notebook / memory / product
Making Pom fit on an 8 GB Mac
Pomvox was too heavy for smaller Macs. Our first fix hid a feature from people. Our second fix asked them.
Pom’s shorthand
- Pomvox was using so much memory that it slowed down Macs with 8 GB
- Our first fix quietly switched off cleanup on those Macs, without telling anyone
- The better fix made Pomvox lighter, then simply asked people what they wanted
Pomvox does two jobs on your Mac. First it listens and turns your voice into words. Then it tidies those words: it takes out the ums, fixes the punctuation, and when you say "Tuesday, wait, no, Friday," it writes just "Friday." We call that second part cleanup.
Cleanup is the heavier of the two jobs. On our own laptops it ran without a hitch. Plenty of people use a Mac with 8 GB of memory, though, and on those machines, with a browser and a few other apps open, Pomvox could push the whole computer into slowing down.
The first fix was the wrong kind of right
Our first answer was simple. On smaller Macs, cleanup started switched off. Plain dictation still worked, and it was light and quick.
That solved the slowdown. It also created a new problem. Someone new on a smaller Mac got an app that never removed a single um, and they had no idea cleanup even existed. We had made a choice for them and never mentioned it.
A default the user never sees is still a decision. It's just one they didn't get to make.
Five changes in three days
Three days later we replaced that quiet switch with a handful of smaller improvements:
- Only load it when it's needed. Cleanup now waits until you actually start talking, instead of loading the moment the app opens.
- Put it away when you stop. If you go quiet for about five minutes, cleanup steps aside and frees the memory. It comes back the next time you speak.
- A lighter version for lighter Macs. Smaller Macs now get a slimmer version of cleanup, a bit more than half the size of the full one.
- Warm up during setup. The slow first start now happens while you're still reading the welcome screen, not during your first sentence.
- Just ask. On a smaller Mac, Pomvox explains the tradeoff once and lets you decide: cleanup on, or cleanup off.
That last one is the change I care about most. The first four make cleanup cheaper. The question makes it honest.
The lesson
Every app is full of settings someone picked for you. That's fine when the choice is one you would have made yourself. When it's a real tradeoff, like speed versus polish, the respectful thing is to explain it and let people choose.