Upgrade - 301: Show Me You’re Serious

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

With WWDC two weeks away, Myke and Jason share their wishes for iPadOS updates. They also analyze why they love certain kinds of games but are repelled by others and discuss Apple's inevitable move into streaming live sports.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 301 today's show is brought to you by pingdom bombas and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley i'm present i'm here. I'm ready. This episode it is the calm before the storm right? We've got a lot of stuff going on over the next few weeks. This is the last episode before things start to change again I guess with WWDC related

stuff. We'll talk about that a little later on in the episode today but of course I have a hashtag Snell talk question from Nathan and Nathan asks Jason on macOS what is the alert sound you use do you use ping pop or purr you know i those are all sounds that you're allowed i don't use any of them i don't use a default sound i use a custom sound we'll put a link in the show notes to my uh article on Colors that I wrote about this.

Because you can make custom audio files and save them and then use them as your own beep. You don't need to use the system beeps if you don't want to. And the backstory here is, when I was in, and we're going a long way back here, when I was in college, there was an app for the classic Mac OS called Sound Master, which allowed you to put – it was really kind of evil. This is by a guy named Bruce Tomlin. It allowed you to attach a sound effect to many different aspects of Mac OS. like it would play a sound when you started up it would play us down when you chose restart it would play a sound when you chose shut down it would play a sound if you put a disc in it would play a sound if you ejected the disc

it would play a sound on your beep it would play a sound when you clicked a key it would play a sound if you you could you could have it be like you hit the delete key it would play a sound when you clicked a key it would play a sound if you you could you could have it be like you hit the delete key it would play a sound this is the kind of stuff that people did on their computers before they had the internet oh yeah right oh man you had this computer and the computer could do things but it was only things that you could do so you just had to find stuff to do yeah so i had um like a college girlfriend had uh hal 9000 say my mind is going every time she shut her computer down that's which is pretty funny that's good i had um uh this is going to say a lot about who i am um when i ejected a disc for a period of time you would hear william shatner from his album the transformed man from the song lucy in the sky with diamonds shouting and she's gone as the disc

ejected because i thought that was hilarious that's pretty funny one time yeah yeah although you know if you don't eject discs that often then you're like oh yeah right that was william shatner right yeah um but if you're doing it all the time it will make you want to murder so um the answer though is one of the sounds that came with sound master that you could use because it came with some sound files because it was at that point non-trivial to make your own sound files i eventually bought this thing called the mac recorder and that's how i got the william shatner thing in there and all of that but it came with a bunch of sounds and one of the sounds that came with sound master is a person's voice saying in kind of a monotone beep beep just saying the word beep beep and i thought that was hilarious and And I made it my beep sound. And when I left Sound Master

behind, I got that sound, I extracted that sound. And that extraction from my Mac in the 90s has been converted various times when we went to OS 10. And you had to have it in a different format, I converted it to a different format. And that has been my beep sound since I was in college. And it still is my beep sound is a is a voice saying beep that's it that's my answer thank you to nathan for that great question which went into places no one was expecting if you would like to uh submit a question to help us open an episode of upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag snail talk and it will be potentially included in a future episode.

Thank you to everybody that does that. So I wanted to follow up a little bit on how we opened our show last week talking about Black Lives Matter and a lot of the issues that are occurring in the US and elsewhere, including the protests and stuff like that. And one of the reasons I want to bring it up again this week is that Tim Cook posted an open letter on Apple.com talking about his feelings in regards to the current situation regarding systemic racism. It was on the front page, right?

So like all really kind of good Apple open letters, right? When they want you to see them, they put them on Apple.com. Tim doesn't do this as much as Steve used to. I think well as well. Tim does them for like things that are important to the world. Tim doesn't do this as much as Steve used to. I think well as well. Tim does them for like things that are important to the world. Tim does. Steve used to do them for kind of like spite, right?

Yeah. Like the flashback and stuff. So there's a good difference between the two of them. It's very well written. But there was one part in it that I wanted to highlight specifically because I thought that it was really important and it put into words something that I think is useful to hear. So I'll read the quote, which is, This is a moment when many people may want nothing more than a return to normalcy or to a status quo that is only comfortable if we avert our gaze from injustice. As difficult as it may be to admit, that desire is itself a sign of privilege.

As difficult as it may be to admit, that desire is itself a sign of privilege. George Floyd's death is shocking and tragic proof that we must aim higher than a normal future and build one that lives up to the highest ideals of equality and justice. And I think this part is really key because it says something that is useful to bear in mind, which is that things are starting to happen, right? And there are some wrongs starting to be righted and changes occurring. But it's important to remember that we don't just accept those

and think it's all good, right? Oh, great. These police officers were put in prison. These rules were changed. We're all good now. Problem solved. Exactly. Because that's not even the fix. It's not what the problem is. They're like a level above, right?

So we need to all pay attention to and remember how we're feeling now and find ways to continue paying attention and making change going forward. And I'm doing that. I know we're all doing that. And I encourage other people to think of it too. If there are a bunch of things that change stuff,

that's great, but that doesn't mean the problem is solved. And I really liked the way that Tim put that in his letter. So I wanted to just share my thoughts on that. Thank you. I wanted to mention something related to this, which is HBO had a show that just, that was canceled after a couple of seasons.

It was Wyatt Cenac, who is a correspondent and writer at The Daily Show. He was actually on an episode of The Flophouse at one point. I remember that very clearly. He did a show called Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, two seasons. Fans of The Flophouse, Hallie Haglund

was the head writer for that show, who was a regular on The Flophouse, regular guest. She's one of the greatest voices in podcasting oh i love hallie so much so um season so season one of wyatt's next problem areas it was a you know half hour uh news slash comedy show in the vein of john oliver show and the and the daily show and things like that um and it was on hbo and um it's actually a really nice show it's it's funny why it's an x very funny the set design is awesome the the graphics are great um but the in season one their big takeout piece if you think about like john oliver's show they would

sort of do an intro piece and a little interstitial and then they would do a long piece at the end of the show and season one is all about the police and police uh reform and police brutality and all sorts of things that are the issues that we're all grappling with now and he tweeted last week and said um hey hbo wouldn't it be great if since we covered this entire issue in season one of Problem Areas, you could make those available for everybody to see? And he just sort of did it idly. And HBO said, yes, you're right. And his whole show is on HBO. At least, I don't know if it's worldwide or if it's just in the US, but there's a playlist. We'll put a link in the show notes. It's on YouTube, right?

Yeah, it's on YouTube. So you can watch it for free on YouTube. And it's a funny show, but it's also a really good dive into that topic. And because they spent all season talking about it, they get the opportunity to spend time on all sorts of different angles of it, you know from bias to uh to can you reform a police department um you know like lots of different angles that i thought were uh were really good so it's a good show i recommend it and you can watch it for free great so we're going to keep talking about this right i think everyone should and it's important to keep paying attention

um and we got great feedback from some listeners, and I thought it was really nice. We can try and all come together on this. It's super important. Next week, it's draft time. The WWDC 2020 draft will begin on next week's episode. So both me and Jason will be working hard over the next week, coming up with our picks. It's kind of like sharpening our brain swords or something i don't know to do battle i'm really excited uh the draft is i think honestly at this point i think i look

forward to the drafts more than the keynotes oh interesting which that isn't a surprise to me though right like like for me i i i love all the weird stuff that we do on the show and the draft is one of my favorite things so it's true. And the WWDC draft is the big one. It's the biggest draft of the year. I love that it's a little injection of normalcy into our weird world that we live in right now that it's like, oh, yeah, right. Remember drafts and Apple events?

