0:00:00Oh, David Smith, how's your week been? Boring, probably.
0:00:03Yeah, nothing going on. It's just the beginning of fall. Things are quiet.
0:00:07You know, the leaves are turning.
0:00:08Feet up on the ottoman.
0:00:10Yeah, that's me. It's just finally cool enough that I can get a fire going in the
0:00:15fireplace and I can sit on the—just sit by the fire and read a casual book or something like that.
0:00:20Dig into a long novel that you've been saving up for a while.
0:00:23Or the opposite of that. I think the scene we just described is the exact opposite of
0:00:29how the last week has been in my life.
0:00:31Yeah. Isn't that always the truth, though? I mean, I know it's like the human condition,
0:00:37where if you had released new apps and it didn't seem to go anywhere, went over like a lead balloon,
0:00:43you would think, "Wouldn't it be great if one of these apps had been a hit? Wouldn't it be great?"
0:00:47And now that your app is a hit, wouldn't it be great to just have a week—
0:00:52Sit by the fire.
0:00:52Sit by the fire.
0:00:55So as we record this episode on Tuesday the 29th, it'll be out tomorrow, probably the 30th,
0:01:01the top downloaded free app, top app right now in the App Store is your app, WidgetSmith.
0:01:10Yes.
0:01:12And it has been the top app since—
0:01:14Friday the 18th, so about a week and a half ago.
0:01:19So it's been at the top of the list for a week and a half. I think there's a good chance it'll
0:01:24still be at the top of the list tomorrow when this comes out. Congratulations. In all seriousness,
0:01:28joking aside—
0:01:29Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's been completely surreal. It's one of those weird places where—it's not
0:01:38like this is one of those situations either where I just started doing this and then it took off in
0:01:42a wild way. I've been making apps in the App Store since the beginning, since 12 years ago,
0:01:48essentially. And I've seen this happen to other people, and it's always like, "Oh, that's nice.
0:01:53I wonder what that's like." And you never really ever actually think that it's the kind of thing
0:01:57that would actually happen to you. And to actually be in a position where I made something that's
0:02:03sitting at the top of the charts and has remained there, it was certainly never the plan or the
0:02:08expectation, but it's kind of surreal to be the situation I find myself in now.
0:02:12So I made the joke—not even a joke, it's a humorous observation that it was my teenage son
0:02:20who came to me shortly after the release of iOS 14. So you've been number one since the 18th,
0:02:27that's a Friday, you said. And iOS 14 came out famous—
0:02:34Wednesday, I believe.
0:02:35Yeah, famously, because the event was a Tuesday and then—
0:02:38I say "we," I don't have an app, so it's not even really me. I'm using the royal "we" here.
0:02:45You, developers, had something like 21 hours or something like that.
0:02:50And realistically, it was less than that even, because we had to submit,
0:02:55get through App Review, and then be ready for the apps when iOS was actually released the following
0:03:01afternoon. So it was like, I think I had my submissions made within maybe about four hours
0:03:08of the event going up.
0:03:09So you had your submission in the queue four hours after the announcement.
0:03:15Yeah, luck favors the prepared.
0:03:17I do think—so let's just say, my son came to me, and this is probably around the time
0:03:27that it hit the number one on the charts, maybe by the weekend, where it was like,
0:03:31"Hey, have you heard about these iOS 14 widgets?" And I was like, "Yeah." And he's like,
0:03:35"Have you heard about this Apple WidgetSmith?"
0:03:39And I had to sit at a footnote. I was like, "Yes, I have. And in fact—" And then he just
0:03:45rolled his eyes. I was going to tell him how I knew you, and you're a swell guy.
0:03:49And he doesn't care.
0:03:52Yeah, he didn't really care. I thought maybe he had me. And somebody on Twitter was like,
0:03:57"How often does your son think he can sneak something iOS-related by you?" And I said,
0:04:03"Actually, more often than you'd think, because he thinks that I only follow the boring stuff,
0:04:08and that he can alert me to when something actually interesting happens."
0:04:12Or maybe he was sad that you hadn't told him already.
0:04:16Why didn't you give him a heads up? This was coming. He could have been the cool kid on the
0:04:19block who knew it before anyone else did.
0:04:21It's, you know, I say it's—it is surprising, right? Like, you did not—maybe you thought
0:04:31you had something, right? What were you thinking? So WidgetSmith is obviously an all-new thing,
0:04:36because it's entirely predicated on a feature that only exists in iOS 14.
0:04:41Yeah. And so, I mean, WidgetSmith is in many ways like the spiritual successor to another app that
0:04:48I made and launched in the spring called WatchSmith, which was an app all about
0:04:52making custom complications for the Apple Watch. And when I made that, that app launched,
0:05:00and it did reasonably well, but nothing—it didn't set the world on fire or anything. It was just like,
0:05:05it was a power—it was like a niche tool for power users, essentially. It was the way that I have it
0:05:09in my mind and the way that it kind of manifested itself in the market as a result. And when widgets
0:05:16were announced, and I was like, "Okay, I have a lot of the infrastructure in place for how you
0:05:22would build an app that does this kind of thing," where a complication and a widget are functionally
0:05:28and even programmatically very similar in sort of concept. And so I was like, "Well, let's just
0:05:33take what I built there and put it into widgets and kind of see what happens." And if I'm being
0:05:39completely honest, my expectation was that—my personal goal was that WidgetSmith's downloads
0:05:46and subscriber base and everything would be about half of WatchSmith. And that was what I was going
0:05:53into with, because I thought it was like, "Well, this is a power user feature. Who's going to want
0:05:58these power user widgets on their phone?" On the watch, at least, it's a thing that the
0:06:04complication system is really limited. But on your phone, everyone's going to use the widgets that
0:06:10come with the apps that they use. Why would they use mine if they're my calendar widget versus
0:06:16Apple's calendar widget, or my photo widget versus Apple's photo widget? And so I had no expectations
0:06:21for it. And it was just something that I was like, "Well, I'm in the place that I can do this. I have
0:06:26the infrastructure, I have the code. I know what I'm doing enough that it's not a crazy ask." And so
0:06:30I launched it with no expectations. And the first few days before it really blew up was
0:06:38fulfilling my expectations. It was like, "This is kind of finding its niche." I had some good
0:06:44feedback, and it was amongst the people who are very power usury and care a lot about very
0:06:50particular things. And that was what I was expecting, and that's where I was expecting
0:06:55it would go, and it would just cruise along less than a lot of my other apps, but just part of the
0:06:59portfolio, and that's great. I had absolutely no expectation that it would take off in the way that
0:07:04it did. And it came as a complete surprise and is still something that I can only sort of—every
0:07:10now and then, I just open the App Store and just scroll down to make sure that it's actually real.
0:07:14This isn't some big con that is being played on me, because I had no expectation of it,
0:07:21and yet it seems to be true. It seems to be actually what's happening in the world right now.
0:07:25It is interesting. It's an interesting comparison, because famously—and I would like to talk about
0:07:34the watch stuff separately, so we'll come back to this in a somewhat organized fashion that this
0:07:41show usually proceeds—but there is a—so famously, six years in, seven years in, I guess, what are we
0:07:51with the watch? I guess six years since it was announced, and we're at—
0:07:55Yeah, six or seven years. It's the Series 7 watch, so presumably that's the—
0:08:00No, Series 6. Series—I have to say it slowly, so as not to trigger our friend, the electronic widget.
0:08:07Yes. Series 6 watch, watchOS 7, so it's the sixth year. Famously, this is where I'm going,
0:08:20is we don't get custom watch faces. No.
0:08:24There's a friend of mine named Marco Arment, who's—are you familiar with Marco?
0:08:30I am familiar with his work. Okay, so Marco is a watch nerd and is also very
0:08:34fussy about things, and he complains endlessly about Apple's built-in watch faces.
0:08:39I think that's a long story. Why can't apps just make their own faces, period? Why, with—you know,
0:08:50if we have—and we keep hearing these numbers with all the lawsuits with Epic and stuff like that,
0:08:56that there's, I don't know, 100,000 apps going through the App Store a week,
0:08:59and there's over a million in the store of—you know, let's just pick a category, calculators,
0:09:05right? If you tried to use every single iOS calculator, there's got to be hundreds of them,
0:09:14maybe thousands, I don't know, of varying degrees of design quality. Why aren't watch faces the same
0:09:22way? Why aren't there thousands, tens of thousands of watch faces? Why can't the Dallas Cowboys have
0:09:29an app where you can have a custom Dallas Cowboys watch face, et cetera? You can't. That's just not
0:09:36the way watch faces work, and a couple of years ago, they've added—they began adding complications,
0:09:43which is sort of the closest apps get to being able to be on watch faces, right? But even there,
0:09:51it's sort of—you're playing within these very limited confines, right? It's not really like
0:09:57you have a complete canvas to write on? No. No. I mean, it depends a lot on the watch face,
0:10:05and that's where it gets really crazy-making on the watch, is some of the watch faces,
0:10:10you have a reasonably big canvas, like on some of the modular faces where you have a big rectangular
0:10:15block that you can pretty much take over the face with, but on most of them, you get a little
0:10:21teeny little circle that you have to put your entire complication into. And so it's really not—
0:10:28there's only so much that you can do within that amount of space. We're talking about,
0:10:32I don't even know if it's like 50 pixels by 50 pixels, or points, I guess. It's a very small
0:10:39space that you actually have to play with, and so you're definitely not creating a custom watch face.
0:10:44At the most, you're just creating a custom way to display some kind of data there,
0:10:49or some kind of information. And so in addition to the very limited set of rules that you have
0:10:54to—confines you have to play within visually, you also—I don't know if you have to, I guess.
0:11:02I don't know what the rules are. So there's also a wide variety of—and again, I'm laughing because
0:11:09I don't have to make all the complications—but there are a very wide variety of complication
0:11:15sizes, right? And then like upper left corner can be different than upper right corner because,
0:11:21you know, on some of the watch faces, they curve to fit the corner. Different sizes. And
0:11:27joy of joys, there's actually two entirely different sets of watch sizes. There's the old
0:11:37Series 1 or 0 through 3 size with the square corners, and then starting with Series 4 a couple
0:11:44years ago now, the 456. And it turns out, much to the consternation of developers such as yourself,
0:11:52Series 3 remains in the lineup at 199, and so therefore you can look forward to years and years
0:11:58of supporting those extra complication sizes. In addition to that, there are rules about how often—
0:12:05not even rules, really, it's sort of all up in the air—how often does the complication update?
0:12:10So a complication—the way the complication system works is you provide a timeline of information you
0:12:19want to display on it. And you can update that—when you create the timeline, you can have
0:12:25things as often as one per minute. So I can create—and you can create up to 100 of those.
0:12:32So if I'm at one minute-by-minute accuracy, I can create 100 minutes of things that will be shown on
0:12:39the display. And then I can update or change what my timeline is maybe every 15 to 20 minutes,
0:12:46if the battery's full, and if the battery starts to run down, then who knows what. And it'll just
0:12:51sort of—the watch will get to your update or your request for an update whenever it feels
0:12:56like it's appropriate, which may or may not be anytime soon.
0:13:00>> Right. And so this is just a microcosm, but this watch complication situation is sort of a
0:13:08microcosm of the modern era of developing third-party software, where the rules aren't
0:13:16exactly defined. Like, there might have been before, in the old days, something where,
0:13:22you know, you could write software for X, some sort of component, and you can't just update
0:13:29constantly. You only get a sliver of time, but that time would be determinate. You would know
0:13:35once a second, or even if it's once a minute. Once a minute, you will get a slice of time.
0:13:40You can update, and you can count on it. Every minute on the minute, you're going to do this.
0:13:47Maybe you will know. Maybe you could say, "Hey, I don't need to do it on the minute." Everybody
0:13:51might want to do it on the minute. You could just update me, say, 15 seconds after every minute.
0:13:57Do me at the 15-second mark. But then every minute, at 15 seconds after the minute,
0:14:01whatever it is, it would get up. Widgets or complications on the watch aren't like that.
0:14:07They're sort of indeterminate, and the system manages it, and you just sort of
0:14:11raise your hand and make a request, "I would like to update on this," period. And the watch is like,
0:14:18"Okay, we'll deal with it." >> "We'll take that under advisement."
0:14:20>> "We'll take it under advisement." And the intentions aren't hostile towards
0:14:28users. I was going to say towards developers or users. I'll just say towards users.
0:14:35And however hostile it is towards developers, it's in the mindset of doing what's best for the users,
0:14:43which is to extend battery life and manage this sort of calculus of, "Well, let's let these things
0:14:51update as often as possible while also maximizing battery life," which is a very complicated
0:14:59calculus. And therefore, they don't reveal the formula.
0:15:02>> Yeah. And they want to have... And I think it's different on different devices. I think
0:15:07on a Series 3 Apple Watch, and part of why I'm so sad that it's still there,
0:15:11a Series 3 Apple Watch with its CPU and its performance characteristics and its battery life,
0:15:17I think it will have a different recipe than what a brand new sort of top-of-the-line Apple Watch is
0:15:23going to be able to do. There's a wide variety there, and I just have to kind of code my thing
0:15:27so that it's flexible as much as I can between those with kind of no expectation of when I'll
0:15:32actually be able to do what I want to do. >> Right. And that's sort of where,
0:15:39at a hardware level, Apple Watch is going, right? Because, yes, famously when the Watch first came
0:15:49out, apps were very slow. And that was really, really more of a WatchKit problem where the
0:15:56third-party APIs were really, really rubbish, to put it mildly. And in hindsight, why were they so
0:16:05bad? And I think it basically, again, we're never going to get a real explanation from Apple because
0:16:11Apple never explains itself. But I think it's pretty obvious that the basic idea was,
0:16:16we can't open up the real APIs that Apple itself was using for the built-in apps,
0:16:23because either they're not ready, they're not up to our standards, or we can't trust third parties
0:16:28with these APIs to manage energy the way we are internally. So the APIs, the real ones, we can't
0:16:36open. But apps, quote-unquote, "apps" are so super important to iPhone and iPad, we need apps
0:16:45for Apple Watch. And so there was this push and pull where one side is saying,
0:16:51"We can't open up the real APIs for battery life and whatever other reasons, but we have to have
0:16:57apps on the, for lack of a better word, marketing side. Okay, we'll make this other set of APIs
0:17:04that we can trust them with." And they were really slow. But even, let's just say, go up to series
0:17:13three, just the basics and the APIs got better. People don't typically think of their watch as
0:17:21fast or slow anymore, right? Like what you want to do on your watch is fast. So all of the
0:17:28improvements to the chips aren't in the... It's always been an issue with battery-operated
0:17:34devices, laptops to phones to tablets, to manage efficiency over time, both with increasing
0:17:43performance, because you want to do some things faster and whatever, but also using the efficiency
0:17:49to extend battery life. With the watch, it's really all about battery life. Yeah. I mean,
0:17:54I think it's clear that that's the gating factor for any new thing that Apple is trying to do on
0:18:00the Apple Watch, is defined by the battery. And because the batteries in the Apple Watch are just
0:18:04so much smaller physically, there's only so much space you have if you're going to strap something
0:18:09to your wrist to try and squeeze battery into. And all of the features and all of the things
0:18:15that they're trying to do have to also work on a device where it's inconvenient for it to run out
0:18:22of battery in a way that is... It feels more manifest than it is even with your laptop.
0:18:29If I'm sitting at my laptop and I'm working and I'm running Xcode and it's churning through my
0:18:34battery and I'm like, "Oh man, I need to plug in," I just plug in and it's fine. But if I have to
0:18:40do that with my Apple Watch, I have to take my Apple Watch off and put it on a dock and I can't
0:18:44wear it for 45 minutes and it completely eliminates the use of it. I mean, even a phone,
0:18:50the number of times I've used my phone plugged in because it was low on battery, but I still wanted
0:18:54to use it, that's fine. But a watch, it has to work. And ideally, it has to work for at least,
0:18:59whatever, 18 hours a day.
0:19:01If you recall, back in the old days when we had airports, it would often be a common sight to see
0:19:08somebody camped by a wall outlet using their phone while it's plugged in. And the other...
0:19:17I'm trying to avoid the puns with the word complicating, but I'm going to go ahead.
0:19:22Complicating factor with the watch is the health tracking features of the watch.
0:19:29Once you get hooked on them as a user, you feel like you're getting robbed. Like if you have to
0:19:36take your watch off and put it on the charger for 45 minutes and while you're doing so, you are
0:19:42standing and moving around, you feel like you're getting robbed of stand hours and exercise time.
0:19:50Yeah. Or even worse is the situation where you go for a run or a workout or something and you run
0:19:56three or four miles and it runs out of battery when you're a quarter mile from the house.
0:20:00It'll save the data, sort of, but it feels like you're being robbed. These steps didn't count.
0:20:06These calories aren't being counted towards my red ring. It's definitely like you feel
0:20:12personally affronted if you aren't getting credit for the things that you're earning
0:20:17or you feel like you're earning when you're wearing your Apple Watch, for sure.
