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Connected

18: Conceptually Sad

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:07   From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 18.

00:00:11   Today the show is brought to you by lynda.com, where you can instantly stream thousands of

00:00:15   courses created by industry experts.

00:00:17   For a 10-day free trial, visit lynda.com/connected.

00:00:21   Dev Mountain, a world-class coding school in the mountains of Utah.

00:00:25   and PDF Pen Scan Plus from Smile, the app for mobile scanning and OCR.

00:00:30   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined by Mr. Steven Hackett.

00:00:33   Hi Steven.

00:00:34   Hello Michael.

00:00:35   And Mr. Federico Vittucci.

00:00:36   Hi Federico.

00:00:37   Ciao Myke.

00:00:38   Ciao Federico.

00:00:39   How are you doing?

00:00:40   I am very well.

00:00:42   How are you fine gentlemen on this evening?

00:00:44   I'm doing well.

00:00:45   Thank you.

00:00:46   I'm doing extremely well on this evening and hello to you as well Mr. Steven Hackett from

00:00:51   Tennessee.

00:00:52   Hello.

00:00:53   Hello. Is that where you're from? Is that really Tennessee? Yeah, I live, it is, it's the state.

00:00:58   Yeah, I know the American states. That's good. How many can you name, Federica? Oh, many.

00:01:05   Yeah, many of them. All of them, all of the states. How many states are there? 52. 50, right?

00:01:16   So this is a 51. Yeah. I mean, Puerto Rico is almost a state.

00:01:21   I know, right? Email Myke about that. So the thing, the thing is, like, I have felt guilty

00:01:29   about this before, and maybe we've talked about it, but like, you guys, at least being the very

00:01:34   small sample of my international friends are like relatively acquainted with America, like geography,

00:01:41   like, like sort of regional humor.

00:01:44   And now maybe that's colored by the fact that you know me, but like, I feel like

00:01:48   overall people who don't live in America know more about America than like

00:01:53   Americans know about other countries.

00:01:55   Like, I don't know.

00:01:56   I don't know the like intricacies of like, if you live in certain parts of, of

00:02:02   England, you have this accent or you're, you know, these stereotypes apply to you.

00:02:06   I feel bad about it.

00:02:08   I feel like I should know your stereotypes better.

00:02:10   All I know about America is from House of Cards and other TV shows.

00:02:15   Well, that's a documentary basically.

00:02:17   Yeah, and you also.

00:02:19   Have you watched the West Wing?

00:02:21   It's on Netflix.

00:02:22   It's good.

00:02:23   If you like political drama, the West Wing is really good.

00:02:25   Yeah, because I don't have Netflix.

00:02:27   Oh yeah.

00:02:28   Well, you can move to Myke's house and watch it.

00:02:30   Or I can keep using Netflix.

00:02:33   I managed to sign up with a free trial once using a VPN.

00:02:39   What I'm doing now is that Netflix every two or three months they send me an email saying

00:02:44   "Hey, do you want to try Netflix again?"

00:02:46   So every time they send me this email I use the free link, like a freeloader basically,

00:02:52   to watch House of Cards.

00:02:54   So I'm expecting to get another email in February.

00:02:58   This is like when I had all that Dropbox space.

00:03:01   Yes.

00:03:02   But Oli, I have an excuse because I cannot legally access Netflix in Italy.

00:03:07   I had an excuse.

00:03:08   No.

00:03:09   Yeah, you bought an Android phone that came with Dropbox space.

00:03:12   It was my excuse.

00:03:13   So anyway, I just used the free trial.

00:03:16   Just over and over.

00:03:18   Yes.

00:03:19   I like it.

00:03:20   Because they sent me this really heartfelt email saying that they miss me and that they

00:03:24   want me to try Netflix again.

00:03:25   I'm like, "Okay, whatever.

00:03:27   Just streaming us of cards."

00:03:29   Yeah.

00:03:30   It comes back in February.

00:03:31   Every now and then I get a letter from Amazon, and the letter is to encourage me to tell

00:03:36   people to try out Amazon Prime and they give me two little plastic cards like

00:03:41   credit cards that just have a URL on them which is just like amazon.com/prime/freetrial

00:03:46   and they want me to give those to people.

00:03:50   And you just use them?

00:03:51   No, I mean I'm already a Prime subscriber and all they want me to do is just get other

00:03:57   people to sign up for a free trial.

00:03:58   I don't get anything for it, it's not like if you sign up I'll get like an extra month.

00:04:03   They're just little cards that have the generic URL on them that they want me to give out.

00:04:07   Did you talk about Amazon in real life, Myke?

00:04:10   I love Amazon.

00:04:11   I love Prime.

00:04:12   Prime changed my life.

00:04:13   Really?

00:04:14   Yeah, I just renewed my Prime this week, actually.

00:04:17   It's good.

00:04:18   It's good.

00:04:19   Although, I didn't get an email about it.

00:04:22   It's like, "Oh, $100 is out of my account.

00:04:24   Thanks, Amazon."

00:04:25   Yeah, don't worry about things like that.

00:04:27   No, money's a construct, anyways.

00:04:30   Money is...

00:04:31   Guys, speaking of life-changing events, we are changing the lives of people who love

00:04:38   technology around the world by rediscovering old web browsers.

00:04:45   I noticed even that this week we got at least two more entries in our list of unusual browsers

00:04:53   accessing our website.

00:04:55   We did.

00:04:57   The Relay website does not hold up very well on the WebTV viewer.

00:05:02   What is a WebTV viewer?

00:05:03   It ships.

00:05:04   I don't really know.

00:05:05   I tried looking it up, but those are sort of generic terms.

00:05:07   Maybe someone in the chat room can help us out.

00:05:09   But the UI has Sony's logo all over it.

00:05:12   So either it's been hacked or it's some sort of Sony TV product.

00:05:17   But the ATP site, which is built on Squarespace, shows up actually pretty well.

00:05:22   Our site doesn't render at all.

00:05:24   But that's interesting.

00:05:27   So that was from Jimmy on Twitter and we have another one from David Ragsdale on Twitter

00:05:31   who loaded it up in the Kindle Paperwhite experimental browser, which might be the worst

00:05:37   browser that currently ships in the world.

00:05:40   However our website looks pretty good on it.

00:05:44   Yeah well your voice really got high there.

00:05:46   I'm really excited!

00:05:50   So what is a Kindle experimental browser?

00:05:53   Is this the thing that flies with the drone?

00:05:55   Yes, no, it's uh, Kindles, uh, eating Kindles forever have come with a browser built in.

00:06:02   I don't even know what it's based on.

00:06:03   I guess probably some fork of WebKit, but, uh, you can like, if you're connected to wifi,

00:06:08   if you have a 3g Kindle, you can browse the internet.

00:06:11   I'll be at very slowly and in grayscale on your Kindle, it's the worst thing.

00:06:16   Like you never want to be in a situation where like, I need to look up something.

00:06:20   Let me pull out my Kindle.

00:06:21   But the site loads, so thank you to David for being patient enough to let that load.

00:06:27   He also did it at 8.44am, which is a good job doing that first thing in the morning.

00:06:32   So what if we stayed up all night to get the browser to work?

00:06:37   Yeah, maybe.

00:06:38   Talking about E-Ink, are you guys familiar with the Yota phone?

00:06:43   Oh god.

00:06:44   I'm trying to ignore your text message right there.

00:06:45   Is it like the double phone?

00:06:46   Yeah, it's the one that's an Android phone and it's got like a regular Android screen

00:06:49   on the front and an E-Ink screen on the back.

00:06:51   Guess who loves it Federico?

00:06:53   Guess between me and Myke, who of us loves it?

00:06:57   Between you and Myke?

00:06:58   It's Myke.

00:06:59   It's Myke.

00:07:00   It's like the fun with the future in the front and the business in the back.

00:07:05   So they've got in an area where I frequent these days, they have a, in London, they have

00:07:13   a concept store.

00:07:15   What does that mean?

00:07:17   It's where my co-working space is, okay? It's where I go to co-work.

00:07:21   There it is.

00:07:22   It's around that area.

00:07:23   They have set up a store and they have these things now and I went in and played around with one

00:07:28   and I was very very impressed with it.

00:07:29   So they have the Android touch screen and the regular screen on the front and on the back.

00:07:34   They have some set apps that they have, like an RSS reader and News Reader, some games which use the ink screen.

00:07:40   They have a separate home screen thing which is really pared down.

00:07:44   and there's like a toggle that you can do to switch off the front screen completely

00:07:49   and it shows you, it said I had like nine hours battery life and then when I turned it off

00:07:53   to just be the E-Ink screen, so four days.

00:07:55   But you can access the entire Android OS via the E-Ink screen and it wasn't that bad.

00:08:03   That's a really solid recommendation.

00:08:07   No but like if you think, right, if you've got like an hour of battery life

00:08:10   you turn it on you could last for like another six hours and you can still kind of do everything.

00:08:14   Can you make phone calls? Yeah, you can do everything and in the last four days. Yeah, that's what the indicator said ink is

00:08:22   Crazy good for battery life. That's what the pebble uses. Mm-hmm

00:08:26   I was I was really I was really impressed with it, but it's really expensive. Well, it's not really expensive. It's

00:08:33   555 pounds. I mean that's like unlocked phone expensive, but it's more money than I want to spend

00:08:38   But if I was gonna buy an Android phone like if that was my thing

00:08:44   without a shadow of a doubt this is the phone that I would get right now.

00:08:47   Really? Because it's interesting enough

00:08:50   that it actually does something that's useful. Like I can see some real uses.

00:08:55   Federico, imagine you're reading a long article that you found

00:08:57   on MacStories. You could just flip it over and just start reading

00:09:02   reading on E-Ink anyway, which is nicer. I don't read Apple websites.

00:09:06   Okay. And there was this other example that the salesperson guy gave me, which I thought was

00:09:11   quite cool. Like say you get an email with like you're in the airport, I always go back to

00:09:14   the airport and it's got like a QR code on it or whatever for your boarding pass.

00:09:17   You could just take a screenshot of that and you can just lay it on the ink screen and

00:09:21   it's just there and then you can just kind of do what you need to do with it.

00:09:25   I can see that it's one of those things that when you use it you'd find uses for it.

