Last week I wrote about leaving the Mac for Omarchy after 25 years, and ended on being one step closer to a co-operating system that works with me instead of one I have to work around. A lot of this week comes back to that: creating my own co-operating system from the tools available.
This past week has been a major ‘back to school’ week for the family, including new travelling times, and a massive storm that came through the area mid-week that caused a lot of flooding and cleanup. I think it is in times of higher stress that it is interesting to watch what tools I reach for first in order to help get things done.
OpenMinis is an iOS app. It presents as a chatbot app that can interact with different models (like ChatGPT, Claude etc), but it does so much more than that. It’s built to help users make the best out of the native integrations between apps on the iPhone that a user wouldn’t normally have time to try and use.
I reached for it to ask it if it could look up something on my phone and home computer while I was out and about this week, and it did it, nearly instantaneously, smarter and faster than Siri.
I highly recommend you watch this review from MacStories for more details.
The Open Minis segment starts at 22:34.
OpenMinis has full access to my phone, and it talks back to my home setup, all for free — it’s open source under GPL-3.0. It builds the tools it needs to carry on, respecting the sandbox it runs in on the phone.
I have found myself reaching less and less for Perplexity. In fact, I have finally cancelled my account. They have been (IMO) really bullish on forcing users to use their Computer functionality - where it can navigate around the browser and computer system on the user’s behalf - at a large monetary cost. In my opinion computer use is either going to be part and parcel of every operating and agentic system in a short amount of time, or we won’t even have a need for it, considering all it is doing is mimicking human interaction patterns. There might be better ways on the horizon.
I’ve also been building a Mission Control for my agents (who are all sasquatches) on Omarchy. It shows them visually, as an app and as a terminal view, so I can see how they work and what each one is tasked with.
Speaking of Omarchy, in the last week someone has already shipped a workaround for those of us Apple users in the EU that didn’t get iPhone Mirroring last year (or this year for that matter). I had it up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Jev was a latecomer to the news feeds this week. It’s a new model from TypeSafe, co-founded by Diogo Almeida, who helped build the instruction-following research behind ChatGPT at OpenAI. The company had been ‘working in stealth’ on it for the last two years. Jev doesn’t talk. It makes the small decisions (yes/no, pick one, score this) and tells your software how sure it is, fast and cheap enough to run on every step of an agent’s work.
The explanation of Jev starts at 1:07.
I will be implementing it into some of my workflows over the next week, in particular where I need quick filtering decisions (like email and task triage). We will see how it works out.