Upgrade - 109: YouTube Killed the Podcast Star

Episode Date: October 3, 2016

This week Myke starts a YouTube channel, Jason raises his hopes for new Macs in October, and we praise the new features of Messages while quibbling with the usability of its interface.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 109 today's show is brought to you by help spot ring and boom 2 from global delight my name is mike hurley and i am joined by the snellatron jason snell uh you can't do that, Mike. Exits are east and west. If you've listened to the members episode, you'll get that joke. If you haven't, go become a member. You can still get it.

Become a member. It's still available to you. How are you, Mr. Snell? I'm doing fine. I haven't been the Snellatron in a little while, so that was fun to do. Yeah, good, good. How are you?

Yeah, I'm good. A busy day today for me. I launched a YouTube channel. I saw that. I saw that. It is a little project that I've been... I've had kind of rattling around my brain for a while, and I've been working on it for a couple of weeks. And it's a vlog is what I'm working on.

And the style that I'm kind of working through is just I'm making videos about my life. The things that I do, the things that I think. I think that there's going to be a lot of crossover between the shows that I do because the shows that I make are about things that I like. Right. So I've made four videos so far. One of them includes the Amazon Echo quite significantly. And one of them includes pens. I saw that one.

I saw the one with pens. Yeah, that's the first full video. There's an episode one and then there are three episode zeros, which were just like tests, but I decided to put them up because I made them. And I'm pretty proud of it. And so far, people seem really happy with it. So I would really, really love it

if everybody listening would go and subscribe to the channel. The channel is Mike Hurley. So you can go to youtube.com slash Mike Hurley. But if you're on mobile, for a reason I cannot understand, you have to go to youtube.com slash user slash Mike Hurley. There seems to be some kind of bug with YouTube right now that any URL, it's not just like for people that have just started channels, just throws up an error when you do that.

I can't work this out. This is part of, so there's a couple of reasons for this, Jason, why I'm doing this. And this is exemplifying one of them. I'm trying to understand YouTube. Sure. Is one of them. So what goes into it, kind of what the challenges are of it. And this is one of them, right?

So like on this show, we have spoken so much about platforms and gatekeepers and stuff like that. This is the biggest one of all of them. It is. So I'm trying to understand what it's like to be within a system that you cannot control for your content, which is this. But also the flip side of this is i want to give myself over to their algorithm and see what happens i think i mean i i totally get where

your reasoning for for doing this and wanting to discover this one of the things that i had on my list when i started uh being an independent person was experimenting with youtube and i just haven't done more than a couple of videos. And it partly it's, I haven't had, uh, the idea that pushes me over the edge. And part of it is not having, you know, it's very time consuming and there are lots of reasons, but I, I too am fascinated by YouTube and it is, you know, having kids, uh, my, my son, YouTube is his only video entertainment. And for my daughter, it is a huge part of her video entertainment. Although now that she's a little bit older and a teenager, she's really into Netflix stuff too. So that's how she's kind of coming around to traditional television.

But YouTube was there first and is still a great love of hers. She loves YouTubers. Those are her TV stars. So I think it's a super important part as media people, right? It's a super important part of our landscape and the future. And so to kind of poo-poo it would be a big mistake. I'm still trying to figure out the right way for me to do it. And I suppose, you know, I've been putting it off. So it's great to see you jumping in i i'm struck by looking at your videos that it is an awful lot of work that you're putting

into those videos not just not just in in like final cut where i mean i wrote a post on six colors last week about slapping together the total party kill videos and how i i'm impressed at how easy it is to do that in final cut pro 10 i. I'm just amazed at how quickly I can put together something that looks more or less like I wanted it to look. But when I looked at your videos, I thought, you spent a lot of production time on it in terms of putting in text and overlays and things and the music and doing your editing.

And I've done video editing for like 20 years, 25 years. I know how much time that takes. But I also noted that you're committing to videoing your life, which means that now when you go to dinner with Adina, you're sort of committing to saying uh i'm going to consider what in my life is going to be uh something i document for everything you do which is more time and more more brain space that is taken up by it it's weird and i don't know how it's going to fall out yet i know i'm really excited about it right now and frankly adina seems excited about it too um it's great which is good because she would kind of have to be for this to work yes i thought that i thought that as as i saw her sitting there across from you at dinner smiling i thought well she's got to be okay with this or this is not going to happen she thought i was

taking a picture of her then uh-huh she did know that i ended up taking a video that i was going to use but she thought it was a photo so uh friend of the show james thompson developer peacock he sent me a message earlier and he said it looks like this is a lot of work how does this compare to audio so i've been doing i have not been tracking this properly because every single one of the videos has taken a vastly different amount of time to put together for reasons that i can't understand mainly because i'm still learning and there's like i see things that i want to do but i don't know how to do them so i have to work out how to do them but to kind of on the back kind of back of the envelope calculation um purely in the edit so let's say i just talking about editing with audio it takes me about two minutes to every

minute if i'm doing a full edit so i don't do this for all of our shows some shows i make notes and go back and edit and take it out quickly so like this show i make notes as we record for the things to cut out and it means i can get a 90 minute show edited in 15 minutes because this is a timely show we like like to get it out. But Cortex isn't, for example. So for Cortex, I do a full listen edit. And that takes about two minutes to every minute of what's recorded to do. So it's about twice as long to edit

as it is the recorded length. I would say right now for video, it's 45 to 60 minutes per minute of edit. Yeah. Let alone wrestling with youtube system oh yeah which is just crazy making like just doing things like putting in the annotations like the areas that you can click trying to deal with their system is crazy like i can't believe that youtube haven't released native tools to do this,

that you just upload the metadata, because part of the problem is dealing with their website and its caching. But anyway, I'm going to save this discussion for Cortex, because this is a little bit in the weeds now. I would love to hear you guys talk about it. Episode 38 of Cortex, which also came out today,

kind of talks about, in much, much more detail, why I'm doing this. And then me and Gray are going to kind of talks about in in much much more detail why i'm doing this um and then me and gray are going to kind of talk about this over the next few episodes as i come to terms with all of the things that are going on in my new youtube life which is a very very weird thing to say so just after we recorded last week's episode it was rumored that disney were in the fray for buying yeah it doesn't it never fails does it that uh we we do a subject and uh then like immediately after that episode posted like within like an hour of that episode posting the rumor was that disney was considering a bid for for twitter so i just want to warn everybody that uh when you

hear the news in the next couple of hours that twitter might also be bought by toyota or rolex or that they just flat out have been sold which i reckon is the most likely thing spacex the u.s army uh you know a shadowy billionaire industrialist oh great podcast i guess yeah then uh we did that apparently because we this is what we do is talk about things and then immediately other things happen um disney makes sense only to me people are like whoa disney that doesn't make any sense because they're thinking of disney as the brand and mickey mouse and theme parks and things like that but disney's a huge media company uh not just the movies from Disney and Marvel and Star Wars, but ESPN and ABC. So if you think about Twitter as a real time medium for sports and news, that's another thing. And reality TV shows and commentary about

things that are happening on television, that's all actually not as weird a thing as you might initially think. So I didn't think that was an unreasonable suggestion, but it just was a surprise to us because we had just talked about that subject. We had one little bit of follow-up too, which is, I know you mentioned Google and the real names policy and whether if Google is a suitor for Twitter, if Google might be better at that. And I complained about YouTube comments. Good luck with that, by the way, Mike. They've been really great so far. That is good.

