Upgrade - 197: Banana Royale

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

It’s time to reflect on WWDC week, so Jason and Myke are joined by special guest developer James Thomson. We discuss our first impressions of the iOS 12 and macOS Mojave betas, the future of Mac apps in and out of the Mac App Store, and what new features are now at the top of James’s priority list as a developer.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 197 today's show is brought to you by linode fresh books and casper my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell howdy jason hello mr mike hurley Jason Snow. Hello, Mr. Mike Hurley. It's nice to be back. Well, yes. It's not so nice for me. I am struggling with jet lag, but nobody cares about that because we have a special guest. Ha ha, you thought I was going to Snow Talk, but I was not. We would like to welcome James Thompson to the show purely because he's in Jason's house. Hi, James. I want to know why you're recording a podcast in my bedroom It's a good question I have no good answers It was easier to let me join in the podcast

Than get me out of the room basically Yeah, yeah, yeah James Thompson is currently staying in the recording studio At Snow Towers So here we go We're all together But it is a perfect time to have a guest like James Because we have a lot of things to talk about many more things to reflect on from last week but before we do i have a hashtag

snail talk question and it comes from rick and rick wants to know jason did you try one of those whizzy new scooters in san jose at wwdc last week uh well we had a great clockwise episode that I was on where I, um, I was asked about scooters and I said, uh, are you kidding? I have a family. I have so much to live for. Why would I ride on one of those scooters? And then, you know what happened, Mikeers. They're so fun. They're so fun. You don't even have to sign up for an account. I'll just, and this is violating the terms of service of the scooter, by the way. I'll just check one out and you can just ride it around. And I agreed to that because she's very persuasive. And then I rode a scooter. And we literally saw people with broken legs from the scooter. Yeah. And then she texted you, Mike, and said, Jason's riding a scooter.

Get down here. Yeah, and I ran as fast as I could to see Jason flowing in the wind on a very speedy scooter. My hoodie was trailing behind me like a magnificent cape. It was wonderful. Thank you so much to Rick for his hashtag snail talk question. If you would like to open the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag snail talk, and you may be picked for a future episode. speaking of last week what a week it was hey we had a very good week i think uh lots lots of content put out into the world um if you have not heard episode

196 of connected i recommend that you do so it was a uh relay fm variety extravaganza um as well as the connected crew the show was opened wonderfully by stephen hackett jason snell and serenity caldwell they had a really great discussion uh before the connected crew caused a ruckus i guess would be yeah there was some nonsense yeah we got we got all of the sensible stuff at the beginning all of the actual good discussion and then there was trophies and all kinds of nonsense. I recommend that you read it, and I will say again, Jason, thank you so much for being a part of that show.

It was great to have you. Yes, you should definitely read that podcast. Or listen to it, whatever. Mike's jet-lagged. It's fine. Did I say read? Yes. Oh my god. I quit. Bye, everyone. Thanks for listening to episode 197 of Upgrade. Yes. Oh my God. I quit. Read the podcast, people. Thanks for listening to episode 197 of Upgrade.

Are you pivoting to text? Is that where we're going? Yeah, that's it. That's where all the money is, is what I'm told. We did announce at the end of that episode that we're going to be doing some live shows in October, and Chicago is going to be one of them uh relay fm members had a first uh crack at the tickets but if you go to our show notes this week at relay.fm upgrade 197 or look in your podcast player of choice we have a very small

number of tickets left um as at the time of recording, just 20. So if you want to come see me and Jason and a special guest or two in Chicago in October, go to the show notes, click on the link, and you may be able to come and join us, and we hope to see you there. Looking forward to that. More live shows. I love it. Will this be

our first ever upgrade of an audience? Oh, will it? I think it it might be we've done lots of shows together we've been on many like we've had audiences together but i don't think we've ever done an episode of upgrade of an audience before not technically i think i think that may be right but you can it's this is just the beginning it's just the beginning. It's just the beginning, right, of the Upgrade World Tour. Which has one stop right now, which is in Chicago. Yes. I mean, it's a very slow-moving tour.

Would you say it's the first annual Upgrade Tour? I wouldn't want to say that, because I don't know if we were doing it again, it would be in October, you know? Like, what if we did it in, like, May or something? Who knows? That's true. It could be more than annual.

Exactly. I hope so. I hope so. Alright, so there you go. Come see us in Chicago. We look forward to performing in front of you, I guess. I have some very, very slow, late follow-up about HomePods. Before WWDC, like, just after the draft,

iOS 11.4 was released and it included AirPlay 2. And Jason, I wanted to get your quick impressions on what it's like to run stereo HomePods and have multiple HomePods in your house because I know that you have that and you've tested that. Yeah, I actually had a second HomePod in a box unopened and I just would walk by the box going, someday, someday I'll take you out of the box and we'll try AirPlay 2 and stereo pairing. And so I did that. The date finally arrived. And it's stereo. It's exciting. If you play stuff that's got pretty strong stereo panning, like I like to do theles because that was in the early days of stereo where they did a lot of sort of just panning everything hard to the right or to the left everyone was super

excited about this new technology so i just went wild with it i think some engineers were excited about i i think what i've read about the beatles is that the artists were kind of like they thought it was like an afterthought like the stereo mix in sergeant pepper that everybody has heard when they did the remixed version uh the remastered version last year, they said that they weren't even around for the stereo mix. They sweated the mono mix, and then they just let their engineers screw around with the stereo mix. And so they tried to make a better stereo mix this time. So, you know, somebody was enamored with the idea of, oh, on Norwegian wood, we can pan the sitar all the way to the left and the guitar all the way to the right. And we can just do that.

And on the HomePod by itself, there's no stereo panning. Like, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing. Like, it tries to do a bunch of 3D audio stuff, but what it's not doing is trying to represent the audio field of the stereo signal. It's trying to create its own sort of 3D audio field based on how it's interpreting the sound. But if you put two HomePods in a stereo pair, which is fairly easy to do, you basically say, yes, I do want to put these two HomePods in the same room. And it asks you if you want to be in a stereo pair and then that's it. It's done. And it looks like one HomePod and

you can play to it. And then you get that sort of stuff in the left and stuff in the right. And it fills my front room much more effectively than the single HomePod does. Right. You know, for a price, because the HomePod's not cheap, and you have to have two of them to do this. thing if you've got two home pods you can do with AirPlay 2 is it's more easily you know you from from uh an iOS device or even on the home pod itself to say play this song in these rooms and then you get multi-room audio too which is not a new thing but it's new for the home pod do you think that there's gonna be a time when Apple tries to sell you a two-pack like do you think that's the thing they might do you know given that we've heard that

home pod sales are slow i i wonder if they will offer i don't know about a two pack but uh like a deal like a buy you know buy one get one for half off kind of thing that was kind of more than like one box like you know like the amazon thing i was thinking yeah a six pack of tablets yeah exactly right well i was thinking like costco are you gonnapack of tablets. Yeah, exactly right. Well, I was thinking like Costco. Are you going to see a HomePod's at Costco, but you have to buy two? You could imagine, because they're round like that, you could put them in one of those little can holder type things. You could just walk around. It would be great, like a little cup holder.

It's like a tube of Lifesavers, except there are HomePods inside, and you just squeeze out a couple of HomePods when you need them. So many great packaging opportunities. Why are we not in charge of marketing i know right but yeah it does seem like eventually they're gonna say oh the home pod is now this and you can buy two for this right like that seems like a a way to maybe sell them a little bit more and if they want to spur sales that that they they could do that they could also make an argument that bundling you know they could say this is great for stereo pairs or it's great for two rooms and you can spread the music around your

house and just do some marketing that they couldn't do before to try and move these and move more of them and you know yeah we'll see how confident they are in the in the product but given the reports about how well it is not selling maybe uh doing some discounting uh for for bundles would be a good idea one of the things at wwdc when we were wandering around there were just home pods everywhere you'd sort of turn around and there was a home pod just sitting there playing some light jazz in the background or something inexplicably like we're still here we do we exist i uh the the announcement of of siri shortcuts and the idea that it can be triggered from HomePod is making me want a HomePod mini to put in my office.

Like I have an Echo Dot in here. I want just a little thing that's purely for voice commands rather than music. And I wonder if Apple will make a product like that. I know I can have my iPhone do a lot of this stuff, but I still don't know if I want to turn on a high telephone on my iPhone. I'm still not sure about that, and it might be nice to just have a little dedicated,

just tiny little puck to do it, but we'll see. I think they're probably not going to do this, and even if they do release a smaller, cheaper one, it will still be music-focused, right? So it will still be a good speaker. But I'm keen to see what they do. I mean, all of Apple's competitors now have multiple form factors for their speakers, and I wonder if they're going to do the same.

