Upgrade - 250: Building a Home Screen Together

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

After a brief commentary about Twitterrific 6 and the difficult world of App Store pricing, we kick off the The Upgrade Summer of Fun by building the official Upgrade iPhone home screen. 28 apps will be picked! Four will win coveted spaces in the dock! Rules will be invented on the fly! Also, we explain what a draft is.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 250 today's show is brought to you by hollow kiwi co and astropad studio my name is Hurley and I have the joy of always and always and in always of being joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hello, Mike Hurley. Episode 250 is upon us. Yeah, and so we figured that this would be the perfect time to start the Summer of Fun for this year.

Now, if you are new to the upgrade program and you're thinking why are they screaming three words at the top of their voice and why is the music different for this week's episode during the summer we like to put on a selection of episodes that feature different and fun and eccentric topics on this show because from about now until september it tends to be a little bit quieter in a technology space as we go through the summer, plus me and Jason both travel over these months. So we like to mix things up a little bit. And today we're going to be starting the summer of fun on episode 250 because it just felt right to do. And we're going to do an iPhone

home screen draft later on in today's show. We'll explain to you at the time what on earth that means. And then next week, so there's some homework for you, we're going to be doing a Mike at the Movies for Kiki's Delivery Service, which is a movie that we've been wanting to do since we watched My Neighbor Totoro a few months ago. So that will be also next week's episode. And we have many, many wonderful, weird and fantastical topics that will be uh ringing through the summer of fun which tends to end uh with the iphone draft so for the draft for the iphone keynote so uh we've got a lot of wonderful episodes planned for this year so here begins the summer of fun all right at last and a hashtag snell talk question this week jason is very apt comes from

steve steve wants to, what actually is a draft? It seems like a sport metaphor, but it's not something that I'm that familiar with. So Steve, the easiest way that I could describe it is if you've ever played a game at school on a playground or something and you need to pick teams, so you pick a couple of people to pick the teams and then they just take turns picking who's on their team. That's a draft. That's how drafts work. And then it is most notable in at least American sports. This is how you end up getting players who are coming out of school or who are amateur players for football or basketball or baseball. They do the major sports do drafts where like you've got all your college football players and they are ready to be drafted into the NFL. And they don't have a free-for-all where they

can sell their services to a highest bidder, which, by the way, would probably be more fair. This is not a situation that's favorable to the players. It limits their free market by instead making the teams take turns and they usually start with the worst team first and the idea there is that if you're really bad you need more help so anyway we we uh you have repurposed this to be a mechanism that we can use to pick sort of anything in turn and uh part of the key is that if you take it then it's gone and the other person can't take it otherwise Otherwise, you're just doing two lists in parallel. And that's not a draft. Yeah, we basically just brand it as such because it sounds nice.

So there we go. That is kind of what a draft is. And for our purposes, what we use them for. Now, Jason, I believe you've written a lot of notes in our document today about Twitterific 6 and kind of some of the business of selling apps. So I would like to know from you what is going on with Twitterific and what is it specifically that you wanted to talk about today? Well, I mean, I wrote a little thing last week and I could be excited about it and just say, hey, a new version of Twitterific for iOS came out. I like Twitterific. I use it. It's my Twitter client of choice.

I use it on the Mac. I use it on iOS. It's got, you know, it syncs across all of them, which is really nice. And if you're using Tweetbot, you get that too. It's, you know, these are competitors. These are the two kind of like primary premium, not the Twitter app apps that are out there. It's got some new features, better media support, more themes, syncable by iCloud. So you can actually like user customize, you can make a theme, you can actually make a theme on the Mac version and put it in by iCloud. So you can actually like user customize, you can make a theme, you can actually make a theme on the Mac version and put it in an iCloud folder,

and it syncs to the iOS versions. And you can use those themes there. It's pretty cool. But I think what's what's most interesting, and it's kind of unfortunate, but I think it's also worth talking about just the challenge of business models in the App Store and what people's expectations are, and how hard it is for developers to figure out the right thing to do is that, you know, apps auto update generally, unless you set them not to. And what they decided to do was release Twitterific 6 on top of the old version. And that caused a lot of people to get really angry, apparently because there's for some group of users who weren't seeing banner ads in Twitterific before they say they are seeing them now. Now, the Icon Factory wrote a whole document that we can put in the show notes about the

purchase policy of Twitterific 6. There's a whole history of what they've charged for Twitterific and what the business model has been over time. I think it's, I think, you know, I'm trying to get a handle on the source of the user anger, because it seems to me based on their document that what Icon Factory basically has said is, if you've given us money in the last, like, five years, we're gonna do right by you. And we're either if you've given us money in the last like five years we're gonna do right by you and we're either if you're on a subscription you just keep the subscription and if you uh if you bought the app or i mean it's a free app with in-app purchases if you've um if you've uh recently

done an in-app purchase uh we will give you an extra six months of that in-app purchase in the new thing before we ask you for more money. And basically, if you've given us an in-app purchase at all since 2014, so five years ago, more than five years ago, you still won't see those banner ads. You will get a sort of a nag screen that comes up every now and then saying we would like it if you would support the app, but they'll hide the banner ads for you and so it looks like they're being really generous here um and that unless there's either a technical mistake or there's something that they're not communicating clearly it sounds to me like the only people who are really seeing ads who weren't seeing them before are people who bought the app back in 20 like 2013 basically

came out the end of 2012 for three dollars and those people got graced basically when they switched to the free within app purchase model the people who bought the app got graced with no ads until last week and uh and and this is the one of those things where it's like, they are getting so much junk on Twitter about this for, I think, because they've been so good to their customers. I think literally what they're getting is they're getting angry people who they have been always, Icon Factory has always been sort of like trying to do the right thing and say, you know, we're going to give you no ads for longer because of that. And it's gone so long now that people just figure that they get no ads forever. And what they did last week is they said,

okay, we're doing a new version. We're going to update it over the old version. And if you haven't paid us in the last five years, you're going to need to pay us again. And, you know, this leads to this whole conversation about like, what's the right thing to do as an app developer? Do you update or release a new version of the app? If they release a new version of the app, what happens to the old version of the app? People, I will lay money down that if they kept the old version around and it broke in iOS 13, that people would complain about that. And yet they should have no need or they should put no effort into making the old app continue to work because the old app is, people are not paying them for the old app. And $3

received in 2013 does not help them do work today. Also so so there's some of that some of it is the complexity of the in-app purchase system because uh they have been trying to find a business model for this and that and therefore you go to this site and you're like oh my god uh you know we went from paid to free with these in-app purchases and we did a tip jar and there's all of this complexity on top of it that's frustrating. And then another layer on top of that is people, there are a lot of people who hate the idea of a subscription and they're offering monthly and annual subscriptions. They also offer a purchase that's a one-time purchase that they called forever, which was a mistake because what it really is, is it's for the life of version six. I'll point out that version five lasted seven years,

