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Connected

249: Federighi Snapped His Fingers

 

00:00:00   (upbeat music)

00:00:02   - Hello and welcome to Connected episode 249.

00:00:12   It's made possible this week by our sponsors,

00:00:15   KiwiCo, Squarespace, and Pingdom.

00:00:18   My name is Steven Hackett and I'm joined by Myke Hurley.

00:00:21   - Hello.

00:00:22   - Welcome back.

00:00:23   - Thank you for filling in for me last week.

00:00:24   I was in Romania and had no stable wifi connection.

00:00:28   Well David Sparks filled in for you.

00:00:31   I was me, like I don't really am.

00:00:34   So thank David.

00:00:35   Always be yourself, Steven.

00:00:37   Never change.

00:00:38   And we are also joined by Federico Vittucci.

00:00:40   Hello everybody, how are you Steven?

00:00:42   I'm good.

00:00:43   We're all together, at least for this week.

00:00:46   And we have some follow-up to talk about.

00:00:48   You don't.

00:00:49   I do.

00:00:50   You can tell Myke's back because this is all of his follow-up.

00:00:51   It's all my follow-up.

00:00:52   My gift for missing last week is I've provided the entire follow-up section single-handedly,

00:00:57   I'm now going to deliver it all to you.

00:01:00   Okay, I'm ready.

00:01:02   Bluetooth controllers for the Apple TV.

00:01:04   This is part of my persona as the Apple TV expert.

00:01:07   So we heard--

00:01:08   It's not a persona, you are the Apple TV expert.

00:01:11   Yes, sorry, my life as the Apple TV expert,

00:01:15   the TV OS expert.

00:01:16   We found out from lots of people

00:01:18   over the last couple of weeks

00:01:19   the reason why Apple called out very specifically

00:01:22   the Xbox One S controller on stage,

00:01:25   And it's because for some really weird reason, the original Xbox One and the original Xbox Elite controller are not Bluetooth.

00:01:33   I don't know why Microsoft decided to do this, but they used a technology that wasn't Bluetooth.

00:01:38   And it's the Xbox One S and later, including the Xbox One X and the Xbox Elite controller two, which is not out yet, but it's coming out soon.

00:01:47   They all have Bluetooth. So that's why.

00:01:49   and we can now close the case.

00:01:51   So the case is now closed on why Apple said Xbox One S controller.

00:01:56   Yeah.

00:01:56   You know, if Apple had been more clear about this,

00:01:59   you could have had a KBase case to close.

00:02:03   I'm going to ignore this comment.

00:02:04   And I'm going to say that I bought a dual shot.

00:02:09   So I have an Xbox One X controller that works with the iPad Pro.

00:02:15   I played around with... I was playing Oddmar, which is a very nice looking platform game on iPad.

00:02:22   I don't love the Xbox controller. I still... I prefer the... I just prefer the DualShock.

00:02:28   So I... You know me, I could have used the DualShock that I already have for the PS4 Pro,

00:02:35   but who wants to pair and unpair a controller every single time you want to switch between

00:02:40   the PlayStation and the iPad Pro? So I bought a DualShock 4 just for the iPad Pro.

00:02:45   A white one which looks really nice.

00:02:50   I go backwards and forwards on the DualShock compared to the Xbox controller.

00:02:54   I really like the way the Elite controller feels.

00:02:57   It is very comfortable to hold.

00:02:58   Yes, but it's a little too heavy.

00:03:02   It is heavy.

00:03:03   I'll give you that.

00:03:04   It's a lot of metal inside.

00:03:06   It's a very serious controller, but for the price they charge, it should be.

00:03:10   It's like $150 or something.

00:03:12   And I feel bad because every time I'm playing with that controller, and at this point I'm

00:03:16   fully aware of the fact that we've lost Steven completely, but every time I play with that

00:03:22   controller I feel bad that I'm not as pro as the controller is.

00:03:26   I feel like I'm not a good enough gamer.

00:03:29   So Steven, this controller allows you to physically change the way that it operates.

00:03:36   It has these latches in it to change the triggers to only need to be fired.

00:03:41   you know, so you know like on a game controller you pull down the trigger on the back right,

00:03:45   like on the back left, you can pull them down halfway, so it's called like a hair trigger,

00:03:51   but that's for like if you're really good at first person shooters and the literal time

00:03:56   that it takes to pull the trigger all the way down means that you would get killed,

00:04:00   I am not even nearly at that level as a gamer.

00:04:04   No, but I have found that for like, for RSI stuff that controller has been really good

00:04:10   for me because I can do things like that, right?

00:04:12   So like the the amount of pressure that I need to exert on the controller is way less.

00:04:17   So I have found that controller to be very comfortable.

00:04:19   You can also remove the analog sticks and replace them with different analog sticks.

00:04:25   Like it's it's like a whole big thing.

00:04:26   The Xbox Elite controller is wild.

00:04:29   Why did you do that?

00:04:30   Ah, because it felt very fancy to do.

00:04:32   Ah, OK. I like to take all of these pieces are held on by magnets as well.

00:04:38   Yes, which is kind of fancy.

00:04:39   And I like to just take them off and put them back on again.

00:04:42   But you can change the height of the stick.

00:04:45   It's all it's all it's all very obscene, really.

00:04:48   Sure. It's a very nice control.

00:04:50   I can see why people are into that.

00:04:52   It's like it's like when you're when you're on a very fancy flight.

00:04:55   And when I am, I always like to order everything available.

00:05:00   And so like with the Xbox controller, I'm like, I'm drunk on sticks.

00:05:04   I have all these sticks and all these buttons that I can customize like.

00:05:08   Yes, give me all the sticks and all the things that I can change and I will change them.

00:05:12   And I've done that.

00:05:13   And it comes with like a braided cable and like a hard case, like a, and all that kind

00:05:17   of stuff.

00:05:18   Yes, so I've changed everything and now I'm not sure if I know how to put it back together.

00:05:22   Like there was an original configuration when I took it out of the box.

00:05:26   Who knows what that is now?

00:05:27   But who knows what it is now?

00:05:28   So it, you know, the sticks have been changed and it's very heavy.

00:05:34   It's very metal.

00:05:35   There's a lot of metal parts, which is probably not good for the weight, but it's super fancy

00:05:42   when you look at it.

00:05:43   But the current one you cannot use with the Apple TV or the iPad Pro, but there is a second

00:05:48   version coming out at some point this year which you will be able to just connect Bluetooth

00:05:52   in.

00:05:53   Yeah, alright.

00:05:54   I have more TV OS related stuff for you, obviously.

00:05:56   And of course you are the TV OS expert.

00:05:59   So Adrian, do you remember last time I was talking about how Control Center will be nice

00:06:03   because it will give us a quick way to change audio output.

00:06:06   Yes.

00:06:07   Turns out there is a shortcut.

00:06:09   Adrian wrote in to let me know, and Adrian was very disappointed

00:06:12   because I was the TV OS expert and didn't know this, as is right.

00:06:16   Everyone should be disappointed.

00:06:17   You can change the sound output by long pressing the play button,

00:06:21   but only on the home screen, which seems kind of silly.

00:06:25   So you only on the home screen, only on the home screen.

00:06:29   So not inside of any apps.

00:06:30   I'm pretty sure that I do it everywhere.

00:06:33   No, you can do the pull down from the top and change it, but to press and hold down

00:06:38   the play button only works on the home screen.

00:06:40   I don't think it does work on the home screen.

00:06:42   I think it works everywhere.

00:06:43   The long press the play button.

00:06:45   I have tried it in a couple of different applications and it didn't work.

00:06:49   I'm clearly not a good enough expert.

00:06:51   Well, you are a newly minted expert.

00:06:53   That's true, I'm still getting my wings.

00:06:55   I have more stuff for you that might be a little bit more expert.

00:06:58   - The picture in picture is coming to tvOS 13.

00:07:01   - Okay, so how does it work?

00:07:03   - You'll be able to watch video

00:07:04   while you're browsing the Apple TV, you know.

00:07:07   - Okay, well.

00:07:08   - I'm not convinced that this feature is as useful

00:07:12   on the Apple TV as it is on the iPad,

00:07:14   but it's possible to do if you wanna do it.

00:07:17   - Just think how great it will be

00:07:19   that you can open all of your shopping apps

00:07:21   on your Apple TV and scroll through

00:07:25   virtual racks of clothing while streaming video

00:07:27   in picture in picture. No, but OK.

00:07:29   But maybe on a more

00:07:31   serious note, maybe

00:07:33   you could like if Google

00:07:35   supports it, well, you know, LOL,

00:07:37   maybe in a couple of years.

00:07:39   But in theory, you could do things

00:07:42   like open a YouTube video, put

00:07:44   it in picture in picture and then

00:07:45   continue browsing YouTube to, I

00:07:47   don't know, browse other channels

00:07:48   and other stuff or things like,

00:07:50   for example, something literally the

00:07:52   only app that I use on my Apple TV

00:07:54   that is not video related is

00:07:56   home cam, which allows me to check on my home kit cameras.

00:08:00   It's got like a grid of real time video feeds from my home cameras.

00:08:05   So in theory, I could I should be able to I don't know if I want to check on

00:08:08   whatever is going on on the balcony or what the dogs are doing in the other room.

00:08:12   I should be able to like while I'm watching the office, enable picture in picture,

00:08:17   quickly check on my cameras and while the video is still playing.

00:08:21   So. So what I don't know, I haven't been able to confirm this,

00:08:26   is if you can watch multiple video streams at once. Now that would be the only real good

00:08:32   use right? That you could have something playing and you could watch another video but I've

00:08:38   not been able to confirm if that's the case. Like that doesn't work on iOS right? You can't

00:08:43   have a video playing and then watch another video. So I'm expecting it's probably the

00:08:47   same because one good use for picture in picture is sports right? So like there's multiple

00:08:55   events happening at the same time, right? And you can watch multiple things. I've not

00:08:59   been able to confirm if it works with one video or another, maybe people can let me

00:09:04   know. I'm not running the tvOS beta on my Apple TV.

00:09:08   What? Wow. You're not a sham of an expert.

00:09:13   I know. tvOS 13 is also bringing something called wireless audio sync. So if you're using

00:09:19   multiple devices with Airplay, you can use an iOS device to test and correct audio latency.

00:09:25   That's cool.

00:09:26   For multiple device setups. It is actually pretty cool. And they have an interesting UI,

00:09:29   which I'll put a link in the show notes, to a tweet from Steve Moser. And they show a bunch

00:09:37   of the setup stuff for that. Like it plays tones and then it's measured from the TV to the iOS

00:09:41   device and then it calibrates it. See, this is the kind of info that you would only get from a

00:09:45   a TVOS expert. Exactly. Me, not Steve Moser. Or if you follow Steve Moser on Twitter. Don't

00:09:52   follow Steve Moser, follow Myke Hurley. He tweets just for me. We love you Steve. We

00:10:00   have Myke Hurley here. You don't need any more than that, surely. Let's be real. Change

00:10:11   hats, and now you are the folding phone expert. So what is going on in the folding phone scene?

