Upgrade - 37: I Don't Have a Production Staff

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

This week Jason and Myke talk about different podcast production styles, the apps they are using on their Apple Watches, and answer a selection of #askupgrade questions.

from relay fm it is time for upgrade today's show is number 37 and it is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, and PDFPen Scan Plus from Smile, which is the app for mobile scanning and OCR. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined as always by the man with the plan. It's Mr. Jason Snell. I will reveal my plan to you at a later time. Hello, Mike. How's it going? I'm very well. How are you? It's good. It's Monday. I've been traveling so much the last couple of months that I'm really

happy to be starting. I know it seems weird to be like, yay, it's Monday. I get to do some work, but it's Monday and I get to have a week where it's like I'm not flying anywhere. I just can actually work for the whole week. And that's exciting. So I'm happy to start it with you, as always. It is a nice start to the week. Upgrade. It's time to upgrade the week. The week is upgraded for the rest of the week. Pretty good.

So we have some categorized follow-up today. I know. Well, the last couple of weeks you've been putting together, as I've been completely underwater with travel and finishing my photos book for Take Control and a bunch of other projects that we're going to talk about one of them in a little bit, that you've been doing the show prep more than I was doing it for most of the time before. And now you've been doing it the last few weeks. And I'm not going to get used to it because I want to contribute to the show prep and not make you do it all. But, boy, that is a fine list of show notes there. I wish the audience could see them, but we can't give away our secrets.

Yeah, because we call people names. Yeah. Also, it's a podcast, so they couldn't see it because we can't do that. No. Well, that also means if people have been upset with the last couple of weeks' episodes or upset with this one, then you can blame me. It's all my fault. That's right. If they've seemed off the last few weeks, it's because Mike has been planning them.

So last week on Ask Upgrade, Adam wrote in to say that he was going to be ditching Picture Life and moving to Photos. But he was unhappy that he would be losing the kind of memories feature the flashback feature of picture life yeah we had a bunch of people write in with a bunch of different suggestions

and we we sort of shrugged and mentioned a couple of things and exposed our ignorance and then everybody wrote in to say you were dummies so a bunch of these suggestions we got more than once but i have five different suggestions for adam the first one comes from tony and tony suggested that time hop would be a it would actually be a good answer because we mentioned it's like oh time hop just a social but actually time hop can look at your iphone's photos and videos and as well as other services and show you things from previous times so it can look at what's actually on your device so i hope they're going to do an update to time hop although i'm not completely uh optimistic about that because if you're using iCloud photo library it will show

you every photo you took on that date and there will be dozens for some days and this is what i discovered is it's not really picking a few at random. If you have like 30, it just shows you all 30. And if they aren't downloaded to the device because, you know, you're saving space by having to be on the cloud, it just shows you the thumbnail at full size. And it looks awful. So I feel like TimeHop needs to do some work here. If you're not using iCloud Photo Library, then it would probably be better. But it's not ideal, but it does work. It's just sort of ruined time hop for me because I've got all these really bad looking thumbnails for a day instead of them kind of curating it. And, you know, I'd be happy if they just picked a couple, but the app doesn't do that. But still, TimeHop is an option.

It's a fun app. I like it. And it does look at your photo library. Even if it did show you all of them, which I agree isn't ideal, at least if you could see them properly, then it wouldn't be too bad. The fact that I think the worst part of that, that sounds to me anyway,

is the fact that it's showing you like low resolution images, basically. Yeah me anyway, is the fact that it's showing you low-resolution images, basically. Yeah, it's not good. Again, it was written before there was the iCloud photo library. So again, they could probably do something where they say if they don't have the full-size version, I don't even want to show it. But that would require an update. And I'm not sure. I think TimeHop doesn't even work in iPad mode.

would require an update and i'm not sure time hop doesn't even work in ipad mode i think on an ipad uh it it's still an iphone resolution thing so i don't know how committed they are to their ios app but it's worth a try uh bart wrote in to say that there is a built-in search in ios that will show you photos from a year ago yeah apparently if you type in the search box one year ago, it shows you your photos from a year ago. That doesn't work on photos for the Mac. I don't know why. But Bart says that you can type one year ago in iOS photos and it will show you pictures

from a year ago. It's not showing me anything, so maybe I didn't take pictures a year ago. Maybe. I don't know. Okay, that's fine. Thanks, Bart. Chris wrote in to suggest another app called memoir um chris says it connects to a bunch of different services and it does the job for him for photo memories so that's one um and graham suggested another app called photo flashback which apparently does a similar kind of thing.

Photo Flashback looks what actually is on your device. Remember I said that I thought there was an app that might have done this and the reason I knew this is because Graham wrote it up for Mac Stories. So that looks at your iCloud photo library and it will show you

previous years there. And then Richard finally wrote in to say that Workflow, the app cloud photo library and it will show you uh previous years there and then richard finally wrote in to say that workflow the app workflow has a workflow called time machine that lets you look at photos from a set time ago so you can go in and say when do you want the photos to be and it'll show you them now that's that's that's the way to work around the fact that things like smart albums will only let you set a specific uh by saying, you know, using a workflow because workflow can do that. Memoir looks like it's a good option because it's got your photos and like TimeHop, it's going to connect to your other photo services and float those to the top. And those are all fun. So that was great feedback. Thank you,

everybody, for doing what we could not, which is give Adam some answers. What we horrifically failed to achieve. There will be links to all of those apps that we mentioned in today's show notes, which you can find in your podcast app of choice, or over on the website, relay.fm, slash upgrade, slash 37. So, moving on, we spoke about Raiders of the lost ark last week um we did i don't want to i want to do my best to try and not spoil anything that we spoke about uh because i'm sure that there'll be some people that um have not yet uh maybe seen the movie or maybe holding it or

something like that you know i've seen that kind of stuff in the past people do that um but basically the feedback that i have here uh that i wanted to give is that i think people should go back and listen to the incomparable episode about razors of the lost ark episode we're following out episode number eight we're following out back to 2010 yep we mentioned yes we mentioned it on the show uh and then i as soon as we finished recording put it to the top of my overcast list and listened to it and really really enjoyed it um so i recommend that people go back and listen to that uh john gruber was on it with dan moran and yourself yeah i look back at it and i can't believe we only talked for an hour but that was back when i imagined that thecomparable would be an hour long every episode.

And it's turned out to be more like an hour and a half now. And I just don't care. I don't edit it down. I try to wind the conversation down after an hour or 90 minutes or so. But sometimes it runs long. But, yeah. And I was glad you mentioned, because I haven't listened to that episode in a while, and you mentioned it actually sounds pretty good. I mean, keeping in mind that's a podcast from five years ago.