I still haven't made my mind up on that. All right, should we do Upstream? Should we get the triumph from return of Upstream? There's been a lot happening yeah there's a lot we got it's sort of like that uh the delayed follow up earlier that a bunch of stuff going on that we haven't that we should at least mention is happening in the digital media world um most notably i think because i don't think we mentioned on the show before is that um for all of our talk about disney buying fox comcast is now bidding for fox too so yet another major media company says that they want to make a bid

apparently they approached the fox board during fox's negotiations with disney and made an offer or had a prospective offer and fox turned them down. They didn't think it was as good a fit for the company. But Comcast is sort of redoubling its efforts. There's going to be a shareholder meeting in July. So that makes it sound like Comcast is going to make the argument that it may not be as good a fit, but will give you more money, shareholders. Just bottom line, will give you more money. And it sounds like that's been their game all along is that the fox board would really prefer to sell to disney they think it's just a better fit overall for the fox uh company to go to the p the parts of it that are being sold to go to disney um it may mean that disney will ultimately need to sweeten its offer

it may mean that comcast uh will be the owner of fox and it may also be that the shareholders will take the board's advice and reject the offer but um but some extra drama in what was sort of assumed to be a done deal and i guess we'll get the final outcome in july i i love this one line that i keep seeing everywhere which is how comcast have described their offer they said it is at least as favorable to Fox shareholders as the Disney offer. It's like the most noncommittal. It's at least as favorable.

Don't have to sell yourself too much. It's between good and good plus. Yeah. This is some news that I know you're excited about, Jason. Amazon has saved the expense yeah the expanse we talked about that that's the example of a show that had its rights sold in a weird way where it's uh what they call svod but it's streaming video on demand it's streaming rights in the u.s went to amazon so it would air on sci-fi channel and then it would air on amazon

streaming later and then on netflix and most of the rest of the world. And Comcast, actually, Universal, that owns the SyFy channel, said that that was not – they couldn't pencil it out. They couldn't make that work given the ratings on the linear TV. And that's all they got out of that show. And so they canceled it. And there were rumors out there that Amazon was interested and that Jeff Bezos actually likes that show. It's one of his favorite shows. It's good to have a billionaire on your side

for something like that. And not only did it get picked up, but it got picked up. The way the pickup was announced was there was a space conference and Jeff Bezos was on stage talking about his space company, Blue Origin. And somebody asked about,

will you save the Expanse? And Jeff Bezos said, I save the Expanse? And Jeff Bezos said, I believe the Expanse is saved. At which point, people in the crowd stood up and began to cheer, which seemed weird until you saw who the people were. It was a setup. It was literally the cast of the Expanse in the audience.

That's just so nice. Cheering the Jeff Bezos. That was a great little moment. I saw that too. Nice little stagecraft. So anyway, that show, which I like a lot and is still airing its third season on Sci-Fi Channel, will be back on Amazon for a fourth season.

Unclear. I haven't heard any details of it. Like, did they pick it up for one season? How many episodes? When do they think that it's going to run? Is it going to run? I imagine they'll drop it in a big binge blob like these services do. Not a lot of details there, but they stopped packing away the sets.

So that's a good sign. I'm looking forward to the Blue Origin branding on all the spaceships. Yeah, that's right. It's all about synergy. Vertical integration. There you go. Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos says that the upcoming programming from the obama family will apparently not have a political slant this still feels like

to me i'll wait until i see it you know i i understand what maybe what they're trying to do here that like they're saying they're not making it the obama network right they're not gonna just put on loads of political campaign ads or whatever, I guess. But I'm keen to see what it ends up looking like. But at least they're going to try to not make it too political, I guess. But I still think the proof will be in the pudding on that one. Yeah, I mean, this is the real question is, do they want to lean into the sort of like public service? This story says,

you know, scripted and unscripted material? I got a little bit of an Oprah kind of vibe almost, right? Where it was like, you know, we're going to do things that are promoting positivity in the world and seeing, you know, inspirational stories and things like that. And that's fine. That's fine. But yeah, we'll see. What does this look like? And we'll have to things like that. And that's fine. That's fine. But yeah, we'll see. What does this look like? And we'll have to see about that. I get that from Netflix's perspective. On one level, they don't want to be seen as just the Obama network. At the same time, Netflix is so huge and they program for so many different audiences that, quite honestly, if they did make something that was political, it's going to be, you know,

it'll appeal to who it appeals to and nobody else. And that's, I think that may be fine for Netflix overall. But we'll, I'll believe it when I see it. That's the bottom line. What does a scripted program produced by the Obamas look like? I don't even know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just looks like a show and that they're just in the TV business and they're entertainment moguls, but it seems like that's not what a post-presidential position should be. So we'll see. Again, I'm going to put in my plug. I would love to see the equivalent of presidential memoirs done as a documentary series. I think that would be amazing. I don't think they'll do it, but I would love to see that. amazing. I don't think they'll do it, but I would love to see that.

And finally, Matt Groening's Disenchantment debuts on August 17th on Netflix. It is a two-season show, 20 episodes in total. It is a cartoon, as you can imagine, it's a cartoon series with adult-oriented humor. Think BoJack Horseman. But it is a fantasy series set in a medieval kingdom, and there's been a bunch of images released, as well as some details, and it obviously is in the typical Groening style as well. Are you excited for this? Yeah, I'm intrigued by it. I liked The Simpsons. We actually just dropped the, um, Simpsons quote draft episode of the incomparable, um, this weekend. So people can listen to that and find out what John Syracuse thinks are the best Simpsons lines of all time.

Um, and I liked Futurama a lot. And so, uh, and I think Matt Groening's cartoons are great and I've thought that since college. So I'm intrigued by this idea. I love the idea that he is a nerd who likes to take well-trod upon nerd genres and topics and spin them into something funny and different. obviously is like all about science fiction tropes this is going to be all about kind of fantasy tropes and then twisting them and and and um so i'm looking forward to it it looks looks like it could be very interesting we'll we'll see i mean you gotta you gotta see it just to uh to to see whether it's any good but i'm i'm intrigued and i gotta like his batting average right like he's he's his shows that he's been involved with have have been uh very good so we'll see if this one is and it seems that this has got a lot of the futurama cast doing voice stuff also i noticed uh matt

berry and noel fielding turning up in the cast list which was interesting interesting uh uh but yeah i haven't seen if it's got the futurama writers associated with it, there isn't really much information about that stuff. So Futurama is one of my favorite shows. So if this is Futurama, but, you know, in medieval world, I would be very interested. Pastorama. Oh, Jason. That was very good.

Very good. It was very good. Very good. It was not good. It's ended the segment. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Hey, freelancers, it's important to make smart decisions for your business to make things easier and to help you save time as well. And this is what FreshBooks is all about. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online,

FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork. Let me tell you a story. This is something that happened to me today. I logged into FreshBooks and I saw that in the little notification panel that they have that I had somebody who was late on paying me. So I went in and I took a look and I saw, oh, they never actually opened the invoice. It was just showing a cent. So with FreshBooks, I was able to send it back to them again. It landed in their inbox and it was paid straight away because for whatever reason, they just missed it. But this saved me from having to have a big spreadsheet, which I was checking all the time. Did this person see it? Did this person see it? And then opening up and like, hey, did you see

that? Like, you don't want to have to do any of that. FreshBooks keeps it super simple. All of that information is shown to you very clearly. So you don't have to bug people, right? You don't have to do anything else goes weird. Like, hey, did you see you don't have to do any of that. FreshBooks keeps it all simple. They can even automate late payment email reminders as well. So you spend even less time chasing payments and more time working on your magic, doing what you're good at. That's what you want to do. You don't want to be spending all of your time dealing with invoices. You want to just be able to do this stuff as quickly as possible so you can get back to doing whatever it is that you do, and that's what FreshBooks is all about.

If you're listening to this and have still not used FreshBooks, give it a try. They're offering a 30-day free trial, which is unrestricted for listeners of this show, with no credit card required. 30-day free trial which is unrestricted for listeners of this show with no credit card required all you have to do is go to freshbooks.com upgrade and enter the code upgrade in the how did you hear about us section we thank fresh books for their continued support of this show and relay fm so jason what betas are you currently running on your devices um on my primary devices i'm running nothing uh i have so i have a um i have an iphone that is now running ios 12 but it's it's an unused iphone and i've got a uh i've got my external ssd running as it does as it did last summer as it did the summer before running um mojave so i am booting into or picking up a different device to look at the betas but i'm not i've not yet put

them on my um production machines because to reiterate my statements of earlier in this episode i have a family i have so much to live for Now James You are travelling right now Because typically you are to be found In Glasgow But you are also a developer Have you installed Any betas on your devices?

No because I Like Jason Well I don't have a family but I like my data And while travelling i was tempted this morning um to put it on my phone before the show and i was like don't do that you've got a few more days in the us it could all go horribly wrong and also i was tempted to be installing it while we were recording and then i thought no the drama the drama of when i look down and see

my phone smoking quietly in the corner i didn't think that was worth it nobody will be seated during the ios beta installation portion of the program what i have heard is that this beta is actually very solid so i think as soon as I get back, I will put it on my main phone. James, I feel like you're shaming me right now by saying beta. I feel like I'm being publicly shamed because I say beta.

Mike's not British enough. No, well, I mean, you know, you've been Americanized. It's fine. I did yesterday when I got home. Edina was cooking some food for me and I asked her about tomatoes and she says what's happened to you wow i mean i'd like to say it's just because you've been out

here for a week but you were doing that no no it's nothing that it's the first time i talked to jason for multiple hours every week that's what it really is that's it um i have also felt the call of ios 12 but have yet to install it on any of my devices. I'm just seeing if I can hold off a little bit longer. But I have spent, as I'm sure we all have, quite a bit of time, especially last week, with people's devices who have installed iOS 12. So I have some more thoughts, as I'm sure that you both do, about just some of the things that we didn't get to cover in a lot of detail last week because we hadn't yet seen them. I wanted to talk about Memoji.