00:10:17   I have an important set of updates for folding phones. I just feel like nobody else is going

00:10:22   to give you this information, so I'm going to do it, whether you want it or not. Huawei

00:10:26   have postponed the launch of the Mate X. It was supposed to be coming out this month,

00:10:33   and it's been moved to September. A Huawei representative has said that they are wanting

00:10:38   to work on improving the screen quality of the device. Huawei are not saying it has anything

00:10:44   to do with the crazy situation that they're in right now and the fact that they won't

00:10:49   be able to use Android anymore possibly, but I think it probably has a little bit to do

00:10:53   with that. It may also be something to do with improving the screen technology, but

00:10:59   I think that the timing of this delay would indicate that maybe they're also hoping they

00:11:04   and it can try and sort out their situation with Google

00:11:09   and/or the American government before they try

00:11:13   and put this incredibly expensive phone on sale

00:11:16   because you'd be a fool to buy it, I think, at this point,

00:11:20   to spend that money on a phone

00:11:22   that may never receive a software update.

00:11:24   And Huawei are making a bunch of claims right now

00:11:27   about the updates that they will be able to apply

00:11:30   that seem tricky to follow based upon the facts

00:11:33   everybody else is giving so they have delayed their phone so they're not going to be beating

00:11:40   yet Samsung to market which we hope they would. Apparently the Samsung Galaxy Fold is quote

00:11:47   "ready to hit the market". A vice president for Samsung's display division said this during a

00:11:52   speech in a different place that had nothing to do with the Galaxy Fold. What kind of speech?

00:11:57   like a wedding speech. He was like "at a dinner" or something and says "Most of the display

00:12:03   problems have been ironed out and the fold is ready to hit the market." I don't like

00:12:07   that sentence, by the way. I want to read that again for you. "Most of the display

00:12:10   problems have been ironed out, the fold is ready to hit the market." Wait a second.

00:12:15   At a dinner speech, right? No, but like shouldn't you fix all of them? Before you put it out,

00:12:20   like why just most of them? Like let's fix them all first. It's fine. And then we can

00:12:25   work it out, right?

00:12:26   And when else are they fixed?

00:12:29   This is in contrast to some other comments from Samsung, and this was a report from The

00:12:35   Verge, where there was a rumor that it was going to be coming out in July, and Samsung

00:12:40   were basically like "well, if it was, you would have expected we would have had an event

00:12:43   by now, and we're not having one", which is basically a kind of way to say "no it's not",

00:12:49   which is now leading people to believe that this phone may debut alongside the Galaxy

00:12:54   Note because if they are getting ready to ship this thing, they will be having another

00:13:01   event in August or September and they'll have the Galaxy Note coming out.

00:13:05   But that's whether Samsung will want to put both of these two phones on sale at the same

00:13:09   time.

00:13:10   Samsung have not given up yet.

00:13:12   They're going to release a phone at this event.

00:13:14   The old one caught fire and the other phone they're going to announce used to break after

00:13:18   two days of use.

00:13:20   To be fair, it was two versions of the Note ago that caught fire, but yes, in previous

00:13:25   instances yes, this phone has caught fire.

00:13:28   And then the next one was just a complete failure.

00:13:33   So this is going to be a really interesting event, I expect.

00:13:38   So that is your folding phone update.

00:13:40   Thank you.

00:13:41   I'm still going to buy the Samsung Galaxy Fold FYI.

00:13:45   If it comes out, I'm still buying it.

00:13:47   Because I really want it.

00:13:48   Can't help it.

00:13:49   we need to do an intervention here.

00:13:51   - I am who I am, okay?

00:13:54   - Sure.

00:13:54   - Never change, Myke, never change.

00:13:58   One last quick bit of follow up,

00:14:01   more of a reminder of something coming in the future.

00:14:04   So it's like a follow forward.

00:14:07   We are having our live show in San Francisco

00:14:10   on August 22nd to mark Relay FM's fifth birthday.

00:14:15   Myke and I will be there along with a bunch

00:14:17   of Really FM Hosts for this sort of extravaganza thing we are planning.

00:14:22   There's still some tickets left so there's a link in the show notes to go check those

00:14:25   out and I would say that there is no place on earth too far to travel from for this event.

00:14:31   It's a bold claim but...

00:14:33   The problem is if you say "well this place is too far" then you've put a line in the

00:14:37   sand and there's no lines in the sand when it comes to great podcast content.

00:14:41   That's true actually.

00:14:44   the company motto actually. It's not the company motto. Okay this episode of

00:14:52   Connected is brought to you by KiwiCo. If you have kids you know how great it is

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00:17:01   So on last week's show, you both spoke about this rumour of a smaller, it's difficult to

00:17:07   say smaller phone, smaller iPhone.

00:17:09   It is what, like the, an iPhone 10 with the screen size of an iPhone 6, which would therefore

00:17:18   make it a physically smaller phone in a bunch of ways because they would most likely shrink

00:17:24   the body down, right?

00:17:26   Which is 5.4 inches I should say.

00:17:28   So it's a little bit different in size, right?

00:17:31   It's like 4.7 inches was the iPhone 6,

00:17:34   but a 5.4 inch iPhone 10 style phone

00:17:39   would probably be quite small, right?

00:17:42   - Yeah. - Because you go, yeah.

00:17:44   So let's just assume smaller phone, effectively.

00:17:47   So you was talking about that,

00:17:48   and then Underscore David Smith wrote a quick blog post.

00:17:52   The developer of Podometer++, right,

00:17:54   has a large user base.

00:17:56   And Underscore found out that nearly 50% of the devices used to run his application were

00:18:02   the iPhone 6 size 4.7 inch screen, which is an interesting statistic.

00:18:08   I'm not 100% sure what to draw from it.

00:18:12   Dave kind of draws the conclusion that like, maybe people just really like that size.

00:18:19   Which I'm sure they do.

00:18:21   Yeah, I mean, if you still have that phone, I guess you like that phone in the sense that

00:18:29   you like any object that you own that you need to pay for again.

00:18:34   Like I just like, I would like to talk about like, do they like it on like on a deep, like

00:18:40   sentimental level in the context of, oh, I'm never ever going to switch to a bigger iPhone

00:18:46   because I really like this one.

00:18:48   Or is it more like, well, this iPhone 7 or 6s already works, why should I buy a new one?

00:18:57   So it's not like a fundamental, intentional decision.

00:19:03   It's just, you know, it's an old phone and it still works, whatever.

00:19:06   It's not like they love it, they just accept it for what it is and eventually they're going

00:19:12   to move on.

00:19:13   I don't know.

00:19:14   There were a lot of years of that size, right?

00:19:17   So you got the iPhone 6, the 6s, the 7 and the 8.

00:19:20   They were all that size, right?

00:19:23   So that's many years.

00:19:24   I think it's also worth noting and I'm not we're not making an argument

00:19:28   against small phones here, but just like as like a counterpoint.

00:19:32   The other thing worth remembering is like that was the peak in iPhone sales.

00:19:36   Yeah. So yeah, like there are a lot of those because

00:19:41   that was when the iPhone sales really went through the roof, right? It was like the six.

00:19:46   And it was during this time frame that the prices crept up and up and up. And so people who have

00:19:52   a 6s or a 7 to replace that phone is now going to cost them more than it would have. And so,

00:19:58   you know, they're holding on to it longer. There's a lot of them out there. This is a multi

00:20:02   factor deal here. It's not as simple as, you know, which is one reason I don't think.

00:20:09   So like I have no doubt that people like the phone at that size and don't want a bigger phone.

00:20:15   Like I totally get it because if they did want, if everybody just wanted bigger phones,

00:20:19   you would see more of the plus phones in David's statistics, which is not the case, right? Like

00:20:24   there are still a lot of those, but it's not as high as the regular size ones. But I think that

00:20:32   there is a lot of play here. I am genuinely like, I think it is a great idea to make a smaller phone.

00:20:38   I think there is something super weird about people that are currently using the iPhone XS

00:20:44   and will go to the iPhone 11 that the iPhone 12 it probably won't be called the 11s right if it's in

00:20:52   2020 because it would be like a new screen size so I can't imagine that they would

00:20:56   keep it as an S but anyway we can that's we have multiple years to work that one

00:21:02   I would be... it's interesting to me that people would just be like, "okay, so my phone's smaller."

00:21:08   That seems strange to me, right? Like if you're on that size, that's the size you want. You want the

00:21:15   newest, latest, and greatest phones, so you don't want to go to the R. That now your phone will just

00:21:20   be a smaller phone, like in screen size and physical size. I don't see them doing that. I

00:21:26   mean, I think they'll they would split the product line again. Is that what you think? Because that's

00:21:31   That's not, I mean like Minchi Quo seems to kind of like hint that it's three phones.

00:21:35   You think there'll be four?

00:21:38   I mean if you're talking like two cycles down, I mean if a small phone is gonna make a comeback,

00:21:44   I think that's the only way they do it.

00:21:45   I don't think they take the, what is now the mainline phone and make that smaller.

00:21:52   That would be weird.

00:21:54   So who knows, like you said we have years to figure that out.

00:21:58   One thing that I'm looking at this chart that David did and I found it really interesting

00:22:04   that out of his user base the iPhone XS is 3% but the iPhone 5s which is old is 4%.

00:22:13   He does not have a lot of brand new phones in this chart.

00:22:17   Now part of it is that they've only been on the market for what is six months now.

00:22:22   And they also sell less.

00:22:23   They sell less of them and you get the iPhone 10 at 9%.

00:22:31   That phone was only on the market for one year.

00:22:33   Remember the 10 went away when the XS and XR came out.

00:22:37   I think the X was a...

00:22:39   We don't know because they don't share unit numbers anymore, but I think the X was maybe

00:22:44   a high point again, relatively speaking, and the XS and XS Max and XR are well below that.

00:22:51   This is just looking at a subset of the App Store, of course, but it's a pretty interesting

00:22:57   relationship between all these phones, and one that I didn't anticipate.

00:22:59   I figured, "Oh, I'll find the XS.

00:23:01   It'll be one of these big chunks."

00:23:02   And it just isn't.

00:23:03   No, I think one of the reasons that makes David's data worth sharing and talking about

00:23:11   is because Podometer++ seems to be such a mainstream application, right?

00:23:16   like he has especially compared to most of the people that are kind of like in

00:23:21   our community like he probably has one of the most diverse groups of people like

00:23:29   of customers I mean like he says one thing I mean this is probably gonna be a

00:23:32   problem for him iOS 13 is gonna gonna kill 17% of his user base because he'll

00:23:38   lose the 5s the 6 and 6 plus yeah the phone slowly evaporate out of their cases

00:23:43   as the night iOS 13 comes out.