00:09:28   I think that it feels like when I first saw it I was like it's interesting but it seems

00:09:32   like a gimmick but I feel like there are some actual real world uses for something like

00:09:37   this.

00:09:38   I don't think this is like the... do you guys remember that super weird and corny kind of presentation from

00:09:47   ASOS for the padphone which was like a device... and there was like the guy pulling out this phone from his jacket

00:09:57   and it's like this is magical it was like super weird and strange and it was like this kind of double device

00:10:04   There was like a phone that you could put into a tablet.

00:10:07   Yeah, dude, it's coming back.

00:10:09   They have a new version, the PadPhone X.

00:10:11   There's a new PadPhone?

00:10:13   Yeah.

00:10:14   Yeah, it's on AT&T.

00:10:15   Yeah, the PadPhone X or X, I guess, coming to AT&T on October 24th.

00:10:20   Got an 8.5 out of 10 on Engadget, so must be good.

00:10:24   Make sure to find the old presentation video because it was like one of my favorite...

00:10:29   I think it was a CES.

00:10:32   If it was CES, that's definitely one of the best CES conferences that I ever watched.

00:10:37   It was really magical.

00:10:39   So Myke, you're saying that this is actually pretty good.

00:10:42   I was very impressed with it, genuinely.

00:10:46   We know what we can get you for Christmas.

00:10:48   Yeah, you can get me that.

00:10:50   I've got some follow up on what WebTV was.

00:10:53   There's a link in the show notes.

00:10:55   MSN TV was a television thin client that came out, I don't know, like the early or late

00:11:03   90s or early 2000s and the service was cut off in January of this year.

00:11:08   I don't know a single word of what you said.

00:11:10   Exactly.

00:11:11   There's a link in the show notes.

00:11:13   Michael, where could the show notes be found?

00:11:16   So I was really impressed as were many people with Federico's Italian interpretation of

00:11:21   the show notes last week.

00:11:23   So I've decided that I would like to give a very British, kind of old-timey presentation

00:11:29   of the show this week.

00:11:30   Are you guys ready for this?

00:11:32   I'm prepared.

00:11:33   Go on.

00:11:34   Verily, if one would like to happen upon thy showeth notes, one should navigate oneself

00:11:39   to thy browser of thine web and pontificate upon the URF RFLF relay full stop FM/connected/18.

00:11:49   Here you will happen upon a selection of the very finest links one could ever wish to peruse.

00:11:54   Wow.

00:11:55   That sounds like when you're playing video games and they're like medieval video games

00:12:04   with kings and queens.

00:12:06   That's like what they talk about.

00:12:08   That's how we get taught English when we grow up.

00:12:11   It's good.

00:12:12   I stood up like halfway through it.

00:12:13   I just felt like I had to.

00:12:14   So next week, Steven, it's your turn.

00:12:16   It's gonna be good.

00:12:17   It's gonna be good.

00:12:18   You gotta roll American, those show notes up.

00:12:20   That's wow.

00:12:21   Please don't read the show notes while you're shooting a gun.

00:12:25   Too late bro.

00:12:27   Or as many people indicated to me over this week, not American, English simplified.

00:12:33   Yes.

00:12:34   Yeah, that screenshot's a hundred years old.

00:12:39   So we have some follow up around Panix transmit and draft widgets and other things.

00:12:47   Federico, what is happening in Cupertino?

00:12:51   Well we don't know what's happening in Cupertino.

00:12:53   What we see on the App Store is that Apple has reversed these three major rejections

00:13:00   for widgets and one iCloud feature on the App Store.

00:13:04   So the first popular rejection was the Pcalc widget that's been reversed the following

00:13:13   day.

00:13:14   Then there was the transmit case with the panic app to an FTP client and file manager.

00:13:20   Apple forced panic to remove a feature to share any file to iCloud drive and the press,

00:13:29   including MaxSories, made a big deal out of this removal and the feature was reinstated.

00:13:36   And now the latest app to go through a similar process has been Greg Pearce's Drafts. Excellent

00:13:44   note-taking app for iOS. The app came with a widget that lets you create a new draft,

00:13:53   an empty note or create a new note with the contents of your clipboard.

00:13:58   And Apple forced Greg to remove the widget because he couldn't ship with buttons to open

00:14:04   the app.

00:14:06   Now the widget is back and it's actually even better than before because it's got buttons,

00:14:12   plenty of them actually, and it also lets you open recent notes in the app.

00:14:18   So it's got plenty of functionality now.

00:14:21   And it looks like Apple is now okay with this sort of widgets.

00:14:25   It didn't really make sense to remove these widgets from the App Store.

00:14:30   There are dozens of apps at this point that can use buttons and other, you know, there

00:14:36   are basically direct links to specific sections of an app to perform tasks from Notification

00:14:42   Center.

00:14:43   It didn't make any sense, so I'm glad that JARFS is the latest example of a questionable

00:14:49   rejection that didn't really make sense and now it's been rectified.

00:14:53   So I'm happy and I actually think that widget is better now.

00:14:58   So that's good news.

00:15:01   But what have we got?

00:15:03   What is the situation?

00:15:04   Like are people allowed to do these things?

00:15:07   Yes.

00:15:08   Maybe.

00:15:09   I mean Evernote, you know there was some talk this week on Twitter about Evernote's widget

00:15:13   has a bunch of buttons.

00:15:15   spoke about last week and they had an update yesterday as well that you know that remained

00:15:20   in place and it seems like either they're going to allow it or you know you have to

00:15:28   remember like these examples are high profile applications they're not you know I mean there

00:15:33   could be other apps that people just don't know about dealing with this but I kind of

00:15:38   my gut says that they're going to let it let it fly and I wonder you know I don't know

00:15:44   how big the app store review team is. I got an email from somebody this week you

00:15:49   know saying like well you know is that app review team even in Cupertino are

00:15:53   they part of like corporate Apple you know parts of like the iTunes store are

00:15:56   outsourced you know how how close how close to the you know how behind the

00:16:01   veil are these reviewers and did they have somebody in there you know their

00:16:06   manager or just even one or two reviewers who like this problem all stems

00:16:11   from a very small group of people.

00:16:13   So it's hard to tell.

00:16:15   I'm hoping that it calms down, obviously,

00:16:17   because it uses great functionality.

00:16:18   It makes widgets actually useful.

00:16:22   So hopefully it's a chapter that's closed.

00:16:25   Yeah, I don't think that widgets like Launcher, which

00:16:30   was an app and a widget to basically simulate

00:16:33   a home screen in the Today View, a notification center,

00:16:37   I don't think that that kind of widgets

00:16:39   are coming back because Apple doesn't like them, you know, just the simulating home screen

00:16:44   in your today view. But I think that widgets that can launch apps, of course, that can

00:16:51   launch specific sections inside an app or perform a task, such as creating a new draft

00:16:57   with the contents of your clipboard, I think those are okay. And I think even if Apple

00:17:03   maybe want widgets to be simpler, I think they have now realized that by rejecting this

00:17:11   sort of functionality, by trying to set an example, they're just upsetting the kind of

00:17:17   audience that also happens to write about them.

00:17:21   Because like, iOS 8 is the kind of geeky, you know, update that is used by... and I'm

00:17:29   I'm not referring to myself in any way.

00:17:32   I'm just trying to think of all the other people who write Apple blogs.

00:17:35   Generally, those people are kind of power users.

00:17:39   So when you take away functionality from power users, they usually complain.

00:17:43   But in this case, they also write websites and blogs so they can make a bigger deal than

00:17:48   maybe in the past few years for other kinds of features that Apple didn't want.

00:17:53   So I think in this case, they just need to let it pass and accept the fact that widgets

00:17:59   do this sort of stuff, you know? And maybe this will be reflected next year in major

00:18:06   changes in the way that Apple is doing widgets. Just at this point, why not do more, right?

00:18:12   Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good point. And iOS on the whole, you know, these new

00:18:19   features in iOS 8 especially, like, they're not as mainstream as, say, copy and paste

00:18:24   was in iPhone OS 3.

00:18:27   They're getting as iOS becomes more mature when they add things, those things are in

00:18:34   of themselves more mature features.

00:18:36   There's no, to use a term that's been thrown around in the past, there's no real low-hanging

00:18:41   fruit left on iOS.

00:18:43   There's obviously a lot of things we would like, but again, we're the power users.

00:18:47   The average person on the street with an iPhone, it does what people need it to do.

00:18:53   I guess you can find people who would want certain things, but on the whole, I think

00:18:56   Apple as iOS matures, like, this is going to be an issue because they're pushing the

00:19:01   bar, you know, they're making it more powerful, they're making it more flexible than it's

00:19:06   ever been before.

00:19:08   And clearly App Review or some faction within Apple, like, hasn't quite caught up to that

00:19:14   yet and hopefully it's, that's not, you know, an ongoing problem.

00:19:22   Well, reliability is the new low-hanging fruit.

00:19:26   Sick burn, bro.

00:19:27   Yeah, I mean, just, you know, people at this point, people know that there are problems

00:19:32   sometimes on iOS, especially when it launches.

00:19:34   They created this new idea that when the new major version of iOS launches, you gotta ask

00:19:40   your friends whether it's okay to upgrade.

00:19:42   Because everybody has the geeky friend, right?

00:19:45   Everybody has the computer tech-savvy friend.

00:19:47   And they always ask, "Hey, I saw there's an update.

00:19:50   Is it safe?"

00:19:51   - Oh, I get that.

00:19:52   - And there was always that kind of component

00:19:55   to releasing software updates,

00:19:58   but in the past two years, especially after Apple Maps,

00:20:01   I think it was the turning point for this kind of behavior.

00:20:04   Friends always ask, "Should I do the update?"

00:20:09   Like, every time I see them, they ask about updates,

00:20:12   because now there's an update for everything all the time.

00:20:15   Everything is a software update these days.

00:20:18   - Unless it's a Mac app.

00:20:19   - They all, yes.

00:20:21   Really sad, I'm sorry for you buddy.

00:20:24   But yes, my friends always ask me about software updates and next year if they focus on...

00:20:30   Like if they come out and say, "Look, this year we just made iOS twice as fast and we give you twice the battery life."

00:20:36   People will just go crazy.

00:20:39   I mean, maybe we would go like...