And I've come around to Gray's opinion about YouTube comments, which is you just let them go. Just embrace them. And I don't know if he ever said that on a podcast. I asked him that in person. He said it on episode 38. So you're all good. When we had lunch,

I was like, what do you do about the YouTube comments? You don't have to look at them. Although he says, I look at them and laugh if there's something awful. Because it's like, whatever, it's a YouTube commenter. But if they bother you, just don't look at them. But leave them on because let whoever have their fun. And I kind of have come around to that now that they are what they are but um anyway uh it's uh so our listener harley wrote in um and said they moved away from that and actually linked to a recent study that said that uh that uh using real names

and having a real names policy doesn't help when it comes to abuse online so which is a shame i i was always under the impression that it would help in my brain you know like i just thought all of people were accountable but seems like maybe not so thank you to harley i'm glad you sent that in tony suggested for the comic segment com mic con how is this one sitting with you uh i i putting the con making a comic con instead of just comics actually makes me like it more so i'm kind of intrigued by that um i'm also thinking that since we've got mike that maybe mike's comics or comics with mike is enough just keep keep it simple so we've gone around this far.

Like weeks and weeks of suggestions and we're just going to call it Comics with Mike. Maybe so. I'm going to let you have the final decision on this whenever we get around to this. I'm still pondering. Still pondering. I also just wanted to include in the show notes

Joe Steele, fake name, wrote a blog post about the iPhone portrait mode where he goes into incredible detail about the things that he can see, good and bad, about the portrait mode. And I wanted to include this in the notes because Steele knows what he's talking about when it comes to visuals. So I thought it was just a good thing to include uh it really does upset me whenever i see any blog posts with my photos in them though from that first day because it just feels unfair like so he you know joe included a couple of pictures that i took yeah but it's just in the worst light possible he well he also has my picture that i took of my cat

which which is was good because it's got a great example of really inconsistent blurring effects in the foreground um but yeah yeah no it's a good it's a really good post he i mean as he says he is a professional at fake imagery yeah that's what he knows so he knows about faking you know uh things to look like they they came through a natural through natural light in a camera that's his job it's like i would imagine that sometimes for steel he causes those errors and then has to fix them with his work right like you know he creates things that don't look right and then they have to be fixed so yeah i mean look i could go around again and again

talking about this but i've been taking more pictures of this thing and i think it's freaking amazing and do you know what like there are some photos that i've been taking where i delete them because i can see some errors but i kind of don't care like the ones that i like i know that there are things in them that aren't magically perfect and that people can't take but it's like for me really is it's it's telling that everybody who is upset about this feature or thinks that it's not good or is unhappy with the results they own big cameras yeah i think that's i think that's right uh joe by the way mr steel himself uh suggests a uh a piece by uh stew Mashwitz that we'll put in the show notes about the depth effect. So thanks, Joe.

One last thing about the cameras. This is something that is weird, but okay. In low light situations, the two times mode is digital zoom. And I've been testing this out by putting my finger over the cameras on the plus.

And it's just a little bit strange i mean i can see why they're doing it and you can kind of i can kind of trick it like i can point it inside the room into a dark area and i can see it when i cover the camera then i point it at the window and it goes black as the cameras are switching over and i'm kind of like i'm fine with it like i'm because i know why it's doing it like it's trying to make sure it can get the best picture and the the low light from the other camera isn't great but it's like huh it's just weird i don't really have a lot to say about it but it's just like a weird thing so what i would suggest though if anybody is frustrated by this is to download a third-party camera app

which will allow you to control specifically which camera you're using. I've been using an app called ProCam just again to fiddle around with stuff as I'm doing my YouTubing stuff because all my videos are shot on my iPhone and I'm planning to leave it that way for the foreseeable future. And ProCam just does some crazy stuff and you can choose which camera lens you want to use. They have this 3D thing now where it uses both of them and it creates these like glitchy jiggly photos that go backwards and forwards and it looks kind of uh 3d it's really weird but it's a great app so um i recommend

it i'll put a link to it in the show notes but that's all i have to say jason it was very kind of backwards and forwards what i was talking about just there but there we go that's all i have to say jason it was very kind of backwards and forwards what i was talking about just there but there we go that's okay that's all right so what you're saying is that you had a different uh several different planes of depth in your conversation and then they were calculated and turned into a very blurry opinion yeah well only some of it some of it was perfectly in focus and the others we artificially blurred blurry around the edges joe will diagram your paragraph for you and tell you what you uh did right and wrong and it'll be fine you could do it for me you know because you're the pro i could i could this week's episode is brought to you by help spot if you are a person or if you are part of a company that deals with any kind of customer support you really should be looking at

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how HelpSpot can serve your support team. Thank you so much to HelpSpot for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Jason Snell. So, Mike Hurley. With my new video career here yeah so who's my new co-host once you become a huge uh video star yeah i don't know we'll find we'll work that out we'll work that i guess you will kill the radio star you're your video star you were your own video star killing your own radio youtube killed the podcast star oh man get the

buggles on the phone buggles 2.0 file a buggle report with anyway go mike at the movies nope let's stop now shall we uh as uh i am now finding new ways to put my Mac through its paces. I'm wondering, where are all of the Macintosh computers? It is October the 3rd. No, no. No, no, Mike. You know what it is? What is it? Mactober!

Oh, yeah? We're in Mactober, are we? I think maybe we are. Tell me about this. I am increasingly optimistic. Let's put it that way. I feel good about this. I feel like we're going to get Macs of some sort this month.

The rumors are heating up. They've recycled the MacBookbook pro with oled touch bar and touch id sensor rumor again um but it's out there again it sounds like it just it you know they couldn't ship it for wwdc and so they delayed it but the rumors are swirling that it is coming soon uh there was a a story on a site that I've never heard of that was referred to by, I think, MacRumors.com as a shaky rumor, which is hilarious to me that rumor sites are calling out other sites for their quality of rumors. But hey, they're the ones who know. That actually said that there was going to be a media event on October 24th, which is a Monday, which seems really weird to me.

But I feel like this is, if you look back, Apple has more often than not over the last few years had an October event following their big blowout iPhone September event. And last year they wouldn't need another event to launch them. But obviously that didn't happen. So maybe this is something that has sort of come into focus in the last few months that, yeah, we're going to need to go back to the two-step instead of just the single event like we did last year. So I think that's the most likely scenario. And when you talk about the rumors that are heating up again, reheating those rumors for the MacBook Pro, when you talk about the rumors of a new MacBook Air, which baffled us sort of when we heard that initially. But, you know, those are out there, a USB-C MacBook Air, maybe even a MacBook Air with a Retina display.