0:20:19Yeah. And I've had that happen. That's enough for a while because battery life has gotten better
0:20:25in the last few years, but I've had that happen during a workout on a jog where that's when it's
0:20:30run out and it feels like Tripoli angering, right? It's like, "I was running. I was actually out
0:20:38jogging. I'm sweaty. I really deserve those credits." And it's not there. And I think to
0:20:45their credit, certainly, they've done a great job of preserving that battery life, but it's come at
0:20:50a very tricky balance that they have to try and balance and find how much power, how much
0:20:56capability, how much utility can they put on the watch while still doing all these things.
0:21:02And I think also the thing that's crazy with the Apple Watch and the battery life side is how it is
0:21:07constantly doing things. It is always trying to make sure, "Did you just fall down? Did you just
0:21:12fall down? Did you just fall down?" It's monitoring you as long as you're wearing the watch. It's
0:21:18doing that. It's taking your heart rate once every six minutes. It's doing stuff persistently in a way
0:21:24that it certainly doesn't come free. So it's not like a situation where I close my laptop lid and
0:21:32it pretty much just goes to sleep and it's not doing anything. The Apple Watch, if anything,
0:21:36other than the screen being lit up, is doing just as much most of the time than it would be
0:21:43when you are actually actively interacting with it. Are you washing your hands?
0:21:48Are you washing your hands? Now? Yeah. What about now?
0:21:50Nope. Nope. Doesn't seem like it. Nope. What about now?
0:21:55So anyway, that's a long digression to come back to what my main point is, which is that one way
0:22:02to think about iOS 14 widgets is that they are very much like watch complications. Insofar as
0:22:12there are limited sizes, there are some serious limitations on... Well, effectively, they're mostly
0:22:23non-interactive. You can't make buttons that do things on widgets. They're sort of like information
0:22:31panels, which again, is a lot like watch complications. They kind of update on the system's
0:22:39schedule, right? Yep. They do.
0:22:42I mean, pretty much everything we just said about watch complications applies to iOS 14 widgets.
0:22:50I guess the sizes are easier to deal with, right? Where you just sort of have...
0:22:54They're just set icon sizes, a one icon size versus a row of icons.
0:23:03Yeah. I mean, sizing is a bit funny with widgets because there's three different types,
0:23:10like a small, medium, and a large, but the actual size that each of those are
0:23:16vary wildly between which phone you actually have or if you're on an iPad. If you have an iPhone SE,
0:23:22the size of the widget is different than if you're looking at that widget on a XR or one of the
0:23:30larger screen. I think there's like six different sizes, actual point sizes that they have. It's
0:23:37easier because you have so much more of a margin. You're not trying to squeeze something into the
0:23:41difference between 44 points and 50 points. You're talking about the difference between 170 points
0:23:47and 179 points or something. That difference matters a lot less, but there's certainly still
0:23:54that... There's certainly a variety you have to accommodate for.
0:23:58I do not want to go too deep down this digression, and famous last words for me, but one of the
0:24:04things I've been doing all summer is I've been running iOS 14 betas and still now with the
0:24:11release version, I'm running it on an iPhone XR. My regular phone, my main phone that I've used for
0:24:19the last year is an iPhone 11 Pro. The difference between the Pro and the other... The iPhone X
0:24:32wasn't called the iPhone X Pro, but the OLED ones, which are now called Pro, run at Retina 3X.
0:24:40The XR and the regular iPhone 11s, which aren't OLED, their regular LCD, run at 2X Retina.
0:24:50But the difference when you really dig into the point size, like, "Oh, well, that means one point
0:24:56is two pixels on the 2X one and one point is three pixels on the other one." But the actual difference
0:25:02in sizes is really kind of wild. If you run both phones at their default sizes, like accessibility-wise
0:25:11for text size, just don't bump up or bump down the text size at all, run everything at sort of
0:25:17the default. And if you're running on one of the phones that has scaling available, don't set
0:25:22scaling to anything. The difference in sizes of text between the two is quite different. It's not
0:25:30like, "Oh, you have to sort of be a type nerd to notice that it's..." No, it's actually very
0:25:34different. And for something like widgets, I can see exactly where you're going with that.
0:25:41Yeah, it's a very... I think it speaks to just the difference of 2X and 3X, but it isn't that
0:25:48the 3X screen has a resolution, has sort of a dots per inch on the screen that is commensurately
0:25:56more detailed. It's higher, but it's not like if 1X was the thing and then we doubled the resolution
0:26:03and then we tripled the resolution, it isn't actually doing those changes. And so controls
0:26:09definitely look different and it feels very different. I actually was in the same circumstance.
0:26:15My testing phone over the summer was a XR and going from that back to my 11 Pro feels really...
0:26:24The keyboard is slightly different. It's not like things are totally out of whack, but it's like,
0:26:30I feel different. Things are just a little bit weird in a way that when we went from the 1X to
0:26:372X originally, like with the iPhone 4, it really was... Everything stayed the same size, everything
0:26:43just got sharper. Whereas now between 2X and 3X, it's definitely... That's not the case. Things are
0:26:50physically different. The actual size of something that's 100 points tall is very different between
0:26:58the different devices and the phones. And so, and all these things that I have to... When you're
0:27:02designing something that has to work across all of them, it has to be reasonable at all the extremes
0:27:08of that, even if at a point level you're exactly the same. Yeah, and it actually is counter
0:27:13intuitive where the 3X ones, the point size is physically bigger. And so, 16 point type is the
0:27:21default text size on iOS, it always has been. 16 point type is bigger on an iPhone 11 Pro than 16
0:27:30point type on an iPhone 11, physically bigger. And you therefore get... It's not just that the iPhone
0:27:3811 has a bigger screen than the non-Max 11, it actually packs the pixels or the points in more.
0:27:45So you get significantly more lines or words on a line in an email or an Apple Note than when
0:27:53you're viewing the exact same email or Apple Note on the other device. And you would think,
0:28:00maybe it would be the other way because you think, "Well, it's 3X, so it must be... They
0:28:03must have more pixels per inch too." But it's actually different. And it's all very strange
0:28:08and so different from the old days where you could just count on an iPhone screen being an iPhone
0:28:14screen. And like you said, even when they went Redna, you just kept everything the same physical
0:28:18size and just doubled the resolution and made everything sharper. Yeah, it went from... It was
0:28:24324 by 480, I think was the original iPhone. And then it's just like when they went to 2X,
0:28:29they just doubled that and kept the screen exactly the same size. Right. And then even when they went
0:28:33with the iPhone 5, when they went to a different aspect ratio, they just added pixels at the top.
0:28:39They didn't change the size of anything. So the keyboard was actually the exact same width.
0:28:46It just... They just added pixels at the top. Now we're in a new world. All right, let me take a
0:28:52break before we continue and talk about our friends at Eero. Oh, man, these days your house isn't just
0:28:57your home, it's everything. It's your office, it's your school, it's your podcast studio,
0:29:02it's a movie theater, it's a restaurant. My house is all those things right now,
0:29:07literally right at this moment today. Anyway, all of these activities, they put a strain on your
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0:30:32really easy to figure out how many you should order based on the size of your house and how
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0:31:24of the show. It's a great product. All right. So you've had, do you think, here's another
0:31:32angle I've been going with. Do you think you would have had the idea for Widget Smith if you
0:31:36hadn't already done Watch Smith? That is an interesting question. I don't think it would
0:31:44have ended up in the same way that I did, that it did, ultimately it did. Because the thing that
0:31:52happened with Watch Smith that I, like my goal with that app was to try and make, essentially,
0:31:58like let people make their watch faces like their own. Like I wanted you to be able to control the
0:32:03typefaces, the colors, the data, how it was structured, how it was laid out. Like there's
0:32:08tremendous amount of like, especially on the watch, it was something that I started to notice
0:32:13is that like I got really picky about exactly how I wanted things to look in a way that I care about
0:32:20more on my wrist because it's something that's, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, it's a fashion
0:32:26thing, but it's like something I wanted to look good. Like I actually care if I'm going to have
0:32:30the date or the temperature shown on my watch face and I'm like going out to a nice dinner back when
0:32:36that was the thing we did and I want it to look nice. Like I'm wearing my Apple watch rather than
0:32:42my fancy watch because I want to close my rings, but I want it to look just the way I want it to
0:32:48look. And I think the result of that, of that sort of that ultimate desire that in the watch I was so
0:32:55persi—like I got so specific about it is that I went through probably like five or six different
0:33:02editor screens of how can I make this something that isn't like totally intractable to a common
0:33:09user that is a clear, straightforward way that I can create this complexity and give you so much
0:33:16choice and let you choose the typeface and let you choose the colors and let you choose exactly what
0:33:22is shown and what's shown here and what time it's appearing on your screen and all of the things
0:33:26that ultimately like WatchSmith ended up being. It was that level of sophistication that I needed
0:33:34to squeeze into something that was usable was something I don't know if I would have had the
0:33:40time or the sort of idea about with widgets if I hadn't gone through that for the watch, because
0:33:46the watch is so much more constrained and every little thing and every little tweak and that
0:33:50adjustment that you make mattered so much more there. So that when I was doing it and applying
0:33:55it to widgets, it made sense to just carry it over. Like I'd come up with a design that I feel
0:34:01like made a lot of sense and was intuitive and gave you that balance between power and flexibility
0:34:06that applied immediately and directly to widgets. But if I hadn't sort of
0:34:14gone through all that process with WatchSmith and with complications in mind, it would have been
0:34:20hard for me to come up with it for something like widgets where I feel like in my mind,
0:34:25anyway, originally it's like I think that San Francisco Rounded is the best widgets font,
0:34:30probably. I think it just looks gorgeous on the home screen, I think. And there's a very good
0:34:34chance that I would have just asserted that and set that as the default, even if I'd had the idea
0:34:40for an app like Widgetsmith and said, "I think that just looks gorgeous." And I would have missed
0:34:46out on the fact that while that is gorgeous, and I think if I'm Alan Dye sitting in my white studio
0:34:52designing widgets for Apple's built-in apps, that's probably what I'm going to use, the reality is
0:34:57once I had my mind opened to the fact that it's like, "Well, what other fonts are there? What
0:35:03other fonts would look interesting, and how can I add them into the application?" then you start to
0:35:07be like, "Actually, this is where the real magic starts to happen," that you can make it look like
0:35:12it isn't just an Apple widget, that there's a value and a utility in standing out from the system,
0:35:20in potentially even being slightly conflicting with the way the system widgets look.
0:35:27That is a benefit and not a drawback. And why the app originally seems like it really took off was
0:35:34because that was the case. It had so much flexibility and it had so much choice in it,
0:35:41that people felt like they could actually express themselves with it, that they could find a font
0:35:47that suited them. And if you're a San Francisco rounded person, great, more power to you. But if
0:35:52you're a New York person, or if you want some of the more silly and esoteric fonts that I have in
0:35:58there, or whatever that might be, great. Do that. If that makes you happy that every time you pick
0:36:03up your phone, you want it to look like that. But I really don't think I would have necessarily had
0:36:08the expectation or the imagination to invent this if I hadn't had to do it for the watch,
0:36:15if I hadn't had to do that for complications, because they felt like a fashion item. They
0:36:18felt like something that had to have that level of customization anyway. And there, I wasn't competing
0:36:25with other text most of the time. A lot of the watch faces, it's just clock hands. And so a lot
0:36:34of fonts, I feel like, look good on the Apple Watch in a way that—or feel at home, anyway,
0:36:38on the Apple Watch in a way that isn't quite the same on an iPhone, because there's so much other
0:36:42system text that's always on the screen as well. Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting answer. I could
0:36:49see that. And there was definitely something where you were playing around with custom watch faces,
0:36:57even though it's not something you can do. It's not like Apple lets apps do it, but you were
0:37:03playing around with it anyway, knowing that it wasn't something that you could ship as a feature
0:37:11in an app. But just what if we could? Let's just play with it. And Steven Troughton Smith,
0:37:16famed hacker and troublemaker on Twitter, was messing around with the same ideas.
0:37:25Yeah. Well, he was the one I think he came up with in his spelunking prowess, was able to work out a
0:37:32way to hide the system time inside of a watch kit app, which is typically not something that's
0:37:38possible. Typically, there's always the time shown in the top right corner of a watch app when it's
0:37:44shown. And he and his like, "I have no idea what code…" He shared the code publicly for how to do
0:37:49it, and it's some kind of weird, you just dive deep down into the view hierarchy and find this
0:37:54one particular view that happens to be the clock and make it hidden or whatever it might be. And
0:37:59as soon as he had done that, then it'd be like, "I spent a good part of three or four months just
0:38:04making custom watch faces. That became my hobby to do." And you can't publish them, they don't exist,
0:38:10they're just watch apps. And for a while, I actually used them as my main watch face,
0:38:17because what I would do is if you start a workout inside of my little custom watch face app,
0:38:24it would remain on the screen even when the app was… You lower your wrist and raise your wrist.
0:38:31If you have a workout app running, the workout app is what shows on the screen rather than the clock.
0:38:35And if you turn off the high heart rate workout mode, so typically during a workout,
0:38:44it collects your heart rate multiple times per second, it's continuously monitoring. You can
0:38:48turn that off for power-saving reasons. So I would just turn that off and essentially just have a
0:38:53walking workout running on my wrist all day so I could have my own custom watch face. And I did
0:38:59that for a few months and eventually I kind of lost interest because it felt like while I loved
0:39:04making them, no one should be doing what I'm doing with this. It's completely absurd that I'm running
0:39:10a workout the entire day just so that I can have a custom watch face on my Apple Watch.
0:39:14Yeah, but don't you think that doing that exercised certain design muscles in your head?
0:39:25Because it got you… I know people like to dunk on Malcolm Gladwell and he's got that thing with
0:39:35the, you know, you need 10,000 hours of practice before you get good at anything. And it's, you
0:39:39know, he tries this. I think my criticism of him is he tries to make… He tries to turn very correct
0:39:50feel of a thing, ideas that are true, into think of it rules, right? Like there is no magic 10,000
0:39:58hours thing, but there is truth that you get better at what you do. I mean, that's, you know,
0:40:03and it's easy to forget that, right? But so you spent all of this time obsessing over making entire
0:40:11watch faces and it surely gave you insight into, oh, I… All of a sudden you realize why Apple does
0:40:19X, Y, and Z with theirs. It's like, oh, I was always bugged by that, but now I see why,
0:40:25because when I don't do it, it stinks, you know? Yeah. And working out how to like… There was
0:40:31definitely an element of you start… You don't really understand something until you've really
0:40:39had to build it from the ground up and kind of really gone into it and made all the mistakes.
0:40:45And yeah, like made watch faces that look terrible or work out how to… Even the simple things that
0:40:50seem simple of like, how do you lay out the numbers on a clock is incredibly hard. And like,
0:40:56how do you make that… Like 12 and 11 and 10 have multiple digits, but they need to look balanced
0:41:04and reasonable next to the twos and the threes, which don't have that. And the Apple Watch is…
0:41:11The modern Apple Watches are not square, they're oblong, and so you need it to look reasonable and
0:41:15not like… Yeah. And I think to your point, it's that experience is what ultimately I think made
0:41:21me want to get into complications in a big way and not just view complications. Like I think before I
0:41:27made WatchSmith, complications for me were just kind of a… They were just pure, simple, basic
0:41:33data display. And that's all I ever wanted, that I ever used them for. And the way Apple builds
0:41:38complications is you can use one of Apple's pre-built templates, which are just typically just
0:41:45text for the most part, for a lot of them. Or you have a stack of text, or you can have a gauge with
0:41:50text inside of it, or those types of… There's a couple of pre-built things. And when I got into
0:41:56WatchSmith, I realized I'd learned… I had enough of an insight from my experience with the custom
0:42:03watches. I didn't want to just limit myself to that. And so all of the complications in WatchSmith
0:42:09are actually under the hood rendered as images and just displayed as images. I'm just making bitmaps
0:42:14and putting them into the screen, because that was the only way that I could give the flexibility and
0:42:20control that I actually wanted. And it's because it's the control that I learned I wanted from
0:42:26years of making, or from the experience of making custom watch faces and making those mistakes and
0:42:31kind of having that sense of, "You can't actually do cool stuff with this." That was where I had the
0:42:36first idea for… One of the features of WatchSmith is you can make it that the complication sort of
0:42:43moves around the watch hands as they move. So the classic thing is if you have the date on your
0:42:49complication and you have the hand of the watch sweep over it, ordinarily it's hidden, which seems
0:42:56silly on a digital watch that I can't read the date right now because it's 3/15. That doesn't
0:43:02make any sense. I want to know the date. It's being displayed, but it's being obscured by this
0:43:08digital hands. In a real watch, fair enough. So in WatchSmith, I move it out of the way. I do the
0:43:13math to work out where the hand is at any given time, and I just shift it down. In the system I
0:43:19have, I'm limited because obviously I can't get outside of my circle, but I can do stuff like that
0:43:25that I just don't think I would have thought of otherwise. There's definitely an element of…
0:43:30It's not 10,000 hours because I think that rule loses track of how useful that time is,
0:43:37how actually productive, what have you learned from that experience.
0:43:40I could spend 10,000 hours doing bad work, and it doesn't make me amazing at work.
