00:00:00 ◼ ► Rosemary Orchard, welcome to the talk show. I have been a fan of your work, written and
00:00:08 ◼ ► podcast for so long. I've been meaning to invite you on the show, and I'm so happy to have you here.
00:00:24 ◼ ► how's it going?" And it's like, "Okay, nice guy then. Cool. Good. Yeah, thanks for having me.
00:00:28 ◼ ► I'm excited to be here." John "I think I've gotten so much better at that. I do remember meeting you.
00:00:34 ◼ ► John "I used to be in the early days of being recognized. I was catatonic. I didn't anticipate
00:00:43 ◼ ► it. I learned a lot from Merlin Mann about how to interact in such situations. I started observing
00:00:51 ◼ ► what he did. And he's so fantastic when people come up and they're like, "Hey, Merlin." And he's
00:01:01 ◼ ► Before we get into the meat of the show, I have a personal rant I would like to get off my chest.
00:01:09 ◼ ► I'm curious. Now, I presume that you, I mean, it's almost more than a presumption. I'd be shocked if
00:01:16 ◼ ► this weren't true. But you are an avid user of all three of the major personal computing Apple
00:01:23 ◼ ► platforms, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Rosemary What's an iPad? Yeah, I use all of them a lot,
00:01:31 ◼ ► possibly more than I should. Maybe I should spend some less time looking at screens. But yeah,
00:01:36 ◼ ► I feel like I'm on all of them all day every day. John "Do you have an iPad Magic Keyboard?"
00:01:39 ◼ ► Rosemary I do. The 12.9 inch one has got the Magic Keyboard on it. Yeah, it's generally a
00:01:44 ◼ ► fairly good experience. John "Here's my gripe. I've got one that I bought new. I bought when it was,
00:01:51 ◼ ► when it first came out, which I think was like April 2020 for my 2018 11 inch iPad Pro,
00:01:58 ◼ ► which is still my personal iPad. The iPad for me is without question my third platform. Like if
00:02:06 ◼ ► I've mentioned this often, but if a weirdo criminal took me hostage, and said or took my
00:02:15 ◼ ► family hostage and said, you have to give up one of Apple's platforms. And otherwise, we're gonna
00:02:23 ◼ ► do something bad to your family. I would instantly I would just say iPad. Yeah, or if I got to say
00:02:29 ◼ ► Apple Watch, I guess I'd say that first, but I'm saying of the iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPad, I would
00:02:33 ◼ ► give up first. But I do use it a lot, right? It's my kitchen computer, because I can put it away
00:02:39 ◼ ► and make keeps the kitchen looking nice and neat. And then it's got a low small footprint. And then
00:02:44 ◼ ► it's upstairs, my office is on ground floor and our main living floor is the second floor.
00:02:50 ◼ ► And then it's a nice thing to have on a main living floor, right? If I need to check something,
00:02:56 ◼ ► or I want to write a longer email, then I would peck out with my thumbs, my iPad with the magic
00:03:01 ◼ ► keyboard is right there. Or if I have it disconnected the magic keyboard, I have a drawer
00:03:06 ◼ ► where I'm allowed to stash something like that. For a two year old $300 keyboard, the wear on mine
00:03:15 ◼ ► is extremely disappointing. I've noticed I don't know if it's rubber or what, but you know how it's
00:03:20 ◼ ► got like a coating like the outside? Yeah. And that same coating is between the keys too.
00:03:28 ◼ ► Yes. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And so like on the ERT keys on my keyboard, that sort of rubber coating
00:03:36 ◼ ► is all frayed between those keys. And it's no coincidence that those are three of the most
00:03:42 ◼ ► used keys at the very top in the English language. Yep. So it's not coincidence. But that's,
00:03:57 ◼ ► before we recorded, I posted an item to my website. And I had a markdown error. It looked,
00:04:04 ◼ ► I wanted to link a couple of words to a person's name's Twitter account. And what I and a friend of
00:04:14 ◼ ► the show, John Siracusa was kind enough to be the first to text me and tell me that, what does he
00:04:20 ◼ ► call him? He doesn't call him Mark Down-O's. He calls them, he's got a funny name for my markdown
00:04:26 ◼ ► typos. But I like Mark Down-O's personally. I like Mark Down-O. What did he say? I got to look it up
00:04:32 ◼ ► now. Mark Down-er, he calls it. Right. That makes sense too. That's very John. Yeah, it is very John.
00:04:39 ◼ ► He calls him Mark Down-er's. And I can hear in, even when he texts me, I can hear his voice,
00:04:46 ◼ ► his sad disappointment in me that I have committed another Mark Down-er. I mean, you of all people,
00:04:52 ◼ ► like you should be perfect, shouldn't you? I should. Well, he told me when Mark Down-er first came out
00:04:57 ◼ ► way back when, and he writes Perl, and he saw how I implemented my version of Mark Down-er,
00:05:07 ◼ ► Yep. And he was like, well, that's, you can't really write a parser that way. And I was like,
00:05:12 ◼ ► well, I didn't, I'm not calling it a parser. He, I think he does not use Mark Down-er. He writes,
00:05:18 ◼ ► he just still writes raw HTML. And I can hear his disappointment because this is why he writes HTML,
00:05:24 ◼ ► because he doesn't have Mark Down-er's. But anyway, the error was, what I wanted to write was
00:05:30 ◼ ► open square bracket, then the person's name, close square bracket, then a parenthesis, the URL,
00:05:38 ◼ ► close parenthesis, right? Standard Mark Down-er. Right. With the link in, right in the paragraph.
00:05:44 ◼ ► And what I was missing was the closing square bracket. Yeah. Yeah. That sneaky little one.
00:05:49 ◼ ► Now I'm going to reveal a secret here in public for the first time because of the subject of
00:05:54 ◼ ► today's show, automation. A little over a year ago. Well, actually, all right, Mark Down-er,
00:06:03 ◼ ► I started working on Mark Down-er in late 2003, and it became public in early 2004. But while I
00:06:10 ◼ ► was developing it, I started, once I got it to work, just enough minimum viable product for the
00:06:18 ◼ ► developer to use as a plugin and movable type, I had it installed in my instance of movable type
00:06:24 ◼ ► for Darren fireball. And I started writing my articles using it. And it's, in my opinion,
00:06:41 ◼ ► where everything I posted to during fireball, I was actually using Mark Down and then forming
00:06:46 ◼ ► opinions of, ah, that's syntax that looks, that does not look bad, looks ugly, or that's cumbersome,
00:06:53 ◼ ► or that's missing or something. But then I'd make changes. And a lot of those changes were
00:07:00 ◼ ► backwards incompatible. And I'd have to go back a month and edit every article to change the syntax,
00:07:09 ◼ ► or two, then it got to two months, then it got to three months. And then I knew it was getting ready
00:07:13 ◼ ► for public beta when I stopped, there no longer were things like that. It was like, "Hey, this
00:07:18 ◼ ► feels pretty stable. Like, I'm not coming up with ideas." But then it didn't take long after it,
00:07:32 ◼ ► Stephanie: I mean, it happens, right? Because you're not changing things anymore. Your brain's
00:07:42 ◼ ► Pete: Right. Well, and you know, mistakes happen, right? And it's the nature of Mark Down,
00:07:49 ◼ ► that like, okay, so if you're writing in a programming language, and it's one of those,
00:07:54 ◼ ► let's just say a simple example, many programming languages require you to put semicolons at the end
00:08:05 ◼ ► your script or compile or program, the compiler will bark at you. And hopefully, with an error
00:08:25 ◼ ► 41 or 42, and then you can maybe figure it out yourself. Markdown isn't compiled, it just,
00:08:32 ◼ ► maybe some implementations, I don't know, I've never encountered one that will literally refuse
00:08:38 ◼ ► to go forward if there's certain classes of errors, but it just makes its best guess as to what you
00:08:43 ◼ ► mean. And it goes through, and there's no concept of an error. HTML is similar, and that's what
00:08:56 ◼ ► Right? If you forget to close a tag in HTML, and then you save the file, and you open it in
00:09:03 ◼ ► a web browser, the web browser does its best. Yeah, which sometimes is really not great.
00:09:11 ◼ ► say you've used a pre-tag because you're writing a code block, you just end up with like pre-tag,
00:09:16 ◼ ► your code, pre-tag, like, but missing the closing triangular bracket, the greater than sign.
00:09:24 ◼ ► Right. Or speaking of pre-tags, to me, one of the, again, I don't mean to brag about it, but it's
00:09:30 ◼ ► kind of popular at this point, but one of the best things about Markdown is how easy it makes to write
00:09:36 ◼ ► pre-sections because you don't have to escape anything. Whatever's inside is just there. And
00:09:42 ◼ ► the whole, it used to be, for me, it was like the worst part of writing raw HTML is when you wanted
00:09:55 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And also, I love the fact that a lot of flavors of Markdown, after you've done those
00:10:00 ◼ ► first three backticks, you can just write the language, Python or YAML or whatever it is,
00:10:05 ◼ ► obviously YAML's another Markdown language, but, or is it called Markup language? It's yet another
00:10:10 ◼ ► one. That's the first part for sure. But yeah, I love the fact you can do that. And then you get
00:10:28 ◼ ► it has been my reference spec, for lack of a better word, hasn't changed or at some point
00:10:41 ◼ ► since then. But it didn't take long for me to think, you know what I need next is like a lint
00:10:45 ◼ ► script, something like a pre-flight script to look for common errors. Yes, yeah. And so very short,
00:10:53 ◼ ► 17 years later, last year, I was feeling inspired early in the summer. And I wrote it. And
00:11:03 ◼ ► the breakthrough for me was, and part of what led me to procrastinate for literally close to
00:11:11 ◼ ► two decades was that I started thinking about it. And I started thinking that like any proper linter,
00:11:18 ◼ ► it should catch as many errors as possible. And that's a really daunting task. And my breakthrough
00:11:28 ◼ ► last year was to hell with that. I was so, I didn't write a proper Markdown parser 17 years ago,
00:11:35 ◼ ► when I made Markdown, I just did the thing, the easiest thing I could do to get it to work fast
00:11:41 ◼ ► enough for me to be satisfied with it. Why don't I just fix the mistakes I actually make? That's it.
00:11:47 ◼ ► And so I started keeping a list of every Markdown related error that I personally posted during
00:11:54 ◼ ► Fireball and wrote a separate script. It's not part of my Markdown PL. It's just a separate
00:11:59 ◼ ► script that tries to flag those errors. And then I wrote like an Apple script for Mars Edit,
00:12:12 ◼ ► So that instead of using Mars Edit to publish, I run a keyboard Mysore action. And the keyboard
00:12:21 ◼ ► Mysore action runs an Apple script. The Apple script gets the body of text from the current
00:12:26 ◼ ► Mars Edit document, passes it to my Lint script, which is actually written in Perl, of course,
00:12:32 ◼ ► because it's the only shell scripting language on my twisted regular expression, addled mind,
00:12:39 ◼ ► can really be productive with. If there's no errors or warnings, let's call them warnings,
00:12:45 ◼ ► then it just then the Apple script tells Mars Edit, go ahead and publish and show a little
00:12:51 ◼ ► notification, a temporary notification saying markdown lint thumbs up. Or I think it's actually
00:12:56 ◼ ► the green checkbox emoji. And then I know it published. And if there are errors, it tells
00:13:02 ◼ ► Mars Edit to it uses Apple script and it shows a simple display alert or display dialogue with a
00:13:09 ◼ ► list of the errors. You know, I tend to write my links in Markdown with the reference style,
00:13:14 ◼ ► as opposed to the inline links where I'll make a link and then it's like a foot and like a named
00:13:19 ◼ ► footnote. And then somewhere else in the document, you have to use that reference name, colon,
00:13:23 ◼ ► and then that's where the URL goes. And it'll say something like, let's say I'm linking to your name,
00:13:29 ◼ ► and I've made the link definition RO, because that's your initials, Rosemary Orchard. It'll
00:13:35 ◼ ► say link definition RO is used but not defined. And that's it. And it doesn't even tell me what
00:13:49 ◼ ► So here we are a year now. Now, here we are a year later, and I still haven't published it. I mean
00:13:57 ◼ ► to, but I think by coming public talking about it with you, this will inspire me to actually
00:14:02 ◼ ► publish it soon because it's, I think it's ready. I mean, I don't know how many other people will
00:14:06 ◼ ► find it useful, but they might. And I mean, I'm sure a lot of people will. Markdown, it's one of
00:14:11 ◼ ► those things that's very simple, which you would think makes it really easy. And the number of
00:14:14 ◼ ► people that manage to screw it up on a daily basis, because like, for example, your link,
00:14:19 ◼ ► okay, you're missing a square closing bracket. Well, you do that and you miss a square opening
00:14:27 ◼ ► Yeah, that, yeah. Well, that's one thing I know a lot of people do. A lot of people like using
00:14:33 ◼ ► Markdown editors that are like split view left and right. On the left, you're writing your Markdown,
00:14:39 ◼ ► and on the right, it's a live preview of Markdown processed, rendered into HTML. And I think one
00:14:47 ◼ ► reason that most of the world has gotten by for all this time and Markdown grows in popularity
00:14:52 ◼ ► without any kind of error checking or a rigid, you can't post if there's any known errors,
00:14:58 ◼ ► it'll block you or whatever, is that once you preview it, most of the errors are very obvious,
00:15:23 ◼ ► And so I thought, huh, let me go check if my lint script catches that. But now when I post from my
00:15:29 ◼ ► iPad or my iPhone, I just go right through the web interface in my installation of movable type. So,
00:15:35 ◼ ► my lint script doesn't run. There's, I can't think of a way to do that. And I don't post from
00:15:45 ◼ ► So, I went down to my Mac, and lo and behold, it didn't get flagged. And I was like, huh,
00:15:51 ◼ ► yeah. So, I made a note in my list of other errors I should check for. So, it's on the list,
00:15:57 ◼ ► I'll add it. But I was like, I wonder why I never made that mistake before. It seems like something
00:16:01 ◼ ► I would have done before. And so, I fixed it, reposted it, it's up there now, it's fixed. It's
00:16:06 ◼ ► the one about the design your own iPhone, for anybody who's wondering which recent post of mine.