00:23:45   It's like the underscore just snaps your fingers and all those phones just disappear.

00:23:49   I think Craig Federighi snapped his finger is actually how that works.

00:23:54   Podometer++ is the only app out of all of our friends, out of all the people I know

00:23:58   who make iPhone apps, that is the only app I've seen on like a random family member's

00:24:04   home screen.

00:24:06   No offense to Overcast or Peacock or anybody else, I've never seen those out on my cousin's

00:24:12   wife's phone or something at Thanksgiving.

00:24:14   It's like, oh, I didn't say anything

00:24:16   'cause I didn't want to be that guy.

00:24:17   I was like, oh, look at that.

00:24:18   You got a little underscore with you.

00:24:20   I think that's kind of interesting.

00:24:21   - I've never seen any app from any of my friends

00:24:24   on any Italian phone, which is very sad.

00:24:27   It's like my friends don't exist for these other people

00:24:31   here in Italy. - Wow.

00:24:32   - Yeah, it's like a parallel universe, basically.

00:24:35   I'm kind of ashamed of the apps that my mom uses, honestly.

00:24:41   I try to pretend, you know, she's not the mother of the person who runs Mac stories.

00:24:47   She has terrible taste in apps, you know?

00:24:50   Yeah.

00:24:51   Yeah.

00:24:52   Yeah.

00:24:53   And sometimes, sometimes, like, she calls me and she's like, "Hey, do you think this

00:24:58   app is fine?"

00:24:59   I'm like, "What's this app?"

00:25:01   She's like, "I saw it in a TV commercial and it's always some kind of shopping app or some

00:25:07   kind of, I don't know, she's just, she's got terrible taste in apps."

00:25:11   should read Mac stories more without the Google translator. Oh my god the bees! The

00:25:15   bees are everywhere. Also like another piece of follow-up to what you guys were

00:25:18   talking about last time about like getting like creating the perfect

00:25:21   iPhone. Steven I think it was you who said like Apple needs to do

00:25:25   something to improve the selfie camera? Like I'm just poking around now and you

00:25:29   know it's probably not I mean I know it's not the exact same camera but like

00:25:33   the iPhone XS has a 7 megapixel camera and so did the iPhone 7. Oh man. I mean

00:25:40   but at the same time the 7 also says as a 12 megapixel back camera but I don't

00:25:47   expect a lot has actually changed on those selfie cameras between then and now

00:25:52   I agree that I would love to see that change I would love to see them do more

00:25:56   I would what I would like to see is the two like one wide-angle one regular on

00:26:03   the front and then like the three cameras on the back I think that's a

00:26:06   a part of that is going to come true. Yeah, I really do hope that they, the

00:26:11   Apple do have a smaller phone. I'm just intrigued to see where it goes in the

00:26:14   lineup. I can't imagine four iPhones for sale. New ones. That seems like too much

00:26:19   to me. I mean, maybe they they position it as kind of how the SE was, right? The SE

00:26:26   came along, the case design had already changed, it was sort of a remix of what

00:26:30   was there before, you know. There was a story like a year ago, I think

00:26:34   Steve Tran Smith was involved in, he probably was, where like there was

00:26:38   evidence of an iPhone 7 style phone but had a new internal part number and that

00:26:45   would make sense to me. You know after the eight cycles out out of the end you

00:26:48   know at the bottom of the line keep that form factor around and give it you know

00:26:53   a new CPU every couple of years and just keep that 4.7 inch phone as it is. Now

00:26:58   eventually they want to move off touch ID and go face ID only but I don't think

00:27:02   that has to happen anytime super soon and that may give people an option if they don't

00:27:09   want the XR or the XS.

00:27:12   So maybe it's not like a new phone, it's just sort of a remix like last time.

00:27:15   I don't know, I mean it's not what Quo is saying.

00:27:17   Quo says it's a...

00:27:18   Yeah, but what is it?

00:27:19   I mean, come on.

00:27:20   What does that guy know?

00:27:21   Okay.

00:27:22   He knows everything.

00:27:23   Everything?

00:27:24   Yeah, I don't know.

00:27:25   I really don't know.

00:27:28   a very interesting thing to think about, like to go with small. I mean, again, it's not

00:27:34   that much smaller, but it is smaller, right? You're going from 5.8 to 5.4 inches, right?

00:27:41   Well, I think it's the size. But if they were to keep it in the seven form factor, and it

00:27:47   worked, you and I are talking about different future phones now, right? But but part of

00:27:50   the conversation of someone not wanting to buy a new phone is they're familiar with their

00:27:55   current phone. They're familiar with the home button. They're familiar with touch ID. And

00:28:02   they feel intimidated or they just don't want to deal or maybe they don't like face ID.

00:28:06   And so there's also that angle to this of, hey, you know, if you still like this stuff,

00:28:10   we're gonna let it hang on for a little bit longer. I don't know if that's enough to justify

00:28:16   this particular like imaginary phones existence. But in talking to people who are looking at

00:28:20   at like going from a 6S to a XR,

00:28:23   that's a big jump in terms of how the phone

00:28:25   just actually works.

00:28:27   And some people don't wanna make that jump yet.

00:28:29   You know, I had this in my own household.

00:28:30   My wife had an iPhone SE for a long time

00:28:33   and it was just falling apart.

00:28:34   And she particularly wanted a better camera.

00:28:37   And I gave her my iPhone X and she basically handed back

00:28:41   to me and said, I'd like an eight.

00:28:43   'Cause she wanted the home button,

00:28:43   she wanted that user experience.

00:28:46   And I think there are a lot of people

00:28:47   who are in that boat too.

00:28:48   Yeah, I really just, when I look at this rumor and I think about how it's 2020, that smaller

00:28:55   phone is going to look like an iPhone X.

00:28:56   It's going to have face ID.

00:28:57   It's going to be all that stuff.

00:29:00   And yeah, I think it probably should be, but I just do think that there are people who

00:29:03   will be disappointed.

00:29:05   Yeah, but they will have been disappointed in 2019 as well.

00:29:09   So because like, I can't imagine Apple creating a new iPhone that doesn't have all this technology

00:29:16   in it now.

00:29:17   That's where they are right now.

00:29:18   It's one of those things that like people are gonna have to either get used to it. I'll move to Android

00:29:24   Like that's kind of that but that's kind of where it is, right?

00:29:27   Like I can't imagine them being like ah, we just kept we just made a new iPhone 7

00:29:32   Like it just seems like it's too late for that now

00:29:35   When really they could they could try and do something to push the product in different ways

00:29:40   Maybe a smaller phone might make it cheaper, you know, they might have like a cheaper starting price

00:29:45   Which is like another thing they probably want to do, right?

00:29:48   Yeah, they could have it as sort of like a 10r style deal right one fewer cameras and

00:29:54   Slightly different case design like I think there's that would follow in their current sort of system of thinking about the iPhone line

00:30:02   Mm-hmm

00:30:03   Anyways, the will will continue to talk about new iPhones because the secret is there's always new iPhones coming

00:30:09   Topic that's the one thing you can count on you can set your watch to new iPhones

00:30:13   Every September something you'll be within a couple weeks on your watch

00:30:17   I mean that's close enough. That's what you need really

00:30:20   Speaking of things that come around every year the public betas are here Apple

00:30:26   It's a July it's June their watch is just set to every couple of weeks

00:30:30   So you're in the time frame and I was so surprised that it was this early

00:30:35   Especially because they seem to be the same builds are very close to developer beta 2

00:30:41   Just a little a little rough around the edges for some people but nevertheless they're here

00:30:46   People are getting their hands on them and I'm curious Myke you you seem I know and I message you've been

00:30:52   You've been very worked up about iPad OS. Have you made the plunge? No, I was gonna do it

00:30:58   So like the public beta came out and I was like, alright, okay, and now it's that's too much

00:31:03   I was still gonna go for the developer beta, but I was like public bears out

00:31:05   I'm gonna do it and then I was I'm in an hour and I was talking to you guys and

00:31:09   I message and Stephen was like, oh you should just do it and I was deciding what iPad and

00:31:15   And then before I did it, I just spent like 10 minutes on Twitter and everybody that I know was like urging the rest of the world please not to touch them.

00:31:21   So I haven't done it.

00:31:24   Probably a good idea.

00:31:26   You think so? I mean, I know you are having, and I heard this last time and I know we're going to talk about it again today.

00:31:32   You are having a particularly difficult time.

00:31:35   Yeah.

00:31:36   Which may be unique to you or may have been a problem from beta one or like whatever, but you are having a particularly bad time.

00:31:43   but it seems like just in general there is a level of unreliability that you would expect from

00:31:50   a beta typically. I have in the past waited for beta 3 and maybe I'll, and I think right now

00:31:56   I'm just gonna wait to see what beta 3 is like. I'm getting ready to go away again and I really

00:32:02   don't want to be traveling with a super buggy iPad. So I've held off, I'm holding off still,

00:32:10   But I really want to use iPadOS so badly, but I'm holding off.

00:32:15   Yeah, I think waiting for beta 3 is probably a good idea.

00:32:18   These are the worst

00:32:22   first two betas that I've seen in a few years.

00:32:25   And maybe we got, you know.

00:32:28   Which is not, again, like and I think it's always worth mentioning,

00:32:31   like when we when you mention that, that is not a criticism particularly, right?

00:32:35   Like it could be and sometimes should be bad, right?

00:32:39   Like it's in development.

00:32:40   I don't think that it's necessarily a

00:32:43   and you could correct me if I'm wrong, but like it doesn't

00:32:46   necessarily feel like it's a criticism of

00:32:48   iOS 13 in its current state.

00:32:51   Right. Like it's expected to be a bit broken.

00:32:54   It's not a criticism, but it is surprising because

00:32:58   I mean, let's face it, there's a responsibility for Apple

00:33:02   to make sure that these betas are at least

00:33:06   somewhat stable because yes, it's a developer beta, but I mean, you know that all kinds

00:33:12   of people are going to install it anyway and the bigger Apple gets and the more people

00:33:17   use iPhones and iPads, you know, there's going to be lots and lots of attention.

00:33:20   Well, I guess that's the interesting point, isn't it really? Because you're using developer

00:33:25   beta 2 and having lots of problems as are many other people and the public beta is apparently

00:33:31   developer beta 2 in some form.

00:33:34   And so like if that is the case, then then I mean, because I understand what you're saying,

00:33:37   but I feel like the fact that the public beta exists kind of excuses them a little from

00:33:42   needing to worry about that for the developer beta, right?

00:33:45   Because they have like plausible deniability, like there's a public beta, you shouldn't

00:33:48   be touching the developer beta.

00:33:50   But if the developer beta is...

00:33:52   Well, it's based on that.

00:33:54   So exactly that.

