00:00:15 ◼ ► fireplace and I can sit on the—just sit by the fire and read a casual book or something like that.
00:00:31 ◼ ► Yeah. Isn't that always the truth, though? I mean, I know it's like the human condition,
00:00:37 ◼ ► where if you had released new apps and it didn't seem to go anywhere, went over like a lead balloon,
00:00:43 ◼ ► you would think, "Wouldn't it be great if one of these apps had been a hit? Wouldn't it be great?"
00:00:55 ◼ ► So as we record this episode on Tuesday the 29th, it'll be out tomorrow, probably the 30th,
00:01:01 ◼ ► the top downloaded free app, top app right now in the App Store is your app, WidgetSmith.
00:01:19 ◼ ► So it's been at the top of the list for a week and a half. I think there's a good chance it'll
00:01:24 ◼ ► still be at the top of the list tomorrow when this comes out. Congratulations. In all seriousness,
00:01:29 ◼ ► Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's been completely surreal. It's one of those weird places where—it's not
00:01:38 ◼ ► like this is one of those situations either where I just started doing this and then it took off in
00:01:42 ◼ ► a wild way. I've been making apps in the App Store since the beginning, since 12 years ago,
00:01:48 ◼ ► essentially. And I've seen this happen to other people, and it's always like, "Oh, that's nice.
00:01:53 ◼ ► I wonder what that's like." And you never really ever actually think that it's the kind of thing
00:01:57 ◼ ► that would actually happen to you. And to actually be in a position where I made something that's
00:02:03 ◼ ► sitting at the top of the charts and has remained there, it was certainly never the plan or the
00:02:12 ◼ ► So I made the joke—not even a joke, it's a humorous observation that it was my teenage son
00:02:20 ◼ ► who came to me shortly after the release of iOS 14. So you've been number one since the 18th,
00:02:38 ◼ ► I say "we," I don't have an app, so it's not even really me. I'm using the royal "we" here.
00:02:55 ◼ ► get through App Review, and then be ready for the apps when iOS was actually released the following
00:03:01 ◼ ► afternoon. So it was like, I think I had my submissions made within maybe about four hours
00:03:31 ◼ ► "Hey, have you heard about these iOS 14 widgets?" And I was like, "Yeah." And he's like,
00:03:39 ◼ ► And I had to sit at a footnote. I was like, "Yes, I have. And in fact—" And then he just
00:03:52 ◼ ► Yeah, he didn't really care. I thought maybe he had me. And somebody on Twitter was like,
00:04:03 ◼ ► "Actually, more often than you'd think, because he thinks that I only follow the boring stuff,
00:04:16 ◼ ► Why didn't you give him a heads up? This was coming. He could have been the cool kid on the
00:04:21 ◼ ► It's, you know, I say it's—it is surprising, right? Like, you did not—maybe you thought
00:04:31 ◼ ► you had something, right? What were you thinking? So WidgetSmith is obviously an all-new thing,
00:04:41 ◼ ► Yeah. And so, I mean, WidgetSmith is in many ways like the spiritual successor to another app that
00:04:52 ◼ ► making custom complications for the Apple Watch. And when I made that, that app launched,
00:05:00 ◼ ► and it did reasonably well, but nothing—it didn't set the world on fire or anything. It was just like,
00:05:05 ◼ ► it was a power—it was like a niche tool for power users, essentially. It was the way that I have it
00:05:09 ◼ ► in my mind and the way that it kind of manifested itself in the market as a result. And when widgets
00:05:16 ◼ ► were announced, and I was like, "Okay, I have a lot of the infrastructure in place for how you
00:05:22 ◼ ► would build an app that does this kind of thing," where a complication and a widget are functionally
00:05:28 ◼ ► and even programmatically very similar in sort of concept. And so I was like, "Well, let's just
00:05:33 ◼ ► take what I built there and put it into widgets and kind of see what happens." And if I'm being
00:05:39 ◼ ► completely honest, my expectation was that—my personal goal was that WidgetSmith's downloads
00:05:46 ◼ ► and subscriber base and everything would be about half of WatchSmith. And that was what I was going
00:05:53 ◼ ► into with, because I thought it was like, "Well, this is a power user feature. Who's going to want
00:05:58 ◼ ► these power user widgets on their phone?" On the watch, at least, it's a thing that the
00:06:04 ◼ ► complication system is really limited. But on your phone, everyone's going to use the widgets that
00:06:10 ◼ ► come with the apps that they use. Why would they use mine if they're my calendar widget versus
00:06:16 ◼ ► Apple's calendar widget, or my photo widget versus Apple's photo widget? And so I had no expectations
00:06:21 ◼ ► for it. And it was just something that I was like, "Well, I'm in the place that I can do this. I have
00:06:26 ◼ ► the infrastructure, I have the code. I know what I'm doing enough that it's not a crazy ask." And so
00:06:30 ◼ ► I launched it with no expectations. And the first few days before it really blew up was
00:06:38 ◼ ► fulfilling my expectations. It was like, "This is kind of finding its niche." I had some good
00:06:44 ◼ ► feedback, and it was amongst the people who are very power usury and care a lot about very
00:06:55 ◼ ► it would go, and it would just cruise along less than a lot of my other apps, but just part of the
00:06:59 ◼ ► portfolio, and that's great. I had absolutely no expectation that it would take off in the way that
00:07:04 ◼ ► it did. And it came as a complete surprise and is still something that I can only sort of—every
00:07:10 ◼ ► now and then, I just open the App Store and just scroll down to make sure that it's actually real.
00:07:14 ◼ ► This isn't some big con that is being played on me, because I had no expectation of it,
00:07:21 ◼ ► and yet it seems to be true. It seems to be actually what's happening in the world right now.
00:07:25 ◼ ► It is interesting. It's an interesting comparison, because famously—and I would like to talk about
00:07:34 ◼ ► the watch stuff separately, so we'll come back to this in a somewhat organized fashion that this
00:07:41 ◼ ► show usually proceeds—but there is a—so famously, six years in, seven years in, I guess, what are we
00:08:00 ◼ ► No, Series 6. Series—I have to say it slowly, so as not to trigger our friend, the electronic widget.
00:08:07 ◼ ► Yes. Series 6 watch, watchOS 7, so it's the sixth year. Famously, this is where I'm going,
00:08:39 ◼ ► I think that's a long story. Why can't apps just make their own faces, period? Why, with—you know,
00:08:50 ◼ ► if we have—and we keep hearing these numbers with all the lawsuits with Epic and stuff like that,
00:08:59 ◼ ► and there's over a million in the store of—you know, let's just pick a category, calculators,
00:09:05 ◼ ► right? If you tried to use every single iOS calculator, there's got to be hundreds of them,
00:09:14 ◼ ► maybe thousands, I don't know, of varying degrees of design quality. Why aren't watch faces the same
00:09:22 ◼ ► way? Why aren't there thousands, tens of thousands of watch faces? Why can't the Dallas Cowboys have
00:09:29 ◼ ► an app where you can have a custom Dallas Cowboys watch face, et cetera? You can't. That's just not
00:09:36 ◼ ► the way watch faces work, and a couple of years ago, they've added—they began adding complications,
00:09:43 ◼ ► which is sort of the closest apps get to being able to be on watch faces, right? But even there,
00:09:51 ◼ ► it's sort of—you're playing within these very limited confines, right? It's not really like
00:09:57 ◼ ► you have a complete canvas to write on? No. No. I mean, it depends a lot on the watch face,
00:10:10 ◼ ► you have a reasonably big canvas, like on some of the modular faces where you have a big rectangular
00:10:15 ◼ ► block that you can pretty much take over the face with, but on most of them, you get a little
00:10:21 ◼ ► teeny little circle that you have to put your entire complication into. And so it's really not—
00:10:32 ◼ ► I don't even know if it's like 50 pixels by 50 pixels, or points, I guess. It's a very small
00:10:39 ◼ ► space that you actually have to play with, and so you're definitely not creating a custom watch face.
00:10:49 ◼ ► or some kind of information. And so in addition to the very limited set of rules that you have
00:10:54 ◼ ► to—confines you have to play within visually, you also—I don't know if you have to, I guess.
00:11:02 ◼ ► I don't know what the rules are. So there's also a wide variety of—and again, I'm laughing because
00:11:09 ◼ ► I don't have to make all the complications—but there are a very wide variety of complication
00:11:15 ◼ ► sizes, right? And then like upper left corner can be different than upper right corner because,
00:11:21 ◼ ► you know, on some of the watch faces, they curve to fit the corner. Different sizes. And
00:11:27 ◼ ► joy of joys, there's actually two entirely different sets of watch sizes. There's the old
00:11:37 ◼ ► Series 1 or 0 through 3 size with the square corners, and then starting with Series 4 a couple
00:11:44 ◼ ► years ago now, the 456. And it turns out, much to the consternation of developers such as yourself,
00:11:52 ◼ ► Series 3 remains in the lineup at 199, and so therefore you can look forward to years and years
00:11:58 ◼ ► of supporting those extra complication sizes. In addition to that, there are rules about how often—
00:12:05 ◼ ► not even rules, really, it's sort of all up in the air—how often does the complication update?
00:12:10 ◼ ► So a complication—the way the complication system works is you provide a timeline of information you
00:12:19 ◼ ► want to display on it. And you can update that—when you create the timeline, you can have
00:12:25 ◼ ► things as often as one per minute. So I can create—and you can create up to 100 of those.
00:12:32 ◼ ► So if I'm at one minute-by-minute accuracy, I can create 100 minutes of things that will be shown on
00:12:39 ◼ ► the display. And then I can update or change what my timeline is maybe every 15 to 20 minutes,
00:12:46 ◼ ► if the battery's full, and if the battery starts to run down, then who knows what. And it'll just
00:12:51 ◼ ► sort of—the watch will get to your update or your request for an update whenever it feels
00:13:00 ◼ ► >> Right. And so this is just a microcosm, but this watch complication situation is sort of a
00:13:22 ◼ ► you know, you could write software for X, some sort of component, and you can't just update
00:13:29 ◼ ► constantly. You only get a sliver of time, but that time would be determinate. You would know
00:13:35 ◼ ► once a second, or even if it's once a minute. Once a minute, you will get a slice of time.
00:13:40 ◼ ► You can update, and you can count on it. Every minute on the minute, you're going to do this.
00:13:47 ◼ ► Maybe you will know. Maybe you could say, "Hey, I don't need to do it on the minute." Everybody
00:13:51 ◼ ► might want to do it on the minute. You could just update me, say, 15 seconds after every minute.
00:14:01 ◼ ► whatever it is, it would get up. Widgets or complications on the watch aren't like that.
00:14:11 ◼ ► raise your hand and make a request, "I would like to update on this," period. And the watch is like,
00:14:35 ◼ ► And however hostile it is towards developers, it's in the mindset of doing what's best for the users,
00:14:43 ◼ ► which is to extend battery life and manage this sort of calculus of, "Well, let's let these things
00:14:51 ◼ ► update as often as possible while also maximizing battery life," which is a very complicated
00:15:02 ◼ ► >> Yeah. And they want to have... And I think it's different on different devices. I think
00:15:11 ◼ ► a Series 3 Apple Watch with its CPU and its performance characteristics and its battery life,
00:15:17 ◼ ► I think it will have a different recipe than what a brand new sort of top-of-the-line Apple Watch is
00:15:23 ◼ ► going to be able to do. There's a wide variety there, and I just have to kind of code my thing
00:15:27 ◼ ► so that it's flexible as much as I can between those with kind of no expectation of when I'll
00:15:39 ◼ ► at a hardware level, Apple Watch is going, right? Because, yes, famously when the Watch first came
00:15:49 ◼ ► out, apps were very slow. And that was really, really more of a WatchKit problem where the
00:15:56 ◼ ► third-party APIs were really, really rubbish, to put it mildly. And in hindsight, why were they so
00:16:05 ◼ ► bad? And I think it basically, again, we're never going to get a real explanation from Apple because
00:16:23 ◼ ► because either they're not ready, they're not up to our standards, or we can't trust third parties
00:16:28 ◼ ► with these APIs to manage energy the way we are internally. So the APIs, the real ones, we can't
00:16:36 ◼ ► open. But apps, quote-unquote, "apps" are so super important to iPhone and iPad, we need apps
00:16:51 ◼ ► "We can't open up the real APIs for battery life and whatever other reasons, but we have to have
00:16:57 ◼ ► apps on the, for lack of a better word, marketing side. Okay, we'll make this other set of APIs
00:17:04 ◼ ► that we can trust them with." And they were really slow. But even, let's just say, go up to series
00:17:13 ◼ ► three, just the basics and the APIs got better. People don't typically think of their watch as
00:17:21 ◼ ► fast or slow anymore, right? Like what you want to do on your watch is fast. So all of the
00:17:28 ◼ ► improvements to the chips aren't in the... It's always been an issue with battery-operated
00:17:34 ◼ ► devices, laptops to phones to tablets, to manage efficiency over time, both with increasing
00:17:43 ◼ ► performance, because you want to do some things faster and whatever, but also using the efficiency
00:17:49 ◼ ► to extend battery life. With the watch, it's really all about battery life. Yeah. I mean,
00:17:54 ◼ ► I think it's clear that that's the gating factor for any new thing that Apple is trying to do on
00:18:00 ◼ ► the Apple Watch, is defined by the battery. And because the batteries in the Apple Watch are just
00:18:04 ◼ ► so much smaller physically, there's only so much space you have if you're going to strap something
00:18:09 ◼ ► to your wrist to try and squeeze battery into. And all of the features and all of the things
00:18:15 ◼ ► that they're trying to do have to also work on a device where it's inconvenient for it to run out
00:18:22 ◼ ► of battery in a way that is... It feels more manifest than it is even with your laptop.
00:18:29 ◼ ► If I'm sitting at my laptop and I'm working and I'm running Xcode and it's churning through my
00:18:34 ◼ ► battery and I'm like, "Oh man, I need to plug in," I just plug in and it's fine. But if I have to
00:18:40 ◼ ► do that with my Apple Watch, I have to take my Apple Watch off and put it on a dock and I can't
00:18:44 ◼ ► wear it for 45 minutes and it completely eliminates the use of it. I mean, even a phone,
00:18:50 ◼ ► the number of times I've used my phone plugged in because it was low on battery, but I still wanted
00:18:54 ◼ ► to use it, that's fine. But a watch, it has to work. And ideally, it has to work for at least,
00:19:01 ◼ ► If you recall, back in the old days when we had airports, it would often be a common sight to see
00:19:08 ◼ ► somebody camped by a wall outlet using their phone while it's plugged in. And the other...
00:19:29 ◼ ► Once you get hooked on them as a user, you feel like you're getting robbed. Like if you have to
00:19:36 ◼ ► take your watch off and put it on the charger for 45 minutes and while you're doing so, you are
00:19:42 ◼ ► standing and moving around, you feel like you're getting robbed of stand hours and exercise time.
00:19:50 ◼ ► Yeah. Or even worse is the situation where you go for a run or a workout or something and you run
00:19:56 ◼ ► three or four miles and it runs out of battery when you're a quarter mile from the house.
00:20:00 ◼ ► It'll save the data, sort of, but it feels like you're being robbed. These steps didn't count.
00:20:19 ◼ ► Yeah. And I've had that happen. That's enough for a while because battery life has gotten better
00:20:25 ◼ ► in the last few years, but I've had that happen during a workout on a jog where that's when it's
00:20:30 ◼ ► run out and it feels like Tripoli angering, right? It's like, "I was running. I was actually out
00:20:38 ◼ ► jogging. I'm sweaty. I really deserve those credits." And it's not there. And I think to
00:20:45 ◼ ► their credit, certainly, they've done a great job of preserving that battery life, but it's come at
00:20:50 ◼ ► a very tricky balance that they have to try and balance and find how much power, how much
00:20:56 ◼ ► capability, how much utility can they put on the watch while still doing all these things.
00:21:02 ◼ ► And I think also the thing that's crazy with the Apple Watch and the battery life side is how it is
00:21:07 ◼ ► constantly doing things. It is always trying to make sure, "Did you just fall down? Did you just
00:21:12 ◼ ► fall down? Did you just fall down?" It's monitoring you as long as you're wearing the watch. It's
00:21:18 ◼ ► doing that. It's taking your heart rate once every six minutes. It's doing stuff persistently in a way
00:21:24 ◼ ► that it certainly doesn't come free. So it's not like a situation where I close my laptop lid and
00:21:32 ◼ ► it pretty much just goes to sleep and it's not doing anything. The Apple Watch, if anything,
00:21:36 ◼ ► other than the screen being lit up, is doing just as much most of the time than it would be
00:21:55 ◼ ► So anyway, that's a long digression to come back to what my main point is, which is that one way
00:22:02 ◼ ► to think about iOS 14 widgets is that they are very much like watch complications. Insofar as
00:22:12 ◼ ► there are limited sizes, there are some serious limitations on... Well, effectively, they're mostly
00:22:23 ◼ ► non-interactive. You can't make buttons that do things on widgets. They're sort of like information
00:22:31 ◼ ► panels, which again, is a lot like watch complications. They kind of update on the system's
00:22:42 ◼ ► I mean, pretty much everything we just said about watch complications applies to iOS 14 widgets.
00:23:03 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, sizing is a bit funny with widgets because there's three different types,
00:23:16 ◼ ► vary wildly between which phone you actually have or if you're on an iPad. If you have an iPhone SE,
00:23:22 ◼ ► the size of the widget is different than if you're looking at that widget on a XR or one of the
00:23:30 ◼ ► larger screen. I think there's like six different sizes, actual point sizes that they have. It's
00:23:37 ◼ ► easier because you have so much more of a margin. You're not trying to squeeze something into the
00:23:41 ◼ ► difference between 44 points and 50 points. You're talking about the difference between 170 points
00:23:47 ◼ ► and 179 points or something. That difference matters a lot less, but there's certainly still
00:23:58 ◼ ► I do not want to go too deep down this digression, and famous last words for me, but one of the
00:24:04 ◼ ► things I've been doing all summer is I've been running iOS 14 betas and still now with the
00:24:11 ◼ ► release version, I'm running it on an iPhone XR. My regular phone, my main phone that I've used for
00:24:19 ◼ ► the last year is an iPhone 11 Pro. The difference between the Pro and the other... The iPhone X
00:24:32 ◼ ► wasn't called the iPhone X Pro, but the OLED ones, which are now called Pro, run at Retina 3X.