00:20:43   We would go, "Yeah, we'll go here."

00:20:46   But worse than you SDK stuff.

00:20:48   stuff. Right, I mean that's what I'm saying like like I would love my phone to last two days but

00:20:53   like Apple, I mean we talked about this with OS X like with an annual release cycle

00:20:57   they've got to put stuff out every year and by the time iOS 8 is sort of like done being patched up

00:21:03   you know they're on to iOS 9 or whatever's next and it's it's a pace that's worrisome

00:21:09   and and this sort of thing where you know the the SDK and the features and the APIs pull ahead and

00:21:17   it's got to like by the time Apple, like the rest of the applicants yanked along up to

00:21:22   this current state then like the SDK and APIs and everything are already further ahead.

00:21:27   It's kind of, it takes some time for everyone to get on the same page and by the time they

00:21:31   are there's a new page being written at WWDC.

00:21:34   But we'll see.

00:21:37   I guess we will talk about the features that we want to see in iOS 9 and kind of the stuff

00:21:43   that we think is still missing maybe next year.

00:21:47   But in general I think that iOS is at the point where the simple things are the most

00:21:51   appreciated ones.

00:21:53   So speed and reliability, efficiency in general, just being able to use an app without crashing

00:21:59   and without having to restart an iPhone every couple of days to speed things up.

00:22:07   That would be awesome just in general.

00:22:11   It's true.

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00:24:52   Topic zero this week is a topic we haven't really ever talked about before but there

00:24:58   There are apps that you can use to manage your photos.

00:25:01   Really?

00:25:02   Yeah, it's pretty cool.

00:25:03   Like can you move the photos around?

00:25:05   Yeah, you can put them on the cloud and then the cloud sometimes goes out of business.

00:25:10   Can I like take the photos from my hard disk and put them on the web?

00:25:17   I love that you said hard disk.

00:25:21   So carousel is an app that we've covered before built by our friends at Dropbox and carousel

00:25:28   started life as basically an auto uploader for your iOS or Android device.

00:25:33   So you have pictures in your camera roll carousel uploads them to Dropbox automatically and

00:25:39   those of us who use Dropbox or either for photo management and storage or just as a

00:25:44   gateway to the Mac or your desktop computer.

00:25:48   It's really great right you don't have to use image capture you don't have to plug it

00:25:50   and it just syncs up, you don't have to deal with photo stream.

00:25:53   Well, you got to hand to Dropbox.

00:25:56   I really have been impressed at the rate

00:25:57   that they've been adding things to carousel.

00:25:59   And so this morning, or yesterday sometime,

00:26:06   the carousel app got a nice update.

00:26:08   We have a link in the show notes that I'm now

00:26:09   realizing is like a week old because it's

00:26:11   about the Android app, so we'll fix that.

00:26:13   But a couple really nice things have come to the iOS device.

00:26:17   So carousel, one of its main UI features

00:26:19   was you could scroll back in time so you could like have this little like slider

00:26:23   and like slide back like 2012 and look at pictures but they've sort of beefed

00:26:29   that up with it with the ability to they'll send up like a push notification

00:26:34   for a flashback which is very similar to which service was it had don't say don't

00:26:41   say don't say we'll just be sad okay so one of the dead photo management systems

00:26:47   of that I think it was I think it's dead they're all dead it is the one that died

00:26:52   it's the one that we all loved and then it died yeah the photo management

00:26:55   service that shall not be named had this feature so you could very yes no that's

00:27:03   sorry have had this feature it made it very easy to see photos in your library

00:27:08   from previous years and so now carousel does that so I was playing with it this

00:27:13   morning and apparently like 10 years ago today I had pictures taken like just

00:27:18   like me and my college roommate in our dorm so it's kind of fun to be like oh

00:27:20   man that was 10 years ago what happened how did I get old it's all built in now

00:27:25   which is really nice and and that feature obviously works if you have all

00:27:28   your photos and Dropbox and carousel knows about them but it also has a

00:27:32   feature which is a little I think more mainstream where it can clean up space

00:27:38   on your phone and I don't know about you guys I don't know if you have played

00:27:42   with this but it's a little confusing as to what it's doing when it's doing it so

00:27:49   I went in and I had some things on my camera roll and I said hey there's some

00:27:53   space we can clean up I hit the button and then like something happened I don't

00:27:56   know what happened but what I really want is a switch to be like once

00:28:00   carousel has uploaded this image take it off my camera roll because I keep my

00:28:03   camera roll basically empty and right now I've got to plug it into my Mac and

00:28:07   blow it away an image capture so I don't have to delete them one at a time I tap

00:28:11   on them all in iOS. So let me understand, carousel can delete photos from the photos

00:28:18   app but they go into a recently deleted album? Yes. And then you gotta delete all the photos

00:28:28   from the recently deleted album otherwise they get wiped from the device after 30 days?

00:28:34   I believe so. Again, like, we should know this.

00:28:38   Yeah, that's an ISA thing. Because I'm trying all these new apps to delete screenshots, right?

00:28:45   There's one called Screeny and another called Sharky.

00:28:50   And basically, yes, it's called Sharky.

00:28:52   Where's George?

00:28:55   So basically, when you delete the screenshots, they go into a recently deleted album on your device.

00:29:03   and if you want to just erase them from memory you gotta hit a button and say

00:29:11   just delete them all right now. I haven't tried Carousel, like I only

00:29:17   downloaded the app again and used it for like two minutes. I didn't see the option

00:29:23   to delete photos from the camera roll. But I guess that, I mean I'm kind of

00:29:30   I'm interested in trying Carousel again because of the flashback, but I also am fine with

00:29:37   iCloud Photo Library.

00:29:40   I went on a bit of a quest a couple of weeks ago.

00:29:44   I managed to download all the photos that I have, like everywhere.

00:29:50   It's a little more than 3,000 pictures, and I put them all into iCloud Photo Library because

00:29:56   I upgraded to the paid plan.

00:29:59   99 cents each month and I'm fine, you know, there's some minor issues occasionally, like

00:30:10   you don't see the thumbnails in the Photos app, you gotta restart the app, but overall

00:30:14   all my photos sync across devices and it's fine. But I think Dropbox is doing some cool

00:30:20   stuff with Carousel, now I'm not sure about this option to delete photos and also the

00:30:26   the way that they worded it, like, free up space on your device.

00:30:30   Yeah, it's weird.

00:30:31   That's not really true, because you cannot really delete the photos.

00:30:34   You gotta still make sure that the photos are deleted.

00:30:37   But that's an iOS 8 limitation, I think.

00:30:39   I think they're trying to make it...

00:30:42   The flashback is really nice.

00:30:44   But when I opened it this morning, it wasn't really like a Never Peaks-like flashback.

00:30:49   There was pictures taken on this exact day.

00:30:53   It was like pictures from around the same period a while back.

00:31:00   I think the free space verbiage is just trying to...

00:31:04   That's what people think, right?

00:31:05   Like, "Oh, I need to have free space on my phone."

00:31:08   And "delete" is a scary word to put into an application.

00:31:12   So maybe they're just trying to...

00:31:14   Coupled with the limitation, they can't really do what I want them to do, so they're just

00:31:18   trying to soften that language somehow.

00:31:21   I think I think overall I mean Dropbox with carousel being like the front lines is very clearly trying to become like a

00:31:29   photo management solution built on top of their sync engine you know on

00:31:33   OS 10 you can have it automatically suck in screenshots

00:31:38   You can actually the Dropbox app on the Mac will take your iPhoto library contents and like upload them to Dropbox and

00:31:45   They're really making a play

00:31:48   Like not only like can you sync your PowerPoint documents with Dropbox is like you can use it. You know like it like I do still

00:31:55   Like just for photo storage and for you know having my photos always accessible to me

00:32:00   I'm really at this point like not

00:32:03   Like I will play with iCloud photos when photos that app shows up for for the Mac, but I'm really not

00:32:13   I'm not yearning for iCloud photos to sort of come out of beta and be available everywhere.

00:32:20   It's not super anxious to change my system right now.

00:32:30   Yeah, as it stands, I'm fine with Dropbox.

00:32:36   I don't ever peruse the photos that are in Dropbox.

00:32:39   I just know that they're there, but I don't do anything with them.

00:32:43   That's a great point because since I started using iCloud for the library,

00:32:48   I'm going through my old photos more because they're just there.

00:32:52   And I love going through old photos.

00:32:55   It's one of the things that I love doing the most when I'm not doing

00:32:59   backstory stuff on my iPad or my iPhone.

00:33:02   Just going through old photos, remembering people, remembering stuff.

00:33:06   And because I have all the photos there, I'm looking at my photos more and I feel like

00:33:11   I make better use of my memories because I can easily access them.

00:33:16   Whereas before it was always, you know, I gotta make sure that I open this folder, I

00:33:20   gotta try a specific app, and now they're just there.

00:33:23   And I think I'm happier, you know, because it's easier.

00:33:27   I guess you could say the same thing for music.

00:33:31   people like Steven who just don't use Spotify and other beats music or

00:33:35   streaming services, they just want their music. For me, I think that my photos are

00:33:39   more valuable, I guess, for me than songs, and I cannot see Steven's point about

00:33:44   music, I cannot see a reflection of that in photos. So yeah, that's a great point,

00:33:49   Myke. Thank you for saying that.

00:33:52   So we got a little more photo topics.

00:33:57   Federico, basically your system exploded, right?

00:34:01   For crunching images for your website?

00:34:03   Yeah, you were right when you said that this deal was a real...

00:34:08   What's the word that you used to describe that kind of workflow?

00:34:13   Fragile, I think is what I said.

00:34:16   Yes, that was an understatement.

00:34:19   Give people a refresher of what you're talking about.

00:34:22   So a couple of episodes ago, I was working on my Twitter article, and I was putting together

00:34:32   screenshots because I was reaching the end of my writing session.

00:34:36   And so I thought that because I was testing this app that allowed me to, let's say, automate

00:34:45   the system share sheet and kind of to connect multiple share sheets and the document picker.

00:34:51   So I thought that I could create a workflow to take a screenshot, put it in Dropbox through

00:34:57   the native document picker, and then on my Mac Mini server, which is hosted at Mac Mini

00:35:02   Colu, I could open the file in ImageOptim, which is this image optimization app for the

00:35:10   Mac which removes a lot of extra information from image files and it makes them smaller

00:35:16   without visibly ugly loss in terms of quality.