00:33:55   And if the public beta is bad, then yeah, it does make it a bit trickier, especially

00:33:59   when Apple actually do go to some lengths to talk about it.

00:34:03   Like it got in the keynote, it was like the public beta is coming in July, woo!

00:34:07   Right, like it's, you know, they are going some way to promote that system now in ways

00:34:13   that they didn't before and probably because there is great benefit to them, right?

00:34:17   Like in getting huge adoption of a beta, you'll find out a lot of what's broken, but it

00:34:26   depends on how badly it breaks things, I suppose, as to whether that's a good thing or not.

00:34:30   Yeah, I really don't understand why it was necessary to put out the public beta for iOS

00:34:36   now. It's not like they're being forced or they made some, they actually said July.

00:34:42   So what was the rush?

00:34:43   Yeah, I can't work it out. Yeah, yeah, I can't work it out. Like, we were talking about this

00:34:48   on upgrade on Monday and someone in the chat room said that like, you know, any more time

00:34:53   is more time to collect data, which is a good point, but they were targeting July. So there

00:34:59   There must have been a reason for that.

00:35:00   - Unless like they are intentionally,

00:35:02   maybe that upgrade listener has a good point.

00:35:04   Maybe they want to intentionally test

00:35:07   some major bugs that they have.

00:35:10   They wanna see what the data that they get at scale is like.

00:35:13   So I think that's a plausible explanation,

00:35:17   but I would personally advise on waiting.

00:35:21   If you still haven't put out, I mean, it's Wednesday,

00:35:24   so on Monday, we're probably gonna get Beta 3.

00:35:26   Wait for that.

00:35:28   wait a couple of hours, see what people are saying on Twitter, see what people are saying

00:35:32   on Reddit, and then maybe put it on your devices. Beta 3, you know, I know that Myke, you put

00:35:39   it on in previous years, you waited until Beta 3, it feels to me like it's a good compromise

00:35:47   between you want to get on the beta train early, but you also want to have some stability.

00:35:53   We're starting to see now some basic compatibility updates from developers on the App Store.

00:35:59   We're starting to see that the first test flight betas for iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 apps.

00:36:09   So beta 3, you know, it's been almost a month.

00:36:13   I think it's a good time, you know, if you absolutely want the beta, but you don't want the bad bugs of beta 1 and 2, beta 3 is a good compromise.

00:36:22   compromise.

00:36:23   Because once you get to like three or four, you're about halfway.

00:36:27   Yeah.

00:36:28   Right?

00:36:29   Yeah.

00:36:30   So, you know, which is a horrific thing to consider, right?

00:36:33   When you…

00:36:34   Don't even mention it.

00:36:35   Don't even mention it, please.

00:36:36   Oh yeah, sorry, I forget about you.

00:36:39   I was just thinking about like developers, but yeah, of course, you as well.

00:36:42   Sorry about that.

00:36:43   I never said anything.

00:36:45   Let's talk about your issues in a minute.

00:36:47   I want to come back.

00:36:48   We're going to get an update.

00:36:49   The weekly update of Federico's various problems because I know it's horrific for you

00:36:54   But there is some kind of like macabre enjoyment to get from it. Sure. I'm sorry

00:36:59   It's all it's all for the show and it's all content. But Steven how you

00:37:03   Have iPad OS on your iPad now. Yeah, I put it on my iPad Pro

00:37:08   Yesterday or the day before and it's it's rough. I've got some apps that are crashing it locks up sometimes

00:37:17   Notifications on the home screen or just sometimes they just don't load their content

00:37:21   I mean, it's a little rough, but I can see the promise

00:37:24   That one of the first things I did was load in a banking website after use pretty often

00:37:29   That just doesn't work in mobile Safari and it just works now like it's a real browser. It's fantastic and

00:37:35   and I can see how the multiple app instant stuff and the new multitasking is going to be a

00:37:43   Lot more powerful. I'm not sure how discoverable it all is, especially the multi app and slide over business

00:37:49   But I have spent very little time with that yet

00:37:52   So I'm reserving my judgment for more usage

00:37:56   But yeah, if it's you know, like you Myke where you're doing your work on your iPad, I agree with Federico

00:38:02   I'd wait one more. Yeah as I again, it's like I would be putting it on the device that I will take

00:38:09   With me on a trip. I feel like that's probably unwise

00:38:13   Probably probably so and as far as Catalina. I was running it on a 12-inch MacBook and

00:38:19   That was just a poor choice. That's that's not a fast machine. It's an original 12-inch MacBook

00:38:26   That's not a fast machine in Mojave and he put a beta OS on it and it really was struggling

00:38:31   So I moved it to an external SSD that I can boot my MacBook Pro from and I have all my data on that

00:38:37   I've actually used migration assistant to get my stuff onto Catalina. And it is, it's a mess.

00:38:43   That's it's real buggy. And the battery life's real bad. It's not not a good time on the Catalina

00:38:48   beta. So we're gonna hear about Federico's woes. But first, let me tell you about our second

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00:41:04   next website. All right, Federico laid on us. How's it going?

00:41:09   Let's start from the bad news. It's been it's been a week. Really, for me. I've been filing

00:41:19   lots of raters and taking lots of sysdiagnose files on my iPhone and the iPad that I've

00:41:30   been unable to basically take notes on my iPhone. I've been forgetting to save things

00:41:39   because like one of the reasons that I love the Notes app when it works is that I can

00:41:45   just save an idea that I have or a thought that I have and forget about it. When I'm

00:41:50   on the phone it'll show up on the iPad later. It works in the background, it doesn't create

00:41:55   conflicted copies. And so because I wasn't able to save notes from my phone I would often

00:42:03   think of something and then I wasn't able to save it. And that was lost forever in the

00:42:11   maze of my brain.

00:42:12   So so you could create them, but they just don't go anywhere.

00:42:17   Right. Yeah, basically.

00:42:19   Or actually, my main problem was that the iPhone app kept crashing

00:42:23   every every few minutes, really.

00:42:26   So it was basically impossible to use.

00:42:28   I was able to to to salvage all of my notes

00:42:33   on the iPad by moving them to local storage.

00:42:38   So I've been using notes on the iPad through the "on my iPad" location, which is fine.

00:42:46   It just means that I've only used my iPad for notes. So I am sort of behind the schedule that

00:42:53   I had in mind for the iOS 13 review, but I think I'll be fine because it's still June.

00:42:59   It's not even, you know, in the past I started writing like by July 10. So I'm slightly behind

00:43:06   schedule but it's a schedule that I had all in my mind because you know I tend

00:43:12   to get anxious about all of this so I'll be okay I think. More bad news my Memoji

00:43:19   are gone forever it seems. That is the real horror, the tragedy. That Memoji was

00:43:25   perfect and you know that we put it together years ago when it came out and

00:43:30   it was it was such a good representation of me I'm really bummed about the fact

00:43:36   that the Memoji died. So both of them are dead.

00:43:41   - That's quite a thing to think about.

00:43:45   - Yeah, they are lost forever in iCloud. RIP Memoji.

00:43:50   So those will have to be recreated at some point,

00:43:54   unless Beta 3 brings them back from the dead.

00:43:56   I don't know if that's even possible.

00:43:58   - That would be kind of wonderful, wouldn't it?

00:44:00   - It would be wonderful.

00:44:01   So I basically spent the past week taking notes

00:44:05   on the iPad without iCloud. When I was on the phone I wasn't able to take notes so

00:44:11   I actually started using Reminders to save ideas which is like, it's terrible. It's

00:44:17   slightly better now.

00:44:18   So Reminders is syncing, it's just Notes that isn't syncing?

00:44:22   Oh yeah, Notes was the main problem. Everything else slowly came back with Beta 2 except for

00:44:30   So whatever happened with Memoji, those are gone.

00:44:34   Should this, I mean, okay, the answer is obviously no, but should this be happening?

00:44:38   Did anything change with Notes? Like, why is this happening?

00:44:42   I don't know. I have no idea. Now to the better news.

00:44:46   I cannot get into the details, but I'm just gonna say that

00:44:50   by filing radars

00:44:54   and by using the feedback reporting tool,

00:44:58   whoever, you know, engineers at Apple really followed up multiple times on my

00:45:05   report here and that was really, that was really like, it was a really good service

00:45:10   honestly, like to just be able to add comments with the feedback assistant and

00:45:16   be able to add links to the debug reports, to the crash reports and you

00:45:23   know, I was really happy with the kind of support that I received from

00:45:30   using the Feedback Assistant app and I was really impressed by, like, I

00:45:37   got the sense that they really wanted to make sure that this would get fixed and

00:45:43   it appears just today that we may have a fix. I don't want to jinx it because

00:45:53   I feel like, you know, maybe something's gonna break again, but it appears that my notes

00:45:58   are now fine. And this is just as of 30 minutes ago, like before starting the show.

00:46:05   So they've, they've, you've synced them all now.

00:46:06   I synced them all again. I have the same number of like total notes between the iPhone and

00:46:14   the iPad. I still haven't checked iCloud.com or my Mac, but it appears that there's parity

00:46:22   between the two devices and iCloud is working and the Notes app is not crashing anymore.

00:46:30   There's tons of logs in my analytics data, all of these files that the system just generates

00:46:37   for whatever is going on. I don't know exactly what happened. My interpretation is that something

00:46:43   horrible happened with the Notes area of my iCloud account. And by filing all these reports

00:46:51   through the feedback assistant that got the attention of the necessary folks at

00:46:56   Apple. So I'm really thankful for the feedback assistant system and

00:47:01   to just be able to comment multiple times and add details. So, you know,

00:47:08   I'm guessing that it was a terrible bug that they discovered in my account.

00:47:13   It's probably why it was so helpful, right? Because like they've found something so bad,

00:47:18   they need to get to the bottom of it. Yeah. So I, I, I, they just opened it up and it was all

00:47:24   just a soup of base 64, just simming around in the server that is actually possible. I still

00:47:32   maintain that every problem you have on your iPhone is related to base 64 in some way,

00:47:37   no matter what it is. I just think that you, the voodoo that you did with all of that stuff is just

00:47:43   like you will feel the effects of that forever.

00:47:47   I haven't used Base64 in months.

00:47:50   I feel like an addict now.

00:47:53   Like I haven't used it in like three months.

00:47:56   Right?

00:47:57   What is like the methadone version of Base64?

00:48:01   It's like, I don't know,

00:48:02   I don't know, watching shortcuts videos on Reddit.

00:48:08   I don't know.

00:48:10   Like watching other people do it.

00:48:12   Okay. But yeah, so it was a terrible bug. It got the attention of the folks at Apple

00:48:21   through my reports in the Feedback Assistant. I actually have been using the Feedback Assistant

00:48:27   app a lot. It's on my home screen. There's a lot of discussion as to like, does it actually

00:48:36   work fighting raiders? And there's a whole debate with our friends like Marco and Casey,

00:48:42   everybody has an opinion on this. Here's my opinion, if you care about it.

