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434: A Squirmy Soup of Rectangles

 

00:00:00   Hello everybody and welcome to our WWDC 2021 live, but not in person, but still live spectacular.

00:00:09   Although most people who hear it won't hear it live, but some of you are hearing it live. So here we are. It's our live spectacular.

00:00:13   I have been in a crabby mood all day for no reason whatsoever. You ever have one of those days like,

00:00:19   you know, against the Mondays, even though it's, uh, I guess, is it Monday? What is the, yeah, it is Monday, isn't it? Golly, I'm loopy.

00:00:26   Um, didn't sleep well last night and again, nothing in particular, just, you know, a random night where

00:00:31   I didn't sleep well, been kind of grumpy all day. And I went through the keynote and, and just very

00:00:37   briefly, I thought, okay, that's fine. And then I watched the State of the Union. I was like, no,

00:00:44   actually there's more here than I thought. And then I took my 11 Pro and I put the beta on it. So this

00:00:51   is an older phone, not older, but you know what I mean? It's not my daily phone. I put the beta on it and I've

00:00:57   only fiddled with it for a few minutes, but I think I was unreasonably grumpy when watching the keynote.

00:01:03   And I actually think there's a lot more and more interesting stuff here than I initially thought.

00:01:07   So I would be curious to hear if you guys were willing and interested in providing some sort of

00:01:14   broad overview. Did you at all feel grumpy ever? Am I just a crab apple or is there more here?

00:01:22   I'm trying to self-censor so you don't have to bleep me later. I'm trying to make your edit better, man.

00:01:26   You're welcome. So anyway, I was curious, you know, do you guys, if you'll do a very brief opening

00:01:32   statement, if we are even capable of such a thing, how was your general sentiment of the entire day?

00:01:38   I think it, I had a similar opinion as I think many of the reactions I saw online at first and,

00:01:46   you know, during like on Twitter and stuff, which was, it seemed kind of boring from a developer's

00:01:52   perspective. There is a bunch of stuff from a user's perspective, but from a developer's

00:01:56   perspective, there wasn't a lot that was shown off in the keynote. And the State of the Union

00:02:03   really honestly didn't expand on that very much. Like I kind of expected like, hey, we're going to

00:02:08   get to all the really deep technical stuff in the State of the Union. And it kind of didn't.

00:02:14   But once you start looking into the API diffs and the new APIs and stuff like that, it becomes a lot

00:02:22   more of an update, of a meaningful update at that kind of level. You know, I would almost compare it

00:02:28   to like a speed bump update in the hardware where you don't necessarily, there's not like a lot of

00:02:34   like in your face, like wow, massive new thing for developers here. But there is a lot of under

00:02:40   the hood stuff that has been updated. And a lot of it is not going to affect everyone. You know,

00:02:46   it might only affect you if you use certain APIs or whatever. But a lot of it is stuff that I think

00:02:50   everybody would use and has been waiting for. You know, things like obviously, you know, Swift having

00:02:54   async/await and actors, like that's a pretty significant change to the APIs that we all use.

00:02:59   And so that's a huge thing that's going to affect all of us in various ways. And there's stuff like

00:03:06   underlying framework changes. There's this new, completely new text engine. They revamped store

00:03:12   kit. Like there's all sorts of stuff like that, that many apps will find themselves benefiting

00:03:16   from at some point. And then there's always, you know, like the whole kind of like, you know,

00:03:21   little miscellaneous API niceties that come up. Like I noticed there's now an API for decoding and

00:03:29   thumbnailing images. You know, like it's stuff like that, that, you know, like off, off the main

00:03:34   thread, you know, things like we've all had to like, you know, paste snippets from StackOverflow

00:03:38   into our code base or import like little, like, you know, single class libraries and functions

00:03:43   to do these very common tasks. And to have that built in is just a little nicety, you know, and,

00:03:47   and so there's a whole bunch of stuff like that. You know, there's, there's, you know, a meaningful

00:03:52   update to Swift UI. I wouldn't at first glance call it like super revolutionary, but they, you know,

00:03:58   they, it's a nice point update to Swift UI basically. And so we have a lot of stuff here,

00:04:04   none of which is especially headline grabbing for developers for the most part, but a lot of just

00:04:10   kind of general niceties that form this kind of, you know, speed bump update to the software,

00:04:16   basically. And in a year that was probably massively disrupted by all the COVID work from

00:04:21   home stuff, I would imagine like this, this is pretty good considering all that. So I'm, I'm

00:04:28   happy with it so far. I mean, again, this is day one, haven't had time to look at it yet. Happy

00:04:32   with it so far. And also I think developers kind of need a break. Like, you know, it's kind of like,

00:04:38   like the iOS 12 year where like iOS 12, we kind of all got like a free summer that was mostly a

00:04:44   summer off if we wanted it to be because there wasn't, there weren't like that many breaking

00:04:49   new features that we had to implement. And this, I think this is going to be one of those summers

00:04:53   as well, which the whole world needs right now. We need like a time off, a break. And I think this

00:05:00   is going to be that kind of thing where on one hand, I don't see a lot of new ground for apps to

00:05:07   like have new capabilities that weren't possible before and, and to open up new markets that,

00:05:13   you know, I don't see a lot of that kind of change, but I also don't see a lot of

00:05:18   like crap that we all have to adopt. That's just kind of a churn, like, you know, new,

00:05:23   new system wide UI themes or stuff like that. Like, you know, that, that kind of stuff where

00:05:27   you're kind of obligated as a developer to do a bunch of work that might, that kind of like blocks

00:05:31   the rest of your feature work until you do that. Like there's not a lot of that either. So

00:05:35   ultimately I think it's going to be a really nice kind of lower key summer and fall where we're

00:05:41   going to be able to work on actual features of our apps and making the apps better if we want to,

00:05:46   as opposed to doing a bunch of churn work to keep up with the platform. The downside is there's not

00:05:51   a lot new for us to do. And until we can require iOS 15, a lot of the, a lot of the little niceties

00:05:56   won't really be available to us either. But that's not a bad thing for this summer.

00:06:01   Yeah. And it's funny you brought up the, the, the last year because it occurred to me earlier today,

00:06:07   and I meant to bring this up earlier that this feels like the last two WWDCs feel like what you

00:06:14   would expect given the timelines of COVID overlapping all of these two events. So last year's

00:06:20   WWDC, you know, COVID really became a thing in March and granted, I am sure that that is the

00:06:25   crunch time for Apple to really and properly get everything across the finish line. But at that

00:06:31   point they had had, you know, quite a lot, most of the year even, or most of the season perhaps,

00:06:36   to work on these new features. And last year's WWDC was very impressive. I mean, widgets alone,

00:06:41   I think was a really big deal and there was plenty more beside that. This year, I feel like,

00:06:46   certainly at a glance, I don't feel like there's a lot to be excited for, for developers at a glance.

00:06:51   And I didn't even think there was that much to be excited for as a user at a glance. But I think

00:06:57   part of that is because this was a full year of COVID that, that Apple had to work through. And

00:07:02   Apple is famously a company that does not do remote work well or didn't anyway. And so I think

00:07:08   it's not really that surprising, like you had said, Marco, that this year is perhaps less splashy

00:07:13   than, than last year was since that train had already left the station for WWDC 2020. And there

00:07:19   was nothing they can do to stop it. This year, you know, they had to fight with all of the

00:07:24   uncertainties of the whole of 2020 in order to deliver anything. But again, I really think that

00:07:31   I would, my initial take was wrong. And the more I think about it, the more I think there is some

00:07:35   really interesting stuff here. Jon, I interrupted you, I'm sorry. What was your quick opening

00:07:40   statement? I think, you know, we always talk about WWDC as this sort of balancing act, specifically

00:07:46   the keynote where, you know, especially when it's all virtual like this, the keynote is expected to

00:07:52   be viewed by many, many people and in many ways targeted at a much larger audience. Like when,

00:07:56   when we're there in person, it's like, yeah, we're in the room, but we understand that the

00:07:59   keynote is not just for us. Like it's a whole week long conference that's just for us. The

00:08:03   keynote is kind of for the public or whatever. So there's always this balance between how much

00:08:07   developer focused content versus how much Apple just saying, here's, you know, cause part of WWDC

00:08:12   is there's a new version of iOS. There's a new version of tvOS, new version of macOS. Here's

00:08:16   what they're called. Here's the features they have, right? Sometimes those features require

00:08:20   developers to do stuff, but sometimes they're just new features. And this is the time when Apple

00:08:23   announces those things, right? So we expect there's going to be a lot of content that's like, oh,

00:08:28   look, here's a new feature in the OS. It's our feature and there's no SDK for it. And just

00:08:33   FYI, it's there. Right. But sometimes there's tons of developer facing features. Oh, we've invented,

00:08:38   Xcode is released or we've invented a new programming language and you're all going to be

00:08:43   using it soon. Or, you know, Apple Silicon, you know, like sometimes is big developer focus. Right.

00:08:48   And then on top of that, there's the context of, you know, where we talked about the past couple

00:08:52   episodes of developer sentiment and the Epic trial and all the, you know, legislative stuff going on

00:08:59   and antitrust here and in Europe and all the other stuff like that sort of looms as a shadow over

00:09:04   this. And last week I think it was Marco more or less predicting like there's not going to be any

00:09:08   overtures in this WWDC keynote to try to like, you know, extend the olive branch or whatever to

00:09:16   developers. And for the most part that was right. But I think Apple still has to kind of walk that

00:09:22   line. We want developers to be excited about the new stuff we're going to announce. And this is the

00:09:27   developer conference. So it's not like we're going to have this sort of mournful tone where it's like,

00:09:32   Oh, I know everyone doesn't like us, but here's some new stuff. Right. So they have to, you know,

00:09:36   be enthusiastic, but they also, it's difficult for them to sort of find the right balance. And

00:09:41   it really depends on who the audience is. Maybe you don't care about any of this stuff and you

00:09:45   think your relationship with Apple is awesome. And you're just super excited. Like that audience

00:09:48   needs to be served as well. You know, and some, some developers are cranky about it and they need

00:09:53   to be, you know, like, I think it was a difficult situation. Right. So, and they always have some

00:09:59   kind of gag openings this time. They had a gag opening that was like, you know, if developers

00:10:03   could design the intro WWDC, how would it be? And depending on your point of view, it's like, Oh,

00:10:08   this was a fun little, you know, cause they do those guys all the time. It's obviously well

00:10:11   produced, highly polished, pretty funny as far as the, you know, these things go. But if you're in a

00:10:16   cranky mood, you watch that you're like, well, I'm not excited about WWDC. So these people who are

00:10:21   supposed to be developers being excited, it makes me cranky. But if you're actually enthusiastic

00:10:25   about, you know, what's going to be announced and looking forward to it, you're like, yeah,

00:10:30   it's a little funny opening. And I think that is sort of the difficulty of this year's WWDC,

00:10:35   aside from all the COVID stuff that you talked about, aside from all the, like, what do they

00:10:38   have to announce and what do they not have to announce? There is that difficulty of how does,

00:10:42   how does Apple present itself to the world and to its developers amidst that larger context? And I

00:10:47   think Apple did an okay job of it. And I think there was a slightly different tone in the state

00:10:51   of the union than there was in this one. But in general, there was just a lot of stuff for them

00:10:54   to announce. So mostly it was like, okay, we're going to describe all the things. And the final

00:10:58   thing I'll add is like, you know, no hardware this year, right? So, uh, that was the, we brought this

00:11:05   up in a couple of past shows without an Intel roadmap or any external sort of third-party

00:11:10   hardware limiter or gate on Apple's releases. If Apple doesn't tell us when they're ready with

00:11:17   their, whatever new chip that's going to go in the new Pro Max, we just don't know. Uh,

00:11:22   what is the new hardware just not ready? Maybe, uh, or maybe they're going to announce it, uh,

00:11:28   two weeks after WWDC. And the only reason they didn't do it now is because they had so much

00:11:32   content. I mean, despite the fact that we were saying like, this is boring and you know, there's

00:11:36   not that too much exciting stuff. It's not like they're, they were padding it. There was a lot

00:11:41   of stuff in it. And you know, I'm trying to wrap up this intro as fast as we can, because I think

00:11:45   as we go through this keynote, there was actually a lot of things granted a lot of them are end user

00:11:50   features, but still, it's not like they spent 10 minutes on an AR table demo, right? It's not like

00:11:54   they had five game developers come up and show their games, right? It was just con thing after

00:11:59   thing after thing. And they didn't even, as usual, they didn't even hit on like 50% of the stuff

00:12:04   that's available state of the union, which we're probably not going to get time to cover much of,

00:12:08   I think didn't go like, didn't have too much extra technical detail, mostly because they spent a long

00:12:14   time going into much more depth on a few topics that they decided were important, which is a

00:12:20   different approach than they had done in the past where they do sort of a survey course of like

00:12:23   quick hits on technical stuff that they didn't mention at all in the keynote, right? And each

00:12:27   little quick hit would be like, and here's a new thing, go to the session to see more. And here's

00:12:31   another new techie thing, go to this session to see more. And here's another new techie thing. Instead,

00:12:34   they really concentrated on a handful of things they thought were important and really spent time

00:12:39   with them, which is reasonable because again, there's a whole week worth of sessions. And I've

00:12:43   gone through the sessions and sort of like, you know, bookmark them or whatever to like,

00:12:46   know the ones that are going to watch. There's a ton of really interesting good sessions.

00:12:50   Granted, like Marco said, most of them being like, oh, here's a framework that you already use,

00:12:56   but it has new features. And you're going to want to use them because the new features are like

00:13:00   things that you've always wanted to do or things that weren't possible before,

00:13:03   or just enhancements that just make you smile. If you have any experience with the API, like, wow,

00:13:07   that's great. Like even something as simple as like SF symbols. Now you can do a multiple colors.

00:13:11   Cool. Like I saw that in the Apple apps during the keynote and I was wondering what the deal

00:13:15   with that was. And now I can use them myself and be make my own. That's not a big deal to anyone

00:13:19   who's not a developer, but that's exactly the content that you would expect to see in WWDC. So

00:13:23   sorry for making this go longer, but yeah, I think we need to dive into the announcements because

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00:15:21   All right, so let's dive in. Opening video, I don't think there's really that much else to say

00:15:30   about it other than, hey, there was a DeLorean. That was neat. I actually enjoyed the Memoji

00:15:36   audience that Tim walked out in front of. I mean, it's cheesy and weird, but given that we live in a

00:15:41   weird time, I thought it was kind of cute. And then here we are at iOS 15. So there were several

00:15:47   themes. There was stay connected. There was focus, I think. I'm trying to get these right now. Stay

00:15:52   connected, explore the world around you and one other that I apparently didn't take good enough

00:15:57   notes for. I don't think you have to remember these themes because we will never see them again.

00:16:01   All right, good talk. So let's start with FaceTime. There's spatial audio for FaceTime, which again,

00:16:05   if I had a device that supported spatial audio, I'd be more enthusiastic about this, but it seems

00:16:10   clever. So my understanding is if you're in a multi-person FaceTime call, they'll arrange the

00:16:17   people on screen in a particular way. So let's say the three of us were on a FaceTime call.

00:16:21   Well, perhaps John is to the left-hand side of the screen and Marco's to the right-hand side of the

00:16:26   screen. Well, as I hear John speaking, it will be panned a little bit to the left-hand, to the left

00:16:34   headphone. So it sounds like he's coming from my left, slightly anyway. And then if Marco talks,

00:16:40   it'll sound like he's coming from my right ever so slightly. So it helps you, I guess, have a little

00:16:45   bit of spatial awareness as to the conversation and it makes it feel, one would assume, more real.

00:16:50   It's a little thing, but I think that's pretty cool.

00:16:52   I think it was a good use of spatial audio because I've been a little bit down on trying to use it

00:16:56   for TV or music or other contexts where the audio was professionally produced to be a certain way.

00:17:01   And now this thing is trying to mess with it to make it sound like it's coming from a place that

00:17:04   it's not. But that doesn't appeal to me, but this is a perfect application. In a FaceTime call,

00:17:10   you're probably not playing high-fidelity music to each other. Although they did emphasize that

00:17:17   if you don't like this feature, you can turn it off. But it's just people talking. And there were

00:17:22   a bunch of features related to FaceTime that were just making it easier to hear people talking. The

00:17:27   noise canceling, the leaf blower where they're trying to isolate the person's voice and remove

00:17:36   background noise. And then spatial audio. If you are talking to your whole family on an iPad,

00:17:42   spatial audio making the voices slightly more distinguishable by position, it's fine. It's cool.

00:17:49   Granted, you probably can recognize the voices of your family anyway, but this is a perfect

00:17:55   application of this type of thing. And I'm glad to see it spread throughout their product line.

00:18:02   One of the things is that the grid view, which is now a feature because the previous floating boxes

00:18:08   and everything are, some people found unappealing. So now you can have a plain old grid view. And one

00:18:14   of the things they added to the grid view is kind of like the tvOS high contrast selection that we

00:18:19   talked about on a previous show. I knew you would be so happy about this. That has come to FaceTime.

00:18:24   Now the person who's speaking can get a nice white outline around the little round

00:18:28   rack that they're in, which is neat. I'm liking these. It makes some sense. I don't know if this

00:18:36   is just coincidence or if it's just that prioritization, but with COVID, everyone working

00:18:39   from home, a lot of the features that we're about to talk about with iOS or this whole stay connected

00:18:44   thing are features that would help if you are spending a lot of time working from home doing

00:18:51   video conferencing with people. Yeah, it's a really good direction to go. I mean,

00:18:55   obviously, you know, the sooner they can get this out, the better because people really have needed

00:18:59   this for a long time. And if anything, it might be a little bit late for the like massive wave

00:19:03   of COVID shutdowns. But you know, first of all, COVID isn't over yet. And it's probably a long

00:19:08   time from being totally over in all places in the world. But also, I think we're in for an era of

00:19:15   a lot more remote work than we had before, because I think a lot of people

00:19:20   will choose to, you know, if their if their businesses will allow them to, and I think many

00:19:24   will, I think a lot of people will choose to stay mostly or entirely remote who have been remote for

00:19:29   this past year. So I think I think this will actually be really nice if they can get people

00:19:34   to use it. On that point, getting people to use it. I mean, FaceTime has always been very, very

00:19:42   good for like, you know, one to one, you know, family and friends used and great for that.

00:19:48   I still haven't really seen anybody that I know use group FaceTime. And I mean, one reason for

00:19:55   that is because it was until this Apple device only, but the fact that they made a web view

00:20:01   for FaceTime, like a web participant interface for FaceTime. That is a pretty big deal.

00:20:06   Yep, yep. I couldn't believe it when I heard that. And they actually mentioned Android,

00:20:12   if I'm not mistaken during the keynote. And it won't be native, like you had said, but the fact

00:20:16   that it's even possible is tremendous. You know, when we used to travel, you know, do you remember

00:20:21   that? Do you remember going places? That was fun. When we used to travel, you know, when we would

00:20:25   hand the kids off and typically, you know, we would have like one set of grandparents have them

00:20:30   for a couple days and the other set have them for a couple days. And my in-laws are all on Android

00:20:35   devices. And so we would, you know, use Google Duo, which was fine, to be honest. And then we

00:20:39   would use FaceTime with my family. But to have just one system on my end anyway, that works for

00:20:46   anyone would be really, really nice. And so I'm very curious to see what the implementation feels

00:20:50   and looks like on Android. I'm sure it won't be stupendous, but if it's at least decent, that'll

00:20:56   be really great. And Apple also pointed out, by the way, that they are still encrypting end to end

00:21:01   even on the web. Yeah, I mean, and one, I think one very limiting factor here is going to be that

00:21:06   it seems like the web version, I think, only is available through the FaceTime links feature,

00:21:11   where you kind of schedule calls with like a web link in advance. I don't think there's going to be,

00:21:16   at least from what they showed today, I don't think there's going to be a way for people on Android

00:21:21   or web or Windows or whatever to initiate a FaceTime call themselves or to have FaceTime,

00:21:26   you know, between each other without somebody on an Apple device being in the call. So,

00:21:30   I mean, I mean, they might like, here's the thing about the web thing. Like we know other companies

00:21:34   have done web-based teleconferencing before, like Google Hangouts or whatever. Right. And all the

00:21:37   systems like to use them at all, for the most part, they want you to be logged in with whatever their

00:21:42   identity is. Like, so you're logged into your Google account and then you can initiate a Google

00:21:46   Hangout or whatever the hell they're calling the things these days, meetings, right? If you are

00:21:52   like, you know, a bunch of people who don't all have Apple devices, what are the chances that your

00:21:56   friends or relatives who have Android devices are logged in somewhere with an Apple ID? Chances seem

00:22:02   pretty low, especially if they don't have any Apple devices, and that is Apple's identity system.

00:22:06   So the idea that someone else would initiate a call, but they don't have any Apple devices,

00:22:12   they would have to make an Apple ID, log in, and then maybe, we don't know if this is true,

00:22:18   but maybe there's a web interface to FaceTime where, you know, if you're logged in with your

00:22:22   Apple ID, you can initiate a FaceTime call. But even before we get to whether that is the case or

00:22:27   not, again, what are the odds that someone is going to sign up for an Apple ID? So it's nice

00:22:32   that they did the web version. If their real play was like, we want to be the end-all be-all video

00:22:39   communication thing for the world, regardless of platform, like what they finally came around to

00:22:44   after many years with Apple TV+, which is like, look, we can't just be on our own devices. We

00:22:48   have to be in every single television. We have to be on Roku. We have to be everywhere. They're not

00:22:53   doing that yet with FaceTime. This is a baby step in that direction. But if they wanted to do that,

00:22:57   they got to make an Android app. They got to let people send and receive calls from like their

00:23:01   Google account. And it doesn't seem like they want to do that. So this is kind of weird because a lot

00:23:06   of the features they rolled out are sort of catch up with Zoom, like where you can blur the background

00:23:10   and you can, you know, share documents and watch things at the same time. We'll talk more about

00:23:15   this in a little bit. Tons of awesome features that I love that I've wanted for years and years,

00:23:19   but the sort of cross-platform heterogeneous, non-all-Apple family play is still

00:23:26   questionable. Like I like the FaceTime links and I like the fact that they're doing something,

00:23:31   but it seems like it's kind of, if you were in a friend group or family that was like this and

00:23:35   everyone was doing it on FaceTime and you've got like this link and you have to use the web view

00:23:38   and like everyone else is in the native app, it just doesn't feel like it, you know, you're on

00:23:44   equal footing with everybody else. And I feel like you'd probably resent that and say, why can't we

00:23:47   all just use Zoom? That stinks everywhere. I mean, to be fair, like people who choose to use Android

00:23:53   or Windows probably aren't super into having a first-class experience with their computing

00:23:57   devices. I mean, but at least they feel like they're used to, everyone's used to using Zoom

00:24:02   or used to using whatever they use for, I don't know, it really depends on the group. Like,

00:24:05   you know, when I think about my use of video conferencing, I have to use Microsoft Teams at

00:24:09   work because that's what everybody uses. And at least that's homogeneous where it's like, look,

00:24:13   everyone in my company uses Teams, so, you know, everyone's going to be on Teams. We all complain

00:24:17   about Teams together and commiserate. Other things for like school stuff for my kids, that seems to be

00:24:21   all on Zoom, right? And, you know, with my family, it's FaceTime because we're mostly Apple. So there

00:24:26   is kind of this idea that within a particular group, there's a platform that we all agree on.