00:16:12 ◼ ► This episode won't air for a couple days. So, anybody listening to this episode, even when it's
00:16:16 ◼ ► fresh, it was a couple days ago. But it's a fun site at neil.fun, where you get to make your own
00:16:21 ◼ ► goofy iPhone in 3D. It's crazy. Anyway, I went back up to my iPad, and I'm still bothered. And
00:16:28 ◼ ► I should be furthering myself, throwing myself into my show notes for this episode with you.
00:16:38 ◼ ► with Siracusa. And I thought, huh, I wonder, I tried to type like four closing square brackets.
00:16:55 ◼ ► hit the key pretty hard, and all four showed up. But when I just sort of gently hit the left square
00:17:09 ◼ ► The butterfly keyboard. I mean, I think they're scissors. I think they're actually scissors.
00:17:22 ◼ ► a square bracket key. And it's a little bit stuck. Like, you might have luck turning it upside down
00:17:38 ◼ ► if you spilled anything other than water, any kind of like even lightly sugared or juice
00:17:54 ◼ ► Yeah. Like it's slightly like the resistance is increased when you press on it slightly.
00:17:59 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's worse when you hit it towards the top. And it seems like my weird style of typing.
00:18:05 ◼ ► I don't, I hardly use my pinky fingers when touch typing. I've got like a crazy, terrible,
00:18:13 ◼ ► no one should ever learn to type my way style of typing. I tend to hit those bracket keys
00:18:24 ◼ ► It just naturally goes towards the top of that key. Now, the other thing that's weird about
00:18:31 ◼ ► the 11 inch magic keyboard, and at least on the US layout, I don't do what kind of layout do you
00:18:47 ◼ ► On the US magic keyboard, at least the left square bracket is a full size key on this is on the 11.
00:18:59 ◼ ► It's a half width key because the 11 inch magic keyboard is has to be a sort of slightly compressed
00:19:08 ◼ ► layout, which didn't make sense to me at first because the 11 inch MacBook Airs had a full size
00:19:14 ◼ ► keyboard. But then when you think about the aspect ratio of the screen, it makes sense, right?
00:19:19 ◼ ► Well, also the bezel on those things. You can compare the sizes. I've got a friend who's still
00:19:23 ◼ ► got 11 inch MacBook Air and like holding like one of the modern iPad Airs next to it. It's like,
00:19:31 ◼ ► Yeah, it's the old bezels. The further you go back in time, the more ridiculous the bezels look like,
00:19:46 ◼ ► So number one, it's an un-ranted rant. I get out fewer of my things I want to post or even talk
00:19:54 ◼ ► about on podcasts. My list of things I want to complain about is always growing faster than my
00:20:07 ◼ ► But ever since 2020, when these came out, I've been bothered by the asymmetry of those two keys being
00:20:17 ◼ ► completely different sizes, right? Because they're clearly sibling keys, right? It's open bracket,
00:20:25 ◼ ► closed bracket. And the curly braces are the shift variants. So even when you shift, the shifted and
00:20:31 ◼ ► unshifted versions of those keys are the left and right versions. And so philosophically, they should
00:20:38 ◼ ► clearly be the same size. Right. And if you would think, right. And if you, if the designers of the
00:20:44 ◼ ► keyboard, I realized that if some of the keys have to be smaller than standard size to fit.
00:20:49 ◼ ► Yeah. I realized compromises have to be made, but clearly to me, I can't even see how it was more
00:20:55 ◼ ► than a minute of thought that the solution would be for both of those keys to be three-quarter size.
00:21:02 ◼ ► If you're saying we have room for one and a half keys for the brackets, well then make them both
00:21:16 ◼ ► I've just checked on the Apple website and the 11 inch, the brackets are the same size there.
00:21:20 ◼ ► But like they've managed to get it symmetrical for the square and curly brackets that are on
00:21:24 ◼ ► the same key and also the nine and zero you'll be pleased to hear are also the same size.
00:21:29 ◼ ► They shrunk the tab key on that row a little bit on the course hero to make up for the fact that
00:21:42 ◼ ► I might make me happier. Well, but the last thing I'm going to do at this point in time in 2022 is
00:21:48 ◼ ► buy a new iPad keyboard. Cause that's the other conundrum I'm up against. So I guess I'll take
00:21:53 ◼ ► to it with an air canister after the show and see if that clears it up, but otherwise I might be in
00:21:59 ◼ ► trouble. So two thoughts came to me about the durability. That's number one is there's no excuse
00:22:04 ◼ ► for it, right? Like it's two year old keyboard that costs $300. The bracket key shouldn't break.
00:22:08 ◼ ► Right. But I can't help, but think that the one that broke from me is the half size one,
00:22:14 ◼ ► not the full size one. And presumably I've pressed both of those keys, almost the same number of
00:22:22 ◼ ► times. I can't imagine when would I use closing bracket when I haven't previously typed a square
00:22:28 ◼ ► bracket, right? Yeah. Not on those ones, like on the regular, you know, on your parentheses,
00:22:33 ◼ ► brackets, your round brackets, you could be typing colon and then closing round bracket for
00:22:43 ◼ ► Right. The only thing I know about UK keyboards really is the L-shaped return key, which I find
00:22:49 ◼ ► charming to be like must have tradition for UK typists. No, I really do. I just think that's
00:23:01 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. It is very strange how both different and similar our keyboards are. And actually the
00:23:07 ◼ ► Apple British keyboard is closer to the US Apple keyboard than you would have between say windows
00:23:12 ◼ ► keyboards because the @ symbol doesn't move. So the @ symbol is on shift two for all Apple devices,
00:23:17 ◼ ► as far as I know, and windows and Linux. But in the UK and a chunk of Europe, the @ symbol is on
00:23:24 ◼ ► a shift. And then it's the quotation mark key, I believe. And then so yeah, the quotation marks and
00:23:32 ◼ ► the @ symbol are swapped on windows. I think it is. I'm like struggling to remember and I'm
00:23:36 ◼ ► looking at the keyword in front of me, which is not helping because I've got a key cron.
00:23:40 ◼ ► And of course that that has Mac key caps, even though I've changed the key caps to different
00:23:43 ◼ ► ones. I put the right key caps on there because I'm not a monster. I'm using a proper for my Mac
00:23:48 ◼ ► layout here. But yeah, it is very strange how we've ended up with such different layouts in some ways
00:23:54 ◼ ► and yet so similar in others. So I feel like well, and the other thing on the UK keyboard,
00:23:59 ◼ ► are the regular parentheses above the nine and zero? Yeah. Well, then I would guess that the
00:24:05 ◼ ► closing one gets hit more often because I think people type zeros more often than nines, like 100,
00:24:11 ◼ ► 1000. On the other hand, all stores end their prices with 99. If you get shop managers, then
00:24:17 ◼ ► now, yeah, so they're probably close. They're probably relatively close, but I would guess
00:24:22 ◼ ► with the brackets, it's got to be really close. I don't think it's a coincidence that the one of
00:24:27 ◼ ► mine that seems to be failing is the half sized one. Right? Because it seems like if anyone is
00:24:34 ◼ ► going to have a structural problem, it would be the one that's smaller than Yeah, bigger. Yeah,
00:24:39 ◼ ► yeah, it's much more likely to get something stuck in there that's not able to get out as well,
00:24:43 ◼ ► I would say like that would be my assumption. Yeah, I'm just I'm trying to remember now what
00:24:47 ◼ ► the the US layout looks like. And oh, yeah, right. Because you've got the so what they've done is
00:24:54 ◼ ► they've matched the size of your pipe and backslash key, which we have next to the lower half of our
00:24:59 ◼ ► turnkey. Yeah. Oh, like, what? Why are those two matched in size people? Oh, no, I'm not I'm not
00:25:05 ◼ ► gonna be able to live with this now. I'm never buying a US keyboard again. Anyway. Well, the
00:25:09 ◼ ► other solution, of course, is to switch from an 11 inch to a 12.9 inch iPad. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
00:25:15 ◼ ► that is a very good solution. I 10 out of 10 approve of that. I love my 12.9 inch iPad.
00:25:20 ◼ ► Honestly, it's a great device. And especially when you're using a nice app for writing some markdown
00:25:25 ◼ ► and then being able to do proper split screen with two actual apps is very nice instead of like the
00:25:31 ◼ ► half iPhone preview on the right hand side. Well, my fingers are crossed because I don't want to get
00:25:36 ◼ ► a 12.9 inch iPad because I I'm a Mac user first. So when I travel, I do take my iPad, but why would
00:25:43 ◼ ► I want a 13 inch iPad along with a 13 inch MacBook Pro in the same bag? Second screen? Anyway,
00:25:50 ◼ ► fingers crossed that the next 11 inch iPad magic keyboard will have a rejiggered layout that
00:25:57 ◼ ► doesn't make to me. It'll consider decisions about which keys should be half size and which are full
00:26:05 ◼ ► size. Well, hopefully somebody at Apple who works on the magic keyboard is listening to this right
00:26:10 ◼ ► now and is just going to look at it and go wait, how did we do that? I'm just going to fix that in
00:26:14 ◼ ► the next run. Like it's fine. We still got time before we put them in boxes. We'll just swap some
00:26:17 ◼ ► of these keys over. Right. And before I leave the subject, I'll just say I am recording this
00:26:22 ◼ ► podcast on a 2014 MacBook Pro. That was for many years, my main machine. And even when I wasn't my
00:26:32 ◼ ► primary machine, cause I had an iMac 5k on my desk, I still used it very much. I have probably used
00:26:39 ◼ ► this. I almost certainly use this MacBook more than any Mac portable or Apple portable device
00:26:46 ◼ ► I've ever owned for more years, for more time. And obviously with lots and lots of typing
00:26:51 ◼ ► and the keyboard is still perfect. There's absolutely, there's not a single key that is
00:26:58 ◼ ► a little glitchy or, ah, you got to remember when I type whatever, you know, the E key that sometimes
00:27:03 ◼ ► it's goofy. And obviously with aluminum in between the keys, there's no wear and tear or anything
00:27:09 ◼ ► like that. No, the only Mac that I've had a problem with the keyboard was one with that
00:27:12 ◼ ► butterfly keyboard and it was the J key. So sometimes you type a J and you get none. Sometimes
00:27:18 ◼ ► you get one and sometimes you get two or three. And that was really annoying. Especially I was on
00:27:24 ◼ ► a project when I discovered this that had like three J's in the name. I don't even remember the
00:27:28 ◼ ► name of the project. I just remember that there were J's in the name and I couldn't type it on the
00:27:33 ◼ ► building keyboard half the time, like not without having to go back and correct it. So of course I
00:27:37 ◼ ► did the sensible thing and I automated it and added a snippet so I could just type. I think I went with
00:27:42 ◼ ► semi colon L K because that way I didn't have to touch the J. Yeah, J would be a problem for me for
00:27:46 ◼ ► some obvious reasons. I don't know. You just drop it from your name. You'll be fine. But it doesn't
00:27:52 ◼ ► matter. Even, you know, what's the least used letter? Z Q maybe? I don't know. It doesn't matter.
00:27:57 ◼ ► You're going to, you type all of them enough that you can't have them fail. And it's just ridiculous
00:28:01 ◼ ► because we keyboard should last spills aside something like that. Of course there's the water
00:28:07 ◼ ► damage it, but just through use, I don't know. It just seems bad for any company and certainly by
00:28:12 ◼ ► Apple standards. And again, $300 is a hefty price for a keyboard, right? I mean, there are a lot of
00:28:19 ◼ ► people out there in the world who use $300 laptops. The entire laptop is the $500 or something like
00:28:26 ◼ ► that. So 300 bucks just to get the keyboard part of using your iPad as a keyboard is a premium
00:28:32 ◼ ► price. I'm not saying it's too much, but it's not to be built to last is what I'm saying. Yeah.
00:28:38 ◼ ► Yeah. Like by the time you've got a 12, like a decent size iPad with a bit of storage on it,
00:28:43 ◼ ► maybe you've added the cellular when you're looking at the pros and then you've added that
00:28:47 ◼ ► magic keyboard, you're well over the price of some of the max, some of the entry-level max.
