Upgrade - 215: The Future of TV is the TV App

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

If watch faces are the main interface of the Apple Watch, why are they so inconsistent? And why are developers suddenly showing off what faces they'd design if they had the ability? It's complicated. ...Also: Photoshop is coming to the iPad for real, and Apple may be offering some of its new TV shows for free.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 from relay fm this is upgrade episode 215 today's show is brought to you by green chef pingdom and squarespace my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snow it is great to be here in an episode number divisible by five. 215. Hi, Mike. How are you doing? Our Snell Talk question this week, hashtag Snell Talk, comes from our friend Stay. He wants to know, to follow up on Upgrading Casey's question from last week, where is Jason's favorite place to visit outside of California and what places top his bucket list for places
Starting point is 00:00:46 he'd like to go uh so careful listeners to the upgrade program will know that in the episode where we discussed that mike had just returned from his vacation his his honeymoon to hawaii that hawaii is my favorite place. So my favorite place to visit outside of California is Hawaii. I would go there every year if I could. Um, this year, um, my kids have a huge amount of time between, uh, right before Christmas and like a week after new year's. It's the perfect time to go to Hawaii. But because my wife is very wonderful and now has a full-time job where she's providing benefits to the rest of the family, that also means that she's limited in her vacation time
Starting point is 00:01:39 and we can't just go to Hawaii. So, you know, trade-offs, but I would love to do it every year because I love Hawaii. So that's my answer. And then in terms of top of my bucket list, I have a big-ish birthday coming up. No, I have a big birthday coming up in 2020. 30, can you imagine? Yeah, I know, right? 30, can you imagine? I know, right? Yeah. It's hard to believe hitting 30, but it might happen. So I have already informed my wife that I want to go to Australia or New Zealand for that birthday.
Starting point is 00:02:20 Oh, look at you. All right. Yeah. You've never been to either, I'm assuming? I've never been, no. I've never been to either i'm assuming i've never been no um i've never been south of the equator so uh yeah that those are my those are my choices i originally said australia but then i also admitted to say new zealand would also be just fine lord of the rings right as as we have as we have determined on a different one of my podcasts um australia is filled with
Starting point is 00:02:43 wild animals that will try to kill you. And New Zealand has essentially no predators more dangerous than like a pig or a cat. So I'm open to New Zealand, but either one is fine. Thank you to stay for asking that question. If you would like to submit your own question to be answered on a future episode to open the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk. I would like to remind our listeners that we will be recording an episode
Starting point is 00:03:14 in person next week. I'll get to that at the end of the show so we can talk about some of the potential logistics that will come with that. So what I will ask is if anybody has any questions that pertains specifically to us being in person, send them in for the next week's show, hashtag Snow Talk. Some follow-up. We were talking on the last episode about USB-C and the iPad and the Apple
Starting point is 00:03:37 Pencil, and listener Jono wrote in to make a very good point about why in 9to5Mac's report from Guilherme Rambeau, Guilherme mentioned that the existing Apple Pencil may not be compatible with new iPads because the Apple Pencil currently pairs over Lightning and these new iPads may be USB-C. So how would you pair them? It's a very good point. Exactly. Yeah, i think i hadn't really thought about that it's a very good point it wouldn't shock me given that it's bluetooth basically it wouldn't shock me if you could still use them even in this situation but it might require a ridiculous trip through the dark back streets of dongle town yeah in order to adapt usbc to lightning and then have the little gender adapter and then plug into that and then it would pair then you're gonna have charging issues too right because it's just not going to be as easy to charge like it yeah it would be a
Starting point is 00:04:38 pain in the butt yeah so it might be compatible but it's probably not going to be advisable even if it is compatible. Further follow-up about the iPad Pro, there was an update to said report from Guillermo Rambo saying... He just tossed it in there. ...that the processor would be an A12X processor. Not an A1210 processor, an A12X processor. And this is nice because so often the iPads are the previous generation chip technology with some stepped up things that add the X. Or sometimes current, right?
Starting point is 00:05:10 Like it's never like a, it's very rarely a new, new thing, but this would be a brand new chip. A chip that actually may never get anywhere else other than this iPad. You know, it may be the A13 for the next iPhone. We don't know. Yeah, exactly right. So the A12X, the idea there is that it's going to be based on the existing chip that's in this year's iPhones. But with the, you know, extensions that they do to, you know, which can take various things, better graphics, whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:05:37 It's an upgrade, a little bit of an iPad spin on the existing processors that are in the iPhone XS and XR. And that's exciting because those are incredibly powerful. So as Guilherme says in his report, it is a GPU, apparently, which would be beefed up specifically. Right. And its code name is Vortex, which I enjoy as a code name. Sure. Sure.
Starting point is 00:05:59 And it's, yeah, because there's many more pixels on one of these giant iPad Pro screens than on even on the iPhone XS Max. Yep. So this got me thinking. We've seen these reports about the A12 and how Apple has built into the A12. There is a, like, JavaScript benchmarks are off the charts with the A12 because the A12 is basically includes instruction sets. They talked about this on ATP the last two weeks. Instruction sets that calculate things like JavaScript does.
Starting point is 00:06:32 It's basically like you don't have to do extra work to do JavaScript stuff. It will handle it natively. And that means that the JavaScript benchmarks are off the charts to the point where like JavaScript benchmarks on an iPhone XS are faster than on an iMac Pro. And that's ridiculous, but it's because of that optimization. And I was thinking, oh, well, a 12X on the new iPad Pros, that means that they're also gonna have
Starting point is 00:06:56 that high level JavaScript. And it just, it got me thinking about one of my huge frustrations with the iPad Pro, which is it's mobile Safari. Mobile Safari is not as fully featured as desktop Safari is. And in addition, because of the user agents it reports to websites, a lot of websites hijack a page load and load a mobile version of the site, which can be good, but is often very bad because it's a phone page that's loading on an iPad.
Starting point is 00:07:28 And I heard from a lot of people when I complained about this on Twitter, like I do, who are big iPad Pro users who very much said, yes, this is one of their biggest frustrations. This is a place where Chromebooks really have it over the iPad and where the new tablet from Google has it over the iPad is that it's got a desktop browsing experience and the iPad's browsing experience is not I also heard from a lot of people and it's the usual which is Apple can do anything and they're amazing and they never do anything wrong but this is a hard problem and Apple can never solve it it's like okay that is another way to take it it's so easily solvable i mean the difference between this and like the uh the slate right the google slate is the pointing device i mean that's
Starting point is 00:08:11 that's what you need right because these devices i completely agree they're more than powerful in fact sometimes overpowered right like to deal with these but the problem is that touch doesn't work always with every single website so you need a pointing device and honestly it's true the apple pencil can deal with this right like you know like as well as a trackpad but they already make something that can make this work yeah and and you know i what i'm not saying and of course the other thing that happens on twitter is that people assume you are being an absolutist and like and and then they're like, aha, but this doesn't solve all examples. And therefore it is wrong, which is also dumb. Um, you know, desktop Safari lets you adjust per site, uh, video autoplay, video autoplay
Starting point is 00:08:55 with sound. There's all these things. It's like, it wouldn't be that hard. I mean, again, it's an engineering project, but it's Apple. I think they're capable of it to say this site i want you to load the full desktop version this site i don't and of course it is worth mentioning right yes you can say force desktop but it doesn't always work it doesn't always work because in many ways a lot of times what happens is you're already redirected elsewhere and that you're not on the real page anymore and you can't get back to it and you can't force it beforehand like look they need this is something that would make a big difference it will make a huge difference to the future of the ipad we have some stuff later on today which kind of like actually comes back to this topic so
Starting point is 00:09:36 maybe we should leave it there for now yeah i think just the the overarching thing here is this ipad pro that's rumored to be released in the next month maybe is going to have probably the best JavaScript performance of any device that exists. And yet, when you think about the web browsing experience on the iPad and compare it to other devices, the fact that it is a mobile browser and doesn't give you the desktop browser performance like other than issues with pointing devices uh you could do a great desktop class web browsing experience on the ipad pro and we should be able to do that so you know we'll see we'll see if they get there now we'll see if they get there in ios 13 uh we'll we'll see when we get there all Alright, so as I mentioned, we will come back to some of this
Starting point is 00:10:25 a little later on, but for now, Jason, we must do some upstream news, because CNBC had a report in quotation, I think, about Apple's upcoming streaming service. I want to read a quote from this article.