00:24:31   It's just that when all the things that I described, it's an equal experience, maybe not a

00:24:35   great experience, but an equal experience for everybody. And this FaceTime thing is now going to

00:24:39   be some of the participants get fancy native apps on their iPad or iPhone, and some people are

00:24:45   looking at a web page that hopefully works on their Android phone. I will say also the audio

00:24:51   stuff they mentioned very, very briefly, John mentioned voice isolation, the ML based filtering,

00:24:56   filtering out background noise, that's a really cool thing. This is not the first, you know,

00:25:01   software to ever do that, but it's not that common yet. And Apple can probably do a pretty good job

00:25:06   of it. So I'm looking forward to hearing that. Also, they threw in right at the end there,

00:25:11   there's also an option for what they called wide spectrum sound, which picks up like all frequencies

00:25:16   of audio, because normally, all of these video chat and audio chat apps, they normally apply

00:25:22   very, very heavy filtering and gating to the audio to try to cram it down into the smallest bit rate

00:25:28   possible. And they optimize it for speech. And they and they throw out anything that is probably

00:25:33   not speech frequencies. And so to have this option to not do that, I think it's going to sound

00:25:39   incredible, because we're so accustomed to, you know, phone calls and phone call like experiences,

00:25:46   sounding the way they do with with like the very aggressive voice only compression,

00:25:50   to turn that off and to actually hear all of the audio frequencies without all the aggressive

00:25:55   filtering and gating and everything is probably going to sound incredible. So I'm actually really

00:26:00   excited to try that out. That actually relates to the other thing was is a share play business,

00:26:05   right. So one of the places where what you're describing comes into play is if you're on a

00:26:08   zoom meeting or whatever, and there's a song you want someone to play, and you like play it on your

00:26:12   phone, and you hold your phone up to the microphone or something, it sounds awful, right? Because

00:26:15   it's taking like music and then just trying to narrow it through whatever filters they have to

00:26:21   just be speech. And plus, it's like going out of a tinny speaker into a microphone, right? If what

00:26:25   you actually want to do is have multiple people on a, you know, video conference together, either

00:26:30   listening to or watching something at the same time, why bother even trying to smuggle it over

00:26:35   the connection that you're talking over? If it is a thing that is available on the internet,

00:26:39   we can all watch it together. Let's all watch Ted lasso together, right? And then we're all watching

00:26:42   presumably full fidelity streams from our own location that are synchronized with each other.

00:26:46   Again, lots of other sites and apps have done this and services like Netflix. And,

00:26:50   you know, I know a bunch of people who have done this, my kids have done it where you

00:26:53   simultaneously watch with a bunch of friends again, mostly because of COVID because you can't

00:26:56   all be in the same house. But just the basic functionality like this is all you know,

00:27:01   makes sense in the context of COVID. But even setting aside COVID, all of these features are

00:27:05   features that are useful outside of the context of COVID to be able to share media at full fidelity

00:27:11   to be able to share documents, screens, all screen sharing, oh my god, like, how many times do I do

00:27:16   tech support for my parents, where they have to point one of their iOS devices cameras at the

00:27:21   screen of another iOS device? Right? I can screen share on the Mac, but when they have a problem

00:27:26   with their iOS device, it's like, and then I'm trying to correct their, you know, I can't see

00:27:29   the screen anymore. And it's not in focus. And it's a really difficult job. screen sharing iOS,

00:27:33   like the idea that we have this incredibly high bandwidth connection between each other where we

00:27:38   can see each other in real time and video. And the only thing we were using it for is to just see

00:27:42   people's faces. It's so great to finally say, let's, let's, let's share a document. Let's look

00:27:47   at charts. Let's share a song. Let's watch a video at the same time. I really hope this gets

00:27:52   wide adoption because this is exactly what I wanted. I always hated the feeling that

00:27:56   I was connected with somebody. But the only things I was allowed to send over this connection was

00:28:00   just a picture of myself. And I've wanted to do anything else like if we're on a call with the

00:28:03   family. And even if we just want to look at some recent pictures, oh, did you see that picture I

00:28:07   recently added to the shared album? Oh, Uncle Joe isn't in the shared album. Oh, I can add you. Can

00:28:11   I just show the picture right now so we can all look at it together? Because we're all on a

00:28:14   FaceTime call. And somehow I can't bring up a photo. This is going to be a big quality of life

00:28:20   upgrade for sort of communication over the internet for people who have high OS devices.

00:28:26   Jared Ranere: Yeah, SharePlay is really exciting for those kind of like, I think, like, I don't

00:28:32   know how many people are going to do what Apple demoed with like watching a movie together.

00:28:37   I think it's great to have that capability. But again, like I think because group FaceTime seems

00:28:42   to have not really taken off so far, that might be kind of optimistic. Like the whole time I was

00:28:47   watching that I was thinking back to iMessage apps, and like when that debuted, and Apple had this

00:28:54   idea that how this would work in practice where people would install these iMessage apps and then

00:28:59   coordinate stuff inside iMessage and pick your takeout orders like from your takeout order iMessage

00:29:05   app altogether. And in practice, nobody really did that. I think with FaceTime with SharePlay in

00:29:11   FaceTime, I think that's probably going to be how it ends up. I bet most people are probably not

00:29:16   going to be using it to watch movies and stuff together. But if you can use it to do things like

00:29:19   screen sharing more easily or showing a photo like that is probably going to be a really nice

00:29:24   improvement. And that's going to be probably very widely used.

00:29:27   Jared Ranere Yeah, I agree with both of you guys that having some some ability to screen share is

00:29:33   likely to be a tremendous and very, very awesome feature. I have, using Plex, done, you know,

00:29:41   watched together a couple times. And this was mostly with my brother-in-law and his fiance. And

00:29:46   it does work well. And I'm sure Apple's would work just as well, if not better. It works well. And I

00:29:52   actually enjoyed watching a couple movies that way. But the thing of it was, was I don't think I would

00:29:57   necessarily enjoy having a FaceTime call with video all happening while we're watching a movie. You

00:30:03   know, like, I feel like I want to be able to watch something together, especially something as long

00:30:10   as a movie, but I don't want to have like my face on screen the entire time I want. I want to be

00:30:16   able to like, get the movie going. And you know, do the play pause thing where if they pause, it

00:30:20   pauses me if I pause it pauses them. But I want to be able to like chat about the movie or something

00:30:24   over iMessage. I don't want to necessarily do that over FaceTime. And I hope that that's the thing.

00:30:28   They always showed it, or at least one any recollection I have, is that they always showed it

00:30:33   as, "Oh, we are video chatting and simultaneously watching Ted Lasso," which is just not something

00:30:38   I'm personally into. But it very well could be that it will work in this more flexible way.

00:30:46   We just don't know yet. And it is worth noting that in the State of the Union, which we're

00:30:50   probably not going to get to today, they did mention that there's a whole API for this.

00:30:54   So you can, as an app developer, do your own like cut of this. And in fact, they had,

00:31:02   what I swear they said it was a demo app. Some people on Twitter said it was notes, but they had

00:31:06   something where they were doing like a digital whiteboard with three different people on iPads

00:31:11   with pencils, all drawing on the same whiteboard at the same time. And if I understood them right,

00:31:15   the implication was that this was all done using these new APIs. So I'm, even though I have no

00:31:19   particular need for this for anything that I'm working on, I'm very interested to see what does

00:31:25   this API look like? Can you provide some arbitrary data that Apple will just sync in real time so you

00:31:32   can do this whiteboard app? Or is that being treated as video? How is that all working under

00:31:36   the hood? And I'm very curious to look into it, but I haven't had time yet.

00:31:39   **Matt Stauffer** And related to that are the things where they will gather up items shared

00:31:43   with you via messages. If someone sends you a photo or whatever, and pull them into the apps

00:31:47   that they belong in, things people, if they send you a link, those are visible in Safari. If they

00:31:51   send you a podcast thing that's visible in Apple podcasts, I was saying TV show visible in Apple TV,

00:31:56   like sort of this unification, because we all have this experience of like, where was that thing?

00:32:00   Did someone email it to me? Well, cause we're all looking at our email. Was that in a message? Now

00:32:04   I have to go to messages and try to scroll backwards in a message thread or do a search. And

00:32:08   if that content was just simply surfaced where we, you know, if it was a photo, it will be surfaced

00:32:13   somewhere in the photos app. And if it was a link to a website, it'll be for service somewhere in

00:32:17   Safari. It's not quite where we want to be in terms of what if I don't use the podcast app? What if I

00:32:21   don't use Safari? What if I, you know, I use Netflix and not Apple TV, like, but baby steps

00:32:26   here, but like, just, I feel like all of these features are sort of raising the bar, raising the

00:32:31   floor of like, what can we expect as the baseline feature set and the baseline feature set of sort

00:32:35   of communication on the internet has really gone up in recent years, especially with the sort of

00:32:39   COVID forest advent of, you know, video conferencing, a thing that, you know, not too many decades ago,

00:32:45   it's like, well, that's great if you have a good connection, but you're not going to be doing it

00:32:48   normally. And now it's just kind of like status quo, like at the very least real-time audio

00:32:52   communication, maybe with some grainy video. And I would say within all the apps like Slack and

00:32:58   teams and everything, the expectation that you can share some portion of your screen, either your

00:33:02   whole screen or a window or share a document or do stuff like that. That's sort of what people expect

00:33:06   from their devices. And, you know, again, Apple is held back by the need to have all Apple devices

00:33:14   or have some subset of the people be on the web. And so that's still a problem for them, but

00:33:18   within smaller circles of people who all do have Apple devices, even if it's just within a single

00:33:23   family or just two or three friends, the expectation that there's things you can do

00:33:28   when communicating that are richer than just sending plain text messages or sending photos

00:33:35   back and forth, or maybe doing a FaceTime call that you can sort of integrate all these things

00:33:38   together. I think people will just become accustomed to doing that. I think a lot of the

00:33:42   features that Apple is doing here are catch up with things that people already are accustomed

00:33:45   to doing from their work experience. So I think this is necessary changes for the times, but also

00:33:51   I look forward to this sort of, you know, as a raising the floor of like, this is just, you know,

00:33:57   what kids will eventually expect when they're adults that of course you can do this from all

00:34:00   your devices with all your friends, even if it's in a different app, depending on your platform.

00:34:05   Yep. So next, we learned a little bit about messages and they've revamped a few things

00:34:13   in there, particularly like the way photos look, for example. There's, as you mentioned,

00:34:17   I think John was a second ago, there's like shared with you that you can see in messages

00:34:21   and Apple news and other places as well. They made a very brief mention and showed,

00:34:27   if I understood it right, it looked like when somebody sent a picture of like an event that

00:34:34   you were also at to you via iMessage, that it like somehow ended up inside photos as kind of like that

00:34:42   group, you know, everyone's at this, everyone's at the keynote. We all took pictures of each other

00:34:46   and we sent them to each other and it all just ends up in the right spot in photos.

00:34:49   I really wish they had expanded upon that. I don't know much about it, but that looked very

00:34:53   interesting to me. And it seemed like in a way it was like baby steps into like a family sharing

00:34:59   across multiple families. You know what I mean? Like a broader family sharing. And I thought that

00:35:03   was very interesting. I think it's like what I just said before, that if things are sent to you,

00:35:08   rather than having to go to the message app to dig them out, because they are photos,

00:35:11   that information will be surfaced in the photos app. I don't know. And I suspect not that they're

00:35:16   not like, Oh, they're suddenly part of your photo library. Right. I think it's just sort of a view

00:35:20   into data that exists, like wherever messages stores that I'm not sure when we all get these

00:35:25   devices and start actually using them to communicate, it should become clear, but

00:35:28   it definitely doesn't seem like, you know, because you wouldn't want, it's kind of like the old

00:35:32   Google contacts thing. You wouldn't want every single picture someone sends you via messages to

00:35:36   be a permanent addition to your photo library. Right. And so I'm pretty sure that's not what

00:35:40   they're doing, but it is nice to be able to just go to photos and click on shared with me and be

00:35:43   able to scroll through a list of photos and find that thing that was sent to you a week ago. Yep.

00:35:47   So next we talked about focus and I, like I said earlier at first glance, I was kind of like, okay,

00:35:53   but I do have a iOS 15 beta on my old iPhone. And I played with this more than I played with

00:36:00   anything else about the only thing I've played with really. And I had a glance, I really like

00:36:05   it a lot. So what this is, is, you know, we have do not disturb today and imagine you had

00:36:11   N number of peer things that are equivalent to do not disturb, but set up differently. So out of the

00:36:19   box, it comes with do not disturb driving sleep and then personal and work. And some of these are

00:36:24   set up. Some of them aren't, but the idea is, Oh, and you can also create a completely and totally

00:36:29   custom one. And they also have a couple of other like example templates, fitness gaming and reading.

00:36:35   But if you create a totally custom one, you know, you get to choose a color and an icon kind of like

00:36:40   shortcuts. And then it says, okay, notifications from people choose the people you want

00:36:44   notifications from when this focus is turned on. So if you're in this mode, let's say it's work or

00:36:51   whatever, then you can say, well, I want Marco and John and Aaron to be able to blow through and, and

00:36:59   I want to be able to receive their notifications, but my parents and my brothers, eh, they're not

00:37:04   good enough. They can wait. And I wouldn't see notifications from them. And so you can choose

00:37:09   whatever context you want. Then it says, okay, notifications from apps, choose the apps you want

00:37:12   notifications from when the focus is turned on. So it's same story. So maybe I want notifications

00:37:16   from Slack, but I don't need notifications from Twitter. Really probably nobody ever needs

00:37:21   notifications from Twitter, but you get the, you get the idea. And so you can choose what apps you

00:37:25   would like to have notifications from. And then in certain contexts, both apps, and we learned this

00:37:32   in state of the union apps can say, well, this particular notification is really time sensitive.

00:37:37   Say your DoorDash order is just arrived or something like that, or your, your lift is here.

00:37:41   And I'm very curious to see if shady developers will abuse the snot out of this. I certainly

00:37:49   hope not, but do expect it. I guarantee you they will. Right. But the idea is if you're a good,

00:37:54   honest developer, then you'll say, you know, most of them, most of these lists and notifications are

00:37:59   just, you know, marketing or what have you. They're not that big a deal, but this one that your

00:38:03   drivers here, that's time sensitive. And so in these, in the focus, you can optionally say,

00:38:09   Hey, if there's something time sensitive, even if it's from an app that I haven't specifically

00:38:13   blessed to be in this focus, then you can say, okay, it'll, we can allow that to come through.

00:38:18   And then I believe in, in iMessage, it will say, Hey, this person is trying to focus. And it's very

00:38:26   much like a do not disturb while driving. Yeah, this person is trying to focus, but if this is

00:38:29   really important, you know, tap this link or whatever, tap this button and we'll allow you to,

00:38:34   to bust through that. And again, I've only played with it for a few minutes. I haven't

00:38:39   spent a lot of time with it, but this looks really, really cool. And it seems like a very

00:38:45   appley and very well done balancing of flexibility with, Oh my God, I don't want to spend 30 minutes

00:38:53   setting up this focus, you know, because I can, I can fathom ways that it would be nicer to have

00:38:59   more granular customization, but then you're going to be spending all this time setting up all of

00:39:04   your different focuses and tweaking them just right. And unless you're CGP cray, that's probably

00:39:08   not something you want to bother with. And this seems like it's really struck the, the, the right

00:39:13   balance between flexible and also not a pain to set up. Now, do either of you guys have, I don't

00:39:21   think you do, John Marco, do you have the beta on anything yet? Only on a test iPhone. It's my

00:39:27   old iPhone seven actually. It is even sending them a real Apple ID. It's like, you know, a test ID

00:39:32   that I have like sent into nothing, um, you know, purchase nothing. I have to like, it's weird. So

00:39:36   it's always kind of funny, like trying to get files and stuff to it because it's not my Apple

00:39:41   ID. So it's like, I have to like airdrop stuff over it's anyway. Um, but ultimately I am very,

00:39:48   very happy to see this focus focus their focus on focus because I've, I love do not disturb. And

00:39:58   that has really like just using do not disturb and on the auto DND settings, like for every night,

00:40:03   like when I'm asleep, that was such a big like iOS quality of life improvement. And the, the,

00:40:10   the one big complaint most people had about doing disturb was we would like more granularity on,

00:40:16   on what this means. And it seems like they've given that to us and more with this focus system.

00:40:22   This I think is going to be probably the most like note noticeable and noteworthy change for iOS

00:40:29   power users in all of iOS 15 because every power user I know uses do not disturb in some way.

00:40:35   And so to have these kinds of like multiple contexts where you can set different modes,

00:40:40   you want to be in for different conditions and to have each one of those be more customizable

00:40:46   to begin with. That's a great thing. Um, as for the notification, uh, like priority system,

00:40:52   I do think that will be largely either abused or ignored by many apps because everything about

00:40:57   everything about notifications is largely abused by tons of apps and the rules are never enforced

00:41:04   against them. So I do expect it to be widely abused, including by Apple for their own promotions,

00:41:10   for all their own ads, building that system. Like I guarantee you it will be abused. That being said,

00:41:15   if you ignore or if you don't expect much out of the notification priority features,

00:41:21   and if you instead just look at the focus system as a whole and its customized ability and its

00:41:25   rules and everything, I'm very excited about that. I think the challenge with all these systems,

00:41:30   like, you know, where by iOS 15, 15, uh, that's the time when you get down to, okay,

00:41:36   now it's time to actually even add more flexibility on top of the notifications.

00:41:40   And I think one of the prerequisites of the system is like what they added, uh,

00:41:44   in past releases, you know, when a notification notification comes up at that moment in that

00:41:49   notification, you can take actions to be like, don't show me these anymore. You know what I mean?

00:41:53   Like as opposed to digging through a, you know, an app or whatever. And so that's trying to meet

00:41:57   the challenge of these features. And the challenge is what if you're not an iOS power user, we want

00:42:03   people who just buy a phone and use it to also see some benefit. Now you might look at this and say,

00:42:08   this is just for the people who want to tweak everything. Just so that's a power user feature.

00:42:11   And it's great. We want those to be in the, in the iOS, right? By 15, that's when you start adding

00:42:15   those. But I think Apple also feels a need to try to make it so these features are useful to

00:42:20   other people. Some of that involves annoying prompting. Do not disturb is a great example.

00:42:24   We all use it. We all probably can't live without it. I think we've all met people who have been

00:42:29   iPhone users for years who have no idea that do not disturb exists. And very often those same

00:42:33   people will complain. I hate all these notifications that I'm getting. Oh, and I always, I shut down my

00:42:38   phone at night. So the notifications won't wake me up and you tell them about do not disturb,

00:42:41   that you can set times when you're don't want to be disturbed and it won't bother you. And they're

00:42:45   like, really? And I'm like, yeah, it really works. Right. So that's the level most people add is they

00:42:49   don't even know about do not disturb, which is the simplest of simple things, let alone this whole

00:42:53   world. Right. So to get people on board with features like this, Apple has to sort of in the

00:42:57   onboarding prompt them and say, you know, Oh, is there some time you don't want to be disturbed?

00:43:02   Maybe tell me about it now. Or at the time you get a notification, Hey, do you, you know, want

00:43:07   to see notifications like this from now on? Kind of like the whole thing of like, Oh, this app was

00:43:11   tracking your location in the background. Do you want to keep letting it do that? We find that

00:43:14   annoying because we're like, yes, I already made that decision. Why are you asking me again? But

00:43:17   the reason Apple prompts for this is they want to let more people benefit from these features than

00:43:22   just the people that know about them. And there is some, there is some fallout for the expert users

00:43:26   of being like, why are you bothering me with this? Right. But I feel where Apple is coming from.

00:43:30   And I think a lot of these features that, you know, with the apps giving notification types

00:43:37   so that we can filter out or whatever, yes, they will be abused by third-party apps. They'll say

00:43:41   everything I have to say is the highest possible priority. But because if Apple has done a good

00:43:46   job with this feature, which I think we've done a middling job, because you can at the time,

00:43:49   you're annoyed, take action. And if an app does that to you a bunch of times, you can take action

00:43:55   and say, stop sending these. And also because Apple seems so proactive and like inferring

00:44:01   behavior and saying, we've noticed that this app has spammed you with a bunch of notifications.

00:44:05   Are you sure you want to allow it to have notifications and prompting you extra, extra

00:44:08   prompting you with a button right in your face saying, no, I don't want to see them anymore.

00:44:12   It will allow some kind of feedback loop between the user and the annoying app, even if they have

00:44:18   no idea would not have no idea otherwise how to go into settings and, you know, disable the thing.

00:44:24   And then as for Apple's notifications, I think Apple will actually correctly categorize all the

00:44:29   notifications. I think part of the bind Apple has been in is they, they want to send these

00:44:33   notifications. Yeah, sometimes because they just want to upsell things and make money because some

00:44:37   business unit needs to have more people sign up for a thing. I get that. But also sometimes

00:44:41   like even just for like the notifications I got today from the developer app,

00:44:46   like there are notifications that they want to send you. And I, you know, I want that app to be

00:44:51   able to send notifications, but not all notifications are equal. I think most Apple apps that aren't

00:44:56   directly tied to trying to get more people to pay for a thing will in fact, and even the other ones

00:45:02   will, will correctly categorize their notifications and prioritize them and say, this one's informative.

00:45:06   This is the highest priority. I don't think the Apple apps will say the highest possible priority

00:45:11   is to say, Hey, you might want to sign up for, you got a free month of Apple TV or plus or whatever.

00:45:17   Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they will mark that as highest priority. But I think these, uh,

00:45:21   notification levels are exactly what Apple needs to do the writer thing with their own

00:45:29   notifications. Cause they're on, they're going to send them. They want to be able to send them,

00:45:32   but they would love to be able to identify, categorize them and say, this is a notification,

00:45:38   not a big deal. This is a casual one. Maybe you look at this if you don't want to, and then allow

00:45:41   it up to the user, especially the power user to perhaps filter out the ones that are reminding me

00:45:46   for the 19th time that some app is using my location always. And do I still want to do this?

00:45:49   They didn't say that there was, that was something you could do in the West, but that's what I'm

00:45:52   thinking in the direction we're going. If apps categorize their, their stuff. And if I have

00:45:56   enough control to filter that I'm out, maybe power users will have to see less of this stuff

00:46:01   that is annoying us as well. Yeah. I just, I really, really like this focus feature and,

00:46:06   and I barely played with it, but I'm really, really into it. And I'm starting to have,

00:46:13   what was it? iOS five with notification center. I'm having bad thoughts, bad thoughts. And Oh my

00:46:18   gosh, I still, Oh, I was five was rough. And I, I think Marco and I both, that was the one that

00:46:24   we installed beta one at WBC and then immediately regretted it deeply regretted it. I was going to

00:46:30   say that because iOS 15, you know, like in, in general, this whole release is like not so many

00:46:35   major new features, lots of small ones that it actually will be way more stable than iOS five.