00:28:55 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a very good way to put it. Where I were an iPad pro plus a magic keyboard is more
00:29:02 ◼ ► than a lot of the base MacBook air configuration. Yep. All right. Let me take a break here and thank
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00:31:03 ◼ ► All right. Now here's the reason I thought it was serendipitous to invite you on the show. Now
00:31:14 ◼ ► When did the first edition come out? Oh, now you're asking difficult questions. I didn't do
00:31:19 ◼ ► my homework on this. Nobody told me I, you could say a while ago. Yeah, it was definitely a while
00:31:25 ◼ ► ago. It was a couple of years ago. The first version came out and so I've been working on
00:31:29 ◼ ► it since then. I think it was like December, November, December, 2019 ish. Yeah. Okay. Yeah,
00:31:34 ◼ ► that sounds about right. I think this book, number one, I'm a huge fan of the whole take control
00:31:41 ◼ ► series. And you know, it's so funny now that I'm mid-career and I do this sort of thing. I've never
00:31:50 ◼ ► written a book, but I know so many of the authors of take control books. And I remember when I first
00:31:58 ◼ ► started learning computers, especially in college, right? Like high school, I was totally enthusiastic
00:32:04 ◼ ► and into it, but it was like, I didn't know you could go to the bookstore and buy computer books.
00:32:08 ◼ ► And even if I did back then, like in the late eighties, there were very few that were interesting
00:32:16 ◼ ► to me. And then in the nineties, when I got into it, buying O'Reilly books, they were expensive,
00:32:22 ◼ ► like really expensive, but they were also really great books. I remember I'd read a book by a
00:32:28 ◼ ► certain author like Danny Goodman. You remember, have you ever heard of him? He wrote like
00:32:32 ◼ ► the first great Apple script book. And then he wrote like an introductory book to this new thing
00:32:39 ◼ ► called HTML. And of course, and it's where I learned. And it's why like on daring fireball,
00:32:46 ◼ ► why I try always like when I'm citing a news article, not to just say the New York Times,
00:32:52 ◼ ► colon, and then here's a block quote, but such and such reporter, right? Reporting for the New
00:32:59 ◼ ► York Times because bylines matter. I mean that in news articles. And I think it's especially true
00:33:04 ◼ ► for books. And I just, there's a list of programming and computer book authors who I knew,
00:33:12 ◼ ► and I loved their books and found them very useful. And then would be more likely to buy
00:33:16 ◼ ► the next book that the same person wrote. And it never failed me. Whatever. It's such a privilege
00:33:21 ◼ ► for me now that I still consume books like this. But now I know the authors personally.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And it is one of my favorite privileges of the bizarre position I occupy in the Apple ecosystem.
00:33:34 ◼ ► So the Take Control series I love. Take Control of Shortcuts in particular, though, I think is such
00:33:42 ◼ ► a super useful book. Thank you. That was the aim behind it. When I was creating it, like a lot of
00:33:50 ◼ ► people kind of seen it and gone, Okay, well, that's something that's appeared on my iPhone home screen,
00:33:54 ◼ ► I don't care about it, delete, trying to actually make that connection from Hey, there's this funky
00:33:59 ◼ ► blue turquoise and pink icon to Hey, there's something really useful that you can do. And you
00:34:05 ◼ ► can make Siri better by using this. I think the value of books like this covering it will just
00:34:11 ◼ ► say shortcuts as the example from A to Z, where your book opens with what you would think an
00:34:20 ◼ ► introduction to shortcuts would entail. What is it? How do you run them? What's the basic idea?
00:34:26 ◼ ► How do you start getting your mind wrapped around it? And then continuing forward to examples,
00:34:32 ◼ ► then more complex examples. And then by the end, really fascinatingly complex examples that fit
00:34:39 ◼ ► within the context of a book, but I think that computer books, even though I said, I know people
00:34:47 ◼ ► who write them, I do think it's far, it's a far smaller industry today than it was 20 years ago.
00:34:54 ◼ ► Well, we have Stack Overflow now, right? And all of these other places where I don't have to sit
00:35:01 ◼ ► down and like scan through an index and try and like check in a glossary to figure out what
00:35:06 ◼ ► word that I'm thinking of might actually be the other word that I should be looking for this with,
00:35:11 ◼ ► and then go and look at an example and then prop it up on a book stand next to my machine and type
00:35:16 ◼ ► it all into a terminal of some kind and have it printed out on punch cards and then hope that I
00:35:21 ◼ ► don't drop them so that they fall out of order and so on. It is the world has become a much
00:35:33 ◼ ► necessarily to find the answer. And then of course, Apple goes and throws us a curve ball
00:35:36 ◼ ► by giving everything really difficult to Google names, pages, shortcuts, like all of these things,
00:35:42 ◼ ► like do not disturb, like, oh, come on, Apple, you could give this a unique name. But no,
00:35:48 ◼ ► they're trying to make it really simple. So it's the words that you would think of when you type
00:35:52 ◼ ► it into your search so that it comes up, which is great. But also, folks, have you heard of an alias,
00:36:01 ◼ ► And the one in particular, because I got more into shortcuts last year, when it came out for
00:36:09 ◼ ► Mac, for the obvious reason, like I said, Mac is and again, if we go back to my analogy about a
00:36:15 ◼ ► criminal syndicate, holding my family hostage and telling me I can only pick if they tighten the
00:36:20 ◼ ► grip and said, you can only pick one platform, I would pick the Mac because it's the one I work on.
00:36:27 ◼ ► And I would cry as I hand it over my iPhone and start Googling for what Android phone I should
00:36:34 ◼ ► switch to, I would be very upset. But it's the one I use for work. For fun, for more hours of the day,
00:36:43 ◼ ► it probably is the iPhone. But the Mac is where I work. And a lot of the stuff that one automates is
00:36:51 ◼ ► work-related. Not all, right? And you've got lots of examples in the book of like home automation
00:36:56 ◼ ► type stuff. But that problem you said about the Google ability of the word shortcuts is so much,
00:37:03 ◼ ► it's even worse with Mac. Because Mac shortcuts is all about keyboard shortcuts, right?
00:37:09 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And very occasionally, like somebody will be like, so how do I put a shortcut on my
00:37:14 ◼ ► desktop to open an application? Oh, you've just switched from Windows. Hi, welcome. This is not
00:37:19 ◼ ► how we do things over here. Welcome to the doc. It's so difficult. So difficult. Like even searching
00:37:25 ◼ ► on Apple's website sometimes doesn't get you the results that you're looking for. Their help section
00:37:30 ◼ ► for shortcuts is pretty great. But you have to find that. Otherwise, it's sending you down like
00:37:35 ◼ ► keyboard shortcuts for GarageBand. Right. And I know search engine optimization gets a bad name
00:37:42 ◼ ► as a racket of how do you cheat your way to the top of search results for a certain term.
00:37:50 ◼ ► But at the opposite end of the spectrum, when all you have no intention, like if you're Apple,
00:37:56 ◼ ► and you're creating a new technology, and all you want is for people, if they want to learn more
00:38:02 ◼ ► about it, to be able to learn more about it. You're not trying to trick DuckDuckGo and Google and Bing
00:38:08 ◼ ► into giving you higher results that you don't really deserve. Giving your thing a unique name
00:38:15 ◼ ► has still and probably always will have tremendous value. So for example, AppleScript, all one word.
00:38:23 ◼ ► If you type AppleScript something, you're going to get results about AppleScript something. They
00:38:29 ◼ ► may not solve your problem, but it's going to point you in the right direction, right, and give you a
00:38:33 ◼ ► chunk of a script that you can copy and paste and go stick together with a bunch of other things.
00:38:44 ◼ ► They are shortcuts. But you're exactly right, though. And my complaint that computer books have
00:38:52 ◼ ► declined in prominence, and therefore a lot of publishers have closed. I mean, it all makes
00:39:01 ◼ ► sense. I'm not arguing that it really could have turned out another way. I think you put your
00:39:07 ◼ ► finger exactly on probably the top two sites that have alleviated the need for books in a lot of
00:39:16 ◼ ► cases, Stack Overflow for sure, for programming or this type of thing, and Reddit. There is also
00:39:24 ◼ ► the problem of the bad form of SEO and content farms. These sites, it is sort of, this is why
00:39:35 ◼ ► we can't have nice things, right? The internet is amazing. And it really, it's unbelievable how much
00:39:43 ◼ ► of this information is out there, just freely accessible. And you could just search in a simple
00:39:48 ◼ ► little box without a complicated query language. You just type plain language and hit the return
00:39:54 ◼ ► key, however shaped your return key is, and you can find it. But for programming topics,
00:40:01 ◼ ► you know, and it's true for lots of commonly searched for things, health topics for sure,
00:40:06 ◼ ► but like programming topics, there are so many sites out there that are just there to get.
00:40:14 ◼ ► If your question is, how do you split standard in from standard out or standard error in a shell
00:40:22 ◼ ► script or something like that, you get these top results that are these sites. And they might have
00:40:34 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you get lucky when you're searching for things like that, you'll get
00:40:39 ◼ ► like Linode and DigitalOcean and some of the other folks who are doing like server hosting and so on,
00:40:44 ◼ ► who've written their own articles to take advantage of the fact that this is a space where
00:40:49 ◼ ► people need guides from a company they can trust. And those are pretty high up in the results, but
00:40:54 ◼ ► they're not as high up in the results as that place that basically scrapes Stack Overflow and
00:40:58 ◼ ► dumps it into a thing full of ads and highlights different keywords so that you click on it after
00:41:03 ◼ ► you clicked on the Stack Overflow one and it didn't answer your question thinking that it might.
00:41:07 ◼ ► Right. And it's a total game of whack-a-mole where those content forums are constantly trying to stay
00:41:14 ◼ ► atop paying people not to write like good articles, right? Like what you'd want, it would be like back
00:41:20 ◼ ► in the day, O'Reilly, which I said was a great publisher of books, but they had a great website
00:41:26 ◼ ► too where they would pay often the same authors who wrote their books to write articles. And
00:41:32 ◼ ► instead of doing what I think is clearly the right thing and finding really talented, enthusiastic
00:41:38 ◼ ► writers who have a natural pedagogical ability, they're natural born writers and teachers,
00:41:48 ◼ ► and they're good at explaining things. Oh, and then you read something from a good author and
00:41:53 ◼ ► you're like, "Oh, I get it now. That's a great way to put it. Now this thing that was confusing,
00:41:57 ◼ ► I get." Instead, the content farms aren't paying talented programmers or authors. They're paying
00:42:04 ◼ ► people to figure out how do we keep our thing about JavaScript printing to the console in the
00:42:14 ◼ ► top two of Google's results? Whether it's the— Yeah, they're looking for the minimum viable
00:42:19 ◼ ► product, right? Rather than the best possible solution. Right. And it's one of those weird ways
00:42:24 ◼ ► that—and this is not even getting into the complaints people have about Google with the
00:42:30 ◼ ► number of ads they put in their search results and preferencing their own internal content. Like when
00:42:37 ◼ ► you type in a restaurant name and they just show you their—instead of taking to the restaurant's
00:42:41 ◼ ► website as the number one hit, the top thing is their own card for it, which that's a separate
00:42:46 ◼ ► discussion. Just the parts of Google and all the other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing and
00:42:51 ◼ ► where they're just trying to surface the best results, it's gotten worse since like 15,
00:42:57 ◼ ► 20 years ago. Because like 15, 20 years ago, the results were all from people's actual blogs,
00:43:08 ◼ ► right? Yeah. Or something like O'Reilly.net or O'Reillynet.com, whatever their website used to be.
00:43:15 ◼ ► But real things that were only published just to help readers and written for readers first,
00:43:20 ◼ ► not written for the search engine first. Yeah, definitely. I think the other thing that
00:43:24 ◼ ► we are perhaps struggling with is there is a trend towards video for explanation. And I know
00:43:33 ◼ ► a picture is worth a thousand words. And if I'm sending somebody a bug report, like if I'm on one
00:43:37 ◼ ► of the Omni group, they've got some betas running at the moment. And if I run into a bug on one of
00:43:42 ◼ ► those, I'm going to send their support a description of it, some screenshots and a video because then
00:43:46 ◼ ► they can see exactly where I've gone and what I've run into and what I was trying to do. And
00:43:50 ◼ ► was I holding it wrong? Or is it something that they need to work on their side? It's really
00:43:54 ◼ ► helpful. But I think the other problem that you have with video is it's not easily to get it into
00:44:00 ◼ ► the search rankings. Like if you go search for something on YouTube, you're going to find the
00:44:04 ◼ ► results that you're looking for. But also it goes out of date very quickly. And it's very difficult
00:44:09 ◼ ► to just update part of a video to be more modern. Like I've seen this with Home Assistant, there's a
00:44:17 ◼ ► lot of great creators out there. They've got a whole creative network actually that they recently
00:44:20 ◼ ► launched. And they're making videos. And they're great. They're really great videos, until something
00:44:26 ◼ ► significant changes in the UI a couple of months down the line, at which point all the videos
00:44:30 ◼ ► created before then kind of need a translation filter over the top of them. And the closest I've
00:44:35 ◼ ► seen to somebody updating videos and doing it well was actually Symphony, the PHP framework. They have
00:44:41 ◼ ► their own video platform for tutorials called Symphony casts. And what they have underneath is
00:44:46 ◼ ► they've got a transcript of every video with code blocks that you can copy. And if something's
00:44:51 ◼ ► changed, then they edit it in the transcript. And they add like a note that flashes up on screen of,
00:44:56 ◼ ► "Hey, this has changed in XYZ version. See below." And then you can scroll down, you can click on
00:45:02 ◼ ► that area of the transcript and they'll fast forward you to that point in the video or whatever,
00:45:05 ◼ ► they do a little drop in. But it's very difficult to update video. But video is incredibly popular
00:45:10 ◼ ► to the point where I was installing a new smart lock and the paper instructions were awful. I had
00:45:16 ◼ ► to watch the video. I had to watch the video like five or six times. If I'd had some actual, like,
00:45:21 ◼ ► I don't know, like rough drawings and some arrows on the drawings, then I would have been able to do
00:45:26 ◼ ► the entire thing about 60,000 times faster, I feel. But instead I was sitting there watching
00:45:30 ◼ ► a video on like a 50 inch television going, "Wait, what did they just do there? I need to be able to
00:45:35 ◼ ► zoom in. How do I zoom in on a 50 inch TV? Like, do I just have to go and sit like with my nose to
00:45:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I've had things like that too, where I've
00:45:50 ◼ ► bought a gadget and you open it, like, "All right, now how do I set this up?" And it's like,
00:45:54 ◼ ► "Here's how you set this up. This is the instruction packet. Point your phone at this QR code."
