Upgrade - 356: This Is Not for You, Developers

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Myke and Jason break down the WWDC 2021 keynote, which brought Apple's various devices together in some surprising ways. Were the changes to iPadOS exciting or disappointing? Are we excited about Shortcuts on the Mac? Will Focus modes keep us focused? And the Upgrade Draft results take an unexpected turn.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 356 and today's show is brought to you by pingdom text expander door dash and wondery my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley it's uh it's wwdc week day in fact which we're in day as we are as you were hearing us the wwdc keynote ended like 20 minutes ago so we have fresh minds bushy tails bright eyed ready to talk about wwdc and my hashtag snow talk question for you jason snell is who won the draft uh jason why don't you tell the Upgradians who won the draft? I don't think I heard you if you said it. You did, Mike.

I won the draft, didn't I, Jason? You did. You did. I got it. I'm the winner. You are. In fact, you won on a twofer that the moment it happened, I thought, oh, well, that's it. I didn't realize when you picked them that you were picking something that would essentially

be worth two if you were right. And you did. And you were right. I didn't think of it either that pushed yeah i know i know but that pushed you by the way i did win the tie the over under on the tie break of the yeah i marked that one off and was very nervous a little bit longer than you thought although not full two hours but but close yeah um but there was a moment where i had crept back into contention with a with a choice that would have been a tough argument for me to make but it was it was at least arguable and then they dropped uh they dropped shortcuts for mac os so again in this moment i'm both exhilarated and realize that i've lost the

draft but but i'm so excited that that got announced. Me too. But one of your other picks was at least one new or updated Apple system app based on Catalyst, which is shortcuts. Shortcuts. So you get two points there. And that was the end. Just for the record, you cleaned up on iOS and iPadOS. You correctly guessed HomeScreen widgets on iPad. More size options for widgets.

They added the XL size on iPad. We'll get to all this later in detail. App library on iPad. New features for the Messages app. I got in this category overhaul of notifications, new features for FaceTime. And the one we would have litigated was arguably Mail app updated with more modern features. Not the features that we said such as but i could have made the argument that one of the haze big features is that they protect you

from tracking pixels and they did announce that it would have been tenuous there would have been a big fight if we would again yeah it would have been ricky ricky like nobody wants that here uh on mac os i got test flight for mac os very at very end, that would have been quite a thing to win on that one, but I was too far behind. I was worried about that, Jason. I'm not going to lie. I got very nervous when TestFlight for Mac, because if there was hardware, you would have potentially won. There was no hardware, obviously. No. So you got those under macOS, like I said, shortcuts for macOS and one new or updated Apple system app based on Catalyst. And then in our other picks

i got home segment of the keynote they built the sets everybody they're gonna use them and always on watch displays improve which is one of my favorite ways to get a point in the draft which is it's mentioned on a slide but not said out loud because apps more apps get always on watch display support in the new version of watch os and you got focus on mental health features in watch os with the new mindfulness app and that uh means that i score it seven six we could have litigated it to seven five it doesn't matter you are the winner congratulations thank you uh we we have no trophy we have no twitter account you just have the warm feeling of returning to your rightful place as uh the

master of developer conference draftery so congratulations let me just say look don't tell federico and steven it is more important for me personally to win the draft the upgrade draft because this is more on knowledge skill and expertise where where the Rickies can be a little bit more on pure luck, especially when it gets to Ricky picks, because we have to pick things that are very unlikely. So you can come across as rather prophetic, right, on Connected. But here, there's so many picks, and it's based on so much stuff, and a lot of it is who's smarter in that like who made

the best picks and so it's harder to i also honestly for me it's harder for me to win this as well yeah then it is the rookies yeah it's it's uh i know i think this is really good i will say that i my upgrade strategy and i'm not trying to make excuses here. Ted Lasso would tell me, just be a goldfish. But my strategy swings a little bit based on when I'm feeling really good about myself, I pick a little bit more for entertainment and a little bit less for strategy. And when I'm feeling down, I pick a little bit more for strategy. And I realized after we did the draft last week that the place where you saw this is when you went in on Apple hardware, I had a moment where I basically said,

oh, well, if you're going to pick that, I'm going to pick it too. And I thought afterward is like, oh, if I really wanted to win, I would have picked something really obvious instead that was going to happen. And that would be a point for me. And I had that moment where I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. It's

more fun this way. What I'm saying is get ready for me to really try to cut you next time. You know what, Jason? Get ready for me to extend my lead. I was soft. Well, yeah, you're going to have to bring it on, Mike, because I was soft before. I was comfortable

with all of my many wins. Now I'm hungry. I'm going for the whole year. Well, yeah, you're going to have to bring it on, Mike, because I was soft before. I was comfortable with all of my many wins. Now I'm hungry. Yeah? I'm hungry for the iPhone event. We'll see. So watch out. We'll see. That's 2-0 to me so far for the year.

Indeed. Dominant. So before we get into, we're going to be touching on pretty much everything that Apple announced, especially going in deep as much as we can at this point on all of the operating systems. Let's just talk about the presentation itself. There were a couple of things to me in the overall presentation that were interesting, where I kind of feel like this is, in some ways, the first pseudo post-COVID video presentation from Apple, in the sense of there were many instances where people were in the same physical space,

right? Which they did. I have not done that really, or they said I've been ramping up to that. And I'm thinking, especially like the intro part where they have like the whole musical number and stuff. Right.

And I know that you, that obviously there, there are ways to make things safe. We know how to do this way better now, vaccinations, all that kind of stuff. But I think we got a little bit more of a taste this time as to what these events could look like going into the future if this is something that Apple wants to keep going in some way. Yep, it's possible. I think we got a little

bit more of that, a little bit more of that this time. It's possible. They definitely, I think, have leaned in over the last year to the idea of writing something that's not quite what you could do with a live presentation and have jokes and transitions and things. And they've been growing and improving that over time. And so we saw even more of that, more jokes and things. Sometimes I think some of the Craig Federighi jokes work probably better if there was an audience to laugh yeah a knowing developer audience so some of those i was like maybe that would have been better talk show host problem right like john oliver i enjoy john oliver but it's not as funny when there's not an audience there's no laughter right it's a totally different kind of vibe so they have they have that issue

um but they also again continue their run of doing kind of goofy intro videos that are available kind of on a meta level here. It's like people imagining things that then they acted out with the fake Tim and fake Craig, which I thought was a lot of fun. I like that. That was a good touch. I thought that was hilarious. Yeah. And then to give us that feeling of a live event, Tim enters the event to applause, and it's a bunch of emojis in the audience. I was really worried that that was going to be like a permanent thing throughout

the presentation. I really didn't want that to be the case. You know, just these bunch of creepy heads. They bookended it. But yeah, it is definitely in line with what we've seen before. I think what's interesting is just on an overall level, the mixture of developer and non-developer content. Apple has struggled with this for a long time. After Apple realized that the developer conference keynote was also an event that drew attention just because it's Apple, Apple has struggled with this idea that they want to use it as a platform to make announcements that a lot of people are going to pay attention to that are not developers, but also that it is a developer conference and the point is the developers. And I felt like, I don't know, I felt like there were moments where it felt

like just another Apple product presentation, and then it would swerve into developer stuff, and then it would swerve back. And I just, I thought it was a little bit odd and I don't know if there's a right answer here. I think this is a fundamental problem. Short of Apple just going full nerd and literally saying, don't watch this regular people, which is what the State of the Union presentation is essentially.

I think this is always going to be a struggle because just because of Apple's prominence, people are going to be paying attention to this and they are going to want to know about the next OS versions for everything. And yet it is also a message to developers. And so they just, they kind of swerve back and forth a little bit. It's hard. It's hard thing for them to do. I think they do a decent job. I mean, let me just preface this by saying I watched all of Google IO this year. And let me tell you, compared to Google, they do a significantly better job. Because the problem with Google IO is you get to hear a bunch about like how Google Search is improving, which no one cares about except Google, right? Like people don't like

general users, I don't really think that they care that you can now shop in google images like i don't need that like and even if i do like i'm not going to be like finally right like it will just happen to me and i'll be fine with it at least with the stuff that apple's announcing one all developers are apple customers so they benefit from this too and also i think setting it sets the tone of what the platforms are going to be focusing on, which can be a guiding light for developers. Where it gets weird for me is when they announce things that some of which have clear ramifications for developers and some of which don't. That's when it gets weird. Because I get wanting to roll out the new features of your operating system. That's one of the things you're doing here.

Because I get wanting to roll out the new features of your operating system. That's one of the things you're doing here. But that's a more kind of broad approach, which does not mean that they're not going to recap all of this in September or October when they release these things. Because not everybody will remember or has paid attention today. That's fine. But they'll do these things where they'll be like, oh, look at this amazing feature. And it's in FaceTime and it's in messages and it's everywhere else. And you can put it in your app too. And then they'll go on to the next amazing feature and they'll be like, and look at this amazing feature. It's in Siri and news. Anyway, moving on. And I'll be like,

yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are the ones that get me where, where it's like, this is for you developers. This is not for you developers. Especially when it's stuff where developers could look at it and be like, I would like to be able to take advantage of this i know you're not going to let me you know like and that's that's the awkward part of it it's hard i'll say i have my very own mini wwdc here at mega studio today underscore david smith is here and we watch wwdc together and i asked him what he felt afterwards and he said that as a developer they felt like there was kind of nothing for him and from the keynote like there wasn't the big thing right last year there were widgets obviously a big deal for david but like you know just in general because like every year there is like

the thing you can as a developer focus on and this year it was like a lot of small things. But what I will say as a customer, as a user, I felt like this year had more things I am interested in that I can use and pay attention to than last year did. I feel like especially iPadOS, which we'll get to later on, it felt like it had more stuff that I think I will be able to take advantage of than say iOS 14 did, where it felt a little bit like, well, we'll just wait and see what developers do. Where this year it felt like Apple themselves have much more to

present as these are features for people. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It definitely felt that way. Also, unsaid here, when we're talking about big picture things, unsaid here, one, unification of the platforms. Did not get a lot of things that were not, like, we got features in the iPhone, basically, the iOS section. And then they said, and also on iPad and Mac. We got features in the iPad section that was, like, also on iPhone and Mac. And we got features in the Mac section that were also on iPad and iPhone. So I felt like there were years when there would be these big features and then you would get to the Mac and it'd be like, nope, nothing here. And not the case now.

It feels like Apple is now really kind of fully integrated where these things are happening everywhere. And so I think that's a good thing, but that's definitely one of the things that I noticed this time. And it goes to the messages about the consumer feature side of it, right? Which is a big part of it. But I think that going along with that is maybe a quest for a little unstated, a little quest for stability, that maybe these features are not as radical. And that's a good thing because there's been a lot going on on Apple's platforms. And maybe this year they're keeping it a little bit lower key.

And I think that is probably okay. Also, because of the pandemic, it's also possible that they really tried to say, let's not bite off more than we can chew after what has been going on for the last year. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by TextExpander from our friends at Smile. TextExpander removes the repetition out of work so you can focus on what matters most.

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correct some common misspellings of my own, to add in some punctuation where I need it, that kind of stuff. But also big things like being able to share the very sponsor copy that we're using for these ads. We share them amongst our team here at RelayFM, so everybody has the right thing when and where they need it. As a listener of Upgrade, you can get 20% off your first year. Just go to texexpander.com slash podcast to learn more about TexExpander today. That's texexpander.com slash podcast. Our thanks to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM let's actually start with the platform that got the least attention

today I think well except for tvOS that got nothing like you know there's a couple of little things coming to tvOS but it's mostly like we had to add this kind of stuff so it's getting some of those like sharey features and things like that and some stuff that we'll maybe touch on when we talk about home but let's talk

about watch os yes it's weird that like to me now i feel like the apple watch has really matured fast as a platform like it has hit the areas that it touches on and they don't seem to be eager or over eager to add features it maybe doesn't need as a platform. I feel like this has been a success for Apple in that way. I think that's right. I think that I have a question, and perhaps we'll learn more as this week goes on, from developers. I want to know, are they hitting the pain points in the background here? Right. Because in terms of features, there's not a lot here in terms of features. It feels very much like Apple really just wants to do app updates on watchOS. So I'm hoping that people who develop watch apps will say, Oh, in the background, they're really addressing a bunch of technical

things that are going to be good. Tell me about developers right the developers are going to have to have to tell us that but from my perspective yeah it's app new apps and app enhancements is a lot of what it is and i think some of these are based on the spirit of the of the times but some of them are also finally kind of clearing up half-baked apps that were kind of obligatory in early versions of watch os that they're now making better and they've been doing this gradually over time but like there was a lot of time spent on the photos app on watch os and that's a great example where as somebody who's written a book about photos every summer and i feel every time they mention photos on stage, I feel the hours that I'm going to be putting in updating my book weigh upon me. But I will tell you, the Photos app on watchOS has been, you know, really not anything, right?