I don't know what of that is true or not, but there's enough accumulating here. And the bottom line is that MacBook Pro cannot be launched with a press release. It is a dramatic change to the flagship Mac, essentially. And so how could they just do that with a press release? So I just feel like all signs are pointing to a mid to late October Apple event somewhere, maybe on campus, maybe it's town hall again, one last ride for town hall,

an encore performance at town hall, or maybe it's something that's offsite. But because it's a Mac event, it won't need the media scrutiny that an iPhone event requires. So I don't know, I'm feeling better about this being, plus they need it, right? I mean, that's the other bottom line here is that those products all need to be refreshed. Macs are not necessarily holiday splurge items, but still going into the holiday season with a line that is other than the MacBook

completely covered in dust and cobwebs seems like a bad idea to me so regarding the uh the weirdness of the macbook air um my theory on this it's not a complicated theory but it's my theory there is no macbook air that's actually a refresh to the macbook but the wires got crossed like that they're going to refresh the macbook again it could be it could be um because i seriously cannot understand why they would do this anything to the macbook air now i think that i think the question is the macbook is well apple knows how the macbook is selling better than we do right and the macbook is a beautiful piece of hardware but it is limited

the processor isn't very fast right but that's what i think is they're going to do they're going to put something more comparable in there yeah well so this is this is the question but but um would you do that in an in a in an air uh which is this old enclosure um it seems weird to me if they take the macbook air which rather than just having a variation on the macbook right but it may be that their feeling is like the macbook air still still sells well and they can without having to go because the the the macbook because it's so small and fanless has incredible limitations that the MacBook Air enclosure doesn't have. So they could put a Retina display in the 13-inch MacBook Air enclosure and still have

a pretty powerful processor in there compared to what they can fit in the MacBook. And so I wonder if that's the conversation is like, look, if everybody loves the MacBook Air and it's still selling really well, and it allows us to kind of hold down the bottom of our product line on the laptop front in terms of price. And we still can't really crank up the power on the MacBook. It's just too early. Why not just keep the MacBook Air around another year or two? It's not like the old Apple Playbook. I will grant you 100%. But it's a new Apple. And I do wonder if somebody made that argument that they'd be better off in the interim having a product that's not the high-end MacBook Pro but is also not the speed-limited and port-limited MacBook.

I just can't stand the design of that thing anymore. That horrific, huge, silver bezel. The bezel. Hey, I have one. I don't use it every day anymore but i have one sitting right behind me now and and i love that i love that computer so much but compared to apple's entire product line it looks wrong doesn't it i mean i suppose they could change the bezel if they're if they're making it a retina display maybe they change the bezel or something but

it does it is the last um it's i don't even know how you you call it it's the last series design language right it's like the previous generation design language of apple laptops and it's still kind of hanging around so i i don't know what that is i think you're totally right that that one of the problems with especially supply chain rumors is that you don't know what the marketing is right so yeah there are there are it's just like remember the iphone math which was iphone plus i guess uh there are lots of uh you could you could be seeing a 13 inch uh usbc laptop from apple that is not going to be called a macbook air and doesn't look like

the macbook air but is also not the super thin macbook it's a different macbook and they call it something different or they call it the macbook or maybe they do call it the macbook air that's the part that we don't know but there are those rumors out there about that which was surprising but they have not faded away so um so what what it's called would be an interesting part of it and if the the MacBook Air keeps on living for a while, I think that's fine. I think there's a place for it. Because the MacBook, as futuristic as it is and as perfectly good as it is for a lot of uses, there are also a lot of people who use a MacBook Air who probably would not choose to switch to a macbook because of the limitations of it right now i mean today maybe not in two years so i want to go back to that timing for a second october 24th feels really late because then you're looking at what shipping notes start in november

maybe or like within a couple of days, basically start in November. Yeah, but that is something that Macs sometimes are shipping same week, right? They have done that with Mac announcements. Also, they've done Mac announcements where they ship certain models, you know, that day or at the end of that week, and then other ones come later, right? And it ends up being, oh, well, that one didn't ship until December 28th. That has happened too. But again, holiday, you could refresh the bulk of the product line. And then if one of the products seems problematic, right? One of the problems is like, ah, this is hard to make.

It's having delays on the product line. They say, well, that one will be available later. And they just kind of move on with it. But it's late if you're thinking about capturing holiday shoppers but if they're all in the channel by the first couple weeks in november i think it'll be fine yeah it's it's um it just seems it just seems too close to the holidays you know and i don't know why they're releasing them i don't know if they're doing them for the holidays or they're doing them just like because at this point but yeah or because of timing that this is when they've got the they feel like they have to they've also been pressured you know with the intel chip delays they may feel pressured to use maybe they they almost certainly had a

different schedule planned and the way that intel's chip releases are falling they can't so they they may have finally decided we just need to do a refresh now even though it's not the ideal time because we we can't we wait we've waited too long already and now if we wait for the next shoe to drop it will be spring and everything will be six months even six months older especially when they're sitting on not just revisions but potential revolutions in the products right like that the macbook pro is a brand new macbook pro it's not just like the macbook pro that we know and love you know right there are also rumors that um sierra is the the the next beta of sierra that's one of the prime features that's going to go into it is the support for all the,

you know, the touch bar and touch ID on the Mac and all of that, which, you know, people were intuiting from the, the fact that Sierra has this unlock Apple watch unlock feature and Apple pay that all uses iOS devices that, that, uh, yeah, that uses touch ID. So, um, you know, the, that you can do Apple pay, but you need to have a device that that you're you're authenticating that's external the logical thought is well this will be on max in the future when will that be and and uh so yeah all signs point to it and and all timing suggests that it was meant to be sooner and it didn't get out then so But I think it's going to happen. I'm optimistic about it.

This is not one of those sources tell me that, but it's not that. But my confidence in this being a real thing has gone up, I guess is what I would say. I was in an Apple store yesterday. I went to the covent garden apple store because i was in the area and i wanted to just just just to hold the jet black black a little bit more than i had because i'd only touched one for like a second yeah and i wanted to kind of

pick it up and yeah it does feel really great like it feels amazing to hold it is a very strange feeling product it i almost can't believe that there's aluminium in there um but i also again turned the thing over and it was just caked in hand grease further proving to myself why i just couldn't deal with that phone um but walking around the apple store and kind of just looking at stuff, and they had all these Macs everywhere, right? Because obviously they sell them. And every single one of them had people in front of them playing around with them. And certainly that day, people were buying them, right? Because that just, I assume, is the natural thing

in what is currently the only central London store because the Regent Street store is still closed for renovations. So there's going to be people buying those computers that day and they're going to be spending a lot of money and probably many of them, if not all of them, will fall outside of the return window. And there's just a part of me that's like, those computers are really old.

