Upgrade - 14: The Marvel of the Buttermilk Biscuit

Episode Date: December 15, 2014

This week Myke and Jason discuss the etiquette of digital gifts, compare how they use their iOS devices compared to their Macs, and decide on a collective name for listeners of the show.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 14 today's episode of upgrade is brought to you by igloo an internet you'll actually like mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam and pdf pen scan from Smile, the app for mobile scanning and OCR. My name is Mike Hurley, and by now you should know that my co-host is the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. I'm melting! It's raining here in California.

It's still raining here in California, Mike. You need the rain. How do you feel about the rain, Jason? Does it make you happy? Does it make you sad? Do you sing in the rain? What I really like about the rain is that I don't have to go out in it

because I have no commute anymore. And this morning my wife took my son to school and I'm like, you could drive. She's like, no, we're going to walk it. It's close. And then it just started pouring down. But, you know, it's good. We need the rain. Otherwise, we will all die of thirst in the summer.

So it's good that we're getting it. But there's a lot of it in a very short amount of time here. So I hope it keeps up. But it's just kind of cold and damp. And this storm is a lot cooler than the last storm. So the last storm, our heater didn't even come on. It was just a warm, tropical kind of storm that came in. So it was pretty mild.

And this one's a little bit colder, so it's more kind of damp and unpleasant. But I just stay inside. That's my solution to the bad weather. Stay inside. Don't go anywhere. Why would you, anyway? I have nowhere to go. Actually, that's not true.

I'm going to speak at a user group in Sacramento tomorrow. So I actually have to drive. Hopefully it won't. I don't think it's going to rain so much tomorrow. But I have to to go. Actually, that's not true. I'm going to speak at a user group in Sacramento tomorrow. So I actually have to drive. Hopefully it won't. I don't think it's going to rain so much tomorrow, but I have to drive up there. That's more than an hour away. So that'll get me out. I'll be out tomorrow. What's the topic of your discussion?

I'll let you know when I figure that out. And you're going tomorrow. And I'm going tomorrow. That's right. I just looked at the calendar today and I was like, oh, yeah. Huh. Okay. I'll, you know, it's a user group. So they're pretty forgiving.

And I have many things I can talk about. I just, I'll put, you know, an outline and some slides together. It'll be great. It'll be fine. There's a lovely picture of you on the MacNexus.org page. Good. Well Googled, Mike. Well well googled this is how i roll yeah i'll be there tomorrow if you're in sacramento and listening to this between

monday december 15th and tuesday december 16th 2014 you could go and uh listen to me talk there that's like two people who are on this audience. But anyway, yeah, I'll be there. So I look forward to hearing about that. Will there be video, Jason? Are they going to video you? Somebody will video you from the back of an iPhone and post it to YouTube. I hope not. It's better when I can just be unvarnished and say anything.

Anything! You should go and tell them why this year, well, 2015 will be the year of Linux. You should go and tell them that. Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. It's inevitable.

Mr. Jason Snell. Mr. Mike Hurley. Would you like to address some follow-up, some hashtag askupgrade follow-up? I would. I would. Hashtag askupgrade is, of course, this if this then that setup that was recommended to us by a lovely listener. And now when anybody tweets anything with hashtag AskUpgrade on the Twitter, it's automatically put in a Google spreadsheet for us to control.

I have to say, there has been some abuse of the hashtag, hasn't there? Yes. We'll get to some of it. I omitted some of it where people were like saying what kind of shoes, which shoes should I wear this morning and things like that. We're not going to do that. But we'll skim over those. But it is kind of nice to have them all just sort of sitting there in that spreadsheet.

Oh, it is a fantastic idea, actually. Yeah, I've heard from several people who are saying they may do the same thing for their podcast. Just do the same thing, give podcast to just uh do the same thing give it a hashtag and then collect the results in a spreadsheet it's very very clever it's a very very good idea so that's that's our meta meta follow-up uh first piece of follow-up is from listener joe steel uh not a real name and uh it is what is the official name for Upgrade fans? I like Upgraders. Upgraders.

Mm-hmm. All right. What do you think of that? It's not bad. It's not bad. It's an actual thing. It could be an actual thing. And I like the errs better than the e's. Maybe that's a Trekkie and Trekker kind of thing.

But Upgraders just sounds like a person who upgrades, which is much more reasonable. Upgrade-ees is like, I'm a crazy person and love, I don't know, it just, it doesn't work for me. So I would go with upgraders. I suspect that perhaps our listeners may have some opinions. They can always go to hashtag askupgrade on Twitter. I have, I mean, I have the word upgradees

earmarked for something else. Oh, good, good. Good. So we won't call our listeners the Upgradees. In the chat room, we have suggestions for Upgradians, Upgradists, Updates. I don't know why Updates. Update is not the name of the show, people. What?

Oh, no. Okay. Anyway, so thank you, Joe Stee? Oh, no. Okay. Anyway, so thank you, Joe Steele, for asking the question. Until it's unseated as champion, I think Upgraders is our current official name for listeners. What does our next Upgrader have to say for today? Our next Upgrader is listener Ben, who asks, what should I have for breakfast? Now, see, this is what we were talking about, about the abuse of the ask upgrade hashtag. You can't ask upgrade anything, just anything.

Also, because he sent this like five days ago, so he's still waiting for us to tell him what to have for breakfast. Listener Ben is in deep trouble we we only are answering them here on the show well and the answer if you're going to do exactly what we say you know then maybe jason what do you what do you think we should make ben have for breakfast well i mean clearly the answer is waffles so he should have waffles waffles and so ben i expect to see evidence for you evidence of your uh ask upgrade influence breakfast yeah i i made um sunday we had uh we had some nice people over to our house for uh for a little brunch um and uh i made biscuits which are not cookies which are not you know british biscuits they're they're like southern buttermilk biscuits they're like a little bit like scones except there's more moisture

in them so they don't suck all the moisture out of your entire body when you bite into one. Like a scone. I like scones but they're dry man. They're dry. And I make those and I actually make those more than waffles these days because I really like them. I got a good recipe from

Alton Brown, the TV chef cook guy. He's not a chef. He's a cook. And we had some of those and that was really good. And some bagels and some other stuff. It was, I would say, a successful brunch. We talked about podcasting a little bit because that always comes up. Yeah, we had a good time. But biscuits are confusing. So I didn't mention it because they mean cookies in your world. And that's not what I made. I didn't mention it because they mean cookies in your world. And that's not what I made. I didn't bake cookies.

They're biscuits. They're very nice. People who don't know, people outside the U.S. who have never tried to make a southern-style buttermilk biscuit, they're pretty easy to make and quite tasty, actually. And you can put jam on them. Put many things on them. I put jam on them. You can put maple syrup or honey. Anyway, that's our breakfast vertical. And you put jam on them. Many things on them. I put jam on them. You can put maple syrup or honey.

Anyway, that's our breakfast vertical. Thank you, listener Ben. So you do eat them more like scones than cookies? Oh, yes. Yeah. So they're, I mean, it's mostly flour and baking powder and salt and then butter and buttermilk. and salt, and then butter, and buttermilk. And the way you make them is you keep folding them over. You fold the dough over on itself like 10 times or something like that. And what it does is that's creating layers. And so then you bake them, use a little cookie cutter, basically,

or biscuit cutter. Is that a thing? You know, those little molds that you can make a cookie in a different shape, like a Santa Claus cookie or a circle cookie or a square cookie. Yeah, they're cutters, cookie cutters. Yeah, cookie cutters. So I use those and make the little round biscuits, and it's in a little pan, and you put it in the oven. And when they come out, because you fold the dough on top of each other,

you get these layers so that you can kind of pull them apart. They just kind of fall apart. And, you know, so you can just open it up in half and then put some jam or butter or whatever, honey on them and eat them. And they're very good. They're tasty. I recommend them. I started talking about biscuits on Twitter when I was making them, and people are like, all my international Twitter followers, like, what are you talking about? And I realize people don't know around the world the marvel of the buttermilk biscuit. You should try it out.