00:46:04 ◼ ► Right. And then the QR code just takes you to a YouTube video where somebody from the company
00:46:09 ◼ ► explains what to do. But it's like, this seems like something that it should be like an IKEA product,
00:46:15 ◼ ► where there's like three little drawings and they tell you, "Oh, first drawing like this,
00:46:21 ◼ ► second drawing, third drawing. Okay, now you're done." And it's like, like, imagine putting
00:46:26 ◼ ► together a Lego kit where if instead of giving you the instructions, they're like, "Just watch
00:46:30 ◼ ► this video." It would drive you nuts. Yeah, and it's just very difficult as well, because if you
00:46:36 ◼ ► know that the answer is like on step three, then you have to know the timestamp in the video,
00:46:41 ◼ ► unless they've been good, unless the creator has been able to add timestamps. But yeah,
00:46:46 ◼ ► like it's really difficult. And when it goes out of date, it's just so sad, because it's like,
00:46:52 ◼ ► to update it is record a new video. And having done some video production, I can tell you,
00:47:00 ◼ ► Right, because I am not Mr. Video, as everybody knows, but I've done it enough. Even like years
00:47:07 ◼ ► on my YouTube channel, I've only got like, almost everything on my YouTube channel are live versions
00:47:12 ◼ ► of the show from WWDC. But a couple years ago, when AirPods were new, I put a video out. I'll
00:47:18 ◼ ► put it in the show notes, I swear to God, how to take your AirPods out of the case, because
00:47:22 ◼ ► the natural way to do it is try to pinch them, but you can't, because they're sort of round.
00:47:26 ◼ ► And if you just sort of push them out from the middle towards the outside, they pop right out.
00:47:31 ◼ ► And it's, to me, it's better. That whole problem has gotten better with iPads. But anyway, I made
00:47:35 ◼ ► a little YouTube video just for fun. And it took me so long to shoot. And I know that people who
00:47:44 ◼ ► keep a setup ready to go. You've got lights and a table or you've got a staging area. You don't
00:47:50 ◼ ► have to create your studio however much your studio is in quotes. I get it that if you do it
00:47:57 ◼ ► regularly, you keep your studio set up. But if you're going to appear on the video, you know,
00:48:02 ◼ ► you want to get a shower and do your hair right and put a clean shirt on. It's a lot when,
00:48:09 ◼ ► especially if you just need to update 5% in the middle for this new thing in the OS or something
00:48:17 ◼ ► like that. I don't know how commonly known it is out there. I know amongst people who create stuff,
00:48:23 ◼ ► everybody knows, but like YouTube doesn't let you replace a video. So like, if you put out
00:48:31 ◼ ► an hour long video and then you find out that there's a name spelled wrong in the credits,
00:48:36 ◼ ► but the video has already been published. Your only option is to delete it and replace it with
00:48:43 ◼ ► a new video and it gets a new URL. So if you catch it right away, okay. But once you've got lots and
00:48:49 ◼ ► lots of views on it, you want to keep the views because keeping views is how you build your
00:48:54 ◼ ► reputation on YouTube. It's understandable why they do that, I guess, because what would happen
00:48:59 ◼ ► otherwise? I mean, you could think of all sorts of other nefarious ways this could go wrong,
00:49:04 ◼ ► but if you could just replace it willy-nilly, people could. Well, number one, there'd be a
00:49:14 ◼ ► wanting to buy it and replace it with our spam. So I get why, but it's incredibly frustrating,
00:49:33 ◼ ► but something changes in the syntax of the AppleScript, I could just go back to that 10-year-old
00:49:38 ◼ ► article and either just fix it, right? Just change it without a note or change it and add a note and
00:49:44 ◼ ► say, "Hey, I updated this in August of 2022 because this changed." Like that's built into the RSS
00:49:50 ◼ ► specification, the updated date. Like it's very common in so many places to have an updated at
00:49:57 ◼ ► date or modified on date. Files have got it in our protein system, but somehow yet not YouTube videos.
00:50:04 ◼ ► Right. So the videos is an interesting idea. I still feel the drive, even though I'm settled
00:50:10 ◼ ► in at Daring Fireball with my website and this talk show, I still have the drive to create new
00:50:17 ◼ ► stuff and have it be read and listened to. And it is still a thrill for me to do that. And so
00:50:24 ◼ ► I totally get why, you know, I remember when I was getting started having that drive, it just seems to
00:50:29 ◼ ► me that so many people who are getting started go to video first now. And I'm not quite sure if
00:50:35 ◼ ► that's just because being on TV was always the big deal, right? Like when I was a kid before the
00:50:41 ◼ ► internet, you know, if you asked a class of students, "What would you rather grow up to be?
00:50:47 ◼ ► Would you rather be on TV or would you rather have be the author of books?" Almost every kid was,
00:50:54 ◼ ► even me, I might've even as a kid raised my hand for the be on TV, right? It just seemed like that
00:50:59 ◼ ► was the thing. I got older and realized that's not what I wanted. So I don't know how much of it is
00:51:04 ◼ ► that. And I don't know how much of it is the fact that earning money through YouTube is definitely
00:51:13 ◼ ► possible and sustainable. Not easy, right? It's never easy, but it is real. Like that's part of
00:51:20 ◼ ► the tremendous success of YouTube is that they've got a system in place that is legitimate where
00:51:27 ◼ ► they're aggregating tremendous amounts of attention from viewers worldwide, getting advertisers
00:51:34 ◼ ► to pay real money to put their ads in front of those people. And the advertisers are getting
00:51:39 ◼ ► real results from those things. So it perpetrates itself in a healthy fashion. So I could see why
00:51:47 ◼ ► people are drawn to that. Whereas writing articles and making money from writing articles is really
00:52:01 ◼ ► somebody who wants to start their own website, like they're probably going to start with like
00:52:04 ◼ ► a free word space or a WordPress, sorry, or a blogger space, and maybe they'll upgrade and
00:52:10 ◼ ► actually pay to have their own domain. Or maybe they'll think, "No, why should I pay for anything
00:52:14 ◼ ► until I make money?" And spoiler, catch-22, you're not going to be trustworthy until you have your
00:52:19 ◼ ► own domain name. But you know, if you're not paying for a domain name until you make money,
00:52:28 ◼ ► you're against everything else, which is going into the search results. Whereas if you start
00:52:34 ◼ ► on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, then like people are already there searching for a particular
00:52:40 ◼ ► kind of thing. And so the algorithm is going to do a better job of funneling them towards stuff.
00:52:46 ◼ ► And especially if you've managed to get yourself into a playlist of some kind that's useful things
00:52:52 ◼ ► about this or that. I remember when I was studying computer science in Austria, I was struggling with
00:52:56 ◼ ► some of the mathematical terms just because the names, unsurprisingly, were foreign to me because
00:53:01 ◼ ► they were German. And so I had to like learn the concept in class and sort of vaguely understand it
00:53:06 ◼ ► and then go home, figure out what that concept was in English, and then relearn it. So I would
00:53:10 ◼ ► properly understand it. So I ended up following a lot of random mathematics and computer science
00:53:15 ◼ ► channels for that sort of logic stuff. But I found them all through playlists that other students have
00:53:20 ◼ ► put together, which we shared in class. And if you get onto something like that, then you know,
00:53:25 ◼ ► you get people coming to your channel, and then they click and find the other stuff. And
00:53:29 ◼ ► it happens relatively organically. But just going into the whole ocean of content as big as YouTube
00:53:36 ◼ ► is, it is, it's not that big. It's a lake compared to the whole of the internet, which has got all
00:53:46 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. And I guess too with like, I mean, I don't think there's many people competing with
00:54:03 ◼ ► David Smith of Widget Smith. And various other famous on shortly after that. So yeah, that,
00:54:09 ◼ ► that was driver. I mean, but I don't, I'm not quite sure though, that it, that, that explained
00:54:16 ◼ ► to people how to do it. Like I think what the TikTok for that did, which was a genuine sensation
00:54:23 ◼ ► and for people who don't remember it, what it was at iOS 14, just a year ago, or was it two years
00:54:28 ◼ ► ago with iOS 13? I think it was two years ago when I was 14, because we're about to have the release
00:54:32 ◼ ► of 16. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So I've, I was right. That it was two years ago
00:54:38 ◼ ► and got my version numbers mixed up, but there was like this TikTok that was like, Hey, look what you
00:54:42 ◼ ► can do because what you can do with shortcuts, I guess it's two key things that you can do is you
00:54:48 ◼ ► can have a shortcut that just opens a specific app. Like let's say Instagram, what does this
00:54:54 ◼ ► shortcut do? It launches Instagram. The other thing you can do is you can give the shortcut,
00:54:59 ◼ ► whatever icon you want, or I guess three things. You can have a shortcut, open an app and do
00:55:05 ◼ ► nothing else. You can give it a custom icon and you can add it to your home screen. And you can
00:55:11 ◼ ► give it a custom name as well, if you want. And a custom name, right? Custom icon and name. So
00:55:16 ◼ ► all of a sudden, let's say you're a neat Nick and the app library feature certainly makes this so
00:55:23 ◼ ► much easier to do, to just sort of have like even just one home screen of organized icons on your
00:55:30 ◼ ► iPhone. And then just put all your other apps that you do have installed over in the app library.
00:55:35 ◼ ► You could go through and with just going through like a dozen to 16 icons, do them one by one.
00:55:44 ◼ ► It's not that much work. Give each a custom icon. That's like from a theme pack, get a themed
00:55:50 ◼ ► wallpaper that goes with them. And then all of a sudden your iPhone home screen doesn't look like
00:55:55 ◼ ► an iPhone home screen. It looks like whatever it is, the thing that you're like Tron or Star Wars
00:56:01 ◼ ► or super cool. And a total throwback to like the classic days of Mac OS. Like when I was in
00:56:08 ◼ ► college in the nineties, everybody who was a Mac super nerd, like me at the time, we loved
00:56:15 ◼ ► customizing the icons. Oh, and that's when icon factory, I first grew to know them and they would
00:56:21 ◼ ► release like icon packs and they'd have like these alternate versions of all the popular apps. And
00:56:26 ◼ ► you could like customize all your popular apps with these custom icons that were drawn by awesome
00:56:31 ◼ ► artists. And it's like, so that took off, but I guess that the people who watch that TikTok and
00:56:38 ◼ ► wanted to do that with their phone then needed to somehow Google, well, how exactly do I do this
00:56:42 ◼ ► step-by-step? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there were some like instruction videos, like in that
00:56:50 ◼ ► so like you open this app and then you add this open app action and you select the app and then
00:56:55 ◼ ► you do the add to home screen. You select the image from the pack you've downloaded and stuff,
00:56:58 ◼ ► but it is quite a few steps for somebody to just figure out entirely by themselves. And yeah,
00:57:04 ◼ ► Googling it like, how do I add a shortcut to my home screen? I think I like, I haven't tested this,
00:57:10 ◼ ► but I'm 95 to 98% certain that will still be a Safari bookmark in most cases. Like that will be
00:57:16 ◼ ► the default result because that's, that's kind of what home screen shortcuts used to be. And now
00:57:22 ◼ ► they might be a progressive web app where it launches in its own little container. Wordle
00:57:26 ◼ ► did that, which was really cool, but it's not, it's, it's really difficult to just be able to
00:57:31 ◼ ► search and find out something about shortcuts because what is a shortcut anyway? Like it's a
00:57:36 ◼ ► really difficult concept to describe to somebody what is a shortcut and what is an action and why
00:57:41 ◼ ► does this app have actions, but this app doesn't. And well, Apple's helping developers fix that in
00:57:45 ◼ ► iOS 16 by making it a lot easier for them. Thank God. But you know, it is a very difficult concept
00:57:50 ◼ ► to just Google. And it's the same if you're trying to do something in pages. Like I love pages.
