Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [music]

00:00:11 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 417.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by TextExpander, Sourcegraph, DoorDash, and ZocDoc.

00:00:21 ◼   ► My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Hi, Myke Hurley. It's very exciting. It's the Summer of Fun.

00:00:28 ◼   ► - And we got a special guest up today.

00:00:29 ◼   ► - Summer of fun!

00:00:30 ◼   ► - Summer of fun!

00:00:32 ◼   ► - It's true.

00:00:33 ◼   ► - I have a hashtag Snows

00:00:33 ◼   ► Haul question for you, and it comes from Steven, not that one.

00:00:36 ◼   ► What is your biggest bucket list sporting event?

00:00:40 ◼   ► - Huh?

00:00:42 ◼   ► That's a good question.

00:00:43 ◼   ► I, let's see.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Well, I would say seeing Cal playing in the Rose Bowl,

00:00:48 ◼   ► but that is never gonna happen now.

00:00:49 ◼   ► It's like literally never gonna happen.

00:00:51 ◼   ► - What does Cal playing in the Rose Bowl mean?

00:00:54 ◼   ► - Cal playing in the Rose Bowl?

00:00:55 ◼   ► It's related to Bridget Knight.

00:00:58 ◼   ► she comes down from the skies. And the Rose Bowl is a football game that has been played for

00:01:04 ◼   ► a century more that usually traditionally for the last 75 years or whatever has mostly pitted the

00:01:15 ◼   ► champion of the Big Ten Conference and the champion of the Pac-10 Conference and then 12 more recently.

00:01:23 ◼   ► And so as a, Cal is a team in that conference,

00:01:27 ◼   ► the Pacific 10 and 12 conference

00:01:29 ◼   ► that is in dire straits right now,

00:01:31 ◼   ► we don't want to get into that,

00:01:32 ◼   ► but I'll just say that that was always the dream

00:01:34 ◼   ► is that Cal would win the conference

00:01:36 ◼   ► and go to the Rose Bowl

00:01:37 ◼   ► because they haven't been to the Rose Bowl

00:01:38 ◼   ► in like 60 or 70 years.

00:01:41 ◼   ► And they've come close a couple of times,

00:01:44 ◼   ► but they have not gotten there in my lifetime.

00:01:48 ◼   ► And that was always the dream

00:01:49 ◼   ► was to go see Cal play in the Rose Bowl.

00:01:51 ◼   ► But due to changes in conferences

00:01:52 ◼   ► and the landscape of college football,

00:01:54 ◼   ► that will probably never happen now.

00:01:58 ◼   ► The door has almost completely closed.

00:02:00 ◼   ► It was always a wild dream,

00:02:01 ◼   ► like watching the Giants win the World Series,

00:02:03 ◼   ► which they did three times in the 2010s.

00:02:05 ◼   ► So I got that one.

00:02:07 ◼   ► Anyway, that would have been the bucket list item,

00:02:08 ◼   ► but I feel like it will never happen,

00:02:12 ◼   ► and I have no way to make it happen.

00:02:14 ◼   ► It's out of my control,

00:02:15 ◼   ► because it has to be an event that exists

00:02:18 ◼   ► for me to go to it, and it's never gonna exist.

00:02:21 ◼   ► So I'm gonna say, and Lauren and I were talking about this

00:02:24 ◼   ► just a couple of weeks ago for obvious reasons,

00:02:27 ◼   ► is, you know, someday I wanna go to Wimbledon.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And I don't wanna go like to the final.

00:02:33 ◼   ► I wanna go to like a day early on

00:02:35 ◼   ► where there's just people all over playing tennis

00:02:38 ◼   ► and on grass and it's London and it's the summertime.

00:02:42 ◼   ► And that I would love to do sometime.

00:02:44 ◼   ► - I got to see some of the semifinal one year.

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Oh, nice.

00:02:47 ◼   ► I actually kind of think I like it more if,

00:02:50 ◼   ► I think I'd like to hang out like on the outside where there's like the little courts and people

00:02:53 ◼   ► were playing doubles and they're all just it sounds like a Wimbledon village that would

00:02:57 ◼   ► be a really fun thing so that's I think what I'm going to say my sports bucket list is

00:03:01 ◼   ► is some strawberries and cream Jason Yeah exactly so really that is I mean and I'm saying

00:03:06 ◼   ► that seriously like I could say like a World Cup final and all that but it's like the truth

00:03:10 ◼   ► is the World Cup is coming to the US I will probably try to go to a World Cup match while

00:03:16 ◼   ► it's here but um but that's not on my list it's i think wimbledon going to wimbledon is is my answer

00:03:22 ◼   ► here if you would like to send in a question for jason to answer on an episode of upgrade just send

00:03:28 ◼   ► in a tweet with the hashtag snow talk and you can help us start the show we have an action-packed

00:03:32 ◼   ► show today jason snow but we still got to head on down to the corral for the rumor roundup

00:03:37 ◼   ► for when people were hearing this some rumors that were over a week old but nevertheless

00:03:42 ◼   ► Still things to talk about.

00:03:44 ◼   ► We did warn you on last week's episode

00:03:46 ◼   ► that we were pre-recording.

00:03:47 ◼   ► So if any of this stuff changes,

00:03:49 ◼   ► we cannot be held accountable for that.

00:03:51 ◼   ► That's not how time works.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Puck News is reporting that Apple is the quote,

00:03:55 ◼   ► "Most likely winner of a $3 billion

00:03:58 ◼   ► NFL Sunday ticket deal."

00:04:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's a lot of money, but we've had this out there.

00:04:04 ◼   ► It sounds like Amazon has been bidding against Apple

00:04:09 ◼   ► for this, but yeah.

00:04:11 ◼   ► This sounds like a, this is probably gonna happen.

00:04:15 ◼   ► This is Apple spending a lot of money on sports.

00:04:18 ◼   ► - And speaking of Apple and Amazon,

00:04:19 ◼   ► they are also in a bidding war for the US broadcasting

00:04:22 ◼   ► rights to the UEFA Champions League football.

00:04:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is again, it's all part of the strategy, right?

00:04:30 ◼   ► Of Apple wants to give people reason.

00:04:34 ◼   ► Like I've said, it's not just even the money.

00:04:36 ◼   ► The money presumably will come at some point,

00:04:39 ◼   ► although what they're spending,

00:04:40 ◼   ► They may never get their money back for this, but the point is it, it serves a

00:04:44 ◼   ► couple of larger purposes.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And one is just getting people into the apple ecosystem.

00:04:47 ◼   ► But I really believe one of the reasons is they want to get, um, they want to

00:04:52 ◼   ► get households and devices into the apple TV compatible ecosystem, right?

00:04:58 ◼   ► Like, so step one, uh, you can't even watch this.

00:05:01 ◼   ► You need to get a box that has an apple TV app on it.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Doesn't even have to be the apple TV, just a box that has apple TV.

00:05:07 ◼   ► Step two is like create an Apple ID or whatever you need to do to log in, even if you don't

00:05:12 ◼   ► give them money, like to get to the point where you're able to watch something.

00:05:17 ◼   ► Like that's a huge strategy and then beyond that to get them start paying and then maybe

00:05:22 ◼   ► you're in the bundle and all those things.

00:05:24 ◼   ► But like it's a long-term ecosystem play for Apple and they're gonna spend a lot of money

00:05:30 ◼   ► on it for sure.

00:05:32 ◼   ► Now something I thought was interesting about the Sunday Ticket and potentially the Epic

00:05:36 ◼   ► Champions League, I would guess both of these would be US only. Which is not how they've

00:05:47 ◼   ► done for their other sports stuff.

00:05:49 ◼   ► Well, MLS and MLB have a, I mean it's just a different product with different issues.

00:05:56 ◼   ► The NFL makes a lot of money, they already have a product for outside the US to watch

00:06:01 ◼   ► all the games, so they don't need to do that.

00:06:03 ◼   ► Yeah, no, no, it's not about the strategy. It's just it would be, it's about Apple's strategy,

00:06:08 ◼   ► which I find intriguing, right? Because obviously, I mean, who knows about NFL, whatever, but I can,

00:06:14 ◼   ► well, not who knows. You would know. I would know. They're not going to get the UEFA Champions League

00:06:19 ◼   ► broadcasting rights in the UK, for example, right? That's just not going to happen. Apple probably

00:06:24 ◼   ► wouldn't even want to pay what that's worth because it's such a huge ticket here.

00:06:30 ◼   ► but they may pay $3 billion for NFL Sunday tickets. So I think the answer would be maybe,

00:06:35 ◼   ► but it's a different kind of deal. Like the UAFA rights in the US are very different than the UAFA

00:06:41 ◼   ► rights in another place, and that's fine. That's what they're going to do. But their sites are

00:06:46 ◼   ► high. I mean, if they're going to spend $3 billion on an NFL Sunday ticket, they're serious about

00:06:50 ◼   ► this. This is serious money for making a serious play for people to get them into their ecosystem.

00:06:57 ◼   ► I think I'm not thinking I represent what I was trying to say clearly like I don't really know if it's about the money

00:07:03 ◼   ► For something like the UEFA Champions League as such like I just don't know if they would get to the table maybe

00:07:09 ◼   ► But like it's such an entrenched thing in certain places in the world some of these sports would be complicated

00:07:15 ◼   ► I get it would be complicated then again if somebody comes up and says I'll pay you more than they will I

00:07:20 ◼   ► Have a hard time. Yeah, they wouldn't listen right I mean there are lots of issues cultural issues and

00:07:27 ◼   ► Where is it available and all that and it varies from place to place?

00:07:29 ◼   ► But but the truth is it's also not a thing where they can just make a deal with one person shake their hand

00:07:34 ◼   ► pay write a check and it's everywhere in the world because so a lot of these sports have already sectioned up the world and

00:07:41 ◼   ► The Apple, you know can't make one no preemptive bid for all of it

00:07:46 ◼   ► Moving on ET news is reporting on information from supply chain sources that apples

00:07:54 ◼   ► Mixed reality headset is still on track for an early 2023 launch timeframe.

00:08:00 ◼   ► They added that a second generation model will be teed up for 2024 featuring a lighter design quote ability to make calls

00:08:08 ◼   ► I think that means

00:08:10 ◼   ► Cell reception, right? Yeah, right because that's just a weird way to phrase that and higher definition cameras

00:08:18 ◼   ► Because it is expected that the first generation model will have quote mid to low spec cameras

00:08:24 ◼   ► which I found to be a curious thing, the camera part.

00:08:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a good question.

00:08:31 ◼   ► Ability to make calls is weird, right?

00:08:32 ◼   ► 'Cause I have to imagine that FaceTime will be built

00:08:35 ◼   ► into these things, but maybe it is a cellular thing.

00:08:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that that means cellular.

00:08:39 ◼   ► I think that's just a good question.

00:08:39 ◼   ► - And yeah, the cameras will be better.

00:08:41 ◼   ► Also, it's just a comparison thing, right?

00:08:43 ◼   ► So like the cameras in the first gen model

00:08:45 ◼   ► will not be the same as the cameras

00:08:47 ◼   ► in the second gen model, okay.

00:08:49 ◼   ► - Well, 'cause what I was thinking about with this

00:08:51 ◼   ► is like the camera kind of quality

00:08:54 ◼   ► that you get from an Oculus, right,

00:08:55 ◼   ► is like really bad if you're looking through it.

00:08:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:08:59 ◼   ► - And I wonder if they're gonna have an experience like that

00:09:00 ◼   ► which wasn't what I expected.

00:09:02 ◼   ► Like I was expecting the mixed reality portion of this

00:09:05 ◼   ► to be like crystal clear looking out to the world.

00:09:07 ◼   ► And so like this report is intriguing to me.

00:09:11 ◼   ► This is not what I was necessarily expecting.

00:09:14 ◼   ► I guess we'll find out

00:09:15 ◼   ► but it was not what I thought it was gonna be like.

00:09:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, well I will see what they do.

00:09:20 ◼   ► I'm sure it'll be good, but it could always be better.

00:09:23 ◼   ► - But we still got that 2023 timeframe apparently,

00:09:26 ◼   ► which just continues to be reported on.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And finally, according to Ross Young,

00:09:30 ◼   ► speaking of 2023, the mini LED display,

00:09:33 ◼   ► the external display that Apple's been working on

00:09:35 ◼   ► has been delayed to early 2023.

00:09:38 ◼   ► This was all on the MacRumors show podcast

00:09:42 ◼   ► that young mentioned this

00:09:44 ◼   ► and confirmed it will feature promotion.

00:09:46 ◼   ► So the high refresh rate stuff.

00:09:47 ◼   ► Just as a reminder,

00:09:48 ◼   ► This product was originally scheduled for June,

00:09:51 ◼   ► then slipped to October, this is this year, now for 2023.

00:09:56 ◼   ► This will also be a 27 inch product like the Studio Display.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And Ross Young also said that the larger MacBook Air,

00:10:05 ◼   ► the 15 inch MacBook Air product that we've been talking

00:10:08 ◼   ► about that we think might be the MacBook Studio,

00:10:10 ◼   ► is also set for 2023 as of now as well.

00:10:13 ◼   ► - Interesting.

00:10:14 ◼   ► - Supply chain baby.

00:10:15 ◼   ► - I think Studio Display, you know,

00:10:18 ◼   ► I think this is like the pro display or studio display pro

00:10:21 ◼   ► or they'll give it another name,

00:10:22 ◼   ► but like it's gonna be way more expensive

00:10:24 ◼   ► than the studio display,

00:10:25 ◼   ► but it's gonna be super fancy and swanky.

00:10:27 ◼   ► - Jason, do you wanna explain what we're gonna be doing

00:10:30 ◼   ► on the rest of the episode today?

00:10:31 ◼   ► Can you explain yourself, Jason?

00:10:32 ◼   ► - What we're about to do.

00:10:33 ◼   ► All right, you might not know this mic,

00:10:35 ◼   ► but it's the summer of fun.

00:10:36 ◼   ► - Summer of fun. - Summer of fun.

00:10:38 ◼   ► - In the summer of fun,

00:10:39 ◼   ► we try to do things a little bit differently,

00:10:41 ◼   ► partially because it's fun,

00:10:43 ◼   ► partially because there's other stuff going on,

00:10:44 ◼   ► like there's travel and stuff.

00:10:45 ◼   ► And so we had to prerecord this

00:10:48 ◼   ► because we couldn't record on the day that this will,

00:10:51 ◼   ► we normally record and this will be released.

00:10:53 ◼   ► So we have a document, people may not know this.

00:10:57 ◼   ► We have a document called the Summer of Fun document.

00:10:59 ◼   ► And I had this idea,

00:11:01 ◼   ► I actually had lunch with Shelley Brisbane

00:11:03 ◼   ► and we were talking about accessibility stuff

00:11:07 ◼   ► in the new versions of Apple's operating systems.

00:11:11 ◼   ► And I thought it would be really interesting

00:11:13 ◼   ► to bring in people,

00:11:14 ◼   ► we don't normally do guests on this show, right?

00:11:16 ◼   ► But it's the summer of fun.

00:11:18 ◼   ► And I thought, what if we got people in to sort of like

00:11:21 ◼   ► report on an area of expertise

00:11:23 ◼   ► and just check in with them about it?

00:11:26 ◼   ► And that led me to put in our document,

00:11:28 ◼   ► a thing called the verticals.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Now people may not remember from way back

00:11:32 ◼   ► in the earliest days,

00:11:33 ◼   ► one of the things that I always used to talk about

00:11:35 ◼   ► that was like a buzzword in publishing and in tech

00:11:40 ◼   ► was this idea of verticals,

00:11:42 ◼   ► which is like, it's like how to split up a topic

00:11:47 ◼   ► or into like little subtopics or demographic groups.

00:11:52 ◼   ► So there's like, there are the verticals,

00:11:53 ◼   ► there's the horizontal, which is everything.

00:11:55 ◼   ► And then there's these verticals that are like,

00:11:57 ◼   ► so you're super interested in this, you're in the vertical.

00:11:59 ◼   ► It's a piece of jargon that we thought was funny.

00:12:02 ◼   ► And we talked about how every segment of upgrade

00:12:04 ◼   ► was a vertical for a while and it's a whole thing.

00:12:06 ◼   ► - Ask upgrade is one of the original verticals.

00:12:08 ◼   ► - It is one of the original verticals.

00:12:10 ◼   ► It remains vertical to this day, in fact.

00:12:12 ◼   ► So this episode is the verticals,

00:12:15 ◼   ► where we are gonna have three guests in three topic areas.

00:12:20 ◼   ► And we're gonna talk about what's going on this summer

00:12:23 ◼   ► and into the fall with the iOS and macOS, especially,

00:12:26 ◼   ► but also watch an iPad betas

00:12:28 ◼   ► and how it affects different aspects of this.

00:12:30 ◼   ► There will be some more verticals I anticipate this summer.