Starting point is 00:10:40 The product will include Apple-owned content, which will be free to Apple device owners, and subscription content, which will be free to Apple device owners, and subscription channels, which will allow customers to sign up for online only services, such as those from HBO and Starz. There's two points here
Starting point is 00:10:55 we want to address. The first is the second point. Taking the model, basically, that Amazon has with Prime Video Channels, full disclosure, they've been a sponsor of some Real AFM shows, but that doesn't really make a difference to this point, but just wanted to mention it because I said the exact name of the product.
Starting point is 00:11:10 That got reported as news, and it's not really because even the story says Bloomberg already reported that part in May. So one of the things is this is a very long story and it's very hard to find what actually is new reporting here, if anything. And yet the story got picked up heavily. So here is the
Starting point is 00:11:25 here is the part that seems to be new so the channels the idea there is apple's gonna um which goes directly against kind of the app model that they launched the apple tv with is that apple now is going to try and get you to buy uh premium streaming services essentially sign up within the tv app and they appear in the tv app which is sort of like i mean you can still buy things already with um i'm not sure how different that is than what they do now because you can buy things with uh apple's payment system through their through the third-party apps but maybe the apps won't be necessary because it'll be in the tv app who knows right so you won't need to download the HBO Now app because you just watch
Starting point is 00:12:05 those shows within the TV app. That's how the Prime channels work. So maybe that's very confusing, but it's also old news. So really the news seems to be this suggestion that Apple is going to make some of its own video content available for free for people who are using Apple's devices and running that TV app as a way, I guess, to get people comfortable in the TV app and also to get those other things, other channels in front of them. Now, the amount of money Apple's spending on original content will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be made back by taking a percentage of the sales of other people's streaming video services. That is not a, you know, Apple is not investing in this content in order to sell you HBO Now and take
Starting point is 00:12:46 a percentage of the subscription sale. That's not why it's doing it. Probably what's going to go on here is either Apple wants to get people into the TV app and sees that what the CNBC story says is a Netflix-like subscription service, quote, down the road. And I think that's basically the report here is that they're saying Apple will launch this content for free in the TV app along with the channel stuff. And then they will launch the full service a little bit later. And the only question there is, is it really going to be free shows to start? Or is it going to be more like Apple Music where you get these shows for free, but you've got to sign up and after three months we start charging you or after six months we start charging you? I feel like the idea of them doing a trial is just an inevitability. I feel like anyone could write that in an article
Starting point is 00:13:45 without ever knowing it. Because it makes perfect sense. And they already did it with Apple Music. And that wasn't even their own stuff. And we've talked about the split season model too, where if they order 13 episodes of a show, maybe these shows debut with six or four or three. And maybe they roll out in a drop or maybe some of them
Starting point is 00:14:07 roll out weekly uh but the idea there is uh you what you want is to get people to sample this stuff and then decide that they're in and they want to pay and that's probably like what all this report really says is they're going to give some stuff away and i i'm sure right like we would all agree of course they are because there's going to be some stuff away and i i'm sure right like we would all agree of course they are because there's going to be a free trial at some point almost certainly so maybe that's what this is or maybe not maybe you know maybe this report is saying that they're just going to drop a couple of shows just for free right in the tv app because what they want as the first step in moving people into the tv app where obviously this other service is going to live in that TV app.
Starting point is 00:14:48 That's worth it to them to burn a couple of shows just to get people comfortable in the TV app. Keeping in mind, they're not giving it away to everybody. They're giving it away to everybody who has an Apple TV or an iPad or an iPhone to watch on those devices. But still, of course,
Starting point is 00:15:01 because that's what they're going to do. Anyway, it's a weird report. There's a lot of words for apparently not a lot that's new. And the stuff that's new is kind of unclear. So, you know, but it's worth at least pondering the idea that Apple somehow is going to, you know, that its master strategy, I think it's worth saying that this story is saying what we've kind of intuited, which is its master strategy is get people in the TV app, put their service in the TV app. And then this previous Bloomberg report saying they're also going to focus on reselling other people streaming in the TV app and making the TV app. So the future of TV was apps, but now the future of TV is the TV app. And that's not surprising. They've been headed that way for a year. The future of TV
Starting point is 00:15:50 apps is apps, and apps is the future of TV. And the apps are named, if the app is named TV, the future of TV apps is the TV app. We have a new challenger approaching. Of course, there is another media conglomerate which is working on their own streaming service
Starting point is 00:16:05 warner media who we have been talking about a little bit over the last couple of weeks there's a report from the hollywood reporter that the warner media is preparing to launch their streaming service of their own in case you need a refresher so some of the services and or content that could be included in this hbo tbs cartoon network properties from the dc universe hannah barbara cartoons sesame street because hbo have the rights for sesame street and even warner brothers movies which includes stuff like the harry potter franchise i was thinking about this one jason because at first i was kind of like all right but then i started thinking about some of the properties that Warner actually own.