So I guess I got to start planning my plan of attack. It's the big one. I'm very excited. So that's going to be next week's show. And the week after will be our post-keynote show. So it's all happening. Yeah, what's that going to be like? I have a couple of coronavirus-related topics

I want to just bring up really quick about the way Apple is continuing to respond to COVID-19. Don't forget that's still out there. Hasn't been in front of my mind for the last week or so, but it's still happening. Italy and Latvia have both launched apps that take advantage

of the exposure notification API. So these are now running, right? Like they're available. I was actually talking to Federico earlier. He's downloaded it and is using the one in Italy. It's the first person I know personally that is using an app with the exposure notification

API. Yeah, I was impressed in there with their localization that Federico's phone is set to English and the Italian notification app had detailed instructions about how to use it in English. I thought that was very impressive. Oh, that's really nice. I didn't think of that, but that's a really good point. So still hoping that more people are going to take a part to this. I've been seeing some people talking over the last few days. It's a very good point so still hoping that more people are going to take a part into this i've been seeing some people talking over the last few days it's a very good point like with everything that's going on right now in the world on top of the coronavirus stuff like it's i think only i think for for certain people people like me only highlighting more why you wouldn't want a like decentralized government-based approach like having someone in the middle might be good uh

so yeah but it's interesting to see that there are companies that are out countries that are out there that have got these apps up and running and then i also saw a report from mark german at bloomberg on how apple is is planning and already starting to have employees return to its offices so there's a couple of things that I'll just highlight. So they're doing, some people started to return in May. Apple was offering optional COVID-19 tests for those employees. They are requiring temperature checks that people only work a few days a week in the office.

They're enforcing social distancing. One detail on this, which is interesting, I hadn't considered before, only two people in an elevator at a time. Elevators are like, oh, yeah, you're super close to people, right? So elevators are going to be a weird one for a while. And Apple is also requesting their employees to wear masks in the office, too. So that's kind of what they're doing. There's nothing groundbreaking here.

All sorts of companies are struggling with this. I mean, my wife's place of business, she's a librarian. They returned to their workplace last week. And it was, you know, half the staff at a time alternating, half at home, half in the library, socially distanced, wearing masks. Like it was a, you know, it's not back to normal. It's back to a seriously modified kind of thing and trying to figure out the best way to get some people back into the office without, you know, putting them at risk.

So everybody's trying different stuff and we'll see how it goes. A lot of this reopening is going to lead to increases in incidence of the virus. So we'll just, everybody's just going to watch and hopefully do the right things to not spread it around. There has to be some kind of level,

right? That's in between where we were before and where we've been for the last few months. Yeah. Ideally you want, you want to go from complete shutdown to something that's safe, but a little bit more open in order to kind of ride it out. I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And we've got to work. everyone's got to work together on it this is something that we're only going to get through if we pull together so there's a lot of it going around right now uh upstream let's do some uh headlines in streaming media apple have hired jim di lorenzo away from amazon no way jim diLorenzo? Everyone's favorite. The interesting part here is that DiLorenzo is a sports person and they will be heading up sports for Apple TV Plus,

according to Peter Kafka. Yeah, so he was involved in a lot of Amazon's kind of, they've done some experimentation with sports and with live sports and deals with sport. They did some, they've got

some premier league deals in the uk they've done some nfl deals in the u.s and for this guy to go to apple we now i want to just not to pat ourselves on the back too much but we had a conversation a few weeks ago on upstream about live sports as a potential target based on a different report for apple and the idea that there are lots of sports rights that are coming up and there are a lot of sports entities that are really excited about the idea that different streaming services

are going to lead to an even bigger kind of feeding frenzy where they're going to make even more money because the streamers are going to want to get people to basically force them to subscribe to their stream to get their live sports that they want. And that is potentially a big trend. This is also why all the cable companies, the earlier part of the last decade, spent huge amounts of money for long-term deals with a lot of sports properties,

because they were afraid that there would be cord cutting and that their hedge against it was live sports. So live sports is one of those things that if you don't care about sports, you know, you don't care about it. But for a large number of people, live sports is one of the few levers that you can use to force people into a particular provider because they have a favorite team or a favorite sport. And they, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, well, there's this TV show I heard was good, but I'm not going to watch it.

But if it's like, it's your favorite team, and now they're only over here, the power is enormous. And then also keep in mind that it's also like live TV versus on demand. And that's a different profile because you want to watch that live. So this is going to be, if the rush to create streaming services was the story of the last few years, and now we're kind of in that era where everybody's kind of got that and they're all going to be battling, I feel like the story of the next five years, at least in part, is going to be over exclusive stuff like sports deals, because that's one way that you get people to sign up for Apple TV Plus is to say, if you want to watch whatever it is, you have to sign up for apple tv plus is to say if you want to watch whatever it is you have to sign

up for apple tv plus i will also say there is a positive here for consumers which is some sports stuff isn't accessible like uh famously and they just changed this but in la for the last few years most people in la couldn't watch the dodgers on tv because the dodgers the baseball team in la by the way um they they signed an exclusive agreement with one cable company and that cable company um tried to extort a big fee out of the other cable companies in la and they they had a dispute and like many many many people in la just couldn't get their local team. Or the NFL package that lets you see any NFL game live, not just the one that's being shown in your local market, was sold to DirecTV, which is a satellite provider. So if you had cable, you couldn't see it.

You literally had to put a satellite dish on your roof if you wanted to see it. So we've seen companies use sports as leverage to get people onto their platform before but also a streaming service the barrier is less right you don't have to install hardware it doesn't matter like where you live you can sign up for the streaming service so on on that level it's not great because it's like i don't want to sign up for the streaming service that i don't actually want but my favorite team is on it i get that i do prefer though the idea that i want to sign up for the streaming service that I don't actually want, but my favorite team is on it. I get that. I do prefer though, the idea that I can just sign up for a streaming service for the season and then cancel it. Then I need to install something on my roof or move to a place where the cable company shows my team because those are not, those are not great. So we got

to keep an eye on this because I think it's very clear now that Apple is going to make a play for live sports. We talked about them buying a catalog and and old stuff and maybe that maybe you know that's not their strategy but their strategy is original programming and that includes live sports programming frankly if you hire somebody to head up a sports division you at least have some plans to do something related to sports which sure seems like it doesn't more than what they've done sports related content before which is ultimately like documentary type focus stuff is what they're looking to do and you probably don't need a sports person for that part of the division right like it's it's a different idea yeah and there's lots of different sports out there i mean there's the major sports

in america but like they're also the off kind of off-brand sports so that's do they sign a deal to do the nfl in europe do they sign a deal to do the you know bundesliga in america right like they there there's a lot of different um angles to take here but as when they when they hired those two guys from sony to do original programming we knew they were going to do original programming and this looks very much like apple is absolutely going to do sports it's just a matter of what and when and if they're able to even get the deals that they want right like they can have all the the the intention that they like but maybe nobody wants to sell them the rights or they just won't pay enough we'll see as the discord just pointed out uh they missed their chance on uh the marvel races because john oliver got that so they're gonna have to wait for the next cycle of sponsorship for marvel races there's a new apple tv plus show called dear dot dot dot uh it's been released i

hadn't heard about this i don't know if apple had announced this one before now um it seems like it is a probably a relatively small production. It was influenced by their Apple Watch marketing campaign. Do you remember the ads they did where they featured letters written by customers talking about how the watch changed their lives? This is particularly notable because two upgrade listeners

have been featured in those ads, which is a funny thing. This series features stars like Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and it features letters from fans whose lives have been impacted by these individuals. So I guess I haven't seen the show yet, but I can imagine what it is.