00:48:48   No.

00:48:49   Maybe, maybe, well, there you go. That's the show. Goodbye. Arrivederci.

00:48:53   See ya.

00:48:55   Okay. So maybe we could argue about, like, is it a dysfunctional organization if you

00:49:01   can only file bugs in, within the span of three weeks in June and early July? I don't

00:49:07   That's a discussion. But you know what? I'm gonna do my job. I'm gonna file my complaints

00:49:14   I'm gonna file my suggestions and I'm gonna file my feedback

00:49:18   Then the ball is in Apple's court and like they decide what they want to do with it

00:49:23   But at least I've done my part. It's like when you're a citizen, like if you're a good citizen of a country

00:49:29   You know and you just ate like a slice of pizza and then you gotta you know

00:49:35   you have some trash that you gotta get rid of,

00:49:37   you don't get rid of the trash in the middle of the street.

00:49:39   You look for a trash can.

00:49:41   So like, you're following the law,

00:49:43   you're being a good citizen.

00:49:44   And I also wanna follow the law here.

00:49:46   Like, I have complaints, I have ideas, I follow radar.

00:49:49   Then whatever happens, happens, I don't know.

00:49:51   But at least I've done my part.

00:49:53   - It seems like the feedback assistant is a easier--

00:49:57   - It's much easier to use than before, yes.

00:50:00   - Than radar at least anyway, or at least it has been.

00:50:02   So that's a benefit.

00:50:04   - It's like, I don't know.

00:50:05   Maybe it doesn't work.

00:50:06   But I feel like I've done my part,

00:50:09   and now I'm in a position to complain about it.

00:50:12   Because I know that I've filed my reports and my ideas

00:50:16   and my suggestions.

00:50:19   I wouldn't like to complain if I didn't do my part.

00:50:22   Now, it's like when you complain about who won the elections

00:50:27   and you didn't even vote.

00:50:28   You've got to shut up if you didn't vote.

00:50:30   You can't complain about who won.

00:50:33   So it's just a way that I like to live my life.

00:50:37   You know, I get to complain and I get to share my opinions when I'm in a position to share them.

00:50:42   So have you seen the David Lertman Kanye West interview?

00:50:47   No.

00:50:48   Okay.

00:50:49   Because I watched that last night and that exact thing came up.

00:50:51   It's a very interesting interview, but you know, Kanye's being Kanye and he kind of mentions at one point about he's never voted.

00:51:00   And then David Lertman is just like, you have no opinion.

00:51:02   And it's kind of incredible.

00:51:03   It's actually a really interesting interview. I recommend people watch it.

00:51:05   I like, I like Clermont. He's a good, he's a good man. So,

00:51:08   It's really fun before the, the, they like show him getting ready to go on stage and he's like,

00:51:13   I'm so nervous. And then he goes on stage. It's, it's like the whole thing is actually really good.

00:51:18   There's some good stuff and then there's some wild stuff and there's some like infuriating stuff,

00:51:22   but I recommend people watch it. This looks like a really random tangent, but it's just because that

00:51:26   exact thing came up and I saw it last night. So I wondered if you'd seen it too.

00:51:30   No, no, I didn't. But yeah, so basically, fighting all these crash logs and sysdiagnos

00:51:39   worked, I guess. Fingers crossed maybe the problem has been fixed. Really, my main problem is not,

00:51:46   like, complaining about beta bugs. That is fine. It's really that I'm the kind of person that,

00:51:55   even though I could have used some alternatives, like, for example, using local storage instead of

00:52:01   iCloud or using some third-party note-taking app. My main problem is my brain in the sense that

00:52:09   just knowing that something isn't working makes me go insane. Like, knowing that some part of iCloud

00:52:19   is not working fine for me, bothers me like at a physical level that you have no idea.

00:52:26   Well, I mean, I would just be constantly concerned about what the other part is that is obviously

00:52:30   broken.

00:52:31   Exactly. Yes. I've spent the past week being constantly concerned about, oh, am I going

00:52:35   to lose my reminders? Am I going to lose my mail? Am I going to lose my Safari bookmarks?

00:52:40   Like that is no way to live. And so just knowing that some part of my account was not behaving

00:52:47   correctly, such huge stress. It was not about notes necessarily, right? It was not about...

00:52:54   That was just a symptom, like the thought of having this invisible problem that I was

00:53:01   unable to fix myself. That's what has been driving me a little crazy over the past week.

00:53:06   But again, fingers crossed it's been fixed, probably. So I can go back to live my life

00:53:11   and take notes and actually start working on a mind map for the review.

00:53:15   a wild thing to have happened. Yeah, it was really bad. It was really, really bad. Yeah,

00:53:22   and it's funny, every time I open these crash logs, there's like all this text that makes

00:53:28   no sense to me, like "private frameworks.delib", whatever, all these codes for problems like

00:53:36   "0.0.xb", like what is this? It's funny, it means nothing to you, but somebody opened

00:53:43   it and they're like "oh no!" Somebody's like "uh-huh, yeah I know these words, I

00:53:48   know what they mean." No, no, I mean it's not like, I mean like somebody's opened

00:53:51   it and like it's their worst nightmare. Yeah. Like all of the codes that they never

00:53:56   want to see, they're all there, you know? Yeah. Everything's broken. Can you tell

00:54:01   me about parameters and shortcuts? What do you want to know? You tweeted about this,

00:54:08   that you'd had a third-party application that had implemented them, so I would love

00:54:12   like a just a very quick refresher and something that is exciting to you like

00:54:17   why you think it's exciting what kind of things you think you might see from it

00:54:20   so I think it's basically the kind of shortcuts API that we've been discussing

00:54:27   for the past really the past few years since it was workflow and now it's been

00:54:32   made available to developers through parameters in in the short in the series

00:54:37   shortcuts API and I have a beta, a single beta so far of JSON, not Snell but it's

00:54:46   a utility by Simon Stovering, he also makes Scriptable the JavaScript app for iOS and

00:54:53   JSON it allows you to preview and browse .json files, JSON content on your iOS devices and

00:55:04   he just released a beta, there's probably a link to the test flight on Twitter somewhere,

00:55:09   and he's taking advantage of the new shortcuts parameters API to let you do some really beautiful

00:55:17   things with JSON. So effectively you can now install, quote-unquote install, you can find

00:55:25   the JSON shortcut in the shortcuts app when you search for the name of the app, and just like

00:55:32   before you will find a suggestion for a series shortcut for a third-party app,

00:55:37   just like iOS 12. What is different is that this shortcut is

00:55:43   customizable. It's got fields, it's got parameters that you can customize. Some

00:55:47   of them can accept plain text, others are like switches, like toggles that you can

00:55:53   flip on and off. It's exactly what we were arguing last year that we

00:55:59   wanted to have visual actions for third-party apps that could be customizable, but without

00:56:08   having them be based on URL schemes and X callback URL.

00:56:13   And then the other benefit being that you can set everything up in shortcuts.

00:56:19   Yes.

00:56:20   Right, and can make...

00:56:21   Instead of doing it before...

00:56:23   Right.

00:56:24   Like, in iOS 12, if you wanted to customize a shortcut,

00:56:28   you needed to do in the original app

00:56:30   that offered the shortcut to the system.

00:56:33   And it was not dynamic.

00:56:36   You could only configure the shortcut beforehand.

00:56:39   And if you wanted to have some dynamic input,

00:56:43   for example, you look at apps like James Thompson

00:56:45   and his shortcuts for Pcalc,

00:56:47   he used the system clipboard as a sort of workaround.

00:56:51   -It was all very complicated, basically.

00:56:53   It was all very hacky and not stable enough. But this means that now you can have shortcuts

00:56:59   for third-party apps in your custom shortcuts, in the main shortcuts app, and you can actually

00:57:05   customize the data that they work with. Or the example that I shared on Twitter was,

00:57:12   I have a shortcut that works with the Trello API. So my shortcut gets some JSON content

00:57:18   from Trello and passes that content to the JSON app via a native Siri shortcut that I

00:57:25   configured and customized inside the shortcuts app. This is based on parameters.

00:57:30   Can all this happen in the background?

00:57:32   Yes, it can.

00:57:33   So I could have a third-party application fetch data from within the third-party application

00:57:39   and pass it to another chain in the shortcut without anything ever needing to happen.

00:57:44   In fact, I did not tweet this, but just last night Simon posted a second build of the beta

00:57:51   that allows you to retrieve from the shortcuts app the JSON text of a document that you keep

00:58:00   in the document library of the JSON app.

00:58:04   So right from shortcuts you can say install this series shortcut for JSON and there's

00:58:10   There's a file name field, a file name parameter.

00:58:13   You go in there, you type in the name of the file

00:58:16   that you want to fetch, and totally in the background,

00:58:19   without having to open JSON and switch back to shortcuts,

00:58:23   it fetches the-- that document fetches the text,

00:58:27   and that text is now a variable that you

00:58:28   can use in another action.

00:58:30   OK, that's incredible.

00:58:31   Yeah.

00:58:32   Yeah.

00:58:32   So imagine this for task managers.

00:58:35   Imagine this for document-based apps.

00:58:37   You will be able to create to-dos.

00:58:39   You will be able to, I don't know, edit images.

00:58:42   You will be able to make it work in the background

00:58:45   or show you a UI or switch to that app.

00:58:48   You will be able to retrieve documents

00:58:50   or maybe specific metadata about a document,

00:58:54   like give me the file name or the creation.

00:58:57   Like you can do whatever you want

00:58:59   because everything is customizable.

00:59:00   Developers just need to build these shortcuts.

00:59:04   You cannot build them yourself, of course.

00:59:06   The developer has to support that technology,

00:59:08   But you can customize the parameters.

00:59:11   You can put in whatever you want.

00:59:12   You can put in some plain text, or you can use variables.

00:59:17   It's all up to you.

00:59:18   And it's amazing.

00:59:18   It's exactly what I wanted.

00:59:22   And it's now possible developers just need to adopt them.

00:59:26   It'll be really good.

00:59:28   I think I'm more excited for this, of course,

00:59:31   than the multi-window at the moment.

00:59:35   I'm trying to imagine all the ways that I can rewrite my shortcuts by getting rid of

00:59:43   X callback, by getting rid of multiple actions and just replace them with a single series

00:59:50   shortcut for a third-party app that has parameters and that lets me process data or fetch data

00:59:57   without doing all the hacks and the workarounds and the X callback dance that I used to do

01:00:05   to do before, it's really, really good.

01:00:07   And yeah.

01:00:09   I'm very excited about the possibility of being able to do stuff

01:00:13   that doesn't require apps to be opened.

