#Fun things for iphone 4s mac

#Fun things for iphone 4s mac

Best I can think is that apps could hook up to (as yet utterly hypothetical) Siri APIs much in the same way that Mac apps can supply system-wide Services menu items. But I’m not sure what form that integration could take. People are going to start clamoring for third-party Siri integration as soon as they see Siri in action. File system sandboxing and background processing restrictions make it easy to keep apps from interfering with each other or with the system as a whole. Hit the home button to go back to the home screen. The second level is when you tap an app to use it. The iOS interface is fundamentally only two levels deep: the first level is the home screen, listing all available apps. But with the original iPhone, it was always obvious how Apple could allow third-party developers into the party: by allowing third-party apps. 2011’s Siri is largely based on the same feature set: messages, email, phone calls, calendars, alarms, web search. The original iPhone launched in 2007 with a limited feature set and no third-party apps. Siri is designed to do things for us.īut there are parallels between Siri and the regular iPhone interface, too. Prior to Siri, iOS struck me as being designed to make it easy for us to do things. But Siri is indicative of an AI-focused ambition that Apple hasn’t shown since before Steve Jobs returned to the company. I don’t mean to imply that Siri doesn’t fit in or feel right at home - it does. As stated above, this new interface is in many ways the opposite of the regular one - open-ended and implicit instead of narrowly defined and explicit. The first interface is the app interface. In a sense, Siri is like a second interface to iOS. Siri: “I changed your alarm to 10 AM tomorrow.” Walking down a city street, I said, “Remind me to fix Amy’s glasses when I get home.” 1 Half an hour later, within a few doors of our house, the reminder went off. I remembered, a mile away from home, that a screw had fallen out of my wife’s favorite eyeglasses over the weekend, and that she was waiting for me to fix them. I was out running errands today, walking through the city.

I interrupted and said, “Play ‘Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones”, and Siri played just that song. I told Siri, “Play something by the Rolling Stones” and it played a random Stones song (“Gimme Shelter”, from Let It Bleed). I asked, “When was my last haircut?”, and it found that appointment from a month ago. On a whim, I asked Siri, with no other context, “When is my next haircut?” Siri answered with my appointment scheduled for later this month. I tried the same things Scott Forstall demoed on stage. You’re just, well, talking to your iPhone. You’re not driving or commanding the existing iPhone interface with commands. It’s a completely different interface for interacting with your iPhone. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri - primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked.

There’s no way to tell what will work and what won’t. Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. Everything you can do in iOS is something you can see and touch on screen. It’s also sort of the antithesis of everything prior in iOS.

Even the startups from former Apple employees of that era worked on this sort of thing - remember General Magic? New models of human-computer interaction. Sculley-era Apple was obsessed with this sort of thing - natural language processing, the computer as “digital assistant”. The iPhone 4S is exactly what Apple says it is: just like the iPhone 4, but noticeably faster, with a significantly improved camera, and an impressive new voice-driven feature called Siri. This is the easiest product review I’ve ever written.