00:35:25   So they're smaller, they save you bandwidth on the CDN, and they don't look terrible.

00:35:32   And I thought that the Mac Mini, using Hazel, could...

00:35:36   I'm just adding layers and layers of complication here.

00:35:39   The Mac Mini, using Hazel, could look for the image file in Dropbox, run ImageOptim,

00:35:44   it back into Dropbox and then back on my iPad I would open the document picker again, find

00:35:50   the optimized image file, download it and use the sharesheet again to upload it and

00:35:57   get a link.

00:35:58   So that was quite a few steps.

00:36:00   I love you so much for trying.

00:36:02   Yeah, that's a lot of…

00:36:04   You gotta give me credit for my commitment to my idea, right?

00:36:09   I mean, I really tried to make it work.

00:36:13   I then realized that basically the entire thing was broken.

00:36:20   No image was being optimized.

00:36:28   Waiting there for it to come back and it's just gone forever.

00:36:32   You just thought it was done?

00:36:34   No, I was putting together my article, right?

00:36:37   And thank God I got the, like, I started being skeptical.

00:36:42   I was like, are my images really optimized?

00:36:45   Because the preview for the article in the editorial,

00:36:49   when you switch to the preview, it took seconds to load.

00:36:54   And usually, when I have optimized images,

00:36:56   they don't take all those seconds to load.

00:37:01   So I started wondering, are my images really smaller?

00:37:05   And so I downloaded all the already uploaded images,

00:37:09   which were like only 10 files, fortunately, out of like 50.

00:37:14   Only 10 files I downloaded them and they were full quality.

00:37:18   And so I ran my workflow again,

00:37:21   this time while being logged into my Mac mini via screens,

00:37:26   the VNC client to see the process happening.

00:37:30   And of course, image app team was launching

00:37:32   and then closing after a fraction of a second

00:37:35   without even touching the file.

00:37:36   (laughing)

00:37:37   just there bouncing in the dark. And yes, it was terrific workflow. Actually, you know

00:37:46   what? I think that by doing all the upload, download the image and then using Pythonista

00:37:54   to open the file, I think I was making the image bigger. So, yeah. So, yeah. Basically,

00:38:06   I spent like an afternoon being upset.

00:38:09   And then I just decided that for once I needed to use my Mac.

00:38:13   I didn't really want to go through my screenshots on my Mac.

00:38:17   Primarily because I was upset.

00:38:18   So out of principle.

00:38:20   But then the practical version of myself thought that, you know, 50 image files, I probably

00:38:28   want to optimize them.

00:38:29   So I ran the image optim locally.

00:38:32   Now I'm basically left with no solution because there's no image opt-in for iOS.

00:38:38   I know that there's an app called "Reduce", I know that there's the other app called "OneEdit"

00:38:43   that can save multiple images from PNG to JPEG, but still it's no replacement for image

00:38:49   opt-in.

00:38:50   There's no image opt-in on iOS.

00:38:51   I'm really sad about this, like not physically sad but just like conceptually sad, if that's

00:38:58   a thing.

00:39:00   So yeah, I don't know what the solution is.

00:39:03   I'm kind of hoping that maybe in the future workflow, the guys that make this awesome

00:39:08   new app will try to find a way to bring ImageOptim to iOS.

00:39:14   I know that ImageOptim is actually based on a bunch of open source libraries to do various

00:39:20   types of JPEG optimization.

00:39:24   Like I don't remember the names, but if you go to the website, you can see the names of

00:39:27   of all the technologies that they use.

00:39:29   I don't know guys, because there's no solution for me.

00:39:34   I know that I could, there's a version of image opt-in

00:39:37   called image opt-in CLI that you can run from terminal,

00:39:42   but it's not like an official download.

00:39:47   You gotta do some stuff with Ruby.

00:39:49   You gotta download the Ruby gems.

00:39:52   I don't know.

00:39:53   - Tej, it sounds like there could be

00:39:54   a much easier way to do this.

00:39:57   Oh yeah, pay more in CDN.

00:39:59   That's a much easier way.

00:40:00   - Stephen, how do you do it?

00:40:02   - I use the Mac.

00:40:05   Actually, I don't really crunch.

00:40:06   I don't have that many images.

00:40:07   So I usually don't bother with it, but.

00:40:10   - Right.

00:40:11   - I do enjoy the fact that Federico

00:40:14   basically Benjamin buttoned his images,

00:40:16   which is sort of hilarious.

00:40:18   I mean, Federico, would it be like the worst thing

00:40:24   If you only had your iPad and you didn't have your Mac to like drop box them over to your

00:40:31   Mac Mini and then use screens on the iPad like do it on the Mac itself and then let

00:40:36   them sync back.

00:40:37   Yeah, but that's slow, right?

00:40:40   I mean I get it but...

00:40:42   Yeah I guess that could be a...

00:40:44   Yeah especially because the Mac Mini is really fast at uploading to Dropbox because of the

00:40:49   the crazy Mac Mini color speeds. It takes a second to download an image that's 2 megabytes.

00:40:56   I guess I could do that. I will probably start doing that or maybe I'll just hire someone

00:41:03   to write me a script. Because the thing is that Rackspace, which is the CDN that I use,

00:41:09   Cloud Files, they do have a Python library that's like a new one. It's called PyRacks.

00:41:17   I just don't know how to install it on my Mac. I don't have the time. It doesn't support

00:41:22   Pythonista because ideally I would just use the Rackspace API with Pythonista and it would

00:41:28   be perfect because I will have native uploads. But still, in that case, I will have the problem

00:41:35   of no image opt-in on iOS. See, I really need a Mac for this. Unless someone makes image

00:41:42   ImageOptim is compatible. In that case, because when you start getting savings of like—

00:41:49   But this is how your brain works when you start thinking of these new things. We are

00:41:53   following you down this rabbit hole.

00:41:56   You are observing the process. Basically, when you get, say, ImageOptim, when you give

00:42:03   multiple images to ImageOptim, it gives you a summary of all the megabytes or kilobytes

00:42:08   that you're saving by optimizing the files.

00:42:11   So for the Twitter article, I was saving like 20 megabytes.

00:42:15   And if you multiply that for, I don't know,

00:42:18   let's just say for 10,000 page views,

00:42:22   Steven, are you better at math than me?

00:42:25   - Nope.

00:42:26   That's a whole lot of megabytes.

00:42:28   - That's a lot of megabytes.

00:42:29   And that's actually a lot of euros out of my pocket

00:42:33   if I don't optimize my images.

00:42:35   So I need ImageOptim, especially for this,

00:42:38   popular article that people are expecting like the Twitter apps, the iPad apps that I posted today,

00:42:44   I need those savings on the files. But if I want to do that on the iPad, that's a problem.

00:42:51   And I like for the kind of mini review or the small news post that has a small image,

00:42:59   I can live without image opt-in. But for these kind of big reviews or big features that I have

00:43:04   have on the site, I need to optimize the files.

00:43:07   And yeah, I guess I will go with Stephen's way

00:43:11   and just use screens.

00:43:13   Also because screens has a nice new clipboard mode.

00:43:17   You know, Stephen, you actually gave me a pretty good idea here.

00:43:20   Well, that'll be $250.

00:43:23   You can PayPal me.

00:43:25   I mean, it's interesting to hear what holds you up

00:43:30   from doing all your work on iOS.

00:43:31   And this is not one that I would have guessed.

00:43:34   I probably wouldn't have thought about it, but you know something that is like seemingly like that Mac

00:43:40   app is super simple like you just drag an image onto it and it gives you output

00:43:43   but that because of behind the scenes stuff it's not on iOS yet but definitely

00:43:49   keep us posted and you know maybe you could just hire Myke to

00:43:54   run ImageOptima on his MacBook Pro for you.

00:43:56   Yeah I'll do that.

00:43:57   Yeah, thank you guys for for being my my therapists here for

00:44:03   image problems

00:44:05   You're welcome

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00:46:09   That's a cool sponsor.

00:46:10   Yeah, I like that.

00:46:11   Yeah, I just wanted to say that it sounds really awesome.

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00:46:21   So we're going to talk about workflow, which frankly seems like magic still.

00:46:28   So I know we've got some links where Federico talked about it on his site, but Myke, you've

00:46:34   been using it a lot.

00:46:36   I want to hear from Myke.

00:46:38   Hello, everyone.

00:46:39   Me too.

00:46:40   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm a workflow addict.

00:46:45   So basically what happened was this app came out for me like at midnight last Wednesday.

00:46:52   So basically just after we finished recording this show.

00:46:55   And I knew Federico had mentioned that it was coming out and workflow guys had mentioned

00:46:58   it was coming out.

00:47:00   I was up until half past three in the morning talking to Federico basically just over and

00:47:07   over and over again saying, "Oh my God, this is amazing.

00:47:10   I can't believe this is possible."

00:47:13   workflow is an app that allows you to create chains of actions in a visual

00:47:19   style. A lot of people have said it's kind of like editorials, kind of like

00:47:24   launch center pro, it's kind of like automator. But for me it's like a flowchart.

00:47:29   You're basically just creating a flowchart of actions and these actions

00:47:34   perform a greater action in aggregate. So like for example a very simple workflow

00:47:41   that I created but it solves something that frustrates me and this is this is

00:47:45   super vain you know when you use the front-facing camera to take a selfie

00:47:49   yeah and it yeah okay yes you do Steven you send them and I don't I'm not a

00:47:55   hundred percent sure why this happens it doesn't need to be explained perfectly

00:47:59   fine the front-facing camera flips the image because it's like a mirror yeah

00:48:05   because like a mirror so it flips the image around and I don't like that

00:48:08   because it looks weird to me. So I set up a workflow. So basically I just hit

00:48:15   the workflow, it takes a picture of me and then it flips the image around and

00:48:20   then I can share it. And it's just three little actions. I just dragged in "take

00:48:24   photo with front camera, take one photo, flip image horizontally and share." So

00:48:29   it's for me to do that. Previously I'll take a picture and I have to open

00:48:33   an app like some weird image editing app and I have to flip it around and then

00:48:37   save it to the camera roll and then I'd have two images and then I could share it.