Starting point is 00:16:47 And it's like, I think we maybe sometimes don't give them the same credit we could give Disney. Right? Right. Even just Harry Potter. So me and Nadina are currently watching the Harry Potter movies because she's never seen them. She never read the books, never seen the movies. So we're watching them all. And as I'm watching them, as somebody who read the books and watched the movies, loved the movies loved the movies but i was like god this would be a really good tv show instead i
Starting point is 00:17:08 know right where they could actually tell the stories because like we watched goblet of fire and she's like why don't we get to see what everybody else is doing i'm like oh because you did in the book but there just is not enough time in the movies to tell the whole stories. God, it would be a really good, like, seven-series TV show, high budget on HBO. Oh, boy, that would be good. Or on the Warner Media Streaming Service. What's interesting here is that basically they're feeling like
Starting point is 00:17:39 HBO Now is successful, and they don't want to upset that. So they're going to keep that going, but they want to build this broader streaming service that encompasses all their content i look at that and think okay i guess it kind of makes sense but in the long run i i'm not sure hbo now makes sense on its own that you you you at some point you probably just want everybody to have they're trying to not burn all their bridges which is probably a good good move right in the long run one streaming service because i get they also want to increase the content at hbo but at some point like if this is if this is not if this is a super
Starting point is 00:18:11 set it's everything that hbo does and is going to do plus other stuff then then at that point it doesn't make sense now maybe hbo and this service are different in some way and that is that would be different i don't know um but i i'm fascinated by this because you're right they they also they have their dc thing that they did that they launched which is the dc universe streaming service which just launched and that's got original shows on it as well as uh and and catalog stuff so um it is a little like like disney right where they've got they're going to do a uh they're not doing a marvel streaming service but they've got multiple streaming services in different areas and i could totally see um warner doing something similar with uh with some of this other stuff and harry potter is a good
Starting point is 00:18:55 piece of intellectual property there are others there's a warner brothers has a lot of intellectual property in their vault that they could uh they could put together not just for old stuff but for for new stuff and as as well as completely original stuff but like franchise stuff that they could pull out and put on here including some other dc stuff uh that's not in the dc streaming service or that's on both that might be interesting to do harry potter is a great example of that too so there's there's lots we'll see um we'll see what they're doing but everybody's you know every single one of these giants is going to have a multi-tiered streaming strategy and that's what the future is going to be is you're going to have your compact comcast streaming and you're going to have your warner streaming and you're going to have your disney
Starting point is 00:19:36 streaming and that's just uh and sony apparently also will exist or will be bought by somebody but yeah so it's just like i was watching the movies right and the first one came out in 2001 so it's like it's fast approaching 20 years i'll tell you man the special effects in the in the philosopher's stone do not hold they do no the rest of them like from the second one it does its job right but like in the first one you can see all these places where they're trying to like hide special effects right like they're trying to like you know you don't see mcgonagall turn into a cat you just see a shadow right it's like we can't do that yet but like they get that later on but like just in general the uh special effects do not hold up in that first movie but it was like
Starting point is 00:20:19 i looked i was like oh because it's only 20 years old it's kind of and i guess you know i reckon those budgets improved a lot from the second one onwards but it's been great years old. It's kind of, and I guess, you know, I reckon those budgets improved a lot from the second one onwards. But it's been great fun to watch it again, but it does make me think at the same time, at 20 years, like, I'm surprised
Starting point is 00:20:32 they haven't tried to reboot it yet. And I know that there's a lot of other Harry Potter stuff going on, which is probably why, right? Like, there's like a whole prequel series of stuff. Yeah, film series, yeah. In Fantastic Beasts. And the uh theater stuff
Starting point is 00:20:47 there's still a lot going on all over the place yeah but i would love to see tv show i did see a thing recently that they're making like that somebody some some studio is making like a triple a open world game set in the harry potter universe which seems interesting so when you get to the end of all the movies then the next thing you guys need to do is go see uh the harry potter and the cursed child i think we will i think it seems to be enjoying it a lot more than i expected she would so that's good that's good and you'll like it because because the plot of that movie is very back to the future which is your favorite so yeah all right today's show is brought to you in part by our friends over at green chef green chef is a meal delivery service that includes everything that you need to cook delicious gourmet meals that you can feel good about.
Starting point is 00:21:31 Because Green Chef sends a wide variety of organic ingredients and imaginative new recipes to you every single week. Now, what I think is kind of awesome about Green Chef, what sets them apart, is the way that they split up some of their meal plans because they have meal plans for different dietary types. So with Green Chef, you can choose meal plans that could be paleo or vegan or vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, omnivore, carnivore, and they are the first USDA certified organic meal delivery service. Every ingredient is thoughtfully sourced and its journey is tracked from planting to plating. Their recipes include pre-made sauces, dressings, and spices as well, so you get more flavor in less time. Everything is hand-picked. They deliver it right to your door. And with Green Chef, it's easy to maintain a specialty diet and enjoy exciting new options. You don't have to just eat boring stuff or break your diet. You can do both of these things together, which is kind of cool, I think.
Starting point is 00:22:27 Jason, I know you've received some Green Chef food in the past, and I kind of wanted to hear your experience on that because I know that you went outside of your usual dietary requirements for this. Yeah, well, so Green Chef has all these great different options, but we have some issues in our house that are a little bit different than the, than the features that they offer. So we ended up just getting the vegetarian version and I am a vegetarian, uh, skeptic. Yeah. I just, I don't believe they exist. No, that's not true. I, I don't love, uh, vegetables. I am just not that person. And, uh, so I was like, well, okay, you know, we need to try green chef. We'll
Starting point is 00:23:05 try the vegetarian. Cause I'm not going to get a, you know, a meat box with pork in it. Cause my family doesn't eat pork, even though I do, but they don't. It was so good. Like this, the thing is that they're vegetarian meals. They were so good. I was, gotta be honest here, dreading it, dreading these two meals that were going to come in a box for four people that were vegetarian. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to take one for the podcast sponsorship team. And it was actually really great. And they were both really tasty. They weren't boring. They weren't, I don't know what I was expecting. I guess I have misjudged the tastiness of vegetarian meals and clever chefs who put clever ingredients together in order to make things that
Starting point is 00:23:44 were tasty. But they were all really good, and I would have it again. And if I was to become a vegetarian, I would absolutely get on the vegetarian plan train because having some help in coming up with good vegetarian entrees, that would be a big plus for me. So yeah, I was very happy, surprised just how good they were. That's really cool. So if you want to go and find out more about this yourself,
Starting point is 00:24:09 you definitely, definitely should. And you can go to greenchef.us slash upgrade. When you do, you will get $50 off your first box of Green Chef. So once again, for $50 off your first box of Green Chef, go to greenchef, so G-R-E-e-n-c-h-e-f dot u-s slash upgrade. Our thanks to Green Chef for their support of this show
Starting point is 00:24:29 and RelayFM. Alright, so, this week, this past week, if you follow lots of people that we talk about on this show on Twitter, people like David Smith and Steve Troughton Smith, not related, I don't think
Starting point is 00:24:45 but both Smiths or Marco Arment, then you may have seen custom watch faces on the Apple Watch as a thing It's a thing that people are doing which is funny because of course you can't do it you can write an app that
Starting point is 00:25:01 poses as a watch face Let me explain this a little bit. So Steve Troughton Smith created a thing, which is on GitHub. So it's something you can go get started with on your own of building your own custom watch faces using SpriteKit. Now these aren't, as Jason said, these aren't actual watch faces you can choose as watch faces.