The whole idea with Incomparable is that they're all meant to be, you know, more or less they're all about works. And if you go back later and watch a movie, you should be able to listen to the episode about that movie and get something out of it, even if it was five years ago. Because we're not talking about the headlines of 2010. We're just talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark. we're not talking about the headlines of 2010 we're just talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark um so it was good to hear that you that you thought it sounded okay because that was you know the eighth of those that I produced and so probably the you know something in the 10th or 15th podcast I had ever edited so I'm glad it sounded okay yeah and it was it was just fun to hear but it was really interesting because it just didn't sound like it was old like it

sounded sounded really good so congratulations on the evergreen content that's great um next many people uh so as a quick aside i was talking about um we were talking a bit about utility belts and things like that. And I mentioned how in... Indiana Jones' whip. Yeah. I was talking about I'd seen Star Wars that weekend as well. And I mentioned how Luke Skywalker seems to happen upon a grappling hook when he needs to swing across the cavern, basically, with Leia. A poorly designed cavern, yes.

So I thought, why did he have a grappling hook? like the cavern basically with with really designed cavern yes um so i you know i thought like why did he have a grappling hook and basically everyone uh that listened to the show commented to let me know that um it probably came from the stormtrooper suit but then my next question my follow-up question is so why do stormtroopers have grappling hooks i don't understand why anybody on the death star needed a grappling hook uh so so that that's kind of all i have there about that yeah it's it's just more questions answer one question ask another question but i do like that's not something i'd really thought of that even though they ditch the stormtrooper outfit fit he apparently keeps the the utility belt because you know maybe they could use it

and they do yep he's like that's this is great i'm gonna i'm gonna keep this thing it's awesome there's a multi-tool on here there's a there's an electric screwdriver lasers everything lasers everything uh but yeah so there you go so So maybe Stormtroopers have grappling hooks too, but it doesn't make complete sense to me. And then Brian also wrote in to say that in the 1977 theatrical release, Luke's grappling hook misses the first time and he tries again. I'm pleased

that they did that, and it's sad to see that it was Lucas right out of there. Indeed. So that's that. And then one last piece of follow-up i have today jason uh if you remember about our filipino boy band that was uh basically started in our honor that's not that's not true at all yes you know uh gabriel uh created a artist's rendition of what the upgrade band could look like. I don't know if you've seen this.

I think it is amazing. And I wanted the world to see it because it is an incredible picture of me and you. I am iMike with an I, I-M-I-C. And for a reason that I'm not completely sure, you go by the name Manila Rice. I guess because of the Philippines, right? This is the Philippines, yeah.

This is the Philippineines yeah this is the philippine boy band version of us and you are singing a song of uh original composition movies called mike at the movies yes and there are some great uh signs being held by our adoring fan base in the audience yes they all have um hearts for eyes they're very much like the uh the one student in that uh opening scene of raiders of the Lost Ark in the classroom. There's a heart upgrade sign and a Yo Amo I Mike sign. It's great, is what we're saying. So thank you, Gabriel.

Yeah, excellent work. So I think we're actually at the end of follow-up. Yeah, I think so. So I think what we've learned today is that if I of follow-up. Yeah, I think so. So I think what we've learned today is that if I prepare follow-up, it is efficient. Yeah, I am terrible. I'm so excited by follow-up even now. You'd think I'd be jaded that I just pack in so much follow-up. Also, we had the genius move of putting AskUpgrade at the end.

So we split our follow-up essentially in two. And that's a good move, I think. It makes it seem like we have more self-controlcontrol than we actually do yeah there's some great stuff in our upgrade today actually yeah i'm looking forward to that segment as always but let me uh take a break we'll take our first break before we jump into some topics that we have today this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by our friends over at lynda.com they are the online learning platform of over 3 000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. You can get yourself a free 10-day trial by visiting lynda.com.

That's l-y-n-d-a dot com slash upgrade. lynda.com is for people that basically want to expand their mind to learn new and exciting things. Maybe there's always this thing that you've been curious about that you want to fix, or, you know, you want to make something happen for yourself, you want to advance yourself in new ways. And you want to go and learn some stuff to help you do that. So let's say, for example, that you've always wanted to learn Excel, like you've got this idea for a promotion in mind at work. And one of the skills you're really going to need is to be able to like do some cool stuff with data and create pivot tables, right? You can learn this stuff with lynda.com. Maybe you want to do something creative, you want to get a bit artsy, you want to do some web design, or maybe,

you know, you've been interested in even like painting, or just like art in general. lynda.com has courses on all of this stuff. Like, I was looking at photography once, and they have the things that you'd expect, right? They have the software, right? So you can go and learn how to use Lightroom. They had courses on Aperture. I'm sure that they have courses on the Photos app as well. But you can also learn the practical stuff. So like how to shoot a portrait properly, how to light a scene properly. It's like it's not just software. It's also like things, like the other stuff that you're going to need to help you learn these new things. Learn.com's courses, they are put on by experts. They're super passionate about teaching,

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lynda.com slash upgrade for your free 10-day trial. Thank you so much lynda.com for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. So, Mr. Jason Snell, you put together a little thing uh that you released this weekend a project that you've been working on for the incomparable um do you want to explain to people

kind of what it is and where the idea for that came from yeah uh so this weekend, yeah, we dropped this episode. So David Letterman, the TV talk show host in the U.S. for he's been hosting a nightly talk show for 33 years. I guess you call them chat shows, would you? Yeah, we were called them. They talk, chat, whatever. Anyway, he's retiring after 33 years. His last show was Wednesday. And in the 80s, it was the best way I could describe it, I think, is that during my formative years as a teenager, kind of understanding and being exposed to different kinds of writing and writing and, and, and culture and, and, uh, comedy and, and creativity and things like that. And irony. And I mean, I, I just absorbed a lot from David Letterman. I can't remember when I started watching him, but I was very rapidly watching his show, recording his show on a VCR and playing it back the next morning, uh, every day, every night, every day. Um, and, uh, And so was a huge fan. And it was made a huge impact on me. And so with him retiring, I thought I want to do an episode of The Incomparable about that. And I was thinking about getting together a panel, I know a bunch of people who are also

David Letterman fans, and I was gonna get them all together. And we were going to talk about it. And I had a moment where I thought, you know, I kind of want to do something special. And I'm not quite sure whether I had been thinking, do I want to try something in a little bit of a different format? And I can't remember whether I actually said, you know, hey, I want to live through what Mike lived through when he made Behind the App. I don't know if I did that or not. But I thought it would be interesting.