I also want to talk about some of the changes to messages. And it basically feels like Apple is furthering their attempts at making messages a social platform in a way, because they've done a bunch of very interesting things with the camera. So the camera now in messages, you can display your Memoji head on your own head. You can add filters and you can also play around interestingly with stickers. So you can put messages stickers into pictures that you take but i found quite randomly that right now it seems like only some stickers are popping up

and you can actually attach stickers to your face and move your face around and the stickers stay attached to your face it's very interesting so federico had an amazing idea which i will give him the credit for um i'm looking at doing a sticker pack it may involve pandas but he said why not make a sticker which was like a panda mask oh god that you could put over your face yeah no no it sounds cute mike it's not horrifying at all when you see a cartoon panda mask with real human eyes that is a horror show uh i i look forward to seeing how it looks though but yeah with the eyes cut out and then your eyes through it i think that would be delightful and maybe your your mouth inside it oh god all right so again as with most

of your wild ideas i i thoroughly recommend that you do it but i believe it will be some kind of horror uh i wish i wish to say this was federico's idea not mine so uh he he is the horror master wow it sounded like you were giving him credit and it turns out you were just giving him throwing him under the bus yes yep um i am very excited to play around with this stuff the most honestly the thing that makes me want to install ios 12 is memoji it's why i haven't installed it on my ipad yet because i figure i don't want to put i don't really want to put multiple devices in the beta right now but it's making me, and the reason I haven't put on any iPad is I want to put on my iPhone so I can play with Memoji more. And I have played around with it a bunch.

I have kind of left a litter of my own face on people's devices. I've kind of just been picking up people's devices, making my own face and giving it back to them. I am really, really impressed by just how good the animations are. And I think a lot of that has come from the eye tracking and stuff that they're doing as well. It really adds a lot of life. You know, they spent a lot of time showing tongues, right?

Tongue detection, which works and is also very hilarious. Um, but obviously a lot of the eye tracking stuff that they've been doing with ARKit 2 also makes an appearance in Memoji and really helps add to the overall character of what you're making. I know Apple wouldn't do this, but I was looking at that and I was thinking in-app purchase hats. I mean, I think, yes, they should do this. I mean, I think, yes, they should do this. I don't think they're going to charge for it, but I really think that frequent releases of different clothing items would be a good thing. Or even just seasonal things, right?

You know, like Santa hats over the holidays, bunny ears over Easter. You know, like little things that they could do, like a jack-o'-lantern to put on your head during the during halloween like those things i think would be a lot of fun and i would really like to see them honestly i would like to see them do some branded stuff but i don't see that happening for the foreseeable future the other thing i was thinking which i really think they won't do is allow third parties yeah provide items because you could see

oh you know you down download some app and you get a little hat you know branded without or a t-shirt or you get some you know some kind of not t-shirts but you get some kind of props just think of what could happen to the podcast merch industry yep Yep. It goes virtual. Dan Morin had a Memoji that he created that was him wearing his trademark Boston Red Sox hat, except it was just a blue hat, a blue baseball cap. And I had that immediate thought of,

well, clearly the next step is for Apple to make a deal with sports franchises and things like that so that you can wear the hat of your baseball team or whatever. Yeah, Bitmoji has this already. They do deals with different sports leagues and stuff to get branded clothing in there. Microsoft did it on the Xbox Live stuff as well. in there and microsoft did it on the xbox live stuff as well you know typically if you completed a game you might unlock some uh stuff related to it yeah i i would i would be very keen i'm very keen to see what they and how they end up doing this but um or if they end up doing anything but

i am i am super impressed with the animation of of memoji again like i have no idea how in the long run i will use this but the fact that they are creating something which is me right like i can create me and it can be used in more places now like in facetime as well i feel like this might get a little bit more use out of an emoji for me on a longterm basis. That's the key to me is the fact that, because we could talk about Animoji and it's like, oh, they're excited about Memoji. That's great. They were excited about Animoji last year.

How long did that last? Not very long. The difference is that Apple is, in addition to doing Memoji, Apple is trying to spread Animoji and Memoji into other places. And that is why it will end up being more used than when it was just in messages recording those little things. They're trying to put it in

taking pictures and sharing photos and stuff like that and in FaceTime. And, you know, it can't extend everywhere, obviously, but the fact that they're making an effort to put it in other places and I feel like with a Memoji, you're basically kind of creating an avatar for yourself so it could show up in your Apple ID and your game center and all sorts of other places too down the road. And I think that's why it will be more persistent

than just stock Animoji in messages was. Or give us access to it in scene kit and AR kit and things like that. I can throw bananas at James's weird panda mask. Great. Exactly. I've only played around a little bit with so many improvements to notifications,

but overall, this seems like really a lot of the stuff that I was looking for. Not just grouping by app, which I'm so pleased they brought back again, but grouping categories looks really good. And then all of those instant toggles that you have to turn off notifications for certain apps and to make quick changes to them.

And they've really simplified the changes, you know, like deliver quietly. You know, that is a really nice way of summing up a bunch of different toggles being turned off um i i am really really enthused about some of these notifications improvements and i think it's going to make the way that i deal with my own devices a lot nicer going forward i think the key is that after you use ios 12 for a while, you're going to have gradually gotten push notifications and dismissed them, you know, and said, I never want to see this again. And I think that that means

that over time, as you use it, you're going to your experience will improve. But also think about it this way. For all the times that somebody on the internet, John Gruber does this a lot that other people do too, has pointed out annoying push notifications that apps do. One of the cool things about this feature is that not only can I unsubscribe from an annoying push notification, something I don't want to see, or just send it to Notification Center, it actually provides a disincentive for apps to send too many notifications and notifications that are of the wrong kind that are too self-serving and that are useless because if you under ios 12 if you annoy somebody with a dumb push notification they're going to just turn it off right then and there and never see your

push notifications again and that's great because that is not just the user having the power to block you it's the fear of angering the user put in the developer and i know i have a developer near me but like i want the developers to have this calculation of do i really want to bother them with this and right now they don't they don't seem to worry because it's so hard to figure out how to turn off a push notification yeah i am really excited about that too like there is a real big potential here for those push notifications to really start to go away those like point what almost feel like pointless marketing messages you know like from games and stuff we're like hey and i'm looking at you super mario run like i'm

looking at you oh we got an event it's like i really that's right it's banana week everybody yeah i just don't i just don't want that And also, I saw that there is a way, which I think is really cool, that from a notification, you can press a button to go into the app as well to change the app's specific notifications, not just going into settings. So I think that's really cool too.

Jason, have you taken a look at screen time at all? I haven't. I haven't had a chance i mean i i honestly i installed an um ios 12 on an iphone 10 specifically to make some emojis and i haven't looked at screen time actually i did look at it briefly and what it said was you have spent a lot of time in messages because that's all i was doing on that. So it really, that's going to be when I either install it on my main iPhone or whether I wait until the public data and do it then. That's really what's going to tell the tale. Right now, it's not providing a representative sample because I'm literally just using that phone for trying out features in iOS 12.

Yeah, I mean, I think when I put it on, it's going to be the equivalent of stepping on the scales because you're going to look at the results and you're going to go, oh, no. Because something that I didn't recall or didn't see when we were talking last week, it's not just how much time you're spending in an application. It also tells you how many notifications you receive from specific applications as well.

We had somebody, was it Serenity, said that she got like 70 notifications from messages one day? Oh, I think it was a three-digit number, honestly. And that's the kind of stuff where I'm going to be really keen to see. When you take the screen time reports and you look and you like, you look at how you're dealing with notifications and you can make some things there as well, right?

Like if you look at it and you're like, wow, I get 400 Twitter notifications a day. Maybe I should turn off Twitter notifications, right? Like I think this sort of stuff's going to be really good. And I'm keen to see what or if any recommendations are made to the user by apple based upon this information um that i think that's going to be really cool to see as well also there was one little detail that i really like um about app limits and this is the the ability to say oh

i only want to spend an hour a day in twitter or whatever if an app uses universal linking, which is that thing where you tap a Twitter link and it opens in a Twitter app, right? And then it gives you that little button in the top right where you can go back to the website again. If an app uses this and you put a limit on the iOS app, it also blocks that app's website in Safari if you set an app limit. So if you said, I only want to spend an hour a day in Twitter, and then you hit that limit and you go to twitter.com, it shows you the same thing where it's like, hey, you set a limit for this. And I think that is really cool.

And all the developers that set up universal linking are cursing themselves right now. So I just thought that that was a really nice, well-thought-out implementation of this. And they're using an existing technology right now. So I just thought that that was a really nice, like well thought out implementation of this. And they're using an existing technology to help further make this a more useful thing. So I thought that was really cool. And there were a couple of other little details that I saw. I picked a few up from Dan's great post on Six Colors as well. It's easier to quit apps now. You don't need to do that press and hold.

You can just swipe them up and they go away, which I think is great. I mean, is that good? Or is that just sort of giving in to the people who think that they have to quit their apps? Oh, no, no, no, no. I quit apps because things go wrong. Things break, right?