0:43:45Hopefully you've learned something along the way. In this case, I did a lot of work on custom watch
0:43:52faces that informed the work I did making custom complications, which then informed my work making
0:43:56custom widgets. Right. It's like maybe you are a very good graphic designer, and you do things,
0:44:02but you've never made a business card for somebody. And somebody says, "Hey, I need
0:44:12business cards." You need to design some business cards for them. You don't need to do 10,000 hours
0:44:16of business cards before you can become as good at designing business cards as you're ever going
0:44:23to get. Whatever your skill is as a graphic designer and typographer, you can max it out
0:44:29on business cards pretty quickly because it's a very limited… It's a very small complication
0:44:37in graphic design terms. But your first couple of cards aren't going to be great. You're going
0:44:43to realize that, "Oh, this text is way too big. Wow, the text on a business card needs to be tiny.
0:44:50Oh, I would have never thought I need to set eight-point type. That eight-point type seems
0:44:56like a footnote, but that's really what you need," et cetera. And then you can run into problems like,
0:45:01"Oh, it turns out that business cards get scuffed up and the corners turn in." You kind of don't
0:45:08want to put anything close to the edge because people put them in their pocket and then they get
0:45:14all bent up and you kind of want everything in the center, et cetera. But you don't need 10,000
0:45:19hours. But you do need to make some. And making entire watch faces can make you a lot better at
0:45:25making complications. The other thing that I find interesting about it is that you essentially have
0:45:34to suss out the—and I mean you in specific with the idea of apps like Widgetsmith and WatchSmith—you
0:45:41kind of have to suss out the rules as they are. And there's no point—and this is where I think
0:45:48your personal disposition really is just so perfect for these type of apps where, sure,
0:45:55you have complaints about what Apple allows and doesn't allow, and you'll make them clear.
0:46:01It's not like you're hiding them. But rather than just bemoan the fact that you can't make entirely
0:46:07custom watch faces and just say, "This stinks. Apple is being obstinate. I'm going to go pout
0:46:14for another year and hope that WatchOS 8 lets me make watch faces," you just say, "Well,
0:46:21what are the rules? How does the whole thing work? And then once I understand the rules,
0:46:27what can I do?" Yeah. And I think the reality is I've been making apps for Apple's platforms for
0:46:37a long time, and I've seen the outcome of having that approach where you just get grumpy about what
0:46:43you can't do rather than try and really see what you can do and how can you be creative with the
0:46:50tools that we do have. And there's so much more of an opportunity in that than if it's so easy
0:46:56to get stuck and say, "I really want to be able to show the time in a complication," but Apple
0:47:03doesn't let you do that. They only let you update your complication once every 15 minutes. I can't
0:47:08do that. And it's like, "Well, they have this timeline thing, which I don't think really is
0:47:10intended to be updated every minute, but if I use that and push the limits a little bit, and
0:47:16I've definitely run into issues in this, but conceptually, if you just say, "Well, what is
0:47:20the best I can do?" It's like, "And I can't have seconds on my clock, but I can have minutes." And
0:47:24if that's good enough, then that's great. And I think that's so often in this game, the reality is
0:47:32Apple will change over time. I used to think that WatchKit was all we were ever going to get,
0:47:39and to some degree, that I thought, "I'm just going to have to make the best of it." And I've
0:47:42made all manner of kind of awful WatchKit apps because that was the best I could do.
0:47:46And then when SwiftUI came along and suddenly I can make an actual Watch app, it's like, "Wow,
0:47:51this is amazing." And I have all this head start because I didn't get just stuck in the mud about
0:47:57the fact that I couldn't do animation before. I love the idea. All computer systems are sort of
0:48:09like this, and maybe all real games are too, but I used to, back in the day, I used to play a lot of
0:48:19simulated sports games on the old Sega Genesis. I love John Madden football and NHL hockey.
0:48:25And the thing about both of those games, and I don't know to what degree it's still true,
0:48:30because it's like when I see screenshots of Madden today, it just looks... The graphics are stunning,
0:48:37but it looks like a televised football game. Whereas back in the mid to late 90s, they were,
0:48:43you know, they look like Sega Genesis games. They were clearly designed to sort of,
0:48:49as you'd first start playing it, they would kind of look like real games. And the way you would
0:48:56play the football game was the way that teams in the real NFL would play football. But when you got
0:49:02good at the game, you realized which plays worked and what they did, and you'd end up playing a game.
0:49:11If two good players played each other, it was exciting, and it was a terrific sport. But what
0:49:19you'd watch was nothing like real football and nothing like real hockey. The hockey game was
0:49:24actually much more like basketball because scoring was way higher. And you'd play these, you know,
0:49:30you'd play like two-minute periods or something. And just to try to help make it seem more
0:49:36realistic, like seconds in the hockey game were like maybe half a second. You know, the clock
0:49:43went way faster. Just to try to help keep it realistic, quote unquote realistic. But it looked
0:49:48nothing like... But it was a terrific game. It's everything in computers and like sort of...
0:49:52What you're doing to me is sort of figuring that out, right? It's like you're making things with,
0:49:58certainly with WatchSmith in particular, that maybe they're not designed for, but they are...
0:50:04It's all within the rules. You're not using undocumented APIs. It's not like the way that
0:50:11you could sometimes just get in a groove in the hockey game and score. Then they'd drop the
0:50:19Puckett Center ice. And if you had the timing just right, you could get it again, make a certain move,
0:50:25and it was like unbeatable. And you could sort of get in a groove. And you weren't cheating. You
0:50:30didn't hack your cartridge. You just sort of figured out this is within the rules of the game
0:50:36and the system. Here's how it works. And now you could have a date complication that moves out of
0:50:41the way when the hour hand or the minute hand reaches 15 minutes after the hour.
0:50:47Yeah, exactly. It's very much... I mean, this is the part of my job that I enjoy the most.
0:50:53It's finding those unexpected ways around that... You call them kind of like their hacks,
0:51:01but they're not hacks in the way that I'm actually hacking the operating system.
0:51:05That I'm finding these weird workarounds that work and are consistent and are performant and
0:51:11all the things that you need them to be, but are definitely not what the feature was intended for.
0:51:16That's a pattern that I've had to use many times, because that's the only way to actually
0:51:24make things that are really interesting and new, that are different than what other people are
0:51:31doing. Because otherwise, it's easy to do the obvious thing that's the common case that Apple
0:51:36has designed the API for, but it's much more fun to make the thing that is not at all what they
0:51:41intended for. And they're surprised when they always have that line at the end of a thing,
0:51:44"We can't wait to see what you do with it." And you're like, "I don't think they meant this."
0:51:47But I think in some ways, maybe they are. You know what I mean?
0:51:53You know, like in the way that they definitely wouldn't be if what you shipped or somebody
0:52:01shipped was, "Well, I found a jailbreak and I've used it to open up the latest version of iOS,
0:52:07and now I have my own jailbreak app store." No, people at Apple probably overall are not excited
0:52:12to see what you were able to do with it. But I think that by staying within the system, but
0:52:19finding possibilities, it's not an exploit, right? It's unforeseen possibilities within the rules.
0:52:28And again, if the rules were all designed with things like performance in mind, and you're not
0:52:35doing anything that's unperformant or, "Well, he's doing this. He shouldn't be able to." If we didn't
0:52:41envision this and it's sucking the battery down, they're going to change the rules, right?
0:52:47I think they are kind of excited to see stuff like that.
0:52:49I'm sure they are. There are certain people within Apple who I think probably think it's
0:52:54really cool. And there are people who are like, "What? That was not within the design spec that
0:52:58we had when we had the meeting six months ago about what people were going to be able to do.
0:53:02This was not what they were supposed to be able to do." I think that's more what I mean.
0:53:07And I think the feedback I've gotten over the years from doing this kind of stuff from Apple
0:53:12is that they generally do like it because I think it also is an escape valve for features they don't
0:53:18want to make mainstream, but they can point to things that are on these edges that take a lot
0:53:27more work. It's not easy to do. This is the hard way to do it. They don't want to make custom watch
0:53:33faces, but if you can find ways to make complications really capable, then you're
0:53:38kind of releasing a little bit of that pressure. Because if they're pulling back a little bit on,
0:53:43actually, maybe we don't need custom watch faces. Maybe we can just make complications
0:53:47a little bit better. Yeah. It gets to a very old bit of advice, which is that when you're reporting
0:53:56a bug or a feature request to a developer as a user, you can propose an idea.
0:54:06And it's not that it's unwelcome, but that a lot of the times, even if you're going to propose
0:54:11a solution, start by describing your problem in as much detail first. And it's that description
0:54:20of the problem that's often more interesting to the developer than the proposed solution.
0:54:30And again, that might be it. Where it's like, "Well, wait, I've got this, I don't know, what's
0:54:36the bike riding app, Stadia?" Strava?
0:54:39Strava. I don't even know if Strava has complications. I assume probably they do.
0:54:44Probably.
0:54:45Or whatever it is. But maybe your idea is, "I wish Strava could have their own watch face,
0:54:54because I would like something when I'm riding my bike, I'd like this information from Strava there."
0:55:02But say the problem first, and maybe there's a better answer where they could integrate it into
0:55:07the workout app that is shown when you're on your bike doing a workout. Or maybe the answer is they
0:55:11could do it with a complication and put it there. And that sort of description definitely, I think,
0:55:21is right up the alley of the solutions you've had with Widgetsmith and WatchSmith. Where it's like,
0:55:27"Oh, I would just like to have a custom thing in the corner."
0:55:30And what I love in watchOS 7 is that now you can have multiple complications from the same app,
0:55:37which is a huge boon for me and what I'm doing here. Now I can take over a huge proportion of
0:55:47the watch face. And it's not a custom watch face, but other than the time, everything on the watch
0:55:53face can be something I render. And that's a huge opportunity and a huge canvas for me. I just have
0:56:00to let go of the fact that I have to use their hands for the time or their numerals. But other
0:56:05than that, everything else I can do. Yeah, that was a weird limitation. And you can sort of see
0:56:12it with some of Apple's complications, like Breathe, which to me, if you love the Breathe
0:56:22thing, more power to you. But it's like, I don't know. I've been using the new S6. I'm just going
0:56:31to say S6 review unit watch since I got it a couple of weeks ago. And I set it up as new,
0:56:38and I've been running it as default. And it's like the Breathe things have once an hour,
0:56:44I don't even know how often they come up. But by default, it's like all of a sudden I'm working,
0:56:48and I get a tap, and I look at my wrist and go, "Oh, what's that?" And it's like, "Hey,
0:56:51why don't you take a break and breathe for a minute?" And it's like, "F you." That is my,
0:56:57I want like a big F you button every time that comes up until I broke down. And I was like,
0:57:03"All right, enough of my running with all these defaults. I'm turning this off."
0:57:06But the complication, you could see why you would, even if you want to have the Breathe complication
0:57:13on your watch face, you'd only want one. There's no reason to put it in two corners. But even with
0:57:18some of Apple's, I'm surprised they didn't foresee the need, like weather, right? How did they get
0:57:25around that before? So Apple has, their apps have been able to export multiple complications
0:57:31since the beginning. That's always been, so that when primarily it was shown through things like
0:57:35weather, where you would be able to show the UV index and the temperature in two corners. And that
0:57:41was always the way that only Apple's apps could do that. I see. They had the ability to export
0:57:48multiple complications, but for a third-party app, it was always just one per type. And so we could
0:57:54show multiple complications on a watch face if it happened to support multiple types. So if in the
0:57:59modular one, you have the big rectangle and you have the small circle, and I could take one of
0:58:03each, but I couldn't take two circles or anything like that before watchOS 6. Ah, that makes sense.
0:58:11Yeah. And I guess that they weren't thinking, and again, literally, WatchSmith is, because it's as,
0:58:18it's not about a specific type of complication. It's all sorts of complications, everything from
0:58:26weather to exercise information, et cetera. Astronomy, tides, I have all manner of
0:58:33anything I could think of. It's very much a kitchen sink. Right. So it's very natural that
0:58:39somebody who's into that would want to have more than one of the same size on their watch face,
0:58:44because it's not duplicating information at all, because it's sort of a, it's an inverse of
0:58:51the typical relationship where, you know, I was going to say weather, but that's a bad example.
0:59:01But, you know. Sure. But I think your example of something like Strava or something where
0:59:04maybe you're going to show the number of miles you've biked this week or whatever that might be,
0:59:10like, there's a limit to the number of places that you're going to want to devote to your biking
0:59:15activities. But for the other things where you have, yeah, it's like when I have so many different
0:59:20types of data, like I want to have the moon phase, because I think it looks pretty, and I want to have
0:59:26the sunset time, and I want to have the temperature, and I want to have the date.
0:59:30And I want to have all those on the screen at the same time, because sure, why not? And so it
0:59:36definitely lends itself to having multiple instances of those things. And in theory,
0:59:42before I could have made dozens of different apps for everything, but that just logistically would
0:59:49not have been feasible. And I'm so glad I didn't ever have to go down that road.
0:59:55With the fonts thing, I know that when I feel like the idea that you're going to customize the,
1:00:02you have quite a bit of fonts you can choose from for the WidgetSmith widgets.
1:00:08Yeah.
1:00:09I'm reminded of and I know I asked you this before the show, is do your roots on the Apple platforms
1:00:16go back to the classic Mac OS era? And they don't. And Michael Simmons and I were did enough
1:00:22reminiscing about it on the last episode of this show. But one of the simplest things that you
1:00:27could do on the old classic Mac OS is we had a there was a clock up in the upper right corner.
1:00:31And I actually forget whether it was from Apple and it was in the system, or if it was a third
1:00:37party thing or not, but it was or if it started as like a lot of things did started as a third
1:00:42party thing, and then Apple put it there. But it was much like the Mac OS 10 clock where it was
1:00:49upper right corner in the menu bar, and you'd have options for you know, do you want the,
1:00:54you know, all the stuff you'd all the various options you want ampm? Do you want 24 hour time?
1:01:00Do you want the colon to blink? You know, everybody, you know, it's the same sort of
1:01:06things, right? You're very familiar with all of these options. And some people, some people
1:01:10definitely want the colon to blink and other people if the colon blinks, they will go insane.
1:01:16I just literally one of the smallest punctuation characters other than a single dot in the entire
1:01:23keyboard. And if it's up there blinking, it'll drive them insane. I personally I'm not a blinking
1:01:29colon person, but it doesn't drive me crazy. But I know that there are people who are irate. But one
1:01:35of the other things so so far, so good. You think okay, clock in the upper right corner. What's new?
1:01:40The other thing was that I think it was the third party thing, but it was very common. But you could
1:01:45also pick what font the clock the digital clock in the corner was. Sure. And it always seemed crazy to
1:01:54me. And this, you know, what did I pick? I picked the system font, right? If so, like in the Chicago
1:02:0012 era, it was Chicago 12. And then when they changed it to charcoal, I changed it to charcoal,
1:02:06and it just was the exact size and shape of the system font. And if it wasn't going to be the
1:02:11system font, and sometimes when I'd play with it, it would be like a smaller version of the system
1:02:17font, like the system font in that era, Chicago 12. That was the menu bar font. And that's the
1:02:25famous, you know, the font that we all had on the iPods when the iPods first came out. Like the
1:02:30Finder for file names would use Geneva, which was their sort of bitmap version of Helvetica. Well,
1:02:38that was sort of a system font, too. It wasn't the same font. It was Geneva versus Chicago,
1:02:42but it was what the system used for lists of things. So you might set your clock to be Geneva
1:02:48nine point font. And that still looked like it was part of the system, right? It's like, instead of
1:02:54and I thought, you know, I remember when I was playing around with it, like, Oh, that's kind of
1:02:57clever, because it's not really a menu. It's just a clock. So maybe it should be Geneva nine. And it
1:03:01just gets you as a as an avid user into that thinking of like junior level UI designer,
1:03:08which is fun and really is like a great gateway into thinking like a software designer.
1:03:15Which again, I think is where this tremendous enthusiasm from widgets is what that's tapping
1:03:24into. But what always struck me and I saw a lot of people's clocks over the years, because I spent a
1:03:29lot of time as like the resident, hey, my Mac isn't working right. Get Gruber over here to fix
1:03:35it type. And then at some point, you know, in the late 90s was even doing like freelance consulting
1:03:40where people would call me in and I would actually make money doing it and you get to see a lot of
1:03:45people's what extent you know, a lot of desktops. And I was always interested in it. Like, what do
1:03:51people have? People would pick the craziest fonts for the clock. It was all over the place. Again,
1:03:58and it wasn't like, oh, it's like everybody likes like zap chancery, right? Like certain other fonts
1:04:05over this. I forget if that was one of the fonts in the but you know, a font like that, like a
1:04:09calligraphy font. Yeah, you couldn't you whatever, however many fonts people had the you no idea.