I have a love of formats. I have a love of making things to a format for hundreds of episodes, like with The Incomparable, as we're now doing with this show. But I also love breaking formats. I think one of the great things about having a recurring format is that when you break it, it's funny and interesting to do something unexpected. Honestly, thinking about

it right now, probably something influenced a lot by David Letterman in the 80s because he took what was by all accounts a normal talk show and then did extremely weird stuff with it. And that was a kick. So I decided to do that. I decided, what if I did an episode of The Incomparable that was more edited and produced like like an NPR show or like behind the app where I did interviews with a bunch of different people and then sort of told the story? A big motivator for me, too, was that I had a real point of view for this story. Sometimes, you know, we talk about movies and I have an opinion, but I think that the most important thing about it is the conversation. Everybody's got their different takes and there's a give and take and all of that. And with this, I felt like there was some stuff I really wanted to say about David Letterman and about the kind of arc of his career and about how it influenced me and what it all means to me that he's retiring. And I felt like a panel discussion wasn't really the place for that. I wanted to

exert a little more editorial authority over that topic. And so I decided to do that, to do the interviews and then write a script that, you know, I would narrate and interleave, you know, drop in all of these little bits from my interview subjects. And so I did. And it's about an hour and six minutes long, and it dropped on Friday night. And it was a lot of work. But you know that because you did the same thing with Behind the App.

I want to talk about the Incomparable episode a little bit. I know Letterman. I am familiar with him um i've seen clips and stuff over the years but i've never seen an episode of either or either or any of his shows um i'm kind of tangentially familiar with him and i've seen some youtube clips you know of like oh you should watch this type of thing So I listened to the show and found it really interesting to kind of hear the history of this guy. And basically I was like, I listened to it today and was like pausing and going to YouTube to find things like what was the monkey cam? I watched like his 9-11 monologue and that kind of stuff. I thought about putting in

more audio clips and quite frankly i i ran out of time i just and energy i just couldn't i i thought about putting in a lot of uh more audio and instead i've got a couple at the section breaks but otherwise i just i just didn't do it it is all on youtube basically all of it i was gonna say like i wish that you did it and then when i watched watched it, I was like, you couldn't have put seven minutes in the middle. It wouldn't have been weird. But that monologue was, I think, quite important to watch to understand

a bit about him. So I kind of was just like searching around YouTube today and getting a bit familiar with it. And I can see that, like, in your intention of creating this episode, it was to celebrate the work that that man did and share it with like-minded people. But for me, you actually educated me

about why Letterman is an important thing to a bunch of people. And I found it quite fascinating. So it was excellent work. I'm glad you liked it. One of the things, I mean, I go back and forth between thinking it's targeted at nobody because it's about a subject that only people who really care about it will want to listen to. And yet it spends a lot of time explaining who the person is. That's in my more negative moments.

In my more positive moments, what I would say is I tried to make something that would explain why he was important to me, even if it's not, he's not important to you and why he was important to other people, the other people I talked to and tell a sort of an interesting story also about somebody who's influential, um, or, you know, at an early part in your life and an early part in their career. and also how the kind of the wheel continues to turn. And the person who starts out as this influential rule breaker ends up as the man at the end. And how that's the path that we all kind of follow is Phil Michaels in the in the in the piece says something about Conan O'Brien and says, you know, people younger than me feel the same way about him. But I don't because those people younger than me are awful, I think is what he says. So, I mean, that was part of it too.

So, you know, I've been interested to hear from a few people who don't like him or don't know anything about him that they got something out of the piece because that was part of the goal was to tell a story that was partly about me and my influences and why I find this important. And putting it in my voice a little bit more, I felt was one of the reasons to do that. That if it was just a, hey, let's all talk about David Letterman, I'm not sure if people would,

who didn't really like David Letterman, would want to listen. But telling a story about why he was important and why a lot of people are really, consider this week to be a big deal. Why is that? Why do we think that this is a milestone that he's retiring?

And so I tried to put that in there. I wouldn't spoil it because people should listen to it. why is that why do we think that this is a milestone that he's retiring um and so that that i tried to put that in there i wouldn't spoil it because people should listen to it but i really liked the personal stories that you threw in both your own opinions about him now but then also the story that you put in to explain how you feel that was really really nice that's my this american life moment in there there's a couple of those where i was uh i had a moment of like oh this is sort of like that and and it was this complete tangent about my own life. And I thought, you know, actually these kinds of things do kind of thrive when people bring in some of their personal baggage. And this, this is supposed to be kind of my personal story,

along with some other friends of mine's personal stories about this. So I threw it in there and, uh, I'm, I'm pretty happy with it. I mean, there are a million things I would change if I wanted to spend another week on it, but I don't. So, and I don't have the time and he's retiring Wednesday. So that we got, we got it where, you know, I got it to some place that I was, I was, I was pretty happy with it. But yeah, I did try to make, I also wrote the script. So that's, you know, it's me reading words that I wrote, but it's me reading from a script. And that's an interesting challenge too, because that's not the same as just speaking extemporaneously like this. And so that was also kind of interesting. So it was fun to do.

I consulted you about how you put together Behind the App and then essentially ignored your advice. Because you did a lot of Behind the App, I feel, where you sort of knew your interviews and knew where people said, knew that people said things that you were going to put in. So you'd write, right? And then you'd go find clips to illustrate what you were writing about.

Is that accurate? Yeah, I mean, I did all the interview. I wrote all the questions, did all the interviews, then wrote the scripts. And most of the time I wrote the scripts and then went back into the interviews, re-listened to the relevant sections and cut out the clips that I thought I would want to use.

Then I recorded the audio of me reading the script. Then I would stop at points that I wanted to add clips, listen back to the correctly categorized clips, and drop them in where I thought that they were relevant. Yeah, which makes sense. So what I tried to do instead was I had Casting Words, which is a podcast transcript service. And I could have used some other services. I just chose them because I've used them before.

I had them do transcripts of all my interviews. And I posted – I should say I posted the interviews. And Joe Steele in the chat room points this out. I know he liked doing this. And I've heard from a couple other people that the show is an hour long and it features me. And then it features clips from these interviews I I did these, these five interviews that I did. Um, or the bonus track, you can actually listen for three and a half hours to all five interviews I did. And it's just the interviews. Um, so you can hear what I took out and what I kept because, you know,

three and a half hours of interviews only leads to an hour of running time, and that includes the ads and me, who's not in the interviews. So it's a very different kind of thing. But anyway, so I transcribed those three and a half hours of interviews with time code. That's an option. You pay a little more per minute. And then I treated it kind of like a magazine article in that, you know, a lot of times if I'm writing an article with many, a news story or a magazine story that's got lots of quotes in it, which I don't do much anymore, but I used to do all the time. You end up with all your notes of all your interviews and you put them together and you find

the common areas of conversation and you kind of organize those quotes and then you build a story around it. And that's what I did with this script is I used the, I knew that we had talked about, uh, when did you first see Letterman? Uh, what were those, why were those early days so influential? What about when he didn't get the tonight show, Jay Leno got the tonight show and then he moved to CBS and how did that feel? And then sort of like, what's your relationship with the show now? Um, that, you know, it's been on for 20 years. Do you still watch it every night? We had some buckets for those things. So I took what everybody said about those different topics from the transcripts and basically copied and pasted them together into different categories.