It literally, it auto synced your favorites and you could kind of scroll through them and view a photo. And what they showed with the Photos app is, oh, we made it a real app now. In the context of early watchOS, they couldn't, and they didn't have the time or the power, but now they do. So now they have memory highlights and featured photos, and they have sharing support. They did a whole bunch of stuff for that. And now it's a more powerful thing. Plus they use the portrait mode stuff, which is not technically in the Photos app, but they're using the bunch of stuff for that. And, and now it's a more powerful thing. Plus they use the portrait mode stuff, which is not technically in the photos app, but they're using the portrait mode stuff to build a watch face right there.

It's more sophisticated stuff in the area of photos, because that was an area that they kind of like did the minimal effort on and then let it sit there for a while or text input where we were very excited when scribble came along, but you know, you get, you get scribble and you got your emoji inputs. And as an Apple watch user, whenever'm out somewhere because i will i will frequently go for walks uh or runs and i don't bring my phone i just bring my cellular apple watch look at you

you're an apple ad over there yeah well running through the hills in san francisco and airpods yeah exactly right and then i can see my own 3D map of San Francisco with my eyes. So when they say, oh, well, we want to let you mix scribble and voice input and emoji together and basically do some proper sort of text editing of the thing you're inputting in order to send a message from your Apple Watch. I really appreciate that because I am often in situations where I'm trying to communicate with somebody with just the Apple watch and I can't go back to the iPhone when I get frustrated because I don't have my iPhone with me. And so that's like, yes, of course that makes sense. And they let you send little animated GIFs on your Apple watch now, like a face palm. Great. Like all of it is like updating apps, tightening the screws, adding fitness workouts, right?

Boy, that would have been a great draft pick because there's always new fitness workout types. Some new fitness plus stuff, celebrity workouts and artist, musical artist themed workouts and stuff. And those fitness plus is technically an Apple Watch service. So that's all in there. And then like making the Breathe app better because the Breathe app was super simple and they've made it more well it's part of the new mindfulness app right and they've added in those other things and reflect which is a mindfulness thing so they ask you kind of like mindfulness prompts you know so like daily questions daily reminders you know this is becoming a popular thing i mean it's it's part of a business i'm building too

like journaling it's it's a thing that I'm building too, like journaling. It's a thing that helps people. I believe in it. Many other people do. Taking that time to reflect on a thing can help you. And I think this is a simple thing, like, you know, kind of what I'm hoping that Apple continue to do

is more than just this, like what can you use potential sensors for to help people with stress and anxiety? What can science help there with something on your wrist but just even things where the software is prompting you to take a break to take a moment sit and think for a second like evaluate some stuff they're just big mental health things that can could be of great use to people um you mentioned about photos interesting and like little tidbit, the photos watch face,

Apple said, is the most popular watch face for Apple Watch. So they're adding in that portrait one as well. I would not have guessed that. Congratulations, everybody. We've built a computer watch that can put any number of live bits of data on your wrist at all times

fed by our complications that come from our third-party apps. Isn't this great? And then the public responds with, well, yeah, but can I have a picture of my dog? This is one of those great things that highlights the disconnect amongst our technology-minded and focused community

and the wider community. We are, give me more data, show me the computer. And most people are just like, hey, I'm going to wear this thing, give it my notifications, it will track my health. I would like to see a picture of my kids, thanks. Yep. And that's why that portrait mode thing is so smart

because it's using the layer data they've already got to do like a multi-layered watch face. That's super clever. And it uses all of that technology that Apple's already got available to it to do something for... If Apple didn't think that that was a popular face, they wouldn't do it. But they know for a fact that it is. And it makes sense.

You put your resources toward that. And it's... I mean, again, I don't know. The betas are rolling out now. So we're talking. People are installing them. And we'll have definitely more to follow up on next week about it all. But I don't think they added any other watch faces and that's interesting i feel like

in previous years they've had a handful of them yeah and this was just one which is around photos so you know like not only did you not get custom watch faces you didn't get any more and i don't know so one of the things that they have added it was in the little feature slide we spoke about it right which is uh more information like more more available for developers for always on watch faces maybe that's more of a thing right like what you actually want to see more isn't that's your watch face the thing that you're currently using or have been using maybe that is more of a benefit but it doesn't really seem like that there's much added in the way of watches.

Now, it is worth noting. Multiple name timers I'll throw in is, again, a watchOS user. Like, yeah, that, again, I don't know why it took so long, but yeah, these are all frustrations. And that's what leads me to think, like, this seems very clearly, as a watch user, like they are paying attention to how people use the watch and where the pain points are. And what they did here was, what you said before about how this is a mature operating system, I think that's exactly right in the sense that they are not rushing to just fill this thing with features that are maybe not the greatest, but you got to have them. You're fighting a battle there. This was very much like,

hey, where are our customers missing out? What can we give them that would delight them? And what are we not giving them that frustrates them? Can we fix some of that? And just at a glance, based on just the keynote and a very brief segment about it, that's how it came across to me, is I'm hopeful that watchOS 8

is going to have a bunch of these sort of like little details and that's fine that's great because it does what it already does what I want it to do right it already does it all so I'm fine with this I will add though that obviously WWDC is not the only time Apple can and does add

watch faces so there could be more watch faces in watchOS 8 by the time that the watch seven is released. Yeah. We all know that new watches, new iPhones in the fall generate features and potentially new Macs or iPads, but definitely new watches and iPhones. There are sometimes features that are exclusive to that hardware that don't

get mentioned now. Like the, when they added the altimeter, right, they added specific watch faces or enhancements to watch faces just for that. So, you know, it's possible for them to add it there. I mean, some of the stuff you're saying about fitness, like the new

Fitness Plus workouts and stuff, they're available now, right? So this is just a time to talk on some of that stuff. Right. And put Apple Watch in the context of Fitness Plus and vice versa, like just to remind everybody of that connection and that those products work together and so that that was a good opportunity for them but the expansion for always on watch faces i think is going to be the biggest thing here for users and developers you know yeah

i don't know the details it was just on that slide but i'm looking forward to hearing more because yes that was a needed thing i hope they my guess is that people are going to look at and go oh well it's not as far as I, as I wished it to go. And I'm like, okay, I get it. I get it.

But it's the right direction to go in like more of that, please. You have a little more power to the always on, always on watch face stuff. Like give us a little bit more than we are currently getting. One of the things that was different about this year's WWDC is they gave some dedicated segments to things that they've not done before and some of them spanned different products some of them were just focused around a specific product airpods was one of them and they added a few different

features for airpods specifically i mean i guess also ios ipad os mac os right because they interact with it one is conversation boost which is to help people who have hearing difficulties to use their AirPods and the microphones in their AirPods with some customization levels to help them work for them, so that was great. Working Better with Find My I mean, fine. Some of the stuff they were showing off, like it seemed

like stuff I already have, but maybe enhancements to it, like being able to play the sound when your AirPods are in the case, as well as just when they're outside. They're using some of the UI that you find in with AirTags to help you locate them, but it's obviously not with the U1 chips. I hope that they add that in future AirPods products still. Separation alerts if you forgot them, you know, that's kind of cool. Announce notifications. Now I'll ask you, Jason, do you use the announce messages feature of airpods no no no no no okay i do i hate it i hate it and i like it and also hate it but i do like it sometimes when i want it um they announced announced notifications i immediately said

absolutely no way because that seemed like a terrible idea but you'll be able to choose which apps you can enable using some of the focus modes, which we'll talk about in a bit. But I don't know, maybe certain apps, like for example, I would probably want Slack DMs if I'm going to have iMessages, right? Sure. But do I want my email? No, I don't want that. The reason I'm against it largely is because when I'm in the context where I'm walking around with my AirPods, especially when I'm on the Apple Watch and I'm running or walking the dog or something, I'm not really looking to be interrupted.

And although I do get notifications in that context, I'm always listening to music or listening to a podcast usually. And it's very frustrating when the audio that I'm listening to gets interrupted because somebody like you're already interrupting my run or my walk with tapping my wrist. That's already an imposition. And a lot of times since I'm out there with just my Apple Watch, it very rarely something i do need to respond to and so i'll get these messages and you know i've gotten it where it's like hey you know the the developers who have my uh my messages id which regret giving that out uh will be like hey i got a new beta can i brief you on it i'm like i am running right like i don't i don't want that and it'll be like i might i might respond and be like okay or i'll talk to you later or whatever and

they're like no no i'm gonna respond now a couple more times like but but really the truth is the only level of interruption that i'm willing to have when i'm out like that is the tap on the wrist um to have it be breaking my podcast that I'm listening to on top of that. It's just personally, my use case doesn't work for me. So I get it. I could get it in certain circumstances with certain devices in certain contexts.

But in general, I feel like there are enough ways for me to be notified that don't involve interrupting the audio that I'm listening to that I turned all that stuff off. Yeah, I do like it. I mean, I use I wear my AirPods a lot of the day, right? Sometimes I'm not even listening to things and I just leave them in like, I don't think I'm alone in this. Lots of people do this. So you know, I don't wear an Apple Watch,

right? So I'm not getting those taps. It can be helpful. So Paul in the discord points out that when he is writing is riding a bike, the announced stuff is good. And I actually agree. When I have done that, I don't do much bike riding anymore. I'm mostly doing running. But when I was doing something like riding a bike where it's not really safe for me to look at my wrist, something like that, where you've got a much more Siri-focused kind of workflow, I could see it. I guess you could now kind of maybe use the new focus mode. You set a mode like, hey, I'm riding the bike and then you get your messages announced to

you. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think we'll get to that stuff, but I think that that's where this stuff is going, which is give me a lot more granularity over who gets through and what apps get through. And that would help a lot. Spatial audio is coming to tvOS and M1 Macs with AirPods,

which is great. That's a feature that they definitely should have added. I'm intrigued to see how they're going to make that work. Yeah. And they're going to do the thing where you, if you move your head around the, you know, your,

your audio field pans too. But how do they know where my TV is? Well, so we, let's see. ATP, I think, talked about this. But the answer is basically when you start playing something, it's not really about knowing where your device is. It's about knowing where your head's positioned

when you start playing something. And so the idea here is when you start playing something, your head is looking at the screen and that's the center. is when you start playing something your head is looking at the screen and it that's the center and if you spend i suspect if you spend a lot of time set sort of off to the left then it will do a little re-centering at that point so i think there's some trickery going on there where it doesn't actually need to know physically where your screen is it knows where you're looking and that's enough for it to figure it out but anyway

it's going to do it which is great it should have been there probably before but um they're syncing these features up now so that'll be on on tv os and on mac os um again these features that get rolled out across all of apple's platforms um m1 max will also get spatial audio spatial audio for apple music that's coming now so starting today is when the first tracks are going to start coming out for that i'm really excited to check it out it was actually one of the albums they announced was an exact album that i wanted which was the weekend's most recent album i was listening to that a couple of weeks ago after that apple announced the spatial audio thing i was thinking i want to hear this album in spatial audio i hope that that's one of the

ones that they do and it was so i'm pleased and looking forward to listening to it. Great. But there was nothing, one of the things we were hoping for and expecting, to kind of suggest a way for Apple to do something with AirPods to enable lossless support. They didn't do that. I don't know if the Apple will now, right? Like they didn't do it now.

Maybe they could do it later. We don't know, but it isn't a thing that's happened today. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Pingdom from SolarWinds. Today's internet users expect a fast and responsive web experience. No matter how targeted your marketing content or how sleek your website, they're going to bounce off a page if it's loading too slowly. But with real user monitoring from Pingdom, you can discover how website performance affects your visitors' experiences. So you can take action before your business is impacted, all for as low as $10 a month. Whether your visitors are dispersed across the world, across browsers, devices, and platforms, it doesn't matter because Pingdom is going to help you identify those bottlenecks, troubleshoot performance issues,

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Then when you're ready to buy, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get an amazing 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we got that home segment. Yeah, they built the sets, people. I mean, there wasn't really a lot to this, to be honest. I was expecting something bigger. There were rumors of Home OS as a thing that was potentially coming, right?

Right, and potentially new Home announcements and things. But this did exactly what I expected them to do. This did exactly what I expected them to do. So Matter, they put up the logo, right? Like the Matter Home Alliance support an iOS 15. I feel like that was actually the number one thing because this is,

so not unveiling of Apple's grand home strategy, if there is one, but definitely a broadening, linking to the Matter stuff, mentioning using Siri on third-party devices. We just knew that's a new thing.