but who knows how long version six will last. And so you don't really know what you're getting for your $30 by doing that. I think it's $30. It's not cheap, but it's just, you don't get nickel and dimed over every month or every year. And some people don't like that idea. It's like, I don't want to pay $30. I also don't want a subscription. And, you know, I think that there are some okay criticisms, criticisms I understand about the way that they phrase some of this stuff and how they tried to communicate it. But what really makes me sad is this seems to be a company that has fought really hard about how to do this and has tried to always do

right by their paying customers. And by the way, the vast majority, according to Icon Factory, of Twitterific users just use it for free with ads. That's the vast majority of it. But I think they've tried to do right by their paying customers. The existence of this purchase policy shows that they've consistently over the years tried to do the right thing for people who've given them money and given them features forever in some cases or for years um before you know even though that's not really what they paid for because they wanted to do the right thing and yet now they're getting torn apart by people who are like oh this is an outrage i can't believe I gave you money. And now you're making me see ads unless I pay you again. And I'll one last thing on this point,

which is the the entitlement of people who think that paying three bucks in 2013 gives you an ad free premium Twitter client forever is amazing to me like Twitter makes a client that's free, use it. If you think Twitterific or Tweetbot is better, then those developers aren't part of Twitter. You got to pay them. You got to pay them. And I am not seeing, unless there's a technical problem, or I'm really misunderstanding this detailed document that Icon Factory put out, I am not seeing where they have taken money from somebody and then turned around and said, okay, you got to pay us again. That's no good anymore.

Like they seem to have gone out of their way to be generous. And the sad thing is that it may be that that generosity is the thing that sort of trained people to that they would never be asked for money again. But it's just, you know, this is just when you think maybe the app store is starting to make sense and settle down you see something like this and you realize just what a mess the app store is and i mean the customers the customer's attitude toward payment and the complexity of the entire model that's based on apple's rules yeah i think some of this is really difficult because you know i think that there is a potential issue in assuming that the customer is aware of any of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes as well.

Right. Like the economics of software development are so murky to customers as well as developers themselves. And I'm not saying that anyone, well, it's difficult to say who's pointing fingers who, but everybody's pointing fingers at each other, right? It's like, you owe me this software, you need to pay me more money. Like, I get all of it. But like, I just want to say it's difficult. I think it's very difficult as an average consumer to understand what your purchase is getting you.

For sure. I think that this is part of the issue created by the app store all those years ago and yeah it's now trying to be fixed by subscriptions but really the subscriptions should have come along and been a possible possibility for more developers a long time ago because we're now in this like really difficult time where people struggle to understand what they get now i don't think that that is right for them people to start like, holding abuse, because I think that's ridiculous. But the idea of somebody seeing this and being like, huh, I thought I paid for this. Like,

I understand that mentality, especially if you've been using it for so long, you don't even remember what when you paid for it. And it gets worse. I have a friend who will remain nameless, who is not a technical person, doesn't work in the technical field at all, who got angry about this. And they're like, I bought this app a couple of years ago. And I said, well, I'm looking here and it looks like it's a free app. And their response was, oh, oh, okay then. It was really one of those things like, oh, I didn't even realize that I didn't pay for it. I thought I paid for it. And now they're asking me for more money. And it turns out I didn't pay for it and they're asking me for money.

And again, you can use it without paying them. You just get the ads and then you get to choose to turn it off. And I think that Apple add, add so much complexity to this through their rules. Definitely. Cause I get to find it so difficult to be like, it's this person's fault.

It's this person's fault. I think that the world that we're in has just become really hard to understand. What paying for an app actually gets you today? And I really hope that subscriptions continue to be a thing that works for people. I really hope it works for the Icon Factory, which is terrific, or has been working and continues to work. But it's a real mess it and it seems to be it is only becoming increasingly more difficult for developers to build a sustainable business model yeah and we want them to succeed but if they don't succeed then the apps go away so really

that's that's the the answer is if you don't want to pay then that's fine at some point they'll just stop developing their app and that's And that's certainly an option here. I think what I feel bad for developers is that a lot of these decisions are made by Apple, but the user doesn't perceive any of them as being from Apple. They perceive them as bad behavior on the part of the developers. It all gets blamed on the developer, which I understand from a consumer point of view. It's like, I don't even know. Your app is the one asking me for these things. made this decision but we know that there's a lot more complexity behind the scenes and apple gets shielded like very rarely will a user say why i'm being asked to subscribe to an app i i am outraged by the

conditions put in this market by apple's rules that no they say why are you asking me for money developer that's that's where it comes back to it and it falls on them yeah the hope i think for a lot of people was that the subscription model would be a thing to help save this but there is also as you mentioned the issue of subscription fatigue for sure there's you don't want to subscribe to 150 different applications like nobody wants to do that right we're all subscribing to so much stuff. But I hope that at least for some apps, at least the annual subscription for like a smallish amount of money,

like a few dollars, but it's going to be a big help to a lot of developers. And I think wouldn't be too difficult for most customers. But yes, I think this is worth bringing up every now and then, especially because this one seems to have

hit a real sore point of a lot of people. Yep. All right. We are going to get into our Summer of Fun iPhone home screen draft. But before we do, let me give our thanks

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So we thought, what can we draft? This was a conversation we had a little while ago, and this one had been bouncing around in my head for a while about trying to draft the perfect iPhone home screen. Now, 28 apps can go on the iPhone home screen. We're going to take turns picking one app each. Some of them are not really going to need much discussion, but we'll see about that. And what I thought we'd do, because we want to create the perfect home screen,

we don't want to have duplicates. We're not going to pick the Twitter app, Terrific, and Tweetbot, right? We're going to have one app per category, and we're going to go through it like that. And I guess, who's going to go first? Jason, you know what? I'm going to let you go first.

Why don't you take the first pick for the iPhone home screen draft? I don't want you know what? I'm going to let you go first. Why don't you take the first pick for the iPhone home screen draft? I don't want to go first. I'm going to let you go first. You go first. It was your idea. I'm going to give it to you. You go first. All right.