00:12:34 ◼   ► I don't know whether those will get dropped

00:12:35 ◼   ► into regular episodes.

00:12:38 ◼   ► probably, though, we'll just have occasional vertical segments for the rest of the summer,

00:12:42 ◼   ► at least a handful. But this episode, because it needs to be out of time a little bit,

00:12:46 ◼   ► is the all—well, not all, because you've heard that there's more in this show than just the

00:12:52 ◼   ► verticals, but mostly the verticals with three special guests. And then we'll do some more

00:12:56 ◼   ► little guest segments occasionally in the summer. It's not a new permanent change to the upgrade

00:13:00 ◼   ► format but it's a summer fun thing. So the verticals, little interviews, little

00:13:07 ◼   ► mini segments with special guests who are experts in a particular field.

00:13:12 ◼   ► But before we get to that let me thank TextExpander for their support of this

00:13:15 ◼   ► week's episode. When you work in a small team, every moment counts, you don't want

00:13:19 ◼   ► to be wasting your time finding video conferencing details to send to a new

00:13:23 ◼   ► client. You don't want to have to track down those same FAQs every single time

00:13:26 ◼   ► from the company website. These are the kinds of things you want at your

00:13:29 ◼   ► fingertips so you can get your work done faster and that's why you need TextExpander.

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00:13:43 ◼   ► most to you.

00:13:44 ◼   ► So about video conferencing, that's one of mine.

00:13:46 ◼   ► If I type ZZOOM anywhere on my Mac, it prefills all of the stuff from my Zoom call, like my

00:13:53 ◼   ► standard Zoom link that I give to people.

00:13:55 ◼   ► So it just opens them to my personal meeting ID and they can just click on it and they're

00:13:59 ◼   ► to go straight and join that Zoom call with me. TextExpander's powerful shortcuts and abbreviations

00:14:03 ◼   ► will streamline your team's work as well. All you have to do is type that short abbreviation,

00:14:07 ◼   ► TextExpander will do the rest for you. So you can just build and collect your most commonly used

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00:14:21 ◼   ► automatically add in information like dates. You can have fields you can fill in the blanks of if

00:14:25 ◼   ► If you want to do some more customization, maybe you want to add timestamps to some text

00:14:29 ◼   ► and more. This will make sure that you keep the personality and the communication you send,

00:14:34 ◼   ► or even do something that we do here at Relay FM for doing good consistent naming for file

00:14:39 ◼   ► structures. So like where all of the contracts that we have for all of our various sponsors,

00:14:43 ◼   ► they're all saved with a TextExpander snippet with some drop down fields that we select from,

00:14:48 ◼   ► we type in the name of the sponsor, and then everything is named nice and consistently.

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00:15:10 ◼   ► That's textexpander.com/upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show.

00:15:17 ◼   ► So we're now joined by James Thompson on the upgrade program.

00:15:19 ◼   ► You may know James as the developer of PCALC and DICE by PCALC, aka PDICE, and James is also a

00:15:27 ◼   ► frequent podcaster on many shows over at The Incomparable. By PCALC. By PCALC. The Incomparable

00:15:33 ◼   ► by PCALC. I don't think I'm sponsoring the whole network. I'm sorry to say you are.

00:15:39 ◼   ► That's his... No, you are now. James by PCALC.

00:15:41 ◼   ► Here on the upgrade vertical. This is the vertical by PCALC. James, welcome.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Hello. We're so the concept with the uh the special summer fun uh verticals episode is we're

00:15:55 ◼   ► talking to people for a segment about a little area of their speciality that is that how you guys say

00:16:00 ◼   ► it speciality? I say special no wait I don't know anymore now you've asked me I think I see special

00:16:05 ◼   ► tea yeah. Oh okay. I I'm now trying to double think what I'm actually saying. Aluminium is my

00:16:11 ◼   ► my speciality. Anyway, guess what James? It's programming for you. It's not synthesizers

00:16:18 ◼   ► from the eighties. It's programming for you.

00:16:20 ◼   ► - I figured that was most likely. I did have some like briefing beforehand.

00:16:24 ◼   ► - That's good. That's good. And it's again, the summer and we're trying to check in about

00:16:30 ◼   ► what's going on with the betas and where the Apple platforms are going in the fall. And

00:16:36 ◼   ► that's what I wanted us to talk to you about

00:16:39 ◼   ► for this vertical segment.

00:16:41 ◼   ► So, you know, from a high level in terms of like the tools

00:16:45 ◼   ► and what's new that you could potentially use

00:16:48 ◼   ► in your software,

00:16:49 ◼   ► have you had things that the betas have changed

00:16:54 ◼   ► in how you're working?

00:16:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, realistically, I'm still pretty early

00:16:58 ◼   ► into my new versions for the autumn.

00:17:01 ◼   ► I usually try and get some last bug fix releases out

00:17:04 ◼   ► just before WWDC, like to deal with all the small stuff

00:17:07 ◼   ► that I know about.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And then I move on to doing the major architectural work

00:17:11 ◼   ► for the autumn.

00:17:12 ◼   ► But this year, a combination of factors,

00:17:14 ◼   ► including spending a month on a secret project

00:17:16 ◼   ► that I cannot talk about,

00:17:18 ◼   ► means that I'm only just shipping

00:17:20 ◼   ► the last of those updates out this week.

00:17:22 ◼   ► But I have been like doing all my exploratory work

00:17:25 ◼   ► on the betas as I go along.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Betas, I said, not betas.

00:17:28 ◼   ► - Yes, you did, as was foretold.

00:17:30 ◼   ► - Yes. - Some people pronounce it betas.

00:17:32 ◼   ► Is Xcode, you know, did they mess up Xcode?

00:17:36 ◼   ► Did they fix Xcode?

00:17:37 ◼   ► You know, is that, has that changed?

00:17:40 ◼   ► - I mean, like there is quite a few things

00:17:43 ◼   ► that are currently broken

00:17:45 ◼   ► and they've dropped support for building apps

00:17:47 ◼   ► that will run on earlier systems,

00:17:49 ◼   ► which is always a problem

00:17:50 ◼   ► 'cause then you have people saying,

00:17:51 ◼   ► why do you no longer support, you know,

00:17:54 ◼   ► iOS 11 or something?

00:17:56 ◼   ► There's nothing particularly good or bad in terms of Xcode.

00:18:01 ◼   ► It's a bit faster in compiling, but I can't really

00:18:05 ◼   ► use it day to day unless I'm specifically working

00:18:09 ◼   ► on my apps for the autumn.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Always, you end up having multiple versions

00:18:13 ◼   ► of Xcode installed and switching between them as needed.

00:18:17 ◼   ► I will say that Xcode is still one

00:18:18 ◼   ► of the all-time great development environments,

00:18:20 ◼   ► and all those people deserve a raise and a vacation.

00:18:24 ◼   ► Oh.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Very nice.

00:18:27 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean the Xcode side of it's not too bad.

00:18:32 ◼   ► It's when you get into the actual beta themselves that you start to run into problems.

00:18:37 ◼   ► I know that you have, just by Pcalc is a catalyst app.

00:18:42 ◼   ► So I know you've experimented with that and had experiments ship.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Any changes in catalysts that you've noticed that might make your life a little bit easier

00:18:53 ◼   ► or harder, I suppose?

00:18:54 ◼   ► I mean, generally all the changes this year are such that I don't need to do vast amounts

00:19:00 ◼   ► of work just to stay in the same place.

00:19:03 ◼   ► There's nothing that really breaks my existing code or any major architectural or visual

00:19:08 ◼   ► changes.

00:19:09 ◼   ► That's always the best kind of WWDC when you come out of it, and it's like if I literally

00:19:14 ◼   ► do nothing, everything will still work.

00:19:18 ◼   ► So then it's a case of what can you actually do to improve things?

00:19:22 ◼   ► And Catalyst has got some basic stuff in it that I've been wanting for years, particularly

00:19:26 ◼   ► related to like moving and resizing windows from code.

00:19:30 ◼   ► So for example, if you had a separate toolbar type window, like I recently added to dice,

00:19:36 ◼   ► and you wanted to position that relative to your main window when you opened it, you just

00:19:40 ◼   ► couldn't do that before the system just decided where it was going to go.

00:19:45 ◼   ► And the stuff like that, I would say, like, the majority of changes are really in things

00:19:52 ◼   ► like SwiftUI, which has got, you know, overall small quality of life improvements and new

00:20:00 ◼   ► things like the ability to make menu bar apps and there's a whole new SwiftUI charting API

00:20:05 ◼   ► that I suspect I might use in Dice to make pretty graphs of dice roll statistics and

00:20:10 ◼   ► things like that.

00:20:11 ◼   ► Do you use SwiftUI in Dice right now?

00:20:13 ◼   ► Yes, on the Mac version the preferences window is all SwiftUI and the widgets are all SwiftUI everywhere.

00:20:22 ◼   ► So you have to use it for some things, but the preferences window was my kind of like, "Let's try something."

00:20:31 ◼   ► I mean, it wasn't a great success given that when 12.4 came out, it completely broke SwiftUI in catalyst apps, in shipping apps.

00:20:39 ◼   ► So, you know, there's things where you end up and you realize you're using a sort of

00:20:46 ◼   ► a niche element of a niche element and nobody's actually tested it. I shouldn't say nobody,

00:20:52 ◼   ► but that was a pretty bad one. And I remember, I think it was Steve Trilton Smith when that

00:20:57 ◼   ► happened to him, he said, "I'm never using SwiftUI again. I'm not going that far."

00:21:01 ◼   ► I enjoyed your exchange with him where basically you were, it was as if you were both looking

00:21:06 ◼   ► and each other singing, "Did you see this?"

00:21:09 ◼   ► And the other one said, "Mm-hmm, are our apps broken now?"

00:21:14 ◼   ► Yes, they are.

00:21:16 ◼   ► In the shipping version, not in a beta with months of runway

00:21:19 ◼   ► but literally a shipping version that broke pieces

00:21:22 ◼   ► of your Swift UI.

00:21:24 ◼   ► - Which is not great, but there was an easy enough fix

00:21:27 ◼   ► but it just meant that I need to rush a fixer.

00:21:30 ◼   ► - You mentioned the windowing and that separate window

00:21:33 ◼   ► for dice rolling, which is an excellent feature idea,

00:21:36 ◼   ► by the way.

00:21:37 ◼   ► - Yes, whoever gave me that idea was a genius.

00:21:39 ◼   ► - Whoever gave you that idea.

00:21:40 ◼   ► Is that, so going to fall and having Stage Manager on iPad,

00:21:45 ◼   ► I assume that those go hand in hand,

00:21:49 ◼   ► that your windowing improvements will be improvements

00:21:53 ◼   ► on the iPad version too.

00:21:55 ◼   ► Is that a thing that you can do now

00:21:57 ◼   ► where you can have those multiple windows on the iPad

00:21:59 ◼   ► or does it not work that way?

00:22:00 ◼   ► - Well, I need to double check,

00:22:01 ◼   ► But the last time I looked, the window positioning code

00:22:05 ◼   ► was only available for the Mac.

00:22:08 ◼   ► But it did look very much like it

00:22:09 ◼   ► could be available on iOS under Stage Manager,

00:22:13 ◼   ► but currently wasn't.

00:22:14 ◼   ► So I'm hoping that that's going to appear.

00:22:16 ◼   ► You could have the separate windows,

00:22:18 ◼   ► and it works just like it currently works.

00:22:22 ◼   ► But whenever you get WWDC, there's

00:22:27 ◼   ► always a tension between which new features

00:22:30 ◼   ► to support that's going to bring the most improvements to my users versus which new

00:22:34 ◼   ► features does Apple want developers to support that will likely get me featured on the App

00:22:38 ◼   ► Store.

00:22:39 ◼   ► Is that still important being featured on the App Store?

00:22:43 ◼   ► It's much less than it was.

00:22:45 ◼   ► I mean previously you would get a good sales bump and you would stay there for quite a

00:22:51 ◼   ► while and it goes away pretty quickly.

00:22:54 ◼   ► But I think it still helps and you know everything helps and visibility and if you can

00:23:00 ◼   ► say, "Oh, I've got stage manager support in the autumn." It's not just Apple, but you'll

00:23:06 ◼   ► get some visibility and depressed generally.

00:23:09 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Right. So that's the balance of, you might,

00:23:12 ◼   ► not to put it in these terms, but you might have a feature that you really want to implement

00:23:16 ◼   ► because you think people will like it, but using not any shiny new tech that Apple has

00:23:22 ◼   ► rolled out this fall. And then there's the shiny new tech that Apple is rolling out.

00:23:28 ◼   ► And if you choose that feature instead, even if it might be used by fewer users, it's the

00:23:33 ◼   ► thing that's going to get you attention because everybody's writing their stories and Apple's

00:23:38 ◼   ► doing its little showcasing of apps that use this brand new technology that shipped.

00:23:42 ◼   ► And so there's a tendency toward adopting the new stuff because it helps your apps visibility.

00:23:49 ◼   ► >>ANDREW I will say though that this year I think both of those are probably the same

00:23:54 ◼   ► thing and it is stage manager because I think it is something that users will actually use,

00:24:00 ◼   ► but it is also the shiny feature of the year.

00:24:03 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** That's good. This is a game you play though,

00:24:05 ◼   ► right? This is one of your, I observe as somebody who's observed your software for a long time,

00:24:11 ◼   ► that this is something that you do try to do is adopt things that be aggressive. I mean,

00:24:16 ◼   ► you're somebody who has a calculator app, a dice rolling app, and used to have a dock

00:24:21 ◼   ► app that is slowly being rebuilt, featured by feature by John Syracuse.

00:24:24 ◼   ► - He's welcome to it.

00:24:26 ◼   ► - Enjoy.

00:24:27 ◼   ► And, but I think you've always had that strategy of, well, what's new?

00:24:31 ◼   ► What can I do with that?

00:24:32 ◼   ► And I don't know how much of that is just business strategy of, I want to be there and

00:24:37 ◼   ► I want to be seen by Apple as somebody who's embracing their new features.

00:24:41 ◼   ► And I want to be seen by users as being on the cutting edge and how much of it is you

00:24:45 ◼   ► being interested in exploring whatever is new?

00:24:48 ◼   ► I think it's a mix and I think it depends. Like some years I find myself reaching for

00:24:55 ◼   ► that feature, you know, like with the quick note support last year, it was like, well,

00:25:01 ◼   ► it's kind of useless, but I will do it.

00:25:07 ◼   ► When you roll a one, the quick note is tied to what you've rolled and so you can compile

00:25:12 ◼   ► a note full of all your cursing for rolling a one.

00:25:16 ◼   ► I mean that was a thing where you could kind of attach the state of your app at any given

00:25:20 ◼   ► point into a note and then recall it.

00:25:23 ◼   ► And it's like, does anybody use that?

00:25:27 ◼   ► I don't think so.

00:25:28 ◼   ► But that was one where like I don't have anything else, I need a shiny feature.

00:25:33 ◼   ► But I think stage manager is not going to be that.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I think it's more useful.

00:25:39 ◼   ► Yeah I mean there are always these little things right?

00:25:42 ◼   ► Like for example you could have said in previous years that just having multi-window support

00:25:52 ◼   ► would have been one of these features that might be nice to have, right?

00:25:57 ◼   ► Like how many people are going to use that on iPad etc etc.

00:26:00 ◼   ► However now multi-window support is kind of part of being ready for stage manager and

00:26:05 ◼   ► has become really important, right?

00:26:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean that was something that I was thinking about for the last few weeks is,

00:26:16 ◼   ► DICE is pretty much set for stage manager because it's a much more modern code base

00:26:20 ◼   ► than Pcalc and I did a lot of work for Catalyst with multiple windows and things that's flowed

00:26:25 ◼   ► back into the iPad app already.

00:26:27 ◼   ► And honestly, I don't think I need to do much there at all, if anything, to have good stage

00:26:32 ◼   ► manager support.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Basic support in Pcalc is pretty simple.

00:26:36 ◼   ► things kind of work right now, because if you supported

00:26:40 ◼   ► multiple screen sizes and split screen,

00:26:41 ◼   ► you've done most of the hard work already.

00:26:44 ◼   ► I do have some specific bugs in there,

00:26:46 ◼   ► because I made assumptions about certain screen

00:26:48 ◼   ► sizes mean certain things.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Like I have a set of layouts that's

00:26:52 ◼   ► only intended for use in split screen or slide over,

00:26:55 ◼   ► and those are triggering in stage manager at the moment.

00:26:58 ◼   ► Because I didn't imagine that it was a thing

00:27:01 ◼   ► that was going to happen.

00:27:02 ◼   ► But yeah, the main thing I'm facing with Peacock,

00:27:04 ◼   ► which is not as trivial as I would like,

00:27:06 ◼   ► is support for multiple windows.