They showed like an Ecobee thermostat that you could talk to and tell it to do something. The Home app on Apple Watch. I don't think anybody had that in Keynote Bingo, but there it is having a better version of that. Another app, actually speaking of Apple Watch, another app that was not very good. You know, the stuff you could do on the Apple Watch was really limited and looks like there's

much more that you can do there. You know, rolling in, I thought it was funny that there's a, you know, shared with you in the TV app for all of you collection of shows and movies that are based on sort of everybody in your home. I thought that was really funny that we're getting all of these great family sharing features when you still can't share your photo library. But all these other family sharing features that use their kind of recommendation engine and all of that is in there. But the one that made me actually excited because it's something that I want to use

is last year they mentioned Carkey, the idea that you could use sort of like an Apple Pay style wallet style card to open cars. And they did extend that this time to ultra wide band. And that's really the future because then there's very precise proximity detail. That's the future of car keys is going to be ultra wide band on your smartphone is your car key. But here they added a thing called home keys, which, you know, tap to securely unlock a door. This is basically NFC key support on the device on the iPhone. And you will immediately see every smart key manufacturer either release a module or a new lock that supports home keys, because this is what everybody really wants to do is tap their phone or their

watch and get into their house. That's that because right now, as somebody with a smart lock on their door right now, it's like Bluetooth LE and it's complicated and it's weird. And this is very straightforward because for the same reason as the car key with NFC or with UWB is powerful is it's more precise about your location and they can get closer to your door and know you're standing at your door, tapping on the lock and letting you in. Whereas with Bluetooth LE, it's like, did you go away? Are you back now? Oh, I guess you're back now. So I'll unlock the door.

And it works, but it's not very precise. And it's sometimes very slow. So you walk up to the door and then you stand there and five seconds later, the door unlocks. So this is a much more kind of direct thing. So we'll see a lot more of that when this feature ships. The idea of the kind of like the locking, unlocking as I walk towards and away,

I'd never liked the thought of that. I feel like for my, just the way that I am, I would feel like I would constantly to be checking, but in trying to check would continue to keep unlocking and locking the door, right? So I like the idea of there being a physical connection, you know, like I take my phone out and I wave it and it unlocks. Like I like that thought more than a kind of proximity based thing.

So I think that's pretty cool. And they also spoke about that coming to like hotel rooms and they're working with a bunch of hotel chains as well as a thing for the future. So that seemed kind of cool. HomePod mini is getting a bunch of features like stereo pairing. So it's going to work the same way that the regular HomePod stereo pair does right now. I'm great.

I'm pleased that they're adding this. It's a great feature and I think will work great with HomePod mini and you'd be able to get that set up for cheaper than an original HomePod was. So I think that's a good feature. I will say since I did a full reset of my HomePods, and with the most recent updates to 14.6 or whatever, it's working flawlessly now. So not had any issues at all like

I was having. So I once again, thumbs up to the HomePod stereo pair features working for me again. What did you think about Siri on third-party devices? Yeah, I just, I think it's about time. I don't know the details, and the details are always weird. I remember this when Sonos added Alexa, and it was like, oh, great. And then, you know, big footnote. But it doesn't really work like you think it does, and it's not that good. And you might decide you don't even want to use it. So we'll see. But I think this is yet another example of Apple realizing that there are places where Apple keeping its stuff locked into its devices and its platforms and not having it be a little bit broader just hurts it doesn't help it it actually hurts it it's actually against what apple is trying to do and in the home space

you see it with matter this is apple realizing that the way you do this is not by locking everything down but is by opening it up and competing and that's what they're doing so one of the other things that apple broke out was health and they specifically talk about health in its own section did anything jump out yeah i'm not gonna lie i think it's great that they do this stuff but just for me personally like a lot of these features don't really jump out with me was there anything for you honestly i'm sure that some of this stuff is important but i thought this was by far the most boring part of the entire presentation. It began with a fairly boring video. Which I felt like I couldn't connect to.

I didn't know what I was supposed to take away from that. No. As either user or developer. Yeah. It was like, isn't it great that we're doing research and working with the medical field? And I don't know. The balance and gait stuff I thought was really clever. That's an example of Apple looking at all the data it collects on movement when you're walking around and saying, could we actually do something with this?

And then doing a study and figuring it out. And if that truly can lead to, they said, warning you that you might be at greater risk of falling because your walking is unstable. that you might be at greater risk of falling because your walking is unstable. I was thinking also it might be an early warning of like motor diseases and things that, you know, you wouldn't maybe notice, but that your phone notices. I think that was an interesting little addition to health on the iPhone. They're adding more trends stuff, which was very much a thing of like, oh, well, they're already doing that. They're just really adding more and going in the direction they've already gone. And then the lab integration and sharing stuff with your health provider, my response was, this is all great.

Will it actually work with anybody's providers? Right. Because that's always the question is, it's great that you've got the ability to share your data with your health provider. It's great that you've got the ability to get this labs data in and out of your device. But the asterisk is always, it only works with the three partners that we've worked with. So what's the end result there? I think the end result there is probably that in a few years, this will be much more usable, but it's doubtful to me that something like that's going to happen anytime, like immediately. It's more like, oh, yes, great. You can share with your provider. We will, the maker of the enterprise system that provides that data to my provider will update its software to do that in four years.

It's like, okay, well, I'll see you then. I guess the thing that most users would care about was the family kind of sharing of health data. Yeah. And that was, again, I joked about it earlier, but there's just a lot of family stuff in this set of releases. And it's funny because the family feature that a lot of us wanted in terms of photos is just never going to come, apparently. But that they did try to come up with some of these ideas. So the idea that you can share health data with people in your family, that's, I think, especially going to be strong for things like the elderly sharing with their kids how they're doing or other people who are helping them out. I can see that as a real advantage. And then I'll throw in there another thing that they mentioned, which is this sort of with Apple IDs, the legacy stuff, the idea that I was talking to in a Slack with Glenn Fleischman, who does Mac 911, the column at Macworld. And he

said one of the top questions that he gets is about people who died and the Apple ID kind of gets shut off and it's a huge problem. And so Apple addressing that directly, you know, these are all kind of like looking at the bigger picture of, it's great. I think that was part of iCloud Plus, right? Which is we're going to get to, it wasn't so much about. Yeah, but it's that idea that you've got data that you want to keep private and secure and all that,

but you don't want to make it a silo that nobody can get into. And that they seem to have built a bunch of, you know, they always say secure and private, but like abilities to set up a sharing relationship and say no this this person like my mom shares some of her apple watch health data with me like that maybe makes sense right and so they seem to be headed down that path what about privacy they had like a

whole section on privacy we mentioned the male privacy protection thing they're expanding the website privacy report thing that you get in safari out to apps and it's doing a couple of things as well as showing you what system things the the apps are requiring so like location data contact data things you have said that the the apps can have access to but showing you when and how often they're being so what's really smart about that is there's granting permission right and they did they've done this granting permission thing i would argue that maybe they've overdone it where it's it's extra confusing like you can't they ask you in increments so they're like do you want to share location and then later it's like do you are you sure you want to share location for all time and then later it'll

come back and say look at where you've been you've been sharing your location with this app are you sure you want to do that i think that it's too much i think that they're they're um that's one of those cases where apple is kind of overdoing it because they're treating us like babies who have to be oh you dumb user you said you wanted to share location with your weather app but you don't really right did you know who would want to do that why would you want your weather app to know where you are? So what's smart about this new feature is if you grant permission, you get to see when it's used. And I like that.

I like the idea that it's like, it's not just that I'm granting this audio app permission to record my, you know, use my microphone, but I can look and see when it used the microphone. And this is a way, you know, to give you, I guess, to see nefarious uses, but also to give you peace of mind. Like you can see when this particular permission was actually used. I think that's smart. And they're also kind of expanding and bringing in some of the web-based stuff into apps too, which is really interesting. So showing if an application is talking to things on the web and what they are. They're bringing a lot of their stuff directly into apps.

The idea is your app is going to have a privacy report. Third-party domains accessed by the app are going to be listed. This is all, at least at this point, it's very much a disclosure kind of thing. But this is all just Apple, I would say, ratcheting up. It's all in the details, right? But I would think that they're going to be app developers who are going to be made uncomfortable by this, because it's going to expose more information about what their apps are doing to the users who care about it. And what's interesting, too, is that this doesn't seem like it's a policy change, right? It's just

a disclosure. So it's not Apple saying,'re blocking third-party app domains it's it's apple saying we're going to list all third-party app domains that your app contacts and your users can see it and that's um i don't know apple's got a lot of uh of of trouble uh brewing and some of it is about like Facebook and the app tracking transparency and all of that. That's a policy change, right? That's a, we're going to make you not do this unless you ask.

This is not that. This is just a disclosure thing. But I think it's a very Apple kind of thing to do. And I think it's all for the good based on what I know so far. But who knows about the details? iCloud Plus. This is not a joke uh icloud plus another plus service let's just plus it you know they follow on the greatest plus which is upgrade plus they go to icloud plus

icloud plus let me let me frame this for you mike what icloud plus is iCloud plus could just as easily be called oh not that iCloud not that iCloud because literally what they say is if you pay for iCloud you get all these features what is what does it mean it's like well we know we give you some free iCloud that we haven't upgraded in a million years. That's not this. Everybody else is now iCloud plus for the same price. It's not like a new thing. It's literally they're taking iCloud, which meant like, I mean, they're also servicizing it, right?

iCloud is a general thing. Like everybody gets access to iCloud and they're saying, but there are premium features of iCloud that you have to pay for and includes all the storage that you already got and a bunch of other features. And iCloud used to mean something much simpler than it does now. So I get why they're redefining it this way and saying iCloud Plus means you pay and you get more storage. I assume if you're in the Apple bundle, you pick up all this stuff too. And there's a lot of amazing stuff in there. A bunch of us, I think, have talked about and written over the years about Apple could do more in terms of privacy with like its own VPN. Private Relay isn't quite a VPN, but it kind of is a VPN.

That when you're in Safari, that it's going to encrypt your traffic and send it through two different relays. So it basically is a VPN inside Safari. And the two different relays they say is because not even Apple can see what's going through there because it's going through two different places. And so it's just even that much more confusing. But it fits perfectly with their commitment to privacy to do something like that. I can't wait to see who complains about that feature because they will. Hide my email, which is literally just sign in with Apple on demand for anything to create an email address

that is just a forwarding email address that goes to you so people don't need to know who you are. My immediate thought there was that that'll get abused, that they're going to need to have a system to report abuse because it's really easy to send up disposable emails that are used for abuse is a thing that happens so they're going to have to watch that oh so i didn't understand what you meant by that but yes of course that that that that's not good right people use it creating fake email accounts to to anonymize their abuse of other people right so they're going

to have to they're and they probably have thought about that, but I love the idea, right? Like somebody asks for your email and you're like, I don't want to give you my email and sign in with Apple, we'll hide that and hide my email, we'll just let you do that regardless, which is great. And then, yeah, they added in, they sort of rolled their existing HomeKit secure video like as a feature, but now they're sort of restating that as an iCloud Plus feature that you get the unlimited secure video and I guess unlimited cameras.

But what's funny is it's the same prices. So it's literally just sort of restating what used to be like storage tiers of iCloud and saying, no, no, no. Now it is a product called iCloud Plus that you pay for. Not that iCloud over there. Not that one. That's the five gigabytes. Not that one. Not that one. Oh, I just, I'm looking on Apple's website. You can use a custom email domain. I don't know why you'd ever do that for iCloud mail, but you can now. Huh. So you can personalize your iCloud mail address of a custom domain name and invite

family members to use the same domain with the iCloud mail address with a custom domain name and invite family members to use the same domain you know I know why you would do that actually because there are people that want to do this and they don't want to use something like Gmail or whatever they want something they feel is more privacy focused that's why you would do that with Apple

yeah they're using Apple as their mail provider but they want a custom domain that makes sense the private relay thing is interesting to me because it's like the start of vpn features right you don't it doesn't seem like you could be able to get to choose stuff but it's giving you that basic level of protection or at least that basic level of anonymity from the websites that you're visiting which yes i'm sure is like this is another swipe at the web advertising industry right like now we're going for all of them right like it's not

just apps we're now putting more in place to go in opposition to that kind of stuff so that was interesting of course i found private relay personally funny as a name but you know that's that's just that's's your new membership product. That's what we should call it. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com for Private Relay. Our Discord is now called Private Relay. Private Relay. That's what it is.

