Upgrade - 162: The Spider Is a Metaphor

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

Jason’s iMac gets a unwelcome visitor and he ponders an upgrade--but is the iMac Pro overkill, or a wise investment? Also, an influx of new emoji are coming to iOS and macOS in the near future, which is more important than you’d think.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 162 today's show is brought to you by encapsular flight logger and fresh books my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you i'mley. How are you? I'm very well. How are you? Well, I am completely out of sorts because my iMac is not in front of me right now. And I do think people want to hear about that. Nobody cares about that right now. Later we can care about it. But right now, nobody cares about what computer you're using because it is time for everybody's favorite segment of the show,

Hashtag Snell Talk. And today's hashtag snell talk question has been sent in by reed and reed wants to know jason how did you celebrate your birthday happy birthday jason oh thank you uh you know it is a it was a just a work day so i didn't work as much as I would normally. I watched some baseball because my birthday tends to coincide with baseball playoffs. And there are always interesting baseball games on television. So I watched some of those and had lunch with my wife because she had kind of a weird schedule on that day too. And then we all went out to dinner with her parents actually were in town.

So we all went out to dinner to a nice restaurant and uh she bought a cake that was very nice and that's the kind of cake that uh that i like from the place that i found a cake that i like because i don't like a lot of cakes did the waitstaff sing happy birthday to you no in fact there was a very dicey moment when the guy came with the bill and my um my mother-in-law mentioned that it was my birthday and the guy looked at me like it's your birthday do you you do you want a dessert and i said well first off we already told you we don't want a dessert because we have a dessert at home we have the cake and second i don't let's just i shut him down put a candle in that because it's up for. It was not that kind of restaurant, but seriously, no.

And that is a pro tip, by the way. When there are servers around, when your waiter is around at a restaurant, don't mention that it's somebody's birthday because they will listen and then it gets weird. Unless that's what you want to happen. Unless that's what you want to happen. Unless that's what you want. But I said pro tip, not amateur tip of somebody who's excited to make the waitstaff at a restaurant sing non-proprietary birthday songs to them. But if you're a pro, you just let it go. So we're going to be together next week, which we'll talk about in a moment.

And I'll do my level best not to mention to any waitstaff that it's your birthday during that period of time. Well, it'll be too late. But they won't know that, Jason. You will miss your chance. They won't know if I say it. They will know neither way. There are probably people who go get the birthday thing every time they go out to dinner because nobody is checking their ID. Yeah, free cake.

So we are going to be together next week. So if you want to send in, you can bear that in mind of your Snell Talk questions. together next week so if you want to send in you can bear that in mind of your snail talk questions hashtag snail talk if you want to ask a question to start the show and you have a rare opportunity to ask something that i don't know what would what we would do or what difference it would be because we're going to be looking into each other's eyes when we record the show but it could open up some opportunities from some new and exciting snail talk questions we're going to be at the release notes conference next week so if you're going to be there We're going to be at the Release Notes conference next week. So if you're going to be there, it's going to be in Chicago. If you're going to be there, come say hi. We're doing a couple of event things, but they're like ticketed events.

So that's going to be a, they're already gone. So we're doing a live episode of Connected and the tickets are already gone for that. But there is going to be one public meetup that we're going to be a part of, which I'm doing as part of the Pen Addict podcast. we're going to be a part of which i'm doing as part of the pen addict podcast um we're going to be having a open house at field notes the uh notebook company we're going to open the house with them um they have like a facebook event thing i'm going to put that in the show notes because if people do want to come by this will be a really cool event to go to and you can come that's friday right that's on friday it's on friday october 13th yes i will not be there. No.

So don't look for me. Well, you can look for Jason, but you won't find Jason. Yeah, pro tip, don't look for me. Because if you were an amateur tip, then you will look for me and not find me. And pros don't like to fail. We're all about pro tips today. Lots of pro tips on this show.

This is the pro tip edition. Pro tip. So yeah, we're going to be at Release Notes. If you're going to be there, please come and say hi. If you're not, we'll be doing stuff. If we're going to be at release notes um if you're going to be there please come and say hi uh if you're not we'll be doing stuff if we're going to do any kind of a public event we'll tweet about it or something but uh we don't have anything on the cards right now for that but if you're in chicago i hope that we're going to see you next week i don't think on the cards is the way that phrase works but that's fine that's maybe they're literally our cards that you've got It's in the cards.

It's not in the cards. You don't know how I set up my calendar. It could just be very card-based. You could have an entirely card-based planning system. Maybe that's what they say in England. It's not on the cards. It's a card-based calendar system right there.

There's been a follow-up for WatchOS. WatchOS 4.0.1 has been out in the last week or so, and it specifically called out fixing the captive Wi-Fi bug that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks that a bunch of people were seeing where the Apple Watch was trying to connect to open Wi-Fi networks that didn't have passwords for. Apparently, Apple has done something to fix this

and that's watchOS 4.0.1. I've never seen this problem myself personally, so I can't attest to whether it's been improved. But this is a bug fix that we were waiting for. Yep. This is the... You walk by some place that

has an open Wi-Fi but you have to go in the browser to log in, and it gets confused, and it's bad. So this is good that they put this out there, because it's being aggressive at trying to attach to Wi-Fi, but a little too aggressive. Upgradian Rob has sent in an app to us called Half. It's called the Half app.

You can go halfapp.co for this. It is an application for iOS and macOS to convert your images and videos to HEAF and HEVC. So we've been talking about, people have been asking us, we've got a bunch of questions, ask Upgrade questions about this, like how can I do this? What's the best way to do this? This is an application that claims to do this, right right like it claims to be able to take your photos and turn them into the smaller

file sizes the new compression systems that apple have use of caution i guess i haven't tried this i'm a little bit wary personally of sending my files through this conversion system but this is an app that says it does it yeah and, and it doesn't do batch yet, although they say that that's coming. And something, so I said last time, and I'll say it again, that I don't like the idea. I think you should just keep your old photos

the way they are rather than converting them because when you convert a lossy compressed file to a new lossy format, there is some data loss that happens there. Now, of course, it's already compressed. So there's a limit to, you know, it's already lost a lot of data. One thing that I like about what the half FAQ says is they're using the highest quality setting when they do this. So they're not they're trying to not throw away more data and you still get a size savings. So if you don't care about this, that's fine.

It's just like, I looked at this and thought, you know what, I'll leave my old JPEGs alone. So you'd really need to be in a space crunch. And if you are, then so be it. But I feel like you probably rather just keep your originals around and cloud storage is getting cheaper and on-device storage is getting cheaper. In the long arc of history, it's getting cheaper, maybe not right at the moment.