00:48:42   But so it's just like this is the kind of stuff that I'm finding super interesting.

00:48:46   I mean and then it goes into like some of the crazy things that people have built.

00:48:51   Like Federico created this timezone converting thing.

00:48:55   Oh you know you actually got to fix that.

00:49:00   So I'll wait for you until you share that but it basically scrapes Google and does like

00:49:05   a timezone conversion.

00:49:07   We know what I put together last night. Basically, in Safari I always want to get the link of

00:49:19   an image, but Safari for iOS when you tap and hold an image it only gives you two options.

00:49:26   One to copy the image and the other to save it. There's no option to copy the link to

00:49:31   the image. So I put together this new workflow that uses a feature of an upcoming update.

00:49:39   It basically looks at the selection of the web browser and there's a bunch of steps involved

00:49:47   and then it gives me a list of all image URLs found in the Safari selection and I can choose

00:49:55   one and it's copied to my clipboard and I'm really excited about this one.

00:50:01   One of the biggest things about workflow that surprised me the most was the extension support.

00:50:12   Like how you can make any workflow basically, I've got one that adds, if I'm on a page in

00:50:20   browser or in tweetbot or anywhere I have a URL that's a podcast I can open

00:50:25   the workflow to add it to Huffduffer like I don't have to copy the URL or

00:50:28   anything it's just all you hit run workflow and then I get the option to

00:50:33   run whatever I want to. Myke is gasping. Give me that URL. Alright I'll send it to you.

00:50:38   Yeah because as well like I'm trying to put a couple of these in the show notes

00:50:41   because people will just be like like like how I just reacted give me it I want

00:50:46   it.

00:50:47   Yeah, and the sharing of, so like if someone builds something like Federico, I have several

00:50:52   that you built and that you were tweeting about the other night, and it's really nice

00:50:56   to like download because it just, it's really easy to share.

00:50:59   But what's frustrating is they don't sync between your devices and so you can use airdrop.

00:51:03   So like I'll make one on my phone or iPad and then airdrop it to the other device, which

00:51:08   is a little frustrating.

00:51:09   Hopefully, I don't know if you know, but it would be nice if they had some sort of syncing.

00:51:13   Yeah, I guess at one point they will have to add sync.

00:51:18   I don't know more, Steven.

00:51:21   Even like a manual sync like Launch Center Pro does, where it just backs it up to, I

00:51:25   think it goes to Dropbox, right?

00:51:26   And then you just have to go to another device and load it on.

00:51:31   But just when it...

00:51:34   The fact that I use Chrome makes it super awesome, because it means that I'm able to

00:51:41   together some of the other, like so say for example there's a I want to take a

00:51:46   web page and turn it into a PDF like that awesome screenshot app doesn't work

00:51:50   in Chrome but now I can use a create PDF workflow and and do it instead so I'm

00:51:58   able to in Chrome I can just grab these things now and do interesting things

00:52:01   with them where Chrome was kind of it kind of is like a second-class citizen

00:52:05   for extension support because a lot of these apps are made for Safari.

00:52:11   So it's interesting how some of the things you can do.

00:52:14   And just stuff like file downloaders.

00:52:18   Yeah, that's a big one too.

00:52:21   Or also, when you mentioned the extension, something that's really nice is the way that

00:52:28   workflow can kind of make, like be a replacement for other apps extensions.

00:52:37   Like for instance, the Draft extension, it lets you capture text from any app.

00:52:44   So for instance, from Safari, I can capture the link to a web page into a draft.

00:52:51   But I cannot really run an action at the moment of capturing text from the Draft extension.

00:52:59   So with Workflow, and using the URL scheme of the Drafts app, I can, from Safari, with

00:53:06   just one workflow, one chain of actions, I can send a link to Drafts which sends it somewhere

00:53:14   else and then I return to Safari and I can run this from the from the sharesheet.

00:53:20   You know there's no bookmarklet, there's no other weirdness with JavaScript and Python and that kind

00:53:26   of stuff so this is really nice. And there's two workflows that I like I'm using all the time.

00:53:33   One is to open a Twitter link in the Twitter app because when people send me, including you

00:53:40   Myke and Steven, when you send me links to tweets, those are like links that open in Safari in the

00:53:47   Twitter website and with Workflow I can just open the tweet in the Twitter app, which is really nice.

00:53:54   And there's another workflow that I found on Reddit, there's a subreddit called, just Workflow,

00:54:02   it's full of people sharing workflows and suggestions, it's really nice. Some guy made

00:54:08   the workflow to open the website called azlyrics.com that basically to look at the search result

00:54:24   for the currently playing song in google.com and find the lyrics webpage and just open

00:54:32   that directly without seeing Safari first. It just opens the direct link to the webpage

00:54:39   for the song lyrics. It's really full of these kind of possibilities. I mean, I got a bunch

00:54:46   of workflows that are really just demos, you know, just concepts. Like, I'm not going to

00:54:50   use those workflows on a daily basis. But other workflows, like you, Myke, like, I'm

00:54:55   I'm using these every day because they're actually and practically useful.

00:55:01   And it's still kind of incredible for me to see that Apple is doing also this big promotion

00:55:07   for the app and that it's so popular.

00:55:09   I mean it still is in the top 10 of the general top paid apps for iPhone and iPad.

00:55:18   And Apple has chosen the app as editor's choice, best new apps.

00:55:23   today the App Store Twitter account, Twitter about workflow, so it's really kind of surreal

00:55:29   for me to see this interest in iOS automation. I think it's totally deserved because it's

00:55:41   such an awesome app made by a fantastic team and I'm super excited about the future. I

00:55:50   they're planning big stuff.

00:55:52   And I'm so happy to see people like Myke,

00:55:56   and I don't mean this in like,

00:55:58   to disrespect you. - No, no.

00:55:59   - Like, you're not generally interested

00:56:02   into Python scripting or making these URL actions,

00:56:06   you know, that kind of stuff. - I was always interested

00:56:08   in the URL scheme stuff, but it just went over my head.

00:56:11   - Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant.

00:56:13   It was too much for you. - Yeah.

00:56:15   - Because you didn't-- - But it's like,

00:56:16   I showed workflow to my girlfriend yesterday.

00:56:19   - Yeah.

00:56:20   - And she was like, "Oh, this is really cool.

00:56:22   "I wanna try this out."

00:56:23   So I immediately just gifted her the app.

00:56:25   It's like, do it.

00:56:26   But she, 'cause it makes sense.

00:56:28   And because they do a great thing as well,

00:56:31   they have so many different actions

00:56:33   that you can choose from,

00:56:34   but they do a good job of not showing you them all

00:56:38   unless you explicitly ask to see them all.

00:56:40   So it shows you suggested actions, right?

00:56:43   And then you can back out and see all actions.

00:56:45   And I just think it just makes it easier.

00:56:48   I do like looking at the all actions list though,

00:56:50   that's how I've gotten inspiration to build new things,

00:56:54   'cause I can see some of the stuff that it can do,

00:56:56   you know, like if I don't go down a certain path.

00:56:59   But I mean, there are things that I would like to see,

00:57:02   like I'd like to see the gallery more frequently updated.

00:57:06   I would love it if, like you know how drafts

00:57:09   has like the community, where like you can kind of see

00:57:12   all of the things that people submit to the drafts community?

00:57:16   I would love to see that for workflow as well,

00:57:18   like just a site where you can search,

00:57:20   like I wanna do this type of workflow,

00:57:23   and then it shows up. - They're kind of doing that

00:57:24   on Reddit, but it's not real evolved at this point.

00:57:29   - Right, you see, I'd love to see that on their site.

00:57:32   Like I'm sure these are all, I mean, you know,

00:57:35   not reinventing the wheel, like I'm sure

00:57:36   that they are thinking about this stuff,

00:57:38   but like I say these things just because I think

00:57:40   that this is such an important app.

00:57:43   This is genuinely, I think, one of the most important apps

00:57:46   that I've seen in a long time.

00:57:47   the things that this thing can do is I just think it's incredible I'm completely blown away by it and

00:57:54   I cannot believe it was built by like by a couple of guys they're like 18 and 20 yeah and and they're

00:58:03   really nice guys as well and and it just blows me away well I think back another second yeah I think

00:58:09   it works because it is visual and yeah you know automator on the mac is is visual but this is even

00:58:16   in some ways easier to use an automator on OS X.

00:58:20   - Oh, it definitely is.

00:58:22   - You know, like, I was kind of the same, but with you,

00:58:23   like I have Launch Center Pro

00:58:25   and I use it for a couple of things,

00:58:26   but I never really got super into it.

00:58:28   But like Workflow, because it's,

00:58:31   Workflow rewards you for using it, right?

00:58:33   It's fun to build these things and put them together.

00:58:36   And it has a, because it's visual,

00:58:39   you can kind of understand the flow a little bit better

00:58:41   than just straight X callback URL,

00:58:44   or things like Launch Center Pro kind of on top of it.

00:58:48   So yeah, I agree, Myke.

00:58:49   It's a big step forward in using iOS

00:58:52   for more complicated tasks.

00:58:54   Now, I know there was some,

00:58:57   the app was a long time coming,

00:59:00   and I'm hoping that the App Store review,

00:59:04   which we'll keep coming back to,

00:59:05   allows them to continue pushing it forward

00:59:07   because it really is incredibly powerful just on day one.

00:59:12   And as these things evolve and people figure out

00:59:14   how to do more things, it's only gonna get better and better.

00:59:18   - Yeah, I think that a big difference

00:59:21   with other automation apps is that workflow actually ties

00:59:25   into native iOS features, like you can quick look files

00:59:30   or you can open web pages in Safari, you can pick documents.

00:59:33   Like it's not just a launcher,

00:59:35   it actually does stuff with files and, you know,

00:59:40   apps like music, you know, it kind of,

00:59:42   It's built deeply into iOS.

00:59:45   And I think that the feature that most people are not

00:59:50   talking about is the engine and the system

00:59:53   that they built into workflow, which they call the content

00:59:56   graph, which is basically what keeps the app working

01:00:02   when you-- with this visual system.

01:00:05   And it's basically an engine that

01:00:07   capable of transforming actions to output certain types of content depending on what

01:00:16   action you use next. So this sounds like a messy collection of words. But in practice,

01:00:24   you can do stuff like, action 1 takes a link to a webpage and action 2 says "make PDF".