We'll put a link in the show notes. How about that to the recipe I use? I think I found it. Alton Brown Healthier Biscuits is the one that I like. Healthier because they're not truly healthy. I can put it in. I know how to put things in the show notes. I know, but I got it already.

Okay. I'm magic like that. I appreciate your powers as a host. Anyway, so this is our cooking vertical. There it is. Well done. Actually, I'm going to move up another piece of feedback then because this seems to be an appropriate time. Listener Matt, or it may be former listener Matt, said, why not just change the theme of the podcast to be about the life of the independent worker? It seems it's headed that way anyway. And I talked to listener Matt about it. And his point is he's not an independent worker. He's a guy in an office.

And I totally understand this. He's tired of listening to people who are podcasters who don't have actual jobs talking about what it's like to be them. My response to former listener Matt is that it's not going to be about that all the time. It will be about that occasionally because you and I are both sort of new to this life and there are interesting wrinkles that come out of it. But, you know, this is primarily going to be about technology. And I say that after having talked about buttermilk biscuits for five minutes. And I believe in a previous episode I talked about Brussels sprouts. So that may also happen.

But we're going to – we span – we contain multitudes, Lister Matt. But I think it's fair to say, and I hope you agree, Mike, that this shows about a few things. It is about technology and how it affects our lives. And we will talk about technology. But it will also touch on other things that affect us, both both me and mike would you say that's about right yeah i think what upgrade isn't is a tech news show and i think that's what people wanted it to be maybe at least some people um but it's definitely more i think now at least uh now that we've kind of found our groove i I think, it's definitely more about the way that technology affects us. So like when we talk about things like blogging and podcasting and membership schemes and things, they're like things that are happening in our lives at the moment. And we actually changed the description of the show to fit it a little bit more. Because I think whenever you start a show like this, you have to let it adapt a little bit and the fortunate and maybe unfortunate in some uh in some ways about this show um it's

because it has you on it so people are going to come immediately that is unfortunate it's very unfortunate so you saw that one you've really got something here from from episode one there's going to be a relatively large audience so people get to see the adaption of the show because all shows go through this and it's helpful if you have a show of a small audience at first so you can kind of find your groove and i think upgrade has found its groove and it's more about like things that affect us with technology and trends and things like that and then obviously the huge stories we'll discuss but we don't go into the minutiae every week and i think think connected does that a bit more. Like we actually talk about in the past week, this is something that's happened or something like that, you know?

Well, I think, I mean, look, if there's something big that happens, uh, especially about Apple, but really something big in technology, we're going to talk about it. And, um, what's happened the last few weeks, I think, cause we've done a lot of shows where you've just left your job. I left my job not too long ago, and nothing really has happened that's interesting. So we talk about the things that are sort of on our mind. And on the tech news front, there wasn't a whole lot. But I do also agree that I don't think that just because something like a headline happened somewhere, we would necessarily cover it for a couple of reasons. One is if we don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I kind of don't want to give it time just to say, oh yeah, this thing happened. And what do we think of it? And every now and then, it doesn't happen very

often, but every now and then when I'm listening to ATP, that happens where it's like, anybody have anything on this? And then you hear John Syracuse go, nope. And then it's like, okay, well, let's move on. Casey says good talk. And then. Yeah, exactly. Right. And, you know, also I do listen to a lot of tech podcasts. So I have that other thought of if it's a minor topic and it's been covered to death on another show, I'm not sure I really want to have us cover it to death and say the exact same thing. I mean, I don't, not everybody listens to every podcast, but that's an aspect of it too. So what I want to do is reassure people that this is not going to turn into quit, right? That's not what we're doing here. This is not

about people working independently, but there are angles to that that will come up because of the stuff that Mike and I are doing and we will talk about them and when there is news about technology we may take a little bit of a different tack when we talk about it and think about like a different angle to it because I would love to be able to do that to take a

piece of news and say I wonder what this means for X or you know instead of it just being like hey hey, this happened. What do we think of the specs of this new product? And we'll see how it goes. That part remains to be seen. But we, you know, that during the holiday period, a lot of tech companies are not really releasing products.

They're selling the products they already announced and there are sales and things like that. And it makes it more difficult to have a show that's just purely focused on tech. And we don't want it to be purely focused anyway, but I will totally admit that the balance the last few weeks was a little bit different than I would say the average show would be, but that's what an average is. It's over time and those two weeks I think are not, you know, they're a little bit off the normal formula, but in the end I think it'll all balance out. So now that we've spoken in length about the show. That's the self-analyzing vertical.

Yes. Should we talk about Smile? We should smile about Smile. Because they're a friend. This episode is brought to you by Smile Software and PDF Pen Scan Plus. PDF Pen Scan Plus is the app for mobile scanning and ocr which allows you to scan documents directly from your iphone and ipad and taking advantage of pure ocr magic you can take images of multiple pages effortlessly and do post-process image editing you can crop these

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It works on both your iPhone and your iPad, and it's available in the App Store right now. If you'd like to learn more, you can do so by going to smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Smile and PDF Pen Scan Plus for helping support this week's episode of the show. And a good friend, by the way, once an Eagle 56 in the chat room says,

will you ever crown a best friend and the answer to that is um if somebody would like to buy all of our ad spots yes and i will allow that also best also best enemy available for the enemy discount still nobody has contacted me about an enemy deal i like the idea it would be like a hostile witness in a trial. Like, you know, they're appearing under protest to tell you about their service or something. Or we would have to bring in like a guest to read the ad because we would refuse to do it.

It could be fun if somebody wants to be our official enemy. I'm just saying. Anyway, let's see. We got some more feedback, of course. Nice feedback from Upgrader Josh. Let's try that. Don't overanalyze. Just do something that lets me give you money. Anything. Both of you. Which is us talking about subscriptions versus ads and how we do it. And I appreciate that. It's very nice to listener Josh to say that. And I'm sure we will find some way for you to give us money at some point, right?

You know, somewhere, somehow we'll find a way. Yeah. You could buy stickers. You could buy stickers. You could buy stickers. I don't see any money from the stickers though. So that's a good way to give upgrade to support relay, which is fine. When we do a t-shirt however that would be a different

story all right nice um listener oh k lacoste i actually don't know what that listener's real name is do we let me see if i can look that up this is good podcasting um kevin listener kevin upgrader kevin says, can we make the What's Jason reading on Marvel Unlimited a weekly vertical? P.S. Reading on a mini? Question mark, exclamation point. I guess that's what, an interrobang. Yeah, I read comics on an iPad mini and it's fine. They're better on an iPad Air. That's totally true. But on an iPad mini, it's fine. Sometimes I will pinch and zoom, especially on two-page spreads, because those are really small. But I can do it.

And as to what I'm reading on Marvel Unlimited, I'm not sure if I'm reading anything right now. The most recent thing that I read and enjoyed on Marvel Unlimited was the Infinity event from Jonathan Hickman, which is the Avengers and New Avengers. And I like it. It's like a sci-fi story. I mean, the nice thing about it is it's one writer. It's fairly self-contained. It's like 14 issues or something. And it's in only two comics. There are some tie-ins, but really you can read the two comics and it's a straightforward story. And Hickman has done some really strange things with the avengers in telling

these um this weird sci-fi story about like uh collapsing parallel universes and stuff like that and it's really interesting it's actually very much unlike um most superhero comics and i like that i actually grew up uh anybody who had episode 14 is when I would first mention the Micronauts on Upgrade, you win. I grew up on sci-fi comics like the Micronauts that were, you know, not really about superheroes. They were superhero-y, but it was mostly more like sci-fi concepts. And Hickman's Avengers run has been like that, where it's got the usual superhero characters in it, but they're dealing with kind of cosmic issues.

A little like Guardians of the Galaxy is more a sci-fi movie than a superhero movie. It's a little like that. And so I just read that a couple weeks ago and really liked it. That's that vertical. Mike, have you read any of that? No.