But in the end, do you want to go through the trouble? And then you've got two sets. So then do you delete your old ones or do they keep kicking around in a backup? And I think it's kind of a mess. But if you really want to do it, yes is a this is an app that'll do it and they're going to bring batch processing in and they seem to be doing the right thing and trying to minimize the data loss that would will happen when you uh do double lossy compression yeah i am as i it's good that this exists but i'm definitely in the snail camp of just i'll let it go in the future i mean

i haven't even converted on my iphone yet i have i'm keeping it as jpeg because i haven't upgraded my mac to high sierra like i'm just waiting right in a position where i've got everything running and i have no intention of upgrading to high sierra right now um so i'm going to keep everything in jpeg for the time being i mean i have more than enough space on my devices uh but in the future i will move to these systems once all of my devices i'm comfortable to have them all supported because i'm really sure i really like you know i just can't see myself going back to my archive and trying to convert it but exactly yeah 100 so it's like i'm just kind of like i know it's there it's going to be great when it's there i'm not using it at all right now but one day i will uh you know

that's kind of i feel a lot that way about a lot of the things that are in high sierra like um apfs right like i'm using it on my iphone on my ipad and it's fine but i'm really kind of hesitant to to put it on my mac right now i'm just a little bit like i'm just gonna give it some time because i don't need High Sierra for anything. And considering some of the stuff that High Sierra is doing, it feels to me personally like a higher risk upgrade than normal. So I'm kind of just going to wait for a little bit. Yeah, I can see that.

So yeah. We spent a bunch of time talking about Twitterific for Mac when they were running their Kickstarter campaign. And the Kickstarter campaign was funded and they've had Project Phoenix in beta. And now it is going to be available to everybody on Tuesday the 10th. So tomorrow, as we record this,

Twitterific for Mac will be available in the macOS app store. But Kickstarter backers like me and you, we got our copies of the full final version of Tutorific for Mac a few days ago. And I wanted to know, Jason, as a person who loves Tutorific, used Tutorific on all the devices, what are you thinking about this application? Are you using it? Like, how do you feel about it? I am using it. I've been using it more the last couple of weeks. It's been in beta for a while, but it's one of those things where it's not... It was under construction. It was definitely a beta. And so I would use it for a little while, but I hadn't gotten gone full in. And there's still some things that it doesn't do that I miss from the Twitter for Mac app because it has access to features that Twitterific doesn't have access to because it has to use the API.

It has access to features that Twitterific doesn't have access to because it has to use the API. And Twitter for Mac can use Twitter, secret Twitter stuff. But I like a lot of things about it. It's customizable. You actually can hold down the option key when you open the preferences, and you can build your own custom theme. It looks good. Syncs with the iOS stuff and looks very much like the iOS app in a lot of ways. There are things about it that are a little weird that are going to either take some getting used to or some refinement on the Icon Factory's part. I'm not sure how well some of the interface

translates from iOS in terms of things that, like in iOS, you can get to threads and replies by swiping. And on the Mac, they don't do that, which is fine. But I end up trying to click on things. And I end up in this weird position where I'm like, how do I get the thread to show up using my mouse instead of like my keyboard, I can do it with an arrow key but uh how do i get that with my mouse and you know and you can't swipe it i just tried i didn't even realize it would be nice if you could just swipe on the trackpad over the items and that would be just like on ios but failing that uh some sort of uh reliable uh kind of mouse gesture and it's not it's not quite reliable it feels like double clicking is it seems to do a lot of stuff, but there's something about double clicking,

which feels weird to me. Where you double click too. I have a lot of, sometimes there's a thread button that you can click on, but sometimes it's sort of like I have to double click in the margin because if I double click in the tweet, it doesn't do anything.

But if I go out on the margin, it does, or it doesn't do it as reliably. And it's a, for all do it as reliably and you know it's it's a for all of its uh you know it's version 5.0 it really is in many ways version 1.0 of of bringing it back but it's got a lot of stuff i really like um and it's uh yeah it's uh it's it's a good start and and there are a lot of things i like about it so i'm trying trying to use it more and we'll see how it goes. But yeah, I'm encouraged. It also has, it's one of these things that it's funny.

Twitterific on iOS has a mute and muffle feature where you can like, just like on TweetBot, you can hide stuff that you don't want to see. And that interface doesn't currently exist in the Mac version, but the feature is there. So if all the stuff that I have muted and muffled, just like users of TweetBot on Mac and iOS will

know this as a feature. I have lost that when I switched away. Well, Twitterific for Mac was so old and kind of out of sync that it didn't do it. But now it syncs together. So all of my mutes and muffles on iOS just work on the Mac, even though there's no UI for it yet.

Yeah, like I was playing around with it and couldn't find a way to do that. I was like, oh, where is that feature? But it's like it's not here yet. Yeah, the UI is not on the Mac side yet. It's only on the iOS side. So I'm sure they'll add it. And there's other stuff that I would like them to add there's some there's some um a lot of interface niceties that you know they they they had their list from their kickstarter of the features that

they needed to do and uh and so some of the stuff isn't there that i would like like i i have individual lists called out on a sidebar in ios i would love to be able to do something like that where i could take one of my lists and put it in the toolbar of my window so that I could just flip to a particular list instead of having to click the list button and then click the sports button or whatever. But yeah, it's getting there. that I always bring up when I am talking about a Twitter client that is not TweetBot, which is to say to everybody out there who uses TweetBot, I have TweetBot. I have used TweetBot on all the platforms. You don't need to remind me that TweetBot exists. I am aware of it. Doesn't work for me. Glad it works for you, but I i am aware it exists you don't need to point out that tweetbot exists because i have found that if you discuss any other twitter client people who

use tweetbot emerge like from the shadows from a bush and they say what about tweetbot have you used tweetbot have you heard the good news about tweetbot and the answer is yep i heard it i got it it's fine it's not for me and that's. As a person who uses Chrome on iOS, like I understand, right? Like I think that mine's a little bit more extreme, but you know, like people are just like, why don't you just use, I just don't. All right. Like I just don't, it's not what I want to do. It's just, I just don't. Mike, did you know that Safari is a browser that Apple provides? That's the good news about Safari. So I'll say like, I've only really like tinkered around with TweetBot on the Mac a little bit. And I am struck at how much it feels like an iOS app.

It's a very strange feeling. It is a nice-looking application. I'm pleased that it exists. Do you mean Twitterific? I mean, but I think what you just said is true for TweetBot. That's 100% true for TweetBot. I meant Twitterific, but it's 100 true for tweetbot although i will for me personally i feel like the mac version of tweetbot feels more like

a mac app than the mac version of twitterific does oh yeah well and that's what i was saying about interface niceties i think that's part of it is that um in doing a conversion from ios to mac twitterific is still you know there are still a lot of things where, you know, if they were building it for the Mac or if they had more time to work on it, they would have made it more Mac-y. And there's some stuff where they obviously just chose to be like, well, look, this is, we got to ship this first version. So let's just do it. Whereas Tweetbot has had way more time to be a considered refined Mac app. Although there are still things in Tweetbot on the Mac that I think this is a little weird,

right? Because I feel like it's sort of riding on iOS conventions a little bit. Yeah. And like even TweetBot for the Mac doesn't have all of the same features that iOS does. Like the iOS apps are more advanced, right? Like they have their whole activity tab stuff, which doesn't exist in the same way on the Mac and things like that. Yeah.