I'm sorry. That's just the law. That's how it has to be. Well, VPN. The problem with doing VPN for every Apple device is that's an enormous amount of traffic, right? So what they're saying is, well, what about Safari? Can we do it with Safari? And the answer is, yeah, yeah, okay, we could do it with Safari, but it's going to cost

as well. We'll only give it to the people who are paying us for iCloud. All right. Okay. Let's do that. So one last thing on iCloud. This is from the setup. This was sent to me in the members' Discord. When you buy a new device, you get to temporarily do a

backup, even if you don't have enough space as part of your plan. Huh. For up to three weeks. So you can back it all up, no matter what, for three weeks and do your device download and set up. So this allows you to transfer everything, even if you're on the free

plan. That is fantastic. They're really never increasing that storage size, but that's good. They've gotten around one of the major problems from my and as well now like with icloud plus they have made icloud even better right like there's even more of a reason to get it you get stuff and some of these things could be genuinely useful for some people this episode of upgrade is brought to you by DoorDash. Maybe you're hungry for Chinese tonight. Your housemate wants pizza. Somebody else is craving frozen yogurt. There's something for everybody on DoorDash. DoorDash connects you with the restaurants that you love

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Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Just before we continue, a bit of a real-time follow-up. We have a problem. We have a real-time problem, Mike. I don't think we have a problem we have a real-time problem like i don't think we have a problem at all uh apparently apparently shortcuts on the mac is maybe built with swift ui rather than catalyst yeah so that's the thing so uh we have a problem because i've checked with steven hackett and he thinks that mail app updated with more modern features, my point, is valid. And since they never mentioned that Shortcuts was based on Catalyst,

I was going to give it to you. But now that we found out it's actually not true and they never mentioned it, I think I got to take that point away from you. And if that's the case, we're tied. I don't think that mail app being updated with modern features is that one little privacy feature i really don't think that's a modern feature of mail apps i mean it it hey put it in and trumpeted it is that not the very model of a modern mail app just because hey did something doesn't mean it's a feature of like it's not it's not the kind of stuff we're talking about like in the in what we think the pick to be stuff like snoozing and automatic mail sorting it's like a feature of the mail app rather than because that's not even really part of the app

it's part of the iCloud service right well no it's a it's a part of the it's part of the app no I don't I really don't think everybody gets everybody gets that feature right that's not just a icloud plus feature i really don't think that that's a mail app feature i really don't if if we're going to do it that way and you want to take the draw victory where you can but i really don't think i think it's a modern like right the ability to display them but route them through different places so that they don't have the uh the tracking ability but you still see the images convince You will not convince me on this. If we want to go with it that way and go with what Steven says, then fine, we can do that.

Well, Steven's available if you want to hear from him. I did just check with him, and I can tell you that he ruled in my favor, but you can check in with him if you like. No, I trust it. And if that's the case, then fine, you win the draft. You take it away from me.

Okay. Late-breaking draft shenanigans before the episode ends. All right, should we move on to developer updates? Yeah, let's do it. So they spent a little bit of time you take it away from me okay late breaking draft shenanigans before the episode ends all right should we move on to developer updates yeah let's do it so they spent a little bit of time during the keynote talking about that um and they really focused on a couple of things of course the state of the union focuses on way more stuff right and as we're recording this they're doing that so we don't know what that is and also we're not developers so we may not understand it even if

we saw it but api was one of the things and then there was like a star wars almost of apis flying at the screen i love it this is a little bit like the weird fish um jeremy's where it's like can two non-programmers determine what happened in developer technologies based entirely on the image reused in the on reused on the screen. It was like, API, that's got to be good, right? Yeah, I didn't understand. I mean, developer stuff. Object capture, sure.

Swift update, concurrency. Concurrency is going to be big, I hear. I'm really excited about that. I didn't really understand any of the Swift part. Like, I didn't. It was weird because it didn't feel like it was detailed enough for developers and was too confusing for non-developers. So I don't really,

but I guess they felt like they wanted to put something in there. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the developer conference, right? I actually think the most interesting kind of developer development... I can't believe I said that.

I think the most interesting one... I don't know, like Swift Playgrounds being able to submit apps to the App Store. That's one that's like, what? And then Xcode Cloud, which i know is sort of they had an app store category but you know that's the part that got me which is they rolled test flight for the mac into there but the idea that they're gonna offer the ability to like build on the build in the cloud so you work on your device but then you you send a build and it builds in the cloud and it tested on a whole bunch of virtual Apple devices. I thought that was really interesting.

I also thought it was very interesting that they said it'll be available to everyone next year and we'll have details on pricing and availability at a later time. And I'm like, oh, look, that's a service. They're going to charge developers for xcode xcode cloud that's really interesting um given all the conversations about sort of like apple taking money taking money from developers via their cut um as a way that you know apple is compensated for its platform this is one of those arguments that they made in a lot of these court cases um this is interesting because this is like another way to take money from developers is to charge them for a cloud-based build service i don't know i i'm i am not a

developer so i don't know all the ramifications of that but um that's really interesting to me i also again i don't really know what benefit that will serve if macs are powerful right for like building i guess the testing is probably a good thing right and having that automated in a way but again there are people smarter on this stuff than us that will be able to talk about this with more uh experience we don't we don't really know what we're talking about here. Test flight for Mac, though. So I'm pleased that's happening. Yeah. I feel for my Mac developer friends who have been so frustrated by the fact that it's hard to do betas on the Mac and it's easy to do betas on iPad. That's right. And that was one of those things where I just thought it was not going to happen. And it's a weird place that they put it, but they kind of tossed it off in there.

It's like, oh, and Mac, which I was hopeful because if I had to boil down the message of this keynote to one thing, it's that Apple's, I mentioned this earlier, but like Apple's platforms are in lockstep now. Like, so it's weird, right? The test flight wouldn't be available on the Mac because so much is it's on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, like over and over again, they said that. And then what about test flight? This is a developer conference. Well, here it is. So that was a big thing and will make not just our developer friends happy, but it'll make all of us who use betas on the Mac. James Thompson

won't be texting me beta builds, right? Which he does now. Here, try this one. Presumably not. Maybe he will. Maybe he'll keep doing that for old time's sake, but he shouldn't have to. While we're talking developer stuff in the App Store, something else I wanted to mention that I noticed. First off, they talk about weekly visitors to the app store, which I found very weird as a metric because that's like a web metric. And I feel like this is in line with some of the arguments they've made in some of those, like in the court case, which is this idea of like the value in the app store is the fact that it exposes so many people to the app store marketing. And so it felt like they were reinforcing that. Like, look how many people come to the app store, which is a little bit weird, right? Because I don't think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of the app store is an app that lives

in your phone. And if you want an app, you go there and get it. Whereas they're viewing it as visitors that are paying a visit. I don't know about that and they also mentioned 230 billion dollars paid to developers which is just like checking the boxes but like this is the argument they've been making all along in court and they're reinforcing it here oh i'll throw in in-app events as a category is fascinating to me right the idea that's another way to market the content inside your app is by saying we're doing a special event inside our app um and i wonder how that will be used and abused both i can't help but look at a feature like that and try to think who asked for it someone asked apple for this so they've had a few people ask apple for this i mean game developers

sounds to me right where you've got a you've got a tournament or uh you know a special thing i mean it's basically marketing though right marketing and promotion it's a thing that's happening inside it's a reason to get people to open your app at a certain point is that this thing is happening now like it's so it's it's a marketing thing i but i can't wait for i'll just pick on james again can't wait for james thompson to uh start to start like a shiny dice week in Dice Bike Peacock. It'll be in the in-app events list. Get ready for shiny dice week. They're all shiny for one week only.

I mean, I guess as well, it probably also helps with Apple promoting things. I guess they're always looking for stuff to write stories about actually all these things roll together to say the app store is marketing the app store is a marketing platform i actually think you could argue that it goes against apple's claim that the app store is um is it a fundamental part of the platform or is it a marketing channel and the answer is it's a marketing channel, right? Like that's, that's what it is. And so they do, they're going to, this is another way to market in app events and,

and the here how many weekly visitors come to the app store and they're going to see this and they're going to market it. They sell ads, they have events, they have all their app store write-ups that they do, which are marketing essentially sort of marketing coming from Apple, but about the apps that are in the store. And then you can throw the A-B testing thing in there, right? Which is something that if you missed it, what they were saying is app developers are going to be able to show different screens and show different icons and stuff. And it's basically like, it's a marketing thing, which is if I make my app store record look like this or this, which one does better. And so you can more finely hone your marketing message and get more users of

your apps. So it's that app store category was funny because so much of it was really just marketing, marketing tools the app store is a marketing engine which is i think if you know that's a message that they've been sending for a while now i'll be interested to see what the tools look like for the ab testing of uh of product pages and stuff oh apple's back-end tools have traditionally been so terrible yeah i can imagine it would be that's why it seems like quite a complicated thing i also continue to find it's just the balance and i know it's they will say that they do it in their privacy ways and stuff but it's like this type of marketing is bad and this type of marketing is good because we have deemed it so and you know it's like this is going to be like

this is going to be a data-driven system right you will target certain people and you will get results and it's like this is we say this way is good but then we've got this other type of advertising that we're saying is bad and we control the whole platform so you know i would just what occurs to me is that it's the difference between sort of like utility of the platform vendor providing a utility to get you to the apps that are available for the platform. And then turning it into a full-fledged, fully operational Death Star of marketing. And if we've seen anything about the evolution of the App Store over the last... Oh, App Store. It is.

It's this, right? It's the weaponization of the App Store and turning it into this marketing monster. And it makes a lot of money for a lot of people. But it still has a weird, right? I mean, to me, it's an app from the platform vendor. And so to have it be, well, I guess apps from platform vendors that are marketing tools and are full of ads is not uncommon. It's just uncommon from Apple. And I guess that's what makes it kind of uncanny to me is that it's Apple just throwing all in like, this is just all about marketing and promotion and sales and it's all going to happen inside the app store. So that's where we are. Talk about iOS 15. Yeah. iOS 15. There's a lot. I'm surprised at how excited I am about iOS 15 versus iPadOS. Now we should say iOS 15 went first in the keynote. And if the theme is it works everywhere, there are a lot of features that are announced for iOS 15 that you could say are iPhone features because iPhone is the most popular of Apple's platforms.

But they went everywhere, right? Like that's sort of the point of a lot of this stuff is it went, you know, it goes to the iPhone, but it also goes to the iPad and the Mac. It goes to all those places. And I think Stephen said this, I think he texted it to me at one point, that this year there have been a lot of features that are everywhere at the same time. You know, like there are a bunch of these features that we're going to talk about and they're on iOS, they're on iPadOS, and they're on the Mac in a way that is quite interesting. They're bringing all of this stuff across.

Like they're introducing it and it's everywhere all at the same time. But on that note about, it's intriguing we're going to get into iPadOS. I think you might be a bit more down on it than me. I'm excited about all these iOS features. I think most of them seem great. And then iPadOS puts more on top. But they broke down iOS 15

into a few different categories, staying connected, focus, intelligence, and exploring the world. And staying connected included FaceTime and messages enhancements. And I would say way more than I thought, and especially FaceTime, it was really interesting to me that they did the best case scenario of what we were talking about last week right they did black background blurring but with portrait mode they did joining um events with links so you can make it a facetime event for a group and share a link and people can join on the web from any device

right you can't start from the web but you can join on the web from any device so which is super interesting you're right it's like there's the little narrow part that we hoped apple would do and they did that and a little bit more and in groups using uh ios if you're using ios you can use spatial audio for group calls which is interesting so you can see like it will kind of spread people out a bit actually i never use group facetime i only yeah i just seem to only ever do one-on-one but it's like multiple people multiple people this is why apple's doing this right is that like i i mentioned this i think last week when we were doing the draft but my family all of whom are on ios devices does a Zoom every other week. It's like, why is that a Zoom?

Why? And it's because everybody is trained to do Zooms, and nobody is thinking of FaceTime for that. And that's why. So Apple knows that and knows that it needs to, I mean, it should have done this years ago, but it needs to do this now. And so they added those features in.

A grid view, too, that is kind of a capitulation. It's them saying that their fun floating bubble view maybe isn't that great. And that people have gone through the pandemic with a grid view and it's fine. I think maybe that's right. They're just like, okay, all right, we get it. And it's good. They're taking it seriously. Like I think they feel left out that they kind of missed an opportunity with FaceTime

and they're not going to let it go even further away from them. Also the voice processing stuff. I thought that was a little bit weird, but also hilarious. Like the giant blower in the background and you can still pick up the audio. Like this is one of the amazing things that uh signal processing technology and machine learning and stuff can do now is is just shocking amounts of rescuing a voice signal out of background noise and to do it in real time um you know probably there's not a giant blower behind you when you're doing this but whatever that background noise is to have it kind of drop away and focus on your voice.

That's that's pretty cool. I like that a lot. And then the idea that they put it as sort of like you can choose voice isolation or wide spectrum. So like you can either you can choose whether you want it to just clamp everything down and only send your voice or whether the birds tweeting in the background are, you know, a part of the whole thing and you want the whole experience out there. That's good. That's good. Share play. So you'll be able to listen to music with other people, watch movies and TV together, and share your screens. You can finally do screen sharing over FaceTime. That was one that should Oh yeah. Screen sharing is a big one, right? Because that's going to be great for support.

It's like, can you share your screen so I can see what you're doing? But the rest of this is, it's clearly Apple also realizing trends, right? The watch together kind of trend has been built into a bunch of different services. Hulu and Disney Plus both built it in. There are browser plugins that do this. And so this is Apple basically making this not just built into their apps, but also an API and working with partners so that like Disney Plus and Hulu and HBO Max and ESPN and the NBA and Twitch and TikTok and Masterclass and also Paramount Plus, who was on the slide, but not spoken aloud. That made me laugh. Right? So like any app can do this.

And the idea here is that your friends that are watching have to watch it. They have to have a subscription in the app and you have to have a subscription in the app. It's not being streamed between you. It's on device from that app. So you're both, if you're watching a Disney Plus show, you're both streaming it from Disney Plus on your device while you're talking to each other.