00:46:39   And it probably will be more stable than iOS five was, but I think there's a whole bunch of weird

00:46:45   API differences in UI kit that will make your apps render weirdly. And so I would still recommend not

00:46:51   installing the beta, but yeah, I can see where you're coming from. Gaze that you want this,

00:46:55   want to get it on this new focus stuff ASAP, but it'll be here before, you know, it's all just be

00:46:59   patient on the topic of installing the first beta to like many of the new features and I was 15 are

00:47:05   social features that kind of require all the people you talk to, to be very lit to be on

00:47:10   15 to be very useful to you. So like, you're like, I don't think this is a big summer for like

00:47:16   non-developers to have much reason to install the beta. You should all share your test Apple IDs with

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00:49:38   and for sponsoring our show. Hear me out for a second. Do either of you guys use scribble on the

00:49:47   iPad? That's the thing where you can use the pencil to hand write in a field that you know,

00:49:53   you're supposed to be typing into and it will automatically convert that handwriting into text.

00:49:58   Do you use that John at all? No, the whole reason I use computers as stated in the past,

00:50:02   so I don't have to use my handwriting text. Fair. What about you Marco? Do you ever use that?

00:50:07   No, because I always have the keyboard on my iPad. All right. Well, the reason I ask is because

00:50:12   the next thing they spoke about was live text. And I think this is more broadly useful by a fair

00:50:18   margin, but it struck me as a very similar thing where I forget that scribble even exists. And then

00:50:25   I'll use it like here or there and think, wow, this is so freaking cool. Even if it's not the

00:50:29   most efficient way to get texted in the iPad, it's so freaking cool. And then I'll forget about it

00:50:34   again. Well, live text seems like it is even cooler, but I wonder if I'll have the wherewithal

00:50:41   to use it like ever. And so what is it? So live text is you can take like an image. So in your

00:50:48   camera roll or coming off the camera and you can use the like click and drag text selection on text

00:50:56   that it finds in the image. And it's not like overlaying like Google Translate does where it

00:51:02   overlays text like computer generated text on top of the text that's in the image itself. It's a very

00:51:08   hard thing to do verbally, but you're actually taking like the loop and all that and selecting

00:51:14   the text in the picture. There's no overlays or nothing. You're just literally selecting the text

00:51:18   in the picture and you like copy and paste it. You can do this on past photos. You can do this on

00:51:23   picture you've just taken. You can do apparently visual lookups. So you can like, you can ask

00:51:27   something Siri or photos or something. You can ask it what kind of dog you're looking at,

00:51:32   what kind of flower, what's this piece of art, what's this book, different landmarks and stuff

00:51:36   like that. This looks extremely cool. It looks like, what is it? Text sniper or something like

00:51:43   that. Yeah, text sniper, which is an app that somebody had mentioned on a podcast not long ago

00:51:47   and is super cool. We'll put a link in the show notes. It looks like it's that sort of a thing,

00:51:52   but built into the OS and it, from a technical perspective, it is mind-blowingly cool.

00:51:57   This is a lot of catch up slash Sherlocking of existing apps and other platforms, right? So most

00:52:03   of these features have existed elsewhere in various forms. Even on iOS, I had an app that I just

00:52:08   uninstalled, sorry, that did the same thing. It would do OCR in your photo library so your searches

00:52:14   could find it. But of course it had to do it in its own app and it took a long time to grind through

00:52:17   your photo library. Having this built into the actual photo library and having it basically be

00:52:21   an OS level function is great. And the demos they showed were pretty impressive because OCRing

00:52:25   straight up computer text is not that difficult, but they showed it OCRing handwriting font.

00:52:30   It does a really good job. And it's mostly for situations where you have an image and not text.

00:52:37   Surprisingly in this modern age, or perhaps not surprisingly because bandwidth is so relatively

00:52:42   cheap, you will find yourself coming across lots of places where you see an image of text.

00:52:46   I mean, Twitter alone is just filled with it, right? And sometimes you just want that text.

00:52:51   And yeah, we mentioned the app TextSniper. I downloaded and installed TextSniper today on

00:52:56   Friends of Recommendation. Why? Because the developer app on macOS does not let you copy

00:53:02   and paste texts from like WWDC session titles or descriptions. And so when I'm talking about

00:53:07   sessions or pasting in descriptions in various Slack channels and we're talking to stuff,

00:53:10   but I couldn't copy and paste it. TextSniper to the rescue, right? So I love for this to be,

00:53:14   sorry TextSniper, but I love for this to be an OS level function. This is sort of the fate of all

00:53:19   features that would be great as OS level functions. Apple will eventually get around to it, right?

00:53:24   That's just the nature of a platform. And I don't begrudge Apple that, like that's what platforms

00:53:30   should do. And so I'm very happy to see this being integrated into photos. This being, I'm presumably

00:53:37   is it an SDK that you can use in your own apps? Probably they do that with most of their other.

00:53:40   I think there already was an SDK to do this with some of the ML Vision stuff from a couple years

00:53:44   ago. Yeah, but it does a really good job. Like Casey said, the UI for it is really neat.

00:53:48   The stuff with photo lookup, I hope that works better than it does. It sounds like it better

00:53:53   than it does currently. Cause it sounds like it's an enhancement of existing thing. Like very often

00:53:56   I'll try to find pictures of my dog and I'll just do dog search in the photos app. And I'll be

00:54:01   disappointed that it misses some obvious dog. Or I'll look for book or something like.

00:54:04   I don't think it was, I don't think it was about that. I think it was only about text that was in

00:54:09   the images. So like it will now. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're both wrong. So this is,

00:54:15   I have taken a photograph of a dog. What is this dog? Is it a Sharpay? Is it a Shih Tzu? Is it a

00:54:23   Beagle? Tell me what breed of dog it is. Or here's a leaf. What kind of leaf is it? So you already

00:54:30   know to some degree what it is, or I guess you don't even necessarily know what it is. My point

00:54:34   is you're not looking through your photo library to find a Beagle. It's the other direction. You

00:54:37   have a photo of a Beagle in front of you and you want to know what breed is this? I have sheep. I

00:54:44   want brick. I mean, this is all kind of combined into the same thing, but yeah, it's basically just

00:54:51   an enhancement. This is, end users don't make these distinctions we're trying to make about

00:54:56   what tech and what SDK is this. They just know that they have photos on their phone. How easy

00:55:00   is it to find the picture of the photo you want? And how easy is it to know what this is a picture

00:55:05   of? And there's a bunch of stuff in this keynote about that, even like the AR stuff of like,

00:55:09   where am I in the city based on photos and stuff like this is part of, if you look at the WWDC

00:55:16   sessions, these are individual frameworks, individual SDKs, individual APIs. But if you

00:55:19   look at it from the user of the phone, this is just like things that my phone can suddenly do.

00:55:23   And if they work well, it's miraculous and delightful. I tend to lean on both Google

00:55:29   photos and Apple photos, hoping that their intelligence is enough to let me find this.

00:55:33   The book example, I took a picture of one of my hardcover copies of The Stand and I wanted to find

00:55:40   that picture, but I have tons of pictures. So I'm like, well, the good thing about this with

00:55:44   live text is I could have just typed The Stand and would find it, but live text didn't exist when I

00:55:48   was doing this search. So good for live text. That would have saved me this. But what I did type was

00:55:51   book. And it was shocked to know that a picture of a hardcover book sitting on a table, Apple photos

00:55:57   couldn't identify that as a book. I mean, maybe it was a weirdly shaped book, maybe like whatever,

00:56:01   it's ML. You don't know why it didn't find it as a book. Maybe it just didn't index that thing.

00:56:04   But anyway, improvements in that, like, because when it works, it's great. And it's frustrating

00:56:09   when it doesn't. Improvements that are welcome. And live text is going to be a huge improvement

00:56:12   in that because I can tell you from experience with that other app, which I think was called

00:56:15   Memo or something, OCRing text out of your photos is incredibly powerful. Like when you've lost all

00:56:22   hope of finding a thing, if you can just remember a word or two, it will narrow it down so fast.

00:56:26   And it's just such a relief versus scrolling through months and weeks and trying to find it.

00:56:31   - Yep. I'm really, really into trying this. And I just haven't had the chance to try that on my

00:56:37   test phone yet, but it looks super duper cool. All right. There were some miscellaneous other things

00:56:43   that I think for the most part are kind of not that interesting. But somebody, I guess John added

00:56:49   some information about secure paste. Do you want to tell me about that?

00:56:52   - I grabbed a bunch of random languages off web pages and threw them in here. This wasn't

00:56:56   in the keynote, but I'm trying to lump them in the right sections. This was about how you can do

00:57:01   copy and paste, I assume, without making that little, you know, the little notification that

00:57:04   comes down that says an app has like copied or pasted something. I think this is like,

00:57:09   you know, an API that lets people avoid that. It basically lets an app not see what's on the

00:57:17   paste board or the clipboard or whatever they call it on iOS. I can't tell if they're using

00:57:20   next terminology or Mac terminology. The app can't see what you've put there until you choose to

00:57:26   paste. Then suddenly it comes out of some secure area and flows into the app and that will avoid

00:57:30   the little popover thing. And I don't know the details of it, but I like the idea that like,

00:57:33   you know, we all noticed when all of a sudden, I guess it was what, 14, when that little notification,

00:57:38   little white capsule kept coming down from the top and showing us the things we're pasting.

00:57:41   Everyone flipped out about it when it first came out because some apps were like copying and

00:57:45   pasting over and over again because of like bugs in the code or maybe they were doing various stuff.

00:57:49   And then a year later, now we have a way to do copy and paste in a more secure way to avoid that

00:57:54   whole issue. So I just like things like that at WODC. Yeah, that is cool. I didn't know about that.

00:57:59   All right. So then they have explore the world around you. And I think we could hopefully blow

00:58:03   through this pretty quickly. Famous last words. A wallet got a bunch of improvements, mostly

00:58:08   emphasizing, you know, taking your keys or using, you know, Apple wallet as a key for all sorts of

00:58:12   things. Cars, hotels, work, amusement parks, like Disney world. Apparently they will let you,

00:58:17   and I don't know if this is like a region limited thing, I would assume so, but you can scan like

00:58:20   a driver's license or another and some other sort of identification card. And I wasn't paying close

00:58:26   enough attention, but apparently you will be able to do something with the American TSA to like

00:58:31   communicate your driver's license information to a TSA checkpoint without having to actually have

00:58:36   your license on you, which is kind of neat. Yeah. It said that the ID support is in quote,

00:58:42   participating US states and the TSA is quote working to enable support. So this is the kind

00:58:50   of thing that like, this is going to be great if everywhere that you go adopts it. But that's a big

00:58:57   if it's the kind of thing that like, I can see this working probably better in Europe and I can

00:59:03   see the US just having like, you know, massive state to state differences and just becoming

00:59:08   kind of like a, I don't know. I'm pessimistic, not for Apple in this case, I'm pessimistic that

00:59:15   US state governments will all coordinate and get their crap together to actually support this in a

00:59:19   meaningful way. Yeah. If we look at like the, who supported the COVID exposure app, like Massachusetts,

00:59:25   a supposedly forward looking, you know, techno literate state didn't support it until like a year

00:59:32   into COVID and anything having to do with ID cards, every state has their own policy and they're

00:59:36   not going to let any tech company tell them how they want to deal with IDs in their state. So it's

00:59:39   kind of like when they say we have single sign on for cable companies and it's supported in select

00:59:44   cable companies, which includes charter. That's it. Just charter. No, not Comcast, not Verizon,

00:59:52   not AT&T, just charter. And so whatever the charter equivalent of states, I don't know,

00:59:55   Rhode Island, like there's going to be like three states that support this. The TSA thing, I hope

01:00:00   I'm wrong about this. I hope more states adopt it, but it's just so hard to do that. TSA thing,

01:00:03   I have more hope for it just because look at how Apple Wallet and the boarding pass thing went.

01:00:08   There's not that many airline companies and they are not states. And so it's easier if you can get

01:00:13   the airline companies on board to persuade the TSA, you know, a bunch of big donor, like one of

01:00:19   the cases where our completely bought and sold government works for us, but having these big

01:00:23   companies that give a lot of money to reelection campaigns get what they want. So maybe TSA will

01:00:28   be slightly easier if they're able to ram this through because they're big money donors. I'm

01:00:34   trying not to be depressing, but it's reality. Also, I feel like the ID stuff, like, I mean,

01:00:39   you know, one of the contexts that you might need to have an ID is if you get pulled over by a police

01:00:44   officer. Now, are you going to want to hand your unlocked phone to a police officer? Are you nuts?

01:00:52   I mean, they might have a thing where like, you know, it locks onto that screen or something like,

01:00:56   but there are a lot of unanswered questions about it. But don't worry, no police officer is going to

01:00:59   accept that as valid identification. Like, I feel like this is, it's a very ideal thing if we could

01:01:06   get to a world where somehow we could do this all conveniently and securely that was accepted

01:01:09   everywhere. But in practice, I think you're going to have to carry your ID with you still. And so

01:01:14   it's a nice thing to try to get rid of your entire wallet, you know, just like Apple Pay credit cards,

01:01:18   like, it's a nice thing to want to get rid of your entire wallet in practice. This will be convenient

01:01:23   for places where this is accepted. But there's still going to be enough places where it's not

01:01:28   that you're going to have to still carry your ID with you. Yep, I agree. They spoke about the

01:01:32   weather app for a little while, it aesthetically looks really good. And it seems like the dark sky

01:01:37   influence has been very heavy on it, which makes total sense. But I don't have too much to say

01:01:44   other than it looks good. I didn't see any sort of API for dark sky information, which was a bummer,

01:01:49   but it very well could be that I missed it. Again, we're recording the night of the keynote. So

01:01:54   yeah, it's like, it's like we thought the first party weather app is better,

01:01:57   thanks to dark sky. Yeah, yep, yep, absolutely. Maps got a handful of upgrades. There are new

01:02:05   maps, the fancy pants, new apps are coming to several new countries over the next few months.

01:02:10   There's an interactive globe, which is cool, I guess. However, one thing that blew my freaking

01:02:17   mind is in certain, and of course it's like San Francisco and nowhere else, in certain locations,

01:02:23   they have like dramatically improved, I wouldn't say imagery, but like rendering. And it looked as

01:02:31   though they were painting, the paint on the roads is being shown on the map. So like if you zoom

01:02:40   into San Francisco, you can see dashed lines in between lanes, you can see crosswalks, you can see

01:02:47   stop written on the road. I don't know how this is happening. This is the coolest freaking thing

01:02:53   I've ever seen. I just think it's fascinating and so neat. It's probably going to be one of

01:02:59   those things. Like it's great in California because like their satellites can actually see the paint

01:03:03   on the road and it's still painted. Whereas you know, you bring it to an area with weather and

01:03:07   it's like all the paints all rubbed off from all the ice and crap that we have here and all the

01:03:10   potholes and like, is it going to render all the pothole patches? Right. No, like I'm looking at,

01:03:17   I don't have any idea where this is in San Francisco, but I happen to be on Bryant Street

01:03:21   and you can see where there's a left-hand turn lane with the left-hand turn, you know, arrow on

01:03:26   it. There's a four-way crosswalk. There's a median, which apparently has two trees within it. Like

01:03:30   this amount of detail is extremely cool. And then I guess when you're doing directions, it has,

01:03:37   it's again, it's a very difficult thing to describe verbally, but it will show like overpasses and

01:03:43   things in 3D space. So when you're going in a, in a, in a place where you have like cloverleafs or

01:03:50   all sorts of different things, all happening on top of each other, you'll be able to see that in 3D

01:03:54   space, which will make it so much easier to look at your phone or CarPlay, and then look at reality

01:04:01   around you and say, Oh, I get it. I see what I'm supposed to do. I just think this is extremely,

01:04:07   extremely cool, but unfortunately only 10 cities this year. And I concur with both of you that

01:04:11   even though Philly, I believe is one of them, I'll believe it in the Northeast in particular when I

01:04:16   see it. But this is super, super cool. And they all, and they also had like a nighttime mode where

01:04:22   they do like some funny, funny in a good way, like clever things with, with lighting. So it looks

01:04:28   like, you know, the moon is shining really brightly. This, and maps has actually been really

01:04:33   good for me. I use maps almost always. The only time I don't use maps is when I'm going on like

01:04:37   a longer trip when I know traffic will be a problem and then I'll use Waze. But maps is really

01:04:42   good and it's only getting better. I mean, it's, it's remember how much and how badly we used to

01:04:46   make fun of Apple maps because it was trash and they've turned that ship around and they've turned

01:04:51   it around nicely. I just think this was very, very cool stuff. Yeah. I mean, as usual, it's all going

01:04:56   to come down to how good is it in your area? Cause that's one thing that, you know, Apple maps has

01:05:00   always been inconsistent in that, in that way. Like, you know, even from the very beginning,

01:05:05   when, when people were complaining about it a lot more, as you said, there were areas where it was

01:05:09   great and then there were areas where it wasn't. And so I hope they're able to actually deliver,

01:05:14   you know, greatness in more places than just the Bay area. I actually, I was kind of disappointed,

01:05:20   like when they showed the Bay area as their example area, I'm like, you know,

01:05:23   are they not aware of the optics of, of this specific problem? Like,

01:05:28   I feel like that was just kind of inviting this kind of criticism. And I, it would have been nicer

01:05:33   to show somewhere else that they had made really good because yeah, we know it's going to be great

01:05:38   in the Bay area, but you know, is it going to be great where all the rest of us actually live?

01:05:42   They're still iterating on the basics too, like setting aside the things announced at WWDC. I've

01:05:46   noticed over the past several months that Apple maps has been getting more detailed and more

01:05:51   specific with just its voice directions when driving in the car, go past this light and at

01:05:56   the next light, do a thing, right. Or even just the, the new intonation of the voice assistant

01:06:02   when it's time for you to make a slight left turn. Have you noticed that over the past several months?

01:06:06   No. Like in 700 feet, make a slight left turn. And then when you actually get to the turn,

01:06:11   the voice says, make a slight left turn. It's just so satisfied that you're going to do it.

01:06:16   But no, but just like more, more voice things stay in the left lane to stay on this road,

01:06:21   right? Like stuff like that, that it used to not just not say anything about before.

01:06:24   It would just tell you when the turns were that kind of enhancement is super important.

01:06:28   And I have to say like, again, being consistent based on your area, I'm not in an obscure area.

01:06:33   I still on a weekly basis do competitions between Google maps and Apple maps. And I have to say that

01:06:40   Google maps still is better about understanding where the traffic is and routing me around it in

01:06:45   a sane way. Apple maps very often takes me on just, you know, Mr. Toad's wild ride. Like I have no

01:06:51   idea where it's taking me. It's like, are you kidding? What are you doing? Apple like gets me

01:06:55   there. It's not like wrong about the roads, but it is making poor choices. So I'm, I'm excited about

01:07:01   the enhancements. I really think Apple maps has been getting better setting aside everything that

01:07:05   they'll be able to see. And then this on top of all the enhancements they've making just

01:07:08   day over day, week over week, year over year, you know, outside the app, I think Apple maps really

01:07:14   is getting better. But it still has some weaknesses against Google. Really quickly with transit,

01:07:19   there's better Apple watch integration. And what I thought was really neat was,

01:07:23   I guess they didn't already have disembark notifications or, or at least they brought

01:07:28   it up at the keynote. So if you're on the subway and you're coming up to your stop, it'll, you

01:07:32   know, touch your little boop boop on your wrist or whatever and say, Hey, it's time to get off

01:07:37   the subway. But what was really neat for me, and I haven't been to New York city in a long time,

01:07:42   but I was a pretty decent subway navigator, especially for someone who's never lived there.

01:07:46   But inevitably anytime I popped out of the subway, I would look around and ask,

01:07:50   where the hell did I just pop out into the real world again? I have no idea what block I'm on,

01:07:54   where am I, which way is North, which way is South, you know, who's on first.

01:07:57   I don't know something. Yeah. I will often need to like walk half a block up in one direction to see,

01:08:01   Oh, I went from 45 to 46. Okay. Now I know which direction I'm going. Like you have to like,

01:08:05   see the next block street sign before you realize. Yep. I'm glad it's not just me. That makes me feel

01:08:11   actually quite a bit better, but anyway, so there's now exit assistance. And what that means is

01:08:15   well, so they said, Oh, you pop out of the subway and you need to look around to figure out where

01:08:19   you are. And I thought, okay, okay. That makes sense. You know, presumably they'll just use GPS

01:08:23   or something like that. Oh no, no, no, no. What they've decided to do, which I think is super cool

01:08:27   and hopefully useful is you take your phone and you kind of like do a scan, like a panoramic

01:08:34   of the buildings that are near you. And then it'll say, Oh, you're on the corner of 47th and 6th.

01:08:40   You need to go this way and put an AR like arrow on the screen to show you exactly what you need,

01:08:44   which way you want to walk. What a cool and clever implementation. And especially since in cities,

01:08:51   oftentimes GPS is really spotty, especially, you know, big, tall cities like New York.

01:08:55   I think this is super duper cool. And I really look forward to trying this in 15 years when I

01:09:01   finally get back to the city. I just think this is super neat. Yeah. Like the actual solution to this

01:09:07   kind of problem is for the like actual transit authorities to mark in the sidewalks when you get

01:09:14   out, like what direction you are. There's actually like background was working in the city. There

01:09:17   was a brief time where somebody did that. Like they were like just kind of gorilla, like spray

01:09:21   painting, compass arrows on the, like right on the sidewalk when you get out. And it was amazing.

01:09:26   And of course, you know, the MTA took them all that I got rid of them all in the ads,

01:09:31   in the absence of like obvious help from subway and city authorities to make this easier with

01:09:37   just like a sign or a thing like that on the sidewalk. This solution by Apple is one of the

01:09:42   most ridiculously overly engineered things I've ever seen. Like to solve such a simple problem,

01:09:48   but I see why they had to solve it because the cities won't do it. But the idea of like, okay,

01:09:52   instead of having a compass where it was painted on the ground when you got out of a subway station,

01:09:56   we're going to build this entire like AR vision network to look at all the buildings around you

01:10:02   and make a giant database. Like that's, it's completely ridiculous, but necessary.

01:10:07   I mean, but that, that is the future. If they ever get around to having some kind of glasses,

01:10:12   this is exactly what you want. You want people's names hovering over their head and you want arrows

01:10:15   showing you where you have to go. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, we're not there yet, but like,

01:10:19   yeah, by all means, please do lay down the groundwork for this. I don't know how many

01:10:22   people will do it and take out their phone. And if it's easier than, you know, but like,

01:10:24   I would just be happy if the stupid compass and the phone worked better. Like when you have map

01:10:28   on directions and you hold your phone flat and you just want the compass to rotate so that it,

01:10:32   like what I'm always want is I want the map on my phone to be aligned with the map in real life.

