Goodnotes App Review, Siri Upgrades & YouTube Intros Playables

Hi folks, it’s been a WHILE. I do apologise for not blessing you with my tech and tea & unhingedness. It’s been a crazy few weeks, professionally & personally and I’ve had some of these sat in draft. But I’m back!
 
For those of you I met recently at some of the tech conferences I have attended and who also told me you love my newsletter ❤️ thank you. While I do write these as a goal for myself to keep up to date on all things product and tech, it’s nice that some of you actually read it and enjoy it.

AND hello to my new subscribers too! There’s quite a few of you so a little intro on myself:

The more time went on, the more it has become harder to write & the guilt set in. It’s like with anything, when you fall off the wagon, gotta just get back onit. Like the gym. So a reminder to you this week to get back on that thing you stopped doing.

1. So what’s the product goss this week? (& the other weeks I missed).

It’s important to add that everything in the world & many product updates right now is some sort of AI. It’s like when that song we all liked ages ago becomes mainstream and we’re all kinda getting bored now but we move…

Siri is getting an upgrade…

Does anyone actually use Siri though?! I was actually thinking about speech related AI type things. While it’s been around for ages and apart from voice notes sometimes, I never really use any of this as much as I should. Maybe because Siri was actually quite instructional, and it is more effort than it is worth.
 
The new IOS 18 upgrade gets smarter with natural language, better sentences & instructions so it can recognise conversation better. It will start to detect books better, pause audiobooks, change book themes etc. It will also have better camera use and can switch modes. The biggest thing I will probably get use from is how it can detect my notes as it’s the app I use religiously. It can tag up my notes, move things around and transcriptions. I guess Apple have to level up their game with the rate other tech giants are competing.

Platforms are venturing into gaming…

This has been an interesting trend. Apps and products are really fighting for airtime from consumers. They want you engaged as much as possible so we’re seeing an increase in all types of mediums, particularly things that are visual. In the last few weeks, we’re seeing the likes of LinkedIn, Netflix & YouTube venture into gaming.

YouTubes app store for games ‘playables’ (the naming could be better, sounds like a questionable dating app) will soon start to appear in YouTube apps for all users. It doesn’t monetise as paid downloads or in-app purchases so it doesn’t challenge the app store rules. However, it does compete with app stores free games. It is essentially keeping consumers engaged in between viewing sessions. Scary.

Privacy detection features seem to be one of the better use cases of AI…

Google is giving android an AI-powered scam call detection feature. It will get to listen to the user and warn them of a scam, unlocking privacy centric features with on-device LLMs. It will look for fraudulent language, find patterns and create flags. I personally think this is great and thinking back to those less tech savvy and will really benefit. We need more of these things than companies developing AI girlfriends. Pls no.

and ofc GPT/Open AI advances that I’m pretty late on…

apart from the awkward livestream, the new updates are pretty powerful, much faster with better capabilities. GPT-4 will be free for all users. It has better voice modes hence the AI girlfriend vids circulating. If you’re building something cool hit me up so I can hype it here!

 2. Products I procrastinated with…

Some weeks ago, I bought an ipad. Honestly don’t do it, it’s the most pointless product. I thought I would use it quite a bit given I like to draw and illustrate. Truth is I barely have the time and maybe the ipad was too big. However, I got told to download an app called Goodnotes. Fairly popular, but I wanted to talk about it as it’s the most recent thing I’ve played around with.
 
Goodnotes is a business/personal note taking app. It has great flexibility and I love how intuitive it is with an Apple pen. Here’s my little review for ipad use:

Monetisation

It’s so well priced and has a one-off cost of £29.99. It let’s you then setup unlimited journals and customise them as you like. Bargain.

Sketching & illustrating

Primarily what I wanted to use it for. It can create great level of detail with an Apple Pen and a broad range of colours etc. You can pair this up with your Mac etc and move into Photoshop/Illustrator. A pro tip is to buy a paper like screen protector so you can control the pen better and feels like paper.

Templates and features

It has some pretty cool features, like changing the template of the notebook from white/brown pages. Changing pen thickness, colours, highlighters etc. You can do lots of different things with it and can turn scribbles into text. If you’re someone who types notes up after handwriting them, maybe an ipad/Goodnotes combo is for you.

3. Product gems that made me howl…

& and what I’m I up too?…

So I have been up to quite a lot. ALOT.

I’ve been building out a way to track my achievements in a more automated fashion. This is a random prototype using Open AI Whisper to transcribe and store somewhere. Once I have this built out properly, I will share it here! Curious to know how many of you journal? Send me a note if you do.

I also had a super interesting peak district trip with a bunch of lovely peeps to end a leadership accelerator I have been a part of. A huge shoutout to Lucy, Michelle, Callum & Marne for being a fab cohort and have helped me develop professionally this year - (Linkedin post)

I have also attended a conference! I wanted to do a proper write up of these but given I probably won’t because of time, I’m going to drop here. I attended MTF which had up to 1000 techies in a room all learning and sharing. I also supported on the product roundtable with my buddy Adil Hussain. It was actually brilliant and hats off to the team for pulling it together as I could see the level of planning that had gone into it.

I want to shout out a few people that I said I would, Nour elhuda zuraiki who made me smile with the Newsletter comments. Nour and I both won WeAreTechCity Tech 100 award and ended up sitting next to each other at the ceremony. She wanted to meet more people and got introduced to Hulm Club from my friend Humayra Hanif who I took to the event. 8 months on, Nour went on to win the MTF build challenge and is thriving. Super proud of her and a lovely human.

Also shouting out Sadiq Dorasat who also actually reads this so I expect a little shoutout now brother! Michael Palmer who attended the event, enjoyed it and was lovely to meet. Finally, Arfah Farooq, who I have known for the last 6 years & founder of MTF. Her resilience to build these spaces and communities is incredibly inspiring <3

Finally, I also had a job/product change. I’m now in motion to be a walking talking knowledge hub leading on all things new car & car manufacturers. I want to do more of a post on automotive and tech soon as it’s a fascinating industry that is ripe for change.

& that’s all folks! Please share this to a friend or to all your friends, anyone! & if you haven’t subscribed yet, then like my fave ASOS push notification for when an item is back in stock, GO GO GO! Subscribe & until next time <3…

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