They read a letter and talk about it. This feels, from a conceptual standpoint, a lot more akin to the stuff that Apple did before TV+. Like, not very... Little Planet planet of the apps little carpool karaoke like we had that campaign so let's make a show out of it yeah just like from where the idea came from it's not like the hbo level of i mean like the show i bet is is is really heartwarming and like can be good. But I just mean from where the idea comes from,

it doesn't really feel the same as for all mankind. It's a different level of TV. This is less prestige TV, which is what they've been trying to do, it seems, with their other stuff. I just found that interesting. I guess they just figured, oh, we have these creators that we have these relationships with we had this great idea why don't we just put these two things together um it was just intriguing to me that one it came out seemingly came out of nowhere uh and two it features a kind of production style that seems to be stuff that apple would moved away from already

yeah i agree it's a that's a weird one but hey you know you need to you're programming a spread of stuff right to appeal to different audiences and all of that like i get it i i get it it's not my cup of tea and netflix has purchased the egyptian theater in hollywood boom there's a bunch of details in this, but I guess the point is they can now show their movies in a theater. They can now get into the Oscars. Yeah, so this is a beautifully restored historic theater.

It was built in the 20s, I want to say. And about 10 years ago, an organization bought it to rehab it because it's a historic landmark. And now they've sold it for an undiscl's a historic landmark. And now they've sold it for an undisclosed sum to Netflix. I hope they made some money on this. I think that that would be great. And it's a great thing for Netflix to become the steward of this. The goal here, so it seems like, I mean, how often, Netflix does have movies a lot though, right? Like

this could literally be the Netflix movie theater, where if you want to see a Netflix movie, you can go to the Netflix movie theater, which is the Egyptian. And it also means that every single movie that they show there will have a qualifying run for the Academy Awards, which is sort of the point. Although I think it's a fun idea. Wouldn't it be cool if you could see movies for free if you were a Netflix subscriber? That would be fun. That would be cool, like sign up and get a ticket and all of that. But I like the idea that, and you know know you got to pay for popcorn or something but i also like the idea of going to

filmmakers about netflix and saying um yes this work netflix is buying this and this is going to be a netflix original but um we will we will have at least our one theater like we'll have a theatrical run if you want to do an opening night and come and do that they could do premieres now exactly right like do do that and then they then it appears on netflix too but we also did that it's interesting i wonder if they're going to do any um because it was it was retrofit to do like revivals and old prints and stuff like that if their plan is to sort of like program the theater but also have it in their back pocket to screen movies or if it's literally going to become Netflix's Egyptian theater and it's just, you know, it's the lovebirds this week. So it's actually a bit of both. So the company, American Cinematheque, the organization that

bought the theater to restore it, they are going to continue to program the theater and will run their own content. And then Netflix will also be putting stuff into it. Yeah, because they can play nitrate film and stuff there, which is super rare and old and flammable. So that's great. So basically Netflix has a venue that they can use when they want to put something in for award competition. thing in for award competition but otherwise it's also still going to be a uh a venue it's a because it's a huge classic movie house uh for for classic uh movies that's awesome but yes netflix is uh everybody soon every streaming service will own a fancy theater in hollywood that's i think uh where this world is going yeah yeah because they might all be up for sale soon, unfortunately.

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and I believe deserves the most love this year, which is iPadOS, because it's the newest platform, if you're going to consider it that, right? Like it's a brand new platform. And the iPad has a lot of places that it can gain to give it, to really make it what it should be and what people want it to be. Yeah, I think the truth is that the iPad has this really interesting combination of being a fairly young platform

and also have a very ambitious platform. And so even though Apple Watch is a younger platform and iPhone is not that much older, like first off, the iPhone took the brunt of the focus of iOSos development for a long time and the watch is not quite as ambitious in a lot of ways there's not to say that there aren't things that could be improved about the watch because it absolutely could be but i look at the ipad specifically and i think it's this combination where apple is really trying to make it a more professional platform on the ipad pro

end and um it just seems like there's the most space for them they're the of all of apple's platforms it's the one that i look at and say i could write a list a mile long of things that you should do on this platform and they can't do them all but like it's the easiest one when you're looking at a wish list um easiest one to fill out so i put a link in the show notes to an actual wish list that you uh spoke about macworld and also there's an episode of app stories that i enjoyed recently where federico and joan went through theirs and i'm kind of putting a lot of that stuff some of my own thoughts together and we'll just talk about a few key areas that could see some love and we would love to see um and who knows if any of these will end up making their way into draft picks next week not impossible one of them is keyboard improvements you know we

i feel like everyone can agree that like we have really great customer support on ipad os now like it's rock solid super thought well from the ground up it's got basically all the features that you would want i'm super happy with it i don't have any real improvements that i would want from the cursor but the keyboard is an area that could see some additional love and care like the cursor got right like we have great keyboard options the hardware keyboards are great the fact that we can connect usb keyboards bluetooth keyboards, you know, you can go wild with it. I think it would be great to see the keyboard more embraced across the entire system, right?

So allowing us to have keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that, but more than the shortcuts that we have inside of applications, right? Yeah, I want user assignable keyboard shortcuts. And right now you can do that, but only with the modifier keys. And there's a very small number of things that you can choose. So like you can remodify the globe to be the escape key or something like that. It's a nice start. But given that Apple's two iPad keyboards don't have a function row. I really want, at the very least, like minimum, Apple needs to let me assign keyboard shortcuts for media control and screen brightness

and on the Magic Keyboard backlight brightness. Like there need to be keyboard shortcuts. If they're not the function keys, which they're not because they don't exist, they need to go somewhere. And I'd actually like it to be more than that. I'd actually like Apple to allow you to assign all sorts of other functions to system-wide keyboard shortcuts. And I know that that's complicated, but this is a major iPadOS update. So now's the time to do it and put down the rules

of what happens if an app wants to have a particular shortcut, but it's been assigned to they do they mark off a certain set of keys and say don't use these in your apps or something like that. Or, you know, there's not not like there isn't complexity here, but the Mac handles it. And I use those assignments on the Mac all the time. I don't actually adjust my media controls with function keys. I use different keyboard shortcuts that I've been using for a long time. So I would really like it if Apple would in some way, expand to have system-wide keyboard shortcuts that are user assignable. And then on top of that, yes, I would also like to be able to assign those to shortcuts, right? So that I could also

have some sort of automation that I can just fire off with a keyboard shortcut but even if it was the minimum of like you press the globe key uh you can set it so the globe key is a function key and then the numbers become function keys so i could do you know globe six adjust the volume or whatever they are right so i feel like that's the the uh it's great that they brought the cursor support essentially forward from ios 14 in order to get it out the door for this new product. But like the keyboard still aren't, you know, there's been no movement there. So that's like the easiest thing, not necessarily to implement, but the easiest thing to look at and say what's lacking, especially when you've got a brand new keyboard and trackpad product like they do is the keyboard's not as functional as it should be yeah and there are so many areas you could go with it and it can be purely hidden to most users right like this could just be a very much pro user thing and that's great by default yep give us some of those right like this Like this is something that Craig Federico,

I think he spoke about with Federico on their interview last year at WWDC on App Stories, where I think he was talking a little bit about, and I think maybe he spoke about this too on the talk show, just about the idea that some things can be discoverable easily by the user and some things aren't, and it's fine to have both although i would argue that holding down the globe key and then pressing numbers is even sort of discoverable or at least easily teachable i don't know why that's not a default for the smart keyboard and the magic keyboard that if you tap and hold you hold down that globe key and then you can quickly

adjust volume and stuff like that i don't know why they didn't do that, but here we go. Friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, did a whole Twitter thread that was great where he basically mocked up an interactive emoji picker for iPadOS because one of my frustrations with emoji input, especially if you're using a keyboard, but in general, it's not a very good emoji picker. There are lots of emoji now and it's hard to find the one that you want. And he did a beautiful example of using the, essentially the emoji keyboard shortcut from Mac OS to bring up a picker where you can then type in the name of the emoji and select it and have it automatically insert where you're typing.

