Using Apple Freeform for a Digital Wunderkammer
Using the new white boarding app from Apple, Tools Require Culture Change, two of my podcasts, and links you’ll like.
Current status: we go back to Texas for three weeks in a few days. It’s always nice to slip into the warm familiarity of the States. And, in Texas, the food: tex-mex, BBQ, ice tea with free refills. Lazy days ahead that I need to be watchful for. More days than not (but not all days), you’ve got to get out of the house and do things, or at the end of the day it seems like all that free, relaxing time was wasted.
Moodboards, Waste Books, Wunderkammers, and Scrapbooks in Apple Freeform
Apple released a new app called Freeform. It’s just like a big whiteboard you can put stuff in. The stuff can be images, text (in the form of text boxes and dopey "sticky notes), and drawing (with the Apple Pencil or your fingers). There’s more: check out this review for a deeper look.
I hope they keep evolving it and merge more with just regular Notes. I’d probably use it as my main note-taking app if it had the usual text stuff: more formatting, search, tags and folder to organize, and especially the to do, checkbox things.
I like Apple Notes just fine. Apple Notes has has good integration with the Apple Pencil - the text recognition is pretty astonishing: like all live text stuff in Apple, you can just select and copy out text.
Here’s one “mood board” in Freeform:
I’d been keeping these in Apple Notes as one big note. There’s not really a point to these “mood boards” as I call them - they’re just stuff I like. I hadn’t considered putting text in them because in Apple Notes things aren’t so fluid. But it’s fun to put in here.
Freeform can more or less handle all that stuff. It gets a little creeky when you go in and out of a board - I assume fetching and rendering all those images from iCloud?
Freeform is pretty good for this kind of thing. It has collaboration features, which sound cool, but I don’t have reason to use them. I haven’t used Miro as much as my colleagues, so I assume Miro is more feature-full - also it works in the browser so it’d be more accessible to more people. Whatever: the Apple lifestyle is rarely about “more.”
(The original export to PDF, then converted to JPG was 64 megs at the size of 32,232x16,833.)
My Content
Success is going to Day 2, Software Defined Talk #392 - This week we discuss the Pentagon’s new C loud Contract, Day 2 at Amazon and Nutanix acquisition rumors. Plus, some thoughts on kids and headphones…
2023 Predictions and Hopes, Tanzu Talk - It’s the last episode of the year so the three of us go over not only predictions in the cloud native space, but also our hopes for what happens. Also, there’s special guest ChatGPT on its predictions and a surprise piece of advice for New Year’s Day.
Tools Eat Culture for Breakfast
Good stuff here: how you work is determined by the tools you use. Or: “Tools eat process for breakfast.” And "the product is the process.”
Less sneakily, when you adopt a new tool, you have to change the way you work to get full advantage/benefit of it. If you adopted PowerPoint, but then just put long form in the slides, you won’t get the benefits of PowerPoint. Or you adopted Google Docs, but don’t use the collaboration and sharing features, you just have Word. If adopt kuberntes and don’t change your application architecture to cloud native ones and use the same release management processes from ITIL-land…and so forth.
In contrast, us vendors will try to get you change you culture to match what our tools can do, so you need the counter-challenger buying model.
Waste Book
Keynotes: it should have what you want to say, and also what the audience wants to hear.
Is there a list of rich people by liquid assets instead of equity valuation? (The point being, you can’t just sell $20bn, or whatever, of your company’s stock in ten minutes and get that cash to buy some Skittles or whatever, let alone have your company survive.)
New breakfast: tom yum omelette. Three eggs, a heaping spoon of tom yum paste, mixed all together with a lot of cheese in the omelette, maybe olives. Tasty!
New theory: Bluey is the story of two Atlassian IPO millionaires who retired and decided to raise their kids in the “yes, and” school of parenting.
Mutual assured replaced-by-AI.
Better Governance with Automation
My colleague Bryan Ross wrote up one of my little videos from the hurdles series, about compliance. He, of course, added a lot more to it. Check it out!
Relevant to your interests
Platform Engineering Needs a Prescriptive Roadmap: A Conversation with Nigel Kersten - “I very strongly believe that the reason most enterprises fail at these sorts of initiatives is that they try to implement them via project management rather than product management. Treat your internal user base as a market of users, and the solutions you build as products for those users. This means you need to solve their problems for them in ways that work for them, rather than just delivering “capabilities”, and it means that you need to keep solving them as those problems change over time, which they always do!”
Google execs on ChatGPT - Wow, this is setup to be a classic case of Disruption in the works: the mega-large incumbent come up with a reason to avoid the less featurefull, cheaper disruptor. Then the incumbent is too late once the category definition changes.
Large language model hype has reached the enterprise - “For example, LLMs could automatically generate a quarterly financial report for a publicly traded company or a press release announcing a new product.”
Tech sector layoffs barely dent demand for IT talent - Plenty of tech jobs out there, it seems: “What we’re hearing from our customers across the board is that it’s a difficult situation where the demand for technologists is roughly two-times the actual supply,”
New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is - “Micro Focus, the UK software outfit that still does much business around support for COBOL, which found that the amount of code in daily use worldwide is somewhere in the region of 775–850 billion lines, and that 92 percent of organizations it surveyed regarded COBOL as a strategic technology.”
Also: “a majority of the survey respondents (52%) said their companies would be keeping their tech headcount at the same level over the next 12 months. In fact, 39% said they expected their company’s tech workforce to increase.”
Your Guide to Radical Designs: - Of course I’m a fool for this aesthetic.
The death of society, for real this time - I haven’t read this kind of “the internet is destroy the fabric of society and casting us into a vortex of nihilism” prose in a long time.
Digital Experience Technology Success Metrics For Marketers - Four categories of metrics.
IT history of Kmart - EDI!
Most organizations have to slow down their software releases - or stall out entirely! - because of the shackles of success: that older software that runs their business but that's gotten a bit...mature. Marc Zottner and I recently wrote up the methodology many large enterprises have used to escape the legacy trap, showing results in weeks instead of years. You can read our free ebook here.