And those are basically the scenes of the show. And then I wrote my narration around those transcripts. And some of the transcripts were wrong. So as I was editing the show, and then I would just go to the time code and cut out those bits. I color coded them all. And then I basically took the script and dropped them in, recorded my narration, and then dropped the clips in one by one. And at one point I found that they had transcribed me saying things as if it was one of the subjects.

I was like, boy, I really agree with what this guy said here. It was me. So I had to rewrite and rerecord a couple of things, but, um, that was my approach to it, which I don't know if I would do that again, but it certainly made it, it made it a lot easier because I knew exactly what people said, you know, with a couple exceptions and could just kind of craft it. Um, and as a, as somebody who's written those kinds of stories before that was a format that was comfortable for me, the idea that I had all the text in front of me and i was just essentially choosing quotes like i was writing a story except it was a radio story instead um i i really uh think that if i was going to

to do what you did now i would probably do it the way that you did it like if i was going to do one episode um that that method is a very smart way of doing just being able to find things because it was incredibly time uh intensive for me uh yeah having to go back and listen again to the probably i think maybe 25 to 30 hours of interviews oh my god yeah the i was able to do like searches in the transcripts and also discovering the casting words had a uh a time code option that was a huge one for me because then i would find an interesting thing and move it into the script with the time code and that made it when i when i put the show it didn't take me it took me most of friday to put the show together but it didn't take that much time because I knew at 30 minutes into Aaron Barnhart, he said this. I could just go there and clip it out and say, that's what I need.

So it was, yeah, it was effective. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but since I don't have a production staff or anything like that, I used Casting Words as my production staff, essentially, to get me a transcript. It's funny. We take so much pride, I think you and I both, in the production of these things. And this is the first time. When I'm doing an incomparable episode, I do a lot of editing for that. But it's all about simple editorial choices.

You're tidying things up basically yeah exactly and then i'll remove tangents and all of that and so it's part of the creative process to edit it and so i take great pride in that this was different the writing of the script was the creative process and i realized later that with a couple exceptions which um i would have caught on a first listen um i could have handed the script to a production assistant and said, cut this and gotten what I wanted because the script was what I wanted. And that's very different. And I don't have a production assistant. I did it myself. But I had that moment as I was building the show on Friday that I had already done the creative part,

which is not the case with most of the other podcasts I do, where there's the creative part of steering the conversation, and then there's the cleanup, and that you make some decisions there. All my editorial decisions, with a couple of exceptions, happened in the script. control freak who's used to controlling everything in the edit i realized my script was what i intended and i could literally have just handed the script in the files to uh somebody who's a competent audio editor and said do this and it would have been fine so i had people like that i would send my scripts to um to have them kind of looked at and chopped down or added to and that was an incredible help for me, at least initially. As it got towards the end, I started to run out of time. So I was, the last couple of episodes,

the scripts were just 100% done by me. But by that point, I felt like I had a better guide for how to do it. But I mean, you know, behind the app, I ran for 11 episodes. And, you know, I'm doing the music thing now, Behind the app ran for 11 episodes. I'm doing the music thing now, which is way easier to put together. It doesn't take as much time to put together.

The edit is still a couple of hours, but editing an episode of Behind the App, they're about 40 minutes on average. Just the assembly would take five or six hours. I am really proud of it uh but i'm you know one of my my feelings to this and i wonder how you feel about it you know what are the benefits of one style over the other i mean it's a lot of it is about taste and and is there a business benefit to to one style or the other is is something that i find very interesting and i wonder how you feel having done just this one if you even have a sense of that oh i don't know i don't know if i do i will I will say that I had I had a bunch of people say um more like this yeah sure no no like with the radio drama yeah as a one-off every now and then it was it's a lot of work to do

something like this and uh I know you felt this way I, I know how hard you worked on Behind the App. So I don't know. I don't know. Well, I feel like Behind the App was really good. And on the whole, the feedback of it was really good too. And I'm very proud of it. But I mean, I was talking about this on Analog this week. Kind of Behind the App met all the goals that I set for it, but I didn't anticipate the amount of work that was going to be needed to do it. I didn't know it was going to take the

amount of work that it did. And it's interesting because, you know, I know it's like, what is the better thing to do here? Because it's all about taste. And I wonder if you're trying to run an effective business, like we are here. For me, it was like, where is my time best served? Because could I do a panel show, which was as financially successful and popular as Behind the App was? Yes, I do three of them basically um and this show and connected

for example uh they take like a tenth of the amount of time to create right and and it's interesting because it's like i i would love to do more things like behind the app and i will again in the future but it there has to be an incredibly good reason to do more things like behind the app and i will again in the future but it there has to be an incredibly good reason to do it because when when i initially did behind the app i was like this is just what it's going to be now i'm just going to do these over and over and over again it's it they they i mean i realize we're it's podcasting about podcasting now but also i think we're talking about making creative choices which i think is interesting i i did i did the letterman episode the way i did because i wanted to try that on for size and and and i felt like it was an appropriate it it was i was trying it on and

it fit what i wanted to do so it was a good opportunity to try that because it it was a good match topic wise and and my intent was it was a match for it but yeah i mean i i went on a mini twitter rant that i won't recap here but the idea that that uh one format is is uh superior to another i mean just because it takes more work doesn't mean it's fundamentally better it's just different and if i had done a letterman episode that was a round table in a classic style it would have been it would have been interesting it would have been different There would have been some things that came up that would have been interesting areas to go in that didn't come up because the participants

didn't speak to each other. They all spoke to me. It would have been different. It would have been good. It would have not been the same. And I feel like this is the challenge. I think that in the end, to the listener, a lot of times, I know you can tell

that something's had a lot of work put into it, but, um, I think maybe there's not an understanding of just how much more effort it is. And the scale is different, like an NPR podcast. I mean, the amount of effort that goes into every one of those shows and the staff that they've got. Um, I think people it's, it's great that people listen to shows like this, but they have to understand that comparing a show like this to a show like This American Life, I mean, you and I could do this with Skype

and essentially with free software and post it for almost nothing. And we have a little more than that, but it's essentially like that. And something like This American Life or any of the more highly produced NPR stuff, I mean, there are whole staffs of writers and technical people and reporters. It's just a huge operation. It's a totally different scale. And the great thing about this medium is that this medium can hold all these different kinds of approaches but they are they are really different and sometimes i think the uh professionalism that that we can bring to a show like this maybe hides the fact that um you know we're doing this on essentially a shoestring

budget compared to something like like that um and's just, I mean, that's just how it is. It's just, there are different kinds of things. If I could do, I was saying to John Syracuse actually the other day that I could do the incomparable like that every week if it was my entire job, but it would take all of my time. It would literally, I could not do a single other thing. And if I could do that and it other thing. Um, and if I could do that and it could support my family, then maybe I would choose to do that. I probably wouldn't because I like writing and stuff, but, um, you know, that's the amount of work it is. It's like a full-time job kind of work to do an episode and how you managed to do behind the app for all those

weeks with everything else. It blows my mind. It it hurt your mind is blown now your mind is also blown it was it was it was really tough it was really really tough um but but you're proud of the work and i'm you know and i'm proud i'm proud of this episode and you know there's something to be said for that and i think that's the argument is um are you are you challenging yourself creatively and are you thinking what's the best format for, for this? And I think, I think if something came up and you said, you know, that would be a really great idea for a three-part documentary series that you would do it. Um, because you've got another tool now, but you, you can also, you also know what all the ramifications of that creative decision will be. And so you can, you can decide, do I want to do that or not?