So I'm going to go with a very simple one that I think everyone should have on their home screen because I can't imagine using my phone without it. And that is the Messages app. Seems like an easy one, right? Would you agree? Yeah. What I was wondering as well is i think by picking this uh we're going from top left uh so this could be a wild design

because we're going to pick the things we want the most even though maybe they would be more likely to go in the dock but i don't also want to try and in audio form create a visual medium here so we're just going to imagine this is top left so the other thing i was thinking which upgradee and jason is going to reorganize their phone based on the upgrade iphone home screen draft i i'd imagine uh yeah well that's a good question i also imagine we'll get a sternly worded uh note from alex cox about the quality of our home screen when we're done yeah but i want to see you can send tweets to us if you do this. I want to see how many phones can we destroy with our iPhone home screen draft.

So top left, messages. What are you going to pick number two, Jason? All right, ironically, top left on my home screen is messages. So that is well done, well picked. I am going to go with an app that has to be on your home screen and also by doing this i know i'm sniping you uh i'm gonna pick safari you gotta have safari you can do so much with safari it gives you the whole web on a phone steve jobs told me that was great so i think

you gotta put you gotta put safari on there and not chrome which you do but uh too late i was gonna do you know what i didn't even have chrome in my list because i knew it would never work i had safari in my list i am a chrome user on the iphone because i am currently a chrome user on the mac although i am getting ready to bow down to the god of ipad os full safari come september i've kind of like resigned myself to the fact that i'm going to be moving away from chrome back to Safari because I'm so excited about the full desktop Safari on the iPadOS. So I can't imagine that Chrome will be in my future on iOS come the end of the year, which is, it'll be a sad day for me, Jason, when I finally give up. Because there are just some things about

the Chrome app now that I love so much over Safari. Like, for example, the way that you open new tabs on the Chrome app is so nice. You just pull down and pull to the left, and it just opens a new tab for you. So many little things like that that I will miss, but that full desktop Safari. I love how you have taken my Safari pic and used it to extol the virtues of Chrome, but too bad. Come on, come on come on we're not

gonna pick it it's at least there it's at least there all right so i'm gonna go with a controversial pick for the home screen here jason lots of people get on me about this but i think there's a good reason the camera app yeah yeah i took it off for a while and i put it back on it's on my home screen now because the reason people always say why have you got the camera on your home screen? It's because you have the camera shortcut on the lock screen, right? And I understand that. But sometimes I want to get to the camera and my phone is open. But also the camera app allows you to get into your photos app really easily as well. So it feels like a two for one for me, because you only have to go press one more tap and you're in photos, right? You hit that little preview on the bottom left so camera does double duty i don't need to have the photos app on my home screen and i also have

the camera app on my home screen for whenever i need it so the upgrade draft says that cameras the camera app is great me and jason both agree that is upgrade certified and it is pick number three i am going to pick one of my the apps that quite honestly i use the most on my phone and my ipad and uh i know it's not necessarily a crowd pleaser but i couldn't live without it and that is slack i use slack all the time to talk to people i can't live without it to communicate with all the people i collaborate with i gotta have it on my phone. So Slack. Yeah, I had Slack on my list. Obviously, I had it further down because I figured we're definitely going to pick it. And it seems to be these days that Slack is not that popular. Like I remember when like everyone was just head over heels in love with Slack, because of its ability to create

these large groups of like teams to be able to talk really easily together but i think people have turned on it because it has become everybody's workplace right and has become so big over time that it moves slowly so yeah it's a it's a real thing but uh slack is there and so that rounds out our current uh our current messages, Safari, camera, and Slack. I have just decided, Mike, while we were talking, that what we're going to do is we're going to pick 28, and then at the end, we're going to pick from those 28, we're going to place four of them,

take turns placing four of them in the dock. Only Jason Snell could come up with a draft of a draft, because that's what we're doing, right? We're going to take the draft, and then draft four from the draft never ends the drafts never end this is the type of draft innovation that only jason summer of fun number five i'm gonna go with an app for my favorite audio medium i'm gonna pick overcast um and that will round out the podcasting category overcast is mine and your

preferred uh podcasting application um developed by marco arment i love overcast i've used it for years i'm so used to it now and marco's effects the uh smart speed and voice boost they are something that i cannot live without now when i listen to my podcast so overcast it is in a pick number five yeah that that makes sense i am going to choose um wow there's so many so many apps to choose from here all the great apps you could say all the great apps i'm gonna go with fantastical uh over calendar i use fantastical that was my pick number six at that. Yeah, see, this isn't quite as competitive. It's more like collaborative. We're building a home screen together here.

It's very nice. So Fantastical is my calendar app, and I like its presentation better than the stock calendar app, at least on the iPhone. On the iPad, it doesn't really work for me. Even though I use it, I don't like it. But on the Mac, it's great. And on the iPhonehone it's great and uh it has a place on my home screen and i want it there on this home screen so fantastic cal from flexi bits um i'm gonna go with my favorite notes app jason notes the notes app uh it's super simple but it does the job Like if I have a little note that I need to write down,

it goes in there. All of my links that I save for all of our shows, it all goes in there because the extension is built so well. I've tried to move to many great notes apps that have come out since, you know, apps like bear, for example, which have some really wonderful features and really great markdown support. But I keep coming back to Notes because that system integration is so useful. It's the reason why I have my eye on Reminders so much, right? Like I can't stop thinking about the new Reminders app in iOS 13. I absolutely love the Notes app and nothing's going to change my mind on that one.

And it would be, I would not have a complete home screen if Notes was not on it. I agree with you. I use Notes as well for a lot of things. And I use it to do every time I do an incomparable and I'm taking notes of the movie I watch. Like that's all in notes. It's yeah, that is my go to place. If I'm like in a restaurant and I'm taking an order, like it goes into notes, right?

Like I'm collecting up stuff from everything. It is just where text will go for me um and i have so much stuff in there like oh like if i'm going on a trip i save pdfs of all of my documents into the notes app right and it's just all there um you can password protect notes like i have some like documents in there too like that i just password protect because then they're really easy to get to. Yeah, I love it. It's fantastic. And where would apologies on Twitter be without people taking screenshots of things written in the notes app?

Exactly. That's really, it's important. It's an important service for everyone who's apologizing on the internet. Speaking of Twitter, I'm going to pick Twitterific now because I mentioned it earlier and that's my preferred Twitter client

and I want to pick it. So I use it a lot too. Twitter, honestly, my phone is a Twitter and Slack machine more than anything else at this point. So thank you to the makers of Twitter apps and to Slack for filling up my phone. I actually didn't have a Twitter app on my list because I have recently been using the official Twitter app

and I didn't want to- Didn't want to promote that one? I didn't want that to be the official Twitter app and I didn't want to didn't want to promote that one I didn't want that to be the the official upgrade pick when when Twitter cut off a lot of the API stuff it made things more difficult for some of the third-party apps and like in speed and stuff plus using the official Twitter app actually makes me use Twitter a little bit less and I and I just I'm not like quitting Twitter but I just, I want to use it differently and the official Twitter app kind of has helped me do that. So that's the one that I've been using.