00:27:09 ◼   ► When I first designed Pcalc for the iPhone,

00:27:11 ◼   ► which was 14 years ago, I didn't plan for that.

00:27:14 ◼   ► And the code makes a bunch of assumptions through it,

00:27:18 ◼   ► which I'm gonna need time to unpick.

00:27:20 ◼   ► And I actually started the process

00:27:21 ◼   ► for doing this a few years ago,

00:27:23 ◼   ► and I got halfway and then said, this is quite hard.

00:27:26 ◼   ► But it's half done,

00:27:29 ◼   ► so I just need to finish the work this summer,

00:27:31 ◼   ► now that it is actually sort of rather important.

00:27:34 ◼   ► - Okay, you left a project in the middle

00:27:36 ◼   ► of trying to do that.

00:27:38 ◼   ► I've done that and I can't go back

00:27:41 ◼   ► because then I go back and I've literally forgotten

00:27:44 ◼   ► because I tried to save that state

00:27:47 ◼   ► where you've got your in process.

00:27:49 ◼   ► So how does that work?

00:27:50 ◼   ► Have you gone back and looked at it and said,

00:27:51 ◼   ► "Oh yes, I know what I was doing here

00:27:53 ◼   ► and I'm able to pick up where I left off."

00:27:55 ◼   ► Or is it more like you spend several days

00:27:57 ◼   ► trying to figure out what it is you did a couple of years ago

00:27:59 ◼   ► and how to move forward.

00:28:01 ◼   ► - It was actually, I was relatively sensible

00:28:05 ◼   ► in the way I did it because the PCALC

00:28:08 ◼   ► is kind of divided into two parts.

00:28:09 ◼   ► There's the user interface bit,

00:28:11 ◼   ► which is different on each platform,

00:28:13 ◼   ► and there's the brain,

00:28:15 ◼   ► which is shared between everything else.

00:28:17 ◼   ► And so the brain has support for it.

00:28:20 ◼   ► It's just, I need to do it in the top level.

00:28:22 ◼   ► So, you can have these sort of,

00:28:25 ◼   ► what I call calc engine objects,

00:28:28 ◼   ► and you can have multiple of them,

00:28:29 ◼   ► then they can all just have their own state and do whatever they like. So that's fine.

00:28:33 ◼   ► It's just there's certain things where I kind of chickened out of it and sort of drew a

00:28:39 ◼   ► line and said, right, I've done it to this level. And then this is a problem for future

00:28:45 ◼   ► James.

00:28:46 ◼   ► >> You have a paper tape window. You're going to have a bunch of different... I'm trying

00:28:51 ◼   ► to think of how people are going to use multiple windows on iPad differently from how they

00:28:55 ◼   ► use it on the Mac. Because on the Mac, it seems to be very much like when you said earlier,

00:28:59 ◼   ► having that second window spawn

00:29:00 ◼   ► on a particular location in DICE,

00:29:02 ◼   ► I thought, well, you can't,

00:29:04 ◼   ► is there such a thing as a particular location

00:29:06 ◼   ► in Stage Manager on the iPad?

00:29:08 ◼   ► They sort of not, they just want,

00:29:10 ◼   ► the system puts it where it will.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And I'm not sure people will use Stage Manager on the iPad

00:29:15 ◼   ► like they do for arbitrary windowing as well,

00:29:19 ◼   ► like something like the paper tape in PCALC

00:29:23 ◼   ► or something like that. - Yeah.

00:29:24 ◼   ► But I could see it if you want to be using PCALC

00:29:27 ◼   ► with one app and then you also want to be using with another app with different states and things

00:29:32 ◼   ► like that. Yeah I would be that person. I use pcalc a lot like genuinely not just because James is

00:29:36 ◼   ► one of my closest friends just because I just genuinely like it and I also need a calculator

00:29:40 ◼   ► a lot and I could imagine having a couple of different working setups for the different stuff

00:29:46 ◼   ► that I'm doing and just having a pcalc window just always there even if it's hiding behind something

00:29:51 ◼   ► else mostly would be very helpful for me rather than needing to like reopen one every single time

00:29:57 ◼   ► or you know having to flick backwards and forwards backwards and forwards so

00:30:00 ◼   ► like I'm genuinely happy you're putting the work in as a customer of yours even

00:30:05 ◼   ► though I know it's gonna be a lot yeah I mean don't think don't thank me yeah

00:30:09 ◼   ► I'm thanking you now because you have to ship it so like I'm thanking you now

00:30:13 ◼   ► thanks in advance thanks in advance yeah okay as a having done this a long time

00:30:19 ◼   ► you know I know I I ask you and everybody else the state of affairs at

00:30:23 ◼   ► the end of the year for my Six Colors report card.

00:30:26 ◼   ► But thinking about it now,

00:30:28 ◼   ► what is it like being an Apple platforms developer today?

00:30:34 ◼   ► We hear a lot of drama and then we hear things

00:30:38 ◼   ► are getting better and then people are angry again.

00:30:40 ◼   ► How do you think it is right now in terms of,

00:30:43 ◼   ► is it getting better or worse,

00:30:45 ◼   ► or is it pretty much the same compared to previous years?

00:30:48 ◼   ► - This is really the hardest question

00:30:51 ◼   ► because it is tough to separate things

00:30:53 ◼   ► from my own personal feelings and be truly

00:30:56 ◼   ► objective about it all.

00:30:58 ◼   ► I think we're in the middle of a time of great transition

00:31:02 ◼   ► in the developer world.

00:31:03 ◼   ► And those are traditionally pretty stressful.

00:31:06 ◼   ► The last really big one we had started over 20 years ago,

00:31:10 ◼   ► going from the traditional Mac APIs

00:31:12 ◼   ► to the Next Step-based app kit stuff.

00:31:15 ◼   ► And that took a long time to play out.

00:31:18 ◼   ► So I was thinking about this earlier.

00:31:20 ◼   ► And in the last 30 years of doing this, and this is purely for Apple platforms, I have

00:31:24 ◼   ► learned seven different user interface frameworks and seven different programming languages.

00:31:29 ◼   ► I could list them all, but I will not.

00:31:32 ◼   ► And I do have to say that the transition to SwiftUI is the one out of all of them that

00:31:36 ◼   ► I personally am enjoying the least.

00:31:40 ◼   ► It is a very different mental model to the previous three decades of user interface frameworks

00:31:46 ◼   ► that I've used.

00:31:47 ◼   ► And I'm finding it more difficult to make that transition than I would care to admit on a podcast.

00:31:51 ◼   ► I mean, like for the first couple of years, there was a lot of, you know, how do I do this basic

00:31:57 ◼   ► thing? And the answer was you couldn't. But there's a lot fewer of those roadblocks each year.

00:32:01 ◼   ► And, you know, anyway, a lot of people, notably younger people, are making great things with Swift

00:32:07 ◼   ► UI already. And I'm sure I will get there eventually. But it's also difficult when you

00:32:12 ◼   ► have existing applications because, you know, rewriting working code is rarely the right answer.

00:32:17 ◼   ► But it is always a question of when to make that jump.

00:32:21 ◼   ► I think Apple's focus on SwiftUI makes it very clear that writing new UIKit or AppKit

00:32:28 ◼   ► code today is extremely foolish.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And yet it's also sometimes absolutely still the best choice to do so.

00:32:36 ◼   ► And that leads to a weird kind of cognitive dissonance, certainly in my brain, which doesn't

00:32:41 ◼   ► make it feel like a great time to be writing code.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I mean, obviously I've heard from other developers,

00:32:48 ◼   ► it seems like that there are a lot of long standing

00:32:51 ◼   ► Apple developers, maybe not as long standing as you,

00:32:54 ◼   ► but still, who, I wonder how much that pronouncement

00:32:59 ◼   ► really did hit home when they said,

00:33:00 ◼   ► 'cause it was just a statement and a presentation

00:33:03 ◼   ► and yet saying Swift and Swift UI are the future.

00:33:06 ◼   ► I wonder how much of an impact that made

00:33:09 ◼   ► because I've heard a lot of long time developers

00:33:12 ◼   ► this summer complaining, but also it's very clear

00:33:16 ◼   ► that it's their realization that they,

00:33:18 ◼   ► any delays they've had in terms of working with SwiftUI

00:33:22 ◼   ► because it's frustrating, that they just need to dive in

00:33:26 ◼   ► and be frustrated because this is where it's going.

00:33:29 ◼   ► And go ahead.

00:33:31 ◼   ► - I mean, it's all, Apple's messaging is always very clear.

00:33:35 ◼   ► You know, like even two years ago when SwiftUI appeared,

00:33:39 ◼   ► it was clear, this is the future.

00:33:41 ◼   ► this is what Apple is going to start focusing on.

00:33:43 ◼   ► And then each year, they're going to sort of ratchet it up.

00:33:46 ◼   ► And I think this was the first year--

00:33:48 ◼   ► I mean, if people were surprised this year,

00:33:50 ◼   ► they weren't paying attention.

00:33:51 ◼   ► But is that gradual, like, all these new APIs

00:33:57 ◼   ► are only going to be in SwiftUI?

00:33:59 ◼   ► And I doubt it.

00:34:02 ◼   ► And this might be a future topic.

00:34:05 ◼   ► But we don't know what the development environment

00:34:09 ◼   ► is for Apple's headset.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Apple is going to be likely dropping an entirely new platform on us later in the year.

00:34:16 ◼   ► And we don't know what that is.

00:34:18 ◼   ► It could be entirely SwiftUI.

00:34:20 ◼   ► I doubt it, but it's the kind of thing if they're trying to make a statement, they might do that.

00:34:28 ◼   ► And I think that the thing with SwiftUI is,

00:34:34 ◼   ► I think the people that have the biggest problems with it are the people who have used the other stuff the longest.

00:34:38 ◼   ► And it's just because your brain is in a certain way of working.

00:34:44 ◼   ► And going like difference between different programming languages usually isn't much.

00:34:49 ◼   ► Even between Objective-C and Swift, it kind of works the same.

00:34:55 ◼   ► But SwiftUI is one of those things that I just had to stare at it whenever widgets appeared.

00:35:01 ◼   ► It's like, well, I need to make widgets.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And I'm just going to stare at this until I can make something work.

00:35:07 ◼   ► and then I'm going to rewrite it and I'm going to see if I actually understand what I'm doing

00:35:11 ◼   ► and so on.

00:35:12 ◼   ► But I don't enjoy it.

00:35:15 ◼   ► And I know people that have said the exact opposite, you know, like people who say this

00:35:19 ◼   ► is this like fits their mental model much better and this is the way to do it.

00:35:24 ◼   ► And I don't know if this is like the, you know, your typical Apple engineers are younger

00:35:33 ◼   ► and have been influenced by like older JavaScript frameworks

00:35:37 ◼   ► that work in a similar way.

00:35:39 ◼   ► And I don't believe that I am incapable of learning things.

00:35:43 ◼   ► I will get there.

00:35:45 ◼   ► But it's not like when I first used UIKit

00:35:49 ◼   ► and I was like, this is great.

00:35:52 ◼   ► You know, this simplifies a lot of stuff.

00:35:54 ◼   ► It makes sense to me.

00:35:56 ◼   ► You know, it's all shiny and modern.

00:35:59 ◼   ► And now I look at this stuff,

00:36:00 ◼   ► which as we've said is 14 years later,

00:36:02 ◼   ► I go, "Oh, I don't like this."

00:36:04 ◼   ► It's the kids who are wrong kind of thing.

00:36:07 ◼   ► - The three of us played some Dungeons & Dragons

00:36:11 ◼   ► a few years ago.

00:36:12 ◼   ► And one of the things that came out of that

00:36:14 ◼   ► was Dice by Peacock.

00:36:16 ◼   ► You look around for inspiration and find it

00:36:21 ◼   ► in these things that we do together.

00:36:24 ◼   ► But one of the things that has struck me

00:36:26 ◼   ► about Dice by Peacock is how you,

00:36:30 ◼   ► And before that, the about box in Pcalc,

00:36:33 ◼   ► if people haven't seen that, it's now its own app,

00:36:36 ◼   ► is you having these projects that are real,

00:36:43 ◼   ► but are also a place for you to experiment with new stuff.

00:36:48 ◼   ► And I've always admired that about you,

00:36:49 ◼   ► the idea that you are trying things out sometimes in public,

00:36:54 ◼   ► but that you're also giving yourself, rather than saying,

00:36:57 ◼   ► "Well, I'm never gonna learn that

00:36:58 ◼   ► because I'm just going to focus on my calculator." You say, "Oh, that's a thing I probably should

00:37:02 ◼   ► play with, and the calculator isn't the best place for it necessarily, so I will find another

00:37:08 ◼   ► place to do it." Is that how you view something like dice, or does it start out that way and

00:37:12 ◼   ► then turn into a real product at some point?

00:37:14 ◼   ► >> JEAN-PAUL I mean, I think all of the above. The about

00:37:18 ◼   ► box in Peacock started because of the rumors at the time of Apple doing a 3D headset, and

00:37:27 ◼   ► you know, like five, six years ago at this point. And I was like, okay, I have not really done any

00:37:33 ◼   ► 3D graphics stuff, so I need to learn it. So, you know, I played around and out of that, I learned

00:37:42 ◼   ► how to do things. You suggested a dice app. And then the dice app became a place where I could

00:37:47 ◼   ► explore catalyst as a technology and see if that was ready. And a lot of this is like, is this

00:37:53 ◼   ► there's something that I would want to use for PCalc.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Because at the moment, I've got a UIKit PCalc,

00:37:57 ◼   ► and I've got an AppKit PCalc on the Mac.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And it's like, could I use a technology like Catalyst

00:38:04 ◼   ► to replace the Mac version?

00:38:06 ◼   ► Because having a really shared source space,

00:38:10 ◼   ► which I do with Dice, is really easy.

00:38:12 ◼   ► Because it's like, I write the app once,

00:38:15 ◼   ► do some Mac-specific things.

00:38:16 ◼   ► But it's a lot easier than I make a change on the iPhone

00:38:22 ◼   ► And then well I need to sort of at least pull that code in and wire it up and do stuff and that can be a hassle

00:38:29 ◼   ► So yeah, I mean dice is my current sort of

00:38:32 ◼   ► experimental you know

00:38:35 ◼   ► thing and

00:38:37 ◼   ► Clearly what I need to do is to make a completely Swift UI project as my next experimental thing to sort of

00:38:45 ◼   ► Figure out you know is this what I use to make a future peak out?

00:38:50 ◼   ► And I think that is part of the problem is at the moment like the answer is very clear is

00:38:55 ◼   ► Swift UI is what Apple wants everybody to be using and what Apple wants Apple gets

00:39:00 ◼   ► But it's not necessarily the best choice for me at the moment

00:39:07 ◼   ► So yeah, there is a lot of experimentation and for you know a keeping my brain relatively

00:39:16 ◼   ► elastic and be

00:39:19 ◼   ► figuring out where, which technologies are right for any particular problem.

00:39:26 ◼   ► Well, you mentioned starting the, that box because of the rumors of Apple working on a VR headset.

00:39:33 ◼   ► It keeps creeping closer and closer. How excited are you about the prospect of that VR AR headset?

00:39:41 ◼   ► I mean, the irony may be that I've been having problems with my eyesight for the last six months.

00:39:49 ◼   ► And it's like, by the time the thing finally arrives,

00:39:53 ◼   ► will I be able to use it?

00:39:55 ◼   ► You can use it to replace your eyes.

00:39:57 ◼   ► Well, we can only hope.

00:40:01 ◼   ► I might need a USB-C port on the back of my neck,

00:40:04 ◼   ► but I don't know if excited is the right word.

00:40:07 ◼   ► It's like, I really love like VR stuff

00:40:11 ◼   ► and the AR things that I've tried.

00:40:12 ◼   ► You know, I think anyone who's never tried VR,

00:40:17 ◼   ► You know, you don't quite have a,

00:40:19 ◼   ► it's hard to explain it to somebody that's never tried it.

00:40:23 ◼   ► And I think, you know, I know you've all tried it,

00:40:26 ◼   ► but there is this certain like magical status to it

00:40:31 ◼   ► that is hard to put across.

00:40:33 ◼   ► But I think this could be something

00:40:36 ◼   ► that is as big as an iPhone,

00:40:38 ◼   ► or it could be the next Apple TV.

00:40:40 ◼   ► And I don't know, you know,

00:40:43 ◼   ► how much effort I should put into it.

00:40:47 ◼   ► I mean, when this thing's--

00:40:48 ◼   ► assuming we get an SDK sometime around the iPhone launches

00:40:55 ◼   ► later in the year.

00:40:56 ◼   ► Because I can imagine, you know, either a separate event

00:40:59 ◼   ► or at that, they're going to at least show off and say,

00:41:04 ◼   ► you know, developers can pay us $5,000

00:41:07 ◼   ► to rent one of these for six months.

