Upgrade - 35: Where The Fluoroelastomer Meets the Road
Episode Date: May 4, 2015After living with the Apple Watch for another week, Jason and Myke discuss what they’ve noticed so far. Then they discuss the peculiar Amazon Echo and give a mini review of "Avengers: Age of Ultron...."
Transcript
Discussion (0)
from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 35 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com
where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts for a 10
day free trial you should head over to lynda.com slash upgrade. MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam,
and Making Light.
Craft a daily ritual to focus on what matters most.
My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by the jet-riding, limousine-riding Mr. Jason Snell.
I think technically maybe I have done those things today.
Because I called an Uber to go to the airport.
That works as a limousine, I guess.
It wasn't really a limousine.
It was like a Honda Accord or something,
but yeah, Toyota Camry.
Traveling in style.
Yeah, hi, Mike.
How's it going?
I am very well, sir.
How the devil are you?
Oh, it's good to be home.
It's good to be back in proper time.
I was in evil time for a while,
but now I'm back in proper time.
Good.
On the West Coast, back in the best coast,
back in my chair for the first time
in a week and uh glad to have my uh crazy six weeks of mostly travel behind me so you've been
out in new york and boston you recorded a couple of shows and with people in person did you record
clockwise uh i i recorded clockwise in lex friedman's office right um but lex wasn't on it
and then and then well he didn't
really have a two-person recording set
up and I'd already scheduled the guests
so it was fine he then he recorded the
rebound with Dan Morin and John Moultz
and I wasn't on that I was I was working
while they were in there doing that and
then in Dan Morin's living room we
recorded this week's incomparable and
went from you know usually we bank an
episode for six weeks or something lately and this one went from recording to posted in about
15 minutes um and i had to take out one f-bomb that ms caldwell dropped and everybody looked at
her not because she's you know language please it's a it's an avengers reference but they looked
at her because they knew that this means means I had to actually edit the episode very poorly.
I just found the F-bomb, took it out, and now it just is a jump cut.
But I did that, and then we did a TV.
Our Game of Thrones, one of the regulars on our Game of Thrones podcast thing is Brian Hamilton, and he's in Boston, too.
So he came over to Dan's place, and Dan Morin and Tony Sindelar and Brian Hamilton and I watched an episode of Game of Thrones and
did a little podcast about that. And then
I went to sleep and
got up at an ungodly hour to come back to the
West Coast. You're happy
to be back in the West Coast? Yeah.
It's good to be home. Although it's way
warmer in Boston than in San Francisco today.
Wait, what? That's not how it works.
That's not what you preach. No, that is.
There's a moment where the switch flips,
and suddenly it's always hotter in Boston than San Francisco.
For half the year, it's always colder, and then it's always hotter.
And now they're going to have like an 80-degree day today.
So not like that here.
That's okay.
They're going to be hot and miserable pretty soon.
They've had such a terrible winter that they deserve their little spring
that they're getting.
I hope you don't get the snow.
I hope that's not how that works.
Not how that works.
Okay, good.
Because that would be upsetting.
You'd end up, I think, just stuck in the garage
and you'd just have to stay there.
Yep.
That was one of those things, by the way.
Did you notice I said garage?
Yeah, yeah, see?
It's just like when you were spelling things.
You spelled, like, honor or something without the U, and it's just like uh just like when you you were spelling things you spelled like
honor or something without the u and it was just horrible and now you just said garage instead of
garage should be garage i'm sorry everybody yeah i'll help it we'll revoke your monocle and top
hat if you keep that up also dan moran who does not have uh enough has not gotten enough of me
in the last few days is in our chat room so hi. It's been a great week in my fair country, by the way.
Oh, yes?
Yes, I hear a royal baby was born.
You would be correct.
And we have Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diane,
is what we have, which is...
Diana, sorry.
I think it's Diana.
Yep, sorry.
Now, again...
I wonder who they named that after.
Anyway.
Anne Elizabeth.
Anne Elizabeth, yes, of course. That's a good name it's nice I like these things
well Pip Pip and Cheerio to you
congratulations to all of the United England
Kingdom
I don't know why I felt like I had to mention that
like they listen you know
just in case
shout out to the
windsors yeah that's right good good big big uh yeah big week nice hey babies are nice it's good
it's good that people are are having babies that's nice keeps the human race going yeah
generations of future tabloid journalists are very thrilled that there's another princess in
the world now indeed i mean it feels these things do fill me with uh with pride um for my country patriotism yeah it's nice it is very nice
i like you say patriotism no um oh i don't know anymore i would say patriotism but i don't know
but you may not be english anymore so yeah all right fair enough who knows who knows should we
do some follow-up i think that's a really good idea so we have self-identified upgrading pete um i like the club of self-identifiers by the way yes this is something
that pete said pete was writing in about his apple watch my apple watch experience got a lot better
when i got over the compulsion to return the watch face to the watch face after i was done with an
app truth is the watch returns itself to the face after you drop your wrist and wait for a minute or
two and my habit of using an app finishing and then resetting the watch to the
watch face before i drop my wrist was unnecessary i've trained myself to use an app and just lower
my wrist when when i'm done after a few days it feels natural so a couple of things about this so
just to clarify that and wrap it up um about the idea that like instead of having to take yourself
back to the watch face the watch will do it itself.
Now, you can actually change that, I believe.
Yeah, in the app, you can change what happens,
whether you go back to the app or whether you go back to the watch face
after some timeout period.
So I wanted to, and I have a good tip for anybody that's missed it,
you can then just double tap the crown,
and it will take you back to the most recently used app, which I've been using a lot. That's a good tip for anybody that's missed it you can then just double tap the crown and it will take you back to the most recently used app which i've been using a lot that's a good top tip but
i'm going to bring this up because uh that is a good a good piece of follow-up it's just like a
usage thing from pete but i'm going to ask you this jason i am a little bit neurotic with my
phone uh i before i lock my iphone i must return it to the first home screen.
If somebody takes my phone and they do something and lock it and I see what they've done, I have to unlock it,
put it back to the first home screen and lock it again.
So this idea of the watch doing itself is quite pleasing to me
after any utility is done.
So in theory, within a minute, there might be things I'm still doing
and the watch is turning itself off, right? So I't want it to to do that because it turns itself off
so quickly but i wanted to wonder one do you find the idea of it returning to the watch face helpful
and two what do you do when you lock your phone are you crazy like me or are you normal like
everybody else i am not crazy like you um although sometimes i will do that, but I'm doing it less because I'm reminded
that I don't need to worry about it. And the most likely scenario is I might want to go back there
soon. I actually have wondered about changing that setting to the returns to the app, because I try
not to use apps very much. But when I do use them, I get a little frustrated that I go back a little
bit too much later,
and then I have to go find the app again, or I guess double tap to go back to the app.
I didn't even know about the double tap thing.
Somebody instructed me that this little piece of paper that I ignored that was on top of the,
or was like in the little envelope with the extra band that says Apple Watch on it,
and has instructions on how to put on a watch band, which I thought was ridiculous. If you unfold it, on the other side,
there's actually like a little set of watch tips
that I completely, or it's on that same side, in fact,
little watch tips that I missed
because it's like you could charge it
and it has a watch face.
But it turns out it's also got a little diagram
where it says double click for last app,
which I didn't know.
Yeah, it's like a mini user guide hiding in there.
Yeah, so it's not exactly a manual. is i'm literally i think packing material but they printed some things on
it that are that are kind of interesting but i don't do that i i um i don't worry about it i've
learned it's a learning experience right we've been talking about the 1.0 experience and one
of those things i've learned to not worry about where what state
my watch is in that you know if if i just put my wrist down it's just it's going to take care of
itself i don't need to worry about it it's going to roll that up into the notifications list if i
ignore it and it's going to go back to the watch face and everything's fine so don't worry about
it what did you think of the packaging in general we
didn't really talk about that last week we both got the sport so bear in mind the sport and the
steel that they have different packaging they do um i was impressed i think i said on six colors
that um you know does anybody box better than apple um make it you can make a floyd mayweather
joke here but i'm not gonna do that well ding. Now you've got to do the two because that would be the boxing bell, right?
Ding, ding.
But they do such a great job.
It's a beautiful box.
I mean, I laughed because it's kind of ridiculous.
I kind of expected it to come in like a blister pack.
You know, just there's a watch here and you rip it out.
I mean, maybe not.
But the fact that there's this big heavy cardboard box and inside it, there's the long plastic watch, fancy watch box.
And inside that is the watch. And then there's this extra little thing that that you pull out that's got the extra band in it and all of that.
I mean, it's it's elaborate. It's nice. I mean, this is they're trying to send the message that, you know, you're buying a $400, you know, $350 at least product when you buy one of these. And so I thought it was,
I was impressed by it. I mean, it's theatrical and it's maybe a little bit silly, but they do
a really great job trying to make you have that feel of like, oh, this is an experience to open
this box. And we joke about unboxing and stuff like that, but it is kind of, you do, you just got this thing, you spend a lot of money on it. It does kind of feel good to have this is an experience to open this box and we joke about unboxing and stuff like that but it is kind of you do you just got this thing you spent a lot of money on it does kind
of feel good to have it be you know a little unveiling happen in your in your house while
while it's going on what did you think so i want to come back to the box in a moment i did think
there was way too much packaging in this and it reminded me of all kind of like first as apple's product generations
go on the packaging gets smaller and smaller yeah like the original ipad box that big
had that big cube and it had a whole bunch of stuff in it and i i was taken by the fact that
inside the giant thick heavy cardboard box there was a giant plastic thing because i
also thought apple kind of got away from unnecessary plastic in their packaging so i expected the watch
to be in the box not in a plastic thing in the box because it's i mean literally the whole idea
was they were simplifying their packaging and using less kind of bad materials but but um and
and it's it's because luxury as we would say yeah but still
you've got a plastic insert inside a plastic box inside a tray inside a giant cardboard box
and it did kind of overlap with the apple in the environment film you know where they're saying
about like how much better they are and i'm sure look i'm sure that all of that stuff is like super like made of recycled materials and all that kind of stuff but it does yeah but
did we need the big do we need the big plastic thing i guess it's a watch case and they wanted
to say look it's just like every other watch it comes with a little watch case that you can
that you can have but it seemed kind of wasteful to me but the boxes themselves beautiful the design
is probably purposefully reminiscent of swatch what boxes are
you familiar with swatch watches yes i never i've never had one but i was mike i grew up in the 80s
i am i am from the swatch watches so they used to come like laid out flat in these long plastic
boxes like i'll include a google image search in the show notes so you can see them.
