Upgrade - 41: Emoji Fragmentation

Episode Date: June 15, 2015

Jason and Myke revisit WWDC 2015 with a week’s perspective, and also discuss iOS 9 emoji support, gaming on OS X, Apple’s new system typography, and Microsoft’s Xbox One compatibility announcement.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 41 today's show 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 field notes i'm not writing it down to remember it later i not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined, as always, by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. Are you back at home in your home studio?

I very much am. I'm back in London, and I'm horribly jet-lagged. I'm sure. Well, come on. You were already living California. No no you were living east coast time so you're jet lagged from California to east coast time maybe but you can't live a normal London

life now you're one of us you've taken our time it's just strange because you were standing in fact at one point for one shining moment right where I'm standing now in my house in my office and holding the brain ball.

Yeah. And that was Thursday. And now it's Monday morning and you are back in London. It's strange. I had the brain ball in the palm of my hands. You did? I threw it to you and you caught it. But that's travel for you it was a big it was

a big week it was it was great to it was great to have uh have you guys out here in san francisco i realized that that almost everybody that i i saw last week does not live here and i'm like the token bay area resident in that group of people it's pretty funny but uh it was good to have everybody out here. It was indeed. That was one of my if not my very favorite part of WWDC was coming to the Snell residence. So thank you for hosting us.

Yeah, thanks for coming out. That was fun. We had a little dinner. I chatted a little bit. Everybody, you know, there was a brief tour of the office saying, yep, there it is. There's a microphone. There's an iMac. There's a brain ball. And then we left the office saying yep there it is there's a microphone there's an iMac there's a brain ball and uh then we uh then we left the office and had a nice time places that are not an office but it was nice to see where the magic happens where the magic yeah now you've you've seen you've seen where the magic happens when I went to London you were very much waving me off and

saying nope nope I will come to you You will not see where the magic happens. But now you've seen where I am standing right now and podcasting. So, yeah, it was a lot of fun. That's, I mean, for me, WWDC, we're going to talk a lot more about WWDC in a little bit. But for me, it's funny because it's like all these people i know come and visit me and i i you know i'm i just live here but i get to once a year all these people that i know come uh and descend on on san francisco and i get to see them so that's pretty fun yeah we uh it's nice to come and join you you know i got some interesting weather. I walked across Golden Gate Bridge, everything.

I was a real tourist. That's good. You got to see our fog, our dramatic fog. Oh, yeah. I walked through it. That was very cold, Jason. It's like being in a cloud. Yes. We had some very cold days last week by San Francisco standards,

summer San Francisco standards, and the hottest day of the year last week was the day of the keynote. So you got the variety pack of San Francisco weather while you were here. Quite a lot of the time it's in the same afternoon you get that weather. Well, driving to my house, you can go from warm and then you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and you're in a cloud and then you merge on the other side and it's warm again. Go figure. Weird place. Very weird place. Whoever came here and was like, yeah, let's live here, they had no idea.

Well, they're looking for the gold, right? I think that's basically it. Also, at this point, you hit the Pacific Ocean, and if you were just heading west, you're like, well, I guess we ran out of land. I guess we'll stop here. And there's gold. Yay, gold.

Sure. All right, should we do some follow-up? I would love to do some follow-up. Possibly even follow-out. Yep, so the first piece comes from a very excitable me that I saw on your website today when I was looking for stuff to talk about today.

There is more emoji added in iOS 9, and with it brings a bunch of new flags, including the Romanian flag, which I hold dear to my heart because I have a girlfriend who originates from Romania. So I have iOS 9 installed on my iPad, and I very excitedly sent her the emoji today,

and she didn't see it, naturally. It just has the two letters R and D, or something like that. It was like r and d or something like that it was like t and d or something like that and so it didn't really help her but uh it's there i'm happy that it's there because i'll get to send her um ironic emoji flags now every now and then um when i'm feeling fancy yeah no it's it's uh it's funny how emojimoji works. Emoji is basically this ISO standard, and they can say, okay, here are some Emoji that we've decided to code into Unicode, and here it is. And then it's up to every platform developer to support Emoji. So if you're a website, you can choose to pass the Unicode. You could pass your own graphical version of it and translate it yourself.

Different platforms have different translations. Different versions of the different platforms have different translations. So, like, if you're in iOS 9, you can see the Romanian flag. You can see the Antarctica flag. You can even see the hidden EU flag. If you're on Windows, you can see the extended middle finger emoji, but not on Apple's platforms.

But on Apple's latest versions of their platforms, you can see the Live Long and Prosper Vulcan hand salute emoji. So it's a funny thing that it's a multi-stage process. You've got to have the kind of emoji menu written and then the platform vendors have to basically hire, or they're using their internal artists. I imagine somebody's job at Apple is just to be an emoji artist, maybe many people's job. And they build, or they're

contracting with somebody, and they build, like how Twitter used the Icon Factory to build their Twitter emojis. So it's just a funny thing and uh there's a site called emojipedia where there's a guy i met we met the guy at uh at wool and they detail what's going on in the world of emoji and i thought this was funny 22 new flags and placeholders for more so um if you're using the ios 9 beta yeah you control your friends from various places with their uh their country flags that they can't see, but you can. It's fun times. The Twitter emoji is weird to me.

They made a whole set of their own. Yeah, I think, doesn't Slack have their own set too? They translate them all into graphics. I think the idea there is they want to have a unified platform but it actually I think doesn't work. On Slack for Mac a lot of the emojis are broken now. They're fine on iOS and they're broken on the Mac and I don't understand that at all.

The flags actually are broken on Slack for Mac. And all the skin colors are broken. Yeah, oh yeah. That's good. Every time Casey List posts an emoji and it's, thumbs up, skin color 2. Yeah. Like, oh, boy. Skin color 2.

Woo. Yeah. I don't know what's going on with Slack. But this is the thing. You know what it is, Mike? It's emoji fragmentation. That's what it is. Uh-oh.

We don't have a universal. Well, we do have a universal standard for emoji, but not a universal display of emoji. Those emoji are all... Have you seen the Microsoft emoji? Some of them are really spectacularly ugly. No, I haven't seen them. Yeah, I don't like their art design for their emoji at all. Apples are pretty good.

Yeah, I like Apple's emoji. I think the thing is, for me, that is emoji. I'm looking at their list now. There are some peculiar ones in there. It's on Emojipedia, naturally. What a great resource. Oh, yeah.

All the great emoji are available there at Emojipedia. You can find out what it looks like. They actually do show it on all the platforms, too. So you can get a preview of what the Android Tangerine looks like, which is cartoony. And then the Apple one, which is much more shaded. And then Microsoft,

it's like a slice of a fruit. They're flat to a fault, I think. If you're just tuning in, you've reached the Emoji Podcast. Emoji Hour with Mike and Jason. Let's move along from emoji upgrading sean was sent along the uh the company behind the elevation dock the uh much ill-fated uh emoji emoji it's taking over the emoji dock put your emoji on it and just look at them. The much ill-fated iPhone dock, the Kickstarter campaign that made many people very upset because they shipped very, very late. They have created a stand for the Apple Watch, which holds the watch in landscape orientation,

which will be very good for the new nightstand mode that they have. So that's a good one to have. nightstand mode that they have. So that's a good one to have. This was actually available before Apple announced their little night alarm mode. What are they calling it?

I don't know. This thing is called the nightstand, which is funny. Watch OS 2, you know, I don't know what they're calling that.

Night mode? Yeah, we'll call it night mode for now it may actually be called night stand which is funny night stand mode I think is what it's called and this thing is called the night stand good call elevation lab or terrible call

well since they preceded it I think they may be in the clear but it's funny that some of the docks that are out there that mount it vertically may now be problematic, right? If it turns out that Apple thinks that when you're docking this by your bedside anyway, that you want it sideways. Now, the upright docks are maybe better if it's at your desk or something. But if it's really just you need to charge it when you're sleeping which is sort of what apple wants you to do they want you having it on its side although they they show that it with the buttons down which is i think not

what apple's expecting but i think you just flip it around it doesn't really matter because they'll go either direction i think that's just how they shot it you know well it shows you that they didn't realize what was going on because if they shot it now the buttons would be pointing up since they're your snooze and cancel buttons but i mean people have sent in pictures to us as well of the the high rise the uh um 12 south stand yeah with it you know people you're able to mount it that way but it's not the way it's meant to be like it has a cutout so you can mount it um vertically but so you that way, but it's not the way it's meant to be. It has a cutout so you can mount it vertically. So you can do it, but it's not meant for that.

