Tech
The ACM’s proposition to redefine the software engineering profession sounds a bit like the Systems Engineer Development (SED) program of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) that I hired in to in 1989. Unfortunately I don’t think such a long term vision is compatible with the U.S. short term culture, so I doubt many companies nor the industry will take this approach.
Android 17
Google has released Android 17, and I just initiated the process to download and install it on my Pixel 10. 9to5Google has a video overview of all the changes, which are mostly cosmetic. For the last several years the Android version upgrades have not included significant functionality additions, rather they include UI and general performance improvements. Functional additions to Android come in the Quarterly Point Releases (QPR) and we expect QPR1 to Android 17 in the fall, timed with the release of the Pixel 11.
Also included in the Android 17 download is the June 2026 Pixel Drop that adds features to Pixel phones. Most useful to me is App Bubbles, which provide users the ability to add applications to the floating “bubble” that appears on top of all screens and apps running on the phone. We previously had this ability for text messaging conversations and I think of it as a multitasking feature that enables me to quickly switch to a task that I have pinned to the display.
One use that I have for app bubbles is for quick access to RadarScope while there are storms in my area to quickly see the current weather radar. To “pin” an app to the bubble tap and hold the app’s icon and tap Bubble at the bottom of the context menu. Note that this feature does not appear to work for all apps, particularly ones that have custom context menus. For example, tap and hold the Gmail icon and you do not see a Bubble option instead you see options to compose new email or open an Gmail account.
Wear OS 7 is also coming for the Pixel Watch and as I am less enthused about that release I am not go to force it to be installed on my watch.
Using Google AI Plus
I replaced the standard, original, Google One subscription with Google AI Plus, which provides more AI features for $4.99 per month. I now have access to the Daily Brief produced by Gemini using Gmail, Calendar, and Text Messaging that I find useful but surprised I am not receiving notifications about them each day, instead I have to go in to the Gemini app to read them, which makes no sense. I found where I control whether I see notifications for Daily Brief and toggled that on/off.
Another problem I have with Gemini on the phone is that it is too verbose. When I ask it for information it produces several paragraphs and seems to insist on reading all of it when I prefer to read what was produced in silence. Perhaps Google could enable user to set a preference such as enabling users to tell Gemini to summarize long responses verbally and provide the remainder on screen to be read.
One more complaint… I like NotebookLM but I wish Google would do one of two things, either enable NotebookLM to access Google Keep or provide users the ability to create and edit notebook sources from a phone. Here is my use case. I religiously track the oil level in our 2013 GMC Terrain in a note in Google Keep. I found it useful to provide that odometer and oil level log to NotebookLM so that I can query it, but to get the log into a notebook I have to send a copy to Google Docs because NotebookLM only knows about Google Docs stored in Drive. Keep does not use Drive for storage, and I suspect Google stores notes in a backend database.
If Google will allow users to create notebooks in NotebookLM and create sources for them on a phone then that notebook could be an alternate to Keep. So far Google has not added any Gemini features to Keep, which is a bit surprising, but in another way suggests that maybe someday NotebookLM could replace Keep. I personally think it would be smart of Keep stayed as it and provided NotebookLM as the “AI equivalent” of Keep.
Ideally, NotebookLM would automatically sync/update Google Drive sources, but right now I have to manually sync to get updates which is fine except that if I simply send a Keep note to a Google Doc it doesn’t overwrite previously shared documents instead it creates another doc with the exact same name and the new “version” of the doc needs to be added as a source. In short, I don’t have an easy way to get updates to my oil log in to NotebookLM.
I use Readwise Reader to read web articles that I save while triaging my RSS subscriptions. Often what I blog about comes from what I read, and so I share the desire that Peter Rukavina wrote below:
My holy grail, as I said, was wanting to be able to highlight a passage in something and have a blog post here automagically created: quoting the work of other writers and posting a short comment is something I do a lot, and I wanted to streamline the process (see also The Three Virtues of a Great Programmer).
Peter goes on to describe how we built a process to post a highlighted quote and an associated note created in Readwise Reader to his blog, and I really want to do this for myself.
My understanding is that during the WWDC keynote yesterday Apple informed us that devices with 8 GB of RAM will not run their on-device AI features. You still get the features via Apple’s cloud but will slow down responses. In my first post about the MacBook Neo I made the point that 8 GB is not enough RAM and speculated the Neo is prelude to Apple selling a subscription to their AI cloud services. All that is left, I think, is for Apple to provide information about the subscription AI cloud services.
Is there anything more disconcerting than a computer keyboard and mouse amok? For some reason just now my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected to the MacBook wouldn’t do what I want. Click an icon on the dock and instead of launching the app a Finder window opens with the Application I clicked highlighted. Click icons on the menu bar and nothing happens. Restarted several times, including without the externals and shutoff some items that start at login. It’s gone for now, but I don’t know which item I shut off was the culprit and I don’t know that I care.
I am reading through articles about announcements from Google I/O 2026, and I think this change Google is planning to make to Tiles in Wear OS 7 has to be one of the most idiotic design decisions I have seen. When you have a UI on a small screen like a watch, why would you not use the entire screen? What are they thinking?
Tiles are also getting a redesign. Google will roll out widgets with Wear OS 7 to replace full-screen tiles. A 2×1 or 2×2 block will display app information in a style that more closely resembles Android 16’s widgets. It doesn’t appear that the new design will allow users to stack widgets on top of each other in the same screen, like Samsung’s version of Wear OS allows Galaxy Watch users to do.
I put my Pixel 10 on a Belkin MagSafe wireless charger. Today it dawned on me that it would be cool if when the phone is on the charger that if a phone call comes in the phone would automatically operate in speaker phone mode so I could just tap a button to receive the call and talk.
Gadgeteer has an embed of a leaked walk thru of the forthcoming Android Desktop that Google officially announced as Googlebook this week. The demo is running in a VM on a Mac not on any native hardware. I don’t see anything in the demo that is really new or exciting. We have been using the “desktop” personal computer metaphor for so long and I wish that a company would have the guts to try something really new.
I think the only reason to consider Googlebook if it were built from the ground up as a AI-based user interface, but instead I think it will simply have AI stuff bolted on and that is not appealing. It’s early days, but hard to say what will be the reason to buy a Googlebook rather than a MacBook.
Om Malik has written a very compelling post about what he calls the Internet of AI. Part of the post is an explanation about what AI actual means from an overall technology perspective. Here is a valuable summary:
The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.