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WWDC 2024
And just like that, WWDC week has come and gone… As expected, there were plenty of announcements across all OSes, both user-facing and technical - including the big one on Apple Intelligence. I don’t think there were many surprises this year. I won’t go into details on the announcements as many people are already doing that, but I do want to point you to a few interesting resources: What’s new in Swift 6.
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On the proper usage of commonFormat for AVAudioFile
Introduction I started looking into AVAudioFile while working on PALApp, my exploration into the world of portable AI. The MVP I was implementing is receiving audio over BLE from a Friend wearable and storing it in an audio file on the device. Try 1 The Friend audio samples are 16-bit little-endian integers. To ease testing, I can simulate this by populating a buffer with a simple sine wave let samples: [Int16] = { var s = [Int16]() for i in 0.
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Portable AI, a month later
It’s been a bit more than one month since my initial post on Portable AI and things are moving fast. The Humane Ai Pin has started shipping, the rabbit R1 has started shipping, Friend has a kickstarter campaign, Rewind became Limitless and a lot of people are now talking about those new “AI devices”. The Humane Ai Pin was the first to ship and the reviews are it. Unfortunately, they’re not glowing, as the device disappoints on many levels: it’s slow, prone to providing incorrect answers, overheats to the point of shutdown, has a barely readable display in daylight, is limited in what it can do and lacks integration with your Apple/Google account… Its hefty starting price of 700$ and the fact it turns into a paperweight as soon as you stop paying the 24$/month subscription does not help.
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Building a wearable AI Device
As ADeus was the first wearable AI open-source project I discovered, I started building a device based on the hardware they were using, and more specifically on the tutorial at ADeus - Raspberry Pi Zero W Setup Guide. I ordered the Pi and the same microphone but as I did not want to play around with 3D printing a case for now, I ended-up ordering the standard Raspberry Pi Zero Case.
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Portable AI
AI, LLMs and generative models have now been known and used by a majority of the population, technical or not. But they’re mostly used from your desktop or your mobile phone. I’m now seeing a growing proposition of portable AI, new form factors that use or fit within the AI eco-system. Commercial offering One of the first I got to know is the AI pin from Humane. I stumbled upon it through this TEDx video: Imran Chaudhri: The disappearing computer — and a world where you can take AI everywhere | TED Talkand immediately went to the web site and signed-in to get notified of any release.
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Vision OS for an existing app
Introduction As a simple intro into visionOS, I used the most simple app I have, AWG Convert, and set-up to add native support for visionOS to it. I added an “Apple Vision” destination to my project, launched the app in the simulator and started to tweak the code to make it look slightly better in the Vision Pro. Just the basics here, not really taking advantage of Spatial Computing, baby steps.
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Interface orientation in visionOS
Introduction Yesterday, during the super interesting Unwrap Live 2024 stream on visionOS from Paul Hudson, I asked the question on whether it was possible to have your visionOS start in “portrait mode”. The reason I asked is because I’m extending a small utility app (AWG Convert) that I’ve coded on the iPhone to have native support for the Vision Pro. There is no iPad version (for now), and the iPhone version only supports portrait orientation.
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Obsidian on Multiple Devices
As I’m getting more serious about using Obsidian as my primary note taking application, having the content available on multiple devices becomes critical. Living in the Apple eco-system, I had two options: Obsidian sync or iCloud. I went for the second option. And for those concerned with privacy, Apple now supports end-to-end encryption using your own keys for your iCloud storage with the Advanced Data Protection option. Setting up Obsidian Sync with iCloud Drive is a good article on the process of setting up sync.
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The Wait is Over
Or so I thought… Last week, I had received a shipping notification for my Rift DK2, indicating a delivery for this Monday. So I spent a bit of the week-end preparing a PC to use with it. It’s a powerful desktop system that I built a bit less than 2 years ago, to work on GWT projects (because building GWT projects can take a long time). When I started with that idea, the goal was to have a fast machine for that task, while keeping the budget low.
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Virtual Insanity
As about 40.000 people on the planet, I’m patiently waiting for my Oculus Rift DK2 to arrive. Although I’m impatient to get it, I’m not going insane, a trait that some members on the Oculus dev forums or subreddit are clearly exhibiting. Am I annoyed ? Slightly. Am I mad at Oculus ? Definitely no (though if I ever run into Palmer Luckey I’ll only buy him regular juice and not that expensive organic cranberry apple juice).
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