But now, if I was going to buy one right now, I would go with the Elevation Labs one because it makes sense to do it that way. I may actually buy a dock now because previously I was happy I had affixed one of the charges to my desk, which is some putty. So it just lays down, doesn't move around. But now maybe I will want this little dock to hold it in landscape mode.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. It looks nice, and there's functionality to it, I guess. On the Apple Watch battery, I know this is a much spoken about discussion, but it was just interesting to me that I had my watch on for basically two full days as I was traveling without charging and it just went all the way. It went the whole way.

It was totally fine. I didn't even need to think about it. Yeah, I think when you're not um exercising uh where that all the sensors are really on that battery life is and you're not just heavily using apps all the time playing a game or something like that which you shouldn't do um it the battery life is great right i mean it really is great i have to say i'm a little bit out of sorts today are you yeah is it the jet lag i'm all over the place have you had have you had sleep issues yeah oh i you know i got home so basically i left at you know what was like i say i woke up at half

past six in the morning or something maybe 7 a.m uh in san francisco time yeah and then my flight was at noon right so it ended up arriving home here at 7 a.m so i didn't sleep so then i'm like still awake and it's 7 a.m here so then i have to go the whole day here as well i don't know all over the place and then i kind of fell i fell asleep at 9 p.m woke up at 3 a.m and then fell asleep again at like 5 and then woke up at 8. So I've had enough sleep, but it's like all over the map. I'm like, I don't know where everyone coming or going today. I was exhausted last week, not changing time zones.

It was still exhausting because it was not only were they incredibly packed days, so many things happening, so many people around. And it's also that time of year where it gets light really, really early. And so that wakes me up. I don't sleep very well this time of year because I wake up at five in the morning because it's light out at five in the morning. And now I have a cat that also would like to wake me up at five in the morning to feed him, which I refuse to do, which means he just bugs me until I get up at seven or 630 or whenever I get up to actually feed him. And there were late nights and we had guests and we had people over at the house and all of those things. And Thursday I was exhausted or Wednesday I was exhausted. Friday I was completely spent. And I went to bed at 930 and we tried to watch some TV in bed before going to sleep.

And I never do this. I just completely fell asleep with the TV on, like snoring and just totally out. And Saturday, I went to bed early too because I just was, yeah. So even without travel, I think it was an exhausting week. And then you went plus eight and had to fly all that way. Did you go direct or did you have to change planes? I did go direct this time. That's good.

That saves a lot of time going London, San Francisco, direct. It's still one flight. Direct with Wi-Fi. That was magical. Is that satellite Wi-Fi? Can you do the Wi-Fi over the ocean? I believe it's satellite Wi-Fi, which is the only way it can be done.

That's the best. That's the best way to do it. It's good. So I was very happy about that. But we do have some more follow-up. If you're tuning in now, it's Emoji and Sleep Disorder podcast. Marlon wrote in.

I want to read what Marlon wrote in and then we can talk about it. I have to disagree with your comments towards the introduction of Metal on OS X. Gaming is a major component of the iOS experience now for a lot of people and anyone looking to game on a Mac will discover how vast the shortcomings are in comparison to iOS. Anything Apple

can do to improve the gaming situation on OS X is more than welcome, starting with giving one of the biggest studios stage time to demo those improvements. It gives people another big reason to choose a Mac over a competitor. We actually had quite a few people write in about this, and I think that maybe our main comment was misunderstood a little bit. So I think that metal is important. I think that gaming is important.

I love gaming. I have a whole video game podcast on this network called Virtual. I am a big gamer. I just think that for me in that environment to show what metal could really mean for OS X, I think they should have shown how metal can improve performance in non-gaming apps because the gaming demo didn't really show people how much better it was going to make things. Like it showed game developers, but I feel like that there are different places

that Apple could show that, like at E3 this week or something like that. There are different ways that they can try and show the gaming performance enhancements. Like I think that maybe they could have shown that and also had a demo to show stuff like things from Adobe

because obviously Metro is really important for OS X, but I would like to see more than things from Adobe. Because obviously, Metro is really important for OS X. But I would like to see more than just video games. But I hope that it has worked for gaming developers and that they're going to embrace it more. I watched the State of the Union demo, by the way. And there is a, or the State of the Union session, and there's an Adobe demo in there

that shows the live zoom in Illustrator in a gigantic Illustrator file. And it's very impressive. And it's got Adobe's full endorsement that they're going to bring Creative Cloud on Mac onto Metal. You know, Mac gaming, look, I was the editor of the game column in Macworld for many years. I think what I'd say is the message that metal is important, and it's important for game developers to develop their iOS games, you know, potentially using the Mac.

I heard Brianna Wu wrote a piece on iMore, I think, about how important it was for her as somebody who develops on the Mac that the performance while she's developing is that much better. I thought the game demo went on too long and that they briefly talked about the development and then there was a whole lot of, let's show us your game. And I was less excited about that. And I got to be honest, I feel for Mac game fans, but having watched this story for 20 years, I feel like it's a little bit like Charlie Brown and the football. PC gaming is on the wane on its own. Just computer gaming is on the wane versus mobile and consoles. And within that, the Mac is always second fiddle.

And I don't anticipate the Mac ever being a major game platform in any way. I just don't see it. And so I feel like there are better things to show off Metal on Mac than a game demo. Now, the game developer part at a developer conference, I think, is solid. I just felt like it started to stray into, look at this game that we're playing here and, you know, isn't this a clever concept? And that's when I felt like they were just sort of wasting my time. And I don't mean to disparage people who want to play games on the Mac. I play games on the Mac too, but, you know, it is the

second choice platform or the non-choice platform for most PC game developers and PC gaming itself is, I would say, on the wane. It doesn't mean it doesn't have great advantages over console or mobile. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, you know, when we talk about Mac gaming, we're talking about a fraction of a fraction and it's always been that way. And I don't think it's going to change. And the success of El Capitan is not going to be based on people playing games on the Mac. It's, you know, I just don't think it is. That may be an unpopular opinion, but that is my opinion, which is why I was not thrilled with the way they chose to present it. You know, that's my take on it. I feel like this was a quid pro quo where the game developer was willing to come on stage and put in the time to do some

stuff in metal but they also wanted to use it as a commercial for for their game and fair enough for them good good job um but as a when we're when we're criticizing the presentation aspects of the keynote that's where it it ran off the rails for me as i felt like they were given um they were given too much time to just do their gameplay demo and And I don't, you know, honestly, I didn't think it was particularly thrilling as a bit of gameplay demo. And I certainly didn't sit there going, wow, those, you know, those graphics and those frame rates are amazing. So, you know, that's my take on it. I would absolutely have rather seen Adobe's demo than the game demo in the keynote, because I think the non-game developers are

more important than game developers on the mac if i had to choose one email i can feel actually i can hear i can hear the email yeah well you know i've got to be honest about it i i feel for mac gaming i have i have been an advocate for mac gaming i've seen great advocates for Mac gaming. I've seen great advocates for Mac gaming. I've seen the Mac game world wax and wane over time. But I just, I feel like I'm kind of over it. It's never going to be a priority for a large number of developers. And even for people who use a Mac, I think most of them play games on other platforms. They play them on iOS, they play them on a console. And the really serious gamers are booting their Macs into Windows and playing PC versions of games. Even John Syracusa, who cannot bear to

have a Microsoft Xbox in his house because it's from Microsoft, has Windows for games on his Mac. So I just, I don't know. I'm trying to keep it real, I guess, even though it's unpopular. But I don't mean to denigrate Mac gamers, and I don't think you I'm trying to keep it real, I guess, even though it's unpopular. But I don't mean to denigrate Mac gamers, and I don't think you did either. That's definitely not the point. I just, in terms of priorities, I think, you know, pro apps from Adobe

is going to be a higher priority in terms of impressing the developers at WWDC and in terms of the user story, for what it's worth. Last piece of follow-up today comes from Upgradian Tom, who just had a great little suggestion that I quite liked about complications.