And I think that's one of the great things about, about trying something new is you get a better sense of how it works for you, what the issues are, and then you can make a decision about whether, whether it works for you or not. I hope that this medium gets to the point where our, our businesses essentially are able to do shows like that and have them be sustainable but um i don't think we're of the size where we can do that now because like you know you were killing yourself over behind the app i mean you could do behind the app if you had some production staff but you know that you just you just quit your job to go full-time the idea that you would hire production staff to help that's that's kind of a ways out, I think, right now.

And so it's important to keep that in mind, too, that there's ambition that sometimes exceeds what's possible, at least in the short term. But I would love to get there because I do think that there's a lot of fun stuff you can do with audio that we don't do very much now because it's just so much uh so much work to do it that it's not practical indeed i think that's probably enough inside baseball for today i agree uh let's take a quick break and then let's talk about some other stuff that people all right people might like to hear about like apple watch apps for example this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by Smile Software and PDF Pen Scan Plus, which is the app for mobile scanning and OCR. With PDF Pen Scan Plus, you can scan documents

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So go learn more right now at smilesoftware.com upgrade. The best scanner is the one that's with you. So go grab PDF Pen Scan Plus from the App Store today. Thank you so go grab pdf pen scan plus from the app store today thank you so much to smile for their support of this show it's not funny that we've come to the point where your your uh your phone is your scanner it's kind of crazy that's just hilarious just scan everything anywhere that's it's pretty cool it's madness that you just you just point

like that it's like why even press a button when you can just point? Yeah. Yeah, it's unexpected. Talk about unexpected ramifications of having a camera on the back of your phone. The fact that you don't even need a scanner and you can scan any document. I mean, I suppose spies thought of that. It's a very spy thing. But for regular people to be like, yeah, I just do this and all my documents are there that's just it's crazy so a couple weeks ago uh yeah thank you smile

thank you very much uh a couple weeks ago we had an ask upgrade question that i wanted to kind of spin out into a into a little bit of a topic today which is about amper watch apps um daniel wrote in to ask of the watch apps that you installed initially, how many have you kept on your watch? And I think to go with this a little bit further, because I mean, I know I still have some apps on here that I've never even opened because I know I might use them in the future.

I kind of wanted to start, Jason, by asking you, and then I'll do the same. What apps are you actually using on your phone? Sorry, on your watch, why why are you using them uh i would say very few um i i can't say what what is installed because i've got stuff installed that i don't use that is just there and i don't know why it's there and i'll get rid of it at some point um so and and what I'd say is mostly what I'm using is coming from, um, glances. So it's overcast and the major league baseball app and the, uh, fitness app. And, uh, that's about, that's about it. I, I will sometimes open the fitness app to start a run or a walk.

Yeah, but, you know, passbook when I've got a barcode or something like that. But I try not to use the apps. I'm, you know, really – and somebody, I think Marco Armit maybe said the other day that he became much more happy with his Apple Watch when he stopped. If it was Marco, if it's not, I apologize to him. But somebody said once you stop actively using apps and just kind of go back on notifications and glances, it becomes a much more pleasant product. And I agree with that. it becomes a much more pleasant product. And I agree with that. You know, not only the app's kind of not very well featured, but I find even the act of flipping over into the app view and scrolling around and looking for an app and launching it to be not a great experience and

usually kind of fruitless because of the limitations of the apps. So what I end up doing is going into an app because I tap on something in a notification or a glance or a complication that kicks off an app. And then I'll use the app. But routinely, I don't use apps. I'm using glances and looking at notifications. But even with glances, you have a very small amount installed there, don't you? I do. I think that you can overdo it. Well, the way you navigate glances is with this swipe right so you can have a huge number of

glances and it's awful because then you can't find the one you're looking for because there's a huge list so i i like i like keeping it keeping it small and what do i use the what do i use the watch for i mean honestly other than the remote control, I could probably lose most of the rest of these glances too because they're not that important. Am I really going to reorder my podcast playlist from Overcast? Maybe, but mostly I'm just going to use the remote control, the now playing glance to control my phone and not worry about the

overcast details of it. Likewise, the Major League Baseball glance tells me the score and I can tap and open the app and it'll tell me a little bit more, but I don't really need more. So I'm just trying to keep it, I'm trying to approach this from like, how minimalistic can I keep this? How, I don't want to be a super active watch user that's got a lot of go-to apps. That's sort of how I'm approaching it.

If I want to do something, I will try to do it, but I'm trying not to treat it like a phone. That makes sense. That definitely makes sense. I have way more installed than you because I've kind of only done maybe one or two clean outs of this stuff um so i have a bunch of apps on here that i've not even opened but there are some that i'll keep on there for like for example um i have uh the apps

of all of the l like i have a bunch of airline apps installed right um and i figure i'm going to keep them on the device because at some point they're going to be useful um like when i next take a trip with that airline and i figure that it might be good to have those apps on here to get like boarding passes and that kind of thing um like i have passbook but sometimes you know i want to try them out but you can't really try those out until i actually have tickets in them. Right, so eventually you will use them so you've got them around. Yeah, so they're just there

because I figured that they will be useful. But the apps that I guess I use the most I use Overcast. These are third-party ones. I use the Maps app more than I thought I would, but obviously it's first-party. I use OmniFocus to see kind of what's going on.

