PodSearch

Connected

605: Being Completely Awesome

 

00:00:00   Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Connected. It is brought to you by the fine

00:00:11   folks over at Sentry and Steam Clock. It is in fact episode 605. My name is man of the

00:00:17   people, Mike Hurley, and I have the pleasure of introducing to you the keynote chairman

00:00:20   for now, Federico Vatici. Hi, Federico.

00:00:22   Hello, man of the people. I will say keynote chairman for the foreseeable future.

00:00:29   We're doing the rickies next week. Yeah. Not ready for that. Not ready for that.

00:00:34   Yeah. We are also joined by the illustrious annual chairman, Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen.

00:00:41   Hello, boys. Hello. Hello. How are you, sir? I'm good. I will say being annual chairman,

00:00:50   the stress of an individual keynote just washes away. When you're a keynote chairman...

00:00:58   Is there closing points for the year, though? I mean, there is that, but I mean, like,

00:01:02   I'm more meaning to this since, like, my title's safe through June, right? It's actually safe

00:01:06   through December. Now, could I consolidate power? Potentially.

00:01:13   Can I do a quick tiny topic 0.0.0 before follow-up? Sure. Which is a quick recap of the 2026 rickies

00:01:22   and see how we're doing? Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. I don't think we have it on this. We won't do the

00:01:27   flexies, just the rickies, all right? So, Stephen said, Tim Cook's job title changes in 2026.

00:01:34   Yeah. He got that. The iPhone 17e ships in 2026. He got that, too. Yeah. So, that's two points so far.

00:01:42   Now, we've got the risky pick. Apple announces a Mac of a touchscreen. It is an update to an existing

00:01:48   notebook. Mac OS doesn't radically change to accommodate touch. The product comes with the

00:01:53   Apple polishing cloth in the box. Hmm. I don't know, man. We'll see if they announce it this year

00:01:59   or not. The problem for you is that Mac might slip now. We'll see. I did not foresee the RAM shortages.

00:02:04   No, you did not. So, I got Apple ships a folding iPhone. Jury's still out. Feel good about it.

00:02:12   A Google LLM is powering some Siri features by default. I got that one. Yeah. And by the end of the year,

00:02:18   Apple will not have shipped equivalent features for all of the AI features shown off at WWDC24.

00:02:25   Craig Federighi will talk at least once more about there being two architectures. Apple will once

00:02:30   again promise that the missing features will be shipping by the end of the next year. Actions

00:02:34   across apps is one of the features that has not been shipped. I still think I'm going to get one of

00:02:40   those three. Actions across apps. I don't think they're shipping this year. Okay. You don't think they

00:02:45   intent to ship it. I don't think they intend to ship it. No, I do not. I do not. Federico was,

00:02:52   Apple updates the MacBook Air of M5. You got that? Yeah. Apple ships some of the AI features

00:02:58   previously seen at WWDC24. I think you're going to get that. We'll see. Yeah. The MacBook Pro is

00:03:03   refreshed of a new chip. You got that? Because you add an extra bonus pick. Yeah. And then Apple

00:03:09   ships a foldable iPhone that is called the iPhone Duo. Yeah. Runs both iOS and iPadOS apps and seamlessly

00:03:17   switches between them. Mm-hmm. And has at least one feature that operates both the outer and inner

00:03:23   screen at the same time. Oh, yeah. Nice. Okay. I think that last one will be some kind of camera

00:03:28   thing. Gotta be. Yeah. For sure. It's gotta be. But the iOS and iPadOS apps at the same time,

00:03:33   I feel less confident about that for you as time goes on. Mm-hmm. But there you go. So that's where

00:03:37   we are so far. Okay. All right. That's pretty good. Now, do you want to do some follow-up, Stephen?

00:03:43   I do. I do. That was very exciting, to be honest with you, to go down the past and future road,

00:03:52   really. Mm-hmm. If you think about it that way. Follow-up. We have some more Triple J sightings in

00:04:00   the wild. Yeah, Stephen, this post was deleted. I think, well, Elijah, I don't know what happened to

00:04:06   your post, but I'm pretty sure it was like an armory or like some sort of weapon place. Not great.

00:04:10   Right. Yeah. Okay. That's probably against the terms of Mastodon. Yeah. When talking about Google

00:04:18   IO, I was searching for a phrase that I could not land on. And the phrase was shipping the

00:04:26   org chart. Yep. The idea that you can see right through to a company's bones by what they

00:04:33   announce. And Google is very guilty of that. Yep. And then there's not a lot of follow-up

00:04:39   this week. Lastly, I just put this in here because I find it genuinely hilarious and I like the new

00:04:46   Apple Creator Studio icons, unlike most people. Apple has a new support document spotted by Mac

00:04:52   Rumors. Identify Apple Creator Studio apps on your Mac. Oh, this is terrible. It's a table of the new

00:05:00   icons on the left and the old icons on the right. Oh my God. Yeah. I like the new ones, but the old

00:05:09   ones are better. Um, but it just goes to, we spoke about this. Y'all spoke about an upgrade a good

00:05:14   bit. Just like how messy this was mostly due to limitations in the Mac app store. It seems like.

00:05:21   Yeah. This document is incredible. Uh, what's worse? These icons or the Ferrari Luce? Uh, the icons,

00:05:29   right? It's gotta be the icons. I think the icons. Yeah. We spoke about the, if you want our thoughts on

00:05:35   Ferrari Luce, you got to pay up, uh, go to getconnectedpro.co. We spoke about it. Look,

00:05:39   we're trying to buy one for the show. Yeah. So we, everyone's going to sign up and we can buy one

00:05:44   for, for, to review. Wouldn't that be incredible? Yeah. I still love that McDonald's icon so much.

00:05:50   Emotion. Yeah. I think it's so good. It stops, right? It's like, it's not the full thing.

00:05:56   McDonald's. It's like two thirds of McDonald's. McDonough. McDonough. McDonough. I mean, I, I opened

00:06:03   like pages or numbers the other day and it was like, Hey, there's a new one. What? I was like,

00:06:08   go away. Leave me alone. Don't make me do this. I haven't signed up for the creator studio yet just

00:06:13   because, I mean, this is the thing I said at the time. There just feels like there's so much that I

00:06:19   would have to deal with and I just can't be bothered to deal with it. Um, they, they did not make this as easy

00:06:25   as it could have been. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, I wonder if they did one of these for the, I work,

00:06:30   if there's a document for the eye work, probably somewhere or if not, there should be because it's

00:06:34   the same problem. Actually, I think it may be a little bit worse, uh, for the eye work apps. Cause

00:06:40   yeah. Uh, they get like version like 14.5 or whatever it is in the app store. Not great. Uh,

00:06:48   I have a tiny complaint about a visit to the Apple store, which I don't even really think is

00:06:54   worth bringing up. I love these stories. No, bring it up. I just wanted to mention it anyway,

00:06:59   because when I was in the Apple store, I was like, this feels like something to talk about on the show.

00:07:03   So Adina and I and Sophia, we were in, uh, London yesterday. Uh, dealing with an appointment and

00:07:12   we decided to stop by the region street store as Adina was interested in replacing her Apple watch

00:07:18   series eight. Um, it's great store. I've been there really, really nice. It's beautiful. It's

00:07:24   really nice. It's really good looking. It's not as good looking as that one in where was it? Is it

00:07:29   Milan? Memphis? Nope. Not the Memphis one. The one that you went to and took pictures in Federico.

00:07:34   Oh, in Rome. In Rome. Is that one's in Rome? Okay. Uh, Palazzo Marignoli. Yes.

00:07:38   Is an all time. You do a lot of good work at Mac stories. That is like an all time for me.

00:07:43   Thank you. That was so fun to put together. Yeah. Cause it was like cool to have the access.

00:07:47   Um, yeah. Yeah. Via Del Corso. Via Del Corso Palazzo Romagnoli. Yeah. That's a historical

00:07:54   location used to be this coffee shop, this, uh, coffee shop for, for poets and artists like a hundred

00:08:01   years ago or something. I don't remember the details, but like it was really popular spot for

00:08:06   Italian culture at the time. And then it became a fast food, um, place that was absolutely trashed.

00:08:13   by the, by the corporation. Also important for the culture, the fast food place.

00:08:18   It's important for the culture. Sure.