So Tom says, one of the things I'd love to see with WatchOS 2 is the ability to set one complication as replaceable by something that's currently active. For example, I'd love to be able to have

the sunrise and sunset complication as a thing that's always there, but if I use Siri to set a timer, I'd want the timer complication to be automatically swapped in for the sunrise-sunset complication because that's always there. But if I use Siri to set a timer, I'd want the timer complication to be automatically swapped in for the sunrise sunset complication because that's more relevant to me at that time. And the timer complication is only useful

as a shortcut when it's running. I really liked that. I thought it was very smart. Yeah, I think the only issue is how you set that in the UI because it risks being really fiddly when you say, all right, how in the, when you force press

to bring up the customize your watch face, how when you say all right how in the when you when you force press to bring up the customize your watch face how do you say well i want this complication here but when there's a timer i mean i i think the very apple way to do it would be to just decide that the timer always goes in this complication and you know while your timer is running you know if you if if you need a complication visible while your timers are running, don't put it there because it's always going to be in the bottom left or it's always going to be in the top right or wherever it is. And I think Apple could do that. And I would love that. We talked about that, I think, a couple of weeks ago, the idea that you should be able to use the complication

space for a couple of different things so that when your calendar has nothing in it, maybe it just goes away and maybe there's something else there. There's a second piece of information. has nothing in it, maybe it just goes away and maybe there's something else there. There's a second piece of information. I think that will come, but not yet. I think obviously this is a new platform, but I agree. I find it kind of baffling that I set a timer and if you set a timer or a stopwatch, you should see it on the face. You should. You should see it while it's running. That should be there. And you shouldn't have to have a blank timer complication sitting on your watch face all the

time just because two or three times a week you have to set a timer when you're cooking dinner. Yep. I agree. I agree. I like the suggestion. I wish it was possible. Even if there was a way to just show the timer UI on all watch faces,

so it just pops up in a specific area whilst it's checking. That would be nice because timers seem like a really cool, important part. Maybe just, you know. It works on the phone. On the phone, it lets you know if you've got a timer set. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It just ticks away underneath the clock. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that'd be interesting anyway should we uh let's let's should we dive in a little bit more into our feelings a week later from wwdc i think that is uh i think that's a good idea awesome let me just take a quick break first thank our friends over at lynda.com for helping support this week's episode of upgrade lynda.com is the online learning platform that houses 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 slash upgrade. That's l-y-n-d-a.com slash upgrade. lynda.com is for people that are curious. It's for people that want to solve problems or just want to make things happen in their life. It's for people that want to master new things.

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lynda.com for continuing to support Upgrade and all of RelayFM. So we're a week removed now. A week to today from the keynote. Have you had any more time to sit and process and think about WWDC, about the things that

are announced and that kind of thing. How are you feeling about it now, Jason? Well, I have had some time. I've also watched, I think, three so far sessions on video, which has been nice to get to sort of remotely attend, you know, time shift my attendance at the conference and think about it a little bit. You know, it really does help to get away from the immediate aftermath of the music portion of the keynote and think about that.

I think it helped to get our minds off of it a little bit. I mean, we all talked about it some, but also, you know, we're talking with each other, everybody covering the event about some different things. I think that was good to give it a little perspective too and think about it. And also people have been able to, through other sessions and also through digging into the betas, have some more perspective about it. One thing, yeah, I mean, plus all the personal stuff of people coming over to my house and cooking them food and things like that. It was a busy week. And I think maybe your mind has some background processes that are functioning when you're doing that other stuff. And I think it's good that you're almost like pondering in the background while you're doing other things.

So I think that's been useful. How about you? Have your thoughts evolved in the last week? It's interesting because I haven't really done an awful lot of like diving into stuff myself, but I've been listening to shows and picking up some pieces here and there. You know, talking to Federico on Connected,

you know, he did his best to calm me down a little bit about the music portion. Not that I necessarily agree with him completely, but he did help at least me put a little bit more perspective on it. I'm interested in the product. I have my negative feelings about the way they presented it, but it doesn't matter. Essentially, it doesn't matter. I'm interested in the product i you know i have i have my negative feelings about the way they presented it but i i'm i'm it doesn't matter essentially it doesn't matter i'm interested in the product turns out my beats subscription uh ends like july 3rd or something like that perfect timing just uh not renew that because it's not going to be around anymore um and move on to this i i um i've been looking forward to the speaking of federico to trying out ios 9 on the ipad and and i just took delivery of a refurbished ipad air 2 that i bought on apple's site a few

days ago and uh you i i was present when you bought an ipad air 2 at the apple store yep in san francisco yep i bought an air 2 uh for a similar kind of reason i mean i i bought a new one because with the savings that I make from the dollar conversion, I could then, if I sold it on in like a few months' time, if I got a new big iPad maybe, I wouldn't lose that much money at all on it, to be honest. Right. So it ends up, you know, I kind of ended up getting it for the cost that I would have got pre-owned here or something like that. And I installed the Baytronic yesterday.

I don't know if they're in embargo, not embargoes, NDAs. Are we in the same sort of situation as last year? I'm going to assume that we are, which means I will just talk about it and see what happens later. I think there are specific things that they don't want you to do, like write a review of it or, you know, developers have other constraints, but it's, you know, people are talking about it. It's just, it's out there and Apple knows that. Yeah. So I've played around a little bit and I'm very interested in it. It's surprisingly stable,

the beta overall, to be honest. And of the apps that I'm using, I haven't noticed any significant problems. There are a few little UI tweaks here and there that need to be considered, but nothing is like catastrophically breaking for me yet. Not that I would suggest that you install it. I'd just like to put that out there saying from my own experience. Because I bought this iPad primarily to try it on. So it's a completely fresh install,

that kind of thing. And I like what I'm seeing. I very much like the split screen stuff, and I'm excited to be able to do that in more apps, not just forcing myself into using apps that have it built in, all of Apple's apps, but using the apps that I like to use and seeing the split screen stuff in there. Because I see the utility.

For example, earlier today I was watching one of the three presentations and I was taking notes on paper whilst watching on my tv and I was thinking it might be quite nice to do the picture in picture and take the notes on my ipad that seems like a nice way of marrying that stuff up because the picture in picture stuff is really really cool right being able to watch video but of course this only works with a native player at the moment because people haven't been able to implement the API. I assume there's an API for it because a lot of apps, like YouTube, for example, they have their own video player

that they built. So I'm excited to see if that's going to be the case, like if people are going to actually have that as a thing and they're going to be able to implement that so other people can use it as well. I assume that they will be kind of crazy if they didn't. But there are things there that really do exactly what I wanted the iPad to be able to do. And that's the main thing that I've been thinking about this week is the iPad, actually. I haven't really put too much thought into OS X. There's not a lot in there necessarily for me right now that i think

actually changes much um but apple's positioning of the ipad now seems like they're really treating it as a product class all of its own um i mean you know that some of the features that seem to be just for the ipad aren't like for example the text selection stuff. That's actually on the iPhone as well. Yeah, Serenity had her iPhone running iOS 9. Such a bad idea, but bless her. And she showed that. She was passing that around in my living room. And we were all doing the little two-finger, move the selection point around and all of that.

And that was pretty cool. And that's on a regular old iPhone 6, not even a 6 Plus. So I think that says something. I think that says something about Apple considering that a feature that's really for people who use the iPad. And iPhone users may use it too, but they really wanted to make that impression that these are features that we care about most on iPad because of how people use the iPad.