So everybody's got to have access to the content. It's pressing play at the same time, basically. Yeah. Except that anybody who's doing this can pause it and can scrub. Like everybody who's involved, who's got that app and is watching has control and the control goes to all devices. So that's pretty cool, right? So that's somebody pauses it and says, no, let me go to this part. This is the good part.

And then press play and it happens everywhere. So that's pretty cool. That's above and beyond the just simple sync stuff. And that's why you'd use something like this. So this is a very specific kind of feature um and it's not a way to share your you know share stuff that you like with other people although you can do like a screen share and then go into photos and show a video or something but that's not that's kind of not the point of it and you assume that screen sharing you wouldn't be able to watch video and stuff like

that like it would copyright protect it out and stuff oh right well the screen sharing will only work with non-protected video right so it'll work with your videos that you shot in in the photos app but it's not going to work with you screen sharing disney plus right that's going to black it out just like it does for for screenshots all of this stuff is really great, but would have been great last year. Now, I'm not trying to be unreasonable, right? They couldn't have done this in time, right? Because there's roadmaps. This stuff takes time.

And I'm sure some of these features will be great in times when you might want them or if you've got that kind of use case. You know, like I'm sure a lot of like long distance relationships will benefit from this friendships you know lots of young people will benefit like i get all of that these features are very reactive to what the last year has been like and they will be great for facetime to have but I think won't be able to have the, I believe, societal impact. Like, for example, if these features would have existed prior to now, again, remembering this will not come until September,

the earliest of this year, the earliest of this year, that they may get more ingrained in people moving forward post-pandemic. And I know that the pandemic is in different stages, different parts of the world, of course, but it does feel like great features have missed their moment a little bit, maybe. Yeah, I think what Apple's really doing here is saying people experienced,

there's a bunch of stuff that people experienced during the pandemic that they did because of the pandemic, that even after they're more able to go out and about and see other people and all of that, that they're still going to want to do. Yes, of course. With their far-flung friends and all of that so i think that's new norms and new relationships built around a different way of living but and these will be great for some of those things however you know would have been way better but hindsight right

you know what you're gonna do yeah messages has mostly seems to be focused around the way that things are shared. So they have this whole new thing called Shared With You, which basically surfaces stuff that people have shared with you inside of other applications. Like, for example, if someone shares an Apple News link with you over iMessage it shows up in the apple news app uh photos that people like if i sent jason a bunch of pictures from an event that we were at together he would see them in his photo library yeah same with podcast music that kind of stuff but not memes or screenshots not those screenshots i will say that i'm pleased that they actually just got out

ahead of it and explained that. And that was important, right? Because it's like, so one of the features of WhatsApp is the ability to automatically save images to your library that people send you. And it is quite normal for people to abuse that with each other, with friends and stuff. Like I know friends that have gotten into some situations they wish they wouldn't have gotten into because their other friends could just randomly put images into their photo library, right? Basically, every time they open the group chat, all the images download.

So I think it's a good feature to have to just build in upfront that we're going to try and do some stuff to work out if you actually might want this. And they're all marked with a little speech bubble icon that indicates they came from messages. So they're not like indistinguishable from other items that appeared in your photo library. But I think, yeah, this is fascinating. And one of the questions I have is there wasn't a lot of third-party developers story in this part. This is one of those things that was like, we love developers and there's an API. Also, there's this thing. And I'm unclear whether anybody else gets to register for this.

Perhaps if not now, then in the long run, yes. But it seems like what they're basically doing is they're looking at all the media and links and everything that come into messages and basically offering it up to other apps and saying, here are some photos that came in to messages. Here are some, you know, links, music, Apple music links that came into messages. Here are some web links. And I'm also unclear. Is it just news links or is it any article that is also in Apple news? links or is it any article that is also in Apple News? And does Apple News do like a little comparison to see if it's in its database and then it shows it? Because then you have the scenario where somebody sends you a web link, but maybe it gets surfaced in Apple News. I would think that's

how it would work. And they said Safari and podcasts and the Apple TV app all are going to have this too. That's all good. But this is a cool idea of taking links that are the currency of conversations and putting them in apps where it's relevant um but right now it seems like it's just apple's apps which you know yeah okay but i would like other apps to be able to do this, right? Like I would like if I have Spotify and somebody sends me a music link, I'd like to be able to see that in Spotify too. Or if I have a different podcast app to have that podcast app, say somebody sent me a link to a podcast and I could see how this is step one and maybe there's a step two, but that was my first thought is this is a cool idea and also limited to a handful of apps that are made by the platform vendor.

Well, so I mean Safari has this feature already and has done for a period of time. I don't know how long. When you open a new Safari window or tab, I should say, it will surface some recommendations of links and include stuff that was sent to you via iMessage. I have never once seen one of those and clicked it because when someone sends me something, I will look at it. I don't know how often I'm like,

thanks for sending me that. Hopefully I'll come across it later on. Goodbye. I don't really think that this is a thing Often I'm like, thanks for sending me that. Hopefully I'll come across it later on. Goodbye. I don't really think that this is a thing that I need. I don't know. Maybe I'll be proven incorrectly. But typically, if somebody sends me something and I'm interested in it, I will action upon it.

So what happens to me a lot is it's not the, hey, they sent me this link in the moment. I will not perform an action upon it. It's more like, oh, what was the thing Mike sent me five days ago? And so I could see a scenario where you're like, oh, somebody mentioned this. And instead of having to go to messages and look up who it was and all of that, in music, it says, Mike mentioned this album. And you're like, oh yeah, that was it. That was the one I was thinking of. So I think it's more like that, right? Where it's the lack of

remembering or immediate action on something. And it kind of scrolls into the past and they're trying to bring it back out in the right context. so it's like when you're in the music context it's going to remind you of all the music that people have mentioned to you lately i think that's the idea there but but i i had that same thought about in introducing um the new safari tabs features and thinking or you could click the link and put it in your tab and then it's in the tab and then you can read it later. You could do that too if you wanted to. Yeah, it's just like Andor, I've worked out a system of which I would save stuff.

But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised. Focus is another system that I am actually really intrigued at, and it has a few different things. And it includes notifications focus modes so starting with notifications they have a new look they seem to differ in sizes a little bit and they seem to be putting more prominence on direct communication rather than just like applications wanting to get your in like want to get your attention and this is similarly forwarded further with the notification summary which is an option that you can choose to turn on where it uses on-device intelligence which i do not feel confident in to try and surface and collect up like notifications from applications not people

if that makes sense right i guess there's a way that you can say to the system what kind of notification you are. I don't know. And so they will try and collect them up and surface to you in kind of like a digest. Yeah, it's trying to, it's like a yet another filter on top of all the other filters for all of your notifications. But I kind of like that idea that like there's so many garbage notifications and it's going to do on-device intelligence, which I think might have once been called like a Siri suggestion.

But I think that's gone and it's just on-device intelligence is the buzzword now. But that's the idea, is sort of like you put them in a barrel and then your little helpful robot friend will say, oh, you might find these interesting just to get them out of your way.

I'm all for that actually because there's way too many notifications. And so I don't know whether this summary would be useful or not, but I do like the idea of kind of throwing all those notifications that are kind of not from people and are just app things in a box

where I don't have to see it or I only see a summary of it or I have to go looking for it. I'm kind of okay with that. I will wait and see on this one. I like the idea of it in theory. I don't have a lot of hope in it in practice personally.

We'll see how that goes. Also as well, I tend to like to see my notifications. I don't necessarily want them to be kind of collapsed and hidden away from me you may be more together with your notification preferences than some of us possibly yes maybe a better person when it comes to notifications than some of us who you know 99 more notifications is a thing that I see. Yeah. I'm probably a pretty good notifications manager. Yeah. And it's also a thing that you don't have to see, right? The summary is sort of like a

declaring bankruptcy for notifications and being like, tell me if anything's important. I just don't want to, I'm not going to do it. But I think it's interesting that it's not for people, right? This is not somebody sending you a text. This is a newspaper sending you a headline about a feature story that they posted a couple of days ago that they want you to read. That kind of stuff goes in the barrel. Do Not Disturb will now show in messages for people you're contacting. So if I was sending a message to Jason, it would say Jason has Do Not Disturb on.

Yeah, so Do Not Disturb and Do Not Disturb While Driving has been basically rolled into Focus. And they introduced it in the keynote in an interesting way where it mentions Focus before they rolled out what Focus is. So they talk about Do Not Disturb because that's a concept we're already familiar with. But the truth is, focus is basically do not disturb custom do not disturb settings. And do not disturb is kind of part of focus or uses the same pathways as focus.

Do not disturb while driving. I mean, there's a difference in that it does the auto reply, you know, you can set it up to auto reply. But like with the new features, you have this ability to choose to share your do not disturb or your focus status with all of your people who are in your contacts. So they can see your status and know that their message isn't going to go through. So like how Slack will say, you can send a message to this person, but they don't have, you know, their notifications are turned off. And do you really want to alert them? And then you have the ability to kind of break through and say yes. Yeah, the benefit for this feature isn't in me knowing Jason has do not disturb on that does nothing for me, really. The benefit is in knowing so I can break through if I need him. Right. Right?

Because if you have do not disturb on, I'll just send you the message. Like, what difference does it make, right? Like, you'll get it when you get to it. The benefit is in me knowing so I could say, no, please notify him because it's important. Does that make sense? Like, there is kind of, if I send you a message, I send you a message, right?

Like, you know, you're not going to get told about it. Honestly, I also think that there's a little bit of relief that you can feel when you know that the person on the other end isn't going to be bothered, right? Like, I've had this happen in Slack, for sure, where I'm sending a message back to somebody who is in perhaps your time zone and you should be asleep, right? It's three in the morning, it's four in the morning, or even if it's 11 at night, it's something where I don't want to wake them up. I don't want to bug them, but I could just send the message now when I know that they'll get it whenever they choose to see it next. And so having that note say, Mike won't see this now is actually reassuring,

right? Cause it means I can send you a note and I, it's not going to bug you and you'll see it when you need to. And then yes, I can, I can break through if I need to, but it also gives me the reassurance that I'm not like waking you up in the middle of the night.

Yeah. Okay. Maybe this is just a thing for me. I personally feel like it is on the other person to set their do not disturb correctly. This is just like a difference where different people think. I agree, but I have those moments where I'm like, I'm not going to bug them at a time.

It's just a reassurance, right? Like I can feel free to send them messages in the middle of the night because they're not going to get them until the morning and that's fine. It's just a little reassurance. It's a little like, you probably haven't felt this way too, but it's all like, do I want to text this person while they're driving? Because will that distract them? And then they'll crash their car and I'll be guilty of distracting them and having them crash their car. And when you do not disturb without driving, it's like, oh, what a relief. They're not going to get that message. Yeah. I never think I wonder if somebody's driving.

How would I know that? How would I know they're not going to get that message so yeah i never think i wonder if somebody's driving like how would i know that how would i know that you say you say goodbye and they're driving and then you need to send them a message oh no yeah no this doesn't happen driving because nobody drives nobody okay all right well i think this is a great feature focus is more broadly the idea that um we were trying to come up with sort of how this would work, but this is pretty close, right? It's presets and you can choose presets. They come up with some presets that are there, but you can build your own focus statuses too. And it'll suggest things, but you can say, when I'm in this mode, only these people get through, only these apps. And it'll let you turn on and off different pages of your home screen. So good.

Based on those statuses. This is the best part. Plus, it works with shortcuts. So you can automate all of this stuff too. Yep. And I guess technically do not disturb is basically part of focus now, right? Right. I guess is the way that you look at it.

Yeah, I'm super into this part of it, which is more about setting up these profiles and being able to use them in certain instances and then you can also go you know you can go one step deeper you can set certain people to break through even through these you know like i i'm really into it um i like that you can automate it through shortcuts you know like i can run a shortcut that's like my show recording shortcut and it sets all my timers and it sets my focus mode

and then we'll find out later. It opens all the windows that I need. Yeah, I really like this feature. It sets your timer. It sets your timer-y timer, right? I really like this. Theoretically do all that. Finally, the day phone and the night phone.

Are you getting it yet? It's the same phone. It's always the same phone. It's interesting to me that it syncs across devices i haven't yet worked out if that's what i want but probably you probably can there might be a way to like not do that if you want to but yeah i would want to try it set up like this i mean i'm trying to think like would i want it to do that? Probably? I don't know. I think the idea there, though, is that your status doesn't change, you know, based on what device you're in. Like, if you're in business mode, all your devices should be in business mode.

And I think you can determine what each device – well, we'll have to see. I assume you can determine on your Mac what business mode means and on your iPad what business mode means. But that's the idea is when you're in business mode, all your devices know you're in business mode. And then when you go into fun mode, all your devices know you're in fun mode now, right? So you don't have the situation where like you're strictly in business on your iPhone and your iPads like getting text messages from people who are fun people. I'll tell you one place where I might want to think about it or hope maybe I could turn it off on some devices. I'm not sure.