00:08:23   So, uh, Idina's Apple watch series eight, the battery obviously isn't as great as it could

00:08:30   be anymore. Uh, and she's not very good at charging it. So that's like a combo. The battery

00:08:34   is bad and she's not good at charging it. It's a disaster. But also in the last few days,

00:08:38   her Apple watch just keeps locking when she's wearing it. Ooh. So it's one of these things

00:08:45   where we tried software update. I've tried a bunch of seconds, turning some things on and

00:08:49   off like wrist detection. None of them works. It just keeps locking. Um, and I even put it

00:08:54   on my wrist and it was doing the same. Like, it's not that like, maybe she's, it doesn't

00:08:57   have a heartbeat or anything anymore. Like it's, you know, we can't, we're not sure what's

00:09:01   going on, but I was like, Hey, maybe it's time to get you a new one anyway. Like this is multiple

00:09:05   years old at this point. Like we can take a look at that. So we were like, Oh, and also

00:09:09   she had previously liked the rose color, like the rose gold color, aluminum. And then they didn't

00:09:15   do it in series eight. So she got silver. So she was excited to see that that was back. So I was

00:09:19   like, great, let's get you an Apple watch. So we're in the city. So I was like, let's just pop in and do

00:09:24   it. So first was, it was hard to find the Apple watches in general. Um, like there, I remember they

00:09:32   used to have these tables that would have like glass on them and you could see in it. They just don't

00:09:37   have that anymore. They kind of set out at least in the registry store a little bit more like iPhones

00:09:41   where they're just kind of like out and on the stands. Um, part of the problem was there were so

00:09:46   many MacBook Neos everywhere. First time I've seen a Mac with Neo in person, didn't go near it. Um,

00:09:51   but, but I saw it, but I was like, I'm not going to touch you. Uh, and I just left it over there.

00:09:55   This is for reasons of not wanting to buy a downstairs computer. So we went and found the models,

00:10:01   which were all so poorly labeled. I had to go into settings to confirm which was which.

00:10:07   Ooh. Like there was no labeling to say like, this is the, you know, the big one is the little one

00:10:13   and the SE, like it was just hard to discern which Apple watch was which, but like, whatever,

00:10:19   uh, maybe they do that on purpose. I don't know, but we couldn't find, I ended up finding the one

00:10:23   that would be hers and we were looking at it. Um, we then kind of like poked around on the iPad to

00:10:28   choose the colors and see what we wanted. And there was no Apple store staff at the table at all,

00:10:34   that the two Apple watch tables, there was nobody, there were customers, but there were

00:10:37   no staff, but as is typical kind of in an Apple store, you can see kind of people everywhere.

00:10:42   They're all like in matching shirts or whatever. And there were a couple of, uh, employees right

00:10:47   over at the end of the store. They were just standing there. So Dina was like, I'm just going

00:10:51   to go over and talk to them. So she went over there to talk to them. And I was going with the

00:10:54   baby. We took a sit, sit down in the Regent street, Apple store still have the chairs with

00:10:59   the trees, you know, the trees, the chairs, the grove, I think is what you're looking.

00:11:02   Yes. No, the tree chairs. So I sat down on a tree chair. Um, and then Dina came back and said

00:11:09   they could get someone to help, but it would take at least 15 minutes for someone to come.

00:11:15   Jeez.

00:11:15   And from where I was standing, I could see six employees. They're probably within 10 feet of

00:11:20   me. None of them appeared to be working with any customers and three of them were just talking to

00:11:26   each other. Now I absolutely believe that they were all busy with things or were assigned to jobs in

00:11:34   certain areas that were not dealing with the Apple watch. Right. And it was like, maybe they, there were

00:11:39   two people dealing with the Apple watches and they were all both in the storeroom, right? Trying to find

00:11:44   a bunch of things for some customers or whatever, but it isn't about the Regent street store or the

00:11:50   employees in the Regent street store. This is just a criticism, which has been levied so many times

00:11:55   about the way that Apple chooses to lay out their stores and how they staff them. Because you end up

00:12:01   in these situations as a customer where you're just kind of stuck, not knowing what you're supposed to

00:12:05   do. Like where if they just had the ability for me to go to a checkout and say, I would like this Apple

00:12:14   watch and then they say, okay, someone will go get that for you. Right. Like that's kind of all I

00:12:19   really want to do. And I know that some stores are starting to bring things like this back, right?

00:12:24   Where you can actually go to a checkout area. And so we just left. Like it's like, you know,

00:12:32   it's like, Oh, at least 15 minutes, we're just waiting and maybe someone will come and then it's going to

00:12:38   take a many, a much longer period of time for them to go through the whole thing and then go get the

00:12:44   work. It's just like, you know, this isn't, and I mean like, it's not on these people, right? Cause

00:12:49   it's just like, they're doing whatever they're doing. Like I know how these stores are kind of

00:12:53   arranged. Like people are assigned to do certain roles, but it's like, it would just be so easy if I

00:12:57   just had a central place to go and ask for a product rather than like hoping to catch the eye of

00:13:04   someone who's floating around the store, you know? So it was just a frustrating experience and it

00:13:10   reminded me kind of like of all the frustrating experiences I've ever had in the Apple store is

00:13:14   always some flavor of this. Like the only time that the Apple store really works is iPhone day because

00:13:21   they are regimented, right? Like they're getting you in and out. You're in a line, you know where you're

00:13:27   going. Everyone's expecting you. They're checking your reservations and you're just doing the whole

00:13:32   thing. Like, and also just in general, reserving products in advance and picking them up. Like,

00:13:37   I don't know why we didn't do that. Like we, I didn't want it to take a look, but like that was

00:13:41   the only, that's, I find the only real way to get what you want. You go in and say, I've got this

00:13:45   reservation. So I'm going to scan you. And then you just sit on the chair tree, the tree chair and

00:13:49   wait for them to bring you a product. Now I just find it really frustrating. It's like they set all this

00:13:53   stuff out for work and business and then they just can't handle it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's rough.

00:13:59   I popped into mine recently to buy a phone for somebody and I knew what I wanted. I just didn't,

00:14:06   I was like, it's near me. I can just drive over and go get it. And I was like, Hey, I need a phone.

00:14:13   Okay. Go stand over here. And like, I knew what I needed, but I still to like go through the

00:14:18   sort of the, the song and dance of it. The watches, at least in my store or right

00:14:24   up front and they're just out on tables. Yeah. And you're right. Unlike everything

00:14:29   else, like the iPhones are all divided. It's like, Oh, this is the iPhone air. And

00:14:32   these are the colors it's in. This is the 17 and this is the colors it's in. Right.

00:14:36   The watches are just like a, in some sort of like area and you kind of don't know

00:14:41   what's what I think the idea is that someone's going to like help you and you're

00:14:44   going to try it on. But waiting 15 minutes is not, is not.

00:14:48   It's like waiting 15 minutes for hopefully someone to come help. It's like,

00:14:53   we're not going to sit and do that. Like, you know, what's all day with the baby

00:14:57   waiting in line because people understand that. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it just reminds me, it's like

00:15:02   this, the reason that we have this thing where you could just buy a thing by scanning it in the

00:15:07   Apple store app is because to try and solve this issue. Right. Like Apple knows that the way that

00:15:12   they set up their stores means that sometimes you're just kind of like hanging around, hoping

00:15:16   to buy something from like a random person. So like, why don't we just let you buy things and walk

00:15:21   out the store? Uh, but obviously you can't do that to the bigger products. Yeah. And anytime I've,

00:15:27   I've done it like with iPhone cases and stuff and it feels like stealing every time, every time,

00:15:31   every time, every time. I don't know where we are on the show anymore because you keep just like

00:15:36   lobbing topics into it as we go. Yeah. Well, we could take a break and then we'll come back to

00:15:42   Tiny Topic 1. To be fair, Tiny Topic 0.0, which was the tiniest complaint about the Apple store was

00:15:47   already in there. Hmm. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Sentry. If you're working in

00:15:56   software, you have a web app or a mobile app, something internal, something for customers,

00:16:01   you know how complicated things can get when you get a bug report. Someone says something is broken,

00:16:07   but you can't reproduce it. So then you start digging. You go through logs, check your traces.

00:16:12   You still have no idea what the user actually saw. Sentry Session Replay fixes that. It gives you a

00:16:19   video-like reproduction of exactly what the user experienced. Their clicks, scrolls, what loaded,

00:16:24   what didn't, all tied to the error in one timeline. So you can see the console output, network calls,

00:16:32   and even rage clicks where users hammered a broken button. And because it's built into Sentry,

00:16:37   the replay is already linked to the error, the trace, and the logs. No hunting required.

00:16:42   We recently did a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff on our CMS at Relay, and we used Sentry to monitor

00:16:49   that CMS. And it was really helpful to know when we were having issues through that migration process.

00:16:55   We weren't having to dig or do a bunch of different tools, jump between different tools. Sentry had it

00:17:01   all together for us. And this is private. Privacy is on by default. Sensitive text and media is masked,

00:17:08   so you're never capturing what you shouldn't be. It works on the web and mobile, React, Next.js,

00:17:15   iOS, Android, Flutter, you name it. Millions of developers use Sentry, including Teams and

00:17:20   Anthropic and Disney+. Try it free at Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y, Sentry.io, and tell them that

00:17:30   we sent you. They have a free dev plan, and listeners of Connected can use the code CONNECTED26

00:17:36   to get $100 in credit if you're a new user. That's Sentry.io and the code CONNECTED26

00:17:43   for $100 in credits if you're a new user. My thanks to Sentry for the support of the show and all of Relay.

00:17:53   Yeah, Stephen, you'd be blogging. Yeah, man. You'd be blogging in Upper Storm. You snuck an

00:17:58   entire blog post into your Now page. Yes, I did. Which, to me, feels like something that you would

00:18:04   talk about, which was you re-architected your entire website. I feel like that's like a thing

00:18:08   that you would usually, you know, make a post about. Here's my blog post and that kind of thing.