But the only thing about it is a lot of this stuff is currently on one model. And it'll be interesting to see if come October, say, what that's going to look like. I mean, I can't see these features, like these split screen features, being able to really truly work on an iPad mini. features being able to really truly work on an iPad mini? Well, it will be interesting to see if they are supported on the iPad mini 4, right? Let's assume there's an iPad mini 4 and it has the same specs as the iPad Air 2, then it could do it. It's the same number of pixels, it's just in a smaller space. And as an iPad mini user, I don't see why you wouldn't allow people to do that because it just is, everything's just a little bit smaller, but it's all the same stuff,

the same information crammed into just a smaller space. So it will be interesting to see if they do that. I would think that they would, that they wouldn't say, well, nope, the mini can't support it because the mini is going to support slide over and that's a similar kind of feature i think i think it will i i think it will support it because because the specs are the same right because the dots on the screens are the same you might as well support it but um it is interesting so it's it's basically every ipad air one and two and every mini except the first one support slide over and picture in picture but only the Air 2 supports this other stuff because it's got so much more RAM and the extra processor core and that's going to be the baseline right presumably this fall we're going to get a faster

iPad Air we're going to get a an iPad mini that's like the Air 2 and then we're probably going to get a larger iPad an iPad Pro or whatever you want to call it that may have the same specs as the Air 3, let's say. That seems like a decent guess. Maybe better, but maybe the same. And that's an interesting product line because that is, with these features, I feel like the Air 2 is already verging on being almost a laptop. You you can see it getting closer and closer that iOS is pushing up to features that we previously sort of put on the other side of the bar, right? The other side of the wall. It's like, those are, those are computer features and, and the iPad doesn't do that. And now Apple is saying, yeah, actually the iPad does do that. And then you get

the bigger screen iPad. And then I think it gets really interesting about, you know, what, And I think it gets really interesting about, you know, should you choose an iPad or should you choose a Mac? Considering that these multitasking features are working on the Air 2, what could an iPad Pro's selling point be? Well, size. I mean, I think the big one is size i think more more space to multitask bigger keyboard um you know just just bigger is better like and it's not like this is a freakishly large ipad in that sense because the rumors are a 12 inch screen right that's the macbook without the keyboard yeah and they probably do something to bring the margins of it

in a little bit more, right? The bezels and stuff. So the actual physical screen size hopefully won't necessarily make that they won't just stretch it out again and then you end up with like a 15-inch device or something. Right. It's not what we think of as

large in terms of Mac stuff. It's just larger than the 10-inch iPad. But Apple's never made a 10-inch laptop, have they? Or certainly not in recent memory. I mean, we think of a 10-inch laptop and we think, well, that's ridiculous. You know, 11 on the smallest MacBook Air, right, is still a larger diagonal measurement than an iPad screen. And so a 12-inch iPad is not ridiculous. It's just bigger. And so there's more space for everything. There was a report today, Steve Troughton Smith did what he always does,

which is root around in these... Now all the Australians are laughing. He's finding all the secret things that are inside uh betas and he found a uh jumbo size keyboard layout that looks like very much could be the ipad pro keyboard layout and it's got more room for more stuff like a tab key i mean it's just it it feels even more like a regular keyboard on the software keyboard and i think that's the biggest appeal for a product like that it's just it feels you know there's more room to work yeah that was interesting like what steve found but i guess it's just normal for him right we we just assume that he's going to find something you just got to give him a couple of days and the guy's digging up stuff like i also saw him say on twitter today

that he seems references to like the tv stuff he's also got a he got a nintendo emulator running on the apple watch last week did you see that i did see that they they jail they basically jail broke the apple watch and they refused to say how because they don't want apple to close the hole but they were able to get native like native apps not like watch kit apps but like native native apps like using iphone frameworks running on the Apple Watch. And I think he said they were able to play Nintendo games emulated on an Apple Watch for several minutes before they completely killed the battery. But still, he does stuff like that. But anyway, I think you're right.

I've been spending most of my time that I've been thinking about these announcements thinking about the iPad. A little bit about the iPhone and a little bit about the Apple Watch. Not a lot about the Mac. I agree. I'm looking forward to the details in El Capitan. I have installed an El Capitan beta on an external hard drive so I can start trying it out in the first beta. But the iPad stuff seemed really, really interesting. the first beta but the ipad stuff seemed really really interesting um and uh and the apple watch stuff is intriguing but i feel like there i'm waiting for developers to tell us the truth

right i mean we we heard like you know i know some developers were able to get that stuff up and running really quickly um yeah i spoke to a couple of people who like friend of the show John Voorhees told me it took him literally 10 minutes because he was already he had a universal app and he had already implemented size classes and he said it took him 10 minutes of code

and he had it running he says it needed some tweaking but he said because he followed that properly he was able to get that. Like, Apple weren't kidding. He got that running really, really fast. So my thinking about that is developers who have not used size classes, like, this is going to be a tough few months for them. As they try and get their, like, iOS 7, iOS 8 apps that were designed in certain ways to to now observe this and i think that's

going to be rough yeah i i heard from um one developer who um i think we mentioned on the show before but he he said he got his app running in slide out slide over in in five minutes and four minutes of that was compiling it's like it just works because that app has the size classes and the layouts and it just works fine. So I'm interested in hearing that story because that's always what comes out of WWDC. You come out with all this great stuff and then the reality hits where a developer goes, oh, it doesn't do this. And then it becomes a question of, is that an oversight? And is Apple going to correct that? Or is that policy and Apple's not going to correct it. And you just, everybody, everybody's dream of what can be capable of that, what that new feature could enable is dashed. And it's like, nope, that's

not, we thought that would be this thing, but it turns out not, maybe next year. And on the Apple Watch, I think that's really the case is, is what does this enable? What are the cool ideas and what things do we kind of, did we have sort of vague hope we're going to be on the Apple watch that are just not going to make it. And I'm really looking forward to hearing the saga of Marco and Overcast and whether he decides to do it on the Apple watch or not. Because he's one guy and he's got a list of features that he wants to prioritize and Apple Watch could be a real distraction. So he has to say, is this technically feasible and

who's going to use it? But I'm really intrigued by the idea of him putting, you know, loading podcasts on the Apple Watch's storage so that you could listen to them natively even when your phone is not around. There's so much work that he was mentioning, you know, this idea of possibly even rendering. On ATP last week, he said maybe even rendering out episodes with smart speed and voice boost already burned in because you have to use the default OS player on the watch. He can't be running and doing smart speed on the watch. So he would have to do that work on the iPhone and then transfer the changed version over to your watch. Well, that's kind of crazy, but kind of cool. It'll be interesting to see what he decides because seeing key developers make these decisions about what they're doing with the Apple Watch or what they're doing with split screen mode, that is going to tell the story of not whether these features will get used or not, but how they get used. Because right now it could be anything. And we're going to get to that moment where we're going to realize,

oh, this whole category of things that we dreamed about aren't going to happen, but this stuff is going to happen because that's working and that's interesting. And that's actually one of the most fun things about the summer after WWDC is watching as all these smart developers go home and start to ponder

how they're going to take advantage of this stuff. And if they can realize their dream or if it's just a, you know, it's just not going to work with what Apple has given them. I think one of the things that we're going to see and from what I heard from a lot of people is just that watch apps

are just going to be more responsive. Like, so, you know, we're going to get what we've got now and it's going to work better. But then it's how many developers then decide to make a decision to take their apps further than they currently are. And that's exactly what we're talking about here.

Overcast exists on the watch. Marco will probably definitely, well, I would assume definitely make it so it's running more natively, right? So things are loading faster and the controls are quicker and that kind of stuff. Like you press to open it and it opens straight away rather than you sit and spin in and spin in and spin in. Right, and he'll be able to use the crown to control the volume.

That's an easy one. But do you take it to the next logical level or is that logical level actually too difficult to create? Because it's like he could do all of that stuff that he's mentioned, but then you are creating a third experience that requires different thinking for the customer because not everything is going to be there. You will have to make the decision to send things there

because just storage space-wise, you can't mirror it. So it's really interesting to think in that regard, like what do you do? And that's what the next few, maybe next six months are going to tell is how many developers decide to go all in on this or are they going to wait? One of the things that kept coming up as well is when is the next Apple Watch going to come out? Because I know that this is, you know, reading the tea leaves, but you're looking at OS 2, right? That's going to come out in the fall. Now, people are still receiving the Apple Watches that they ordered in April.