00:41:09 ◼   ► But it's like, I want to learn it.

00:41:12 ◼   ► I want to play with the graphics.

00:41:13 ◼   ► I want to do things.

00:41:14 ◼   ► But I just don't know as a platform how big it's going to be.

00:41:21 ◼   ► And you know, the iPhone clearly was like a major product category for Apple.

00:41:26 ◼   ► And you know, that's really my lead platform for all my development at the moment.

00:41:31 ◼   ► But is this thing going to be that for the next 20 years?

00:41:35 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:41:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:37 ◼   ► Well, James, thank you for being part of our experimental verticals only episode of upgrade.

00:41:42 ◼   ► We appreciate you being vertical.

00:41:44 ◼   ► and being on the podcast.

00:41:46 ◼   ► - You're welcome.

00:41:47 ◼   ► I'm going to go and be horizontal for a while

00:41:49 ◼   ► because it is extremely warm in this office.

00:41:51 ◼   ► - This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph.

00:41:54 ◼   ► So you've hired a brilliant developer.

00:41:55 ◼   ► That's great, but now you've got to get them onboarded.

00:41:57 ◼   ► If your company's growing,

00:41:59 ◼   ► onboarding new developers will be a common occurrence,

00:42:01 ◼   ► but it's a big undertaking every time.

00:42:03 ◼   ► One of the biggest challenges for new hires

00:42:05 ◼   ► is to get up to speed with the project

00:42:06 ◼   ► that they're going to be working on with their new team.

00:42:09 ◼   ► This can be tricky if the code bases

00:42:10 ◼   ► your developers are working in are already large.

00:42:13 ◼   ► Thankfully, Sourcegraph make it easy to move fast even in those big code bases.

00:42:18 ◼   ► Developers know that knowledge is most useful when it's findable.

00:42:21 ◼   ► Centralization is helpful, but given the fact that most companies can store knowledge in

00:42:25 ◼   ► two different locations at least, how do you make knowledge accessible to those that need

00:42:29 ◼   ► it?

00:42:30 ◼   ► As a code intelligence platform, Sourcegraph gives developers what they need to drive their

00:42:34 ◼   ► own learning over time and in different situations.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Teams about Sourcegraph will have to rely on asking colleagues or reviewing out-of-date

00:42:40 ◼   ► documentation which is cumbersome and time consuming. But with Sourcegraph, every developer

00:42:45 ◼   ► can search across millions of repositories to find specific code, saving time for themselves

00:42:50 ◼   ► and everyone else. So when the questions do come up, you'll know it's the big stuff

00:42:54 ◼   ► that's worthy of extra time. Sourcegraph was created to make developers' lives easier.

00:42:58 ◼   ► And today, they work with leading companies across every industry including 3 out of the

00:43:02 ◼   ► 5 top tech companies, plus PayPal, Uber, Plaid, GE, Reddit and Atlassian. Visit about.sourcegraph.com

00:43:10 ◼   ► to learn more today. That's about.sourcegraph.com to find out why some of the biggest tech companies

00:43:15 ◼   ► in the world use Sourcegraph and to see what it can do for yours. Or just click the link in the

00:43:20 ◼   ► show notes to let them know that you heard about them from this show. Our thanks to Sourcegraph

00:43:24 ◼   ► for their support of this show and Relay FM. We are now joined on the upgrade program by

00:43:28 ◼   ► Shelly Brisbane who is a radio producer, writer and podcaster, host of Parallel on Relay FM and

00:43:34 ◼   ► Lions Towers and Shields on the Incomparable. Hi Shelly, welcome to Upgrade. Hey Myke,

00:43:38 ◼   ► thanks for having me.

00:43:40 ◼   ► - Shelley, I should mention also that you have a book.

00:43:43 ◼   ► It's got many additions.

00:43:45 ◼   ► It's iOS access for all.

00:43:46 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:43:47 ◼   ► - The comprehensive guide to accessibility on iPad, iPhone,

00:43:51 ◼   ► and your website includes the iPod touch.

00:43:54 ◼   ► - I know we're gonna change that.

00:43:56 ◼   ► We're gonna change that.

00:43:56 ◼   ► It's the 10th edition this year.

00:43:58 ◼   ► And I think we might get rid of iPod touch

00:44:00 ◼   ► just because that title, I realize it's unwieldy,

00:44:02 ◼   ► but you know, SEO is important.

00:44:04 ◼   ► So.

00:44:05 ◼   ► - It is, it is.

00:44:06 ◼   ► - So much iPod touch.

00:44:06 ◼   ► - The Apple touch is still kicking around, you know.

00:44:09 ◼   ► - It is, they're around.

00:44:10 ◼   ► - They're compatible, they're versions

00:44:12 ◼   ► that will run iOS 16.

00:44:14 ◼   ► - The supplies last still, they continue to last,

00:44:16 ◼   ► I guess, in people's hands, in people's pockets.

00:44:20 ◼   ► So we wanted to bring you on to talk about accessibility

00:44:24 ◼   ► and the current state of affairs of accessibility.

00:44:28 ◼   ► One of the things about this vertical idea

00:44:31 ◼   ► is what's going on this summer and into the fall

00:44:34 ◼   ► in terms of Apple's OS cycles.

00:44:38 ◼   ► So one of the things Apple takes pride of talking about

00:44:41 ◼   ► is accessibility features.

00:44:42 ◼   ► They pre-announced them before WWDC this year.

00:44:46 ◼   ► And so, you know, when you think about what's going on

00:44:49 ◼   ► with accessibility on Apple platforms right now,

00:44:52 ◼   ► what are the features that are jumping out at you?

00:44:55 ◼   ► - Well, I will say this is the second year

00:44:56 ◼   ► they've done that pre-announced before WWDC.

00:44:58 ◼   ► And we love it.

00:44:59 ◼   ► It's great and accessibility land.

00:45:01 ◼   ► We feel like we have our own special day of Apple attention.

00:45:04 ◼   ► So yeah, this has been a pretty good year

00:45:06 ◼   ► for accessibility features.

00:45:07 ◼   ► We haven't seen them all yet.

00:45:08 ◼   ► The first one I wanna talk about is live captions,

00:45:11 ◼   ► which I think a lot of people

00:45:12 ◼   ► both in and out of the accessibility world

00:45:14 ◼   ► are pretty excited about.

00:45:15 ◼   ► - I'm really excited about this one.

00:45:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, you'll be able to have captions

00:45:17 ◼   ► on your FaceTime call or basically any audio on your devices

00:45:22 ◼   ► and it's not in the betas, it'll be out in the fall

00:45:25 ◼   ► is what I heard an accessibility person say the other day.

00:45:28 ◼   ► But that's pretty exciting because it feels like,

00:45:31 ◼   ► you know, sometimes Apple introduces something new

00:45:33 ◼   ► and you're like, is it gonna be good

00:45:35 ◼   ► or is it gonna be not good?

00:45:36 ◼   ► And I feel like this is in their sweet spot

00:45:38 ◼   ► in terms of machine learning and transcription

00:45:40 ◼   ► and the stuff Apple's good at.

00:45:42 ◼   ► Seems like live captions is gonna be a win for them.

00:45:45 ◼   ► - I worry about the quality of live captions.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Do you worry about that?

00:45:49 ◼   ► Like, I mean, it's something is better than nothing,

00:45:52 ◼   ► but I've seen some auto captioning stuff and it's real bad.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And that's my concern is that it's gonna be this feature

00:45:58 ◼   ► that they're like, here it is, you got it.

00:46:01 ◼   ► and then I'm gonna look at it and think,

00:46:02 ◼   ► oh no, no, this is no good, this is nonsense.

00:46:06 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I mean, YouTube's a terrible,

00:46:07 ◼   ► there's a lot of, and I will tell you

00:46:10 ◼   ► that the people who use this stuff on a daily basis

00:46:13 ◼   ► are the first ones to say, you know,

00:46:16 ◼   ► something better than nothing, yeah sure,

00:46:17 ◼   ► but sometimes it gets in my way

00:46:19 ◼   ► because I actually wanna use this for work or school

00:46:20 ◼   ► or whatever I'm using it for.

00:46:22 ◼   ► I feel like Apple has as high a degree of like,

00:46:25 ◼   ► high a degree of likelihood of success as anybody does.

00:46:29 ◼   ► I mean, Google didn't always do a great job

00:46:31 ◼   ► in the other places that it's in,

00:46:33 ◼   ► some of the video conferencing software,

00:46:35 ◼   ► and it's, meh, you know, some is good, some is bad.

00:46:38 ◼   ► But I guess I'm gonna give Apple a little bit of the doubt

00:46:41 ◼   ► just because I feel like they wouldn't have done it

00:46:45 ◼   ► unless they had a reasonable degree of confidence.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Now, whether it's gonna be as magical as some people think,

00:46:51 ◼   ► in other words, being able to caption

00:46:53 ◼   ► any kind of audio effectively,

00:46:55 ◼   ► my guess is it's probably optimized

00:46:57 ◼   ► for something like FaceTime,

00:46:58 ◼   ► 'cause it's their own protocol

00:46:59 ◼   ► and they have the ability to process the audio

00:47:02 ◼   ► and send it on through and turn it into text.

00:47:04 ◼   ► Whereas if you're just capturing audio aloud,

00:47:07 ◼   ► like a podcast or something crazy like that, I don't know.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I'd be curious to see whether there's a fall off there.

00:47:14 ◼   ► - A Twitter account that I see a lot

00:47:15 ◼   ► and it's very funny is called MLB Closed Captioning,

00:47:20 ◼   ► MLB_CC on Twitter.

00:47:22 ◼   ► And it's literally, and again,

00:47:24 ◼   ► so what's the workflow here from a technical standpoint,

00:47:26 ◼   ► right? Because you've got to have a speech to text recognizer that is on the live audio

00:47:32 ◼   ► stream and is processing it. And it's not just as simple as a transcript because you

00:47:36 ◼   ► have to process it in real time and have like, where does it break? Where is there a pause?

00:47:41 ◼   ► Because you have to flip pages, right? You have to go from caption page to caption page.

00:47:45 ◼   ► It's a really hard problem. And I don't know what the technical workflow is for something

00:47:50 ◼   ► like major league baseball game live streams, but the Twitter accounts hilarious because

00:47:55 ◼   ► like it's some real amazing nonsense and that's funny but like if you're trying to detect

00:48:01 ◼   ► because I've had this like a I've been in a it's been a while but I've been in like

00:48:06 ◼   ► a restaurant or a bar or something where they've got sports on but they've got the captions

00:48:09 ◼   ► turned on and it's the why it's unintelligible right like it's such it's so bad whether they're

00:48:17 ◼   ► doing it automatically or they've got a person doing it it's usually late and it's often

00:48:21 ◼   ► and kind of laughably, like, just,

00:48:25 ◼   ► you can't even recognize it.

00:48:26 ◼   ► So that's my concern with live captions,

00:48:27 ◼   ► is that you're gonna end up with Meow Machine,

00:48:30 ◼   ► a lead-off hitter with a single into center field.

00:48:32 ◼   ► And I don't know who Meow Machine actually is,

00:48:34 ◼   ► but like that's not his name. - I was gonna say,

00:48:35 ◼   ► I think Meow Machine's a great guy.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I want his baseball card right now.

00:48:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, he is a machine.

00:48:41 ◼   ► - I think there's an, and he has a few meows.

00:48:43 ◼   ► And there's an issue as well with just audio quality.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And, you know, FaceTime calls are generally pretty good,

00:48:48 ◼   ► but they can be random if there's background noise.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Again, you're trying to do any kind of audio,

00:48:53 ◼   ► so you're gonna have a pretty great variance

00:48:56 ◼   ► in audio quality and how you're capturing all this audio.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Yeah, there's an awesome opportunity for failure.

00:49:01 ◼   ► I'm just, I'm still looking forward to it.

00:49:04 ◼   ► And again, I'm tempered by the fact

00:49:06 ◼   ► that I do know a lot of people who use this stuff

00:49:09 ◼   ► for actually getting stuff done and being productive,

00:49:12 ◼   ► and they are skeptical, not specifically of the Apple stuff,

00:49:15 ◼   ► because the last time I talked with them,

00:49:16 ◼   ► it was before this was announced,

00:49:18 ◼   ► so I haven't really had a chance.

00:49:19 ◼   ► But I suspect that they would tell me,

00:49:20 ◼   ► seeing is believing or reading is believing.

00:49:22 ◼   ► - All right, what else is on your agenda

00:49:26 ◼   ► in terms of features Apple is working on?

00:49:28 ◼   ► - Well, door detection is a fun one.

00:49:31 ◼   ► This requires a LiDAR equipped device.

00:49:33 ◼   ► So a 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 13 Pro, 13 Pro Max,

00:49:36 ◼   ► or the iPad Pro that has a LiDAR sensor.

00:49:40 ◼   ► And there's a previous feature called People Detection

00:49:44 ◼   ► that was in iOS 15.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Door detection does a little more than that,

00:49:48 ◼   ► but it uses the same technology.

00:49:50 ◼   ► So what door detection will do is find for --

00:49:52 ◼   ► identify for you the presence of a door,

00:49:54 ◼   ► the kind of door it is, whether it's open,

00:49:56 ◼   ► whether there is text on the door,

00:49:57 ◼   ► like a room number or a sign or something like that.

00:50:00 ◼   ► So basically, it'll give you all the information you need

00:50:02 ◼   ► as a blind or visually impaired person

00:50:04 ◼   ► to find and interact with a door.

00:50:06 ◼   ► And the people detection feature

00:50:08 ◼   ► previously just would point to, here's a person.

00:50:12 ◼   ► Here's how far away that person is.

00:50:14 ◼   ► It didn't give you all the sort of identifiers

00:50:16 ◼   ► like it's a male or a female person.

00:50:17 ◼   ► It was mostly about space and distance,

00:50:20 ◼   ► space and the existence of a person.

00:50:22 ◼   ► But door detection just takes what you can do with LIDAR,

00:50:25 ◼   ► that next step,

00:50:27 ◼   ► and for a lot of blind and visually impaired people,

00:50:29 ◼   ► it's actually far more useful than people detection.

00:50:32 ◼   ► People detection was great in the social distancing world,

00:50:34 ◼   ► and Apple made a sort of a play on that,

00:50:36 ◼   ► although I suspect they had that planned long before COVID.

00:50:39 ◼   ► The interesting thing about it

00:50:40 ◼   ► is it's inside the magnifier app,

00:50:42 ◼   ► not an app a totally blind person would typically use,

00:50:45 ◼   ► or an app that you often use for distance stuff

00:50:49 ◼   ► or for when you're walking around navigating.

00:50:50 ◼   ► That's something that you would use

00:50:51 ◼   ► to read something close or to read signage,

00:50:54 ◼   ► but it's as good a place as any to put it.

00:50:55 ◼   ► Otherwise, you have to put it in the camera app, I suppose.

00:50:58 ◼   ► And so it's a really interesting proof of concept

00:51:01 ◼   ► in terms of what can we do with LIDAR

00:51:04 ◼   ► in terms of identification and navigation of objects.

00:51:07 ◼   ► And so a lot of people are pretty excited

00:51:09 ◼   ► about door detection,

00:51:11 ◼   ► assuming that they have the phone.

00:51:12 ◼   ► Obviously, you'd have to have a LIDAR-equipped device.

00:51:14 ◼   ► We don't know what kind of LIDAR capability

00:51:17 ◼   ► we're gonna get with the next level of phones.

00:51:19 ◼   ► This is my concern, and of course,

00:51:20 ◼   ► Apple won't ever answer the question of,

00:51:21 ◼   ► "Hey, how expensive is a LIDAR sensor?"

00:51:24 ◼   ► Because even though lower-end phones,

00:51:27 ◼   ► you're wanting to differentiate the cameras

00:51:29 ◼   ► in the higher-end phones,

00:51:30 ◼   ► and LIDAR is part of the way you do that.

00:51:32 ◼   ► If you put that in lower-end phones,

00:51:33 ◼   ► blind, visually impaired people would be more likely to buy it.

00:51:35 ◼   ► And I know plenty of people who have bought

00:51:37 ◼   ► Pros and Pro Maxes just for the LIDAR,

00:51:40 ◼   ► or the anticipation of the store detection thing.

00:51:42 ◼   ► Well, I mean, as well, the initial thing that I thought of and many thought of when seeing

00:51:46 ◼   ► the door detection is that this looks like prime for some kind of AR device as well,

00:51:53 ◼   ► right?

00:51:54 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:51:55 ◼   ► Which would rely quite heavily on LiDAR and sensors like that.

00:52:00 ◼   ► When you see things like this door detection and what Apple is hopefully able to do with

00:52:04 ◼   ► it, do you get excited about an AR device for this kind of stuff?