00:57:56 ◼ ► Don't get me wrong. The iWork suite at the very least, if you type pages iWork, you'll get a whole
00:58:01 ◼ ► bunch more results, which are way more on track. And a lot of sites are really good about putting
00:58:05 ◼ ► the word iWork in there when they're talking about pages, like pages, part of the iWork suite has
00:58:10 ◼ ► this feature and here's how you use it. But yeah. But yeah, you're right. Numbers is another one.
00:58:15 ◼ ► Yeah. Keynote on the other hand is the most Googleable of the names, right? That's because
00:58:24 ◼ ► even in the generic sense of the word keynote, Apple is very well known for its keynotes. It's,
00:58:37 ◼ ► are still important. And the whole point of this whole discussion is to encourage people who are
00:58:45 ◼ ► listening to, to think back to how much you've learned in the past from good books. I mean it,
00:58:51 ◼ ► and I'm sure that most people who are using shortcuts do it the one search by at a time
00:58:58 ◼ ► way of getting into it. But I find that daunting and I know other people feel differently. There's
00:59:04 ◼ ► some people whose personality is such is that they've always hated books, right? I don't know,
00:59:09 ◼ ► to each their own. But to me, whenever I learned something new, I just have like a compulsive need
00:59:16 ◼ ► not to understand the entirety of the thing, not to have it all in my head, but to at least have
00:59:24 ◼ ► a general idea of the whole thing. Like what exactly, what's the basic idea with shortcuts
00:59:31 ◼ ► and what is the extent of what I can do? What are the sort of things I can expect to be able to do?
00:59:37 ◼ ► And that sort of fundamental high level overview is to me so much, there's never, there still is
00:59:49 ◼ ► never, nothing's been better invented than a well-written, well-organized book for that.
00:59:56 ◼ ► Whether it's, whether it's actually printed on paper or it's an ebook like the Take Control
01:00:03 ◼ ► series or a book that's on the web, but like a book length thing that has an order start to finish
01:00:11 ◼ ► and you can, yes, jump to the middle or search for just the one solution. But that sort of
01:00:46 ◼ ► I didn't understand any of this. Where on earth would I need to start and how can I convey that to somebody? And why are variables important? And what is this? And why do I need to know that it's called a variable? Is that actually important? And trying to figure out all of that is really tricky. But I have to say being able to just pick up some of the other Take Control books and skim through them and see like the little side notes that they've got in there of like, oh, by the way, hey, there's this really cool thing that you can find if you right click on this and you press the option key.
01:01:16 ◼ ► And it's like, wow, didn't know that you could do that. That's amazing. Thanks. I keep forgetting to press the option key when I right click or option click on things. That's something that again, it's how do you search for this like hidden menu feature on the Mac? It's really difficult, but it's right there. But being able to like go through and use other examples as a place to get started has been really helpful.
01:01:37 ◼ ► So that's the first thing I want to encourage people listening is to just if you if shortcuts is one of these things that's been on your list of you could just feel it in your bones that maybe you should get more into a maybe you've tinkered a little Rosemary's book, you should get it and read it.
01:01:53 ◼ ► And it will fill in those gaps of what is the basic scope of what you think you can get done? What are the sort of things you can do in a way that you'll never get just by Googling for specific things from Stack Overflow or something like that.
01:02:10 ◼ ► And Apple does have pretty good documentation for shortcuts. It's not undocumented, but it's still it's like the difference between a dictionary and a book about how to write.
01:02:30 ◼ ► I know the one you mean. It's on tip of my tongue. And there's a subreddit for tip of my tongue for anybody who's looking for something that they can't quite remember the name on
01:02:37 ◼ ► writing. Well, that's it. That's the one by Williams in sir, I can't believe that's a sign that I need to read it again. That is a book that I have read cover to cover at least twice. And now the fact that it wasn't on the tip of my tongue means I should read it again.
01:02:50 ◼ ► But it's the difference between Zinzers on writing well, which is fantastic. And a dictionary is just a reference. And to me, Apple's documentation is a reference and there should be a reference, right? It's not a complaint.
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01:05:09 ◼ ► So one of the things I'm wondering if you have thoughts on this, so it's going back to the name shortcuts. And in addition to the searchability, there's also the fluidity of writing about the things you make in shortcuts that are from shortcuts, which are shortcuts. Right?
01:05:35 ◼ ► suggested that I, sorry, from workflow to shortcuts, I suggested that you call anything that you created in the app a workflow, so that you would have shortcuts workflow or workflow in shortcuts. And that to me was just like a perfect way of like, let's avoid any confusion.
01:05:51 ◼ ► But instead, you have shortcuts, capital S, plural, the app, shortcuts, lowercase, plural, which are all of the things that you create in the shortcuts app. And then you have a shortcut, lowercase, singular, which is a single shortcut. And oh my god, it's confusing.
01:06:08 ◼ ► It is. It's confusing. And as the writer, you're the we're the ones who try to dance around it and rearrange sentences so that we can avoid writing capital shortcuts shortcut, create a new shortcuts shortcut. And then even as a podcaster, it ends up being a tongue twister. I kind of thought the same thing, which I want to come back to this point in a second. But shortcuts originally was a third party app called workflow, or was it workflows?
01:06:37 ◼ ► I forget now whether it was plural or not, but it would have been natural. I don't know what Apple was thinking. I could see why they might have wanted to change the name because now that they own the product, maybe they thought shortcuts was a better name for the whole platform.
01:06:51 ◼ ► But it would have been nice if they named them workflows. And that's what the things are called in Automator. When in Automator, you make a workflow. Yes. The long standing one, I mean, and literally going back to the early 90s is AppleScript. Or what do you make with AppleScripts? AppleScript scripts.
01:07:13 ◼ ► Yeah. Which isn't as awkward. In my opinion, we've gone even worse with shortcuts. But AppleScript scripts is has never just just somehow seems. I hate it.
01:07:27 ◼ ► Yes. Yeah, it is just so difficult. And it doesn't roll off the tongue. Right? There's something about a really good name that just it just works. Right? Like DeLorean. Okay. DeLorean just works. Okay. Everybody immediately thinks back to the future flux capacitor. But shortcuts, shortcut, or shortcut shortcuts actions. What the no, it just it does. It's staccato, right? Rather than legato. It just doesn't feel as nice.
01:07:58 ◼ ► Yeah. And so many. Yeah, there are some names that just worked. I would say a predominant number of famous scripting languages have names that just work. Perl, Ruby, Python. JavaScript has the same problem AppleScript has and has a second problem, which is that it's Java. Yeah, it sounds like it has something to do with Java. And the only thing it has to do with Java, the one and only thing JavaScript relates to Java, is that Java was very popular at the time.
01:08:27 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, like that's literally it the number of times that I've seen people asking, like, hey, so how can I do this in Java space script? And I'm there going, hey, look, it looks like you're asking a question about scriptable. And I feel like Clippy when I do this, okay, the paperclip in Microsoft Word. But it's like, it's really important that you get rid of that space. I know that that seems completely and utterly illogical and irrelevant to you right now. But I promise you, if you delete that space, you're going to get much better search results than it would if you delete it.
01:08:56 ◼ ► And I think that's the only thing that's going to be a problem for you. And I think that's the only thing that's going to be a problem for you.
01:09:14 ◼ ► Well, I'm going to say that all credit for that and all correctly placed commas goes to Joe Kissel, the editor and one of the folks in charge over at Take Control, because he went through the book with a fine tooth comb looking for anything that sounded awkward or weird or didn't make any sense at all and really helped with that.
01:09:36 ◼ ► There's something to be said for having a really great editor and Joe has definitely served that role extremely well here. And it wouldn't have been possible to do this without him. So I'm glad his hard work paid off.
01:09:46 ◼ ► Which gets back to the value of a really well-written book from a good author with good editors.
01:09:55 ◼ ► That lack of distraction, even for those out there who've never really thought about the awkwardness of a shortcut's shortcut, the fact that somebody is there to avoid it means that while you're trying to learn something, you're not distracted by, "Hey, that looks weird."
01:10:10 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. And the number of times I wrote something and then highlighted it with strike through and then wrote TK TK next to it, which is the two characters that you will find together in the English language. TK done twice is the old editor's trick.
01:10:29 ◼ ► Like, this is something that needs fixing. I just can't think of a better way to write this right now, so I'm just going to word vomit it somehow and then come back and fix it later because it needs a better way of doing it.
01:10:40 ◼ ► And sometimes to do the right thing, right, you have to do the wrong thing because once you've done the wrong thing, you'll see the right way to do it.
01:10:46 ◼ ► And other times it was like, I'm just going to give this to like three of my friends and just say, "Hey, can you think of any kind of better way maybe to get started writing this bit? Like, at all? Any suggestions? Throw a dart. If it sounds even vaguely better than what I've got, I'll start with it and see what I can do later."
01:11:04 ◼ ► We mentioned Apple's official shortcuts reference documentation, and as I just mentioned Automator, I made a note of it because I thought it was so perfectly said is in your book, you mention Automator when it gets to the point talking about shortcuts for Mac.
01:11:20 ◼ ► And hey, what should you be using? Automator or shortcuts if you want to automate this thing and it might, maybe it's only on the Mac that you want to do it or maybe like in both cases, both shortcuts and Automator can do things like run an Apple script or run a shell script,
01:11:37 ◼ ► which are things you can't do on iOS, but you can do them in shortcuts, but therefore only on shortcuts for Mac.
01:11:43 ◼ ► But should you use Automator instead? And you have a nice little aside in the book that just says, "Hey, Apple hasn't said Automator is definitely going away, but it sort of seems like that's the way the wind is blowing and that shortcuts is the future."
01:12:00 ◼ ► And if you really want to use Automator, use it. I'm paraphrasing here, not reading, but you know, shortcuts is probably a sure bet for a thing that's going to last.
01:12:09 ◼ ► A, that's to me exactly what I mean about like as a reader who wants to know about shortcuts, like that's in that context of, "Okay, I get it." It's not just that shortcuts is new, but it probably is the other one, the older Automator probably is going away.
01:12:26 ◼ ► So I should try to do it in shortcuts first, but it's also the sort of plain language that Apple is never going to use in their own documentation.
01:12:34 ◼ ► No, and they can't say something like that because until they've officially announced that something's going away, implying that something is going away is tantamount to saying, "It's dead."
01:12:45 ◼ ► And you know what happens when somebody comes out with, "It's dead, Jim." There's, there's troubles everywhere suddenly, or maybe not as the case may be, but you know, they can't explicitly say that something's going away without saying, "Hey, and this thing is a drop-in replacement for it or a replacement."
01:12:59 ◼ ► And it's difficult, it is, but shortcuts is so much easier to use than Automator in this case that, you know, I, I can't really think of a huge number of use cases where using Automator is going to be the better solution.
01:13:12 ◼ ► There are some actions that are only in Automator still for whatever reason, and I presume the shortcuts team has been working really hard to try and get those last outstanding ones over.
01:13:22 ◼ ► But Automator was able to do something as simple as a dynamic name and date and file name, so you'd have to go and update your Automator workflow every time you wanted to run it.
01:13:30 ◼ ► And of course shortcuts can ask for input, it can just input your current date, it can reformat things and so on on the fly, farm it out to another shortcut and get it back, send it through any number of other applications, either using shortcuts or AppleScript or ShellScript if you want, or JavaScript for automation if you're really into torturing yourself.
01:13:57 ◼ ► And let's face it, the Automator UI hasn't been updated in a really long time, and it's a real shame because I know some of the folks who worked on it and they worked really hard on it and they did a really great job.
01:14:07 ◼ ► But it just unfortunately seemed like it never really hit that critical mess that shortcuts has.
01:14:13 ◼ ► And honestly, some of the best actions for Automator were actually from Microsoft as part of the Office suite.
01:14:19 ◼ ► They had some really great ones, specifically like Microsoft Word, converting Word documents to PDFs and things like that.
01:14:28 ◼ ► And you couldn't do it once they took those actions away, but shortcuts can do that because it can make anything into a PDF pretty much.
01:14:36 ◼ ► Microsoft's always been very good about wanting to empower, for lack of a better word, power users who might want to do this, people who don't consider themselves programmers, or even if they are programmers, don't want to program a solution, just want to gin up something to automate this thing that they do over and over again.
01:15:00 ◼ ► Every couple of days I need to make a new invoice, and every time I make a new invoice I want it to fill in the date and this and that.
01:15:08 ◼ ► And doing that manually each time is A, a pain, and B, it's a possible source of a mistake where you forgot to put the date in and the date is just 1/1/1900 or something like that.
01:15:23 ◼ ► Microsoft's always been good at that, so I'm not surprised, but it is true that Automator somehow failed to capture a critical mass that even AppleScript did.
01:15:33 ◼ ► I feel like AppleScript's future is quite possibly permanent. I mean, as somebody who's been an enthusiastic AppleScript user since AppleScript debuted in System 7.1, I think, I don't know, maybe it was 7.5, but at some point in the System 7 era.
01:15:55 ◼ ► But in the early years of Mac OS X it felt like, "Oh man, there's no way that they're going to keep AppleScript around for long because it just wasn't the great fit for the Mac OS X Cocoa Next Foundation."
01:16:10 ◼ ► But then the AppleScript workflows, lowercase w, that are out there are so essential to so many people's needs and really can't be replaced by anything else.