00:24:40 ◼ ► The XR and the regular iPhone 11s, which aren't OLED, their regular LCD, run at 2X Retina.
00:24:50 ◼ ► But the difference when you really dig into the point size, like, "Oh, well, that means one point
00:24:56 ◼ ► is two pixels on the 2X one and one point is three pixels on the other one." But the actual difference
00:25:02 ◼ ► in sizes is really kind of wild. If you run both phones at their default sizes, like accessibility-wise
00:25:11 ◼ ► for text size, just don't bump up or bump down the text size at all, run everything at sort of
00:25:17 ◼ ► the default. And if you're running on one of the phones that has scaling available, don't set
00:25:22 ◼ ► scaling to anything. The difference in sizes of text between the two is quite different. It's not
00:25:30 ◼ ► like, "Oh, you have to sort of be a type nerd to notice that it's..." No, it's actually very
00:25:34 ◼ ► different. And for something like widgets, I can see exactly where you're going with that.
00:25:41 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a very... I think it speaks to just the difference of 2X and 3X, but it isn't that
00:25:48 ◼ ► the 3X screen has a resolution, has sort of a dots per inch on the screen that is commensurately
00:25:56 ◼ ► more detailed. It's higher, but it's not like if 1X was the thing and then we doubled the resolution
00:26:03 ◼ ► and then we tripled the resolution, it isn't actually doing those changes. And so controls
00:26:09 ◼ ► definitely look different and it feels very different. I actually was in the same circumstance.
00:26:15 ◼ ► My testing phone over the summer was a XR and going from that back to my 11 Pro feels really...
00:26:24 ◼ ► The keyboard is slightly different. It's not like things are totally out of whack, but it's like,
00:26:30 ◼ ► I feel different. Things are just a little bit weird in a way that when we went from the 1X to
00:26:37 ◼ ► 2X originally, like with the iPhone 4, it really was... Everything stayed the same size, everything
00:26:43 ◼ ► just got sharper. Whereas now between 2X and 3X, it's definitely... That's not the case. Things are
00:26:50 ◼ ► physically different. The actual size of something that's 100 points tall is very different between
00:26:58 ◼ ► the different devices and the phones. And so, and all these things that I have to... When you're
00:27:02 ◼ ► designing something that has to work across all of them, it has to be reasonable at all the extremes
00:27:08 ◼ ► of that, even if at a point level you're exactly the same. Yeah, and it actually is counter
00:27:13 ◼ ► intuitive where the 3X ones, the point size is physically bigger. And so, 16 point type is the
00:27:21 ◼ ► default text size on iOS, it always has been. 16 point type is bigger on an iPhone 11 Pro than 16
00:27:30 ◼ ► point type on an iPhone 11, physically bigger. And you therefore get... It's not just that the iPhone
00:27:38 ◼ ► 11 has a bigger screen than the non-Max 11, it actually packs the pixels or the points in more.
00:27:45 ◼ ► So you get significantly more lines or words on a line in an email or an Apple Note than when
00:27:53 ◼ ► you're viewing the exact same email or Apple Note on the other device. And you would think,
00:28:00 ◼ ► maybe it would be the other way because you think, "Well, it's 3X, so it must be... They
00:28:03 ◼ ► must have more pixels per inch too." But it's actually different. And it's all very strange
00:28:08 ◼ ► and so different from the old days where you could just count on an iPhone screen being an iPhone
00:28:14 ◼ ► screen. And like you said, even when they went Redna, you just kept everything the same physical
00:28:18 ◼ ► size and just doubled the resolution and made everything sharper. Yeah, it went from... It was
00:28:24 ◼ ► 324 by 480, I think was the original iPhone. And then it's just like when they went to 2X,
00:28:29 ◼ ► they just doubled that and kept the screen exactly the same size. Right. And then even when they went
00:28:33 ◼ ► with the iPhone 5, when they went to a different aspect ratio, they just added pixels at the top.
00:28:39 ◼ ► They didn't change the size of anything. So the keyboard was actually the exact same width.
00:28:46 ◼ ► It just... They just added pixels at the top. Now we're in a new world. All right, let me take a
00:28:52 ◼ ► break before we continue and talk about our friends at Eero. Oh, man, these days your house isn't just
00:28:57 ◼ ► your home, it's everything. It's your office, it's your school, it's your podcast studio,
00:29:07 ◼ ► literally right at this moment today. Anyway, all of these activities, they put a strain on your
00:29:13 ◼ ► Wi-Fi. It's not good if your Wi-Fi doesn't reach every room in your house, or even worse, if it
00:29:17 ◼ ► only reaches a room or two. You need solid Wi-Fi in your whole house. Eero is an Amazon company,
00:29:24 ◼ ► and their whole product line is set up to solve this problem. They cover your whole home with
00:29:30 ◼ ► fast, reliable Wi-Fi inside and out, and it's super easy to set up. You got rooms with bad
00:29:35 ◼ ► Wi-Fi or no Wi-Fi dropouts in certain rooms. Eero can help make every square foot of your home
00:29:41 ◼ ► usable. It's really great. You're listening to me speak right now over a Eero Wi-Fi connection.
00:29:48 ◼ ► You just plug one into your modem. You plug other ones in around your house. Their app is how you
00:29:56 ◼ ► configure everything, and the app has always been great, but it's really gotten better in the last
00:30:00 ◼ ► year. It's a total rewrite. It's even better than ever, and it has all sorts of amazing features
00:30:05 ◼ ► where you can see what every single device in your home that's connected to your network is doing,
00:30:10 ◼ ► and you can manage the ones. You can take your kids' devices and put them on a certain plan so
00:30:15 ◼ ► that they can't get on the Wi-Fi after certain times. All this stuff that sounds like advanced
00:30:20 ◼ ► features, the app makes it super, super easy to manage, but the app also is the thing that makes
00:30:25 ◼ ► it easy to add other Eero base stations around your house. Their website can make it really,
00:30:32 ◼ ► really easy to figure out how many you should order based on the size of your house and how
00:30:36 ◼ ► many floors you have, etc. And it really is just a great service. They also just this week came out
00:30:42 ◼ ► with all new base stations that's, I think it's the version six or something like that. Just go
00:31:02 ◼ ► and you will get free next day shipping with your order. So as you, you could just pause this
00:31:08 ◼ ► podcast right now, spend 15 minutes, order up some Eero stuff, and it'll be at your house tomorrow.
00:31:14 ◼ ► That's amazing. With that code, Eero dot com slash the talk show, get free next day shipping,
00:31:21 ◼ ► go check them out. I recommend it. I would recommend them even if they were not a sponsor
00:31:24 ◼ ► of the show. It's a great product. All right. So you've had, do you think, here's another
00:31:32 ◼ ► angle I've been going with. Do you think you would have had the idea for Widget Smith if you
00:31:36 ◼ ► hadn't already done Watch Smith? That is an interesting question. I don't think it would
00:31:44 ◼ ► have ended up in the same way that I did, that it did, ultimately it did. Because the thing that
00:31:52 ◼ ► happened with Watch Smith that I, like my goal with that app was to try and make, essentially,
00:31:58 ◼ ► like let people make their watch faces like their own. Like I wanted you to be able to control the
00:32:03 ◼ ► typefaces, the colors, the data, how it was structured, how it was laid out. Like there's
00:32:08 ◼ ► tremendous amount of like, especially on the watch, it was something that I started to notice
00:32:13 ◼ ► is that like I got really picky about exactly how I wanted things to look in a way that I care about
00:32:20 ◼ ► more on my wrist because it's something that's, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, it's a fashion
00:32:26 ◼ ► thing, but it's like something I wanted to look good. Like I actually care if I'm going to have
00:32:30 ◼ ► the date or the temperature shown on my watch face and I'm like going out to a nice dinner back when
00:32:36 ◼ ► that was the thing we did and I want it to look nice. Like I'm wearing my Apple watch rather than
00:32:42 ◼ ► my fancy watch because I want to close my rings, but I want it to look just the way I want it to
00:32:48 ◼ ► look. And I think the result of that, of that sort of that ultimate desire that in the watch I was so
00:32:55 ◼ ► persi—like I got so specific about it is that I went through probably like five or six different
00:33:02 ◼ ► editor screens of how can I make this something that isn't like totally intractable to a common
00:33:09 ◼ ► user that is a clear, straightforward way that I can create this complexity and give you so much
00:33:16 ◼ ► choice and let you choose the typeface and let you choose the colors and let you choose exactly what
00:33:22 ◼ ► is shown and what's shown here and what time it's appearing on your screen and all of the things
00:33:26 ◼ ► that ultimately like WatchSmith ended up being. It was that level of sophistication that I needed
00:33:34 ◼ ► to squeeze into something that was usable was something I don't know if I would have had the
00:33:40 ◼ ► time or the sort of idea about with widgets if I hadn't gone through that for the watch, because
00:33:46 ◼ ► the watch is so much more constrained and every little thing and every little tweak and that
00:33:50 ◼ ► adjustment that you make mattered so much more there. So that when I was doing it and applying
00:33:55 ◼ ► it to widgets, it made sense to just carry it over. Like I'd come up with a design that I feel
00:34:01 ◼ ► like made a lot of sense and was intuitive and gave you that balance between power and flexibility
00:34:14 ◼ ► gone through all that process with WatchSmith and with complications in mind, it would have been
00:34:20 ◼ ► hard for me to come up with it for something like widgets where I feel like in my mind,
00:34:25 ◼ ► anyway, originally it's like I think that San Francisco Rounded is the best widgets font,
00:34:30 ◼ ► probably. I think it just looks gorgeous on the home screen, I think. And there's a very good
00:34:34 ◼ ► chance that I would have just asserted that and set that as the default, even if I'd had the idea
00:34:40 ◼ ► for an app like Widgetsmith and said, "I think that just looks gorgeous." And I would have missed
00:34:46 ◼ ► out on the fact that while that is gorgeous, and I think if I'm Alan Dye sitting in my white studio
00:34:52 ◼ ► designing widgets for Apple's built-in apps, that's probably what I'm going to use, the reality is
00:34:57 ◼ ► once I had my mind opened to the fact that it's like, "Well, what other fonts are there? What
00:35:03 ◼ ► other fonts would look interesting, and how can I add them into the application?" then you start to
00:35:07 ◼ ► be like, "Actually, this is where the real magic starts to happen," that you can make it look like
00:35:12 ◼ ► it isn't just an Apple widget, that there's a value and a utility in standing out from the system,
00:35:27 ◼ ► That is a benefit and not a drawback. And why the app originally seems like it really took off was
00:35:41 ◼ ► that people felt like they could actually express themselves with it, that they could find a font
00:35:47 ◼ ► that suited them. And if you're a San Francisco rounded person, great, more power to you. But if
00:35:52 ◼ ► you're a New York person, or if you want some of the more silly and esoteric fonts that I have in
00:35:58 ◼ ► there, or whatever that might be, great. Do that. If that makes you happy that every time you pick
00:36:03 ◼ ► up your phone, you want it to look like that. But I really don't think I would have necessarily had
00:36:08 ◼ ► the expectation or the imagination to invent this if I hadn't had to do it for the watch,
00:36:15 ◼ ► if I hadn't had to do that for complications, because they felt like a fashion item. They
00:36:18 ◼ ► felt like something that had to have that level of customization anyway. And there, I wasn't competing
00:36:25 ◼ ► with other text most of the time. A lot of the watch faces, it's just clock hands. And so a lot
00:36:34 ◼ ► of fonts, I feel like, look good on the Apple Watch in a way that—or feel at home, anyway,
00:36:38 ◼ ► on the Apple Watch in a way that isn't quite the same on an iPhone, because there's so much other
00:36:42 ◼ ► system text that's always on the screen as well. Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting answer. I could
00:36:49 ◼ ► see that. And there was definitely something where you were playing around with custom watch faces,
00:36:57 ◼ ► even though it's not something you can do. It's not like Apple lets apps do it, but you were
00:37:03 ◼ ► playing around with it anyway, knowing that it wasn't something that you could ship as a feature
00:37:11 ◼ ► in an app. But just what if we could? Let's just play with it. And Steven Troughton Smith,
00:37:25 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, he was the one I think he came up with in his spelunking prowess, was able to work out a
00:37:32 ◼ ► way to hide the system time inside of a watch kit app, which is typically not something that's
00:37:38 ◼ ► possible. Typically, there's always the time shown in the top right corner of a watch app when it's
00:37:44 ◼ ► shown. And he and his like, "I have no idea what code…" He shared the code publicly for how to do
00:37:49 ◼ ► it, and it's some kind of weird, you just dive deep down into the view hierarchy and find this
00:37:54 ◼ ► one particular view that happens to be the clock and make it hidden or whatever it might be. And
00:37:59 ◼ ► as soon as he had done that, then it'd be like, "I spent a good part of three or four months just
00:38:04 ◼ ► making custom watch faces. That became my hobby to do." And you can't publish them, they don't exist,
00:38:17 ◼ ► because what I would do is if you start a workout inside of my little custom watch face app,
00:38:24 ◼ ► it would remain on the screen even when the app was… You lower your wrist and raise your wrist.
00:38:31 ◼ ► If you have a workout app running, the workout app is what shows on the screen rather than the clock.
00:38:44 ◼ ► it collects your heart rate multiple times per second, it's continuously monitoring. You can
00:38:48 ◼ ► turn that off for power-saving reasons. So I would just turn that off and essentially just have a
00:38:53 ◼ ► walking workout running on my wrist all day so I could have my own custom watch face. And I did
00:38:59 ◼ ► that for a few months and eventually I kind of lost interest because it felt like while I loved
00:39:04 ◼ ► making them, no one should be doing what I'm doing with this. It's completely absurd that I'm running
00:39:10 ◼ ► a workout the entire day just so that I can have a custom watch face on my Apple Watch.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Yeah, but don't you think that doing that exercised certain design muscles in your head?
00:39:25 ◼ ► Because it got you… I know people like to dunk on Malcolm Gladwell and he's got that thing with
00:39:35 ◼ ► the, you know, you need 10,000 hours of practice before you get good at anything. And it's, you
00:39:39 ◼ ► know, he tries this. I think my criticism of him is he tries to make… He tries to turn very correct
00:39:50 ◼ ► feel of a thing, ideas that are true, into think of it rules, right? Like there is no magic 10,000
00:39:58 ◼ ► hours thing, but there is truth that you get better at what you do. I mean, that's, you know,
00:40:03 ◼ ► and it's easy to forget that, right? But so you spent all of this time obsessing over making entire
00:40:11 ◼ ► watch faces and it surely gave you insight into, oh, I… All of a sudden you realize why Apple does
00:40:19 ◼ ► X, Y, and Z with theirs. It's like, oh, I was always bugged by that, but now I see why,
00:40:25 ◼ ► because when I don't do it, it stinks, you know? Yeah. And working out how to like… There was
00:40:31 ◼ ► definitely an element of you start… You don't really understand something until you've really
00:40:39 ◼ ► had to build it from the ground up and kind of really gone into it and made all the mistakes.
00:40:45 ◼ ► And yeah, like made watch faces that look terrible or work out how to… Even the simple things that
00:40:50 ◼ ► seem simple of like, how do you lay out the numbers on a clock is incredibly hard. And like,
00:40:56 ◼ ► how do you make that… Like 12 and 11 and 10 have multiple digits, but they need to look balanced
00:41:04 ◼ ► and reasonable next to the twos and the threes, which don't have that. And the Apple Watch is…
00:41:11 ◼ ► The modern Apple Watches are not square, they're oblong, and so you need it to look reasonable and
00:41:15 ◼ ► not like… Yeah. And I think to your point, it's that experience is what ultimately I think made
00:41:21 ◼ ► me want to get into complications in a big way and not just view complications. Like I think before I
00:41:27 ◼ ► made WatchSmith, complications for me were just kind of a… They were just pure, simple, basic
00:41:33 ◼ ► data display. And that's all I ever wanted, that I ever used them for. And the way Apple builds
00:41:38 ◼ ► complications is you can use one of Apple's pre-built templates, which are just typically just
00:41:45 ◼ ► text for the most part, for a lot of them. Or you have a stack of text, or you can have a gauge with
00:41:50 ◼ ► text inside of it, or those types of… There's a couple of pre-built things. And when I got into
00:41:56 ◼ ► WatchSmith, I realized I'd learned… I had enough of an insight from my experience with the custom
00:42:03 ◼ ► watches. I didn't want to just limit myself to that. And so all of the complications in WatchSmith
00:42:09 ◼ ► are actually under the hood rendered as images and just displayed as images. I'm just making bitmaps
00:42:14 ◼ ► and putting them into the screen, because that was the only way that I could give the flexibility and
00:42:20 ◼ ► control that I actually wanted. And it's because it's the control that I learned I wanted from
00:42:26 ◼ ► years of making, or from the experience of making custom watch faces and making those mistakes and
00:42:31 ◼ ► kind of having that sense of, "You can't actually do cool stuff with this." That was where I had the
00:42:36 ◼ ► first idea for… One of the features of WatchSmith is you can make it that the complication sort of
00:42:43 ◼ ► moves around the watch hands as they move. So the classic thing is if you have the date on your
00:42:49 ◼ ► complication and you have the hand of the watch sweep over it, ordinarily it's hidden, which seems
00:42:56 ◼ ► silly on a digital watch that I can't read the date right now because it's 3/15. That doesn't
00:43:02 ◼ ► make any sense. I want to know the date. It's being displayed, but it's being obscured by this
00:43:08 ◼ ► digital hands. In a real watch, fair enough. So in WatchSmith, I move it out of the way. I do the
00:43:13 ◼ ► math to work out where the hand is at any given time, and I just shift it down. In the system I
00:43:19 ◼ ► have, I'm limited because obviously I can't get outside of my circle, but I can do stuff like that
00:43:25 ◼ ► that I just don't think I would have thought of otherwise. There's definitely an element of…
00:43:30 ◼ ► It's not 10,000 hours because I think that rule loses track of how useful that time is,
00:43:45 ◼ ► Hopefully you've learned something along the way. In this case, I did a lot of work on custom watch
00:43:52 ◼ ► faces that informed the work I did making custom complications, which then informed my work making
00:43:56 ◼ ► custom widgets. Right. It's like maybe you are a very good graphic designer, and you do things,
00:44:12 ◼ ► business cards." You need to design some business cards for them. You don't need to do 10,000 hours
00:44:16 ◼ ► of business cards before you can become as good at designing business cards as you're ever going
00:44:23 ◼ ► to get. Whatever your skill is as a graphic designer and typographer, you can max it out
00:44:29 ◼ ► on business cards pretty quickly because it's a very limited… It's a very small complication
00:44:37 ◼ ► in graphic design terms. But your first couple of cards aren't going to be great. You're going
00:44:43 ◼ ► to realize that, "Oh, this text is way too big. Wow, the text on a business card needs to be tiny.