00:52:09 ◼   ► Or, I mean, tell me, is that kind of device, would it actually be useful to the accessibility

00:52:15 ◼   ► community, like some kind of mixed reality headset?

00:52:18 ◼   ► Well, probably not as such.

00:52:20 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would like to use it in a mixed

00:52:24 ◼   ► reality context, either for gaming or for entertainment or for any of the number of

00:52:29 ◼   ► ways you can have enhanced experiences.

00:52:31 ◼   ► But I think a lot of people in the accessibility community, especially blind and visually impaired

00:52:35 ◼   ► people, they think about it purely in terms of navigation.

00:52:38 ◼   ► If you have a headset or glasses,

00:52:40 ◼   ► and probably glasses is a better example because--

00:52:42 ◼   ► - Headset feels too heavy duty, right?

00:52:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, absolutely. - For just detecting doors

00:52:46 ◼   ► and things like that. - And there are headsets

00:52:49 ◼   ► that have been, you know, Samsung and other VR headsets

00:52:53 ◼   ► that have been modified to be used as a tool

00:52:56 ◼   ► for blind and visually impaired people

00:52:57 ◼   ► to do stuff like magnification,

00:52:59 ◼   ► watching television, navigating around.

00:53:01 ◼   ► And they're enormous and they're heavy and they're hot

00:53:04 ◼   ► and they cost $3,000 and no thank you.

00:53:07 ◼   ► but glasses as a navigation aid,

00:53:09 ◼   ► because there are already tools out there.

00:53:10 ◼   ► There are companies that have put out combinations

00:53:13 ◼   ► of a phone and a pair of glasses

00:53:16 ◼   ► that will assist you with navigation.

00:53:18 ◼   ► And usually there's a person

00:53:19 ◼   ► on the other end of the phone line

00:53:20 ◼   ► who's able to see through your glasses

00:53:22 ◼   ► over an internet connection that says,

00:53:24 ◼   ► "Okay, go to the right, that's where the intersection is."

00:53:26 ◼   ► And so these are provided as services.

00:53:29 ◼   ► They kind of worked and they kind of didn't.

00:53:32 ◼   ► It ended up being more expensive

00:53:34 ◼   ► and now those are more AI-based services.

00:53:37 ◼   ► But the idea that you could have LIDAR and a camera

00:53:41 ◼   ► and this kind of intelligence in a pair of glasses

00:53:44 ◼   ► that somebody could use as a navigation aid,

00:53:46 ◼   ► whether it was backed up by somebody in a call center

00:53:49 ◼   ► helping or whether it was simply,

00:53:51 ◼   ► okay, I can identify doors, I can identify people,

00:53:53 ◼   ► I can read signage with live text, that sort of thing.

00:53:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's pretty exciting.

00:53:57 ◼   ► And it also says that whatever the first product is,

00:54:01 ◼   ► Sometimes when a brand new category comes from Apple,

00:54:04 ◼   ► you have a question about the accessibility,

00:54:06 ◼   ► not that they didn't think about it,

00:54:07 ◼   ► but how long are we going to have to wait for accessibility?

00:54:10 ◼   ► And so for me, it feels like doing these sort of proof

00:54:14 ◼   ► of concept features so early on is kind of a signal that,

00:54:18 ◼   ► hey, whatever we produce is going to have accessibility

00:54:21 ◼   ► of some kind built in from the get-go.

00:54:24 ◼   ► -I like the idea of making the whole world accessible

00:54:27 ◼   ► using technology. That's really cool.

00:54:29 ◼   ► -Yeah, just put some glasses on.

00:54:31 ◼   ► Yeah, let's see, where have we seen that before?

00:54:33 ◼   ► I don't know. Some guy in the 23rd century.

00:54:36 ◼   ► Yeah. -Yeah.

00:54:37 ◼   ► -Right.

00:54:39 ◼   ► -The -- I wondered if you could explain to me

00:54:42 ◼   ► what eloquence voices are. -Yes.

00:54:45 ◼   ► -Whatever. I was trying to be eloquent there.

00:54:47 ◼   ► -So, eloquence is a line of voices

00:54:50 ◼   ► from a company called Code Factory.

00:54:51 ◼   ► They're available in a lot of screen readers for Windows,

00:54:54 ◼   ► and most notably JAWS,

00:54:55 ◼   ► which is the leading screen reader on the Windows side.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And so a lot of blind people know eloquence.

00:55:00 ◼   ► They're very, they like it.

00:55:01 ◼   ► They're used to it.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Eloquence has several voices.

00:55:05 ◼   ► The main feature that Eloquence provides

00:55:07 ◼   ► is the ability to play text

00:55:09 ◼   ► at a really, really high rate of speed

00:55:11 ◼   ► and for it to still be understandable.

00:55:13 ◼   ► So the voices aren't super high quality.

00:55:15 ◼   ► They're not as good as say an Alex

00:55:16 ◼   ► or some of the other Apple voices,

00:55:18 ◼   ► but you can listen to them really, really fast

00:55:20 ◼   ► and be productive.

00:55:21 ◼   ► So a lot of blind people love Eloquence.

00:55:23 ◼   ► And what Apple has done is added Eloquence

00:55:25 ◼   ► as a voiceover and speech engine voice.

00:55:27 ◼   ► So you won't see it on Siri,

00:55:28 ◼   ► but you'll see it in voiceover.

00:55:29 ◼   ► you'll see it in Speak Screen, Speak Selection.

00:55:32 ◼   ► And this is funny because this wasn't really highlighted

00:55:36 ◼   ► when Apple did their announcements

00:55:38 ◼   ► for Global Accessibility Awareness Day before WWDC,

00:55:41 ◼   ► but it was announced around the same time,

00:55:43 ◼   ► sort of separately, and the blind community,

00:55:46 ◼   ► the Twitter blind community just went nuts.

00:55:48 ◼   ► And this is what they're excited about.

00:55:50 ◼   ► The eloquence voices, because they're familiar,

00:55:53 ◼   ► there are eight of them.

00:55:53 ◼   ► One of them is named Shelley, by the way,

00:55:55 ◼   ► which of course means it's great.

00:55:56 ◼   ► But they are available in enhanced versions

00:55:59 ◼   ► There are also some additional enhanced voices

00:56:01 ◼   ► outside of the eloquence world.

00:56:03 ◼   ► The interesting thing to me, first of all,

00:56:05 ◼   ► is okay, Apple has gone outside

00:56:07 ◼   ► and they've gotten some voices that are familiar.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Apple wants to tell a story, and I believe them,

00:56:12 ◼   ► that there's a lot of user feedback that people said,

00:56:14 ◼   ► "Why can't you get eloquence on Mac OS and iOS?"

00:56:17 ◼   ► And I believe them, but I also believe that it was just

00:56:20 ◼   ► a way for them to get this sort of

00:56:23 ◼   ► optimized performance thing.

00:56:25 ◼   ► For somebody who really wants to read at a high rate of speed

00:56:28 ◼   ► or interact with speech at a higher rate of speech.

00:56:29 ◼   ► So I'll just, just as a quick example,

00:56:31 ◼   ► so I'm pretty good with speech, but I'm not super fast.

00:56:34 ◼   ► I can listen to something that's about 60, 65%

00:56:37 ◼   ► and navigate pretty well.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Eloquence voices, you can listen at 85% and do pretty well.

00:56:42 ◼   ► They're kind of amazing for that.

00:56:45 ◼   ► But again, they're not as good as some of the other options,

00:56:48 ◼   ► but besides the eloquence voices,

00:56:50 ◼   ► Apple has added a bunch of other enhanced voices

00:56:53 ◼   ► that so far from my limited listening,

00:56:55 ◼   ► 'cause those are in the betas, sound pretty good.

00:56:57 ◼   ► And they've also added a whole bunch of languages

00:57:00 ◼   ► for voiceover, which is pretty exciting.

00:57:01 ◼   ► They do that on a regular basis,

00:57:03 ◼   ► but this is just a great big language update.

00:57:05 ◼   ► But the thing to me that was the most fascinating

00:57:07 ◼   ► is just like how eagerly the blind community,

00:57:10 ◼   ► including people who aren't particularly devoted to Apple,

00:57:13 ◼   ► but who may have used an iPhone,

00:57:14 ◼   ► but are sort of like,

00:57:15 ◼   ► "Boy, I sure wish I had eloquence on here."

00:57:17 ◼   ► How excited they are about this.

00:57:19 ◼   ► - 'Cause I imagine the benefit of things

00:57:21 ◼   ► being read to you quickly is the way that voiceover works,

00:57:24 ◼   ► if people haven't experienced it before.

00:57:27 ◼   ► If I'm saying this correctly, Shelly,

00:57:29 ◼   ► please correct me if I'm wrong.

00:57:30 ◼   ► It's reading parts of the UI to you

00:57:33 ◼   ► so you can understand what you can interact with.

00:57:35 ◼   ► And I guess if the thing that you wanna interact with

00:57:38 ◼   ► is the 14th thing it's gonna read out,

00:57:39 ◼   ► the quicker it can get to that before you confirm it,

00:57:41 ◼   ► the better, right?

00:57:42 ◼   ► - It's the UI, but it's everything.

00:57:44 ◼   ► It's anything you wanna read.

00:57:45 ◼   ► It's a webpage, it's a book, it's a document.

00:57:47 ◼   ► And so once you're good at it,

00:57:50 ◼   ► you wanna interact as quickly as you can.

00:57:53 ◼   ► And it's funny because whenever we do speech-based demos,

00:57:57 ◼   ► every demo, everybody I've ever encountered

00:57:58 ◼   ► who's tried to do a live demo,

00:57:59 ◼   ► the first thing they have to do is dial their speech down

00:58:01 ◼   ► about 30 points so that a person who isn't used to it

00:58:04 ◼   ► can listen to it, which I love.

00:58:06 ◼   ► I just, I think that's great.

00:58:07 ◼   ► That's like our own little hack.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Like we're listening to things really, really fast.

00:58:10 ◼   ► And like Eloquence, I was amazed at how high you could get.

00:58:13 ◼   ► I still don't think they're the greatest voices,

00:58:15 ◼   ► but they are really fast.

00:58:18 ◼   ► - Kind of reminds me of the,

00:58:19 ◼   ► I don't know, there are fonts that are optimized

00:58:22 ◼   ► for people with dyslexia, right?

00:58:24 ◼   ► - Right.

00:58:25 ◼   ► - And they look unattractive as fonts.

00:58:29 ◼   ► You know, if you kind of look at them sometimes,

00:58:31 ◼   ► it's like, this looks a little weird,

00:58:33 ◼   ► but I guess that's, again, it's like the point, right?

00:58:35 ◼   ► Like, it's designed in a specific way

00:58:38 ◼   ► that with the voiceover stuff,

00:58:40 ◼   ► as things said really fast, I can understand it,

00:58:44 ◼   ► but the voices are tuned specifically, right?

00:58:47 ◼   ► To sound good at high speeds, so they--

00:58:50 ◼   ► - Yes, and the thing too is that inside voiceover,

00:58:53 ◼   ► the mechanism, one of the mechanisms that makes voiceover

00:58:56 ◼   ► easy to navigate is the rotor, which basically you interact

00:59:00 ◼   ► with by twirling two fingers on the screen

00:59:02 ◼   ► like you would an old style television dial,

00:59:04 ◼   ► and you can use a rotor function to turn your speech rate

00:59:06 ◼   ► up or down, so you might have a standard speech rate

00:59:08 ◼   ► that you like, but let's say you're trying to consume

00:59:11 ◼   ► technical content or a great novel or something like that,

00:59:13 ◼   ► and you want to consume it at a different speech rate,

00:59:17 ◼   ► it's pretty easy to do that, and you can also change voices

00:59:20 ◼   ► in that way. You could put multiple voices in the rotor.

00:59:22 ◼   ► So you might have a high-quality voice like in Alex,

00:59:25 ◼   ► which is universally regarded as kind of the best voice out there.

00:59:28 ◼   ► But then you might also say, "Hey, I want an eloquence voice.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I want Shelley in my rotor, because when I read something

00:59:32 ◼   ► that I want to read really fast, I can read her at 85%,

00:59:35 ◼   ► but then I could switch back to Alex

00:59:36 ◼   ► when I want to comprehend a little differently."

00:59:40 ◼   ► -So what's missing in macOS and iOS in this new round?

00:59:45 ◼   ► What things are you disappointed,

00:59:48 ◼   ► maybe that they haven't done.

00:59:50 ◼   ► - Well, and these aren't specific to this upgrade cycle.

00:59:53 ◼   ► I think all in all, this is a generally good upgrade cycle,

00:59:56 ◼   ► but just sort of in general,

00:59:57 ◼   ► I think macOS VoiceOver still lags behind.

01:00:00 ◼   ► It doesn't get updated to the extent

01:00:03 ◼   ► that iOS VoiceOver does.

01:00:05 ◼   ► They have the same name,

01:00:06 ◼   ► but because they're in different operating systems,

01:00:08 ◼   ► they operate differently,

01:00:09 ◼   ► which actually leads to one of the issues

01:00:10 ◼   ► with VoiceOver on the Mac.

01:00:12 ◼   ► But it has not been either updated consistently

01:00:17 ◼   ► or evangelized to the development community,

01:00:19 ◼   ► there's still a lot of third-party apps

01:00:21 ◼   ► that do not support macOS VoiceOver,

01:00:22 ◼   ► and there's not nearly as much pressure on those developers

01:00:25 ◼   ► as there is in the iOS world.

01:00:27 ◼   ► And so, for example, I can give you

01:00:30 ◼   ► sort of what sound like niggly little feature things,

01:00:34 ◼   ► but in VoiceOver, the default behavior is to group items,

01:00:37 ◼   ► and so it's supposed to be easy to navigate over a large UI

01:00:41 ◼   ► because you move from one group to the other,

01:00:43 ◼   ► and then you can dig down into the group

01:00:44 ◼   ► if you want an individual item.

01:00:47 ◼   ► But the problem with that as a default behavior

01:00:49 ◼   ► is that you end up skipping over UI elements

01:00:52 ◼   ► that you might want to, and it would be nice

01:00:53 ◼   ► if there were more choice in that way.

01:00:55 ◼   ► A lot of people in the past year or so

01:00:57 ◼   ► have had issues with VoiceOver hanging in Safari

01:01:00 ◼   ► in the sense that it will say Safari not responding

01:01:03 ◼   ► because VoiceOver is just taking that much longer

01:01:06 ◼   ► to load up and read the webpage.

01:01:08 ◼   ► So they're just sort of ongoing limitations

01:01:12 ◼   ► with VoiceOver that could probably be addressed

01:01:14 ◼   ► if there was more focus on fixing them.

01:01:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think this is fascinating because

01:01:18 ◼   ► Apple obviously is very committed to accessibility

01:01:22 ◼   ► and talking about accessibility features,

01:01:24 ◼   ► and yet they have to make choices and prioritize things.

01:01:29 ◼   ► And it's interesting to see the places where they're...

01:01:33 ◼   ► Are you concerned sometimes that they are more concerned

01:01:35 ◼   ► about having new features that they can put out

01:01:37 ◼   ► in a press release than advancing their existing features?

01:01:41 ◼   ► - Sometimes, yes.

01:01:42 ◼   ► I mean, and they tend to be very separate.

01:01:44 ◼   ► So a thing like live captions that we talked about

01:01:46 ◼   ► or door detection, obviously,

01:01:47 ◼   ► that's not a direct voiceover feature.

01:01:50 ◼   ► So voiceover is kind of the bread and butter

01:01:51 ◼   ► of accessibility, and there are times

01:01:54 ◼   ► when that doesn't get the support or love

01:01:57 ◼   ► that I think a lot of users, especially Mac people,

01:01:59 ◼   ► people who long ago committed to the Mac,

01:02:01 ◼   ► either as their only system or as a primary

01:02:04 ◼   ► or a prominent system in their world,

01:02:06 ◼   ► 'cause I know people who still have two

01:02:07 ◼   ► or three operating systems lying around,

01:02:09 ◼   ► 'cause we're nerds, but there are people who feel

01:02:11 ◼   ► like Mac OS voiceover has been ignored.

01:02:13 ◼   ► And again, the developer evangelism part is relevant too, because if Apple is paying attention

01:02:18 ◼   ► to iOS voiceover and if they're doing sessions at WWDC about that, you're going to focus

01:02:25 ◼   ► more on how iOS voiceover interacts with apps and you're going to use examples of how apps

01:02:29 ◼   ► can be made accessible and less so on the Mac.

01:02:32 ◼   ► And I think because Windows has had such a huge installed base institutionally, like

01:02:37 ◼   ► any organization that serves blind or visually impaired people, whether it's through the

01:02:41 ◼   ► government or whether it's providing software, hardware to those populations is often super

01:02:47 ◼   ► Windows based.