And they, that's absolutely how it should work, especially with a keyboard on iPadOS. So we'll throw that in there too as a keyboard improvement. Emoji input ought to be way easier than it is now. So talking about keyboard shortcuts, let's talk about actual shortcuts, the application itself. It's almost a meme at this point, but folders and organization in shortcuts would just be a wonderful thing at this point.

an organization in shortcuts would be a wonderful thing at this point. I would take filters on color or tags or whatever. Like if they're like, no, no, no, folders are old, man. Now every shortcut can have a color and it already does and a tag

and then you could filter on those. Like, that's fine. Just give me an organizational principle of some sort so I don't have this giant list of shortcuts that's just kind of like in a big bin which is what it is now and i don't even have that many compared to people like federico but like yes and larger than that like beyond folders it's things like if you make shortcuts like if you if

you come up with a really clever chain of like 10 items that does a thing and you're like wow i could use this in a different shortcut you can can't take it to a different shortcut. You can't, or yes, or later in the same shortcut, you literally can't like select all those items and duplicate them. You can't like select them all and then option drag or whatever or copy them and then paste them. It can't be done. The only way you can really do it is if you're making a new shortcut,

you can duplicate the old shortcut in order to get all of those things and then build your new shortcut around it. It's ridiculous. So, you know, that's the kind of thing. Also, sharing should be easier. I'm glad they have sharing because for a while, I think in betas, it was gone. But you have to, like, go into the settings and then flip this super scary sounding switch. And it's like, danger.

People can run things on your iPad. It's scary. And it's like, I wish that that was a friendlier kind of thing. And also the one that kills me and has killed me since the beginning, since it was an app called Workflow, which is, you know, I appreciate the transparency of when you tap on a shortcut. It opens the shortcuts app and shows you every single step scrolling by really fast as it runs the shortcut that's great um i want a little switch that says i don't need to see this just run it i don't need to see the source code of my apps as i use them scrolling past right like i i don't need that so having the ability to as a user option uh not show all the details of the shortcut as i'm running it but just do the thing

that i want to do yeah that's why i really love the widget because if you can activate something from the widget there's just a little progress bar that fills up and it just does the thing uh i i agree it's the fastest way to run a shortcut honestly yes oh oh trust me i have built shortcuts that are meant to be run from a widget and when when you run them by pressing play, even if you run them tapping on them in shortcuts versus pressing play while you're in the list, like the scrolling by thing, it's way slower, right? Because it's going to have to display all the code as you're going. It's like, I don't need to see that. I just don't. So I hope that we've, in the life cycle of shortcuts, there was like the, hey, we're now part of Apple. Let's do the basic things to run and ship with the system.

And then the next step was we're going to make the kind of the language of shortcuts simpler by having kind of nouns and verbs. Great. That was last year. This year, I'm hoping that it's the, it's the kind of user interface consolidation step that happens,

where they get, in addition to hopefully keyboard shortcut activation, the ability to just make it easier to make and organize these things. Yeah, I would like automation to be pushed a little bit further, for my phone, for my iPad to be looking for triggers and operating on them itself. That's a great one. For example, if I see shortcuts, if I say to shortcuts, for my iPad to be looking for triggers and operating on them itself. That's a great one. For example, if I see, you know, if shortcuts, if I say to shortcuts,

oh, hey, every time you see an item on this calendar, run this shortcut, you know? So then every time I sit down to record a podcast, I've already got everything set. Like it's already running on my time as my phone's already on, do not disturb because it's looking at the calendar for as my phone's already on do not disturb because it's looking at the calendar for me and doing those things you know you can have it be really slow

to start stuff like calendar events email like things that apple can control to a degree if you want to like take baby steps into this but allowing shortcuts to really operate and work on its own whilst also not telling me you know like don't give me a notification that i have to tap or whatever to make it work just exactly take that next step and go a bit further i mean and while we're also talking about shortcuts before i forget give me shortcuts on the mac too please i would like that yeah sure um i will also say um recurring events is a thing that shortcuts really lacks right now the idea because and i see that people ask like can i do this thing where a shortcut waits for this thing to happen and then acts and is a thing that shortcuts really lacks right now. The idea, and I see that people ask,

can I do this thing where a shortcut waits for this thing to happen and then acts? And the answer is no, you can't. You can't with a very limited set of things. You can't say, I have a shortcut that checks for a status of something. And if the status is true, it does something. And I want that to fire off. It's what on a computer we would call like a cron job or

something. I want to fire it off every half hour, or I want to fire it off every 15 minutes between the hours of this, or I want it to fire off every four hours, or I want to fire it off at two and four and 6pm. Like, it can't I have these home automations that are incredibly detailed and um you know i can only run them one time a day i can say like at 3 p.m do this and that's really bad because you can't even duplicate home automations so i can't duplicate it and make another one at 2 p.m and another one at 1 p.m but but it's just uh so stuff like that that makes really for automations to work sometimes you do need automations that can can repeat and check for a status of something or even better yet you know be fired off as you say fired off when something happens which would be great so yes all of that on the list more shortcuts

please now had you thought much about multitasking changes at all for iPad? I am not as angry about multitasking interface than as other people are. Like my big one is the clarity over keyboard focus and having better keyboard, to go back to keyboards for a bit, better keyboard multitasking. So the idea that I could not only see which app, if I'm in split view is active and that my keyboard, uh, my key commands are going to go to, but also to be able to toggle between them.

So it's like, Oh, I'm over in Safari right now. I want to be in notes, you know, and do something to get over there. And you can't really do that either. So I don't necessarily want to see a complete rethink of all multitasking. I don't like the multi window thing that that is built. And if they want to do a rethink of multitasking, I'll welcome it. Like I would love to see it. I don't think multitasking is great right now. But I'm, you know, maybe I'm just trying to compromise and be realistic about it and say i really want them to fix some of the very annoying things about it um but if they've got a new concept for it i'm i'm all ears i'm ready to hear it yeah i mean i don't think it's ios 14 i would expect some refinements in ios 14 but if apple truly are working on an overhaul of the system,

I think that that is further down the line. I do genuinely expect there to be some things that are tidied up or highlighted in different ways, but I don't expect there to be a big sweeping change. It just seems like it's not now, honestly, and that would be such a large thing

that I could even imagine them kind of like what happened with a bunch of things that we got in the first iPadOS and the cursor support. This was supposed to be in 14, but they've ended up pushing it because it's too large.

