Jake Grant

These Athletic NA brews are pretty good.🍺

I have several messaging apps installed on my phone and each one is dedicated to a single chat. Since I’m trying to declutter my digital life this kinda annoys me. But there is a sort of simplicity in having a dedicated app for different chats.

I’ve amassed so much digital cruft on my phone that I set a recurring daily reminder to delete 1 app and close 1 browser tab. I might have to add another task to delete some links in Pocket too.

Updates:

• 17 Jul 2023: 132 applications, 55 tabs
• 24 Jul 2023: 128 applications, 52 tabs (it’s good that the numbers are going down)
• 31 Jul 2023: 123 applications, 49 tabs

Here are the first apps I downloaded when the App Store launched 15 years ago:

Hey, take off the headset when you are interacting with your family that’s right in front of you. #WWDC

Ahead of an Apple AR/VR headset announcement, I am simultaneously excited and worried about a future where we might wear a headset for most of the work day.

Being able to conjure and place as many displays as you want in AR/VR is a cool idea. Your desk won’t have to be littered with big screens and your workspace is much more portable. When you are done for the day, the headset comes off and the evidence of your workspace in the physical world disappears.

I work from home with small children around, so I don’t like the idea of my face and eyes being obscured. Even though I am lucky enough to have a dedicated room for work, I don’t like the idea of my kids not being able to see my eyes immediately when we talk. And I don’t care for the idea of having googly-eyes on the front of a headset to simulate eye contact. That’s just weird.

We’ll need to develop some social hygiene around these devices like taking them off when talking to someone in the same physical space. But I’m not hopeful that we can handle it gracefully as a society, just look at how bad we are at combatting the negative effects of social media.

Apple’s Screen Time feature should be integrated heavily into the headset with reminders encouraging you to take a break and regularly rejoin the real world.

The future form factor these headsets should be eyeglasses or smaller. I’m thinking those cool glasses that Tony Stark wears in those Marvel movies. That seems like a good compromise where our eyes are still visible and we can have an omnipresent overlay.

Took a short hike this morning with the family at a nearby “lake”.