It's not that like if somebody goes in and buys an iphone three weeks before the next iphone because that thing's good you've got some time on that right but you've got people going in there and buying macbook airs and macbook pros it's like those machines you're starting off of a computer that's two or three years old yeah and it for full price for full price and there i know that like i am not asking apple to like reduce their stuff i'm not asking them to pre-announce their stuff like i'm not saying that but it's just at this point this is a rarity for them where the entire mac line is old you know they're the the mac pro and the Mac Mini have had this problem for as long as I've been interested in Apple products. That they go for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of days, if not thousands of days, without updates.

Especially the Mac Mini. That product has always kind of been in the corner, right? It's just this thing. It is a gateway drug. It's just there. Yeah, it's like a spork it's it's a utility item that not that few people uh care about and some people love but it's good to have it in the world it was created at a very different time it was created for pc switches who

already had all the hardware they already had their monitor and their keyboard and their mouse and quite frankly that's just not a thing anymore. No, it survived because it's useful for some of Apple's customers to have as a second computer or a server. I mean, there are lots of reasons that it still exists. And I think if those reasons didn't exist, it would have gone away. There is an audience for it,

but it is such a small audience that it is, yeah, it's updated in small ways every few years and that's fine but it's to see the laptops in this state in the state is is very weird and it should be there is nothing that calls this out more than standing at the top of one of those glass staircases and looking down at these tables and tables and tables full of Macs with people in front of them, potentially weighing up a buying decision. Like that's really where it's like,

oh man, what are you doing? It's like you want to push through the crowd going, stop, no, stop, don't, don't do it. Yeah, it felt like that. Other than the MacBook. You can buy the MacBook. I think the Mac, buy the MacBook. It's fine.

I think you could buy that because it was updated in the spring it's fine but yeah even if it gets updated in a couple of weeks that one's still pretty much fine yeah uh it's not gonna be yeah if they updated it in a couple weeks it wouldn't be that much better than the current macbook it would just be a it's a macbook yeah it's fine but um but the others all the others basically i had this i was i was sitting in in for Leo Laporte on his radio show, his call-in show. Oh, I forgot to watch that. I'm going to watch it. No, I'm sure they archive of it.

And it was me and the home theater geek guy. So we're like, if you've got Apple or home theater questions, call in. But one guy called in and he's like, I really want to get a new Apple laptop. What are my options? And I walked through them and he was like, yeah, I think for my uses, I really want the MacBook Pro. And I said, well, here's what you do. Don't buy one until they announce new ones because they're really old. And it was like, that was what I need to, that's how I need to express this at this point is wait. you just have to wait for all these things. So, uh, you know, I would imagine that if Apple does an, a Mac event and it's mostly about that MacBook pro, uh, they will probably also update everything that except maybe the MacBook, that would be my, my gut feeling is

that if it's a Mac event, they're going to tell you how great Sierra is Again, just to remind you, they're going to talk about the MacBook Pro. And yeah, maybe there's a maybe that 13 inch MacBook Air slash MacBook slash something else is the other product that they talk about there. And then they mentioned that the Mac Pro gets updated, the Mac mini maybe gets updated. And the iMacs are very popular computers. And they get they have gotten updated the last two years this time of year. So another speed boost for them. If there's a product that brings Touch ID to the iMac, like a keyboard with Touch ID or something like that, which has not been rumored. But I do wonder about that, if that might be part of this story is an accessory for unless it's built into the iMac itself.

But something like that for the iMac would be a kind of an interesting thing to see, too. Yeah, I can imagine this. I can imagine this event. I just I I'm going to maybe I'm wishing it into existence here. I don't know. But I feel like one of the last couple of Tuesdays in October, hopefully we'll get an invite. And it'll be a nice smaller crowd, people who care about what's going on with the Mac, which is nice. I'd like to go back to the Mac, so to speak. Speaking of which, this episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Boom 2 from Global Delight, which is our lovely little Mac app. We all use our Macs for

different purposes. Some of us use it professionally for creative stuff, maybe for designing. Others maybe stick to daily usage like Netflix and YouTube, you know, just consuming media. But one feature that all of these types of things depend on is the use of the system's volume. So we've all found times where I think we just need a little bit more from what our Mac can output. We like to have our favorite music louder. We maybe wish that our movies sounded a little bit crisper. And we also want our Skype call audios like this to be more enhanced. Well, Boom 2 by Global Delight does exactly this. Boom 2 is a small yet powerful app that enhances the volume of your Mac. When you install

Boom 2, it will automatically calibrate itself to your system's audio, and whenever any audio comes out of your Mac, it will boost it to perfection. Even the most feeble of sounds are amplified to the best of their possible range. Boom 2 promises an immersive and crystal-clear audio experience. It works across your entire system, so be it when you're using editing software or browsing the web, the volume will get intelligently boosted when you need it. The app smartly tunes itself to the perfect highs and lows and boosts the volume to the best-suited range. Global Delight believes that Boom 2 is something

that there's simply just no going back from. Boom 2 also comes with amazing audio effects, which are available as in-app purchases as well. The effects blend beautifully with the audio that you're listening to and create an addictive audio environment. Above all of this, Boom 2 also lets you play around with the output

of its customizable equalizers, letting you tweak your own output to your heart's content. I remember when I was a MacBook Air owner, Jason, I had an 11- macbook air for many years boom was absolutely indispensable to into me because i couldn't hear a thing coming out of the speakers and i used to use boom to great effect to be able to watch and consume any media yeah that was we did a macworld best of show about it because it was uh it was very impressive to get

good you know much louder sound out of uh speakers that were not very good at it so if you want to be immersed into an audio experience like never before go to boom for mac.com that's b-o-o-m-f-o-r-m-a-c.com the app comes with a seven-day free trial, which lets you use the entire apps, including all of the effects. Happy booming. Thank you so much to Global Delight for supporting this show and RelayFM. Alright, so let's talk about messages,

shall we? You wrote a nice little post on Six Colors about some of the trouble with messages from a usability perspective. Right, I mean, my point is not that I've written with messages from a usability perspective. Right. I mean, my point is not that I've written and talked about the fact that I really like the features in the new iMessage, you know, stickers, new messages stuff. I like it.