So it feels very unlikely at this point that we're going to get another one in September or October. So it feels like this is going to go into maybe September 2016 before the next one. If I had to guess, if I had to make a guess about when the next Apple Watch would come out, that would be my guess, is fall of 2016. That they get a year and a half on this piece of hardware.

But you know what they can do for the holiday season? The holiday season bands. Sure. Because I genuinely feel like it doesn't need to be an annual product. You could do every two years and just have new bands every season. They could even do new um new enclosures right they could add a totally different style of of enclosure of metal with the same hardware inside yeah say oh you know now we're gonna have to we're gonna do a brushed aluminum or whatever whatever they decide

or we're gonna do sport in a different color. And they, they could do that too. But I doubt, I doubt that hardware is changing until fall of next year, because that gives it time to settle. And because I think you're right. I don't think this needs to be a cycle, an annual cycle on clockwise last week. Dan Morin brought that up,

right? This relentless one year cycle for some of these products. And I don't think the watch needs it. And I think Apple would rather not be on that, on that pace either. I think it would be nice to have something that I don't think the watch needs it, and I think Apple would rather not be on that pace either. I think it would be nice to have something that I don't have to buy $500 worth every year. I wouldn't mind buying more bands. I have a few bands and smaller transactions, and it keeps the watch feeling new. That, for me, feels like the ideal scenario, but we'll have to wait and see.

It all depends on what Apple thinks they can really do to the thing and if it's not worth an annual cycle then it's not worth it but if it is then they'll do it this another thing that came up last week that i wanted to mention again is is um it actually was reminding me of how pebble did their launch because pebble when they started they said okay we got to get the hardware right they focused all their attention on the hardware. They put huge amounts of stuff in the Pebble hardware, and they shipped it, and the software did almost nothing. But you know what? It was the right decision because you can't update hardware remotely, but you can update software remotely.

I feel like that is what Apple's doing here. That's why we get this watchOS 2 announcement. They're saying, you know, we built this really nice piece of hardware. We're still building the platform, right? We're still building the platform under it. And no, it's never going to get, the old hardware is not going to get support for GPS and not going to have a cellular modem, you know, magically programmed into it. But it is going to get a lot more functionality as we go. And then at some point, yeah, the hardware will change. And you see the indications already, like the fact that an untethered Apple Watch app is going to be able to use Wi-Fi if you're at Starbucks and you only

have your watch and it knows the Starbucks Wi-Fi, then it will just be able to use it. And the apps will be able to get data off the internet without going through the phone. You look at something like that and you think, well, you know, step two is, then there's a watch that's always on the internet. And that'll probably come, maybe not next year, but maybe the year after. And, you know, that's the direction it's all going. We can see that. But there's a long way to go and there's a lot of platform to build between now and the next hardware update. And I think that's

a good place for this product to be, is good hardware and the software now is going to keep making the hardware you already bought better, and that's going to extend the life of the product. Should we take a break? I have one more WWDC thing, if you don't mind. Is that okay? Yeah, go for it. We can have one more WWDC thing if you

don't mind. Is that okay? Yeah, go for it. We can do it on the other side if you want. So I wanted to mention naming because naming has been a thing and some people were sort of saying, oh, Jason, you predicted that they would change the name of OS X which I didn't predict. It was much more like wouldn't it be nice if

I wasn't playing that game of fearless predictions. it was more like you know i i like the idea of mac os instead of os 10 and we got two pieces of feedback thinking exactly what i was thinking when i was sitting in the front row of the talk show listening to phil schiller talk to john gruber last week where uh he basically gave uh gruber gave phil a hard time about watch os with the lowercase w and he's like are you trying to kill me here and Schiller said something like give us time you know it'll all make sense

it'll all make sense and so Toph and Travis both wrote in and said so what does that mean that we'll have macOS next year with the lowercase m and all one word just in the style of watchOS and iOS and I think i think his

i mean give us time who knows what he who knows what he meant by that but if i had to guess it's either your crazy idea which is that there's a an even grander scheme at work here but um you know i i and it's going to be apple os but i don't think that's it man where i was like because everyone's crazy like screaming at me for this Apple phone thing that I keep throwing around and Apple OS. But, yeah, you never know. But I'm not sure you brand, I mean, is watchOS just a placeholder until they do this? But it would totally be consistent if they then rebranded OS X next year as macOS, like watchOS and iOS, and they incremented it to 11 because that would mean next year would be ios 10 watch os 3 and mac os 11 and they would continue to just go up from there

maybe maybe maybe so i i that was that was tantalizing i would say when phil with a gleam in his eye phil schiller winked at the crowd no none, none of that happened. But he did say, sort of, give us time. It'll all make sense. And it does sort of feel like that. Like this is what they would like to do with their branding on their operating system side, to separate it and style it in a certain way. And maybe that's what they're doing with WhyWatchOS is like that, which seems weird to us. But it's actually just like iOS. It starts with lowercase and ends with a capital OS. If they do that, then macOS could not be far behind for all the reasons that I elaborated on in that column that I wrote

about why OS X is kind of old and tired and it runs the Mac anyway, so why not just call it that? And then you could say it's the Apple OS family, right? Apple OS family of iOS, watchOS, and macOS. So maybe that's what we'll see. And then everybody can grimace at the fact and macOS. So maybe that's what we'll see. And then everybody can grimace at the fact that macOS is suddenly one word with a lowercase mac. But only time will tell, as they say. This week's episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by Field Notes. I love

Field Notes. We spoke about them a couple of weeks ago, and I really want you to go and check out their new edition called the Workshop Edition. Field Notes make great notebooks. They've been my notebooks that I've used for many, many years now, and they're the one that I use every day. I was taking some notes on Microsoft's E3 conference earlier today, and I grabbed a Field Notes notebook for that. I have a different Field Notes notebook sit next to me right now,

which I take down notes as we record the shows. They're great for all types of purposes. They're great for this type of note-taking. Many of my friends that were in the keynote last week or in sessions in WWDC were using Field Notes because they slip right in your pocket and they don't interrupt it. They have soft covers on them and they're very easy and pliable and they wear really nicely. Field Notes are for everything. They're for taking notes of conferences.

They're for taking shopping lists. They're for writing down your plans for world domination whatever you want to use field notes for you can use them they're nice and adaptable the paper's really great quality i mean i've used all types of pens i use fountain pens pencils roller balls all types of pens in my field notes and i always love the way that they come out especially this new edition the workshop companion edition using a great thick paper in there, which I really love. Each of these books, they've got six books that come in the Workshop Companion, which is the new edition that Field Notes are running for summer this year. And they're each themed to a common project to be done around the house,

like electrical work, plumbing, painting, gardening, automotive, and woodworking. And if you are a Field Notes Col subscriber like I am you'll get a workshop reminder magnet too. If you're a colour subscriber what this means is that you're going to get in the mail to you directly every year each of the seasonal editions that Field Notes does. They do for a year and they come to you automatically as a colour subscriber. Save a little bit of money and you just don't have to worry about it you're definitely going to get them because these things always sell out so you don't need to worry they just come to you directly in the post i think that this is a great deal i mean i've used them for so long and the additions that

they make are always really beautiful they're always limited and they've always got new and exciting things about them you can find out more about the workshop edition of field notes at large by going to fieldnotesbrand.com slash workshop and if you buy yourself a year-long color subscription starting with the workshop companion and use the code relay at checkout you'll get three carpenter pencils and a three pack of pitch black memo books for free which is the nice standard black edition that they do even though you should be buying a subscription you can also buy packs of the workshop edition separately too but you want to hurry because when these things sell out they're gone forever they don't remake them when they're gone they're gone so that They don't remake them. When they're gone, they're gone. So that's Field Notes.