01:00:15   And it does also feel like it would be and it will be,

01:00:19   again, provided that this gets the developer support that it needs,

01:00:22   which I think could I mean, like, you know, I mean,

01:00:25   I know that like shortcuts hasn't as of yet,

01:00:29   it's not been like an incredibly advanced

01:00:33   system so far, right? But it has gotten a lot of support. Like I still see apps updating

01:00:40   like major apps from big companies and they add shortcut support in some way, right? Like

01:00:44   it doesn't, I know this is a different beast, but at least it feels like we might see some

01:00:49   of this stuff trickling out over a while. And when I say like, you know, the complexity

01:00:54   thing, it's just like a lot of companies just add very basic support, but it's still something.

01:00:59   But this seems like obviously a much better system to be able to have multiple third party

01:01:06   applications talking to each other, right?

01:01:11   What this would give is that world which as of yet has not really been able to be brought

01:01:19   into effect, right?

01:01:21   As it stands right now, it's like, well, you can do a bunch of things, but it's just a

01:01:25   bunch of applications talking to shortcuts and shortcuts talking back and that's the

01:01:28   the end of the conversation, right? Between the two apps. But now it's like, well, I could

01:01:33   use this third party app to give a piece of information to this third party app to give

01:01:37   a piece of information to this third party app. And that's like what we've always wanted

01:01:42   from this system, but it's not been possible. But now we are beginning the road to this

01:01:49   future, which is kind of incredible.

01:01:52   Do you think this future ends in the death of X callback URL? Like, is this powerful

01:01:57   enough to replace it. You couldn't have a stronger sign that,

01:02:01   and let me just quote here because I think I actually saved it. Uh,

01:02:06   while I was at a session at WWDC, um,

01:02:10   well thank, thankfully your notes are working.

01:02:12   My notes are working. So there you go.

01:02:17   I'm browsing my notes and it's not exploding. So.

01:02:21   Can you imagine if they just all started deleting now, like just live on the show?

01:02:25   Why? Okay. And I'm quoting here.

01:02:28   Custom URL schemes are inherently insecure and can be abused by malicious

01:02:33   developers. New uses of custom URL schemes are highly discouraged.

01:02:39   That was said on stage?

01:02:40   Yes, there was a recession.

01:02:42   And so I believe that it's not going to happen, you know,

01:02:47   in a week. It's not going to happen this year.

01:02:50   It's probably not going to happen next year. But I think,

01:02:53   If not deprecated entirely, I believe they're going to lock down the system more and more.

01:03:03   And I think just one last point that I wanted to add about third-party apps communicating

01:03:08   with each other.

01:03:09   The beautiful part of all of this for me is the fact that you're in the middle of it,

01:03:15   there's still shortcuts and there's still the content graph engine.

01:03:20   So the technology that Ari and Carad and their team came up with years ago, in 2013 and early

01:03:28   2014, that is still the glue.

01:03:31   And of course it's been enhanced and improved and revised, but at a fundamental level, that

01:03:36   idea of shortcuts, having the content graph engine and taking care of transformations

01:03:43   of data, like text can become a PDF, can become an image, a link can become something else.

01:03:50   That technology is still at the core of all of this.

01:03:54   And to you, the user, it's exposed in a visual programming environment where you drag and

01:04:00   drop actions and you have these variables and now you have the new editor, of course.

01:04:06   But there's a beauty in the fact that a couple of kids came up with this idea years ago.

01:04:13   and of course it's been much improved but at the very essence of it is still the technology that powers

01:04:20   this amazing communication between apps in iOS 13.

01:04:23   It's kind of funny really, like this is, this has been, this information has been relatively low-key so far this year.

01:04:31   Like, I know that there are obviously people like you and David and Rosemary like on Automators talking about it

01:04:36   but like it wasn't as part of the larger presentation, but like this is what we were hoping

01:04:43   last year was gonna be.

01:04:46   Right? It was like this level of control and it feels like that maybe

01:04:51   this year is when it happens but it's been

01:04:54   kind of... it's a bit more under the radar.

01:04:58   Yeah, yeah I mean it was not in the keynote, it was probably just mentioned

01:05:03   that the State of the Union.

01:05:04   I'm just super excited. I have a hundred and sixty shortcuts that I

01:05:09   got to update.

01:05:10   Also, I should mention...

01:05:12   Sounds like a wild weekend.

01:05:14   Yeah, I should mention that as I was hoping would be the case, I think I said on the show

01:05:20   that all of my shortcuts broke, but that I was confident that the data was still hiding

01:05:27   in there.

01:05:29   That was indeed the case, because beta2 basically restored all of...

01:05:34   Most of the variables that were hiding, they were still in there, they were just not exposed

01:05:39   correctly in beta one, but with beta two they came back.

01:05:42   So there was some like translation that was done incorrectly basically.

01:05:46   Yeah, but all the variables and all the data.

01:05:48   It didn't remove anything.

01:05:49   It just couldn't read what was written properly.

01:05:52   Yes. Yes. So basically all of my shortcuts are working again.

01:05:57   I just need, they are in a working state.

01:06:00   And I guess maybe next week we're going to talk about some of

01:06:03   the changes to shortcuts and sharing that are going on in

01:06:08   this version of the app, but I just want to update them because they're not so elegant

01:06:14   anymore. I have the option of removing a lot of actions, and the fewer actions you have

01:06:22   in a shortcut, the better it is. So they are working, they're just not elegant, so I want

01:06:27   to make them a little nicer. So I'm going to update them anyway.

01:06:30   Man, I can't wait to see what will come of all this stuff. It's very exciting.

01:06:35   Yeah, I guess I gotta start sharing some shortcuts, at least on Club Max Stories. There's a few

01:06:42   basic things that I would like to share. I'm gonna save some of them, of course, for the

01:06:47   review. Probably gonna have a section with shortcuts examples like last year.

01:06:52   Probably gonna, yeah. I might talk about shortcuts in the review, who knows.

01:06:56   Maybe, I guess, if I really have to. I mean, jeez, I don't know.

01:07:00   Still a lot of character for you, but, you know, I guess if you're gonna do it.

01:07:05   (laughs)

01:07:06   All right, we're gonna wrap up today

01:07:07   talking about Catalyst apps,

01:07:10   but first let me tell you about our final sponsor,

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01:08:39   I have some very important breaking news.

01:08:43   Apple have expanded business chat to Shopify stores.

01:08:50   You can find the show notes at relay.fm/connected/249.

01:08:56   I'm kind of making a joke because of business chat, but that is actually pretty cool because

01:09:02   that's a lot of stores.

01:09:04   Yes, I know.

01:09:05   So, Shopify is now supporting in business chat, so that will make it a lot more useful

01:09:09   to a lot of small companies.

01:09:11   I have not used it yet.

01:09:12   I need to find it.

01:09:14   Is it even outside of the US?

01:09:15   I have no idea.

01:09:16   I don't even know because I've never been in.

01:09:18   Yeah.

01:09:19   Okay.

01:09:20   did in Italy. It kinda did work. But yeah, this is great. I mean, I've noticed Shopify

01:09:26   storefronts on a lot of things that I've bought online recently. Especially like keyboards.

01:09:32   Like every time I buy a keyboard, it's from a Shopify store. Yeah, so this is very nice.

01:09:40   So that is a cool thing to have, at least as a thing. I'm pleased that they did that.

01:09:45   I didn't initially misread the headline and thought it said Spotify and I was very confused.

01:09:52   It's like why?

01:09:54   Apple wouldn't let Spotify business chat with people.

01:09:57   Not unless they charged them 70%.

01:10:00   Over on Mac Stories this week and on episode 117 of App Stories, Federico, you and John

01:10:07   talked about Catalyst apps and there's been a lot of grumbling in parts of the community

01:10:14   about catalyst, which we can get into about john. So some people have some people have

01:10:22   called it a sweet solution, like the building web app for the iPhone. Remember that that

01:10:26   was no fun. I disagree with all that we can get into that. But I definitely point people

01:10:30   to that article. The app stories episode was excellent. And so let's let's get into this

01:10:36   a little bit. Federico, how do you feel about catalyst apps? So the main thesis of the story,

01:10:43   which I fully agree with, John has been thinking about this article for a long time, is we,

01:10:52   and by we I mean at Mac Stories, we don't think that Catalyst is just about bringing

01:11:00   toy apps or like small utilities and games and video streaming apps to the Mac.

01:11:07   We think it's more than that.

01:11:09   We think it can be more than that.

01:11:12   And our main argument that John really put well in the story is if you use the iPad to

01:11:21   get work done, to do more than just browsing Netflix and YouTube, you know that there absolutely

01:11:29   are apps that could be useful to have on the Mac that would make for excellent Mac apps

01:11:36   provided that the developers put in the work to optimize them for the macOS platform.

01:11:41   And to think that the iPad does not have any productivity apps to offer to the Mac, that

01:11:50   just feels short-sighted and a little out of touch with reality.

01:11:54   That is my personal opinion.

01:11:56   It's not what John wrote, but it's what I believe.

01:11:59   John actually came up with a list.

01:12:02   He didn't share the full list in the article, but he has like 60 apps that are not like

01:12:08   entertainment or toy related.

01:12:11   would make for excellent Mac versions. Maybe you'll get to share this full list somewhere

01:12:16   in the newsletter. I don't know. He mentioned a few examples in the story. You got things

01:12:20   like Working Copy, you got things like the Apollo Reddit client, or shortcuts, of course.

01:12:28   All of these, LumaFusion, Ferrite, all of these iPad first, and sometimes iPad only

01:12:34   productivity apps that exist on iOS, people are using them. See, it's not just me and

01:12:40   John Voorhees, these two special snowflakes using the iPad as a computer, you open Reddit,

01:12:46   you go to reddit.com/r/iPad, you will find thousands of people using the iPad as a computer,

01:12:54   getting work done, getting video editing done, professional photo editing done. These people

01:13:00   exist in the world, on planet Earth. It's a thing, whether you like it or not. And so,

01:13:07   To think that Catalyst is just about "Oh yeah, make YouTube available on the Mac and

01:13:12   Netflix available on the Mac and a bunch of games for those kids."

01:13:16   That just feels a little condescending, personally speaking, and just untrue.

01:13:21   So that was the point of the story, to illustrate how there's more than...

01:13:31   Nothing wrong with games and entertainment, of course.

01:13:32   Nothing wrong with that.

01:13:33   But there's more to it.

01:13:35   Maybe Apple could have done a better job at making this argument at WWDC.

01:13:40   Maybe fully agree with the fact that Apple should have done a better job with their catalyst apps.

01:13:45   They're not setting a high bar, you know, with their examples. I agree with that.

01:13:50   And look at podcasts, for example, coming in Catalina, they're doing a bunch of custom work

01:13:55   to make that as decent as it is right now. Fully agree with that sentiment.

01:14:00   but from a third-party developer perspective there's a lot more to

01:14:04   Catalyst than just you know "oh yeah I can now watch Netflix on my Mac"

01:14:08   that's the argument of the story.