And the rumors, the thing we're going to talk about next, which is changes to the home screen, was apparently going to be be in 13 but they pushed it because it's so large i would be really surprised to see apple make significant changes to the home screen and multitasking in the same release i think they would pick one and do that uh it would surprise me to see all of that change in one because that's at that point you basically feel like you're using a completely different operating system to the one that you had before might be a bit too much one of the things that you can sometimes see with apple is that they

will bring a suite of features in because they're all kind of like connected so you'll be like well why did they add this oh it's because they also added this. And there's an item that's later on our list, which is about the famous sort of what if they support an external display? So you can put a big screen attached to an iPad. And now that you've got keyboard and mouse support, you don't have to just mirror it. You can just run your app on that. And I actually run into this sometimes when I'm using my 12.9-inch iPad Pro in vertical orientation, which is I sometimes think, why can't I just run apps at top and bottom instead of side to side? Why can't I do that? Oh, that's a very good point. Right?

So that, well, and this is the thing is then I look at my giant, you know, iMac screen here, and I think about a big screen, maybe not this big for an iPad as an external display. And I think, well, if you're going to do external display support, are you going to force people to only run one or two apps side by side, left and right? Or would you maybe let people cut up the screen a little bit differently? And I could probably make a case that that would be, you know, if you're going to do external display support, maybe you add the ability to have some more, some sort of different ways to organize your multitasking, but not, not necessarily a total multitasking overhaul as much as a, you know, we're going to let you subdivide the iPad screen top and bottom.

And on external displays, you're going to be able to subdivide it a couple of different ways. So you could run four things at once or two things at once or whatever it is. I could maybe see that. But I agree with you that it seems that would be a lot in a period where I think they're going to want to not bite off more than they can chew right now. To redesign the home screen and multitasking does seem like a lot. I will touch on the external display support thing. I would really like that personally, like to be much more than it is now, whether it's like a second screen, they got all the pieces. Now you can literally dock your iPad to a docking station with a keyboard and a mouse and run the apps and have it all work and make sense. So I would be, honestly, I would be shocked

if this isn't in there because everything they did in the last cycle enabled this. So why not do it? Unless they feel like there are some serious multitasking issues and they don't want to deal with those right now. Because I guess I would get that. But yeah, it's time. Not everybody's going to want to do that. Again now because i i guess i would get that but um but yeah it's it's time not everybody's going to want to do that again the whole story of the ipad is uh about it

being a flexible computing device and you know federico uses it in a bunch of different ways and i use it in some different ways and one of the ways that he uses it that i don't is docked but right now the docking experience at a desk is not great to an external monitor. And they could fix that pretty. And then that just expands the number of use cases for the iPad. If you do that, you can now, you know, you've got your keyboard and trackpad. You've got it as a touch tablet. You've got it with the Apple Pencil.

And now you've got it at a desk with a big monitor. That's great. Fantastic. And so then the home screen changes. Stuff like widgets, documents. the home screen changes um stuff like widgets documents i i would really love to see the ipad os home screen become a mix between the best of ios and the best of mac os like the ability to have app icons but then also folders from files just on the desktop and then some interactive really usable widgets that i can use basically elements of applications

without opening the application. Like I would love a text entry box for my to-do manager and my calendar just on the home screen, right? So I can just enter those in and really make the iPadOS home screen much more of a destination to do things than just a place to open applications. That's what I would like to see.

That's great. And you could see how they might do that by sort of expanding what a widget is capable of so that it's just, it's more, you can do more with widgets than, you know, now that, especially now that you can put widgets, it's only last year that you could put widgets on the home screen.

Yes. So that was a start. Yeah, it was definitely a start,, it's only last year that you could put widgets on the home screen. Yes. So that was a start. Yeah, it was definitely a start, but it's not enough, right? Like this should take some serious rethinking and some of it should find its way to the iPhone too. You know, this model of these grids of applications that are forced to fit in a certain way

and they can't be adapted. Like that model, I think, is time for a change. It's been long enough that we've had that. And there are real useful things you could do. It's not just change for the sake of change, but there could be significant improvements that could be made to the springboard experience with a change in iOS.

I mentioned the files, kind of like adding maybe files or documents to the home screen. The Files app should always be improved. It still feels like it needs a lot. I was just going to say that the Files app, like I don't even think I have a list this year of new features for the files app i feel like they added a lot of new features my request for the files app is it needs to work it like it needs to work better it's it's unreliable it's messy it just needs love it needs

to be better it feels slow and and you know when you useinder, you just feel like you're in control of the file system. When I use files, I feel like I am using the file system, but dragging it through molasses. Like everything is more slow. Everything needs more taps. You know, you end up with these weird windows that pop up. And stuff stops working.

Yeah, things just are completely unreliable. And then you don't know how to get there and you have to remove like a server and add it back in and you drag things from one place to another hoping they'll copy but there is often no feedback about whether the file exists or has been moved or anything um it's better with certain um instances than others like if you're just just on your iPad dragging to different folders, it's pretty straightforward. But if you're using a network or a cloud or something like that, it's just a mess.

And so I'm glad they added all those features last year. It's great. Thank you. Just make it better. Just make it more reliable. I just want to rely on it and have it work with all of my stuff. And I know where the files are and I know I can add a favorite that is a folder on my server and it stays there and doesn't vanish sometimes and so that I can never

use favorites that's been a case favorites in the files app's been broken for years now so yeah better how about that better just make it better it has gotten consistently better every year right from not having it to having it and then having the improvements. But it started at such a low point. There still is so much more needed for this part of the operating system, which is a very important part of the operating system. I'm happy that it exists,

but I definitely want more from it. What about pro apps? Do you expect that we're going to see any significant Apple-made pro apps do you expect that we're gonna see any significant apple made pro apps well my expectations will be revealed in the draft next week mike but i don't know i you know part part of me wants um a sign like i'm not gonna use xcode or you or alternate name for iPad-based development tool. I'm not going to use it, but I would welcome it. I would welcome it. It doesn't have to be Final Cut. It doesn't have to be Logic. It could be Xcode or Xcode for iPad, which is a subset, yada, yada, yada. I just want

to see Apple make a commitment to pro apps instead of what they currently have, which is GarageBand and iMovie and Swift Playgrounds. If you believe your platform is pro, why are your pro apps not on it? So I hope they will make the commitment to at least one of those. But if I had to put money down, well, we'll week but right now my i just i i it hasn't happened yet so i'm really pessimistic about it but i hope i'm wrong um in my macworld story i mentioned the terminal too which is i know it's wild surprise to me and people are like well you can't do that because of security it's like i don't know i mean there's ish which is, which is a third party, uh,

app that, that basically has emulating a PC and it's got a sandbox and it's got access to the file sandbox. So you can see files on the file system, but, and then you're running, you know, Unix commands inside it.

Like Apple could build a terminal, which would be very helpful for a lot of developers, actually, that was secure inside iPadOS if they wanted to. And it's like, well, why not do that? Like I have so many things that I do on my Mac that are running little shell scripts or little Perl scripts or little, you know, whatever they are. And then little Unix commands. And they're great. And I'd use them in shortcuts on the iPad if I could. But the only way to do that now is to actually go to

a remote server via SSH and do it there and then take the data back, which is not so great. So sure, I just thought I'd pile that on of like, show me you're serious. That's really, I don't even want to request specifics here. I really just want Apple to show us that you're serious. That's really, I don't even want to request specifics here. I really just want Apple to show us that they're serious about the iPad as a professional platform in whatever form they choose, whatever, take your pick, whatever.

Yeah, I don't think, I want these. I don't think we're going to get the one that I want, which is Logic, right? Not yet. But I do feel like it's time to show your hand a little bit with one of them, right?