Starting point is 00:25:21 They're apps that you can make, little apps that you can make that operate like watch faces. And if you use a setting on the Apple Watch, which is to, when you look at the watch for it to show you the last used app, which is a setting that you can choose, you ever show me the last used app or my watch face, you can, by doing this, kind of fake a custom watch face, which has led to many, many people playing around with what Steve has been doing and digging in and kind of customizing their own thing with SpriteKit. And it's spread quite widely. I will include also in the show notes a link to a blog post that David Smith has done. So underscore, he made a bunch of really useful functional faces, but also some
Starting point is 00:26:03 faces that look like my watch brand, Nomos, which is kind of funny. He used those as an inspiration. And of course, if you look at some of what Steve Trout and Smith has been doing, it clearly started from the Hermes face and moved on from there, right? The Hermes face, which debuted with the Series 4, is this two colors cut in half, and and it moves the color kind of split moves with the minute hand so it moves around the face and then he kind of went on from there so you kind of would ask yourself why are people doing this you know and i think that jason you wrote a really good article that i have no doubt in my mind that that some of this because I think it started a wave of conversation
Starting point is 00:26:46 over the last couple of weeks about Apple watch faces in general because we see new ones every single year, but there's no consistency. The new watch faces have new complication types. They can't use old ones. Old watch faces aren't updated to get the new ones. It kind of feels like every year we get new watch faces
Starting point is 00:27:04 that have some difference and then the new ones. It kind of feels like every year we get new watch faces that have some difference and then the old ones get forgotten about. Yeah, this is, yeah, I wrote about it briefly in my Apple Watch review and then Marco wrote a post about faces and then I wrote a lot longer post just about faces too. So it was kind of in the water there. But I think this moment where we've got the larger screen
Starting point is 00:27:24 on the Apple watches this this generation and the moves that apple made in terms of the faces really brought to the forefront um that apple doesn't care very much about watch faces if that makes sense like uh and i know the reaction that can be well what do you mean they built this new thing and they have these awesome new watch faces with these new complications. It's like, yeah, they do. But if you peel it back a layer, what you'll find is Apple, every time they come up with a new watch, they like will throw a couple of faces on there. But they don't go back really and rethink the old faces.
Starting point is 00:28:00 And this time it's all exacerbated. So they made the two infograph faces in order to make more rich complications they created some new complication styles for the new infograph faces i think there are three or four new complication styles for the new faces that only work on those faces fair enough right but the weird thing is everything else like all the other faces didn't get updated except for like little minor updates and some of which are annoying like making the straight line complications on other faces into slight curves but it's still literally the same complication it's the old style complication um so that's that's annoying and they keep doing that
Starting point is 00:28:41 where obviously it's not a priority to them to make their old watch faces better, just to throw more new ones on. And that's, I mean, what Marco said, I think on Twitter or maybe in his blog post, is it feels to him like there's like one person working on faces at Apple. And so they do what they can, and then that's it. But then you get into some of the details that are just so bad. And the best one, the best example is Apple introduced a new circular complication on the new watch faces. They have an existing circular complication. They made no attempt to put any compatibility in. So if you use the infograph faces and you lose all of these complications from older apps that
Starting point is 00:29:25 haven't been updated to use the new complication type, including a bunch of complications from Apple that just aren't there. They're Apple originated. Like if you want to launch messages or something, it's just, Nope, it's not there anymore. You have to use a different face for that. So they've created this own kind of like discontinuity of of watch face complications in in the thing that they completely control themselves and and it is just one of those moments where a whole bunch of us who use the apple watch look at this and say why is it that for all of the effort apple puts into so many aspects of the apple watch it has it appears to be doing almost the minimum on watch face design, like literally. And because the minimum is we have a new big screen, we need to create new faces to take advantage of them that
Starting point is 00:30:13 we can show off. So they did that. And then literally nothing else, including adding compatibility for older complications, um, or allowing those new complications to live on the older faces, which is the other part of this. My favorite Apple Watch face is utility. And I took screenshots of utility in the infograph face. And the actual watch face itself is exactly the same size. The circle is exactly the same size, which means those complications in the corners have exactly the same amount of room on both faces, but one face can only use the old ones and one face can only use the new ones. And I get that there might be some design issues there, but it seems kind of ridiculous. Like, why can't I use my favorite face with the new complications if there's room for them there and i i think the
Starting point is 00:31:06 real answer is they didn't bother probably because whoever's working on this had to prioritize and updating old faces uh wasn't uh wasn't gonna gonna make the cut and i guess that's that's ultimately what a lot of us are saying and and and you see the frustration when you see developers like steve trott and smith building these uh watch face apps i i think the message here is one third parties can build watch face apps and that's interesting but two it's there's a hunger for better watch faces on the apple Watch. And for me, it comes down to this idea that if Apple, and this is what I said in my piece, if Apple, I get that Apple might want to keep complete control or mostly control of the watch faces. I get that. I get that we may never see a true third-party access to custom watch faces. we will um it doesn't again people on twitter
Starting point is 00:32:07 will make that absolutist argument they'll say well you know they can't let anybody because there'll be intellectual property issues and lawsuits and things like well you know if you write a carplay app you have to get approval from a special part of apple app store group in order to be allowed to have a carplay app right you can curate a developer and say we trust you but but even if they don't like this is the thing is okay apple you want to completely control the watch face experience fine i mean i don't love it but but i get it um but if you're gonna have the monopoly on it you gotta do a better job like that's the bottom line is you gotta do a better job you've got to update your old faces you got to bottom line is you've got to do a better job. You've got to update your old faces. You've got to provide more variety. You've got to make the complications better and more compatible.
Starting point is 00:32:48 And I get the argument, I think overarching argument that there have been so many other problems on watchOS for the last few years that they've been trying to deal with that the watch faces was not a priority. But I look at watchOS 5 today and think it's come a long way. And it feels to be at a level where the faces and the lack of compatibility and the fact that they've kind of been doing minimal effort on faces all this time is starting to show. And so from my perspective, I feel like all of us are essentially through all these different actions are saying, hey, Apple, watch faces matter.
Starting point is 00:33:27 You don't pay as much attention to them as you should. By the time we get to watch OS 6, can we either let third party developers build watch faces or can you do a better job internally of providing access to, you know, complications across all the faces and making sure all the faces are up to date? Because there's a discontinuity here. And, you know, i think the face is the main interface of the apple watch like not the it's it's it's the equivalent of the finder or the app launch screen on on an iphone uh i think faces and complications are how people use the apple watch and so to to just kind of stick in a couple new ones and not worry about the old ones and build new complication styles and not worry about the existing ones and not even bother to update your
Starting point is 00:34:08 own complications for the new style it's just it's not good it's it's really bad and so that's that's what's going on here it's fun to watch steve trout and smith's thing because he's he basically built this face that can do like i don't know thousands of different you can hit a random button and like thousands of different options across it and uh it's just it's fun and these are developers playing but they're also making a point that it's not impossible to build nice watch faces and uh somebody you know somebody ought to do it either inside or outside apple i want to talk about the copyright issues thing because i think that's brought up quite a lot. And also it's like I can see why people will bring it up
Starting point is 00:34:48 because a lot of the watch faces that are being created by people right now would infringe on the copyright of other watchmakers, right? And I think it's because right now as people are kind of just getting their head around it, they're making replicas of things or they're using property that they already understand that they're making replicas of things or they're using property that they already understand because they're first tinkering right like this
Starting point is 00:35:09 is kind of how you learn is by like okay can i make this it's like okay i made this and it looks like this so i know how it works now i can start working on my own ideas and underscore david smith's a really good example of that right right? Like he shows in his blog post, like, first, I created some stuff that looked like watches that I knew. And then when I understood that I made some stuff that was useful in my own way. And there are my own designs, right? Because I think that's kind of how people start. So I can see how the argument of copyright gets brought up when everybody's kind of sharing things that look like different Rolexes or whatever. But ultimately, this is a problem that Apple can solve or have already solved. Look at the iMessage sticker store. This was the thing that they spoke about, right?