00:18:15   Yeah, I thought about that. I thought on the Now page, like, it draws less attention to it,

00:18:21   but now we're talking about it on the show, so I guess that didn't work.

00:18:23   This is part of the reason we're doing it. It's because it felt like you were trying to bury

00:18:28   this news and I won't allow it, so here we are. What did you do to your website? Did you break it?

00:18:32   Many, in many ways. I do have a fix for what we see in Notion, which is a broken preview image.

00:18:41   That's fine. Yeah, so, I mean, go read the post, but I have joined the cool kids in running my site

00:18:49   on a static site generator, which is just wild. After 512 is getting ready to be 18 years old

00:18:56   for, like, 16 and a half of those years, it's been on WordPress. And it's, I got, and Federica,

00:19:07   I know you and I have talked about this. Like, WordPress is great, but when you get big enough,

00:19:13   things can get weird and complicated. So, like, I am just, I'm knocking on the door of 12,000 posts

00:19:21   over those 18 years.

00:19:23   Well, let me see.

00:19:24   Yeah, I bet you're more. Because our sites are...

00:19:27   Knocking on the door of 18,000.

00:19:31   Right, yeah. And your site's a year younger than mine, I think, or something like that.

00:19:35   2009?

00:19:36   Yeah, so one year younger. But you have a whole team. Like, I mean, you know, John's in there

00:19:40   just, like, power blocking every day.

00:19:41   Yeah.

00:19:42   I'm knocking on the door of, like, 50. You know, any day now, I'm going to catch up to you

00:19:47   too.

00:19:47   Yeah.

00:19:48   Are you still doing the every Friday thing?

00:19:51   In theory, I haven't been... The reason I've not been blogging is because I've been too

00:19:56   busy with Kickstarter stuff, which, that's a story for another time.

00:19:59   Wow. You just dropped that right in.

00:20:01   Did I even say a URL? No. I just said...

00:20:04   I mean, if people want to go to design.fm and learn more about what you're doing, that's

00:20:08   fine.

00:20:08   Yeah. They can do that. But I didn't say it. But yes, I...

00:20:13   You've been busy.

00:20:14   I haven't had the time. I haven't had the time.

00:20:16   Yeah. So, the problem I had was that my traffic is extremely unpredictable. It's a pretty good

00:20:27   amount of traffic every day, but my project pages, including the macOS screenshot library,

00:20:33   but especially the 6K macOS wallpaper page, those pages do a lot of traffic. The wallpaper

00:20:42   page is just wild traffic just every day. You can just count on it. But then, like, eight

00:20:48   times a year, people rediscover it on Hacker News or Reddit, or most recently, it was on

00:20:53   some sort of Chinese Apple user form, and I can't... I don't have it in front of me, but

00:21:00   the traffic was just unbelievable in terms of how many people came. And that made...

00:21:06   What page? Sorry? What page?

00:21:07   The 6K, the macOS wallpaper gallery.

00:21:10   Oh, the wallpapers. Okay. Yeah.

00:21:12   And that makes it really expensive to host, because you have to account for those days.

00:21:17   And I just was kind of at a point where I was like, that's a lot of money for a project that

00:21:23   literally makes no money unless you buy a t-shirt. Like, it doesn't really make sense.

00:21:27   And so, I moved to Hugo, which is a static site generator. I looked at several. I talked to

00:21:34   a bunch of people who were in this world. I chose Hugo because of the size of the site.

00:21:41   Leventy and some others would take a really long time to build a site this big. And Hugo

00:21:46   is written in Go. And it just doesn't care about your battery life or your fans in your computer.

00:21:53   It's like, I'm going to build this site as fast as I can. And what you get as the visitor is just

00:22:00   HTML pages. No database calls. No WordPress shenanigans. It's just static files, which means it's also

00:22:09   really fast for the visitors, which is awesome because parts of it were quite slow on WordPress.

00:22:15   I just learned that Leventy was a site generator. This entire time, I thought it was something about

00:22:22   accessibility. That's a different thing. Yeah. I mix them up in my brain. Apparently so. And I just thought

00:22:30   that when people were talking about Leventy, they were talking about an accessibility tool. Yeah.

00:22:34   Yeah. It's a static site generator. I don't really understand static site generators. Okay.

00:22:38   You should be completely awesome. Honest. I don't get it. I don't really understand it.

00:22:42   You should be completely awesome, Mike.

00:22:42   You should be awesome.

00:22:43   The three-second version is WordPress, Neon, RCMS at Relay. Those are web applications that have

00:22:53   database calls. It's like all the data lives in a database and the page calls that information when

00:22:58   it gets built. Or it's cached. It doesn't do it that often. But what a static site generator is,

00:23:03   like all you get when you hit a page on 5.12 or any other site that is built this way now is just

00:23:10   a web page. How it does that is that it builds the site and in my case locally on my Mac. And then I

00:23:18   push changes up to Cloudflare, which is where I'm hosting it now. And it just, it makes the web part of

00:23:25   it much simpler. Like if you were to poke around the directory of the site now, it's just HTML files.

00:23:33   And some JavaScript and some CSS. Like it's as simple as it can be. And it builds all that

00:23:38   locally. And then I just push the changes up.

00:23:41   But why wouldn't you always do that?

00:23:42   Because there are, so like there's downsides to this. Like I no longer have a CMS. Like I sort of

00:23:48   shoehorned my site into IA Writer to edit posts, which is fine. Like I like IA Writer and it actually

00:23:55   handles this really well. But I don't have a web interface to edit this unless I go to the private GitHub

00:24:02   repo and like edit a markdown file and then rebuild the site. So it, you are jumping through more hoops

00:24:08   to do this. And if I were on a team, like say that Mac stories want to do this, y'all would have to work

00:24:15   through how to do that with multiple people. You'd be checking things in now to GitHub. And I know y'all do

00:24:19   some of that, or at least you have in the past with your like editing workflows. But as a single person,

00:24:25   just working on the site, you know, I post guest posts sometimes, but those people

00:24:30   were not in WordPress, right? They were just like send me their thing and I would publish it.

00:24:34   It's fine. And so yeah, the downside is like the ease of use. The upside is the speed,

00:24:41   the simplicity. And, uh, I'm going to be paying a fraction of a fraction of what I was for my

00:24:49   hosting, which is, was the sort of the first thing that kicked this off was like, and I switched hosts,

00:24:54   WordPress hosts, like several times over the years, um, trying to find something that was a balance of

00:25:01   cost and performance. And every time I did that, it just ended up being expensive and kind of overly

00:25:10   complicated for my needs. Okay. But yes, I broke lots of things. I am sorry. Um, some of it was

00:25:17   foreseen. Some of it was not foreseen. Um, but if you see anything weird, let me know, drop me a note

00:25:24   and I'll get it fixed. Do you have to use, you have to use different apps now? Yeah. I had to,

00:25:30   I had to say goodbye to Mars edit, which is really sad. I love Mars edit. I'm sorry, Daniel. Um,

00:25:34   so I'm writing and I could write anything that, that knows Markdown. The reason I chose IA writer is

00:25:42   because I like the way that it, you can like set a folder on your Mac to be like your library. And so

00:25:48   I have my posts folder as the library and IA writer create new document. Um, put the front matter in,

00:25:55   which is like all the metadata at the top of the document, right? I save it. It's all,

00:26:00   this is all like in my local documents folder. This is not even on Dropbox. It's just some in

00:26:04   my local documents folder on my Mac. If I want to preview the site locally, I can build it in terminal.

00:26:10   And that's how I was doing all the development work was like, I just have a local web server

00:26:14   running and I can break things. And like my local site now is really broken. Cause I was trying to

00:26:19   fix something with footnotes. Um, I have a fix for now. I'm going to get that out this afternoon,

00:26:24   but I can build it locally, check it out, make sure it works. And then I push any changes to GitHub

00:26:33   and then Cloudflare watches the GitHub repo and builds the site, like takes the site live on Cloudflare

00:26:40   automatically. So as soon as I hit push into the repo, then after a couple minutes, the change is

00:26:47   reflected online. So that part's all automated, which is really nice. Um, Hugo is really well

00:26:54   supported by these services. It's, it seems to be very popular. My research was, it was basically

00:26:59   all positive. And so, um, basically as soon as I write something, save it and upload it to GitHub,

00:27:07   then the rest of it is automatic. If you have to fix a typo, do you have to rebuild your entire website?

00:27:13   Uh, yes. Well, so if I want, I don't have to rebuild it. I don't have to rebuild it locally.

00:27:21   Like a typo would just update that one page. So I could update the page. Um, Cloudflare will like

00:27:27   take that page and rebuild that page. That still takes a minute or so. Um, but I have to rebuild the

00:27:34   whole site. Like if I make a site-wide CSS change, um, if it, if that calls, like if I have to like

00:27:41   change a class somewhere, um, it's really like old school web development. Like it, you know,

00:27:47   like the footer is like its own file that it pulls in. But if I wanted to change something like,

00:27:53   Oh, I need to change like the, the, the tags that form the sidebar and that could be universal,

00:27:59   but it's fast because it's all just text. Um, the, my informax MacBook pro will build the site

00:28:06   from zero, like a cold build within like maybe 25 seconds. If I'm just doing changes, it's a split

00:28:13   second. So, okay. Does it get, do that get longer over time? But obviously it's never going to be a

00:28:18   super long time. It shouldn't have. I mean like in the span of years, like, you know, in another 18 years,

00:28:25   it will take twice as long, but I don't, but also my computer will be much faster in 10 years,

00:28:31   probably. So, well, okay. I mean, unless the RAM shortage means there's no new computers anymore.

