to be very careful retaining essence of the photograph that you take. They're not changing the subject . What you can do is effectively alter the twenty five percent border around the edges of the photo because what you're doing is you're generating extra image on the ed ges to allow you to do cropping and rotation that is using some generative ation to do that . And in the demos, it looks really good. I have not played with it a lot yet. I need to try that out more, but I appreciate that Apple's taking that approach where they're not changing the person's color of their eyes or their haircut or something like that . And that so there's that. And then the more advanced cleanup tool essentially just handles cleanup where you erase like a person photobombing your picture of , you know, of your family . It erases situations that were harder to do in the past because one of the things was, I think with cleanup , the original version of it, you had a really good tight definition , high contrast objects that you were trying to remove, whereas now it can handle things that are a little more complex and fill in more complex things, like we saw the example of creating a striped sock on a kid or filling in set of curtains that were hanging next to a window that were blocked by an object that was erased. So I was pretty impressed with the photo stuff. I just need I need to play with it more. Yeah, me too . I really don't know what to think about the reframe feature yet . On the one hand, I think it's a really cool technical dem o . On the other , I don't know, is that even that's not a real photo anymore, right? I don't like the idea of it entirely. I kind of makes me a little uncom fortable, yes. But what's a real photo? Yeah, then if you think like when you apply a filter to a photo, you've been doing we've been doing this for the past fifteen years or something since Instagram came out. When you apply a filter , is that a real photo? And I've I've erased plenty of like telephone wires and things in my time and photos that I've taken, you know, using other like retouch and other apps. But I guess it depends like the ph doesot o is the identity is the essence of a photo something that only matters to you in private , but it's okay when it's a photo meant to be shared and maybe I don't know. Oh, maybe maybe the other way around though, really. I mean, do you really, you know, 'cause you're not at least if it's for you privately, then you're not spreading misinformation. I don't know. You know what I mean? There's different ways to look at that. Yeah. And to me , it's a matter of degree . And if I have a picture that's just a little off and rotating the amount I wanted to get the horizon right would leave a slice missing in the corner that's not really an important slice but would look wrong because there's a piece of the sky missing. I'd be okay with doing that. I don't want to change the person that I'm taking a picture of or the object that I'm taking a picture of, but if I'm making some very small changes around the edges that are adding a few leaves to a tree or a little blue to the sky, I don't have a problem with that. Yeah Yeah . All right , well we still have so much to unpack and I've barely started taking notes on the betas . Yeah, same. I actually waited till I came home to feed a lot of data into my research system, which is what we're going to talk about a little bit more during the post show for App Stories plus listeners because you and I have, it's interesting. We landed in similar systems with different storage tools, I think is really what it comes down to more than anything else. But I wanted to hear a little bit of how yours is going and I can explain what I've been doing. And I actually have a surprise for you, Techi, so alright yeah a little bit of hardware surprise that's alright I've been working really hard the last couple of days but that's it for today's episode everybody. We will be back in another week yet again from our own homes , in our own studios . But yeah, thanks again to Decagan and Mercury Weather for sponsoring the episode. And you can find me and Federico over at MacStories . net and on social media where Federico is at Fatichi. That's VITIC and I'm at John Vortez. JOHN VW R HW S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Chajan