Which is exactly that. Yeah, exactly. Just show us that you're serious about it. I don't care what the demonstration is. It can be symbolic. It could literally be, we plan to bring uh you know by by the time you developers are in san jose next year for wwdc hey um there'll be an app that you can use to build apps on your ipad yeah right that's all or or we intend to ship on versions

of logic and final cut by the end of the year. Like whatever, whatever the demonstration is, just give us a demonstration that you believe in this platform that you are the steward of. I also want to, my personal, this is not a pro app, but my personal frustration is that the health app isn't on iPad. Like I still don't understand it. Like I use my iPad all the time for stuff and i want to look up health data and i i actually there are a couple devices that i would probably rather attach to my

ipad via bluetooth that are health devices and log the data there rather than use my phone because of just where my ipad is in my house versus where i keep my phone and uh the health app just isn't isn't there i don't understand it i want i, I actually want the Health app on the Mac too. I think that the Health app needs to be on all of Apple's platforms and I'm kind of baffled about why it isn't. So I'll throw it in there too. And look, no iPad wishlist will be complete from the two of us who are asking for better support at the system level for audio

so we can finally record podcasts on iOS effectively. That's it. I mean, we've detailed it before it's pretty basic they need they need an audio api you need to be able to record different things in different apps i would love anything that would enable something like audio hijack to exist on ipad but failing that i would like to be able to be on skype on the ipad and also have a recording app open, recording my microphone and ideally also recording Skype two separate tracks at the same time. Like audio was built very simply for the iPhone in the early days and has not been touched.

And they got to do it. They got to do it. They won't. We'll be left behind again, um we're gonna keep beating that drum until they hear it because drums make sound so that's our wish list it'll be super interesting to see how many of those pop up next week in the draft yes and how many we're so despairing about that we're not gonna bother picking them because we know apple's not gonna do it all right this episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Bombas. They're the folks that make insanely

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much much more of a gamer than you are so i want to know what it what is the frame of this conversation today what do you want to talk to me about gaming well two things struck me back when i i said we should talk about this and one of them them is you recommended Roundguard a while ago when we were talking about Apple Arcade games. And I have been playing that a lot. Good. Or at least a lot for me. I really enjoy it. I recommend it.

It's a lot of fun. And I was thinking about why that game stuck with me and what other games have stuck with me and what do they have in common and what does that say about what appeals to me when i'm looking for a game to play and then the other piece of data is all of my friends talking about animal crossing yeah and playing that and selling fruit on their islands and stuff for bells um which is very similar to when all of my friends were talking about stardew valley yep arguably animal crossing is a bigger deal than stardew

was at that time but it's a similar thing they're similar-ish games as well right there you're tending to your stuff and you're making transactions and you're earning stuff and all of that yeah and um i in a moment of self-reflection uh while i was thinking of why i round guard appealed to me i also asked myself why do why does hearing what people are doing in animal crossing um completely repel me okay okay good news and turn turn me off and be like wow i don't want to do that because literally literally i hear people talk about animal crossing and i think it sounds like a lot of work it sounds like a game where you have to do work and i think to myself i don't want to do work i i do enough work i don't want to do more work i don't want to grind on things and i think

that there is truth in the fact that there are a lot of games where the whole idea is that you grind you do this and then this and then this and you get a thing if you think about it jason all games are someone's work wow okay they're all jobs of some kind like some people are little balls that bounce around in a dungeon yeah like a round guard they're just trying to make their gold you know like in brown god they're just trying to make gold you know like if you play a racing game that's someone's job they're just a racing driver you know it's all someone's job okay all right i'm okay that's good what so so what are the games so we'll get into like the commonality of the games that i like but what are the games that you like just so we're clear about what you like and what i like and how they're different so my

gaming habits fall into like two and a half areas so the big kind of my my main uh favorite type of game are large open world games that you have tons to do typically in such a way that you can make your own games within the game so examples of these include uh zelda breath of the wild stardew valley grand theft auto the pokemon games and animal crossing these are these large open world games where there is typically a structure but you can also kind of veer off and do things in your own order in your own path in my opinion breath of the wild is the very very best game for this in the sense that you can quite literally run into the castle that features the final boss as your first action in the game if you want to like i've never played a game like that you know you play a game like a

grand theft auto game they shut off parts of the world. You have to get to a certain point before they open them up. But that's like my main type of game because I really love to have a thing that the game developer has presented to me as my path. But also if I want to, I can go and spend time doing this other thing

so I can approach the game how I want. My other large area of gaming is mobile games that you can just pick up and put down with infinite replayability. And some of my favorites here are Peggle, which is one of my very favorite games of all time. Roundguard is heavily influenced by Peggle. Other examples are Threes, Flip-Flop Solitaire,

the Altos games, both Adventure and Odyssey, and Hold Down. I also like some puzzle and sports games that are kind of on larger platforms. I was thinking of stuff like Portal, the Tony Hawk games, Need for Speed and Burnout. That's like my half category. But the main games that I gravitate towards

are the open world games and the infinitely replayable mobile games. Yeah, so for me, the ones that you mentioned second are the ones that are the one are the one they work for me they work yeah so ground guard alto's odyssey i played alto's odyssey got uh maxed out top level on that flip-flop solitaire i still play a lot um mini metro and mini motorway those are um those are both games that i enjoy a lot i played portal and portal 2 all the way through and that's i'll come back to that but i think that they um that that's even similar in some ways and what they all have in common is that you can invest

a lot of time in these games but the way you do it is in a series of short sessions with a beginning and an ending and i I really liked that. I was actually thinking about back when I played first-person shooters a lot, and I was far more inclined to do online play than I was to play through the story. And back in the day, the stories in the early days of first-person shooters were more level-like, where you would be on a level, and then you'd solve it, and then you'd move on and those work better for me because there's a beginning and an end but the the network play was the stuff that i loved or on a on a console if

you've got something similar where it's just two people sitting there and you're playing a game and then there's a winner because there's a beginning and there's an end and if you have more time and more inclination to keep playing, you say, you want to go again? All right, let's go again. As opposed to kind of the open-endedness of it. Like I'm playing Life is Strange 2 right now, which although it has episodes and all of that,

it feels very much like a long open-ended story. And at some point I just have to say, I can't play this anymore right now. I'm going to put it down. And that's not as appealing to me as doing a run in Alto's Odyssey or playing a level or a whole playthrough of Roundguard and getting to a point and saying,

okay, I'm going to stop here or it's over now. And so for me, there's something about like having it have a beginning and an end, so I can pick it up, I can play it, and then there's an end where I can walk away. And although I do enjoy the Syracusian artsy-fartsy games that are two, three, four hours long, sometimes longer, like Life is Strange 2 is an example of that. The original Life is Strange, which I really liked, but it's harder for me to get into them and to find time for them. And that's the other piece of this, right? Which is the iPad is my primary game platform. And the reason for that is I can play on the iPad anywhere

and I don't interfere with other people. And when I'm playing on the computer, I have to come out into the garage and turn on the computer and sit here in my chair and play a game with the door closed probably, right? And on a console, I'm like in the middle of the living room playing on a console, which means that if anybody else wants to be in the living room or do anything in the living room, they've got my game in the way, which I don't like. I would much rather it just be me and my game in the way, which I don't like it's it's, I would much rather it just be me in my game. So the iPad is perfect for that because I can play on that iPad on the couch, on the bed, uh, in the hammock,