00:28:38   Yeah. But then you just won't be blogging anymore either. So.

00:28:41   That's true. All, all tech history, all tech is tech history at that point.

00:28:45   We're currently using history because no one can buy computers. There are no computers. We're all

00:28:51   using obsolete product. So, yes. So, uh, thank you to people who helped some people in, um,

00:28:57   some people in discord were very helpful. Our friend Rob was very helpful and helping me,

00:29:04   helping steer me kind of towards what generator. Um, this feels like something Rob would like.

00:29:09   I used to, for, he was like the first person I texted. I was like, Hey, like I want to do this.

00:29:13   And we actually had a conversation about Eleventy and like the, the site size is really the problem

00:29:18   is that it's so big. And so Hugo is really built for that. Um, I will tell you, go is a wild

00:29:26   language. Like I've had to do a little bit and go. And like, I know Mark had talked about this years

00:29:31   ago because the overcast crawlers are written and go, it's bananas town in there. Like I never want

00:29:36   to go in there again. Like I did like the couple of things I needed to do. I was like, I was going

00:29:40   to back out of this room very slowly. Surely the LLMs know it though, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:47   Claude did some of this work for me. It was, it was a helpful partner. Helps by Rob and Claude.

00:29:53   That's right. Uh, yeah. But, um, you know, now I'm just doing like, again, Federico knows this. We both

00:30:01   have lived this, like you end up with cruft and WordPress installs and you're like, Oh, for like

00:30:08   five years, I use this like random type of thing for these posts and then I quit using it. Well, like,

00:30:13   that's fine because WordPress knows about both. But when you change CMSs or you move to no CMS,

00:30:20   it's like, well, I have to contend with all that now. And so it's, uh, it's been a, I'm

00:30:25   going to put in air quotes, a fun trip down memory lane of like past decisions I made. I

00:30:30   tell you, I would have done some things differently in the beginning that I'm still paying for in

00:30:34   some ways. Uh, but it's also been fun to like really work on the site. Like I've really gotten

00:30:40   to refresh, especially my CSS skills, but do some JavaScript stuff. Um, it's kind of been

00:30:47   fun to be like a web developer a little bit. This, this had the ringing of a classic Steven

00:30:53   project to me though, where you were like, you know, I'm thinking I might change something

00:30:59   around with the website. And then like three days later, you're like, it's live now. It's

00:31:03   like, wow. Okay. I, that is a classic Steven. I spent basically all day Saturday, just hold

00:31:10   up working on this. Cause this is how I've known you to like buy cars. Sometimes you're like, yeah,

00:31:16   I'm thinking about a new car. It's like, Hey, look at this thing. Driving off the lot, like

00:31:20   three days later. So usually what happens there is like, I've made my decision and then I'm not

00:31:25   thinking about the decision. I'm thinking about like executing the decision. Yes. Yes. So, uh,

00:31:32   good news guys, Johnny, I've designed my next car. Oh, JK. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank

00:31:39   you. You two are both wearing the device of my dreams, except it's made by the wrong company,

00:31:47   which is the Fitbit air. So you both bought one. Um, do you have any first impressions that you'd

00:31:55   like to share with me? So this is essentially a fitness tracker with no screen. It just looks like,

00:32:00   what if an Apple watch band, but all the way round? Yeah, I love it. Um, uh, I was talking

00:32:06   about this with Brandon, uh, on MPC actually also got one. Um, I love it so much. It's so like,

00:32:13   you don't think about it. And because it doesn't have a screen, uh, I noticed that the, the led sensor

00:32:18   is always on, like it's always pulling, uh, because it doesn't have the concern of the display and using

00:32:25   apps and all the things that an Apple watch can do, uh, connectivity. Like, I mean, it's only syncing

00:32:31   to be a Bluetooth to, to the app, but it doesn't have to do anything else. And because of that,

00:32:36   I find, so I've been using this for the past two or three days, just to wearing both my Apple watch

00:32:40   and the Fitbit on the same wrist. Um, I had to, I had to do the, uh, so my right wrist, I cannot use

00:32:48   these devices because I got a tattoo. Uh, the left wrist is the only one that is free. Uh, no joke.

00:32:54   I kept it free because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to use wearable devices. You need to make

00:32:58   like, just like the perfect ring of an Apple watch sensor and like tattoo all around it. Yeah. Just

00:33:05   like, this is it. That's actually a pretty good idea. And I noticed that, uh, that the data that I get

00:33:12   out of the Fitbit Air is seems to be, seems to me more accurate than the Apple watch. Um, I love that

00:33:18   it's saving a lot of data. It's, it's saving a lot of data points that it's capturing throughout the day

00:33:24   and something very nice that I think Google has done, uh, because I mean the device itself, there's nothing

00:33:30   to it. Uh, I got, I got the equivalent of like, what is it? Like a nylon band, uh, the one size you can

00:33:36   just, uh, adjust it to your preferred, uh, to your preferred comfort size. Um, there's nothing to it

00:33:42   once you set it up. Um, but something that Google has done is as part of the rebrand from Fitbit to

00:33:49   Google health for the app on the iPhone, which I don't hate. I think it's actually really nicely designed

00:33:55   and a lot more intuitive if you ask me, uh, than Apple health. If you just want to see how, how well

00:34:01   or badly you slept, that's a UI and a navigation with fewer taps than the health app from Apple that makes

00:34:10   sense to me. Um, but the cool thing is Google launched day one, a Google health API. So you, because

00:34:18   everything is saved and encrypted in your Google account, there's an API. Uh, and you know me, I obviously, uh,

00:34:24   immediately made a command line interface for it so that, uh, so that, uh, because now every morning I

00:34:35   can just open codecs, uh, in chat GPT on my phone and I can ask, give me a breakdown of how well I slept

00:34:42   last night. Yeah. But doesn't, doesn't the app do this? Like, does it have a chat bot in it? Uh,

00:34:50   does it, I, I haven't even used it. Oh, I think there's a subscription to pay for. Yeah. I'm not

00:34:57   paying that. I can just open codecs and it gives me like in, in, in about a minute, it runs through

00:35:03   all the data points. Okay. And that makes more sense to me because then you don't need the ultra plan or

00:35:08   whatever and you can do the same kind of thing. And it, and it cross references, right? Uh, so when did

00:35:13   the user go to bed, uh, what's the sleep data for that, a time threshold, like cross references,

00:35:19   that time threshold with heart rate data. And about a minute later, it gives me a natural language

00:35:25   response. Um, uh, being like, yeah, this is how well you slept. Uh, uh, you know, deep sleep was, uh,

00:35:31   more than the day before, but you were awake a couple more minutes. And I think it's really useful to

00:35:37   have this kind of simple interaction in plain language that doesn't require, uh, looking at charts and

00:35:43   graphs and a bunch of different things on a screen. Yeah. I want to make a recommendation at this

00:35:49   point for, uh, cause you know, I've spoken a lot about athletic. I think I've actually spoken about

00:35:53   this on the show already, but I'm just going to say it again. Uh, the makers of, of athletic make

00:35:58   an app called pace now, which is basically this kind of thing. It's less about athletic fitness and

00:36:06   general fitness. And you open the app and it's like, it just tells you this stuff in, in, in English.

00:36:13   You know, rather than like, here's the score and here's the, it's like, this is going on. This is

00:36:21   going on. You slept well. So like, yeah, if you have an Apple watch and you want something that's a

00:36:24   little bit closer to this, I recommend this app. I agree with all the hardware stuff. And I really

00:36:30   would love an Apple version of this. Uh, it weighs nothing. I have the same band. You do Federico

00:36:37   weighs nothing. You don't think about it. The battery life is like, even with the Apple watch ultra,

00:36:43   is like so far beyond because it's just doing so much less. And I would love a world where I could

00:36:48   wear a traditional watch when I want to, but still have fitness data. Um, I don't like the application.

00:36:54   I ran into, I had an old Fitbit account and that's gone. And like the migration to Google health is

00:36:59   super bad. Um, I had, I like had several restarts where it kept trying to log in as a different Google

00:37:06   account that my phone knows about. And it's like, well, no, stop. Like I've told you what

00:37:10   my email address is. Quit trying to use the other one. Um, finally got that done. And I just, I just

00:37:17   don't like the app itself. Most of its personal taste and some of the design choices, I think it's a bit

00:37:23   busy. Um, I did not, at this point have not paid for the AI coach thing. In fact, last time I looked,

00:37:33   it wasn't even available to me. Um, I don't know if it's like rolling out or, or what the deal is.