It's a bigger market. Yeah. And the today feature, which is the equivalent in Twitterific is not on the Mac and things like that. Yeah, it's a bigger market. Yeah, and the Today feature, which is the equivalent in Twitterrific, is not on the Mac at this point. Maybe someday. I hope that the response is good. I'm interested to see what the response will be like because calling this version 5 feels weird

because you say it really feels like version 1. But it would need to be like, what, Twitterrific 2 version 1? Exactly. Something that's strange. This is the only way to do it. And I reckon probably that if you are a twitterific user you're just going to be super happy with this because it exists but i

can't see them pulling people in from other twitter apps right now with with this version you know i can't personally i i don't imagine like tweetbot users or the official app users being like great i'll switch over to terrific now um because the mac app this is a building like this is a foundation to build upon so i hope that it's successful for them i hope that they can build a business on it um and most of all i'm pleased because you and john syracuse will finally get an app that you can use yeah it's true and and uh john and i were both people who would like dig into the apps frameworks to customize the,

the look and feel of the app. And it's nice that although it's basically unsupported, it's got that way that you can go in and build your own theme. Cause I've totally done that. Wow. And, well, you know,

I don't like their dark theme. The text is like gray on a on a on a it's like gray on dark gray background it's like I hate that I hate the lack of contrast so I I you know I could I could change it and that's fun too and I can change it in a UI instead of having to change it in a in a text file like like before so that's kind of fun too but it's like a good post for six colors to tell people how to do that because I have no idea. Yeah, I suppose so.

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right now to download Flight Logger and update your travel experience today. That is F-L-I-G-H-T-L-O-G-G-E-R dot C-O. Thanks to Flightlogger for their support of this show. Great app. Really, really like it. Yay. I would like to talk about your Spider Mac. Oh, boy. So, last week, before we recorded the show, if you listen live, and you can listen live to the show every week,

go to relay.fm.com and you can find out when this show and all of our shows will be streaming. So you can join in with the chat room if you want. It's a great time. The live listeners last week found out that your iMac had a spider in it. Yep. This is true. This was a horrifying realization for me as i am not a fan of the eight-legged creatures uh but can you explain what happened like how how does a spider

even get into a computer i can't explain what happened mike the 5k imac unlike previous imax has was sort of one of the things mentioned about its bill its build was that the screen is a single piece like used to be you could pop an imax glass off the front uh with suction cups because it was held on by powerful magnets and then you could access the computer that way and the the imMac, the 4K iMac is, or 5K iMac, is a single piece. Like the glass and the screen are all attached. And I think the implication there when we learned that was that that meant also that it was probably a very tight fit. It's closer to the glass. There's maybe very little air gap, if any air gap there.

Well, guess what? It's big enough? There is enough room in there and somehow somewhere access in there that a small spider could crawl in there. And I heard from some, when I posted this on Twitter, I heard from people who said that they also had a spider or a fly

or a couple of people said ants had crawled into the space, the very small space between the glass and the screen. Obviously had come in a vent and then crawled around inside my computer and emerged somehow in the screen. At which point it died and sat in the screen. What I find interesting that the spider died but it stayed in the same place it must have been a real tight fit well yeah i think that's it it's a it was a very tight fit well it may have died and then fallen into a position where it stuck that's possible this makes me so uncomfortable i didn't check with the medical examiner the spider medical examiner about this spider car but whatever it was it was sort of like and you know it was kind

of like i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna shake my iMac like a like a like a tambourine or something but it it didn't seem to be movable it was wedged in that spot and as i asked at the time attempting to poke it with the mouse pointer didn't do anything either you know just not a thing just to check not a thing i tried i i moved my windows underneath it and uh no no effect can i shuffle it down no it is an x spider yeah so i mean i just assumed that the screen was laminated right like that was just i mean i assume they obviously never said that but like my mind was like oh screen was laminated, right? Like that was just, I mean, I assume they obviously never said that, but like my mind was like,

oh, this is laminated like the iPhones, right? That's just kind of what my brain had told me these computers were like, you know, like that there was no gap anymore. Sure, yeah, yeah, that's, you're right. They never really said it, but your brain starts to think, oh, well, all of Apple now are are just the glass and the

screen are all connected and that's how it works now and uh and nope let me tell you i i yeah i that was my moment when i saw it i was like what is that and it's like let me can i wipe that and it's like there's nothing there what that's a spider it's under the glass but over the screen how is that possible the spider is coming from inside the glass it's from inside the glass horrible yep it would have been worse if i knocked on the screen and it knocked back that would have been worse it would it would have been significantly worse if you saw it moving around i feel like that would have been like just like a horror show anyway well yeah but at least then there would have been the hope that i would come back the next day and it would be gone it will have left its screen domain i guess

and then i could just continue on with my life as normal and they said that that max don't get bugs um you you spider's not a bug come on give me that one give me that one you wrote a post on six colors about this because you have to, right? You've got to show the pictures to the world. But there was a thing in there that really stood out to me that this Mac was one of the first products that you reviewed on Six Colors. And I had one of these feelings of

that feels like so long ago and not long enough. You know, like it was this weird timeline freeze for me. It was like, oh, wow. Because one, it just feels like Jason Snell, he does Six Colors. That's just how you cemented in freeze for me right it was like oh wow it felt because one it just feels like jason snell he does six colors that's just how you you've cemented in the beginning of time you know but like the macworld stuff has mostly disappeared in my like association of you so it's just funny three years three years oh my word well i guess it's as long as old as the show right like we started at the same time but yeah it feels like ages ago and not long enough.

So what are you going to do about this thing? What's going to happen? Are you going to live with it? Have you given the spider a name? No, I've not given the spider a name. So I could live with it. Dan Morin pointed out that he had an iMac that he used that had, like, a blue line on it for a couple

of years and he just used it and the truth is moran is a monster though yeah well so yeah i could live with it um but it was it's really distracting it was it was it was driving me because it was basically dead in the center as well right which is like the worst place no it was sort of in the in it was it was not in the center but it was in my my working area i mean that's a big screen but it was in my working area and it's one of those things where yeah i could have avoided i thought about things like should i just put a sticker on there should i should i can i find an app that will just float uh or like block off that part of the screen and just like pretend that screen isn't there

and just it's going to emulate a much smaller screen draw a little white line around the spider like i've got two i've got two different virtual monitors on that screen but the spider part is blacked out like i thought about all sorts of things like that um so yeah i could deal with it the the thing is um so my thought process first all right let's walk through the thought process because of course i could live with it i could live with it it would be it would uh it would very it would frustrate me and distract me on a regular basis but i could i could i could live with it i i'm not gonna say i could get used to it but you're a grown-up right like you can deal with it you're a grown-up right yeah but again i might deal with it by putting a piece of tape on the screen or something like but um i could i could do that so then i started to think you know your initial reaction is you know burn everything down

time to get a new imac there's a spider in this one like that those are the initial reactions and and then i thought well this is a great computer great computer, so even if I were to just say, forget it, this is giving me a new one, I would want to put this one to use, and now I'm put in the position where I'm either handing down to one of my children or selling on the internet or on eBay or whatever a computer with a spider in the screen. So then it's like, hey, enjoy this great iMac. Why do you want it? Well, there's a dead spider in the screen so then it's like here enjoy this great iMac why do you want it well there's a spot there's a dead spider behind the glass oh thanks for the spider

Mac that you've just given me so I thought okay I can live with it for a while but ultimately I'm gonna want to get the screen I'm gonna either want to get the screen. I'm going to either want to get the screen replaced, or I'm going to want to get somebody to attempt to remove the spider from the screen. Whatever, however that works. The screen is like a $400 part, I think. And getting in there is complicated because it's all attached with tape now. So you have to kind of like knife around the edges to get in and then you have to replace the tape and all of that stuff.