1:04:16There was no accounting for the taste in clock font. People love to pick fonts like that. The
1:04:22rest of the system was all the regular system font. It wasn't like they installed an extension
1:04:26that would change their system font for everything, including the menu bar and dialogues and
1:04:32everything. Nope, just the clock, but maybe they wanted it to be times italic. Yeah, you know,
1:04:39and I was always fascinated by it. And so as I see people's enthusiasm for picking custom fonts
1:04:47for their widgets that have, you know, not like, oh, I was I know, I think your software update
1:04:55added that the first update to widgets may have added a few more fonts like Dan. What are the new
1:05:02ones? Dan is one of the new ones I've done I have. Oh, gosh, I've been adding like, I mean, this is
1:05:08where it gets a little like comedic in some ways for the number of different fonts. So like right
1:05:12now you can have regular San Francisco, San Francisco rounded New York, San Francisco mono
1:05:17Futura. And I have my silly ones noteworthy marker felt chalk duster typewriter. And then I have
1:05:22palatino gill sands copper plate and din. Right. That's a good variety. And those are all built in
1:05:29fonts, right? That's yes. And I say this as a question, but I happen to know that they're all
1:05:34built into the system. Yeah. But let's just say din for example, though, din is a font that is
1:05:43as San Francisco has evolved, it's gotten a little bit more of its own character.
1:05:51But I know I happen to know that internal to Apple as Apple was working on the font,
1:05:56we now know as San Francisco, before it officially had a name, it was sort of like a skunkworks
1:06:02project for years, because when it first we first saw it when the original Apple Watch debuted,
1:06:07and it was the it's always been the system font on Apple Watch. And it was the first time we saw it.
1:06:14And I remember being in the audience at the event. And it's, you know, of course, that's the sort of
1:06:22thing I think of is they announced is what it was the weird event that they only had, they only had
1:06:27one event there at the college in Cupertino, the dance auditorium. And they start showing
1:06:34screenshots of this new product Apple Watch. And I'm like looking at it. And I thought that my
1:06:40first thought was, oh, wow, they're using din. Yeah. And that's what I thought the font was.
1:06:46And I was like, oh, it looks din looks great on a watch. This is great. And then they'd show more
1:06:51screenshots. And I saw at least a couple of characters that I knew weren't din. But I was
1:06:56stymied. I was like, I have no idea what this font is. And it admits all of the wow, there's
1:07:0410,000 questions about this product. It's not even shipping for six months. But there's a hands on
1:07:09area across the street. And we can go and holy cow, I'm across the hands on table area from
1:07:14Gwen Stefani. Wow, this is bizarre. That's true story. I'm like, they're trying on Apple Watch as
1:07:20I look up at who's trying one on across the table from me. It's Gwen Stefani. I'm like,
1:07:25this is bizarre. That's not normal. This is not normal for Apple events. It's gotten a little
1:07:32more normal in the years since as it's been, they've gotten a little more celebrity late. And
1:07:35one time, I was with the host with someone and we're outside. And you a sports fan?
1:07:42I would say I'm a passing sport. Well, I enjoy watching sports, but I'm not like devoted to any
1:07:49particular sports me and Clayton Morris, who used to be at Fox News, we were outside, just getting
1:07:55fresh air outside the Bill James Civic Auditorium. You know, it wasn't like five minutes before
1:08:02start. It was like, I don't know, 20-25 minutes before the event was supposed to start. But we had
1:08:06seats already and we just went out to get fresh air. And Barry Bonds and Joe Montana come in
1:08:14together right past us. What is quite a combination of characters? It's right. It's
1:08:22unbelievable. It's like, what, what do we do? And nothing. We just, you know, just kind of give them
1:08:29the look like, hey, we know who you guys are, maybe the greatest baseball player of our lifetimes
1:08:36and the greatest football player of our lifetimes. Just walking by together like, you know, it's
1:08:42cool. There they go. Right in there to find out about new iPhones. Anyway, all these questions
1:08:47about Apple Watch, I have the biggest one, perhaps the biggest was what is this font? And I figured
1:08:52out, you know, by looking at the actual hand on ones, it was like, God, this is something new.
1:08:58But internally to Apple, it was some designers before they knew the name called it DINVetica,
1:09:04because it was sort of at a basic level, not that it's a ripoff, it's a very original font that's
1:09:10serving Apple very well and evolving in very good ways. But if you need to just a starting point to
1:09:17understand San Francisco, it's sort of half DIN, half Healthetica. So offering DIN as an option
1:09:24fits in. But offering fonts like New York, which is sort of a Times sort of serif font, you know,
1:09:32and what are the handwritten ones, Markerfelt? It's like Markerfelt and Noteworthy.
1:09:39Noteworthy. Right.
1:09:40Yeah. Like, they are definitely not. They do, they have, they, while you could say that, like,
1:09:47San Francisco is, you know, DIN and Healthetica send a mission together, like Markerfelt and
1:09:51Noteworthy are, they have, they have, they share no common ancestors in the font tree.
1:09:57But this is, so offering those as options. So those handwritten silly fonts, I don't know how
1:10:06you would describe friendly, whatever adjectives, not my cup of tea personally, but I also totally
1:10:16understand what it's like to have a strong personal preference for fonts. And if that's what
1:10:23pleases you, more power to you, right? Like, so I've gotten tweets from people like, this must be
1:10:32driving you nuts seeing people, you know, use crazy ugly fonts to make their widgets. And no, it
1:10:37doesn't at all. Right? Like, what drove me nuts for years would be like, when the built-in notes app
1:10:44only offered, I think it was noteworthy, maybe it was Markerfelt, maybe they changed it
1:10:50over the years. I forget. I think it might've been Markerfelt at first, but yeah, I think it was
1:10:55Markerfelt to start with. And then they offered an option, like not to use it. And you could use
1:10:59Healthetica instead. And it was like a prototypical or hypothetical glass of ice water in hell.
1:11:07But that was because everybody had to use it, right? If the notes app is you get Markerfelt,
1:11:13whether you like it or not, then the fact that I don't like Markerfelt gives me strong feelings
1:11:18and makes me write very angry posts on my website. But the fact that somebody is allowed to set it as
1:11:24an option doesn't bother me at all. I say more power to you. I hope, you know, I could see why
1:11:30maybe you enjoy that. Yeah. And I think it's what you were saying about the clock, right? It's that
1:11:34sense of like, you can't even predict it. Like, it's not something that, oh, you see someone,
1:11:39there's like button-down businessman, you know, oh, he's going to want like a very button-down
1:11:43business font, or he's going to want New York because that reminds him of the New York Times.
1:11:47I don't know. Like, you can't guess. It's just as likely he's running around with Markerfelt.
1:11:52And that's what he thinks is fun. And it's like, he could be even like, sometimes you get the
1:11:57impression, it's like, I'm using this font ironically. I think it's ugly. And I like that
1:12:01it's ugly. I like that it's silly. It's like, I'm not trying to make this gorgeous. I'm trying to
1:12:06make this funny. And it's like, it's a little joke that I'm playing on myself every time I pick up my
1:12:12phone. And, you know, it would be like, if I made Ariel one of the options, and you set that as your
1:12:19widget font, right? You'd be playing a little joke on yourself every time you picked up your phone.
1:12:24And maybe it would make you laugh for a while, and eventually you'd go crazy and you'd change it. But
1:12:27like, if that made you, if they put a smile on your face even once, like, sure, why not?
1:12:32Ariel's maybe the exception. See, now maybe you've pushed my button.
1:12:37Well, that was, though I will say that was one of the, so I don't like April Fools. Like,
1:12:43I think they're completely silly and pointless. The only April Fool I've ever thought of that
1:12:47I would ever actually do as a developer is that I would add Ariel as an option,
1:12:53but only if you select it on April 1st. Right.
1:12:55Like, that is the one, and it only works for that one day. But on one day a year,
1:13:00you could use Ariel, and it would only be for, only be on April 1st.
1:13:04Somebody, so here's my necessary digression on Ariel and why I would make an exception.
1:13:12Ariel is a ripoff of Helvetica. And that's, this is a fact, not an opinion. And it was,
1:13:20Helvetica has been a very famous typeface since before computers. It was a sensation from when
1:13:25it debuted in 1968, I believe. And when true type fonts became a thing on computers, Apple licensed
1:13:38the real Helvetica, and it became the default document font. It's like in TextEdit and going
1:13:45back to the classic Mac OS with teach text. And every Mac word processor I've ever used,
1:13:51Mac write, even Microsoft Word. If you try a new word processor and type command N,
1:13:58what is the font in the new window by default? It's Helvetica 12. Microsoft decided not to pay
1:14:06to license Helvetica and instead commissioned a ripoff. That's Ariel. They decided it would
1:14:13be cheaper to do their own. And so the only ways that, and so it's a ripoff in that it
1:14:19has the same metrics as Helvetica. And to most people's eyes, it looks the same and it's supposed
1:14:25to look largely the same. And then they just changed a few letters to not try to make it a
1:14:33copy copy, but just sort of a, well, it's inspired by copy. The capital R in Ariel looks really
1:14:42stupid and the capital C looks really bad. And the lowercase T has a pointy top for unbelievable,
1:14:50you know, it looks like a toothpick at the top and a typeface where none of the other characters do
1:14:54this. My opinion, and I believe this, I'll go to my grave, is that anybody who says they like Ariel,
1:15:02what they mean is they like Helvetica and they don't see the difference. And if anybody ever
1:15:06says, I would like you to do this, make this for me and use Ariel 12. You as a designer are
1:15:13committing a crime if you don't just set it in Helvetica 12 and assume that they're getting what
1:15:19they wanted. For example, I just read a story yesterday that is in his debate prep that Joe
1:15:25Biden, somebody sent this to me, I should link to it from Daring Fireball, that Joe Biden,
1:15:30his favorite typeface is Ariel 14. And they're like, oh, who's group we're going to vote for now?
1:15:36But my, my, my take on that is that I could see why Joe Biden likes that as typeface because it's
1:15:42just plain, right? It's a very plain font. And so when he says I would like my, my materials set in
1:15:48Ariel 14, whoever he says that to should just set it all in Helvetica 14. And Joe Biden will be even
1:15:55better off than he was before and will be happy as a clam. Yep. All right. All right. Let me take a
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1:17:16before we move on, let's talk about all of the various things that WidgetSmith offers right now.
1:17:24So what are the features that, what things can you put in a WidgetSmith widget?
1:17:28Sure. So it's like sort of the core conceit of the app is that I wanted to just let you
1:17:36make as many widgets as you want and have them do whatever you want. And so you can add widgets of
1:17:43any particular size of the small, medium, and large that you want. And then you can schedule
1:17:48those widgets to appear or just have a default and they'll just always be displayed. But you could,
1:17:52but if you want, you could say, "I want my widgets to, during the workday, show one thing or during
1:17:57the evening, show something else." And it's like the types of widgets that I have in it are, you
1:18:03have things that are time-based, so like the time clock, the fuzzy time, that kind of thing, or the
1:18:10date or a calendar, a bunch of stuff with photos. You can show a photo with text layered on top of
1:18:16it, your battery, things that are coming up on your calendar, things that are in your reminders
1:18:20list, weather, tides, and astronomy data, so like the moon phase or the sunrise and sunset time.
1:18:28And so those are all the kind of, essentially, my goal is to try and capture
1:18:33basically all the data sources that exist in iOS as much as I could, so in terms of tapping into
1:18:41the system calendar and the system reminders list and just trying to be as comprehensive as I can.
1:18:47And I mean, the reality is, this is the list of things that I was able to get ready in time,
1:18:54rather than necessarily the full list of things that I could have imagined or dreamt up. I still
1:19:00have a whole bunch of stuff, but it's like to start with, and the things that I think most people use
1:19:03it for is to show those kind of basic data and even just, probably the most popular widget is
1:19:09just showing the date and showing it in an interesting way, because for each of those types
1:19:13of widgets, you can choose the font, the color, if there's a border around it, the time, the things
1:19:19like we were talking about earlier, like the time format, you know, do you want to have 24-hour time,
1:19:24do you want to have the system default time, do you want to have a full PM written out, or just
1:19:28one that's a single A or a P? Basically, my goal is that you can configure basically everything
1:19:35about it. Do you want the text on the bottom, do you want the text on the top? Whatever it might be,
1:19:38that's kind of the core conceit of the app and the features it has.
1:19:43I don't know why I was in college and at the student newspaper and the editor a few years
1:19:49ahead of me, Scott Smith, turned me on to just using A and P instead of AM PM, and his argument
1:20:01was, well, they both have an M, so you're just wasting, you're wasting space. I was like, huh,
1:20:06never thought of that. And then ever since now for 25 years and counting, I get frustrated
1:20:13when software doesn't let you do it. And I understand why, because it is standard just
1:20:18to have the AM and the PM. But the fact that you, you know, yeah, I'll handle that case,
1:20:26you know, it's not that rare, right? It's not like there's two of us out there who do it. But
1:20:31but in it, so those are the data sources. We've talked about fonts, you've added a couple already,
1:20:40even since launching. And of course, color. Yeah. Oh boy, colors.
1:20:46You gotta love that my very first app update after like it kind of like, well, it's like in the way
1:20:55the story went crazy is like the place that Widget Smith had its like 15 minutes of fame moment was
1:21:02on TikTok, where it got picked up by kind of the impression I get is it's very much like the fashion
1:21:08beauty vlogger kind of community. It seems to be kind of the place where it
1:21:12hit in a way which is definitely an audience and a community that I have no experience in whatsoever.
1:21:19But that's apparently where it got picked up. And as you may imagine, my very first app update
1:21:25added a collection of pastel colors as prebuilt options to the application, where it's like,
1:21:31all of a sudden now you have this beautiful pastel orange and yellow and pink and blue that were not
1:21:37the colors that I was envisioning when I was making the app, but they're in there now.
1:21:41So how did you get the feedback for that? Was it because people wrote to you or because you were
1:21:47like watching their TikToks where they said, "This is great, but I wish it had..."?
1:21:52Well, the story for that is actually even more of a like a roundabout thing where so on the Friday
1:22:00that it ended up getting like having its explosive moment, like early in the day, so when I launched
1:22:05an app, it always will have kind of like a contact me button, where it'll be like, "Tap here and send
1:22:11me an email," basically. And I collect customer support and get feedback that way. And Widget
1:22:17Smith was no different. And about just after lunch on that Friday, I thought that all of a sudden my
1:22:24app had gotten like somehow that email address, that support address, had gotten sucked into some
1:22:28kind of spam bot or something. Because the usual first week of support I get are from people in the
1:22:37Apple tech community, and many of them know me by name and are like, they're writing a letter with
1:22:41feedback or comments or bug reports, whatever it might be. They're writing it to me. They'll be
1:22:45like, "Hey, underscore. Congrats on the app. I ran into this issue." And it's like, to me.
1:22:50And all of a sudden around midday, I started getting the opposite of that, which was these
1:22:54very short, poorly written, slightly incoherent things that I was getting from addresses that
1:23:02didn't look like the normal kind of community and audience that I was getting. And I was like,
1:23:05"Oh, gosh. Somehow this address has gotten kind of pulled into something that's not what I
1:23:10am using. Somehow it's gotten to some spam bot that's just sitting there and thinks it's funny
1:23:15to just keep sending me these kind of emails." And not that it's like disparage those, but it's
1:23:20a very different kind of email than I'm used to. And that just kept building over and over throughout
1:23:26that day. And it's like, it just becomes more and more problematic in the sense of, "Oh, what do I
1:23:30do with these?" And at some point later in that afternoon, someone I think on Twitter just sent
1:23:35me a link to one of the videos on TikTok that I think was the one that had the biggest views at
1:23:42this point. And at that point, it had several million views at that point. And it all of a
1:23:48sudden was like, "Oh, this is starting to make sense as to why my support queue is now just
1:23:54filled with emoji everywhere, and it is a totally different audience than I'm used to." And it isn't
1:24:02necessarily that they were asking for pastels. It was more I interpreted the audience and the
1:24:06way that they were using it to be that they would appreciate if there was an increase in the pastel
1:24:12palette within the application. And so I did that on my own prerogative, and it hit very well.
1:24:18That feedback was very well received. And then immediately, I think the second or third update
1:24:24was I built a custom color picker so that you could really dial it into exactly whatever it is
1:24:31the color you want, because it became very clear that my pre-built basics were like, "Would you like
1:24:37it in red or green or blue?" This isn't going to cut it. We're going to need to really go down that
1:24:42road. But I just discovered it in a weird—someone was like, "Hey, you seem like you're doing well
1:24:48on TikTok." And I'm like, "I know what TikTok is. It's not like I have no concept of it, but I don't
1:24:53have an account. I've never used it." And so out of nowhere, essentially, this was happening in this
1:25:01community that I'm not really a part of or have a connection to. And it wasn't really until it
1:25:06spilled over into Twitter, which is a community that I do typically have experience in, that I
1:25:14actually was like, "Oh, this is what's happening." And that's where all of a sudden my shift towards
1:25:21cuter fonts and more pastel colors became something that seemed like an obvious move.