They used to come and you would open them in the same
way, like you'd pop them open on one side and they would fold
open. So it's very similar to that
and I think that that is a
cue. And I'm sure I saw somewhere
when there was like some
images, I think
in like an AppleCare document
or something, or on 9to5Macs at
some point before the watch was released.
Or it might have been WWDC images,
something like that that someone was talking about.
I think Johnny Ives saying that he used to like
Swatch Watches or something when he was a kid.
I could have just made all of that up,
but we'll go with that anyway.
But they did remind me of that, and I liked it.
I thought the packaging,
I thought the whole unboxing experience,
which Apple is so good for,
and it's part of the whole product,
I thought that that was really great.
But I would also like to see them
slim that down a bit for the next one
because it maybe was a bit superfluous
in some places.
We know they can do this
and they do a great job at it.
But it did, yeah,
I noticed that it felt like
it was one layer too many.
And again, you're going to hear from people,
like watch people especially,
who are going to say, you've got to have the box. You've got to have the watch box. But they have
the big box and then the little box. And it's the big heavy box. It's not like a flimsy outside box
that has the, then you get to the inner box and you're like, oh, here's where the real watch box
is. It was like a giant box that would normally have a computer in it. And inside that is a
plastic box. And inside that is a
is a watch, but it's beautiful. And it certainly makes the whole thing an experience. And that is
part of what this is about. And that's what Apple excels at. So I you know, I can't fault them too
much. But it did. It did feel a little bit over the top. But it was pretty, it was pretty cool.
And it took, I swear, it took less than an hour when people started getting them for somebody to point out that if you um if uh if you how should i phrase this if you remove the extra watch band that
comes with it that's tucked away in that little thing and then just look at the insert and have a
a childish mind a juvenile mind you will you will laugh because there's a shape that is
really stupidly juvenile. Yeah.
And I cannot believe that got past quality control.
Because everyone was tweeting it.
Yeah, because there's the long part with the watch band and then there's a more bulbous part.
Anyway.
Kind of like real genius.
Yeah.
But it is.
It's like real genius.
Real genius would say, you know,
can you do that with a watch?
Maybe.
Yeah.
Alex wrote in to ask us about what we thought about t9 input for the watch this is my favorite apple watch question ever so
t9 input for people that are maybe not familiar was a type of predictive texting before phones
had full keyboards and you would basically um you would be able to type with the number pad and each number i think from number two onwards would have a letters add letters associated with it
like two would be abc three would be def and so on yeah and you would um before predictive texting
you would have to type them out so if you wanted the letter c you'd have to type the number two
three times but quite quickly right so you'd be like and be like c and then you go to
e and then it did it on three anyway and then t9 came along where you would just tap the letters
once and the the phone would work out what you were trying to say so what alex was saying is
what about t9 input for the watch as a way to remove the amount of keys needed to be displayed
on screen and we're already seeing calculators so in theory there is enough space jason what do you think about t9 input i i don't even know how
to answer this question i think it's i i if you know maybe somebody should write an app that is
the t9 app for the apple watch but it just you know i find i i what i'd say is i think voice
dictation is great.
And you also have your phone nearby.
I found Siri to be good.
I found the predictive answers to be okay.
And I've also found the fact that you can set six of your own to be very, very useful.
Because I have some messages that I reply to people that are extremely similar,
and I now have like canned responses you can do this if you don't know in the messages portion of the uh watch app so the on the watch app on the phone in messages there is a section which says default replies and you can set six default replies which will show up
in the uh default replies when you go for a message sometimes at the top sometimes
at the bottom i don't know why that happens uh but there you go you can do that so that they're
there for you what have you put in there like cheers mate ahoy telephone my every day my mom
texts me and asks me how i am and every time i say i'm all good and send a little x as a kiss
that's in there and then nice a couple of just standard things that I'll say to my girlfriend.
There we go.
I think I've spoken maybe on other shows,
maybe on this show, that we have similar messages that we
send each other. Many couples have their own little
language that they have, the words that they
say, so I have some of those in there as well.
That's nice.
But we're going to get to this. She's bought an Apple Watch
for her own, but we're going to get to this.
This is something I want to talk about today after we thank our first sponsor for this week.
Excellent.
That is our friends over at lynda.com, the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills for a free 10-day trial.
In fact, go to lynda.com slash upgrade.
That's lynda.com slash upgrade. That's lynda.com slash upgrade. lynda.com is an
awesome company. They are there for you when you want to learn new stuff. If you want to solve some
problems, maybe you're curious about something, you've got a new hobby you've been trying to
tackle, or you just want to make things, you want to build things, you want to make stuff happen for
you, that's what lynda.com can enable. Maybe you have always wanted to learn Excel properly,
or maybe you want to learn Keynote or PowerPoint for an upcoming presentation that you've got.
I will be looking at these soon because I've got some presentations and talks that I'm doing,
and I want to make Keynote sing. I've never fully understood how to use it to its greatest effect,
but I know that I'm going to get some great stuff out of lynda.com. But going further,
like maybe I just want to learn a bit more about presentation skills, right? Because it's not just about how pretty the slides are.
You've got to learn to present properly.
And doing what I do here is very different to presentations.
But lynda.com has courses and all that stuff.
It's for practical things, but also for the things around the practical things.
Like, for example, they have like management training, right?
But they also have negotiation tactics.
Then there's courses on body
language. There's courses on learning about like color and shading for drawing, but also about like
how to use Photoshop, right? So they have different types of ways of coming at a problem. So they have
the practical things like the tools, but then also the fundamental ideas that sit behind those tools.
It's very good stuff. And you can create your own playlist, right? So if you are looking to try and get into artwork, or maybe you want to become a designer
or something like that, you can learn how to use Photoshop and you can create your own playlist
there. So you can put some Photoshop courses in it. You can put some Illustrator courses in. You
can also put some foundations of color courses in there as well. So you maybe want to put a bit of
typography in there as well. You maybe want to watch the Helvetica documentary. You can make a playlist out of all of this stuff.
It's all available on lynda.com. You can watch it whenever you want, wherever you want.
You can learn from these top experts when you're on the bus by using their iOS and Android apps as well to watch.
Or you can just save them to watch later on your own desktop and follow along with their fantastic course transcripts.
Your lynda.com membership is going to give you unlimited
access to training on hundreds of topics
all for one flat rate. Whether you're
looking to become an industry expert, you're
super passionate about a hobby, or you want to learn something
new, go to lynda.com
slash upgrade, that's L-Y-N-D-A
dot com slash upgrade, and sign up
for your free 10-day trial. Thank you so much
lynda.com for their support of this show
and all of the shows
at RelayFM.
All the great shows!
So I'll bump
this up in the topic list because I mentioned
it now. So this weekend
my girlfriend ordered an Apple Watch,
which I was surprised about.
She'd mentioned
wanting one, and when we
went to the store for the try on
she really liked it
and kind of decided that she was going to get one
but she didn't buy one immediately
she just said that she'd wait
and then I was going to try and pick her one up
when I was in San Francisco
because if they're available in stores then
which could be because it's June time
I could save her some money
but this weekend
after spending some time with some family where I was demoing some of the watch features to people,
she looked on a store, saw that the one that she wanted was only two to three weeks shipping, and bought it.
So I think that's really interesting because that's an example of somebody in the wild seeing a watch,
somebody seeing it and knowing what it is and then making a choice
rather than having it be this,
oh, I've seen the ads and maybe the try-on
or something like that.
But she's actually seen you using it.
Yeah.
And as well, her feeling of it is
I'm not really sure if this is going to work for me
or if this is going to be something I like
but I want
to try it.
Because as well, she always has her phone
on silent.
Even phone calls, she always has it on silent.
She goes to her phone when
she wants to interact with it.
So she says, I will maybe only have
messages on there. And she's
disappointed that you can't have
like i message vips only show up right it shows everybody yeah i that that's definitely a feature
i wish they had yep i think that's an ios 9 feature for sure um because it's such an easy one
uh like vips everywhere right everyone that's in your friend's wheel was a vip and you know
because you can set them different to the favorites on your phone. Like, it just seems like a perfect thing to me. So it's interesting
that she's wanted to do that. Like, I mean, and she likes the stuff, you know, the idea of us
being able to communicate with each other in fun and new ways, right? But we're not sure of how
well that will stick. If it does stick, I think it think it will but we'll see but she's very much just like i don't know how much i'll use it but i want to try it because i'm interested
in it and i think that it might be fun but i don't know if you know if it will
be something that works out for me in the long term and i said to her look you've got a 14 day
return window like yeah get it now and then decide if you like it.
You've got two weeks to try it out
and if you don't like it,
you can just take it back.
It was also funny
that the white sport in 38mm
was shipping in two weeks, right?
It shows the differences,
at least here,
as to what's shipping
because some of the other models,
the 42s,
they're like July.
Right.
So there you go.
I just thought that was really interesting.
Good she doesn't have to
wait until july to try i mean that would be the worst so then we would have just waited until i
went and picked one up for her but but it's great it's going to be here in the next couple of weeks
that's cool well it'll be interesting to see how she reacts and and whether she decides she wants
to keep it or not but um i mean i'm i'm enjoying it i i you know i i got to travel with it this time which was
kind of interesting i also got to see a couple of models that i that um so lex friedman uh has a uh
stainless with the milanese loop and i got to see that and try that on and um that was interesting i decided so he's he lex is in ad sales and wears shirts with
collars and buttons every day it seems i am i am a you know writer editor podcaster who wears t-shirts
and is a slob i think the stainless and the milanese loop looks really nice with like a
And the Milanese loop looked really nice with like a collared buttoned shirt.
It looks really fashionable to me.
It also, in watching Lex's, I thought, I don't want that.
It's not for me.
So that was good because I had at one point thought of buying the stainless steel watch,
not with the Milanese loop.
And I decided I didn't like the shiny.
I really prefer the matted, you know the matte colors of the of the sport models and then dan moran has my ordered model he's got
the um the the the black the space gray with black sport band model and it looked good although i
have to admit i'm actually a little torn because i i like the i like the lighter sport model too so i'm not quite sure i i i and i've got the voice of matt alexander in the
back of my head saying don't have a big black thing on your arm right um and uh i kind of i
kind of get that that it's really heavy because it's dark you know it's dark band dark body the whole thing and i'm kind of liking the the the light you
know silvery uh matte color of the the sport edition that i've got so i'm a little torn there
but it was really nice to be able to see those in person and we had a bunch of we had a group of like
six people and half of us had apple watches um john syracuse tried my apple watch on it was the
first time he's worn an apple watch so that that was kind of fun, in the movie theater.
He was like, hey, can I try on the watch?
What did he say?