like outside, like anywhere I can, I can play. Uh, and that's the other piece of it is, is just being able to pick it up and play it at any point rather than having to like carve out dedicated time. Because I think in my life lauren and i were talking about this yesterday i think i think we we don't like the idea of okay i'm going to not spend time with

you now and go off for a few hours and play a game interesting um and and so we don't so we don't do that but i think and i don't have an answer here, but I think psychologically, the big thing for me is having some feeling of kind of completion in a short period of time. And it's okay if you're building to something, right? Because Altos, you are building to doing all of those different tricks and getting to the top level. And in Roundguard, you're trying to get not only to win

and to ideally win with a maximized amount of gold but also to gather all the relics right like there are long-term goals but they're all put together by short-term uh functions and then something like flip-flop or mini metro you know you know that game's not going to last more than five minutes ten minutes and so you play it and then you're done and you move on with your life. This is interesting because the way that you describe it would, would like kind of suggest that your gaming habits are more quote unquote casual, but you don't play games exclusively that are considered casual games,

right? Because you do play successfully much larger games that quote-unquote gamers play right games like a portal right and you can complete them it's not like you're bad at those types of games because again portal my real list limitation with portal was that i had to play it on a computer and so i had to carve out the time but the actual game worked for me because you play a level and like you solve it and then you say to yourself do i want to do another level and if the answer is yes you play another level and then you walk away which is great so that that portal is a good example where i thought okay it's it's not

entirely about the context of like where i'm playing and as somebody pointed out in the discord um it's absolutely intriguing to me this idea that is is gaining steam of of using your uh your console as the game engine but streaming it to your ipad right right so you can play it somewhere else it's like i would i would love and i don't think play PlayStation 4 does this with the iPad, but I would love to play that Spider-Man game, and I have it. But I don't think I'm going to, again, go to the room with the PlayStation, turn on the TV, sit down, get out the controller, all that. Maybe there's a way to make that a little more, I don't know if it's casual, just kind of drop in. But there's definitely something there. And it struck me, why are there games that i like and there are other games that my friends talk about that i'm like wow i never want to do that i never i literally never want to play animal

crossing i'm just not it it sounds terrible to me and i i know i'm not saying that it's bad i'm saying that i know within myself that that game does not push the right buttons. Right. That it's not for me. There are ways to do this with the PlayStation 4, but they're not super simple. I think really a big part of the next generation of consoles will be enabling stuff like this, I think. I think this is going to be one of the big things for the next version of the Xbox and the PlayStation is the Cloud Play stuff

because that's gaining much more steam no pun intended uh i i do expect it to be much more of a thing for microsoft especially when julian was playing breath of the wild the first time through it was on the the wii u and uh he would just sit in the corner of the living room while we were watching tv and play breath of the wild on the wii u controller and that was that was literally you know he's streaming it to the you know first party controller and playing it on the handheld and then eventually you know he gets we've got it on switch so that he can do that anywhere instead of just in the within eight feet of the yeah yeah so i mean i also i can actually sympathize with this idea um i play way fewer

games now that i live with my partner right than i used to before yeah the idea of like i don't really want to spend 10 hours this weekend doing a thing on my own. I like to do things together. Exactly. So there will be now, so the big games for me these days, they are events in that there will be a few games a year where I will put that time in, but I'm not going to do it every day, right? Or every week even. And what I do like,

there are games like Stardew and like Animal Crossing that me and Nadina play together, right? We both play the game right so that I like a lot because then I can put we can put more time into a game because it's a game that we both enjoy but she doesn't enjoy all the games that I enjoy so I will pick a few games a year where I'm like right I am going to choose that because this game is that important to me but it means that I play less games overall because i'm less likely to dip into an unknown quantity right like a new game and you shooter that i've not tried i don't i'm not i want to see you know or like uh it's getting mixed reviews so i won't bother

where before i'll be like well maybe i'll like it let me give it a go i want a new game so i do that way less than i used to for that reason um but I do still like to attack these large games more than you do because it is more important to me. So I will find the time, but it's way less time for a similar reason to you. Yeah, the idea of spending hundreds of hours on a game, it turns me off, which is why I will do, for me, it's the artsy-fartsy Syracuse-like games

that I will play a few times a year. But I want somebody to recommend something and say, this is a good one, let's do it. And it's like, okay, I'll put in five or 10 or 20 hours on that one. But I'm only going to do that a couple times a year. And the hundreds of hours, again, if you want me to play a game for hundreds of hours,

what you need to do is be sneaky like Alto's odyssey and have it be a bunch of short bursts that i love so much that i just keep playing it all the time in short bursts because what i'm not going to do and this is the truth it's what you said i'm i'm not going to carve out five hours to go play a game by myself. It's just, I live in a house with three other people and it's not going to happen. And I'm not saying that that's bad. If you do that, dear, dear listener, I'm just saying the way my life is configured, it's never going to happen. And I cannot tell you how many times I have bought a game or a console in a game saying,

I'm going to play this. I'm so excited. And I've never played it. I bought Destiny and played for about five hours during the beta. And then it launched. And it launched the week of an Apple event, by the way. It launched the week that the iPhone launched. And I never played it after that.

I literally never played it. I bought the Spider-Man game for PS4 because I love Spider-Man and that game got such great reviews. And what happened is I had it for two months in secret and played it for about two hours. And then my son got it for his birthday

and played through the entire game in less than a week. And now it's just sitting again. And will I go back to it? Maybe, but probably not, even though that makes me sad. I really hope that you do sometimes for some reason find yourself playing that game because i know you

would love it because i know i would i know i know and also i'll i'll throw in there something that uh is uh something i saw on twitter this week uh which is in defense of easy mode. And I thought, yeah, I'm a believer in that. Actually. I'm kind of a believer in, well, I know that there are like hard modes where you're,

where it's challenging and all that, but like, I, I'm never going to want that challenge like in, in a game like that. Give it to me an easy mode. Let me enjoy the story. Let me do the basics that are required to make it feel like I accomplished

something. But yes, I admit it. I want, I want a super easy mode where make it feel like i accomplished something but yes i admit it i want i want a super easy mode where i can feel like i'm spider-man without actually having to have the reflexes of a spider because i don't then you should set that game to easy mode like i i started playing the the game and bumped it down i don't remember what i started it at but i do this right like i'm playing a game i want to play through it like because i want to enjoy it and it's too punishing to me it's like well no i'm gonna bump this down so i can actually play through and maybe when i get a bit better at

the game i'll bump it back up again i like games that allow you to make the change rather than set it once and not being able to change it so that that can be that's a pro tip to people like games are for enjoying and if you find yourself being punished by it just change the difficulty level and you might enjoy it more some people want the challenge and like more power to you if you do but not everybody does

alright let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to round out this episode thank you for bringing that topic Jason it went into places I wasn't expecting it was really fun this episode is brought to you by Pingdom from SolarWinds. While you've been listening to this show, how would you know if you were having troubles of your website? Would you know if your customers couldn't click that buy now button or access your content? You might stumble across this problem by luck. You might get an email. You

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14-day free trial with no credit card required by going to pingdom.com slash relay fm then use the code upgrade at checkout when you sign up and you'll get a huge 30 of your first invoice a thanks to pingdom from solar winds for their support of this show and relay fm all right we'll finish this episode off with some hashtag ask upgrade questions the first one this week comes from kevin kevin wants to know will there be a running score update of the episode 400 draft after each apple announcement or is the time capsule sealed i personally would like to not think about it until episode 400 and then have have a reveal and just i'm going to forget what we even picked i have i've already forgotten confirmed to you right now i have

forgotten what has been picked yeah so if people want to to track it they're welcome to but i'd actually rather not know so like if something happens that one of us picked i'd actually rather not even know that we picked it um i just want to wait 100 weeks and be surprised yep we do need people to let us know as episode 400 approaches just to make sure that we're remembering that we need to check that back because i would i also do not guarantee that i will remember i do have a note in my task manager but still well if it pops into your mind or maybe you're listening to this show like at weird times, people do that, right?