I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now. So you suggested on your lovely website, Six Colors, to check out the font presentation, like the session that they did. And I watched it today, and I was quite interested. I thought it was quite an interesting presentation. So this is about San Francisco because I know there was a lot of, because Apple didn't really mention it on stage. It was on one of the big word clouds, but they didn't really mention that both iOS and macOS, I'm just going to go with it now, have new system fonts, which is a brand of San Francisco. So the way that it's done now is San Francisco, the font,

has two different styles. I think it's called SF and SF Compact. And Compact is on the watch, and SF is on iOS and OS X. And they have ever so slightly differing characteristics that make them better for the screens that they're on um why did you find this uh so interesting well i i mean i'm not a font nerd at the level of a john gruber not even close, but what I, years in publishing, especially have taught me some things about type and the difference between display type and regular type, which, and as I was watching the presentation and, you know, how much of that was necessary for developers? I don't

know. I felt like it was a little bit of an evangelism session where it's really like, no, seriously, don't scale up your small type for large spaces because it looks really bad. Use the right size for the right place. It was a little bit of a just trying to get developers to think about type as important and complicated and that they should sort of trust Apple to do the right thing at the right sizes rather than just sort of figure it'll all be fine if they just take a 15 point uh set of type and make it 50 points which was one of his examples it's like this looks really bad don't do that i felt like he was crying inside the presenter every time he did something like that who may have been the guy was italian which i saw federico tweeting about how much he loved the presentation because it was done by an italian guy whose name i don't have to hand he knows the he knows the guy too which is funny

uh antonio cavadoni and he's on he's on he's on twitter even but um it's uh yeah so i think some of it is that which is like look developers we've we've got a whole team that's tried to do the right thing here. So what you need to do is say, like, say the size you want, and we'll give it to you, and it'll look good. So trust us. There was that aspect of it. But it's also a good little primer on how, or as it's properly pronounced, you, on fonts and, and decisions font designers make. And there's some really nice things where he's got the two different outlines of two different versions of the font.

And you can see like on this, we changed the way this is so that things were a little more elongated. So that it's more readable at small sizes because at small sizes, everything kind of like compresses together. And so we make these things more distorted, but if you, if you more readable at small sizes, because at small sizes, everything kind of like compresses together. And so we make these things more distorted. But if you showed them at large sizes, they would look ridiculous. He talked about overshooting, so that you make a circle actually taller than a square so that they, if placed next to each other, they look the same size. If you make the circle exactly the same size as the square, it looks smaller. And that's an optical

illusion. He talked about how so much of vision is based on optical illusions. And so you have to kind of make things different or in order to make things see the, see the same. And I really like that. So it's like, if you've ever wondered about typography and fonts and, and how all that stuff works, I think it actually works. That presentation works as a little bit of an intro to those kinds of concepts. And, you know, you could, you could go way deeper, obviously, but I like, I like that. And also the, the sign that Apple takes this stuff seriously enough that when they decided they're going to make their own font, they aren't kidding around. And they actually, you know, it's downloadable for developers under a license that says you can

only use it in UI, which I think is also interesting that this is not, you know, Apple doesn't want to see everybody's website set in San Francisco. That's not the point of it. But they went to the trouble of building this font specifically for their devices. So, you know, it's nice to see that level of care taken to it, that somebody cares enough about typography to work on this. And so his presentation was really good. So I think people should check it out if they're at all interested in typography, even though the purpose that I think it served at WWDC is very much to sort of lecture developers to not screw up their fonts by assuming that just text is text. I think that was really what he was trying to do is like if you if you walk away anything here just understand display fonts are not regular fonts that you know we do different things at different sizes that fonts have features that

you know like making fractions we have a feature for that right that um that to to just think of fonts as something more than just like an unintelligent thing that they just kind of do whatever and it'll be fine. And it served that purpose, too. But it's also very educational. other sessions are because Antonio was doing a great job of actually describing what fonts and typography are about and why it's important and you could see like from this guy that it was like a plea right he was like please please just trust me and do what I've been working on for years and years and take advantage of this thing that we've created for you. And you can see it in the way that they show these minor little details about the way it changes at certain points and weights

and how they look at tracking and kerning and all that stuff, things that I've learned about today through watching this presentation. And it was just one of those things where it was like, I know that a lot of other companies have done this, you know google made a font um and they've done stuff like that as well but you see them on stage and they're like showing the way that they've put this thought into it it's like look how these three letters are the same in the way that they're presented and how much we've had to think about changing them because of that and it's oh we have to have a different six in some instances in case it's read upside down. And it's like, you know, you've got to love

that kind of sweat in the details, because they didn't need to do this. They could have continued to use Health Etica forever, but instead they used San Francisco instead, and it's nice. I like that they gave that guy the time on stage to explain why it's important, rather than just have somebody say,

no, you must do this now, and you must use this API, and shut up about it. I like that they gave him his time to discuss his craft. That's the nice thing about WWDC, is there are all these slots, and I'm sure there are more topics than there are slots, but you can use slots for interesting things

that you might not otherwise do. It's also not a long presentation, it's not an hour, it's half an hour. 30 minutes or something. It's a good one i liked it a lot so people should definitely check it out and people should if you're interested in this stuff i mean the beauty of the wwdc videos is you don't have to be a paid developer to watch them and you can do what back in the old days when i would go to wwdc for the full week and it wasn't totally packed and sold out and insane like it is now.

You'd go to a lot of sessions kind of on a whim to see what was new. And they would give you an overview for about 10 minutes. And then they would bring out the code samples. And you would leave and go to another session and pop in there and see if you can glean something more there. The nice thing about these videos is you can do that. You can fast forward or just go to a different session once you reach a point where you're like, whoa, now I don't understand what's going on. This is all code. a point where you're like, whoa, now I don't understand what's going on. This is all code. And so even if you're not a developer, I would say, and you're curious about how this stuff works,

those videos can be great and you can surf around, you know, you can pop in and out of them as you need to, which I think is really good. I've been enjoying watching them and I'm glad Apple makes them available. I've mentioned a couple of times today that E3 is going on and just before we recorded this episode Microsoft held their press conference and it prompted you to make a purchase yeah it's funny it was on a whim fortunately my children

don't listen to this podcast so they won't hear this but my daughter's graduating from middle school and my son is graduating from elementary school and again people, you know, people make a big deal about, oh, do you celebrate a graduation every year? And, you know, my son's been at the same school for six years and he's leaving it. And there's a little ceremony and it's nice. And my daughter's been in the middle school for three years. She's going to high school and there's a little ceremony and it's nice. They're both the same day. My mom's coming in. My wife's parents are coming in, and we're going to buy them some presents.

So my kids both love video games, and I'm watching the coverage of E3 and the Microsoft thing, and they announced that Xbox One, which previously has been incompatible with all the Xbox 360 games, will gradually become compatible with many Xbox 360 games. They're going to, it's kind of unclear. It sounds like they may be doing some recompiling and that you basically put in the disc and it downloads the, it downloads a special Xbox One version of it. And they verify that you, you know, that you have the disc and then it plays. It seems a little bit weird, but I had been on the fence about buying an Xbox One.

I think my kids would really like to have another current generation console, but we also have enough Xbox 360 games that I didn't want to keep the Xbox 360 around and hooked up and plugged in just for those games. And so I'm going to take a little bit of a flyer on this and hope that they end up adding compatibility for the games that my kids like eventually over the next six months but i decided to pull the trigger on it because i could get it here in two days with amazon prime and put it in you know gift wrap and give that to them as a little present on their graduation day so um so it so you know the hype worked microsoft fine you win but seriously i think these console makers don't understand how important it

is for people with an investment in old their previous platform how much easier it is to buy the new platform knowing that your games come along it's like i have a wii u number one reason we have a wii u is it plays all the wii games and so i was able to just pull out the wii and put in the wii U and just swap them and move on with my life, right? Rather than collecting yet another box. And the 360 and the PlayStation 4, you can't do that. You got to keep your old console around. That is not good. So I understand that there's a lot of issues in terms of getting the games to play. And do you have to build in special hardware? And does that the cost i don't understand all that but for a lot of regular people they're

not really viewing consoles as an additive thing it's much more of a uh replacement thing and if it you know i got the new xbox you also have to get rid of all your old xbox games or find room for an extra xbox that made that product a lot less appealing. So... To address it, to play the other side, the reason that it didn't work is because Microsoft and PlayStation, well, Sony with PlayStation,

they both changed console architecture in this revision, which isn't always the case. So Nintendo did not do that. They stuck to the same architecture which means the games will play because fundamentally 360 games do not run on the xbox one they just can't they could have put the disc in but it's not gonna work and so what microsoft appeared to be doing is recompiling games for the xbox one because it won't be all games. It's not going to be until the holiday season.