1:25:27Yeah, and that's what I was talking about, too, where a good developer
1:25:33doesn't just take requests. It's you listen to the reason, right? And so even if you sussed out,
1:25:43"Oh, I can suss out from this that a variety of pastels would go over fantastic with this crowd,"
1:25:52it's not because they said, "I would like you to add pastels." You have to just sort of read between
1:25:59the lines. And it's like maybe in the same way that a good wedding DJ doesn't just take the
1:26:06request for specific songs, but is like, "Oh, these people are ready to dance." You think more like
1:26:16that, and you're steering their desires that way. Was the custom picker hard? I don't even know. Is
1:26:23that a standard thing in SwiftUI? It's not a standard thing. It's completely—well,
1:26:27there is a standard one in SwiftUI, but I couldn't use it because of the way that my editor is
1:26:32structured. It just wouldn't have worked. It would be this kind of weird odd man out in my picker,
1:26:38so I just built a custom one. It's like, "Is it hard? I don't know." I've been doing this a long
1:26:42time. It wasn't straightforward, but it was not something that was insurmountable. The nice thing
1:26:50with color, at least in this, it's a constrained problem set. For my purposes, there's only so many
1:26:58colors that I need to display, and I can kind of relatively easily come up with a way to just drag
1:27:04your finger along on the picker. And that's a fairly intuitive thing, rather than going down
1:27:09the road of RGB or something, which is not a very user-friendly thing of they don't know how much
1:27:15red they want in their color. They just want to see it on the screen and drag their finger over
1:27:19towards it and be like, "Oh, there it is. I want this one." I find talking to my son,
1:27:24and he's nerdier than most. He's not really into programming at all yet, maybe. He's actually taking
1:27:33computer science for the first time now in 11th grade. What do you think the language is?
1:27:38Java still? No, better. Great. Oh, Python? Yeah, Python.
1:27:43Python. I thought it was... My hope was, "Oh, I hope it's Python." I don't even know Python,
1:27:49but I was hoping it was Python because I don't really know it, but I know enough about it to
1:27:53root for it, and I know it's a good language. And I thought, "Well, if not Python, hopefully
1:27:58JavaScript. Please not Java. Please not Java." It was Python. And his textbook is the O'Reilly
1:28:05Python book. And it's like, "Oh, well, that's a good book." But even he knows RGB. It's like a
1:28:13gamer thing because you learn the RGB color so you can program your keyboard to light up the right
1:28:18colors. But it actually is surprising talking to him about it that there's a surprising number of
1:28:24people who all of a sudden, they know hex values for RGB colors. And it's like, "Oh, I'm surprised
1:28:33that you know that. Okay, sure." But it's not a particularly humane way to describe color.
1:28:40No, no. That's definitely not something that it is a tool of trade, not something that a normal
1:28:46person should be expected to know the exact hex value of the color that they want.
1:28:51Yeah, 4A, 525A.
1:28:53Yeah.
1:28:54So I'm trying to think what else there's left to talk about here. So all right, let's talk
1:29:04about the monetization.
1:29:06Sure.
1:29:07So this, it seems like... Like you said earlier that you kind of thought maybe WidgetSmith would
1:29:19be less popular than WatchSmith. They share a monetization strategy and in fact, pool together.
1:29:27Sure.
1:29:28So the basic idea, they're free apps and certain of the features are unlocked through a... What do
1:29:35you call it? A pro account, a premium account?
1:29:37Yeah, I call it WidgetSmith Premium. It's like a membership or a subscription to the app.
1:29:42And it is, I think, $2 a month or $20 a year. And among those are weather and the tides,
1:29:54which I guess... Is that the same data source or is it different?
1:29:57It's two separate data sources. The tide data is coming from a tide data source,
1:30:03and then the weather is a separate thing.
1:30:05Yeah. And that's it. It's very simple. There's no, "Oh, you pay $1 to get colors and you pay
1:30:16$3 to get weather and that renews because it's subscription." It's just one thing,
1:30:23it's a membership, and then the only choice is do you want to pay monthly or annually and save 20%.
1:30:30I love that you're very precise and say that you save 19%.
1:30:34Yeah. Well, I gotta say, just as a brief digression on that, it's like that screen
1:30:40is the one that I feel like I agonized over more. I try and be thoughtful about my design in a lot
1:30:45of things, but that's the screen that I think I agonized over the most because I don't want to be...
1:30:51It's very easy to be misleading or to be manipulative or to be...
1:30:57Having people sign up for things that ultimately they're going to regret.
1:31:02And there's countless scams and things in the App Store that are that way. And it's like,
1:31:06my goal and my design is the opposite. And maybe some people might say it's a bad design in that
1:31:14way, but it's like, my goal is it is very clear what you're signing up for, it is very clear
1:31:19what it costs, it is clear the difference between the monthly and the yearly, where it's like,
1:31:27even with the monthly, I show you the monthly price times 12, and I say it's going to cost this
1:31:33much a year. And so it's very clear that this is what's going to happen. Because the last thing I
1:31:38want is to have everybody who hits that button and starts subscribing to the app, they know exactly
1:31:43what they're in for, they're not going to be surprised, they're not going to be upset. That's
1:31:48the thing that I ultimately want there, because I'd rather have fewer customers that were happier
1:31:52than somehow end up with all these customers who are like, "Why am I being charged for your app?
1:31:57This is not what I want." And so my goal with that was definitely very much to just be
1:32:01as straightforward and clear as I can. It's like, rather than saying you're saving 20%,
1:32:06it's like, "No, you're actually saving 19%." Because if I'm lying to you and saying it's 20%,
1:32:10then I'm lying to you. I'm already off to a place that that's not true. You're actually not saving
1:32:1620%, you're saving 19%. Right. And the buttons are the same size, you're not steering people
1:32:23towards a big sign up for the year versus sign up for the month, or vice versa. They're the same
1:32:29size. The 23.88 per year annual cost of the monthly is printed in a very normal sized font.
1:32:39The same font as everything else. The only actual small print is the actual, what should be small
1:32:46print, your purchase will be applied to your iTunes account and the confirmation of your
1:32:50purchase subscriptions will automatically renew. There's nothing hidden in the small print. It's
1:32:54a very honest exchange. And again, it's beautifully simple where you're either in
1:33:00the membership or not. The free version is extremely useful in both cases.
1:33:14It's a very good balance where it is very useful as a free app, and therefore it is very popular
1:33:21as a free download. But yet, what is there to be paid for is a reasonable amount of money. It is
1:33:27about 20 bucks a year for anybody who does sign up and gives features that people would actually
1:33:36want. Right. Yeah. And what I like to, I ended up with this, it's like selling
1:33:42more, essentially selling digital goods is always a weird business because it doesn't cost me
1:33:50anything to let you access pink. Right.
1:33:56The fact that in theory I could have put pink behind a paywall and you have to pay a dollar
1:34:01to unlock pink, okay, great, or blue, or whatever color that might be. That feels like a weird
1:34:09business to be in. This is a broader discussion of a lot of the apps that are making most of the
1:34:14money on the App Store are these consumable in-app purchase things where you're buying gems that
1:34:20are just bits in a database, but they're creating this big cost to them. And it's like,
1:34:25I don't ever feel great about that. And instead, I feel much better about a business where weather
1:34:30and time data costs me something, and so I can't provide it to you for free. It's unreasonable. And
1:34:36certainly I'm not giving it to you at cost. That's not what it costs me to provide that data, but
1:34:44it feels reasonable to pay for that. I need you to pay for it on an ongoing basis,
1:34:49so it's a subscription, and then that's the audience that I'm charging for. And if you
1:34:58are a user who just wants to support the app and just wants to pay for it and never use
1:35:03weather and tides, great. I appreciate that. That's wonderful. But if you're someone who wants
1:35:08weather data, I feel good about charging you for that. And it's nice and simple and straightforward.
1:35:13It's not trying to be manipulative or problematic in a way that I feel like so much of the App Store
1:35:19is, and it means that I'm avoiding a lot of the things that would go down a path where you can
1:35:26make a quick buck but end up in a way worse place. It sounds like you and I are getting ready to move
1:35:34to some kind of hippie compound, but you can't put a price on what it's like to sleep good at night.
1:35:42Trying to scoop up every available penny you could make if you tried to do everything short of towing
1:35:55your line against tricking people into paying for something gets you dangerously close to trying to
1:36:01move the line of what constitutes tricking or not. Whereas if you're trying to stay as far away from
1:36:07the tricky line as possible, you almost certainly are leaving money on the table that you would have
1:36:13picked up, but you're probably not leaving any money on the table from people who definitely
1:36:18wanted to buy it, and they're the ones you feel good about. And there's so many normal businesses
1:36:23in the real world where you never have to worry about it. If you run a restaurant,
1:36:28nobody gets tricked into coming into your restaurant to eat.
1:36:31I didn't know I had to pay for this dinner. Why am I paying for this steak? I thought it was free.
1:36:40Yeah, that's the expectation. And there's this straightforwardness. You walk in the door,
1:36:46and they hand you a piece of paper that has the name of the food and how much it costs.
1:36:50And it's very straightforward. And you'd be surprised if you order the hamburger and it
1:36:55says it's $15. And at the end of the meal, they're like, "That will be $17 a month for the rest of
1:37:01your life." It's like, "What? That would be a surprise. That would not be what you expected
1:37:06for." But that's not what happens. Or next month when your credit card bill comes and you've got
1:37:11another charge from the place you ate a month ago, and it's like, "What? I didn't know I was
1:37:15subscribing to a hamburger from the place. I was in an airport over in Florida. Why am I subscribed
1:37:23to a hamburger?" But I feel like so often that happens in the App Store, though. That kind of
1:37:27thing can happen where there are so—especially with subscriptions—it can very easily be something
1:37:33that you don't really know what you're signing up for. Yeah, totally. All right, let's talk a
1:37:37little bit about weather. I don't think people understand that weather data costs money to
1:37:42developers. And it does. There is no—well, there's some free weather info, but "free," and there's a
1:37:51reason why weather apps are usually paid. And if they're not paid, are sort of a cesspool of
1:37:58privacy-invasive shenanigans. Yeah, where they're just trying to get your location data, basically.
1:38:04Yep, because—yeah, and this is—once you think about it, everybody—if you,
1:38:13dear listener of the talk show, have never really pondered this, you're going to—your mind's about
1:38:19to be blown, because if you think that there are a bunch of scammy ad network type of businesses,
1:38:25hundreds and hundreds of them out there, that really would like to have your location data,
1:38:32and you know that all these apps system-wide have really been locked down in terms of anything that
1:38:39has location data you have to ask the user for permission for, and it's very easy to go check
1:38:45in the privacy section of settings which apps have location data, which ones have used it recently,
1:38:51and how to turn it off. And you think, you know, it's hard for scammers to get into it.
1:38:57What apps do you grant location to? Well, of course you grant it to your weather app,
1:39:02right? Because you want weather where you are, and it makes—other than a turn-by-turn directions app,
1:39:10I can't think of another genre of app where granting location data is more essential to it.
1:39:16I guess the Pokemon Go, right? And like ride hailing, maybe.
1:39:19Yeah, ride hailing, right. But that's—again, that's sort of mapping, right? Like, it's just a—ride
1:39:25hailing is almost just a variant of turn-by-turn directions. It's giving them turn-by-turn
1:39:31directions to get to you, you know? Yeah.
1:39:32So guess what? There's an awful lot of weather apps that have made arrangements and deals,
1:39:39and if you have a free third-party weather app on your phone, you probably are giving up your
1:39:45location data to outfits that you probably don't want to give your location data to.
1:39:50Yeah. I mean, I can speak from experience that that is something that—at any time there are
1:39:56companies that exist, and I get solicitations for this kind of stuff as a developer, that
1:40:01any time you have an app that accesses location data, that they are more than happy to pay you
1:40:06for that data. And you'll just—they'll basically say, "Oh, it's no big deal. You just drop our SDK
1:40:11into your application." Right.
1:40:12And it'll—because you've granted permission, we'll just collect the data and send it off,
1:40:17and you'll get a check each month, and it absolutely exists and it's something. And it's
1:40:22like, I don't think that's what people are signing up for when they're hitting, like,
1:40:25"Show me the location. Show me the weather data for where I am right now."
1:40:28Yeah. So this whole direction got me thinking. And when Apple bought Dark Sky earlier this year,
1:40:37it made me wonder—I was not surprised, because I've been a fan of Dark Sky
1:40:44I think since they launched. It's a fantastic service, and I love their
1:40:49predictions for near-term precipitation. And they've been uncannily accurate for the most
1:40:57part over the years. And when they're not, it's never like—I feel ripped off. It's like if they
1:41:02say, "Hey, rain's starting in five minutes," and it doesn't rain, it looks—it sure as heck looks
1:41:08like it's about to rain. Right? Yeah.
1:41:09And there have been times where they've said, "Dark Sky has given me an alert, like,
1:41:14rain's starting in 10 minutes." And I look up and I'm like, "They're nuts. There's no way it's going
1:41:18to rain in 10 minutes." And sure as hell, 11 minutes later, it's raining. And it's like,
1:41:23"Where did this come from?" But anyway, I wonder if Apple's long-term plan on this is to provide
1:41:31weather services at the system level. I mean, it definitely was something that came to mind for me,
1:41:38as someone who uses it. I could see Apple trying to get to—I don't know how—I'm not sure if they
1:41:47would ever require it. That feels like tricksy, but it's definitely a thing of if they can get
1:41:52people off the need for a third-party developer to have to pay for weather data. That certainly seems
1:42:02like a good benefit. I mean, my suspicion, though, honestly, is that they don't like that in the
1:42:07weather app, it has the Weather Channel logo in the bottom right corner. I know. Or the Yahoo logo,
1:42:12whatever that is. I think the reality is they just view that as, "Why do we have on one of the most
1:42:18used apps probably—I've got to imagine it's like Messages and then Weather are probably the two most
1:42:23used apps on iOS. We have some other company's logo prominently in the corner of this app at
1:42:30all times, and I've got to imagine they just want to not have that there." Have you ever asked your
1:42:36home assistant, your dingus, for the weather? Like if you have HomePods and you ask, "Hey,
1:42:43what's the weather?" I don't know what the rules are because it doesn't seem like they always
1:42:50tell you, but sometimes they'll be like, "The weather today in Philadelphia will be 71 degrees
1:42:54with 30% chance of rain, and a low temperature in the evening down to 57. My weather data is
1:43:01provided by the Weather Channel." And it's even worse than the logo, right? Because the logo,
1:43:07at least they can make small and stick in the lower corner, but to actually—
1:43:10Have to say it out loud.
1:43:13Right.
1:43:13Yeah. I just go to imagine that has more to do with it because I think they—I
1:43:19would love for them to provide it. And I mean, in some ways, of course, that would make a bit
1:43:24of a conundrum for me because part of the way that I've sort of structured my things is that
1:43:28weather data has a cost. But if they did, they could certainly go down that road now that they
1:43:34own Dark Sky and that they have that data and they have it in a broader way. But in my mind,
1:43:42they're just going to—they just want to get rid of that logo as soon as they can.
1:43:45Yeah. Well, that's where I was going with it is that if—so it is admirable that you're not
1:43:49charging for access to more than, say, the eight primary colors. And I say that—I say admirable
1:43:55in that I like your thinking. I don't think there's anything wrong, personally, with apps that do that.
1:44:01We actually had tossed that around with Vesper as an idea before we just gave up the ghost,
1:44:06but that maybe we would have a paid subscription thing that would have alternate themes for Vesper.
1:44:12And that wasn't necessarily no marginal cost because we were thinking maybe it would be
1:44:18fonts that we had to license to include. But it might be. It might be stuff like colors where
1:44:25literally it's not a marginal cost to us to offer a red. But you have to charge for something.
1:44:32And it felt better than charging for sync. I don't know.
1:44:36Yeah. And I think—
1:44:38Or more for sync or something like that.
1:44:40When I think about that, though, it's great to reserve the ability to charge for things in the
1:44:46future. When I'm coming into something like this, it's like, I want to have a business model up front
1:44:54that I'm accumulating enough revenue to keep the lights on and to have a reasonable business,
1:45:01but it's offset just as much by creating goodwill and the opportunity in the future.
1:45:07That if at some point, whether data becomes free for me and it becomes a little silly that I'm
1:45:11charging for it, then at that point, it's like, I'm sure there are other opportunities and there's
1:45:16other things. Or even in the near term, one of the obvious things that I should probably be starting
1:45:20to do is work with designers and have theme packs or things that are that kind of a purchase within
1:45:29the application. What I like about that is it's a truly premium upsell in a way that it isn't like,
1:45:38"I'm charging you for red." It's like, "I'm charging you for, here's this designer who has
1:45:43created this gorgeous set of borders and colors and backgrounds and wallpapers, and you can
1:45:49buy them as a unit, and you're getting something that feels nice, not something that feels like
1:45:55I'm being cheap." Yeah, exactly. If it was a custom border design that made it seem like a very fancy
1:46:02certificate of authenticity, my widget is completely certified, and people might have fun
1:46:10with that. Yeah, and I do think... Here's my other question about weather before I get off the
1:46:18weather. The other thing I wanted to pick your brain about is that WidgetSmith defaults to feels
1:46:24like temperature instead of actual temperature. I get a lot of feedback on this. Okay, so as a
1:46:31weather app aficionado, I have mixed feelings about this. I'm curious why that's the default.