He was just tapping around, and I had him unlock it,
and he was just tapping around and looking at it,
and he didn't wear it as long.
I think he was more concerned about how it felt on his wrist,
and he asked me whether I was comfortable with it and all that.
But I don't know he i don't
want to speak for him he didn't he didn't make any declarations but he was definitely gathering
you know gathering intel gathering information about it because he's like one before i imagine
like a johnny five input kind of moment you know he's scanning it and just taking a look see what
he thinks it could be he assimilated all data at that moment but he didn't uh it was actually
sitting next to john watching movie was really funny because i you know he was uh i was taking
note of the the parts of the movie that he that he laughed at the most it was kind of interesting
it's like oh that one that joke worked for john and then dan was on the other side of me and he
would he would laugh out loud at something i'd be like that wouldn't work for Dan it was a little weird because these are people I've
don't I've never like watched uh gone to the movies with before so but we did get a little
yes in the movie theater there is an Apple Watch try on program if you happen to be sitting next
to me that's a good service you offer yeah it is I didn't bring the little wipe down rag though
I have to say I used my shirt so how how's it been traveling with the Apple Watch?
As you said this week, you've been out and about.
Do you have any kind of different feelings about it now that you've been out and about in the world?
I feel like moments of brilliance and moments of frustration is a good way to put it.
I spent a day on Thursday.
I walked around manhattan
i spoke at this conference that was at the roosevelt hotel um and then i went up to the
bloomberg building and had lunch with some friends and then i walked i walked across town
and saw lex for a little bit and then i walked down you know much further downtown for a meeting. So I did about pedometer plus plus said, you know, whatever, 16, 17,000 steps and, you
know, seven miles, something like that.
At least just whatever, you know, just walking around town, 17 miles.
I had people, well, 17,000 steps, seven miles.
But it's, you know, people were like, oh, you should take a cab.
I was like, no, it's a nice day and I'm never never in Manhattan, and I'm going to walk, because why would I not do that?
So I got good things and bad things about it in that experience.
One is the GPS proximity.
GPS accuracy in Manhattan is terrible, because all the tall buildings block the sky, which is where GPS comes from.
And so the maps on my wrist was just a disaster.
It didn't know where I was. It kept saying, go to the street while I was on the street.
Um, it was not helpful. It didn't help me. I, I used it in Boston. It was much better. I was in,
in Somerville and walking down the street and it's low buildings and it was fine,
but in the tall buildings in Manhattan, it was just not, it was not any help. That said, I also had some really
great moments where the watch, I feel like did exactly what it was supposed to do. I was walking
up to Bloomberg to have lunch with my friend Kelly and she texted me to say, okay, we're going to
meet at 1130 at this, you know, at this location. And I was walking, you know, with my bag and
walking up, walking up that direction.
And I get the little tap on my wrist and I look and it's the text from Kelly.
And she says, we're going to meet here.
And I went tap.
Okay.
Sent the okay.
Kept walking.
Didn't break stride.
Didn't stop and pull my phone out of my pocket.
Just kept on going.
And I thought, that is what this is for.
That is how this is supposed to work.
So little bits of that and then the little moments of frustration too also i was listening to music and podcasts and i was using the remote um app and uh and so i was able to like pause and change the volume and stuff like that while
without taking my phone out of my pocket that works really well actually yeah that that works
really well that's very i find that to be very responsive. I was surprised how well that did actually work.
I love turning the crown to change the volume.
That's really neat.
Didn't know you could do that.
Oh, yeah.
In the remote glance, if you turn the crown, it makes the volume go up or down.
So I just thought you had to tap the plus and minus.
No, no, you can use the crown.
You're sort of trained that the crown can't do anything because app developers don't have
access to the crown, but Apple has access to the crown crown so it works in the remote glance you can do that
which is neat so so i had a good it was a good experience it lasted i never had anything remotely
resembling a battery issue it lasted i feel like apple really overshot i think apple was so worried
about um stories about people's watches running out that they gave themselves a lot of room to more heavily use the watch
than maybe is an actual normal profile,
just to make sure that it could get through the day.
And so I never came close.
But yeah, I had a good time.
It was a nice little addition.
And traveling and being in places where I'm not usually
and keeping my phone in my pocket and looking at little notifications on my watch, it worked great.
Occasionally somebody that I was meeting with would notice that I had an Apple Watch on,
and a lot of times they wouldn't because it's just a watch.
So a little bit of both.
And then they'd ask me about it, and, you know, if they wanted to see it, I'd show it to them.
But a lot of people don't even notice. And I like that. I was in a, I was at a dinner
and, you know, I got a tap on the wrist and it was one of those moments where I thought,
oh, this is really good. Cause if I had my pebble, everybody would have heard the buzz
and seen it light up. And instead it was just a tap. And I could say, I can either, you know,
I can wait until there's an appropriate time to check and see what's going on.
And nobody needs to know that I got that but me.
And I like that a lot.
I thought that was really, really good because so many notifications are obtrusive.
And this was completely unobtrusive, which was, that was pretty nice.
So I'm liking it.
I'm liking it so far.
I'm not liking bringing another charger with me, although I sort of just brought an iPhone plug
and the watch plug and the same power adapter
and did it that way,
so I could sort of do one or the other.
But it is one other cable to bring.
It's like I've got to bring my watch charger on my trip now,
plus my iPhone charger, plus my iPad charger.
I bought one, an extra one, and just threw it in my travel bag.
I actually threw the sport one in my travel bag and then had the little metal one, which I have on my table.
It's so frustrating that that thing does not stick to the table.
So I got some like, I don't know what you guys call it.
We call it Blu-Tack.
I don't know. It's like you put We call it blue tack. I don't know.
You put posters on the wall of it.
Yeah, okay.
It's like a tacky thing. It's not glue
but anyway.
Oh, it's like posting putty.
Yes, temporary adhesive type stuff.
I stuck that to the back, stuck it to my bedside table
so it doesn't move around and every night
I just place my watch on it and it doesn't
fly all over the place. I'm going to get a stand at some point.
I just haven't decided which one I want to get yet.
I like 12 South have a really nice looking one,
which I'm interested in.
And that's probably the one that I'll get,
but I don't think they're shipping yet.
At least I'm still waiting for like an email.
It's called the high rise for Apple watch.
Yeah.
So I wanted to go back to something you mentioned a moment ago as well about the
lighting up thing because i i talked about this on the weekend and i think a bunch of people didn't
really get what i was talking about with the pebble and with the android wear watch i wore
both of them i wore both of them in business environments when i was working in my marketing
job when you get notification on those things they light up and yeah and originally when
i got the apple watch i thought oh that's going to be frustrating because it doesn't do that you
have to raise your wrist but the reason apple has the wrist raising is primarily because the battery
life that's why i expect that that exists right so it doesn't by not lighting up the screen every
time you get a notification it probably keeps the battery life down but there is also a hidden
utility in that because when I was sitting,
I was talking to somebody
or sitting down at a meeting
and my screen would light up,
people would look at it.
And also, especially with the Android one,
because it's big, bright color screen,
like the Apple Watch is,
it would draw people's attention away.
So it was actually not just affecting my attention
because it was vibrating on my wrist,
it was affecting other people's attention
because it would draw them to the wrist as well. And also people can read what's on there,
which is typically not what you want. So the tapping thing is so good for that because I
know it's there. There's no screen light up to tell me that anybody else is there or to break
my attention even further. And then I can come to it when I need to. There is a real utility in that,
which is apparent
once you've used a competing type of device, I think. Yeah, I mean, you can also do this with,
you know, your phone in silent mode in your pocket, although even then you can often hear
silent phones vibrating everywhere. Yeah, this is totally not the same as that. I have...
Yeah, I agree. If the watch is against against something it makes an ungodly noise i
don't know if you've come across this yet so like for example if uh you know me and my girlfriend
are watching a movie in bed and i have my hand behind my head so it's resting on the headboard
if the watch goes off it's like it's crazy it's a crazy sound but you know but it has to be resting
against something i think yeah i've never experienced that because i it's a crazy sound but you know but it has to be resting against something i think yeah i've
never experienced that because i it's in do not disturb basically by the time i take it off
and it stays there until morning yeah but this is like in the day or in the morning or in the
evening like it's not like night bedtime bedtime you know but it's against yeah i don't know i
haven't experienced that but that might be true.
That's interesting.
It can go crazy for it, but it's not so much.
It's madness.
One of my favorite things is when you get like a heartbeat thing from someone
and you look at it and you can see the whole thing shaking.
Have you seen that?
No.
Like if you look really closely, you can see the watch like vibrating, right?
Because it's got this intense...
Which is natural, but if you look at just the edge,
you can see it shaking when it vibrates for the heartbeat or something.
Wow.
I don't have mine set to the extra super boost either.
So I don't know.
Maybe mine is really sensitive, but i don't think that it is
uh but yeah because you can actually you can bump it up can't you you can say like give me
oh no i have my haptic strength to the top but i don't have the prominent haptic one
so maybe maybe mine is stronger than yours in general i don't know if you change the strength
of your haptic i have it i have it at max but not the the prominent pre-buzz thing.
But it works well.
I am experiencing the feeling of haptic taps.
Sorry, not haptic.
Phantom taps.
That's what I'm talking about.
Oh, phantom taps, where you're convinced that you've got to tap,
but there's no tap there.
Uh-huh.
Have you had that feeling?
Have you had that experience?
No. I've actually been really happy to not have had that feeling? have you had that experience? no I've actually been really happy
to not have had that experience
because I expected I would and perhaps I will
but I haven't had it yet
I haven't been convinced that there's a
tap there when there isn't one
how are you feeling
about the watch in general?
are you overall happy?
because I know you said you've got some things that are frustrating
but overall are you feeling good about it i am feeling good about it i mean i'm wearing
it all day i'm using it it's not frustrating me in the sense that you know it's not running out
of battery it i i use the pebble for a couple years so i'm going from that and the integration
listening to you on last week's connected talking about how you know pebble just couldn't integrate
with ios very well at all.
And Apple gets to control the platform and control the watch.
And so it's better integrated.
It's still got moments where it reminds me of pebble where like the weather
app is closed in the background and is no longer updating the temperature and
the temperature is wrong or the location is wrong.
I went from New Jersey to New York city and it still had Lex's hometown listed for
a while as my weather. And I thought, why is that not updated? And that was something Pebble did a
lot, which is rely on an app to be open that got closed. And iOS needs to do a better job of saying,
oh, somebody wants to know what that app has to say. I need to reopen it so I can get data from
that app. But generally, yeah, I'm enjoying the experience.
It's comfortable to wear.