I check things off as well. Pedometer++ I have installed because I just like that app a lot. I use Dark Sky because I think that the weather stuff that it uses is better, in my opinion, than the standard weather app. I use Due. Are you familiar with dew uh d-u-e it's uh it's like a it's like a kind of advanced alarm and reminder app like it does some good

stuff that i like like it will set off an alarm and it will just keep triggering until you get rid of it and it's got some really good options for like snoozing things and i use it for like quick alarms like to take medication or like if i you know want to remember to go out for a walk or stuff like that like it'll continue to bug you and and i quite like it it does timers and and alerts and i like it quite a lot and it works really well on the watch because you just say like remind me to take medication at 4 p.m and it just passes the text and puts the alert in it's one of the better watch apps that I've used actually because it boils down

the functionality of the iPhone app and puts it in there, like you can snooze things and it's a really good app and I like it a lot they're kind of I think the main apps that I have but I have a ton of others on here but in regard to glances, again I think I maybe have more well no I have a ton of others on here. But in regard to glances,

again, I think I maybe have more. Well, no, I have more than you do. I have the battery one, although I'm kind of thinking about getting rid of that because it's not an issue. I haven't had an issue with battery. I'm actually going to get rid of it now. So the battery one's gone

because basically I just open it and I just look at what the percentage is. That's all it is. I just think, oh, that's what it is now. I have OmniFocus there. I find that to be quite useful as a way to quickly get into OmniFocus as well on the watch. I have Overcast and then Now Playing. I like the Overcast

app as well, actually. I think Marco did a great job with the redesign. And I like having the you know, it just has the next artwork and stuff like that. I then had the now playing because that is really good. I have dark sky there, which because, you know, I like the glance is really great. Then I have activity, heartbeat and pedometer.

They're my glasses. That's it? That is it. They're my glances. That's it? That is it. They're my glances. That's good. And I just took one out then because I had the official weather glance, but I've just removed that

because there was no point in having dark sky and weather. This is the thing. Every time I look at this, I end up paring it down a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. Like, I have the twitterific app installed because you know i i mentioned previously i think i may have spoken about some connected that i want to get dm notifications so i just have those on not for for twitterific

on my phone because i'm a tweetbot user but i like it because you can see the dm in full you can reply to it on the watch and that sort of stuff if you want and i quite like that and i think they've done a good job with their app um but that's kind of the extent for me and i don't know if that is good bad i don't know if it's what apple intended um i'm not i'm not sure about that well i think it's a good question to say um did you know you're coming from the perspective of starting with a lot and going down to a little, and I'm sort of trying to minimize it as much as I can and then add them as I go. But I'm not sure Apple knows the answer. I mean, like I said, I've found that I kind of like apps as things you kick off from, we said this the other week, things you kick off from a glance or a notification.

And so I don't have a Twitterific glance or something, but if I get a Twitterific notification, I can tap on it for more information and to reply. And that's how I launched that app, is through a notification only and not from going out and finding the app and saying, show me some things on Twitter, because I kind of don't want to do that. I've been really happy in general with the apps.

So when there is an app like what we have with Twitterific, I really like the way the notification launches into the app. I find that experience to be quite good. Yeah. Oh, no, that really works for me. And that's one of the reasons why I don't feel the need to go out and launch apps directly because the notifications send me there. And that's a good, it can be a good experience.

Twitterrific does a very good job where it takes you immediately to the thing that you were notified about and lets you reply to it or you know whatever you want to do i i've used some other apps that will notify you and then you tap to launch those apps and they like slack is like this the The Slack app will say, hey, Mike just DMed you in Slack. And then I'll tap to open Slack, and it'll say, all right, here's Slack. Mike, would you like DMs or mentions? I'm like, well, I just tapped on a DM, so why don't you show me that DM and let me reply? And it just fails at that.

So Slack's watch app, I can confidently say, does a bad job at that. They did it wrong. Yeah, their app needs to work like in general that it should be able to do way more than it does i think yeah i agree and not not to over feature it but just like why what is the point of having this app if uh something as basic as it alerts you that you've got a message but you when you tap on it just doesn't, it's like it doesn't even know that it sent you the alert. And that's not good. That's not how it should be working.

And Twitterific shows how it should work in that example where I got a DM from somebody. I only have Twitterific set to notify me about DMs, and I can actually reply using my voice from the watch and send a DM back to that person on Twitter. That's great. Slack does not do nearly as good a job on that front. Sorry, Slack. I love you, but your watch app needs work. I still, like I was thinking about this the other day because like, you know, at the moment everyone's saying that the watch apps tend to suck, which, you know,

by and large they kind of do, and it's not... Some of it is thought of not having devices, and some of it is thought in just watch kit, right? Just not being enough. And I'm starting to wonder now, when we get native apps, is it going to be, like, a marketing problem? Like, is it going to be a marketing problem? Like,

for people that have watches or people that are thinking about watches, are they going to just think that apps suck on the device and kind of, you know, the horse has left the barn at that point? I think that's the right analogy.

The horse is bolted. It's too far at that point that point people expect them to kind of suck i don't think so i don't think so i i think um it's an interesting question i don't think they suck i think they're not i think they're just kind of not they only do a limited amount of things but i wouldn't say like i said some of them are bad some of them are better um i think apple has plenty of time to allow the apps to get better and people be like hey the apps are better now and i think it'll any in the grand scheme of things i i don't think it matters yeah yeah no i i i can see that but it is it's an interesting thing and i'm still not 100 sure uh why they decided to go down the route that they went down um like it probably would have just been great if we could just have

actionable notifications some kind of glance support like rather than the full apps i don't because the more the more i kind of go for it the best stuff lives in the glances and notifications you know yeah yeah and we've talked about that before the the idea that maybe the more I kind of go for it, the best stuff lives in the glances and the notifications. Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked about that before, the idea that maybe there's a different approach to interacting with the apps

than what they've got now. And maybe they'll learn. Or maybe the apps will become so great that the app screen makes more sense than it maybe does right now. But I just, I really like interacting. Um, Ooh, my computer beeped. I, I, I really like interacting with, um, the notifications and glances because I feel like it's just contextual that,

and that's what the watch is supposed to be. It's say, Hey, this thing happened. Oh, tap, maybe nothing, maybe, maybe reply and then move on that. You know, I, I very rarely am in a situation where I'm like, let's launch a watch app. Yeah. This doesn't happen.

Like, because I don't think that's a failing. I don't, I think that, I think that's appropriate to the device that, that, uh, that's not what it's for.

It's just, sometimes I'm running into this again. I'm not unique in this, It's just sometimes I'm running into this, again, I'm not unique in this, right? But sometimes I'm running into this situation where I know that I can do something faster on the watch if the watch app will load fast enough. So it's like, I feel like I'm taking a gamble every time I try and do something.

Because it's like, I know I can do this quicker if the watch app will respond. Because,'s like, I know I can do this quicker if the watch app will respond. Because, you know, it kind of seems to be times a bit of potluck as to whether it's going to load or not, you know. Sometimes you'll open a watch app and it's like there straight away.