01:16:20 ◼ ► Whereas I think that's the difference with Automator too, is it's easy to envision how shortcuts will soon be able to do everything Automator did, and therefore why not get rid of the old one?
01:16:32 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. And it really does feel like, you know, when workflow first came out on the iPhone and the iPad, a lot of folks looked at it and said, "This is Automator for my iPhone."
01:16:43 ◼ ► This is really cool because they do look really similar. They've got blocks that you drag in, there's a line running between them, and you pass data between your blocks and it goes from the top to the bottom.
01:16:52 ◼ ► And now that we've got two of these things, both from Apple on our Mac, and one of them can import the workflows from the other.
01:17:07 ◼ ► Right. And again, that aside is just the perfect sort of note. Your book is filled with notes like that, that just give people a little bit of context.
01:17:15 ◼ ► You can just read this book and get caught up on knowing the state of things like that. And now you've got this high-level view.
01:17:23 ◼ ► I think what you just mentioned, workflow debuting on iOS and iPad, God, I don't know how long, maybe like 10 years ago?
01:17:33 ◼ ► It must have been at least seven or so years ago because I was studying for my computer science degree at the time when it was really starting to become more popular. It was out on the App Store then.
01:17:43 ◼ ► I'm going to admit something very cynical, and I am embarrassed to admit it because I think I should professionally have the opposite attitude.
01:17:51 ◼ ► But when it came out and I read about it and I took a look at it and I was like, "Ah, I get it," and I sort of got that first impression of, "Yeah, it's like Automator for iOS," right?
01:18:01 ◼ ► I just assumed that coming from a third party and knowing the technical restrictions of third-party apps on iOS, that this can't be that useful.
01:18:14 ◼ ► And that it sort of gets to the broader philosophical argument about iOS's restrictions being good for the typical non-technical users' protection and safety.
01:18:28 ◼ ► And it's why people like and love, love their iPhones and iPads more than they ever learned a computer, including the Mac, many people.
01:18:43 ◼ ► I cannot overstate to people who really believe that the iOS should be as open as the Mac to non-App Store apps and stuff like that.
01:18:59 ◼ ► I just can't emphasize enough how many times I know firsthand from people and talking to fellow nerds like me and you, but who have family members or a father-in-law or somebody who just used computers their whole life.
01:19:17 ◼ ► Accounting got computerized as early as almost any profession because for obvious reasons.
01:19:26 ◼ ► And once they had a computer that was working, just left it alone until the thing physically broke, right?
01:19:37 ◼ ► I'll go back to the accountant example, but just an accountant who works by themselves as a one-person operation, but had a computer that worked and they depended on it, obviously.
01:19:49 ◼ ► Hopefully backed it up somehow and did stuff like that, but more or less just left it alone and didn't want to install anything new or upgrade anything because they could mess it up.
01:20:04 ◼ ► But the flip side is, if you are an enthusiast and you want to do things like we can do on the Mac and have been able to do, and Windows, the limits of iOS have always been and continue to this day to be very frustrating.
01:20:19 ◼ ► Yeah, that everything is inside of a sandbox and workflow works around this a lot and to an extent actually Surecut still does.
01:20:29 ◼ ► So where it could read stuff out from iOS, like reading things out of your calendar and reminders, it was able to do that using the public APIs, which are the codes available to developers that they can put into their apps to read stuff out of it once it's done the pop-up to ask for permission.
01:20:50 ◼ ► Well, those apps all had these things called X callback URLs, and that's how they communicated.
01:20:57 ◼ ► So to publish a post on WordPress, it would talk to a WordPress API for your blog and things like that.
01:21:12 ◼ ► And then people realized it was basically that every developer, every app that shortcuts or workflows it was then it integrated with pretty much just had to sign a disclaimer saying they weren't going to sue Apple for integrating with their app.
01:21:36 ◼ ► And it's like, no, they have to do things differently, but they were able to integrate with so many things so well because there were all of these different ways of accessing it.
01:21:46 ◼ ► And I know Ari and I think Conrad, part of the original workflow team, they were jailbreakers.
01:21:55 ◼ ► And that kind of showed a bit in workflow of their solution of we'll find a way to do this.
01:22:00 ◼ ► Like we're going to find a way, like there's a crack somewhere and we're going to figure out how to use it so we can give people the control that they want.
01:22:07 ◼ ► That to me is really amazing going from jailbreaking devices to making your devices so much better in such a really cool way.
01:22:16 ◼ ► It reminds me of the line from the first Jurassic Park movie where they said that they bred all the dinosaurs to be all females so that there wouldn't be any reproduction out in the wild, but then they found eggs.
01:22:31 ◼ ► And I think it's the Jeff Goldblum, Ian Malcolm character who says, "Life finds a way."
01:22:39 ◼ ► But that's sort of what happened with inter-application communication on iOS where the Mac has had a rich, very rich, officially from Apple sanctioned way of doing inter-application communication where one app can talk to another through Apple events, which are the technology that AppleScript is the scripting language on top of.
01:23:03 ◼ ► And the gap that workflow and now shortcuts have grew to take advantage of is exactly what you said, that apps could register for their own custom URLs that they can handle.
01:23:15 ◼ ► And I don't think Apple was thinking of inter-application communication of going from drafts to things or from this to that.
01:23:33 ◼ ► Just a way to open a specific draft and then you could get this drafts colon slash slash and an identifier for a particular note in drafts.
01:23:44 ◼ ► You could keep it pasted somewhere and then you'd click it and it would just jump you right.
01:23:57 ◼ ► And it was all encoded as a URL. You had to be a programmer to decipher it, literally to decode it.
01:24:19 ◼ ► But it was the best we could do with true inter-application communication or a system that's designed for it.
01:24:29 ◼ ► If you're using app A and you want app A to send something to app B but you want to keep going with app A, you just trigger the action.
01:24:42 ◼ ► It goes. Maybe you get a notification or something that it succeeded or failed, but you don't leave.
01:24:49 ◼ ► But with the callback URLs, your actual iPhone would switch from app A to app B with the animation and the thing would happen.
01:25:12 ◼ ► Yeah, it is very much like UI scripting to an extent where you have something that goes and presses this button, presses that button.
01:25:19 ◼ ► Of course, it was better than that where you would just say to the app, "Hey," and create this thing and do this action that you can do with the thing that you've just created, please.
01:25:32 ◼ ► And if you did enough of them in a row and you saved workflow to do that, your iPhone would just look like it was possessed for a good couple of minutes as it bounced from here to there to back again.
01:25:41 ◼ ► And then over here and did this thing and then it all flipped around and went upside down and back to front.
01:25:46 ◼ ► And at some point you'd eventually end up back where you started, assuming that nothing crashed along the way.
01:26:03 ◼ ► I'm not sure if QuickKeys was the one that did this, but that when you recorded what they called macros, it really was just like a phantom user playing your screen.
01:26:17 ◼ ► It was exactly like an invisible person was controlling your computer, but they could do it very fast.
01:26:33 ◼ ► So when Apple acquired Workflow, I realized as soon as they acquired it, well, I thought there's two possibilities.
01:26:39 ◼ ► I thought, A, either I vastly underestimated Workflow, and this is truly technology that is so amazing that Apple is actually going to build it into the system.
01:26:55 ◼ ► They realized that the developers behind it were talented, but they wanted to hire them to do something else and weren't going to allow them to keep Workflow alive outside their work at Apple.
01:27:06 ◼ ► But it turns out it was A, and B. They did hire the team, and many of them are still there.
01:27:12 ◼ ► But the actual technology, it's not like, "Oh, we want you to remake Workflow, but we'll do it officially this time."
01:27:23 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And I bet the developers who did that are both very happy that it's still there and also at times cursing their past selves for writing that bit of code.
01:27:32 ◼ ► "Why did you write that like that? What were you thinking?" Or at least that's what I do when I look at code.
01:27:36 ◼ ► "What idiot wrote this? Oh, that would be me." That's what happens all the time, isn't it?
01:27:41 ◼ ► As somebody who's truly an expert on it, though, do you think that those roots as a user of shortcuts and a creator of shortcuts still show that it wasn't?
01:27:57 ◼ ► Obviously, it's gone through iterations and changes, and everything got squared off and rounded off again, and the menu on iPad has moved from the left side to the right side and things like that.
01:28:06 ◼ ► But at its core, it's still your blocks with your actions in and variables that you put into that, and there's a line running from the top to the bottom.
01:28:15 ◼ ► And this is a great little trick that a lot of people don't know about. There's a line that runs along the center of your actions, connecting one to the next one, unless you don't use the data from the previous action into the next action, at which point the line disappears.
01:28:29 ◼ ► And then it starts again when you're taking data through, so that line is basically your flow of data, assuming that it's flowing from top to bottom, that's as complex as it gets.
01:28:38 ◼ ► But I think it's still there, and I mean, they've probably rewritten that bit a number of times, most recently with the change to SwiftUI, but it's very much still there.
01:28:47 ◼ ► And you can also tell if you look in the actions section, there are a number of apps whose actions haven't changed in a very long time, and those are the actions that were there when this was, you know, Workflow.
01:28:59 ◼ ► I remember talking to some developers when Apple took over shortcuts and trying to find out how they were going to update their actions.
01:29:06 ◼ ► And the answer was basically they had to open a support ticket with Apple and say, "Hey, I'm writing my own shortcut actions, can you remove the old ones, please, because I can't update those and they're pointing to an app that doesn't exist anymore."
01:29:18 ◼ ► But, you know, there's still some of those actions in the App Store. I think the tally from Agile Tortoise actually is still using the original actions.
01:29:30 ◼ ► But, you know, WordPress, I'm pretty certain that action's not changed. The WordPress API does not change that fast, so there will be no reason for them to update it.
01:29:39 ◼ ► And there's got to be some other ones in there as well. And it's, some of them, it's just you wouldn't necessarily notice if they did update, but I think some of them are still the same as they always were.
01:29:49 ◼ ► And that is an interesting thing for an Apple product, especially today, but it's always been. Apple's never, and as years have gone on, have included fewer and fewer third-party stuff in a default.
01:30:02 ◼ ► Just take a new Apple product out of the Apple Store and unbox it, turn it on, and use it right there. How much third-party stuff is there? Almost none at this point.
01:30:14 ◼ ► But it used to be that they'd ship with a bunch of apps. They used to include apps from the Omni Group and before Safari, they included Internet Explorer built in, which is, in hindsight, it seems, "Wow, that was a long time ago when they were…"
01:30:30 ◼ ► And it was controversial when they switched from baking or including Netscape as the default browser to IE. But yeah, Shortcuts still has third-party app actions in the default list because back in the day when it was third-party, that was the only way to do it.
01:30:50 ◼ ► Because they could communicate by these callback URLs, but there was no way for an app like Drafts or things or whichever of the many apps that drew to embrace Workflow for them to broadcast, "Here's the things you can do."
01:31:10 ◼ ► So instead, Workflow built those things in, and now they're still there for backwards compatibility.
01:31:17 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly, because that was a problem that was had until relatively recently where you couldn't reuse a Shortcuts action. And things had this problem, for example, because they have things for iPhone, things for iPad, and things for Mac.
01:31:31 ◼ ► Well, that's three things, quite literally, which their name always amuses me. There are some great folks over there doing some wonderful work.
01:31:37 ◼ ► But it meant that their Shortcuts actions didn't match. So if you ran your Shortcut on your iPhone, then to run that exact same Shortcut on your iPad, you had to either add an if statement and say, "Hey, if this is an iPad, run the iPad action instead."
01:31:56 ◼ ► Unfortunately, they've now cleared that up and made that a lot easier. And that's part of the progress that they've gone down. And I'm sure the original Workflow team, you know, actually worked with some of these app developers. I'm sure some of them have had contact with each other way back in the past saying, "Hey, by the way, I'm just adding all these new URL scheme supports into my app. So feel free to include them in Workflow, please."
01:32:16 ◼ ► Pretty please. But now it's the other way around where it is. App developers add something in their app, and it's become a lot easier in iOS 16, which I'm really excited about.
01:32:25 ◼ ► And then Shortcuts just picks it up, which means the first time that somebody new opens the Shortcuts app, assuming that they've got some of their favorite apps that they use regularly installed, they will see, especially in iOS 16, at the bottom of that folders list, they'll see Shortcuts from your apps, which will be recommended Shortcuts from your apps using App Actions and everything from that.
01:32:46 ◼ ► And that to me is really like the point that we've all been looking for and hoping for, where you can take people who don't really know what they're doing, they don't know anything about programming, they don't know what Shortcuts is, they just know that, "Hey, this is the really like the this is the way that I can add a quick button that will just do exactly what I need into the home screen of my iPhone."
01:33:07 ◼ ► Or I can add it as a back tap through an accessibility shortcut, or I can talk to it with Siri, and it will just do the thing that I want, because it's been set up to do exactly that, which just makes your personal device actually personal.
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01:35:57 ◼ ► So you talked about, I know your book only covers up to iOS 15, but also the current version of Mac OS.
01:36:04 ◼ ► But of course that's because the other operating systems aren't out yet. So anything else?