Do you read comics? Yes, but not right now, yeah. I actually downloaded Comixology to my 6+. Oh, yeah. I just want to see what it's going to be like. I think, well, I definitely could only use the guided view. That would be great in guided view, though. I don't really like guided view.

I don't like guided view either. I love that they did it, and I think that it's great for people who are not comic literate. I talk about my wife being kind of comic illiterate. She's a librarian. She never grew up with comics, though. She's a great reader. But reading comics is a different kind of literacy. You've got to process the visual information really differently than reading a book.

And for somebody like her, I think Guided View is great because you don't have to figure out what panel to read next or where your focus needs to go. That's great. But if you are literate in how to read a comic book page, it's awful, I think. You do it because the screen's not big enough and so you have to do it. And they built it because the iPhone original, early model iPhones were so small that there's no way you could read a comic on it. And they wanted to address that audience. And it's great that they did but I can't I can't read in that format I mean it makes I understand why they did it like it makes as you say it makes sense and and I get why because you actually can't really read a comic on a phone in any other way I don't think it you just like sort of zooming in and panning. But I don't like that I don't see the full panel. Right, yes.

I mean, it is good because I have a bad habit of opening a double-page spread and my eye is just flicking down to the bottom right corner to see what's happening. I have that, like, you know, like when somebody gets a book and then they open it to the last page and read the last line. Sure. I'm one of those sort of people, you know. Like, a big action on the right hand side and just quickly look at it before i read everything on the left but i do prefer to be able to see the art in full um and i know that at the end like would you get to the end of the page it will show you the whole page

if you want it to um rather than like so it zooms into all the different panels so it's allowed to read and it shows you the page, but I just don't think you get the same experience from it. Right. And there's a narrative tension that's brought, and the artists and writers know it, that you can see everything on one page, but you can't see what's on the flip page.

And that defines the pacing and all of that. But, you know, but I do love digital comics. I'm very happy that we now live in a world where we have these beautiful color devices that let us read comics digitally. I think it's a great thing for the comics medium as a whole. So that's what's Jason reading on Marvel Unlimited this week. Maybe I'll bring that back. We'll see.

If I read something interesting, I promise to mention it. How about that? Great. Listener Mr. Villeneuve, which I probably have mispronounced. Yes, you're going to get another correction now. That's okay. We'll just keep going on this. This is the badly pronouncing French things vertical.

We were talking about Sean Blanc, who I essentially called Shane Blank. Not quite, but I might as well have. Let's just get it all wrong. Sean Blanc. And you said it was like Montblanc, who I essentially called Shane Blank. Not quite, but I might as well have. Let's just get it all wrong. Sean Blanc. And you said it was like Mont Blanc, the pen, to which our French listeners, upgraders said, you don't pronounce the T and the C. It's a Brit trying to correct an American on a French word.

And pretty funny. So at least Mont Blanc. Yeah. Allow me to defend myself here. Sean Blanc's name is not pronounced Blanc. That was why I did it. And also because the English pronunciation of Mont Blanc, the pen, is Mont Blanc. I know that it's not.

But that's how people say it. Pen vertical. I kind of went with that for you. I kind of went with that for you, but yes, I apologize to everybody in our slightly neighboring country for my gross pronunciation of your beautiful mountain. Mont Blanc. So the pen is pronounced Mont Blanc. No, well, it shouldn't be, but that's what everybody says. Oh, okay.

So it's a common mispronunciation. Not the actual pronunciation. All right. Listener Adam sent us a neat tweet with a link to imitation Nerf brain balls going cheap in, what is that, Spitalfields Market? Spitalfields Market, yep. This is an interesting one. I know this shop. This is a chain shop called Tiger.

And the next time that I see one, I'm going to pop into one and buy myself a foam brain. Three pounds each? Just for this show. So I can kind of sit here and just look at the brain and feel inspired. That's good. We're deep in the foam brain vertical now because also listener Brian wrote in to say, thank you for talking about the brain balls on upgrade i found this while cleaning my basement and he sent me a link to an ebay auction where he is selling his mint in box nick and nerf foam brain ball starting bid 150

dollars buy it now for 200 so he wasn't aware that it was valuable until we talked about the Brain Ball and talked about how they were going on eBay. And now we're going to make Listener Brian some money. So good job, Listener Brian. And to those out there who covet a Mint Inbox Nick and Nerf Brain Ball, it's on eBay from Listener Brian. I think I want it. I don't think it's worth it i think you should investigate that four pound tiger brain ball it's just made from a tiger brain sorry tigers the brain ball is like you know it's like a mythical object now yeah nobody has bid on the uh on on listener brian's uh ebay upgrade a brain ball right now upgrade

upgrade to brian sure here's something i didn't know that you can do financing on ebay now so it says it's a bad idea yeah two hundred dollars or thirty four dollars for six months that's that is a horrible thing to do uh as a customer fantastic thing to do as a business it's an easy way to help them sell the larger ticket items like a 200 brain ball very interesting it's a bad idea horrible idea well unless you're ebay all right uh i think we're done with follow-up mike i think we made it through oh bravo although Phew. Although our next, our actual one,

our first topic this week is inspired by Brian Hamilton and his Ask Upgrade question. Yes. How do you feel about giving software as a gift? I'd like to give my friends iOS games as stocking stuffers. So we're going to talk about this

and we're going to talk about like kind of digital goods, but an interesting thing to do, and you see, I see a lot of companies doing this now um like playstation and uh microsoft especially with games is to create gift cards yeah for digital games so there's a thing that we were joking about this on virtual a couple of weeks ago that nintendo is going to start selling digital codes in actual 3DS boxes.

So there are some games that they have that are just digital, but they will be sold in the actual box, not just as a card, which is stupid because you kind of put in an empty... Basically, Nintendo is selling empty boxes. But it's a way to try and, I think, push people down the digital path because the games that they're selling are only in digital form. But the reason I mention this is I think that this is a good way

to give digital gifts to people is to give them a physical object which allows them to redeem the gift. But of course, you can't do that with apps. So then the only thing you can do it for is a gift card. But if you want to give somebody a specific app for a specific reason, like all of your relatives

won't get to give them one password. Maybe AgileBits should them one password uh maybe maybe agile bits should make one password gift cards but i'm sure that's not as simple as uh as you'd think so can't you gift an app i think you can you can but it's it's not the idea of the gifting it's the fact that there's nothing physical and it's the physical thing i think that people want um but yeah you can gift apps you can do that on i. I still don't think you can gift iBooks, which is a really weird thing. And only a couple of years ago,

they changed it so you can gift Kindle books. And there are always challenges too where you want to give it at Christmas under the tree and they want to send them an email immediately saying redeem your code and get your app oh you you can gift an iBook now real-time follow-up oh that's good um so and this was my issue with kindle books too is that is that uh you couldn't i was sending kindle book things on christmas morning because i couldn't queue it up i I could buy it like a week in advance and they would get an email a week in advance saying,

oh, you got a Kindle book as a gift, which is not helpful. That's stupid. So I think it's really, I think it's really smart. I just did this. So I was putting together my little gift packages that I send to all of the incomparable panelists

for thanking them for being on the show over the year. And it's just a little envelope with a couple of things in it. And I wanted to put an Amazon gift card in. And then I realized that for my Canadian panelist, I can't do that because it doesn't work on amazon.ca. And Amazon is very smart about this. Amazon lets you set a gift card or a gift certificate for any value as a pdf that they mail to me and then i print and it actually is one of those like for uh it's got like folded over and then folded over again and now it looks like a card even though it just came out of my printer i've done this before