00:37:41   Um, that's, that's fine by me at this point. Uh, but my, my plan is to do like a, sort of a long-term

00:37:48   review. Um, I, I, I don't know how I feel about like, which one's more accurate in terms of steps

00:37:55   and things like that, but really most, I mean, no one is going to wear two of these things hardly at all.

00:38:02   And so it's more about like knowing the one that you have, you know, uh, how it works for you. And, um,

00:38:10   right now, I think it's also important to note for, for iPhone users in particular,

00:38:14   obviously, uh, it only has one way sync with Apple health. It can read information from Apple health

00:38:21   and you can, in the UI, it sure looks like it should write to Apple health, but it doesn't.

00:38:27   Um, that's forthcoming. Hopefully I've, I've read different things about what Google has said there

00:38:33   for me, I would want that. Um, but it's not there right now. So like right now,

00:38:40   now I'm using an actually completely disconnected from Apple health. Like just

00:38:44   you track everything in your own little world and I'll do this stuff in the Apple world with my watch

00:38:49   and like, we'll kind of see how it goes, but it's, it's remarkably refreshing to have a device.

00:38:58   It's like, it's 99 bucks. I think, um, really simple. It's not trying to get me to engage with it.

00:39:04   Right. That it's not trying to, to bump into my everyday life the way the Apple watch does.

00:39:10   And, and like, is, is it's Fitbit going back to its roots, right? Like back in the day, like I had early Fitbits

00:39:16   when it was literally like just a little puck and you put it in a rubber band or you put it into like a clip

00:39:21   that you could wear on your clothing somewhere. And it was literally just a pedometer. Right.

00:39:25   And then eventually they added stuff. And then for years, all Fitbits were smartwatches effectively to some degree.

00:39:33   Right. And there's room clearly for something else. And it's not the whoop, right. That was way more expensive.

00:39:41   It does more. It whoop is much more about like the, the, what it does with the data, the, the data collection itself.

00:39:47   I feel like, and this is simpler than that. And I think for a lot of people, simpler is better in some of these regards.

00:39:56   And if you're don't have an Apple watch, you're not interested in Apple watch and you, but you still want something on your body

00:40:05   to track more than what your phone can in your pocket. I think this is a reasonable choice, assuming that you're okay with that data

00:40:12   basically being in Google health and not synced back to Apple health, at least at this point.

00:40:18   I'm hoping that this product is successful enough or like appreciated enough that maybe it, maybe it pushes Apple to make it something like this.

00:40:27   And I could imagine maybe in a world, if they're going to start making a bunch of weird wearables for AI,

00:40:33   like maybe they could do this too. Like there could be something in this world as well.

00:40:39   Like I really hope so. Cause I want something that gives me all of the stuff the Apple watch gives me, right?

00:40:46   Cause I do like the rings and all that kind of stuff, but I, I would like to be able to, to wear regular watches

00:40:54   and still get all that information. Um, which is why this does seem interesting to me.

00:40:58   And I think maybe, you know, maybe once it gets to the point, Google said it, well, once it gets to the point,

00:41:03   where it's, it's reading and writing to Apple health, um, that, that could be a bit more interesting for me even then, uh, we'll see.

00:41:12   But it does look cool. I'll say that. And like, actually as well, like wearing both of them doesn't look bad,

00:41:18   which is the thing, you know, if you wear an Apple watch and one of these, like,

00:41:21   it just kind of looks like you've got some kind of, you're made a fashion choice.

00:41:25   Yeah. It's very low key. Like in terms of both size weight and the look.

00:41:33   So you both have, what one do you have? Cause there's like three different ones. Isn't there like, like, um, bands?

00:41:44   Yes. I don't know. I've got the rubbery one.

00:41:46   Okay.

00:41:48   Whatever it's called.

00:41:49   Well, cause they have the performance one, the active one and the elevated.

00:41:55   Let's see. I don't have this Seth Curry one, which is very funny to me. Um.

00:42:02   He's been wearing one of these for months.

00:42:05   Yeah.

00:42:06   Publicly.

00:42:07   Active is the one I have.

00:42:09   The active one. So the rubbery one.

00:42:11   Yes.

00:42:12   The one that's more like an Apple watch band.

00:42:13   That's the one you have too, Federico. The rubbery one.

00:42:17   No, no. I have the, the, the nylon one.

00:42:20   The performance one.

00:42:21   Yeah.

00:42:22   Yeah.

00:42:22   The one that looks like a trail loop.

00:42:23   Yes.

00:42:24   With the Velcro.

00:42:25   Thank you.

00:42:26   Yeah.

00:42:26   Yeah. It's Velcro.

00:42:27   Yeah.

00:42:27   Yeah.

00:42:29   Uh, 99 bucks though, man. It's, it's, it's pretty compelling.

00:42:33   Pretty good.

00:42:34   It's pretty good.

00:42:34   Pretty good.

00:42:35   Without a subscription too.

00:42:36   So MKBHD made a good video comparing it and the Whoop mostly.

00:42:39   And like Whoop is like, it's like 300 bucks a year.

00:42:43   That actually includes the subscription.

00:42:44   And then once you've got the hardware, then you've got to have the subscription going.

00:42:47   So it's like, for some reason, Google's decided they want to destroy Whoop, I guess.

00:42:53   And now they're going to do that.

00:42:56   Yeah.

00:42:57   Very interesting.

00:42:58   Yeah.

00:42:58   And I mean, there's always going to be room for something more extreme, right?

00:43:03   But not everybody wants that.

00:43:05   And I think there's a lot of people like, um,

00:43:07   Our Ring is, is apparently planning for IPO and they have the Our Ring 5, which is imminently due.

00:43:14   There were some leaks about that this week, but there's subscription, right?

00:43:18   For, it's basically like you get the hardware, you pay for the hardware, but then you, you also pay for the service.

00:43:23   Google's clearly doing that with like the AI health coach.

00:43:26   But if you pay 99 bucks, it just does a bunch of stuff out of the box, which is awesome.

00:43:32   Or, uh, announced the five like today.

00:43:34   Oh, yeah, it was announced today.

00:43:36   Oh, well, there you go.

00:43:37   I guess the leaks were...

00:43:38   It's lighter, lighter, thinner, uh, looks like, looks more like a, like a...

00:43:44   It looks kind of normal.

00:43:45   It's still too big, but...

00:43:47   It's still chunkier than a normal wedding ring, but it's much better than the current one, which, I mean, you put it on and you can tell like, oh, that's a smart ring.

00:43:55   Have y'all tried aura rings in the past?

00:43:58   No.

00:43:58   Both Sylvia and I have an aura ring 4.

00:44:01   Okay.

00:44:01   Do you like it?

00:44:04   Big issue with it is that we really like it, but unlike other wearable devices, including the Fitbit Air, it leaks a lot of green light at night from the sensor.

00:44:18   Wow.

00:44:19   And that was really bothering Sylvia.

00:44:22   She's a light sleeper.

00:44:23   And when everything is dark, you could see these flashes of green light coming out of her hand.

00:44:30   And, uh, yeah, that was not great.

00:44:32   And there's actually a whole niche of people on the internet, obviously, trying to come up with solutions, including if you search on Amazon, like silicon covers for the aura ring to prevent light leaking, they don't really work.

00:44:46   We have tried so many of them.

00:44:47   Sylvia eventually resorted to making her own, um, uh, sort of cover for the ring, but it was so cumbersome to, to sort of attach it every single night.

00:44:57   And so she basically just stopped using it.

00:45:00   And so did I, because it was also bothering Sylvia.

00:45:02   And if I'm supposed to wear a fitness tracker, it's supposed to be on all day long.

00:45:08   And so I wasn't really seeing the benefit of using a ring just for the daytime.

00:45:13   Um, and that's a shame because I, you know, it's not supposed to happen.

00:45:18   She tried multiple sizes, but it seems to be a pretty widespread issue, especially if you are very sensitive to, uh, you know, light, uh, when you're sleeping.

00:45:28   So today, before we started the show, Mark Gurman posted to Bloomberg, here's a first peek at Apple's iOS 27 kind of Siri overhaul.

00:45:41   And it's essentially a selection of screenshots that Bloomberg has made, which I find fascinating.

00:45:51   Remember, remember when I used to make concepts for the next versions of iOS?

00:45:57   Yeah.

00:45:57   That's what Bloomberg is doing.

00:45:59   Well, I guess he's saying he's seen this, right?

00:46:02   Yeah, right.

00:46:02   But you can't, you can't share those, right?

00:46:05   Because like, there's, it can lead to people getting in trouble.

00:46:10   This is closer to what Jon Prosser did.

00:46:12   Hey, I mean, that worked out fine.

00:46:14   Right?

00:46:15   But what I find fascinating about this is they say like, Bloomberg made these.

00:46:20   Who made these?

00:46:22   They look good.

00:46:24   Like, it's like, I find it just a fascinating story of like, here's a bunch of screenshots that I made of iOS 27.

00:46:33   So yeah, really weird.

00:46:35   I mean, it's not, there is no real information in here that is new.

00:46:38   It is essentially just visual representations and a collection of the reporting that Mark has been doing over the last kind of month about what's coming.

00:46:47   But there was one detail in here that I was like, oh man, that's going to be annoying.