Sometimes you open a watch app and you're waiting for like three screen refreshes. You know, like the screen goes off, comes back on screen, you know, and you're waiting for like three uh screen refreshes you know like the screen goes off comes back on screen you know you're waiting for the app to load and and it's kind of it's like this there's just this thing there's this nugget of like this is so useful but then other times it's like oh you're so annoying right now and i my hope is that software will solve some of this that the the os updates will make this more efficient and maybe you know having having native code running on the device will mean

that a lot of that stuff will be less problematic than it is now that's just a hope i mean it might might or might not work but um i agree there there are those moments where you fall in the you think oh i can do this on the watch really quickly, and then you tap, and nothing happens. And like I said, that feels like I'm falling back into using the pebble, where sometimes an app just isn't there. And so you have to go to your phone anyway, because it can't use it. And Apple needs to be better at that, because Apple controls the operating system. at that because Apple controls the operating system. Apple needs to work on that so that

my weather glance doesn't stop working because the app quit in the background and doesn't know to relaunch it. It should know that I've got a weather complication, let's say, and know that that means that data needs to be refreshed every so often.

And it just doesn't do that sometimes. So that's a bug. Hopefully one that will be fixed. Should we move on to the mask upgrade? I think that's a good idea. You know what time it is. It is time to listen to me tell you about some friends.

And with a little bit of a chime in from Mike, I'm actually looking. I do have an app to turn my light bulbs on and off for my watch. So, you know, we're living in the future now. There it is. I turned them off. Oh, they're back on. Anyway, yeah.

There you go. Technology. Ask Upgrade brought to you as often, not always, but often by MailRoute. My friends at MailRoute. MailRoute is a company that makes a service that filters out spam, viruses, and bounced email before it gets to your mail server, before it gets to your inbox. If you can imagine a world where spam is not a problem for you and your inbox is clear of it, the fact is I am living in that world right now. MailRoute makes that a problem for you and your inbox is clear of it. The fact is I am living in that world right now. MailRoute makes that a reality for me. I don't have to install any hardware or software

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Hashtag ask upgrade. Thank you. Mail route. Thank you. Mail route. So like every time you start the mail route read, I'm like, what am I going to do this time?

I'm never a hundred percent sure how I'm going to present mailbagging to the world. Yeah. That was, that was a new one. I was in a cavern. That's a phrase that has never been spoken before in the history of humanity. I'm going to start Ask Upgrade with a question from Nilesh. Nilesh wants to know, do you have any Safari extensions in your Safari browsers?

If so, which ones do you have installed? I feel like I'm going to break the heart a little bit when I tell him that I don't use Safari. I am a Chrome user and I do have some extensions in Chrome that I use. I use the 1Password extension and I use the Evernote web clipper for the times where I want to clip something to Evernote, which is not very often, but when I do, it's there and I'm happy that it's there. But for me, 1Password is the ultimate of all browser extensions. I love it very

much. Jason, I am assuming that you do use Safari. I just want to say as well, sorry, I asked you a question and then decided to answer a question of my own that I didn't ask. I also use Safari on my iPhone. Okay. No, Chrome, sorry I also use Safari on my iPhone. Okay.

No, Chrome, sorry. I use Chrome on my iPhone. I use Chrome on my iPhone and Chrome on the desktop. I have Chrome all over the place. Shame. Shame! I'm one of those people. I use Safari. I'm not one of those people. I'm one of those other people. And I'm looking at my list of extensions right now.

They're not all turned on. I turn them on and off from time to time. I have Benjamin Mayo's Fireballed extension, which basically adds a fireballed.org link to Daring Fireball. So if a site, fireballed.org takes a local cache of anything that's linked to from Daring Fireball. So if a site gets fireballed it basically adds a link after every page on daring fireball after every link that is um to the fireballed cache version so this is for if gruba destroy the website yeah you can you can look at the cache version instead i use that occasionally so i have it turned on i i currently don't have turned on because it kind of it messes with the with some search results on Google.

But Lex Friedman wrote a plugin called or an extension called Affiliatizer, which basically takes every Amazon link that it sees on the Web and puts an affiliate code next to it. And you can you can put your own affiliate code or you can put the affiliate code of somebody else that you like it actually ships with three affiliate codes um that rotate and one of them is lex and one of them is me and one of them is john gruber it i yeah so anyway i use that sometimes with my own affiliate code so that i get affiliate links on everything i buy on amazon um i've got a bunch that are not turned on. One Password is in there. It's obviously turned on. Greg Noss wrote a Safari extension called Damned Fireball. And all it does is when the Yankees are doing well and John Gruber puts the Yankees logo at the top of Daring Fireball, it replaces that image with a Yankees logo with a circle and a line through it.

That's all it does. But I love it. And I keep it on, even though the Yankees are not going anywhere this year. I have Footnotify, which basically takes HTML footnotes and makes them popovers, which I like because a lot of sites don't do that.

They've got the footnotes at the bottom, including during Fireball, and it turns them into little popovers where you click the footnote link and it pops a little, the text of the footnote up right there. So that's a fun one. I have ultimate status bar, which is, which creates a status bar that floats when you, that appears when you float over a link with your, your cursor. Um, so that's, that's kind of a neat one. And, uh, obviously Instapaper. And those are the big ones. I've got some other ones that I'm not sure if they still work or not. I have a thing called fastest tube that I use to download YouTube videos from YouTube, but I only, but it also hijacks all of the ads on all the sites on the web. So I only turn it on, like I used it today because I had to download the Total Party

Kill session video because I used that as a source material for the podcast. And so I enable it, I enable FastestTube, I download it, and then I disable it again because I don't like the fact that it's also, in addition to its actual features, it's also rewriting all the ads that I see. That's weird. Anyway, that's it. Well, I'm trying my hardest to get all of these in the show notes. All right. So I'm frantically typing and Googling and finding things.

So I'm going to ask the next question whilst I complete that task. Stephen would like to know, is there a way to teach voice-to-text the correct spelling of a name? For example, Gen, not Jen, or Allie, not Allie, something like that. something like that um and i you have a you have a link there to a macworld article which uh which says in siri how you can uh how you can pronounce it but i don't think that solves the the voice to text problem no i couldn't find something for that but i figured that you know maybe this could help i don't know yeah so so we'll put that link in the notes too, which is if Siri says a name wrong, you can actually say that's not how you say it. And then Siri will respond, how do you pronounce the name and that person's first name? And then you say it and Siri will try to give you some choices and you can choose which one is accurate.

And then that should solve that for how Siri pronounces names. But that doesn't go the other direction in terms of spelling, alternate spellings. I don't know. I don't know if you, you know, you use Siri and it will often underline in blue or you use voice to text.