and that's really smart and and so i think there's something to this because it's so i love the idea in a way of saying you know what you should not not like something to this because it's so, I love the idea in a way of saying, you know what, you should, not like Crossy Road because it's free, but like Monument Valley. Like if I want to give Monument Valley to somebody, I know they haven't played it, but they've got an iPhone and I think they'll really enjoy it. I should be able to give them something like one of those cards you get at Starbucks or something. Something that's got a code on it that is a redemption code for that game that whoever redeems it, that'll be on their Apple ID. And I should be able to print that out on a little card-like thing, like what Amazon did, and put that in an envelope or put it in a bag with a giant amount. My daughter did this. She gave a friend a gift card and it was in a huge bag with all of this tissue paper. And at the

bottom, there was a little gift card. It's kind of funny. You should be able to do that. Because this is the thing is those software and eBooks and things can make really good gifts, but they're completely intangible. And even though it is kind of stupid to give somebody an empty box, at least the thought counts and there's that moment of realization that you got it got them something and that you cared about it and you know just saying you know an app will appear on your phone like like a u2 album right here it is oh it's an app that's no good and you can't do that anyway they've got to log in and sign in and accept it and all of that and it's

just not great it's just not a great gift experience. And it's too bad because it eliminates this whole class of presents that especially tech nerdy people might want to give because they're the ones who know all the cool apps and they want to tell their friends or their family. It's a challenge. It's a real challenge. The interesting, not interesting, but the annoying thing, it's completely different to interesting,

is like so say you want to gift somebody an app and you want to do it as a Christmas present. You have to do it on Christmas Day, right, because they're going to get the email. Yeah, Amazon. And then it looks like you forgot. And Cal Seth Gray in the chat room points out, and this is true, I actually did know this, now you can queue your Amazon stuff. But when they first rolled out Amazon e-book gifting as a concept, it was instantaneous. So it's getting better. But even then, yeah, it's just like, oh, I got an email that I got a present.

Yay. It's not that exciting. I don't know. This is a problem. And then there's the hardware, which is also a problem because so much tech hardware is really expensive. So unless you're buying for somebody who you have a very large budget for, it's your significant other or a parent or a child or, I don't know, a boss that you really, really, really want to impress. that you really, really, really want to impress, that's also a problem.

So many technology items are computers and things, which are... I know there are those television ads, I don't know if you see them in the UK, where there's a luxury car with a giant ribbon on it, which just kills me. Yeah, totally, you're going to buy a car for a Christmas present. That's totally going to happen.

Surprise, we got a new car! My understanding is that only happens when somebody turns 16. That's what I learned from American TV. Interesting. Yeah, that could be. Well, the car ads don't show the wife murdering the husband for buying a car without telling her. That happens after the commercial's over. What the hell did you do?

But it's a similar thing where it's like, those are big ticket items. So you end up in this weird, if you're a techie person or you're giving gifts to people in your life who maybe rely, I think a lot of our readers, listeners, upgraders, they rely on our upgraders to be their kind of tech gurus, their tech experts. upgraders to be their kind of tech gurus, their tech experts. But what do you buy them? You know, an iPod

case or iPhone case, iPad case? You're left with this very thin collection of things that are hardware that aren't just ephemeral and transient, mysterious download codes, but aren't like a computer.

And, and it's a very thin slice of things that are like 20 bucks or 50 bucks. Yep. You know, accessories can be key, uh, for this kind of stuff, but then it's still difficult to buy because things like,

like, um, somebody was asking me about, uh, buying a present for, for a friend. Uh, and they were saying,

Oh, I might get them. What do you think about getting them? Like an iPhone. And they were saying, oh, I might get them. What do you think about getting them an iPhone case? It's like, yeah, but that's really difficult because people really care about these things and they dig in and they want to get the... People choose something that matches personality or fashion or taste. So they're difficult things to buy.

But you keep looking at them all the time. But there was another piece of real-time follow-up from Upgrader Kyle, who's on it today. You can queue iTunes stuff now, too. You can. Which you didn't used to be able to do. Exactly. He has reminded me, though, of another frustration

that I have with digital gifts. Because it says right here on the screenshot that he sent us, gift redeemable in the US store only. That's really difficult for me because I've tried to buy things for people before and I can't do it. So in the UK, I cannot gift you an app.

This bugged me too because I, and again, maybe Lister Kyle will set me right, but I went to amazon.com and tried to see if I could get an Amazon Canada gift card. And I couldn't. I had to go to Amazon.ca, log in with my Amazon.com account, which works at Amazon.ca, buy it there. And that just seems sort of silly to me that I have to do that. If I'm giving a gift to somebody in the UK, I should be able to gift them a UK version. I should be able to pay the US price

and have it just attached to their iTunes account. Why is it limited to the US store only? It's stupid. Stupid. Maybe they're worried about fraud, about people gifting things from a fake account to a real account in order to bypass. But you know, this regional restriction stuff is

really not... It's very 20th century and we need to get over it. So to see Apple furthering it in that way, it's just – that's dumb. It's frustrating. So we're talking about apps, and we're going to talk a little bit more about apps today. So some actual technology topics coming up. Yes, come back, Matt. Come back, former listener Matt.

Right after this break. Yes. Brought to you by our friends, MailRoute. Jason. MailRoute. Please tell me all about MailRoute. Well, MailRoute, I've told you about before. It is a service that filters out spam and viruses and bounced emails and things like that.

So that by the time your email gets to you, most or all of the junk has been taken out. I've been using it for a couple of years now. It works great. I very rarely, I got a false positive the other day, and it was the first one I had gotten in a long time. And the way that works is once a day I get an email from MailRoute saying, here are the messages we filtered. And I look at it, I glance at it, and there was one that was good. And I can click on a link right in that email that says, the one I used is W plus R, which is whitelist, whitelist plus, what does the R stand for? You know, read or deliver, or maybe it's D, W plus D. Anyway, one link that I click, and boom, that person is whitelisted so that it will never filter out for them again,

and the mail is delivered. And I'm in my mail client when I do that, and immediately that message pops in to my inbox. So super easy when there is a false reading, but I'm telling you, it doesn't happen very often. It's really, really a solid service at making the right decisions. In fact, and this is not a paid endorsement, but I noticed on Twitter this weekend that Marco Arment was asking about spam filtering. And I mentioned, somebody actually said, well, Jason said good things about him, but maybe he was lying because they paid him. And I said, no, I've actually been using it and it works pretty well.

And Marco reported back yesterday on Twitter. He said, I put MailRoute in front of my FastMail account a few days ago. Spam has dropped to nearly nothing with almost no false positives. And that's my experience too. It's really cleaned out my mailbox. So if you're a regular person, you can set it up and it's super easy. There's no hardware or software to install because this all happens up in the cloud. It's on their servers and then they pass the mail. They filter it and then pass it on

to your server. So by the time it gets to you, all the junk has been taken out, which is great, especially if you run your own server, because then that junk never gets transferred over your network. It never gets to you. You never have to store it. It's just not ever there, which is great. And they have lots of great tools for email administrators and IT pros. They've got an API, and they've got many different things they support, LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, Outbound Relay, and Mike's favorite, mailbagging. Mailbagging! Mailbagging! Everything you want for people handling your mail.

So if you want to remove spam from your life, like I did, go to mailroute.net slash upgrade. You'll get a free trial, and you'll get 10% off the lifetime of your account, not for a month or a year, but for the lifetime of your account 10% off mail route. So if you're getting plagued by spam, and you want to find a solution that works on the server before the server, so you never have to see it, you never have to filter it out on your desktop. I highly recommend MailRoute. And thank you to MailRoute for being our friend, a friend of Upgrade. A friend indeed. Just before we get on to our next topic, can I actually mention a piece of tech news that broke today?

Oh, yes. Because it's quite important to me, and I think it's interesting considering the difference between the UK and the US on this type of stuff. So British Telecom, who have primarily been a landline and internet provider for the last few years, moving into TV, they actually started their own mobile network, O2, many, many years ago, and then they span it off and it got bought by Telefonica and became independent. So BT for many, many years has not had a mobile presence. Now, today, BT have confirmed that they're in talks to acquire EE, which is one of the new very large networks in the UK. What two letters will they choose as their new name?