01:36:10 ◼ ► So the big new thing in shortcuts for iOS 16 is this sort of the way that third party apps can broadcast, for lack of a better term, their shortcuts, built-in shortcuts capabilities and shortcuts will pick them up.
01:36:24 ◼ ► I agree with you. That is so super welcoming for new users. It's great for anybody because it's convenient.
01:36:30 ◼ ► Even if you're a long-time shortcuts user, it's like, "Okay, here's the stuff I need. It's right here."
01:36:34 ◼ ► But if you're new, it's like you said, it's almost like now shortcuts when you first launch it looks more welcoming because it's like, "Yeah, here's these apps I use."
01:36:45 ◼ ► Oh, and the actions are descriptive. I could say, "Oh, I would like to be able to automate that."
01:36:51 ◼ ► Yeah. Even if they don't know necessarily that they're automating things, right? My parents have got shortcuts on their home screen. They don't really know what shortcuts is.
01:36:58 ◼ ► They don't really care about automating things, but they wanted a way that when they use their blood pressure monitor, they can just tap a button and log it into HealthKit.
01:37:06 ◼ ► And now they've got it thanks to shortcuts. And so having things like that pop up from apps that people actually use and want to use is really good.
01:37:23 ◼ ► Because the worst thing about Siri is like, "I'm sorry, here are some web search results," or whatever it is she actually says whenever she comes back with that because you said the thing that to you makes perfect sense.
01:37:33 ◼ ► And of course that means that it should do A, B, and C. But it didn't understand that because the app developer gave it a completely different name.
01:37:41 ◼ ► Well, now you can set your own name so that whatever you think is the right way to say it, it doesn't matter whether or not that's what the app developer intended or whether that's the right way to do it.
01:37:50 ◼ ► That's the way that your brain works, and you can make your phone work the way your brain works instead of trying to make your brain work the way other people thought it should work.
01:37:58 ◼ ► Which, as we all know, there's a variety of neurotypical versus lots of neuroatypical ways out there.
01:38:04 ◼ ► But even just regional variations of the way that we talk about things is really important, and being able to actually have an experience that when you look at your phone, it's there for you.
01:38:15 ◼ ► Your iPad serves your needs. Your Mac, when you right-click on something in the Finder, shows you the actions that you need, not the ones that anybody else cares about, just the things that you need.
01:38:30 ◼ ► And you get to a point that I've tried to preach ever since I've been writing about automation stuff on Daring Fireball over the years, and getting to the sort of, to me, fearful years before Apple acquired Workflow and officially said, "We're going to bake this into the iOS,"
01:38:52 ◼ ► where iOS didn't have any automation at all, built from Apple in the system, right? And it was only the best we could do was the third-party thing, and Workflow was the best.
01:39:01 ◼ ► But it seemed from the outside that Apple had lost interest in automation, and the only stuff on the Mac was all aging, right?
01:39:10 ◼ ► AppleScript is a carryover from classic Mac OS, and like I said, it's almost a miracle that it's still here today and thriving in the way that it still is.
01:39:20 ◼ ► But I don't think anybody, when Mac OS X originally shipped in 2002, I think, 2001, 2002, what are the technologies from classic Mac OS that carried over into the first version of Mac OS X that will still be there 20 years later?
01:39:41 ◼ ► And AppleScript hadn't gotten improved, and I guess the hope for people like me and you and your colleague David Sparks and everybody else who loves it was that Apple was going to come out with it.
01:39:52 ◼ ► The reason they hadn't been updating AppleScript was that they had something in the works, and it's, "Here's the new thing," and it's SwiftScript or whatever you wanted, whatever name it could have been.
01:40:01 ◼ ► And it's an all-new scripting system. I mean, we could still long for a new scripting system, honestly, but that's a separate conversation.
01:40:09 ◼ ► But the fact that Apple's most popular platform, arguably the most popular platform in the world, iOS, didn't have automation made it seem like Apple thought it wasn't.
01:40:21 ◼ ► And the thinking of, "Well, why wouldn't they want it?" and the idea would be the argument, and it's oft repeated, even by people who wish they would but who are cynical and say, "Yeah, of course they're not," because most people aren't going to use it.
01:40:34 ◼ ► And my argument against that has always been, "Yes, that is absolutely true." And in the earlier days of computing, like the HyperCard era and going back even further, like when you buy an Apple II in the '80s and you just turned it on, what did you get?
01:40:52 ◼ ► You got a prompt where you could just type basic programs. You could just start typing programs when you turn the computer on.
01:41:00 ◼ ► The idea back then that slowly faded away was that everybody, if given the right tools and the right approach to it, could be a programmer and would want to be a programmer to some extent.
01:41:15 ◼ ► No, we really do. The number of people who are required to use a computer to do their job and then come out with the absolutely stellar line of, "I'm not a computer person," when you ask them to do something as simple as, "Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?" is astounding.
01:41:31 ◼ ► It's slightly terrifying because basically if they're saying, "Hey, I'm not a computer person," when they're asked to do something with the computer that's required for part of their job, they're basically saying, "I can't do my job." And that's just like, "Whoa, okay, I didn't realize that we were voicing personal thoughts like this today. I'll get you some chocolate to go with this. Do we need to have a sit down?"
01:41:48 ◼ ► But, you know, the number of people who just go, "No, I don't want to automate things," but people actually do. They just don't know it under the name that we're talking about it. And it's really difficult sometimes to put things in a way that other people understand because they're not looking for an automated solution.
01:42:03 ◼ ► What they want is that when they talk to Siri, instead of using reminders, it uses this app that they found that they've been using with their spouse because that's a great place to store groceries because it means that whenever they go to the grocery store, they actually end up with the things that they need instead of six bottles of ketchup and no peanut butter or whatever it is that their household problem is.
01:42:22 ◼ ► And they just want their device to actually be integrated into their lives. And that's, I think, why Shortcuts is called Shortcuts rather than Automator because it is about putting a shortcut where you're looking for the thing to the thing that you actually want.
01:42:37 ◼ ► And they started out on iOS with Siri Intents, right, so that you could add something to your preferred task manager using Siri, but that's always been kind of flaky. And I don't know why that is, but, you know, I've tried it with so many different apps and this is where you've got the problem of naming, right, because OmniFocus is a lovely unique name when Siri understands it.
01:42:57 ◼ ► Things is a bit confusing for Siri and Jew, it asks you when you want it to be done by, like, what's the deadline? It's like, no, I don't want a deadline. I just want you to, like I said, Tuesday at 9pm, please just do it.
01:43:09 ◼ ► But whatever it is, you know, Siri's always been a bit flaky on that. But by adding the Shortcuts support, then it really just puts things hopefully in the place where you're using it and where you can find something that when you say it makes sense for you and is understood by your device.
01:43:24 ◼ ► That is so true. I know we keep coming back to really good names, but that just that fail for other reasons. And I'm I've been a user of Dew, D-U-E, I think since like the original version, I just have a couple of weekly reminders in there like to take out the trash and when it's time at the beginning of the week to change my weekly sponsor.
01:43:45 ◼ ► Yeah, that I've been running in Dew for, I don't know, a dozen years. It is very confusing. In addition to Google search ability, yes, Siri confusion is natural, right? And especially you're talking about creating a reminder.
01:44:18 ◼ ► Well done. Like, thanks computer. That's a new one for today. Like Siri mispronouncing things, honestly, it's one of my favorite things. I was driving back with my parents from France last weekend. And so of course, my parents, my dad in particular doesn't speak very good French at all. And so he has his Siri naturally set to English.
01:44:36 ◼ ► Okay, but you would think driving in France that Siri could I don't know use French Siri for the route the street names. No, no, no, there were some Oh my god, they're just
01:44:49 ◼ ► reading everything. Even something somebody who doesn't know French very well would at least try to pronounce the French way reading it just brutal, brutally as English.
01:44:59 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And I don't think I can even do it because I do speak French. And so I don't think I can even pronounce the things that way that Siri was doing it. But oh my gosh, that was terrible. But you know, it is very difficult. How do you explain to a computer how to sound things out? And there's the whole phonetic alphabet and so on. But then do you expect every app developer to know the phonetic alphabet to put that in somewhere so that they can do that? And then do you expect every user to know that Zapier rhymes with happier instead of being Zapier that rhymes with P?
01:45:28 ◼ ► I don't know, I'm making up words here. But you know, like knowing how to pronounce the name of the app is that's a really big barrier to entry. Because how many people have said a word wrong because they learned it by reading like I used to pronounce picturesque picturesque because if you look at it, that's what it is. And I learned it from reading a book. And it wasn't until ages later that my mom was like, Oh, you mean picturesque. Rosen, I'm like, Oh, no, that's a word I've been mispronouncing for a couple of years now. Whoops.
01:45:57 ◼ ► Rosemary, you're describing the entire bane of my decades long podcasting existence. And my parents are well spoken. It's just that I as an extremely avid reader encountered so many words that my parents, we just never weren't used and weren't used on the TV shows we watched. And so I just made up my own pronunciations. And they're all broken.
01:46:28 ◼ ► Yep, yep. And it happens to everyone, right? But you look up an app on the App Store, and then you think, Oh, cool. I know how that's pronounced. Obviously, this is Instagram, Facebook, OneDrive. Okay, cool. And then you get some other ones like Achoo, which is a great app for the developer of Apollo that lets you view the HTML Safari on your iPhone. But for me, as a native English speaker, Achoo, like that's logical. I've seen Robin Hood Men in Tights. I know how this is pronounced. Non native speaker, good luck.
01:46:57 ◼ ► You know, and that's nothing against Chrissy. He's done a great job there. Like, you know, but Airbnb, like a number of times that I've had to explain to non native speakers of English, that T's and C's means terms and conditions, because they hear T's and C's on the advert. And they're thinking like T as in T E A, as in like the drink, or T as in T E E, the golf tee. Okay, and then C's. Okay, is it like C's as in like I see? Or is it C is in an ocean?
01:47:24 ◼ ► And there's just like, and then actually turns out something completely different, right? And it's very difficult to figure out how you pronounce these things. Like, is it Amex or Amex?
01:47:36 ◼ ► And both of them are right and both of them are wrong. I'm sure the folks at American Express have their own personal internal guidelines as to how this should be pronounced. And then every one of us will say it ever so slightly differently. And it's just really difficult to actually interact with your device in a way that especially if you're using your voice, and a lot of people like to use their voice.
01:47:53 ◼ ► To interact with their devices, it's a lot more common than a lot of us nerds would like to think. A lot of us nerds are very reticient when it comes to talking to our devices. And we think no, it's faster to type. I'm just going to do that because it'll be right. And we get around our devices pretty quickly. But I'm there sitting there with my parents in the evening, and my dad thinks of something and go and asks us and we go, Oh, I don't know. And he goes, Hey, Apple lady, what does this say? And she comes back with web results. And he's fine with that, to be clear, like he actually doesn't mind them at all. Because you know, he's a little bit more
01:48:08 ◼ ► But I'm there sitting there with my parents in the evening and my dad thinks of something
01:48:17 ◼ ► this say?" And she comes back with web results and he's fine with that, to be clear. Like,
01:48:21 ◼ ► he actually doesn't mind them at all because she'll read out like the first sentence of
01:48:25 ◼ ► the first web result. And honestly, it seems like nine out of 10 times when he's actually
01:48:29 ◼ ► talking instead of like half not paying attention to what he's saying, that she gets it right
01:48:42 ◼ ► what the right pronunciation is, or the meaning isn't clear, and number of words that sound
01:48:58 ◼ ► coming to invade Britain back in the day because we had Latin and then the Vikings came and
01:49:04 ◼ ► so we butchered some German in there and then the French came and we were like, "Oh no,
01:49:08 ◼ ► we're really going to mess with these guys. They love their language. We're really going
01:49:15 ◼ ► incredibly difficult. And when my words go up at the end of a sentence, that's a question,
01:49:22 ◼ ► which to you and me is something that's very logical and easy to understand perhaps. But
01:49:27 ◼ ► to somebody who's not a native speaker of English, where that upwards intonation doesn't necessarily
01:49:32 ◼ ► mean a question, that's very difficult. And just because I've done an upwards intonation,
01:49:41 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good one. Because I can hear it. I took high school Spanish for four years
01:49:49 ◼ ► a second language. But I can tell when like a Spanish speaker or French speaker, Italian,
01:50:05 ◼ ► language, I can't even tell when they're asking a question. It just isn't there, let alone
01:50:10 ◼ ► understand the words. I guess my main point though, and going back to that example with
01:50:14 ◼ ► your parents is that my pro, this is why even a company with as broad a reach as Apple making
01:50:31 ◼ ► it, right? It's the platform that longtime Apple people had always hoped that Apple would
01:50:36 ◼ ► have is the one that reaches the mass market, the actual computer for the rest of us. The
01:50:52 ◼ ► really, not like in a religious cult of Mac way, but just seriously, the problems you're
01:50:57 ◼ ► having, you don't have to reinstall the operating system every year on the Mac. You should just
01:51:01 ◼ ► get it. It'll just sit there and you could do the simple email and web and printing some
01:51:06 ◼ ► stuff when you need to print and it'll actually print. Don't. iOS is that platform and they
01:51:13 ◼ ► have this tremendous reach, but why should they still care about automation if most people
01:51:17 ◼ ► aren't going to use it? A, there's the, "Hey, more people should be using it if they would
01:51:28 ◼ ► that's downhill from that, one level down, is that even if most people don't create their
01:51:44 ◼ ► them with others and somebody can be the person who didn't create it, even if they could have,
01:51:51 ◼ ► but they didn't want to try. But like a small team of people, like if there's a rotating
01:51:57 ◼ ► crew of six people who collaborate on the podcast and there's some steps of the process
01:52:04 ◼ ► that can be automated. And that is, as everybody who makes podcasts know, there are definitely
01:52:09 ◼ ► some steps that can be automated. All it takes is for one of the people on the team to make
01:52:15 ◼ ► the custom automation that could be a shortcut and share it with the rest of the team and
01:52:22 ◼ ► everybody else can use it, even if they wouldn't have created it themselves. And they never,
01:52:36 ◼ ► And then you can get on things like the Reddit or individual apps. Most popular third-party
01:52:43 ◼ ► apps have successful thriving user communities. Keyboard maestro certainly has a really good
01:52:50 ◼ ► one. And you can just hang out there and look for like the subject of a thread that catches
01:52:56 ◼ ► your eye. Like, Oh, that sounds like something I might use and click into it. And somebody
01:53:21 ◼ ► sing the praises of enough, but would require a whole nother show. These things have more
01:53:26 ◼ ► consumers of the macros or scripts or workflows or shortcuts, whatever you want to call the
01:53:40 ◼ ► or for work or whatever, then there are creators of them. That's, and I don't think that
01:53:46 ◼ ► will ever change. And that to me is the, it was like one of those like moments where it's
01:53:52 ◼ ► like, and you hear like this great music when Apple's confirmed that shortcuts was going
01:53:58 ◼ ► to be built into iOS, it was like, yes, this is going to get better every year. This is,
01:54:04 ◼ ► there's a future for this and it really is. As we wrap up any other new stuff in iOS 16
01:54:19 ◼ ► locked some shortcuts that people were doing specifically shortcuts, automations. I had
01:54:24 ◼ ► automations for every focus mode, which was customizing my background image and changing
01:54:34 ◼ ► And I am really glad because that means that Apple is realizing that, hey, people are doing
01:54:44 ◼ ► shortcuts, I want to show because it is pure far from it, but I'm really glad that they're
01:54:57 ◼ ► because that means that they're actually watching shortcuts, right? That means that they're
01:55:03 ◼ ► Okay. We'll put that into the main operating system. Like we'll just put it right there.