And they've said there'll be 100 supported by the holiday season. And what Microsoft has said, all they've said so far, is that developers just need to opt in. So Microsoft appear to be doing the work on it. Now, the reason that Microsoft are doing this is because they took a hit for it initially, because they said they were going to do it, and then ripped it out because there was just this big fracas

with basically the Xbox that had to be constantly connected to the internet. Microsoft did a lot of crazy things with the Xbox One that they had to walk back. And one of them that they walked back was backwards compatibility because they kind of had to because of the way they needed to change

the way that their system worked. And there was no pressure from sony because sony wasn't offering backward compatibility either exactly now what's happened what's transpired is sony are just walking around and actually they are running circles around microsoft sales wise um so something that microsoft are doing now is trying to give the bridge for people like yourself to upgrade to the Xbox One. When, you know, there are statistics and people will tell you that the actuality is most people don't use the backward compatibility feature after a short space of time because the games get replaced but it is something that even mentally for some people whether you do or don't and it's not important really whether you do or don't

it's the way that mentally as you have just done it makes you feel like you're making a better purchase a more informed purchase because you're able to use the investment that you've put in over the last five years or whatever so that's why they tried to do it so you know basically how many how many wii games do we play now on the wii u how many how many times do i find my kids there is there are a handful of wii games that still get played on the wii u it's only a handful most of them are not being played anymore and i should probably give those to merlin actually because they have a wii and i i've given some games to merlin for his daughter to play. But mostly not. It's like having a computer that's upgradable. Sometimes it's just a mental block.

But the fact is, there are Xbox 360 games that my son loves. And I'm hoping anyway that they will be brought over and compatible so that I can disconnect the 360 entirely at some point. That would be really nice because, you know, again, it's a transition thing. It's right. It's about, can we get people, do the effort to get people on the new platform and they gradually will let go of the old platform. Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, and that's why they do it and why they should probably, they should try all they can. And this is a huge technological achievement that Microsoft have managed to do, because the way it works is you put the disk in, it authenticates and then you download the game, which means Microsoft has done an incredible amount me earlier today, he just caught up with the presentation. This is Microsoft trying to win back the gamers

that they upset a year ago. And that's definitely the case. On that note, if you're interested in this at all, we're actually, me and Federico have a game podcast on this network called Virtual. And we're doing two episodes this week to cover all of the E3 news. We're doing one tomorrow, Tuesday,

and then one on Friday to try and cover everything from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and the rest. So you should check those out. If you're interested in that kind of thing, we're doing some good coverage this week. Should we do some Ask Upgrade? Ask Upgrade is brought to you

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in the early days when John was a college student. And we've upgraded so much, upgraded of our infrastructure in terms of security on the internet. But email is not secure. It's just not secure. Anybody can send email to anyone else. And as a result, this is why we have spammers. This is why spammers exist. Because they can have their servers connecting to every email server they can find and try to deliver their spam.

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So thank you to MailRoute for sponsoring. Hashtag ask upgrade. And thanks, Mike, for your faraway mailbagging. My neighbors are going to think I'm crazy. So I just went to the other side of the room and shouted mailbagging at you. Crazier? Crazier. Our first

AskUpgrade this week comes from Guy. Guy asks, is there anything that will make you both consider jailbreaking your iOS devices? Have you ever jailbroken, Jason? So jailbreaking used to be really important because there were features that you could enable

that just simply weren't there. So I did jailbreaking to try out apps before there were apps in the App Store. I did jailbreaking to enable video out from the dock connector at one point so that we could do presentations on stage at Macworld Expo. You used to not be able to do

that via a wire or via any means. That was until like a year ago. That was like super recent. Yeah. Well, no, it was not too long ago you could do a direct video out. The video adapters were sold, I don't know, that was like four years ago, five years ago. But for the first two or three years, you couldn't do that. And so we had several jailbroken iPads at Macworld Expo just because that was the only way that we could do a demo on a screen of things that were on an iPad. I got to say, though, the stuff that jailbreaking is used for today, you know, tweaky settings and piracy, basically. And while I appreciate people who want to jailbreak their iOS devices, I don't think there's anything that would make me consider, given all of the other issues that are going around jailbreaking, I feel like it's time as something that appeals to... It never appealed to a broad audience, but that audience that it did appeal to just keeps getting narrower and narrower. So no, I don't think there's anything that would make me consider at this point.

I agree completely. I don't have anything that I need. I mean, short of a crackdown where Apple says, you know, all podcast apps must be removed from the store and, you know, but that's not going to happen. You know, Apple's not going to do that. So, you know, I'm fine with it. I don't think there's, it's not to say that there aren't some features that are nice that you can probably enable with jailbreaking. I'm just saying I don't think there's anything that would counterbalance the difficulty of going through it and difficulty of having upgrades and having things be nonstandard and broken. And I don't want to go through that because I did go through that for a couple of years. And it was kind of awful, but necessary. And I don't see anything that would make it worth it this time.

Richard would like to know, Richard has a question for you, Jason. Will I be able to play Apple Music on the watch without my phone? That would be a huge advantage over other services like Spotify. I mean, in theory, yeah, right? You'll be able to download it to the device, even if it's maybe to play off locally. WatchOS 2. Yeah. WatchOS 2, it will be up to the app developers so

would apple make it so that you could save off um apple music files and copy them on a playlist like you can now with itunes files they could absolutely do that and maybe they will do that spotify could do that too so that's the thing is that it would be a huge advantage over spotify but based on how the watch kit stuff in watch os2 works spotify should be able to do it too anybody should be able to save some files locally on the watch and then play them back when you're separate from the from the iphone so it's a question of who will do that because it's complicated right you got to download the files you got to download the files. You've got to have them be secure based on whatever your music license is.

And then you have to transfer them to the other device. But I think offline viewing of streaming content or using streaming content is such a great feature. I really love it in Marvel Unlimited that I can save off 12 issues of comic books and read them. And it makes me very sad that I can't watch Netflix series on an airplane because they don't allow offline viewing. So I hope, you know, the music services do this on apps today. So I hope that they will do that on the watch at some point. But I don't think it's necessarily going to be an Apple advantage because looking at the way they describe the API, Spotify should be able to build a watch app that does it too.

Might be an advantage for a couple of months though, right? Could be. I mean, yeah, they could do a watch OS one point. Because I'm pretty sure on the Apple Music site, it says it's supported in Apple Watch after a software upgrade. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it says that. That could be. They could drop an Apple Watch software update

that's got it as a native app and no other watch apps will have that until the fall and that's your platform advantage. So it's possible. There you go. So let's wait and see, Richard. Pete has asked, with the Notes app functionality in iOS 9

being only for iOS devices, what checklist to-do apps do you use on the Apple Watch? Well, first off, I think it's also on the Mac, but I think Pete's question is about Apple Watch. Yeah. There's no Notes, so far as we know, no new Notes app for the Apple Watch that lets you check things off, although wouldn't that be nice? I'm not currently doing any checklist or to-do stuff on Apple Watch. I'm not. I feel like, for me, that's almost a bridge too far. And if I'm in a checking off mode, I can just pull out

my phone and it's not a problem. I could see that I might want to try something out, but I haven't done that yet. What about you you so i do use omni focus i have the omni focus app and sometimes i do check off things in omni focus as they pop up um but i have i find doing something like grocery shopping or whatever i use clear um and and i have to have it on my wrist as i'm walking around supermarket and i just check off things in clear so that works pretty well you're so fancy i know i know um this comes from matt will americans be able to use apple pay in the uk i believe the answer to that is yes they will be in fact somebody replied to matt on twitter and said that americans can already use

apple pay in the uk yeah exactly because there are those contactless terminals it's the banks that need it it's not the stores so much as long as the terminals are there and this actually reminds me i forgot a piece of follow-up from earlier i just completely skipped over it's in the document um we're talking about barclays bank the bank in the uk that that i would like to use that isn't supporting apple pay um i did a bit of digging on this. Basically, it's kind of as I expected. Barclays have their own service called PingIt, which is a payment service that they tried to implement in the UK. They did such a good job at it. It was so revolutionary that the UK Payments Council said, that's really good. We're going to make all banks use this now. And basically,