00:44:50 ◼ ► Oh, I would have never thought I need to set eight-point type. That eight-point type seems
00:44:56 ◼ ► like a footnote, but that's really what you need," et cetera. And then you can run into problems like,
00:45:01 ◼ ► "Oh, it turns out that business cards get scuffed up and the corners turn in." You kind of don't
00:45:08 ◼ ► want to put anything close to the edge because people put them in their pocket and then they get
00:45:14 ◼ ► all bent up and you kind of want everything in the center, et cetera. But you don't need 10,000
00:45:19 ◼ ► hours. But you do need to make some. And making entire watch faces can make you a lot better at
00:45:25 ◼ ► making complications. The other thing that I find interesting about it is that you essentially have
00:45:34 ◼ ► to suss out the—and I mean you in specific with the idea of apps like Widgetsmith and WatchSmith—you
00:45:41 ◼ ► kind of have to suss out the rules as they are. And there's no point—and this is where I think
00:45:48 ◼ ► your personal disposition really is just so perfect for these type of apps where, sure,
00:45:55 ◼ ► you have complaints about what Apple allows and doesn't allow, and you'll make them clear.
00:46:01 ◼ ► It's not like you're hiding them. But rather than just bemoan the fact that you can't make entirely
00:46:07 ◼ ► custom watch faces and just say, "This stinks. Apple is being obstinate. I'm going to go pout
00:46:14 ◼ ► for another year and hope that WatchOS 8 lets me make watch faces," you just say, "Well,
00:46:21 ◼ ► what are the rules? How does the whole thing work? And then once I understand the rules,
00:46:27 ◼ ► what can I do?" Yeah. And I think the reality is I've been making apps for Apple's platforms for
00:46:37 ◼ ► a long time, and I've seen the outcome of having that approach where you just get grumpy about what
00:46:43 ◼ ► you can't do rather than try and really see what you can do and how can you be creative with the
00:46:50 ◼ ► tools that we do have. And there's so much more of an opportunity in that than if it's so easy
00:46:56 ◼ ► to get stuck and say, "I really want to be able to show the time in a complication," but Apple
00:47:03 ◼ ► doesn't let you do that. They only let you update your complication once every 15 minutes. I can't
00:47:08 ◼ ► do that. And it's like, "Well, they have this timeline thing, which I don't think really is
00:47:10 ◼ ► intended to be updated every minute, but if I use that and push the limits a little bit, and
00:47:16 ◼ ► I've definitely run into issues in this, but conceptually, if you just say, "Well, what is
00:47:20 ◼ ► the best I can do?" It's like, "And I can't have seconds on my clock, but I can have minutes." And
00:47:24 ◼ ► if that's good enough, then that's great. And I think that's so often in this game, the reality is
00:47:32 ◼ ► Apple will change over time. I used to think that WatchKit was all we were ever going to get,
00:47:39 ◼ ► and to some degree, that I thought, "I'm just going to have to make the best of it." And I've
00:47:46 ◼ ► And then when SwiftUI came along and suddenly I can make an actual Watch app, it's like, "Wow,
00:47:51 ◼ ► this is amazing." And I have all this head start because I didn't get just stuck in the mud about
00:47:57 ◼ ► the fact that I couldn't do animation before. I love the idea. All computer systems are sort of
00:48:09 ◼ ► like this, and maybe all real games are too, but I used to, back in the day, I used to play a lot of
00:48:19 ◼ ► simulated sports games on the old Sega Genesis. I love John Madden football and NHL hockey.
00:48:25 ◼ ► And the thing about both of those games, and I don't know to what degree it's still true,
00:48:30 ◼ ► because it's like when I see screenshots of Madden today, it just looks... The graphics are stunning,
00:48:37 ◼ ► but it looks like a televised football game. Whereas back in the mid to late 90s, they were,
00:48:49 ◼ ► as you'd first start playing it, they would kind of look like real games. And the way you would
00:48:56 ◼ ► play the football game was the way that teams in the real NFL would play football. But when you got
00:49:02 ◼ ► good at the game, you realized which plays worked and what they did, and you'd end up playing a game.
00:49:11 ◼ ► If two good players played each other, it was exciting, and it was a terrific sport. But what
00:49:19 ◼ ► you'd watch was nothing like real football and nothing like real hockey. The hockey game was
00:49:24 ◼ ► actually much more like basketball because scoring was way higher. And you'd play these, you know,
00:49:30 ◼ ► you'd play like two-minute periods or something. And just to try to help make it seem more
00:49:36 ◼ ► realistic, like seconds in the hockey game were like maybe half a second. You know, the clock
00:49:43 ◼ ► went way faster. Just to try to help keep it realistic, quote unquote realistic. But it looked
00:49:48 ◼ ► nothing like... But it was a terrific game. It's everything in computers and like sort of...
00:49:52 ◼ ► What you're doing to me is sort of figuring that out, right? It's like you're making things with,
00:49:58 ◼ ► certainly with WatchSmith in particular, that maybe they're not designed for, but they are...
00:50:04 ◼ ► It's all within the rules. You're not using undocumented APIs. It's not like the way that
00:50:11 ◼ ► you could sometimes just get in a groove in the hockey game and score. Then they'd drop the
00:50:19 ◼ ► Puckett Center ice. And if you had the timing just right, you could get it again, make a certain move,
00:50:25 ◼ ► and it was like unbeatable. And you could sort of get in a groove. And you weren't cheating. You
00:50:30 ◼ ► didn't hack your cartridge. You just sort of figured out this is within the rules of the game
00:50:36 ◼ ► and the system. Here's how it works. And now you could have a date complication that moves out of
00:50:47 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. It's very much... I mean, this is the part of my job that I enjoy the most.
00:50:53 ◼ ► It's finding those unexpected ways around that... You call them kind of like their hacks,
00:51:05 ◼ ► That I'm finding these weird workarounds that work and are consistent and are performant and
00:51:11 ◼ ► all the things that you need them to be, but are definitely not what the feature was intended for.
00:51:16 ◼ ► That's a pattern that I've had to use many times, because that's the only way to actually
00:51:24 ◼ ► make things that are really interesting and new, that are different than what other people are
00:51:31 ◼ ► doing. Because otherwise, it's easy to do the obvious thing that's the common case that Apple
00:51:36 ◼ ► has designed the API for, but it's much more fun to make the thing that is not at all what they
00:51:41 ◼ ► intended for. And they're surprised when they always have that line at the end of a thing,
00:51:44 ◼ ► "We can't wait to see what you do with it." And you're like, "I don't think they meant this."
00:51:53 ◼ ► You know, like in the way that they definitely wouldn't be if what you shipped or somebody
00:52:01 ◼ ► shipped was, "Well, I found a jailbreak and I've used it to open up the latest version of iOS,
00:52:07 ◼ ► and now I have my own jailbreak app store." No, people at Apple probably overall are not excited
00:52:12 ◼ ► to see what you were able to do with it. But I think that by staying within the system, but
00:52:19 ◼ ► finding possibilities, it's not an exploit, right? It's unforeseen possibilities within the rules.
00:52:28 ◼ ► And again, if the rules were all designed with things like performance in mind, and you're not
00:52:35 ◼ ► doing anything that's unperformant or, "Well, he's doing this. He shouldn't be able to." If we didn't
00:52:41 ◼ ► envision this and it's sucking the battery down, they're going to change the rules, right?
00:52:49 ◼ ► I'm sure they are. There are certain people within Apple who I think probably think it's
00:52:54 ◼ ► really cool. And there are people who are like, "What? That was not within the design spec that
00:52:58 ◼ ► we had when we had the meeting six months ago about what people were going to be able to do.
00:53:02 ◼ ► This was not what they were supposed to be able to do." I think that's more what I mean.
00:53:07 ◼ ► And I think the feedback I've gotten over the years from doing this kind of stuff from Apple
00:53:12 ◼ ► is that they generally do like it because I think it also is an escape valve for features they don't
00:53:18 ◼ ► want to make mainstream, but they can point to things that are on these edges that take a lot
00:53:27 ◼ ► more work. It's not easy to do. This is the hard way to do it. They don't want to make custom watch
00:53:38 ◼ ► kind of releasing a little bit of that pressure. Because if they're pulling back a little bit on,
00:53:47 ◼ ► a little bit better. Yeah. It gets to a very old bit of advice, which is that when you're reporting
00:54:06 ◼ ► And it's not that it's unwelcome, but that a lot of the times, even if you're going to propose
00:54:11 ◼ ► a solution, start by describing your problem in as much detail first. And it's that description
00:54:20 ◼ ► of the problem that's often more interesting to the developer than the proposed solution.
00:54:30 ◼ ► And again, that might be it. Where it's like, "Well, wait, I've got this, I don't know, what's
00:54:45 ◼ ► Or whatever it is. But maybe your idea is, "I wish Strava could have their own watch face,
00:54:54 ◼ ► because I would like something when I'm riding my bike, I'd like this information from Strava there."
00:55:02 ◼ ► But say the problem first, and maybe there's a better answer where they could integrate it into
00:55:07 ◼ ► the workout app that is shown when you're on your bike doing a workout. Or maybe the answer is they
00:55:11 ◼ ► could do it with a complication and put it there. And that sort of description definitely, I think,
00:55:21 ◼ ► is right up the alley of the solutions you've had with Widgetsmith and WatchSmith. Where it's like,
00:55:30 ◼ ► And what I love in watchOS 7 is that now you can have multiple complications from the same app,
00:55:37 ◼ ► which is a huge boon for me and what I'm doing here. Now I can take over a huge proportion of
00:55:47 ◼ ► the watch face. And it's not a custom watch face, but other than the time, everything on the watch
00:55:53 ◼ ► face can be something I render. And that's a huge opportunity and a huge canvas for me. I just have
00:56:00 ◼ ► to let go of the fact that I have to use their hands for the time or their numerals. But other
00:56:05 ◼ ► than that, everything else I can do. Yeah, that was a weird limitation. And you can sort of see
00:56:12 ◼ ► it with some of Apple's complications, like Breathe, which to me, if you love the Breathe
00:56:22 ◼ ► thing, more power to you. But it's like, I don't know. I've been using the new S6. I'm just going
00:56:31 ◼ ► to say S6 review unit watch since I got it a couple of weeks ago. And I set it up as new,
00:56:38 ◼ ► and I've been running it as default. And it's like the Breathe things have once an hour,
00:56:44 ◼ ► I don't even know how often they come up. But by default, it's like all of a sudden I'm working,
00:56:48 ◼ ► and I get a tap, and I look at my wrist and go, "Oh, what's that?" And it's like, "Hey,
00:56:51 ◼ ► why don't you take a break and breathe for a minute?" And it's like, "F you." That is my,
00:56:57 ◼ ► I want like a big F you button every time that comes up until I broke down. And I was like,
00:57:06 ◼ ► But the complication, you could see why you would, even if you want to have the Breathe complication
00:57:13 ◼ ► on your watch face, you'd only want one. There's no reason to put it in two corners. But even with
00:57:18 ◼ ► some of Apple's, I'm surprised they didn't foresee the need, like weather, right? How did they get
00:57:25 ◼ ► around that before? So Apple has, their apps have been able to export multiple complications
00:57:31 ◼ ► since the beginning. That's always been, so that when primarily it was shown through things like
00:57:35 ◼ ► weather, where you would be able to show the UV index and the temperature in two corners. And that
00:57:41 ◼ ► was always the way that only Apple's apps could do that. I see. They had the ability to export
00:57:48 ◼ ► multiple complications, but for a third-party app, it was always just one per type. And so we could
00:57:54 ◼ ► show multiple complications on a watch face if it happened to support multiple types. So if in the
00:57:59 ◼ ► modular one, you have the big rectangle and you have the small circle, and I could take one of
00:58:03 ◼ ► each, but I couldn't take two circles or anything like that before watchOS 6. Ah, that makes sense.
00:58:11 ◼ ► Yeah. And I guess that they weren't thinking, and again, literally, WatchSmith is, because it's as,
00:58:18 ◼ ► it's not about a specific type of complication. It's all sorts of complications, everything from
00:58:33 ◼ ► anything I could think of. It's very much a kitchen sink. Right. So it's very natural that
00:58:39 ◼ ► somebody who's into that would want to have more than one of the same size on their watch face,
00:58:44 ◼ ► because it's not duplicating information at all, because it's sort of a, it's an inverse of
00:58:51 ◼ ► the typical relationship where, you know, I was going to say weather, but that's a bad example.
00:59:01 ◼ ► But, you know. Sure. But I think your example of something like Strava or something where
00:59:04 ◼ ► maybe you're going to show the number of miles you've biked this week or whatever that might be,
00:59:10 ◼ ► like, there's a limit to the number of places that you're going to want to devote to your biking
00:59:15 ◼ ► activities. But for the other things where you have, yeah, it's like when I have so many different
00:59:20 ◼ ► types of data, like I want to have the moon phase, because I think it looks pretty, and I want to have
00:59:30 ◼ ► And I want to have all those on the screen at the same time, because sure, why not? And so it
00:59:42 ◼ ► before I could have made dozens of different apps for everything, but that just logistically would
00:59:55 ◼ ► With the fonts thing, I know that when I feel like the idea that you're going to customize the,
01:00:09 ◼ ► I'm reminded of and I know I asked you this before the show, is do your roots on the Apple platforms
01:00:16 ◼ ► go back to the classic Mac OS era? And they don't. And Michael Simmons and I were did enough
01:00:22 ◼ ► reminiscing about it on the last episode of this show. But one of the simplest things that you
01:00:27 ◼ ► could do on the old classic Mac OS is we had a there was a clock up in the upper right corner.
01:00:31 ◼ ► And I actually forget whether it was from Apple and it was in the system, or if it was a third
01:00:37 ◼ ► party thing or not, but it was or if it started as like a lot of things did started as a third
01:00:42 ◼ ► party thing, and then Apple put it there. But it was much like the Mac OS 10 clock where it was
01:00:49 ◼ ► upper right corner in the menu bar, and you'd have options for you know, do you want the,
01:00:54 ◼ ► you know, all the stuff you'd all the various options you want ampm? Do you want 24 hour time?
01:01:06 ◼ ► things, right? You're very familiar with all of these options. And some people, some people
01:01:10 ◼ ► definitely want the colon to blink and other people if the colon blinks, they will go insane.
01:01:16 ◼ ► I just literally one of the smallest punctuation characters other than a single dot in the entire
01:01:23 ◼ ► keyboard. And if it's up there blinking, it'll drive them insane. I personally I'm not a blinking
01:01:29 ◼ ► colon person, but it doesn't drive me crazy. But I know that there are people who are irate. But one
01:01:35 ◼ ► of the other things so so far, so good. You think okay, clock in the upper right corner. What's new?
01:01:40 ◼ ► The other thing was that I think it was the third party thing, but it was very common. But you could
01:01:45 ◼ ► also pick what font the clock the digital clock in the corner was. Sure. And it always seemed crazy to
01:01:54 ◼ ► me. And this, you know, what did I pick? I picked the system font, right? If so, like in the Chicago
01:02:00 ◼ ► 12 era, it was Chicago 12. And then when they changed it to charcoal, I changed it to charcoal,
01:02:06 ◼ ► and it just was the exact size and shape of the system font. And if it wasn't going to be the
01:02:11 ◼ ► system font, and sometimes when I'd play with it, it would be like a smaller version of the system
01:02:17 ◼ ► font, like the system font in that era, Chicago 12. That was the menu bar font. And that's the
01:02:25 ◼ ► famous, you know, the font that we all had on the iPods when the iPods first came out. Like the
01:02:30 ◼ ► Finder for file names would use Geneva, which was their sort of bitmap version of Helvetica. Well,
01:02:38 ◼ ► that was sort of a system font, too. It wasn't the same font. It was Geneva versus Chicago,
01:02:42 ◼ ► but it was what the system used for lists of things. So you might set your clock to be Geneva
01:02:48 ◼ ► nine point font. And that still looked like it was part of the system, right? It's like, instead of
01:02:54 ◼ ► and I thought, you know, I remember when I was playing around with it, like, Oh, that's kind of
01:02:57 ◼ ► clever, because it's not really a menu. It's just a clock. So maybe it should be Geneva nine. And it
01:03:01 ◼ ► just gets you as a as an avid user into that thinking of like junior level UI designer,
01:03:08 ◼ ► which is fun and really is like a great gateway into thinking like a software designer.