This has become something that you can't really do anymore, right? Yeah, it's not meant to be. I mean, iFixit does it and it can be done but it's not one of those things that is... iMac screens are not a thing

that you generally want to try to mess with yourself. Also because like even in the old ones that were easier to pop off, the challenge is how do you... Okay, the spider's bothering you, but if you don't do it right or if you're in the wrong environment when you put it together, you're going to end up with a dog hair and a fingerprint and some dust. Four spiders.

You're getting more spiders in there than you had before. Or more spiders. Just dump in a tray of ants and then slap the glass back on and see and you got an ant farm well you gotta you gotta send in something bigger to get the spider out that's how that works oh that's that is that is that's good they should make a song about that anyway um so i decided i would do that and uh that i would replace the screen so what what's ended up happening is i i'm gonna get the i going to get either the spider removed, evicted from the screen or replace the screen. And my iMac is gone.

I've already taken it to the nice service people who are going to attempt a screen replacement on it. And what I also decided as a part of this whole conversation about the future of my iMac and whether I should just like set it on fire because there's spiders is I, I have, I think come around to the idea that I'm going to buy an iMac pro. Interesting. So I'll, I'll fix this one and then I can sell it or, or pass it down. And when the iMac pro comes out, there could be some conspiracy theories brought about here, you know you know was was the spider replants that you'd buy it was jason stelzine with a box of spiders in his garage going into his garage for those who haven't been in my garage i do not need to supply spiders i live i i work in a garage in we have spiders and we have spiders in our house sometimes we have them in a garage in we have spiders in we have spiders in our house sometimes we have them

in a garage there are a lot of them outside in the trees there's spider webs on our on our car mirrors when we go out in the morning there are spiders around i don't need to supply spiders this is a natural process that brings spiders into my life so how did you get to this then like why why why do you think that you want or need an iMac pro well the short version would be it's Marco Arment's fault yeah because it's always Marco's fault because if you mention products around Marco he will convince you to buy an expensive product I once visited Marco and i think within 25 minutes had bought all new audio equipment like new headphones a new headphone amp and a new microphone yeah he has this horrible ability to make you see sense but sense that is expensive well

you're yeah you're viewing it once you get it's like the reality distortion field with Steve Jobs. It's a little like that. It's this sort of like once you start to view Marco's perspective, which is very much a, and it's not unreasonable, right? That's the thing that's dangerous about it. It's like, well, yeah, but if you look at it this way, you should buy the good thing because the good thing is good and you will use it. I mean, it comes across sometimes as him talking you into buying things and spending lots of money but his perspective is is usually a reasonable one which is to get something good you have to pay for it so don't cheap out get the good thing

because you're going to use it this is not a thing that you're not going to use you should you should get this and i think that i think that when he's talking to people he knows about this stuff he is as opposed to maybe some of the stuff that he tries out himself, there's an extra burden when you're talking to somebody you know. And he knows how you use that audio stuff and that you're going to appreciate it and therefore it has value and that spending more money on it, you're going to get the value out of it. And so it's worth it. So that's basically what happened with me in the iMac Pro is he said, and he's completely right. He said, you, me, Jason, use iZotope RX6, which is this audio software that does noise removal and echo removal and all sorts of other wild things.

I've written about it a couple of times. I do a lot of podcasts with people who are not in ideal recording environments. And so I get files that are full of background hums from heaters and air conditioners and computer fans and sometimes in echoey rooms. And I process most of it to make it sound better. And that using iZotope. And that is a piece of software

that uses all the cores that you can throw at it all the processor cores and marco is somebody who really is focused on processor efficiency like he spent all that time working on multi and he talked about on the atp working on multi-threading mp3 encoding because he got frustrated that the MP3 encoders were only using like two cores or one core and he wanted them to be efficiently use all the cores all the time right but he's right the tools that I use to do a lot of this are are multi-core savvy and so I will benefit greatly from having an imac pro with that many many core processor that's very fast because instead of starting a denoise job and then walking away for 10 minutes even on my i7 imac it takes forever to do that stuff yeah that it will happen a lot faster the

generation after you right um mine is completely maxed out and if i ever use isotope and i use it every now and then i don't use it nearly as frequently as you do yeah i'm always surprised by how long it takes because everything else is so quick it's like okay i'm gonna process this file okay five minutes remaining uh what right because everything else i do with audio on my imac it it happens in seconds. Yeah. And if you've got iStat menus on or Activity Monitor open, you can see it pins the processors at 100%. The fans spin up. And for five minutes or whatever, or longer, it is just churning on this stuff. It does an amazing job.

That's why it's doing it the way it's doing it. But it is incredibly processor intensive so um that that is uh also your iMac actually because it's the 2015 has the faster uh SSD faster storage transfer it's like 2x of mine and that's another place where I would get a benefit by getting a new iMac or iMac Pro is once I'm done processing these files, I have to save them. And the save takes forever. And now keep in mind, also, these are huge files. Like when I do denoising for a session of Total Party Kill, the Dungeons and Dragons podcast that we do.

So that's got like seven people on it. the dungeons and dragons podcast that we do um so that's got like seven people on it so i have seven uncompressed audio files that are probably four hours long each wow oh my god that takes a long time and those are huge files and then you have to save them so anyway you know marco's point he's right like i could an imac pro even though it would be by far the most expensive computer in terms of a dollar figure, not necessarily in terms of like actual dollars because of inflation and things like that, but the largest single amount of money I'd, I've ever spent for a computer. If I bought an iMac Pro, I've never bought a $5,000 computer before.

Generally they're two, they're $2,500 computers at most. But would I use it? And would it make my job easier? And would everything go faster? And would I be more productive? Yeah, actually, yeah, it's true. I would be. So maybe. We'll see. The good news is, like the 4K orMac, my hope is that I will get to review the iMac Pro. Because that's what happened with the 5K iMac. I wrote a review of it. Apple sent me one, and I used it, and I wrote a review of it, and I sent it back to Apple. And before I had even sent it back to Apple, I had ordered one, right? So my hope is that it'll be something like that. I'll get to try it out and say, okay, let's see how this thing works. Another funny thing that actually works in my favor for the iMac Pro is that it's going to be Visa mountable.

Unlike the current generation of iMacs where you have to order it as either one with a stand or one that's Visa mountable, max where you have to order it as a either one with a stand or one that's visa mountable which led to me carrying my iMac like a I don't know like a like a box of pizza when I was taking it in to get it fixed because it was off the arm and just this slab has no no no stand or anything anyway the iMac pro has um apparently you it's like the old iMacs where you can you can pop off the uh pop off the stand and and mount it and it's just one configuration for both because if I do hand down my existing iMac I'm going to have to get basically either either wall mounted somewhere or I'm going to have to buy a VESA mount a computer stand to stand it because it doesn't have a stand of its own it's right it's made to be mounted so yeah so now i'm leaning toward that we'll see how it is if i

get to review it that'll be great because i'll get to try out the uh the imac pro and see for myself how um if it's something i want to do so yeah that's awesome i'm very keen to know how you feel about it I can't see myself buying an iMac Pro like I don't need it I'm good I really do believe that the iMac that I have right now is going to be my computer for the next few years

because I very rarely have to do anything like what you do because most of the shows that I do are with people that are in predictable environments, right? So like the amount of times that I have to do any severe audio processing is very minimal.

