Mastodawn

Marcos Tanaka Jun 12, 2024

Interesting change in guidance for App Intents this year, probably in preparation for upcoming Apple Intelligence features. Direct quote from ‘Design App Intents for system experiences’:

“Previously, app intents were meant to be the most habitual tasks in your app that could be useful outside of your app. This meant an app was expected to only have a few app intents. In iOS 18, we’re changing this guidance to go beyond common functionality. Now, anything your app does should be an app intent.”

Show thread

Peter N Lewis Jun 13, 2024

@mactanaka this has always been the problem with Intents, and Shortcuts for that matter, and too a lesser degree AppleScript support if an app had that. They implement only what the programmer thinks the user will want to do. I can tell you with twenty years of experience developing automation tools—what users wants to do is extremely varied and unpredictable. This is why, to date anyway, things like UI control are required to automate apps - clicking and typing and interacting with UI widgets.

Show thread

Marcos Tanaka

@peternlewis It seems like the idea before was to make it easier for users who are not familiar with automation to understand what they could do with Shortcuts without overwhelming them with too many options. But now that users will presumably be able to interact with it using natural language, the more actions apps provide, the better the AI assistant will be able to successfully fulfill their requests.