PingIt is a system where you can register your phone number with your bank. And it's now called PayM in the UK now. It's like the standardized system. So, for example, let's say you were in the UK, Jason. You could say to your bank, this is my phone number. I could say to my bank, this is my phone number. And we could send payments to each other via our phone numbers in banking apps. It's very clever. Basically, Barclays are trying to take ping it to the next level and they're trying to make it so you can

pay businesses and charities and stuff with ping it so basically what it seems like is that uh barclays are resisting because they want their own system reminds me of that currency thing it's exactly like that. And I had the feeling this was going to be the case when you mentioned that it's strange that Barclays would not be on the list because they seem to be more of a tech-forward bank. But isn't that always the way?

The tech-forward organization is building their own thing. And then this thing comes along that everybody can adopt and they immediately sort of sniff at it and go, we built our own thing. But the problem with that is that by trying to keep their own thing in the spotlight, they risk being seen as a technology laggard instead because they're not supporting the thing that everybody else is supporting. It feels very much like currency where Walmart and a bunch of other stores got together and said, we're building a new awesome payment system. And then Apple pay came out and they said,

Nope, we're going to still do our thing. And it's just not going to happen because there's a better system. So they like they Barclays tweeted about it, right from the official account that they have. And they're basically saying, we can assure you have've been talking with Apple of how our customers can use Apple Pay

in addition to our existing mobile payment services. And these talks remain constructive. So I wonder if Apple say, you can't do anything else. You want to use this? You can't do it. And then, you know, you don't know what side it's coming from,

but there is a side that is making them say, no, we won't do this. I also made a dumb joke last week about Apple Pay in the UK where I likened it to anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, which I'm still a little proud of. But the next day they announced a Sex Pistols credit card. What? Which, yes. Oh, yes. On Virgin Bank or Virgin Card or whatever in the uk there is a sex pistols set of sex pistols themed credit cards so i got to use the apple pay in the uk joke for a second day

that was nice i don't even understand because they've totally sold out now why would these two things go together in any way, punk rock and financial services really are natural, aren't they? Gosh. Yeah. Isn't it crazy to see how this... Virgin money. This anarchic band just completely... Just sold out.

I think you mean anarchic... Antarctic? I think you mean Antarctic band. They live at the South Pole. No, I think you mean Antarctic. Antarctic. I think you mean Antarctic band. They live at the South Pole. No, I think you mean Antarctic brand. That's where we are. They're just a brand

like all the others. Our last question this week comes from Nathan. Do you think that improvements to Siri and Spotlight are the groundwork for an Apple search engine? I love this question.

I love this question. I love this question. And the answer is yes, sort of. I think Apple does not want to make a search engine as we think of it with Google. Like apple.com, let's search or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm interested in what you think about this. I was thinking about it

when I was even sitting in the keynote, which is I feel like this is the information resource that doesn't require a search engine, but it is a search engine. It is between the proactive stuff and what you're going to see on the search screen in iOS and the natural language search that's happening in El Capitan. I feel like this is what Apple's pushing is they've got information resources and search technologies all happening in all these different places. And they're bringing them together. They're making them available in all sorts of different locations.

And you never have to hit a search engine per se. You know, you search on your iOS device or in Spotlight if you want to. But it's not quite what we think of as a traditional search engine. But it is definitely a competitor to Google and all the other search engines. It's different, but it is like that. And I think this is one of Google's fears, and people have talked about this for years now, that the rise of mobile and apps, you know,

Google risks losing not just information from users who might go to other places, but risks losing one of their greatest products, maybe their greatest product, which is the search box. And it won't go to a competitor. It's not going to go to Bing. It's going to go to apps that have their own search of different resources. And that's what Apple's trying to do here, is build something that means you never go to Google because you don't need to, because you can use Apple's trying to do here is build something that means you never go to Google because you don't need to because you can use Apple's system to intercept you. And you may never even feel like you're using a search engine per se. You're just using your device to find things.

So, you know, I love this question because I think it lets me say, you know, yes and no. It's not like we think of a search engine. But, yeah, that's pretty much what they're trying to do is mean that you never have to go to a search engine. Yeah, I think it's the same sort of idea. There isn't going to be a web-based search that anybody can use. It's just the places that you would normally perform searches, we will provide you with information.

Right. Now, Google is really good at this too, right? Google Now is good at this. And Google has a head start here, not only because they're good at search, but because they've been trying to build this into their mobile products for a while now. So there's a, as Joe Steele just said in the chat room, the problem is the perceived quality of the search, like Maps versus Google Maps. And I would add to that, can Apple do this well?

I'm not saying they can. I'm saying that they're trying to. And I hope they, you know, for their sake that they execute well, because as a user, I would really not like to have this like, oh, well, you know, there's a search feature in iOS, but I can't really use that. I have to launch an app because Google stuff is so much better than Apple's. You know, I would like the integrated stuff in the system to be good. But this is tough stuff for Apple. This is new stuff for Apple. But that's what they need to do. They absolutely do need to do it and have it be integrated. The proactive stuff is adding another level.

The natural language and spotlight is adding another level. But this is what they're – and, you know, whether we call this Siri or not, these are all of those same technologies. It's a whole bunch of different data sources being organized together. And, you know, you should be able to ask it questions it should also know what and and you know intuit what you're going to need and provide it for you that's all part of the dream here so the intelligent assistant instead of um uh we should be able to think of a search engine as like a last resort where it's like wow nobody has suggested anything for me i guess i have to go to the search engine.

Yep. I think both of these companies, Google and Apple, what they're actually trying to do is provide you with the search results before you make the search. I think that's where they're going. That's what they want it to be in the future. And that's what this stuff is moving towards. Yeah. So that's it that's our upgrade over uh we did want to just mention in a couple of weeks time we'll be doing

uh our next mic at the movies maybe next i think it's next week right i do believe what's the date mine the 22nd yep so all right so if you want to watch the movie along with mike go to his house knock on his door i'll welcome you in i'm watching it 24 hours a day for the next to watch the movie along with Mike, go to his house, knock on his door. I welcome you in. I'm watching it 24 hours a day for the next week. So the movie, we're going to stick with the 80s because that seems to have been our theme. So if you would like to watch a movie that Mike is also going to watch for the first time, get out your, I don't even know what, get out your DVD players, get out your netflix streams wherever it's available to you and seek out uh cameron crowe's 1989 film starring john cusack say anything very uh very interesting 80s film uh i with a with a super famous scene toward the end looking at the artwork on imdb this is the movie that has a meme that

i don't understand which is the boombox thing yep so i've seen this i know this is a thing but i don't know what it's you don't know what it means now now try not to watch the whole movie saying oh there's a boombox i wonder if he'll raise that over his head soon well i can assume what i assume is and you can can just, you just, you have to play stone-faced in it. I assume he's playing a love song for that boombox to try and get the girl. Interesting theory, Mike. Interesting theory. We will check on your theory

next week when we do Mike at the Movies. So that's it for this week's episode of Upgrade. If you'd like to catch our show notes, you should head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 41. If you'd like to find Jason online, he writes sixcolors.com. And you can also find him on Twitter. He's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L.

And I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. This show is a part of RelayFM. You can find more of our shows online at relay.fm. Thanks again to our sponsors this week too, Field Notes, MailRoute, and lynda.com for helping us out. But most importantly, thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to listen to our little program. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell.

Kickboxing, it's the sport of the future. I don't understand. You will.