01:10:37   So if I come out of the subway station and I'm looking at my map and that's in the process of

01:10:41   giving me directions, please rotate the map so that the direction I'm facing matches, you know

01:10:47   what I mean? Like, and sometimes it does that and sometimes it doesn't. And if it doesn't,

01:10:50   you can be very confusing. So I would be happy if just that worked, but Hey, if AR is that we

01:10:55   can jump all the way to show me where the arrow goes, I'll take that as well. I just want to know

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01:12:53   off. Mack Weldon, reinventing men's basics. There are some improvements to AirPods or I don't know

01:13:03   if it's really actually the original AirPods or just the AirPods Pro and Max but there's

01:13:08   conversation boost with ambient noise reduction. This is particularly for those with hearing

01:13:14   impairments. And I think that does require AirPods Pro. But if you're the example I used was, you

01:13:19   know, you're at a dining like an outdoor dining table with your partner and you're trying to

01:13:24   understand the waiter or waitress that's, you know, helping you out. Well, you can turn on this

01:13:30   conversation boost thing where it will try to focus in on whoever's talking and boost just that,

01:13:36   which I thought was super neat. There's announced notifications. So a lot of times there's actually

01:13:42   I was listening to upgrade earlier. And there's a funny conversation between Mike and Jason about

01:13:45   this. But you can announce text messages. So you know, sir, sir, I don't want to say that word,

01:13:51   the assistant will pop in and say, Oh, Marco just sent a text and he said he misses you.

01:13:57   And in that, that is a thing that some people like some people don't. But now you can do that

01:14:01   with notifications, which is kind of neat. But the most cool thing to me was they're doing

01:14:06   improvements to find my so apparently there is going to they're going to use like the Bluetooth

01:14:11   low energy beacon stuff to ride on the same network as air tags. So you can hopefully if you

01:14:17   lose your AirPods and it's near somebody else's iPhone, you can still find them. They're even

01:14:21   doing that like proximity view where you can hone in on it, home in on it. Where did I just have this

01:14:25   conversation with you guys? Home in on it. Thank you. Yeah, there you go. So home in on it. And

01:14:31   then there's also a separation alert. So if you walk away and your AirPods are not with you,

01:14:35   it'll start yelling at you and saying, Oh, you forgot me. I'm very curious to see how that works

01:14:41   because like I don't care if I walk away at home, but I do care if I walk away at a picnic table

01:14:47   in a park that I was working at. So I'm not sure how intelligent that is. But still, I think that's

01:14:52   a super neat idea and certainly long coming. And then finally, in the AirPods section, spatial audio

01:14:56   on tvOS and also M1 Max, which was pretty cool. And then finally, Dolby Atmos audio is starting

01:15:04   today for Apple Music people. Yeah, this is all really cool. The Find My Network support, I think,

01:15:09   was it was the biggest surprise for me because I didn't realize that they would be able to do it.

01:15:15   And it does make sense. They don't have the U1. They can't do the precise positioning,

01:15:19   like, you know, with where you could like see it on your couch. But it has Bluetooth so you can at

01:15:23   least get like a rough idea of distance to it. And you know, the fact that it uses the Find My Network.

01:15:27   So even if you like drop an AirPod, like as you're running somewhere and it's not even near your

01:15:33   house, like you can still then find it later because it uses the Find My Network. That's

01:15:38   really cool. Only on AirPods Pro though. Regular ones apparently don't have whatever Bluetooth

01:15:42   low energy beacon thing they need. That makes sense. That's so frustrating. I really need to

01:15:46   get it in there. See, I mean, I'm having the damn Apple TV problem again because I really feel like

01:15:50   I should just bite the bullet and get AirPods Pro, but they it's got to be any day now, right?

01:15:55   They've been rumored to have new AirPods and AirPods Pros for like the last year.

01:15:58   Any day now it's coming. I'm playing the Apple TV game all over again. All right, moving right along

01:16:05   before I get depressed about that. iPad OS. Home screen was I think the one of the two big features.

01:16:11   You can put widgets on the home screen proper now, which I mean, it seems pretty obvious that they

01:16:15   wanted to ship that last year. Just didn't have the time. App library comes to the home screen

01:16:21   and including it looked like an entry in the dock. I don't know if I love that. I don't know if I love

01:16:27   that the app library is in the dock. Yeah, see, I hope it's optional or disappears some way somehow

01:16:31   after some amount of time. I don't know, but I like the idea of the app library not really digging it

01:16:37   living in the dock all the time, but we'll see. We'll see. Maybe it doesn't. We're not really sure.

01:16:41   Multitasking. It is not the complete rewrite and revamp that everyone I think was kind of

01:16:49   hoping for. Some quietly, some not. But as said, I think it was from Craig, but maybe somebody else.

01:16:55   Easier to discover, easier to use, and even more powerful. And so now there's a multitasking menu.

01:17:01   So, Hey, guess what? If you have nothing but gestures, nobody knows what the hell to do,

01:17:05   but if you have buttons, people can figure it out. Well, you also have to know which thing to tap to

01:17:10   at that menu, but yeah, you're right. This is not an overhaul. Like it apparently Apple, you know,

01:17:15   that thing you described easier, better, right? It is an enhancement of the existing system. And

01:17:20   we all know the existing system could have used some enhancements, but still Apple is very married

01:17:26   to the idea that the way iPadOS works when it comes to multiple things is that the screen is

01:17:31   divided amongst multiple, you know, apps that don't exist in windows, that don't have any kind of

01:17:37   Chrome. And they're just slowly making concessions while still firmly resisting the idea of window

01:17:44   Chrome or of windows. And I'm not saying they're making the wrong decision, but like this WWC was

01:17:49   a clear expression of their intent. We want it to work like this. You're splitting up the screen

01:17:54   among apps, but we recognize that the existing system for doing that has weaknesses. So let's

01:18:01   shore up those weaknesses. Let's not fundamentally throw it all out and just everybody gets windows

01:18:04   and they all have closed boxes on them, right? They didn't do that at all. So this is yet another run

01:18:09   at this exact problem. They said, we are going to make this work. We are committed to splitting up

01:18:14   your screen into pieces. We're going to add keyboard shortcuts for it. We're going to add,

01:18:19   you know, more discoverable UIs, more obvious UIs. So, Hey, do you want this to be on the left

01:18:24   half of the screen or the right? And in particular, I think the most important feature, I say this as

01:18:28   someone who has not used this OS and is not an iPad power user, but my impression of the most

01:18:33   important feature of multitasking is the ease with which you can take a thing that was filling half

01:18:38   the screen and get rid of it and pick a different thing to go there. Because it seems like that was

01:18:42   way too complicated before. And this is a step in the direction that I talked about in the last show

01:18:46   of making this a more generic system, right? So the splitting up of the screen is fine,

01:18:52   but before there was this whole sort of marriage between the apps. And once they were, two of them

01:18:56   were in a pair, they kind of stayed in a pair, but you might have another instance of that app.

01:19:00   It's not in the pair and it got all confusing. And now it seems to me from looking at the demo

01:19:05   in the keynote, more composable of like, Oh, so you got a bunch of stuff on the screen at any

01:19:11   moment, anything that's in any portion of the screen, you can remove that thing and put a

01:19:15   different thing there or remove that thing and expand the one that was there to fill the whole

01:19:19   thing. Now there's some new things that it meant thrown in the mix. Oh, now there's a shelf. So

01:19:24   you've got the dock, you've got the shelf, you've got slide over. You've got the app library. You've

01:19:28   got the little menu that comes down. There's a lot of stuff. It is still way more complicated than

01:19:34   the simple, Oh, so you have a bunch of windows and they have title bars and you can drag them around.

01:19:37   Right. But you know, this is, this is Apple's expression of their intent. They want to make

01:19:43   this work. All right. And so I think everything they've done is an improvement, but I think

01:19:49   it's not real in some ways it's getting simpler. Like what I just said, like it's simpler to be

01:19:54   able to mix and match apps the way you want to, but by adding yet another UI element, which is

01:20:00   the shelf for holding like the little minimize thing, like it's, it's still hard to explain this

01:20:05   model to people, right? It will, I think it will be easier to use, but you can explain to somebody

01:20:11   how windows work out, you know, and even though we have all sorts of weird windows, like, Hey,

01:20:15   my Chrome window looks so weird and has these tabs on the thing and finder windows look different

01:20:18   than that. And Safari windows are going to look even weirder. We'll get to in a little bit,

01:20:22   but you can more or less explain windows exist. There's usually some way to close them,

01:20:26   to maximize them, to minimize them. You can resize them from all the different edges and you can drag

01:20:29   them around somehow. Uh, and apps are going to have multiple windows and, you know, you can explain

01:20:34   it. iPad iOS is a lot more to explain, but I think this is a big step up from where they were. Now. I

01:20:40   think the question is, is this enough? Right. And I think we'll have to sort of defer to the iPad

01:20:46   experts to say, does this sort of solve all the problems you had? And now you feel it is powerful

01:20:52   enough to do what you want. And, you know, and it's kind of like the notifications. The other

01:20:56   question is what about the people who aren't power users? Does any of this help them at all?

01:21:00   Or are they equally terminally confused? Cause very often, you know, I'll have a relative accidentally

01:21:06   put something into slide over and have no idea what happened to be super confused and just be like,

01:21:10   I, whatever that was, I never want to see it again. Right. Cause they want the just full screen iPad

01:21:16   experience. And you know, you've been able to get that by turning off that preference to not do that.

01:21:19   But I think that's a shame because I think, you know, the ability to look at more than one thing

01:21:23   at a time, shouldn't be a power user feature. And that is the challenge, right? You're not just

01:21:27   satisfying the power users. Also, you want someone to be able to do what I think comes naturally to

01:21:33   everybody on a Mac or a PC, which is like, I'm going to have two web browser windows and they're

01:21:37   both next to each other. Imagine that, or I'm going to have a web browser window over here

01:21:41   and a document that I'm writing over here next to each other. It's, it shouldn't be a power user

01:21:46   feature. I'm not sure this achieves that, but I think it will achieve making iPad power users much

01:21:52   less frustrated. Yeah. I think this ultimately, I mean, I haven't a chance to play with it yet

01:21:57   because I wanted to wait until at least tomorrow before I put the new beta on anything that's

01:22:03   logged in my iCloud account. But I'm glad they went this direction at least, you know, like they

01:22:09   went the direction of, we're going to have actual sort of visible UI for managing the, you know,

01:22:18   the multitasking windows on iPad. That's what they really needed because before it was all just

01:22:23   hidden behind these gestures that you had to figure out, which were not necessarily always

01:22:28   obvious. It's still hidden behind a little thing that you have to know to tap on. Like it's three

01:22:33   dots, right? So it's at least the dots. Yeah. I mean, it's not great. It's better than nothing,

01:22:39   but it still is not the same. Like I'm saying they do not want to put a window Chrome on because

01:22:42   window Chrome is like always visible. And again, Mac, Apple seems to be allergic to window Chrome

01:22:47   on Mac OS as well, which we'll get to the war on window. Chrome continues. Yes. But like to have

01:22:53   this be a button that you can tap and then do things with or to like that is a huge advanced

01:23:01   for, you know, the discoverability of the, of the you know, multitasking gestures and stuff.

01:23:06   And I think I can see why there's lots of reasons why they're not just doing windows on iPad. Like

01:23:14   they're not doing that for lots of reasons, many of which are good reasons. Like one of the ones

01:23:19   that a lot of people don't necessarily think of, but that is pretty important is the way iOS works

01:23:26   with Ram and with virtual memory. And the fact that it lacks a swap file means that every device

01:23:33   has a, has a hard Ram limit. And that means that there's a limit of how many apps can be on screen

01:23:40   at once. If they had like a free form windowing system, you would have the capability as a user

01:23:46   to put tons of windows on screen at once more than the actual OS and its memory architecture

01:23:54   would be able to support. Or it would have to have really weird arbitrary seeming limitations. Like

01:23:59   maybe after you created your sixth window on an iPad pro, then it would, it would close your,

01:24:05   you know, your oldest last used one or something like it would have weird effects. It would do what

01:24:10   it does now. It would, it would freeze dry them, right? Like I'm not saying that they recommend

01:24:13   doing that, but this is how, this is how it works today is when you go to the app switcher, some of

01:24:16   those apps, you see an image of the last live thing they updated when they had, when they had time

01:24:21   to CPU, some of those things are just cardboard cutouts of an app that is no longer running. Right.

01:24:26   And you can't tell cause it's just the app switcher. Right. But if you had a scenario where

01:24:29   you describe where like an arbitrary number of overlapping windows were there, some of those

01:24:33   windows would be owned by an application that is currently running and could in theory update them.

01:24:38   And some of those windows would be fake cardboard cutouts, just basically an image of the OS safe

01:24:42   last time that app was running. And if it wasn't like a video player or something, you might not

01:24:47   notice like, huh, nothing's changed in that window in a while. I wonder if that app is actually

01:24:50   running. But, uh, but yeah, like this, that limitation is it's mostly historic. Like,

01:24:56   you know, we've got 16 gigabyte iPad pros now, uh, this will eventually take care of itself through

01:25:02   the March of time. But for now it is a real thing. I don't think that's the strongest reason to not

01:25:07   have it, but it is certainly a practical reason today. And for the foreseeable future until

01:25:12   everybody's, you know, iOS devices have 32 gigs of Ram or whatever. Yeah, that's fair. But in general,

01:25:18   I do think that there's lots of, uh, things that are fundamental to iOS apps, to iOS itself as the

01:25:24   OS, to iOS hardware that make freeform windows more difficult than you might think. You know,

01:25:30   when you, when you first think, Oh, they should just have freeform windows. There's a lot of stuff

01:25:34   that gets in the way. There's, there's the Ram limit. There's the, there's screen size limits.

01:25:38   There's app size limits where like, you know, apps just weren't iOS apps were not designed to be

01:25:42   below a certain size. And so you have to have these arbitrary like limitations on how tall the

01:25:47   windows can be. They also weren't designed for things like live resizing and so that, you know,

01:25:52   that makes things more complicated. Like there's, there's a lot of reasons why freeform windows on

01:25:56   the iPad would be a very big challenge and would possibly come with like massive weird side effects.

01:26:02   So I understand why they're, why they're not doing freeform windowing. And as long as they're going

01:26:06   to keep doing their like, you know, screen kind of tile splitting arrangement that they, that they've

01:26:12   been doing, it sure does look like this is a pretty big improvement to making that more usable to more

01:26:18   people. There's still a lot of room to go. Uh, but this is a big improvement. Yeah. And I mean,

01:26:23   you kind of left out the, the primary reason why they don't want to just go with windows is because

01:26:28   the whole point is the iPad is not a Mac, right? And the people who love the iPad love it for many

01:26:33   reasons that have to do with how it's not like a Mac, right? The simplicity, you know, even when

01:26:38   I talk about the, I have the most asking is complicated or whatever. The fact that it can be

01:26:41   used more simply the fact that it is sort of has fewer sharp edges, right? That is there's no point

01:26:46   in the iPad. If you're just going to make it a Mac without a keyboard, right. It needs to stay an

01:26:52   iPad. So I understand why Apple is going with this. Like, you know, it just, you know, like I

01:26:57   said, in the last show people want, I think the flexibility of the Mac, but they do not want the

01:27:02   Mac baggage that comes with it. And part of that baggage is, uh, you know, just plain old windows

01:27:07   menu pointer, like just the old interface, because we know that has a lot of sharp edges. We know

01:27:11   people are not good at managing windows and it's not a task that they relish and generally don't

01:27:14   want to do it. And that's part of why people love the iPad and the iPhone so much because it doesn't

01:27:18   ask them to do those things. So, you know, it's not what Apple is doing is not easy. Uh, and so,

01:27:23   you know, if, if they make improvements every year, eventually maybe they'll converge on a good

01:27:28   solution. The only thing I worry about is adding interface elements and new, uh, new cap, new proper

01:27:35   nouns that people need to know or understand maybe is not the path, but you know, baby steps.

01:27:41   Oh, and speaking of that, they have the, uh, the menu bar thing. Don't call it a menu bar.

01:27:47   It's not a menu bar. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this and it wasn't really brought up,

01:27:52   but, but for a moment, and I feel like I saw it on a, on a screenshot or like a video of a device

01:27:57   that was being used. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what was that? What was that?

01:28:01   And we'll put a link in the show notes to a video, uh, from Steve. We have two videos showing

01:28:06   what the interface looks like when you're using it. And the weird thing is how it appears. Now

01:28:09   it's a power user feature, I suppose like one of the things about catalyst apps is they, you know,

01:28:14   that you can define menus in them and they'll menus will appear on the Mac, but that same

01:28:20   information is available. Those catalyst apps on iOS, but the iOS doesn't have a menu bar. So how

01:28:23   do you surface that? Um, and apparently if you hold down the command key, it will show you keyboard

01:28:29   shortcuts, but it will also show you essentially a little menu bar floating on the not quite bottom

01:28:34   of the screen, showing all the commands, uh, for file edit, insert format in this, you know,

01:28:40   screenshot and this thing. Uh, and the commands have a keyboard shortcuts that you can type,

01:28:44   but you can also tap them with your finger. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate

01:28:48   across the menu bar and then up into the menu items. It's a little bit strange. It's a little

01:28:52   bit of a power user feature. It is obviously not meant to be the main interface, but it is

01:28:57   more or less in keeping with the function of the menu bar on the Mac, which is these days,

01:29:02   most Mac apps don't expect you to be going up to the menu bar over and over and over again.

01:29:08   When you're using the app, the menu bar exists to have to hold the full functionality of the app.

01:29:13   But in general, if you're going to be efficient, there's a few commands you're going to use

01:29:18   frequently. You're probably going to use the keyboard shortcuts for them. And only when

01:29:21   you're like, where is that command? Would you go up to the menus? And the extreme scenario being,

01:29:26   say you're using a very complicated, you know, graphics editor where you can never remember

01:29:30   where the heck the grid snapping manager palette window is. You go up to the help menu, you type

01:29:35   grid and you know, like, like, but I'm not saying it's the junk drawer, but it is like

01:29:39   the user accessible visible place for all the functionality on the app. iOS has not been like

01:29:45   that historically. Historically, the keyboard shortcuts are a thing that only people who had

01:29:49   keyboards connected to their iPads even knew existed. And when they did, it was just a little

01:29:53   overlay. This is a big step up. This is like, now we're revealing to you a bunch of functionality

01:29:59   in this transient interface element that's not on the screen all the time. And like you have this

01:30:02   bar taken up, you know, you just don't menu bar, but when you ask for it, Oh, here are all the

01:30:08   functions that we think are accessible or relevant to you in your current context. So I don't know how

01:30:13   apps are going to deal with this. It would be nice if Apple sort of led in this direction. This is what

01:30:18   a lot of people were disappointed about. It was like, Oh, where's Final Cut Pro for the Mac? Like,

01:30:21   where's Logic Pro for them or not for the iPad or iOS rather. Whereas, you know, where are Apple's

01:30:25   pro apps for iPadOS to show us all, how should we think about a full featured pro app on the iPad?

01:30:31   How should, if you did have Final Cut Pro on the iPad, what would it look like? Would it have this

01:30:36   menu bar thing? What would the interface look like? How should we do this? I mean, third parties are

01:30:40   plowing bravely ahead and I'm sure they will adopt all of these features. And in fact, they have

01:30:44   invented their own sort of menu systems and menu bars and pallets and even internal windowing

01:30:49   interfaces. But thus far, Apple hasn't really led in this area, but I am glad that they are

01:30:55   at least thinking about it and providing some interface elements and some sort of access for

01:31:01   power users to get this functionality from the keyboard, even if they don't remember the keyboard

01:31:06   shortcuts, or even if there aren't any keyboard shortcuts, just using the arrow keys or whatever.

01:31:09   All right. So then they had a long segment about notes and more than anything else, like they said,

01:31:17   Oh, we'll have tags, we'll have this activity view thing, but quick note. And apparently speaking of

01:31:23   completely undiscoverable gestures, if you swipe up from the bottom right of your iPad screen,

01:31:29   then notes is aware of the app that you're using when you do that, and will let you take notes on

01:31:36   whatever it is you're looking at. And this was a little fuzzy to me. I don't really have a clear

01:31:42   view of where the guardrails are for this, where the limits are for this, but basically like for

01:31:48   Safari, for example, if you do this quick note thing, it'll take note of what page you're on,

01:31:55   it'll let you drop the URL in there real easily. And additionally, if you have text highlighted,

01:32:00   or I guess maybe if you copy paste text into this note, when you go back to that page in Safari,

01:32:06   it'll actually highlight that text that is in your note to tell you this is something you cared

01:32:10   about before. I really want to dig into this as well once I get this on my iPad in maybe a couple

01:32:16   betas from now. In principle, this looks super cool because you can basically take notes on

01:32:20   anything in your iPad. You know, the files are in the computer, but you can take notes on just about

01:32:26   anything. And if it's as smart as they say it is, it looks really, really slick, but I really want

01:32:33   to play with it before I say too much more about it. I'm reminded of my vague recollection of one

01:32:40   of the features of NCSA Mosaic was that you could add annotations to web pages. Like this was a

01:32:45   feature of the browser. And I suppose like if there was something on a web page, you could maybe

01:32:49   use just annotations about the page itself. But the idea that as you were browsing the web, you

01:32:52   could sort of mark it up with your own stuff. And then when you went back there, you could see your

01:32:56   own notes. I think that's what this trying to accomplish. I do wonder how they're addressing

01:33:01   sort of the challenge of the web being that URLs don't work the way they're quote unquote supposed

01:33:07   to. So the same URL can have very different content, depending on all sorts of factors.

01:33:12   URLs themselves are filled with garbage that may change. Sometimes the query string is super

01:33:16   duper important. Sometimes it's not. So if you have, even just for the tab group stuff that we'll

01:33:22   get to a little bit later, if you are associating a note with a URL, the chances of you being able

01:33:29   to ever get back to that exact URL may not be a hundred percent. And so I do wonder how reliable,

01:33:34   because people just expect it to work. Like if they're just like logged into their Amazon account

01:33:38   and wandering from product to product and they're on their wish list and put an annotation, right?