But I am a big fan of Twitterific as well. I think that it is my favorite, especially UI design wise. I love the way that Twitterific looks. So I'm very happy to have it in at number eight on our list. That's the second row, right? That's the second row as it stands now. Not the final row, but the second row as it stands now

is Overcast, Fantastical, Notes, and Twitterific. But as you said, we will give a complete and full picture of what it will look like after the sub-draft, after the main draft is completed. So we're going to number nine. I'm going to go with an email app now, Jason, and I'm going to spark all right i i have a decree that there are no good email apps they just don't exist um there is only the email

app that you can stand or the email app that has the features you have to have um and for me spark's team features are the things that i have to have like i i need them um i need to i need to be able to to use the team features that spark has and uh that's kind of that's kind of where i'm going with that one right like i i it's something that's very important for my work but a lot of the lot of the other features of the app could be better in many different ways but we had to pick an email app and spark may as well be the one that goes on the list it's a real ringing endorsement for email on iphone i hear you i had uh the mail apple mail app for a long time i've been trying gmail actually in its place on my phone the gmail app since i do get my mail through gmail and again it's one of those things where for everything that i like about it there's another

thing that i dislike about it so i can just pick my poison of like which feature I dislike or like the most in any of them, but they're not, none of them fills me with enough satisfaction that I say, okay, I can stop now. I've got, I've got the perfect email client just hasn't happened. And I've, I've tried them all, right? So everyone's going to send me their favorite, but I'll tell you right now, I've tried them all. And there's always something that I'm not happy with. One of the big things is I don't just use Gmail. Like I also use an iCloud email address for a lot of personal stuff. So I can't just use Gmail-based applications, of which there are many.

So that's kind of one of the big problems for me of where I come from with this. So that's in pick number nine, Spock. All right. Well, I know what you said earlier in pick number three about how having a camera app on your phone also gives you quick access to photos. But you know what? I don't want to wait in the cat and have the camera app open and then tap to go into photos. I just want to use the photos app and I use it all the time to see photos, to share photos,

to edit photos, to write a book about photos. All of those reasons I pick photos number 10. How do you write about how do you write a book about photos using the photos app just out of interest you just take pictures of words it's very hard because a picture is worth a thousand words so the the number of words i have to write it's enormous well i really i guess you only need to have like a hundred pictures and like you have a massive book on your hands it's easy jason it's it couldn't be easier it's easy money 100 pictures you have one you have like 100 000 it's easy yep all right so that's taken us up to pick number 10 uh should we take a break here before we finish off the rest yep

sounds good all right this episode is also brought to you by kiwi co if you have kids you know how great it is when you find something for your kids to do that is educational and fun at the same time but coming up with ideas and planning projects can take time. And if you're a parent, you're probably very busy. Individually researching each creative project, finding ways for them to be educational and fun isn't practical, but you still want your kids to be able to enjoy the creative stuff that they're doing, which is where KiwiCo comes in.

KiwiCo have a selection of hands-on projects for kids of all ages. You sign up for a KiwiCo subscription and every month you receive a crate full of exciting projects. They come with everything you need so there's no last minute dashes to the craft store. We're looking at hundreds of hands-on projects that are available with KiwiCo covering science, technology, engineering, art and math so you know that your kids are learning while they're getting creative. It doesn't matter how old your kids are as well. They have crates for all ages, and you can pause or cancel your subscription plan at any time. Now, Jason, I believe that KiwiCo sent you a crate out, and I just wanted to get your experience of it.

Yeah, I've got the walking robot here, which is one of the older projects. And, you know, I'm going to be honest. I've been saving it because this is the first week of summer vacation. And as we were saying at the dinner table last night, we need to assign my son things to do this summer, other than the number one thing, which is sit around like a lump and play video games. So one of the things we're going to be doing is constructing a walking robot using the KiwiCo kit. And that's going to take us probably not the entire summer so we're going to have to come up with other things to do but i think it's a good idea to give him uh you know something a little

bit of a challenge and maybe a mechanical challenge that he'll find interesting but also is some variety because searching for variety over the summer is a big thing yeah this is actually the perfect time for this type of stuff so you can change the way that your kid plays with kiwi co by going to kiwico.com slash ahoy and you'll get your first crate for free that is k-i-w-i-c-o.com slash ahoy for your first crate free once more that is k-i-w-i-c-o.com slash ahoy give it a try get that free crate and see what your kids think our thanks to kiwi co for their support of upgrade and all of relay fm all right so it's my turn again right as we go into app number 11 here i am going to pick calzones by underscore david smith which is whilst technically has calendar functionality i'm going to say is a world clock application is how I'm going to pick

this one, just because cow zones is an app that's become so important to me as a way to be able to keep track of all of the wild time zones of the many people I work with. Like right now, I am in a time zone that is plus two hours from my regular time zone. So understanding when on earth I'm recording with Jason, I really need to be able to have an application that can do that. And Calzones is wonderful. That is really great UI being able for me to see at a glance the time zones of when all my events are coupled with all of the different times of all of the people that I work with. It has a wonderful widget as well that I'm a big fan of.

I absolutely love this application. Mike, rules question. Is Calzones not a calendar app? It has calendar functionality, but I'm going to say for category specifics, it is a time zone conversion application. All right. Okay. I'll allow it. I'm a softie. I'll allow it. We make the rules. We make the rules here take that clock app you you're disqualified from your use as a time zone conversion app uh-huh see you later clock although maybe we could count clock as an alarm app yeah you just have to recategorize it but it can't it can't be used as a as a time zone app now because that's out no can't be all right what have you got next oh boy um i uh things are getting complicated now i'm gonna i'm gonna pick shortcuts next okay uh yes i have the shortcuts

app on on my home screen and i um you know you can get things from widgets and you can run things in the share sheet but sometimes i'm running shortcuts or i'm editing shortcuts right out in uh and just in app land i just want to open shortcuts and uh and go there and and see what's going on and and run a shortcut and i love shortcuts i use it more on my ipad i'll be honest than on my iphone but i do use it on my iphone and uh and i need to have it handy so i i put shortcuts put the power of shortcuts right on my home screen. I am really happy that the Maps category has remained open to this point of the home screen draft. So I can pick Google Maps because I believe Google Maps to be superior over Apple Maps. Especially outside of America, Google Maps really gets the job done, especially with all the point of interest information. And then when you're in a point of interest, finding out like, when is it open? When