1:46:40That's almost never the default. Sure. So this is one of those cases where every weather app I ever
1:46:49use, where it's an option that I can display the actual temperature, like the scientific temperature
1:46:57or the apparent temperature, I always set it to apparent temperature. Because as a person existing
1:47:03in the world, that's the temperature that actually is meaningful to me. That if I go outside and it
1:47:10feels like 100, then I want to know that it feels like 100, not that it is 90. That's what I want to
1:47:18know when I look at the weather app. So I'm always flipping that switch. And so as a developer,
1:47:26that's one of the places where I'm just being a little opinionated and saying, "I think this is
1:47:30actually what you want." That when you say you want to know the weather, you actually want to know what
1:47:36it's going to feel like if you go outside, not what a thermometer sitting outside would tell you.
1:47:43And so in the same, like what you were saying earlier of like, "Tell me the problem. Don't tell
1:47:47me what your solution is to the problem." The problem you have is, "What's it going to feel
1:47:51like if I go outside?" And I can answer that question. People have worked this out with
1:47:56feels like temperature and wind chill and heat index and all that. And so I think that's a better
1:48:01answer. And some people get really upset about that when they realize that like, "Why does it
1:48:07seem like my thermometer outside on my deck says that it's 80 degrees, but your thing says it's 90
1:48:14degrees." And it's like, "Well, it's because it's super humid outside." And if you go outside,
1:48:17it's going to feel like it's 90. And so that's why there's an option to do it. I made it so that you
1:48:22can optionally turn it off. But as a default, I firmly believe that apparent temperature is what
1:48:28everyone should think about because that's actually what people care about.
1:48:31Okay, I was on board with you. And on that team all summer long, earlier this summer,
1:48:36I switched all of my apps that I—and I switched between a bunch. All of them that support feels
1:48:43like, I switched to feels like. I had it on my watch. And I was like, "This is fantastic." And
1:48:48there were days—and it was summer. And it was, you know, it's the East Coast. So, you know,
1:48:53usually it was my feels like would say, "Hey, it feels like 95, even though it's only
1:49:0084." And that's a big difference. And it's the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. And
1:49:07it would be right. And I was like, "Everything should be like this." And then I ran into a couple
1:49:12of days in a row where it was wrong. And it would be like, "It feels like 94." And it's like, "Oh,
1:49:19that's miserable." And I was like, "Well, I got to go out anyway." I go out, and it was beautiful.
1:49:24And it was like, and it's the—really, the feels like was just, in my opinion, wrong. It didn't
1:49:29feel like it at all. And I don't know what—and I was talking to Ryan Jones, who's the developer of
1:49:36Weatherline, one of my favorite third-party weather apps. And he was like, he just—it
1:49:42was one of our typical chats where it was either going to be really long, and he was like, "Oh,
1:49:46don't even get me started." And it basically, he was like, "I think all the effort I've put into
1:49:52Weatherline, you could put into—I would like to put into a new formula for feels like to actually
1:49:58get it right." That's how hard it can be. And I concluded by the end of summer that when feels
1:50:06like is wrong is worse, and therefore outweighs the benefits of when feels like is better. And
1:50:14what I kind of want, and none of my apps seem to do, is to find the perfect balance of showing me
1:50:20both at once. It's like, it seems like most apps either show you one or the other, or they show you
1:50:25one of them big, and then the other one is like small print at the bottom, you know, like weighted.
1:50:30But it can be very wrong. That's my complaint with it, is that sometimes it'll say it feels like
1:50:37blank, and it's like, no, it actually feels like the actual temperature.
1:50:42Yeah. And I mean, there are so many solutions to this that are tricky. It certainly is a thing,
1:50:47because it's not like perception is a hard thing to measure,
1:50:51especially with something like weather. And some people don't mind the humidity nearly as
1:50:57much as others and say that they're going to feel it differently. And I think of the National
1:51:03Weather Service. Have you ever seen their graphical forecast?
1:51:07No, I don't think so.
1:51:08So they have this forecast that is very, very economic in terms of the way that it shows
1:51:19you with the weather data. And what I've always thought is interesting with their economy of
1:51:25how they do it is the heat index or the wind chill is only shown when it's beyond a certain amount
1:51:32different than the typical amount different from the actual temperature. And I feel like there's
1:51:42a certain maybe something in there that I think they may be sort of hitting on. But there's a
1:51:49certain balance where, yes, you only want it to show when it's going to tell you something that
1:51:55you really need to know. Like when it is actually-- you're going to walk outside and you're going to
1:52:01be like, "I thought it was 72," and you walk outside and you're miserable. And you're like,
1:52:05"I want you to tell me that right now." So maybe there's something like that where you only show it
1:52:11if it's different, like above a certain amount. And so you're trying to optimize for the surprise
1:52:17factor. Or if it's above-- only tell me if the heat index is above 95, say. At that point,
1:52:26switch to using that or I don't know. But it's a problem I've struggled with for how to show that
1:52:34data in a way that is reasonable. Yeah, it's a complicated problem. Anyway, now that you have
1:52:39a weather app, effectively, welcome to the club. I've been in the club for a while. Yeah, I guess
1:52:45so. So I guess last but not least, again, I'm not trying to get actual numbers. No, no, that's fine.
1:52:56But a reasonable-- amidst this avalanche of downloads, you're also getting a somewhat
1:53:04commensurate increase in number of people who are actually signing up. It's not just
1:53:09all people using the free app. It is actually a hit product for you. Yes. No, it is certainly
1:53:16converting well, at an rate that you would usually expect for this kind of thing. Because in a normal
1:53:21application, you kind of expect that the majority of your users aren't going to subscribe, aren't
1:53:28going to pay, aren't going to be doing anything like that. But you just hope that a certain
1:53:32percentage of people are, and that it seemed to be the case with this. That enough people want to
1:53:40see that data or support the app or for whatever reason they're signing up, that they're doing it.
1:53:47And I was worried when it had its crazy-- the first 24 to 48 hours of this app, where it really
1:53:58took off, were unlike anything I've ever seen in 12 years of making apps for the App Store,
1:54:02where the number of downloads I was getting in an hour is collectively what it usually takes years
1:54:10for all my other apps put together. That's insane.
1:54:14It's one of these things, I don't have a concept of how to even really deal with that. And my fear
1:54:20was that obviously you'd have this huge spike, absurd numbers, tens of millions of people
1:54:25downloading the app, and then all of a sudden it was going to fall off, and no one was going to
1:54:31subscribe. And it would have just been like, "Huh." If you remember that funny day that I had
1:54:34crazy downloads and then nothing changed in my life? That was kind of what I was-- at least the
1:54:40pessimist in me certainly had that little fear in the back of my mind. But I was thankful to see that
1:54:47even as it's sort of settled down and it isn't-- I mean, I kind of feel like-- you know when you see
1:54:52people going off to climb Mount Everest, they have to go up to different camps along the way?
1:54:57Yes.
1:54:57And they'll go up somewhere and they'll spend a week, and then they'll go to the next one,
1:55:00and they'll spend a week. I feel like I'm in one of those base camps now, where
1:55:08in those first few days, I was up on Everest. I'd never seen anything like this. This is way up high,
1:55:14and it's like I've come down from there, but I'm just hanging out at advanced base camp now. It's
1:55:20not normal by any definition of what normal would be, but it's continuing on and having a life and
1:55:27having conversions into subscriptions and doing the things that make it a sustainable business
1:55:32and not just being crazy up, crazy down. That was funny, and I just go back to my other apps.
1:55:39Congratulations. It is well-deserved. But just in terms of how bananas it is,
1:55:45I'm looking at the live top chart for free apps right now. And as we speak, the list is number one,
1:55:53WidgetSmith, two, Zoom. Again, this is in coronavirus with back to school and all of
1:56:03this stuff going over Zoom. Three is your arch rival, Color Widgets. But similar to the same
1:56:12basic idea is an app about widgets. Four, Discord, a very, very popular talking chat app.
1:56:23Five, TikTok, which has been threatened to be removed from the app stores, which in addition
1:56:29to its popularity has prompted its downloads. Six, YouTube, Instagram, Gmail. Have you heard
1:56:36of Gmail? Snapchat. And then number 10 is Facebook, and then 11 is Messenger, and it goes on from
1:56:43there. Now, of course, some of this is it doesn't mean that WidgetSmith is more popular than Facebook.
1:56:50Obviously, Facebook's downloads are suppressed and Instagram, et cetera, are suppressed on a
1:56:55daily basis significantly by the fact that there are literally billions of people who already have
1:57:01them. But it puts it into context. I mean, some of these apps are not like the others in this list.
1:57:11Right? One of these apps was made by a single person working at a computer in his basement,
1:57:16and the other one is made by some of the most valuable companies in the world.
1:57:20Right. I mean, I think I'm pretty sure that Facebook has more than one engineer working
1:57:26on their main app. I hope so.
1:57:27I think so. It's just really, really awesome to be talking to you and have you not just on the list,
1:57:36but at number one. It's really a lot of fun. But part of that is, before we go into the final
1:57:44section, I want to talk about sleep tracking. But before we get there, your basic strategy
1:57:50has been so interesting to me. Over the 12 years you've been working on the platform,
1:57:55was it a recent tweet? I just saw a tweet from you where you mentioned that you've had 59 apps.
1:58:02Yeah.
1:58:02Was that recent?
1:58:03Yeah, that was a couple of days ago when I was just kind of reminiscing on the 12 years that
1:58:09it has been to get me to here. I've made 59 apps over the last 12 years.
1:58:14Tell me if you disagree in any way. But I think a basic description of your strategy from the
1:58:23beginning is to come up with ideas for smaller apps that you could do by yourself relatively
1:58:33quickly and see what's popular, see what sticks. And if it gains traction or some angle of it
1:58:44gains traction, then go with it. And if not, move on to another idea. All 59 apps are not still
1:58:52actively maintained and available in the app store. Your strategy is to be a singles hitter,
1:59:02not a home run hitter. And spray a lot of singles and get on base as often as you can.
1:59:07And in baseball, good things happen as opposed to, "Well, I'll just sit there and keep trying
1:59:13to hit a home run and wait till the bases are loaded." Let me keep going with my analogies here.
1:59:20If you're playing Tetris, you're trying to clear lines as you go. You're not saving a column over
1:59:26on the side waiting for a couple of big four-in-a-row pieces to get the four-in-a-row
1:59:33things. You're clearing rows as you go. And to me, this is the payoff that you've been waiting for.
1:59:43You keep working on good ideas. You keep trying them. You're there on day one. And in terms of
1:59:50that whole debate of, "Hey, why were developers so mad that they only had 24 hours notice for iOS 14?"
1:59:58Because it's good to be there on day one. Right? And it's-
2:00:05I've benefited from that many, many times. One of my other popular apps,
2:00:09Podometer++, is a step counter. And it was the first app that ever
2:00:13used the motion processor in the iPhone 5S. And because it was the first, it did well.
2:00:19And that's a skill. It is a tremendous skill. You're prolific. And I'm not trying to
2:00:26puff you up just because you're the guest on my show, but there's a prolificness to it.
2:00:32But if you think about it, just the amount of time you've spent on the infrastructure of setting up
2:00:38the metadata in the App Store to get 59 apps adds up to weeks of time.
2:00:44Well, I have my 10,000 hours of uploading screenshots into iTunes Connect.
2:00:48Right, right. I have been doing that far more than I wish I would have been able to.
2:00:52Right. You're really good at launching a new app.
2:00:57Yeah.
2:00:57You never know what's going to hit. It's always true.
2:01:05And I think it's one of those things where my goal in what is, A, I have a really short attention
2:01:12span. And I love—the thing I enjoy most is making new apps. If I'm honest, I really don't
2:01:16like maintaining apps. I love making them. I love the idea. I love seeing a WWDC keynote is probably
2:01:25my favorite two hours of the year in my work. I love seeing these are the new things and coming
2:01:32up with what's possible. Or as we were talking about earlier, what's maybe not so possible in
2:01:37what they're hoping for, but something that I could make happen. I love that process, and I love
2:01:44doing that. And I have a short attention span, and I get bored maintaining something. And so
2:01:49I like that process. And it means that, yeah, it's like I've gotten good at knowing how to turn apps
2:01:55around very quickly. I've gotten good at knowing how to launch apps, how to—what are the features
2:02:00that are actually going to be meaningful for an application? What is something that if I actually
2:02:05make, it's like—there's a very fine line between knowing what's a good version 1 feature and what's
2:02:11a version 1.1 feature. And because half the time I never build the 1.1, it's important to know that
2:02:16difference and to know that this is not something that I need for version 1, and I should push it to
2:02:21the side and wait on it. And that has allowed me to be able to be in the position where it's like,
2:02:28I've launched 59 apps. I would say all but maybe six of them were complete flops from a financial,
2:02:35a business, whatever perspective. I learned a lot from them. So it's certainly like—and
2:02:39it benefits me now when I'm making an app like WidgetSmith that touches so many different parts
2:02:45of iOS and all of the system that I've built a calendar app. So if I want to add calendars to
2:02:52WidgetSmith, that's easy. I've done that before. I have all this code. I know where all the weird
2:02:56bugs are. I've worked around them before. If I want to interact with weather data, like I built
2:03:00a weather app years ago, and I've done this before. I know how to do it. And I can build
2:03:06that experience, and I think it's a model that works well for the—I feel like the indies
2:03:12kind of traditionally, like the traditional Mac or Apple indie is the person who has their one thing
2:03:20that they almost slavishly work on and develop. And you have a James Thompson who's worked on
2:03:26PCALC for timing material. I don't know how long he's been working on that app.
2:03:3130 years?
2:03:32It's just 30 years. Something like that. And he is—that path, I would have lost my mind.
2:03:39I'm glad it works for him. That's great. But for me, I'm always looking and interested in the new
2:03:46thing, and I am already in the midst of all of this with WidgetSmith. The biggest app in the
2:03:54world right now, I'm already starting to think about new apps I want to make. And if anything,
2:03:58the maintenance and the management of WidgetSmith is a burden rather than a blessing. That's just
2:04:04who I am, and that's how I've gotten to be to where I am. And it's a situation, too, where I
2:04:09think it's worth saying that I feel very grateful for the ability to do what I do, and I think it is
2:04:16largely based on the App Store and on Apple and what they do for a developer like me. The fact
2:04:24that I can launch 59 apps over 12 years, and the infrastructure and everything is in place for me
2:04:31to be able to do that, and they take care of the billing, and they take care of all of the things
2:04:34that allow a one-man shop. It's just me in my basement writing code. I don't have a big
2:04:41infrastructure. I don't have a big staff. That, I don't think, would be possible in a world that
2:04:48wasn't like the App Store, and it's something that I feel very grateful for. Sometimes I get to be in
2:04:53my bonnet around all the stuff that's been happening with the App Store and Epic and all the
2:04:57shenanigans. It's like, I'm able to do what I love doing because the App Store is the way it is, and
2:05:04it works for people like me to have just as much standing as all the other apps you just listed in
2:05:10the top 10 of the App Store right now. I have just as much claim to that top chart as they do.
2:05:17And it doesn't matter that they're Google. It doesn't matter that they're Facebook. I'm just
2:05:20a guy, but the App Store is a great leveler in that way. And so I feel very grateful for
2:05:24like that Apple has created it and sort of is something that exists for me.
2:05:28Yeah, that's well said. I mean, and it must be gratifying too, because the nature of Widget
2:05:32Smith is such that what people are enthusiastic for about it means they see it all the time,
2:05:41right? It is not like... Peacock. Just to toss out another example. Beloved,
2:05:49I've been using Peacock, I think for close, if not 30 years. Close, certainly close, at least 25.
2:05:54I go days and weeks, maybe even at a time without launching Peacock because I have nothing to
2:06:02calculate, right? Whereas a widget on your home screen, there it is on your home screen. And where
2:06:07do people really, if they're really going to spend time to tweak and customize the color and the font
2:06:14and the size and sit there and really get in there and futz with it, where do they want it? They want
2:06:21it on their first home screen, right? Or the second one, the one where they're going to see it all the
2:06:25time. So there you've got this thing that they see all the time, which is super cool. Put aside just
2:06:31the financial aspect of it. That's just cool when you realize, "Holy crap, there are thousands
2:06:42of people looking at my thing all day, every day, and it's in the device in their pocket."
2:06:47Yeah. And it has the name of the app right underneath every widget.
2:06:51Which is really awesome.
2:06:53Which is... I get a lot of requests that I'm like, "Oh man, can't you hide that?" And it's like,
2:06:57A, I can't because that's just not the way Apple has built the widget system. And B,
2:07:02if I could, I would not.
2:07:03There you go. There's the first time you've been a little selfish on the entire interview.
2:07:08A little bit. A little bit in this. That's one thing that I am very grateful that every single
2:07:13time I see a screenshot of someone being like, "Hey, look at this cool thing I did with my home
2:07:16screen." There it is. Widget Smith right there. Go to the app store, search for it and get it.
2:07:21It is. It's very cool. It is a very nice way of...