01:14:10   Why don't you tell me how you really feel?

01:14:12   Like I feel like you're holding back if you could just give me

01:14:19   like a little bit more would be great. I think really the biggest problem here is

01:14:25   is, and I put problem in inverted commas, was the introduction of SwiftUI. It was the

01:14:32   right time to do it because it's an important technology for a bunch of different reasons,

01:14:37   but it put an expiry date, potentially, on Catalyst in a lot of people's minds. Unfortunately,

01:14:46   the technology feels like... So the idea of the sweet solution is actually kind of an

01:14:53   interesting one, like comparing it to that. Because if you remove the fact that the sweet

01:15:00   solution was bad, it was a bad idea, where Catalyst doesn't seem to be a bad idea or

01:15:05   the technology isn't bad, it will actually work and it will give you some of what you

01:15:08   want. But it was the idea of like, Catalyst is clearly a stopgap or like a point in the

01:15:19   roadmap to the future with the future being much more involved. If SwiftUI really works,

01:15:26   that seems to be a much more complete solution for people. But before you can get there,

01:15:33   there's a lot of work and in the meantime, Catalyst exists and this is very clearly

01:15:39   the path. Apple now have multiple technologies to put applications in multiple places

01:15:48   in platforms that don't currently allow for that, right?

01:15:52   Like, there's no way currently to take your iOS app

01:15:55   and put it on the Mac, but Apple is going to give

01:15:58   two technologies which will enable that in different ways.

01:16:00   Like, it is very clear what the future is at this point.

01:16:03   - And importantly, Catalyst is a way to do that today.

01:16:06   - To now, now, yes. - Or this fall.

01:16:08   Where I don't think there's gonna be many developers

01:16:10   who are totally rewritten for SwiftUI on day one.

01:16:14   There may be a few, but that is a longer term,

01:16:18   bigger project. And what catalyst does is it unlocks the bajillion iOS apps that are

01:16:26   on the App Store. It unlocks those for the Mac in the here and now it Swift UI is, I

01:16:33   fully believe a decade long thing is it's it can't do everything that you need to do

01:16:38   now. It's extremely resource resource intensive. And it only supports the newest OS. So if

01:16:44   are like underscore and you have a bunch of people on old devices you can't actually move

01:16:49   to it.

01:16:50   Yeah it's like it's like Swift in general right like Swift was announced a long time

01:16:53   ago and yeah five years it's being used by a lot of people but not the masses it's not

01:16:58   being and I think everybody's resigned to the fact that ultimately they will be using

01:17:02   it but it's just not yet even Marco's learning it so rest in peace what exactly we're like

01:17:09   That needs to be clarified.

01:17:10   Objective C.

01:17:11   OK.

01:17:12   Yeah.

01:17:13   OK.

01:17:14   I don't know.

01:17:15   So the problem I have with the debate that's going on is people look at SwiftUI as like

01:17:20   a, OK, maybe they agree with me that it's a six, eight, 10-year thing.

01:17:25   And at some point, Apple will require all new apps to be in SwiftUI.

01:17:30   But that doesn't make CataList less important.

01:17:33   There was the joke, and maybe it wasn't a joke, like, oh, well,

01:17:38   Catalyst was end of lifed in the same keynote it was announced

01:17:42   in.

01:17:43   I just don't see that being the case,

01:17:45   because Catalyst is going to be here for a long time.

01:17:50   And Catalyst gives developers an opportunity

01:17:54   to have their apps make more money.

01:17:56   And if they make more money, maybe they'll

01:17:58   be more likely to invest in rewriting in SwiftUI.

01:18:01   Catalyst is a blessing to those developers

01:18:05   for the next several years, maybe the next 10 years,

01:18:07   hopefully giving them the flexibility and latitude

01:18:11   to move to this new future paradigm.

01:18:13   Say that Catalyst didn't exist,

01:18:15   and Apple just announced Swift UI a couple weeks ago.

01:18:19   No doubt people would be excited about it.

01:18:21   No doubt it would be as groundbreaking

01:18:24   and as kind of paradigm shifting as it seems to be,

01:18:28   but in the same thing, it's like,

01:18:30   well that's off in the future. Like well I can't what can it can't do anything

01:18:34   for me for the next couple of years and kind of like Swift by the time it's good

01:18:39   enough and by the time your user base is on OS that can support it some of the

01:18:43   newness has worn off and some of the excitement has worn off and what

01:18:45   catalyst does is it gives developers a bridge to that future and it gives the

01:18:53   Mac and the iPad more stable footing until that future arrives. No doubt if

01:18:59   If Apple could have waved a magic wand and say,

01:19:01   okay, any Swift app, you can run anywhere,

01:19:04   no catalyst needed, it just works,

01:19:06   that would have been ideal,

01:19:08   but that's not the world that they're in.

01:19:10   They needed something to get them there.

01:19:13   And while Swift UI is exciting,

01:19:14   and I genuinely think it is,

01:19:16   it's not here today for most people.

01:19:19   And so you have to have something to get to that future.

01:19:23   And I do wanna talk about the carbon and cocoa thing

01:19:25   in a minute, but I'm curious what y'all think about that.

01:19:28   Do you, am I thinking about that in a way that makes sense to the two of you?

01:19:31   Yeah, but I just think that like the introduction of Catholics to the world has been met with

01:19:39   too many stumbling blocks, which puts it at risk of maybe not getting to where it could

01:19:47   or should be, right?

01:19:48   So like they are, it was overshined at the keynote when it was actually introduced to

01:19:53   the world.

01:19:54   Apple have not done the best possible job at showing off what it can do, right?

01:19:59   So people have like a bad taste in their mouth about it because there is one app

01:20:03   that's pretty decent which is built now and then there's a bunch of kind of

01:20:08   non-updated apps from before which have a lot of weirdness in them. A lot of the

01:20:13   conversation that is occurring around the time of year when people should be

01:20:17   thinking about whether they want to actually make an app for this thing is

01:20:20   is pretty negative because of a lot of this stuff.

01:20:23   And nobody can try a catalyst app made by a third party developer yet because nobody's

01:20:29   finished him.

01:20:30   Right.

01:20:31   Right.

01:20:32   They're not done.

01:20:33   So like, we can't even sit here now and be like, Oh, but we tried this one.

01:20:35   And it's actually amazing and works just how you want.

01:20:38   Sure.

01:20:39   Because nobody's made it.

01:20:40   So like, my concern is that the general conversation is trending towards negative because of these

01:20:46   like confluence of bad events.

01:20:48   Well, to a degree, that's Apple's own secrecy working against them.

01:20:53   So take something like the new Reminders app, which is an AppKit app on Catalina.

01:20:59   Had Catalyst been ready a year ago when that Reminders work started, or had the Reminders

01:21:08   team been brought in to the Catalyst program and said, "Hey, we know you're working Reminders.

01:21:13   We'd love for it to be the flagship app using this technology.

01:21:17   we could have had a catalyst reminders app on Mac OS 1015. But we don't because either

01:21:23   it wasn't ready internally, or they didn't want to tell anybody, probably honestly, both.

01:21:28   And so you run into that and Apple sometimes, okay, there's this new thing over here, who's

01:21:32   using internally? Well, no one because no one knew about it. That was actually came

01:21:35   out a little bit and Jason's interview with the Swift UI guys on upgrade a couple weeks

01:21:39   ago. And so I would expect that whatever's after Mac OS Catalina, there will be I had

01:21:47   this in a predictions or somewhere that they would have something like messages or mail

01:21:53   be a catalyst app.

01:21:55   I think it's too early for that.

01:21:56   I agree with you.

01:21:57   I wish that they had like a really shining example.

01:21:59   I wish it had been reminders.

01:22:00   I think that would really gotten people's attention, but they're just not there yet.

01:22:04   And so this first year, I don't know if it's going to be the flood of iPad apps on the

01:22:09   Mac that I maybe thought it was going to be because it does seem like it's more work than

01:22:14   just checking a box and there's so much iOS stuff to do first like a lot of

01:22:18   developers say well I got to be ready for iOS 13 and once that's all done I'll

01:22:23   look at the Mac version so it may be a slower start but I don't know how much

01:22:28   of that is the fault of the negativity around it versus just how the how the

01:22:33   chips ended up landing right but then it's like a cause and effect type

01:22:37   situation right which is that that's kind of what I'm getting to we're deep

01:22:41   on the chicken and egg. Then if there's none this year, well what's the reason? And then what happens?

01:22:45   Like I still am optimistic that if there is an opportunity for a company to make money, then they

01:22:53   should look at that seriously. And that, you know, like if a developer feels like this is a good

01:22:59   option for them, then they will do it irrespective of what the community is saying, right? Like

01:23:06   because you would be silly not to give it a go, but it feels like it might start slowly.

01:23:13   But I remain optimistic because it seems like a wise business decision to at least try it.

01:23:21   Oh yeah, I think you're right about that.

01:23:23   And I hope that people will still put the effort into giving it a go because as an iPad first user,

01:23:32   I still remain very excited about the opportunity to have some applications, you know, some of the

01:23:37   ones like what Federico and John have mentioned, but you know, like for me, apps like Timery and

01:23:42   Calzones, which are like applications I use every day and would be fantastic on the Mac because they

01:23:49   the counterparts to them don't work very well. And I would love to see applications like that.

01:23:56   And yeah, they maybe are smaller applications. They maybe are like things that I'm not spending

01:24:00   in 600 hours a day in, but like I check in and out of.

01:24:03   But like, what's a calendar like?

01:24:05   That's what I do with calendars.

01:24:07   We don't call calendars utility apps. You know what I mean?

01:24:09   So I would like to see a lot of that type of stuff appearing.

01:24:14   But it's just a case of of waiting and seeing for for how it goes.

01:24:19   I get the impression there's some of the oh, the iPad isn't for real work

01:24:22   bleeding into this conversation. Yes. From other people.

01:24:24   Yes, I find that frustrating.

01:24:26   Like just because the iPad isn't up for your work doesn't mean that there's not good.

01:24:30   apps that could come over. It's difficult when you're when when I think it's just it's difficult

01:24:35   when your identity and way of life is challenged. And that's what this does. Yeah, I mean, the

01:24:41   people that are saying, oh, the Mac doesn't need help from the iPad, like you're just wrong. You're

01:24:45   just you're just wrong about that. Because the Mac is not Apple's most important platform. It's not

01:24:52   even Apple's second most important platform. I choose to see all this as like Apple wouldn't be

01:24:59   doing catalyst if it thought the Mac was dying? Because like, why would you spend the I'm sure

01:25:04   vast amount of resources to make all of this work? Why would you make Swift UI work on Mac OS,

01:25:11   if you didn't think Mac OS was going to be around? So like, I don't think it's a matter of,

01:25:16   oh, that the Mac is dying. And like this is Apple says, this is the only lifeboat. And I just don't

01:25:21   believe it. Like, I just think a lot of that is, is got some flawed logic in it. And, you know,

01:25:26   You know, the idea that the iPad is a toy and like we don't need those, you know, the

01:25:30   silly little apps on our big important computers, like just you're missing the bigger picture.