01:33:43   And then they get logged out of Amazon and they go back to the product page and they say, where

01:33:48   are my notes in this product? It's like, well, it's because you're not logged in and because you

01:33:50   weren't looking at the product page, you were looking at it in your wish list. And that's even

01:33:53   in Amazon, which is pretty good about URLs and that URLs actually are somewhat stable and do

01:33:58   represent what it is that you're looking at. Other websites are not so kind. And the URL has little

01:34:02   bearing on what you're looking at. And the same URL can have 20 different things on it. And the

01:34:07   same page can have 20 different URLs and yeah, good luck. But it seems cool in theory. And if

01:34:13   Apple can do some sort of smart normalization or some other way of sort of, you know, being fuzzy

01:34:18   about it and saying, well, this looks vaguely like the page where you made annotations, we'll,

01:34:21   we'll give it to you. But yeah, we'll have to try it. I mean, it's most likely based on the system

01:34:26   that almost no one knows about. The NS user activity API which kind of gives apps the ability

01:34:33   to say like, Oh, here's what the user is currently doing in my app. Here's what's currently, you know,

01:34:37   on screen or they're currently working on whatever. And then, and you know, you give it identifiers or

01:34:41   metadata or whatever, and then you can, that's how handoff works. Like it basically hands off that

01:34:45   data to a Mac app or to the watch app or whatever. And then the app resumes from whatever, you know,

01:34:51   identifier or metadata was in that, that user activity object. But this is, there's a feature

01:34:55   that no one has known about except Merlin, I think where you can like just in an app,

01:35:02   like viewing something in an app, you can usually hold in the Siri button and say,

01:35:07   remind me about this in whatever time interval or whatever. And by saying, remind me about this,

01:35:12   it looks at the current NS user activity of the current app that's on screen and actually saves

01:35:18   like basically like a deep link to that. And it works in a bunch of different places, you know,

01:35:22   voicemails, Safari tabs, stuff like that. So it's probably using that same system. And if that's

01:35:29   what it is, and now I don't know how it gets from, you know, the having that link in the quick note

01:35:35   to then going when the app shows the page to then like highlight that proactively. I mean,

01:35:41   maybe it, you know, maybe it has some new API for that or something, or maybe it's just a private

01:35:45   thing for Apple's apps, but that's probably how it works. Yeah, I had, I had made the same assumption.

01:35:50   There, it's funny on a more broad note, it seems to me like over the last few years,

01:35:56   more and more and more stuff is driven by NS user activity. And, and if your app is something

01:36:03   wherein it makes sense to, to, to emit anything for through NS user activity, it seems like

01:36:10   ever increasingly, it is time to embrace that API. It's used for intents and widgets, if I'm not

01:36:17   mistaken, it's used like everywhere, like you said, handoff, it's used in so many different places.

01:36:22   All sorts of stuff. All right, moving right along. Translate for iPad looked cool. You can do

01:36:26   handwriting practice, which is neat, especially for languages that don't use, you know, letters

01:36:31   that like I'm used to, you know, um, there's an auto translate feature with no button taps required.

01:36:37   I think this would be a little socially awkward to just plunk an iPad down on like a, a clerk's

01:36:41   counter, you know, when you're trying to buy something in a foreign country, but Hey, if it

01:36:45   works, that's super cool. Uh, so I really dig that. There's also system wide translation. You can

01:36:50   select text anywhere in the system and you know, there's a now translate option in that little pop

01:36:54   over or not pop over, but the little like toolbar thing, whatever, uh, is where you can translate

01:36:58   text, which is neat. Uh, John, you want to take us through some miscellaneous that you, you have

01:37:02   accumulated. Yeah, this stuff harvested from Apple's web pages and various tweets and stuff,

01:37:08   uh, muting notifications. You can mute an app or messaging thread temporarily for the next hour or

01:37:13   for the next day. This I'm assuming this is more sort of just in time stuff. Like I don't want to

01:37:17   stop this app from sending me notifications, but I don't want it to bother me for the rest of the

01:37:21   day. We get more enhancements and I think that this, by the way, like just muting an iMessage

01:37:28   thread for an hour. Like if the, if like your friends are all talking about something like

01:37:31   just flooding you with notifications in a thread that like you don't want to turn off notifications

01:37:35   completely forever, but you don't really care or can't deal with it right now during this hour.

01:37:40   That's a fantastic feature. And it's another challenge of like power users will know it and

01:37:44   love it. How do you serve this for people who otherwise wouldn't know about this feature?

01:37:48   Because everyone will benefit from this. They just might not know, Oh, if I have to hold down,

01:37:53   you know, it's another hidden UI versus present UI. If you present it as a button or an option

01:37:57   that is obvious to people, they'll, they will definitely take it because it's a useful feature.

01:38:01   If you don't, then maybe only quote unquote power users will find it. Apparently the text

01:38:05   magnification loop is back on iPad OS, the little thing that shows you a magnified version. Oh,

01:38:09   thank God. It was always a good idea because yeah, the iPad is bigger and I do like how

01:38:14   they change the text selection to be sort of more, I'm saying more Mac like, but like,

01:38:18   you know, the iPad is bigger. It should have different rules about text selection, but

01:38:22   bottom line is your finger is blocking part of it. And the whole point of that loop is

01:38:26   show me the thing. My finger is blocking. So I'm glad that's back. This one is super cool. I didn't

01:38:30   see any demo of this, but it's just texts from Apple's webpage. Apparently Apple has some kind

01:38:36   of built in two factor authentication system. So, you know, we've talked about using whatever the

01:38:41   Google authenticator or authy or all the other apps that, uh, that lets you store your two

01:38:46   factor authentication for various websites. Some, some services make you use their authenticator

01:38:50   app. Like steam makes you use their, some Microsoft sites make you use the Microsoft authenticator,

01:38:54   but then other ones are more generic. Apparently Apple itself in the OS now has some way to

01:38:59   generate two factor codes. And if you integrate with it, it will do what the other two factor

01:39:06   systems could not, which is you can auto fill the code, right? Rather than having to go to authy,

01:39:12   tap the code to copy it, go back to the place where you are pasted into the little field,

01:39:15   hope it handles your paste correctly and all that stuff. The Apple one will be integrated right into

01:39:20   the system. Uh, I kind of love it. Um, I know it's unfair to other apps cause they can't do this kind

01:39:25   of integration, but this is the kind of integration I want. Uh, I wouldn't be so sure. Uh, sponsor of

01:39:31   this very episode, one password on iOS. I don't feel like I've ever broken the code as to when

01:39:36   it works completely and when it's, when it doesn't. But generally speaking at the very least, it will

01:39:42   copy that, that, you know, six digit code to your clipboard. But a lot of times on iOS, it will

01:39:47   actually properly fill in that, that, you know, one time use code automatically. So once you enter,

01:39:53   you know, your username and password, you, and you've used one password to do that. And then the

01:39:57   iOS integration, you know, into one password to do that or vice versa. Uh, then when you proceed to

01:40:02   the next screen and ask for your code, a lot of times it will actually enter iOS. Well, you know,

01:40:08   drop it in there for you and you don't have to do anything else. And worst case it's paste. It's

01:40:13   already there waiting for you. Yeah. The, the web integration has always been good with this because

01:40:16   of web extensions, which they've just gotten made better and better. Like that now you can have web

01:40:20   extensions that span out all of Apple's platforms and web extensions do have the power to do this

01:40:24   for you. Uh, the Apple one though, is going to be able to integrate with, you know, like native apps,

01:40:28   right. That, you know, one password doesn't have access to, so I'm glad they built this in. My fear

01:40:33   is nobody will use this because we all already have our own, you know, people who use one password,

01:40:39   like Apple is never going to match the feature set of one password. They're just not gonna,

01:40:42   because that's an entire company dedicated to this one feature. I don't use one password,

01:40:46   but I use the Google authenticator. I'm not going to move all my stuff to something else.

01:40:50   Other people use off the and they love off the, how does the built-in Apple thing fit into this?

01:40:55   Oh, and by the way, when I use Chrome on my Mac, it has its own password thing. That's not built

01:41:00   into Apple's thing. It's a Apple is late to this game. Um, so I'm glad they're doing something

01:41:06   because I think this should be an OS level feature, but boy, they're super late. And I'm not sure,

01:41:11   kind of like a lot of the stuff they're trying to do in TVS, a TVOS. I'm not sure they're going to

01:41:15   be able to get everybody on board. Hey, everybody stop using your more full feature third-party apps

01:41:20   and use the built-in one cause it's built in. And like the only way you get a benefit from this

01:41:26   is if just everybody converts to supporting the built-in one. And Apple hasn't even been

01:41:29   able to do that with Apple pay, which is an amazing service that they weren't particularly late to. So

01:41:33   I'm not optimistic about the chances of this feature, but I like the idea of it.

01:41:37   Yeah. I mean, in general, I think this has all the same benefits and drawbacks of all the rest of

01:41:42   Apple's built-in password management stuff where like, like I'm a one password user and yes,

01:41:46   they are sponsoring this episode, but I've been a user since way before that. Um, and,

01:41:50   and I do all the two FA stuff in one password because it's amazing to have that and to have

01:41:54   it be saying not, not to worry about, you know, John losing his Google authenticator phone,

01:41:58   bad place to be. Um, but you know, I, I, the reason why I haven't converted over to use Apple system

01:42:06   is that I like one password because it is reliable and because there is an app that I can go to that

01:42:15   hat that's like the center of all this information. I can, I can go there and easily manage it and

01:42:18   everything. Apple seems to be allergic to the idea of making apps that expose their functionality,

01:42:25   like in an app, like there's all this magic stuff that happens throughout the system.

01:42:29   And a lot of it never makes it to an app or never has an app made for it.

01:42:33   And so settings app, that tiny app called settings. Yeah. Yeah. But that's separate

01:42:39   issue. It was a shortcut that someone posted that was basically like it would put an icon on your

01:42:42   home screen that said passwords and all it would do would jump you into settings to the password

01:42:46   section. And most people had no idea that that section was even there. I don't even know where

01:42:50   it is either because who can find anything in settings these days. So you're right. If that

01:42:52   was a separate app, a, it would be easier to find and B they could add features to that app instead

01:42:58   because now they're stuck with like, well, if we own it, if it wants to do anything that the

01:43:01   setting app can't do well, tough cause settings app can do like a series of screens that go from

01:43:05   left to right. And that's basically it. Right. And, and, and I've been in that settings area

01:43:08   occasionally and it's miserable to try to actually use that like to, to find something or to edit or

01:43:14   change something. It's very clunky. And, and there's also issues that I've had with iCloud

01:43:20   key chain stuff with just reliability of like whether iCloud key chain works correctly on a

01:43:25   device. And sometimes it will have a device where it just breaks and my password just don't auto

01:43:31   fill and I don't know why or they're just not there. And it persists that way until that device

01:43:36   gets restored or updated or whatever. And like that's, they still have basic reliability problems

01:43:41   sometimes for me. And that's why I don't keep anything important only in iCloud key chain.

01:43:47   Like I will, I'll use it for like, you know, if some website that I don't intend to really use

01:43:51   very much has, you know, registration form and iCloud fills in an auto filled secure password,

01:43:55   I'll be like, sure, whatever. Yeah. Click, click, click. Okay. Whatever. But anything that I want

01:43:59   to keep long term, I keep in one password because I still don't feel like I can trust Apple system

01:44:03   to really be reliable and like a safe data store yet. And I don't know that this is going to change

01:44:10   that. And anything that uses a 2FA authenticator, I'd rather have in something like one password

01:44:15   where I know I have a form of backup of that, like that seed code for that. So I don't know. I don't,

01:44:22   I don't see myself using this in the future, but maybe, maybe that'll change. I don't know.

01:44:26   I mean, I think it's important that it exists because you know, the barrier to getting like

01:44:30   someone in your family to use two factors, like, oh, I got to download an app and which app do I

01:44:34   have to use? And do I have to pay for this app? Just having something, anything built into the

01:44:38   OS for two factor is really important for the people who otherwise don't know or care about

01:44:43   this stuff is then they don't have to get a separate app. They don't care about the details.

01:44:47   At least we have something again, assuming it meets some minimum level level of reliability,

01:44:51   which I think this is probably close to like, this is not as pure win as the thing they did where,

01:44:57   like when you get a, the messages app would, uh, would extract the code and let you paste it in.

01:45:02   Right. Cause that was just like, let me just save you a step. This should save even more steps,

01:45:06   but it does require a little bit more buy-in than just merely existing and using messages.

01:45:10   All right. We are running long. So we got to pick up the pace a little bit. Uh, so we'll just say,

01:45:16   Hey, you can build in and release an iOS app from Swift playgrounds. That's cool.

01:45:20   Somehow. The good thing is we don't, I personally don't know any more about that, but yes,

01:45:24   that is a big, huge deal. And they did not elaborate on it. Yeah. That's the one thing

01:45:28   that I expected to be, to have a lot more info and say to the union and they're just,

01:45:32   there was a little bit more information, but that's about it. But you know, I think one thing

01:45:36   they were, they didn't show the, uh, the, you know, app store connect interface at all. You

01:45:42   still have to, it seems like you still have to use app store connect to manage everything. Uh, so,

01:45:47   and you know, I was, you know, I would imagine you're probably gonna still gonna get all your

01:45:50   rejection notices in apps to connect to and probably not in Swift playgrounds.

01:45:54   I don't think it's, I don't think it's clear at all. Like someone tweeted,

01:45:57   I retweeted someone's snarky. This is so where in Swift playgrounds do I enter my DUNS number?

01:46:01   Like, cause going from zero to, I put an app on the app store. It's way more complicated than

01:46:08   what they expose in playground. So they showed like, uh, you know, Oh, these products are cross

01:46:12   compatible with Xcode, which is awesome. It's great that you're not stuck. Like if you started

01:46:16   an iPad, you're stuck in this little baby version of the thing. No, it's apparently the project will

01:46:19   work in both places, but then they showed like the settings, like how do I look at my app settings?

01:46:23   And it is so simplified in a, in a refreshing way. Like if you ever looked at the Xcode, you know,

01:46:28   settings for your project, it's just, it's huge. And there's so much stuff. And it's just

01:46:33   like, it is a very developer interface. And on playgrounds, it's like, Oh, here's a little pop

01:46:37   over with a couple of like on off switches. Like, and nothing else is exposed. Now it's probably all

01:46:42   buried in there because it's cross compatible with Xcode, but yeah, many, many questions remain about

01:46:47   this, but we're waiting for Xcode and iPad. Uh, this is not it, but Hey, you can apparently

01:46:52   develop a real live native Swift UI app on your iPad and put it on the app store. So this is a

01:46:58   huge step. It is monumentally important. And we will learn more about it as we watch the sessions

01:47:04   that detail this. Yeah, it really, I mean, this is massive. We don't really have time to talk fully

01:47:09   about it yet. And we don't know enough about it really to talk too much about it yet, but

01:47:12   being able to build iOS apps on iOS is a huge deal. It's a massive deal for so many reasons. And

01:47:18   I don't think we're ever going to get full blown Xcode on, on iPads. Um, because what that means

01:47:26   is so contrary to how everything works on iOS, you know, with things like different files and

01:47:32   file management and different tools being all integrated together. Like it's, it's the kind

01:47:35   of thing that iOS is terrible at and not designed for. So I'm not expecting to ever get quote Xcode

01:47:41   for iPad in the way that we know Xcode today and the way most developers build most apps of any

01:47:45   complexity, but to be able to build apps at all and put them on the app store and get them rejected

01:47:51   in four or five days for providing too little functionality, that's really magical. Uh, and,

01:47:56   and I hope that this becomes like a thing that helps get people into app development more like

01:48:01   I have concerns about Swift UI being the like education side of things because Swift UI is

01:48:09   something that looks very easy but is not. And it looks very like, so Swift. Well, right. Well,

01:48:15   yeah, exactly. I mean the whole idea of using Swift as an educational language, I think is kind

01:48:18   of comical. Um, but you know, type one parentheses in the wrong place and God knows the error,

01:48:25   a lot the error message you're going to get from Swift UI. But, uh, for people who are already,

01:48:30   who know enough to use Swift and Swift UI or can plow through the, the probably pretty steep

01:48:37   learning curve on some of this stuff. Uh, if all you have is an iPad, then now you have access to

01:48:42   make apps. That's pretty, that's something you couldn't do before. It's something that we,

01:48:46   I honestly never thought we would get. So to have that at all is amazing. And you know,

01:48:51   even though there's going to be probably a lot of little rough edges to what that means in reality,

01:48:55   uh, that's still a great thing. Yeah. And it's another tick in the scoreboard for Swift UI. And

01:49:03   you know, I, this app that maybe I'll release before I die, it's entirely Swift UI and I do

01:49:10   like it, but there's, there's rough edges everywhere. And honestly, I don't think that

01:49:15   many of those rough edges have been sanded down this release, but we'll see over time.

01:49:21   But nonetheless, uh, it seems that Swift UI is the thing that, that is most portable, which is

01:49:28   an obvious thing to say, right? It was always designed to be portable, but you know, widgets

01:49:32   have to be Swift UI. It, they said something about how these, these apps that you write on the iPad

01:49:38   have to be Swift UI. And apparently they are portable between Xcode and the iPad or in Swift

01:49:43   playgrounds, but it's unclear exactly how that works. And if you start to dip into traditional

01:49:50   UI kit, like what happens. So yeah, if you're not on the Swift UI train, if you're not at least be,

01:49:55   you know, functionally able to read it, if not write basic stuff, I think it's coming on time

01:50:02   for you to learn. Moving on, I'm going to try to do this quickly and it's not going to work.

01:50:06   Privacy, mail privacy protection, hide your IP address, hide your location. App privacy reports

01:50:11   are available. Siri now has on-device speech recognition, which yes, is a privacy thing,

01:50:17   but looks like it's going to make Siri way faster. Also, I just said the name of that assistant like

01:50:23   three times in a row. I apologize. But, so the point is it'll be way quicker as you tell it to

01:50:29   shush as it's trying to parse what I just said. So that's exciting. No, that's, that is massive.

01:50:35   By the way, we blew right past the mounds far thing. I do want to get back to that in a second,

01:50:38   but like having on-device recognition, it's funny. Most people forgotten or never knew that iOS

01:50:44   devices did very briefly have this feature right before Siri was released. Siri came with the iPhone

01:50:51   4S. The iPhone 4 and I believe 3GS also had on-device speech recognition for a limited

01:51:00   amount of functionality. They could like, even back then before Siri, it had this feature. It

01:51:06   was based on the same feature that Macs have have had forever. And you could do very simple,

01:51:11   you know, a limited set of tasks with on-device speech recognition before. And it was great.

01:51:18   And Siri was actually in these ways of like, you know, latency and being able to do it offline.

01:51:23   Siri was actually a step back in those areas. And we are now finally closing that gap. And

01:51:28   I am very much looking forward to this because one of my biggest problems with Siri is that it's

01:51:36   inconsistent. And one of my second, my second biggest problem with Siri is that it's often slow.

01:51:41   Now where I really want this is on the HomePod. That's where I really need this.

01:51:47   But having it on the phone is a good start.

01:51:49   Yeah. I wonder if the HomePod, I mean, they touted it as like, oh,

01:51:52   feature of our neural engine. Is the HomePod not powerful enough to do this? I wish it was because

01:51:56   yes, responding faster. I tweeted, I hope this is a dramatic change because obviously everything

01:52:01   in the demo looks really fast. And I got some replies saying, yes, it is a dramatic change.

01:52:05   So I give this a huge thumbs up. I really hope this works the way they showed it.

01:52:10   Yep, very much so. Marco, you said you wanted to talk about privacy again for a second?

01:52:13   Yeah. The Mail and Safari privacy protection features where they hide your IP address from

01:52:21   tracking pixels and mail messages and from something in Safari, I assume it's just the

01:52:27   identified trackers from the like the tracking detector thing in Safari. Like, because it's

01:52:32   obviously not going to be proxying all of your image loads and all of your script load through

01:52:36   from everything you browse in Safari. That seems unlikely. And Mail, I assume with Mail,

01:52:43   it's probably, again, it's probably only tracking pixels that they can identify that way. Probably

01:52:49   not all mail images. But the idea that they're doing something to effectively like proxy or VPN,

01:52:58   your image requests to hide your IP from people who send you mail. That's a very good thing.

01:53:03   How they implement it is, it depends a lot on how they implement it, like how effective this is,

01:53:10   because one thing people can still do is they could still see like, if they generate a unique

01:53:17   URL for each email that is sent, they know if an image gets requested that's in your email,

01:53:24   they know that your email was delivered. Unless the way it's implemented is Apple loads all

01:53:29   image requests for all of these tracking pixels, even if you haven't opened any emails, which would

01:53:36   dilute the value of that somewhat as a data point. But that has its own issues with how and when it

01:53:42   was open and everything. So we'll see how this is implemented. But overall, the idea of Apple Mail

01:53:48   tackling the problem of mail tracking pixels is a great thing. Because if we think the web is bad

01:53:57   with tracking everything, Mail is no better. And typically, Mail, with a few exceptions,

01:54:04   like this is one of the advertised features of Hey, but with a few exceptions, most mail clients

01:54:08   have done nothing to very little about trying to block, you know, email based tracking for inline

01:54:16   images. And most people don't use the settings that Apple has offered for years of just don't

01:54:22   load inline images, because most emails get totally broken if you don't load inline images.

01:54:26   So most people, you know, need those or leave those on an iOS has been on by default. I don't

01:54:31   know if it's default on the Mac. But anyway, to have something like this that can that can

01:54:36   let you load inline images, sometimes or most of the time, but still block tracking for the really

01:54:43   creepy ad tech side of this. That's fantastic. They are going to anger so many email spammers,

01:54:50   I mean, marketers, excuse me. But I don't care. Email marketers have have stomped all over our

01:54:58   privacy for so long with tracking pixels that they deserve no sympathy. And I'm very, very happy to

01:55:03   see Apple taking a stand on this. Definitely agree. All right, we had a section on iCloud,

01:55:09   which is a little bit unexpected. They have some account recovery tools now, which are great.

01:55:14   Among the things you can do is you can designate say, like a partner to be a recovery contact. So

01:55:21   if you are like john, and you lose the one and only phone that has you know, Google authenticator,

01:55:25   in this case, the one only phone that has your, your iCloud login, you can on your new phone,

01:55:31   say, Oh, I need to recover. And then the six digit code that would normally go to your phone instead

01:55:36   would go to your your partner. And you would have them read, you know, the six digit code off to you,

01:55:41   and then you can be let back into your device. Similarly, digital legacy. So if you pass away,

01:55:46   these are the people who are allowed to have your iCloud, iCloud information, if not credentials,

01:55:52   if that happens, I think it's a when not an if. Well, fair, fair. No way, man, I'm living forever.