01:02:48 ◼   ► And so even though a lot of people have Macs and have chosen Macs, especially after they

01:02:51 ◼   ► got iPhones, I think there's a feeling that there's less need to be as aggressive with

01:02:59 ◼   ► making voiceover on the Mac the best it possibly can be.

01:03:03 ◼   ► And now we have the issue that with Catalyst apps, the Catalyst apps versus AppKit apps

01:03:08 ◼   ► behave differently in voiceover.

01:03:09 ◼   ► So if you're a VoiceOver user and you're used to AppKit apps, and then all of a sudden you

01:03:13 ◼   ► get into a Catalyst app, you're going to have to learn a few new things.

01:03:17 ◼   ► And there are ways around—that was a concern I had when Catalyst first came out, and it

01:03:21 ◼   ► was not something that I could even quantify.

01:03:24 ◼   ► I was just like, "Oh, this is going to be weird," because, again, iOS VoiceOver and

01:03:27 ◼   ► macOS VoiceOver, they share the same name, they do the same thing, but they behave differently

01:03:32 ◼   ► for logical reasons, because VoiceOver is keyboard-based and VoiceOver on the Mac is

01:03:36 ◼   ► keyboard-based and VoiceOver on iOS is gesture-based.

01:03:39 ◼   ► So there's still some challenges there.

01:03:41 ◼   ► I think it's a good implementation of a screen reader.

01:03:45 ◼   ► It's very much usable, but I think that people find barriers

01:03:50 ◼   ► often when they wanna use a specific app

01:03:52 ◼   ► or as I was describing with web browsers

01:03:54 ◼   ► where they get just something weird and they go,

01:03:56 ◼   ► why is it like that?

01:03:58 ◼   ► It wouldn't be something that would be tolerated

01:04:00 ◼   ► if it were for a mainstream audience, honestly.

01:04:02 ◼   ► - What else?

01:04:05 ◼   ► - Well, I'll mention a couple of things.

01:04:07 ◼   ► Braille support is one, and I'm not a braille user.

01:04:09 ◼   ► And when I say braille support, what I mean is,

01:04:12 ◼   ► people who are braille users will connect

01:04:14 ◼   ► what's called a braille display to their iPhone.

01:04:17 ◼   ► And so the output of voiceover from the iPhone

01:04:20 ◼   ► is on the braille display in braille characters as well.

01:04:23 ◼   ► And also you can type from the braille display

01:04:26 ◼   ► to the iOS device and have it converted to text.

01:04:28 ◼   ► And this is useful for people who are native braille users.

01:04:31 ◼   ► It's also useful for people who are deafblind

01:04:36 ◼   ► so they can't hear the voice spoken on the iPhone,

01:04:39 ◼   ► but they can use the braille display

01:04:40 ◼   ► to physically interact with the iPhone.

01:04:42 ◼   ► So braille displays are a big productivity tool

01:04:45 ◼   ► for people in work and school

01:04:47 ◼   ► who want to both use it with and without an iOS device.

01:04:52 ◼   ► And every upgrade cycle,

01:04:53 ◼   ► there seems to be a sort of a weird,

01:04:55 ◼   ► incongruous braille bug.

01:04:57 ◼   ► It should be noted that iOS versus Android,

01:05:00 ◼   ► the braille support is, it's not even comparable.

01:05:03 ◼   ► IOS support for Braille is far superior.

01:05:06 ◼   ► The trouble is that every time there's an upgrade cycle,

01:05:09 ◼   ► there seems to be some almost insurmountable Braille bug

01:05:12 ◼   ► that is allowed to go out with the shipping software.

01:05:15 ◼   ► It is often fixed eventually, usually by the point to release

01:05:19 ◼   ► but you've engendered a lot of ill feeling among Braille users

01:05:23 ◼   ► and the bugs are sufficiently different from one another

01:05:27 ◼   ► that I can't tell you whether there's something in common

01:05:29 ◼   ► that's being done in the upgrade cycles

01:05:31 ◼   ► and the new releases that's causing those braille bugs

01:05:34 ◼   ► because they're so different from one another.

01:05:36 ◼   ► But there is a sense in the community

01:05:38 ◼   ► that those braille bugs are allowed to fester

01:05:40 ◼   ► even after the software has shipped.

01:05:41 ◼   ► And so that's unfortunate.

01:05:43 ◼   ► And the last thing I would say,

01:05:45 ◼   ► and this is, people have different levels of desire for this.

01:05:48 ◼   ► There's some people that believe that the App Store

01:05:50 ◼   ► should have accessibility ratings or labels

01:05:53 ◼   ► so that whether the developer does it

01:05:55 ◼   ► or whether Apple does it,

01:05:56 ◼   ► there should be basically a rating

01:05:57 ◼   ► that says how accessible an app is.

01:06:00 ◼   ► I can see that there's all sorts of problems

01:06:02 ◼   ► with how you

01:06:03 ◼   ► deliminate, how you determine that,

01:06:07 ◼   ► how you say, is something accessible to voiceover?

01:06:09 ◼   ► Who makes that judgment?

01:06:10 ◼   ► How accessible does it have to be?

01:06:12 ◼   ► But I do feel like,

01:06:13 ◼   ► if you had some sort of a nutrition label,

01:06:16 ◼   ► where the developer could say,

01:06:18 ◼   ► I've consciously made my app voiceover compatible.

01:06:20 ◼   ► I support dynamic type.

01:06:22 ◼   ► I support assistive touch and switch control

01:06:26 ◼   ► and all the other accessibility features

01:06:28 ◼   ► that are available within those software,

01:06:31 ◼   ► that I as a user at least can make a choice,

01:06:34 ◼   ► oh, do I want this Twitter client

01:06:36 ◼   ► or do I want that Twitter client

01:06:37 ◼   ► because it's declared itself to be accessible.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And then you've also made the developer accountable.

01:06:42 ◼   ► So if I download it and it's not accessible,

01:06:44 ◼   ► then I can go back and I can say to Apple

01:06:45 ◼   ► or to the developer in reviews,

01:06:47 ◼   ► hey, this is not as advertised.

01:06:50 ◼   ► And it feels like making that available

01:06:53 ◼   ► and then subsequently Apple evangelizing that

01:06:55 ◼   ► through the developer program and saying,

01:06:57 ◼   ► "Hey, you should declare your nutritional--

01:07:00 ◼   ► your nutrition label for accessibility,"

01:07:02 ◼   ► would just be an encouragement to other developers to do it

01:07:05 ◼   ► and would show up to developers who didn't.

01:07:07 ◼   ► I think that's a really great idea.

01:07:08 ◼   ► I mean, if I'm remembering correctly,

01:07:10 ◼   ► the privacy-focused nutrition labels

01:07:12 ◼   ► are also self-reported by the developers.

01:07:14 ◼   ► So, they wouldn't have to, like,

01:07:18 ◼   ► staff up to check every little feature, right?

01:07:21 ◼   ► Because Apple wouldn't need to,

01:07:22 ◼   ► but they could create this system.

01:07:24 ◼   ► And as you say, right,

01:07:25 ◼   ► then the developer has to say they've done it,

01:07:28 ◼   ► and then they can be called to task

01:07:31 ◼   ► if it turns out that they didn't.

01:07:32 ◼   ► But I think that nutrition labeling,

01:07:34 ◼   ► I think they do it in two different ways now.

01:07:36 ◼   ► Is that right, Jason?

01:07:37 ◼   ► They do like a privacy one.

01:07:41 ◼   ► I think there's another one,

01:07:42 ◼   ► but I think this would be a great idea.

01:07:44 ◼   ► It makes perfect sense to me.

01:07:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, the privacy one's fairly new, I think,

01:07:46 ◼   ► and I think it's great.

01:07:47 ◼   ► It's funny because it's so far down on the page

01:07:50 ◼   ► that you kind of don't notice it

01:07:51 ◼   ► unless you're looking for it.

01:07:52 ◼   ► But the thing about an accessibility label too

01:07:55 ◼   ► is that I could search for it.

01:07:56 ◼   ► I could go in the app store and I could say,

01:07:57 ◼   ► find me accessible Twitter clients.

01:07:59 ◼   ► I can't say Twitter apparently.

01:08:01 ◼   ► Find me a Twitter client that's accessible.

01:08:02 ◼   ► Find me note-taking apps that are accessible.

01:08:05 ◼   ► Most of them are, that's not a good choice,

01:08:07 ◼   ► but there are some inaccessible

01:08:08 ◼   ► Twitter clients inexplicably.

01:08:10 ◼   ► And yeah, I feel like it would be,

01:08:13 ◼   ► I think there are people out there

01:08:14 ◼   ► who would like Apple to enforce it in some way.

01:08:16 ◼   ► And I see many problems with it,

01:08:19 ◼   ► even going beyond just the idea of the volume of work

01:08:22 ◼   ► that Apple would have to do.

01:08:23 ◼   ► Because then Apple has to not only say they're accessible,

01:08:26 ◼   ► they're basically taking responsibility

01:08:28 ◼   ► for the developer's work.

01:08:29 ◼   ► And the developer says,

01:08:30 ◼   ► I support voiceover, I'm fully accessible.

01:08:33 ◼   ► But then there's one button that isn't labeled properly.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And then whose fault is that?

01:08:38 ◼   ► Who should get the grief for that?

01:08:39 ◼   ► Well, the developer clearly.

01:08:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think Apple maintaining that

01:08:44 ◼   ► would be a good idea.

01:08:45 ◼   ► I mean, we see issues with app review, right?

01:08:47 ◼   ► Like where something clearly should be allowed

01:08:50 ◼   ► through app review, but it doesn't get allowed

01:08:52 ◼   ► throughout preview or vice versa.

01:08:53 ◼   ► And then they're supposed to be monitoring

01:08:56 ◼   ► that whole process, but they don't fully.

01:08:58 ◼   ► - Well, Shelly, thank you so much for being part

01:09:01 ◼   ► of this vertical experience that is happening.

01:09:05 ◼   ► We're building, it's building blocks.

01:09:06 ◼   ► We're building upward with each segment here this week.

01:09:09 ◼   ► And thank you for being one of the key building blocks

01:09:12 ◼   ► in making a podcast.

01:09:14 ◼   ► - My pleasure.

01:09:15 ◼   ► I feel like you're creating your own AR experience.

01:09:17 ◼   ► It's the vertical upgrade experience.

01:09:20 ◼   ► - That's right, except no substitutes.

01:09:22 ◼   ► Ask for it by name.

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01:11:24 ◼   ► A thanks to DoorDash for their support

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01:11:28 ◼   ► Our final guest of this episode is David Smith,

01:11:31 ◼   ► developer of Widgetsmith, Podometer++, and many other apps,

01:11:35 ◼   ► and podcaster on "Under the Radar" on Relay FM.

01:11:38 ◼   ► Hi, Dave.

01:11:39 ◼   ► - Hello.

01:11:40 ◼   ► Welcome to the verticals.

01:11:43 ◼   ► - It's very high up here.

01:11:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, you're on the stack.

01:11:46 ◼   ► You know, we're just building a whole stack of segments here

01:11:49 ◼   ► because it's the summer of fun

01:11:50 ◼   ► and this is a thing we decided to do.

01:11:52 ◼   ► But it's also the summer for developers like you,

01:11:54 ◼   ► summer of working on your apps

01:11:59 ◼   ► and looking at what Apple is doing with new technologies.

01:12:01 ◼   ► We talked to James Thompson about that earlier.

01:12:03 ◼   ► He's lowered down on the stack down there.

01:12:05 ◼   ► And I wanted to talk to you about widgets.

01:12:07 ◼   ► This is the widget vertical because, I mean,

01:12:10 ◼   ► WidgetSmith, WatchSmith, you spent a lot of time

01:12:13 ◼   ► with widgets and complications,

01:12:15 ◼   ► and this year we've got new widgets

01:12:16 ◼   ► that are inspired by watch complications.

01:12:19 ◼   ► And so I thought that you would be the right person

01:12:21 ◼   ► to talk to about widgets.

01:12:22 ◼   ► Did you look, everywhere you look, do you see widgets now?

01:12:26 ◼   ► - Widgets are my, yeah.

01:12:28 ◼   ► Widgets are my livelihood.

01:12:30 ◼   ► Widgets are what I do.

01:12:31 ◼   ► It's a funny thing, especially because widgets often

01:12:34 ◼   ► are used as like a throwaway term

01:12:36 ◼   ► when people are describing, it's like,

01:12:37 ◼   ► oh, you know, just cranking widgets

01:12:39 ◼   ► or when people are making widgets,

01:12:41 ◼   ► it's like, well, that is actually what I do.

01:12:43 ◼   ► That is my profession.

01:12:44 ◼   ► - Did you ever look at a wall clock and go,

01:12:47 ◼   ► what is a clock, but just a physical widget?

01:12:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, just a widget.

01:12:51 ◼   ► Everything's a widget.

01:12:52 ◼   ► - Yep, yeah.

01:12:53 ◼   ► So what are your, I mean,

01:12:55 ◼   ► obviously the thing we're most excited about probably

01:12:57 ◼   ► is the new lock screen widgets in iOS,

01:13:02 ◼   ► because not only do they suggest strongly

01:13:04 ◼   ► that there's gonna be an always on display

01:13:06 ◼   ► on some iPhones this fall,

01:13:07 ◼   ► but just more broadly, the idea that you've got

01:13:10 ◼   ► some little glanceable data items

01:13:14 ◼   ► that you can put on your lock screen.

01:13:16 ◼   ► That's great, but how has that been for you?

01:13:18 ◼   ► How have they been in these early beta months in practice?

01:13:22 ◼   ► What has been your process in trying to figure out

01:13:25 ◼   ► how to build tools to make little widgets

01:13:29 ◼   ► that live in your lock screen?

01:13:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely been a lot of fun.

01:13:32 ◼   ► And I think it was very relieving at WWDC this year

01:13:36 ◼   ► to see widgets get a lot of attention and be something

01:13:39 ◼   ► that's one of the sort of marquee features of iOS 16.

01:13:42 ◼   ► When, you know, like widgets are very important to me

01:13:45 ◼   ► from, you know, sort of personally and professionally.

01:13:47 ◼   ► And so in last year, you know, it's like iOS 14,

01:13:51 ◼   ► widgets exploded, it was a big deal.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Like, you know, WidgetSmith was like viral on TikTok

01:13:55 ◼   ► and it was this whole big thing.

01:13:57 ◼   ► And then iOS 15 came around

01:14:00 ◼   ► and it was very quiet on the widgets front.

01:14:03 ◼   ► I mean, essentially the main change was just,

01:14:05 ◼   ► they came to the iPad and we got an extra size there.

01:14:09 ◼   ► But otherwise, widgets were essentially unchanged

01:14:11 ◼   ► from 14 to 15.

01:14:13 ◼   ► And as someone who cares a lot about widgets,

01:14:17 ◼   ► that's always a little bit worrying,

01:14:18 ◼   ► that if this is gonna be a feature that Apple rolls out

01:14:22 ◼   ► and then doesn't go anywhere,

01:14:23 ◼   ► and that just kind of, it is what it is,

01:14:25 ◼   ► and maybe they regretted the decision,

01:14:27 ◼   ► or this is all they ever had in mind for it,

01:14:29 ◼   ► and that's not the best place to be.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Ideally, if you're working on Apple technology

01:14:33 ◼   ► and this is how you make your living,

01:14:35 ◼   ► you're gonna wanna be sort of in the mainstream

01:14:38 ◼   ► of where Apple is pushing the platform

01:14:40 ◼   ► and what they care about,

01:14:41 ◼   ► where they're putting their attention,

01:14:42 ◼   ► their engineering resources.

01:14:44 ◼   ► And so last year was a little bit worrying.

01:14:46 ◼   ► I mean, it was fine.

01:14:47 ◼   ► It was nice to have a quiet summer,

01:14:48 ◼   ► but it wasn't something that made me feel good long-term.

01:14:52 ◼   ► And so this year when we get lock screen widgets

01:14:56 ◼   ► and they're essentially one of the crux parts

01:14:59 ◼   ► of the marquee feature of iOS 16, I'd say,

01:15:01 ◼   ► which is, you know, lock screen customization. And that customization is certainly also a

01:15:06 ◼   ► direct result to a reflection of iOS 14's sort of aesthetic craze where it became—one

01:15:15 ◼   ► of the reasons which became popular was because people used it to customize the feel and aesthetic

01:15:21 ◼   ► of their iPhone. And now they're—you know, Apple is fully embracing that to some degree,

01:15:25 ◼   ► or at least they're starting to embrace that by letting you choose, you know, sort of things

01:15:30 ◼   ► that they've never been able to change before. So you can change the font of the time on

01:15:34 ◼   ► your lock screen, and you can, you know, they have all their image effects and color stuff

01:15:39 ◼   ► that you can apply to it, and they added lock screen widgets. And that's exciting, I think,

01:15:45 ◼   ► just from a fundamental—for me, that's cool that Apple is engaging with that in a way,

01:15:50 ◼   ► and then they're, you know, they're implementing widgets in a way that, as someone who has

01:15:55 ◼   ► a lot of experience building watch complications is sort of straightforward and makes sense.