BEAT. B-E-E-B-E-T? E-T-B. E-T. Phone home. Oh, phone! See? Oh, it's perfect.

They should be E-T. So E-E, which is abbreviated from everything everywhere, which is a company that came into existence when T-Mobile and Orange merged here a few years ago and created E-E. T-Mobile and Orange merged here a few years ago and created EE. So it's actually now an offshoot of Deutsche Telekom, the owners of T-Mobile in the US as well, I believe. Unless they've been bought, because I know there was talk about it. No, they're still trying to unload them.

So the interesting thing is that there's a lot of things that are now going to happen because EE had Spectrum for different operators so they gave out to three in other network here and Vodafone had an agreement with some other company. So there's lots of weird things that are going to happen. But the reason I bring this up is because it's interesting

because now it looks like there's enough movement and shifting in the mobile markets here that we are getting less competition. That's why I bring this up because I find it very interesting. Because if you look, if you can kind of read the tea leaves and see that this is going to break up a bunch of agreements, which may mean that maybe there's more shifting that's going to happen.

And I just find it interesting because as companies are merging, because EE were merged from two companies and now they're going to BT, and that could break up some other agreements, which might mean that some other companies have to maybe work together more closely. It's moving us, I think, towards the US model. Even though we will probably never, as long as there's a couple of providers would be better because we don't have areas that won't ever be serviced by one network like i know that you guys have you know so there are parts of america where it's like you

just can't get like there's not that many though i mean there is usually some competition in every market in the U.S. Some. I see this stuff, and it concerns me a little bit as these companies are ballooning. Oh, yeah. Like, BT now offers television, and they actually have quite a comparable television package compared to Sky TV and Virgin TV here. package compared to Sky TV and Virgin TV here. Like, BT are buying up a lot of the sports games to kind of block Sky out.

So they're buying up a lot of football to get people to join BT TV. It's just interesting because they're definitely learning from Comcast and like AT&T. Well, that's not good. That can't be good. No, it's not good. I mean, the good thing that we always have

is the European Union for this stuff. They are very, at least seemingly, pro-consumer. You know, like, they're always trying to slap people on the wrists. Whether rightly or wrongly, you know, like how they try and have jurisdiction over Google, Microsoft, which works for some instances, it is, at least we always have them to try and protect us.

This deal may not go through. Regulators may say, no, you cannot do it. But actually, it's something interesting to bring up because I think it's a sort of change in the tide. It's not, you know, competition. I'm less concerned about wireless because although those are huge companies and will behave badly, at least they're battling each other.

Having competition, even if it's, I mean, it's better when there's somebody like T-Mobile in the U.S. that essentially has nothing to lose. And so their entire, their deals aren't always great, but they try very hard to be different. The whole un-carrier branding that they use, the idea there is that they will offer things that the other carriers just don't want to offer, like an unlimited data plan. And that's interesting. It helps when you've got a competitor like that that's hungry and willing to do that in order U.S. is the internet, wired internet, broadband internet market, which until wireless internet can provide a really serious competitor, and I know you use your wireless internet for the show, until that happens, my choices of fast internet at my house are Comcast. That's it. That's it. I had DSL before, which is AT&T lines, and I was able to use a

reseller for that. But Comcast doesn't have to resell their lines to other providers. It's theirs to control. And as a result, there's really no competition in my area. There's no fiber here. And so it's Comcast or slow internet those are my choices well i choose comcast because i have no choice uh i have to choose it to do what i do so that's the worst but you know the few the less competition there is the worse it is for for everybody so my condolences yeah welcome to com welcome to cable town it seems like it's good it does concern me it really does concern me that we're going to end up moving towards that. But we'll see.

Anyway, so I mentioned apps. So you recently posted as part of your extended gift guide coverage on sixcolors.com your favorite things for iOS apps. Yes. And you put some choices in there. I must say you're quite behind on Inquisitive, but that's another issue for another day. I am so...

Well, because I'm not commuting anymore, I am picking and choosing Inquisitive episodes and then putting them manually in my playlist. So I've been meaning to listen to Guy for a while now, and I just haven't had the chance. That's okay. I will let you off on this also i wanted to make sure that it was in there so i i reordered my playlist so there would be interesting

things in there in that screenshot thank you thank you for saving my ego although if i wouldn't have seen anything i would have just presumed you'd listen to all my shows so you know it works it works one way or another it's very i i really there are not enough dishes for me to wash to listen to all the podcasts I want to listen to. It is a challenge in my life. It is so weird that I listen to more shows now than I did before, and I don't know how that's happening.

I don't know how that's possible. I don't know what I'm doing. But basically, something that you picked out in this post is the fact that you are currently using replacement apps to Apple's first-party apps quite frequently. I don't know how it happened. And I wanted to give you kind of an idea

of what my sort of situation is like as well. So you can kind of see how I'm doing with that stuff. Nice. So like you, I use Mailbox for mail. There are just some things that initially I wasn't too sure about with Mailbox. I don't advise using Mailbox for calendars. It's really bad at calendars. What did I say?

You said you use Mailbox for mail, which is exactly as intended. You should use Mailbox for mail and not any other reason. Try not to use it to take pictures and stuff. No, it's the worst replacement for the camera app you could imagine just terry every time you want to take a picture you have to make a new message and then say insert photo and then say make a new photo and it's just it's it's unintuitive yeah so i i really i really like mailbox like some of the stuff that i was initially not sure about um i've actually come to love like you know how you can say say to mailbox tell me about this message in three days time or something. Yes, yes.

And one of the reasons I've actually come to love it is because I now use Mailbox on the Mac too. Because if you use an app outside the Mailbox ecosystem, things start to get a bit weird. Right, because the apps, the mailbox apps, will know that that message needs to boomerang back into your inbox, and they will do that if they're running, but if you're not using an app that does that, they won't know.

You can see those messages, those special mailboxes, they're visible as IMAP mailboxes, but really you need to buy in for it to work, because you need the apps to all know that if you said, I want to see this message tomorrow, that it's now tomorrow

and here's that message again. But quite simply, my favorite feature of mailbox is the manual reordering that you can do of your messages. Huh. I never use that feature. Oh, I love it.

I love it. So say there's something that's like four messages down that I know I need to do it. I love it. So say there's something that's like four messages down that I know I need to do today. I just drag it up to the top and it gets done. I kind of treat my emails sometimes like a little bit of a to-do list. And that makes people like, it makes their toenails curl.

I totally do that. But I think that's what Mailbox is actually built to do. You know, it actually also has to do functionality built right in, like lists. But there are just certain things that it does that I really like. I have a real hate-hate relationship with Apple's Mail, just in general, especially on the desktop. It just makes me want to cry every time I use it. And I think that Mailbox is a really interesting app and it's

a lot of good stuff um i think i maybe go a step further than you jason in that i use chrome for my web browsing you do go a step further than me i still use safari for that and it's because i use chrome on the desktop for many reasons and i use safari on the desktop so if i was using chrome on the desktop i would my wife uses chrome on the, and so she uses Chrome on her phone too. I think that it makes sense to have all those things tied together because they kind of share information. But I am also a big Fantastical user as well, like you. I think that might be all I can necessarily think of. I mean, obviously I use, not obviously, but I do use Overcast and not the official podcast app right uh i use beach music not music although that kind of is first yeah well

i just i i remember when the first uh app replacements came out um replacing apple stock apps i thought oh well you know this is esoteric and weird and for super nerdy people who have super nerdy needs and it's great that they're making these things, but come on, you know, Apple's. And there was the question about whether Apple would even allow those things to continue because they duplicate existing functionality. And they got over that and it hasn't been a big deal. But I just realized when I was making my list this year

that, you know, three of the items on my list of apps I use a lot that are not, you know, that are third-party apps are replacements for stock Apple apps. You know, Overcast for podcasts, Fantastical for calendar, and Mailbox for mail. So I don't know how that happened. And I don't know if that's a sign of really good, mature third-party apps that are really well thought out,

or whether it's a bad sign that apple's apps are making me want to abandon them for for third-party apps i'm not i'm not sure whether i'm an outlier there and uh those are very yeah i think it's becoming more and more prevalent that people are using these and you know what a really interesting thing to look at which i hadn't thought of we could we could try and see what the what people are doing is homescreen.is they have a most popular app top apps don't they you know i i posted a homescreen.is tweet and i like deleted it within 20 minutes because i was everybody on my twitter stream was criticizing my choices i saw that actually i just deleted it i said forget it yeah it's uh and it was not it was a messy home screen.