Starting point is 00:35:59 Apple spoke about this, the potential for copyright infringement issues, and that they said that they would take care of it. it seems by and large that they mostly have i mean you can search for a lot of copyright characters and you typically only find stuff that is legit like if you search for disney characters you find disney stuff that disney makes you don't find other people like like so you know the very popular character poutine right they make a sticker pack for poutine there aren't like a bunch of like other people trying to make these like fake poutine sticker packs because you would find them right because it's a character that people like but you don't see it right you don't see mickey mouse stickers it's literally a curated app store like this is why we have a curated app store. This is why you have to get approval from Apple.
Starting point is 00:36:47 Now, we could argue in the app store space, especially on the largest collection that they've got the highest volume, they have issues there with approving some stuff that should not get approved. But on the smaller ones, it seems to not be that much of a problem. But even in the app store there is a process right that if you as the copyright holder have a problem you can lodge a complaint get them kicked out and it can be taken care of so there is a method for this like the copyright complaint i think is an easy one to levy but when you play it out it's manageable like it is totally manageable and so so i'm not gonna yeah accept
Starting point is 00:37:26 that argument that well you can't do this because they'll all be knockoffs of existing faces first off there is the irony here that apple itself was got in trouble for knocking off an existing watch face um but mondale swiss clock right yeah the swiss clock right but uh you know you put if they wanted to do third-party watch faces they could could say it's very much in the terms already, but they could even point a finger at it that anything that's an intellectual property of an existing are or whatever and they'll and they'll be super specific about it or they'll train up a team who's looking at specific watch faces and figuring out what's there or not or they'll do the other thing which is say you can apply to be a watch face developer and agree to all these other things and we're going to watch what you do more closely and that's going to be how they do it is like you know you're an approved watch face developer there are
Starting point is 00:38:30 lots of ways they can do it if they want to do it and uh it would be great if they want to do it that way because maybe apple could focus on making complications compatible across all of these different things and not worry about building a million different faces. But again, I'm okay if they want to just keep it all to themselves as long as they make all of the watch faces they offer good and compatible and make the complication system as robust as they can so that you can use complications in different places and maybe in different contexts, which is another thing that they're lacking where you, you know, I want my timer to appear when a timer is running, but otherwise I don't want it to appear at all. Stuff like that that's also not capable right now.
Starting point is 00:39:13 So ultimately, do you think that Apple will ever allow this custom watch faces? Do you think that it is a thing that they will do? If I had to put money on it, I would say no. Ever is a long time. I think it is highly possible that they will one day do it. Will they do it next year? I'm skeptical. It's possible. Within the next five years, let's kind of put a cap on it
Starting point is 00:39:43 just to make it a little bit easier to discuss. Yeah, let's say yes. Yeah, let's say yes. I think that in the long range, I think they will do it because it just is going to make the watch more delightful to have a lot of different face options on it, and it reduces their burden. Because in the end, if you think about it,
Starting point is 00:40:27 Apple would be, especially if they don't have a huge team working on faces, but then letting people, uh, write their own, you know, pretty face designs or whatever. And, and, uh,
Starting point is 00:40:34 and focus on the complications, but I could see them saying, you know what? There aren't that many. Um, like honestly, Steve Troughton Smith, what he showed is if you build a clever watch face with a whole
Starting point is 00:40:46 bunch of different options, you can end up creating something with thousands of variations that let you customize it to your personality. And if that's true, then you could also, if you're Apple, just build a bunch of those kinds of faces in different styles and feel like you've given enough personalization options to people. So, you know, I think it might be a good move for Apple to open it up, but I can see why they wouldn't want to. And again, I'd be okay with that
Starting point is 00:41:17 if they do all the other things. But the problem is they haven't opened it up and they aren't doing the other things. And honestly, even if third-party watch faces were allowed today, it would still be a mess because there are the different complication types and compatibility is limited. You know, you, and you don't get access to the old complications on the new faces. And it's, it's kind of a mess as it is, which may be why it isn't a third-party opportunity right now, because it's kind of a mess and maybe what they need to do. And maybe
Starting point is 00:41:44 even what they've been doing in the background is building a new system for faces that is way better that would be a great watch os6 feature and maybe as a part of that you would have either more much more dynamic complications or third-party watch faces we'll have to see but um i like the fact that it's not just me it's some other people too who are all kind of grumbling about how faces should be better on the apple watch that's the bottom line is the apple watch faces are interesting that it's not just me, it's some other people too, who are all kind of grumbling about how faces should be better on the Apple Watch. That's the bottom line is the Apple Watch faces are interesting, but it's kind of a mess beneath the surface and they should be better. And it matters. It's an important part of what that device does. And clearly it's not getting enough attention inside Apple. And I think all of us who are complaining are hoping that by causing a little bit of a dust up, maybe somebody inside Apple goes, see, I told you we aren't doing enough
Starting point is 00:42:30 with faces. Maybe we'll see that sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn't. Today's show is also brought to you by our friends over at Pingdom. Pingdom are super awesome because they help keep sites online. They help keep some of your favorite sites online from your favorite companies, including RelayFM, because Pingdom provide real-time feedback for monitoring. So you don't have to be refreshing your page all day or keeping your eye on logs all day. So you get to know what's going on because Pingdom are monitoring your website for you. Stuff breaks on the line all the time. Pingdom detect more than 400,000 outages every single day. It doesn't matter what type of size company you are, what type of website you have. There can be issues
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Starting point is 00:43:42 You just give them the URL that you want to monitor, and they'll take care of the rest. Go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now, and you can get yourself a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Then when you sign up, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get a huge 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So today, Adobe had a presentation on their Adobe Max conference, I guess, convention. I think it's a little bit of both. It seems like a pretty big deal.
Starting point is 00:44:14 It happens in San Jose. And it confirms the Bloomberg report that we had earlier this year about Photoshop coming to the iPad. I like they have a line on their website. It says not Photoshop for the iPad, Photoshop on the iPad. And that is like a really good way of explaining what they're doing. They haven't made an iOS version of Photoshop.
Starting point is 00:44:39 They are taking the new version of Photoshop and making it work the same everywhere. This is the full desktop app. It has all of the toolbars, all the controls, and layer management, unlimited layers, and all that kind of stuff. It is a new user interface, but Adobe are saying that they are observing
Starting point is 00:44:57 a lot of the placement and actions from existing versions of Photoshop to ensure muscle memory is maintained. But like with Final Cut Pro pro 10 which is kind of what adobe are kind of going through here their their final cutification of photoshop not every feature is going to make it to this 1.0 and it's the 1.0 across all devices so they're initially going to be shipping a slimmed down version with planning to add more functionality over time. So they think that this 1.0 will have the majority of stuff that people need, but it's going to be some super powerful features or some education features which exist in the current Photoshop that won't make it to the 1.0, but will be added in as time goes on, which I think is a perfectly fine way of working, right? And I think that
Starting point is 00:45:46 by and large, Final Cut Pro X has bore that out, right? Like I assume there are still some people using 7, but I think over time people got happier and happier with how that went. This version of Photoshop syncs with the desktop version. So they're using cloud PSD files as a thing they've created. So you can work on the same file seamlessly. So the file lives in the cloud. It lives in your creative cloud. So you can work on a desktop, then on the iPad.
Starting point is 00:46:12 What do you think about this to start with? Well, I'm so happy, as we said before, I'm happy. And I'm a Photoshop user. I'm a Create-A-Cloud, Photoshop, and Lightroom subscriber. And so I'll get this when it comes out. I'll just add this to the list. And as we've been talking about, and Federico, and Fraser Spears, and so many people have talked about, the iPad hardware is capable of this, right?