01:16:01 ◼   ► And while I think they could have gone in a different direction, I mean obviously technically

01:16:04 ◼   ► there's a lot of different things they could have put done for how they implemented widgets

01:16:08 ◼   ► on the lock screen, but they chose to essentially take, you know, watchOS complications and

01:16:13 ◼   ► put them onto the lock screen. Certainly from my perspective it made it easy for me, you

01:16:16 ◼   ► know, so as I've been implementing them, you know, at this point, you know, just maybe

01:16:20 ◼   ► what are we, about a month past WWDC, you know, I have a fully working version of lock

01:16:24 ◼   ► screen complications in Widgetsmith that's in beta testing and is, you know, sort of

01:16:29 ◼   ► there. It wasn't a big leap for me to be able to do this because it is very much the, you

01:16:34 ◼   ► know, adopting technologies in the way that I've been doing on watch complications for

01:16:39 ◼   ► years. And so, you know, it's been relatively straightforward and nice. And I think it's

01:16:43 ◼   ► a bit of a—there's certainly a tension, I feel, there because there are limits to

01:16:48 ◼   ► to what doing the complication kind of desaturated,

01:16:52 ◼   ► sort of frosted look that they've taken for lock screen,

01:16:56 ◼   ► the widgets, or I'm gonna,

01:16:58 ◼   ► every now and then I'll call them complications

01:16:59 ◼   ► because that's just where they are in my head.

01:17:01 ◼   ► But yeah, I think there are limitations to that,

01:17:03 ◼   ► but also I can sort of, you know,

01:17:06 ◼   ► so that they're not full color,

01:17:08 ◼   ► there's things that I can do on a home screen widget

01:17:10 ◼   ► that I can't do here, but I mean,

01:17:12 ◼   ► the reality is I'm glad that they exist,

01:17:14 ◼   ► I'm glad that they're there,

01:17:14 ◼   ► and because of they're coming from something

01:17:16 ◼   ► That's already existing technology that, you know, if you're sort of an app developer who's

01:17:23 ◼   ► been on this platform for a while, you'll feel very comfortable making it.

01:17:25 ◼   ► And so, you know, overall I'm thrilled.

01:17:28 ◼   ► It's been sort of a good first month getting them built out.

01:17:31 ◼   ► >>Joe Kriebel Is it true that the Apple Watch complications

01:17:34 ◼   ► are now also using the same format as the lockscreen complications are on iOS?

01:17:39 ◼   ► >>Steve

01:17:39 ◼   ► >> So the answer to that is slightly complicated, but the short version is yes.

01:17:44 ◼   ► >> The complication question is complicated.

01:17:46 ◼   ► >> It is, it's a complicated complication. So what they've done in watchOS 9 is they've

01:17:52 ◼   ► gone through and updated all of the watch faces to support a new format of complication

01:17:59 ◼   ► that is exactly—that uses WidgetKit, uses the same technology that exists on iOS. And

01:18:07 ◼   ► they even from a code level the lock screen widgets are technically in the same family as the

01:18:16 ◼   ► watchOS new complication system with the exception that on the watch there's a corner complication

01:18:22 ◼   ► that doesn't exist on the iOS lock screen. But otherwise, you know, the round, the rectangle,

01:18:28 ◼   ► and the flat text style are exactly the same. And so if you opt into that as an app developer,

01:18:36 ◼   ► you can share exactly the same code between your lock screen complications and your watchOS

01:18:44 ◼   ► 9 complications. Where it gets a little bit complicated is just in terms of the

01:18:48 ◼   ► sort of backwards compatibility mode side of that. So if you want to support watchOS 8

01:18:55 ◼   ► complications, then you may need to have two different, you know, sort of incarnations of

01:19:00 ◼   ► your complications. Or if you only support the new style, then they won't be available on,

01:19:04 ◼   ► you know, older watches and they won't appear at all on the Series 3 style, you know, Apple watches,

01:19:11 ◼   ► the 38 and the 42 millimeter watches. They just don't exist there, which is probably in some ways

01:19:16 ◼   ► why Series 3 watches finally deprecated and won't get watchOS 9. So it's a little bit complicated

01:19:23 ◼   ► then, but I think moving forward, like if you can ignore the complicated past sort of backwards

01:19:29 ◼   ► compatibility side of things, then yes, moving forward, widgets and complications are now under

01:19:34 ◼   ► or a unified system that makes things a lot simpler and especially on watchOS simplifies

01:19:39 ◼   ► things dramatically. So there are now four families of complication that exist on watchOS.

01:19:45 ◼   ► So you have the circular, the rectangular, the text, and the corner, and that's it. There's

01:19:50 ◼   ► only those four. Whereas previously on watchOS, I think we've had something like maybe 10

01:19:55 ◼   ► or 12 different families because there are all these slightly different variants of things

01:19:59 ◼   ► where depending on which watch face it was, like the simple watch face had a different

01:20:03 ◼   ► set of complications than the utility watch face and things where there were these limitations

01:20:08 ◼   ► or just tweaks that Apple did in the way that they structured complications initially, and

01:20:12 ◼   ► so they've gotten rid of all that. And now it's all SwiftUI, and it's all sort of homogenized

01:20:17 ◼   ► onto this basic—there's four different types of things, three of which exist on the lock

01:20:21 ◼   ► screens, four of which exist on watchOS.

01:20:24 ◼   ► >>Steve, would you say that you were prepared for this moment because you made WatchSmith

01:20:30 ◼   ► and spent a lot of time thinking about complications.

01:20:32 ◼   ► Did that -- When this lock-screen-widget thing,

01:20:35 ◼   ► kids announced, do you sit there and go --

01:20:37 ◼   ► I mean, you were literally -- I could watch you

01:20:39 ◼   ► because you were right in front of me when this happened.

01:20:41 ◼   ► We all were looking at you.

01:20:43 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, it's that 'Jurassic Park' moment, right?"

01:20:47 ◼   ► It's complications. I know this.

01:20:48 ◼   ► -I was thinking about you, Dave.

01:20:50 ◼   ► I couldn't see you, but I was thinking about you, you know?

01:20:52 ◼   ► -We were all watching Dave in that moment.

01:20:54 ◼   ► We really were.

01:20:55 ◼   ► -Yeah, I mean, it certainly --

01:20:57 ◼   ► especially given the history of Widgetsmith, which is that, you know, I made WatchSmith first,

01:21:02 ◼   ► and that was an app that I made for making custom complications on the Apple Watch. And that's,

01:21:08 ◼   ► you know, it was an app that I made, you know, maybe it was probably about nine months before

01:21:13 ◼   ► Widgetsmith was a thing. And that's where I started. And that's—complications were the thing

01:21:17 ◼   ► that got me excited about customization and about aesthetics and about, you know, sort of giving

01:21:23 ◼   ► users that kind of control. Because that was something that I personally felt that I was

01:21:26 ◼   ► was missing on my Apple Watch that I didn't like that all my complications on my Apple

01:21:31 ◼   ► Watch looked very samey and I couldn't feel like I could make them my own. And so I made

01:21:35 ◼   ► WatchSmith to be able to do that. And so then, you know, widgets were announced and it's

01:21:39 ◼   ► like, well, I essentially have all of this infrastructure and I've thought about this

01:21:43 ◼   ► problem a lot so I can go ahead and, you know, sort of move it onto onto iOS with Widgetsmith.

01:21:50 ◼   ► And then, yeah, so this feels very much like kind of a coming full circle. And now I'm

01:21:55 ◼   ► taking the learning and in many ways the code that I built for WatchSmith is now being repurposed

01:22:01 ◼   ► back into Widgetsmith for the lock screen side of the complications. And it's just sort

01:22:05 ◼   ► of all kind of wrapping up nicely. And so yes, I think if you've been a good little

01:22:10 ◼   ► Apple developer and been supporting iOS and watchOS for a long time and so you've been

01:22:14 ◼   ► doing complication work, lock screen complications or lock screen widgets are very straightforward,

01:22:21 ◼   ► are very trivial. Like I got them up and running very easily. And the way that they're doing

01:22:25 ◼   ► a lot of the theming and stuff is very similar to the way they do the theming on watchOS.

01:22:30 ◼   ► Where on watchOS, you can have a complication, you can give it a tint color. You can make

01:22:35 ◼   ► your watch red or pink or whatever. And the way they do that and the way that they're

01:22:39 ◼   ► dealing with colors and saturation and all that kind of stuff is very, very similar and

01:22:44 ◼   ► very familiar. And I think in a world where if we are to speculate that there will one

01:22:49 ◼   ► be a sort of an always-on iPhone. I imagine the same technology that they use on watchOS

01:22:58 ◼   ► right now for doing the always-on complications will transfer over exactly. It would be my

01:23:03 ◼   ► expectation and seems likely based on what they're saying. So yes, I feel very prepared

01:23:07 ◼   ► for this. It was a very easy summer in a way that—some summers I've been a developer

01:23:13 ◼   ► for—what was it? This was my 13th WDC, 14th WDC, something like that. And some years it's

01:23:18 ◼   ► It's just a train wreck.

01:23:20 ◼   ► This year was not one of those years.

01:23:21 ◼   ► This year was like, I got this.

01:23:22 ◼   ► I know exactly what I'm doing and it was no problem to get going.

01:23:26 ◼   ► >> No, but he's going to out underscore underscore, am I right?

01:23:28 ◼   ► >> No.

01:23:29 ◼   ► >> That's right.

01:23:30 ◼   ► >> It's not going to happen.

01:23:31 ◼   ► So you mentioned a couple of times both like the aesthetic stuff for iOS 14 and kind of

01:23:35 ◼   ► what that was what propelled WidgetSmith to the masses.

01:23:39 ◼   ► And you mentioned about with iOS 16 the effect that people have customization of colors and

01:23:44 ◼   ► stuff.

01:23:45 ◼   ► Now, as I've been playing around with some of these widgets, I'm kind of seeing that

01:23:50 ◼   ► there is, the way that I'm viewing this is there are some similarities and some differences

01:23:55 ◼   ► and I don't know how it's going to shake out because this time it isn't the widgets really

01:24:01 ◼   ► that can customize the look of the lock screen.

01:24:04 ◼   ► It's Apple's tools that do that and then you add widgets in as part of it.

01:24:10 ◼   ► Do you have any kind of feeling about if this is going to be as big a deal as the original

01:24:16 ◼   ► ones or is it still too early for you to tell?

01:24:20 ◼   ► I think that's hard to say, certainly.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And I think Apple's system, in a way that I think is very clever, and I'd be curious

01:24:27 ◼   ► to see if in iOS 17 it extends into the home screen beyond the lock screen, their system

01:24:34 ◼   ► seems very much built around giving you really good tools to get something that is cohesive

01:24:41 ◼   ► and looks good very easily. And they have really good built-in features and they do

01:24:47 ◼   ► a lot of machine intelligence to work out which photos you might want on your lock screen,

01:24:51 ◼   ► which photos would look good as a lock screen image, and which filters you can apply to

01:24:56 ◼   ► those images and which color schemes are applied are intelligently suggested. And the end result

01:25:02 ◼   ► of this is something that is pretty—is very easy to get something that looks pretty good.

01:25:07 ◼   ► I think the difficulty there is it's obviously—I think that approach will work very well for

01:25:15 ◼   ► the majority of people. Like 80, 90 percent of people, it'll be great. I think the difficulty

01:25:19 ◼   ► is it, you know, sort of at a certain point it ends, and you can't—if you want to make

01:25:24 ◼   ► it more different, you can't. That, you know, Apple has sort of created this very nice sort

01:25:30 ◼   ► sandbox in which you can play, but if you wanted to do something different, if you wanted a

01:25:35 ◼   ► different font for your time, you can't. If you wanted to use a different font for your widgets,

01:25:41 ◼   ► but you know, which is something in Widgetsmith, that's something I can do. I can give you a font

01:25:47 ◼   ► that's different. So if you wanted a monospace font or you wanted any of the, I think I have

01:25:51 ◼   ► 20-something fonts in Widgetsmith, if you wanted to use one of those, that's great for your widgets,

01:25:56 ◼   ► but you can't change the time, and so it will look a little disjointed. And I think there's

01:26:00 ◼   ► There's a slight tension there in terms of,

01:26:02 ◼   ► I think the approach they're taking here

01:26:05 ◼   ► will work really well to give people who aren't,

01:26:09 ◼   ► I think as much as iOS 14 and aesthetics and customization

01:26:14 ◼   ► was a big feature in terms of, millions of people used it,

01:26:18 ◼   ► there are billions of people who use iPhones.

01:26:21 ◼   ► And so I think there is still tremendous number of people

01:26:23 ◼   ► in just from my own experience with WidgetSmith,

01:26:26 ◼   ► who are people who are discovering customization now

01:26:29 ◼   ► two, you know, nearly two years on.

01:26:31 ◼   ► And so I think it's interesting to see that Apple is,

01:26:34 ◼   ► you know, in a very Appley way, making that accessible,

01:26:36 ◼   ► making it easy to get started.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And then by doing that, there's a lot less fiddly.

01:26:41 ◼   ► It's a lot less, you know, a lot of the customization

01:26:44 ◼   ► and aesthetic stuff that you want,

01:26:45 ◼   ► you could do in home screen widgets

01:26:48 ◼   ► required a little bit of, you know, fiddling around.

01:26:50 ◼   ► And I mean, if you're, especially if you're going to go

01:26:52 ◼   ► down the road of like custom icons and things,

01:26:54 ◼   ► like it is very fiddly and takes a lot of patience and time

01:26:58 ◼   ► and isn't something that necessarily everyone

01:27:00 ◼   ► would want to do.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Whereas this version is set up such that

01:27:03 ◼   ► even if you have three different third-party widgets

01:27:06 ◼   ► from three different companies,

01:27:07 ◼   ► they will all generally start to,

01:27:10 ◼   ► they will fit in well and look of a kind,

01:27:13 ◼   ► even though those developers didn't do that intentionally.

01:27:18 ◼   ► It is fundamentally like if you choose a color,

01:27:22 ◼   ► all those lock screen widgets will get that color.

01:27:24 ◼   ► And the developers didn't have to do anything to do that

01:27:27 ◼   ► or have the ability to override that.

01:27:28 ◼   ► So it feels like there's a little bit of a tension there

01:27:32 ◼   ► where as someone who makes a tool that is all about super,

01:27:35 ◼   ► super custom widgets, it's a little frustrating sometimes

01:27:38 ◼   ► that there are some things that I can't allow my users to do.

01:27:41 ◼   ► But I think overall, it's an exciting thing

01:27:44 ◼   ► that it's making this feature and customization so

01:27:47 ◼   ► forefront of what's big in iOS 16

01:27:50 ◼   ► and making it so accessible and such an easy way

01:27:55 ◼   ► get started, that hopefully then it gets people interested and then potentially down the road

01:28:00 ◼   ► makes them more interested in using other types of customization, or if the feature

01:28:05 ◼   ► is successful in Apple being excited about continuing to go down this road and allow

01:28:10 ◼   ► even more down the road.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Yeah, this is why I think it could be still pretty successful, because the iOS 14 widgets,

01:28:18 ◼   ► there wasn't really any push from Apple. It was like, "We've redid this thing. The home

01:28:24 ◼   ► screens now more beautiful plus you can add widgets to it it was like it looks

01:28:28 ◼   ► as it always did there isn't anything new but you can add widgets on top and

01:28:32 ◼   ► so then people had to take it upon themselves to prettify their home

01:28:36 ◼   ► screens and then put all their widgets in to match and or vice-versa but with

01:28:41 ◼   ► the lock screen it is very easy to make a very attractive lock screen and you

01:28:45 ◼   ► can customize the font of the time and all that kind of stuff so then because

01:28:49 ◼   ► you've put that work in adding some widgets onto the lock screen of your own

01:28:53 ◼   ► and feels like a natural step to it.

01:28:55 ◼   ► So I could imagine there will be a lot of demand for widgets

01:28:58 ◼   ► once people found this feature and played around with it.

01:29:01 ◼   ► So I could imagine it having a lot of success,

01:29:04 ◼   ► but just from a different starting point.

01:29:06 ◼   ► We'll see.

01:29:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think that that certainly is my hope.

01:29:09 ◼   ► I mean, I think I've been through enough iOS launches

01:29:12 ◼   ► that it's very hard to predict what's actually gonna catch

01:29:15 ◼   ► and what's actually gonna flop.