Stickers and lasers and all that stuff. It's fun. People can complain about it, but it's fun. And people like sending stuff like that that's just people like having fun when they're sending messages to each other not all people no we hear from people who don't like fun things and that's fine you don't have to use those features but the my bigger point was i love i love that apple dumped all of this stuff into this into their apps especially on ios i wish they had done more

of it on the mac but um i love that they they said okay we're bringing the fun we're putting all this stuff in there we're just going to pour it all in what i don't love is that it is the on the interface standpoint from the usability standpoint it's a mess it's like it's not you once you know how to use messages you can use all of those features fairly easily but you have to know how to use it and the idea that you have to sort of like discover all of the complex secrets of your messaging app seems a little counterproductive to me so i would like to make a similar opening statement um in that i love the new i message uh i really like that it's bringing more conversations for me from other places from other apps back into it because

it's so good and i'm having a lot of fun talking to people in it like i really love the stickers i actually really like the effects because they're fun uh kind of silly and sticky in the way that like they're making me want to stay within the application and use it more. I love all the rich previews, the rich media previews, like previewing tweets, previewing different posts. I love all of that stuff. It means you don't have to keep clicking backwards and forwards between applications. And all of these things have been a much-needed change for iMessage to make it kind of a real 2016 internet aware messaging platform but there are issues

and it's mostly around the fact that how you mentioned pouring it all in they didn't change messages they just bolted all of these features onto the existing applications and this always creates issues when you do something like this

and I can see why they did it the way that they did, because they wanted to kind of add these things into the familiar environment. But in doing that, things are really hidden and complicated. And your post kind of breaks down a few of them, so I thought we'd touch on them. So the first one being the little blue up send arrow, which just in and of itself makes no sense as a as a glyph yeah it's it's you get used to it and you start to realize that's what you're doing but i have yet to encounter somebody who's upgraded to ios 10 this includes everybody in my family and this actually includes me because

by the time i installed ios 10 beta i had forgotten the detail of that from the demo at the developers conference. And you're sitting there and you're going, what do I do now? Like you type a message and you're like, how do I send this? And it's just, it used to be a thing that said send, right? And now there's an up arrow and you get used to it, but it's not obvious. And it's sort of like it starts there where you need to intuit what between the gray rectangular box with a kind of like a carrot pointing to the right. And then you've got a blue circular box with an arrow pointing up. And I would also say you're using two different kinds of pointers here in two different box shapes a circle and a rectangle i also find that weird uh but anyway that's that's

what's going on here uh it's it's it's less obvious than it was before and and everybody seems a little stymied by it when they first see it. And then something that I find really weird is that it is on 3D touch enabled devices, you 3D touch this arrow to get to the effects, you know, like to the lasers and the confetti and all that stuff. On non-3D touch devices, you long press to get it. Yep. But on 3D touch devices, you can't long press to get it. Yeah, right.

Just 3D touch, lazy person, it says. Push harder. But my biggest issue with this is that you 3D touch, you swipe up while still holding down to choose your effect. You let go, and then you still have to press send. When I let go, it should send. Right, because you've done that in one swift or one swift movement to get to that point you're showing very clear preference for that you want to let go and

have it and have it send and instead it just takes you back and then you you tap and and yeah which every time feels like it's broken to me i heard from several people when i mentioned offhandedly that you long press on the arrow to get those effects, who had no idea. Nope. Right? Because that's even more. I mean, 3D Touch in general is a not discoverable feature. And you have to just push on things hard and see what happens. And long press is similar.

I mean, it's good that those are there. I advocated for that, that you've got to have an alternative to 3D Touch for people who can't do it. But behind that arrow, I think that there are not a lot of people expecting that there's a whole category of effects. Because remember, there's still the gray thing pointing right

that's over there that reveals a whole bunch of effects. So I think people assume that that's what's available to them once they explore and don't understand that beneath that send arrow, which also is scary because if you don't do it right, you've just sent a message, which I think people are reluctant to press the arrow if they are not done with what they're doing. Even if you're going through the arrow, not sending it because instead you're picking an effect.

Yeah. The handwriting keyboard is weird. I completely agree with you that it is not important enough for a software keyboard key and it's not important enough for automatically switching to when you put your phone in landscape.

Yeah. Plus it's unlike any other interaction in messages is that on the iPad, you get this ink button on your keyboard and then on the iPhone, you don't. And the only indication that you can do inky handwriting in messages

is if you turn your phone sideways and then that's the interface for it. And how do you discover that? Why is it completely different interaction from all the other effects? I don't know. Also, there are two, we'll get to it, but also there are two different things where you can use your finger to draw messages to people.

Digital touch. Right. They behave completely differently and are located in different places. And I don't really understand that decision either digital touch on ios devices is flat out inscrutable to me yeah no it's it's baffling i mean it's so baffling that if you tap they had the little animated like trying to tell you what happens which itself is inscrutable the you know if you you know it they've got these like three it's a strip of like three icons explaining to you

what they are and they animate to say, like, if you put two fingers, you get a heart and you put one finger down and you get a fireball or whatever it is. But even that's so confusing that if you tap on that animated little chart, it brings up a full screen bit of documentation explaining to you how to use messages for digital how to use digital touch basically and why was this the only part of messages that got any documentation inside of the application i don't know like because you know you can argue that like apple wouldn't give you a splash screen when you open messages like a little tour even though that's the way to do these things right that that's kind of if what you're going to do is take an existing ui put these features into it the way that you tell people about them

is by actually showing them right full screen little tour this is how you do it right that's kind of the way you do it but it's very unlikely for apple to do something like that it's very unlikely for many developers to do something like that because it's kind of admitting that these things aren't intuitive yeah which they aren't so why did they do this for digital touch but nothing else they've admitted digital touch wasn't intuitive like it's strange to me and also like the heartbeat doesn't make any sense because it's not a real heartbeat yeah the taps don't make any sense because they don't hit you on the wrist that's why it's only really works on the watch like the only part of this digital touch thing that was kind of needed or not needed but is kind of any good really in my opinion is taking a

picture and drawing on the picture that's right everything else i don't get it the fireball one what does that even do it doesn't even do anything it's just like this little orb yeah that's my son is sending me fireballs that's what he does every and then, I just get a fireball from him. And I think it's just because that's his, he knows to put down the one finger. Also, we haven't mentioned yet that there's the, digital touch starts in the small area, but if you tap the right thing, it expands

and you get like full screen digital touch canvas. I don't know who thinks digital touch is a great idea at apple um on the on the apple watch it was silly but a little bit fun and oversold and over emphasized in the interface and they've de-emphasized it in watch os 3 but now here it comes in messages being emphasized like this yeah it. It's like two teams got different memos. The watch team got told to de-emphasize it. Then the iMessage team got told to emphasize it. Bring it up.

Yeah. It's right. And again, it's the second feature that lets you draw in messages. So take your pick based on whether you want ink on paper or whether you want like a light colored thing on a dark background, which is there because of the OLED screen on the Apple Watch and they've imported it from the Apple Watch. I don't know. So that's, yeah.

Yeah. It's not great. You're right. Drawing on pictures is like the best part of that. Which I like. I like that part. I think that's cool. It's basically markup.