It doesn't feel like I'm wearing something outlandish.
It feels just like I'm wearing a watch.
I find value in what it has to offer.
I feel like some of the apps are really interesting.
A lot of them are not interesting, but that's okay because we also know that the developers just don't have that much, you know, that many tools in their paintbrush, you know,
or in their paint, what is it?
I was going to say an arsenal, but arsenals don't hold tools, they hold weapons.
And that was a mixed metaphor.
So instead I just destroyed the metaphor entirely.
You know what I mean?
They don't have that many tools to use to build these apps right now,
and they built them all sight unseen.
And, you know, like I know Marco Armet is working really hard to do an entirely new approach now that he's seen the actual watch like he had his here's what it's
going to be theoretically and then he gets the watch he's like oh no uh i should do some things
differently and i think that a lot of developers are doing that too so i think we're it's just
such early days that um it's uh i'm enjoying it but I'm also appreciating that it's got a long way to go.
How about you?
Are you liking it, happy about it?
It's part of my life now.
Look at that.
It's just part of, like, first thing I do when I wake up in the morning
is put the watch on because now that's the way that, like,
my watch and phone work together, right?
It makes sense because together they,
like when the watch is on, my phone is fine again
because it's usually in do not disturb mode.
So pretty much all the time now,
like before it was just in the evenings,
but now I don't need my phone to do anything
because my watch can tell me about the things
I want to be told about.
I'm trying to still get to the point where i'm happy with
the notification balance like there are still things that are coming through i'm like ah do i
really want those to come through like i get enough email that i would prefer it to not bother me
every time but i also like to be able to just archive email from the watch or set them to show up tomorrow in mailbox.
So I'm trying to work out,
shall I just have them not tap me?
I'm still trying to work out,
how do I want that balance to work?
I have no mail notifications right now.
None.
I like to be notified about email
because there are things that come through
that I like to jump on immediately. Sponsor requests, for example. I like to get notified about email because there are things that come through that I like to jump on immediately.
Sponsor requests, for example, I like to get to those straight away.
I could set up my email to be more smart to try and work that stuff out.
But I might go down that route if I decide to keep notifications on.
I just haven't decided yet about how I want to deal with that.
I've just been told that I've earned another hour towards my stand goal,
which is nice.
That's always good to know.
Oh, good for you.
It just told me to stand.
It told me every hour on the plane, stand up now.
And I was like, yeah, yeah.
I actually want to talk to you about that,
the fitness stuff in a minute,
to see how you feel about that kind of stuff.
But yeah, I'm just trying to work. the the fitness stuff in a minute um to see how you feel about that kind of stuff but yeah
i'm just trying to work i'm that balance that that balanced notification i really want to
uh really want to work out more and i do feel now that i keep saying it but there there has to be
better support in ios 9 for for developers to be more fine-grained about the notifications and stuff like that i think that that is a must and it is real low-hanging fruit now again um so i really hope that we see
more of that now i want to take a break and i'll but i want to talk to you about being out in the
real world and with the with the watch a little bit more and people's reactions to it but also
the activity fitness stuff because me and you haven't really spoken about that at all um but
before we do that we have a great sponsor a a great new sponsor, and this is Making Light.
Jason, I believe that you should be familiar with these guys.
I am familiar with these guys.
I've been talking to these guys for a little while and they've sent me some of their stuff
that my family and I have enjoyed.
So I'll ask you about that in a moment.
But let me tell all the Upgrade listeners what Making
Light is. Making Light is a company that helps us focus. It can help you focus because we have
distractions all around us today. And many people that listen to the show, like me and Jason, we
are creative workers. And sometimes you really need the focus to get your work done within the
time you need it done, right? But it's the same as no matter whatever work you do, sometimes you
just need to make sure that you can get what you want done when you want it done and that helps if you're able to
focus your attention and we have a bunch of different ways that we try and focus our attention
we find apps right to help us with this stuff or we we engage like our senses so we maybe find the
perfect cup of coffee or tea for taste we find find the great playlist for sound. You know,
we get lovely clicky keyboards, so it feels good when we write, you know, the touch sensation.
But what about scent? Now, this is something that we don't really think about. I'd never
really thought about before. But this is something what Making Light can help you do. And let me
explain why that's great. Making Light is a subscription service that sends really high
quality candles right to your door, allowing
you to create a new ritual in your day or a new thing that can help you just switch on that last
ounce of focus. Once you light a candle, it's time to write or meditate or whatever else deserves
your focus at that time. I was really surprised about how well this has worked for me. And when
I am like when I need to crunch on something now, like I'm sitting down,
I have some show prep to do
or if I have to write a script for Inquisitive
or something like that,
and I'm struggling with it,
I grab a making light candle,
I light them up,
and it changes the room.
And that change and that feeling of knowing
that once I light this candle,
I have like two hours here
in which I really need to get this done. It's been a really interesting thing. Now, Jason, tell me what you've thought about the
products that you've received from Making Light. Well, so we got them and my daughter was excited
about it. And what we decided to do was try to do something like in the evening and light a candle.
And like I said, my daughter was really excited about doing that. And so we actually had some matches from Matt Alexander, speaking of whom.
And I really like the idea.
They have different scents that are kind of interesting and they're pretty.
They're in these little metal containers.
And I like the idea.
It actually reminded me of when Casey talks about vinyl and talks about the ritual
and how there's power in that i think that you know we are you know these things exist for a
reason because they do focus us or stop and make us contemplate and whether it's something like
trying to be more productive at work or trying to take some time out of your of your schedule to
to just you know set the mood or change the mood a little bit. Um, I, it's a really interesting,
um, not to liken it to something like a tap on the wrist telling you to stand up, but it's a little bit like that. It's like, it's, it's like a, uh, an opportunity to take a pause
and, uh, reflect a little bit and just change your path a little bit in your day. And, uh,
and that's been kind of a, kind of a fun experience. And like I said, my daughter is
also just obsessed with the fact that all the candles smell different.
So she enjoys that part of it too.
Each month with making light, you receive enough that you're going to get yourself 22-hour rituals of focus.
You can light maybe 20 days or something like that because the candles have got in them enough for that kind of burn.
This comes in the form of two candles, a box of wooden matches,
and a preview sample of next month's featured fragrance.
Each candle is poured by hand by a small family company in Indiana.
They have a fantastic workshop, which you can see on their website.
They have over 40 years of history in candle making.
They have the skills, the people, and the tools to make you something truly special.
They're made from 100% botanical soy wax, fragrances infused with essential oils,
and all that lovely stuff. Making Light costs just $24 a month with free shipping anywhere in the USA.
They have Canadian shipping for an extra $5 a month and UK shipping for an extra $10.
Listeners, this show can get $5 off their first order with the promo code UPGRADE. So go find out
more for yourself at makinglight.us.
And if you need any more convincing,
they have a really great and fun video that you can watch there too.
It's featured front and center on the website.
Just click the play button and you can check it out.
Thank you so much to Making Light for supporting this show
and all of RelayFM.
Fun sponsor.
Yeah, that's a lot of fun.
So have people noticed the watch on your wrist in the
world did anybody ask you anything people that maybe know about this stuff or don't know well
okay so like on the flight this morning the guy sitting next to me had a an ipad in a um
in one of those uh keyboard shell things that turns it into a laptop.
And I was thinking, wow, that's hardcore.
First, I was like, what kind of laptop is that?
It looks like some kind of knockoff MacBook Air.
And then I looked at the screen and I thought, that's an iPad.
This is one of those crazy hard shell, turn your iPad into a laptop thing.
He noticed.
turn your iPad into a laptop thing. He noticed, but he was proven at that point to be apparently a fairly hardcore Apple person because he would turn his iPad into a... That's pretty
hardcore, I think. I had other people who had no idea at all. And then other people who noticed,
but it took them a long time. And I don't know how different people process people wearing watches.
And it's also like, am I wearing it where I've got a sleeve over it versus, versus not? It is a
very bright green wristband. I have no idea whether that, that ties into it or not. Because
like I said, I usually am wearing like a black leather band and it's intentionally as boring as
possible. But I don't know i mean people
would ask about it and and say you know how do you like it and all that but a lot of people didn't
even notice too so i think because it's a watch you know it watches come in all shapes and sizes
and i'm not sure john gruber wrote about this i'm i i'm not sure anybody um who isn't a watch person
or these days an apple person even notices watches i think the uh the the bright
bands are more noticeable if you have one of the metal bands or the leather bands i think the watch
is more inconspicuous but i think these these bright sport bands draw attention to them and
then when people have their attention drawn they see what it is because i've had people ask like
um i've had some friends ask when we've been out with friends and see what it is because i've had people ask like um i've had
some friends ask when we've been out with friends and stuff they notice it and i've had a couple of
people that i don't know ask me what i think like in stores and stuff i have had more of that but i
think it's because i have this really bright blue watch on my arm um yeah what about the activity
and fitness stuff have you been using any of it have you used the workout app
are you checking out your fitness rings
is any of that landing with you
not yet
I actually didn't realize that you had to trigger a workout
for it to notice
that you went for a hike
or a walk
so I haven't used that feature
it does this exercise thing that I haven't worked
out yet and that doesn't come from the workouts
but I don't know where that's coming from.
The tracking, yes, I've noticed
that and it's another little prod
although again when you're traveling
I had my day in
New York where I could walk around a lot and I had other days
where I couldn't do anything. I couldn't go anywhere.
And so I still have to
I'm actually thinking that this week is going to be my chance to do a little more exploration with that,
because I just haven't. I've been noticing the standing goals. And honestly, I've been so focused
on the traditional pedometer kind of metrics that the rings, I'm not quite sure how to interpret
them yet.
I feel like their initial settings are also, or at least how I initially set it,
it was for really like, I was giving the watch low expectations
because I would have days on this trip where I felt like I didn't do anything.
And it's like, you're at your goal.
And I thought, wow, was the goal to just keep breathing?
Because I did that, but I did very little more than that.
So I haven't gotten that piece of it yet. I'm intrigued by it, but I just haven't taken
advantage of it at all, I would say at this point. I'm not going to say like Marco said on ATP this
week that he just doesn't exercise. I do a little, but I uh i haven't i've got other things other tools that i
use to kind of meter my my progress and i haven't yet figured out how to you know adapt or replace
those with things that come from the watch so i have been more noticeable of this kind of stuff because the activity app is there and it's
it's pointing me to things i have yet to do much about it but i'm more conscious of it than ever
before so that's probably a good thing the standing stuff i am very much enjoying that it
is making me do that because i am standing i'm getting up and walking around the house
more often than i did before so yeah yeah an effect on my life which is a good one but it's
also weighing on my mind more about how active i am in the day that's probably a good thing and
the fact that it's there just giving me these very gentle reminders like it's not going i don't feel
like i'm being bullied by the watch right i've but i feel like it's reminding me like hey like it says you know you should maybe
focus on moving around a little bit more today you know you haven't it's it's like we're like
i saw one that was like we're approaching the evening and you're less than halfway like to your
move goal so maybe you should do something about that um and so it's like, yeah, okay, that's quite cool. I like that.