And a lot of the applications that I use that do require processing power, they're not fully optimized in a way that maybe isotope would be right to use all of those cores yeah exactly that's that's going to be my argument when we get to the end of the year is okay this is what a five thousand dollar and i think a lot of a lot of people who are kind of on the pro side of mac usage are going to have this moment, which is what do I get for $5,000 with the base model iMac Pro versus what do I get for the build to order high-end iMac, 5K iMac? And what's the difference there? And what's the real difference there, right? Because the true pinned multi-processor,

Because the true pinned multi-core processor test, the iMac Pro will undoubtedly blow away the iMac. Because it's made to do that. But in your everyday life, will you see the benefits? And I was talking to Stephen Hackett about this too because of video stuff. I also do for some of the stuff I do, I do video stuff. Stephen's doing a lot of video. Encoding 4k video is another plan. So it's like, wow. Um, that's that I, when I encode video for, uh, for total party kill, I often will just leave it overnight and it doesn't take all night to finish. It finishes in an hour or two, but I just, at the end of the day, I'm like, all right, export the file here. And I walk away because it is a long process. And that's just 1080 video.

So that's another, you know, this is the question. It's like, do you do stuff that is going to use eight cores? No, like I don't. Or are you really just going to benefit from by having a fast i7 and fast storage? And is that all you really need? Because even video, I have absolutely no intention of doing 4K, right? And I know that like Stephen has all these problems and of trying to do things in 4K. Like I've had some people ask me questions about this before, like Final Cut can deal with it, but it is really tough. And I guess an iMac

Pro is built to handle these types of tasks, providing the applications are developed to take advantage of all of it. But it's more power than I need, especially for how little time in my life sit in front of my iMac. Most of my working time really is on iOS, so I'm kind of good. But I get why lots of people will look at the iMac Pro. It's why the computer should exist in the first place. But I'm also, Jason, waiting. I'm waiting before I make any choices to see what the Mac Pro is. I just want to see, right? Like my next computer in maybe two or three years,

is it going to be an iMac Pro or is it going to be a Mac Pro? I don't know yet, right? And so I'm keen to wait it out. It's like another reason, like just to wait out any kind of upgrade to see maybe next year what the Mac Pro looks like, because you never know, like it might be better for me for my things at that point,

but I just can't foresee it right now. Yeah, I think, you know, pros of the Mac Pro is if a spider gets in your monitor, you can just get a new monitor. Exactly. But I don't know. I'm not sure that's a path I need to walk down. But I can see how some people are going to be.

And Apple's intention was not to have a Mac Pro, right? So there's the question of what's that Mac Pro going to be? That's why I'm even more intrigued by it because it shouldn't exist. This should be it. It's a product that shouldn't exist. It's true. And the iMac Pro was meant to replace it. And of course, now it's not going to replace it, which is a question of like, what's the iMac Pro versus the Mac Pro? That's going to be really interesting to watch. Yeah, so we'll see. But I'm now much more also as somebody who runs my own business and we have the way that the tax and structure of the business work. You know, we try to this is boring, but forgive me for a second.

We try to have the business be break even basically because all the profit is then rolls into our taxes and we have to pay our taxes anyway. So we rather the business break even and then we just pay the taxes on the money that we make. What that means, net result is at the end of the year, I'm seriously considering buying things. Because that helps make the, that's a good time to buy stuff. It's at the end of the year where we're wrapping up the books for the calendar year. And so buying an iMac or an iMac Pro in December it's great I hope it doesn't I hope I can buy one in December and it doesn't it doesn't uh get delayed to January because then that will make me sad but uh but yeah so we'll see we'll see um but I I'm now leaning that way because

although the iMac that I have is amazing other than the spider and I really like it and it's so powerful and it's so great for so many things. The truth is that a lot of the stuff that I do does take a lot of extra power. And although it does it in an amazingly short amount of time, there now exists computers that could shave that time quite a bit yeah and you know it's not the stuff it's not me typing words right it's not me looking at pictures it's the churning through um hundreds of gigabytes of um of audio and video and stuff like that so maybe maybe but so that this is the path that the spider sent me down. But, you know, in the end, the spider is a separate issue. Like the spider just sort of made me also think about do I want to get a new iMac? Do I want do I want to make sure that this iMac doesn't have a spider in it so that I can pass it down or sell it and get a new iMac because it got, we got to the, that point,

right. Where it's suddenly, it's like, I can't just freely at any point, give this thing away or sell it because there's now a spider embedded in the screen. So it was the, it was a,

it, it just forced me to think of the larger issues that I had been already thinking about involving my, my iMac and whether I want to upgrade after three years spider is a metaphor you know the spider makes the spider makes us consider our lives I think Mike today's show is also brought to you by FreshBooks hey freelancers wouldn't it be great if you could save a bunch of time in your working life so you could make more focus on the smart decisions that you need to make for your business well what if you could save up to 192 hours? That's a lovely number, isn't it? Well,

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If you do any type of invoicing or expenses tracking, really, you should check out FreshBooks. I could not recommend it enough. We thank FreshBooks for their support of this show. It is emoji season. It is. Apple have previewed more emoji. So if you remember a few months ago, Apple showed off some of the emoji that they were going to be doing.

It included some of the elf and stuff like that, all of the mythical beings that they're putting in along with some of the other faces that they're adding. Well, they've now previewed even more emoji that are going to, and they've also said when we're going to get them. They're going to come in 11.1, which is also going to be in beta this week.

So I think on public and developer beta, they're going to be pushing the emoji out on 11.1. And then 11.1, I reckon, will probably come out around iPhone 10 time, if not before. Some of the new emoji that have been shown are face with monocle, which I will be using

with abundance some gender neutral emoji for children adult and older adult cup with a straw which is an emoji that i have wanted for a long time one of the first conversations i had with emoji pedia maestro mr jeremy burge is why is there not a cup with a straw emoji and the reason this frustrated me is because in apple's picker one you know like they have like the food picker it used to have a cup of a straw in it so well there's actually no emoji for that so that's coming um a smiling hedgehog which is one of the cutest emoji that has ever existed um there is the american sign language sign for i love you, which I think is amazing.

And I think will get used a lot, which is a great one. And then stuff like sleds, curling stones. Curling stone. Which is just a beautiful emoji. It is beautifully done and just in time for the Winter Olympics. Yep. Because that's when people will use it. It's the only time. There will be curling.

I will wear the curling emoji out in february i'm telling you now and also one i think which will also be used a ton is a shushing face so uh a face with a lip to the mouth to be like so that's a good one that one's going to be used a lot there's a lot of great new emoji coming in here i'm very excited about it and it's probably smiley with a monocle that a lot of great new emoji coming in here. I'm very excited about it. And it's probably- Smiley with a monocle. That kills me. I think monocles are hilarious.