01:25:36   And if if those types of Mac users out there, and there are plenty of them.

01:25:41   But so if you look at the the ecosystem, the Mac exists in, there are still really good

01:25:46   Mac apps out there.

01:25:47   And yes, there are people still making independent like good app kit apps, but you can name them

01:25:52   on one hand.

01:25:54   that's even the iPad is a vastly larger ecosystem.

01:25:58   If you really love this platform,

01:26:00   why wouldn't you want access to those applications?

01:26:05   It really confuses me, that point of view.

01:26:09   Anyways, before we wrap this up,

01:26:11   I did wanna talk about carbon for a second.

01:26:13   - This is one of those situations where you're concerned,

01:26:17   you're alienating Mac users and they won't believe you

01:26:19   to be an authority anymore,

01:26:22   So you have to talk about some like ancient technology.

01:26:24   - That's right.

01:26:25   You're the TVOS guy.

01:26:27   - I'm the carbon guy. - We're talking about carbon.

01:26:29   Like I have a dog cow tattoo.

01:26:30   What more cred do I need?

01:26:31   But if you're, no, really I just wanted to explain this

01:26:34   because this argument has included like,

01:26:37   oh, it's like carbon or like cocoa.

01:26:39   And I'm not sure everyone,

01:26:41   most of our listeners weren't around for that.

01:26:43   And even if they were like, it's a complicated topic.

01:26:46   So I just kind of wanted to explain it

01:26:48   so as people have these debates online,

01:26:51   you know what this is about because there are some parallels between now and the carbon

01:26:56   deal, but it's not a perfect analogy.

01:26:58   And I think people who say it is, they're missing some points.

01:27:01   So anyways, just to promise I'll make this brief, as Federica and Myke slowly back away

01:27:06   from their microphones.

01:27:08   But when OS 10 came about, as obviously a new platform, because it was powered by next

01:27:15   technology, so not the classic Mac OS.

01:27:18   And the initial plan was to have sort of two environments in this new operating system.

01:27:26   It was called Rhapsody.

01:27:27   That was the code name Rhapsody was released as Mac OS X server 1.0.

01:27:32   Those details aren't important.

01:27:33   But the plan for a while was you can write new apps that work on the next technologies

01:27:41   that was AppKit.

01:27:43   But if you have a classic Mac OS app, so the whole library of Macintosh software up to

01:27:48   this point that was gonna have to run in this emulated environment if you want

01:27:53   the new features like protected memory and and preemptive multitasking the

01:27:58   things that made this new operating system good and secure if you want those

01:28:02   things you got to rewrite your app and so that's kind of like like today if

01:28:07   Apple was saying if you want to be on iOS 13 you have to rewrite and Swift UI

01:28:12   UI, people would freak out because you're you are requiring a ton of work.

01:28:19   And the payoff is not super obvious.

01:28:21   So that's where Apple was for a long time.

01:28:24   Those are called yellow box and blue box.

01:28:25   By the way, that the new was yellow box, the oldest blue box.

01:28:28   So I have a new shiny app, rent an app kit, or I have my old bus, the classic Mac OS app

01:28:34   running an emulator in a separate, like totally separate environment.

01:28:38   that wasn't going to work, because why would Adobe or Microsoft rewrite their app in this

01:28:44   weird Objective C language and put a bunch of money into it into a company and a platform

01:28:51   that literally was dying in the late 1990s. And basically everyone revolted. And so Apple

01:28:57   shifted gears, there was a technology called carbon. And carbon was a bridge. So I could

01:29:01   have my classic Mac OS app, I could tune it up, I could get rid of some really old API's

01:29:06   and clean it up a little bit. But then magically it would come like coming into its own on

01:29:12   Mac OS 10. Because carbon was native to Mac OS 10. So people are comparing that to catalyst,

01:29:18   I have this app on this other platform, I do some stuff to it, but not a rewrite, just

01:29:23   tidy it up. And boom, it runs on the Mac, the new Mac OS 10. Carbon was, in hindsight,

01:29:32   most important software decision of this timeframe because it allowed the library of Mac OS applications

01:29:39   to run on Mac OS 10. Mac OS 10 really struggled in the early days with native apps, it would

01:29:44   have been 100 times worse without carbon. So you can see why people talk about this,

01:29:48   right? Like, oh, a carbon is like catalyst and cocoa is like Swift UI, it's the future,

01:29:53   but we don't have to get there yet. So I see why people are using that analogy. So that's

01:29:57   kind of like the the heart of it. There are some differences, though. So like, we were

01:30:01   just talking about how there's not like a other than podcast, there's not a flagship catalyst app

01:30:07   on Mac OS Catalina. Well, to prove its metal Apple wrote finder in carbon, like they really

01:30:14   were committed to it in a way that we haven't seen. They did. They went big on that one.

01:30:18   You just go on the Yeah, you can't get any bigger on the Mac. And, and then later they rewrote it

01:30:24   in cocoa to like, Oh, and now it's time to finder was sort of this canary in the coal mine of like,

01:30:28   this is the API set you should be paying attention to.

01:30:32   So it is different, but fundamentally why it's different

01:30:36   is because AppKit is not doomed to extinction anytime soon.

01:30:41   And the classic Mac OS was.

01:30:44   The classic Mac, like, the reason Apple

01:30:46   was going out of business is 'cause the classic Mac OS

01:30:47   was so bad, and they had to move to something more modern,

01:30:52   and that's just not where Apple is today.

01:30:54   Apple is pitching a future where you can write an app

01:30:57   and it runs on all their platforms,

01:30:59   the system they have now is clearly successful.

01:31:03   Look how much money they have in the bank.

01:31:04   Look how many apps are in the app stores.

01:31:06   Look how many users they have.

01:31:07   They're coming to this from a position of strength.

01:31:11   We can complain about the Mac ecosystem

01:31:13   or the iPad ecosystem for that matter,

01:31:15   but they are still world stronger

01:31:18   than the classic Mac OS was.

01:31:20   So I think comparing the two isn't quite right,

01:31:24   but that's kind of what people are talking about.

01:31:26   - It's the closest comparison though.

01:31:28   - It is, it totally is.

01:31:29   And it really proves how good Apple is at this.

01:31:34   And I think that's missing in some of this conversation.

01:31:37   Like no company in technology is as good at transitions

01:31:41   as Apple is, full stop.

01:31:43   Look at, let's look at Windows.

01:31:45   They have tried, Microsoft has tried for years

01:31:48   to get rid of baggage,

01:31:50   to get rid of historical cruft in Windows.

01:31:53   They tried Windows RT, Windows on ARM,

01:31:55   And they can't shed it because their customer base demands that they run the same app they

01:31:59   wrote in 1996.

01:32:01   And Apple, for better or for worse, is willing to make those changes, but also willing to

01:32:06   bring their users and developers along.

01:32:08   It's never for free.

01:32:09   There's always work to do.

01:32:10   Look, carbonizing an app was work, catalyzing an app also work.

01:32:17   But if you do that work, you're rewarded by new features.

01:32:20   And eventually you're sort of in this utopia of everything works everywhere.

01:32:24   So that's kind of wanted to fill that out for people because I think people are throwing

01:32:27   those terms around and I think it's helpful to revisit that stuff on occasion.

01:32:32   But just make carbon worked is like the end of this like carbon made Mac OS 10 viable

01:32:39   and it got deprecated and mountain lion is finally all gone this year because 32 bit

01:32:44   stuff is going away.

01:32:46   Carbon lasted like almost 20 years, right?

01:32:49   Like it was ever really over 20 years.

01:32:53   I don't think catalyst will be that long.

01:32:55   But writing off catalyst today is as short-sighted

01:32:58   as writing off carbon in 1998 or 1999.

01:33:02   I'm like, oh, that's never gonna work.

01:33:05   You just gotta write AppKit apps

01:33:06   and go native on the next step stuff.

01:33:09   That was short-sighted because it didn't value

01:33:11   the time in the middle of the transition.

01:33:14   And I think that's what people are doing now.

01:33:16   This is an important step forward

01:33:19   for the Mac and for the iPad.

01:33:21   And writing it off because you don't understand it,

01:33:23   or the apps that you use are already on the Mac,

01:33:26   that's just looking at your angle of it.

01:33:28   But you get the big picture.

01:33:29   This is important for Apple because it's important for them

01:33:31   to unify their platforms.

01:33:33   And this is just step one of 12 of that, just like Carbon was.

01:33:37   Maybe it's better to say unifying the app platform.

01:33:41   Yes.

01:33:41   Or the app store platform than the platform itself.

01:33:44   Yes.

01:33:45   They are not moving-- I mean, they had that big slide, right,

01:33:47   saying we're not combining Mac OS and iOS.

01:33:49   Yeah.

01:33:50   They didn't say yet, but the yet was hanging there.

01:33:52   Like, I don't care what anyone says.

01:33:54   It's a yet.

01:33:54   It's not a never.

01:33:55   But to a degree, if you combine the app platform,

01:34:00   the question is sort of moot.

01:34:03   Right, but at a certain point, you've

01:34:05   got to assume that the Mac just gets smaller and smaller

01:34:08   and smaller as we go into the future.

01:34:10   And then how much do you-- uh-oh, I shouldn't do--

01:34:13   I probably shouldn't be having this conversation.

01:34:15   Let's pretend I never said that, and we'll just move on.

01:34:19   Yeah.

01:34:19   OK.

01:34:19   What is in the show?

01:34:20   We'll just walk away.

01:34:22   If you want to find links to stuff we spoke about this week,

01:34:25   head over to the website relay.fm/connected/249.

01:34:30   While you're there, you can get in touch.

01:34:31   There's an email link in the sidebar.

01:34:34   You can email us about your favorite story

01:34:36   from the carbon days.

01:34:37   I will read those.

01:34:37   It'll be great.

01:34:38   If you want to leave us feedback on Twitter,

01:34:41   you can do that as well.

01:34:43   You can find Myke there as imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

01:34:47   Myke, of course, is the host of a bunch of shows here at relay FM.

01:34:51   So go, go check those out.

01:34:52   You can find Federico on Twitter as Viti, V I T I C C I, and you can, uh, follow

01:34:59   his work@maxstories.net where they're writing about Mac apps all of a sudden.

01:35:04   It's a, it's a crazy world over there.

01:35:05   You can find me on Twitter as ISMH and I write five 12 pixels.net.

01:35:09   I think our sponsors this week, they are KiwiCo Squarespace and Pingdom.

01:35:14   Without them, the show would not be possible.

01:35:16   And until next week gentlemen, say goodbye.

01:35:19   - Cheerio.

01:35:20   - Adios. - Adios.