So I'm thinking more about it,
which is probably a benefit about the watch
that I haven't really fully realized yet,
but it's probably a good one.
Yeah, and again, one of the most powerful things
can just be to say, hey, to get your attention.
It's what we were talking about with the sponsor earlier.
It's just a break.
Just, you know, think about this.
I've written about using an app, Break Time, on my Mac to do the same thing, to basically
say, hey, you should take a break.
You should get up.
Just you get in the zone sometimes and you think, I got a lot of work to do.
I'm going to move to this.
Now I'll do this.
Now I'll do that.
And to have somebody tapping you on the shoulder or the wrist and say, do something else. Or did
you know that you need to walk more today? You haven't really been that active today. You should
do something about that. That's good. That is useful. And it's not going to cure you of your
sedentary lifestyle, but it can make you stick your head up and say,
oh, yeah, right. I have been meaning to do that thing that I never get around to doing. And maybe
it improves your chances of remembering to do it. So do you want to move on?
Yeah, I don't think I've got, I don't think I've got anything more about the watch right now,
other than to say what we, you to say sort of what we said before.
I like it. I'm enjoying wearing it.
I find it useful.
I don't know if I, you know, it's definitely not a must-have kind of product.
It's not.
It's a fun product, but, you know, the Pebble wasn't a must-have either.
It was fun and interesting, and it allowed me to change the way I interact with my phone and reduce some of my interaction with my phone.
And let me, I also have, I guess this would be the other thing I would say.
I mentioned this last week.
I really like the ability to put my phone down somewhere where I'm not and know that I can attend to a lot of what it does without it.
I like that.
I like that if I'm in another room, I know if something comes through. I don't need to have my phone with me. I can plug my phone
in. I can leave it on the counter and not worry about it. I really like that. I feel a little less
tethered to it. And I know that's funny because the watch is tethered to it, but I feel less like
I'm cut off from this important information source if I don't have it with me.
So I like that part of it.
I don't love when the phone rings and I have to decide whether I'm going to run to get the phone or if I'm going to answer on my watch because I still haven't gotten over answering on my watch seeming like a ridiculous thing to do.
I've done it a bunch, and I think it's fine.
All right. We'll see.
I've got to get used to that idea that answering it on my watch is a thing that I can actually do
without just rolling my eyes thinking that I'm a ridiculous person.
But you know that? It's just the feeling.
For this watch to be successful, one of the ways for it to be successful, there are probably lots, is to change your relationship that your phone time is there because you want to, uh, do something on
your phone and have it less that because that's the only way to interact is through the phone.
So you pull the phone out and now you're checking all your different apps, um, to like put one more
like step between you and, and the, and the phone and being able to take it out of your pocket and
know that if something really comes up, you will know about it, but you don't need to have the whole thing in your pocket all the time.
And I have already noticed some of that.
So that's kind of a fun experience to go through.
I think people kind of get used to just hearing a lot of this stuff, right?
This reminds me of when I used to listen to podcasts when the original iPhone came out.
There is lots to say about it.
People have lots of thoughts about it and lots of thoughts on it.
And it's kind of, this is how it's going to be.
People are going to keep talking about it and we're going to keep changing opinions on it.
And it's like, then an app's going to come out that we want to talk about.
It's going to be an interesting kind of feeling. And I think it's going to be an interesting uh an interesting kind of feeling and i think
it's something we're just going to have to get used to yeah yeah i think so but it's fun i mean
we and we talked about it last week the 1.0 thing i i love i love that this is new because we're all
experiencing it and we're all we're all um learning things about ourselves and how we what our
relationship with our phone is
and how having something on our wrist can be different.
There are people like Marco who have never worn a watch, who are now wearing a watch,
and they are experiencing like, what is a watch about, right?
And then there are other people who have that realization like,
oh yeah, this is why people do wristwatches instead of pocket watches. It is
easier to check the time when you can glance at your wrist instead of pulling something out of
your pocket. And everybody's having different experiences of how it fits in their lives. And
this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how technology affects people.
The fluoroelastomer meets the road.
Thank you. Yes, this is where the fluoroelastomer meets the road, Mike.
You nailed it.
Ding.
But, you know, because this is new tech that we're not entirely sure of how it works and how it's going to fit into our lives.
And in changing things about our lives, it reveals things about how we live our lives.
And that's really interesting, too.
our lives, it reveals things about how we live our lives. And that's really interesting too.
So that's the fun of being on the cutting edge of being a gadget nerd and having these new gadgets that people haven't had before, or people in our community haven't had before. And prior to a
couple of years ago, people haven't had. That's a lot of fun. It's not for everybody, but I love it.
I love that we're all, you know, we all have opinions and they differ. Somebody on Twitter
the other day, I made a statement on Twitter the other day that I feel like,
it was based on what our conversation was, I feel like the app stuff is still too prominent
and that I'd almost rather not have an apps display at all and have the last pane of the glances be an app list
rather than have an apps honeycomb thing.
Because I feel like glances are really good.
Between glances and notifications,
you should be able to get to apps.
And that manually going and launching an app
seems kind of ridiculous to me.
And somebody on Twitter said,
I completely disagree.
I hate glances and I love going to the app picker.
And she might be right.
She and I might both have valid opinions. I might be right. I might be right you know she she and i might be both had valid opinions i might be
right i might be wrong we don't know we we don't know whether one of us is an oddball or whether
we're 50 50 or whether one of us you know two weeks down the line goes oh no and now i get it
um we don't know and that's fun i love love that. I love that about this part of the life
cycle of a product. So now I have more to say about apps. Yeah. I definitely stand by my feelings
that like calling it the home screen and having it be like this is, I'm still getting used to it.
I still think it's kind of weird. But anyway, in now leaving my phone around the house
and me being in different places in the house, there are sometimes I need to check things. And
like, let's say I want to read an email, right? That's come through. And I'm like, I wanted to
see what that says. I can open up the mail app and read it. Right. And I can mark it as unread
and come back to it again later. Or if I want to send a text message,
or there's like a chain of messages come through,
and I've dismissed them,
but now I want to go back in and read them and do something about them,
I can open the messages app and get to that.
Or if I want to check what's coming up on OmniFocus,
I've been doing that a bunch,
and I can open the OmniFocus app to do that.
Or I've added like,
I use Due for like alerts and reminders
for certain things that
happening up later in the day like I'll remember to take out the trash in 20 minutes I don't really
put that stuff in OmniFocus I can open due use Siri and say remind me to take out the trash in
20 minutes it does all the text passing that it usually does and then we'll just it quite simply
adds it in and then remind me in 20 minutes like i've started to use some of the
apps a little bit more um and i'm starting to see more utility in some of them that are designed
really well yeah yeah they're not they're not bad at all um and some of them are incredibly clever
i just feel like i think there's this question of how do you get to them and like my number one way
to get to an app is that i tap
on a glance or a notification or that's maybe number one and number two sometimes i go out and
fish for an app in the sea of little app icons so you know maybe we'll get used to it and realize
that it's really great or maybe at some point apple will be like oh yeah this isn't the right
metaphor here but um we'll see. But it's interesting.
I am surprised at how...
I feel like developers talk down
the capability of these apps so much
that I'm now surprised when they do things.
That's a good point.
So good job, developers, for saying,
no, no, no, we can't do anything with WatchKit.
Sorry.
No, can't.
Nope.
Just don't get your hopes up
because there's literally nothing we can do.
It's just going to be a big spinning thing that says wait for better apps to come later this year.
And then you get the apps and you're like, oh, look, look at what it's doing.
It gave me the baseball score or it lets me control my podcast playback, even though, you know, it's not super powerful.
It's and we know what's happening behind the scenes and how it's kind of being driven by the iPhone, but in the end, um, they can be cool. They're not all cool,
but some of them are very cool. So you have something else that you just threw in a document
here. Yeah, I just drew it. I just want to mention this. Um, and this wasn't in our document, but,
um, so Dan Morin, uh, has an Amazon echo. I told him he should buy one and write about it for Six Colors.
And then, you know, and if he didn't like it and regret it, we would pay for it because, you know, I want to write about it sometime.
And it's, if people don't know, it's this little tube, metal tube that is like, it's like Siri in a tube.
It's Siri embedded in a Bluetooth speaker, essentially. So it's got access. It's like Siri in a tube. It's Siri embedded in a Bluetooth speaker, essentially.
So it's got access.
It's voice control.
It's got access to Amazon's kind of like cloud stuff behind it.
And I just wanted to say that I saw it and it was kind of neat.
Like it's not going to win the awards for best speaker or anything.
And yet, you know, it sounded pretty good.
And it's a Bluetooth speaker.
And then you can do stuff like, especially since Amazon has their Prime Music library, which is a pretty decent library of music. It's nothing fantastic, but it's pretty decent. And Dan was showing me you can just say, and that device is called Alexa. So I guess I'm'm gonna say ahoy ahoy tube um i don't think i think dan is the only person that's
gonna have this problem yeah okay well let me put it this way i'm gonna play jazz in dan's house now
because you say alexa play some jazz and alexa says playing some jazz music from amazon prime
music and it just plays jazz or and it's tied into, I think it's
got a Pandora integration. So you can have it play music. You can ask it the typical Siri things.
It's not quite as good as Siri. Like with Siri, you can kind of stumble around and say, you know,
did the Giants play tonight? And it'll say, oh, the San Francisco Giants beat the Los Angeles
Dodgers tonight. With Alexa, you have to say it more specifically
than Siri. Siri gives you more latitude. Um, but that all said, I think, I think it's a cool idea.
And the microphone is really good. Like you can be a couple of rooms away and, um, and it will
pick up your, your, your command and you can, it's got a little light ring on the top. So when
you say the name, the ring sort of spins and then so it's like like the
little spinning siri icon except it's on the top of this device so you can see it um so it's a it's
a neat idea it was a lot of fun and dan has a wemo light uh timer switch thing which uh so you could
say um alexa turn off the light and the light turns off and she says okay i thought that was
i thought that was pretty cool too.
And they just announced If This Then That integration.
Or as you like to say.
If.
If.
Marco was upset because I didn't give enough Ts.
Not enough Ts.