And now there's a smiley with a monocle. So that one's going to get used in all sorts of ironic ways, I think. That'll be great. The swearing face, the stars in eyes, the vomit face, the mind exploding, the dinosaurs. This is a really great update. There's going to be a lot in there. And as always, we spoke about this a bunch. Adding new a really great update. There's going to be a lot in there. And as always, we spoke about this a bunch. Adding new emoji drives iOS adoption because your friends start sending

you emoji that you can't see. So you will update to iOS 11 as well. And there have been reports, I'll put a link in the show notes to an article, Mac Rumors, that iOS adoption has been a little bit slower than usual with iOS 11. So it's currently installed, as of a couple of weeks ago, on like 25% of devices, but this is slower than it's been in the past. Like iOS 10 was at 34% at the same period of time. So it's not horrifically slower, but it is slower. And I will say personally, I don't know if you've seen this, Jason, but this has, I have not noticed this jason but um this has i have not noticed this personally but i've been seeing a lot of people talking online and we had a family

dinner yesterday and every single member of my family was telling me about the battery life problems that they're having on their phones since ios 11 yeah this is like after a couple of weeks of updating so that initial processing of all the photos and whatever it does should be done by now but but people were showing me you know like it was like one o'clock in the afternoon and there were like low power warnings happening on people's phones so something going on in 11 i think for a lot of people it's unclear right i mean it's hard to pin down but i've definitely heard people report on it um older models this seems to have been um an update that i've heard from a lot of people with iphone sixes who have uh who say that it is uh it's really slow yeah this is predominantly uh six

and six s's that are in the family that were that most of the most of my members of my family have either an iphone six or iphone success um And they were all having these problems. So I hope that something will happen here with 11.1 maybe to try and address some of this stuff. Apple has been pushing out a bunch of updates. We've got a.01, a.02, and I hope that some of that is fixed in this. It's interesting. I mean, you mentioned the emoji thing,

and it's so easy for people to say, I can't believe they're talking about emoji. This isn't particularly important. I will point out that Apple went to the trouble of doing an entire press release, basically. They've done two now for this emoji release. Yeah, well, right. They did one on World Emoji Day, and now they've done one on Friday. They did one about the new emojis in iOS 11.1.

They know that this is a thing. It's funny that they come in the.1 release and not in the.0 release. I don't know what that is. Maybe that's just to spur people to update who have held out. There may be a strategy to it, which would be interesting if there's a strategy. Like the early adopters get the first version and then the laggards start getting, they demand the later version because their friends aren't sending them but they know that this drives interest in the operating systems and it's this

purely social way of forcing your peers to update because you need to update to see the emoji and to use the emoji which people want to do once they if you use emoji it's like oh my god I can use that emoji now and like it's like the moment when mike realized he could start sending the nerd

emoji right that was it was huge so like if you think about it right let's let this the the understood wisdom is that it does help push adoption so if you know this like if apple will notice if you know this piece of information isn't it better to let the uh os out to a small like a smaller subset of users to make sure that you iron out any bugs before you push the update that forces the rest of the user base to update right like yeah you know i think that there is a logic to that right like if it is very very normal for an os to go out and there to be widespread problems that didn't come out in testing right This is just a normal thing that happens. It happens with all types of software.

So maybe it would make sense to like, you do the public beta, you find out what you find out, you push it out to everybody else, and then you find out more stuff. Oh, there's battery life problems. Well, let's fix those before we push out the update that makes the rest of our users update because they want the emoji.

I can see why you would maybe stage this if this is the case right because the emoji are done they're showing them to us right they're done and they're done you know clearly done it's done and and i don't think like it is an incredibly difficult process of putting these into the os right like i can't imagine that it's like that it needs a team of 50 people to put the code points in i wanted to mention and this is something i i find because i find this emoji stuff fascinating because it's like as much as people kind of roll their eyes out i feel like this is really meaningful like people are using this as a method of communicating it solves a lot of problems that when we went to computer communication

and plain text was all we had and you lost a lot a lot of nuance of speech intonation and body language, right? That emoji is kind of like- It brings all that back. Become a way of bringing some of that back. And it's got new meanings. And I think it's going to be with us for a very long time to come. And so it constantly fascinates me. One of the things that I'm also interested in is how the,

how software provides access to emoji. Because one of the, one of the challenges is with all these new emoji, the emoji keyboard is unwieldy, right? And I feel like Apple still providing you a picker with a million smiley faces in it. It's like,

I know that you can now do the smiley fit, you know, you type, you type pizza and the autocorrect thing will suggest a pizza emoji to you which is that's a start but i feel like there's more that needs to happen here in terms of clever ways to get people the emoji that they want and i know there are like third-party emoji keyboards and i you know but i want to see apple and apple's investing a lot in emoji art and and rolling these things out and publicizing them.

I'm not entirely convinced that the people who build the keyboard are, at least I haven't seen any evidence that the people who build Apple's keyboard app have really tried to think about better ways of doing emoji input. And then, and forget on the Mac, like on the Mac, it's a complete disaster unless you're using Slack basically. And I, that needs to be better too because i i you know these these are part of

our lexicon and they need to be easier to use i would say that the mac is better because there's a search bar in the picker right it at least has that well that right but you have to bring up the picker yeah which is yes it's a terrible you can't search in ios right if you if you've got a you're just looking for a particular flag you can't search you you have to have the the auto correct bar up and then you can type the name of the country and it will do it it'll show i will say if you're using the messages app there is a software button uh for emoji as well which i always forget is there's like a little smiley face just in the message window but you know we use so many different applications and it would be better to have you know honestly i would like there to just be an emoji key on the keyboard right like

that would just be great like just put a hardware emoji key on the keyboard and then i can just bring up a picker i'd be very happy with that um i use gboard on ios and it has when in their emoji thing it has a search view. It has a search field. You can type in whatever you want. They put in a bunch of different meanings, right? So like there are a lot of words attached to each emoji based upon what people actually use them for. Like, there

are some interesting ones. Like if you search the word butt, a peach comes up. The peach comes up, yeah. Google understands, right? It's what people use these emojis for. Not that I ever send these types of emojis. No, you wouldn't do that. You write about the smiley button in the text window. It's easy to forget.

That's a nice place contextually. The problem is if access to emoji in certain apps versus everywhere is, yeah. Like Slack. For me, Slack has become the default way. I use emoji and Slack way more than anywhere else. And it's because Slack has built in really easy access to emoji. You type a colon and you start to type a word that you think is an emoji and it, it, and it pops up a little list above it of suggestions and you can pick one and hit return and you're done, right? It's so easy to do. And that emoji expression is now a native part of Slack.

And I want an experience kind of like that. And I don't know what that is, whether there's a system-wide keyboard shortcut for emoji search that inserts something. Because that's actually what I do on the mac is launch bar has an emoji search and so i i enter launch bar and type the name of an emoji and press return and it inserts it and i do it that way i can't let mac i can't let slack get away from this conversation though without saying how terrible they are supporting emoji like the emoji is a massive part of their system like it's in all their communication emoji is part of slack's brand they're like a year behind two years behind on the new emoji they will now be a year behind on on releases of emoji so they haven't yet implemented the emoji from

this time last year from last year yeah which is mind-boggling what is their problem mind-boggling because emoji is such a big part of their corporate brand. They use it everywhere. Yeah. Then again, I do use custom emoji a lot in Slack, which is kind of nice. And that's not something that's real. That's not part of the standard. But that's an interesting little lab for how people use.