Like my iPad, I have always in Do Not Disturb because I just don't need it lighting up or whatever. Like my phone will do it. I've just had it this way for years, but maybe I've just gotten used to that and I'll try this new system and see what I think. But I've had my iPad in Do Not Disturb for a while because it's like, if I have it not in a keyboard case

or I have it open or whatever, and it's like in the corner of the room, the screen will keep lighting up all the time. Yeah. You know? And so, I don't know yet. I want to see exactly how this works. I'm intrigued to see what kind of flexibility do I have with that.

Maybe it's just some devices only even do not disturb all the time or not. Or maybe this system will be better. And I wonder about the granularity of the automation. Like you mentioned sitting in a keyboard case is like, if I put my iPad in the magic keyboard, it means that I'm writing. I would love to be able to say basically, when I put my iPad in the magic keyboard, it means that I'm writing. I would love to be able to say basically, when I put my iPad in the keyboard, here's the mode you need to go in, right?

And it's don't distract me while I'm writing. I would love to be able to do that. I'm not sure it can do a like when connected to a magic keyboard or something, but that would be pretty cool. I know that like connecting certain Bluetooth devices can be an automation for shortcuts, but I don't know if the Magic Keyboard counts.

I don't know. I mean, it's not a Bluetooth device, but it would sure be nice if it could sense that and run an automation when that device was attached, for example. But this is a huge amount of potential here to be. Really excited about this. Really, yeah. I worry.

I'm worried that this is the feature that's going to disappoint me, though. You know, I feel like at this point during WWDC, it is always like, whoa, this is amazing. There's so much potential here. And then I start to dig into it, and it's like, oh, this. So far, this feels the thing that is most likely to disappoint me, I feel like. And this is purely based on everything Apple's ever done around this area

has fallen short for me in some way. Everything surrounding notifications and preferences there. So we'll see. We mentioned intelligence. So intelligence is, I think, kind of like a new catch-all for Siri and machine learning and all that kind of stuff. And I think I kind of like that name. I'll run through a couple of these real quick.

I don't think we need to spend too much time talking about any of them. Live text, this is like text selection in images and stuff like that. Seems pretty cool. I want to see how it works. And it's in the camera and it's in the photos app. And it's basically, and it's across all Apple devices.

So it's not just iOS, like on the Mac, what you'll be able to do on any of these devices actually is like take a screenshot Apple devices, so it's not just iOS. On the Mac, what you'll be able to do on any of these devices actually is take a screenshot or if somebody posts one of those tweets where it's a note apologizing for the terrible thing they did, you could literally copy that text out.

I bet that's the one it works best in too because it's Apple's notes. Spotlight has been enhanced in a bunch of ways. The photo search can now be done from spotlight and they've made improvements to like contact cards and contact info yeah and photos memories have been kind of given a new life you can choose music from apple music instead of just the basic tracks that apple uses this is Apple's like third or fourth time,

I forget who's counting, of trying to do a like machine learning generated photo collage thing. And previously it was more like an, almost like an auto iMovie. And this is different. You could customize it, but it was like a movie was the output.

And here it's almost like on-demand Instagram story of your past, kind of. That's the part that I think is fascinating and I'm looking forward to trying out is it's interactive. The idea that they try to pick music, but you can also choose a mood. But then if you want to swipe back or swipe forward or pause, you can do that and And the music keeps playing and then it just syncs back up. So it's not a video that it's making for you to share, although I'm sure you can share it. It's like just a machine learning driven performance for you of your photos. It's a really interesting idea. They didn't do what I wanted them to do here, though, which was I wanted to see Apple do

something to kind of address more customization of memories. And we spoke about this a number of weeks ago on Connected, episode 340, I think, where we were talking about a wonderful Lauren Good article about kind of some of the pain that can be associated with photo memories and i was hoping apple was going to have more to say on that kind of stuff and i don't know if they've done anything of ios but there was none of that and i felt like that was a big miss like because google has made in in the next version of android and in google photos they're starting to do some of this kind of stuff where they're trying, you can kind of give it some like, hey, don't show me this person

or show me this time. Like, I want to see Apple do more here. I think they're dropping the ball on this one. There needs to be, in my opinion, and in many other people's opinions, ways to be able to basically force the photos app to be a bit more mindful with some types of memories. Or it was like, hey, look at our music and remixes. When it started, I was like, oh, here we go. I've been waiting for this. And it was not. Then again, that's entirely possibly a feature that's there, but they're not going to talk about it, which is a sad feature. Yeah. But still, I mean, it's important.

And I think people would dig it, but we'll see. We'll see if they do anything like that. Yeah, I'll mention too, we kind of glossed over it a second ago, but like one of the live text and all of that and look up, there's all of this stuff that Apple's actually been doing for a long time in photos, which is using machine learning to look at images and classify them. So they're, they're now they're OCRing them for text. They're looking at them for contents. Um, and it used to be like in photos, you could search for horses and you'd get all the photos with horses or beaches and you look at all the photos for

beaches. And now what they seem to have done in photos, at least, is, and Spotlight, I think, too, is they're applying that and they're also sort of letting you kind of see it a little more. It used to just kind of be in a search index for you to find, and now they're like calling it out, like, yeah, there's a horse in this, or yeah, there's a restaurant in this, and here, yeah, there's a restaurant in this. And here's the name of it. And you can go search it. And just it's one step forward where before I think it says something about there may

be their confidence in this technology that initially it was sort of like, yeah, you know, it's not great, but we're going to just throw it in the search index. And when you search for horses, there'll be some dogs in there, but there'll be horses and you'll find what you're looking for. And now I feel like they're more confident. So it's a level up, which is, it's not just that's a cat, but that's a short haired cat, or that's not just a dog, it's a beagle. And it'll tell you it's a beagle and not just wait for you to search for beagle, right? And so it's interesting that over's just over the last few years,

they have become more confident in the output of their machine learning algorithms. And then exploring the world. Who doesn't love to explore the world, Mike? Yeah, I know. The weather app has a new design. Dark Sky. Yeah, and they're using that data, I guess.

There was no kind of weather kit or anything like that. No, but they did. So they did have like those maps that are very much like, hey, we've got these full screen high res weather maps. I'm like, oh, it's dark sky. Look at that. And air quality has become a huge issue in the Bay Area the last few years because of the wildfires in the fall. And it's a huge thing. And so it's interesting that they built in air quality maps and will show stuff. Did you notice the other thing that I noticed about the redesigned weather app

is that a lot of the elements on it are look like they're literally just small widgets so i imagine they're all going to be available as widgets they're all like you scrolled and it was just a whole bunch of little boxes with information in them and they look like widgets and i gotta think they maybe are widgets and that you will also be able to add those just out onto the home screen because it was a very if they're not widgets they are widget inspired because they look just like widgets or at least there's like a weather widget that updates with that kind of look and feel right something like that but they look very much um very much related and maps look the kind of a an interesting design change for maps yeah i mean the detail like it's typically like the 3d city detail in these seven cities that's right like your bear experience will be i i like the um improved transit stuff

that they're trying to throw in there the road details are very smart um I assume that this is metadata that they've been collecting on all of their mapping passes with their mapping vans, right? They're also taking pictures of all of the things that are on the roadway, like crosswalks and stuff like that, and bike lanes, and they seem to be building that stuff

in, which is good, because if you've ever been on a road that was a featureless gray thing, featureless gray thing featureless gray stripe in apple maps and but it's actually a much more complex kind of thing in real life um this is uh this is is better to do it this way oh and they got the ar scanning thing of buildings right like i thought they already did that i thought they had it last year where you where you could you could uh maybe it was not for directions, but it was just for location. If you were in a city center and the big buildings block GPS, that you could basically like wave your phone around and it would figure out where you were based on the buildings it saw.

That's only in the Discord. So I don't know what they're showing them. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Yeah, so I think what this was is like showing you directions of where to go. What this was is like showing you directions of where to go. So you emerge from the transit stop and you use this feature and then it will like draw an arrow and say you walk that way. But I don't know. It's fun. I mean, they're not.

This was different because it's more like rich data in the maps interface than it is sort of maps app features. If that if I can differentiate between the two, it seems like maps is still going to be what maps was, but it's going to look different and have more data rolling out. I mean, it's still rolling out data with its new maps to, was it Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Australia? We'll get it later this year.

Like they're still sort of slowly rolling out those rich maps and now there's sort of richer maps coming. But London and the Bay Area will have them so you and i can talk about it when that happens i use google maps but i will try out this new apple maps is there anything else on uh on ios 15 uh i wanted to mention wallet um oh yeah because identity cards if you're if your u.s state participates you could put that in there california then they're gonna work for uh well we'll see work with the the tsa so the idea that you could you can tap to authenticate your identity instead of having to show your driver's

license or something i cannot tell you how dubious i am having this doesn't i mean i'm sure that they're trying to make this work but i don't know what did i say before about the health stuff it's like well this is really great and when one of these giant organizations finally moves their their technology provider who has a subcontractor who's providing this service updates their software and hardware and rolls all the hardware out then in five years this will be great it's that kind of thing it feels like to me you're saying all right so now i'm gonna i mean the tsa it can be tricky i mean maybe it's harder for me because i'm not american but seems like that it's tricky at the

best of times and then like so i won't take my id with me and then hope that i don't know something wild doesn't happen and my phone doesn't run out of battery because then i'm stuck i don't know it's like a whole level of of anxiety i feel like that would bring me clearly i'm not the target market for this like i it was a long time into my international travel before i stopped printing things like to take in a little folder you know so so I don't know this. I don't think this features for me. Great if they can make it work for the people that would want it. But I think I would always want to have my ID card. I've been using Well, yeah, I think that's the truth. Like with so many of these things, you end up taking your ID card and a

backup credit card in case a place doesn't do contactless or there's some other technology problem. Like, I mean, again, I think this is one of those things that they try to do this and with the hope that in 10 years, it's all completely like solid, but it's not going to be something that in most places you're going to be able to rely on now. That said, if I could get this working in the line at the airport so that I could do a couple of taps with my phone or my Apple Watch to give them my boarding pass and give them my ID, that would be fun. That would be great. The other part of the wallet thing, and we mentioned this earlier, but related to that is keys. So car key for cars and keys for your house and keys for hotel rooms and your badge for corporate offices that Apple is sort of taking their more narrow kind of like the stuff that they did for transit and the stuff that they did for payment.

And now they're adding this sort of key approach that they're trying to do where you can unlock various locks with your phone or your watch and that's great i'm super into the corporate id thing that's awesome and also hotel room keys that's great i love that having a hotel room key just on my phone i think that's awesome yeah i'm really no kidding no kidding probably unlikely to demagnetize like the hotel room keys do. And you can't lose them. Yeah. You ever had that where you had to go down to the front desk because your key just stops working? Yeah. And they'll say, well, you shouldn't put it next to powerful magnets.

I didn't, though. It was in the same pocket as my Kleenex. Powerful magnets. It was literally nothing, and yet it failed. So it's because your card is bad, Mr. Hotel Man. But it probably wouldn't work like that for this, so that would be good. This episode of Upgrade

is brought to you by Secret Sauce from Wondery. In Wondery's podcast series, Secret Sauce hosts John Fry and Sam Donner explore the stories and successes behind some of the world's most inspiring businesses, creative innovators and intrep some of the world's most inspiring businesses, creative innovators, and intrepid entrepreneurs. And at the top of their list is Johnny Ive. As listeners of this show will know, without the unstoppable partnership of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive, Apple would not be where it is today. When they came together in the 90s,

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There's some details about Johnny's life and upbringing that I just didn't know, like little anecdotes that I'm really happy to have heard. They were digging out like audio from interviews and stuff. So that was really fun in the episode that I was checking out. And I liked that during the story as well, the host stopped to consider the lessons that can be learned from the decisions that Johnny seems to have made in his career. Listen to Secret Sauce on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music,

or you can listen one week early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Wondery, fill the story. Thanks to Wondery for their support of this show and RelayFM. Should we talk about iPadOS 15? Let's do it. So, let's start with the home screen. Can I stop you there?

I want to start a little bit sooner. Okay. The intro to this section. Okay. I thought was so good at describing what's great about the iPad. Okay. I think Apple has really nailed it. The idea like it's all about flexibility.

They're like, oh, what's great about the iPad? It's a touch tablet. You know, you put it in this case and you got a keyboard and a trackpad. You use the pencil. Right? It's the flexibility. It can be anything you want it to be. And I'm sitting there as we've pondered external display support and the idea that you could potentially hook this up to a monitor and use it with a keyboard and a trackpad.

And I'm thinking, oh, look, this is where they're going. They're going where we thought. And they didn't go there. And they ended this section by saying that it basically is completely rethinking what you can do with your iPad. And I had the same reaction, which was, or not at all rethink what you can do with your iPad.