There's lots of Ts at the end there.
If.
If this and that integration means you can do things like, right now you can say, Alexa, put marshmallows on my shopping list and she'll put it on the Amazon shopping list.
But there's if this, then that integration.
So your shopping list and your to-do list can get pushed to to-do list apps and reminders and things like that.
They don't have to just stay inside sort of Amazon's little ecosystem.
And my thought was, and Dan mentioned this too. So Dan's thought was, and I agree with it, I'll put it that way,
full credit to Dan. It actually feels like a product that should be made by Google or Apple
in the sense that they have better ecosystems behind them. Amazon, it's a little bit weird.
It's like, you know, Amazon, I don't think of Amazon as providing a to-do list for me, right?
There are other options.
But the if this, then that stuff makes it, kind of gets it out there into a wider bit of integration.
So it's a weird product.
You still have to sign up to be invited to buy it, which is also weird.
But I kind of thought it was cool.
Again, in the sense, a little bit like what we were talking about with the Apple Watch.
It certainly doesn't seem necessary, but it's fun.
And, you know, it's also a Bluetooth speaker, I believe.
So you can also just play things through it in this, through this metal tube,
even if you're not telling it what to do with your voice.
So anyway, I thought it was neat.
And it turns the light on and off.
I thought that was a lot of fun.
Dan's really annoyed because it worked.
He's in the chat room now and he's telling telling us that it did do it so maybe we should say like
hey alexa turn off the light and just see what happens oh yeah that'll turn off dan's light it's
true um hey hey uh alexa add marshmallows to my shopping list sorry dan it's like i'm still there dan what i don't understand though is why
the naming thing is so crazy to me because you can't set your own name which i'm sure it said
you could in the you can say you can say you i believe you can only set amazon and alexa as the
name yeah so i don't know why they call it the Echo. It doesn't make any sense.
Like if you can call it either Amazon or Alexa, why is it not called the Amazon Alexa? I think
the reason that they used it is they wanted to personalize it and they wanted a series of sounds
that is less likely to be vocalized in normal speech in English. I really think that's the reason.
It's like to avoid the Ahoy telephone problem, right?
But then why do they call it the Echo?
Because you talk and it says things back to you?
But why not call it Alexa?
Like Siri is called Siri.
I almost wrote in,
or maybe Alexa is Amazon's intelligent agent technology,
but the product
is not that. I don't know. Dan
reports that his light's not on. Alexa,
turn the light on.
Take that, Dan.
But, you know, yeah,
it's a weird product.
Actually, one of my thoughts was
what if a next generation Apple TV did that?
What if it was tied in? What if it had ties to Apple's services?
And even when the TV was off, what if you had the ability to instruct it and have it tell you things?
I don't know whether that is something Apple wants to do or if that's a little too far afield for a TV product.
But it struck me that there's maybe a product category there.
And that it's kind of funny that Apple and Google aren't making that product because I think they've got more of the technology behind it than Amazon does.
And yet Amazon is the one who's made this product because Amazon is crazy and
will make anything apparently. But I thought it was cool.
It was a lot of fun to play with at least. And, and it's got an iOS app,
so you can actually look in the Android app and you can look and see like you
can go through the past, past things that you've said to it stuff
like that yeah is there a review coming i don't know dan is saying he's unsubscribing from our
show i i don't know i it would be nice uh did he write about it on six colors he may have i've been
traveling so much that um he has he he wrote it once. I wonder, and he mentioned it
in a Clockwise,
in Clockwise 84
he talks about it
a little bit.
But maybe there's more there.
Or maybe there isn't
and that's lean.
Or maybe Dan is tired of us.
Dan just texted me
a picture of all
the terrible things
that we've been doing
to his Alexa.
Can we get that picture
in the show notes?
Yeah, yeah.
He just sent me his shopping list with marshmallows on it.
I really hope that Dan's the only person
because otherwise we're going to have another one of these.
Again, we're going to have to go to Ahoy Metal Tube if we have to.
Yeah.
That may have to happen.
I really hope that there is a small overlap of people that have that problem.
Oh, God.
If we've gotten in trouble for this,
then I'd just like to apologize now.
Who's got an Amazon Echo?
Come on.
There can't be that many people who've got that.
I'd like to think so.
We do actually have one more small topic this week
that we're going to talk about at the end of the show.
Yes. Because we're going to talk about at the end of the show. Yes.
Because we're going to talk about Age of Ultron.
Yes.
But we don't want to talk about it now because people haven't seen the movie.
Not everybody wants to hear us talk about movies and not everybody has seen it.
Exactly.
So we're going to do our ask.
Oh, my word.
What's happened to me today?
You said ask.
Yeah. We're going to me today? You said ask. Yeah.
Boy, we're going to have you saying ax pretty soon.
Ax upgrade.
Never.
That will not ever happen.
Good.
I hope not.
We're going to do our ask upgrade segment.
Ask upgrade.
Ask upgrade, which is brought to you by our friends at MailRoute.
Jason, please tell the people.
Oh, MailRoute.
So we just did an incomparable about Age of Ultron.
And in talking about MailRoute, I suggested that if you imagine a world without spam viruses or bounced email, perhaps you're imagining the Age of Ultron where Ultron filters all your spam.
But no, this is not a dystopia.
It is a utopia.
It's the real world.
Upgrade listeners can get a very special deal on MailRoute, by the way.
So listen at the end of this explanation.
But let me tell you how Upgrade, I want to call it Upgrade, MailRoute works.
MailRoute is kind of a magical service.
It lives in the cloud.
You don't have to buy any hardware or software.
You don't have to install or maintain anything. You point your MX record for your
domain. This is the thing that tells the internet where your email should go. And you pointed at
MailRoute. MailRoute takes in everything that comes in across the transom of the internet,
all the junk, all the spam, everything that you don't want, and everything that you do.
And then their smart servers filter it out. They know what spam looks like.
They know what viruses look like.
Those never get delivered to you.
And then the stuff that is good that you do want
does get delivered to you.
So your email server and your inbox
never see the bad stuff.
The bad stuff doesn't go in your spam folder
that is on your computer.
It never gets there.
It doesn't have to take time to download that stuff.
That junk just never even appears.
It stays up on MailRoute and there's some nice tools for you to check and see what got filtered. If you want to check and see if something got misfiltered. I almost never see
something get misfiltered, maybe once a month. And then with one click, you can whitelist that
sender and automatically have it delivered to you. So as a desktop user, it makes me happy.
If you're an email administrator or an IT professional, they have all the tools fully buzzword compliant, everything that you need
for somebody who's going to provide a mail service to you. There's an API for easy account management,
support for LDAP and Active Directory, TLS, outbound relay, mailbagging.
Alexa, please bag my mail.
TLS, outbound relay, mailbagging.
Alexa, please bag my mail.
Alexa, add mailbagging to my to-do list.
Everything that you'd want from people handling your mail,
it's in there in MailRoute.
And here is the previously foreshadowed deal.
This is not valid for Ultron, by the way.
This is only valid for humans.
Not valid for Alexa either, frankly.
Go to MailRoute.net. Slash Go to mailroute.net slash upgrade.
Mailroute.net slash upgrade.
That's the name of the show.
That's how they know that we sent you.
You will get a free trial.
You will get 10% off.
You will not get 10% off your first order or 10% off an order.
You will get 10% off the lifetime of your account by signing up.
And there is a free trial, so you can give it a shot even if you're not sure.
Before you buy, you can give it a shot and test it out
and find out if it's right for you.
MailRoute.net slash upgrade.
And thank you so much to MailRoute and not to Ultron
for sponsoring Upgrade and supporting RelayFM.
Thank you, MailRoute.
So I have a few Ask Upgrades for us.
So this one comes from Upgradee and Robert.
I have a question
regarding iCloud Drive and the OS
10 Documents folder. I was thinking of
moving my entire Documents
folder, only 3.4 gigabytes,
to iCloud Drive to have access to
all of my documents from anywhere that I am.
Do you believe that this
idea, placing all of my documents in
iCloud Drive, makes for a sound strategy documents in iCloud Drive makes for a sound
strategy does iCloud Drive work like Dropbox in that sense I assume there would still be a local
copy on my Mac that I could continue to back up with Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner
as someone who's been reviewing Yosemite iCloud and all of its options I'm curious as to your
opinion this is a good one um because I haven't even considered this but it makes sense in theory
because then apps that you use in your ios devices could easily get access to that by going into the
document picker like what would be the harm in doing this other than icloud chewing it all up
but in theory that doesn't happen right right it um if you've got the space
for it you could totally do it um 3.4 gigs is not a lot my yeah my only hesitation but if you buy a
lot of extra storage space for say photosync and you've got 200 gigs left over then you're in really
good shape um my feeling is dropbox gives you more information about what it's doing.
iCloud Drive is a it-just-works kind of thing
where I feel like I don't have a lot of feedback
about what it's transferring and what it's not transferring.
But, yeah, you've got cloud storage.
I would say you might want to try it out with some stuff
and see how it goes. It does
auto sync in the background. It does a lot of those Dropbox-y things. And if you've got the
space available, then take advantage of it and see if it works for you and if it makes your life
easier to have that stuff syncing across your devices. I think it's a perfectly valid thing.
I mean, my take on iCloud Drive is that it's probably not the best product for somebody who is more finicky and technical and wants, you know, people like probably the listeners of the show who want to, you know, are not satisfied with, you know, a smaller solution when a bigger one that's more complicated and gives them more options will do.
But, you know, iCloud Drive is Apple's attempt to do Dropbox for everybody. I mean,
just super simple, built-in Dropbox, essentially, is what it is. So yeah, I'd say give it a try.
I don't think it's going to eat your data. And you can back it up because those files are on
your hard drive. They should back up just fine. So give it a try. I think I wouldn't copy maybe
everything. I'd say try it with some of your documents that you use and see how it goes
and maybe move some more then and do it gradually and see what happens.
That's what I would say.
We actually have more iCloud and space-related questions.
This one comes from Michael.
I'm using photos of iCloud library enabled.
The space in iCloud is vastly different to that on the disk.
Is this normal?
That's a good question.
I don't know if that's normal.
There are lots of weird things going on with space.
The space that your photos library lists is complicated because it's, first off, they're like the hard links and stuff,
but it should be roughly what you're doing.
Although, let's see, I mean, there's some things that don't sync,
but the media all syncs.
I don't know.
This is a good question.
It could be that the way that the sizes are measured on your local disk
versus in the cloud are different, that they actually measure the space differently.
It could be that you have duplicates that shouldn't be, that you have duplicates that are local that it doesn't bother because it knows that they're duplicates, although that's possible.