I quit apps too. I just wonder what the rationale was for changing that back. I really prefer it this way because I got so frustrated in having to do that. Like, oh, well, I would still try it. I try to flip those apps up. Why won't you die? And then it's like, oh, right, I got to hold. And then I think somebody just said, this is too much friction.

People are going to. The problem is people will quit their apps accidentally, more likely this way. And you'd think, oh, well, but you've got to swipe up. This happens to me on the iPad all the time. When I swipe into the multitask view and I tap an app to bring it forward and my finger skids on the surface of my iPad just a little

and the app goes whoop and it's gone. And I think, no no no I wasn't trying to quit you so I get it like you need to look for a bigger swipe gesture on the iPad I wonder if they've done that too but um I would prefer to not have to wait and hold my finger until we enter quit mode to do it because sometimes you you gotta quit apps yeah the swipe gestures on the ipad are not are not nice right now they they changed a way the way a lot of it works and now a quick swipe takes you home to get to the dock you have to kind of do a longer swipe and hold somewhere in the middle to get to multitasking you have to do a big swipe and hold like on the

iphone it's that's very not good right now and i'm hoping that this animation will get maybe refined or reordered like the way that you do this a little bit because they've kind of got it a little bit broken i think i think the quick swipe should still be bringing up the dock but they're trying kind of trying to unify it with the iphone but they've gone too far in my opinion um because the the ipad's action should be quick to get to the dock not to get to home that's i don't think that's what people are doing yeah but what about the home buttonless ipad pro that's coming out this they should swap them around so like a mid swipe up should take you home in my in my opinion so like you can quick swipe to get to the dock swipe to the middle of the screen takes you home swipe and hold will get you to multitasking or

whatever it's going to be um i i think that making the dock a little bit harder to get to i don't think is the right way to do it because i feel like post ios 11 for most most uh ipad users i think the dock has become more important than the home screen at least for ipad pro users i guess would you agree like do you find yourself going to the dock more than home no no i actually i don't use i i only use the dock uh essentially to kick off multitasking i know it's there and i can open apps and yet i don't i find myself swiping up maybe maybe they know something that's different to the way that me and Federico thinks it works, right?

Like me and Federico used it that way. So we were bemoaning it, but maybe most iPad users are still going home. Well, they're trying to get people to use it that way. And maybe they should stick with that. Or maybe they've realized, you know what? We've trained people to use the home screen and they're not going to change. And that's, I mean, why do I do it that way? It's because that's how they've realized you know what we've trained people to use the home screen and they're not going to change and that's i mean why do i do it that way it's because

that's how i've always used my ipad and i can still use it that way so i haven't had to learn a new way and even though there is a new way which is to swipe up and launch an app from the dock i find myself doing that all the time i've got apps that i are the most commonly used apps they're in my dock and yet i press the button and then tap on them in the dock i don't swipe up the dock and then tap on them i just don't us old people don't like to learn new things really yeah right we're saying here and i will learn new things if that there's a new way of doing it but what apple did was add a new possibility to the existing old way at which point it's like well i don't i don't need to do that so i don't i have not embraced the dock you've ruined it for everyone jason

they were looking at you well i would i would encourage developer uh beta people to file a radar and for uh public beta people when the public betas come out later this month to um to use the feedback thing because this seems like the kind of thing that they might actually tune over the summer i believe they will behavior is weird and this is i i seldom file radars because just because but i do when something really bugs me and this is one that i will be when i install the beta on my ipad i will file right off this one because i think i understand what they're trying to do but i think they just need to swap one of the gestures around and i think it would be an overall better experience but but yeah earlier filing bugs the better you know if

you get the bug reports in now there's rather than doing it like a week before it ships yes at which point there is literally no chance of anything changing do it now yeah i i'm i'm wondering how quick does beta 2 come out is it like a week or two weeks it depends if this is a solid build which it sounds like it won't be as pressed to get something out quickly um and it also depends how long this build has been sitting there because sometimes they sit for a while they know they've got something solid they don't want to change it so this build could be you know like two weeks old or something at this point and they just you know we've got something that works we'll put out. We'll not put out our absolute latest code. Also, they are going to do a public beta probably by the end of the month.

And they want that to be generally what they do is they release a developer version and then that becomes the public beta after some period of time where they're sure that from the developer release, it hasn't destroyed people's devices. And so my question is, will this be the public beta? Probably not. It's possible, though, given how the reviews are really good in terms of stability, because otherwise, they're probably going to do another release and then see how that is. And if that's got problems, they'll have to do another release. And then the public beta release will come from that. And that may be too long because I think they want to get to public beta by the end of June. Yeah, and this has got all the Memoji and stuff in it,

which is really going to make people install the public beta who might not normally install betas. So they want to get it right. I bet this is going to be a thoroughly installed beta, right? Like, almost to the level of, oh, there's new emoji, right? Like, it kind of feels like that. So yeah, I bet you're right. I bet this gets pretty heavily installed,

because this is one of those things that your friend sends you one, and you're like, wait, what? And then you go and install the beta, right? So yeah, I think you're right. They probably want to go and install the beta right like so yeah i think you're right they probably want to make sure that this one is as solid as a rock um mac os jason can you remind me mojave mojave mojave mojave mojave um dark mode uh i played around with dark mode a little bit on uh stephen hackett Hackett had a Mojave installed on a drive. And I tried it out, and I like it more than I thought I would.

When they were showing it off in the demo, it just didn't work for me. But I like it more in person, and I wonder what you thought about Dark Mode. I'm looking forward to seeing it i'm glad that apple finally has my has offered it my complaint about the dark menu bar was that it felt like they wanted to do a dark mode and they they just couldn't and so they said well you can make a dark menu bar and i thought that was dumb um so now that there's a proper dark mode i'll try it out i actually i like the idea of having my system kick into dark mode at night when my room is presumably darker. And the bright white windows on my screen are more prevalent. But also there's a question of how you want apps to support this, right?

Like right now I have a bunch of white background black text windows up on my display and if i go into dark mode and none of them adapt that's dumb and that's one of the things is that developers will need to build with the latest sdk to get dark mode it's not going to automatically apply to old apps presumably because developers are going to find oh wait a minute i this text i forgot to use a system color so you're going to get black text on a black background or something how much blacker could it be none yeah like we were playing around with itunes and there were some apple music promos that you couldn't read the text off which was hilarious uh because they were just basically

images in itunes and all the text was black on and the background was black. And with Safari, they made a really interesting decision to, um, the like, you know, they, they need to honor the, the CSS of a webpage. Although I wonder, I haven't looked, I wonder if they're going to propose a CSS extension, Safari extension that actually says use these styles in dark mode so that websites could potentially support dark mode. I wonder. I'm going to have to ask about that. But what they did do is Safari Reader will kick into its dark theme if you're in dark mode. So you load a page that's white, like six colors.

It's white background, black text, right? You load it in dark mode. It you load a page that's white like six colors it's white white background black text right you load it in dark mode it's like that's super bright but if you hit the safari reader button it will go into a dark reader mode but i would love it if i had the ability to say if you're running on a on a mac with dark mode on use this style instead and make a dark mode version of my website. And similarly, like if I'm in Google Docs, which I am right now, I would really like it if in dark mode, Google Docs actually was white text on a black background or something like that instead of what it is now. And, you know, again, that would be something that Apple would need to

provide support for and work with web developers on and it's going to be sporadic. So I'm enthusiastic about it but I'm also realistic that there's going to be a lot of stuff that doesn't really honor it for a while if ever and that's just how it is. But all those really old apps, they're going to kill anyway. That's true. In the end

it won't matter. If you're an old app, you won't be around much longer. There are a couple of things on the horizon, right, which could kill old apps, including that notarizing thing. Yeah. Yeah, so the 32-bit apps will go away next year. And there's this idea of notarizing apps, which is a different concept than the old one, which was you sign your app, if you're not in the Mac App Store, and you want to be launchable in the default state of the security settings in Mac OS, you are a registered Apple developer, and you sign your app release with your developer key. And what that means is,

Apple, you know, you are somebody Apple knows, and the system therefore will let you launch your app, even though it's outside of the Mac App Store and um that's good because it also means that if somebody releases malware they can just kill that developer key and push that out to everybody and then max won't launch the malware anymore they'll refuse because this is similar to some of the stuff with gatekeeper right they've had for a while this yeah this is i to some of the stuff with Gatekeeper, right? They've had for a while. Yeah, this is, I mean, it is Gatekeeper. It's just Gatekeeper is sort of changing. And this is a transitional stage for Gatekeeper. I think one of the things they talked about was when you upload your app,

they're going to scan it for malware and give it the sort of basic checks. But it's not going to, I think it's going to be entirely automated. Yeah, that's what they said. So this is the difference. They're going to transition away from the signed apps thing. That's going to go away, I think, next year. Maybe they didn't say, but it's going to go away. It's going to go away eventually.