01:00:35   And normally you would say, okay, if I want to make a PDF from a link, I guess you will

01:00:41   just create a blank page with the link as text.

01:00:46   But actually because of the content graph, Workflow is capable of guessing, okay, if

01:00:51   this is a link, you probably want me to fetch the contents of this link and you probably

01:00:56   want me to return HTML and because you have make PDF as the next section, you want me

01:01:03   to convert this HTML to PDF and give you a preview. So the power of the content graph,

01:01:09   just being able to turn certain types of content into different types of content depending

01:01:14   on the actions that you choose, that's incredibly powerful for iOS automation. And if you've

01:01:21   been spending hours into apps like editorial and drafts, do you know all the errors that

01:01:27   you get with "oh, wrong input type"? That kind of stuff, because you're trying to make

01:01:31   the app do things that it's not supposed to do.

01:01:35   And with Workflow, you can do crazy things that are seemingly unrelated.

01:01:39   You can do stuff like link to PDF or like if I take an image from the browser, either

01:01:46   if I use Quick Look, you show me a preview, but if I, I don't know, if I use Safari, then

01:01:54   open the image in the new tab.

01:01:56   So it's this kind of flexible system and for iOS automation, I think that's huge.

01:02:01   and also much more capable than Automator or noise 10.

01:02:05   So it's a-- yeah, I'm really excited.

01:02:10   I like some-- and I do it every now and then.

01:02:13   I just open the app and just start dragging things around

01:02:18   and seeing what I can find.

01:02:21   And that excites me, because every time I open it,

01:02:24   I kind of-- not every time, but every few times I open it,

01:02:28   and I have an idea.

01:02:30   I'm like, "Okay, how could I try and do something like this?"

01:02:34   I'm just in awe at this application.

01:02:39   But let's talk more about some apps.

01:02:42   Let's talk about Federico's Apps of the Year.

01:02:45   But before we do that,

01:02:47   let's thank one of my apps of the year,

01:02:48   PDF Pen Scan Plus from Smile Software,

01:02:52   helping support this episode.

01:02:53   PDF Pen Scan Plus is the app for mobile scanning and OCR.

01:02:57   It allows you to scan documents directly on your iPhone and iPad and use OCR on them to

01:03:02   detect the text that is found in the image that you take.

01:03:06   So you can take images of multiple images super quickly and you can do all the post

01:03:10   process image editing right on your iOS device.

01:03:14   You can crop these images quickly and precisely.

01:03:16   PDF Pen Scan Plus recognises the edges of your images, making sure you don't miss anything

01:03:21   important.

01:03:22   And version 1.5 now takes advantage of image optimisation, making sure your images are

01:03:26   crystal clear.

01:03:27   So PDF/PEN ScanPlus can help you blast through stacks of documents or receipts in one go.

01:03:33   You can export these documents all at once, making batch scanning easier than ever.

01:03:38   So maybe you leave it to the end of the month to do your expenses so you can scan all your

01:03:41   images in.

01:03:42   You can see, "Oh, I've got all these receipts.

01:03:44   Let me go BBBP.

01:03:45   We've got your receipts."

01:03:47   And then you can automatically upload them to Dropbox or iCloud Drive for storing and

01:03:51   availability on the Mac and other iOS devices.

01:03:55   PDF/Pen Scan Plus's OCR scanning also takes a text of the documents which you can copy

01:04:00   and paste into another app for easy searching later or to use somewhere else which is really

01:04:05   really cool.

01:04:06   PDF/Pen Scan Plus is a universal iOS app.

01:04:09   It works on your iPhone and your iPad and it's available right now on the App Store.

01:04:13   You can learn more by going to Smilesoftware.com/connected.

01:04:17   Thank you so much to Smile for their continued support of this show.

01:04:24   The year is over and the Federico has spoken.

01:04:27   Yeah, it's become an annual tradition.

01:04:33   It's been four years now that I do this kind of recap.

01:04:37   Myke, do you want to ask me questions?

01:04:40   What do you want to talk about?

01:04:42   I'm happy to answer all your questions and concerns.

01:04:46   So what we're talking about...

01:04:47   Do I sound like this is questions and concerns reminds me of an underscore David Smith?

01:04:51   Yeah.

01:04:52   Well, I mean, you know, no one could sound just like Hanus Kool, but I guess you can

01:04:55   use his words.

01:04:58   What we're talking about is Federica Viticci's must-have iPad apps for 2014.

01:05:03   So Federica mentioned every year he does this, he rounds up the apps that have come out in

01:05:08   the year or the things that he's using this year.

01:05:11   And what I'm kind of interested in, because people can go, they can go to our show notes,

01:05:16   relay.fm/connector/18, they can find the link to Mac Stories and read the piece.

01:05:22   But I have a couple of things that I'm interested in.

01:05:26   In 2014, what have the apps that have been released enabled you to do that you've not

01:05:32   been able to do before?

01:05:34   What changes have been made to make your iPad even better to work on?

01:05:40   Two big changes were workflow, which we just talked about.

01:05:44   It speeds up a lot of tasks that I do every day.

01:05:49   The other big change was editorial 1.1 which came out in May.

01:05:55   I did a big review of the update and max stories also.

01:05:59   That was a big change.

01:06:01   It added a bunch of new features.

01:06:05   I have hundreds of workflows in editorial for text editing and images just being able

01:06:12   to prepare blog posts on the iPad.

01:06:15   That was a big change.

01:06:17   In general, I think that with iOS 8, so starting this, especially since August, when I got

01:06:23   all the betas that I covered on Mac stories in September, I started seeing this big change

01:06:31   for extensions, you know, action extensions, share extensions, today widgets, not so much

01:06:37   with the keyboards, I don't do much keyboard switching except for emoji++ and sometimes

01:06:44   clips. Extensions were huge for me. I was super happy to drop all the Python scripts,

01:06:55   all the JavaScript bookmarks in Safari to use extensions, which are much, much better

01:07:02   than before. And in terms of personal use of the iPad, I think that Todoist was another

01:07:11   a big change. We talked about this before, moving away from Reminders and iCloud and

01:07:18   using Todoist, that was a big change for me. And Clips, which is this clipboard manager

01:07:25   from the same developers of Dispatch and email client for iPhone. I didn't really use clipboard

01:07:32   managers before iOS 8 because they didn't have an easy enough way to copy stuff into

01:07:39   their containers, I would guess. And there's still no real clipboard manager for iOS, like

01:07:48   it can have on OS X with Alfred and Clip Menu and other similar apps, Launch Bar. There's

01:07:55   no real clipboard manager on iOS, so Clips is a nice in-between solution, because it

01:08:02   uses the widget and the extensions. So in general, I think doing a comparison, right,

01:08:08   the way that I work on the iPad in December 2014 and compared to last year, I think that

01:08:14   I'm much faster. Probably the basic workflow is not much different because it's still heavily

01:08:22   based on Safari editorial and launch center pro and drafts. But I think I'm faster. Like

01:08:29   I can do, I wouldn't say double the work, but I can save several minutes more thanks

01:08:34   to extensions and thanks to workflow and all these more capable tools and just faster and

01:08:42   more reliable ways to move information around, to move images around.

01:08:49   Not so much for ImageOptim.

01:08:51   To move documents around.

01:08:54   I'm generally faster.

01:08:57   And then there's the brand new stuff. Like, some of those apps I didn't mention in the

01:09:06   article because I'm still testing them. I'm not sure whether they'll become, like, apps

01:09:11   that I use every day. There's the new stuff, like being able to convert currencies in Safari

01:09:16   using stacks. Or some new apps and updates that are coming out. There's a big update

01:09:23   to Python Insta, which I don't know when it will come out. There's really some new stuff

01:09:29   that is coming down the road for iOS 8. And I think that until next time, we will keep

01:09:37   seeing these sort of new ideas, right? And so today, I think I'm still changing things,

01:09:44   like how I do stuff. I will probably rewrite for the, again, all the image workflow that

01:09:50   I use. But yes, in general I think I'm much faster and I think that's good news because

01:09:57   I can concentrate on other stuff. Like I can do more show notes for the podcasts or I can

01:10:03   do more research or I can do more reading because it doesn't take me half an hour just

01:10:07   to put together a blog post for my stories. You know? That's a saving time is a much,

01:10:14   much welcome change.

01:10:15   Obviously this year you've moved from the mini to the iPad Air 2.

01:10:20   Has this changed anything in a significant way?

01:10:23   Do you find you work better with the Air 2 than the mini?

01:10:28   In hindsight I think, yeah, I think I...

01:10:34   It's probably because my eyesight is getting worse.

01:10:38   I think I'm more comfortable with the Air 2.

01:10:42   but only because they managed to make it so thin and light.

01:10:46   The original iPad Air was too heavy and thick for me.

01:10:51   This one I think strikes a great balance between the mini and the bigger form factor.

01:10:58   So I think it was a great move and I'm expecting that the higher capacity of RAM and the CPU will...

01:11:09   there will be apps that really take advantage of that sort of stuff.

01:11:13   I'm seeing that today with the fact that Safari can keep more tabs in memory, for example,

01:11:20   compared to the mini, so that's a nice change. But I still have to use apps that really take

01:11:27   the hardware to the extreme, you know, the apps that can make you go "okay, yeah, I can see why

01:11:34   I need more RAM and more CPU. Today I see like a small glimpse of that kind of process like

01:11:39   there's more tabs in Safari or for example the other day I was using this, I was trying this

01:11:47   service called Rev.com. It's an audio transcription service that I wanted to try out. Basically you

01:11:56   record an audio file, you send this audio file to this company using an iOS app and they give

01:12:03   they give text back to you, they transcribe the audio for you, so they promote this kind of service

01:12:10   as being a nice workflow for students or people who attend conferences and they want

01:12:18   to transcribe audio. So what I did was, using Workflow, I downloaded the mp3 file of an episode

01:12:28   of David Smith's podcast, Developing Perspective. I downloaded this other app called... Let

01:12:39   me just take my iPad. It's an audio editor for iOS, which I found on the App Store using

01:12:46   search. So that was a new one for me. It is called Hokusai. I think it's Japanese.