Like, I didn't consider this a rethink at all. No, it wasn't a rethink. It wasn't a rethink. Like redefining your existing multitasking, fixing the very confusing and kind of broken idea of multiple windows in an app. Like they did that. They did that and we'll see how it goes, but it looks encouraging. It looks like that. They did that and we'll see how it goes, but it looks encouraging. Looks like that could be a really good direction. What it was not is extending the flexibility or completely rethinking what you can do with your iPad, both of which read to me like scripts from a different version of this presentation that unveiled something new about how you could work on an iPad in a completely different context.

And it's not what we got. And so I kind of wanted to just start there with saying that I think they talked a good game here, but then they didn't bring what they were talking about, per se. That said, there's a lot to like in the iPad announcements. I think there was a lot of cool stuff that they did here. And I would say when we talk about multitasking, it feels to me like they're actually on a path to something. And I know it's like Charlie Brown is laying on the ground. The football got pulled away from him just moments ago. He went, oh, and then fell in the grass.

And then he says to himself, but you know what? I think I could get it the next time. I realize that's sort of what I'm doing here. But I don't know. When I look at what they did with multit release is get it functional and give them room to advance it later but first things first which is rethinking the whole multitasking interface so it makes more sense look we've been saying for weeks that surely they're going to show us uh what what us what the M1's for and they didn't. They didn't. They didn't. I, you know, I started to feel like that was probably not going to happen. I was expecting changes. I was expecting good changes, big changes

and we got them. But I really started to cool on some of the stuff, especially things like the external monitor support and stuff like that. We'll see. Right. I still feel like that's inevitable,

but it didn't happen this time. And so that's, I mean, the way that I'm thinking of it today is I'm actually not any less a believer in the fact that it's coming. It's more that I think what they did here is sort of fix what was broken and give them a place from which they can go to other places, right?

Like, like multitasking now. So what they did, okay, here's what they did. Uh, first off, they put a multitasking menu at the top of essentially a window which is your app or two

apps if they're in split view right there's a little dot they're little dots up there and you can grab the dots and like move the apps around and you can tap the dot and you get something that's very similar to the traffic light buttons on mac os right it's a you know do you want to put this in full screen do you want to put this in in split view do you want to put this in slide over so it's all visible you don't have to know the secret incantations um in order to get that it's all bound to key keystrokes as well which are very exciting right for people who like to use keyboards that you can do all of this stuff that way you can automate it there's a whole bunch of really great stuff there also something that wasn't mentioned in the keynote but but that Steve Troughton Smith,

friend of the show, discovered shortly thereafter, or had discovered by one of his users for one of his apps, is that if you do all of these iPad and Mac kind of things where you build the menu bar on the Mac, and all that stuff is there, apparently in ipad os 15 that stuff is lit up uh on the ipad app and what you get is not a menu bar but you get a little command symbol in the top of the toolbar containing your entire menu structure so menus are there it's kind of replacing the when you would hold down the command key to get your keyboard shortcuts it's it's that now but they are yeah put together into file edit view that kind of thing right and you can define that as a developer but so so if we look at the pieces

full menu support is there and uh an element that lets you determine what kind of multitasking feature you want is there that could be added to. And that element itself, if you just grab it, moves it around on the screen. And I'll throw in another thing that we also haven't talked about quite yet, which is Quick Notes, which is an interesting feature that's on all of Apple's, or it's on the iPad Mac, right? Is it on? It's not on the iPhone, right? Because how would it be?

Or maybe it is. I don't know. Quick Notes. Quick Notes? Yeah, it's on the iPhone. It's on the iPhone too, because everything is on everything. All right. It's viewable on the iPhone.

Okay. It's not really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you're not going to bring a quick... But on the iPad, what is a Quick Note? Like on the Mac, what's a Quick Note? A Quick Note's a floating window. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you, you're not going to bring a quick, but on the iPad, what is a quick note?

Like on the Mac, what's a quick note? A quick note is a floating window. Well, okay. That's the Mac floating windows is a thing. The Mac does. What is a quick note on an iPad?

It's a floating window. It's literally a floating window on an iPad. It's a window. That's basically a notes window that floats above whatever else you're doing on your iPad. They also added a window that can come up like open this in a new window. And that window floats above the other apps that are open, even in split view. Yeah. And can be sent to the new shelf where we have to start a new friendship with shelf and or you can set it left or right and and i look at all this and i think one i'm disappointed that there isn't like proper

external display support and all of that but two literally every piece to do that is there like literally everything is there so that what that makes me believe is that Apple wanted to walk before it ran here. It has to figure out like a better way to do multitasking, make sure that it works. And but I look at this and I think when I iPad OS 15 ships, literally at any point they could ship a software update and maybe an external display or something and just turn that on because they're so close to having the ability to just have actual kind of Mac style windowing on an external display and maybe even on both. Like they could, they could totally go there. They haven't gone there yet. And you know, they might not ever go there. I think they will, but they might not. But like,

in the meantime, they have done so much of the work of like here's a floating window here's a set of windows and how we manage these windows like they're doing all of those things and the details you know i'm curious how you feel about it um it looked without having used it it looks like it makes a lot more sense. Like that people will actually be able to understand. I think it looks great. I'm just happy to no longer need to be dragging app icons around. I won't do that anymore. And so this, this feels like a much more mature system that was rethought rather than

we're just going to keep adding on top of what we already have done. Right. Like, Oh, we can drag apps around. I will just, We're just going to keep adding on top of what we already have done. Right? Like, oh, we can drag apps around. Ah, we'll just, that will be the way that we'll make split views. At a certain point, that just started to become a little bit ludicrous for me. And I think that this is a much more mature, much more modern and thought out way of managing the multitasking system. I wished that they will have pushed it further, but they haven't.

I really like what I've seen. I'm very enthusiastic to try out some of this stuff, especially because you can do things like using shortcuts to open split views and you can create split views from inside of the multitasking switcher now. Like they seem to have really spent some time. I mean, honestly, what it feels like is people that use iPadOS a lot

got given the ability to change the way that multitasking works on iPadOS because this is stuff that I just think makes a lot of sense for the way the platform has been working. And they've been working on it for a few years. That's the other thing it feels like to me. It feels like that they went back to first principles and said, okay, probably here's what we want to do in the long run with iPadOS windowing and multitasking. What do we need to do to get there?

And how do we start with a system that's going to have room to grow, but also is going to make sense? That is not going to be our current windowing setup, and it's not going to be the various ways you need to drag things out. And they came up with this. And yes, I need to use it, but it looks really encouraging. I am very encouraged by the fact that it seems to make sense. And even, like I said, even kind of harken back to the controls on macOS in terms of you've got a little thing and you tap it and it says,

what would you like to do? Full screen, split view, slide over. Like, oh yeah, that makes sense. So we get to be the first podcast to say that, you know, next year. I'm not even going to say that because I feel like they're so close now that at any point they could just announce

a new external Apple display and say, oh, and by the way, the iPad works with it and what? And they could just announce a uh you know a new external apple display and say oh and by the way the ipad works with it and what and they could do that too like they do with the pointer support but failing that yes this time next year see it back here and we'll check in on ipad multitasking and see what they do next widgets are now available on the home screen free placement anywhere on the home screen uh with have a larger format, like an Excel size just for the iPad, which is great. App library is available now, including the kind of hiding of home screens. And the app library lives in the dock, which is perfect.

Right. When you think about focus, you can't do focus on the iPad if you couldn't do things like turn on and off pages and stuff like that so it really needed to be available here but like putting in the doc makes sense i actually think putting in the doc makes more sense than putting it at the end of the app screens i mean they did both so that's fine but like putting in the doc and just having all your apps available in the doc yeah that's be vastly better. The app library will be then on iPad than it is on the iPhone. I don't think we mentioned with the way that multitasking works now, when you want to add a new app to a split view, it basically shows you your home screens again, including the dock.

So you can just choose whatever one you want. And so I think again, all of this, I think is much more discoverable. And I think for people that use the iPad but don't use the multitasking features because they're complicated or tricky or annoying, I think this will help more people get better use out of the system that already exists. I really do hope, though, that it is laying the groundwork for more.

But this does feel like a vastly superior uh foundation for future iterations i'm really excited about trying some of this stuff out uh swift playgrounds was part of the ipad part i mean and again i need to really get my head around this but it seems like you can now build apps on the ipad and submit them to the Store. And I feel like I need to fully understand how far can you go? My understanding is if it's all in Swift, you could probably do it. But so many apps are not all in Swift, right?

They have some other thing. However, there is also like, you can take them out of Swift Playgrounds and then put them in Xcode and then like continue them there and then submit them to the App Store. So there's a lot of stuff going on here um and i don't know how practical it is that you'd have an entire app written

entirely in swift and swift playgrounds and that that would be what you wanted to submit to the app store but it does answer that question right which is can you write an app for this platform on this platform and with the release of this the answer will be yes right like with a billion asterisks after it a very long footnote but yes will still be the answer and that's uh that's that's good that's good this is an x code right but it's it's uh it's a start it's a start i said these, like the iPadOS 15, not the Swift one, and I'm not going to do anything with that,

but the iPadOS 15 features combined with the iOS 15 features, this is very exciting for me. I'm excited to try this out. I'm pretty pumped on it. I have one note about the shelf that I wanted to mention too, because looking at the shelf,

which is, to explain this, it's kind of like a... On the Mac, you have lots of windows, right? You have lots of windows open and you don't have that on iPad. So how do you handle lots of windows being open? In iPadOS 15, what they do is you put them on the shelf. So you've got, you can see all your stuff that's open, all your documents that are open. You can have like five pages documents and they all sit on the shelf. And then you can tap and you can open that one full screen, or you can put it in slide over, or you can put it in split view or whatever, or you can put it on the shelf.

And we'll see how that works. It seems to be a very thoughtful way of doing multiple windows in a single, you know, single window interface, basically. But a thought struck me while I was watching the shelf video, which is, it kind of reminds me of what Apple does with iPhone interface when they're trying to adapt something that's on the iPad or the Mac to the iPhone, where there's like, they have to think about Safari, for example, right? Where it's like, well, we can't really do tabs on the iPhone because there's not enough room. So we've got a different way of doing like the currently it's like the little cards and stuff. It's like the small screen version of the big interface because you can't fit it in there. And the shelf feels kind of like that.

The shelf feels kind of like, what if we took windowing like on the Mac, but well, we don't really have the space. It's not really quite right. And then they invented the shelf. And I'm saying this in a positive way, but I also think it's really interesting because it feels like Apple is trying to take the same concept that's on the Mac, but fit it into a platform

that does not have the characteristics that the Mac has. The smallest Mac screen is the largest iPad screen. And so they created the shelf thing, which is sort of like, well, we can't do what the Mac does, but we can do something that kind of takes those same items and organizes them in a different way. Anyway, that was just a thought I had, is that this is the compact version of a complex multi-window interface, which is, what if we put them all on a shelf?

Should we finish up by talking about macOS Monterey? Oh, we should. We should. This is, this is, there's a lot here, I would say. I was very excited by this. In fact, I felt like I'm more excited by macOS than I am with the other announcements, which is a surprise to me. First off,

it gets all the previously announced features, right? Like that. I thought that was a really nice point pointing out that like now that Apple Silicon and Catalyst and like all of those things have happened and Apple's kind of aligned its platforms to bring it around to sort of what we said at the top of the show. The Mac is no longer like, well, the Mac is getting this feature

that you saw on iPad last year, and this other feature, but not all of it. No, for the most part, the message today was, hey, all those things we mentioned before, well, they're on the Mac. Okay, the Mac just gets them because that's where Apple is now. Um, so that's great. But what we're left with is some other features that they, that they held for this Mac section that I was fascinated by. Um, the moment that I laughed out loud and could not believe what I was seeing, I laughed loud too. I laughed really loud.

Was universal control. Because I think what I, what I shouted at the screen was who wanted this? And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in a, this is such a weird idea that's kind of brilliant but super strange and this is the idea that you've got an iPad next to your Mac and you're using your Mac keyboard and mouse and then you want to do something on the iPad why should you have to reach for the iPad or reach for the iPad's keyboard and trackpad when you could just push the cursor

off the side of your Mac screen and it would appear, it would pop out on the iPad and that you could drag things back and forth between them. So they're not, like when I was at my mom's house a couple of weeks ago,

I was using Sidecar, right? But that's two Mac windows. My iPad became a Mac window. This is like that, except the iPad stays the iPad and keeps running the iPad apps. But if I move the cursor over there, it just pops out and is running. And the keyboard will type on the iPad. And it's just continuity taken to this level where you're running multiple devices with the same input devices.

It's really interesting. It's kind of strange um there are like there are some nuances if you noticed in the in the uh in the video in the keynote that like there's this gray bar that appears on the side of the display when you're about to kind of pop over into the ipad and it allows you to do like adjustment like the height adjustment and stuff so you can kind of get everything kind of level to whatever the actual geography is. Cause it doesn't know, right? These devices don't actually know where they're physically positioned next to one another. In fact, how does it know that it's to the right and not to the left? The answer is it doesn't.