Starting point is 00:46:38 Like, it's not a question. The iPad hardware is capable. the iPad hardware is capable. The question has been, can you bring it to the touch interface? But you've got the touch and Apple Pencil as an input. So I'm really excited by this. And I'm okay that it might not have every feature. I mean, ask me again if it doesn't have a favorite feature of mine. But given what I use Photoshop for, the number one feature is that it's Photoshop, Photoshop for. The number one feature is that it's Photoshop and that I have been using that app for 25 years now, a long, long time. And so I know it. And that's why, that's really why I use it and pay for it is that I just, I know it, I know how to use it. I don't want to learn something else at this point when I've got the thing that I want, but on iPad, I don't. So, you know, I'm, I'm interested in it. It is a,
Starting point is 00:47:30 the thing that gives me pause is this conversation that they had about cloud PSD files, which in the Verge has a, as a podcast, and they also did a transcript of a Q and A that they had with an Adobe exec that mentions the idea that Photoshop files in the cloud. And they, you know, Nealey's got it covered, right? He's like, well, wait a second, I'm on a plane somewhere and I can't get the, you know, in-flight wireless to download a giant Photoshop file. And the guy from Adobe says, no, no, no, it's, it's, it's fine. We, you know, we, we're, we fine. We're going to sync stuff and put it in the cache and you can pull traditional PSDs in and export out traditional PSDs.
Starting point is 00:48:14 It's more like what they're building is a cross-device sync for documents you're working on. And that made me feel a little bit better about it. The idea is Adobe wants that if you're working on, if you're working on, if you're working on, if you think about like what Apple's demoed with their iCloud stuff,
Starting point is 00:48:29 it's the same idea. It's like you're working on Photoshop on a Mac and then you open up Photoshop on the iPad. It basically should be able to get the exact same document in the exact same state
Starting point is 00:48:37 without you saving it somewhere, dragging it somewhere else, you know, copying it in, editing it there and then putting it back. That if you're working in Photoshop on different devices, it's going to use this cloud PSD format to seamlessly sync that file and that project across. And that's okay. I just don't want it to be what Adobe has done with some stuff in the past, which is sort of like, why don't you just
Starting point is 00:49:01 abandon files and go to our weird cloud service that everybody needs to be a member of Creative Cloud to use? And my response to that is always, no, I'm not interested in that. I want to use my Dropbox, right? So it sounds like- And you can. You can do that, like I said. Yeah. Sounds like they are thinking of the cloud stuff as being, and I'm sure they sell to work groups, you know, super expensive cloud storage and stuff like that. But for this purpose, it seems like it's more about creating that kind of seamless across device experience as you hop from place to place. So all of the, a lot of the product imagery and the demos and stuff that they're showing
Starting point is 00:49:40 are including the Apple Pencil. It seems to be a very important part of this purely because I think that a lot of the controls are pretty small. And also, you know, I think a lot of creative people, they use Wacom tablets and stuff like that. They're used to having a stylus. And on the Vergecast, which Jason mentioned, which was an interview with Scott Belsky, who's Adobe's chief product officer.
Starting point is 00:50:02 Yes. I want to refer to him as the Adobe guy. The Adobe guy. Just some rando. I want to refer to him as the Adobe guy. The Adobe guy. Just some rando. I want to read you a little part of this. Adobe employee number 862. Some phone calls may be made from Apple to Adobe today. So this is a transcript.
Starting point is 00:50:16 We're really excited. I would almost bet that Adobe and Apple are already working on what their presentation is going to be for the iPad Pro event whenever it occurs, right? But what I mean is the phone call is because of this. We're really excited about the Pencil. I think you'll see the capabilities of this accessory grow over time. We do collaborate with Apple a lot on this. All I can say is it's an important part of the product for the iPad.
Starting point is 00:50:41 I think it will grow in importance. So I picked and chose a little bit from that because Nilay jumps on him because he's so frigging excited that it goes down this route. So that's like two sentences smushed together. But what I think that very clearly tells you is exactly that, that Apple and Adobe have probably already been working on their presentation. And I believe, I think this is very clear, that Adobe have definitely seen some stuff
Starting point is 00:51:07 that's coming over the next few years i think this i mean we spoke about this when the report came out this is very much these two companies needing to work together to make this work like they if adobe are going to make this bet they need to know apple are in this for the long haul yes and apple need adobe right like they need each other for this to really make this something that goes on to be a good thing and the apple pencil becoming a more important part of the toolkit will 100 make this photoshop move a good one because what it's showing is pointing devices right and like that these are a thing that should exist on the ipad and maybe the primary one is the Apple Pencil,
Starting point is 00:51:46 but it doesn't matter how it is because that's what you need for these desktop class apps because the UIs are built differently. So I think that this whole thing, including the Apple Pencil thing and this whole thing with Photoshop, is really significant. This is a big thing for the iPad.
Starting point is 00:52:01 Yep. So here's my thinking on it, right? Maybe this pushes more people, more companies to make this decision. Or maybe this is just something that Adobe can do because Adobe has a business model that supports this. But either way, this is positive because even if nothing else happens except for the fact that we now have Photoshop on the iPad, that's a big win for the iPad. Like just that on its own, that's huge. But it could also mean that more companies like Microsoft did as well, right? We can't discount
Starting point is 00:52:31 Word. Word on the iPad is really good. But like just showing that if you have a business model that supports it, or if you can create one that will, the iPad is the place for you. I wrote a thing about this a while ago when i was complaining about on the internet like i do apparently about photoshop not being real on the ipad that um there's an artist named jen bartell and she was detailing her workflow and talking about how um she's gotten better on ipad but she you know until real full photoshop is there she can't she can't use the ipad even though she really likes the iPad and the Apple Pencil. And so she's got a mobile studio, like a Wacom mobile studio that's basically running Windows that she can use.
Starting point is 00:53:14 And that's an example of somebody who is an existing Adobe customer and wants to use the iPad and can't. And I think there are a lot of them. there are a lot of them. I think there are a lot of them out there who appreciate or would consider the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, current or future, if they had this other piece, which is they need Photoshop. And you can say, well, oh, but they can use this other piece of software that runs on the iPad. And some people can, but a lot of people can't. In her case, it has to do, there are Adobe specific brushes she uses. Like she wants Photoshop on the iPad and she's gonna get it, which is very exciting, right? And I think there are gonna be a lot of people like that
Starting point is 00:53:54 who love the hardware, but they are also part of, their whole workflow is based on Adobe products and especially Photoshop. So it's exciting. This wasn't all. Adobe had a bunch of other stuff today, which is also encouraging. They have a video app aimed at YouTubers
Starting point is 00:54:12 called Premiere Rush. And it is a version of Premiere, which is slimmed down and streamlined. It's on all devices and phones and tablets and pcs and stuff like that um but it is created with youtubers in mind it's effectively iMovie right right and this is this is i wonder what we'll see from apple on this front because if anything because well at some point i think they've got to do something then they can update iMovie and that's fine. But I keep thinking to myself, is anybody at Apple thinking that Logic and Final Cut need to be on the iPad Pro?