01:55:07 ◼ ► Thanks. Love it. And then they've taken that further and put more focus mode automations
01:55:17 ◼ ► group in Safari through the focus mode that's activated, but you can also then change it
01:55:32 ◼ ► automation that will go, hey, I'm going to check your calendar a second. Looks like you're
01:55:37 ◼ ► recording. Actually, you're on the talk show today talking to John Gruber. How wonderful.
01:55:41 ◼ ► So I'm going to put you into the guest sub version of your podcasting focus mode, which
01:55:45 ◼ ► means I'm going to activate this Safari to app group, and I'm going to change your background
01:55:49 ◼ ► to that instead of your standard podcasting one and so on. And that to me is really where
01:55:55 ◼ ► they're giving and taking like, and there's that beautiful symbiotic relationship of they're
01:56:07 ◼ ► snowball effect of where things are building on it. And it's really great that folks like
01:56:18 ◼ ► merge really great. Like there's proper support for like filling in from spreadsheets and
01:56:28 ◼ ► back in. And I think a good chunk of why that's coming back is because of this vocal minority
01:56:34 ◼ ► who's got into shortcuts and automation and stuff and realized that actually that's what
01:56:38 ◼ ► they need. And that's great. And I'm just really excited by all of this and hoping that
01:56:44 ◼ ► we're going to get an automations tab on the Mac. I know that you can automate shortcuts
01:56:54 ◼ ► advantage that shortcuts has is it's a pretty app. It doesn't look like something that when
01:57:00 ◼ ► you open it up, you're going to break your Mac with it. You probably could if you tried
01:57:06 ◼ ► hard enough, but the built-in security controls are going to try and stop you doing that. But
01:57:11 ◼ ► it does look nice and friendly. And I think adding an automations tab into that and maybe
01:57:15 ◼ ► at some point in the future, this honestly, Jon, is my biggest wish. The gallery inside
01:57:19 ◼ ► of shortcuts, let there be shortcuts developers. Like don't let us charge for it. I'm fine
01:57:25 ◼ ► with that. I'll quite happily make and submit stuff and have it go through a proper review
01:57:43 ◼ ► health. Well, that's a shortcut that a whole bunch of people could use and take advantage
01:57:48 ◼ ► of. And that would be great. And I've already built that. It's on my parents' iPhone home
01:57:51 ◼ ► screens in their health folders because that's where they find apps and that works. And I've
01:57:56 ◼ ► done the same thing for scales for other people and so on and so forth. All of those sorts
01:57:59 ◼ ► of things, they're really simple little shortcuts. But as you said, there's a lot of people out
01:58:03 ◼ ► there who won't create them. So if the gallery became even bigger, that's my hope for, I
01:58:14 ◼ ► love them to do that. I know that they'd have to have like an entire review team who hopefully
01:58:18 ◼ ► actually understand shortcuts. Unlike some of the folks at the app store review who currently
01:58:22 ◼ ► don't understand what a status bar application is. That's been a fun conversation back and
01:58:27 ◼ ► forth. Like no, it's a status bar application. When you close it, it's supposed to disappear.
01:58:31 ◼ ► We swear. No, it's not. But yes, if they could do that, and if they could add that back in,
01:58:35 ◼ ► that would be or add that in because it used to be that you could submit stuff to the gallery.
01:58:42 ◼ ► way back when this was workflow. But there's some stuff in there that's really great. And
01:58:52 ◼ ► really long time. I remember this from way, way back when. And yeah, it just feels like
01:59:12 ◼ ► really is a sign that it's not just a fringe group at Apple, who sort of snuck shortcuts
01:59:20 ◼ ► in but that the whole platforms team is serious about it, that they have the gallery in the
01:59:26 ◼ ► first place so that you can share these through the iCloud gallery to people and they can
01:59:46 ◼ ► If you're just want to benefit from a shortcut written by somebody else, how do you reproduce
01:59:50 ◼ ► it? If you can't just download it or copy and paste it, you can't because it's not text,
01:59:57 ◼ ► it's not a scripting language. You can't just say, "Select this text on the webpage and
02:00:04 ◼ ► that it exists, but there's probably a thousand ways it could be better. And even with stuff
02:00:10 ◼ ► like the editorial guidance, where they can say shortcut of the day and highlight really
02:00:21 ◼ ► They've had Federico Vittucci, David Sparks, and so on. And yeah, I'm loving that they're
02:00:35 ◼ ► might think as well, but they're working really hard on doing that. But if there was perhaps
02:00:39 ◼ ► a way that they could get more stuff in there in a way that just automatically highlights
02:00:45 ◼ ► folks like Matthew Casanelli and Chris Lawley, who are out there making some really cool
02:00:49 ◼ ► and amazing things. And then it could just be, "And hey, this person, by the way, already
02:00:58 ◼ ► download button's right there." And you happen to have a headshot of them and a tiny three-line
02:01:03 ◼ ► bio that somebody wrote and they're just reusing until somebody says, "Hey, we should probably
02:01:19 ◼ ► app actually gets some love in that it gets onto your iPad and your Mac because, you know,
02:01:37 ◼ ► Yeah, it's funny because the Mac is the Mac because the Mac is the most capable platform.
02:01:50 ◼ ► I kind of get it. I know we're running towards the end. But one of the cool things if people
02:01:58 ◼ ► them in shortcuts parlance automations. But like an automation could be triggered. There's
02:02:04 ◼ ► all sorts of neat ways, all sorts of things you could think of. But like one of them would
02:02:13 ◼ ► to do that with computers forever going back to cron on Unix going back to like the 70s.
02:02:19 ◼ ► But they've often been complicated, you know, and you think, well, that shouldn't be hard.
02:02:24 ◼ ► You just tell your computer to do this thing at a certain type of day. But you get into
02:02:34 ◼ ► Well, and what is the computer running? And even when sleep became a real thing, practically
02:02:43 ◼ ► useful thing for computers to put them to sleep instead of powering them down, how much
02:02:47 ◼ ► is it actually doing while it's sleeping other than the one thing it has to do is listen
02:02:53 ◼ ► to wake up? But can it actually keep time? Does it check the clock every minute, whatever?
02:02:58 ◼ ► But anyway, you can do that with shortcuts. And there's other ones too, that obvious things
02:03:04 ◼ ► that you think of with your phone, like when you leave your home, or when you come home,
02:03:09 ◼ ► or when you get to work or when you get somewhere. So you can do location based ones, any other
02:03:18 ◼ ► Obviously focus modes, alarms going off, however, is one of my favorites. There's a really great
02:03:23 ◼ ► app called signals for home kit. So when my alarm goes off in the morning, if I hit the
02:03:30 ◼ ► the evil alarm clock. It's my punishment for hitting snooze, like flash the lights as bright
02:03:39 ◼ ► But that definitely helps wake me up. Of course, carplay is a great one. And I really wish
02:03:46 ◼ ► that some of the actions like locations could be automated because you can work around that
02:03:51 ◼ ► with a focus mode. So you can have a focus mode automatically activate at a specific location.
02:03:57 ◼ ► And then you can use the focus mode activating to run a shortcut that you can't just use
02:04:01 ◼ ► arriving at a location as a completely automated solution. And NFC tags, I love NFC tags, having
02:04:33 ◼ ► So I'll tell you, a shortcut I made a while ago, is I have a post office box. And it's,
02:04:40 ◼ ► I put it off for years and years and years getting one. And it was great change, because
02:04:48 ◼ ► giving out my home address. And it is it's a great thing to do. I recommend it, especially
02:05:00 ◼ ► Yeah. And so I wrote a shortcut a while back now. And every time I checked my post office
02:05:12 ◼ ► put my key in the post office box until I've run the shortcut. And then the shortcut just
02:05:22 ◼ ► run that just says, how long has it been since I checked the post office box? And surprise,
02:05:27 ◼ ► it often surprises me, I think I just checked the other day. And it'll say like 16 days.
02:05:31 ◼ ► And I'll be like, ah, now what I'm thinking, you're making me think if I put an NFC tag
02:05:37 ◼ ► in there, yeah, then I just have to bump my phone against it. And there's a couple of taps
02:05:42 ◼ ► and a swipe I could get rid of. I'm just wondering if the post office will be spooked when they
02:05:50 ◼ ► packages and mail in there. If they look and see an NFC tag, are they going to think what
02:06:05 ◼ ► be going, oh, that's a great idea is NFC tags don't do particularly well on metal, you'll
02:06:09 ◼ ► need to get a shielded one, but they're really easy to get on Amazon. They're really easy
02:06:13 ◼ ► to get. It's just make sure that you get one that you can put on metal because otherwise
02:06:27 ◼ ► So that's just the first thing that came into my mind. But man, what a great idea that is.
02:06:31 ◼ ► Yeah, it really is. I mean, then what you can do, okay, because you're doing that, like,
02:06:41 ◼ ► one of those, one of the great shortcuts integration apps, and have a home screen widget that updates
02:06:47 ◼ ► based on the date of the information. So I have a bunch of Widget Pack widgets and some
02:06:56 ◼ ► places. And some of my Widget Pack ones are basically like, hey, X number of days until
02:07:00 ◼ ► this thing or since you did that thing, whatever it is, and it just gives me a really, like,
02:07:10 ◼ ► day. So I've got Carrot Weather telling me, you know, whatever, you know, actually, it's
02:07:15 ◼ ► not so exciting now that there's a certain president missing. But you know, it's probably
02:07:24 ◼ ► threatening my life, which I greatly appreciate. Thank you, Maker of Carrot. But you know,
02:07:28 ◼ ► having all that information just kind of like in your phone's home screen, cycling up and
02:07:40 ◼ ► you leave the house, then you know, that information then pops up and you're like, oh, hey, it's
02:07:46 ◼ ► been two weeks since I checked my post office box. I'm just gonna go check that one now.
02:07:50 ◼ ► Long story short, Apple really has enthusiastically allowed us to turn our iOS devices into, you
02:07:58 ◼ ► know, customizable, automatable devices. Focus modes, you're opening up my ideas for ways
02:08:25 ◼ ► Right, but maybe Pushkit or Widgetpack, neither of which I've tried, but now they're on
02:09:31 ◼ ► Yes, it is, but it works out really well because we get enough time every week for some folks
02:09:36 ◼ ► who do watch live to actually think about it and send us their feedback, and then everyone
02:09:43 ◼ ► and then Monday there's just, bam, avalanche of feedback for the show on Tuesday. So, it's
02:09:49 ◼ ► Yeah. But anyway, and last but not least, of course, your homepage, which is a terrific
02:09:58 ◼ ► got links to all of these shows at rosemaryorchard.com. So, if you want to find out more and listen
02:10:04 ◼ ► to these shows, and if you… I mean, we only touch the surface. Literally, if you think,
02:10:10 ◼ ► how can there be an entire podcast about automation stuff on Apple platforms? Seriously, they're
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