And what's going to replace it is this notarized apps thing, which is per app, per app version. So instead of signing your app, not realizing it's got malware in it, and then Apple kills your developer account and all of your apps everywhere stop working, which is really bad. Now, the Apple will be able to kill a specific app, a specific app version. And the way it works is you have to build your app as a developer for again for outside the Mac App Store, upload it to Apple's notary service, and they will scan it in an automated fashion and then kick it back with basically a little ticket that is, this has been scanned by Apple. And by default, Gatekeeper will not let you launch apps.

Instead of them being like signed, they will be notarized and it will want a notarized app or it will say, I can't launch this. Now, what they haven't said is they said that they'd like that process to be about an hour, which is I was sitting next to a developer who was like, oh, my God, like, like, I don't want to wait an hour if I'm just trying to push out a bug fix. But and that they were targeting an hour and it's supposed to be automated, but it's still going to take an hour, which is that's a lot of

that's a lot of scanning going on there or something. Trust me, sometimes when you upload stuff and it's just processing through the app store, depending on what happens, you know, you can have a half hour there. Yeah. So there's there's the mysteries of Apple's infrastructure remain. There are a lot of open questions about what Apple didn't say is what the long-term plan is for, um, for gatekeeper. I'm going to assume that in the long run, gatekeeper will still allow you to change your setting to run anything. But Apple could at any point say, you know what, unless it's been signed or notarized or whatever, we're just not going to let it run. And that would be Apple kind of clamping down on third

party software to a greater degree. Also, and again, I'm just trying to explore the limits of this thing. You know, they could scan for things with that notary service that would be a de facto rejection, like apps that do this will not be allowed on the Mac. And if they did that combined with changing Gatekeeper, this is a worst case scenario, they basically set a approval process for all apps on the Mac, even if they're not in the Mac App Store.

Also, my understanding is at least in this initial run of the notary service that you've got to be, you've got to opt into their new security runtime. And I think that means that you have to like use their entitlements, which means it's basically limited like a Mac App Store app. And if that's their intent, that also means that apps, even though the Mac App Store is opening up what it's allowing apps to do compared to the past, App Store is opening up what it's allowing apps to do compared to the past. It does also mean that if you want to take advantage of this sort of default security on the Mac, you've got to follow more of the Mac App Store rules. So there's a lot going on here that is going to make Mac

apps more secure and Macs more secure. But there is a question of just how heavy handed versus light touch Apple's going to be with apps that are outside the Mac App Store. One of the things I read implied that existing apps will still get the, you know, if you want to access the camera and things like that. So, you know, these things are going to affect people anyway, I think, from reading some of the documentation this morning. But the other thing that just occurred to me there was

assuming Apple stores a copy of the app, if they discover some new malware a week after you've been notarized, they could go back and say, wait a minute, we've just discovered this, you know, rerun the scan. And then they kill that. And then that version is then killed.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's all good. But it also, it becomes this question of like, what is the future of Mac apps outside the Mac App Store? And we'll just have to see. I think nobody's asked Apple these questions. They haven't talked about a lot of the details of this.

It has, you will see, I'll guarantee it. You will see stories about how this is the end of this. It has, you will see, I'll guarantee it. You will see stories about how this is the end of free software on the Mac, that everything's going to be controlled by Apple. That is certainly an extreme interpretation of where it could go. I'm not convinced that's where it's going to go, but it could go there. So there, and you'll also see stories that will say, it's great. It's not a problem. It's just Apple improving the security of the platform. And I would say that's your kind of best case scenario. So somewhere in there, we'll have to see, because it's going to be up to Apple, you

know, its policies, how it's implemented, all of those things. But yeah, I'd like to believe that at some level, Apple will allow people to do stuff that makes their, they're just gonna make it harder. They're going to say, yes, you can still disable system integrity protection, like you can now. And at that point, Apple's basically saying, we will not protect you from anything bad that happens. And some people, honestly, as long as some people are, people will do that if they're allowed to. And if all Apple wants to do is reduce the number of people who are doing that and keeping more people safe, that's probably okay. But it's all going to be in the details, and we don't know the details yet.

But it is really interesting. I wrote a little thing on Six Colors about this. Definitely, Apple is trying to – the big picture is Apple is trying to make it easier for apps to fit in the Mac App Store, which is why we saw Transmit from Panic and BB Edit coming back to the Mac App Store. They're making changes this year. And my understanding is kind of ongoing changes to add more entitlements, which basically let an app say, hey, I want to read the whole hard drive. Can I do that? And that used to be forbidden in the Mac App Store. And now it will be allowed, basically, if you ask. And that allows Apple to say, should this app have that? Oh, this is Transmit. It makes sense for it to read outside

the sandbox. We'll allow it. And previously, that wasn't allowed. So they're expanding that part, but it also seems like they're adding more restrictions on the stuff that's outside the Mac App Store, which is interesting, like an interesting combination there. But you could argue they want to make the Mac app store more appealing, but they want to make the Mac as a whole platform more secure while understanding that not everything can be in the Mac app store. I'm starting to get twitchy whenever I download an app, it's not signed, and I have to do the little, you know, control click on it to open it. And it's like, are you sure you want to open this? And I go, I'm really not sure.

I don't know what's in this. Well, because there's been a bunch of high profile malware things over the last year, right? And I guess that's why they're doing this. Like that BitTorrent client was one of them. Well, didn't Panic get hit by one as well? Panic, I think think opened some app and then somebody got into their github uh sources or something like right so the result of one of

those apps but yeah it seemed like this has been happening a lot more anyway and the cryptographic signature stuff it's not just it's not just we want an unsigned app to be dangerous, but it's also like if you sign an app, what it means is that that app can't be modified later to have malware inserted because then the signature fails. And they're also changing stuff now that if some library your app loads is unsigned, then you won't run and things like that. Right, right. is unsigned then you won't run and things like that right right like the the little pieces the plugins and other things if they aren't from you or apple they say well wait a second where did that come from and apparently there's a way for you to say oh no no no it's from this developer and they're a friend but that requires like that developer to sign it and for you to affirm it and they're adding a whole bunch of stuff like this. So, I mean,

this is a story that could be about Apple exerting a lot of control over the Mac in ways that will make it unpleasant for third-party developers. But the other way to portray it is, I think, also valid, which is Apple's trying to find ways to, how do we bring, if you're Apple, how do we bring security models that we understand that we've learned from the being on the inside of the app store how would we apply those to an open market um and on the on ios they don't have an open market but on the mac they do and so they're trying to do that and it's an interesting idea and i think the um the bit torrent client transmission as distinct from transmit um that one got bit multiple times where things were being inserted but i believe that was And I think the BitTorrent client transmission, as distinct from Transmit.

That one got bit multiple times where things were being inserted. But I believe that was signed. So, you know, it's not just, you know, oh, this was signed by the developer, so it must be okay. It's like, well, maybe not if, you know, if somebody got into their machine. Yeah, they got their key and then they signed the malware version. I think they inserted it when it was being built, right? and there was also there was the xcode a while back there was a malware version of xcode that inserted malware into oh right yeah yeah that was on chinese servers because there was somebody because you why would you download xcode from anywhere but apple but the answer was it was hard to download in china i think from apple uh and it was slow and so they took somebody had like a local version of xcode that

you could download to save yourself time and and and it was a faster download and it was a it was a hacked version of xcode with malware insertion in it oh what a world so there's more than enough good reason for apple to do this. But of course, the ramifications are wide-reaching. But as long as an app is in even somewhat active development, this, in theory, shouldn't be too hard unless you're doing something that would be tricky. Depends on how strict they want to be. If they want to be really strict, then it could be a thing.

I think the most interesting thing to me is that rather than make App Store policy changes, they seem to have made sandboxing changes. They meet, right, they instead of just saying, you know what, if you want to do stuff that's outside the sandbox, fine. They didn't do that. They built new security measures that let apps ask for more power. And I think they're going to continue doing that. And that is a policy change of a sort, but it's a high level. It's somebody like Phil Schiller saying, how do we make these Mac apps that are for power users more powerful and get them in the Mac app store? And somebody in the security team saying,

well, we would need to build in these new intents, these new requests for the ability to get outside. And then we would need to look at those. And we need to build a security system around that. And it seems like that's what they've been doing. And the first parts of that will roll out in Mojave. After this break, we should ask James about some of the stuff that he is excited about as a developer. But first, let me thank Casper for their support of this show

casper the company focused on sleep dedicated to making you exceptionally comfortable one night at a time you spend a lot of your life sleeping actually a third so if you spend a third of your life doing that don't you want it to be the best it could possibly be that's why you want a casper mattress their mattresses are perfectly designed for humans of engineering to soothe and support your natural geometry it's got all the right support in all the right places. How does it do this? How are Casper mattresses so comfortable? Well, it's because they combine multiple supportive memory foams for a quality mattress with just the right sink and bounce. Their mattresses are designed and developed in the US, and their breathable design helps to regulate your body

temperature throughout the night. And with over 20,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars, Casper is very quickly becoming the internet's favorite mattress. Casper has a 100-night risk-free sleep on it trial, so you can be sure of your purchase. They will deliver directly to your door, and if for any reason you don't love it, Casper has a hassle-free return policy. Now, Jason, I know that you spent a few days in a hotel bed last week. When you return

home do you do you run to the bedroom and hug your casper immediately well first of all it's very large it's a queen-size mattress so that would hugging it would be you could just hug the corner i did uh i did enjoy sitting down on it and thinking oh yes this is the i'm home again in fact i drove i didn't even stay every um every night down there i i came back on wednesday night so i could sleep in at home which is it's nice to be home and all that and part of that is yes the casper mattress my family the pets and the casper mattress probably in that order you can get 50 towards select mattress purchases by going to casper.com slash upgrade and using upgrade at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