It's actually much better now than it was. Ever since I migrated to the iPhone 6, it kind of was a disaster. And I was like, I need to take care of this. And I just hadn't done it. But still, that was one of those really nice Twitter moments where I'm like, hey, here's my home screen. And everybody's then like,

oh, well, let me criticize all of your bad choices. Thank you. So I just deleted the tweet forget it so they don't show the stock apple apps on this screen but it does give a good indication so for example 12 of uh home screen that is people use mailbox uh 11.47 use use inbox the google app Google app. 17% have Fantastical. That's a big number. I mean, obviously, this is skewed. These are nerds. These are nerds.

Yeah. But it gives a good indication because you've got 14% use Gmail. Now, if you assume that most people probably don't have Gmail, Inbox, and Mailbox on their home screen, you may be looking at about half use not the Apple Mail app, potentially. And it's just looking at this data is quite interesting. 17% of people have Chrome, which is maybe higher than I would have expected to. So, you know, you can kind of get from this that there is some, there's quite a lot of movement in people wanting to use uh third-party apps i mean it's just i've just remembered like you know you said about when the first um first part of third-party apps for

first-party replacements came out obviously there was a time where apple would reject apps because it well this is a mail app and you have all the mail you need what's duplicates existing functionality which was crazy. I think it was a podcast app was the first one that got that rejection, or at least the first one that I remember. Right, because you could sideload podcasts already using iTunes,

so why would you ever need a podcast app? Exactly. I think it's interesting that the Twitter app, Federico will be happy to hear this, the Twitter app is on 35% of home screens on homescreen.is, and TweetBot is only on 29%. And it's the only other Twitter client there, isn't it? Apparently so.

Your darling Twitterific. Yes, I love it. I love it. I like it on the iPhone. I gave up on it on the Mac, and I love it on the iPad. I think it's great on the iPad. So obviously, at WWDC 2014, a bunch of things happened that we didn't expect would happen, right? Like keyboards, for example. Will we ever see the ability to add your own third-party replacement

instead of the Apple app? So when I click a button to email someone, can I open Mailbox instead of Mail? I think it might happen eventually. It's like a low-hanging fruit thing, right? It's like you can imagine it's all a whiteboard, and they're waiting until they need to fill an amount of check. Like, you know, we have X amount of features.

We kind of need a couple more. Why don't we just put this one in too? I think the question is when does the user experience harmed more by the fact that people have these apps that do the same thing as the Apple apps? And when they tap on something, they expect it to go to the apps they're using. And it doesn't. It goes to the apps they're using and it doesn't it goes to the apple apps when does that experience um become more of a problem than the problems that are generated by having lots of dialogue boxes that pop up that say i'm not your default would you like to make

me your default don't ask ask again later etc etc like they do on the desktop or another confusing potentially preference in the settings app like the notification center preferences. And I would argue that, I mean, Apple knows about what apps people are using. improvement, a net improvement to the experience to let people set the defaults, as long as the choice to set the defaults is well designed. But that's a question is, would it be well designed? Or would it be really annoying if they if and they that may be exactly what Apple's thinking is, we could do this now, sort of like the old copy and paste debate, right? We could do this now, but it would be crappy. It would, it would literally be, you appear to be launching this web browser, but Safari, Chrome, but Safari is set as your default. Would you like me to change that? And you don't want that. That's actually kind of a lousy experience, especially if you get it all the time. So maybe it may be

that Apple's like not philosophically opposed to this idea, but wants to do it in a way where, where most users are not going to get bugged by it. Because it bugs me when I try to share something or click on a link, like a calendar link, and it takes me to calendar instead of Fantastical, or a mail link that takes me to mail instead of mailbox. That bugs me. It makes me avoid certain features in the operating system, because they're not going to do what I actually want them to do. features in the operating system because they're not going to do what i actually want them to do so this is something that another thing that upgrader kyle has pointed out who is quite literally on fire today i think we should just call him let's call him let's get him on the

show is that you can correct us live button which i didn't actually so it allows you to view all of the apps this week i mean because what we were looking at before was apps this week, not apps overall on homescreen.is, with Apple's apps included. And then it kind of becomes a different story. Like 63% of people have mail. Well, sure. Where is that button? Oh, view with Apple's apps.

Oh, look at that. 63% have mail. 77% at that. 63% have mail. 77% have Safari. 86% have phone. So take that, people who don't like the phone app. It's still there. It's interesting. 39% have Google Maps.

36% have Apple Maps. I don't know why people are using Apple Maps. And like 38% of people have Notes. What is going on here? Come on, guys. Mike, Mike. Yeah. Is Notes on my home screen?

No. Notes is on my, I think, my second screen. Do you use the Notes app? I do. What do you use it for? The number one thing i use it for is when i am watching a movie or a tv show for the incomparable and i need to take notes about what i'm seeing so i can refer to it later when i'm uh when i'm doing the podcast that's what i use the notes app for because it's it's it's has no features it syncs to my Mac, so I can call it up here.

That's what I do. That's all I use it for, I think, almost entirely. If I launch it on my Mac today, let's see what's on there. I have a thing that I needed to read to my son that I had in Gmail and I couldn't find in Mailbox. That's the one thing that really bugs me about Mailbox, is that its search isn't very good. So I have that in here.

And then it's an incomparable note, an incomparable note, an incomparable note, incomparable, incomparable, incomparable. Yeah, it's all notes from me sitting and watching a movie and flipping open my iPad and typing a couple of things about something that I'm watching. a couple of things about something that i'm watching i can see why you deleted the the tweet because now i just want to discuss with you notes apps um yeah yeah i had notes app on the home screen yeah i'm sure that upset quite a lot of people like it i had it on the home screen upsetting me a little bit but um it's now on my second screen i'm trying to think though like what app can can do that as well as that app and maybe simple note maybe but maybe but isn't it overkill for me to install a third-party app just to do uh the occasional notes while i'm watching an incomparable thing when i've got that app installed on my phone and

my mac already and that's all i'm doing all i'm for. It's like, I use it so seldomly that even if there is something better, I get no benefit out of it being better because I don't use it for anything else. It's that literally that I use Vesper more for notes that I actually want to file away and look at later. I don't use notes for that. Notes is the, while I'm watching a Doctor Who episode and I want to write down things that i want to talk about on the podcast that's that's what i use it for okay yeah do you think that when and if the vespa mac app comes that you might it might change your mind uh i think it will be more i think i would probably use it more yeah if it was if uh i i had access to it on my mac than i do i just i i literally do use it as the place like uh you know like it was designed for i use it at the place

where i squirrel away things where i'm just i'm somewhere and i'm like oh i'll write that down and remember to look for it later i just really cannot stand that paper texture oh well yeah it's terrible and i know that's not not necessarily a reason not to use the app, but it does, it makes me feel unwell. I don't really know why it's there. I don't get it. Like, why? Why now?

Are you still doing it? Like, reminders. I can't even go close to that application. You know, oh, so bad bad why do you click the things and then the cards scroll up do you use the reminders app at all i do do you use it frequently jason i do it's where i put all of my story ideas for six colors okay it's funny i think what i'm finding here is that what I'm using different apps for is different tasks.