01:12:54   Oh my God.

01:12:55   So it let me edit the MP3 and I noticed that when I exported the MP3 file, it was really

01:13:03   fast, like faster than I think it would have been on the old hardware.

01:13:11   I could tell that something was different and that was a nice surprise.

01:13:17   And by the way, the Rev.com transcription was really accurate, like just a couple of

01:13:23   spelling mistakes.

01:13:25   I kind of wanted to stress test them by giving them an episode about WatchKit.

01:13:33   They mostly got it right because David was using a lot of technical terms, but something

01:13:39   that I found amusing is that instead of transcribing WatchKit, they transcribed WatchKit.

01:13:46   Yeah, that was kind of weird.

01:13:51   It's close.

01:13:52   It's close.

01:13:53   Really close.

01:13:54   I think the the the hardware change will be

01:13:57   more notable

01:14:00   Down the road at least I hope so I you know, otherwise, it's wasted money

01:14:06   You should have gone the golden I think everyone's fast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean my like I sit here listening to this

01:14:13   I've read your article. I

01:14:15   I've seen some of this in my own life. Like I went from the air back to the retina mini and I

01:14:22   Prefer the size I think but for me like what holds up my work on iOS is sort of like

01:14:29   fundamental issues

01:14:31   That software can only go so far in addressing like yes

01:14:35   I was eight and things like workflow in particular and editorial like I can do a lot of the stuff like

01:14:41   Text expand or having a keyboard like I can do a lot of stuff

01:14:44   I do on my Mac on my iPad now, but it's sort of like the fundamental things of

01:14:49   when I write I like a lot of browser tabs open and sometimes I have multiple text documents and I like to see it all

01:14:54   at once and and

01:14:55   I'm so much slower at typing on the iPad than I am on the Mac

01:14:59   And so there's still some like fundamental things that may never change about the device itself that still have me reaching

01:15:05   for like a MacBook Pro with the keyboard where I can have all these windows open and and maybe that's a

01:15:12   Shift that I just haven't made mentally yet

01:15:14   especially with some of the like multiple apps at a time thing and

01:15:18   But it's still, I still feel like, yeah, this stuff is great and like it does address a lot of issues,

01:15:25   but there's some like fundamental like step one problems that I still have with, you know,

01:15:30   porting a lot of my work to the tablet.

01:15:33   I don't know.

01:15:35   I mean, for me, like I find that I read something like this,

01:15:42   I read these articles that Federico writes or just listen to him talk

01:15:45   and I want to be able to work like this.

01:15:48   Like I hear it and I'm like,

01:15:52   I want to be able to use the iPad to do work in this way.

01:15:57   I wanna be more like you Federico,

01:16:03   I don't know what to say.

01:16:04   - Thank you, that's really an honor for Myke.

01:16:07   - So much so that I read your article earlier

01:16:09   and I grabbed my iPad mini

01:16:11   and I reorganized the home screen.

01:16:13   Yeah, I think I'm happy to hear that because it means that the article at least has some

01:16:20   kind of purpose.

01:16:22   I think it took me a lot of time to say, okay, I want to make sure that if one day, you know,

01:16:32   I'm on an island and for some reason the island only lets me use an iPad, I don't know why

01:16:38   why would that ever happen, but just follow my argument.

01:16:42   If I'm in the position where I cannot use a MacBook,

01:16:44   I need to make sure that I don't drop all my work

01:16:49   for the site.

01:16:51   I need to be able to continue to work and to do the same,

01:16:53   work at the same degree of quality.

01:16:57   Readers shouldn't be able to tell whether

01:17:01   that's Federico writing at a Mac and when,

01:17:04   okay, yeah, that's Federico on an iPad

01:17:05   because the article is worse.

01:17:07   I don't want that kind of reader experience.

01:17:10   So it took me a lot of time to,

01:17:14   and especially a lot of money,

01:17:15   to browse the App Store and try many, many apps

01:17:19   because I tend to buy all the apps that I use for work

01:17:24   that I don't necessarily even review for Mac stories

01:17:27   because I just need them personally.

01:17:29   And it took me a lot of time to,

01:17:31   coming from the Mac where I was used to stuff like Alfred

01:17:35   or Keyboard Maestro, you know, what do I do on iOS now?

01:17:39   And it was time consuming, and it was tiring

01:17:43   from every time I needed to set up an app from scratch,

01:17:48   which was, you know, it's not a fun experience.

01:17:51   But now I can see, I think I can see the benefit of that,

01:17:56   because when I work on my iPad, I'm completely comfortable.

01:18:01   And when I'm at my Mac, now I don't keep up

01:18:04   with my iOS workflows on my Mac and I'm not sure what to do anymore when I'm on my MacBook

01:18:11   because there's no editorial, there's no clips, there's no workflow on my MacBook and so I'm

01:18:18   not exactly sure how and if I want to, you know, rebuild all my workflows on the Mac.

01:18:28   And I think that, to conclude, what I want to do, if people find this kind of, I wouldn't

01:18:42   say mission, but maybe a way of doing things, if people find this enjoyable and if people

01:18:49   like you Myke can take some inspiration out of these kind of articles, I think it's useful

01:18:58   you know, to write this kind of stuff or make stories because I like it. I don't want to

01:19:03   like, I actually enjoy showing people how stuff can be done on iOS and I enjoy talking

01:19:10   to you and showing you new apps and new tips. I actually take a lot of enjoyment out of

01:19:16   that. And I think that maybe also more people can say, "Hey, maybe I can be more, I can

01:19:24   have this kind of freedom to do work anywhere I want because I can just take my iPad with

01:19:29   me or my iPhone even. And I think that's powerful, right? Being able to do work anywhere. Or

01:19:39   maybe not just necessarily do work anywhere because I don't want people to work all the

01:19:43   time. But just knowing that if something happens and you cannot be at home and use a computer,

01:19:49   can still do serious stuff on iOS.

01:19:52   That's the...

01:19:53   Oh, it makes a ton of sense.

01:19:55   Sum up.

01:19:56   Yeah.

01:19:57   Thank you.

01:19:58   No, and I think, you know, this has obviously been a topic since day one on our show because

01:20:03   it's been a topic for you for a long time and sometimes people are like, well, you know,

01:20:08   I think people look at it as kind of a you're doing it for like weird reasons.

01:20:13   Like, like what you just said is really true that, you know, there are situations where

01:20:17   you can't have a Mac or like you just have your tablet because you're in between things and it's very helpful

01:20:23   like to you know, you might not be able to do a hundred percent of what you can do on the Mac

01:20:27   but the more you can do like the more freedom you have to

01:20:30   Sort of like live your life without being tied to you know

01:20:34   Any more hardware than you than you need to be I think that's a perfectly valid reason. I think it's about a reason that

01:20:40   like the iPad

01:20:43   Exists you look at Apple's

01:20:45   marketing for it and you know we didn't talk about the new Christmas ad but like you know it's bouncing like in that ad bouncing between

01:20:50   the Mac and the iPad doing all these things and and it being a

01:20:54   Not so much about the device in front of you

01:20:56   But about the work that's in front of you and what you're trying to accomplish and that is exactly more important than yes

01:21:02   like these things are just tools like they're fancy screwdrivers. That's all they are and

01:21:06   You know making it sing making it do the things that you need it to do like

01:21:10   Anyone who looks at that with an eyebrow raised is crazy to me

01:21:15   Thank you for saying that because one last thought. On my Twitter account I show a lot

01:21:26   of screenshots of the workflows that I use for articles and just on the iPad in general.

01:21:36   Every time I share that kind of "Hey, I'm working on this kind of workflow" or "I managed

01:21:44   do this or thanks to this other person for the suggestion, I get the comment that says

01:21:50   with a winky face at the end, "Hey, why don't you just use a Mac?" Yeah, I know, I can use

01:21:56   a Mac, you know, I have a MacBook right now.

01:21:59   Oh, sort of. Most of a MacBook.

01:22:02   Sort of. Most of the MacBook, at least. What's left of the MacBook? I have a Mac and I'm

01:22:07   not saying this to, like, I'm not a, it doesn't make me upset, right? I mean, there's a much

01:22:14   much worse stuff in the world that's comments.

01:22:17   No, come on.

01:22:19   Yeah, I mean, I'm not even upset at Twitter scanning apps, but that's another topic.

01:22:25   So it doesn't make me upset, but it's like, I think an attitude that I don't like.

01:22:31   Like why can't you understand why would some people have the like, some people I think

01:22:38   like me want to know that if they cannot be at a desk every day they can still be in touch

01:22:45   with people or just being able to do work because maybe work gets your mind off things

01:22:51   or maybe because you want to just be able to continue your stuff anywhere you are. And

01:22:57   I think that part of the problem here is that especially when you talk to people who have

01:23:03   made a serious investment in getting an expensive Mac or like an iMac or a Mac Pro and then

01:23:10   you say, "Yeah, I don't need a Mac. I need an iPad." You don't necessarily attack another

01:23:17   person's investment, but when you put that in question, they get all defensive. So I

01:23:22   don't want to turn this into analog, Myke, so I won't steal your show. But I think that

01:23:29   there's always a, especially in this niche, right? We're talking about a small community

01:23:33   really. But when you say, "I don't need a Mac. I can do all my stuff on iOS." And you

01:23:38   get the Mac people saying, "Oh, you're crazy. Why wouldn't you?" And you get the winky face

01:23:41   at the end of a tweet and you got all the sarcastic notes, you know? And you get all

01:23:46   the smiles and the creepy messages. I don't know why they put winky faces at the end.

01:23:51   And they say, "Use a Mac with a winky face. What's the winky face for?" So you get all

01:23:56   messages and I'm like why wouldn't you just... I'm not saying give it a chance but just

01:24:02   try to understand a different position, you know, because I totally understand

01:24:06   why people would say "no, I need a Mac" like someone like Myke who has a

01:24:10   recording studio or you know as all the fancy hardware to make people sound

01:24:15   better like I totally understand why Myke needs a Mac I totally understand

01:24:19   why someone like Marco needs a Mac because he needs to program and because

01:24:22   there's stuff on iOS that you cannot do. It's not possible. There's no development program

01:24:29   on the iPad that lets you make apps. So I totally get it. But I think we would save

01:24:39   a lot of time without being sarcastic and just being able to accept more other people's

01:24:48   point of views, which I realize it's an extremely obvious statement, but when it comes to this

01:24:54   small audience, you know, people who work on iOS and the Mac, which is like less than

01:24:59   1% of the world's population, I think it'll be more useful. Just general thought, because

01:25:06   of the winky face.