But it's got that kind of shiny neon. Like I like all of that. I like that. I think that's cool. But I think a lot of the tapping effects, you're best served using stickers for that stuff as opposed to the taps. Yeah, the taps are really there because you're so limited on the Apple Watch with what you can do. And so then bring that over to the iPhone. Other than that it is Apple Watch compatibility, I guess, so that if you send a digital touch to somebody who's using an apple watch they'll get the taps and things along with a phony heartbeat but this continues the chain of perplexity for me though because it's like okay

so you did this because you want to have parity between the apple watch and the phones, right? So it's not just the phones that can send and receive the digital touch stuff. So the watches that can send and receive the digital touch stuff, you put it on the phones as well. So then they mix over and then you can kind of, okay, all right, I see where you're coming from. You want to make sure that all of your devices can kind of interact with this stuff. But what about the Mac and anything? Because the Mac cannot do any of the stuff that ios can do so like you felt it was important enough to put

digital touch in the iphone so that there was another device to communicate digital touch stuff with the watch but then none of the stickers none of the apps none of the digital stuff is in the mac so that can't communicate correctly with the iphone it's like this this weird disconnect stuff which always feels to me like as a consequence of apple secrecy that like these teams don't get to work together properly that's the way i always think of it in my head i could be completely wrong but that's how i see it you'd think there would be one messages team, though, on all platforms. You would. I mean, that's all I have to say. I have no idea.

Yes, you would think that, but some of the features seem to argue otherwise at times. Should we talk about the message app store? That's another challenge. Let me quote from your article here. Here's how to direct someone to the messages app store. Tap the gray greater than sign, then the app store icon, then the four circles icon in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Then the icon with a plus symbol that's labeled store. See, it's that simple. That's simple. That's it's a nightmare. It, that is a nightmare piece of a term that I've heard people use recently that I like mystery meat, like interface.

Yeah. And the idea that there's no way to know it. A term that I've heard people use recently that I like, mystery meat. Mystery meat interface, yeah. And the idea that there's no way to know it. You kind of just have to guess it. I don't think we're saying that this is easy stuff. How do you add an interface for all of these features? But as somebody looking at the end product, it's hard to approve of what got done. Like, it's hard for me to say, yeah, this is a good way to approach this because it seems so scattershot it's not like they buried everything under the that little gray uh arrow thingy uh they they buried some of the things under there and some of them are not under

there and some of them are one level under there and some of them are two or three levels under there so it's all it's all over the place them people are really excited about stickers and yet the access to stickers you've got a if you want to get stickers through that interface you kind of have to go deep down in because you have to go past your existing stickers to get to the app store to get more stickers and having the having that weird kind of like alternate app store you know i'm not sure's a good idea. I'm not sure that what they should not, maybe what they should have is just a button that takes you to the app store, app,

and shows you stickers. I don't know. Having that little store without throwing you out is kind of nice though. Because all you're seeing there is those apps. If you went to the app store, it might be a bit trickier. There's nothing stopping them from having a button somewhere that just opens the App Store app and shows you the sticker section. And you're looking at stickers.

And it's just the same as you're seeing, but you're not inside messages anymore. And it just goes back there. It's a little weird because you end up in this kind of strange modal app store inside messages that doesn't behave quite like the regular app store and then there's also like the manage apps icon having having a second class of apps at all is strange that that these are these are apps but they sort of aren't apps and they show up in a different app launcher than the regular app launcher which i understand why but it's just conceptually it's a it's it's a difficult thing but i just it it it it takes a long way when i somebody was like oh that stickers are cool how do i get stickers and i thought about how to explain to them how to get there and i realized wow that's a lot that's a long way to go

to explain how you get to the sticker app store basically i want to talk about stickers as well now because i love stickers there are some things here like i i wished that stickers synced across platforms so like the stickers that you downloaded the sticker packs i would love to be able to have them sync and install automatically without needing to have all apps sync oh i'm sure that if i had all purchased apps sync across devices maybe it would show up or i bet maybe it would then just show up in the store and i'd have to manually install them on each device anyway but like i wish that they just synced across devices and their positions so what i'm finding myself doing is every few days i'll open one of my ipads i'll

go into the store i'll go to my purchases i'll download all of them iPads, I'll go into the store, I'll go to my purchases, I'll download all of them. Because I have to go to the App Store purchases, not the messages App Store purchases. So to install them all. Then their positions aren't the same as on my other devices, so I either change them or just leave them. And that's kind of frustrating. Because... It frustrates me, because I really like to use them.

In a minute I'm going to talk about some of my favorites but i wish that there that this just worked better i wish that also when you didn't get to the limit like those little little kind of dots at the bottom that it then starts to sneak under the other ui which is clearly a bug that never got fixed but everybody encountered on day one because there's so many sticker packs um i had no idea that you could rotate stickers and change their sizes so like you drag up and they just use another finger to like turn them around or make them bigger i was maybe using messages for like nearly two months before i knew this i just i was just like one day so i think it was you sent me a sticker upside down and i was like how did you do that i sent you skeletor upside down yeah and uh

easter egg that conversation i've discovered today is in the um app store screenshot for the incomparable sticker pack it is the conversation that me and you had where i found out i could turn stickers upside down is the conversation is you then used it as the the thing which i just found out about today whilst going through the app store to pick out some of my favorite sticker packs to put in the show notes i saw that you did that and it really made me laugh so yeah i wished i wished that it was better um i don't know if it will ever get better because they wouldn't make any significant changes to ios 11 and then by that point everybody's just used to it. So maybe by then it's like a moot point anyway but

I wish that they would have done more to kind of maybe redo messages. Our phones are so big now. There's so much of that stuff that they could have put in a bar above the message field. Like how Facebook does it. It can get a bit messy

but Facebook just has this bar which allows you to quickly get to all of your apps and stickers and emoji and stuff. I kind of wish they would have just done that. There are a bunch of applications, even on the iPhone, where Apple does this stuff, and so many developers do this stuff. Add that app-specific keyboard row. I really wish that they would have done something like that. They would have been able to get way more buttons in there

they could have split up stickers and apps into their own little trays it would have been really nice yeah I kind of feel like what we're really saying here is that obviously the people who built messages were put to work adding all these features and by and large

we have issues maybe with digital touch but by and large it's not like i have problems with the features i think the features are fun i love the idea that they wanted to make more fun right but it does feel a little bit like they had more time to get the features right than to get how they all work together seamlessly in one app right and that is what feels like a hodgepodge to me which is why my story is something like like great features bad usability it's like you know yes but also no honestly it's probably the way it should be done get the features right and then find a way to put them in and then it may just be that you run out of time and you just kind of have to put them

wherever they need to go because it's arguably more important that the features work than them be easily findable i feel like that digital touch feature shouldn't have shipped but yeah yeah i mean i question its existence in general digital touch is somebody's baby and that person is high up enough that they can, against maybe any people telling them otherwise, just keep putting it in there. Yeah. Because, yeah, I would rather have like a sketch feature that maybe has colors and stuff and not just the ink. And that also lets you draw on pictures if you want.

