During yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, in the course of discussing something related to Apple Notes, I mentioned that I'd created an automation for note-taking with Shortcuts and Apple Notes, and that at the time, on an iPhone 13, it wasn't fast enough to be practical.
I didn't recall, at that moment, exactly what I'd intended for the automation to do, only that I had to wait for it, and it wasn't responsive enough to be practical.
After the meetup, I checked and the automation was still on my phone, now an iPhone 16, with a faster processor and more RAM. And I was able to recall what I'd created it for in the first place.
It was a dictated note, so it relied on speech recognition, and it recorded my location and the weather conditions at that location at the time of the note. It was intended to be kind of a travel diary, where I might record my impressions of a place we were visiting with some additional meta-data added automatically.
I ran it, and much to my surprise, it ran very quickly. Much of that is certainly due to the more robust hardware on the iPhone 16. The automation also has to go out to Apple's weather service and query that as well, and perhaps there've been some improvements in that since the time I created it.
It performed well enough that it's made me consider creating some additional specialized notes. At least, it's convinced me that it may be practical. I don't have an immediate use-case in mind.
It's been a while since I've experienced "surprise and delight" from an Apple product, and I can't say this approached euphoria, but I was pleased and somewhat surprised.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:46 Sunday, 15 December 2024