So rather than having like one app that has a bunch of categories and I put different notes in different categories, I just put all my story ideas and reminders and some to-dos

that are sort of like work to-dos of like you need to do this today. And a few ideas are in there. And then I use Notes app but just for the incomparable notes. And I use Vesper for something different than that. And I use, you know, Grocery IQ for shopping

lists. I, you know, sort of single task apps instead of having a, I'm really bad at the fiddly filing system thing of like, I'm going to tag this with this and put it in this category and all that. I just, I never do that. So instead my categorization system in some ways seems to be what app I put it in. I updated my home screen on homescreen.is to be more acceptable now. Notes isn't on it anymore. I'm very intrigued about the way you use your phone now. What does it mean, Mike? Yeah, I'm intrigued by it too because I have no idea what i'm doing i just i don't know i don't know i don't use my phone as much as i think a lot of people do

because i use it more when i'm out of the house which i'm not as much anymore i when i'm in the house uh and like in the house house and not in my office i'm usually my ios device is that ipad mini that's what i will look at for email and twitter and things like that the phone uh is when i'm out and about more than anything else so the use cases are pretty different i want to park that there for just a moment put it in the parking lot yeah i want to park that there for just a moment. Put it in the parking lot. Yeah, I want to come back to that. And maybe we can discuss your home screen a little bit too. Because I'm looking at it now. And I'll update mine, Jason, so you can see it too if you'd like. But before we do that, I want to take a moment to thank our third friend for this week.

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all of RelayFM. And a good friend. They are a good friend indeed. So I have just taken a new screenshot, and I'm going to go to the home screen app, if I can find it. So I'm going to try and activate a spotlight search. Oh, the spotlight search worked. That's nice.

And do I want to – oh, I do need to sign in, so I can update it right here. It's uploading, Jason, as we speak. So what I want to talk to you a little bit about now is the way you use your iOS device. Because I'm very interested because of the way you described it, because I don't think it's normal. I think that...

I didn't mean it like that. That sounded really bad. I mean, I don't think it's like how people tend to use these devices now. You know, in the way that you say it's my on-the-go device, which I don't think is necessarily the way that a lot of people use their phones.

Like me, I use it for so much all day, every day. Even when my Mac is in front of me, I'm using my iPhone for stuff because I prefer to use my iPhone for stuff. I used to do that. I used to do that until the iPad came out and the iPad changed that behavior. I used to prefer using my iPhone over my Mac for so many things when the iPhone first come out before the

iPad came out. In that period, I used to have my laptop around the coffee table and things like that. And even when it was sitting there kind of closed, I would just use my phone. It was just easier. The apps were better than using a webpage, but the iPad has supplanted it. When I'm in my house, unless I have the iPhone in my pocket and the iPad is like, I don't even know where it is. And all I want to do is look and see what's going on on Twitter. It happens, but it's very rare. Usually I will go to the iPad instead. When I'm in the house. I've just put my home screen in the chat room. So I can- I'm in the house. I've just put my home screen in the chat room so I can take the onslaught from the upgraders as we speak. Yes.

Okay, so see, the thing is, I have never been an iPad guy. I mean, I've always had iPads, but they never seem to stick for me, which is strange. I don't think it's normal, Mike have i don't think it's normal mike i don't think it's normal it isn't normal uh because a lot of people love their ipads and they use them when they're at home but i've just never been able to get them to to stick i didn't mean to call you abnormal jason oh that's okay no you may be right. You may well be right, Mike. You wouldn't be the first. You won't be the last. So you are not a heavy iPhone user then, fair to say. I mean, if I'm going anywhere, I obviously have my iPhone with me.

I'm always listening to, that is where I listen to all my podcasts. Okay. So if I'm doing the dishes or something, I will put my headphones on my iPhone and do the dishes listening to podcasts. If I'm driving somewhere, it's connected via Bluetooth and I'm listening to podcasts. And if I'm out and about, I'm out at

walking down the street and need to see what's going on on Twitter or something like that. Absolutely, all of those things happen. It's just that if I'm in the house and the iPad is around, I will use the iPad, not the phone. That's really the distinction, and I'm not out as much as I used to be. That's also true.

Okay, so this is interesting because my iPhone usage, it's not the same, you know, because I am in front of my Mac more than I obviously when I was never in front of my Mac in my corporate job. But I do find myself using my iPhone an awful lot still to do things like if I want to read RSS feeds, I use my iPhone. Quite a lot of the time if I want to read Twitter, I use my iPhone because I prefer the experience. I mean, I do have a really big iPhone, which that is, I think, part of the reason why I don't use my iPad mini so much anymore. I've spoken about that before, but I prefer to read things on that device in my hand rather than on the Mac. So you know how people say like reading something digitally has a different feel to it than when you read like a book?

Sure. I feel that way about my phone. So reading something on the desktop feels impersonal. And then when I read on my phone, it's in my hand and I'm manipulating it with my thumb and it feels more real, I think. I agree with that to a certain point. In fact, I have it happen often now. This is one of the ways that I use handoff is if I'm sitting here at my desk and I've got my iPad or my iPhone with me

and it's time for me to take a break. I'm using one of the Mac apps I wrote about break time saying you should get up because you've been sitting down for half an hour. I will often use a handoff at that moment to take whatever webpage is up in front of me and I'll just flip it open to the iOS device and read it there. And I prefer that. I think I agree with you there. Or I send it to Instapaper and I read it on my Kindle, one of those things. But I do, I see what you're saying there. For me, the text input thing bothers me. I'm just not, I'm a very, very good typist and I'm not a very good iPhone keyboard person. So I don't mind reading Twitter on the iPhone, I don't mind reading Twitter on the iPhone, although the Mac Twitter app has that great notification tab where it shows who favorited and retweeted and stuff that the iPhone version doesn't have.

So, or, you know, Federico loves the iOS version of Twitter. I don't love it so much. So I do some of that on the Mac because I think that's actually a preferable interface for it. I don't know. Everybody's use cases are different. You have the big phone. So you really do have lots of reasons why you would gravitate toward that.

And that makes sense to me. I think it really has changed even more my device usage, the six plus uh than i maybe expected like i i don't have any desire to upgrade my ipad for a while and i spoke about the ipad air 2 which seems really nice and because there's this part of me that's like you could work from an ios device like more often if you really wanted to um but then i do get i get that that feeling where if I'm going to sit down and do some big work stuff, I kind of want my Mac for that. I feel like I'm still chained in that way that maybe Federico isn't. But I do feel like if I'm going to start doing some spreadsheet work,

if I'm going to start doing some writing stuff, I want to have a keyboard in front of me. So at that point, I'd either have an iPad or a keyboard or I'd grab the Mac and I'm always going to grab the Mac because there are things, some of the stuff that I use, the stuff that I use extensively, like Google Docs, it works better on the Mac than it does on iOS devices. So for me, that still makes a lot more sense to do that.

But I think that at the moment, the 6 Plus and my MacBook Pro are like a perfect pairing. But I think it's interesting to hear the way that you are with that. Do you think it's maybe because, I mean, I know you select commuting and stuff stopped, but do you think that you're a Mac guy at heart? You're still a desktop guy? No, I don't know. I mean, the fact that I'm a very, very, very fast typist means the physical keyboard thing is always going to have a lot of weight for me

because I can be more productive on a physical keyboard. Now, I could attach a physical keyboard to an iPad or even an iPhone if I really wanted to. And sometimes I might do that. I find lots of value. But like I said, I'm finding the value in the iPad a little more than the iPhone. And I don't know why that is. I mean, obviously, if I had to choose one, I'd probably choose the iPhone only because I'm not going to carry an iPad around everywhere I go in public, right? That's not going to happen. going to carry an iPad around everywhere I go in public, right? It's not going to happen. But it's a great home device. And it fits in that slot for me. I do more now on my Mac than I did before, but that's because it's this awesome iMac and it's right in my house. And it's great to do that.