I mean, having a single feature that lets you do that. But instead, we've got kind of the ink feature and then we've got the separate digital touch feature that's complicated and you've got all the finger gestures and yeah the pure maximum that it should have gone to was just exactly what the watch has because the phone has more right like it has hearts and heartbreak and fireballs they should never have been there i don't know why they're there reasons i don't know let me jason can i run through some of my favorite sticker packs yes let's get positive here because i want to bookend this with talking about probably

my favorite ios feature of the last two years which is the inclusion of stickers because they are so much fun and they make my messages way better and it's like emoji who i've got stickers now right uh i love the stamp pack by Illuminated Bits. There'll be links to all of these in the show notes. The stamp pack is basically just tons and tons of stamps that you can put over things, including Phyla Radar, which is a hilarious stamp. The Extra Finer by pen addict listener and aficionado Lee Reyes.

It's basically a bunch of beautifully illustrated which she did uh fountain pen and uh fountain pen related stickers of course uh there is the ragtag classic pack which is a bunch of animated um emoji kind of like things which i really like the best one there they have a mic drop an an animated mic drop sticker, which is great. Grammar Snob, which I love because I get to correct my own grammar with all the messages, errors that I make. Aardman Face Bomb, which is hilarious. It's just Aardman Animation has created a bunch of eyes and faces, like mouths and stuff, so you can put them over other people's pictures, which is good you know like this one of the great things about every time anybody ever sends a picture to you or in any message that these days it just gets immediately

sticker bombed the emojipedia flag stickers pack by jeremy burge of emojipedia because it has the hello internet flag and the flaggy flag so it has nail and gear and flaggy flag i love that because mostly because i love sending the flaggy flag sticker to gray it's effectively the only reason that i like that this thing exists uh sticker pals which is a ton of stickers it can be a little bit confusing to work through this application sometimes but the david lanham animations is so good um and the stickers are so good that it's worth it david lanham did a bunch of uh of icons for me when we did the mac user blog at mac world that i loved i love his work so i was happy to see that he did this sticker pack me too uh the hipster sticker pack because of course there's

like a little character looks like me and i can put beards and top hats and things on everybody and of course the incomparable sticker pack oh yes well that's the finest of all the sticker packs because i've all the stickers i swept out all of the uh art that we've collected over the years and just dumped it into a sticker pack that you can get for free it's great so if you want to send skeletor you can now or the shame burrito you can do that or glenning so i will say i will say at this point and we've mentioned it before there are relay stickers in the works it is coming they are uh they're in testing right now because it's it's part of our application we're not just releasing a pack um and we're trying to

do some cool stuff with that so yeah you You may be asking yourself, how does one test stickers? The answer is very carefully. Well, no, I just send them all to you. Yeah, that's okay. So, yeah, I'm very excited about all stickers. And, of course, our stickers as well. Mr. Jason Snell, I believe that it is time to take a break because it is Ask Upgrade time. Ask Upgrade. This episode of Upgrade and Ask Upgrade is brought to you by the Ring Video Doorbell.

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Thank you so much to Ring for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay, Jason Snell, it's time for some Ask Upgrade. No lasers. Yay! No, I already did the lasers. There you go. The lasers have now

landed. Thank you. Brett wants to know, yes, can the iPhone 7 Plus use the MacBook Adorable USB-C to lightning charger or the iPad Pro charger for fast charging? Not that I've noticed, and from things I've seen online and i don't

have an accurate source for this so don't quote me that it had been checked to see if this device was capable of usb 3 speeds and transfer of and and it's not and it currently under the 12.9 ipad pro is the only ios device that can take advantage of the usbc power and transfer speed yep seems so that that seems to be the case that that hasn't come to take advantage of the usbc power and transfer speed yep seems so that that seems to be the case that that hasn't come to the rest of the the product line which is weird i agree i i wonder about that sometimes i i wonder about the ipad pro um where they're going with it and i occasionally wonder to myself if they might put more ports on it at some point, which I know is wacky for an iOS device, but I don't know. Could you put a USB-C port on an iPad Pro in addition to lightning?

At this point, I think they should, honestly. I think that would be great, right? Because then they're saying this is a real computer that can be used with more peripherals, and it's Pro. That's one of the things that makes it Pro. I think that might be an interesting choice for them to have it be, have it have the same ports as the MacBook. Casper wanted to know,

now that the iPhone has a non-button button that vibrates, do you think it will come to the iPads? Now, I want to put something out here. And I may be thinking of this, Jason, as like the MacBook Adorables keyboard that keyboard has not yet found its way to other products

because that keyboard is needed there for other reasons like that little butterfly super shallow keyboard. Apple are going to continue to and they still have make keyboards with more kind of depth of travel I wonder if the non-button button the taptic home

button will only remain on the iphone because it's needed there for space reasons and that the ipads that don't even have taptic motors in them will continue to have a physical home button? I think it's possible. I think the question is, why does that non-moving home button exist on the iPhone 7? It's possible that this is the only time we'll see that product because if it's all screen next time, the home button may completely change its appearance again. So do you need to replace the physical button on the iPad

or is it good enough? You don't need the space. You're not worried about the fact that it's a moving. I think what's the cost of it and is there a benefit? And I'm not sure whether the iPads have that benefit or not. I'm sure Apple knows how to make it now, right? So if they feel like there's a direct benefit to doing it, but I'm not sure they're trying to waterproof the iPads and all of that. I think Taptic Engine is a good question on the iPad, right? I mean, the iPhone has, the iPhone 7 has all those Taptic features all over the

interface now, and the iPad has none of those, and it also has no 3D Touch. And part of the problem is a much larger device, you've got to do more work in terms of vibration and in terms of reading the screen for 3D Touch kind of stuff. And so I think it's a really good question of how far do the ipad and iphone diverge in terms of features and does apple care about bringing those features to the ipad or or does apple say look you know taptic stuff is fun but it's not an ipad feature like whether that's because they don't want to bother or whether that's because they feel like the products are used differently and they don't have um they don't have have bother or whether that's because they feel like the products are used differently and they don't have to have those things. It'll be interesting to see what happens there because that really is a choice that Apple has to make. They can keep them in lockstep

even if it's delayed by a year or whatever, but they can say, okay, new iPads next spring and they've got 3D Touch or they've got the Taptic Engine or they've got the non-moving home button. And will they do that or will they instead say, yeah ipads don't do that just iphones and here's why yeah see i i just wonder if you could really do taptic on a device that big but that's what i wonder about be hard right i mean i'm sure you could but you might have to do like multiple engines in different parts and have them you know move simultaneously uh in order to get that effect it would be putting them in the corners maybe yeah different engineering challenge for sure um similar to what we talked about with 3d touch where if you're if you're if you're reading the strain across that you know that big screen comparatively giant screen

um it's a harder trick than doing 3d touch on the smaller screen not that they can't do it but it's it's more work and do they want to do it is that a priority for them in terms of the ipad daniel's asked now that you guys seem to be using ios more than ever what email client have you settled on jason uh well i am not happy with my we're going to talk about this in a forthcoming episode of free agents i'm not happy with my we're going to talk about this in a forthcoming episode of free agents i'm not happy with my email setup on ios right now um i don't have a i'm not using any of the fancy uh you know defer your email for later kind of mail processing features right now i've tried a bunch of them none of them really worked for me and i've gone back to kind of plain vanilla

mail so on ios i'm just using Apple Mail right now. And part of that was because I wanted to spend time with Apple Mail and iOS 10. Every time you do a new version, I feel like it's worth doing that. And it's simple and it's reliable in a way that the other apps that I was using were not so reliable with. And since I'm using basically Gmail on the Mac, it seems like the best solution for now. But I may try something else at some point, but I've just reverted to default and I'm using Apple Mail. I use AirMail and I've been very happy with AirMail. It has some rough edges in places, but it's incredibly powerful.