01:03:15 ◼ ► Which again, I think is where this tremendous enthusiasm from widgets is what that's tapping
01:03:24 ◼ ► into. But what always struck me and I saw a lot of people's clocks over the years, because I spent a
01:03:29 ◼ ► lot of time as like the resident, hey, my Mac isn't working right. Get Gruber over here to fix
01:03:35 ◼ ► it type. And then at some point, you know, in the late 90s was even doing like freelance consulting
01:03:40 ◼ ► where people would call me in and I would actually make money doing it and you get to see a lot of
01:03:45 ◼ ► people's what extent you know, a lot of desktops. And I was always interested in it. Like, what do
01:03:51 ◼ ► people have? People would pick the craziest fonts for the clock. It was all over the place. Again,
01:03:58 ◼ ► and it wasn't like, oh, it's like everybody likes like zap chancery, right? Like certain other fonts
01:04:05 ◼ ► over this. I forget if that was one of the fonts in the but you know, a font like that, like a
01:04:09 ◼ ► calligraphy font. Yeah, you couldn't you whatever, however many fonts people had the you no idea.
01:04:16 ◼ ► There was no accounting for the taste in clock font. People love to pick fonts like that. The
01:04:22 ◼ ► rest of the system was all the regular system font. It wasn't like they installed an extension
01:04:26 ◼ ► that would change their system font for everything, including the menu bar and dialogues and
01:04:32 ◼ ► everything. Nope, just the clock, but maybe they wanted it to be times italic. Yeah, you know,
01:04:39 ◼ ► and I was always fascinated by it. And so as I see people's enthusiasm for picking custom fonts
01:04:47 ◼ ► for their widgets that have, you know, not like, oh, I was I know, I think your software update
01:04:55 ◼ ► added that the first update to widgets may have added a few more fonts like Dan. What are the new
01:05:02 ◼ ► ones? Dan is one of the new ones I've done I have. Oh, gosh, I've been adding like, I mean, this is
01:05:08 ◼ ► where it gets a little like comedic in some ways for the number of different fonts. So like right
01:05:12 ◼ ► now you can have regular San Francisco, San Francisco rounded New York, San Francisco mono
01:05:17 ◼ ► Futura. And I have my silly ones noteworthy marker felt chalk duster typewriter. And then I have
01:05:22 ◼ ► palatino gill sands copper plate and din. Right. That's a good variety. And those are all built in
01:05:29 ◼ ► fonts, right? That's yes. And I say this as a question, but I happen to know that they're all
01:05:34 ◼ ► built into the system. Yeah. But let's just say din for example, though, din is a font that is
01:05:56 ◼ ► we now know as San Francisco, before it officially had a name, it was sort of like a skunkworks
01:06:02 ◼ ► project for years, because when it first we first saw it when the original Apple Watch debuted,
01:06:07 ◼ ► and it was the it's always been the system font on Apple Watch. And it was the first time we saw it.
01:06:14 ◼ ► And I remember being in the audience at the event. And it's, you know, of course, that's the sort of
01:06:22 ◼ ► thing I think of is they announced is what it was the weird event that they only had, they only had
01:06:27 ◼ ► one event there at the college in Cupertino, the dance auditorium. And they start showing
01:06:34 ◼ ► screenshots of this new product Apple Watch. And I'm like looking at it. And I thought that my
01:06:40 ◼ ► first thought was, oh, wow, they're using din. Yeah. And that's what I thought the font was.
01:06:46 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, it looks din looks great on a watch. This is great. And then they'd show more
01:06:51 ◼ ► screenshots. And I saw at least a couple of characters that I knew weren't din. But I was
01:06:56 ◼ ► stymied. I was like, I have no idea what this font is. And it admits all of the wow, there's
01:07:04 ◼ ► 10,000 questions about this product. It's not even shipping for six months. But there's a hands on
01:07:09 ◼ ► area across the street. And we can go and holy cow, I'm across the hands on table area from
01:07:14 ◼ ► Gwen Stefani. Wow, this is bizarre. That's true story. I'm like, they're trying on Apple Watch as
01:07:20 ◼ ► I look up at who's trying one on across the table from me. It's Gwen Stefani. I'm like,
01:07:25 ◼ ► this is bizarre. That's not normal. This is not normal for Apple events. It's gotten a little
01:07:32 ◼ ► more normal in the years since as it's been, they've gotten a little more celebrity late. And
01:07:42 ◼ ► I would say I'm a passing sport. Well, I enjoy watching sports, but I'm not like devoted to any
01:07:49 ◼ ► particular sports me and Clayton Morris, who used to be at Fox News, we were outside, just getting
01:07:55 ◼ ► fresh air outside the Bill James Civic Auditorium. You know, it wasn't like five minutes before
01:08:02 ◼ ► start. It was like, I don't know, 20-25 minutes before the event was supposed to start. But we had
01:08:06 ◼ ► seats already and we just went out to get fresh air. And Barry Bonds and Joe Montana come in
01:08:22 ◼ ► unbelievable. It's like, what, what do we do? And nothing. We just, you know, just kind of give them
01:08:29 ◼ ► the look like, hey, we know who you guys are, maybe the greatest baseball player of our lifetimes
01:08:36 ◼ ► and the greatest football player of our lifetimes. Just walking by together like, you know, it's
01:08:42 ◼ ► cool. There they go. Right in there to find out about new iPhones. Anyway, all these questions
01:08:47 ◼ ► about Apple Watch, I have the biggest one, perhaps the biggest was what is this font? And I figured
01:08:52 ◼ ► out, you know, by looking at the actual hand on ones, it was like, God, this is something new.
01:08:58 ◼ ► But internally to Apple, it was some designers before they knew the name called it DINVetica,
01:09:04 ◼ ► because it was sort of at a basic level, not that it's a ripoff, it's a very original font that's
01:09:10 ◼ ► serving Apple very well and evolving in very good ways. But if you need to just a starting point to
01:09:17 ◼ ► understand San Francisco, it's sort of half DIN, half Healthetica. So offering DIN as an option
01:09:24 ◼ ► fits in. But offering fonts like New York, which is sort of a Times sort of serif font, you know,
01:09:40 ◼ ► Yeah. Like, they are definitely not. They do, they have, they, while you could say that, like,
01:09:47 ◼ ► San Francisco is, you know, DIN and Healthetica send a mission together, like Markerfelt and
01:09:57 ◼ ► But this is, so offering those as options. So those handwritten silly fonts, I don't know how
01:10:06 ◼ ► you would describe friendly, whatever adjectives, not my cup of tea personally, but I also totally
01:10:16 ◼ ► understand what it's like to have a strong personal preference for fonts. And if that's what
01:10:23 ◼ ► pleases you, more power to you, right? Like, so I've gotten tweets from people like, this must be
01:10:32 ◼ ► driving you nuts seeing people, you know, use crazy ugly fonts to make their widgets. And no, it
01:10:37 ◼ ► doesn't at all. Right? Like, what drove me nuts for years would be like, when the built-in notes app
01:10:44 ◼ ► only offered, I think it was noteworthy, maybe it was Markerfelt, maybe they changed it
01:10:50 ◼ ► over the years. I forget. I think it might've been Markerfelt at first, but yeah, I think it was
01:10:55 ◼ ► Markerfelt to start with. And then they offered an option, like not to use it. And you could use
01:10:59 ◼ ► Healthetica instead. And it was like a prototypical or hypothetical glass of ice water in hell.
01:11:07 ◼ ► But that was because everybody had to use it, right? If the notes app is you get Markerfelt,
01:11:13 ◼ ► whether you like it or not, then the fact that I don't like Markerfelt gives me strong feelings
01:11:18 ◼ ► and makes me write very angry posts on my website. But the fact that somebody is allowed to set it as
01:11:24 ◼ ► an option doesn't bother me at all. I say more power to you. I hope, you know, I could see why
01:11:30 ◼ ► maybe you enjoy that. Yeah. And I think it's what you were saying about the clock, right? It's that
01:11:34 ◼ ► sense of like, you can't even predict it. Like, it's not something that, oh, you see someone,
01:11:39 ◼ ► there's like button-down businessman, you know, oh, he's going to want like a very button-down
01:11:43 ◼ ► business font, or he's going to want New York because that reminds him of the New York Times.
01:11:47 ◼ ► I don't know. Like, you can't guess. It's just as likely he's running around with Markerfelt.
01:11:52 ◼ ► And that's what he thinks is fun. And it's like, he could be even like, sometimes you get the
01:11:57 ◼ ► impression, it's like, I'm using this font ironically. I think it's ugly. And I like that
01:12:01 ◼ ► it's ugly. I like that it's silly. It's like, I'm not trying to make this gorgeous. I'm trying to
01:12:06 ◼ ► make this funny. And it's like, it's a little joke that I'm playing on myself every time I pick up my
01:12:12 ◼ ► phone. And, you know, it would be like, if I made Ariel one of the options, and you set that as your
01:12:19 ◼ ► widget font, right? You'd be playing a little joke on yourself every time you picked up your phone.
01:12:24 ◼ ► And maybe it would make you laugh for a while, and eventually you'd go crazy and you'd change it. But
01:12:27 ◼ ► like, if that made you, if they put a smile on your face even once, like, sure, why not?
01:12:37 ◼ ► Well, that was, though I will say that was one of the, so I don't like April Fools. Like,
01:12:43 ◼ ► I think they're completely silly and pointless. The only April Fool I've ever thought of that
01:13:04 ◼ ► Somebody, so here's my necessary digression on Ariel and why I would make an exception.
01:13:12 ◼ ► Ariel is a ripoff of Helvetica. And that's, this is a fact, not an opinion. And it was,
01:13:20 ◼ ► Helvetica has been a very famous typeface since before computers. It was a sensation from when
01:13:25 ◼ ► it debuted in 1968, I believe. And when true type fonts became a thing on computers, Apple licensed
01:13:38 ◼ ► the real Helvetica, and it became the default document font. It's like in TextEdit and going
01:13:45 ◼ ► back to the classic Mac OS with teach text. And every Mac word processor I've ever used,
01:13:58 ◼ ► what is the font in the new window by default? It's Helvetica 12. Microsoft decided not to pay
01:14:06 ◼ ► to license Helvetica and instead commissioned a ripoff. That's Ariel. They decided it would
01:14:19 ◼ ► has the same metrics as Helvetica. And to most people's eyes, it looks the same and it's supposed
01:14:25 ◼ ► to look largely the same. And then they just changed a few letters to not try to make it a
01:14:33 ◼ ► copy copy, but just sort of a, well, it's inspired by copy. The capital R in Ariel looks really
01:14:42 ◼ ► stupid and the capital C looks really bad. And the lowercase T has a pointy top for unbelievable,
01:14:50 ◼ ► you know, it looks like a toothpick at the top and a typeface where none of the other characters do
01:14:54 ◼ ► this. My opinion, and I believe this, I'll go to my grave, is that anybody who says they like Ariel,
01:15:02 ◼ ► what they mean is they like Helvetica and they don't see the difference. And if anybody ever
01:15:06 ◼ ► says, I would like you to do this, make this for me and use Ariel 12. You as a designer are
01:15:13 ◼ ► committing a crime if you don't just set it in Helvetica 12 and assume that they're getting what
01:15:19 ◼ ► they wanted. For example, I just read a story yesterday that is in his debate prep that Joe
01:15:25 ◼ ► Biden, somebody sent this to me, I should link to it from Daring Fireball, that Joe Biden,
01:15:30 ◼ ► his favorite typeface is Ariel 14. And they're like, oh, who's group we're going to vote for now?
01:15:36 ◼ ► But my, my, my take on that is that I could see why Joe Biden likes that as typeface because it's
01:15:42 ◼ ► just plain, right? It's a very plain font. And so when he says I would like my, my materials set in
01:15:48 ◼ ► Ariel 14, whoever he says that to should just set it all in Helvetica 14. And Joe Biden will be even
01:15:55 ◼ ► better off than he was before and will be happy as a clam. Yep. All right. All right. Let me take a
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01:17:16 ◼ ► before we move on, let's talk about all of the various things that WidgetSmith offers right now.
01:17:28 ◼ ► Sure. So it's like sort of the core conceit of the app is that I wanted to just let you
01:17:36 ◼ ► make as many widgets as you want and have them do whatever you want. And so you can add widgets of
01:17:43 ◼ ► any particular size of the small, medium, and large that you want. And then you can schedule
01:17:48 ◼ ► those widgets to appear or just have a default and they'll just always be displayed. But you could,
01:17:52 ◼ ► but if you want, you could say, "I want my widgets to, during the workday, show one thing or during
01:17:57 ◼ ► the evening, show something else." And it's like the types of widgets that I have in it are, you
01:18:03 ◼ ► have things that are time-based, so like the time clock, the fuzzy time, that kind of thing, or the
01:18:10 ◼ ► date or a calendar, a bunch of stuff with photos. You can show a photo with text layered on top of
01:18:16 ◼ ► it, your battery, things that are coming up on your calendar, things that are in your reminders
01:18:20 ◼ ► list, weather, tides, and astronomy data, so like the moon phase or the sunrise and sunset time.
01:18:33 ◼ ► basically all the data sources that exist in iOS as much as I could, so in terms of tapping into
01:18:41 ◼ ► the system calendar and the system reminders list and just trying to be as comprehensive as I can.
01:18:47 ◼ ► And I mean, the reality is, this is the list of things that I was able to get ready in time,
01:18:54 ◼ ► rather than necessarily the full list of things that I could have imagined or dreamt up. I still
01:19:00 ◼ ► have a whole bunch of stuff, but it's like to start with, and the things that I think most people use
01:19:03 ◼ ► it for is to show those kind of basic data and even just, probably the most popular widget is
01:19:09 ◼ ► just showing the date and showing it in an interesting way, because for each of those types
01:19:13 ◼ ► of widgets, you can choose the font, the color, if there's a border around it, the time, the things
01:19:19 ◼ ► like we were talking about earlier, like the time format, you know, do you want to have 24-hour time,
01:19:24 ◼ ► do you want to have the system default time, do you want to have a full PM written out, or just
01:19:28 ◼ ► one that's a single A or a P? Basically, my goal is that you can configure basically everything
01:19:35 ◼ ► about it. Do you want the text on the bottom, do you want the text on the top? Whatever it might be,
01:19:43 ◼ ► I don't know why I was in college and at the student newspaper and the editor a few years
01:19:49 ◼ ► ahead of me, Scott Smith, turned me on to just using A and P instead of AM PM, and his argument
01:20:01 ◼ ► was, well, they both have an M, so you're just wasting, you're wasting space. I was like, huh,
01:20:06 ◼ ► never thought of that. And then ever since now for 25 years and counting, I get frustrated
01:20:18 ◼ ► to have the AM and the PM. But the fact that you, you know, yeah, I'll handle that case,
01:20:26 ◼ ► you know, it's not that rare, right? It's not like there's two of us out there who do it. But
01:20:31 ◼ ► but in it, so those are the data sources. We've talked about fonts, you've added a couple already,
01:20:46 ◼ ► You gotta love that my very first app update after like it kind of like, well, it's like in the way
01:20:55 ◼ ► the story went crazy is like the place that Widget Smith had its like 15 minutes of fame moment was
01:21:02 ◼ ► on TikTok, where it got picked up by kind of the impression I get is it's very much like the fashion
01:21:12 ◼ ► hit in a way which is definitely an audience and a community that I have no experience in whatsoever.
01:21:19 ◼ ► But that's apparently where it got picked up. And as you may imagine, my very first app update
01:21:25 ◼ ► added a collection of pastel colors as prebuilt options to the application, where it's like,
01:21:31 ◼ ► all of a sudden now you have this beautiful pastel orange and yellow and pink and blue that were not
01:21:41 ◼ ► So how did you get the feedback for that? Was it because people wrote to you or because you were
01:21:52 ◼ ► Well, the story for that is actually even more of a like a roundabout thing where so on the Friday
01:22:00 ◼ ► that it ended up getting like having its explosive moment, like early in the day, so when I launched
01:22:05 ◼ ► an app, it always will have kind of like a contact me button, where it'll be like, "Tap here and send
01:22:11 ◼ ► me an email," basically. And I collect customer support and get feedback that way. And Widget
01:22:17 ◼ ► Smith was no different. And about just after lunch on that Friday, I thought that all of a sudden my
01:22:24 ◼ ► app had gotten like somehow that email address, that support address, had gotten sucked into some
01:22:28 ◼ ► kind of spam bot or something. Because the usual first week of support I get are from people in the
01:22:37 ◼ ► Apple tech community, and many of them know me by name and are like, they're writing a letter with
01:22:41 ◼ ► feedback or comments or bug reports, whatever it might be. They're writing it to me. They'll be
01:22:45 ◼ ► like, "Hey, underscore. Congrats on the app. I ran into this issue." And it's like, to me.
01:22:50 ◼ ► And all of a sudden around midday, I started getting the opposite of that, which was these
01:22:54 ◼ ► very short, poorly written, slightly incoherent things that I was getting from addresses that
01:23:02 ◼ ► didn't look like the normal kind of community and audience that I was getting. And I was like,
01:23:05 ◼ ► "Oh, gosh. Somehow this address has gotten kind of pulled into something that's not what I
01:23:10 ◼ ► am using. Somehow it's gotten to some spam bot that's just sitting there and thinks it's funny
01:23:15 ◼ ► to just keep sending me these kind of emails." And not that it's like disparage those, but it's
01:23:20 ◼ ► a very different kind of email than I'm used to. And that just kept building over and over throughout
01:23:26 ◼ ► that day. And it's like, it just becomes more and more problematic in the sense of, "Oh, what do I
01:23:30 ◼ ► do with these?" And at some point later in that afternoon, someone I think on Twitter just sent
01:23:35 ◼ ► me a link to one of the videos on TikTok that I think was the one that had the biggest views at
01:23:42 ◼ ► this point. And at that point, it had several million views at that point. And it all of a
01:23:48 ◼ ► sudden was like, "Oh, this is starting to make sense as to why my support queue is now just
01:23:54 ◼ ► filled with emoji everywhere, and it is a totally different audience than I'm used to." And it isn't
01:24:02 ◼ ► necessarily that they were asking for pastels. It was more I interpreted the audience and the
01:24:06 ◼ ► way that they were using it to be that they would appreciate if there was an increase in the pastel
01:24:12 ◼ ► palette within the application. And so I did that on my own prerogative, and it hit very well.