is it busy? You know, and having all of that data available to you, as well as what I have found to be more reliable transit information. Google Maps is my preferred mapping application. Yeah, that's one that I let sit sit there because i could have picked apple maps and i thought about it and i thought i'm just going to hear from everybody complaining about apple maps and that google maps is better and i'm already going to hear from all the tweet bot people so why should i really hear from the all the google maps people too so i'm happy to let you have google maps yeah leave leave the apple maps people to me right i'll take the flack for maps you take the flack for twitter clients that's how we're going to kind of let this one roll an important

consideration when you're drafting apps it's gonna get worse um okay my next choice is going to be one password which i also have on my home screen uh and yes i know that there are a lot of places where password lookup happens in browsers and things like that and yet you know what i am opening one password all the time to look something up to copy something out to you know it doesn't always work the in browser integration i gotta make edits i gotta i gotta type in a password on my daughter's computer she's like what's the password for this i and so i i want it at hand and so i always have one password at hand it's not just passwords though like i just got a new credit card and i have my pin number saved in there yep right we got a new pin number i haven't changed the pin number and so i saved

the pin number in one password so then when i need to grab it or i need to remember it i have it saved in there i have all of like my bank account information in there like it's so much more than just passwords so yeah i'm the same as you like i agree like in there. It's so much more than just passwords. So yeah, I'm the same as you. I agree. Safari Keychain is so much better now. But I still want to be able to use 1Password. And I love the change in iOS 12,

which lets me use 1Password. You can use the third-party password managers in the little Quick Look bar. So it only made 1 one password even stronger for me but it's more than just just plain password management it's it's so much more it's like all of that secret information you want to keep at hand should we do weather should we move into the weather category uh sure if you want to you get to you get to decide i'm gonna pick carrot weather yay i love carrot weather like i understand some people don't like the character that the app has which is easy to turn off if it's not a thing that you want

i don't like it i turn it off it's fine and i get it right because it's like you know maybe you don't want a cartoon character effectively in your weather application but it's there if i ever want to see it and like but i'm more often than not i would I don't really see a lot of the stuff that's in there. They're kind of like the character, but it's there. It's still there. I can get it for a joke if I want to. But really for me, Carrot Weather,

Carrot Weather is one of my very favorite iPhone applications. The amount of development that goes into this app kind of astounds me, like all of the new features that the Carrot team put into Carrot Weather. I didn't really

know so many features could be added to a weather application over time, but they keep making it more and more powerful. I love the way that it visualizes data. I love how customizable it is. I can put all of the information that I want where I want it, depending on what is important to me, right? Like for me, I want to know feels like temperature. I want to know rainfall percentage. I want to know wind and I want to know UV. Like they are the four things I really want to have available to me

because depending on where I am or what I'm doing, they're the things that I care most about. And I'm able to have all of that, like where exactly where I need it in the application. So it also has an amazing Apple Watch app as well. Like carrot weather is the bee's knees. Yep. I agree completely. And I was going to pick it and I realized you would pick it and I didn't need to worry about it. And thank you for justifying my strategy. All right. With my choice, I am going to go with, sorry, Spotify fans, I'm going with

the music app. I am an Apple Music user. I've got my old mp3 library loaded up in iCloud Music Library. And I've got a whole bunch of playlists and all sorts of other stuff that I have access to that I've built since I subscribed to Apple Music. I use Apple Music on my phone all the time and not on my iPad because I don't listen to music on my iPad. But I do use the music app on my ipad but i do use uh the music app on my phone when i'm traveling when i want to listen to music in the car all of those things uh plus i also will use my iphone to control my airplay speakers like my home pods in the house so i actually use the music app a lot and that's why i want it on my home screen i use the music app as

well so i'll take this flag for you as well. Like, again, it's like notes. Music is tied really well into the system. And considering I'm so heavy in the Apple ecosystem, like the fact that I own a HomePod, right? Like you kind of need to be a music user at a certain point, because if you really want to be able to take advantage of that device, Spotify is not going to cut it for you. So, you know, rightly or or wrongly that's one of the

big reasons that i remain in music and also as well i'm not i'm not huge on like the music discovery features of a music streaming service in general um i like to find my music either myself or from friend recommendations this is kind of how i am. So I know that Spotify is considered to be better with a lot of the algorithmic stuff, but it's less of a thing that I care about. So at that point, I'm just choosing which app I like most. And I'm not a big fan of the Spotify app. I like the music app more.

So that's kind of where I am. I think if you don't care about the algorithmic stuff, these apps are very similar. They have the same catalogs available to them. So really, you're just making very minor decisions at that point, and I go with music for a bunch of reasons. I am going to pick a social network,

and I'm going to pick Instagram. I love Instagram. It is my favorite social network. It is the one that I check the most. It is the one that I enjoy spending the most time in. Instagram doesn't make me angry. Instagram doesn't make me sad. Um, Instagram makes me happy. I like to see what my friends are up to. I like to be creative and post stuff myself. Um, that is my preferred social network in general these days. Uh, I still use Twitter a lot. Like

it's where I get my news. It's where I'm able to promote stuff. But Instagram has become the place where I get to see what the people that I care about are doing. And that's why I check it. You know, and I think like screen time these days, I was checking some stats recently. I open and spend more time on Instagram now than I do with Twitter. That was something that changed a few months ago. So I'm happy about that because it was something that I actually wanted to do this year was to kind of shift where I was spending my time to spend time if I'm going to be spending social network time in a place that makes me

happier rather than a place that is unpredictable for me. So that's why I would want it on my home screen because it's so important to me. Now me i i believe jason already picked twitter well which is a social network so how could you allow mike to pick instagram as a social network i think that in category twitter is its own category right like i feel like it was choosing a twitter app right and now instagram is in the instagram category so i agree i agree i don't think i was but i agree completely well how did he get on this call jason i don't know it's just i have internalized the rules uh pedants out there and uh anyway moving on to my choice i'm gonna choose something i you know i have a family and sometimes you need to know where the heck the family is and we went to my daughter's high school graduation last week and uh we were all wandering

around on a very large football field and outside of it and we're like where do we meet after the ceremony and where are you oh you're over there why don't we meet over there and i was able to find the location of my entire family using the find my friends app i my daughter you know every now and then it'll be like oh where is she Like she's on a little mini vacation with her friends right now. And I know where she is, which is great. Again, am I spying on my daughter? I'm just checking up on her a little. It's okay.