00:46:52   Which is for the, for the kind of swipe down feature to bring up kind of Siri slash spotlight combo.

00:46:59   You'll do that from the center of the screen.

00:47:01   And then if you want notification center, it'll be swiping from the left.

00:47:04   And I just know this is going to be a nightmare for me.

00:47:06   Yeah.

00:47:07   No, why?

00:47:08   You're going to have three areas.

00:47:10   So notifications left, Siri center, control center, right.

00:47:13   It's, it's, it's more, I'm talking just the muscle memory of like, I, I'm going to be doing this all wrong all the time.

00:47:20   I bet you there's going to be a control for doing that.

00:47:24   And everybody is going to tie that to the action button.

00:47:28   That's it.

00:47:28   Oh yeah.

00:47:31   Well, I mean, you think this will be, this won't be the UI that happens when you press the, the long, long press the power button.

00:47:39   You reckon it'll be different.

00:47:39   I think they're going to, they're going to find, obviously like if they do this, everybody's going to complain.

00:47:46   Right.

00:47:47   So they are, I am very confident that this kind of change is the kind of thing that can get tweaked by public beta time in July.

00:47:56   But also I would be shocked if they don't have some kind of control or app intent that puts you immediately in typing mode or whatever.

00:48:05   Yeah.

00:48:05   I'm just, I'm just rereading the report here.

00:48:07   And he says that like, you can get Siri by both ways, but it will be a different UI from swiping down than it will be from the long press on the, on the hub, on the, on the lock button.

00:48:20   But yeah, I think that's a really good point, right?

00:48:22   That like, maybe they'll put even just a shortcut or it will just be part of the action button.

00:48:27   You know, like that, that like very intense 3D UI that they made.

00:48:31   Now it'll just be one of the options will just be like, bring up whatever this mode is going to be called.

00:48:36   But yeah, interesting stuff.

00:48:38   I, I am very eager for this new Siri app or whatever it's going to be, this new Siri experience.

00:48:46   Especially when he's saying like, it's possible you might be able to like choose your model, which I would be fascinated if they will let you do that.

00:48:54   But yeah, it's going to be interesting.

00:48:56   It's going to be interesting times just a couple of weeks away.

00:48:58   But I really just wanted to bring it up for the, just the pure, I think weirdness of Bloomberg making their own screenshots.

00:49:04   This episode of Connected is brought to you by Steam Clock.

00:49:11   You probably have a lot of opinions about app quality.

00:49:14   You know, the difference between an app that feels right and one that feels off.

00:49:17   Steam Clock software builds mobile apps for companies that care about taste.

00:49:23   They're a design and development studio based in Vancouver, and they've been shipping iOS and Android apps for over 15 years.

00:49:30   Their clients are growing tech companies that care about mobile, but don't have the in-house team to build something great.

00:49:37   Steam Clock works with companies to level up their app so they can go from it's holding us back to it's pulling its weight.

00:49:45   Some of their clients have discovered the hard way that vibe coding your way to the app store is not a product strategy.

00:49:53   Steam Clock has deep experience shipping apps for iOS and Android, and they're good at helping companies figure out the right technical approach for their situation.

00:50:01   Client apps that they've worked on have been downloaded over 10 million times, and they've helped five of their clients through acquisitions.

00:50:08   So if you're building something and need a mobile team that cares as much as you do, Steam Clock is where to start.

00:50:15   Visit Steam Clock dot com slash connected to get in touch.

00:50:19   That's Steam Clock dot com slash connected.

00:50:23   Our thanks to Steam Clock for their support of the show and all of Relay.

00:50:27   Federico, you cannot be stopped.

00:50:31   No.

00:50:32   It's another week.

00:50:33   Mine more.

00:50:33   It's another project.

00:50:35   And another one.

00:50:35   And another one.

00:50:36   And another one.

00:50:38   Yeah.

00:50:38   Are you getting it yet?

00:50:39   These are not three websites.

00:50:41   I don't know where I was going.

00:50:43   Tell us about your new reminders project.

00:50:47   Yes, this is called RemCTL.

00:50:49   It means Reminders Control.

00:50:51   I actually think that the CTL thing is going to be my new little brand for command line interfaces, because I will be releasing more.

00:51:01   This is my next command line interface that is designed for people and AI agents.

00:51:06   And it's a Reminders CLI for the Apple Reminders app on macOS.

00:51:12   Right now, it only officially works and supports macOS Tahoe.

00:51:17   So, sorry, I do not have at the moment a VM or an old Mac running.

00:51:22   Oh, gosh, what was it?

00:51:24   Sequoia.

00:51:25   No, Sequoia.

00:51:26   So, it's Tahoe only for now.

00:51:29   But you may be wondering, what's the big deal, Tichi?

00:51:33   There's a bunch of Reminders CLIs out there that you can use with your Codex or Cloud Code or OpenClaw, whatever.

00:51:39   Yes, that is true.

00:51:42   But I wanted to have the best one out there.

00:51:47   Because all of those existing CLIs, including the very own Reminders CLI made by Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw,

00:51:55   They are all limited to what is officially offered to third-party developers who want to integrate with Reminders, which means they're using the EventKit framework, which is sort of a subset of Calendar, essentially, that can write basic Reminders data.

00:52:16   But I don't know if you noticed, but starting with iOS 13, especially, so we're talking five, six years ago at this point, Reminders has grown a lot.

00:52:24   And it's got a lot of features that have always been closed off to third-party developers, I'm talking about things like subtasks or image attachments or tags or grocery lists with automatic categorization, templates, sections inside lists.

00:52:44   So how you can do now sort of a Kanban board, there's a lot of things that third-party developers, if you want to make a Reminders client, you cannot use those features because Apple locked them behind a private framework and a private API.

00:53:02   And that was my goal.

00:53:03   Like, I started working on this a couple of months ago, and I wondered, can I make the best possible Reminders CLI that is a perfect replica of all the things you can do in Reminders on the Mac, I should be able to do in this CLI with my agent of choice, instead of using the Reminders app manually.

00:53:26   And that's what RemCTL does, it's a one-to-one match for all the Reminders functionalities, they're all here, subtasks, sections, you can tell your agent to make a smart list for you with the custom filters that Apple supports.

00:53:46   So you can ask in natural language, make me a smart list that shows me all my tasks that are tagged to family and that are due within the next week, and it'll make a native smart list in Reminders for you.

00:53:58   You can choose to apply a custom symbol or a custom emoji with a specific color, and it'll use the default Reminders symbols or emoji or colors.

00:54:08   Every single Reminders functionality is in the CLI and in the skill that comes bundled.

00:54:14   This was possible thanks to Codex, which is my sort of agent for making these things of choice, and it's largely based on three sort of big ideas.

00:54:26   So Reminders, again, like shortcuts that we talked about last week, Reminders on the Mac keeps all of its data in an SQLite database.

00:54:36   And that database is just freely available for you to copy, inspect, open in a folder on Mac OS.

00:54:45   The CLI only reads from that database.

00:54:49   It never edits, modifies, touches the database, because that would be really dangerous and silly.

00:54:55   But it's using that database to read stuff about your Reminders.

00:54:59   Like, this Reminder, when is it due?

00:55:01   Is it inside of a section of a list?

00:55:04   Is it recurring?

00:55:06   Does it have an urgent Reminder, the new feature of iOS 26?

00:55:11   It reads from that database.

00:55:14   Then it has two modes for actually writing content to Reminders.

00:55:19   It uses the regular vanilla event kit for basic reminders.

00:55:25   Like, if you just ask it, remind me to take out the trash at 6 p.m., it's just going to use the regular event kit that everybody uses.

00:55:32   But, and this was sort of the final breakthrough,

00:55:36   Codex reverse-engineered the private reminder kit framework that Apple uses.

00:55:44   For itself.

00:55:45   And that I have no idea why there's no Reminder kit API for developers.

00:55:50   And this was the big breakthrough for me when building this.

00:55:55   It's using Reminder kit to natively, essentially, it acts as if it were the Reminders app, calling Reminder kit.

00:56:04   And so, that's why if you ask, hey, can you create a Reminder tagged, I don't know, podcasts, and save it in my podcast list, but inside the connected section,

00:56:15   and give it an urgent reminder for tomorrow at 10 p.m., and it'll do that.

00:56:21   And it'll take a couple of seconds to do that.

00:56:24   There's lots of documentation for people and agents, and I even was able to add in a native permissions onboarding flow for the first time you install the CLI.

00:56:40   It's going to automatically detect a bunch of things.

00:56:42   It's going to ask you for native permissions to control the Reminders app.

00:56:47   And it's going to open a really nice, fancy permissions window with two icons that you need to drag into system settings to give access to the terminal

00:56:59   and the Python interpreter installed on your machine, because this thing uses Python, and it actually auto-opens system settings for you inside the correct section.

00:57:12   So, all you need to do is drag those icons, give your touch ID or password, and that's it.

00:57:18   You're good to go.

00:57:18   I like it when apps do that.

00:57:20   Yeah.

00:57:20   And because I know you can do that, it annoys me whenever apps don't do that.

