It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.

There has also been an emphasis on “concentricity”. It’s an impossible thing to achieve and an easy target for ridicule. But it’s another case where Apple wants to take control of the UI elements that intersect with the physical hardware. All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.

Other challenges, like infusing your own branding into an app with clear buttons will be easier to reason about once the reality of the hardware drops. Until then, stay away from the edges and wait for Apple to reveal the real reason for Liquid Glass.

I've changed my mind quite a bit on the role and importance of chat interfaces. I used to think they were the primitive version of rich, creative, more intuitive interfaces that would come in the future; now I think conversational, anthropomorphic interfaces will coexist with more rich dexterous ones, and the two will both evolve over time to be more intuitive, capable, and powerful.

I kept checking the database manually after each interaction to see it was indeed updating the right records — but after a few hours of using it, I've basically learned to trust it. I ask it to do things, it tells me it did them, and I don't check anymore. Full delegation.

How can I trust it? High task success rate — I interact with it, and observe that it doesn't let me down, over and over again. The price for this degree of delegation is giving up control over exactly how the task is done. It often does things differently from the way I would, but that doesn't matter as long as outputs from the system are useful for me.