But I think a lot of it comes back to the keyboard thing that I'm not very good at typing on my, on my iPhone, even with the custom keyboards. And I'm very good at typing on this Bluetooth keyboard I have here. So that for me, that, that, that means a lot of, in terms of my productivity. And that's, that is my productivity. Also, I'm really pretty fast at typing on an iPad with my thumbs on the iPad Mini. I'm pretty fast at that. And it's just when I get to the iPhone that I'm really not very good. It just, it's a hard, I make too many mistakes. I spend a lot of time correcting mistakes because the autocorrect doesn't do a good enough job. And yeah, it's a little frustrating.

But I love my iPhone. Don't get me wrong. I just, there are things that I would prefer to do elsewhere. But I don't think it's a Mac thing. I think it's a keyboard thing. I've said that before. I would love to be able to travel with just my iPad and not my Mac. podcast stuff especially where the way ios does audio you know you don't have the ability i can't i can't do that right now unfortunately um and so i travel with a mac and and i use it when i need mackey things but i don't use it for stuff that is better on the ipad what do you think of workflow so this new app that's come out, which is an iOS app, and it's focused on trying to create workflows. It's a bit like Automator for iOS.

Now, how do you feel about if you do use an app like this? Because it's very much an iOS power user app. I'm excited about it. Again, if you took the podcast stuff out of the equation um i would be really happy using my bluetooth keyboard and my origami case and an ipad and traveling with that and writing with that writing with that in cafes and writing with that at my in-laws house and at my mom's house and whatever, I would, I would do that. And I would use editorial, which has got some great workflow stuff in it. And I would, I would use workflows.

And I, I'm, I'm very excited about the idea of doing more power user things on, on iOS. For me, you know, what it comes back to is in the end, I always have a Mac available because I have to, because of this podcasty thing we're doing, which there are workarounds, but they're really terrible. Like literally for me to do a podcast next week when I'm in Arizona without bringing a Mac with me, I would need to bring, I would need to talk to you on one iOS device while recording my microphone on a different iOS device because you can't do both. And that's not cool. And then if I was editing the show myself instead of you editing it, I could do that too. It would take a lot longer, but I could totally do that. There's a great

app for iOS that is a multi-track editor that really does work. And on the iPad Air 2, it super really works. But it would take a little more time, but it could be doable. It's just not all there yet. So that's what holds me back. But on the writing and productivity side, I mean, Federico has shown us that you can do amazing things with this. And I'm really excited about that because an app like Workflow tries to make it a little simpler. like Workflow tries to make it a little simpler. You don't have to necessarily be quite as daring and iOS daredevil like Federico Vittici is in order to do some of this stuff. So I think it's

great. I'm a big believer in iOS as a platform to get work done. But again, I'm more on the iPad side. And I realize people are kind of down on the iPad right now, but I think it's only through things like workflow that the iPad becomes so useful that it legitimately can be a replacement for a laptop. Because there are some things that you can do with this app, which are incredible, and they don't feel as hacky as trying to do things with URL schemes that Federico has really sort of championed um for

the last couple of years you know using like apps like drafts and launch into pro which are fantastic apps but they are a little bit more kind of if you want to do some interesting stuff you've got to get in there and start typing some stuff which is not very accessible and then you've got something like workflow where it's just like you can just drag and drop the things you want to do and it kind of all makes sense you can preview editorial has some of that too and i really like that about editorial the drag and drop uh sort of widgets like automator on the mac that it's not going to give you every solution but it lets you build you know it's going to be it's going to be you know text expander and keyboard maestro have bigger audiences more addressable audiences than apple script because it's just

it's too nerdy and those are are simple and this is the same thing with workflow or the or the workflows that are in editorial where you know people who are not comfortable with code can still get things done and and i'm not somebody who's comfortable with ruby code right i'm not going to do that yeah Or JavaScript code even. Yeah. I feel exactly the same. I've, you know, I've been playing a lot with workflow and it's the first one of these types of apps

that I've really felt in control of because I don't understand and, you know, I haven't taken the time to really try and learn a lot of the craziness that you can do, you know, with chaining these apps together using URL schemes and things like that. Like I've toyed with it and played around with it in the past, but this is an app that allows me to really dig in and try out some interesting things.

So I've put links to workflow and editorial in the show notes. Most of the apps that I think we've spoken about, you can kind of get to them via our home screens. Yes. Too many apps to put in the show notes today, I think. One that I will put in, actually, is Break Time that you mentioned. Sure. Because I've been thinking about this.

I'm not thinking I need to do this. I need to get up and walk around more because I have some back problems. And I think that this is exactly the type of thing. It's so easy to lose track of time. It's so easy to lose track of time. And with break time, I've discovered that, that I turn it on and say, you know, let me know in 30 minutes. And then it comes on and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I just turned that on.

There's something wrong. No, 30 minutes passed. And you just stared at a computer while sitting in a chair chair unmoving other than your fingers for that entire time that's bad for the rest of your body and uh yeah so it's it's uh it's it's great i mean there are lots of apps that do this i'm sure that there are others that are also really good this is the one that looked uh kind of looked the best and had the best set of features to me and it's pretty cheap and uh i like it kind of looked the best and had the best set of features to me. It's pretty cheap, and I like it.

The Mac App Store. Downloading it right now. Beauty. So, yeah. So that went a different way than I expected, but I thought it was quite an interesting discussion. There's still so much that we wanted to talk about today, but we can save those for next week.

Exactly. We've got two more shows this year, so we have time to um some more holiday uh technology topics if we want to as well as a best of the year whether we do that next week or the week after um i'll be i'll be traveling but uh i'll bring that computer i'll bring my macbook air and my microphone with me and and uh and we'll still have our conversations you're not going anywhere your family's all right there right yeah yeah i'll be we're recording like if you want to check the schedule at the moment there are some shows that are moving around right there will be episodes of everything um over the next couple of weeks but the days are slightly moving um i think pretty much the only day we won't be recording of an like over these

seeing weeks is probably christmas day i think. Your commitment to this network has failed. Shame on you not recording on Christmas Day. I have failed you all and I apologize. And check the schedule if you can forgive me. Check the schedule. And I hope Renegade Upgradie and Matt enjoyed all of our tech talk this week. I hope he's back. I hope so too. I hope a friendade Upgradie and Matt enjoyed all of our tech talk. I hope he's back.

I hope so, too. I hope a friend has told him to come back. Maybe somebody from Smile. Maybe. Or MailRoute. Or Igloo. Maybe. Maybe that's how it works.

Thank you to all of those people. Thanks to Jason as well. That was a nice little wrap-up. If you'd like to find us on the internet, if you'd like to surf the information superhighway to locate me and Jason, then you can go to a couple of places.

Relay.fm is where you'll find this show and a bunch of other shows. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episodes, relay.fm upgrade14. You type that in the box at the top of your Netscape Navigator to get there. Exactly.

Or any sort of web communications platform or system. Mosaic. Probably. Probably not. I am at I'm Icon Twitter. I-M-Y-K-E. And Jason is at Jsnell. J-S-N-E-L-L.

And he writes the fantastic sixcolors.com, which gets better every day, Jason. And I think that you stepping away from the corporate life has benefited us all greatly. And I don't think that you get told that enough and you should be told that more. And I hope that you feel that you made the right decision too,

because it feels that way for the rest of us. I was on Mac Power Users. It'll be out next week. And they said the same thing to me. It was very nice to say, I feel like we get more Jason now and that's good. And I really appreciate that. Again, I hope that I can keep doing it because I love what I'm doing right now. I hope that I can make the financial part of it work. But in terms of what I'm doing, and I'm certainly very busy, but I'm loving it.

So I'm glad people are enjoying that they get more of me now that isn't spent time in meetings or talking to human resources or talking about laying people off, but instead is just like writing stories and doing podcasts. So, yay. And we will be back next time thank you very much

to all the upgraders for listening don't forget hashtag ask upgrade if you'd like to ask us a question or you can send us a follow up via any means that you would like carry a pigeon is preferred we'll be back next time until then goodbye

ahoy telephone Until then, goodbye. Ahoy, telephone.