01:55:58   I mean, that would be nice. But you know, I think I'm realistic here. Fair enough. I think a lot of

01:56:03   these features, the recovery and the legacy features, like some services, depending on you

01:56:08   know, again, where you have your identity, let's say you have a Google account, Google has similar

01:56:11   features, but like, Apple, Apple has an identity system, it's Apple ID, and you essentially need

01:56:18   to use it to be in the Apple ecosystem and use all their stuff. And I imagine one of the biggest

01:56:23   headaches for Apple is people coming to the Apple Store or calling support and saying, I can't get

01:56:29   into my thing, I forgot my password. And Apple because they have real security, for the most part,

01:56:34   there's little to nothing they can do for you. And they can't Apple can't solve this problem by

01:56:39   giving themselves a backdoor or by like, oh, Apple should be able to get in because that's what people

01:56:43   think. People think, well, you're Apple, of course, you can give me my stuff back, like, and the

01:56:47   technical nuances of like, why Apple can't and shouldn't do that are lost on people, they just

01:56:52   want their pictures of their kids back, right. So this is a human solution to that problem, which is,

01:56:57   we will encourage you to, to put other humans in the circle of trust for your thing. Obviously,

01:57:04   there are downsides because you got to be careful you put in that circle of trust,

01:57:07   but in situations where, like, if they encourage it with the correct framing, like someone you

01:57:14   really do trust or whatever. I mean, I don't know, it's a little bit fraught, but I'm glad this

01:57:19   feature exists, just because I think a lot of people do have someone, they do want to have a

01:57:24   backup, they don't want to just rely on their carefulness. And you know, their memory and their,

01:57:30   you know, you know, bank safety deposit box of, you know, recovery codes or whatever,

01:57:36   every kind of service that has that an identity that has lots of valuable personal information

01:57:40   should have systems like this that people can use if they want. Because without it, it's all too

01:57:47   easy to find yourself in a situation where very important precious, you know, precious things to

01:57:53   you again, photos of your kids are lost forever. Yeah. And then I think it was after the keynote,

01:58:00   somebody had discovered that there's going to be temporary iCloud storage for device transfers,

01:58:06   which I was like, wait, what? When I read this, so I think John put a blurb in the show notes.

01:58:11   Now, when you buy a new device, you can use iCloud backup to move your data to your new device. Even

01:58:15   if you're low on storage, iCloud will grant you as much storage as you need to complete a temporary

01:58:20   backup free of charge for up to three weeks. This allows you to get all your apps, data and settings

01:58:24   on your device automatically. What a great idea. Yeah, this is awesome. My only thing I tweeted

01:58:30   this as well is that I hope they someday soon extend this to software updates as well. Because

01:58:37   I know so many like real life people who don't pay for iCloud storage and their phones are always

01:58:44   full or very close to full and they don't do software updates. Like they don't update to the

01:58:48   latest iOS for like a year or more, or they just do it until they're until they get the next phone

01:58:54   because their phone doesn't have enough space to run the software update. And this is such a great

01:58:58   thing to do this for phone upgrades. Great. Also apply this to software updates. That would be

01:59:03   incredible. Because so many people hold on to way too old a version of iOS, only for this reason,

01:59:09   that their phone doesn't have enough space to update and they don't want to pay for iCloud.

01:59:13   And so yeah, to have like a temporary thing that Apple can can, you know, spare a bit of space for

01:59:18   a day while their phone updates, that would be pretty great. Maybe Apple knows the metrics on

01:59:23   that because people buy new phones once every year, two years, three years, whatever. But

01:59:27   OS updates come way more frequently than that. What percentage of Apple's phones are in this

01:59:31   situation where they would need this temp storage? And because OS updates tend to roll out to

01:59:37   everyone more or less at the same time and Apple pushes them super heavily, I wonder if they would

01:59:42   end up overcommitting the storage. Again, Apple knows these numbers. You know, we don't. But it

01:59:47   seems plausible that they might prefer the sort of, let's say, more evenly spread distribution

01:59:53   and lower frequency of phone upgraders as opposed to OS updates, which are not evenly distributed

02:00:00   and much more frequent. Then we get into iCloud Plus because you can never have enough pluses.

02:00:06   This was weird to me. Not bad, just weird. And it seems like if I were to summarize it, it's

02:00:16   an Apple provided don't call it a VPN VPN. It's an Apple. Well, before you get through

02:00:21   listing the features, like, so you just said iCloud Plus. We all saw that and we all thought,

02:00:26   here's a new brand for a thing that historically when Apple has done this, it's like a new thing

02:00:32   that you can pay for. Like it didn't, isn't that what everyone thought when you see iCloud Plus?

02:00:36   And that's purely Apple's choice of like, we are coming up with a new branding. We're explicitly

02:00:40   using a branding that we've used before to imply that this is a service that you're going to pay

02:00:45   for. And now we're going to list the features. And so go ahead. So you've got the, you got the,

02:00:49   the private relay VPN thing. So you got a private relay VPN thing. You've got hide my email, which

02:00:54   gives you like a randomized email that, that will forward to your real email address.

02:00:58   Apparently you can get custom domain or you can use custom domains with iCloud, which was new to

02:01:03   me. I don't believe this was mentioned on the keynote and then home kits, secure video. You

02:01:07   can have unlimited cameras. I think you're limited to five right now, if I remember right. And the

02:01:13   video does not take up, you know, any of your allotted storage, it's considered separate.

02:01:17   And gentlemen, I'm super excited to tell you that they have, and I'm quoting the same low prices

02:01:23   that they offer today. So, so this is getting back to my intro. The only reason we thought this would

02:01:28   be something you would charge for is because you started it by branding it like one of the things

02:01:32   that you charge for. And then at the end, you're like, Oh, we don't charge for it. Aren't you glad?

02:01:35   It's like, well, the only reason I thought you were going to charge anything cause you, cause you

02:01:37   made me think you were going to charge something. So I don't know. It seems like they do. So it

02:01:42   seems like what they've done is rename iCloud paid plans to iCloud plus. Well, yeah, you have to,

02:01:48   you have to already pay. Like that's why they say the same low price. If you already pay for iCloud

02:01:53   extra storage, then you get this extra stuff. But if you don't pay for it, you don't get it. But the

02:01:59   branding is iCloud plus is confusing to me. Like, and I'm not begrudging them. Like I think these

02:02:03   features are all good features, particularly the custom domains, especially. I mean, it's probably

02:02:08   more of a techie thing, but like custom domains are a really good idea. I encourage, especially

02:02:13   everyone who's listening to a tech podcast, you should. And I say this as someone who doesn't

02:02:17   follow his advice myself, but you should, you should, I kind of do like I have my own domain,

02:02:22   but anyway, um, you should have your own domain definitely for your website, probably also for

02:02:28   email, but it's a pain who wants to have, if you're not super techie, you don't want to like sign up

02:02:32   for an email service. Oh, I got to have my own email domain or whatever. It's just easier for

02:02:36   me to just use one of the third party ones. Well, here you go. If you're, if you're willing to

02:02:40   tolerate Apple's mail system at all, um, but don't want to have an email address that's at me.com at

02:02:45   mac.com@itools.com@icloud.com. Uh, now apparently somehow through some system that we don't yet know,

02:02:54   you can just, I guess you register a domain. Do you pay for the domain? I don't know how it's

02:02:58   going to work, but having a custom domain, uh, that's not, I'm hoping that not owned by Apple

02:03:04   would mean that in theory, if you ever move elsewhere, you could keep your same email

02:03:08   address. We don't have the details on this. We don't know how it will work, but in theory,

02:03:11   I like the idea of this. Nope. I agree. All right. Health. Uh, they added walking steadiness as a,

02:03:20   as a mobility thing. Um, they added descriptions of lab data trends. Uh, you can share your health

02:03:27   data with your doctor and then you can also share your health data with family members.

02:03:30   So your family members can see, Oh, you know, this trend is that they're resting heart rate is up a

02:03:36   lot over the last month. Maybe you should encourage, you know, Nana to go and get checked out or

02:03:40   something like that. It's good stuff. Yeah. It's a good use of like, they have all these sensors,

02:03:45   especially with the Apple watch, like literally strapped to you. Um, and even just your phone

02:03:48   and your pocket can pick up things like the walking steadiness. And so this is all, uh,

02:03:52   you know, a extremely like the health app. We don't talk about it too much. It's just been there and

02:03:57   it's slowly advancing, but there's been a lot of buy-in on the health app. Most health applications

02:04:01   on iOS integrate with the built in health app because it is made from the beginning to be

02:04:07   integrated with, and it's actually pretty good. And every year it gets a little bit better. And

02:04:10   the more they integrate the sensor data combined with like diagnostic info combined with finally,

02:04:15   somehow, depending on your country or state, getting integration with the actual healthcare

02:04:19   system, like the doctors and everything to the extent that they can succeed in that it makes

02:04:23   everything better. Yep. Watch OS 8, uh, health. It's got a new mindfulness app, uh, including

02:04:31   reflect, which asks you to reflect on, you know, particular prompts throughout the day. So the

02:04:35   example they showed was think about something you love to do and why it brings you joy.

02:04:38   Uh, there's sleep app, which now includes respiratory rate. There's new workout types

02:04:42   for tai chi and Pilates. Uh, they've gotten a new seemingly famous, uh, fitness instructor,

02:04:47   Jeanette Jenkins, who I personally had not heard of, but apparently she's going to be doing, uh,

02:04:51   fitness plus workouts. Uh, and they're also doing an artist spotlight series. So, uh, I guess in,

02:04:57   in, in most Apple fitness plus workouts, you know, you'll get a smattering of different music.

02:05:02   And for these, the entire workout is one artist. Uh, also in watch OS 8, uh, they spent a lot of

02:05:08   time on photos, uh, which seems like an interesting choice, but one little tidbit they dropped was

02:05:13   that the photos face is the most popular watch face, which I thought was not surprising,

02:05:16   but interesting. I wrote that down too. I actually, I did think it was surprising,

02:05:20   but it makes sense. It shows how much people who buy the Apple watch really care about watches and

02:05:25   watch faces. They just want a picture of their kids. Yep. Uh, they have, uh, support for when

02:05:33   you have a photo on your, on your watch face. If it was taken with a portrait mode, they do this

02:05:38   like fake 3d. They called it dynamic composition. Uh, I see this a lot on like Facebook and stuff.

02:05:43   Did that seem creepy to you? I did not care for it. I've never really liked it personally.

02:05:49   I like out loud said, Oh, when they scrolled the face like inflated. I, I did not like that at all.

02:05:56   Maybe I'm in the minority. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't, I didn't really care for it either.

02:06:01   Uh, you can apparently, uh, respond to things a lot better. So they talked about composition.

02:06:07   You can, uh, use the digital crown to, to move your cursor while you're entering stuff during

02:06:12   like scribble. And they have gift search, which is exciting. I thought that was pretty neat.

02:06:16   And also on one of the word cloud slide sort of things, they mentioned that, uh,

02:06:21   you can do multiple timers, which is very exciting too. Oh, that's nice. I mean, for me, like, I mean,

02:06:26   watchOS I think is probably the, the, the section of this that seemed to have the least changes for

02:06:33   developers to do anything about and even possibly for Apple as well. It seems like a pretty, pretty

02:06:39   quiet year for the watch. But, um, there was one big API change that finally I think will be nice.

02:06:47   Um, it's, we didn't get custom watch faces, uh, still, still holding out hope, but I had complained

02:06:55   of, uh, maybe a month or two ago about how, like, you know, two years into having always on watch

02:07:01   faces and the hardware, every app would just do the, like, it would just blur the background when

02:07:06   the watch face went to like sleep mode. And so now they have an API and watchOS eight where your app.

02:07:13   So they kind of, they branded it as like always on screen apps, but that's not quite what it is.

02:07:18   What it is is there's an API to describe how your app should look instead of just being blurred out

02:07:27   when it is the foreground app and the display goes, do those into that like half sleep mode.

02:07:31   So now you can, you can specify like, you know, okay, well when it, when it's in sleep mode, make

02:07:36   these modifications to the Swift UI interface, you know, this thing gets dimmed. This thing gets

02:07:41   hidden. This thing gets blurred out cause it's sensitive info, like whatever it is, you could now

02:07:45   specify exactly how that will look for your UI. So that should allow things to be just much nicer for

02:07:52   the always on screen watches. And I hope that Apple has done that same thing to their own apps.

02:07:57   Uh, because like this was probably gonna be like literally earlier today, I was trying to like do

02:08:01   a stretch that I had to hold for some amount of time and I had the Apple watch on. So I'm like,

02:08:04   all right, I'll launch a stopwatch app and I'll hit go and I'll just start the stretch. And as

02:08:09   soon as the screen goes to sleep, it blurred and you can't even see this. And like really the

02:08:13   stopwatch get like nothing like, so I'm very glad to see this support coming and hopefully Apple has

02:08:20   done their work to update their apps to do this. Um, but we'll see. All right. HomeKit got a section

02:08:27   uh, they talked about HomeKit. They, uh, apparently you can use one of the tubes to ask,

02:08:35   uh, for something to be played on the Apple TV, which is kind of neat. Um, they talked a little

02:08:40   bit about SharePlay stuff, uh, for they, they showed that if you're going to sit down and watch

02:08:45   TV, that you can, I, and I wasn't clear on the user interface here, but apparently you can like

02:08:50   say of the four of us that live together, uh, it's only me and Aaron that are watching TV or TV right

02:08:56   now. And so it'll show like more adult offerings or I can say, Oh no, it's me, it's Aaron, it's

02:09:00   Declan and Michaela. And they'll show like more family friendly options, which I thought was kind

02:09:03   of neat. Um, you can use the HomePod mini as Apple TV 4k speakers. You can do lossless audio on,

02:09:11   on the HomePod mini later this year. Uh, there's a voice recognition to know who's talking to them.

02:09:17   There's Siri on third party devices. I said the thing again, there's the two behind third party

02:09:22   devices, which I was very surprised to see. Uh, however, it requires the HomePod to be like the

02:09:28   receiver of these communications, uh, because they don't want to send them up to third party servers.

02:09:33   Yeah. The way I interpreted that was the thermostat can listen to your command, but it just probably

02:09:38   sends the audio to the, like to a HomePod. So you have to have a HomePod somewhere in the house.

02:09:44   That is actually, so it's basically acting as a remote microphone to your existing HomePod,

02:09:49   you know, not, not like the, like its own HomePod that talks directly to the internet.

02:09:54   But can the HomePod talk back to the thermostat and tell it to do something or is it just one way?

02:09:58   I think it's one way.

02:09:59   Yeah, I don't, they didn't, they didn't go into too much on that. And that's, I don't think it's,

02:10:03   I don't think that feature is out yet. Like a lot of what they mentioned in the keynote and the

02:10:07   state of the union is stuff that is actually not in the betas yet or, and a lot of it, they said,

02:10:12   like, you know, coming later this year or coming this fall. Um, so a lot of these features are

02:10:17   things that we can't actually see or test yet. Yeah. Uh, moving right along, there is Matter

02:10:24   support in iOS 15. I think we talked about this just last week, but this is the thing that was

02:10:27   formerly connected home over IP or Troyp. Uh, that's now rebranded Matter and there's support

02:10:32   for that in iOS 15, whatever that means. Uh, there's a better Apple watch app for Home,

02:10:37   which is really a low bar because the Home app is really bad. Uh, and then there's package detection

02:10:43   on video cameras. So it'll let you know if a package has been delivered and then we get to

02:10:48   Mac OS Monterey and oh, we're out of time. All right. Well, it's been great everybody.

02:10:51   Our thank you to our sponsors, Mac, Walden, one password and yes, please. We'll talk to you next

02:10:55   week. Are you trying to skip the Mac OS? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I was expecting a much

02:11:02   more violent reaction from the two of you that Joe down on Mac OS. Oh, here it is. Yeah. Yeah.

02:11:10   Uh, so Mac OS Monterey, uh, and they talked about several different things. There's

02:11:14   FaceTime improvements. There's a low power mode, which is pretty cool. Um,

02:11:18   do we know any details about that though? It said it reduces the clock speed, uh, of the CPU,

02:11:23   reduces screen brightness and does something to background apps. I don't know the details,

02:11:28   but that's, that's how it was described in its various feature pages. Um, and finally,

02:11:32   you know, this I've been using these like, you know, I'm, I'm on my Intel max. I've been using

02:11:36   these, these turbo boost disabling utilities for years cause it really does make a very big

02:11:40   difference to drop the clock speed. Maximum makes a huge difference in power usage. And you know,

02:11:45   you don't necessarily need that all the time. You know, there are much of the time you want

02:11:49   full power, but it's really nice to have the option to turn it on when you want to do things like

02:11:54   operate a laptop in your lap and have it not melt your legs, uh, or go on a very long flight and you

02:11:59   want to maximize your battery life as long as you possibly can. Should have that built in. What's

02:12:03   a flight. So to have that built in to the OS, like first of all, it's easy. Like they should have done

02:12:10   this years ago. I'm glad they're doing it now. And that's going to be great because doing it like my

02:12:16   nerdy hacky way is both difficult and limited. Um, you know, if they doing it their way where it's

02:12:22   built into the OS, they can be smarter about things like not running photo indexing and other

02:12:27   like CPU intensive things during low power mode. Um, so hopefully they've done a deep integration

02:12:33   here with all the various like processing demons in the system. Uh, and, and that I'm looking

02:12:39   forward to, uh, even though my current laptop, the M1 MacBook air has such a ridiculously awesome

02:12:45   battery life that I probably wouldn't use it right now on this hardware, but certainly in the future,

02:12:50   I bet I will have hardware that I will use this on. And for everybody out there who still has Intel

02:12:53   max, this is fantastic. It would be nice if this thing worked the way 4g and 5g do on the phone,

02:12:59   where basically it will not use 5g unless it thinks it really needs it to save battery life,

02:13:04   even though it will show 5g in the menu bar and the status bar. Like when it, when 5g is available,

02:13:09   it will just use 4g until the OS thinks that it's actually needs to send and receive data that would

02:13:14   be beyond the bandwidth of, I don't know. I don't know how it makes a decision, but I can imagine,

02:13:17   well, first of all, I can imagine, especially with an M1, just putting in low power mode,

02:13:22   like permanently all the time, because it's plenty fast to do what they do with their Mac,

02:13:26   just all the time and Hey, bonus battery life. But most people would feel that if they tried to

02:13:31   do something like if they're trying to build an X code, you don't want to be in low power mode or

02:13:34   whatever, because it probably spawns a lot of background threads. So it would be great if you

02:13:37   could say, be in like auto mode, which is like being low power mode all the time until it seems

02:13:42   like there's a bunch of stuff, you know, queuing it because you know, you can in Mac OS either

02:13:48   explicitly or implicitly by the framework or use threads have priorities, right? There's, you know,

02:13:54   there's, there's a big range of priorities, you know, setting aside the Unix, nicing of processes

02:13:58   and stuff that Mac OS itself has specific priorities for different kinds of things that run.

02:14:03   And so at any given time, Mac OS knows how much stuff is user initiated, high priority stuff,

02:14:08   how much stuff is background. It knows which processes are spawned from demons versus which

02:14:11   ones respond from interactive applications and all this stuff. And so it can get a kind of idea of

02:14:16   like what load them under, and then for the background processes, it kind of knows when's

02:14:20   the last time I ran photo analysis. So I can imagine, which they didn't talk about here,

02:14:24   but I can imagine a future enhancement of this auto mode, which is like, just be in low power

02:14:28   mode essentially all the time, because I'm willing to sacrifice how up to date my photo analysis is

02:14:35   by letting you only run it like, you know, half the interval you normally would ride,

02:14:40   or only letting you run it for five minutes out of every hour, right? It's different than putting

02:14:44   in a low power mode permanently, because it would still do those high part when you hit build an X

02:14:49   code, it would ramp up to full power and then settle back down. And it wouldn't stop photo

02:14:53   analysis from ever running, it would just make it run less frequently. Because with a low power mode

02:14:57   as a manual switch, obviously, it will prompt you to go into that when you get low on battery,

02:15:02   like the phone does, which is great. And some people want to be running at all time, which is

02:15:06   also good. But most people, like human nature being what it is, you want to run it, you want

02:15:10   it to be fast up until you realize you're almost out of battery, and then you want it to be low

02:15:14   power, but then you run out and you would have actually been better served in that scenario with

02:15:18   it being in this auto mode. So there's room for enhancement here, and I'm optimistic about it.

02:15:22   All right, so moving right along within macOS, focus is synced across all your devices,

02:15:28   supposedly, so you'll get all your different, you know, working, eating, playing, sleeping, whatever.

02:15:34   And by the way, that's awesome. Like, I love that we're now in a world where major iOS features

02:15:42   come to macOS at the same time. Like the fact that it's even available in macOS now,

02:15:47   instead of like three years from now. That's a good change. I'm very happy about that.

02:15:52   Yep, agreed. Like the FaceTime stuff too. And a lot of that has to do, we mentioned, you know,

02:15:55   like the weather app being enhanced in iOS. Like that's, I think they rewrote the whole thing in

02:16:01   SwiftUI. A bunch of stuff is being redone in SwiftUI. And SwiftUI is much easier to be

02:16:05   cross platform or like even just the messages app being catalyst or whatever it is like,

02:16:09   the frameworks and the how they span the platforms, whether it's catalyst or SwiftUI is what lets us

02:16:15   have these features at the same time. It's not like they made a custom app kit version of all

02:16:18   this stuff. Like, why do we get all the FaceTime improvements? Well, I guess I'm assuming it's

02:16:21   essentially the same app on both platforms. Same thing with the focus stuff. Like the background

02:16:26   demons might have always been the same thing, but it's always the UI that's a stumbling block. And

02:16:30   now that you can share some or all the UI across all their platforms, you know, it's a big payoff

02:16:35   for that. Yep. Quick notes and notes is also being updated to have all the new fancy, you know,

02:16:42   take a note on whatever you want stuff, which is very cool. And then we talk about continuity and

02:16:48   more specifically universal control. Holy freaking crap. This looked amazing. So to back up a half

02:16:56   step, if you think about the way things are today is that you have sidecar, which is you can set an

02:17:03   iPad next to your Mac and you can, you know, fiddle in control center and in system preferences,

02:17:07   I forget exactly where it is. And you can say, all right, I would like this iPad to be effectively an

02:17:11   external display for my Mac. And then you can have that act like an external display, you know,

02:17:18   as though you plugged in another display to your Mac. I use it not infrequently actually. And it

02:17:23   works really, really well. It's really, really well done. I really, really like it. Well, now

02:17:27   you have universal control, which is like not really the same thing. It didn't correct me,

02:17:34   gentlemen, if I go off the path here, but it's kind of like synergy, which you may have used

02:17:40   years and years ago, like I did. But basically you can have your iPad next to your Mac, but rather

02:17:47   than having it be a screen. So it's not the same as sidecar. What you can do is you can drag, let's

02:17:53   say, you're looking at an iMac and your iPad is to the right of the iMac. Well, you drag your mouse

02:17:59   cursor all the way to the right edge of the iMac screen. And I guess just keep pushing a little bit

02:18:04   like through the muck, if you will, or through the air. And then suddenly you will be taking control

02:18:10   of the mouse cursor on the iPad. And so as you mouse around using the mouse that is connected

02:18:16   to your iMac, you're actually controlling the cursor on the iPad. And then you can even pick

02:18:21   up and drag things like an image, for example, from the iPad back to the left to where your iMac is,

02:18:29   and then paste it on your iMac. And then they were saying, actually, you can do this with three

02:18:33   different computers and maybe even more than that. So say you have your MacBook Pro to the left of

02:18:38   your iMac. Well, you can take and you're using just the keyboard and mouse associated with your iMac.