Starting point is 00:54:53 Because in some form. Now, GarageBand is a light version of Logic. And iMovie is a light version of Final Cut Pro. But I do have to ask like is that enough is that enough on the ipad pro to have these kind of light versions that haven't really improved a lot on the ipad in a while um it is cool to see adobe trying to rush in here and say we've got a you know youtuber video editing app that is now available on iPhone and iPad. That's great. But I do wonder, what is Apple's strategy there? Because we've talked about Ferrite, which is what I use on
Starting point is 00:55:34 the iPad to edit podcasts. And there is no logic for iPad. Will there be? And what about Final Cut? That's a good example. Again, the hardware can do it. What about Xcode? Sure, sure. That's a big question too. So what's Apple's intention for this platform too in the long term? Also, they're working on a drawing and painting app, which is codenamed Project Gemini, which is then clearly, well, I would assume, gunning for Procreate. Yeah. Kudos to Adobe, right? It took them a while. I think they made a bad bet,
Starting point is 00:56:07 which is that they basically made a bet on we're going to do fun bite-sized apps for the iPhone. And then the world went in a little bit of a different direction and they've had to realign. And this became part of a larger kind of re-envisioning of what their apps are as sort of across devices. So it's been a long wait, but it's good to see it. All right.
Starting point is 00:56:32 We should do some Ask Upgrade. Today's show is also brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. You can make your next move with Squarespace because they will let you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain name award winning templates 24 7 customer support and so much more they are the perfect home for your next project it doesn't matter what type of website you want to make squarespace have got the tools to let you do it they're an all-in-one platform there is nothing to install or patch or upgrade it is quite simply the easiest way to take your project from an idea to having a place and a home online.
Starting point is 00:57:07 Their templates are really great, very customizable. They have some that are built around specific ideas, like maybe portfolios or businesses or weddings or events, but they're all really customizable. The templates actually come with some content pre-filled in, which really helps you to understand, like, what do I need to put on a wedding website? We found this very useful when we built our wedding website on Squarespace because they gave us a page structure that we could take and could adapt to our own needs.
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Starting point is 00:58:20 The first comes from Wildfire. With the increase in phone size and high DPI screens, I'm feeling less inclined to need or want a Kindle. Do you think this trend will eventually reduce the demand for Kindles, or do you think that that demand is inherent for other purposes, Jason? I think the demand is already reduced by the existence of iPads and iPhones and other phones and tablets.
Starting point is 00:58:43 I think that was the big reducer in demand is for some people, a backlit screen or an OLED screen is enough. I don't think it's going to make a huge impact as long as the physical screen of the, has glare and is, um, not is, is basically emitting light rather than reflecting light. And so for me, like I could read a book on my iPhone. I have read books on my iPhone or, and like the 10 S max is bigger. So that's nice. But for me, the reason you get a Kindle is one, no interruptions, no notifications no notifications um no one swipe away from other apps it's a focused device it's got very long battery life um and the screen the e-ink screen it is there is a there is a light you can turn on in the dark but it is a reflective thing it is it is white with black lettering on it that works like paper. The sun shines on it or
Starting point is 00:59:46 a light shines on it, and then it bounces back in your eyes. And that is a very different feel than a phone screen. And so is that a niche set of desires? It is. That's why the Kindle is a niche device. But I do think that nothing in the trends of the phones in the last few years has really made me think, oh, well, this is going to kill the Kindle. The existence of tablets and phones makes the Kindle's audience much smaller because they have to get a dedicated device and you can read on these devices just fine. But I would, I, nothing has come. I mean, tell, talk to me when Apple makes an iPad or iPhone that has no glare and doesn't feel like it's shining a light in my face and I'll talk, you know. But until then, I just don't think that a bigger screen for most people, a bigger screen or a higher DPI is what drives people to the Kindle.
Starting point is 01:00:43 Josh asks, do you have any idea on how to distribute live photos i'd like to freely distribute some movies that i've made into live photos that i've shot with my drone when i export them i get jpegs and mov files so two parts to this one this wasn't a question but it was something that i thought to myself can you actually make live photos that weren't photos turns out you can i found an app i think this is an api i didn't find many apps that could do this but i found an app pretty cool app that called into live where you can take movies and turn them into native live photos just a part of this question i thought i could give some use to everyone it exists it's a free
Starting point is 01:01:19 app uh has a bunch of ads in it but you can remove the ads of an in-app purchase, and it has extra functionality. Look pretty cool. But the sharing part seems trickier because, I mean, I've seen people talk about this, but I couldn't really find anything definite. You may know as the photos person that when you share live photos, you can share them individually, right? Like I can send you an iMessage, and you can see the live photo, or I can send you an iMessage and you can see the live photo or I can send you it via AirDrop and you get the live photo.
Starting point is 01:01:49 But there doesn't seem to be a way to allow for that file to be downloaded en masse. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. This is the, I feel like live photos for such a fun feature, Apple has done a really bad job of making it available to other people right yeah i
Starting point is 01:02:07 mean i i haven't been able to find a reliable way that will allow you to share them uh like to like for example like you could share a dropbox link to a file because whenever i try and export them to dropbox i get that like a jpeg and a movie file like you get both and I've tried it with the HE I've tried it with like um the the settings for HEIC on and off and I couldn't really find a way to do it yeah you can make a um uh an album and share it um but it's and share it. But it's, yeah, it's not, it's a mess, is my short version of it is, it's a mess.
Starting point is 01:02:52 And I wish that it were better, but it's not. And there are cases where you can make a shared album and send people a link. That's a new, I think, feature. I'm actually trying to do it right now where you you uh right you can generate an icloud link for a photo right yeah via the new sharing stuff interesting that could that could maybe do it right all right so i'm making an icloud link to an image now and i'm going to send it to jason via imessage and if you can download it then potentially this is a way to do it i guess probably the best thing for you to do is to i don't know not open it on an ios
Starting point is 01:03:32 device because then it just goes straight to photos but yeah no i just opened it on my mac and i have an image and it is a photo not live not? Not live. There you go. Who knows? Boo. We tried. I use motion stills to turn live photos into animations, animated chiffs. Or is it pronounced shifts? I don't know.
Starting point is 01:03:59 Heefs. No, not heefs. Those are different. Heefs. So basically, we will throw it to the Upgradians. If anybody knows a good way to do this, we'd love to know. So the ability to try and maybe give somebody a link or some kind of downloadable format, which is a native live photo.
Starting point is 01:04:19 We've tried with this sharing thing, and it seems like still, like if Jason picked it up on his iPhone, it will probably work but we want it so like you could tweet a link and people could download one of these awesome drone photos from josh so let us know you can tweet at us let us know or email however you would like napali wants to know jason now that the time capsule is dead are there network drives available that are time machine friendly or can Time Machine back up over the internet? I know that there are network-attached storage devices that offer Time Machine compatibility. So the idea there is that you've got a server in your house that's a storage server, and you can back up to it.