00:57:24   Yeah, it's like, go to this section of settings.

00:57:26   I don't know where that is.

00:57:27   Yes.

00:57:28   It's like, it's going to take me, like, 10 minutes to find it, because I never know where anything is in settings anymore.

00:57:33   Mm-hmm.

00:57:33   Yep.

00:57:35   So, this has been, like, honestly, really useful for me.

00:57:40   I've been using it since I started creating this.

00:57:43   I know that John has been using it as, like, with all the things that he does.

00:57:47   Like, John, for example, this week has told me that he was very busy, like, managing a lot of sponsorship-related emails.

00:57:53   And he told me that he really loved the combination of, like, using, I think John uses Cloud.

00:57:58   And he was using Cloud to sort of make sense of his emails using the Spark CLI and MyReminders CLI.

00:58:07   So, to create, like, tasks for those emails from sponsors and making sense of, like, those dozens and dozens of messages.

00:58:15   And, yeah, obviously free and open source and available for everybody to use, submit a file, an issue, and I will take a look at it.

00:58:26   And it's pretty agnostic in the sense that you can use it with Codex, with Cloud, with OpenClaw.

00:58:32   It doesn't matter.

00:58:34   God forbid I even tested it with Grok.

00:58:37   Oh, no.

00:58:37   I mean, I had to, because there's going to be the people who are like, oh, did you test it with Grok?

00:58:41   Yes, I did.

00:58:42   Did you do it with new deep fakes in your reminders list?

00:58:45   I did not, thankfully.

00:58:47   Good, good, good, good.

00:58:48   Well, I don't know, Grok might put them in there.

00:58:51   You've got to watch out.

00:58:51   At least for now.

00:58:53   I tested it with perplexity, personal, I tested it with everything, and it works.

00:58:59   So, yeah.

00:58:59   How do you expect this to hold up over time?

00:59:04   Ah, that's a fun question.

00:59:05   Like, macOS 27 is coming.

00:59:08   Yes.

00:59:09   Spoiler.

00:59:11   Yeah.

00:59:11   Whoa!

00:59:12   Look!

00:59:12   MacRumors, when you quote this, it's the Connected Podcast Reports.

00:59:17   Yes, on the Relay Network, yes.

00:59:20   Exclusive.

00:59:21   I mean, you'll have months to fix it, I guess.

00:59:23   if there are issues.

00:59:24   I do.

00:59:24   I do, and...

00:59:26   It's not like you're busy at this time of year.

00:59:28   No, it's fine.

00:59:30   It's fine, it's fine, it's fine.

00:59:31   The great thing is that I have, like I said last week, I'm learning a lot in this process

00:59:38   of making these tools and releasing them.

00:59:42   And something that I learned is that that database exists on macOS for a lot of compatibility

00:59:50   reasons as well, which means that set aside the iCloud syncing part, which of course I don't,

00:59:57   I cannot touch because that requires a private entitlement from Apple.

01:00:02   That database knows how to handle certain reminders that need to be displayed on an older machine,

01:00:11   right?

01:00:11   So you got to keep some compatibility layer going.

01:00:16   But worst case scenario, if Apple decides to completely change the reminders data layer

01:00:24   for macOS 27 and iOS 27, I will get to work and I will make it so the CLI knows how to handle

01:00:33   a device on 26 versus a device on 27.

01:00:36   Right.

01:00:37   But at this point, given how the real thing that would suck for me wouldn't be like changing the data layer

01:00:46   because of these things, these agents can just do things.

01:00:48   The only obstacle realistically that I foresee is if and when, hopefully never,

01:00:55   Apple locks down macOS so that these things are not freely available for you to inspect in folders.

01:01:02   Yeah.

01:01:03   So that's the only thing.

01:01:04   Hope it doesn't happen.

01:01:06   I wonder if this agent stuff makes it more or less likely that they would do that.

01:01:12   I feel like I don't have a good answer.

01:01:15   Me neither.

01:01:16   It's been on my mind and it's especially because like I was thinking, what if, so I was talking

01:01:21   behind the scenes with friend of the show, Steve Transmith about this, like what happens

01:01:26   when, when these agents can just take something that's on the operating system and make something

01:01:33   based on it, but that doesn't exist out of the box.

01:01:37   And I guess my question would be what happens if Apple actually embraces this and maybe they

01:01:44   don't, but, um, maybe they just, uh, intentionally ignore it and just let it be because they know

01:01:51   here, here's the thing.

01:01:52   They know that AI developers and tinkerers and enthusiasts choose and prioritize macOS because

01:02:03   of this.

01:02:04   Right.

01:02:05   Yeah.

01:02:06   I, I, I think, I mean, this is like a dreaded thing to say, but I think at some point they need

01:02:13   to create a set of privacy controls to allow, uh, like to, to help users that maybe don't

01:02:24   know what they're doing, who are installing some of these tools that they find on the internet.

01:02:28   Maybe like if you're not at the very, I mean, for example, the CLI, first of all, it requires

01:02:35   you to issue some terminal commands.

01:02:36   So there's already like, but we're not super far away though from like, uh, we'll just take

01:02:41   care of that part for you.

01:02:42   Right.

01:02:43   Like, you know, like, you're not, you know, you're not many, you, I can understand you wouldn't

01:02:48   do this, but you could create part of the system to do it.

01:02:52   Right.

01:02:53   So I figure at some point there might be a benefit to some of these things requiring

01:03:01   you as a user to kind of like, you know, like Jason has spoken about like developer mode a

01:03:05   bunch of times.

01:03:06   Yeah.

01:03:06   Yeah.

01:03:07   Like there being just some kind of like, I know what I'm doing here.

01:03:11   I think that there could be something beneficial to having something like that because too many

01:03:17   people are getting too clever about using the computer, you know, in a way that can be, I

01:03:24   could be catastrophic for people that don't fully understand what they're doing.

01:03:29   They saw, they saw something on Reddit that everyone was excited about and they just went

01:03:33   and installed it.

01:03:34   It could be.

01:03:35   And I mean, there's a, there's a developer mode on iOS already.

01:03:38   And I mean, it wouldn't be too much of a hassle to, to, to have a developer mode on macOS that

01:03:44   basically bypasses a bunch of those security restrictions.

01:03:46   And, and it requires you to restart your Mac twice and put in your password 10 times and

01:03:52   then it's enabled.

01:03:53   That would be fine because it's the kind of thing that you do once and then forget about

01:03:56   it.

01:03:56   And if you know what you're doing, you know what you're doing.

01:03:58   So yeah, I could actually see that scenario where the entirety of the, or maybe most of

01:04:06   the underpinnings of these apps on macOS, like library slash application support, like

01:04:10   that kind of stuff gets hidden.

01:04:12   I mean, it's already hidden by default, like the library folder, for example.

01:04:16   It's already hidden by default.

01:04:17   You got to know how to show it, but it's there in the file system.

01:04:20   I could see a scenario in which they sort of hide that and lock it down by default.

01:04:25   But then if you want to enable developer mode, you can.

01:04:28   I just don't think they're going to get rid of that access for good because otherwise most

01:04:33   macOS users would just absolutely revolt and demand that John Ternus already steps down.

01:04:38   And I think, you know, they seem to, I think they're pretty proud of the fact that there

01:04:43   are so many people that are using their Macs in these ways.

01:04:47   I think that they're, they seem to be excited about it.

01:04:50   And so doing things like this would stop that.

01:04:54   Exactly.

01:04:55   It would just stop it dead.

01:04:56   And so I don't think it would be, but at the same time, I think that they, they need to

01:05:01   show a little bit of, of responsibility.

01:05:05   Obviously goes without saying, I expect that for most interactions with reminders, you will

01:05:13   get a, you will get a great experience with the new Siri backed by Google Gemini.

01:05:17   The advantage here is that if you want to use something like Codex and Cloud Code or your

01:05:23   OpenClaw, your Hermes agent, whatever, this allows you to use reminders to its full extent from your

01:05:31   OpenAI or Anthropic application of choice.

01:05:34   It allows you to do things like, for example, something really nice that I can do now.

01:05:39   Every week I used to have a shortcuts, personal automation, to create the template in reminders

01:05:47   for the next issue of Mac Stories Weekly, the newsletter for the, for the upcoming week.

01:05:53   But I had to go into the reminders app, manually delete the previous week's list, take the new

01:06:05   one and manually pin it to the top of the sidebar.

01:06:08   Now I have a Codex automation that does it all for me.

01:06:12   It, uh, automatically deletes the previous temp, uh, list and creates the new project and

01:06:20   automatically makes it a pinned project to the top of the sidebar, because that's another

01:06:25   sort of private API feature that it supports.

01:06:28   Um, so that's nice.

01:06:30   And that's something that you can do with Codex and I'm sure you can replicate sort of the same

01:06:34   with a Cloud Code routine or whatever they're called.

01:06:37   Did you have to, like, for some of this stuff that's in the private API.

01:06:42   Did you have to, to ask Codex to find these features specifically?

01:06:48   Like, I want to do this.

01:06:50   How is it doing this?

01:06:52   Yes.