They listen to current episodes and go back to old ones. Maybe just by luck, you're around episode 397 or something. Just in real time, just let us know that there's a draft that we need to redo. Alex asks, with Apple not having the ability to have in-person time with developers this year, do you think that iOS 14 could see more focus on the iOS system apps, this way making developers not

having so many things to learn? Yeah, I think that's a great point. It will be interesting to see. We'd already been thinking that if you look at the cadence of Apple software releases, they've had, this year was a kind of cataclysmic software release cycle. And then the previous year was a quiet one where they kind of fixed stuff. And then the previous year was a, again, terrible buggy release cycle.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all if the goal with iOS 14 and with the next version of macOS as well is less reliance on new features and more on stability and getting things working okay and that would also mean not unveiling a bazillion new apis to developers for like whatever the new thing is i'm sure there will be some but uh being kind to developers especially after last year where they spent all summer kind of like dealing with bugs and are still not even like there's still people out there who are working on Catalyst apps and

there's going to be a new version of Catalyst presumably. So, and they haven't shipped their apps yet. So like taking it easy on that front and instead focusing on some other stuff. I mean, I assume that SwiftUI and maybe Catalyst will get a bump because they need it. But I could also see this being a year where Apple retrenches a little bit and kind of focuses on fixing bugs and upgrading its own built-in apps. And that would be okay.

Yeah, definitely. I think I would quite like to see that myself. Michael asks, what would you like to see in the next iac refresh or redesign uh the bezels have got to come in i think i think the imac design as nice as it is the bezels are enormous and we live in a world where all the bezels are shrinking and uh the imac needs to do that and i know people are like oh well yeah but it's a

desktop computer who cares and indeed who cares how thin it is and yet they made it thinner too I but I do think that bringing it in so that it's more just a screen floating in front of you and not a screen with a big black rectangle around it and then a big silver rectangle below it like to make that less is has to be a design goal and then um i want the spinning discs out and um it may be that the next iMac even is an ARM Mac but if not um then it'll presumably have like a t2 and be kind of the modern uh like the iMac Pro is so um but those are my top things is bring the bezels in and get rid of spinning disk support forever the visual design is the big thing for me I mean I would also like to see something like face ID might be kind of fun I'd honestly like to see them try something totally different but I think they're pretty committed now to the floating

screen I'd love to see them try to do something like the G4 iMac, right? Where there's like a base that has the fancy, you know, computery stuff in it. And then the screen is just this floating object. That would be pretty awesome. But I doubt it. I doubt they're going to do that. All right. Next question comes from Block and they ask, are you aware of any family friendly solutions to share and manage sensitive information such as social security numbers or billing account numbers, not just text, but documents or files as well? I think 1PasswordForFamilies is a great option for this. I use it for this stuff. Yeah, I use it too. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but that's what we use is 1Password. We have a family account and the

you know all sorts of documents and stuff and everybody's passport numbers and all that stuff is in there yeah i mean it's a great thing for it because it's not it can be numbers and logins and that kind of stuff but you can also have scans of stuff images like i share like passport images and stuff like that in there like You can get all kinds of great stuff in that. So that's one of the reasons that I use it. I use it for business stuff and family stuff. Can you do

encrypted notes in iOS that are shared? I know you can do shared notes. I don't know about encrypted notes. Like locked, do you mean like the locked ones? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if you mean like the locked ones yeah yeah i don't know i don't know if you can i've never tried that one but i still would personally prefer one password to that uh then then doing those those shared notes looks like you can't lock a shared

note right there you go then yeah kevin asks how is jason's wife's Lauren's, that's a funny sentence, iPhone. How is Lauren's iPhone 10 battery issue? Kevin had the same issue, but it broke the cellular circuit. So it was way too expensive to fix. Can we get an update? I went on Apple's website for support and said the battery expanded and they said, okay, send it in. And they said, it looks to me like this is a covered issue and we're not going to charge you. And I sent it in and they sent it, they sent, I mean,

they didn't send it back, right. They sent a, a different iPhone 10 with the same specs because I think that's how they do it is they send that right back to you. And then they put the other one in the queue to be refurbed and sent out to someone else. So we didn't get charged, which I think is only right since it was their battery that expanded and pushed everything out of the iPhone. So I don't know what method that Kevin used here, but a swollen iPhone battery, at least in my experience, was something that Apple was... I would have paid to fix it, but I felt like Apple should fix it

because that's like literally their battery doing damage to the phone. And they did. I didn't even have to pay for the battery swap. Yeah, I think that's how I would expect it. I think that makes sense. And finally today, Jared asks, what combination of Twitter and RSS do you use, if any?

How do you see those tools? Is similar, different, or complementary? I'm using RSS more than I used to. I'm using NetNewsWire, the new open source version of NetNewsWire, primarily on my iPad with a limited number of stuff that I'm subscribed to. And it is the first time I've used RSS regularly in a long time. But I use that sort of like at a certain time of day, like in the morning or in the evening, where I'm sitting down, and I want to look and see what I can read. Whereas Twitter kind of comes and

goes throughout the day. So breaking news, and things from sources that are not my go to sources happen on Twitter. And then my go to sources happen a couple of times a day in NetNewsWire. And that is also where I do things like compile links for Liftoff. Like I've got a bunch of space RSS feeds in there and those will get shared out of there into the Liftoff Tumblr and things like that. They'll come from there. But Twitter is more breaking news and sources that are

outside my usual set what about you exactly the same so i i use rss now and i use reader but the the idea of like i have stuff in there that i definitely want to make sure i check these sources or these are sources for good news for me for shows um so i you know i really like i like that i have that there is like this is where i know i can go to get information if i'm looking for it and i will check it maybe once a day once every two days for me depends on on what shows that i'm recording at a time and then i will use twitter for that exact stuff right like breaking news other sources getting different types of information, and also like news sources that aren't necessarily like,

I know I'm going to have to have checked this one to make sure that I'm prepared for a show. Yeah. So yeah, very similar, very similar. All right. So I think that's it for this week's episode. You can send in Ask Upgrade questions with the hashtag AskUpgrade on Twitter.

Or if you're a Real AFM member in the Real AFM members Discord, just use the command question mark AskUpgrade and you can have them ask there. The great thing about that is they can be longer than a tweet if you want to. So we thank everyone who is a Real AFM member who is part of the Real AFM members Discord as well.

That's great. We're doing everything we can to make that even more and more exciting as time goes on we have some stuff coming up real soon on that one uh so next week's episode is going to be the draft episode which we're so excited about uh i'm getting we're going to be working diligently on getting that one prepared for you uh if you want to find us online, there's a few places to do that. On Twitter, Jason is at JasonL, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. You can find Jason's work over at SixColors.com,

TheIncomparable.com, and Jason is the host of many shows here at RelayFM, as am I as well. Thanks so much to Pingdom, Bombas, and Ooni for their support of this show, and also to our RelayFM members as well who also help make this show happen and to you our listeners for tuning in every week

we'll be back next time until then say goodbye Jason Snell goodbye Mike Curley