I don't think they transcode videos, although they do transcode or convert.
You've got a lot of pings, like screenshots and stuff.
Those all get converted to JPEGs, which are much smaller.
That's one example where things get converted.
So I don't know.
Vastly different if it's done uploading and it says it's the same number of photos in both places.
That is a little bit weird, but I don't – it's the same number of photos um in both places that is a little bit
weird but i i don't it's so early yet i don't have any i i don't have an experience to match
this so i'm not quite sure what's going on there my only thought on this was the optimized disk
space thing so you could have less on the disk because sure yes physically less on a disk if
optimized disk space is turned on that
would be the case absolutely that you wouldn't have all those photos on your disk so the the
space in iCloud would be vastly larger than the space on your disk um but I don't I don't know I
assumed that wasn't what he was asking but I don't I don't know so there are some reasons um but I
would say make sure that you know the the number that you're seeing is the number that's in iCloud
it's not resizing your photos or anything like that
if you're doing iCloud photo library
it's not resizing them
and in fact it's keeping the originals and your edited versions
so it should be in the ballpark
So this next question comes from Will
and Will has asked upgrade curious to know what uh our
thoughts are on soundcloud's podcast platform update um and mentioned that timed comments
seem like an interesting thing yeah so this is out of beta now yeah it's been there for a long
time in fact we used this on the macworld and uh andwise podcast back at IDG because we were in the beta.
And our chapter marks came through as comments in SoundCloud, which is kind of interesting.
And people can leave comments.
And it's kind of a cool idea.
I don't know a lot of the details.
When it was in beta, it was kind of weird.
It was hard to find the download URL.
SoundCloud really wanted plays.
If you weren't in a podcast app,
they really wanted the plays to be in their embedded player,
which is a problem because sometimes you want the MP3 URL to pass somewhere
or to link to.
And so it got kind of frustrating.
They were playing hide the MP3 with the user,
which I really didn't like.
I also didn't love the fact that they showed every play.
So like everybody knew if you use SoundCloud,
everybody knows exactly how many people downloaded
every episode that you did.
I checked this.
You can turn that off.
Yeah.
So this is the thing is it seems to not do that anymore.
So that's cool.
And I think they got better about the download URL thing too.
So I think it's great that there's another player. I think they got better about the download URL thing too. So I think it's
great that there's another player. I taught a class, I mentioned this in a previous show
about podcasting, and then I just spoke at this conference about podcasting. One of the
questions is, where do I put my files? And there are not a lot of great answers because
your web hoster is probably not going to get behind you posting an hour of podcast every week. You at some point are going
to need somebody to host that stuff. And adding SoundCloud to the list adds another player here.
And SoundCloud seems to really want to be the container of sound on the internet. And so them
supporting podcasting is really cool. That said, I don't use it.
And I don't know if I would want things like formal commenting from listeners on SoundCloud because then it's on SoundCloud and it's on their site and it's not on my site.
It's not on Relay.
It's not on Incomparable.
It's over on SoundCloud.
And that's what they want is they want to draw everybody to their platform.
So I like it as another option.
And for some people, it may be really great.
I'm not entirely sure it's one that I particularly want to participate in, but maybe.
I think it's great that it's finally public because that was in beta for like, what, two years?
Something like that? A long time.
So when people used to ask me about SoundCloud before and like why I didn't use them or what I thought about them,
I said I wasn't going to go near it until they had a business model
because during the beta it was just free.
And now they have a business model,
which is awesome because you can pay, right?
And you get upload time increases
and you get additional statistic information,
which is kind of like what Libsyn has as well, right?
The more you pay, the more data you get.
But I would still not go with them myself.
I may say check them out if you're interested.
And mine is because the company that I use, Libsyn,
have been in business for over 10 years,
and they've been doing this for 10 years,
and I know that what they do works.
I haven't used SoundCloud.
I'm not interested in using a brand, not a brand new,
but a new thing when my old thing works
great like
especially for something which for me is so important
I might test it out and play around a little bit
more but for now
I'm going to stick with where I am
right well it's nice that there
are more options you're right it does actually
make a lot of us uneasy
when it's something that's being given away for free
instead of I feel good about paying Libbsyn as strange as it sounds like look i on some levels
i feel like given how much data is being transferred there i'm not sure i'm paying
them enough honestly but i'm glad that they have a business and i'm paying them i i feel like
comfortable in that and with soundcloud it's like why are they giving everybody free podcasting what's's the what's the end game here? And like I said, I think maybe the end game is
you get you to host your podcast, and we get your content in our ecosystem where we can auto tag it
and connect it to other things and just kind of keep people in SoundCloud. But that's a little
like YouTube, right? And we know how the YouTubers feel about everybody being in YouTube is there may
come a time when they say, we're going to put ads in your content.
And if you want to sell ads, you need to cut us in or you need to, you know, you need to go somewhere else.
But we're really the only game in town. And that's the scary part of that kind of situation.
But, you know, the SoundCloud people are cool. I've met them. I met some of them when I was in Berlin a few years ago.
I met some of them when I was in Berlin a few years ago.
And it's a cool service, and I think people should check it out.
But they should also check out Libsyn and see if their ISP lets them post files for their podcast too.
Yeah, it's good. I like businesses making tools for podcasters because that doesn't happen a lot.
And it's a good sign that there's more of that now.
And last question today from Rob.
What does the Apple watch we talked about
just a little bit about this earlier what does the apple watch consider exercise that fills the
ring the exercise ring is it based on heart rate i assume that is the case yeah i think it's time
above a target heart rate i think that's what it is it's like you have to have enough time above
the target heart rate that's you know aerobic exercise that's like you have to have enough time above the target heart rate. That's, you know, aerobic exercise.
That's like if you don't lift your heart rate, like walking is great, being active and not sedentary.
But if your heart doesn't go above a certain rate that it, you know, whatever it's using as its baseline, it doesn't consider that exercise because you're not, you know, it's nice to take a walk.
But if you're not raising your heart rate, you're not really getting exercise.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
I wondered if you knew, but if you don't, then that makes sense.
I don't.
I think that's my educated guess, but I don't know for sure.
Cool.
So, spoiler horn time.
Right, so I didn't want to spend a ton of time on this sure because this is not mike watches a movie
you know yeah we're doing that next week next week um so i need to watch a movie this week
and uh and of course you did a great episode of the incomparable that i'm about halfway through
um which is a lot of fun uh andy isn't totally breaking my heart yet
he's kind of slightly breaking it
Andy's not feeling the magic of the
Marvel Cinematic Universe that's true
but I think
him not absolutely loving it
and questioning
I think Andy and Iko has a lot of
existential thoughts about like
you know is this a movie or is it
part of a franchise did we get what we you know is this a movie or is it part of a franchise
did did we get what we you know did we get what we paid for versus could they have been a little
more you know ambitious and in certain ways and i i like um i like being challenged by andy he
didn't he didn't sort of like hijack the the podcast where we all end up just kind of pelting
him with questions which is sort of what happened with the first Avengers episode we did.
But,
you know,
I think Andy raises a lot of valid points.
What I said in the,
on the podcast about,
about that we did yesterday about age of Ultron is it's kind of like not a
movie.
It's like something new.
This is a new,
these franchise continuing story feature films.
They have to be feature films because they need to charge people a lot of
money.
They need to earn a billion dollars to pay for these giants, all these special effects and the actors and all
that. But they're kind of not movies, right? They're installments in a collection of things.
It's not a TV series quite, but it's not just a movie either. I remember when I saw the sixth
Harry Potter movie, I very much had the reaction like they should have put a previously on Harry
Potter at the beginning because really what I was watching was two and a half hours of the latest episode of an,
you know, an annual released television series that goes to theaters, but is much more like
a television series. It's recurring characters. We see them again. It's the next year. What's
the next story? There's a story arc and then there's an individual plot in the movie, but
there's a bigger story arc. And the Marvel movies are like that. i feel like the star wars movies are probably going to be like that too
dc wants to do it with their superhero movies so i thought andy asked some interesting challenging
questions about like the nature of what are you trying to get out of this thing and is this a
movie you enjoy or is it kind of part of a larger thing and yeah he totally isn't under the spell of
it but at the same time he thought it was better than the last one and saw the positive and as well
as the negative in it.
I thought that was a good conversation to have
because these are not like
movies as we
used to think of them. These are franchise
installments or something.
That all said,
I had a great time.
I really liked it.
Did you like it? I loved it. Absolutely loved it.
I got to see it like 10 days ago
because it was released earlier in the UK.
The premiere was here.
My understanding was the government
gave like a ton of money to Disney.
It's like in tax breaks and stuff.
They shot a lot of it here.
And it's a thing that's happening more and more,
especially with the Marvel movies.
Many of the Marvel movies,
including the last Iron Man movie,
were released earlier by like two weeks nearly in the uk which is great for me
because we very rarely disney is typically very bad with this with their animation they release
things here like a month two months three months late it's really weird and it was one movie i
can't remember which one it was one of the pix movies, where it was getting ready to be released on video in the US
before it came out here.
So, you know, it can suck, and I don't really understand why,
but we got it a bit early, which is great.
And I think the thing that I've heard so far
that I didn't agree with, especially with Andy,
and I think a couple of other people on the panel,
was the action scenes.
I loved every single one of them.
The fight scenes that were confusing i loved them because they
were confusing because i feel like they were meant to be they were meant to just be chaos
like you just fog before crazy stuff is happening yeah like the first one like the first the first
one like the first scene the assault on the castle-y thing yeah and it was just kind of like
for me it was like this is all crazy no one really knows what's going on because the avengers felt
kind of ambushed in that scenario for the amount of people that were there right and then it was
kind of just like here is a bunch of superheroes like smashing into stuff like for a bit and i feel
like it was kind of like let's get this of the way, because the other ones later had more meaning to them.
Yeah.
And it was kind of just...