That is casper.com slash upgrade and the code upgrade for $50 towards select mattress purchases. Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Mr. James Thompson, you are a developer. I would say you do develop for the Mac, but primarily iOS, I would say is probably, would I be right in saying that these days, that peak out? I think that's fair to say where most of my money comes from, so that is equally

where a lot of my focus goes. So I want to talk about a few things. I think I'll split this in half between iOS and the Mac, because funnily enough, they're becoming the same thing eventually. Spoilers. Siri shortcuts. in half between ios and the mac because funnily enough they're becoming the same thing eventually um and the spoilers uh siri shortcuts um you are well known for implementing just about any new thing that apple uh will debut where do you see siri shortcuts as to making a difference in peak so i've been looking at doing uh looking at thinking about

doing workflow stuff for a long time and it was always just there on the to-do list it was like i'd really like to get to that i'd really like to get to that and now we have shortcuts which is part of the system and seems to be the way that apple is going to expose a lot of siri functionality to developers and things like this it's like this has gone from you know on page two of the list of things that i would look at to line one of what i want to look at oh interesting okay so and i think that's going to be absolutely the case for lots of developers it's like oh here is the new big apple thing that we need to look at over the summer yep and i don't know yet what that's going to be i mean the example that somebody gave to me

as i am known somewhat for the about screen of p calc was ahoy telephone it's banana time but i i don't know yet where the things would be because it seems to be the api is mainly for like repeating something that you've done before in the past uh so you know the kind of things that you would use the um 3d touch shortcuts on an icon like you, you know, you can go somewhere, but there's not really a way of inputting information. So you can't say, you know, you know, what is six times seven or something like that. You can't pass in arbitrary inputs. You can only say, here is a pre-recorded phrase, and I'm going to associate that with something in the app. And that might be, you know, for something it might be, you know, let's play this particular playlist

or let's repeat this order we did before. But there isn't yet the sort of what you would want to pass parameters into that. So there is a certain amount of limitation to it, I think, although it does look like this is going to be the way forward, that Apple is going to do this stuff. I wonder if the conception of the way these things can be implemented will change once people get a hold of the Shortcuts app.

Because if the Shortcuts app is anything like Workflow, the ability to pass things in and out is key. And from everything that we've seen so far, it seems like that Shortcuts basically is workflow. So, you know, I understand what the APIs look like right now, but I wonder if there is, it will be different once you can actually change some pCalc actions through the Shortcuts app. I'm assuming that Shortcuts is going to support the old sort of workflow URL callback stuff as well. But none of that makes it into the Apple documentation on this stuff.

I think that's just a legacy thing. So, you know, the APIs are very specific in, you know, here are the things that you can do. And here's how you associate a shortcut, you know, like a Siri phrase to trigger this. I think you're right. I think it will open up. The question, I would say, is whether it opens up before this ships. I think it won't.

I think it will stay. We'll get what we've got. And then next year, we'll get more. got and then next year we'll get more uh but i'm looking i i want to really dig into it and see what's possible and figure out um i mean like there was one thing so you know you get the little response sheets that you can do in line um when you're talking to siri bring one of those up and i was like oh i wonder if they could be interactive and i was thinking you know i'll uh bring up a an inline little something uh you know throw a tip tip calculator or something in there and it's like no these things are non-interactive you can have a few buttons at the bottom but it's

very much designed for this is displaying information it's not for even you know having like a checkbox that you could check on it before you say go ahead or whatever so they tried to prevent you from causing them a bunch of problems uh around september again didn't they they thought about that very specifically yes i think i'm number one on the list definitely stop james putting a calculator in this um but yeah i think for pcalc specifically i'm not sure where the hooks are going to go yeah like what what's going to be the best thing to do it may be for you it is very simple actions right like open or you know like open pcalc right or something like that you know like because there are uh so for example i'll give you some things that I've been thinking about, like, having different work modes that I get into,

you know, one of them might result in a few actions being performed, and then p count being opened, right? Like, because, right, I'm in this mode now. So I need my calculator. But there, there are things that other apps might do, would be a little bit you know so for example like they show um as part of a result of an action start playing some audio right you could do something like grab the current result out of pcalc take that put that in a google spreadsheet somewhere or vice versa that sort of thing and that's very i think that's that is very useful and that's where you know like stuff like that sort of thing and that's very i think that's that is very useful and that's where you know like stuff like that like grabbing a result that's probably going to

make the most sense when the four shortcuts app is there right so you can see how you could chain a bunch of stuff together i see what you mean though like for for the uses that might be best for p calc specifically like performing calculations um it that may not be something that is around in its first iteration yeah but i mean it looks very very promising and the fact i think that it's the you know first party citizen of the os now is going to make i would assume make every developer look at this over the summer and i think that's it's just like raising workflows profile to you know like if you implement this apple might feature you on the store so you should really probably do yeah if you want that ios launch feature you should probably

be implementing shortcuts because that they're going to have a whole section of apps with shortcuts you know like that's probably going to be the big thing this year like they did ar kit last year hence why you created an ar mode in your calculator so with ar kit 2.0 what is exciting to you i mean like i i am i write calculator. I should write a calculator. But there is this part of me that looks at all that stuff and is like, I could write a game, a real game. I could spend the summer writing a game. And then it's like, no, no, I shouldn't do this.

But the multiplayer stuff, I mean, it was like there was at least sort of five players involved. So they had this AR game that you could play at the conference, which was the one that they showed in the keynote, where you're just firing blocks at people and trying to knock over their little catapults. But it was, they had like, you could play four player around the table. Then there was a fifth person who was an Apple employee who was acting as a camera operator who was displaying another view onto the big screen behind you. And it's like, so you could, I don't know what the limits are, but presumably you could have lots of players. They also, the source code to that whole thing they're open sourcing it they're making it available to developers to do whatever they like with and there's going to be a ton of stuff in that that is interesting on how to sort of synchronize the state between all the different uh devices that are taking part in that and that's something i'd love to play with uh you know i i do want to do the the peacock battle royale mode oh my god no you know more of a banana royale oh boy banana royale with cheese yes no that sounds that sounds

horrible disgusting and there's stuff in that there's also the they'll do the thing where you can pre-scan a 3d object and then your app can recognize that like it does today with you can do an ar kit with images you can have like a poster on the wall that kind of stuff but you could have a 3d object let's say it was a banana that you scan in and then when the thing sees that 3d object it can attach you know sort of content around that like like they did with the lego uh building um it i mean there was lots of things and there was also the share this idea of sharing the sort of the the scans that have been done over 3d space so when somebody else goes there it can recognize it uh and you can you know you would it's not as instant as you know you can leave something on a table and then

somebody else will find it you know you'd have to actually do this within your app um but there's there's a lot of potential and they're clearly ramping up on the AR things it seemed like there was it seems like there's more focus on AR kit than there should be if you see what I mean then it's current importance to the operating

system and to devices it's almost as if there might be something in future, there was a nice job listing I saw on the Apple Store, and it was for somebody doing sort of UI kit style frameworks for VR and AR, you know, for having your buttons and your controls and whatever within that 3D space. And I'm thinking, hmm, that sounds like it would be useful if you had, say, some kind of glasses.

So I'm going to keep playing with the AR stuff, you know. Evenings and weekends, we shall say. Yeah, sure. I think, you know, another thing for me is very telling who uh who they sent to the talk show this year and yeah it was absolutely head of ar right and i found that that conversation i

found it really fascinating um i want to get head of ar and vr don't forget yeah and vr and vr and vr mike rockwell um was the gentleman name. And I really enjoyed hearing him speak. He seemed like, obviously, he really knows what he's doing. And I really much enjoyed that. We went to it live. But I think that that's very telling. I think Apple clearly want to get Mike Rockwell's name known and his face known and his voice known. So that would tell me that we may see him on stage soon uh because he

will be demoing the glasses at some point and then even landed with a fantastic kind of pseudo slip up from greg joswiak right where he was kind of like oh in the years to come uh we may see a new form factor for ar uh that i that made me smile because because I'm not sure he would have said that if maybe he'd spent an extra second thinking about it, but I don't know. What about Project Sneak Peek? This is the idea of Marzipan, right? You mean Project Marzipan? Marzipan. This is going to get too confusing if we continue going down this this level of uh of naming um you currently maintain both ios and mac versions of peak out do you think that you would likely stop working on the app kit version once this this has become a thing next year so the i think the devil

is in the details on all this stuff um so the current version of the mac app is actually a port of the ios app already so what i did was i threw away the old mac app and i took the ios code and i ported it over to the mac and then i wrote mac stuff around the edges of it you know for sort of windows menus and all that stuff and going into the the Mazapan stuff, I was thinking that that might be the way that they would do it so that you could have, you know, you would use some UI kit and then you might have some AppKit stuff for doing the Mac specific bits. And currently it doesn't sound like that might be the case. I think Steve Stoughton Smith was poking around at things and he was saying if you try and mix in some AppKit, things go badly wrong. That might be where they

want to be in, you know, 15 months or whatever, but I don't think they're there yet. So I would like to do it. I would like to have most of the source shared. One thing I did on the iOS version after I ported it was I added the layout editing. And I thought, I'd like to do the layout editing on the Mac, but I'm going to have to rewrite a lot of this code to do it. And so it hasn't happened yet. So if I could just instantly take the code, put it on the Mac, there you go. And there are other things that the iOS version does better. It's better at handling resizing.