But like, we'll have that. Like, when do I start dinner? My wife is on the way back from work, but she stopped at the supermarket. And I know she's still at the supermarket. I know what the timing is like. It is super convenient. And yes, it does mean that my mom knows where i am at all times it's fine i let her it makes her feel better it's okay but i i use find my friends all the time and

uh it's great and you're a friend on find my friends and so steven so i can always know i use find my friends all the time it is the best wwdc all of a sudden it's like all these little bubbles pop up and i'm like oh my friends are here it's great i love it that's my favorite time is when i land and the airport and then like see people coming in it's wonderful but'm like oh my friends are here it's great i love it that's my favorite time is when i land and the airport and then like see people coming in it's wonderful but i use find my friends all the time i have a small group of friends that i have there and also my wife as well like and we uh so like we have we have a dinner with you with steven like i have like a bunch of friends on there sometimes i just like to know where my friends are i don't i don't think

that's too weird right like? But it's a thing. And I love Find My Friends. I think that it's a super well-done application. I'm really intrigued to see what the Find My app is, right? I haven't really spent much time looking into that one yet because I'm still not on the betas because I'm traveling. I'm waiting for beta 2.

I want to see what that's like and I might put it on my iPad. But the integration of all my devices as well being in the same thing, actually think it could be kind of useful so it will be useful like i don't see why it wouldn't be but i'm intrigued to see what other stuff is going to be uh in find my so i don't like that name by the way find my i agree it should have come up with a new name for it i don't think that that's very elegant at all um jason i'm going to be really boring now but it's i had to pick it files oh files oh that's great i have that i have that on my home screen on my um on my ipad not on my iphone but sure

i need to get to files so i use the files app uh it's very very boring but that is a pick files is what i'm gonna go with for pick 19 all right i mean what can you say it's a way to get to your files i need files and they're in the files app like in fact i will make you feel better uh an app i never don't have on page one of my home screen ever ever ever is the most boring app you could possibly imagine it is settings and i choose settings yay you gotta have settings up there because you never know when you're gonna need to well when i was 13 you'll have other ways but what i was gonna say is you'll never know when you're gonna need to connect to a bluetooth device and you have to open settings and tap on bluetooth and then tap on the device because otherwise it for some reason

just won't connect anyway i use a lot of settings settings lives on the top left of my second screen. I do not begrudge that. It took a long time for me to move settings away from my home screen, but I needed the space and it just got bumped off. But I 100% am happy with settings being on the upgrade iPhone home screen. So now we're going to go. I'm going to go with pCalc now by a friend of the show james thompson i need calculation calculation a lot it's something that i do a lot i deal a lot with

needing to work out percentages of stuff um and just in general uh i i like to use calculation again i know that i can get to the apple from Control Center, but it's just not my favorite. So I like to use PCalc. PCalc is my favorite calculator application. I like the themes. I like the icons that you can choose from. And I like the customization. I like that you can kind of program your own buttons.

And I love that it has a hidden game and all the great AR stuff in there, which is not necessarily helpful for calculation, but makes me just love the app all the more so i'm a big p-calc fan it is on my home screen and it now lives on the upgrade home screen as well nice it does it does it's going to be there uh near reminders uh-oh which i'm also putting on um i use reminders for all of my all of my story lists uh and here's so here's the thing i was just having this conversation with steven hackett earlier today where he said i had a really great idea for something for liftoff and i didn't write it down and now i don't remember it and it's like yeah this is what i use reminders

for it's right in the name it reminds you of things and i don't use it as my to-do list manager per se um but i do use it as my place to write down things in an ordered way so not notes where i have a story list one i've got a things i need to remember for when we're going on a trip things that i i i thought of it and i know that if i don't write it down right now it will be lost and i want it in a structured list and that is what i use reminders for i was gonna pick to do this next i in all good faith will not be picking to do this next i in all good faith will not be picking to do it's like i feel like that one's way too close um but yeah reminders i mean who knows as i said maybe reminders will be where all of my to-dos live in just a few months

time we'll find out um but reminders is good to be there for now i think uh so i am going to pick one of my new favorite applications. I am a time tracking human being. I like to track my time. I'm tracking my time right now. And I use a service called Toggle with T-O-G-G-L. But the Toggle app is garbage. And there is a third party app that I really like called Timery. And I've been using Timery for months now. It's been out for a little while. I'm a big fan of it. It gives me all of the features that i want for time tracking makes it super easy again has another widget i love widgets that's one of the widgets that i use so i use timery for my time tracking and i'm very happy to have it there jason will have nothing to say about this but if you do use toggle then you

should use timery i am going going to pick we're getting down to it now, Mike. Let's see. I picked boring settings. I picked one password. Mike, you may know this about me. I'm what the kids call an old. Can you guess what app I'm going to pick? Phone. Phone is my choice.

I have to call people on the phone. I make FaceTime calls using the phone app that is a thing i have to do even now in the year 2019 the phone app is an app i need and i tried to move it away from my home screen and you know what it doesn't work i gotta have it on my home screen so it lives on the top row right next to messages, and I use it when I need to initiate a phone call or FaceTime. That's interesting. It's perfectly fine to have there. It is a phone after all, right?

I'm fine with it being here. But whenever I want to initiate a call, I always search for the person in Spotlight. That's how I tend to do it. I'm not telling you to change. I'm not telling anyone to change. The phone app lived on my home screen for a long time out of inertia. I was like, well, it should be here. It was in my dock for a long time as well. It's like, it's a phone. I need the phone app. But then I just don't, I personally don't really use the phone very often. I don't even FaceTime very much. If I did FaceTime more, I would either

have the FaceTime or the phone app on my home screen. But right now I just search for people and contact them that way. But you know what, Jason? I was going to put the phone if I didn't. My last pick was going to be the phone if it hadn't come up already, just because I felt like it probably should probably should. Yeah, it's nice to be there. Jason, I need to wake up every day. And the way that I wake up is by using an alarm. And the alarm can be found in the clock app.

So the alarm category will be taken up by the clock app. We dodged a bullet there. Clock. I have nothing else to say, but I feel like clock is important because it's where our alarms go. Because that is where the alarms go. All right. Okay. I see your point there.

But we're getting down to the end here um and and the choices that i have left are shall we say quirkier choices that not everybody would put on their home screen but i have them on but isn't isn't that part of the the wonderful thing it's like there's there's no one can contest what you're going to put on here jason so you can do whatever you're going to put on here, Jason. So you can do whatever you want. So, you know, Control Center is great. I use Control Center a lot.