It'll underline in blue for something that it doesn't have a high confidence that it got right. It's like spell check when you're typing, except it's for speech to text and it will it's it's nuance behind the scenes saying I might not have a high confidence in this word. And if you tap on that you get other options. It's possible that if you type if you say Jen you could correct it but it's also possible that it's just going to not do it. And I'm not quite sure what you do. I don't think there's like a mode. Is there a mode? There are some modes in

there where you can actually say things and they get like return or new paragraph or exclamation point or whatever that it will translate properly. I'm not sure if there's a way using the nuance engine to force it to do, you know, capital G, lowercase e-n, and have that come out. But you could try it. Sure could. There's no harm in it. It just may end up with something ridiculous,

but you can just delete it. Yep. Harleykin on Twitter kind of pointed out, regarding the watch battery, to keep in mind that batteries age and will decrease and because we charge them every day it could take battery away over time which is you know I understand that and I think that's in reference to us

saying the battery life is so good which we mentioned again today but it's good right now and you know even if I lost 10% I would still be fine with it. Yeah I think this person was also suggesting that we, you know, I was saying, look, I think they overshot and they could dial it back a little bit.

And I do think that's true. And yes, it is true that over time, the battery life is going to decrease, but it seems like right now they've still overshot. And frankly, I don't want to feel like my watch experience is worse because in a couple of years it needs to be worse. I'm not sure I can get behind that. So that was my thought there.

Jimmy wrote in, do you have phantom entries before the watch arrived in your activity calendar too? So this is something something and he included a picture so i'll explain this if you go to the activity app on your iphone and you go back to before you got the watch right uh it's actually you can see that there seemed to be like test entries or something that were going on before your watch arrived and it's just kind of interesting to see that my watch was alive and being tested yeah like two weeks before there was a one day where there was a little bit of activity yeah it's weird i had that i on uh the fourth fifth and the fourth and fifth of april and yeah something was happening with my with my device before it before it arrived with me also what was funny about that is i was not aware that the Activity app was a thing that existed.

Oh, you didn't know? No, I never realized that it was there. So I said, where are you seeing that? And he said, well, in the Activity app. And I said, Activity app? It was installed when the Watch app. Right. I app. Right. I think.

Right. So on the, I think that's right. On the 9th and 10th of April, there was a very small activity noted. I had. And then nothing. On the 5th of April, two calories were burned. Yes. Two calories.

So there you go. They were moving around on their own before they were even shipped out to us. Kyle has asked, Is there any place on the Apple Watch, either on the watch itself or in the iPhone app, to check for watch OS updates? Yes, there are in the app. In the companion app, there is an about thing, and you can check for updates there updates there was the first thing that i did when my watch came i just wanted to double check uh and so yeah you can do that it's in uh it's right at the top i think somewhere general i

believe yep you can go to software update and it will check for an update for you and there isn't one there isn't one spoiler alert no no no update has been released. WatchOS 1.0. We're all still on 1.0. Jason. A friend in the chat room who has no vowels in his name says that that app is installed with a watch app but not shown until you pair a watch. Oh, okay. And that's why I didn't notice it was there. I don't feel as bad now about not

not noticing the activity app good uh spencer would like to know what was the first compiled program that you wrote on your own i will just come out and say i've never done that so i am no help uh me neither awesome awesome compiled program is the difference i i've done things that are not compiled but but I've never compiled anything. I've never done anything. Basic programming and scripting and stuff, but never anything compiled. This is not a developer show. There are other shows that feature developers.

Those are available. There's ATP. Underscore David Smith's got a podcast. There's Daniel Jalkin and Manton Rees do a podcast. There are lots of developer podcasts. This is not one of them. And then we have a question from Patrick. Do you think that force touch trackpads could be a gateway to Touch ID on Macs?

Gateway. Yeah. I'm not sure Touch ID is worth it on a Mac. Interesting. Why do you say that? Yeah, I mean, you can password. It's easy to type in a password on the Mac. I don't know.

I'm not sure whether, because that's a, that's a sensor that has to be built in and it's not cheap and it's not, it's, it's like a little camera. So now you're going to tuck that underneath the force touch part of the force touch trackpad, because I'm not sure that those go together. So now you're fitting another piece of technology in there. I guess, I guess it could happen, but I'm not sure why it would be connected to the Force Touch trackpad. And I kind of feel like it's more likely that we'll see Touch ID verifying your Mac through something like what happens with the watch locking, where your iPhone's presence or your iPhone being unlocked in presence of your Mac unlocks your Mac or something that's NFC based with new

Macs that lets you touch with an unlocked watch or something like that and unlock your Mac. But I'm just not sure Apple thinks that typing a password to unlock your Mac is a big enough inconvenience that it needs to be solved with a piece of hardware like that. I'm not sure that they care that much. And our last question this week comes from matt what do you think about the prospect of a future circular watch from apple somebody did a story about this where they they talked about i mean the interface challenges with the circular display are are immense like a lot of the, the Android wear watches have stuff cut off or cut off in some, in some views. Um, they look good. I wouldn't put it past Apple to at some point do a circular watch, but there are, you know, you, the problem with the circular watch is that

the circle is really great for the clock part. But then when you try to design other things around it, and you've got to drop text in various places. First off now, you know, if your clock part is there, you know, for things like complications, they've got to be on the inside instead of on the outside. It's assuming a circular watch face, which there are ones that are not, that are digital. It makes design of apps difficult

because you know they can't the text can't be aligned really because it's all kind of radial um it's weird and i think i i'm skeptical i think apple's gonna ride the square size and shape for a while and say we don't need to ape that round look. It's better for a digital device to have the square stuff. But you never know. You never know with Apple. They might go there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a long time before we see, if ever, before we see a round Apple Watch.

I don't feel like Apple's like, God, the lack of roundness is a major compromise. I feel like they've got so many other things that they want to worry about before all of the development complications and design complications that would go into having a circular display. Mr. Jason Snell, that brings us to the end of our show today. I think it does. I think it does.

Thanks, everybody, for their Ask Upgrade questions. That's always fun. Yeah, don't forget, you can always get those to us via Twitter. Just use the hashtag askupgrade. They go into a sheet and we take a look at them every week and we pick out some to answer on the show. And occasionally a boy band from the Philippines might crash our spreadsheet.

But that's okay. It's all good. Every now and then. And then we will also work on a future, planning what the future of Mike watches a movie is because we don't have any planned right now, but we will announce on the show at some point,

if we're doing another one, what that film would be. We definitely will. We just don't have a date in mind yet. Got WWDC looming. It's a special occasion, so we'll get back to it. Yep, we definitely will. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode on the internet you can do that at relay.fm

upgrade 37 there's a veritable cornucopia of links today including lots and lots of apps that we've discussed throughout the whole episode we'd like to thank lynda.com, Smile and our friends at MailRoute as well for helping us out with this week's episode

mailbagging! mailbagging indeed if you'd like to find us online you can find jay sneers at jay snell on twitter jsnll and he is over at sixcolors.com if you'd like to find his fantastic writing you can find it there and i'm reviews of watch faces reviews of watch faces as many as you could wish for over at Six Colors. Six watch faces, maybe. Maybe more, who knows. Maybe more. Maybe more. And I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E,

and I host many shows on RelayFM, of which Upgrade is a part. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's show, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.