It has some rough edges in places, but it's incredibly powerful. And I'm able to get a lot of stuff done on my iOS devices in a really interesting way. A lot of the stuff that it can do with integrating other applications is really great. I love some of the notification features that it has. It is a powerful application, but sometimes its power can kind of shake it off course a little bit. But I'm confident in the AirMail team to continue making the app better as they have been over the last few months. So big fan of AirMail. Yeah, my challenge is that I'm very happy using MailPlane, which is essentially Gmail and a Mac frame on the Mac. And I do the bulk of my email on the Mac.

And so using an iOS app that has a bunch of features that really require you to use their Mac app. You see, AirMail has them, but I don't do them. I don't do any of the snoozing stuff it has or anything like that. I think those are the features that would make me want to switch so the reason that i stopped doing it was because mailbox went away and when that went away i realized that i need to stay as close to dealing with my email as the way it should be dealt with everywhere because when airman when mailbox went away I lost a lot of features. The one thing that I really wish could come back is the ability to,

like that airmail we'll put in there, and I should ask them if they've ever thought about it, is the ability to rearrange messages in your inbox. Oh, I miss that so much. I used to be able to do that with mailbox, just like to move them around. That was my favorite thing. But yeah, I decided to like just to stop doing a lot of that snoozing stuff because it keeps you within the platform and if the platform goes

away you're kind of stuck so I've just stopped doing it and I'm trying to just deal with my email as it should be really I may play around with Google inbox at some point but we'll see I use some non-inbox stuff

like at some point. I use some non-inbox stuff. Like non-Gmail stuff, I should say. Alright, Carlos has written in to ask what stock iOS apps have you deleted from your phones? None. As now this feature has been released, I wonder

why they even did it. I think they only did it because people think that it should be done it doesn't really do anything I just have all those apps in a folder the fact like removing default apps is not the thing it is changing the defaults that's the thing because if I remove

I don't know mail I just can't open the mail app and I can't use any sent to links anymore you know like if I remove, I don't know, mail, I just can't open the mail app and I can't use any SendTo links anymore. You know, like if I remove stocks, okay, it's gone now, but like I never see it anyway because I don't keep it on my home screen. So it's kind of a pointless feature to me really

at this point. Like what are you going to do? Like, oh, free up that space. It's not doing that. It doesn't actually do that actually so i don't know why you know i just now i can't really understand why they did it other than to appease people that thought that they needed it yeah which was us at the time at the time we were like great we can finally you know there was kind of it quickly fizzled out as a thing that i wanted to do

i still i still removed stocks with prejudice. I was very happy to do it. I did that. And I actually, on my iPhone, I removed calendar. Because I would search sometimes and get calendar instead of Fantastical. And I don't see it now. Yeah, that could be a good reason to do it. To kind of whittle down the spotlight results,

but I don't really have a problem with that. But I can see if you're searching for events in your calendar because of your crazy system, why that would be useful. Gary asked, I don't know why Gary asked this, but Gary did ask this. Can you read the question so I don't give away my answer? All right, Gary asks, read the question so i don't give away my answer all right gary asks is zz top the band zz top in the uk now i i feel like gary is trolling me because i don't know how you couldn't just know the answer to this the band's name is not zz top the band's name is zz top like that is the band's name

you know like what is the aunt you know what i mean it's not like i will pronounce it's not like i call them like metallica it's metallica right because that's just the band's name like i know it's written out that way but i don't know i have i have no answer that is well if if there's somebody if there's a guy who's whose name is z z top like zoroastrian zool top but he goes by z period z period because he is a uh you know he he doesn't, that's a ridiculous name, so he doesn't go by it. I think that's the question. It's at what point does it go from being, well, it's your name. Everybody in America, you're American.

Everybody in America calls this person ZZ Top. Would you call them, are you going to make the sounds that an American would make to name them? Or are you going to use the letters because it's really just letters that you're saying? That is a way better question than gary's question yeah the answer is i would call him zz top if i didn't know that he liked to be called zz top right so i have a uh related story here which is this is always a problem and and this has come up i think on previous episodes here where there's a question of how you pronounce things and in some cases the the issue is are you pronouncing it um for me the challenge is always do i pronounce it the way that they pronounce it in in england let's say if what i'm doing is

basically just doing an english accent because i think that's one of the issues is if we have the same word that you do and you say it one way and we say it in another way, then if it's a name, let's say, do I affect an English accent to call them the way that they're called in England? Or do I just use the way we pronounce that name in America? And I say this because I of a friend who changed his name from p-a-u-l to p-o-l and he did this because he moved from england to the united states and didn't want to be called paul because in england everybody called him paul so he changed the spelling of his name so everybody would call him the right pronunciation of his name i realize this is him the right pronunciation of his name. I realize this is extreme. But, you know, this isn't unlike people that maybe come from, how would they say on ATP?

Is it East Asia? Was that the agreed upon? Yeah. You mean the Far East? No, I don't. Didn't, yeah. I think it was East Asiaia right sure so uh people that come from east asia who like just give themselves english names yeah oh yeah i grew

up with a a guy a vietnamese guy who uh had a uh he was he said just dan call me dan it's like that was not his name but yeah i don't know it's a it's an interesting little bit of uh pronunciation nerdery but yeah i think my childhood uh librarian was bz smith right and that note that was her initials right i could perfectly i think it would be perfectly reasonable for an english person to say bz smith but if you met b BZ Smith and were talking to her, you would probably not continually refer to her as BZ. I mean, I might.

It sounds kind of cool. Anyway. Yo, what's up, BZ? I like that BZ, as cool as a name as that is, is a librarian. I love that. Children's librarian, yeah.

I love that you went with Children's Librarian for the name BZ. Wow. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. You can find our show notes for today's show over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 109. Thanks again to Help Spot, Boom from Global Delight. Boom 2, I should say, from Global Delight, and Ring for sponsoring this week's episode. If you want to find Jason

online, he's over at sixcolors.com You can find him on Twitter, he is at jsnell, on Twitter J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E, and at youtube.com slash mikehurley I'm throwing that in there as my byline for the time being

And we'll be back next week for another episode of your favorite upgrade program until then, say goodbye Justin Snow goodbye Mike Hurley