2:07:26There's a thing they can search for right there. All right, let me thank our third and final
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2:09:21All right, speaking of the name Widgetsmith, for a while, you'd think it would be an original name.
2:09:27For a couple of hours, at least over the weekend, you could find another Widgetsmith
2:09:32in the App Store. I wrote about it. I don't expect you, after all of your kind words,
2:09:41about the opportunity that the App Store has afforded you. I'm not asking you to complain,
2:09:47but it's got to be frustrating. That had to be like, "Oh, man." If you're set up, you're saying,
2:09:54"Oh, man, Widgetsmith is flying high. This is going to come to an end. One of these days,
2:09:59I'm going to be knocked off the number one spot." It's going to happen anyway, right?
2:10:04For it to be knocked off the number one spot by a rip-off app.
2:10:09That hurts. It hurts. There's no simple way to say it. It just hurts. It was painful to see that—
2:10:17I think that it's most hurtful about—I mean, I've had many copykits I've had to deal with in
2:10:23the years of the App Store. The most hurtful are the ones that are poor knockoffs. It's like what
2:10:30you were saying about Ariel, right? It isn't knocking me off in a way that it's like taking
2:10:38what I did and doing it better, right? That kind of a scenario, it's more like, "Oh, man,
2:10:45I should have thought of that." That feeling is not great. It's not a nice feeling, but it's like,
2:10:50"Okay, that's fair." It's like when you're getting ripped off by somebody who it's clearly just,
2:10:55"This thing is popular. Let me just grab its name, throw together a basic app that will get just
2:11:02enough utility to get past App Review and throw it in the App Store." It's much more like,
2:11:08it feels more like stealing than about being inspired by something or imitating it or
2:11:15those types of the more positive versions of, "Clearly, I'm sure there are countless people
2:11:21making widget apps right now." That would be foolish if you had an idea for one or you're
2:11:27going to think, "I'm going to cash in on this market." Of course, people are doing that.
2:11:31But what's hurtful and what was difficult about that one is that it was such a poor copy,
2:11:38and it wasn't hardworking, and it wasn't thoughtful and clever. I think that was the part that was
2:11:43harmful about it. To complain, it's like, "Certainly, I wish that Apple, their infrastructure
2:11:51was such that that didn't happen in the first place, that they caught that kind of thing."
2:11:55You've got to think there's a way and a mechanism and a business process that they can catch this
2:12:01stuff rather than having it had to always be reported. I could imagine there's always going to
2:12:07be situations that fall outside of the process that they come up with, and there's always going
2:12:14to need to be a "report this app" system to deal with the cases that, if you're copying an app that
2:12:19isn't particularly popular, it might not draw to their attention that there actually isn't this
2:12:25other app that has the same name or whatever that might be. But you've got to think that if they
2:12:30were thoughtful about the names or the keywords and things like that, for the top
2:12:36100 apps in each of the categories—so that's something like, I don't know, like 2,600 apps
2:12:42or something, maybe—it's not an inconceivable number that you'd have to wrap your head around.
2:12:47To be thoughtful and to be protective of those names, it seems like something that they should
2:12:54be able to do. And I think, if anything, while I'm frustrated by it, the only thing that I see
2:13:01that's particularly encouraging to me about all of the controversy that we've been dealing with
2:13:06this summer with the App Store and whether there should be a 30% cut and whether there should be
2:13:10alternative app stores and all of these things, I take hope in that Apple, in the 12 years I've
2:13:17been doing this, seems to do their best work when they are under pressure and they have to prove
2:13:23that they're living up to the ideals that they always market themselves as having.
2:13:29And Apple says the App Store is the place you go because of trust and privacy, and trustworthiness
2:13:36are the things that it's there for. And trustworthiness is a bit in question if you're
2:13:42allowing copycat clone scam apps to exist in your platform. That's clearly just problematic for that.
2:13:49And I'm sure Apple was embarrassed that they let this through. And my hope is that they actually
2:13:54have pressure now because they keep putting up these marketing websites that say the App
2:13:59Store is amazing. And I agree, the App Store is amazing. I just sang its praises a few minutes ago.
2:14:04But now what I like and what I'm encouraged by is they have to prove that now. And so this happened
2:14:11once. I don't expect this is going to happen again for Widgetsmith. I've got to imagine there's
2:14:17someone who got a very stern talking to by somebody who's like, "This is embarrassing. Two days before
2:14:22this, we published this whole big new website on Apple.com saying how great and trustworthy the
2:14:28App Store is. And then this happens two days later. This can never happen again." And that pressure
2:14:33is great. Yeah, I agree with that. That's a good take. And I do think that it's an interesting way
2:14:42to keep them on their competitive toes as they have less competition directly, at least that
2:14:52they're not an underdog. And I definitely don't want to devolve this into an argument over
2:14:58what the word monopoly means. But there is less competition in the phone space.
2:15:06You're talking about developing on the platform for 12 years. We're old enough now where for us,
2:15:1412 years doesn't seem like that long. For my son who's in 11th grade, it seems like he probably
2:15:20barely remembers or doesn't remember what it was like before iPhones. But I remember when the
2:15:27iPhone was new and felt... I felt even before it came out, just in that wild, crazy interim where
2:15:36Apple had announced it at Macworld, but it wasn't even shipping until June, it was a wild time. And
2:15:44I thought, "This is a surefire hit. This is going to be great. I cannot wait for this." And I remember
2:15:49thinking, "They're going to do apps." There's a famous... Not famous, famous to me, but Merlin
2:15:55Mann was doing podcasts on the Macworld show floor and grabbed me and Jason Snell and interviewed us.
2:16:01It was a 10-minute podcast. And Jason Snell and I... Merlin asked us if we thought they were going
2:16:07to have apps, and we didn't even think about that at the time. And within five or six minutes,
2:16:12Snell and I had talked ourselves into, "Yeah, they're going to do apps. There's going to be
2:16:16apps eventually. It has to be." And it's a great five minutes of podcasting because it was an hour
2:16:22after the thing had been unveiled to the world. But at the time, Palm was still real, and they
2:16:30eventually came out with the Palm Pre, which was a great platform, and unfortunately, too late.
2:16:36- Yeah, I made apps for it. - Right. Did you really?
2:16:38- I did. - I loved it.
2:16:40- My first job when I was in high school was making apps for the Palm 5 and the Palm Pre.
2:16:45- Oh, but that's not the Palm Pre. - No, no, I also made apps for the Palm Pre.
2:16:48- Oh, okay. Well, I loved it. Blackberry was still a thing, and they had apps, and
2:16:55nobody knew. And Nokia tried to get... It was all up in the air whether we were going to settle on
2:17:01Monopoly, a duopoly, a triopoly. Was mobile maybe going to be different?
2:17:08- You had Pocket PC, right? App Micro's Microsoft was getting into the
2:17:13sort of space with Pocket PC. - For about 15 years, from the early '90s
2:17:22until the mid-2000s, when we called the non-phone-wond PDAs, and it was a separate category, but
2:17:29it clearly was meant to converge, there were never a dominant platform, and you never knew.
2:17:36And we've settled into a thing, and it's probably the way most markets settle in, where there's
2:17:41fewer competitors than not. But something has to keep Apple on its competitive toes, right?
2:17:46Otherwise, complacency is inevitable. And I think that the pressure on the App Store,
2:17:51the upside to it is, I agree with you completely, that it's a way to inspire Apple to up its game
2:17:59across the board with everything related to the App Store, even if nothing changes regulatory or
2:18:05legal-wise as to what they're required to do. - Yeah, that pressure and that sense of,
2:18:11like, you can't be an underdog when you're the biggest company in the world,
2:18:14but you can still feel like you have to prove yourself. And that desire is only good,
2:18:22and only positive. And if Apple continues to hold themselves to high standards, and then the world
2:18:27holds them to those, that's a great situation for Apple and for the world.
2:18:32- Yeah, when I was in high school, I was a huge Larry Bird fan, and I devoured his autobiography
2:18:39after he retired. And he talked about how he was, and if you search YouTube for Larry Bird
2:18:46trash-talking, he's widely regarded as both one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but
2:18:53almost certainly the greatest trash-talker of all time. And he said in his book that he did it
2:18:59because he felt he'd be playing, and he'd realize, look at the other team's lineup and realize that
2:19:06he knew in his heart there was nobody on their team who could cover him, nobody who he really
2:19:10respected as his peer, as a player. Like, okay, if he's playing the Lakers and Magic Johnson's
2:19:15on the other team, or he's playing the Bulls and young Michael Jordan is on the other team,
2:19:19and he could tell how good Jordan was going to be. Sure. Or Dr. J, you know, any of those classic
2:19:23players that he's, sure, he had no problem getting fired up. But he's playing, I don't know, Denver
2:19:27Nuggets, you know, and it's like, who knows. He'd fire himself up by going over to the other bench
2:19:35before the game and picking out who's going to cover him and say, like, you better hope the co--
2:19:40hope they don't put you on me because I'm going to torch you. And they just say that to fire himself
2:19:45up. I feel like you need to do something like that when you're on top, you know. And I don't think
2:19:50it's-- He doesn't follow through. He's embarrassing himself. Yeah. So I don't think Apple's going to
2:19:53trash talk. But they need to do something inside the locker room effectively, you know, like,
2:20:00that's the other thing with sports is most players don't say things inflammatory because they don't
2:20:05want the other team to put the quote up on the chalkboard or the whiteboard, I guess they have
2:20:09now, you know, hey, this guy on the other team said we can't pitch, you know, well, how do you
2:20:13feel about it, you know, and it fires you up. Apple kind of needs to do that. Like these people say
2:20:18they're not, you know, developers say they're not getting value from the App Store. Let's prove them
2:20:22wrong. Yeah. And I think that's that's good for everybody. Yeah. And then but my last, my last
2:20:28thing on the ripoff story is just that so many people whenever these things come up, say, well,
2:20:33what do you what do you expect Apple to do? Even the richest company in the world, there's if
2:20:36there's 100,000 new apps coming or updates coming through the App Store every week, and there's over
2:20:41a million apps in the App Store, how can they possibly compare every single app against every
2:20:45other one? That's not how you would police it. That that makes no sense. It's you start with the
2:20:52most popular apps, right? And so like if the 57,263rd most popular app gets ripped off,
2:21:02that shouldn't happen. There should be a good way for the rightful developer of that app,
2:21:1153,000 levels down in the popularity charts to register the complaint when they notice it and
2:21:17have it taken care of in a fair and judicious manner. But in terms of like catching this stuff
2:21:22before it even happens, starting with the most popular apps would be the way to go because who
2:21:27did? Why would you want to rip off the 53,000th most popular app, right? Whereas maybe the most
2:21:33popular app number one, maybe you'd want to rip off. Yeah, there's a value in that that is
2:21:39tangible and real and obvious. So that that would be my argument against why we should expect
2:21:46better from Apple. All right, last segment. I want to talk about sleep tracking. Now,
2:21:52you have an app, Sleep++. Merlin Mann, speaking of Merlin Mann, he was on the show about a year ago
2:22:00and turned me on to sleep tracking. And I don't know how, you know, this is typical of when
2:22:05Merlin's on the show. I have no idea how we got there. And it seemed bizarre to me. It just seemed
2:22:10again, like with the breathe thing. I don't know. It doesn't seem like something. I go to sleep when
2:22:14I'm tired. I wake up when I'm when I wake up. Yeah. Merlin said I should I guess I'd been having
2:22:20some sleep problems, which is rare for me. Usually I sleep like a baby. He said you should get Sleep++
2:22:25and I got the Sleep++. This was not, you know, a year ago, the watchOS didn't have built in
2:22:35sleep tracking, but it no, but Sleep++ could track your sleep. And there are other sleep tracking
2:22:42apps. I enjoy, I stuck with it. I still do it to this day. I enjoy it. I do notice some trends. I
2:22:50don't really have any sleep problems, but I enjoy it. I don't really understand how it works now.
2:22:56And I need you, I need you to explain, explain it to me. So you're asking like how watchOS 7 sleep
2:23:01tracking works? Well, I start with how did, how did it work? How did Sleep++ track my sleep before
2:23:07watchOS 7? Sure. So the way, so Sleep++ originally I used to use to kind of like this thing where on
2:23:16the watch you would like start us, you would say when you went to bed and say when you woke up,
2:23:21like you had to physically tap a button on the, on the watch. And that was because of a few,
2:23:24if you did that, it meant that I could access kind of, they had this power efficient way of showing
2:23:31me your motion during the night. And I could use that to kind of infer roughly how well you slept.
2:23:38And I knew the duration of your sleep because you've said, you know, I just went, I went to bed,
2:23:42I just, I'm going to bed and you tap it when you wake up. And that works well. And probably in some
2:23:47ways gives you more accurate data, but for most people, they don't want to have the last thing
2:23:52they do before they go to bed is hitting a button on their watch. And the first thing they do when
2:23:55they wake up is to hit another button. So it doesn't really scale very well. And so instead,
2:24:00what eventually I did is I worked out a way to like an Apple watch when it's attached to,
2:24:05attached to your wrist is always collecting a variety of sort of health and fitness metrics.
2:24:12So it's always collecting your step count. So it's trying to estimate essentially,
2:24:16does it seem like you're walking? And if you are walking, you know, how many steps have you taken?
2:24:21It's also collecting your active calories, which is what is shown in the red ring of your,
2:24:27you know, in the activity app. And it's about every six minutes or so, it'll take a heart rate
2:24:33reading, assuming your wrist is still and is, you know, close enough, like the watch is snug enough
2:24:40to your wrist that it can get a, get a reading, it'll record one about every six minutes.
2:24:44And essentially what I did is I used those three metrics to be able to pretty accurately estimate
2:24:53when it seems like you're in bed, and it's the same like when you are awake and moving. And,
2:24:59you know, a lot of that's just a bit of clever heuristics and looking at the data. And, you know,
2:25:04for a while I had the years of the time that I've been recording all these nights for myself using
2:25:11the old version where I was like manually starting and stopping, and I could use that to kind of
2:25:15build my model that Sleepless Plus is based on. And I would use that, you know, I can use that
2:25:20data to infer things about your night. I personally, it's like, as far as I can tell, any app that
2:25:26tries to tell you, like in very great detail, the sleep stages you're in and all the kind of deep
2:25:33sleep analysis stuff based on just automatic sleep tracking on an Apple Watch, like I'm a little
2:25:38suspect. I don't really see that as something that's possible with what that data is, but it's
2:25:42definitely possible to be able to identify when you're asleep and roughly are you sleeping well
2:25:49or not? Like, are you restless or are you awake? Are you, you know, every time you get up to use
2:25:54the bathroom in the night, you're going to take steps. And so I can say, "Oh, it looks like you're
2:25:57taking steps. Clearly you're not, you know, you're not walking. Unless you're sleepwalking, like,
2:26:01you're awake." And so that's what Sleepless Plus does to sort of create that model and to get the
2:26:09data. And then once you have the data, then it's just the fun part of showing it in ways that are
2:26:14useful, trying to show you trends, trying to give you a sense of your habits and your patterns,
2:26:19because sleep is kind of a weird health metric because you can't change it as easily as you can
2:26:26for a lot of things. Like, if you're trying to close your exercise ring, you can go for a walk.
2:26:32If you're trying to hit 10,000 steps, you can go for a walk. You can do things in a proactive way,
2:26:37but like telling someone you're not sleeping enough, like, there's things they could do to
2:26:42influence that. But if they're a new boy, like if they're a new parent, like, what are they going to
2:26:48do? Like, I'm sorry, like, I have a newborn who wakes me up every two hours. Yes, I'm sleep
2:26:52deprived. And like, I can measure that for you. But mostly what I can do is just give you a sense
2:26:57of when you wake up in the morning and you're like, "I am a wreck." Like, why am I—and you
2:27:02look at the thing and it's like, "Yeah, that's because you slept three hours last night."
2:27:05Like, that's a useful bit of information that I can at least affirm you with. But, you know,
2:27:09sleep tracking is weird in that way. And I think that's led to why Apple's implementation of sleep
2:27:14tracking is so weird. Hmm. So that's a good example to me of like the difference between
2:27:22a heuristic and an algorithm, which I guess the line is usually kind of fuzzy, you know,
2:27:28where does an algorithm turn into a heuristic? But like inferring when you sleep from a bunch of data
2:27:35that isn't really directly measuring sleep is, you know, that's a heuristic where you could be wrong.
2:27:43Yeah, I would have never used it in the first place if I had to start and stop it automatically.
2:27:47Sure.
2:27:48It's just, I just wouldn't remember to do it. And it's like, you know, and I wouldn't remember,
2:27:52I wouldn't remember, I don't know which end of the sleep I'd be less likely to remember. I guess
2:27:56at some point during the day, I'd remember, "Oh, I woke up and I guess I could go back." But—
2:28:00Yeah.
2:28:01Especially the going to sleep part, it's like the whole point of going to sleep is, "Oh, I'm
2:28:05fading off here. You know, I'm falling asleep. I better turn out the—put the iPad down and just
2:28:11close my eyes." It's like, I don't remember anything. So I—you know that I use the app
2:28:20because I've sent you feedback over the last year.