So you could do the sort of full screen, split screen stuff on the Mac, and you just get that. I'd get that for free. But if it would effectively have to dumb down certain things or make them un-Mac-like or, you know, like, could I have a preferences dialogue or would I have to have it all sort of UI kit style controls within the app? Things like that. I think it's wait and see. I would love to do it. It would make my job a lot easier. I think it's wait and see. I would love to do it.

It would make my job a lot easier. And the thing that I was thinking about was, you know, the Mac is not necessarily defined by what framework an app is written in. We had Carbon and Cocoa apps. You know, they both lived side by side. It was, everything was different under the hood, but you could build a nice Mac app with the hood but you could build a nice mac app with both if you can build a nice mac app using this stuff then i see no reason not to use it

um what that says for the future of app kit that's a good question does it make you want to pursue any more ideas for mac apps if if if i'm assuming these days you're probably more well versed in ui kit um so i think it complicates things like so what it means is right now because this is a year away from us getting you know actual details do i want to do any more real mac specific code on the mac version? Probably not. If that code might be thrown away in a year's time. Likewise,

do I want to sort of look at something like DragThing again? Do I revive that? And if I did that, you know, it's going to probably make more sense still doing that in AppKit because the UIKit stuff is not going to have any of the support for the sort of system-wide things that I want to do.

It complicates things. I think it's not clear yet where this is going to go and how much focus is going to be on this. I mean, Apple is using it. They have brought over these apps, the Notes stocks and voice recorder and all that. this i mean apple is using it they have brought over these these apps um you know the the notes stocks and uh voice recorder and all that and i think we'll i haven't really played with them to see how much they feel like mac apps yeah or if they just feel like this is a quick and dirty port

of an ios app because i don't Because I don't think the typical Mac audience, that's what they're looking for. And if the Mac App Store just becomes flooded with every person who does an iOS app just hits a button, makes a Mac app, uploads it to the Mac App Store, I don't see that as being good well it's better than the current state of the mac app store i think well but i think this is one of the big questions is

um what is the volume into the mac app store from ios next year because i've seen people who are very enthusiastic and and have said there'll be flood. And I've also heard people say there won't be very many. It won't really move the needle. It's not going to make a big difference because most developers are not going to bother or they're going to already have a solution that they built using something like Electron that gives them Mac and Windows and then they can forget about it. And I'd like to think that it's going to be somewhere in between those two extremes. But I do think there is a scenario where Apple rolls this out and it's a very small number of developers who really take advantage of it. But that might be enough to make the Mac a richer place, a richer environment to be a user.

But still, it may not be everybody in the Mac apps or the iOS app store is just can't wait to be a Mac. One of the interesting comments when they were talking about this, they said, you know, for iOS developers, this could be a way to get extra revenue by putting it on the Mac app store. And that was interesting because that suggested to me that they were not looking at, you know, well, you buy this once on iOS and then you also automatically own it on Mac. That might be something that they're wanting to do in the future. But that was interesting. Or they were just thinking of, well, it's going to be on another platform,

so maybe you get more of your magic coins that you're selling to gullible people in video games. I do think that's a good question. Like in the long run, if they have a unified app platform, would they not have a unified app store where just as if you're on an iPad and you search, you see iPad apps by default, that you would eventually see Mac apps. And if at the very least this idea, they could make it so that if you buy that app and it's available on all the platforms you just get it on all the platforms and that's not where

they are now but it is possible in the future so there was an always when I watch the keynotes there's that you're you're in the reality distortion field and then you get outside and you start thinking it thinking about it for a while. And you're like, oh, wait a minute. They didn't mention this at all. And yeah, one of the things was I was expecting some kind of app store where I could go on to the, you know, I would click a link. It would take me to a web page. I'd see a preview of the app.

I could buy it. I click Apple Pay. Boom. It appears on all the devices. It will go on and things like that. Apple Pay, boom, it appears on all the devices it will go on and things like that. And there was, while we had some redesigned App Store stuff, there was no movement on anything like that. Right.

And so we didn't, yeah, that's a concern because, you know, if the move, I mean, we sell the Mac version separately. And just this morning I had somebody saying, well, I just bought this on my iPhone. Why can't I run it on my Mac? And it's like, well, you know, right now there's a lot of extra work I do to make a Mac version. And I think that justifies, you know, that it is a separate product. But if it's literally just a one click and it produces a Mac version, I could see people being, you know, reasonably annoyed that they have to pay again for it. So yeah, we'll see. All right, should we move into some hashtag ask upgrade? Let's do it.

Before we do, let me thank Linode for their support of this week's episode. With Linode, you have access to a suite of powerful hosting options with prices starting at just $5 a month for you to get up and running with your own virtual server in the Linode, you have access to a suite of powerful hosting options with prices starting at just $5 a month for you to get up and running with your own virtual server in the Linode cloud, which you can get running in just under a minute. Linode has hundreds of thousands of customers who are all serviced by their friendly 24-7 support team. You can email them, call them, or even chat over IRC in the Linode community.

Linode know how important it is to get you the help that you want, and they also have a suite of amazing guides and support documentation to give you a reference when you need it. No matter what type of assistance you want, they want to do their best to give that to you. Linode have an intuitive control panel that will allow you to deploy, boot,

resize, snapshot, and clone your virtual servers in just under a few clicks, so you can get everything done super quickly, and they feature two-factor authentication to help keep you safe. Linode have fantastic pricing options available. For just $5 a month, you can get one gigabyte of RAM with your virtual server. And they have high memory plans as well that start with 16 gigabytes of RAM. So they have something for every use. As a listener of this show, if you sign up today at linode.com upgrade, you'll not only be supporting us, but also getting $20 towards any Linode plan.

On the one gigabyte of RAM plan, that's four free months. And with a seven-day money-back guarantee, there's nothing to lose. So go to linode.com upgrade to learn more, sign up, and take advantage of that $20 credit or use the promo code upgrade2018 at checkout. Our thanks to Linode for their support of this show and RelayFM. So our first hashtag ask upgrade question, thank you very much, comes from Charlie. This week in Charlie says, I want to buy AirPods as a gift for someone who needs new headphones. Should I wait for potentially an AirPods 2 or do you think that could be coming maybe

not even this year at all? The only things that matters to this person is longer talk time, which in theory AirPods 2 would get. What do you think, Jason? I would not wait. I don't know when we'll see a new set of AirPods. They could be this fall, but they will be two years. At the same time, AirPods are pretty great. Is Apple feeling pressure? And it is a very difficult thing to engineer. So there could be AirPods to this fall. I think AirPods are great as it is. So I wouldn't wait, even though they're there, there's always going to be something new. But I think that this is a product that does not feel old in any way. And that Apple could absolutely get away with not updating them for

another year. And so maybe they will, and maybe they won't, but, um, you know, I, I don't know. I mean, yes, they will, there will always be a better version in the future, but at some point you just got to buy the product that you want. And of all these Apple products that are hanging out there, that there, that there might be a new version between now and the end of the year. AirPods is not one that I would wait for a new version for. I mean, they're, they're struggling to ship, you know, that airPower mat and the charger for the original AirPods and all of that. Are they really going to do a new AirPods this fall?

They could, but I wouldn't wait. They're good as it is. I just, I don't see the, I don't feel like whatever they would introduce this fall would be so dramatically different that you'd be kicking yourself. I'd also say that if they're looking, if the main thing is longer talk time

you know the the beats x and the power beats they have varying levels of extra battery power right true helpful that's a really good point and it has a lot of ask james has a lot of the same technology inside of those two so could be worth looking at um azure has asked why is apple moving so slowly on ipad productivity i spent a school year using it as my teacher laptop but there were no changes not even low-hanging fruit like viewing two docs or two sheets in in those applications so like two google docs and two google sheets side by side i love my ipad for consumption but basic tasks can still be difficult so i i want to jump in with this one first um I understand where Andrew is coming from. I do disagree with some of the points made,

because I don't find it difficult for tasks because I do the majority of my work on the iPad, but I understand the point being made. Apple did not have a lot of changes this year, but I wasn't expecting them. I think that the rumors definitely said that way. And even when they announced everything they announced in iOS 11, I wasn't expecting big definitely said that way. And even when they announced everything they announced in iOS 11,

I wasn't expecting big changes in iOS 12. I think we're going to see a lot of that stuff in iOS 13, if it's going to be called that. I really want them to get rid of those numbers at some point, though. It's just, it's getting difficult to keep track of now. I keep pulling iOS 12, iOS 11, thinking that that's the new one. iOS 12, iOS 11, thinking that that's the new one. But I think that stuff like Siri shortcuts is really going to help with people using their devices

in a productive nature. And so that will be a change. Yes, of course, they have not advanced iPad, the iOS on the iPad to have more to take advantage than they did in iOS 11. But I think they will. And I think in the meantime, this is going to be better for iPad productivity than iOS 10 was, which had basically nothing from iOS 9 to iOS 10. So I think it's going to wait and see. Yes, there are lots of things that could be better,

and I think they will get better. But I think iOS 11 hasn't aged as fast as iOS 9 did yeah I agree that it's easy to look at this and say oh no iPad features and like the fact is a lot of these features are great iPad features they're just not iPad specific features but they will help anybody who's using an iPad I do think and the rumors back this up right the reports from people like Mark Gurman, that Apple did take a bunch of things that they had on the agenda for this version and toss them out. And seeing what they announced, I can actually see how they could get away with it. Like, let's focus on these and having them be really good. Yes, I would love that feature that lets an app fairly easily put up a second version of itself,

essentially a second window. I would love to see that. The one that we talked about last week came up in several conversations I had is it seems like the biggest pain for any of us who are using Split View is you can't tell where focus is. You can't tell which app is basically front most. During the keynote, I was trying to type something in my Twitter app, and I could not get it to go in the Twitter app. It just kept going in my notes instead. And it's like, if I tap here, can I type a keyboard shortcut? No.