02:18:43   You drag all the way to the right. You pick up an image. You drag all the way to the left through

02:18:48   the air, through your iMac, through the air again, and then drop it on your MacBook Pro.

02:18:53   Holy freaking crap, this looks so cool. And if it works at all, I will be deeply impressed.

02:19:00   This is the same functionality as continuity that we know and love. And it just shows how

02:19:04   the interface to it can make such a difference. So we all know whether we like this feature or not.

02:19:09   Oh, I bring up a web page on my phone and suddenly I see the little thing pop up next to the dock

02:19:13   that it knows like I'm on a web page on my phone. And hey, do you want to open that web page on your

02:19:17   Mac? For reasons we'll get into a little bit, web pages may not be the best example because there's

02:19:20   another solution to that. But the idea is that that's continuity. Oh, my devices are aware of

02:19:26   what's going on on the other devices if I'm signing the same Apple ID. So I can get that

02:19:29   thing over here. The addition here is now with this, you know, magic traveling cursor is that

02:19:35   your intent of like, hey, I would like to open that web page here on my Mac,

02:19:39   that normally that you'd express that intent by on your Mac clicking on the little icon that's next

02:19:43   to the dock, right? Now the intent is, oh, I'm going to use the cursor to fly over to my other

02:19:49   device, you know, and we can do that in the same of those third party apps that because they all

02:19:52   know about each other and you can sort of transition control from one device to another

02:19:56   and grab something and bring it back. And that long trip across devices is expressing the same

02:20:03   intent as if you had clicked on a little thing that's next to the dock is just doing it in a sort

02:20:07   of more direct way. It's more direct manipulation as opposed to like, oh, here's an option for some

02:20:12   functionality that we have to put in the UI somewhere. And you can, you know, express your

02:20:16   intent by clicking on it or something. Now just go get the thing and bring it back. But in the end,

02:20:20   it's doing the same thing, which is like, oh, so there's something on that device and you want it

02:20:24   over here and continuity knows about you and you've expressed your intent to that drag.

02:20:28   And now we'll connect all the dots. And it's more complicated to that when you're dragging a file

02:20:32   into another application and they all have to be aware of this. And, you know, so the demo is not

02:20:36   necessarily going to be universal across all your apps, especially in the beginning, but it's super

02:20:41   cool. My question when I saw this demo is how does this system know the relative positions of your

02:20:48   devices? How does it know which one is on the right? Which one in the middle? Which one on the

02:20:52   list? Does it require a U1? Do you arrange it like, like your range displays? Cause that demo,

02:20:59   where they dragged from an iPad across a MacBook pro to an iMac only works if something understands

02:21:05   how they are positioned on the table. Otherwise it gets very confusing real fast, right? Like,

02:21:11   you know, what if you had dragged from the iPad to the laptop and then quickly picked up the laptop

02:21:15   and put it on the other side of the iMac. Now, how do you get to the iMac screen? Like, how does it

02:21:18   know where things are relative to each other? A lot of questions about this interface, but the demo,

02:21:23   it was probably the most technically impressive demo. And I really liked the, even though,

02:21:27   you know, in the end it's like a simple magic trick, right? But like it was, it was like,

02:21:30   like you said, it's like mind blowing before you think about like, you know, the, the logistics of

02:21:35   how it's done that when you bring the mouse cursor from a Mac onto an iPad, it shows up like, cause

02:21:41   the iPad cursor is that little circle. It shows up as like a little circle, like, like as a bulge,

02:21:45   like there's a membrane between the two and you have to press a little bit harder on,

02:21:49   you have to drag a little bit more on your mouse to burst through the membrane. And now you're onto

02:21:52   the iPad a little bit disconcerting, but it's, I thought it was a very, it's a very clever

02:21:58   interface. You know, all the stuff they've done with cursor on the iPad is very clever and very

02:22:02   iPad-y and very interesting and well done. And this is just an extension of that. Yeah.

02:22:06   I'm going to be super sad when they say that, Oh, this doesn't work with Intel max and it doesn't

02:22:11   work with my two year old iPad. It's going to be a real bummer for me. Oh, what a bummer. You're

02:22:15   going to have to replace your hardware with new hardware. I feel so bad for you. You've definitely

02:22:19   not been looking for excuses to do that. You're going to do it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

02:22:24   Early today I actually said to Erin, you know, um, I don't feel like there's anything that I'm

02:22:29   going to want to buy after this is over and sitting here today. That is true. But knowing me,

02:22:34   there was no hardware. Exactly. Uh, but knowing me, I'm sure I'll have some thousand dollar

02:22:39   trinket I want by the end of the day. And she just like rolled her eyes and groaned because,

02:22:42   you know, it's, it's probably true. Uh, moving right along air plates to the Mac. So the Mac

02:22:48   can now act as an airplay receiver. So you could have say an iPad or something like that

02:22:54   and airplay not to your Apple TV. Well, you could do it to your Apple TV, but instead to your Mac,

02:22:58   which is really, really cool. And apparently that's both video and audio, which I, which I'm

02:23:02   super excited by. I always forget this functionality doesn't already exist and I try to

02:23:07   do it. I'm like, Oh, you can't do it. And there's a million third party apps that do it, but like,

02:23:10   it should have always been built in and out. So sorry for all the third party apps that have been

02:23:14   filming those gap for years, but Apple eventually caught up. Uh, moving right along shortcuts coming

02:23:19   to the Mac, which is extremely exciting. So that I wrote down a few quotes, uh, that were said during

02:23:25   the presentation, the future of automation on the Mac is shortcuts. This is just the start of a

02:23:30   multi-year transition was the word used, but they also said automator will still be supported.

02:23:36   So I'm not sure what that means for automator. I'm I don't really use automator to be honest

02:23:41   with you. And I don't really use Apple script either. So I'm not personally shedding tears

02:23:45   about this and shortcuts definitely looks like it's going to be really, really nice. And it looks

02:23:50   like it wasn't just like a, you know, throw it across, Chuck it over the wall sort of thing.

02:23:53   It looks like they actually spent some time on it. Uh, I I'm excited about this. I don't do that

02:23:59   much with shortcuts, but the things I do with shortcuts on iOS, I really, really would hate

02:24:03   to lose out on. And so being able to do similar things on the Mac would be really, really great.

02:24:09   So I'm, I'm really into this. Automator is not long for this world, Casey, just that.

02:24:14   Oh, I don't think so either. I agree with you. You know, the key is that, uh, that shortcuts can

02:24:19   import automated workflows. So that's a sign that automator is going away eventually. Um, I, I hope

02:24:25   what, what I, when I saw shortcuts on the Mac, I'm like, okay, well, people seem to like shortcuts and

02:24:30   we needed an automation store and the Mac. I think there are going to be differences because there

02:24:35   are different things you can do on a Mac in particular, if you can import automated workflows

02:24:38   and those automated workflows have like run shell script, like that's obviously a thing that you can

02:24:42   only do on the Mac. And I think that's perfectly fine. My hope for shortcuts on the Mac is that

02:24:46   potentially it would be easier to make an edit and deal with, uh, shortcuts in a Mac interface,

02:24:54   because as someone who does actual programming for, I don't mean to make it sound bad, but

02:24:59   as someone who does like traditional programming and not like automation for a living, I'm used to

02:25:04   writing computer code. And I find that much more efficient than trying to use automator or shortcuts

02:25:12   to accomplish the same thing. And in many ways I find shortcuts frustrating. Obviously I'm not

02:25:16   the target audience for this, but what I hope is that, Oh, now I have a Mac and a, you know,

02:25:21   a keyboard and a mouse cursor. Maybe it will just be less frustrating for me to deal with shortcuts

02:25:26   or even just to debug shortcuts, such as sort of step through them with a debug interface.

02:25:29   Now that I'm on a Mac with a big screen and multiple windows, I really hope that is a result

02:25:34   of this because I don't as much as shortcuts has been great on iOS. I don't want to give up the

02:25:41   flexibility and the power of automation on the Mac so that it is so that it has to fit into the

02:25:47   envelope defined by what automation is able to do on iOS. And it seems like that's not what they're

02:25:51   doing again, because you can't import automated workflows, but I really hope shortcuts

02:25:55   expands to fill the problem space of the Mac. Let's say.

02:25:58   - I don't see that honestly happening. I mean, shortcuts is, it shortcuts is, is

02:26:03   like big Duplo blocks. Like you can, you can build stuff with it that if you're not a programmer,

02:26:10   it can, it can help you get more powerful use out of your devices. And that's great,

02:26:15   but you are a programmer, John. And I don't think it's ever going to satisfy like programmers.

02:26:20   We have much different and more sophisticated standards when it comes to automation tools and

02:26:26   scriptability and stuff like that. And I don't think shortcuts is ever going to appeal to us,

02:26:31   but it's not designed to. - Well, but I feel like just using it on a Mac,

02:26:36   just being able to have a mouse cursor and a keyboard and multiple windows may make it easier

02:26:40   to do. And it may be like some kind of better debugger. And the fact that it can import

02:26:43   automated workflows means it must be able to essentially run an arbitrary shell script or

02:26:46   run an arbitrary Apple script. And that's always been the escape hatch for programmers. And these

02:26:50   things is I need to get the data from something that supports shortcuts. And then I can go off

02:26:55   into my own land of me just running my command line stuff, and then I can feed it back into the

02:26:59   app. Right? So if I take a side diversion into, you know, a Python script or something, that's

02:27:05   where I can do all the actual work and shortcuts just kind of the glue to hold together. And we

02:27:08   will see, I'm not deeply into Mac automation, but having some kind of story, you know, the future of

02:27:14   automation on the Mac, having any answer to that question is better than the limbo we've been in

02:27:18   for so many years where Apple script exists and is still kind of supported, but it's not clear that

02:27:24   it's long for this world and shortcuts. I mean, they put their stake in the ground. This is the

02:27:28   future of automation on the Mac, like it or not. - Yep. Safari got some under the hood changes,

02:27:35   like better power efficiency. There's a more unified extension like API or interface or

02:27:41   whatever. But more than anything else, Safari got a visual like revamp. And earlier this evening,

02:27:48   as we were recording, I was fiddling with Safari on this iPhone and I went into it wanting to and

02:27:56   expecting to hate it. And I don't think I hate it. I actually think I kind of like it on the phone.

02:28:01   I haven't tried it on the computer yet. - Yeah. This is interesting where they showed the redesign

02:28:05   of the Mac first and then said, "Oh, and by the way, it's totally different on the phone too,

02:28:08   but the way it is on the phone is not the way it is in the Mac." On the Mac, they have really,

02:28:14   really rethought how tabs work. As soon as I saw this, I thought of, when was this, 2014?

02:28:22   The last time they tried to make a radical change to the way tabs work on Safari

02:28:27   was what I call toppy tabs. It was much less radical than this change. And they did not fall

02:28:36   through on toppy tabs. It was a beta. They tried it. People didn't like it. They backed off. It

02:28:42   went with more traditional tabs. This redesign is like nothing I've ever seen in terms of a tab

02:28:48   interface. We'll have to see when we use it, in case you've tried it on iOS. And I think the iOS

02:28:54   changes, which we'll get to in a little bit, are a good idea, but the Mac changes, boy,

02:28:58   I'm not sure their head is in the right place in terms of these changes. So they made their pitch.

02:29:04   They made their emphasis. They said, "Now, this has been a trend in a lot of Mac apps,

02:29:09   and web browsers have always done this to some degree, but it's kind of this false scarcity

02:29:15   of screen space on desktop platforms or even laptops. Now the top bar on your web browser

02:29:20   takes up even less room, leaving more room for your content. How do they pull this off? Well,

02:29:27   if you look at an existing Safari window, if you have a bunch of tabs on it, you've got a top bar

02:29:32   that has back, forward, my reload button, window widgets, an address bar, and extensions. And then

02:29:40   under that bar, you have tabs, if you have tabs at all. I said, "We can save some space if we combine

02:29:48   the bar that has back, forward, and the window widgets, and the address bar with the tabs.

02:29:53   So instead of being one on top of the other, we put them all on the same row." And that was their

02:29:59   pitch. It's a thing that they did. Inarguably, it saves space, but at what cost? Do we all feel like

02:30:10   we are massively cramped for vertical space on a web page such that we can't give up 44 points or

02:30:17   one centimeter of space on our screen? And the cost is now that top bar, it's kind of like in

02:30:23   the Finder, but let's just jam everything in one thing. So the window widgets are up there. The

02:30:27   back, forward buttons are there. The tabs have morphed into a combination tab/address bar such

02:30:36   that when you click on one of the "tabs," it expands to become the address bar, which causes

02:30:41   the position of all the other "tabs" to change as the thing expands. And then if you had any

02:30:48   extensions in the top of your bar, now those are all buried under a pop-up menu, which we know

02:30:52   everybody, Marco loves when you bury things in a pop-up menu. You don't have a customizable toolbar

02:30:58   anymore. What you have is a tiny little space left over of maybe where you can put anything there

02:31:05   that's third-party. And then in the address bar, you get access to where your extensions used to be,

02:31:11   and every one of your tabs becomes the address bar when you click on it, causing all the other

02:31:14   tabs to move around. At first glance, I think this is not an improvement. And I'm trying to think,

02:31:21   is it not an improvement for me because I have a lot of tabs? Is this an improvement for people

02:31:24   who don't have a lot of tabs? Hard to say. I think the squirminess of this UI will be disconcerting

02:31:32   even to the most casual user who doesn't have thousands of tabs. The whole thing with tab

02:31:39   groups, "Oh, now I can save a group of tabs." Nobody's going to do that except for the super

02:31:43   nerds. I can look at that and say that is a power user feature that I think people have shown.

02:31:50   Not only do they not follow through with that kind of organization, but I don't think they even want

02:31:56   to. To have to name tab groups and to manage them is asking more than it is to ask people to manage

02:32:03   their windows, and people already don't want to do that. So I do wonder about the wisdom of these

02:32:09   decisions. I see the trade-offs. I see the pros. I see the cons. And I look at it and I think,

02:32:13   "This is not the right decision." Specifically, the squirminess of the UI, that every time you

02:32:18   tap on a tab, the address bar expands or whatever. I can see if you just tap on it to switch it,

02:32:22   it doesn't do that. Maybe nobody uses the average address bar. Maybe that's what I'm missing.

02:32:26   That no one ever looks at the address bar and really just people are going to click on these

02:32:29   as tabs. Now they're just finally looking tabs. For me, certainly this doesn't look like an upgrade.

02:32:34   And for casual users, I'm not sure this is an upgrade. Yeah, for macOS, I'm not loving it,

02:32:44   having never used it, just looking at it. I'm not loving it. But on iOS, it moves the address bar

02:32:51   down to the bottom in a little floaty thing that disappears when you're scrolling around the web

02:32:56   page and it becomes just the URL at the bottom of the screen. And then when you scroll back to the

02:33:03   top or you tap at the bottom of the screen, then there's a bar that shows the URL, the ellipsis

02:33:08   more button, and then a tab button. And the tab interface is way better. What I also like is

02:33:14   this little pill box or this pill that's at the bottom of the screen that's, I don't know,

02:33:20   maybe 50 points above the multitasking handle. If you grab that and slide it left or right,

02:33:28   much in the same way if you grab the multitasking handle and slide it left or right, it'll go

02:33:32   between recently used apps. Well, this is one way that you can go between tabs. And so I have three

02:33:38   tabs open. I have my website, Google and ATP's website. And as I swipe on the bar that holds URLs,

02:33:45   I can flip between them. And additionally, if I am on the rightmost one and drag from right to left,

02:33:51   it'll give me the option or it'll open up a new tab, which is kind of neat and convenient.

02:33:55   So on iOS, or at least on iPhone, I guess I should say specifically, it seems really nice actually,

02:34:03   but I haven't tried it on iPad and I definitely haven't tried it on the Mac. And I am not

02:34:07   expecting to like it on, certainly not on the Mac and I'm 50/50 on the iPad.

02:34:13   On the phone, it seems like they're addressing reachability, which I think is super important.

02:34:17   And it's kind of the same thing. We're like, oh, now all the functionality is hidden behind

02:34:21   this thing, but it's always kind of been that way in Safari. Like if you wanted to do anything,

02:34:24   you'd first have to do something in Safari on iOS to get to the controls. And then your controls

02:34:30   might be buried under two layers of menus somewhere. Now, at least you can get, like,

02:34:35   it's harder. I mean, we all experience this. If you spend a lot of time like going into

02:34:39   reader view or doing anything like that, it's hard to go way up there to the top of the screen.

02:34:44   If you have one of the larger phones, maybe Marco finds it easier than us, but it's harder to get to

02:34:48   the top. Your thumb tends to be closer to the bottom and switching tabs, same deal. You have

02:34:52   to first activate the thing that lets you get to the tab switcher. And then you're into the

02:34:55   tab switcher being able to swipe sideways, which you can kind of do with the existing interface too.

02:34:59   Again, not having used this, but looking at it, I see how the trade-offs they're making

02:35:04   make sense on the phone that may make it actually more efficient to do common operations still at

02:35:11   the cost of like what they've always been sacrificing, which is like, look, we don't

02:35:14   think people care about the address bar. We're going to hide everything behind two taps or

02:35:17   whatever. Like all that's the same as it always been. I kind of like on the Mac, I would say on

02:35:22   the larger phones, there's room for a bar that is always visible on web pages. I know they're like,

02:35:27   we want that webpage to get the whole screen and we don't want to take any space from it. And all

02:35:32   the UI will disappear except for this very minimal little, like I know what they're getting at,

02:35:36   but our phones aren't the size. They aren't 3.5 inch screens anymore. Like at what point

02:35:39   do we decide that it is worthwhile to have an always visible user interface element

02:35:44   that conveys information other than just that very, very subtle like thing with the address

02:35:48   at the bottom they're putting there. So I think I agree mostly with the trade-offs as compared

02:35:53   with the previous UI on iOS, but overall, I think there's still a little bit too much of a time,

02:35:59   too much devotion to the idea that there should be literally nothing on the screen

02:36:04   in Safari except for the webpage. And I think that is an unrealistic goal and is not,

02:36:07   like it's not a goal worth chasing. Like I'm okay with having some visible UI and I think they may

02:36:14   still be underselling that. Yeah, I've been playing with it on my wonderful jet black iPhone 7 here.

02:36:21   And I don't like the iPhone bar. Like I like having the controls at the bottom, you know,

02:36:27   as John was saying with reachability on modern phones, that makes sense. I just don't like the

02:36:31   limitation of this. You know, if you're, if you're in like the compact mode where the bar has shrunk

02:36:36   to like the rectangle at the bottom, the transition, when you show the bar makes it so much taller and

02:36:42   then it drops this giant drop shadow around it too. So it ends up being like this like floating

02:36:47   blob with a huge shadow over a pretty big part of the webpage that's still showing behind it and

02:36:52   under it. And so it's, it's kind of looks very cluttered in a way that like, I'm surprised modern

02:36:58   Apple is so anti clutter, but instead they've actually increased clutter with this UI and also

02:37:04   hidden controls under even more modes. So, you know, regular mode, as you're scrolling down a

02:37:08   webpage, the bar is skinny. Suppose you want to reload the page. What you have to do now is to

02:37:14   tap the bar to like show it, which you had to do before, but then you have to tap the dot dot dot

02:37:19   ellipsis button. And then under that is a reload button. So it's like, again, it's like junk drawer

02:37:26   design school here of like, let's solve our complexity needs by shoving things into junk

02:37:31   drawers and modes and hover States and all these, like it makes it clunkier to use and it makes it

02:37:38   adds more taps and adds more time instead of just making common things visible. I don't think this

02:37:43   design is a success. I think I'm with John, like if they could, if they just had a toolbar at the

02:37:49   bottom that was always tappable and ready to go, that would be an improvement. It wouldn't look as

02:37:54   nice in marketing shots, but it would be an improvement and it wouldn't be, it would only be

02:37:58   like 20 points taller than the temporary bar they have there. Now, like as you're scrolling down with

02:38:03   like the full time bar that just shows the URL and the lock for HTTPS, like the thing that you tap to

02:38:10   reveal the rest of the controls, the rest of the controls are not that much bigger. Just always

02:38:14   show them then like it's, if that's what you're going for, like just always show them. Like,

02:38:17   I don't see why I don't see what they're gaining by this. And, and, and going back to the desktop

02:38:23   Safari, I don't know what problem they're solving. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they just said they, they,

02:38:30   the vertical screen space, apparently you really need that one centimeter. But here's the thing,

02:38:34   like, again, as you, as you both mentioned, like there's been so much obsession by Apple design,

02:38:40   about making your content as big as possible, fill the screen as big as possible, shove everything

02:38:46   else out of the UI, bury it all in junk drawers that you don't even, you don't even see the junk

02:38:50   drawers handle until you hover over something. And then maybe the handle appears like that's,

02:38:53   that's been their philosophy for so long. But for a web browser, what if my tabs are my content?

02:38:59   My tab list that I have open is a huge part of the content I am looking at when I'm using a

02:39:06   web browser on a desktop, I don't have any need to bury my tabs or to shrink the amount of space

02:39:12   they take up. I want my tabs to be huge. And I want to have as much real estate as possible

02:39:17   to show as many tabs as possible with as many words in their titles as possible. Like even on

02:39:22   my massive, you know, playground sized monitor I have here, like, I still have, you know, my Safari

02:39:28   window still has like, right now I have eight tabs open. And this is only the one that I have open

02:39:33   for recording. But the one I minimized has so many tabs. I mean, there must be, let me see,

02:39:38   ball parking, maybe 20 tabs in my, like my main current Safari window. And of course, they've all

02:39:43   shrunken down to the point where they're only icons now, because I have so many of them and I

02:39:46   should close some so I can get the text back. But with this new design, I will see the text for even

02:39:51   fewer of them, because they now have even less width in the UI to consume and to, to display the

02:39:58   text to tell me what they are. This has been a challenge in web browser design ever since tabs

02:40:02   were introduced. And we had, you know, various things like adding the favicon and everything

02:40:06   that eventually made, made it has more recognizable as you tried to cram more and more of them into

02:40:11   a single window. But what they're doing with this redesign is allocating vastly less space in the UI

02:40:19   for your, you know, series of tabs that you're trying to display. And I think it's a that's a

02:40:24   step backwards in order to achieve a visual design that I don't even think is nicer. I mean,

02:40:31   again, it's I whatever ideal they're trying to get here, you know, they're extending the background

02:40:37   color all the way through through the whatever's left of the title bar. Okay, fine, but I didn't

02:40:43   need that, you know, window title bars have existed on desktops for some time, we're all

02:40:46   accustomed to them like I that's, that's something that's just gonna break some web layouts, and it's

02:40:50   not gonna really do anything for me. Meanwhile, the actual UI is going to be harder to use,

02:40:56   because now I have less space to show my tabs, the buttons are all smaller, common functions now

02:41:02   hidden behind the junk drawer ellipsis button. Again, another mode you have to enter sub menus

02:41:07   upon sub menus upon delay states and hover states, just more and more junk drawer modes to shove stuff

02:41:13   into even common stuff that we use all the time that we should have visible all the time. And then

02:41:18   finally, shoving all this into the title bar makes less draggable space if you want to drag the window

02:41:24   around, or less clickable space if you want to reactivate the window by clicking on title bar in

02:41:28   a way that doesn't do something else by clicking it. So you know, all that dead space in title

02:41:32   bars before that serve purposes, it like it makes things easier to grab and move. And it makes things

02:41:38   less error prone and makes the whole UI easier to use. By shoving everything into the title bars

02:41:43   like they're doing here, it continues the big Sur design trend of making less and less dead space

02:41:50   in the bars to do things like click and drag. And so it actually makes the UI I think,

02:41:56   harder to use in practice, less accessible, less consistent to use, because you'll more

02:42:03   frequently click on something accidentally and make a mistake. Or you'll have to like,

02:42:06   slow the mouse down, you know, going against Fitz laws, because you have to click a smaller and

02:42:10   smaller click target, because you're trying to hit like the little border of the window, so you can

02:42:15   click on it without accidentally, you know, changing tabs. I don't know who this design is for,

02:42:22   because it seems like it's designed for people who not only don't use web browsers, but don't use

02:42:27   computers. Yeah, then they're signing themselves up for difficult design problems for no reason.