01:29:17 ◼   ► And it's like, I think my expectation is that

01:29:20 ◼   ► this will be more, there'll be a broader range of customers who feel excited and feel empowered

01:29:28 ◼   ► to be able to take these steps of customization. And then we'll just sort of see if that spills

01:29:33 ◼   ► over and kind of grows out from there. Because, I think, at the very least, I think most people

01:29:39 ◼   ► have a custom lock screen already. It's something that people are very comfortable with and is very

01:29:45 ◼   ► standard features. I think you have a picture that is meaningful to you and you put it on your lock

01:29:50 ◼   ► screen. Like that is, I think, very, very common. Every now and then you'll see the default people,

01:29:55 ◼   ► if you're just like, I guess one of the one of the curses of being an iOS developer is I'm always

01:29:58 ◼   ► like, if someone's next to me on the bus, I'll have a tendency to just kind of peek over and see,

01:30:02 ◼   ► you know, sort of how they're using their phone. And, you know, sometimes you'll see the, you know,

01:30:06 ◼   ► like the default iOS lock screen, you can kind of get a sense of when they got their first iPhone,

01:30:10 ◼   ► because it will be, you know, is it the is it the aerial view of the beach? Or is it the one from

01:30:15 ◼   ► iOS 14? Or you can kind of get a sense of when, where their lock screen came from. But most people

01:30:20 ◼   ► I would say, "Have a picture." And going down that road, it's like now if you want to set a

01:30:24 ◼   ► picture as your wallpaper, it's like we'll jump you into this customization and aesthetic screen

01:30:29 ◼   ► kind of right away. And even if, you know, so you'll very naturally be made aware of this,

01:30:33 ◼   ► even if you don't read the tech news or listen to tech podcasts.

01:30:36 ◼   ► - I was wondering just as a... obviously, WidgetSmith, there's so much you can do,

01:30:44 ◼   ► and you mentioned earlier the palette is really constrained for lock screen widgets.

01:30:49 ◼   ► How do you feel about what Apple has put there, not necessarily in terms of the look, but in terms of the functionality?

01:30:53 ◼   ► Is there enough there with those circular widgets, with the rectangular widgets, and with that little text item that goes above the time?

01:31:01 ◼   ► Is it, you know, has—does it look like that's flexible enough to satisfy a lot of what people might want to do with these widgets?

01:31:09 ◼   ► Or do you think that they're—do you already have a wish list of like, "Oh, I wish they had given me this capability that isn't in there"?

01:31:15 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, it reminds me a lot of kind of my thinking around kind of

01:31:20 ◼   ► custom watch faces on watchOS and complications there. Where complications, and in this case,

01:31:28 ◼   ► the lock screen widgets, I think in and of themselves are very capable, very well designed.

01:31:34 ◼   ► You can do a lot with it. I don't feel particularly constrained around them. I have

01:31:38 ◼   ► essentially full control over that canvas that they gave me, and I can put anything in there

01:31:41 ◼   ► there that I want, and it's very flexible, which is great. I think the bigger limit I

01:31:47 ◼   ► feel is that they're kind of small, and you can only have up to four of them. You could

01:31:54 ◼   ► have four circles or two rectangular ones or a rectangle and two circles, and that's

01:31:59 ◼   ► about it. And you can have the little text one at the top, and you get one of the text

01:32:03 ◼   ► ones. And I feel like the middle of the lock screen is this big open space. And it's frustrating,

01:32:10 ◼   ► I think to me that that space is not available for widgets,

01:32:14 ◼   ► for users to take over and control.

01:32:17 ◼   ► And like, it reminds me in a lot of ways about, you know,

01:32:19 ◼   ► these feelings I've had about custom watch faces,

01:32:21 ◼   ► where I have a lot of ideas for things

01:32:22 ◼   ► that I would love to make, and I'm gonna have made,

01:32:25 ◼   ► but aren't in a way that I can actually deploy anywhere else

01:32:28 ◼   ► like made custom watch faces that have different content

01:32:30 ◼   ► as their, as that center, you know,

01:32:34 ◼   ► sort of that main content view.

01:32:36 ◼   ► And I look at, you know, you have an iOS 13 Pro Max,

01:32:40 ◼   ► It's a giant screen, and there's this huge,

01:32:42 ◼   ► especially now that notifications are sort of,

01:32:44 ◼   ► by default, gonna be kind of down in the bottom,

01:32:46 ◼   ► that middle section is just empty.

01:32:48 ◼   ► And sometimes that's great,

01:32:49 ◼   ► if you don't wanna put anything there

01:32:51 ◼   ► because you have a picture of a loved one there

01:32:53 ◼   ► and you don't want a widget over their eyes,

01:32:55 ◼   ► great, it's nice to have a big open space.

01:32:57 ◼   ► But it feels a bit limiting and frustrating to me

01:33:02 ◼   ► that you could very easily imagine the small widget size

01:33:06 ◼   ► or the medium widget size

01:33:07 ◼   ► that you can put on your home screen,

01:33:08 ◼   ► you could put it in that spot,

01:33:09 ◼   ► and then you can do a lot more or put data in a way that has more flexibility and you'd

01:33:15 ◼   ► have more control. And I think that's where I feel frustrated more. Like the actual, what

01:33:19 ◼   ► they gave us is great and I think it can do everything. I just wish I could do more with

01:33:24 ◼   ► it and put more content in there. I think that would create even more use cases that

01:33:30 ◼   ► would be available to me. And it's just kind of the same thing in the watch space on watchOS

01:33:34 ◼   ► where it just feels frustrating that it's like, well, if I have content that can fit

01:33:38 ◼   ► into this little circle, then that's great. If it doesn't fit into that little circle,

01:33:42 ◼   ► then it's just you're done, and it doesn't work, and it doesn't kind of apply, and it

01:33:45 ◼   ► doesn't give the user the agency over their screen in a complete way. It just gives them

01:33:50 ◼   ► some agency about some of it.

01:33:52 ◼   ► >>

01:33:52 ◼   ► I like the portrait watch face.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I really do.

01:33:56 ◼   ► I like that portrait effect

01:33:57 ◼   ► and they brought that to the phone.

01:33:59 ◼   ► The difference between the portrait watch face

01:34:01 ◼   ► and what they've done on the phone

01:34:02 ◼   ► is that the portrait watch face

01:34:05 ◼   ► lets you put a complication at the bottom,

01:34:09 ◼   ► at the top of the stack.

01:34:11 ◼   ► And on the iPhone,

01:34:14 ◼   ► the portrait effect covers the complications or the widgets.

01:34:19 ◼   ► It covers them.

01:34:20 ◼   ► And you can have it so it doesn't,

01:34:22 ◼   ► but then they go over the face of the person

01:34:24 ◼   ► 'cause it's usually somebody's head

01:34:25 ◼   ► who's slightly eclipsing.

01:34:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, if you use complications at all,

01:34:29 ◼   ► it turns off the depth effects.

01:34:32 ◼   ► - Is that true? - Yes.

01:34:33 ◼   ► - Because I've had it where I've turned off

01:34:36 ◼   ► the depth effects, oh yeah, well that's it.

01:34:38 ◼   ► You turn off the depth effects and then it goes over you.

01:34:40 ◼   ► So they won't overlay the complications at all?

01:34:43 ◼   ► 'Cause I thought I've seen that

01:34:44 ◼   ► where the complications are there

01:34:45 ◼   ► but they're just overlaid with content.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Regardless, this is my point is I love that depth effect.

01:34:51 ◼   ► I still want to be able to see, put them somewhere.

01:34:55 ◼   ► And I get that there's a lot going on

01:34:56 ◼   ► at the bottom of the phone

01:34:57 ◼   ► in terms of notifications and all that.

01:34:59 ◼   ► But I almost think, I wonder if I could opt

01:35:02 ◼   ► to put my widgets at the bottom of the screen instead

01:35:06 ◼   ► with the notifications above it or something like that.

01:35:09 ◼   ► And perhaps they'll get there and it'll be more flexible.

01:35:11 ◼   ► But I had that moment where I'm like,

01:35:12 ◼   ► oh, these are great, but like here are two fun features

01:35:14 ◼   ► and I kind of can't do both of them at once.

01:35:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think even in the same way,

01:35:19 ◼   ► It's like what you're saying with you know on watch OS it very often is you can say you want the time at the top

01:35:23 ◼   ► Do you want the time at the bottom? Do you want you can move things?

01:35:26 ◼   ► around on that face that makes sense for that image and for makes sense for your use case and what you're interested in and

01:35:32 ◼   ► You know, obviously it's it's like I am I don't look at gift horse in the mouse and say like I don't

01:35:37 ◼   ► Like I'm not excited that we can control this but I could very easily

01:35:40 ◼   ► Immediately have ten ideas for things like other things that I would like to play with about changing this around that moving

01:35:46 ◼   ► moving the time around, moving the widgets around,

01:35:49 ◼   ► even if it isn't that I get full control.

01:35:50 ◼   ► It's like you're saying, if the widget bar,

01:35:52 ◼   ► rather than being below the time,

01:35:53 ◼   ► is above the notifications and buttons on the bottom,

01:35:57 ◼   ► like, sure, why not?

01:35:59 ◼   ► It seems arbitrary that it isn't something

01:36:02 ◼   ► that you can change, and that the arbitrariness

01:36:05 ◼   ► about where the dividing lines are is frustrating.

01:36:08 ◼   ► - Sorry, David, we built these circles

01:36:11 ◼   ► and we hung them right under the time.

01:36:13 ◼   ► That's where they have to go.

01:36:15 ◼   ► Like, okay, I mean, yeah, it's software.

01:36:17 ◼   ► It could be somewhere else, but...

01:36:19 ◼   ► Well, anything else we should, you know,

01:36:22 ◼   ► the observations you've had about living the widget's life

01:36:24 ◼   ► and the complications life this summer

01:36:26 ◼   ► that you think we should watch out for?

01:36:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I mean, I think the other thing,

01:36:29 ◼   ► the only thing that really I think about is,

01:36:31 ◼   ► obviously it's like, it's widely rumored at this point

01:36:33 ◼   ► that there may at some point come

01:36:34 ◼   ► an always-on version of this.

01:36:36 ◼   ► And I think what's intriguing to me about that

01:36:39 ◼   ► is going to be to think about

01:36:40 ◼   ► how that's visually going to look

01:36:42 ◼   ► in terms of if it's going to be something

01:36:44 ◼   ► that is more akin to the way it's done on watchOS

01:36:47 ◼   ► or if it's gonna be a different take on that.

01:36:49 ◼   ► And I think by what I mean is if you have,

01:36:51 ◼   ► like what you were saying, the portraits watch face

01:36:54 ◼   ► on your Apple Watch and in always on mode,

01:36:57 ◼   ► it still shows the background image.

01:36:58 ◼   ► It still shows that picture.

01:37:00 ◼   ► It just dims it and it becomes darker,

01:37:03 ◼   ► but it's still there.

01:37:05 ◼   ► And I'm curious about this,

01:37:08 ◼   ► and when I started to think through,

01:37:09 ◼   ► 'cause at first I was like, oh,

01:37:10 ◼   ► the way they're doing the widgets here

01:37:12 ◼   ► where they're all sort of these fainted,

01:37:13 ◼   ► these sort of, there's no color,

01:37:16 ◼   ► they're all kind of these faint outline versions of things.

01:37:19 ◼   ► It made me wonder if it's like in the always on mode

01:37:22 ◼   ► on an iPhone instead, the screen's gonna go black,

01:37:24 ◼   ► sort of fully black and then have no color.

01:37:27 ◼   ► - Have you noticed what happens when you're in sleep focus?

01:37:31 ◼   ► When you're in sleep focus, it blacks out the screen.

01:37:34 ◼   ► It takes the picture basically away.

01:37:37 ◼   ► - Okay, yeah, no, I can see that, yeah.

01:37:39 ◼   ► - In the betas, and I had that thought too,

01:37:41 ◼   ► which is like, oh, I wonder if this is kind of like

01:37:44 ◼   ► what they're gonna do for an always on display

01:37:46 ◼   ► where they're being much more aggressive in sleep focus.

01:37:49 ◼   ► 'Cause I was wondering like, where'd my picture go?

01:37:51 ◼   ► Why did my picture disappear?

01:37:53 ◼   ► And the answer is I was in sleep focus

01:37:55 ◼   ► 'cause I was coming back on an airplane

01:37:56 ◼   ► and it was past my bedtime.

01:37:58 ◼   ► And I realized, oh, they're taking away content

01:38:02 ◼   ► because I should be asleep right now.

01:38:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they're dimming the screen too.

01:38:05 ◼   ► Like they're lowering the screen brightness as well.

01:38:08 ◼   ► And so it definitely seems like that.

01:38:10 ◼   ► And I think that's just interesting

01:38:11 ◼   ► as a difference of approach.

01:38:12 ◼   ► Whereas you'd think like the watchOS version

01:38:15 ◼   ► would be the most power constrained

01:38:17 ◼   ► 'cause it's this tiny little computer on your watch

01:38:19 ◼   ► with a tiny little battery.

01:38:20 ◼   ► But yet there they show,

01:38:23 ◼   ► the whole screen is lit up with your image

01:38:25 ◼   ► just in a dimmed version.

01:38:27 ◼   ► Whereas it seems like they may be heading in a direction

01:38:29 ◼   ► on the iPhone that instead the screen is mostly black

01:38:32 ◼   ► just with a little bit of gray instead,

01:38:35 ◼   ► which is just an interesting choice.

01:38:36 ◼   ► And it just sort of makes me wonder

01:38:37 ◼   ► what that's gonna actually look like in practice.

01:38:39 ◼   ► And it's like, I'm certainly excited for that.

01:38:40 ◼   ► I think it'd be super cool either way,

01:38:42 ◼   ► but it's just interesting to see that they didn't go

01:38:44 ◼   ► the same way potentially that they went on on watchOS here.

01:38:49 ◼   ► - Well, Dave, thank you so much for giving us

01:38:51 ◼   ► the widget and complication update

01:38:53 ◼   ► that I knew we needed this summer.

01:38:55 ◼   ► We don't always need it,

01:38:56 ◼   ► but this summer I think we needed it.

01:38:57 ◼   ► And I'm very excited to see all of this stuff

01:39:00 ◼   ► and to see what you're working on

01:39:03 ◼   ► because I have faith that the Underscore apps

01:39:06 ◼   ► will be providing me with all sorts of different options on my watch and on my

01:39:10 ◼   ► on my lock screen this fall.

01:39:12 ◼   ► Yeah all the widgets you could ever want is what I hope to provide.

01:39:16 ◼   ► Excellent that's what I want.

01:39:18 ◼   ► This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by ZocDoc.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Before you book any brunch you're spending time pouring over lists and lists of reviews right?

01:39:26 ◼   ► So why not do the same when you're booking a doctor's appointment?

01:39:28 ◼   ► With ZocDoc you can see real verified patient reviews to help find the right doctor in your network

01:39:34 ◼   ► and in your neighborhood.

01:39:35 ◼   ► ZocDoc is a free app that shows you doctors who are patient reviewed, take your insurance

01:39:40 ◼   ► and are available when you need them. You can find every specialist under the sun.

01:39:45 ◼   ► Whether you're trying to straighten teeth, fix an achy back, get them all checked out,

01:39:49 ◼   ► or just about anything else, ZocDoc has got you covered. The mobile app is as easy as ordering

01:39:55 ◼   ► a ride to a restaurant or getting a delivery to your home. You can search, find and book a

01:39:59 ◼   ► doctor with just a few taps. You can find and review local doctors, read those verified patient

01:40:04 ◼   ► reviews from real people who have made real appointments so when you walk into that doctor's

01:40:08 ◼   ► office you're all set to see someone in your network who gets you. So find the doctor that

01:40:13 ◼   ► is right for you and book an appointment in person or remotely, whatever works with your schedule.

01:40:19 ◼   ► Every month millions of people use ZocDoc, it's their go-to when they need to find and book a

01:40:23 ◼   ► quality doctor. I absolutely love the world of remote doctor's appointments. I don't want to have

01:40:29 ◼   ► to go to the doctors, I don't want to have to sit in the waiting room, I just want to be able to have

01:40:34 ◼   ► a time arranged, they'll call me, all I gotta do is finish what I'm doing for a moment,

01:40:39 ◼   ► take the call and then I can go back to what I was doing.

01:40:41 ◼   ► Whether that's work, whether that's something fun, it doesn't matter, I like to be able

01:40:45 ◼   ► to do these things on my own time and that's why ZocDoc is awesome.

01:40:48 ◼   ► Go to ZocDoc.com/UpgradeFM and download the ZocDoc app for free, then start your search

01:40:54 ◼   ► for a top rated doctor today.

01:40:56 ◼   ► Many are available within 24 hours.

01:40:58 ◼   ► zdoc.com/upgradefm

01:41:02 ◼   ► One last time, zocdoc.com/upgradefm

01:41:05 ◼   ► Our thanks to ZocDoc for the support of this show and all of Relay FM.

01:41:09 ◼   ► Alright Jason, so I have some #askupgrade questions for you.