I mean, not to get all meta on it,
but you could argue,
I feel like sometimes I was arguing this last night
to not a lot of reaction,
is the action is there because people want action,
and the action was great,
and there are those moments
that look like comic book panels,
and although I have some problems with the opening, the great thing about the opening is it establishes the
characters that they're fighting kind of is beside the point uh character wise plot wise
it's you know it opens the movie with a bang but that's also you know what's i think the most
important thing in that entire 20 minutes is the dialogue it's the it's the interactions it's the
humor and the interactions between the characters it's like the the explosions make it all go down better but you know what we're
really doing is like checking with your friends that you haven't seen for a while and what are
they up to oh they're assaulting a castle tell me more right and there were also some parts there
that were set up for the rest of the movie like captain america and thor are now like a duo that yeah wasn't in any other movie but now they're
like they use each other to make their own attacks more uh they hit harder right yeah i love hitting
the hammer with the uh or hitting using the hammer to hit the shield yeah it's a pretty awesome move
there was a bunch of that and and just in general there was a lot more especially in the action scenes interplay between the characters which shows them as a team and i really loved
all of that that's the whole point of the movie is i mean serenity on the incomparable called it a
capstone of the you see everybody in their own movies and then this is where you get them
together and the whole point is yes it is overstuffed but the whole point is you get to
see them together that's that's why you do a team up it's like you know hey iron man thor captain america blackwood they're they're all talking to
each other and the hulk and they're all you know we don't we don't get to see that when they're off
do in other movies but here they're all together bouncing off each other and that's fun i was very
happy for the character development in general yeah um hawkeye's character development like
that whole arc of like he seems to be crazy again oh it seems like he's working for the other side
right there's that whole like you know i don't know if you caught that but like when he's on
the phone and he's saying like yes mom yeah they work for you and i was like oh hydra and then it
was like oh no wait family on a farm and it's like what is this and i love when they
go to the farm i don't know if i hope other people will get this reference it reminded me
of the teenage mutant ninja turtles movie when they go to like the super sad house do you remember
that it's like one of one of the turtles movies and they go to like this weird house in the country
and they hang out for a few days and everyone's sad i know nothing about the teenage mutant ninja
turtles but i totally get it's your your you, your defeated heroes have to, like, lick their wounds and rededicate themselves to—
I love scenes like that in these kinds of movies where they have to, you know, talk—
they have to talk amongst themselves, and it's good for character moments.
And then they rededicate themselves, and then they go back out and fight the bad guy again.
It's good stuff.
And I thought they did a really great job of it
in Hawkeye's Secret Farm with his secret wife,
who is Linda Cardellini from Freaks and Geeks.
And I had that moment of like,
has it been that long that now she plays a mom?
She was a high school student,
just like the other day on Freaks and Geeks,
and now she's Hawkeye's wife.
But I thought she was great. That's a
hard part to just be well you're going to be the wife
and mom of a superhero
and you know but they did some good
casting and she was really great.
And that was just all very unexpected
and I was very very happy to
have all of that.
I liked
I see the criticism but I liked
the Black Widow's increased storyline as well.
I understand why it upsets people.
And I get it about it being that she's in love with someone.
But it was kind of the same for Bruce Banner as well.
Like, we kind of, if you've only, I mean, if you look at Mark Ruffalo's character,
Like we kind of, if you've only, I mean, if you look at Mark Ruffalo's character,
like Mark Ruffalo has had the least amount of time in the movies, potentially.
He has absolutely had the least amount.
He's only in the other Avengers movie.
That's it.
And I think, I mean, I don't know. I'd really like to see what Marvel and Disney's take on if the previous Hulk movies are canon or not.
Well, so the Ang Lee one isn't, but the Edward Norton one is.
Okay.
And that's the one that's got Tony Stark having a drink with the general
in the one scene to make it kind of tied in, but not.
But I kind of want a Hulk and Black Widow movie now.
Yes, me too.
Because if they're afraid of doing a Hulk movie,
and Black Widow's in all the S.H.I.E.L.D. movies,
I mean, you could argue that although she hasn't been a title character,
she is super important in Winter Soldier.
I mean, she is a key to that film.
She is as important in Winter Soldier as Captain America is.
I think that's right.
I mean, it's like her and Nick Fury and Captain America is what that movie is.
It's like a buddy cop movie, though.
Yeah, it is.
We're down at the police station,
except it's super,
it's a super police station.
Super police.
Super corrupt Nazi police.
So you're right.
I mean, we need to be on guard on the trope of like,
oh, sure, the only woman
in the Avengers
and she's got a love interest.
But at the same time,
the Hulk, you know,
Bruce Banner,
that is,
that is,
it's happening to both of them.
They also,
it's not a relationship
from the comics. So I feel like it's also a reaction
to how great they were together in the first avengers movie which they were and and saying
well that's really interesting and i think it does the thing is yeah we can talk about you know
does this put her in a girlfriend context and that can be an issue but i love that it tells us some
things about her character i think i i really enjoyed the scene
where she says everybody i know wants to kill people i'm surrounded everybody i know is is in
the business of killing and hurting people and breaking things and you are the only person i know
who doesn't want to do it who's fighting with everything they've got to not kill people and i
like that because that's like that's what's interesting about Banner, right?
He is as reluctant as you can get.
And so the fact that she's attracted to that because he's the resistance.
Also that she's sort of like the Hulk whisperer now is also kind of cool
because we remember that she was really terrified of the Hulk in the first Avengers movie on the Hel helicarrier that's kind of a cool little bit too so i thought that was fun i
think i do think you got to be on guard but i think generally um i think joss whedon did a good job
uh making black widow um have more depth and uh be a more interesting character and uh so i thought
that was good.
I did take from it as well that she was the one with the control in the relationship,
which was a different kind of take, you know,
especially if you're saying like,
I get like the idea of the girlfriend complex,
but I would argue that potentially Bruce Banner
fills that role because he is like,
she has actual control over him.
And if you were looking at it,
like the way that those things are usually played out,
it maybe was slightly flipped.
At least that was the way that I took from it.
Because she actually has control over him.
By, you know,
and not only just his emotions,
but she's the only one that can control the Hulk.
Which is very interesting as a thing.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I liked all that stuff.
What else?
What else you got?
This is, you know,
I talked about it for an hour and a half yesterday,
so I'm interested in what else you've got.
I really liked and saw the idea of let's not kill everyone.
I liked that.
I feel like that they didn't take it too far,
in my opinion.
Like the idea of searching, too far, in my opinion.
Like the idea of searching, scanning buildings, checking for civilians.
Like I appreciated that and liked that and felt that they did a really good job with that. I genuinely believe, though, that like raising that town above the rest of the earth was like a metaphor of all of that kind of stuff.
Like this is an isolated area um and
i really loved ren's uh idea of something incomparable that it was everybody was reacting
that way because of ptsd from new york didn't think of it that way thought that was really smart
i i agree the idea that they went through a situation where there was this horrible destruction
and that they were
trying not to and although although i i do agree that you know you can read it as a commentary on
like man of steel yeah i think it was a commentary on man of steel but like the in-story reason is
because of new york yeah well and i think it's broader than that i think i think that i think
i think it's it's also just like this these are who our heroes are is that i mean there's that moment where hawkeye who we've been set up being
like oh he's totally gonna die because we've seen all the signs of him saying goodbye to his wife
and kids and all that stuff right but and he sees the kid trapped under the rubble and he's sitting
in his safe you know little chair and he and he has a look on his face he's like oh geez i gotta
i gotta i gotta go out there probably gonna get me
killed but i can't leave that kid there was very surprised they killed off quicksilver that
surprised me that seemed like a really good character with a lot of space to grow so here's
the thing quicksilver is not really much of an avenger he's much more of an x-men character and
quicksilver and scarlet witch are shared between the x-men and Avengers franchises. And there was a Quicksilver in the latest X-Men movie, in fact.
So in hindsight, I'm not surprised they killed him off
because he's not really an Avengers kind of character
and Scarlet Witch is very much an Avengers character.
So it sort of makes sense.
Like they don't really need him.
They go together.
They're a pair. They're brother and sister. They're the children of Magneto, except they don't really need him they go together they're a pair they're
brother and sister they're the children of magneto except they can't say that in this movie because
they don't own magneto that is a different studio that has magneto um but uh but that actually leads
into something that i that i also wanted to point out which is when i started to read comics uh
adventures comics in the 80s the two leaders of the of the avengers were not iron man
and captain america they were the vision and the scarlet witch and so seeing vision and the scarlet
witch and they even put a scene because joss whedon is not that much older than me he even put
in a scene where vision flies and saves her and like puts his arms around her and lifts her up
into the air and i thought oh because they're married in the comics.
At least in the 80s, they were married,
the Vision and the Scarlet Witch,
and they were the power couple of the Avengers.
And so it was fun to see those characters
because those are sort of like my Avengers
are a little more like the Avengers we see
at the end of the movie,
where it's the Vision and the Scarlet Witch in the mix.
So that was a lot of fun, actually, to see those characters.
And I thought Vision was really neat
because it's Paul Bettany, who's been the voice of jarvis all along and now he gets to
be an you know the android you know with the with the red uh skin and the little mind gem and he's
floating around with his cape and i thought that was kind of cool that and i like that plot twist
that ultron's building his you know evolved body to rule over the Earth.
And they steal it and replace him with Jarvis and create the Vision.
That was a lot of fun.
I liked that whole character creation.
I liked all of that.
I'm very interested in what is next for the Avengers now.
Because the movie kind of sets it up at the end like New Avengers.
And it's like, whoa, but now i don't understand where
like everybody fits and i guess that's the next like two years worth of movies to tell me how that
all works out um i'm i was i was very happy with the movie overall i really really enjoyed it i
came away from it and had very good feelings about it and it's fun i i enjoyed it a lot and
and my family was trying to see it this weekend and they didn't make it.
So I'm going to have to see it with them next weekend.
And you know what?
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to watching it again.
It was a lot of fun.
And I do think, given where they're going, I think we're going to be in one of those situations where we're going to have a movie where the new Avengers are really involved.
These new people we've been introduced to.
Avengers are really involved, these new people we've been introduced to. And then there's going to be that moment where they have to kind of call in, you know, Tony Stark out of retirement to help
solve whatever, you know, I think some of that may go on. But it'll be fun. You know, you can lose
track of your characters when you have too many characters. And that's true. But also how long are
all these actors going to be able to do these parts. So I think that I think it's good to have
some of those new characters in the mix, because Robert Downey jr. is not going to want
to be Tony Stark or at least be Tony
Stark as Iron Man doing lots of stunts
and stuff for a whole lot longer you
think so good to have some other people
who can come in and and you know fly
around and stuff you bet so thumbs up
from me okay and next week we are going
to talk about Raiders of the Lost Ark.
We are indeed.
Which you have not yet seen.
Which I have not yet seen.
So that's something to look out for next week.
Awesome.
But that about wraps it up for this week's episode.
If you want to catch our show notes, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 35.
If you want to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can do that.
I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.
And Jason is at
jsnell
on Twitter he is also the
editor-in-chief over at sixcolors.com
along with
help from people like Mr. Dan Warren
who I would like to issue a formal apology for
for everything we've done to his house
during this week's episode
thanks again to our sponsors this week
our good friends over at Linda Making Making Light, and Mail Route.
And we'll be back next time.
Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell.
Alexa, kill Dan.