01:24:18 ◼ ► That feedback was very well received. And then immediately, I think the second or third update
01:24:24 ◼ ► was I built a custom color picker so that you could really dial it into exactly whatever it is
01:24:31 ◼ ► the color you want, because it became very clear that my pre-built basics were like, "Would you like
01:24:37 ◼ ► it in red or green or blue?" This isn't going to cut it. We're going to need to really go down that
01:24:42 ◼ ► road. But I just discovered it in a weird—someone was like, "Hey, you seem like you're doing well
01:24:48 ◼ ► on TikTok." And I'm like, "I know what TikTok is. It's not like I have no concept of it, but I don't
01:24:53 ◼ ► have an account. I've never used it." And so out of nowhere, essentially, this was happening in this
01:25:01 ◼ ► community that I'm not really a part of or have a connection to. And it wasn't really until it
01:25:06 ◼ ► spilled over into Twitter, which is a community that I do typically have experience in, that I
01:25:14 ◼ ► actually was like, "Oh, this is what's happening." And that's where all of a sudden my shift towards
01:25:33 ◼ ► doesn't just take requests. It's you listen to the reason, right? And so even if you sussed out,
01:25:43 ◼ ► "Oh, I can suss out from this that a variety of pastels would go over fantastic with this crowd,"
01:25:52 ◼ ► it's not because they said, "I would like you to add pastels." You have to just sort of read between
01:25:59 ◼ ► the lines. And it's like maybe in the same way that a good wedding DJ doesn't just take the
01:26:06 ◼ ► request for specific songs, but is like, "Oh, these people are ready to dance." You think more like
01:26:16 ◼ ► that, and you're steering their desires that way. Was the custom picker hard? I don't even know. Is
01:26:27 ◼ ► there is a standard one in SwiftUI, but I couldn't use it because of the way that my editor is
01:26:32 ◼ ► structured. It just wouldn't have worked. It would be this kind of weird odd man out in my picker,
01:26:38 ◼ ► so I just built a custom one. It's like, "Is it hard? I don't know." I've been doing this a long
01:26:42 ◼ ► time. It wasn't straightforward, but it was not something that was insurmountable. The nice thing
01:26:50 ◼ ► with color, at least in this, it's a constrained problem set. For my purposes, there's only so many
01:26:58 ◼ ► colors that I need to display, and I can kind of relatively easily come up with a way to just drag
01:27:04 ◼ ► your finger along on the picker. And that's a fairly intuitive thing, rather than going down
01:27:09 ◼ ► the road of RGB or something, which is not a very user-friendly thing of they don't know how much
01:27:15 ◼ ► red they want in their color. They just want to see it on the screen and drag their finger over
01:27:24 ◼ ► and he's nerdier than most. He's not really into programming at all yet, maybe. He's actually taking
01:27:33 ◼ ► computer science for the first time now in 11th grade. What do you think the language is?
01:27:43 ◼ ► Python. I thought it was... My hope was, "Oh, I hope it's Python." I don't even know Python,
01:27:49 ◼ ► but I was hoping it was Python because I don't really know it, but I know enough about it to
01:27:53 ◼ ► root for it, and I know it's a good language. And I thought, "Well, if not Python, hopefully
01:27:58 ◼ ► JavaScript. Please not Java. Please not Java." It was Python. And his textbook is the O'Reilly
01:28:05 ◼ ► Python book. And it's like, "Oh, well, that's a good book." But even he knows RGB. It's like a
01:28:13 ◼ ► gamer thing because you learn the RGB color so you can program your keyboard to light up the right
01:28:18 ◼ ► colors. But it actually is surprising talking to him about it that there's a surprising number of
01:28:24 ◼ ► people who all of a sudden, they know hex values for RGB colors. And it's like, "Oh, I'm surprised
01:28:33 ◼ ► that you know that. Okay, sure." But it's not a particularly humane way to describe color.
01:28:40 ◼ ► No, no. That's definitely not something that it is a tool of trade, not something that a normal
01:28:54 ◼ ► So I'm trying to think what else there's left to talk about here. So all right, let's talk
01:29:07 ◼ ► So this, it seems like... Like you said earlier that you kind of thought maybe WidgetSmith would
01:29:19 ◼ ► be less popular than WatchSmith. They share a monetization strategy and in fact, pool together.
01:29:28 ◼ ► So the basic idea, they're free apps and certain of the features are unlocked through a... What do
01:29:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I call it WidgetSmith Premium. It's like a membership or a subscription to the app.
01:29:42 ◼ ► And it is, I think, $2 a month or $20 a year. And among those are weather and the tides,
01:30:05 ◼ ► Yeah. And that's it. It's very simple. There's no, "Oh, you pay $1 to get colors and you pay
01:30:23 ◼ ► it's a membership, and then the only choice is do you want to pay monthly or annually and save 20%.
01:30:40 ◼ ► is the one that I feel like I agonized over more. I try and be thoughtful about my design in a lot
01:30:45 ◼ ► of things, but that's the screen that I think I agonized over the most because I don't want to be...
01:31:02 ◼ ► And there's countless scams and things in the App Store that are that way. And it's like,
01:31:06 ◼ ► my goal and my design is the opposite. And maybe some people might say it's a bad design in that
01:31:14 ◼ ► way, but it's like, my goal is it is very clear what you're signing up for, it is very clear
01:31:19 ◼ ► what it costs, it is clear the difference between the monthly and the yearly, where it's like,
01:31:27 ◼ ► even with the monthly, I show you the monthly price times 12, and I say it's going to cost this
01:31:33 ◼ ► much a year. And so it's very clear that this is what's going to happen. Because the last thing I
01:31:38 ◼ ► want is to have everybody who hits that button and starts subscribing to the app, they know exactly
01:31:43 ◼ ► what they're in for, they're not going to be surprised, they're not going to be upset. That's
01:31:48 ◼ ► the thing that I ultimately want there, because I'd rather have fewer customers that were happier
01:31:52 ◼ ► than somehow end up with all these customers who are like, "Why am I being charged for your app?
01:32:01 ◼ ► as straightforward and clear as I can. It's like, rather than saying you're saving 20%,
01:32:06 ◼ ► it's like, "No, you're actually saving 19%." Because if I'm lying to you and saying it's 20%,
01:32:10 ◼ ► then I'm lying to you. I'm already off to a place that that's not true. You're actually not saving
01:32:16 ◼ ► 20%, you're saving 19%. Right. And the buttons are the same size, you're not steering people
01:32:23 ◼ ► towards a big sign up for the year versus sign up for the month, or vice versa. They're the same
01:32:29 ◼ ► size. The 23.88 per year annual cost of the monthly is printed in a very normal sized font.
01:32:39 ◼ ► The same font as everything else. The only actual small print is the actual, what should be small
01:32:46 ◼ ► print, your purchase will be applied to your iTunes account and the confirmation of your
01:32:50 ◼ ► purchase subscriptions will automatically renew. There's nothing hidden in the small print. It's
01:33:14 ◼ ► It's a very good balance where it is very useful as a free app, and therefore it is very popular
01:33:21 ◼ ► as a free download. But yet, what is there to be paid for is a reasonable amount of money. It is
01:33:27 ◼ ► about 20 bucks a year for anybody who does sign up and gives features that people would actually
01:33:42 ◼ ► more, essentially selling digital goods is always a weird business because it doesn't cost me
01:33:56 ◼ ► The fact that in theory I could have put pink behind a paywall and you have to pay a dollar
01:34:01 ◼ ► to unlock pink, okay, great, or blue, or whatever color that might be. That feels like a weird
01:34:09 ◼ ► business to be in. This is a broader discussion of a lot of the apps that are making most of the
01:34:14 ◼ ► money on the App Store are these consumable in-app purchase things where you're buying gems that
01:34:20 ◼ ► are just bits in a database, but they're creating this big cost to them. And it's like,
01:34:25 ◼ ► I don't ever feel great about that. And instead, I feel much better about a business where weather
01:34:30 ◼ ► and time data costs me something, and so I can't provide it to you for free. It's unreasonable. And
01:34:36 ◼ ► certainly I'm not giving it to you at cost. That's not what it costs me to provide that data, but
01:34:58 ◼ ► are a user who just wants to support the app and just wants to pay for it and never use
01:35:03 ◼ ► weather and tides, great. I appreciate that. That's wonderful. But if you're someone who wants
01:35:08 ◼ ► weather data, I feel good about charging you for that. And it's nice and simple and straightforward.
01:35:13 ◼ ► It's not trying to be manipulative or problematic in a way that I feel like so much of the App Store
01:35:19 ◼ ► is, and it means that I'm avoiding a lot of the things that would go down a path where you can
01:35:26 ◼ ► make a quick buck but end up in a way worse place. It sounds like you and I are getting ready to move
01:35:34 ◼ ► to some kind of hippie compound, but you can't put a price on what it's like to sleep good at night.
01:35:42 ◼ ► Trying to scoop up every available penny you could make if you tried to do everything short of towing
01:35:55 ◼ ► your line against tricking people into paying for something gets you dangerously close to trying to
01:36:01 ◼ ► move the line of what constitutes tricking or not. Whereas if you're trying to stay as far away from
01:36:07 ◼ ► the tricky line as possible, you almost certainly are leaving money on the table that you would have
01:36:13 ◼ ► picked up, but you're probably not leaving any money on the table from people who definitely
01:36:18 ◼ ► wanted to buy it, and they're the ones you feel good about. And there's so many normal businesses
01:36:31 ◼ ► I didn't know I had to pay for this dinner. Why am I paying for this steak? I thought it was free.
01:36:40 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the expectation. And there's this straightforwardness. You walk in the door,
01:36:46 ◼ ► and they hand you a piece of paper that has the name of the food and how much it costs.
01:36:50 ◼ ► And it's very straightforward. And you'd be surprised if you order the hamburger and it
01:36:55 ◼ ► says it's $15. And at the end of the meal, they're like, "That will be $17 a month for the rest of
01:37:01 ◼ ► your life." It's like, "What? That would be a surprise. That would not be what you expected
01:37:06 ◼ ► for." But that's not what happens. Or next month when your credit card bill comes and you've got
01:37:11 ◼ ► another charge from the place you ate a month ago, and it's like, "What? I didn't know I was
01:37:15 ◼ ► subscribing to a hamburger from the place. I was in an airport over in Florida. Why am I subscribed
01:37:23 ◼ ► to a hamburger?" But I feel like so often that happens in the App Store, though. That kind of
01:37:27 ◼ ► thing can happen where there are so—especially with subscriptions—it can very easily be something
01:37:33 ◼ ► that you don't really know what you're signing up for. Yeah, totally. All right, let's talk a
01:37:37 ◼ ► little bit about weather. I don't think people understand that weather data costs money to
01:37:42 ◼ ► developers. And it does. There is no—well, there's some free weather info, but "free," and there's a
01:37:51 ◼ ► reason why weather apps are usually paid. And if they're not paid, are sort of a cesspool of
01:37:58 ◼ ► privacy-invasive shenanigans. Yeah, where they're just trying to get your location data, basically.
01:38:13 ◼ ► dear listener of the talk show, have never really pondered this, you're going to—your mind's about
01:38:19 ◼ ► to be blown, because if you think that there are a bunch of scammy ad network type of businesses,
01:38:25 ◼ ► hundreds and hundreds of them out there, that really would like to have your location data,
01:38:32 ◼ ► and you know that all these apps system-wide have really been locked down in terms of anything that
01:38:39 ◼ ► has location data you have to ask the user for permission for, and it's very easy to go check
01:38:45 ◼ ► in the privacy section of settings which apps have location data, which ones have used it recently,
01:38:51 ◼ ► and how to turn it off. And you think, you know, it's hard for scammers to get into it.
01:39:02 ◼ ► right? Because you want weather where you are, and it makes—other than a turn-by-turn directions app,
01:39:10 ◼ ► I can't think of another genre of app where granting location data is more essential to it.
01:39:19 ◼ ► Yeah, ride hailing, right. But that's—again, that's sort of mapping, right? Like, it's just a—ride
01:39:25 ◼ ► hailing is almost just a variant of turn-by-turn directions. It's giving them turn-by-turn
01:39:32 ◼ ► So guess what? There's an awful lot of weather apps that have made arrangements and deals,
01:39:39 ◼ ► and if you have a free third-party weather app on your phone, you probably are giving up your
01:39:50 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, I can speak from experience that that is something that—at any time there are
01:39:56 ◼ ► companies that exist, and I get solicitations for this kind of stuff as a developer, that
01:40:01 ◼ ► any time you have an app that accesses location data, that they are more than happy to pay you
01:40:06 ◼ ► for that data. And you'll just—they'll basically say, "Oh, it's no big deal. You just drop our SDK
01:40:12 ◼ ► And it'll—because you've granted permission, we'll just collect the data and send it off,
01:40:17 ◼ ► and you'll get a check each month, and it absolutely exists and it's something. And it's
01:40:28 ◼ ► Yeah. So this whole direction got me thinking. And when Apple bought Dark Sky earlier this year,
01:40:49 ◼ ► predictions for near-term precipitation. And they've been uncannily accurate for the most
01:40:57 ◼ ► part over the years. And when they're not, it's never like—I feel ripped off. It's like if they
01:41:02 ◼ ► say, "Hey, rain's starting in five minutes," and it doesn't rain, it looks—it sure as heck looks
01:41:14 ◼ ► rain's starting in 10 minutes." And I look up and I'm like, "They're nuts. There's no way it's going
01:41:18 ◼ ► to rain in 10 minutes." And sure as hell, 11 minutes later, it's raining. And it's like,
01:41:23 ◼ ► "Where did this come from?" But anyway, I wonder if Apple's long-term plan on this is to provide
01:41:31 ◼ ► weather services at the system level. I mean, it definitely was something that came to mind for me,
01:41:38 ◼ ► as someone who uses it. I could see Apple trying to get to—I don't know how—I'm not sure if they
01:41:47 ◼ ► would ever require it. That feels like tricksy, but it's definitely a thing of if they can get
01:41:52 ◼ ► people off the need for a third-party developer to have to pay for weather data. That certainly seems
01:42:02 ◼ ► like a good benefit. I mean, my suspicion, though, honestly, is that they don't like that in the
01:42:07 ◼ ► weather app, it has the Weather Channel logo in the bottom right corner. I know. Or the Yahoo logo,
01:42:12 ◼ ► whatever that is. I think the reality is they just view that as, "Why do we have on one of the most
01:42:18 ◼ ► used apps probably—I've got to imagine it's like Messages and then Weather are probably the two most
01:42:23 ◼ ► used apps on iOS. We have some other company's logo prominently in the corner of this app at
01:42:30 ◼ ► all times, and I've got to imagine they just want to not have that there." Have you ever asked your
01:42:36 ◼ ► home assistant, your dingus, for the weather? Like if you have HomePods and you ask, "Hey,
01:42:43 ◼ ► what's the weather?" I don't know what the rules are because it doesn't seem like they always
01:42:50 ◼ ► tell you, but sometimes they'll be like, "The weather today in Philadelphia will be 71 degrees
01:42:54 ◼ ► with 30% chance of rain, and a low temperature in the evening down to 57. My weather data is
01:43:01 ◼ ► provided by the Weather Channel." And it's even worse than the logo, right? Because the logo,
01:43:19 ◼ ► would love for them to provide it. And I mean, in some ways, of course, that would make a bit
01:43:24 ◼ ► of a conundrum for me because part of the way that I've sort of structured my things is that
01:43:28 ◼ ► weather data has a cost. But if they did, they could certainly go down that road now that they
01:43:34 ◼ ► own Dark Sky and that they have that data and they have it in a broader way. But in my mind,
01:43:45 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, that's where I was going with it is that if—so it is admirable that you're not
01:43:49 ◼ ► charging for access to more than, say, the eight primary colors. And I say that—I say admirable
01:43:55 ◼ ► in that I like your thinking. I don't think there's anything wrong, personally, with apps that do that.
01:44:01 ◼ ► We actually had tossed that around with Vesper as an idea before we just gave up the ghost,
01:44:06 ◼ ► but that maybe we would have a paid subscription thing that would have alternate themes for Vesper.
01:44:12 ◼ ► And that wasn't necessarily no marginal cost because we were thinking maybe it would be
01:44:18 ◼ ► fonts that we had to license to include. But it might be. It might be stuff like colors where
01:44:25 ◼ ► literally it's not a marginal cost to us to offer a red. But you have to charge for something.
01:44:40 ◼ ► When I think about that, though, it's great to reserve the ability to charge for things in the
01:44:46 ◼ ► future. When I'm coming into something like this, it's like, I want to have a business model up front
01:44:54 ◼ ► that I'm accumulating enough revenue to keep the lights on and to have a reasonable business,
01:45:07 ◼ ► That if at some point, whether data becomes free for me and it becomes a little silly that I'm
01:45:11 ◼ ► charging for it, then at that point, it's like, I'm sure there are other opportunities and there's
01:45:16 ◼ ► other things. Or even in the near term, one of the obvious things that I should probably be starting
01:45:20 ◼ ► to do is work with designers and have theme packs or things that are that kind of a purchase within
01:45:29 ◼ ► the application. What I like about that is it's a truly premium upsell in a way that it isn't like,
01:45:38 ◼ ► "I'm charging you for red." It's like, "I'm charging you for, here's this designer who has
01:45:43 ◼ ► created this gorgeous set of borders and colors and backgrounds and wallpapers, and you can
01:45:49 ◼ ► buy them as a unit, and you're getting something that feels nice, not something that feels like
01:45:55 ◼ ► I'm being cheap." Yeah, exactly. If it was a custom border design that made it seem like a very fancy
01:46:02 ◼ ► certificate of authenticity, my widget is completely certified, and people might have fun
01:46:10 ◼ ► with that. Yeah, and I do think... Here's my other question about weather before I get off the
01:46:18 ◼ ► weather. The other thing I wanted to pick your brain about is that WidgetSmith defaults to feels
01:46:24 ◼ ► like temperature instead of actual temperature. I get a lot of feedback on this. Okay, so as a
01:46:31 ◼ ► weather app aficionado, I have mixed feelings about this. I'm curious why that's the default.