There are a lot of things you can do from Control Center. But Control Center is simple and it has its limits. And beyond a certain point, you have to go to the app. You have to go to settings or for controlling devices in your home, you have to go to the home app. devices in your home you have to go to the home app and so the home app is on my home screen and i use it all the time to adjust the lighting or to turn on a light somewhere or to adjust the thermostat sometimes i can do that from control center other times it is easier to do it to change the automation so i change when the lights come on and off i leave the home screen uh home it puts the name in home screen what's home screen without a home app

i see uh having just made that up we need a screen app all right this is my last pick now oh boy okay so my last pick let me think about this i have a selection of applications here that i want to choose from um and i think i think okay so i do a lot of gaming on my iphone i always have i love iphone games so i feel like the iphone the upgraded iphone home screen should have a game on it and i'm gonna pick i think my favorite iphone game of all time which is threes i love threes i still play threes i play it all the time especially when i'm on planes or i'm in lines or i'm like traveling it is a game that i can always pick up and i can always enjoy no matter how long i want to put into it i have been playing consistently for the many many many many many years that it's been available um if you've never

played threes we will be doing you a service by telling you to go and download the application it is superb i love it it's a wonderful game and i'm happy to have it included on the iphone upgrade uh home screen it's a that's a really good game it's not uh it's not my favorite iphone game but it is a great game and i think it's perfectly appropriate that we have a game on the upgrade home screen and that leaves one more app one a 28th app uh and as everybody knows from listening to this show every April, there is nothing Mike likes more than hearing about the traditions and excitement of the sport of American baseball. And that is why, really, honestly, a banner app, it's in the Macworld App Hall of Fame. It is always mentioned, watch this, always mentioned by apple at keynotes very rarely does a keynote not pass when major league baseball's mlb at bad app doesn't get mentioned and the reason is they're

really good at supporting new apple features sometimes they announce support for new apple features that are impossible and they can't actually do them like when they did that ar demo last year showing how augmented reality was going to come to the app and you were going to have data overlaid over the field when you're at the stadium that never shipped but uh i use it all the time to check the scores and listen to the radio and all sorts of things like that and who doesn't like it when they roll out the baseballs on opening day they open the gate they roll out the baseballs and then there are baseballs out there so you can check that out in the mlb at bat app mike yeah this is one of those ones where obviously i have no interest but i am very aware of the fact that this is a very good application not just because

it's where you get to your baseballs but it's actually a good app itself so i'm i'm mostly fine yeah that being there you get your baseballs yeah that's right everybody's happy we now have our 28 yeah we're going to pick our dock and then we can very quickly i will run through the order so in case people at home want to rearrange their home screen they can do that so we now get uh one we get two of these each right we'll just continue going through the order so i'll pick one you pick one these are these are being pulled down so we've got 28 and we're gonna pull them down and put them in the dock all right i am gonna go with overcast very nice that is in fact where my overcast is yep mine too what's your doc pick safari good one that's a very good one uh spark fine you can have your spark uh and that means i am going to put slack oh good

one yep slacks in my dock too all right so we have it we have the iphone uh home screen the upgraded iphone we did it everybody we did it they said whatever it is we did i don't know but we did it we did it we picked 28 apps that are awesome and should be on everyone's home screen if you want to reorder your home screen to look like the one that we have just made in the summer of fun so you can live out your entire summer in this very fun way you will want to start with the top left and you will go like this messages camera fantastical notes twitterific photos cow zones shortcuts google maps one password carrot weather music Messages, camera, Fantastical, notes, Twitterific, photos, calzones, shortcuts, Google Maps, 1Password, Carrot Weather, music, Instagram, Find My Friends, files, settings, pcalc, reminders,

Timery, phone, clock, home, threes, MLB at bat, Overcast, Safari, Spark, and Slack. That almost felt like the PokéWrap, which is kind of incredible. There was a part in the middle where it started to rhyme, which I was very excited about. So that is it. That is the upgrade iPhone home screen draft.

I hope you enjoyed that much as we enjoyed putting it together. This is the first Summer of Fun topic for this year and a great way to start the Summer of Fun, if I do say so myself but no episode of upgrade will be complete without some hashtag ask upgrade questions and we're going to get to that in just a moment once we thank our final sponsor for this episode and that is astropad studio astropad studio turns your ipad into a completely customizable graphics

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free trial of Astropad Studio today by going to astropad.com right now to get started. That is astropad.com. Go check it out right now. And thanks to Astropad Studio for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So we have some hashtag ask upgrade questions, Jasonason and the first one comes from emital and emital asks how do you choose which apps to keep on your home screen on the ipad given that those apps can't be used easily for multitasking can you provide examples of apps that are better suited to the home screen than the dock so i wanted to just clear something up here about this question so the idea being that like if an app is on your home screen and it's not in your dock, it's not as easy to bring it into multitasking. So it is possible to do right.

You can always go home and you press and hold on an application. You press and hold on another one. So it opens that second application and then you drag and drop it in. It's not the easiest way to do it. The easiest way to do it is to use the dock as keyboard users of the iPad. I am able to access every single app on my iPad via Spotlight. And then when you do that, you can drag and drop it, right? This really should be a feature that's available somehow with a software keyboard, I think, or just in the software version,

like without using a hardware keyboard. But Jason, what is your kind of strategy for apps that go on the home screen and apps that go on the dock of your iPad? I, you know, I just loaded up everything that I commonly use in multitasking got stuffed in the dock. And, you know, my dock focus on iPhone is very different. It's just to have them in their special place and they're viewable. On the iPad, literally any app I can think of that I use in that context, I stuff in the dock.

And everything else, I'm usually using a keyboard, so I can just use Spotlight to find those apps, and then I drag them into multitasking that way. Exactly. And of course, there is limited space in the dock, right? So I also have a folder. So for apps that are like utility apps that I use very frequently in Splitview, I have a folder for those. And if I find myself using something frequently, like either searching for it by spotlight or going to the home screen to grab it, I put it in that folder. And then it's always accessible to me whenever I need it. I know a lot of people that just have like a couple of folders on their dock and a bunch of applications and have nothing on the home screen. It's like, I think that that in with this current state of the iPad makes perfect sense. But kind of that's how we make it work.