2:28:22You do.
2:28:22Including features—
2:28:27My quotes were wrong in one point. I miscapitalized a word, I believe.
2:28:31Well, and the big one was, up till four in the morning, you would get, it would classify,
2:28:39like if I fell asleep at three in the morning, it would count as last, you know, wouldn't say
2:28:45technically by the book that's Tuesday or Wednesday morning, but you would classify it as
2:28:53Tuesday night. And I would write to you and complain when I went to bed at like 4.15 that I was
2:29:00being put into the wrong day.
2:29:03My cutoff for the previous night's cut, like was it two or was it apparently not generous enough?
2:29:09That in my mind, people falling asleep at 4.15 are not considering that the night before sleep,
2:29:15but apparently I was wrong on that one.
2:29:17So I've been a big fan. But what now—WatchOS 7 officially supports sleep tracking at the system
2:29:29level. What is new from the system level, and what's new for you as—is this conducive to
2:29:39Sleep++ or is this sort of Sleep++ has sort of been Sherlocked?
2:29:44So that question is the easier one. So Sleep++' downloads have been up since WatchOS 7 came out.
2:29:52So it's clearly not, like if it's Sherlocked, it's Sherlocked in the best way possible that
2:29:55is involving more people downloading it, where it's, if Apple, if anything, Apple has created
2:30:00awareness that sleep tracking is a thing you want to use your watch for, which previously I had to
2:30:05convince people that that was possible and that they should try and charge your watch when you're
2:30:09showering so that you can wear it overnight. I had to kind of do that kind of messaging and convince
2:30:14people that, well, I charge my watch overnight. If I don't charge it overnight, when am I ever
2:30:18going to have my watch charged? And you've quickly realized that if you charge it when you're getting
2:30:22ready in the morning and when you're getting ready for bed, it's very easy to typically,
2:30:26like for a normal person, to have your watch charged. But I think what's Apple doing it is
2:30:33just, what's tricky about it is they're, I think they're limited by the battery life of the Apple
2:30:38watch and the level of analysis and detail that they can pull out of you while you're sleeping.
2:30:45That for all their, like their fancy algorithms and for all they're trying to do, like they're
2:30:50machine learning and it's, you know, sure second to none. But the reality is they're still only
2:30:55collecting motion data heart rate every six, every six minutes. And that's it. Like if you imagine
2:31:02the sensors that are active during the night, and I suppose they could potentially be using
2:31:05the microphone, I'm not sure about that, but there's a limit to what they can do with that.
2:31:11And so they, I think, decided early on, it seems, or at least at this point, is they're not going
2:31:17down the road of clinical analysis of your sleep. They're not trying to, so in my development work
2:31:25for Sleepless Plus, for a while I was wearing a variety of like more dedicated sleep tracking
2:31:31devices. And there are ones that do continuous heart rate monitoring throughout the night.
2:31:36And so this is, you know, essentially the mode that your watch is in when you're running a
2:31:40workout, it's running a mode like that continuously. And so it's tracking your heart rate,
2:31:45you know, multiple times per second. And with that kind of data, if you have continuous heart rate
2:31:50data, you can really start to get into the weeds potentially about sleep stages. And, you know,
2:31:54REM sleep has a different heart rate and respiratory rate than slow wave sleep,
2:32:00or then light sleep, where they can very easily tell when you're awake and when you're asleep,
2:32:04because motion is a pretty bad metric for awake and asleep. Because if you're lying in bed reading,
2:32:10and especially if you're reading on something like an iPad where you don't have to move your
2:32:13wrist to turn the page, like you could very easily be lying in bed completely still,
2:32:17but be completely awake. And there's no way for the watch to know that other than heart rate,
2:32:23because your heart rate goes down when you fall asleep. And I think because Apple doesn't want it,
2:32:27they don't have the battery budget to run the heart rate data all night long, they are limited
2:32:33in kind of mostly they can just do the kind of things I do in Sleepless Plus, where they can say,
2:32:38"It seems like you slept about this long, and you were generally asleep in ways that we can
2:32:44be confident about this often." And I think that's meant that they, instead, rather than being a
2:32:50clinical approach with sleep tracking, they're going the behavioral model for sleep tracking,
2:32:54and they're just trying to do all the things that they can say. It's like, "We're going to
2:32:58influence—you can make good choices to help you wind down and kick off this shortcut an hour."
2:33:05Now it's time for wind down, and you'll get a little tap on your wrist and say, "Hey,
2:33:09you said you wanted to go to bed at 10 o'clock. It's 9.30. Maybe you should calm down. Would you
2:33:16like to listen to some calm music?" They're going down that road where it's very much like this
2:33:22behavioral modification version of sleep tracking, which I think makes sense because of the data they
2:33:27have and because of what they could show you. They don't overpromise and say that it's a really
2:33:33powerful sleep tracker, because it isn't. There are better sleep trackers out there. If you have
2:33:38sleep apnea and need to track your sleep in great detail, the Apple Watch is not the device for you.
2:33:44But what they're saying is, hopefully, the Apple Watch ends with sleep tracking on the Apple Watch
2:33:48and WatchOS 7, it'll encourage you to sleep more and to have better sleep patterns and hygiene that
2:33:56you're going to turn off your phone earlier and you're going to go to bed at a more consistent
2:34:02time, which are the actual changes that you can actually make to your sleep. You can't change if
2:34:07your kid wakes you up in the night, but you can certainly turn off your phone an hour before you
2:34:12go to bed and not just stay up late reading Twitter or watching movies. That's a choice
2:34:17that you can make, and so they can encourage you there. And then for the actual data perspective,
2:34:23my model gets a little bit better because now they're also recording. The Apple Watch records
2:34:28when it thinks I'm asleep. And so that is a confirmation or an adjustment that I can feed
2:34:34into my model. Because if I didn't think you were awake, but the Apple Watch does think you're awake,
2:34:40there's a very good chance they're right and I'm wrong because they're operating at a much lower
2:34:44level, even if not with necessarily way more data. They definitely have a better amount of data,
2:34:51and certainly better machine learning and a giant team of data scientists, I'm sure, who've finally
2:34:56tuned their model. I'm just a guy in my basement writing codes. So you've got to imagine their data
2:35:01is better than mine, so my model got better in watchOS 7. But for people who just want to track
2:35:07their trends and get a sense of, "When do I go to bed on Tuesday nights?" The Health app is hopeless
2:35:12for that kind of stuff. So Sleepless Plus is an app that is useful for everybody, even if they
2:35:18do have watchOS 7 and use the system sleep tracking. Right. Like maybe Tuesday nights is
2:35:23your basketball league or your volleyball and you exercise it, but it's for working professionals
2:35:28and you play late games and you're exercising late in the day. And, oh wow, look at that. Every
2:35:34Tuesday night I actually wind up sleeping earlier because I did this exercise, even though it was
2:35:40later at night. Or maybe vice versa, maybe you come home and you're excited because you were,
2:35:44you know, one way or the other, you might notice a trend. Yeah, I don't know why I kept up with it. I
2:35:51honestly enjoy it. It's just interesting to me, and I did notice some trends. I don't know if it's
2:36:01because of it. I have been going to bed earlier. I'm looking at my last seven days. I'm nowhere
2:36:06close to 4 a.m. So sure, that's good. I don't need to like undo the John Gruber feature where I
2:36:13push that to 6 a.m. No, but it is interesting and I'm glad to hear it. You know that it's like
2:36:19to raise the awareness. I find it fascinating to do it. And I think like with all of the Apple Watch
2:36:27sensors, I'm not sure any one of them is more accurate than a dedicated sensor, right? Like the
2:36:33pedometer aspect is pretty close in my opinion. Like the times where I've actually like
2:36:40like at Disney World or something. Like I haven't done it in years because it's got just too
2:36:46accurate. But like you where you could go on Google Maps and measure a long walk and see what
2:36:52the watch said. The watch was accurate enough where I don't know that any kind of pedometer
2:36:56would be more accurate. But like for all most of the sensors, sure, you're going to get a more
2:37:02accurate blood oxygen level from a dedicated blood oxygen sensor than the one on the watch, but it's
2:37:08good to have it on the watch, right? And I think with that, it's what the value of the sensors on
2:37:15the Apple Watch is there sort of the fact that they're always happening in the background and
2:37:20you don't have to think about it. You don't have to go and look and like if you had a blood oxygen
2:37:24sensor, you can have one of those little like finger clippy things that you picked up at CVS
2:37:28Pharmacy. You'd have to go and remember to use it regularly for that data to be useful. Whereas what
2:37:35the Apple Watch is doing is it's just always on in the background. There's like this ephemeral data
2:37:40collection that you can then go back and look at. And that's I think where it becomes really
2:37:46powerful. It isn't that it's the best at any one of those things necessarily. I think of the way
2:37:51that Apple would say that they have the best camera in the world. I think that's a comment
2:37:57that they would say, and they really mean it. When they say they're the best camera company in the
2:38:00world, they mean it. And I don't think they would say that they are the best sleep tracker in the
2:38:05world. And if they do, they're being a bit disingenuous because a dedicated device that is
2:38:10doing huge amounts of things and is probably the size of a small iPad that you have to strap to
2:38:15your head, that's probably going to be able to get more data out of it. But it's a good device. It can
2:38:21give you enough data to encourage behavioral change and to give you awareness. Because I think what
2:38:27you were saying, it's like you don't know why you do it, but you still kept up with it with sleep
2:38:30tracking. What I've seen time and time again from customers is it's just making you aware of
2:38:36something that you otherwise would never be aware of. Because you're never going to write down every
2:38:40morning when you wake up, "When did I go to bed? When did I wake up?" and just keep track of it.
2:38:43You're never going to do that. So it's never going to be a data that you can be aware of. And so once
2:38:49it's something that is measurable and is measurable in a way that is ephemeral, you don't have to do
2:38:53any work for it. The only work you have to do to track your sleep with an Apple Watch is make sure
2:39:01that it's charged before you go to sleep. And you just get into a few habits with that of charging
2:39:06it and you'll be fine. And once you've done that, now that data is there. And you don't have to check
2:39:11in on it all the time. Like if you didn't open Sleep++ for three weeks and then you open it again,
2:39:16I'll still have all the data that has been collected during that period. And it's available
2:39:20to you, and if you're curious about it or it becomes a thing that you're aware of and it helps
2:39:26you make choices that are like—it's not like it's punitive, but if you don't get a lot of sleep,
2:39:31the line in Sleep++ that was that night will turn a subtle shade of red. And it'll be like, "Hey,
2:39:38maybe that wasn't so good." And it's not going to be mean about it, but it's just saying, "Hey,
2:39:43that's a situation you found yourself in, and it could be better." And that's because you don't
2:39:49have to think about it. It's great. Don't eat three slices of pepperoni pizza at 12.30.
2:39:52Yeah. So it's like, "I do that." I will say the other thing I got confused about upgrading to
2:39:58watchOS 7, which I did by starting with this new review unit watch, was I went through,
2:40:05like I said, I set up the defaults. I was interested in the sleep tracking feature,
2:40:10and they were like, "Do you want to track your sleep?" And it's like, "Okay." And it's like,
2:40:12"What time do you usually go to bed?" And you put it in. And then all of a sudden,
2:40:16without really asking for it, I was set up with the, "Hey, it's an hour from now. You want to go
2:40:22to bed? Do you want to start winding down?" And it locks your phone out. And it's like,
2:40:26"I don't want this. I find it patronizing. I'm a grown man. I don't need to be told to go to bed."
2:40:32And again, if you like the feature, maybe you do need it. Maybe you get distracted and you play
2:40:38video games later tonight. And it's helpful for you to have your watch say, "Hey, maybe you should
2:40:43go to bed," and you'd lost track of time. I'm not saying, I don't want to be too judgmental about
2:40:47it, but I hate the feature. But I also feel like part of that is Apple's desire to save battery
2:40:53life because you go into that sleep mode on watchOS 7, and it turns the always-on display off,
2:41:00and you have to tap it to see something. And you can see why Apple, as a company that wants to both
2:41:06encourage people who are interested to wear their watch all night, but also doesn't want people to
2:41:11feel like now they don't know when to charge it, to encourage them to use a mode where the screen
2:41:17goes completely off, even with a "always-on display." And I think that sleep mode,
2:41:24I mean, previously I've always had to just put it in—I got into the habit, I always flipped my
2:41:28watch into theater mode when I got into bed, because that was just the way you had to do it
2:41:33before. But what's weird with the sleep mode is the way that Apple tries to schedule it and have
2:41:38it be this automatic thing where I find it kind of annoying where it also turns off the sleep mode in
2:41:46the morning based on the time that you've said that you typically wake up. And I've definitely
2:41:52had times when I'm sleeping in for whatever reason—I went to bed late, or I was up in the
2:41:58night with a kid or whatever it is—and I feel like I've been woken up by the bright light of the
2:42:04always—my new Apple Watch has a very bright always-on display, which they talked all about
2:42:10it in the thing. It's twice as bright or three times as bright or whatever it is. They are true,
2:42:15because in a dark room it has woken me up. And I did not set an alarm. I did not want this bright,
2:42:21blaring light to be from my wrist as I'm lying my arms next to me on the pillow. And so I wish
2:42:29that they didn't quite go down that road of it being so scheduled. It's like, "No, when I go to
2:42:35bed, I'll hit the button. I'm in a dark room. It's going to be very obvious that I have not put it in
2:42:40sleep mode yet. And in the morning when I wake up, it's going to be very obvious when I look for the
2:42:44time and my screen is black. And turning my wrist, it still is black. I'm going to remember to turn
2:42:50off sleep mode." And so I think that's—I've turned almost all of that off at this point for myself.
2:42:54I had it on just so I'd know how it worked, but for myself, I've turned it all off and I just
2:42:58manually put it in sleep mode and manually take it out of sleep mode in the morning.
2:43:01Yeah, that's what I do too. And the only thing I automate is I automate Do Not Disturb,
2:43:05which is what I've been doing ever since it was a feature. When I say, "Just don't send me
2:43:09notifications between this hour and that hour," but then other than that, I manage it manually.
2:43:16Yeah, and God help you. I mean, the only thing worse than your always-on Series 6
2:43:21bright display waking you up in the middle of the night is waking up whoever you are in bed with.
2:43:26Yes, that's not what you want. Why is there this beaming beacon of light stuck in our bed? This is
2:43:35not sustainable. It is. But it's always like, "Be careful what you wish for." It's like,
2:43:41I've been clamoring for an always-on display since the very first watch. I spent an embarrassing
2:43:45amount of my Series 0 watch review complaining about the fact that the display isn't always on,
2:43:51and I thought it was nothing but upside once they get the battery life to the point. And then I went
2:43:55to bed with a very bright watch and I was like, "Oh, there is a downside." All right. Well, you
2:44:03have been extremely generous with your time in an extraordinarily busy week. But what a great time
2:44:10to have you on the show for the first time, David. I really appreciate it. So your apps,
2:44:1659 apps, we can't talk about all of them, but there's WidgetSmith and WatchSmith and Sleep++,
2:44:22which we've mentioned. Any other apps you want to toss out there?
2:44:25I think the only other app that I think is that's been a standby for me for many years is Perometer
2:44:31++, which is my step-counting app. And I feel like those four, WidgetSmith, WatchSmith, Sleep++,
2:44:37and Perometer++, that's my business at this point. Those are the ones that have survived out of the
2:44:4259. Yeah. You know what? And speaking about, you said how you did a calendar app and that helped
2:44:47you with WidgetSmith. Being so hooked into the health system had to have been a huge leg up,
2:44:53because that's just not Apple's fault. It is complicated because it has to be complicated
2:44:59for privacy reasons alone. Yes. It is one of the more convoluted systems, for a good reason. And
2:45:09I think they do a really good job of making it usable, but also, yeah, there are a lot of
2:45:16weird edge cases in the health system that I've spent a lot of time and a lot of gray hairs on.
2:45:21Right, with Perometer+ and gray hairs, plus, plus.
2:45:27Podcast-wise, you do have a podcast with Marco Arment, Under the Radar, which you can search for
2:45:34in your podcast app of choice, which is probably Overcast.
2:45:39I hope so.
2:45:39And it will probably show up as the number one hit and not number two,
2:45:44from a podcast called Under the Radar Color Podcasts. Yeah.
2:45:53Thank you so much for being here. What else? Oh, of course, Twitter, you are
2:45:57_DavidSmith, where the underscore is an actual underscore.
2:46:02Yeah.
2:46:03Have you ever seen—there's an old—I think it was McSweeney's Internet Tendencies, where it was like
2:46:1310 worst email addresses in history to read over the phone.
2:46:18Oh, I think I've seen this kind of thing, yeah, where it's certain punctuations and things,
2:46:22or is it actually a word or is it a number? Right, it's a mixture of like, you know,
2:46:27U-N-D-E-R-S-C-O-R-E underscore. But then, you know, anyway, I'll put it in the show notes. I swear.
2:46:33It occurred to me whether or not your underscore in _DavidSmith is an underscore or the word,
2:46:42but people will find you. Anyway, thank you so much. It has been an absolute delight.
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