It's just infuriating. And it's going to be another year, and that's too bad. But there is a lot of iPad productivity stuff know, there's a lot of iPad productivity stuff that's in there now that will be okay. But I agree, I'm frustrated, but at the same time, I feel like iOS 12 does have a lot of benefits. I do wish they were tinkering with it every year.

I think this is one of the victims of that, you know, sort of let's take it slow and not try to push everything into a release so that we have, you know, security and stability. And, you know, sort of let's take it slow and not try to push everything into a release so that we have, you know, security and stability. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sad cause I don't like iPad features rolling out every other year, but I'm okay with it. I think it's also possible that, um, we might get some updates as the year goes on because it, some things might take 18 months or the might take, you know,

That's always the dream. There was a rumor at one point, they were rumored to be rolling iPad features in mid-year. And then they ended up holding them for iOS 11. There was thought that there might be a 10.5 basically that had iPad features. Also, we all expect there to be new iPads this fall. And so it's not impossible that there would be some iPad features that would be rolled out with new iPads this fall. And so it's not impossible that there would be some iPad features that would be

rolled out with new iPads. I do think something like sharing two windows, more easily putting two windows in an app is something that if we were going to see it this year, we would see it at WWDC because developers would have to support that. And since we didn't see it, I think that's not going to happen. But it is possible they'll tinker with some things either when the ipads come out or in you know later on in the year i would love to see apple add more substantive features throughout the year um instead because then then if you take your time with something and it's not ready it's not a year that you have to wait i mean we got the ar kit 1.5 which was you know some significant new features and and it was delivered just in an update. It's not impossible.

Now you're getting my hopes up, James. I hadn't thought of that. That's what I'm here for. Thank you. John has asked, is it possible to control an AirPlay 2 compatible Sonos in conjunction with a HomePod, like having one HomePod in the main living space,

then having an outfit in the rest of your house with connected Sonos speakers that support AirPlay 2. Well, we don't know, right? Like the Sonos stuff hasn't been updated for AirPlay 2 yet, right? I think that's forthcoming. Yeah, it's coming soon. So only Sonos knows for sure.

I'm going to imagine yes, because I think all AirPlay 2 devices are on the network registered as AirPlay 2 devices with names. And so you should be able to, I know for an iOS device, if you played a two AirPlay speakers, and one of them would be a Sonos and one of them would be a HomePod, it should just work like that that they're two they're two airplay 2 devices um so i'm going to assume actually that this is true that this is part of what airplay 2 does but until we you know maybe sonos knows because they're working on this i would sure hope that sonos knew i would like to think they tested this at some point but well either they know or nobody knows nobody knows but i i i'm optimistic about that mark wants to know was the apple podcast studio back at wwdc this year oh boy was it ever it was it was back and better than ever with a giant so inside one of the rooms at the convention

center there was a podcast studio and this year the people from apple podcasts put it together and they they had a giant um last year they did it but this year they did it with this giant styrofoam kind of cube of a studio that was meant to be sound deadening and it had like the apple podcast logo um like carved into the styrofoam and stuff and i'm not i'm serious it was basically polystyrene walls that were like 10 feet high wrapping around the studio and they had a couple of people working uh console with logic and they were recording they had four sure sm77b microphones the microphone i use every day so i was i was at home when i was in there um and i believe relay recorded at least two podcasts in that studio yep there was a b-sides um which is going to be in our show notes which was really fun it was casey less and underscore

david smith and they were talking about the fact that david was the uh podcast photographer um of the week he he photographed atp live and the relayM Live shows. So he was talking about what that was like. And in the show notes for that episode is a photo of Casey and Underscore in the studio. So you can see the Apple Podcast logo carved into the polis diaring that was surrounding. And also there is a show that is specifically just for RelayFM members.

So if you are a RelayFM member, there is a special show that you get once a month. And Jason Snell took the reins with Federico and Casey, and they had a really, really good discussion about some of the ramifications of WWDC stuff. And I really liked it because it was three people who are not typically on shows together. And it was really nice to hear the three of you talking because I listened to that today and really, really enjoyed it. So if you are a RelayF fm member you can get that I I'm you know the number of times I've been on a podcast with Federico is almost zero and Casey pretty close to that um I did that special analog and you know

but and he's been on a couple incomparables but not a lot so um I I did like an episode of the tv podcast about Mr. Robot where I talked to Stephen and Federico. I think that might have been the last time I was on a podcast with Federico. We should fix that. It's been quite a while. We should get Federico on an episode of Upgrade soon, shouldn't we, Jason? Yeah, we should. That is a good idea.

Perhaps it would be fun. Summer of fun. I will also mention the Six Colors members get a podcast every week ish with me and dan and we talk about stuff and it's good people like it a lot they do it's really good but where did you very so we recorded that in the podcast studio that was on a concrete bench outside the hammer theater one while drinking our tea one morning um and that is i released that it's posted on the six colors website um so you can just listen to the mp3 of that even if you're not a member um but if you like hearing from me and dan you can become a member and then subscribe

to the the podcast and get it every week ish um and uh that one is it was two microphones and we were outside in person so i mixed it it's sort of like slightly stereo and you can hear birds chirping in the background although the the reviews are that it sounds pretty good for a podcast recorded outside if you have the right microphones outside podcasts sound pretty good in fact i believe under the radar last week was also released it was recorded live yeah live at a cafe at social policy i i was walking past and saw just saw a podcast occurring which was which was kind of fun adventures well this is what happens there's a photo on twitter um that somebody was walking by and didn't bother us but realized that we were recording a podcast

because it's two guys sitting there with microphones and he knew who we were and took a picture of it so some there is a secret picture of the secret podcast being recorded by me and dan uh but uh yeah it's fun so yes adventures in live podcast recording happened last week for sure i i realized uh when when you guys came back from the the six colors recording that i do a very bad impression of the six colors podcast would you like to hear it you i've already heard it hi dan hello jason that's my uh that's my impression that's how every episode starts and i love it i love the six colors secret podcast people should listen to it our last question today comes from matthew matthew says do you think that apple may have been planning

a macbook and macbook pro refresh like a spec upgrade at wwdc but maybe have held it back based on growing concerns about keyboards it seems very specific i'm going to say the chances are chances are low that this is this is the reason um they've known about keyboards for a while now if there's if there's a production adjustment that happened because of uh wanting to change the keyboards it probably happened a while ago and they're just waiting for them to to be there i don't think i mean it possible. That this is a cascade of things. Involving a change that happened a while ago. That has reached the point where.

The product got delayed. Later than they thought. Because of the change. I guess. But it would have been. I don't think it was like. Oh geez the keyboards. We can't release it this week.

I think it's way more complicated than that. So I wouldn't put it at the feet of the keyboards. Obviously, there's a Mac release that needs to happen at some point later this year, and it didn't happen here, and that's okay. So we'll get it later. It's only been a year since the last laptop refresh. And while I would prefer Apple to refresh their laptops more often than once a year, if they do it in the next few months, it's not going to be a big deal.

It's also possible that there's an Intel thing where there's a process that they're waiting for that they don't have from Intel. I don't know. There's lots of reasons. And as well as them having an idea

for how they want to roll it out and they want to roll it out at a different time. Maybe they want to roll it out with Mojave in the fall. They might do that. Who knows? Mojave, MoMacbooks.

Okay. Yep. James Thompson, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find your work? Where would you like to direct the Upgradians to? I think the best place to look for me is on Twitter, James Thompson, T-H-O-M-S-O-N. And peakout.com if you want to see a website that should have been updated 20 years ago.

It's an old website with some fancy new logos. Yeah. But thank you for having me on this flagship show. Oh, it's a pleasure. I never heard it discussed like that, but I like it. Upgrade is a flagship show. Wouldn't you agree, Jason?

Of course, I would agree. Absolutely. You can find Jason at sixcolors.com and he is at jasonl on Twitter. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to all of your sponsors this week, Linode, FreshBooks, and Casper. We'll be back next time.

Until then, say goodbye, Jason Sandler, James Thompson. Goodbye.