Roger wants to know, are you both still hopeful for an iPad laptop? I still long for the clamshell form factor, but it feels less likely to me. Jason, do you still want, even after iOS 13, an iPad OS, I should say, the iPad laptop? Yeah, I think it's less likely that given Apple's direction that it's going to do that. I would actually say I think it's more likely that there will eventually be a Mac OS touchscreen laptop that is running those apps that are going to be coming over from iOS via Catalyst. And I'm not sure how likely that is either. I do feel like the thing that Apple is missing is a convertible device. And I've been,

I have friends who've got kids going off to college and there's this question like, can they use an iPad? And it's like, you know, it might be tough maybe with iOS 13 and the new Safari browse, you know, desktop browsing features, you could get away with it, but you worry about incompatibilities. But Apple doesn't make something like the Surface, and there are a lot of PC convertibles, things that can be a tablet but can also be a laptop. So am I hopeful? I'm not. I guess I'd say my biggest hope is that Apple at some point recognizes that a first-party convertible keyboard thing for the iPad, or the iPad Pro anyway, would be preferable to something like the bridge keyboard and that Apple actually builds a future iPad Pro

with the ability to do something more than the smart keyboard. But given the smart keyboard, given that Apple is saying sort of like, let the iPad be the iPad, given what Apple is doing with Catalyst to push iPad apps to the Mac, I'm not super hopeful about any of those. I wouldn't say that any of those is particularly likely. And that's what's frustrating is that I think a Mac with a touchscreen would be nice. I think an iPad with a proper first party kind of like laptop mode would be nice. I think an iOS laptop would still be nice. I think an iOS laptop would still be nice. I'm not sure I would give very good odds on any of those things happening because it would require Apple to, you know, Apple does diverge from their approaches to their products and they do it in

surprising ways sometimes. But right now they've been very consistent and the moves they're making don't seem to be moves that are obviously leading. Like Catalyst, in some ways, because of the way that they've framed it about how you take a Mac or an iPad app and make it a Mac app, I feel like in some ways I'm less enthusiastic about the idea of a touchscreen on the Mac ever because they really want these apps to be, you know, Mac apps, which is great. But that also gives them less incentive to introduce touch on the Mac, which I feel like they, I would really like them to do at some point. I actually think as well, like some of the stuff that they added to iPadOS makes me feel like I need a laptop form factor less, especially with something like the bridge keyboard.

I feel like I basically have what I want. I mean, we said that before anyway. And now being able to use a mouse and trackpad and where that might go in the future, I feel like I will be able to build what I want without Apple needing to do it so much. So I'm kind of happy with where we are. But I agree with you that it does feel more likely than ever

that Apple will make some kind of touchscreen product but it will most likely be running mac os and i still think that they should do that stefan asks do you think that the second gen 12.9 inch ipad pro is worth getting if it's a second-hand product or refurbished product i've outgrown my 10.5 but can't quite justify the cost of a new 12.9 you know the the second gen products are good they're not as there was a big performance leap with the third generation um 12.9 uh but you know if the new 12.9 is too i mean i'd look at the refurbished price of a new 12.9 and see if that is closer to what you want um but i don't know and you've outgrown the 10.5. Have you looked at the 11,

which is, again, going to be more expensive, but it is a little bit bigger than the 10.5. I feel like you could get a pretty good deal and you'd be happy with a second gen 12.9 inch iPad Pro. But I will say, I feel like there is a line at those third generation models, the current iPad Pro models, and that it's nothing right now, it's invisible right now. But I have this, I don't know, sense in looking at the specs, that there will come a day when those models forward will be capable of doing things and those previous models won't be. And that's what gives me pause about giving a recommendation for that second gen iPad Pro. I think it'll be good for a while,

but I worry that there will come a time when they will not be, it'll be like, nope, those aren't covered in whatever thing that Apple introduces next. Yeah, it might get outdated quite quickly. But that could be the problem with getting that one right now. Hole asks, is there an easy or quick way to switch my AirPods

between an iPhone and a MacBook? I feel like I'm forever in Bluetooth settings. So I have never used my AirPods with a Mac. It's just not something that I have done. But I do know of an application that exists by a friend of the show, Guilherme Rambo. It's called AirBuddy as a little utility that can help you switch it quicker.

And I've heard good things about it. I don't know if you've ever used this or if you ever use AirPods of your Mac, Jason, but I know that this thing exists. So you can check it out if it's something that you would want. This might be able to give you what you're looking for. So go check that out.

No, I haven't used it. David in the chat room says that that app may not be available. So if people want to try a different alternative there's also an app called tooth fairy that seems to do about the same thing we'll put that link in the show notes too and finally today todd asks did does ipad or did ipad os enable all of the audio features that jason and mike and every podcaster have been asking for jason did it happen? So I wrote a piece last week on Six Colors that I encourage people to read about the iPadOS wishlist meeting reality. And one of the sections in there is about this. The short version is no, there are no really visible audio changes that seem like they will solve my issue,

which is I'd like to run an app that records my microphone while I'm running another app that's doing voice over IP. And ideally, I'd like that app to be able to record the system audio or the app audio as well as my audio, you know, audio hijack, basically, doesn't seem to be possible. Apple is making changes, there are some changes, they deprecated some old, older audio stuff in our app communication, which is like audio bus seems to be going away. And there's this new audio units thing that they want people to use. It gives me a little bit of hope that maybe what's happening is Apple is sort of on the march to doing a more advanced audio system in iOS because iOS's audio system in many ways is still super rudimentary. The fact that you, you know, you can't do these things that the Mac can do and that, that you probably should,

and they can do it in a secure way. I want them to do it the right way, but I want them to do it. In the meantime, what really enabled is that file access means we can use an external audio recorder and then just pop the card in and read the files off. And so that will save me a lot of time. And I will not have to carry around a separate box to do the file transfer. But the actual on-device audio recording is not there, as far as I can tell, in iOS 13. Yeah, but there's some change, though, as you said. Some change to the way the audio is working is a positive sign because it's been so long

and they haven't really done anything. So some change is happening to some of the way that the APIs work there. Could be a good sign for something coming in the future. We'll see about that. Yep. All right. So that wraps up episode 250 of Upgrade and the introduction to the 2019 Summer of Fun. If you would like to send a question for a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and it may be included on a future episode.

Thank you so much to everybody that does that every single week. I have a lovely backlog of great questions, which I'm still pulling from, so thank you so much for doing that. If you want to find Jason online, he is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L, on social media. You can find his work at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com, and Jason hosts many shows here at RelayFM. You can go to relay.fm slash shows to find those. I do too. So relay.fm slash shows. You can find a lot of the stuff that I do. And I'm at imike, I-M-I-K-E,

on the social media channels too as well. Thanks so much to Astropad Studio, KiwiCo, and Holo for their support of this show. And thank you for listening as we celebrate a quarter of the way to 1,000 episodes. I'm sure we'll get, I was thinking about this, I'm sure we'll way to 1,000 episodes. Sure. I'm sure we'll get, I was thinking about this, I'm sure we'll get to 1,000 episodes.

Yeah. It's only like another 12 years or something. Yeah, sure. It's no problem. I'm sure Jason will be fine with that. I'm going to sign him right up because I love doing Upgrade. I really do. Yep.

It is an absolute highlight of my week every week, and I'm so thankful that I get to do this show with you, and we get to put it out there for all the upgradians who really you know people seem to really love this show and we love making it so thank you so much for tuning in absolutely and we'll be back next time until then say goodbye jason snell thanks to everybody out there and thanks to you mike we'll see you next week goodbye everybody