If people can make their own emoji, which ones would take off and which ones wouldn't. And I'm not yet ready to follow in the footsteps of Mark Bramhill of Welcome to Macintosh and propose my own emoji, even though I use the Skeletor emoji. Well, sorry, hooded skeleton all the time. Maybe someday we'll get a skeleton emoji maybe maybe we could do a a i mean there i think there might be a skeleton emoji but it's not the skeletor emoji so maybe maybe um skeletons need a uh like a variant for for uh yellow skeletons with hoods i don't know before we leave emoji corner there's two other things i want to bring up. Something that was fascinating. I saw this on the Emojipedia blog. Last week, the WhatsApp beta for Android got new emoji. Now, just a piece of context, which makes this very interesting.

Jeremy Burge is a personal friend, and we talk about this a lot when we talk about emoji. WhatsApp use apple's emoji artwork on android the apple emoji artwork yeah on android because they wanted to have all the emoji and whatsapp look the same and it is unclear if and how apple allow this right like are they cool with this are they not not? It's unknown. However, in the beta that was just released last week, WhatsApp have recreated Apple's emoji. They are new icons, but they are extremely similar to Apple's. Now, this isn't in the release version yet. It's unknown if it will be. It's also unknown if it's also going to find its way to iOS.

this isn't in the release version yet it's unknown if it will be it's also unknown if it's also going to find its way to ios but it may look like i think at this point whatever was going on apple is maybe unhappy with it now and you know that this is this is what they have decided to do is to all right we're going to make our own and they're going to look exactly like yours so that's the thing that's out there it's very it's a very interesting thing to see whatsapp make that change yeah that's uh again fascinating we've talked about it before on this show too the because we both talked to jeremy burge a lot from emojipedia about this stuff and he knows we're interested in this stuff and uh the emoji fragmentation issue always comes up which is that every platform shows its own emoji there's no the Unicode Consortium doesn't produce an emoji image and hand it out for everyone to use.

Everybody has to produce their own. They produce a description. Yeah, and that can lead to interesting things like the cup with the straw, which in some places is a glass with a, you know, a clear glass with a straw dropped into it. And in other places it's a, like apples is a, it's like a white takeaway container with a lid and a red straw inserted into it. And in other places, it's a, like apples is a, it's like a white takeaway container with a lid and a red straw inserted in it. It's very different because

they've interpreted it different. And that happens. The woman and man in the steam room are very different in some different ones where it's more of just a face with some steam versus somebody having like a back scratcher or something like that where it's it's more like a spa kind of thing and that's all up to the interpretation but whatsapp's always been interesting because they just basically just used apple's emoji set on android in order to keep them in parallel and this is the big mystery is was that allowed was that just a rogue thing that apple didn't know about or didn't care about did you know did apple give them a warning and say you you guys need to make your own emoji set on at least for android uh we don't know but uh obviously they have made their own emoji set yeah something's

changed but we don't know before we move on uh joe steel was very rightly pointing this out because we've probably already had people that have sent this link to us if you're listening to this show there is this Mac app thing called Rocket which kind of enables an emoji picker which is very similar to Slacks Anywhere

on Mac OS I tried it and I couldn't use it because it didn't I was very excited about it and I couldn't use it because it, yeah, it didn't. I was very excited about it and it works in some places. And then I started to, I can't remember now. Basically at some point I thought this is too far the other way. We're now emojifying is happening in places where I don't want it to happen.

So, but yeah, it's there. And the whole goal of it as a Mac app is to make it way easier to put emoji everywhere that you put text. All right, this week's episode is brought to you by Encapsular. They have the website security tools and content delivery network that makes any website safer, faster, and more reliable. It's super easy to get started with Encapsular. You just need to make a small change to your DNS and you're ready to go. There's no hardware or software to install. Once you've done this, you will have access to Encapsular's 30 data centers with 3 terabits of bandwidth, all on their global network.

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Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, it's time for hashtag ask upgrade first question this week comes from anton anton wants to know what do i have to do to get photos to sync people and their faces between ios 11 and high sierra automagically well ideally you have to do nothing although what you do need to do is is is train um it should work but it doesn't always work this seems to be the story with photos in ios 11 and high sierra right now is that it should work but it doesn't always work i've seen people get it to work and i've seen people not get it to work the idea is that when you say it doesn't sync the face training data, but it will, if you say this photo is of this person,

that rides along with it, which allows the other device to train its photos more easily because it can use the data that you provided. So what you need to do is sit down at a Mac, or I mean, I guess you could use your iPhone or your iPad to do this too, but sit down at a mac or i mean i guess you could use your iphone or ipad to do this too but sit down on the device and identify a bunch of the faces in your photos and train start training it a little bit and then that should sync one of the problems that i'm having i'm having and it makes me wonder if some of the battery things might be related to photos after It seems like Photos is not indexing the photos in a reasonable amount of time like it should.

I've had that happen where I've looked at my photo library and it says it's still scanning photos. And it's been a while now and it's still scanning photos. So I wonder if there's some things going on there that are going to have to be addressed in an update. But ideally, the way it's supposed to work is you train faces. You say, this is this person. And there's a drag and drop interface. You can actually select a bunch of the same person and drag them on to the person you've already identified as that person and merge them all together. And that sort of sweeps it up. They threw away the old face scanning interface and put in this brand new interface for iOS 11. So it's a different, it's a whole different thing.

But it's very good at finding faces because I keep seeing people in my people library that are like pictures of people in screenshots i took and they're like oh there's a person it's like no that's just a guy in a screenshot or there's somebody who is on the tv in the background of this picture i took do you know this person no i don't know that machine learning gets too powerful yeah well it is like finding all the faces and uh so yeah you're not supposed to do anything. It's supposed to just work. And if you're having trouble with it, I don't know what to tell you right now, other than maybe try to give it a kick by assigning some faces. But don't expect a one-to-one correlation because that's not how it's set up. Only the faces that you train are the faces that it um that it knows are that person it has to

reprocess everything and get ideally get using the same code to the same point on the devices it's dumb this is one of those things where i i think apple needs to spend more time dealing with uh photos syncing and metadata across devices and And they've come some distance in the last year and a half, but they need to go way further down this path. I feel like we might be saying this forever. Steve wants to know, is there an impact to picture quality if I select a new key photo from a live photo in iOS 11?