01:06:52   I had to set a goal that's a feature of Codex, which is, I think I mentioned it before, it's

01:06:59   the OpenAI version of a loop where you put an agent in a loop on itself and it doesn't

01:07:04   stop until it's satisfied with the result.

01:07:07   Set it to extra high, disabled fast mode because I didn't want to burn through my usage.

01:07:13   And I think it worked for about an hour.

01:07:15   And it came to the conclusion on its own, found the Objective-C file that was, um, responsible

01:07:24   for ReminderKit and created its own, um, sort of third-party Objective-C bridge for ReminderKit.

01:07:33   So that when, when the CLI talks to Reminders and says, I want to, I don't know, create a

01:07:39   template, uh, it's, uh, Reminders doesn't even know.

01:07:43   It just says, okay, this is coming from a ReminderKit.

01:07:46   It's fine.

01:07:46   It's signed.

01:07:47   I can sync it with iCloud.

01:07:49   No worries.

01:07:50   Uh, but yes, Codex, um, I basically, Codex couldn't do it and I realized, well, let me try

01:07:56   the goal command and I bumped up the, the model, uh, reasoning level and I said, no, you got

01:08:03   to find a way to make it happen.

01:08:04   Go for it.

01:08:05   And sure enough, it did.

01:08:07   Does everything need a command line interface?

01:08:11   It feels like right now everything needs a CLI.

01:08:14   Well, we've ended up here because these agents are best when used on a computer that is open

01:08:23   like a Mac or to an extent, a Windows machine, probably better on Linux, actually, than Windows.

01:08:29   The, the world in which we've entered where there's the phrase open, kind of like how a

01:08:36   Windows machine is open.

01:08:37   It's like a very wild, it's just not, it's just not, it's just not where I expected we'd

01:08:42   ever be.

01:08:42   Windows file systems and sandboxing are weird.

01:08:45   And that's why OpenAI, uh, people are complaining that OpenAI is shipping all these fancy new Codex

01:08:51   features for macOS only because quite a paradox, but it's actually easier.

01:08:57   Yeah.

01:08:57   It's so funny.

01:08:58   Yeah.

01:08:59   Yeah.

01:09:00   And I guess that it's the, it's the, in the historical inherent security of Mac

01:09:05   OS maybe.

01:09:06   Yeah.

01:09:07   Right.

01:09:07   Which is allowed for these things to occur.

01:09:09   I don't know what the, I don't know what the reason is, but it's interesting.

01:09:13   But because it feels like right now everything's getting a command or, you know, maybe it's

01:09:18   just because I follow you and John, it feels like everything's getting a command line interface,

01:09:22   but I think it's just you too.

01:09:23   We've, we've seen from a lot of third party developers, maybe that's our influence.

01:09:27   I don't know.

01:09:28   But, uh, used to like, they are, if you think about it this way, they are the new MCP.

01:09:34   Like everybody was doing MCP last year.

01:09:36   Now everybody's doing CLIs because they are, they are actually better for desktop agents

01:09:42   to understand and operate without burning a lot of tokens.

01:09:47   But they do have the limit of there needs to be a computer on.

01:09:51   Yes, absolutely.

01:09:52   Uh, there needs to be on your computer.

01:09:55   Yeah.

01:09:55   Uh, and, uh, that's sort of the idea.

01:09:58   Uh, yeah.

01:10:01   Why are you using reminders?

01:10:02   I really just missed, uh, being able to use a Siri or the Apple watch and just bring up

01:10:09   Siri and say, Hey, remind me to do this.

01:10:11   Yeah.

01:10:11   Because otherwise with other task managers, I end up forgetting to save tasks.

01:10:17   And at the very least with Siri, I don't.

01:10:20   Okay.

01:10:20   Yeah.

01:10:21   And also because I figured I'm going to have to switch in the summer anyway.

01:10:26   So I might as well do it now and get ready for June.

01:10:30   Oh, that's actually an interesting point though.

01:10:33   Right.

01:10:33   Cause it's like, well, now you've built these incredible features for yourself, but like,

01:10:36   how do you test the OSes?

01:10:38   if now you're like abstracting the OS away all the time?

01:10:41   Well, well, well, well, you're going to have to stop doing some of these things in the

01:10:47   summer, right?

01:10:47   Well, yeah.

01:10:48   Or I can, uh, there's an interesting angle for doing both at the same time and see how

01:10:53   it holds up.

01:10:54   Right.

01:10:54   Like, uh, like in a, in a, in a post, uh, real assuming, assuming so, uh, Apple intelligence

01:11:00   world, uh, how does it compare?

01:11:04   Are you more incentivized to just use Apple intelligence or is there still a place if

01:11:08   you're a nerd for, for desktop agents?

01:11:10   I don't know.

01:11:11   Yeah.

01:11:11   Ladies and gentlemen, that's an angle.

01:11:13   Don't steal it from me, please.

01:11:16   Thank you.

01:11:17   Oh, you watch.

01:11:18   I'm going to be, I'm going to be codexing.

01:11:19   My curly review of agents.

01:11:23   Just written by codex.

01:11:25   That's, that's what I did.

01:11:26   He's too busy with his TV OS reviews.

01:11:28   Really?

01:11:29   You don't have time for that.

01:11:30   Yeah.

01:11:31   One day there will be a TV OS version worthy of a review and then I'll return.

01:11:36   Rough.

01:11:36   Oh, I love it.

01:11:37   Okay.

01:11:38   Well, they have to actually ship an operating system update.

01:11:43   Was it last time?

01:11:44   It's like, Hey, look, it's liquid glass.

01:11:46   Like, yeah, but is that a relay?

01:11:47   Yeah.

01:11:48   I actually don't think you did anything.

01:11:49   I don't see anything.

01:11:51   It's the, the pan meme.

01:11:53   You know, it was like, these two pictures are the same.

01:11:55   That's, that's TV OS now.

01:11:56   Well, it's now time to command line us away.

01:12:01   Connected space dash dash exit.

01:12:06   There's probably more to do than that in there.

01:12:07   That was really bad.

01:12:09   It was terrible.

01:12:10   I'm going to leave it in, but I don't, I don't want to.

01:12:13   Yeah.

01:12:14   Sorry.

01:12:15   If you want to find links to stuff we spoke about there in your podcast player, they're

01:12:19   also on the web relay dot FM slash connected slash six Oh five next week.

01:12:26   It's a big one.

01:12:27   We'll be making our picks for WBDC.

01:12:29   Oh, we have regular picks.

01:12:32   We just get a risky pick.

01:12:34   We have flexes to make.

01:12:35   I've been working.

01:12:36   I'm not real happy with what I have so far.

01:12:39   I haven't even thought about it yet.

01:12:41   No, me neither.

01:12:42   Hmm.

01:12:43   I mean, it usually helps me to go through the draft like stuff because then I'm seeing so

01:12:49   many picks, you know, like I'm seeing into the matrix and then it helps me kind of formulate

01:12:53   something.

01:12:54   but like, I don't know, man.

01:12:57   I don't know what I got.

01:12:58   I ain't got nothing.

01:12:58   We'll find out next week how much we got, I guess.

01:13:03   Yeah.

01:13:03   Well, I mean, I'll have it.

01:13:05   Yeah.

01:13:05   By next week.

01:13:06   But like right now, I don't have it.

01:13:08   And the week after we'll know how we've done because we'll score them.

01:13:11   Yeah.

01:13:11   Hopefully.

01:13:12   Unless they cancel WWDC.

01:13:15   I don't think they're going to do that.

01:13:17   But that's the thing is that like we don't know at this point.

01:13:20   But can you imagine if they do?

01:13:22   They might have to.

01:13:23   You don't know what's happening.

01:13:25   Well, whatever happens, we'll be here.

01:13:27   Unless you cancel the show.

01:13:30   Unless whatever cancels, WWDC cancels all of us.

01:13:33   Yes.

01:13:34   Oh, no.

01:13:34   Oh, no.

01:13:36   If you think you know what that might be, you can leave us a note.

01:13:39   There's a feedback form on the website.

01:13:41   The link is in the show notes.

01:13:42   You can go to connectedfeedback.com.

01:13:44   That can be anonymous.

01:13:45   It can rhyme.

01:13:47   It can be funny.

01:13:48   Whatever you want to do.

01:13:49   Drop us a note.

01:13:50   You can also join and get Connected Pro, which is the longer ad-free version of the show we do each and every week.

01:13:57   This week, we spoke about a new Ferrari that Johnny Ive was involved with.

01:14:01   And boy, it's a car.

01:14:04   It's a car.

01:14:05   Go listen to that.

01:14:07   If you want more of us in the meantime, you can find Federico at maxstories.net.

01:14:11   Go check out this Big Reminders article.

01:14:13   He published it just before we recorded.

01:14:15   It's really awesome.

01:14:16   You can find Mike's work across Relay at a bunch of different shows.

01:14:20   And you can find my writing at 512pixels.net.

01:14:24   I'd like to thank our sponsors this week, Century and Steam Clock, making the show possible.

01:14:30   And until next week, guys, say goodbye.

01:14:32   Adiós.

01:14:33   Cheerio.

01:14:34   Bye, y'all.