Starting point is 01:04:59 So those do exist, and you just have to look for Time Machine compatibility on a NAS device. And they can be a little pricey, but I have one, and a lot of people I know have them. And the nice thing about them is it's a huge amount of storage. And if you've got an Apple device with an SSD, you probably don't have a lot of storage. So you can offload your old files and stuff to that server. They're there if you need them, but otherwise not. And they will do Time Machine. It's there. They're there if you need them, but otherwise not. And they will do Time Machine. And the ones that are compatible will let you set a size for the partition that you want for Time
Starting point is 01:05:29 Machine so that Time Machine doesn't expand. It'll expand to fill as much space as you give it. So you can give it a very limited amount. And then it will, when it gets to the end, it'll delete the older files and just kind of keep rolling through the backup. So that's the way to do it. Time Machine, I don't recommend. There are some plugins that claim to do it Time Machine I don't recommend there are some plugins that claim to do this but like I don't recommend trying using Time Machine as an internet backup it's not built to do it that way it's built to be on a local network or or on a external drive
Starting point is 01:05:54 on a local device if you want to do internet backup you should use a service that's built for that that's connecting to their remote servers and compressing data and doing all the things that it needs to do Luke wants to know do you buy Apple care for your apple watch i don't why is that i don't buy apple care for almost anything although i did buy it for my for my ipad my imac pro because it was so expensive that i was like you know what and and the and the apple care was not so expensive so
Starting point is 01:06:20 i for that one i decided to do it but um because I'm I'm a person who had a big spider in my iMac screen at one point right like so like all right we're gonna do that but for my Apple watch I just don't I don't buy Apple care I have been fortunate that the amount of destruction that has happened of devices in my life has never cost me anything close to what I would have been paying on Apple care and so my I'm And so I don't have a negative energy field around me that causes me to break devices all the time. And so I feel like for me, I know people who are like that and they are very happy to use AppleCare. I just have never been one of those people. So I don't buy AppleCare in general. In fact, I think the first time I've ever bought
Starting point is 01:07:01 AppleCare for anything was the iMac Pro. I buy AppleCare for my iPhone. I bought one for my XS Max. I would buy AppleCare for a watch as well. Just because it seems breakable. It is breakable. It's a small little device that feels like you could knock it against something and scratch it break it in some way like it feels like a an easily breakable breakable device i should say um and if apple care was is within your budget
Starting point is 01:07:38 like i recommend it i would always say look at it look at the how this works right one of the reasons that i bought apple care for my uh 10s max is because of how expensive it is to replace even the back glass now on these phones um so i did it because you get a couple of like accidental damage things right now included with with the the apple care i mean you have to pay a small amount for them but it feels like something I want to do, especially after destroying my iPad Pro, as I did recently. I'm warming up to AppleCare a little bit more, because I looked at how expensive
Starting point is 01:08:14 it would be to replace the iPad screen, and not for me. Steph asked, how does international roaming work on the Apple Watch Series 4? Do I need to set up a new provider if I travel abroad? Will the watch work without a cellular connection? Yeah's how it works it doesn't doesn't work it does not work so you can't roam internationally on an apple watch that just it's not a feature so you'll be in your home country it'll work there when you go overseas just turn it off it won't work maybe one
Starting point is 01:08:43 day it will be different but that is a level of complexity in terms of how it's connected to your phone and all of those things that it's just, it does not work. So don't try. And will it work without a cellular connection? Sure, it'll work great. Like the non-cellular Apple Watch does, which is it will be tethered to your Apple Watch via Bluetooth and or Wi-Fi. And finally today, Landon asked, do you know how the iPad tracks apps for screen time if you're using picturing picture and or split screen? So I thought I knew the answer to this.
Starting point is 01:09:15 I asked Federico and he confirmed my suspicion that it tracks them all at the same time. So if you have Safariari and google docs both open they're both getting tracked as being open in screen time so that it's that's the way that i believe it to be that's the way he believes it to be it matches with my own testing uh that it's tracking everything which i think is the best thing to do it It sees everything. Everything. If you would like to send in a question for Ask Upgrade, just send it to tweet with the hashtag Ask Upgrade
Starting point is 01:09:50 and it goes into a document for us to pull out in the future. Again, we're going to be in person next week recording Upgrade, so if you have any questions that you think would work nicely for that environment, send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade.
Starting point is 01:10:06 So we should talk about that. So next week, me and Jason are going to be in Chicago doing a live show. Tickets sold out a long, long time ago. So if you have a ticket, great. Hope to see you there. But here's the thing about this. Oh, boy. We're expecting an Apple event at some point before the end of this month.
Starting point is 01:10:26 Right. I feel like that is a thing at this point. We believe I, I still believe at this point, I don't think it's going to be next week because the, I, in that instance, the invites probably should have gone out last week.
Starting point is 01:10:39 They should probably have already gone out if they were holding it next week, which means, which is good for us in terms of me being in Chicagoago instead of out here for an apple event great but um it does suggest that uh yeah i i think we are hoping uh that it will be the last the last week yes because because so here's the thing if you if by the time you're listening to this, Apple has announced an event for the week of the 29th, which is now what we would, I guess, expect and hope. That means the next episode in Chicago will be a live draft. It's hard to imagine what would happen if that lines up, right?
Starting point is 01:11:23 The idea that we would be drafting an Apple event live on stage. Very excited about the potential live draft. I don't know if my heart can take it. Oh my goodness. Wouldn't that be a lot of fun? So that is what we hope will happen, is that there will be a live draft. Now, in the event,
Starting point is 01:11:42 so we just want to put this out there because we're saying that we're recording next week. the event that there is an apple event next week right like doubt it but just in that event we are still going to be doing our show in chicago right but we will record flop house style an episode that will be a special that will come out probably in november yeah it'll be an evergreen ish episode where we can talk about a topic that is come out probably in november yeah it'll be an evergreen ish episode where we can talk about a topic that is not based on the news of the day because the thought here is if they do an apple event next week we will delay the real upgrade and do it after the apple event as we do because you know recording an episode one day before an apple event
Starting point is 01:12:21 is never a good idea for this show it just because we'd be too excited about the Apple event. I did that once with the talk show where we did a two-hour episode that was released like four hours before an Apple event in which we speculated on the Apple event. And I thought, wow, this episode has the smallest expiration date, the nearest expiration date of any podcast I've ever done
Starting point is 01:12:40 because in four hours, and you have to listen for two hours, it will be- will be such a narrow window it will be useless so so if that happens then we will come up with something very clever and funny that is not tied at all with um with news and you'll hear that episode uh maybe thanksgiving week or something like that but um but we're all crossing our fingers here for an event announced for the week of the 29th
Starting point is 01:13:09 this week sometime so that we can do a live draft episode on stage in Chicago the excitement level of me I might combust on stage I may have to walk off at various points and just like
Starting point is 01:13:24 breathe a bunch of water yeah combust on stage i may have to walk off at various points and just like uh like breathe water yeah so um very excited about the potentials here but nevertheless no matter what we do we're really excited about doing the first ever live with an audience episode of upgrade yeah um so that's going to be a lot of fun uh so we hope to see you all there but otherwise we will be back next week come apple event or high water we'll be back next week uh until then thanks so much to our sponsors squarespace pingdom and green chef you can find jason online at sixcolors.com he's jason l on twitter i am i mike i m y k e on twitter and instagram you should follow me there.
Starting point is 01:14:05 This show is a part of RelayFM. We have many shows at RelayFM that you may enjoy. Go to relay.fm slash shows for that. The show notes for this week are relay.fm slash upgrade slash 215. Until next time, Jason Snell. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. See you next week, Chicago.

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