01:25:08   No more winky faces.

01:25:10   I like winky faces, just not with the winky faces combined with an otherwise somewhat

01:25:15   angry statement. Because can you imagine people like talking to you with an upset tone and

01:25:22   then they do a wink?

01:25:24   Hey you! Wink!

01:25:25   You know? That's what I mean.

01:25:26   Yeah. Steven, do you want to tell us how much you love your pebble, Winky Face?

01:25:37   So I wrote a thing, it was going to be in the show last week but we ran out of time,

01:25:42   about sort of using the pebble in the real world.

01:25:45   And we spoke about it with you, Myke,

01:25:47   when you started wearing one when you had a day job.

01:25:50   And like if people notice it in meetings

01:25:54   or like if it's vibrating or lighting up,

01:25:56   do people like, does it catch people's eye?

01:25:57   Do they ask about it?

01:25:58   And I've had a couple experiences where it was noticed.

01:26:01   And not only because like the vibrate motor

01:26:04   was kind of rattly or the screen lit up in a meeting,

01:26:07   but I would look at it and then, you know,

01:26:10   kind of perceived at least here if you look at your watch like that can be seen

01:26:14   as rude and so I wrote a little bit about that and kind of the short version

01:26:22   of it is is that I think and maybe it's like me being in like meetings with

01:26:28   clients and stuff like we haven't quite like arrived as a culture at least in my

01:26:36   little corner of culture like we're looking at your watch or having a watch

01:26:39   is doing things is considered normal.

01:26:42   And I kind of equate it to like, I was a very early iPhone adopter, like you pull your iPhone

01:26:46   out and there's not that many iPhones around, like it draws attention.

01:26:50   And not necessarily in the "hey I'm going to mug you in your car" type way, but you

01:26:54   know people want to see it, people have questions, and I've seen a little bit of that with the

01:26:58   Pebble.

01:27:00   And so, I ran it for a couple weeks just out of the box, and then Myke on your suggestion,

01:27:07   I turned the vibrate motor off, which is really interesting because then when my phone would

01:27:12   vibrate I would like expect it on my wrist or like go to look at my wrist even after

01:27:18   only like two weeks of wearing it.

01:27:20   It rewired my brain very quickly.

01:27:23   And then I had like a fancy event I had to go to so took it off and put my regular watch

01:27:27   back on because the plastic pebble at least is pretty ugly in my opinion.

01:27:32   And it happened like my phone went off in my pocket and I looked at my wrist and it's

01:27:35   like my mechanical like regular watch like oh this watch doesn't know about

01:27:40   tweetbot like it's just a thing and so it was interesting to me how quickly I

01:27:46   became like used to it and I don't know about you Myke like if you're not

01:27:50   wearing yours and your phone goes off do you look at your wrist like if you're

01:27:53   just around the house and haven't put it on yeah it drives me crazy I hate it

01:27:57   when my when I eat when my pebble runs out battery yeah which I will say at

01:28:03   least like if you turn it off at night the battery life was actually pretty

01:28:07   good better than I had anticipated. So I've kind of come to the end of my

01:28:13   Pebble experiment and I kind of have two points I want to see what you guys think.

01:28:20   One like the Pebble itself as a device you can go out and buy like it's still

01:28:27   gen 1 it's kind of clunky it doesn't integrate really well which we spoke

01:28:32   about a couple weeks ago.

01:28:34   I kind of worry about Pebble with Android Wear and the Apple Watch coming.

01:28:41   There's a link on Pebble's blog they announced this week that they are hooking into Android

01:28:48   Wear.

01:28:49   So Android Wear, I don't think really quite, I need to read more, but I think the gist

01:28:52   of it is that they can do interactive notifications on the Pebble to a degree like Android Wear

01:28:58   does on things like the Moto 360 and the LG G Watch or whichever one mic you own.

01:29:05   Yeah so what it's allowing you to do is when you get an email instead of just

01:29:09   like dismissing the notification you can now take some sort of action on it like

01:29:13   open on the phone archive it or you can decline things like you're able to do

01:29:19   more like some of the stuff where apps use the Android Wear like SDK to do some

01:29:29   more extended functionality. Purple is now hooking into that which is

01:29:34   interesting. Yeah and I think like that sort of thing is going to be key to them

01:29:41   surviving like integrated products coming onto the market and my guess is

01:29:46   that they're not going to be able to do that on iOS, that whatever mechanisms are

01:29:50   being used, you know, Apple's doing this not via like Bluetooth notifications but

01:29:54   through app extensions where you are projecting an extension onto the watch

01:29:59   and if you hit play on your podcast player on your watch like that's going

01:30:03   back to the device itself and sort of its own private way and so I don't think

01:30:09   they're gonna be able to do that level of integration on the iOS side of things

01:30:14   No, and like them adopting Android wear stuff like, you know, there's a question in the chat room

01:30:19   Do you use your your phone less because of the watch like really the answer is no

01:30:23   Because you still have to pull your phone out to deal with anything

01:30:25   You can see what's there and you can dismiss it

01:30:27   But if I got to go to reply to a text message or you know anything like that

01:30:31   I'm still pulling my phone out in my pocket. I

01:30:33   Think like so overall like that. I worry for pebble especially in the iOS camp like what's gonna happen when Apple moves in

01:30:43   I hope that they can become a really credible Android Wear maker because like you know I'm

01:30:49   looking through this blog post now and they're basically saying notification wise and app

01:30:53   wise if you can do it on Android Wear you can do it on Pebble now.

01:30:58   So if that is the case like that is pretty cool and it because what makes it different

01:31:06   is like you know if they say you've got like a week long battery life and if that's important

01:31:12   you, you won't be able to get another smartwatch that can do that.

01:31:17   Pebble becomes the de facto standard and really I mean they need to

01:31:25   have like a version 3 come out quite soon. So we had like the original and

01:31:29   we had the steel, we needed something else maybe a new form

01:31:33   factor, a tighter design because these guys in theory should have a head start

01:31:38   should have had a head start against some of these other companies that are

01:31:42   trying to do this stuff because they've been making these things for a couple of

01:31:45   years you know so like pebble should be able to make in theory like in my

01:31:51   opinion a better watch than like Asus can because pebbles whole business is

01:31:58   making watches like that is their business yeah but I think it's one of

01:32:03   those things where the software will trump like if yeah I'm if the Apple

01:32:07   Well that's like the whole... you can't do that.

01:32:11   It's important.

01:32:12   So I don't know, I don't know, my guess is I'm out of line with you.

01:32:17   I think they'll be fine on Android if they can stick.

01:32:20   I think the future for the Pebble on iOS is darker.

01:32:25   But my idea of buying this thing a month ago was are risk notifications useful?

01:32:33   And the answer I think is yes.

01:32:36   their frustrations with it, which I've voiced, which you've voiced as well.

01:32:41   But the idea that I can just very quickly look at something and especially like in the

01:32:46   car, the pebble is great.

01:32:48   Like I can just, you know, my hands are already up on the wheel and I can just turn my wrist

01:32:52   over and like not be tempted to look at my phone.

01:32:56   And I know before you ride in, I probably shouldn't even be doing the pebble in the

01:33:00   car, but whatever.

01:33:01   That's how life is.

01:33:03   So I think there's a lot of promise in this area of having something that is sort of a

01:33:08   satellite to your phone.

01:33:11   I don't think the Pebble is the ultimate answer, but I do think there are some cultural things

01:33:15   that have to catch up and I think things will.

01:33:17   I think there'll be a point where in a year, two years, three years, as more people are

01:33:21   wearing the Apple Watch or Android Wear devices or even the Pebble, that it's that stigma

01:33:28   of, "Hey, I'm looking at my watch in a meeting.

01:33:31   Am I being rude?

01:33:32   telling you subconsciously that I'm out of time, that will wear off.

01:33:37   And I think it sort of has to, and to a degree, for this to be accepted.

01:33:43   Even now, it's rude to pull your phone out, or I feel it's rude to pull your phone out

01:33:48   when you're having a one-on-one conversation with somebody.

01:33:51   But it's not common for me to be in a meeting and everyone has their iPhones out on the

01:33:55   table to just kind of keep a half-eye on it.

01:33:59   So I think we'll get there as a human race.

01:34:02   But it's, you know, I will say I'm more excited about the Apple Watch now than I was before

01:34:08   wearing a pebble because I've seen sort of that promise of, "Hey, you know, we can put

01:34:12   things a glance away," and my frustration not being able to interact with those things

01:34:18   will be dealt with with the Apple Watch.

01:34:21   And so I would say that it's, I'm probably more likely to jump in on generation one than

01:34:27   I would have been without this little experiment.

01:34:33   That mirrors a lot of my thoughts, although I like my pebble enough to continue to wear

01:34:37   it every day.

01:34:38   Yeah, I'm shipping mine back tomorrow.

01:34:40   Poor pebble.

01:34:41   Really sad conclusion.

01:34:43   That's alright.

01:34:44   Poor pebble.

01:34:45   Alright, I think that's about it for this week's episode of Connected.

01:34:49   If you'd like to find the show notes for this week, you can maybe go back to the start and

01:34:52   listen to my long explanation.

01:34:54   Otherwise, just go to relay.fm/connected/18.

01:34:59   If you'd like to find us on the internet, there's a few ways you can do that.

01:35:02   I am @imike on Twitter, I am YKE @federico.

01:35:08   Federico is @vitici, V I T I C C I, and Steven is @ismh on Twitter.

01:35:16   Federico writes the fantasticmaxstories.net and Steven Hackett writes at the lovely 512pixels.net.

01:35:22   We'll be back next week with another episode of Connected.

01:35:25   Until then, thanks to our sponsors.

01:35:31   And...

01:35:32   Linda, DevMountain and SMILE.

01:35:34   We'll be back.

01:35:35   Bye bye.

01:35:36   Arrivederci.

01:35:37   Adios.

01:35:38   [BLANK_AUDIO]