02:42:32   Like you mentioned the background color going up into the title bar. Why sign up for that? Now you

02:42:37   have now you have to somehow make all your tab text and address bar readable on top of arbitrary

02:42:42   background colors. And granted, they they sign themselves up for that for the menu bar too,

02:42:46   and mostly have done an okay job of it after a couple of iterations. But why sign yourself

02:42:50   up for that in your web browser? Now all of a sudden, I'm looking at like one of the examples,

02:42:53   this text, it's black text on an olive green background, it's lower contrast.

02:42:57   That's a problem, right? I mean, people need to be able to read what those tabs are.

02:43:01   And the squirminess is not just like, oh, it takes you longer to acquire a target or whatever.

02:43:06   I really think that people's mental model of tabs, like based on the name and how they're used is

02:43:12   they're kind of like tabs would be in an, you know, in a paper address book or whatever. When

02:43:17   you really break that metaphor, when you break that sort of design constraint, you know, that

02:43:23   these sort of spatial behavior of tabs by saying these aren't tabs anymore, these are just arbitrary

02:43:27   rounded rectangle regions that they grow and shrink based on, you know, like, like the fact

02:43:32   that all of them expand into the address bar, like I'm looking at the demos now, I think, I think

02:43:36   every time you do click on one of them, it does expand into show the address bar. Like, I think

02:43:41   that is counter to the notion that they seem to be committed to, which is that regular people don't

02:43:46   use the address bar. Now you have no choice that every time you click on one of these,

02:43:50   you know, low contrast, ever-changing colored round recs, it moves everything around. And so

02:43:56   your model of like, oh, I have these tabs and I can switch between them. Now it's like,

02:44:01   it's just a squirmy soup of rectangles. I don't like it. And a squirmy soup of low contrast

02:44:06   rectangles. Like again, we'll have to use this thing in real life to see what it's like, but

02:44:11   it just seems like they are. I mean, I think they may be right about the fact that no one drags

02:44:16   windows anymore, that everyone just maximizes their windows or whatever. And if you look at

02:44:20   the top of like a Chrome window, they already have this problem of it being very hard to find a

02:44:24   draggable region above the tabs. But at least in the Chrome window, the tabs are, they behave

02:44:30   regular, the way regular tabs do is they divvy up the space. And the only time they change size is

02:44:34   when tabs appear or disappear. This combination of a tab with the address bar just seems like a real

02:44:40   mistake to me and the total removal of the ad of the, the rest of the toolbar. Like we used to have

02:44:44   a bunch of buttons in the toolbar and it was customizable. And speaking of that, yes, I have my

02:44:48   reload button, the toolbar. It seems like my reload button extension is just totally pointless now,

02:44:53   because you can't customize as far as I can tell the UI of what remains of the toolbar. What you

02:44:58   can do is put things under the dot dot dot widget, but that's for like actual web extensions, like ad

02:45:02   blockers and stuff like that. The whole point of my extension was I want to put a button on the

02:45:05   toolbar. There's no, there ain't no toolbar left for toolbar men like me. I'm trying to do a lyric

02:45:10   reference. You're not going to get it. It's fine. There's yeah, there's no point in my thing anymore

02:45:15   because that's just totally gone, but that's the, that's the least of the problems with this UI.

02:45:19   The other thing I want to emphasize is they showed a demo of this as if it's a feature. And I'm not

02:45:22   sure that it is, Oh, you've got these tab sets that you can make and you can have these tabs and

02:45:27   they're synced across all your devices. Maybe all the time, or maybe just optionally anyway, they

02:45:32   had a Mac and like some other device or an iPad or something, they said, Hey, you've got the tab

02:45:37   groups in both places. And they changed the active tab on the iPad and the active tab changed on the

02:45:42   Mac too, that they weren't even using. I kind of see what they're going with there. Like if you

02:45:47   do a bunch of work and you're messing around and then you like move over to your Mac, you want it

02:45:51   to be where you left off, but it seems perhaps ill-advised that, you know, that you changing

02:45:58   tabs on your iPad would in real time, change an interface element on a computer, an unintended

02:46:02   computer that you're not in front of, you know, a few feet away. Like I I'm onboard with state

02:46:08   restoration, but I'm not totally on board with the live thing. Like maybe it's just the way I use

02:46:14   things. Like I look at different web pages on my phone than on my Mac. Like I'm doing much heavier

02:46:19   research on phone with tons and tons of tabs or on my Mac with tons of tabs, but on my phone,

02:46:23   I'm doing more limited work because the web pages look different on the phone and you know,

02:46:27   some of them don't work that well on mobile. I don't really want the literal same set of tabs

02:46:33   across all my devices. Like seeing this redesign of Safari is making me like, I was watching this

02:46:39   and feeling glad that, well, at least I'll always have Chrome, which works like a regular web,

02:46:43   which works like a regular web browser. And yes, a bunch of stuff is synchronized, but like it still

02:46:49   just sort of works in a predictable way. And I don't use Chrome at all on my iOS devices. So

02:46:53   it's kind of a separation. Anyway, this is all harsh words for, you know, I haven't used any

02:46:57   of these things and you've used a few of them, but like, yeah, this Mac, this Mac Safari design,

02:47:02   like way more radical than toppy tabs. And I kind of hope they back off on it. I don't think they

02:47:07   will, but the, you know, I'm going to try this and more in future episodes for sure.

02:47:11   Well, and if anything, like the, the difference from Chrome could be a pretty big problem for

02:47:17   them for Safari adoption, because, you know, Safari up till now has basically looked and

02:47:23   worked like Chrome and which is the same way that, you know, the windows edge and like Firefox,

02:47:28   like web browsers that have supported tabs in the modern era, all look and work pretty similarly

02:47:34   until this point. So that's what people expect. And Safari is not the world's most popular web

02:47:39   browser. So like people are going to come to this on the Mac and it's going to be so different

02:47:44   compared to what they expect and what they are used to from their previous experience and

02:47:48   experience from other platforms or the browsers. You know, Chrome is the world's most popular

02:47:51   browser. So they've now diverged in the UI so far from that, that I fear that that actually might

02:47:57   cost them like Chrome converts from sticking with Safari or coming to Safari in the first place,

02:48:02   because it's too different. And it's like people now have an idea of how a modern web browser UI

02:48:07   is supposed to look and work. And this doesn't work that way. Yeah. We'll see. There will be

02:48:13   more on this program. I am quite confident. All right. We are running long. So let's try to speed

02:48:18   it up a little bit. Mailkit is the thing. Apparently it enables apps to easily and securely

02:48:22   interact with the mail app for Mac OS. There's going to be an API about it, which I'm sure

02:48:27   there'll be a session or two about that. Then finally at the end, we got a little smattering

02:48:32   of developer technologies, which was great. There are some new APIs. There's a rotor in Swift UI.

02:48:37   There's an XC test memory graph, which they didn't really talk too much about, but looks good.

02:48:41   Focus is a thing in Swift UI now, which is really great. They spent some time doing object capture,

02:48:47   which requires a Mac and some third-party software, but you can make 3d captures,

02:48:51   3d objects, which is pretty cool. That I'm actually hold on before object capture,

02:48:56   I think is one of the coolest things that I don't think I fully understand yet. Same. If it's what I,

02:49:02   if it's what I think it is, which is like an easy API to use your camera to generate usdz files.

02:49:09   That to me, I'm kind of surprised that it's not built into things like messages

02:49:15   because imagine the like, oh, that is so, so usdz, as far as I understand it, I don't know

02:49:20   much about this world at all, but as far as I understand the usdz format, which they actually

02:49:24   announced at WBC like five, six years ago, um, is basically like, it's like an image format,

02:49:30   but for objects in AR. And so, and they, and they've had these things like on their website,

02:49:36   whenever Apple releases a new product, they will have certain abilities where like,

02:49:41   you'll be able to view the product in AR on your phones. You could like stick the new

02:49:45   Mac pro on your desk and see how big it is. Right. And I've, I've thought this is a dramatically

02:49:51   useful technology that has been dramatically underused so far by the market for things like,

02:49:57   imagine just doing that for like online shopping, you know, being able to see like,

02:50:00   how big is this object I'm looking at? Let's stick it in my room on my, on my AR desk table thing.

02:50:06   And so I like, there's so much use for that. If they've just developed an API that allows you to

02:50:12   take a few pictures around an object and automatically convert it to a usdz file,

02:50:18   that would have massive widespread use for just consumers of like showing each other objects and

02:50:25   messages and stuff like, so I hope that's where this is going. It seems like it's not there yet.

02:50:30   It seems like it's more of a like basic API that you could use to make that app. But I hope that

02:50:36   if that's what this is, I hope that goes further soon and becomes more widespread because there's

02:50:41   so many times when I would love to do that of like, okay, I have this object I want to like,

02:50:46   maybe I'm like, you know, out and I want to show my wife something from, you know, back at home.

02:50:51   And so, you know, I'm in a store, maybe I'm going shopping or whatever. And so, okay, let me like,

02:50:56   scan around this object with my phone and be able to send this to her. And she can, you know,

02:51:02   pop it on her AR table with her phone and see how big it is and how it would look like that. That

02:51:06   kind of thing would be really cool. And, you know, also just for, again, for online shopping, like,

02:51:12   if, if the inventory management apps or, you know, like apps that allow people to sell stuff online,

02:51:19   if they could allow people to take, you know, an object capture of a thing they're selling and put

02:51:26   that on their website super easily, that would be great too for shoppers who have iOS devices, like,

02:51:31   there's so many uses if that's what this is, like, if it works well enough to do that.

02:51:36   So I hope, I hope that this goes further. I think you hit on the correct point, which is if it works

02:51:43   well enough, if you've ever used it in these things, like there's a reason the professional

02:51:46   capture studios are way more complicated. It's amazing that this does anything at all. But I

02:51:50   think what you would end up with if you did that, first of all, you would probably not look silly,

02:51:56   but question the time investment required to capture all the photos to make this as you walked

02:52:01   around the item in the store and tried to position it somewhere so you can get all the sides of it.

02:52:05   And then what you would transfer is something that looks a little bit like a melted wax sculpture of

02:52:10   the thing you're trying to get, like, because you're limited by the depth sensors and, you know,

02:52:15   depth estimation with or without the IR sprayer or lidar and all this stuff. But bottom line is,

02:52:20   it's not like making really good 3D objects is difficult. You're not going to do it in a couple

02:52:26   seconds. They have to take a lot of shortcuts and things do look a little bit lumpen. I would

02:52:30   imagine any place that actually sells things, if they wanted to do this in a vault, would invest

02:52:35   the time to get a good model made and not just as they showed in the demo video, have someone put a

02:52:40   chair in the middle of a warehouse and walk around with an iPhone. That'll work and you'll get a

02:52:43   model. But if your goal is to sell, you want it to look really good. Like Apple doesn't do it. For

02:52:48   example, you just mentioned Apple's product. Apple doesn't do that with its products and they're not

02:52:51   going to start, believe me. Like they are not going to start saying, oh, the new Mac Pro,

02:52:54   we're going to walk around it with an iPhone and just put that up on our website. No, you're going

02:52:58   to have a real polished 3D model because they want their products to look good. So I think this is

02:53:02   super cool that it exists. And it's amazing that we can all do it with our phones. And it does

02:53:06   make a much less expensive way to do essentially object capture. But I do wonder who is this for?

02:53:14   Because every time I think, other than for people, you know, like you said, doing it as a fun thing,

02:53:19   as a consumer, stores want to have a higher quality model. A game is going to want to have a higher

02:53:24   quality model. No movie studio is using this for object capture. Like it's super cool, but I feel

02:53:30   like it is limited by the capture device, which is a phone, which granted has lots of amazing sensors,

02:53:36   but it's not the same as like putting something on a table and spraying it with a million lasers

02:53:40   in a controlled environment. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is going to be

02:53:44   kind of as revolutionary as the measure feature on the phone. Where, yeah, it's cool, but in the

02:53:51   end, the ruler really works better. I echo your enthusiasm, both of you, but I think you're talking

02:53:58   about step 30 and we're on step two, because I swear they had said at some point during the

02:54:04   presentation that it requires some software called Cinema 4D, it requires Mac OS Monterey. So there's

02:54:10   a lot more involved in this than, oh yeah, yeah. Like there's a software store, you know, I think

02:54:14   this is more of a framework than an app, but like, but the point is like the sensors are the, you

02:54:20   know, the sensors and the fusion of sensor input is the important thing. Having a USD file doesn't

02:54:24   buy you anything. Although maybe can iOS just display USD files? Safari can, like it's weird,

02:54:30   like it's supported in some places. I don't know. Anyway, but you're right. They did show you them

02:54:35   dragging a thing into Cinema 4D and like they were doing a chocolate croissant and that chocolate

02:54:39   croissant did not, A, did not like appetizing and B, who looked a little melty. That's true. I think

02:54:44   that was state of the union though. And also USD is a Pixar format. It was, I think there was a

02:54:49   big announcement at DubDub several years ago to Marco's point where they said, oh, we're supporting

02:54:53   this and you know, you can use it in Safari, like Marco said, and so on and so forth, but it's

02:54:57   actually a Pixar format. Swift. Apparently the majority of the top 1000 apps are using Swift.

02:55:03   They talked about async/await and actors very briefly in the keynote. They talked about the

02:55:10   App Store, which is quote "safe and trusted." And they wanted us to know that they paid $230 billion

02:55:16   to developers. We're going to be getting what appeared to be A/B testing and multiple different

02:55:21   pages for your apps, for your app in the App Store. So you can like tweak things, give different

02:55:27   features for different users, all sorts of different stuff there. They're also introducing

02:55:32   a concept of in-app events. So, you know, they said something about Pokemon Go and I don't play

02:55:36   Pokemon Go, but I guess like there's some sort of big event coming up or what was the, what's the

02:55:41   Switch game that everyone loved that you have to like sell rice or something like that.

02:55:45   - Animal Crossing. - You have to sell rice. That's exactly what the,

02:55:50   it's exactly what the game maker wanted you to come away from.

02:55:52   - Wait, did I or did I not get one of you there? That's all that matters.

02:55:56   - It's turnips, but it's cool. - Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, I knew it was a rice.

02:55:59   I couldn't remember what it was. Point being, you know, if there's like this big turnip sale

02:56:03   or whatever going on on Thursday at 10 in the evening, then you can, you can tell Apple that

02:56:07   by some mechanism and they will potentially promote that in the App Store on your device,

02:56:13   which is kind of cool. They, they announced Xcode Cloud, which sounds super freaking awesome,

02:56:19   except they won't tell us how much it's going to cost. And that kind of ruined it for me.

02:56:22   But what is it? It's basically Apple run continuous integration and continuous deployment.

02:56:29   So you can have builds run in the cloud. You can have tests done in the cloud,

02:56:34   done, all this being done in parallel. And you can go do the releases to TestFlight, all automated.

02:56:42   It is very, very cool from the sound of it. We learned in the State of the Union, it is super

02:56:48   duper integrated into Xcode. You can today sign up to potentially be included in a beta, which I've

02:56:55   already done. But that being said, they're not going to make it real until next year. And I think

02:57:02   they said pricing in the fall or something like that. And it's a tough nut to crack because if

02:57:08   you're a little indie developer like me or Marco, you're probably not going to be very expensive to

02:57:14   do CI and CD. But if you're, I don't know, Epic, for example, and you're running these humongous

02:57:21   games and testing them across all these devices and running unit tests all the time and so on and

02:57:26   so forth, it could get really expensive for Apple to run this. So I don't know what they're going to

02:57:30   do about pricing. That seems like a tough nut to crack. I'm really bummed that they didn't even

02:57:34   give a hint as to what it's going to cost, although it's understandable. But if it's cheap enough,

02:57:39   this sounds super duper cool and I'm really interested in it.

02:57:41   Eric Meyer One question I have, and I probably kind of know the answer to this, but like, look,

02:57:45   so if you're doing development on a not so fast Mac with not too many cores, at a certain point,

02:57:51   it may be faster for you to build your thing in Xcode Cloud. I say this as someone who knows

02:57:56   exactly how long it takes to sort of submit anything to Apple, even just notarizing a Mac app

02:58:01   takes way longer than it would if you did it locally, in my experience. But at a certain

02:58:05   point, like on these graphs, there is a threshold beyond which it actually is faster to have your

02:58:10   thing built in the cloud. Technically, that's possible. I don't know what the wait times will

02:58:15   be like on Xcode Cloud or what kind of machines they'll have building your thing. But I was trying

02:58:21   to think of a scenario where Marco might be interested in this. Hey, if you could develop

02:58:24   on your little Mac mini or your MacBook Air instead of your upcoming 40 core, you know,

02:58:29   ARM based Mac Pro. And if they use the 40 core or ARM based Mac Pro to do your builds, if you

02:58:35   paid the maximum amount for Xcode in the cloud, maybe that would be attractive to you. Maybe not,

02:58:39   maybe you still want the big hunk of Mac close by, but it's just a possibility.

02:58:42   Yeah, it's something. I mean, it certainly would make development easier if you have like, you know,

02:58:47   a MacBook Air in the future and you have some massively complex project, or you just try to

02:58:52   use Swift UI to make one view. So, you know, there are uses for that. But in practice, I don't know

02:58:57   if that will actually play out that way, but we'll find out. Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this

02:59:02   week. Mac Weldon, 1Password, and Yes Please. And thank you to our members who support us directly.

02:59:09   You can join atp.fm/join and we will talk to you next week.

02:59:14   Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

02:59:22   Cause it was accidental. Accidental.

02:59:25   Oh, it was accidental. Accidental.

02:59:28   John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

02:59:33   Cause it was accidental. Accidental.

02:59:35   Oh, it was accidental. Accidental.

02:59:38   And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

02:59:48   at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.

02:59:56   Auntie Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A.

03:00:03   It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to.

03:00:10   Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.

03:00:18   Did you catch this reference? I think what Federighi was going for.

03:00:22   When he threw the iPad up in the air. Oh, was that a Prince reference?

03:00:27   I think it was a Prince reference. So this, so for people who don't know, this is, um,

03:00:31   most likely, I think it was referring to, um, Prince did, I mean, Prince did all sorts of

03:00:36   crazy stuff. Famously, um, when he was playing at the, uh, rock and roll hall of fame induction

03:00:42   ceremony, he, he played with, uh, with a bunch of other famous people like Tom Petty, um,

03:00:47   while my guitar gently weeps and Prince basically came in and did an amazing guitar solo, totally

03:00:53   upstaged everyone else who was there. You got to see the video willing to in the show notes.

03:00:57   And then at the end of it, well, actually right now, if you have not seen this video,

03:01:01   it's a, it's a silly spoiler, but you should seriously spend the six minutes and watch

03:01:07   the video right now. We'll be waiting for you. Go watch it. It's an incredible guitar solo.

03:01:11   Even if you're not usually into like, Oh, somebody told me I have to watch this music,

03:01:15   but I don't like, no, seriously watch this. It's fantastic. So anyway, so at the end of this thing,

03:01:19   at Prince, Prince wasn't even part of like the first part of the song. He comes out,

03:01:24   he does this amazing jam. Doesn't say or sing a word. Just does this amazing guitar jam because

03:01:29   Prince, in addition to all his other talents was an incredible guitar player. And then at the end

03:01:34   of it, he throws the guitar straight up into the air and then walks off stage and the camera pans

03:01:42   out and you don't see where you're like, where did it go? You cannot see where the guitar went.

03:01:47   And it's like, what, what, where, what just happened? And he's just gone. It's like the

03:01:52   most amazing, you know, mic drop style exit I've ever seen, especially after such an amazing guitar

03:01:58   solo. So I think that's what, uh, that I think that was a reference because in part, uh, June 7th,

03:02:04   which is today was Prince's birthday. Oh, I didn't know that. I think that might've been a reference

03:02:09   and they have at the end of the credits of the video that no iPads were harmed during the filming

03:02:14   of this thing. I did see that because that's what was my question. So that's the, he threw the iPad

03:02:19   up in the air, but the way he got the iPad in the first place is it dropped down from above him and

03:02:24   he caught it without looking at it. And so I had to ask our resident visual effects expert, Todd

03:02:29   Vaziri, uh, how was that done? Uh, is that a real iPad that he caught? Uh, is that a CG iPad? Was

03:02:35   it already in his hand and they just animated the falling a lots of different ways they could have

03:02:39   gone on this. They could have just dropped a fake iPad 17 times with a pillow underneath them at a

03:02:43   view. I needed a ruling, uh, real, not real. Uh, the answer I got was inconclusive. Uh, so if anyone

03:02:51   at Apple knows how the, how the iPad catch, not the throw, cause the throw, like when you're doing

03:02:56   it on video is pretty easy, you just, you know, whatever. Um, but the catch looked to me like it

03:03:00   is conceivable that they did 500 takes of him trying to do a no look catch of an iPad. And it

03:03:05   just kept falling onto a pillow that was out of view. And finally, all the coolness that Federighi

03:03:12   got from that most likely Prince Katara reference, I think was lost when he ended his prank call to

03:03:19   the ice cream place with got a drop by, Oh, come on. Give him a break. Is that, is that some, is

03:03:26   that like, is that what young people are saying or something? I've never heard got a drop. No,

03:03:30   it's corporate speak. It's corporate speak that really. Yup. Yeah. That was, Hey, he's,

03:03:37   he's still the coolest executive. I mean, I mean the bar is not high, but I agree.

03:03:44   But I just got a drop that that's wow. It's corporate speak. He's got a drop or else we'll

03:03:49   have to put it in the parking lot. He did stand in the pond in his fancy shoes. I'm pretty sure

03:03:53   that was real. That was nice. I'm pretty sure he can afford another pair. Yep.