01:46:40 ◼ ► That's almost never the default. Sure. So this is one of those cases where every weather app I ever
01:46:49 ◼ ► use, where it's an option that I can display the actual temperature, like the scientific temperature
01:46:57 ◼ ► or the apparent temperature, I always set it to apparent temperature. Because as a person existing
01:47:03 ◼ ► in the world, that's the temperature that actually is meaningful to me. That if I go outside and it
01:47:10 ◼ ► feels like 100, then I want to know that it feels like 100, not that it is 90. That's what I want to
01:47:18 ◼ ► know when I look at the weather app. So I'm always flipping that switch. And so as a developer,
01:47:26 ◼ ► that's one of the places where I'm just being a little opinionated and saying, "I think this is
01:47:30 ◼ ► actually what you want." That when you say you want to know the weather, you actually want to know what
01:47:36 ◼ ► it's going to feel like if you go outside, not what a thermometer sitting outside would tell you.
01:47:43 ◼ ► And so in the same, like what you were saying earlier of like, "Tell me the problem. Don't tell
01:47:47 ◼ ► me what your solution is to the problem." The problem you have is, "What's it going to feel
01:47:51 ◼ ► like if I go outside?" And I can answer that question. People have worked this out with
01:47:56 ◼ ► feels like temperature and wind chill and heat index and all that. And so I think that's a better
01:48:01 ◼ ► answer. And some people get really upset about that when they realize that like, "Why does it
01:48:07 ◼ ► seem like my thermometer outside on my deck says that it's 80 degrees, but your thing says it's 90
01:48:14 ◼ ► degrees." And it's like, "Well, it's because it's super humid outside." And if you go outside,
01:48:17 ◼ ► it's going to feel like it's 90. And so that's why there's an option to do it. I made it so that you
01:48:22 ◼ ► can optionally turn it off. But as a default, I firmly believe that apparent temperature is what
01:48:36 ◼ ► I switched all of my apps that I—and I switched between a bunch. All of them that support feels
01:48:43 ◼ ► like, I switched to feels like. I had it on my watch. And I was like, "This is fantastic." And
01:48:48 ◼ ► there were days—and it was summer. And it was, you know, it's the East Coast. So, you know,
01:49:00 ◼ ► 84." And that's a big difference. And it's the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. And
01:49:07 ◼ ► it would be right. And I was like, "Everything should be like this." And then I ran into a couple
01:49:12 ◼ ► of days in a row where it was wrong. And it would be like, "It feels like 94." And it's like, "Oh,
01:49:19 ◼ ► that's miserable." And I was like, "Well, I got to go out anyway." I go out, and it was beautiful.
01:49:24 ◼ ► And it was like, and it's the—really, the feels like was just, in my opinion, wrong. It didn't
01:49:29 ◼ ► feel like it at all. And I don't know what—and I was talking to Ryan Jones, who's the developer of
01:49:42 ◼ ► was one of our typical chats where it was either going to be really long, and he was like, "Oh,
01:49:46 ◼ ► don't even get me started." And it basically, he was like, "I think all the effort I've put into
01:49:52 ◼ ► Weatherline, you could put into—I would like to put into a new formula for feels like to actually
01:49:58 ◼ ► get it right." That's how hard it can be. And I concluded by the end of summer that when feels
01:50:06 ◼ ► like is wrong is worse, and therefore outweighs the benefits of when feels like is better. And
01:50:14 ◼ ► what I kind of want, and none of my apps seem to do, is to find the perfect balance of showing me
01:50:20 ◼ ► both at once. It's like, it seems like most apps either show you one or the other, or they show you
01:50:25 ◼ ► one of them big, and then the other one is like small print at the bottom, you know, like weighted.
01:50:30 ◼ ► But it can be very wrong. That's my complaint with it, is that sometimes it'll say it feels like
01:50:42 ◼ ► Yeah. And I mean, there are so many solutions to this that are tricky. It certainly is a thing,
01:50:51 ◼ ► especially with something like weather. And some people don't mind the humidity nearly as
01:50:57 ◼ ► much as others and say that they're going to feel it differently. And I think of the National
01:51:08 ◼ ► So they have this forecast that is very, very economic in terms of the way that it shows
01:51:19 ◼ ► you with the weather data. And what I've always thought is interesting with their economy of
01:51:25 ◼ ► how they do it is the heat index or the wind chill is only shown when it's beyond a certain amount
01:51:32 ◼ ► different than the typical amount different from the actual temperature. And I feel like there's
01:51:42 ◼ ► a certain maybe something in there that I think they may be sort of hitting on. But there's a
01:51:49 ◼ ► certain balance where, yes, you only want it to show when it's going to tell you something that
01:51:55 ◼ ► you really need to know. Like when it is actually-- you're going to walk outside and you're going to
01:52:01 ◼ ► be like, "I thought it was 72," and you walk outside and you're miserable. And you're like,
01:52:05 ◼ ► "I want you to tell me that right now." So maybe there's something like that where you only show it
01:52:11 ◼ ► if it's different, like above a certain amount. And so you're trying to optimize for the surprise
01:52:17 ◼ ► factor. Or if it's above-- only tell me if the heat index is above 95, say. At that point,
01:52:26 ◼ ► switch to using that or I don't know. But it's a problem I've struggled with for how to show that
01:52:34 ◼ ► data in a way that is reasonable. Yeah, it's a complicated problem. Anyway, now that you have
01:52:39 ◼ ► a weather app, effectively, welcome to the club. I've been in the club for a while. Yeah, I guess
01:52:45 ◼ ► so. So I guess last but not least, again, I'm not trying to get actual numbers. No, no, that's fine.
01:53:09 ◼ ► all people using the free app. It is actually a hit product for you. Yes. No, it is certainly
01:53:16 ◼ ► converting well, at an rate that you would usually expect for this kind of thing. Because in a normal
01:53:21 ◼ ► application, you kind of expect that the majority of your users aren't going to subscribe, aren't
01:53:28 ◼ ► going to pay, aren't going to be doing anything like that. But you just hope that a certain
01:53:32 ◼ ► percentage of people are, and that it seemed to be the case with this. That enough people want to
01:53:40 ◼ ► see that data or support the app or for whatever reason they're signing up, that they're doing it.
01:53:47 ◼ ► And I was worried when it had its crazy-- the first 24 to 48 hours of this app, where it really
01:53:58 ◼ ► took off, were unlike anything I've ever seen in 12 years of making apps for the App Store,
01:54:02 ◼ ► where the number of downloads I was getting in an hour is collectively what it usually takes years
01:54:14 ◼ ► It's one of these things, I don't have a concept of how to even really deal with that. And my fear
01:54:20 ◼ ► was that obviously you'd have this huge spike, absurd numbers, tens of millions of people
01:54:25 ◼ ► downloading the app, and then all of a sudden it was going to fall off, and no one was going to
01:54:31 ◼ ► subscribe. And it would have just been like, "Huh." If you remember that funny day that I had
01:54:34 ◼ ► crazy downloads and then nothing changed in my life? That was kind of what I was-- at least the
01:54:40 ◼ ► pessimist in me certainly had that little fear in the back of my mind. But I was thankful to see that
01:54:47 ◼ ► even as it's sort of settled down and it isn't-- I mean, I kind of feel like-- you know when you see
01:54:52 ◼ ► people going off to climb Mount Everest, they have to go up to different camps along the way?
01:54:57 ◼ ► And they'll go up somewhere and they'll spend a week, and then they'll go to the next one,
01:55:08 ◼ ► in those first few days, I was up on Everest. I'd never seen anything like this. This is way up high,
01:55:14 ◼ ► and it's like I've come down from there, but I'm just hanging out at advanced base camp now. It's
01:55:20 ◼ ► not normal by any definition of what normal would be, but it's continuing on and having a life and
01:55:27 ◼ ► having conversions into subscriptions and doing the things that make it a sustainable business
01:55:32 ◼ ► and not just being crazy up, crazy down. That was funny, and I just go back to my other apps.
01:55:45 ◼ ► I'm looking at the live top chart for free apps right now. And as we speak, the list is number one,
01:56:03 ◼ ► this stuff going over Zoom. Three is your arch rival, Color Widgets. But similar to the same
01:56:12 ◼ ► basic idea is an app about widgets. Four, Discord, a very, very popular talking chat app.
01:56:23 ◼ ► Five, TikTok, which has been threatened to be removed from the app stores, which in addition
01:56:29 ◼ ► to its popularity has prompted its downloads. Six, YouTube, Instagram, Gmail. Have you heard
01:56:36 ◼ ► of Gmail? Snapchat. And then number 10 is Facebook, and then 11 is Messenger, and it goes on from
01:56:43 ◼ ► there. Now, of course, some of this is it doesn't mean that WidgetSmith is more popular than Facebook.
01:56:50 ◼ ► Obviously, Facebook's downloads are suppressed and Instagram, et cetera, are suppressed on a
01:56:55 ◼ ► daily basis significantly by the fact that there are literally billions of people who already have
01:57:01 ◼ ► them. But it puts it into context. I mean, some of these apps are not like the others in this list.
01:57:11 ◼ ► Right? One of these apps was made by a single person working at a computer in his basement,
01:57:20 ◼ ► Right. I mean, I think I'm pretty sure that Facebook has more than one engineer working
01:57:27 ◼ ► I think so. It's just really, really awesome to be talking to you and have you not just on the list,
01:57:36 ◼ ► but at number one. It's really a lot of fun. But part of that is, before we go into the final
01:57:44 ◼ ► section, I want to talk about sleep tracking. But before we get there, your basic strategy
01:57:55 ◼ ► was it a recent tweet? I just saw a tweet from you where you mentioned that you've had 59 apps.
01:58:03 ◼ ► Yeah, that was a couple of days ago when I was just kind of reminiscing on the 12 years that
01:58:14 ◼ ► Tell me if you disagree in any way. But I think a basic description of your strategy from the
01:58:23 ◼ ► beginning is to come up with ideas for smaller apps that you could do by yourself relatively
01:58:33 ◼ ► quickly and see what's popular, see what sticks. And if it gains traction or some angle of it
01:58:44 ◼ ► gains traction, then go with it. And if not, move on to another idea. All 59 apps are not still
01:58:52 ◼ ► actively maintained and available in the app store. Your strategy is to be a singles hitter,
01:59:07 ◼ ► And in baseball, good things happen as opposed to, "Well, I'll just sit there and keep trying
01:59:13 ◼ ► to hit a home run and wait till the bases are loaded." Let me keep going with my analogies here.
01:59:20 ◼ ► If you're playing Tetris, you're trying to clear lines as you go. You're not saving a column over
01:59:33 ◼ ► things. You're clearing rows as you go. And to me, this is the payoff that you've been waiting for.
01:59:43 ◼ ► You keep working on good ideas. You keep trying them. You're there on day one. And in terms of
01:59:50 ◼ ► that whole debate of, "Hey, why were developers so mad that they only had 24 hours notice for iOS 14?"
02:00:26 ◼ ► puff you up just because you're the guest on my show, but there's a prolificness to it.
02:00:32 ◼ ► But if you think about it, just the amount of time you've spent on the infrastructure of setting up
02:01:05 ◼ ► And I think it's one of those things where my goal in what is, A, I have a really short attention
02:01:12 ◼ ► span. And I love—the thing I enjoy most is making new apps. If I'm honest, I really don't
02:01:16 ◼ ► like maintaining apps. I love making them. I love the idea. I love seeing a WWDC keynote is probably
02:01:25 ◼ ► my favorite two hours of the year in my work. I love seeing these are the new things and coming
02:01:32 ◼ ► up with what's possible. Or as we were talking about earlier, what's maybe not so possible in
02:01:37 ◼ ► what they're hoping for, but something that I could make happen. I love that process, and I love
02:01:44 ◼ ► doing that. And I have a short attention span, and I get bored maintaining something. And so
02:01:49 ◼ ► I like that process. And it means that, yeah, it's like I've gotten good at knowing how to turn apps
02:01:55 ◼ ► around very quickly. I've gotten good at knowing how to launch apps, how to—what are the features
02:02:00 ◼ ► that are actually going to be meaningful for an application? What is something that if I actually
02:02:05 ◼ ► make, it's like—there's a very fine line between knowing what's a good version 1 feature and what's
02:02:11 ◼ ► a version 1.1 feature. And because half the time I never build the 1.1, it's important to know that
02:02:16 ◼ ► difference and to know that this is not something that I need for version 1, and I should push it to
02:02:21 ◼ ► the side and wait on it. And that has allowed me to be able to be in the position where it's like,
02:02:28 ◼ ► I've launched 59 apps. I would say all but maybe six of them were complete flops from a financial,
02:02:35 ◼ ► a business, whatever perspective. I learned a lot from them. So it's certainly like—and
02:02:39 ◼ ► it benefits me now when I'm making an app like WidgetSmith that touches so many different parts
02:02:45 ◼ ► of iOS and all of the system that I've built a calendar app. So if I want to add calendars to
02:02:52 ◼ ► WidgetSmith, that's easy. I've done that before. I have all this code. I know where all the weird
02:02:56 ◼ ► bugs are. I've worked around them before. If I want to interact with weather data, like I built
02:03:00 ◼ ► a weather app years ago, and I've done this before. I know how to do it. And I can build
02:03:06 ◼ ► that experience, and I think it's a model that works well for the—I feel like the indies
02:03:12 ◼ ► kind of traditionally, like the traditional Mac or Apple indie is the person who has their one thing
02:03:20 ◼ ► that they almost slavishly work on and develop. And you have a James Thompson who's worked on
02:03:32 ◼ ► It's just 30 years. Something like that. And he is—that path, I would have lost my mind.
02:03:39 ◼ ► I'm glad it works for him. That's great. But for me, I'm always looking and interested in the new
02:03:46 ◼ ► thing, and I am already in the midst of all of this with WidgetSmith. The biggest app in the
02:03:54 ◼ ► world right now, I'm already starting to think about new apps I want to make. And if anything,
02:03:58 ◼ ► the maintenance and the management of WidgetSmith is a burden rather than a blessing. That's just
02:04:04 ◼ ► who I am, and that's how I've gotten to be to where I am. And it's a situation, too, where I
02:04:09 ◼ ► think it's worth saying that I feel very grateful for the ability to do what I do, and I think it is
02:04:16 ◼ ► largely based on the App Store and on Apple and what they do for a developer like me. The fact
02:04:24 ◼ ► that I can launch 59 apps over 12 years, and the infrastructure and everything is in place for me
02:04:31 ◼ ► to be able to do that, and they take care of the billing, and they take care of all of the things
02:04:34 ◼ ► that allow a one-man shop. It's just me in my basement writing code. I don't have a big
02:04:41 ◼ ► infrastructure. I don't have a big staff. That, I don't think, would be possible in a world that
02:04:48 ◼ ► wasn't like the App Store, and it's something that I feel very grateful for. Sometimes I get to be in
02:04:53 ◼ ► my bonnet around all the stuff that's been happening with the App Store and Epic and all the
02:04:57 ◼ ► shenanigans. It's like, I'm able to do what I love doing because the App Store is the way it is, and
02:05:04 ◼ ► it works for people like me to have just as much standing as all the other apps you just listed in
02:05:10 ◼ ► the top 10 of the App Store right now. I have just as much claim to that top chart as they do.
02:05:17 ◼ ► And it doesn't matter that they're Google. It doesn't matter that they're Facebook. I'm just
02:05:20 ◼ ► a guy, but the App Store is a great leveler in that way. And so I feel very grateful for
02:05:28 ◼ ► Yeah, that's well said. I mean, and it must be gratifying too, because the nature of Widget
02:05:32 ◼ ► Smith is such that what people are enthusiastic for about it means they see it all the time,
02:05:49 ◼ ► I've been using Peacock, I think for close, if not 30 years. Close, certainly close, at least 25.
02:05:54 ◼ ► I go days and weeks, maybe even at a time without launching Peacock because I have nothing to
02:06:02 ◼ ► calculate, right? Whereas a widget on your home screen, there it is on your home screen. And where
02:06:07 ◼ ► do people really, if they're really going to spend time to tweak and customize the color and the font
02:06:14 ◼ ► and the size and sit there and really get in there and futz with it, where do they want it? They want
02:06:21 ◼ ► it on their first home screen, right? Or the second one, the one where they're going to see it all the
02:06:25 ◼ ► time. So there you've got this thing that they see all the time, which is super cool. Put aside just
02:06:31 ◼ ► the financial aspect of it. That's just cool when you realize, "Holy crap, there are thousands
02:06:42 ◼ ► of people looking at my thing all day, every day, and it's in the device in their pocket."
02:06:53 ◼ ► Which is... I get a lot of requests that I'm like, "Oh man, can't you hide that?" And it's like,
02:07:03 ◼ ► There you go. There's the first time you've been a little selfish on the entire interview.
02:07:08 ◼ ► A little bit. A little bit in this. That's one thing that I am very grateful that every single
02:07:13 ◼ ► time I see a screenshot of someone being like, "Hey, look at this cool thing I did with my home
02:07:16 ◼ ► screen." There it is. Widget Smith right there. Go to the app store, search for it and get it.
02:07:26 ◼ ► There's a thing they can search for right there. All right, let me thank our third and final
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02:09:21 ◼ ► All right, speaking of the name Widgetsmith, for a while, you'd think it would be an original name.
02:09:41 ◼ ► about the opportunity that the App Store has afforded you. I'm not asking you to complain,
02:09:47 ◼ ► but it's got to be frustrating. That had to be like, "Oh, man." If you're set up, you're saying,
02:09:54 ◼ ► "Oh, man, Widgetsmith is flying high. This is going to come to an end. One of these days,
02:10:09 ◼ ► That hurts. It hurts. There's no simple way to say it. It just hurts. It was painful to see that—
02:10:17 ◼ ► I think that it's most hurtful about—I mean, I've had many copykits I've had to deal with in
02:10:23 ◼ ► the years of the App Store. The most hurtful are the ones that are poor knockoffs. It's like what
02:10:30 ◼ ► you were saying about Ariel, right? It isn't knocking me off in a way that it's like taking
02:10:38 ◼ ► what I did and doing it better, right? That kind of a scenario, it's more like, "Oh, man,
02:10:45 ◼ ► I should have thought of that." That feeling is not great. It's not a nice feeling, but it's like,
02:10:50 ◼ ► "Okay, that's fair." It's like when you're getting ripped off by somebody who it's clearly just,
02:10:55 ◼ ► "This thing is popular. Let me just grab its name, throw together a basic app that will get just
02:11:02 ◼ ► enough utility to get past App Review and throw it in the App Store." It's much more like,
02:11:15 ◼ ► those types of the more positive versions of, "Clearly, I'm sure there are countless people
02:11:21 ◼ ► making widget apps right now." That would be foolish if you had an idea for one or you're
02:11:27 ◼ ► going to think, "I'm going to cash in on this market." Of course, people are doing that.
02:11:31 ◼ ► But what's hurtful and what was difficult about that one is that it was such a poor copy,
02:11:38 ◼ ► and it wasn't hardworking, and it wasn't thoughtful and clever. I think that was the part that was
02:11:43 ◼ ► harmful about it. To complain, it's like, "Certainly, I wish that Apple, their infrastructure
02:11:51 ◼ ► was such that that didn't happen in the first place, that they caught that kind of thing."
02:11:55 ◼ ► You've got to think there's a way and a mechanism and a business process that they can catch this
02:12:01 ◼ ► stuff rather than having it had to always be reported. I could imagine there's always going to
02:12:07 ◼ ► be situations that fall outside of the process that they come up with, and there's always going
02:12:14 ◼ ► to need to be a "report this app" system to deal with the cases that, if you're copying an app that
02:12:19 ◼ ► isn't particularly popular, it might not draw to their attention that there actually isn't this
02:12:25 ◼ ► other app that has the same name or whatever that might be. But you've got to think that if they
02:12:36 ◼ ► 100 apps in each of the categories—so that's something like, I don't know, like 2,600 apps
02:12:42 ◼ ► or something, maybe—it's not an inconceivable number that you'd have to wrap your head around.
02:12:47 ◼ ► To be thoughtful and to be protective of those names, it seems like something that they should
02:12:54 ◼ ► be able to do. And I think, if anything, while I'm frustrated by it, the only thing that I see
02:13:01 ◼ ► that's particularly encouraging to me about all of the controversy that we've been dealing with
02:13:06 ◼ ► this summer with the App Store and whether there should be a 30% cut and whether there should be
02:13:10 ◼ ► alternative app stores and all of these things, I take hope in that Apple, in the 12 years I've
02:13:17 ◼ ► been doing this, seems to do their best work when they are under pressure and they have to prove
02:13:29 ◼ ► And Apple says the App Store is the place you go because of trust and privacy, and trustworthiness
02:13:42 ◼ ► allowing copycat clone scam apps to exist in your platform. That's clearly just problematic for that.
02:13:49 ◼ ► And I'm sure Apple was embarrassed that they let this through. And my hope is that they actually
02:13:54 ◼ ► have pressure now because they keep putting up these marketing websites that say the App
02:13:59 ◼ ► Store is amazing. And I agree, the App Store is amazing. I just sang its praises a few minutes ago.
02:14:04 ◼ ► But now what I like and what I'm encouraged by is they have to prove that now. And so this happened
02:14:11 ◼ ► once. I don't expect this is going to happen again for Widgetsmith. I've got to imagine there's
02:14:17 ◼ ► someone who got a very stern talking to by somebody who's like, "This is embarrassing. Two days before
02:14:22 ◼ ► this, we published this whole big new website on Apple.com saying how great and trustworthy the
02:14:28 ◼ ► App Store is. And then this happens two days later. This can never happen again." And that pressure
02:14:33 ◼ ► is great. Yeah, I agree with that. That's a good take. And I do think that it's an interesting way
02:14:42 ◼ ► to keep them on their competitive toes as they have less competition directly, at least that
02:14:52 ◼ ► they're not an underdog. And I definitely don't want to devolve this into an argument over
02:15:06 ◼ ► You're talking about developing on the platform for 12 years. We're old enough now where for us,
02:15:14 ◼ ► 12 years doesn't seem like that long. For my son who's in 11th grade, it seems like he probably
02:15:20 ◼ ► barely remembers or doesn't remember what it was like before iPhones. But I remember when the
02:15:27 ◼ ► iPhone was new and felt... I felt even before it came out, just in that wild, crazy interim where
02:15:36 ◼ ► Apple had announced it at Macworld, but it wasn't even shipping until June, it was a wild time. And
02:15:44 ◼ ► I thought, "This is a surefire hit. This is going to be great. I cannot wait for this." And I remember
02:15:49 ◼ ► thinking, "They're going to do apps." There's a famous... Not famous, famous to me, but Merlin
02:15:55 ◼ ► Mann was doing podcasts on the Macworld show floor and grabbed me and Jason Snell and interviewed us.
02:16:01 ◼ ► It was a 10-minute podcast. And Jason Snell and I... Merlin asked us if we thought they were going
02:16:07 ◼ ► to have apps, and we didn't even think about that at the time. And within five or six minutes,
02:16:12 ◼ ► Snell and I had talked ourselves into, "Yeah, they're going to do apps. There's going to be
02:16:16 ◼ ► apps eventually. It has to be." And it's a great five minutes of podcasting because it was an hour
02:16:22 ◼ ► after the thing had been unveiled to the world. But at the time, Palm was still real, and they
02:16:30 ◼ ► eventually came out with the Palm Pre, which was a great platform, and unfortunately, too late.
02:16:40 ◼ ► - My first job when I was in high school was making apps for the Palm 5 and the Palm Pre.
02:16:55 ◼ ► nobody knew. And Nokia tried to get... It was all up in the air whether we were going to settle on
02:17:22 ◼ ► until the mid-2000s, when we called the non-phone-wond PDAs, and it was a separate category, but
02:17:29 ◼ ► it clearly was meant to converge, there were never a dominant platform, and you never knew.
02:17:36 ◼ ► And we've settled into a thing, and it's probably the way most markets settle in, where there's
02:17:41 ◼ ► fewer competitors than not. But something has to keep Apple on its competitive toes, right?
02:17:51 ◼ ► the upside to it is, I agree with you completely, that it's a way to inspire Apple to up its game
02:17:59 ◼ ► across the board with everything related to the App Store, even if nothing changes regulatory or
02:18:22 ◼ ► and only positive. And if Apple continues to hold themselves to high standards, and then the world
02:18:32 ◼ ► - Yeah, when I was in high school, I was a huge Larry Bird fan, and I devoured his autobiography
02:18:39 ◼ ► after he retired. And he talked about how he was, and if you search YouTube for Larry Bird
02:18:46 ◼ ► trash-talking, he's widely regarded as both one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but
02:18:53 ◼ ► almost certainly the greatest trash-talker of all time. And he said in his book that he did it
02:18:59 ◼ ► because he felt he'd be playing, and he'd realize, look at the other team's lineup and realize that
02:19:06 ◼ ► he knew in his heart there was nobody on their team who could cover him, nobody who he really
02:19:10 ◼ ► respected as his peer, as a player. Like, okay, if he's playing the Lakers and Magic Johnson's
02:19:15 ◼ ► on the other team, or he's playing the Bulls and young Michael Jordan is on the other team,
02:19:19 ◼ ► and he could tell how good Jordan was going to be. Sure. Or Dr. J, you know, any of those classic
02:19:23 ◼ ► players that he's, sure, he had no problem getting fired up. But he's playing, I don't know, Denver
02:19:27 ◼ ► Nuggets, you know, and it's like, who knows. He'd fire himself up by going over to the other bench
02:19:35 ◼ ► before the game and picking out who's going to cover him and say, like, you better hope the co--
02:19:40 ◼ ► hope they don't put you on me because I'm going to torch you. And they just say that to fire himself
02:19:45 ◼ ► up. I feel like you need to do something like that when you're on top, you know. And I don't think
02:19:50 ◼ ► it's-- He doesn't follow through. He's embarrassing himself. Yeah. So I don't think Apple's going to
02:19:53 ◼ ► trash talk. But they need to do something inside the locker room effectively, you know, like,
02:20:00 ◼ ► that's the other thing with sports is most players don't say things inflammatory because they don't
02:20:05 ◼ ► want the other team to put the quote up on the chalkboard or the whiteboard, I guess they have
02:20:09 ◼ ► now, you know, hey, this guy on the other team said we can't pitch, you know, well, how do you
02:20:13 ◼ ► feel about it, you know, and it fires you up. Apple kind of needs to do that. Like these people say
02:20:18 ◼ ► they're not, you know, developers say they're not getting value from the App Store. Let's prove them
02:20:22 ◼ ► wrong. Yeah. And I think that's that's good for everybody. Yeah. And then but my last, my last
02:20:28 ◼ ► thing on the ripoff story is just that so many people whenever these things come up, say, well,
02:20:33 ◼ ► what do you what do you expect Apple to do? Even the richest company in the world, there's if
02:20:36 ◼ ► there's 100,000 new apps coming or updates coming through the App Store every week, and there's over
02:20:41 ◼ ► a million apps in the App Store, how can they possibly compare every single app against every
02:20:45 ◼ ► other one? That's not how you would police it. That that makes no sense. It's you start with the
02:20:52 ◼ ► most popular apps, right? And so like if the 57,263rd most popular app gets ripped off,
02:21:02 ◼ ► that shouldn't happen. There should be a good way for the rightful developer of that app,
02:21:11 ◼ ► 53,000 levels down in the popularity charts to register the complaint when they notice it and
02:21:17 ◼ ► have it taken care of in a fair and judicious manner. But in terms of like catching this stuff
02:21:22 ◼ ► before it even happens, starting with the most popular apps would be the way to go because who
02:21:27 ◼ ► did? Why would you want to rip off the 53,000th most popular app, right? Whereas maybe the most
02:21:33 ◼ ► popular app number one, maybe you'd want to rip off. Yeah, there's a value in that that is
02:21:39 ◼ ► tangible and real and obvious. So that that would be my argument against why we should expect
02:21:52 ◼ ► you have an app, Sleep++. Merlin Mann, speaking of Merlin Mann, he was on the show about a year ago
02:22:00 ◼ ► and turned me on to sleep tracking. And I don't know how, you know, this is typical of when
02:22:05 ◼ ► Merlin's on the show. I have no idea how we got there. And it seemed bizarre to me. It just seemed
02:22:10 ◼ ► again, like with the breathe thing. I don't know. It doesn't seem like something. I go to sleep when
02:22:14 ◼ ► I'm tired. I wake up when I'm when I wake up. Yeah. Merlin said I should I guess I'd been having
02:22:20 ◼ ► some sleep problems, which is rare for me. Usually I sleep like a baby. He said you should get Sleep++
02:22:25 ◼ ► and I got the Sleep++. This was not, you know, a year ago, the watchOS didn't have built in
02:22:35 ◼ ► sleep tracking, but it no, but Sleep++ could track your sleep. And there are other sleep tracking
02:22:42 ◼ ► apps. I enjoy, I stuck with it. I still do it to this day. I enjoy it. I do notice some trends. I
02:22:50 ◼ ► don't really have any sleep problems, but I enjoy it. I don't really understand how it works now.
02:22:56 ◼ ► And I need you, I need you to explain, explain it to me. So you're asking like how watchOS 7 sleep
02:23:01 ◼ ► tracking works? Well, I start with how did, how did it work? How did Sleep++ track my sleep before
02:23:07 ◼ ► watchOS 7? Sure. So the way, so Sleep++ originally I used to use to kind of like this thing where on
02:23:16 ◼ ► the watch you would like start us, you would say when you went to bed and say when you woke up,
02:23:21 ◼ ► like you had to physically tap a button on the, on the watch. And that was because of a few,
02:23:24 ◼ ► if you did that, it meant that I could access kind of, they had this power efficient way of showing
02:23:31 ◼ ► me your motion during the night. And I could use that to kind of infer roughly how well you slept.
02:23:38 ◼ ► And I knew the duration of your sleep because you've said, you know, I just went, I went to bed,
02:23:42 ◼ ► I just, I'm going to bed and you tap it when you wake up. And that works well. And probably in some
02:23:47 ◼ ► ways gives you more accurate data, but for most people, they don't want to have the last thing
02:23:52 ◼ ► they do before they go to bed is hitting a button on their watch. And the first thing they do when
02:23:55 ◼ ► they wake up is to hit another button. So it doesn't really scale very well. And so instead,
02:24:00 ◼ ► what eventually I did is I worked out a way to like an Apple watch when it's attached to,
02:24:05 ◼ ► attached to your wrist is always collecting a variety of sort of health and fitness metrics.
02:24:16 ◼ ► does it seem like you're walking? And if you are walking, you know, how many steps have you taken?
02:24:21 ◼ ► It's also collecting your active calories, which is what is shown in the red ring of your,
02:24:27 ◼ ► you know, in the activity app. And it's about every six minutes or so, it'll take a heart rate
02:24:33 ◼ ► reading, assuming your wrist is still and is, you know, close enough, like the watch is snug enough
02:24:40 ◼ ► to your wrist that it can get a, get a reading, it'll record one about every six minutes.
02:24:44 ◼ ► And essentially what I did is I used those three metrics to be able to pretty accurately estimate
02:24:53 ◼ ► when it seems like you're in bed, and it's the same like when you are awake and moving. And,
02:24:59 ◼ ► you know, a lot of that's just a bit of clever heuristics and looking at the data. And, you know,
02:25:04 ◼ ► for a while I had the years of the time that I've been recording all these nights for myself using
02:25:11 ◼ ► the old version where I was like manually starting and stopping, and I could use that to kind of
02:25:15 ◼ ► build my model that Sleepless Plus is based on. And I would use that, you know, I can use that
02:25:20 ◼ ► data to infer things about your night. I personally, it's like, as far as I can tell, any app that
02:25:26 ◼ ► tries to tell you, like in very great detail, the sleep stages you're in and all the kind of deep
02:25:33 ◼ ► sleep analysis stuff based on just automatic sleep tracking on an Apple Watch, like I'm a little
02:25:38 ◼ ► suspect. I don't really see that as something that's possible with what that data is, but it's
02:25:42 ◼ ► definitely possible to be able to identify when you're asleep and roughly are you sleeping well
02:25:49 ◼ ► or not? Like, are you restless or are you awake? Are you, you know, every time you get up to use
02:25:54 ◼ ► the bathroom in the night, you're going to take steps. And so I can say, "Oh, it looks like you're
02:25:57 ◼ ► taking steps. Clearly you're not, you know, you're not walking. Unless you're sleepwalking, like,
02:26:01 ◼ ► you're awake." And so that's what Sleepless Plus does to sort of create that model and to get the
02:26:09 ◼ ► data. And then once you have the data, then it's just the fun part of showing it in ways that are
02:26:14 ◼ ► useful, trying to show you trends, trying to give you a sense of your habits and your patterns,
02:26:19 ◼ ► because sleep is kind of a weird health metric because you can't change it as easily as you can
02:26:26 ◼ ► for a lot of things. Like, if you're trying to close your exercise ring, you can go for a walk.
02:26:32 ◼ ► If you're trying to hit 10,000 steps, you can go for a walk. You can do things in a proactive way,
02:26:37 ◼ ► but like telling someone you're not sleeping enough, like, there's things they could do to
02:26:42 ◼ ► influence that. But if they're a new boy, like if they're a new parent, like, what are they going to
02:26:48 ◼ ► do? Like, I'm sorry, like, I have a newborn who wakes me up every two hours. Yes, I'm sleep
02:26:52 ◼ ► deprived. And like, I can measure that for you. But mostly what I can do is just give you a sense
02:26:57 ◼ ► of when you wake up in the morning and you're like, "I am a wreck." Like, why am I—and you
02:27:02 ◼ ► look at the thing and it's like, "Yeah, that's because you slept three hours last night."
02:27:05 ◼ ► Like, that's a useful bit of information that I can at least affirm you with. But, you know,
02:27:09 ◼ ► sleep tracking is weird in that way. And I think that's led to why Apple's implementation of sleep
02:27:14 ◼ ► tracking is so weird. Hmm. So that's a good example to me of like the difference between
02:27:22 ◼ ► a heuristic and an algorithm, which I guess the line is usually kind of fuzzy, you know,
02:27:28 ◼ ► where does an algorithm turn into a heuristic? But like inferring when you sleep from a bunch of data
02:27:35 ◼ ► that isn't really directly measuring sleep is, you know, that's a heuristic where you could be wrong.
02:27:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I would have never used it in the first place if I had to start and stop it automatically.
02:27:48 ◼ ► It's just, I just wouldn't remember to do it. And it's like, you know, and I wouldn't remember,
02:27:52 ◼ ► I wouldn't remember, I don't know which end of the sleep I'd be less likely to remember. I guess
02:27:56 ◼ ► at some point during the day, I'd remember, "Oh, I woke up and I guess I could go back." But—
02:28:01 ◼ ► Especially the going to sleep part, it's like the whole point of going to sleep is, "Oh, I'm
02:28:05 ◼ ► fading off here. You know, I'm falling asleep. I better turn out the—put the iPad down and just
02:28:31 ◼ ► Well, and the big one was, up till four in the morning, you would get, it would classify,
02:28:39 ◼ ► like if I fell asleep at three in the morning, it would count as last, you know, wouldn't say
02:28:45 ◼ ► technically by the book that's Tuesday or Wednesday morning, but you would classify it as
02:28:53 ◼ ► Tuesday night. And I would write to you and complain when I went to bed at like 4.15 that I was
02:29:03 ◼ ► My cutoff for the previous night's cut, like was it two or was it apparently not generous enough?
02:29:09 ◼ ► That in my mind, people falling asleep at 4.15 are not considering that the night before sleep,
02:29:17 ◼ ► So I've been a big fan. But what now—WatchOS 7 officially supports sleep tracking at the system
02:29:29 ◼ ► level. What is new from the system level, and what's new for you as—is this conducive to
02:29:44 ◼ ► So that question is the easier one. So Sleep++' downloads have been up since WatchOS 7 came out.
02:29:52 ◼ ► So it's clearly not, like if it's Sherlocked, it's Sherlocked in the best way possible that
02:29:55 ◼ ► is involving more people downloading it, where it's, if Apple, if anything, Apple has created
02:30:00 ◼ ► awareness that sleep tracking is a thing you want to use your watch for, which previously I had to
02:30:05 ◼ ► convince people that that was possible and that they should try and charge your watch when you're
02:30:09 ◼ ► showering so that you can wear it overnight. I had to kind of do that kind of messaging and convince
02:30:14 ◼ ► people that, well, I charge my watch overnight. If I don't charge it overnight, when am I ever
02:30:18 ◼ ► going to have my watch charged? And you've quickly realized that if you charge it when you're getting
02:30:22 ◼ ► ready in the morning and when you're getting ready for bed, it's very easy to typically,
02:30:26 ◼ ► like for a normal person, to have your watch charged. But I think what's Apple doing it is
02:30:33 ◼ ► just, what's tricky about it is they're, I think they're limited by the battery life of the Apple
02:30:38 ◼ ► watch and the level of analysis and detail that they can pull out of you while you're sleeping.
02:30:45 ◼ ► That for all their, like their fancy algorithms and for all they're trying to do, like they're
02:30:50 ◼ ► machine learning and it's, you know, sure second to none. But the reality is they're still only
02:30:55 ◼ ► collecting motion data heart rate every six, every six minutes. And that's it. Like if you imagine
02:31:02 ◼ ► the sensors that are active during the night, and I suppose they could potentially be using
02:31:05 ◼ ► the microphone, I'm not sure about that, but there's a limit to what they can do with that.
02:31:11 ◼ ► And so they, I think, decided early on, it seems, or at least at this point, is they're not going
02:31:17 ◼ ► down the road of clinical analysis of your sleep. They're not trying to, so in my development work
02:31:25 ◼ ► for Sleepless Plus, for a while I was wearing a variety of like more dedicated sleep tracking
02:31:31 ◼ ► devices. And there are ones that do continuous heart rate monitoring throughout the night.
02:31:36 ◼ ► And so this is, you know, essentially the mode that your watch is in when you're running a
02:31:40 ◼ ► workout, it's running a mode like that continuously. And so it's tracking your heart rate,
02:31:45 ◼ ► you know, multiple times per second. And with that kind of data, if you have continuous heart rate
02:31:50 ◼ ► data, you can really start to get into the weeds potentially about sleep stages. And, you know,
02:32:00 ◼ ► or then light sleep, where they can very easily tell when you're awake and when you're asleep,
02:32:04 ◼ ► because motion is a pretty bad metric for awake and asleep. Because if you're lying in bed reading,
02:32:10 ◼ ► and especially if you're reading on something like an iPad where you don't have to move your
02:32:17 ◼ ► but be completely awake. And there's no way for the watch to know that other than heart rate,
02:32:23 ◼ ► because your heart rate goes down when you fall asleep. And I think because Apple doesn't want it,
02:32:27 ◼ ► they don't have the battery budget to run the heart rate data all night long, they are limited
02:32:33 ◼ ► in kind of mostly they can just do the kind of things I do in Sleepless Plus, where they can say,
02:32:38 ◼ ► "It seems like you slept about this long, and you were generally asleep in ways that we can
02:32:44 ◼ ► be confident about this often." And I think that's meant that they, instead, rather than being a
02:32:50 ◼ ► clinical approach with sleep tracking, they're going the behavioral model for sleep tracking,
02:32:54 ◼ ► and they're just trying to do all the things that they can say. It's like, "We're going to
02:32:58 ◼ ► influence—you can make good choices to help you wind down and kick off this shortcut an hour."
02:33:09 ◼ ► you said you wanted to go to bed at 10 o'clock. It's 9.30. Maybe you should calm down. Would you
02:33:16 ◼ ► like to listen to some calm music?" They're going down that road where it's very much like this
02:33:22 ◼ ► behavioral modification version of sleep tracking, which I think makes sense because of the data they
02:33:27 ◼ ► have and because of what they could show you. They don't overpromise and say that it's a really
02:33:33 ◼ ► powerful sleep tracker, because it isn't. There are better sleep trackers out there. If you have
02:33:38 ◼ ► sleep apnea and need to track your sleep in great detail, the Apple Watch is not the device for you.
02:33:44 ◼ ► But what they're saying is, hopefully, the Apple Watch ends with sleep tracking on the Apple Watch
02:33:48 ◼ ► and WatchOS 7, it'll encourage you to sleep more and to have better sleep patterns and hygiene that
02:33:56 ◼ ► you're going to turn off your phone earlier and you're going to go to bed at a more consistent
02:34:02 ◼ ► time, which are the actual changes that you can actually make to your sleep. You can't change if
02:34:07 ◼ ► your kid wakes you up in the night, but you can certainly turn off your phone an hour before you
02:34:12 ◼ ► go to bed and not just stay up late reading Twitter or watching movies. That's a choice
02:34:17 ◼ ► that you can make, and so they can encourage you there. And then for the actual data perspective,
02:34:23 ◼ ► my model gets a little bit better because now they're also recording. The Apple Watch records
02:34:28 ◼ ► when it thinks I'm asleep. And so that is a confirmation or an adjustment that I can feed
02:34:34 ◼ ► into my model. Because if I didn't think you were awake, but the Apple Watch does think you're awake,
02:34:40 ◼ ► there's a very good chance they're right and I'm wrong because they're operating at a much lower
02:34:44 ◼ ► level, even if not with necessarily way more data. They definitely have a better amount of data,
02:34:51 ◼ ► and certainly better machine learning and a giant team of data scientists, I'm sure, who've finally
02:34:56 ◼ ► tuned their model. I'm just a guy in my basement writing codes. So you've got to imagine their data
02:35:01 ◼ ► is better than mine, so my model got better in watchOS 7. But for people who just want to track
02:35:07 ◼ ► their trends and get a sense of, "When do I go to bed on Tuesday nights?" The Health app is hopeless
02:35:12 ◼ ► for that kind of stuff. So Sleepless Plus is an app that is useful for everybody, even if they
02:35:18 ◼ ► do have watchOS 7 and use the system sleep tracking. Right. Like maybe Tuesday nights is
02:35:23 ◼ ► your basketball league or your volleyball and you exercise it, but it's for working professionals
02:35:28 ◼ ► and you play late games and you're exercising late in the day. And, oh wow, look at that. Every
02:35:34 ◼ ► Tuesday night I actually wind up sleeping earlier because I did this exercise, even though it was
02:35:40 ◼ ► later at night. Or maybe vice versa, maybe you come home and you're excited because you were,
02:35:44 ◼ ► you know, one way or the other, you might notice a trend. Yeah, I don't know why I kept up with it. I
02:35:51 ◼ ► honestly enjoy it. It's just interesting to me, and I did notice some trends. I don't know if it's
02:36:01 ◼ ► because of it. I have been going to bed earlier. I'm looking at my last seven days. I'm nowhere
02:36:06 ◼ ► close to 4 a.m. So sure, that's good. I don't need to like undo the John Gruber feature where I
02:36:13 ◼ ► push that to 6 a.m. No, but it is interesting and I'm glad to hear it. You know that it's like
02:36:19 ◼ ► to raise the awareness. I find it fascinating to do it. And I think like with all of the Apple Watch
02:36:27 ◼ ► sensors, I'm not sure any one of them is more accurate than a dedicated sensor, right? Like the
02:36:33 ◼ ► pedometer aspect is pretty close in my opinion. Like the times where I've actually like
02:36:40 ◼ ► like at Disney World or something. Like I haven't done it in years because it's got just too
02:36:46 ◼ ► accurate. But like you where you could go on Google Maps and measure a long walk and see what
02:36:52 ◼ ► the watch said. The watch was accurate enough where I don't know that any kind of pedometer
02:36:56 ◼ ► would be more accurate. But like for all most of the sensors, sure, you're going to get a more
02:37:02 ◼ ► accurate blood oxygen level from a dedicated blood oxygen sensor than the one on the watch, but it's
02:37:08 ◼ ► good to have it on the watch, right? And I think with that, it's what the value of the sensors on
02:37:15 ◼ ► the Apple Watch is there sort of the fact that they're always happening in the background and
02:37:20 ◼ ► you don't have to think about it. You don't have to go and look and like if you had a blood oxygen
02:37:24 ◼ ► sensor, you can have one of those little like finger clippy things that you picked up at CVS
02:37:28 ◼ ► Pharmacy. You'd have to go and remember to use it regularly for that data to be useful. Whereas what
02:37:35 ◼ ► the Apple Watch is doing is it's just always on in the background. There's like this ephemeral data
02:37:40 ◼ ► collection that you can then go back and look at. And that's I think where it becomes really
02:37:46 ◼ ► powerful. It isn't that it's the best at any one of those things necessarily. I think of the way
02:37:51 ◼ ► that Apple would say that they have the best camera in the world. I think that's a comment
02:37:57 ◼ ► that they would say, and they really mean it. When they say they're the best camera company in the
02:38:00 ◼ ► world, they mean it. And I don't think they would say that they are the best sleep tracker in the
02:38:05 ◼ ► world. And if they do, they're being a bit disingenuous because a dedicated device that is
02:38:10 ◼ ► doing huge amounts of things and is probably the size of a small iPad that you have to strap to
02:38:15 ◼ ► your head, that's probably going to be able to get more data out of it. But it's a good device. It can
02:38:21 ◼ ► give you enough data to encourage behavioral change and to give you awareness. Because I think what
02:38:27 ◼ ► you were saying, it's like you don't know why you do it, but you still kept up with it with sleep
02:38:30 ◼ ► tracking. What I've seen time and time again from customers is it's just making you aware of
02:38:36 ◼ ► something that you otherwise would never be aware of. Because you're never going to write down every
02:38:40 ◼ ► morning when you wake up, "When did I go to bed? When did I wake up?" and just keep track of it.
02:38:43 ◼ ► You're never going to do that. So it's never going to be a data that you can be aware of. And so once
02:38:49 ◼ ► it's something that is measurable and is measurable in a way that is ephemeral, you don't have to do
02:38:53 ◼ ► any work for it. The only work you have to do to track your sleep with an Apple Watch is make sure
02:39:01 ◼ ► that it's charged before you go to sleep. And you just get into a few habits with that of charging
02:39:06 ◼ ► it and you'll be fine. And once you've done that, now that data is there. And you don't have to check
02:39:11 ◼ ► in on it all the time. Like if you didn't open Sleep++ for three weeks and then you open it again,
02:39:16 ◼ ► I'll still have all the data that has been collected during that period. And it's available
02:39:20 ◼ ► to you, and if you're curious about it or it becomes a thing that you're aware of and it helps
02:39:26 ◼ ► you make choices that are like—it's not like it's punitive, but if you don't get a lot of sleep,
02:39:31 ◼ ► the line in Sleep++ that was that night will turn a subtle shade of red. And it'll be like, "Hey,
02:39:38 ◼ ► maybe that wasn't so good." And it's not going to be mean about it, but it's just saying, "Hey,
02:39:43 ◼ ► that's a situation you found yourself in, and it could be better." And that's because you don't
02:39:49 ◼ ► have to think about it. It's great. Don't eat three slices of pepperoni pizza at 12.30.
02:39:52 ◼ ► Yeah. So it's like, "I do that." I will say the other thing I got confused about upgrading to
02:39:58 ◼ ► watchOS 7, which I did by starting with this new review unit watch, was I went through,
02:40:10 ◼ ► and they were like, "Do you want to track your sleep?" And it's like, "Okay." And it's like,
02:40:16 ◼ ► without really asking for it, I was set up with the, "Hey, it's an hour from now. You want to go
02:40:22 ◼ ► to bed? Do you want to start winding down?" And it locks your phone out. And it's like,
02:40:26 ◼ ► "I don't want this. I find it patronizing. I'm a grown man. I don't need to be told to go to bed."
02:40:32 ◼ ► And again, if you like the feature, maybe you do need it. Maybe you get distracted and you play
02:40:38 ◼ ► video games later tonight. And it's helpful for you to have your watch say, "Hey, maybe you should
02:40:43 ◼ ► go to bed," and you'd lost track of time. I'm not saying, I don't want to be too judgmental about
02:40:47 ◼ ► it, but I hate the feature. But I also feel like part of that is Apple's desire to save battery
02:40:53 ◼ ► life because you go into that sleep mode on watchOS 7, and it turns the always-on display off,
02:41:00 ◼ ► and you have to tap it to see something. And you can see why Apple, as a company that wants to both
02:41:06 ◼ ► encourage people who are interested to wear their watch all night, but also doesn't want people to
02:41:11 ◼ ► feel like now they don't know when to charge it, to encourage them to use a mode where the screen
02:41:24 ◼ ► I mean, previously I've always had to just put it in—I got into the habit, I always flipped my
02:41:28 ◼ ► watch into theater mode when I got into bed, because that was just the way you had to do it
02:41:33 ◼ ► before. But what's weird with the sleep mode is the way that Apple tries to schedule it and have
02:41:38 ◼ ► it be this automatic thing where I find it kind of annoying where it also turns off the sleep mode in
02:41:46 ◼ ► the morning based on the time that you've said that you typically wake up. And I've definitely
02:41:52 ◼ ► had times when I'm sleeping in for whatever reason—I went to bed late, or I was up in the
02:41:58 ◼ ► night with a kid or whatever it is—and I feel like I've been woken up by the bright light of the
02:42:04 ◼ ► always—my new Apple Watch has a very bright always-on display, which they talked all about
02:42:10 ◼ ► it in the thing. It's twice as bright or three times as bright or whatever it is. They are true,
02:42:15 ◼ ► because in a dark room it has woken me up. And I did not set an alarm. I did not want this bright,
02:42:21 ◼ ► blaring light to be from my wrist as I'm lying my arms next to me on the pillow. And so I wish
02:42:29 ◼ ► that they didn't quite go down that road of it being so scheduled. It's like, "No, when I go to
02:42:35 ◼ ► bed, I'll hit the button. I'm in a dark room. It's going to be very obvious that I have not put it in
02:42:40 ◼ ► sleep mode yet. And in the morning when I wake up, it's going to be very obvious when I look for the
02:42:44 ◼ ► time and my screen is black. And turning my wrist, it still is black. I'm going to remember to turn
02:42:50 ◼ ► off sleep mode." And so I think that's—I've turned almost all of that off at this point for myself.
02:42:54 ◼ ► I had it on just so I'd know how it worked, but for myself, I've turned it all off and I just
02:43:01 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what I do too. And the only thing I automate is I automate Do Not Disturb,
02:43:05 ◼ ► which is what I've been doing ever since it was a feature. When I say, "Just don't send me
02:43:09 ◼ ► notifications between this hour and that hour," but then other than that, I manage it manually.
02:43:21 ◼ ► bright display waking you up in the middle of the night is waking up whoever you are in bed with.
02:43:26 ◼ ► Yes, that's not what you want. Why is there this beaming beacon of light stuck in our bed? This is
02:43:35 ◼ ► not sustainable. It is. But it's always like, "Be careful what you wish for." It's like,
02:43:41 ◼ ► I've been clamoring for an always-on display since the very first watch. I spent an embarrassing
02:43:45 ◼ ► amount of my Series 0 watch review complaining about the fact that the display isn't always on,
02:43:51 ◼ ► and I thought it was nothing but upside once they get the battery life to the point. And then I went
02:43:55 ◼ ► to bed with a very bright watch and I was like, "Oh, there is a downside." All right. Well, you
02:44:03 ◼ ► have been extremely generous with your time in an extraordinarily busy week. But what a great time
02:44:10 ◼ ► to have you on the show for the first time, David. I really appreciate it. So your apps,
02:44:16 ◼ ► 59 apps, we can't talk about all of them, but there's WidgetSmith and WatchSmith and Sleep++,
02:44:25 ◼ ► I think the only other app that I think is that's been a standby for me for many years is Perometer
02:44:31 ◼ ► ++, which is my step-counting app. And I feel like those four, WidgetSmith, WatchSmith, Sleep++,
02:44:37 ◼ ► and Perometer++, that's my business at this point. Those are the ones that have survived out of the
02:44:42 ◼ ► 59. Yeah. You know what? And speaking about, you said how you did a calendar app and that helped
02:44:47 ◼ ► you with WidgetSmith. Being so hooked into the health system had to have been a huge leg up,
02:44:53 ◼ ► because that's just not Apple's fault. It is complicated because it has to be complicated
02:44:59 ◼ ► for privacy reasons alone. Yes. It is one of the more convoluted systems, for a good reason. And
02:45:09 ◼ ► I think they do a really good job of making it usable, but also, yeah, there are a lot of
02:45:16 ◼ ► weird edge cases in the health system that I've spent a lot of time and a lot of gray hairs on.
02:45:27 ◼ ► Podcast-wise, you do have a podcast with Marco Arment, Under the Radar, which you can search for
02:46:03 ◼ ► Have you ever seen—there's an old—I think it was McSweeney's Internet Tendencies, where it was like
02:46:18 ◼ ► Oh, I think I've seen this kind of thing, yeah, where it's certain punctuations and things,
02:46:27 ◼ ► U-N-D-E-R-S-C-O-R-E underscore. But then, you know, anyway, I'll put it in the show notes. I swear.