Yeah, I need to test this some more. I think so. I would like to think that iOS 11 is shooting several photos that are stills and wrapping them up in the HEIF file. Because remember, the HEIF file can contain multiple images from like a burst. It can contain a video

or just a link to the HEVC video. I need to take this apart. My assumption is yes, that if you pick a different key photo, because you don't have to pick the one that was actually selected, you can slide it around in the live photo and pick a different one. My guess is yes, but I don't know that 100%. I need to investigate this more. I'm planning on updating my book. And some of this stuff has just gone by the wayside because I haven't had a chance with all the other stuff that's come out. So that one's on my list. I'm unclear what's happening because ideally what's

happening in iOS 11 is when you capture a live photo, it should be capturing video and it should be capturing more than one high quality still. And then ideally you could pick from the high quality stills, choose a new key photo, and it would still be a good photo instead of choosing a lower resolution video frame, at which point you've just got a low res video frame instead of your pretty picture. Even if it's a better pose,

it doesn't help if it's way lower quality. Yeah, that's what it does for pre iOS 11 photos, right? Like you end up with a lower quality image. Yeah, but I would like my my hope is that apple is taking advantage of their new file formats and maybe more powerful hardware in

later in a more recent models of iphone to pack more stuff in a live photo but i don't know i i will um i'll investigate and ask apple and i'll let i'll let everybody know sometime down the road about this logan wants to know what pre-order strategy should i use on the 27th for the best chance of getting an iphone 10 multiple devices use the apple store app and the website just everything multiple devices many devices you can get all the things try and use them all at once. That's what I'll be doing. I'm going to be sitting at my desk with my iMac

and my two iPads and my phone. And across this swath of devices, I will be attempting to put my pre-order in for an iPhone X. Yeah, if you had to choose one, it would be an iOS device device running the apple store app um we we we have discovered that lots of people do this because some enormous percentage of orders come through the apple store app for this stuff and people know it works but it works too because for whatever reason with apple systems the app instead of the whatever web app they've got running on the website the the you know the

app ios app has access to the same back-end stuff but is better connected apparently in some way or more robust in in uh connecting to it so uh but yeah if you really want to do it you know be sure you're wide awake and have your uh have your uh all your devices doing accessing places where you can buy these things and just be quick john wants to know on the apple watch is improved series speed with the series 3 tied to the lte or will the gps only version be faster also um i believe it's tied to the new processor that's what makes it yeah it's the new processor in the series 3 it's not the Yeah, it's the new processor in the Series 3. It's not the LTE.

Because most of the time, the Series stuff isn't going over LTE. Anyway, it's processing on the device and being able to listen and being able to speak, which it can do. So it shouldn't be related to the cellular at all. Yeah, all of the new Series features,

including the speaker and talking back to you, that is Series 3 not necessarily Alto it's just the Series 3. Kyle wants to know, for your various projects is there always a specific time for uploading on a day or posting on a certain time?

Do we worry about that? Only for my calendar. I just do things on the day that i do them and i post them on the day that i do them um i i don't spend a lot of time fretting over perfect upload day and time for my projects um it's kind of just like when it's done it goes up yeah i mean people will sometimes set their schedules around our release date and it definitely happens when an episode gets released later people notice which is great right yeah we love that although we feel bad in the moment it also means that we have an audience that actually expects us to deliver and i think

that's great because that's what we should do and we generally do that we've trained them by being consistent and now they've come to expect it from us and we need to deliver. But, um, but there's wiggle room in there. It's very rare that somebody says, Oh, well you didn't release upgrade at 11 AM Pacific or 12 or one or whatever. What's wrong if we do it at four, maybe some people will, but it's not as big a number. Um, I do for a lot of my stuff. It's, um, I know the, I know the release schedule, even if nobody else does. I do. I push a lot of stuff out at eight or nine in the morning, my stuff, it's, I know the release schedule, even if nobody else does. I do, I push a lot of stuff out at eight or nine in the morning, my time, because I want it to be released that day and it's ready to go in advance. And I just set it to then, because then I'm awake and I can see that it's going up or

I'll put, I'll either push it live or on the incomparable. I can schedule it to go live and I watch and see that it happens. So some of it is, is like that. So I will use a time like nine o'clock, just Pacific, just to get it out there. But other times it's when it's done, it goes out, or it's just, I need to get it out this day. With The Incomparable, the only, even though it usually releases on Saturday mornings, my time, the only rule I have there is it comes out on the weekend. Like I mostly do it Saturdays and every now and then I release on a Sunday and people say, is there no episode this weekend? Which again is nice that

they noticed, but I hold myself to, to releasing it on the weekend, which is something that goes back to when I had a regular job. And that was the time I had to work on the side project was on the weekend, but I still sort of do it that way most of the time. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, um, on the web, my understanding, you know, from back in the day when I worked at IDG, there is a certain time that is peak web traffic in the US and it tends to be, it's 11 a.m. Pacific to Eastern. That's the high point, the peak. And if you want to hit a story at the peak, that's when you put it out there. But there are lots of philosophies about making things available later for evening commuters or making them available early in the

morning for morning commuters, people on trains and buses and things to read. Podcast is different because it's when is the download happening for people to listen? Are they getting it on their ride home? Are they getting it on their ride in? Lots of theories. Everybody's different. I think there's no particular best practices so in most cases it's like mike we've got a general rule and then you post it when it's ready yeah it's like they go out on the day that they tend to go out on but i don't i don't ready for about time and and for me if i've got them in advance then i post them in the basically first thing in the morning when i'm up and working just so that you know i waited till the day it's released but

at that point i just want to get on with my day so i I post all of them at 9am and I move on. Yeah. And finally, today, Brian asked, the new App Store Today view has made me go from basically never checking the App Store to looking at it daily. Are you doing the same? I am. I'm finding myself going to that Today view every day. I have looked at the articles. There tends to be something I'm interested in. I think that the time has shown for me that this new app store redesign is really successful and i'm finding a lot of new apps and games because of it yeah i'm using it more i wouldn't say daily but i am using it more as something other than a place where I check the updates. And that's good. I have definitely read articles there

and used it to read about things and find things that I'm interested in. I also really appreciate, and they used to do this, it's just a little more visible now, that when I think to myself, oh, you know, I want to try out some of the apps that use Drag & Drop or that use ARKit, that they've got nice collections of those sitting there yeah

the collections may as you say maybe have always existed but they're way more visible now than they have been in the past and and they've done more to make those pages look nicer i really like the overall look of the app store pages we spoke about that a couple of weeks ago i think this app store redesign at least the users has turned out to be great one thing that that I have noticed, though, I don't check the new and noteworthy anymore, really. I used to do that, but I don't really look at the games category and the apps category. I tend to just look at what's on the Today

view that they have. Just a personal anecdote, but I really do like that. I think that the articles are well done and I like the variation to the stuff that they pick. And most of the time, the things that I look at, whether I would want them or not, I can see that they look to be really good quality applications.

So I think it's been really great and I hope that Apple can keep it up. All right, that is it for this week's episode. If you want to find our show notes, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 162. Thanks again to our sponsors, the great folk over at FreshBooks, Flight Logger,

and Encapsular. If you want to find Jason's work, go to sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. And like me, Jason hosts many shows at RelayFM. Go to relay.fm slash shows, and you can find a list of all of the shows that we do there.

If you only listen to Upgrade or maybe one or two of our podcasts, there's a ton more. I'm sure that you will be able to pick at least one more to add to your list. We produce lots of great content at RelayFM, and I'd like it if you check some of it podcasts. There's a ton more. I'm sure that you will be able to pick at least one more to add to your list. We produce lots of great content at RelayFM and I'd like it if you check some of it out if you haven't already. Jason is at

jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. We'll be back next week where we'll be able to high five at this point in the show. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snell. Until next week mike hurley keep those spiders away from me please don't bring any i don't want any in my in my computers please

keep the spiders away yeah the spiders stay here this is their home