What it does is if you have, if it there's an ipad close to your mac and then you as a human say my because because you're not a monster you say the ipad is to the right of my mac so i'm going to move my cursor off the screen to the right and it'll pop out on the eye on the ipad if you moved it to the left it would still pop out onto the ipad because it would assume that it was to the left if you follow me it doesn't know that wow that's weird it's your behavior that determines whether it's left or right which is why like when craig was showing off it took a second the first time and that bar appeared and then he was just moving it freely right because now we've worked out where we go here right and then And there's no arrangement kind of thing.

It's just your behavior determines how it's arranged. And then you could set it to be connected all the time when they're nearby, or you can have it be sort of like drop the connection after a while. It's sort of like there's some settings there that you can set. But it's a really interesting idea that you can do it with multiple devices and um you have to initiate by the way you have to initiate on the mac you can't put your ipad in a magic keyboard and sit it next to a mac and then push the pointer off the left side and have it pop up on the mac it doesn't do that it's sort of initiated by the Mac. But once you're on, once it's connected,

you can, yes, you could like take an iPad with a magic keyboard and drive the Mac with it. And then you absolutely can do that. Stupid but brilliant demo of like, there's an iPad and then there's a MacBook and then there's an iMac. And I'm going all the way over to the iPad and I'm dragging it across, dragging it across. And then now I'm skipping over the MacBook Pro right like which basically means that they've eliminated the need for a KVM switch for two Macs right yeah because you can just you can just move your cursor over to that other Mac and it just goes. Yep. Yeah. Again, I did not anticipate this feature at all, but it's hilarious. No, who would have had this one on their scorecard?

Nobody. No. I'm pleased that it exists. This is a fun little feature, but I don't think anyone would have been thinking about this before. No. No. And then AirPlay on the Mac, which is not as exciting as you might think, because you might say, oh, well, wait a second. Does that mean that I could AirPlay my iPad to my Mac screen and then I'm using my iPad on my Mac screen? I was like, well, yes, but it's AirPlay, right?

So it's going to be from an iPad, it's going to be mirrored and it's AirPlay 2 basically. So it's going to be lower quality video and there's probably going to be lag. And it's not really for that. It's more like I want to use this Mac to play this movie that I've got on my iPhone, or I want to put this on a conference room Mac. I want to just project it from my... You could do Keynote and do a keynote presentation and present your slides to the Mac while you're running keynote on your Mac.

Like it's that, that's kind of what it's for. But still interesting in a place that they hadn't gone before. Can we talk about shortcuts? Oh yes, please. I'm so excited about this. Single most exciting announcement for me too.

Shortcuts for the Mac. mac it's it seems to be quite an ambitious project everything i had hoped yeah shortcuts for the mac would be and they said and even right down to the fact that they said first off they put up apple script and automator like when was automator mentioned in the keynote the last time when it was introduced maybe um they put it up there and they say, this is just the start of a multi-year transition, right? So they're saying, it's not all there now, but it will be. We are transitioning Mac user automation to shortcuts.

But like the details where they're like, it's in the finder, it's in the menu bar, it's in spotlight, it's in Siri. You can import, I never expected this. You can import automator actions into shortcuts that you can do apple script and uh shell scripts from shortcuts yep on the mac yep it's all there i love uh menu bar and dock for quick access to it. I think that's fantastic. And from an app standpoint, my understanding is that Mac developers will be able to basically support an API for shortcuts. If you're running

an iPad or an iPhone app just from the App Store that was meant for those platforms on an M1 Mac, just works, right? It's just like it was on iOS. Do you know about Catalyst apps? I don't. I think if Catalyst apps support shortcuts when they're on iOS, they support shortcuts on the Mac. That would be nice. But I'm not 100%. I think that, right? Because they've already done the work.

But my understanding is like Mac Mac apps, like just just random Mac app that is not from Catalyst, that's been on the Mac for ages, should be able to support shortcuts. And in the meantime, I'll say again, in the meantime, you could do AppleScript in a shortcut that would support it. Which is amazing. And the future of automation on the mac is what craig fitter

you said it's a multi-year transition um and there's somehow some kind of import from automated to shortcuts which i can't imagine working very seamlessly but i guess well i can see it because honestly one of the problems with automator is that it did not it's its lexicon of uh of commands was not particularly great, nor did it really grow a lot. So I wonder if what they did here, first off, it might be as simple as they're just going to call those code bundles from within shortcuts and just sort of like call them out and say, well, it's over there. Or maybe they rewrote them, or maybe that's part of the transition is to sort of like rewrite that stuff. But however they're bridging it. I'm fascinated by that. You know, it may just be as that's that

simple is that there's a shortcut step that is run automator action. And it's that automator action. And so when you import an automator action, you just kind of get that. But we'll have to see. I'm looking forward to it. It's very exciting. This is good stuff. And the truth is that this is one of those places where iPad and iOS have been ahead of macOS lately, where it's easier for me to automate stuff on my iPad than it is on my Mac, because Shortcuts has so much more power built into it that I have to kind of brute force on the Mac. So very excited about this. I can't wait for it. Shows that Apple cares about user automation and cares about it on the Mac

and that they like shortcuts and they want shortcuts to be everywhere. All of these things are great news. Super great news. Safari. Safari got a bunch of new features that actually impact all of the systems, but they showed it off i think as part

of the mac because you could show off the features larger as a new tab bar which is also kind of the search box or whatever apple calls it the what is it called smart bar smart bar uh now every tab includes its own smart bar yeah but it's all one smart bar. Because they've collapsed the interface. It kind of reminds me of iOS Safari, right? The tab has its URL control inside it. I actually kind of like this.

I think the design looks really cool. It looks modern. I like the look of it. I'm going to withhold judgment. My initial response was that I thought it looked awful and ugly, but that's also because Safari is familiar and this is new. And so I need to really think about it. And also I'm the kind of person who immediately says,

I want you to show me the entire URL of the page that you're on and not just the domain, right? Apple has been striving to simplify what's up in the web browser window, and I'm one of those people who does not want them to. So for me, I look at this and I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I like this. And on the iPhone, it's going to be very strange too, where the domain is going to be at the bottom,

and you swipe across to go to different tabs and stuff. I think it's good for the bottom. I mean, big phone person, right? I'm happy they're moving that down to the bottom. I mean, big phone person, right? Yeah. I'm happy they're moving that down to the bottom. I like the look of it. Yes, maybe it needs use. One thing I haven't seen,

I'm hoping that they still have, is pinned tabs. I don't know if that's a thing anymore. I hope so. Right. Because I use those a lot on the Mac. I do too. But they also have tab groups,

which I think is kind of cool. Yeah. So tab groups are, they're live. They're kind of, if you think about them, so what they're not is bookmarks, right? They're not like,

oh, I set up these five tabs and when I click this tab group, those five tabs always open. That's not what they are. They're like, it's almost like having multiple windows open with different sets of tabs in them, except it's just one window. So if you've got four pages in a tab group, and then you open a new page that's on a different site, and you switch away and you switch back to that tab group,

that extra page is there and you go to on a different device, you go to that tab group, that extra page is there. And then you close a page and it closes in that tab group on all your devices. So the tab groups are not permanent saves of website, like bookmark stuff. They're not that. They're sessions. So the really way to think about it is if you keep 80 tabs open in your browser, but it's really 20 tabs about this and 30 tabs about this and 15 tabs about this. You can put those all into individual tab groups, so it'll be less cluttered, but they're still all available. And they're all available across all your devices, which means that it's kind of a supplement to iCloud tabs, because now all of the tabs are syncing, not just sort of like these are open on your iPhone and these are open on your Mac and these are open on your iPad.

Although there still is, you can still open tabs that are not grouped. And there's basically like a not grouped group that is just like you also have 10 tabs open. also have 10 tabs open. So a tab doesn't have to live in a tab group. But if a tab lives in a tab group, then it stays there until you close it. And it will be in that tab group on all your devices. So it's, it's kind of like organization. I feel like what basically happened is browser makers are like, well, you can open some tabs. And users immediately are like, great, I will open a thousand tabs. And browser makers are like, oh no, don't, no. And so what Apple's saying here is

instead of opening a hundred tabs in one big tab interface, why don't you group your tabs by how you're using them? And I think this is going to be a good feature ultimately. Yeah, and that, that, I think this is going to be a good feature ultimately. Yeah. I'm excited about it. I, again, it's one of those things that I really want to try out the tires on, but I'm excited about it. I didn't even mention maybe what is, I thought

maybe the smartest feature, which is the kind of thing that you, we'd used to have to like build user automation to do, which is like you, if you drag the tab group out of the sidebar in safari into a text like into notes it it gives you a little link dump in text of all those pages with their links right like so if you do a bunch of research and you got a bunch of stuff open and then you like want to save that in a in in notes or send it to somebody you can actually just drag it out and it and it literally just turns it into text that you can paste in or save as text wherever. Nice. Very nice. Which is really thoughtful. So yeah, I'm reluctant about the look of it. I'm a little concerned, but I'm open. I'm accepting that I'm in the we fear change moment now and that I'll get better. But the tab groups thing, I think is actually really smart.

Oh, I have one more thing about Safari. Okay. Which is, I wish I'd picked this in a draft. I wish I talked about it. It was so obvious and we left it there because it happened a year ago. Remember last year, they supported the web extensions API. So basically you could take Chrome extensions

and with some extra work and some security stuff, you could build them and put them in the Mac App Store. And at the time we said, and I wrote an article about this actually a few months afterward, which is who's going to do this? Because most of these things are kind of like open source. And it's going to be extra work, you got to have a Mac, a lot of them don't even have a Mac, you got to have a Mac, you got to build it using Xcode, you got to change some of your code code because Apple has some specific security requirements that are not available or that are not required on these other extension platforms. So even though you can use a lot of your code from your Chrome extensions, you have to do

a lot of extra work. And at the end of all of that, what you get is an extension in the Mac App Store. And my thought at the time was nobody's going to do this because they're going to look at this and say, why am I going to do all this work just to be on the Mac on Safari? Because after all, they could just use Chrome on the Mac and use my extension. They don't actually need. So it's like a fraction of a fraction. The Mac is not an enormous platform. And then it's only people using Safari on the Mac. And if you're building those extensions, you're thinking, I have every Mac and PC because they're all running Chrome. That's the attitude. I know that a lot of people use Safari. I use Safari.

But at the time, what I kept thinking was, yeah, but if they put this on the iPhone, right? Web extensions, browser extensions don't run on mobile, right? They don't run on mobile. And if Apple would let those browser extensions come to the iPhone, I think those developers would be more interested in bringing their extensions out. And that's what happened. That is going to happen now. I think they're going to have to build a Mac version and an iOS version, so they may still not build a Mac OS version. They're slightly different. But essentially, now all that same story happens,

except at the end of the process, what you get is a browser extension that runs on iPad and iPhone. And I think browser extension for iPhone is going to be the thing that pushes a lot of those browser extensions over the edge. Yeah, I'm intrigued to see what this ends up being like because i just don't i can't think of any like i don't use any browser extensions i can't think of what i would use them for on ios let alone on the mac so we'll see i suppose i mean i guess i use maybe like one password but well some of them well no i mean some of them it's it's's rewriting things to look better or look different or add information.

The one that I always use as an example that's fun is there's an extension called Library Extension. And what it does is it takes like Amazon book pages and says if this book is available at your local library. It's a really cool idea, right? So somebody references a book and sends you the Amazon link and you go to the Amazon site and it says, this copy is available at your local library. You could reserve it now instead of buying it on Amazon. It's like, that's so clever. I love that. And there's some other stuff like that. Yes, it's a little bit of an edge case, but the fact that Apple has gone to all this trouble and has... The thing is like offering it up offering safari on ios to extension developers it's like so that's that's really interesting because that's this is why they

have all those security measures right is they're letting people rewrite uh browser pages and stuff but i don't know could be interesting so that's WWDC 2021 is that all I think it might be alright I think that's all she wrote for today we'll of course be having more to talk about next week I'm sure we'll have tried out some bits and stuff too

I know I'm definitely going to be giving iPadOS a while so I can kind of poke through and see what's going on there I don't imagine that I will be trying anything else out between now and then I and see what's going on there. I don't imagine that I will be trying anything else out between now and then. I'm not going to put on my iPhone, I don't think. I'm not going to put it on my Mac, I don't think. We'll find out, I guess, but I'm not planning on that. But iPad for sure. I think I have it downloading and installing right now. Do you have any plans right now for what you'll be testing?

Do you have test devices? I guess you do, don't you? I do. So yeah. My plans are that I will take a sacrificial Mac, an iPad, an iPhone, and install the beta on them. So we'll give some first impressions next week, plus following up on all of the little bits and bobs

that come out. Because there's still a whole week of WWDC to come. We're just starting. So thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you would like to get longer, ad-free episodes of Upgrade, if you could even imagine a longer episode of Upgrade than this one,

go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up right now. Thank you so much to everybody that supports the show by doing that. Also thanks to Wondery, DoorDash, Pingdom, and Smile for their support of this show. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. And I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell.