Upgrade - 417: The Verticals

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

In this special Summer of Fun episode, Jason and Myke welcome three special guests to discuss how development, accessibility, and widgets have been affected by Apple's latest operating-system cycle.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 417 today's show is brought to you by text expander source graph door dash and zoc doc my name is mike hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. It's very exciting. It's the summer of fun. We've got a special episode today. Summer of fun! Summer of fun! It's true.

I have a hashtag snow tool question for you, and it comes from Steven, not that one. What is your biggest bucket list sporting event? Huh. That's a good question. Let's see. Well, I would say seeing cal play in the rose bowl but that's never going to happen now it's like literally never going to happen what is cal playing in the rose bowl mean cal playing in the rose bowl it's related to bridget knight uh she

comes down from the skies and uh the rose bowl is a a football game that has been played for um a century more that is usually traditionally for the last 75 years or whatever has mostly pitted the champion of the big 10 conference and the champion of the pac-10 conference and then 12 more recently um and and so as a cal is a a team in that conference, the Pacific 10 and 12 conference that is in dire straits right now. We don't want to get into that, but I'll just say that that was always the dream is that Cal would win the conference and go to the Rose Bowl because they haven't been to the Rose Bowl in like 60 or 70 years. And they've come close a couple of times, 70 years. And they've come close a couple of times, but they have not gotten there in my lifetime. And that was always the dream was to go see Cal play in the Rose Bowl. But due to changes

in conferences and the landscape of college football, that will probably never happen now. The door has almost completely closed. It was always a wild dream, like watching the Giants win the World Series, which they did three times in the 2010s. So I got that one. Anyway, that would have been the bucket list item, but I feel like it will never happen. And I have no way to make it happen. It's out of my control because it has to be an event that exists for me to go to it. And it's never going to exist. So I'm going to say, and Lauren and I were talking about this just a couple weeks ago for obvious reasons, is, you know, someday I want to go to Wimbledon. And I don't want to go like to the final. I want to go to like a day early on where there's just people all over playing tennis and on grass and it's London and it's the summertime.

And that I would love to do sometime. I got to see some of the semifinal one, yeah. Oh, nice. I actually kind of think I like it more if... I think I'd like to hang out like on the outside where there's like the little courts and people are playing doubles and they're all... It's just, it sounds like...

Village, the Wimbledon Village. That would be a really fun thing. So that's, I think, what I'm going to say my sports bucket list is. Get some strawberries and cream, Jason. Yeah, exactly. So really that is, I mean, and I'm saying that seriously like i could say like a world cup final and all that but it's like the truth is the world cup's coming to the u.s i will probably

try to go to a world cup match while it's here but um but that's not on my list it's i think wimbledon going to wimbledon is is my here. If you would like to send in a question for Jason to answer on an episode of Upgrade, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk and you can help us start the show. We have an action-packed show today, Jason Snow, but we've still got to head on down to the corral for the Rumor Roundup.

Yee-haw! For when people were hearing this, some rumors that were over a week old. But nevertheless, still things to talk about. We did warn you on last week's episode that we were pre-recording so if any of this stuff changes we cannot be held accountable for that it's not how time works puck news is reporting that apple is the quote most likely winner of a three billion dollar nfl sunday ticket deal uh yeah this is it's a lot of money but we've had this out there it sounds like amazon has been bidding against apple for this but yeah this sounds like a this is this is probably going

to happen this is apple spending a lot of money on sports and speaking of apple and amazon they are also in a bidding war for the u.s. broadcasting rights to the UEFA Champions League football. Yeah, this is, again, it's all part of the strategy, right, of Apple wants to give people reason. Like I've said, it's not just even the money. The money presumably will come at some point, although what they're spending, they may never get their money back for this. But the point is it serves a couple of larger purposes. And one is just getting people into the Apple ecosystem. But I really believe one of the reasons is they want to get households and devices into the Apple

TV compatible ecosystem. So step one, you can't even watch this. You need to get a box that has an Apple TV app on it. It doesn't even have to be the Apple TV to get a box that has an apple tv app on it doesn't even have to be the apple tv just a box that has apple tv step two is like create an apple id or whatever you need to do to log in even if you don't give them money like to get to the point where you're you're able to watch something like that's that's a huge strategy and then beyond that to get them get start paying and then maybe you're in the bundle and all those things but like it's a it's a long-term ecosystem play for apple and uh they're going to spend a lot of money on it for sure now something i thought was interesting about the sunday ticket and potentially we have a champions league i would guess both of these would be us only which is not how they've done for their other sports stuff well mls uh and mlb have i mean it's

just a different product with with different issues the nfl makes a lot of money they already have a product for outside the us to watch all the games so they don't need to do that yeah no no it's not about the strategy. It's about Apple's strategy, which I find intriguing. Because obviously, who knows about NFL or whatever? But I can tell you, well, not who knows.

You would know. I would know. They're not going to get the UEFA Champions League broadcasting rights in the UK, for example. That's just not going to happen. Apple probably wouldn't even want to pay what that's worth because it's such a huge ticket here. But they may pay $3 billion for NFL Sunday tickets. So I think the answer would be maybe,

but it's a different kind of deal. Like the UEFA rights in the US are very different than the UEFA rights in another place. And that's fine. That's what they're going to do. But their sights are high. I mean, if they're going to spend $3 billion on an NFL Sunday ticket, they're serious about this.

This is serious money for making a serious play for people to get them into their ecosystem. I don't think I represent what I was trying to say clearly. I don't really know if it's about the money for something like the UEFA for champions league as such like i just don't know if they would get to the table maybe but like it's such an entrenched thing in certain places in the world some of these sports would be complicated i get it would be complicated then again if somebody comes up and says i'll pay you more than they will i i have a hard time believing they wouldn't listen right i mean there are lots of issues, cultural issues,

and where is it available and all that, and it varies from place to place. But the truth is it's also not a thing where they can just make a deal with one person, shake their hand, write a check, and it's everywhere in the world because a lot of these sports have already sectioned up the world, and Apple can't make one preemptive bid for all of it moving on et news is reporting on information from supply chain sources that apple's mixed reality headset is still on track for an early 2023 launch time frame they added that a second

generation model will be teed up for 2024 featuring a lighter design quote ability to make calls i think that means cell reception right yeah sure right because that's just a weird thing way to phrase that and higher definition cameras because it is expected that the first generation model will have quote mid to low spec cameras which i found to be a curious thing the camera the camera part yeah that's a good question ability to make calls is weird right because i i have to imagine that facetime will be built into these things but maybe it is a cellular thing yeah i think that that means cellular i think that's just and yeah the cameras will be better i'm also it's just a comparison thing, right? So like the cameras in the first gen model

will not be the same as the cameras in the second gen model. Okay. Well, because what I was thinking about with this is like the camera kind of quality that you get from an Oculus, right? It's like really bad if you're looking through it. Yeah.

And I wonder if they're going to have an experience like that, which wasn't what I expected. Like I was expecting the mixed reality portion of this to be like crystal clear looking out to the world and so like this report is intriguing to me this is not what i was necessarily expecting i guess we'll find out but it's not what i thought it was going to be like yeah well i will see what they do i'm sure it'll be good but it could always be better but we still got that 2023 time frame apparently this continues to be reported on and finally according to ross young speaking of

2023 the mini led display the external display that apple's been working on has been delayed to early 2023 uh this was all on the mac rumors show podcast that young mentioned this and confirmed it will feature ProMotion so the high refresh rate stuff. Just as a reminder, this product was originally scheduled for June then slipped to October, this is this year, now for 2023.

This will also be a 27 inch product like the Studio Display and Ross Young also said that the larger MacBook Air, the 15-inch MacBook Air product that we've been talking about that we think might be the MacBook Studio is also set for 2023 as of now as well.

Interesting. Interesting. Supply chain, baby. I think Studio Display, you know, I think this is like the Pro Display or Studio Display Pro or they'll give it another name, but like it's going to be way more expensive than the Studio Display, but it's going to be way more expensive than the Studio Display,

but it's going to be super fancy and swanky. Jason, do you want to explain what we're going to be doing on the rest of the episode today? Can you explain yourself, Jason? What we're about to do. All right, you might not know this, Mike, but it's the Summer of Fun. Summer of Fun!

In the Summer of Fun, we try to do things a little bit differently, partially because it's fun, partially because there's other stuff going on, like there's travel and stuff, and so we had to, we had to pre-record this, um, because we couldn't record on the day that this will, we normally record and this will be released. So, um, we have a document, people may not know this. We have a document called the summer of fun document. And I had this idea. I actually had lunch with Shelly Brisbane, and we were talking about accessibility stuff in the new versions of Apple's operating systems. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring in people.

We don't normally do guests on this show, right? But it's the summer of fun. And I thought, what if we got people in to sort of like report on an area of expertise and just check in with them about it. And that led me to put in our document, a thing called the verticals. Now people may not remember from way back in the earliest days, one of the things that I always used to talk about that was like a buzzword in publishing and in, um, and in tech was this idea of verticals, which is like, tech was this idea of verticals, which is like, it's like how to split up a topic or into like little subtopics or demographic groups. So there's like, they're the verticals.

There's the horizontal, which is everything. And then there's these verticals that are like, so you're super interested in this. You're in the vertical. It's a piece of jargon that we thought was funny. And we talked about how every segment of Upgrade was a vertical for a while. And it's a whole thing. Ask Upgrade is one of the original verticals. It is one of the original verticals.

It remains vertical to this day, in fact. So this episode is The Verticals, where we are going to have three guests in three topic areas. And we're going to talk about what's going on this summer and into the fall with the iOS and macOS especially, but also watch an iPad betas and how it affects different aspects of this. There will be some more verticals I anticipate this summer. I don't know whether those will get dropped into regular episodes. Probably, though, we'll just have occasional vertical segments for the rest of the summer, at least a handful. have occasional vertical segments for the rest of the summer, at least a handful. But this episode, because it needs to be out of time a little bit, is the all, well, not all, because you've heard that there's more in this show than just the verticals, but mostly the verticals with three

special guests. And then we'll do some more little guest segments occasionally in the summer. It's not a new permanent change to the upgrade format, but it's a summer of fun thing. So the verticals, little interviews, little mini segments with special guests who are experts in a particular field. But before we get to that, let me thank TextExpander for their support of this week's episode. When you work in a small team, every moment counts. You don't want to be wasting your time finding video conferencing details to send to a new client.

You don't want to have to track down those same FAQs every single time from the company website. These are the kinds of things you want at your fingertips so you can get your work done faster. And that's why you need TaxExpander. With TaxExpander, you can access what you type the most of just a few keystrokes, allowing you to work faster and eliminate repetition, letting you focus on what matters most to you. So about video conferencing, that's one of mine. If I type ZZOOM anywhere on my Mac,

it pre-fills all of the stuff for my Zoom call, like my standard Zoom link that I give to people. So it just opens them to my personal meeting ID and they can just click on it and they're going to go straight and join that Zoom call with me. Text Expander's powerful shortcuts and abbreviations will streamline your team's work as well.

All you have to do is type that short abbreviation, TextExpander will do the rest for you. So you can just build and collect your most commonly used phrases, messages, URLs, and more right within TextExpander, create your chosen abbreviation, and they will be with you everywhere you type. You can even customize the snippets

to have them automatically add in information like dates. You can have fields that you can fill in the blanks of if you want to do some more customization. Maybe you want to add timestamps to some text and more. This will make sure that you keep the personality and the communication you send or even do something that we do here at RelayFM for doing good consistent naming for file structures. So like where all of the contracts that we have for all of our various sponsors, they're all saved with a text expander snippet with some drop down fields that we select from. We type in the name of the sponsor and everything is named nice and consistently. TextExpander is available on any device that you use across any app that you use.

So on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iOS, it's always there. If repetitive typing is getting you down, you need TextExpander. Check out TextExpander today at textexpander.com slash upgrade and you can get 20% off your first year. That's textexpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show. So we're now joined by James Thompson on the upgrade program. You may know James as the developer of PCALC and Dice by PCALC, aka PDICE. And James is also a frequent podcaster on many shows over at The Incomparable. By PCALC.

By PCALC. The Incomparable by PCALC. I don't think I'm sponsoring the whole network. I'm sorry to say you are. No, you are now. It's James by PCALC. Here on the Upgrade Vertical. This is the Vertical by PCALC.

James, welcome. Hello. So the concept with the Special Summer of Fun Verticals episode is we're talking to people for a segment about a little area of their speciality. Is that how you guys say it? Speciality? I say special... No, wait, I don't know anymore. Now you've asked me, I don't know. Do you say asked me i don't know i think it's a specialty yeah oh okay i i i'm now trying to double think what i'm actually saying aluminium is my speciality anyway it's it's guess what james it's it's

programming for you it's not synthesizers from the 80s it's programming for you i figured that was most likely i did have some like briefing beforehand. That's good. That's good. And it's, it's again, the summer and we're trying to check in about what's going on with the betas and where the Apple platforms are going in the fall. And that's what I wanted us to talk to you about for, for this, for this vertical segment. So, you know, from a high level in terms of like the tools and what's new that you could potentially use in your software, have you had things that the betas

have changed in how you're working? Yeah, I mean, realistically, I'm still pretty early into my new versions for the autumn. I usually try and get some last bug fix releases out just before wwdc like to deal with all the small stuff that i know about and then i move on to doing the major

architectural work for the autumn but this year a combination of factors including spending a month on a secret project that i cannot talk about uh means that i'm only just shipping the last of those updates out this week but i have been like doing all my exploratory work on the betas as i go along betas i said not oh yes you did as was foretold some people pronounce it betas is that is xcode you know did they mess up xcode did they fix xcode you know is that is that has it changed i i mean like there is quite a few things that are currently broken and they've dropped support for building apps that will run on earlier systems, which is always a problem, because then you have people saying, why do you no longer support, you know, iOS 11 or something? or bad in terms of Xcode. You know, it's a bit faster in compiling,

but I can't really use it day to day unless I'm specifically working on my apps for the autumn. Always, you end up having multiple versions of Xcode installed and switching between them as needed. I will say that Xcode is still one of the all-time great development environments and all those people deserve a raise and a vacation. Oh, very nice but but yeah i mean the the xcode side of it's not too bad um it's when you get into the actual

betas themselves that you start to run into problems i know that you have you diced by pcalc is a catalyst app so i know you've experimented with that uh and and had experiments ship any changes in catalyst um that you've noticed that might make your your life a little bit easier or harder i suppose i mean like the sort of generally all the changes this year are such that i don't need to do vast amounts of work you know just to stay in the same place there's nothing that really breaks my existing code or any major architectural or visual changes. You know, that's always the best kind of WWDC when you come out of it. And it's like, you know, if I literally do nothing, everything will still work. So then it's a case of like, what can you actually do to improve things?

And Catalyst has got some basic stuff in it that I've been wanting for years, particularly related to moving and resizing windows from code. So for example, if you had a separate toolbar type window, like I recently added to Dice, and you wanted to position that relative to your main window when you opened it, you just couldn't do that before the system just decided where it was going to go. And the stuff like that, I would say the majority of changes are really in things like SwiftUI, which has got overall small quality of life improvements and new things like the ability to make menu bar apps. And there's whole new swift ui charting api that i suspect i might use in dice to make pretty graphs of dice roll statistics and things like

that do you use swift ui and dice right now uh yes on the mac version the preferences window is all swift ui and the widgets are all swift ui everywhere So you have to use it for some things, but the preferences window was my kind of like, let's try something. I mean, it wasn't a great success, given that when 12.4 came out, it completely broke SwiftUI in Catalyst apps, in shipping apps.

So, you know, there's things where you end up and you realize you're using a sort of a niche element of a niche element and nobody's actually tested it. I shouldn't say nobody, but that was a pretty bad one. And I remember, I think it was Steve Troughton Smith when that happened to him. He said, I'm never using SwiftUI again. I'm not going that far. I enjoyed your exchange with him where basically you were it was as if you were both looking at each other saying did you see this and the other one said

are our apps broken now yes they are in the shipping version not not in a beta with months of runway but literally a shipping version that broke pieces of your Swift UI. Which is not great. But there was an easy enough fix, but it just meant that I need to rush a fixer. You mentioned the windowing and that separate window for dice rolling, which is an excellent feature idea, by the way. Yes. Whoever gave me that idea was a genius. Whoever gave you that idea.

Is that, so going to fall and having Stage manager on iPad, I assume that those go hand in hand, that your windowing improvements will be improvements on the iPad version too. Is that, is that a thing that you can do now where you can have those multiple windows on the iPad or does it not work that way? Well, I need to double check, but the last time I looked, the window positioning code Well, I need to double check, but the last time I looked, the window positioning code was only available for the Mac, but it did look very much like it could be available on iOS under Stage Manager, but currently wasn't. So I'm hoping that that's going to appear. You could have the separate windows and it works just like it currently works. works um but whenever like the you get wwdc there's there's kind of like there's always a

tension between which new features to support that's going to bring the most improvements to my users versus which new features does apple want developers to support that will likely get me featured on the app store is that still important being featured on the app store it's it's much less than it was. I mean, previously, you would get a good sales bump and you would stay there for quite a while. And it goes away pretty quickly. But I think it still helps.

And everything helps in visibility. And if you can say, oh, I've got stage manager support in the autumn, it's not just Apple, but you'll get some visibility in the press generally. Right. So that's the balance of you might not to put it in these terms, but you might have a feature that you really want to implement because you think people will like it. But it's using not any shiny new tech that Apple has rolled out this fall. And then there is the shiny new tech that Apple has rolled out this fall. And then there's the shiny new tech that Apple is rolling out. And if you choose that feature instead,

even if it might be used by fewer users, it's the thing that's going to get you attention because everybody's writing their stories and Apple's doing its little showcasing of apps that use this brand new technology that shipped. And so there's a tendency toward adopting the new stuff because it helps your apps visibility. I will say though, that this year, I think both of those are probably the same thing. And it is stage manager because I think it is something that users will actually use, but it is also the shiny

feature of the year. That's good. This is a game you play though, right? This is one of your, I observe, as somebody who's observed your software for a long time, that this is something that you do try to do is adopt things that be aggressive. I mean, you're somebody who has a calculator app, a dice rolling app, and used to have a dock app

that is slowly being rebuilt feature by feature by John Syracuse. He's welcome to it. Enjoy. But I think you've always had that strategy of, well, what's new? What can I do with that? And I don't know how much of that is just business strategy of I want to be there and I want to be seen by Apple as somebody who's embracing their new features.

And I want to be seen by users as being on the cutting edge. And how much of it is you being interested in exploring whatever is new? I think it's a mix and I think it depends. Like some years I find myself reaching for that feature, you know, like with the Quick Notes support last year. It was like, well, it's kind of useless, but I will do it. it was like well it's kind of useless but i will do it when you roll a one the quick note is tied to what you rolled and so you can compile a note full of all your cursing for yeah i mean i mean that was a thing where you could kind of attach the state of your app at any given point into a note and then recall it and it's like i does anybody use that i don't know

i don't think so but that was one where like i don't have anything else i needed i need a shiny feature but i think stage manager is not going to be that i think it's it's more useful yeah i mean there are always these little things right um like example, you could have said in previous years that just having multi-window support would have been one of these features that might be nice to have, right? Like how many people are going to use that on iPad, et cetera, et cetera.

However, now multi-window support is kind of part of being ready for stage Manager and has become really important, right? Yeah, I mean, that was something that I was thinking about for the last few weeks. Dice is pretty much set for Stage Manager because it's a much more modern code base than pCalc. And I did a lot of work for Catalyst with multiple windows and things that's flowed back into the iPad app already. And honestly, I don't think I need to do much there at all, if anything, to have good stage management support. Basic support in pCalc is pretty simple. Most things kind of work right now, you know, because if you supported multiple screen sizes

and split screen, you've done most of the hard work already i do have some specific bugs in there because i made assumptions about like certain screen sizes mean certain things like i have a set of layouts that's only intended for use in split screen or slide over and those are triggering in stage manager at the moment uh because i didn't imagine that it was a thing that was going to happen but yeah the main the main thing I'm facing with Peacock, which is not as trivial as I would like, is support for multiple windows. When I first designed Peacock for the iPhone, which was 14 years ago, I didn't plan for that. And the code makes a bunch of assumptions through it, which I'm going to need time to unpick. And I actually started the process for doing this a few years ago ago and I got halfway and then said, this is quite hard, but it's half, it's half done. So I just need to finish the work this summer now that it is actually a sort of rather important. I can't go back because then I go back and I've literally forgotten because I'm trying to save that state where you've got your in process.

So how does that work? Have you gone back and looked at it and said, oh, yes, I know what I was doing here and I'm able to pick up where I left off? Or is it more like you spend several days trying to figure out what it is you did a couple of years ago and how to move forward? It was actually, I was relatively sensible in the way I did it because the pCalc is kind of divided into two parts. There's the user interface bit, which is different on each platform. And there's the brain, which is shared between everything else. And so the brain has support for it.

It's just, I need to do it in the top level. So, you know, you can have these sort of what I call calc engine objects, and you can have multiple of them, and they can all just have their own state and do whatever they like. So that's fine. It's just there's certain things where I kind of chickened out of it and sort of drew a line and said, right, I've done it to this level, and then this is a problem for future James.

You have a, you're going to have a paper tape window. You're going to have a bunch of different, I'm trying to think of how people are going to use multiple windows on iPad differently from how they use it on the Mac, because on the Mac, it seems to be very much like when you said earlier, having a, that second window spawn on a particular location in dice, I thought, well, you can't, is there such a thing as a particular location in, i thought well you can't is there such a thing as a particular location in in stage manager on the ipad they sort of not they just want no the system puts it where where it will and i'm not sure people will use stage manager on the ipad like they do for arbitrary windowing as well like something like the paper tape in yeah p calc or

something but i could see it if you want to be using pcalc with one app, and then you also want to be using with another app with different states and things like that. Yeah, I would be that person. I use pcalc a lot, like genuinely, not just because James is one of my closest friends, just because I just genuinely like it, and I also need a calculator a lot.

And I could imagine having a couple of different working setups for the different stuff that i'm doing and just having a p-calc window just always there even if it's hiding behind something else mostly would be very helpful for me rather than needing to like reopen one every single time or you know having to flick backwards and forwards backwards and forwards so like i'm genuinely happy you're putting the work in as a customer of yours uh even though i know it's going to be a lot yeah i mean don't thank don't thank me yeah no i'm thanking you now because you have to ship it so like i'm thanking you now thanks in advance thanks in advance okay as a as having done this a long time you know i know i i ask you and everybody else the state of affairs at the end of the year for my Six Colors report card.

But thinking about it now, what is it like being an Apple platforms developer today? We hear a lot of drama and then we hear things are getting better and then people are angry again. How do you think it is right now in terms of, you know, is it getting better or worse or is it pretty much the same compared to previous years? This is really the hardest question because it is tough to separate things from my own personal feelings and be truly objective about it all. I think we're in the middle of a time of great transition in the developer world. And those are traditionally pretty stressful. The last really big one we had started over 20 years ago, going from the traditional Mac APIs

to the Next Step-based AppKit stuff. And that took a long time to play out. So I was thinking about this earlier, and in the last 30 years of doing this, and this is purely for Apple platforms, I have learned seven different user interface frameworks and seven different programming languages. I could list them all, but I will not. And I do have to say that the transition to SwiftUI is the one out of all of them that I personally am enjoying the least.

It is a very different mental model to the previous three decades of user interface frameworks that I've used. And I'm finding it more difficult to make that transition than I would care to admit on a podcast. I mean, like for the first couple of years, there was a lot of, you know, how do I do this basic thing? And the answer was you couldn't, but there's a lot fewer of those roadblocks each year. And, you know, anyway, a lot of people, notably younger people,

are making great things with SwiftUI already. And I'm sure I will get there eventually. But it's also difficult when you have existing applications because rewriting working code is rarely the right answer. But it is always a question of when to make that jump. I think Apple's focus on SwiftUI makes it very clear that writing new UI kit or app kit code today is extremely foolish. And yet it's also sometimes absolutely still the best choice to do so. And that leads to a weird kind of cognitive dissonance, certainly in my brain, which doesn't make it feel like a great time to be writing code. I mean, obviously I've heard from other developers.

It seems like that there are a lot of longstanding Apple developers, maybe not as longstanding as you, but still, who I wonder how much that pronouncement really did hit home when they said, because it was just a statement and a presentation, and yet saying Swift and Swift UI are the future. I wonder how much of an impact that made, because I've heard a lot of longtime developers this summer complaining, but also it's very clear that it's their realization that any delays they've had in terms of working with Swift UI because it's frustrating, delays they've had in terms of working with SwiftUI because it's frustrating, that they just need to dive in and be frustrated because this is where it's going. And go ahead.

I mean, it's all, Apple's messaging is always very clear. You know, like even two years ago when SwiftUI appeared, it was clear, this is the future. This is what Apple is going to start focusing on. And then each year, they're going to sort of ratchet it up. And I think this was the first year. I mean, if people were surprised this year, they weren't paying attention. But, you know, it is that gradual, like, all these new APIs are only going to be in SwiftUI. And, you know, I doubt it. And, you know, this might be a future topic, but we don't know what the development environment is for Apple's headset. Apple is going to be likely dropping an entirely new platform on us later in the year, and we don't know what that is.

It could be entirely SwiftUI. I doubt it, but it's the kind of thing if they're trying to make a statement, they might do that. And I think that the thing with Swift UI is I think the people that have the biggest problems with it are the people who have used the other stuff the longest. And it's just because your brain is in a certain way of working. And the difference between different programming languages usually isn't much, even between Objective-C and Swift. It kind of works the same. But SwiftUI is one of those things that I just had to stare at it

whenever widgets appeared. It's like, well, I need to make widgets, and I'm just going to stare at this until i can make something work and then i'm going to rewrite it and i'm going to see if i actually understand what i'm doing and so on but i don't enjoy it and i know people that have said the exact opposite you know like um people who say this is this like fits their mental model much better and this is the way to do it and i don't know if this is like the you know your typical apple engineers are uh younger and you know have been influenced

by like all the javascript frameworks that work in a similar way and i don't believe that I am incapable of learning things. I will get there. But it's not like when I first used UIKit and I was like, this is great. You know, this simplifies a lot of stuff. It makes sense to me. You know, it's all shiny and modern. And now I look at this stuff, which, as we've said, is 14 years later. And I go, oh, I don't like this. You know, it's the kids who are wrong kind of thing you know the three of us played some dungeons and dragons a few years ago

and one of the things that came out of that was dice by p calc um being you know you just you look around for inspiration and find it in these things that we do together. But one of the things that has struck me about Dice by PCalc is how you, and before that, the About box in PCalc, if people haven't seen that, it's now its own app, is you having these projects that are real, but are also a place for you to experiment with new stuff. And I've always admired that about you, the idea that you are trying things out sometimes in public, but that you're also giving yourself, rather than saying, well, I'm never going to learn that because I'm just going to focus on my calculator. You say, oh, that's a thing I probably should play with. And the calculator isn't the

best place for it necessarily. So I will find another place to do it. Is that how you view something like Dice? Or does it start out that way and then turn into a real product at some point? I mean, I think all of the above, like the about box in PCalc started because of the rumors at the time of Apple doing a 3d headset and that's you know like five six years ago at this point and i was like okay i have not really done any 3d graphics stuff so i need to learn it so you know i played around and out of that i learned how to do things you suggested a dice app and then Dice app became a place where I could explore Catalyst as a technology and see if that was ready.

And a lot of this is like, is this something that I would want to use for PCalc? Because at the moment, I've got a UIKit PCalc and I've got an AppKit PCalc on the Mac. And it's like, could I use a technology like Catalyst to replace the Mac version? Because having a really shared source base, which I do with Dice, is really easy because it's like I write the app once, do some Mac specific things. But, you know, it's a lot easier than I make a change on the iPhone side and then, well, I need to sort of at least pull that code in and wire it up and do stuff. And that can be a hassle. So yeah, I mean, Dice is my current sort of experimental thing.

And clearly what I need to do is to make a completely SwiftUI project as my next experimental thing to sort of figure out, you know, is this what I use to make a future peak? And I think that is part of the problem is at the moment, like the answer is very clear is SwiftUI is what Apple wants everybody to be using and what Apple wants Apple gets. But it's not necessarily the best choice for me at the moment uh so yeah there is a lot of experimentation um for you know a keeping my brain relatively elastic and b

figuring out where which technologies are right for any particular problem well you mentioned starting the about box because of the rumors of apple working on a vr headset it keeps creeping closer and closer how excited are you about the prospect of that vr ar headset i mean that the irony may be that i've been having problems with my eyesight for the last six months. And it's like, by the time the thing finally arrives, will I be able to use it? You can use it to replace your eyes. Well, we can only hope.

I might need a USB-C port on the back of my neck. But I don't know if excited is the right word it's like i really love like vr stuff and the ar things that i've tried you know i i think anyone who's never tried vr you know you don't quite have a it's hard to explain it's something that's never tried it and i think you know you know, I know you've all tried it, but there is this certain like magical status to it that is hard to put across. But I think this could be something that's as big as an iPhone

or it could be the next Apple TV. And I don't know, you know, how much effort I should put into it. I mean, when this thing's... Assuming we get an SDK sometime around the iPhone launches later in the year, because I can imagine either at a separate event or at that, they're going to at least show it off and say,

developers can pay us $5,000 to rent one of these for six months. But it's like, I want to learn it. I want to play with the graphics. I want to do things, but I just don't know as a platform how big it's going to be. And, you know, the iPhone clearly was, was like a major product category for Apple. And, you know, that's, that's really my lead platform for all my development at the moment. But is this thing going to be that for the, like the next 20 years? Who knows? All right. Well, James, thank you for being part of our experimental verticals only episode of Upgrade. We appreciate you being vertical and being on the podcast.

You're welcome. I'm going to go and be horizontal for a while because it is extremely warm in this office. This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph. So you've hired a brilliant developer. That's great, but now you've got to get them onboarded. If your company's growing, onboarding new developers will be a common occurrence,

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notes to let them know that you heard about them from this show. Our thanks to Sourcegraph for their support of this show and RelayFM. We are now joined on the Upgrade program by Shelley Brisbane, who is a radio producer, writer, and podcaster, host of Parallel on RelayFM and Lions, Towers, and Shields on The Incomparable. Hi, Shelley. Welcome to Upgrade. Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me. Shelley, I should mention also that you have a book. It's got many editions. It's iOS Access for All. Yes.

Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility on iPad, iPhone. And your website includes the iPod Touch. I know, we're going to change that. We're going to change that. It's the 10th edition this year, and I think we might get rid of iPod Touch just because that title, I realize it's unwieldy, but you know, SEO is important. It is, It is. It is. So much pod touch. The Apple Touch is still kicking around. It is. They're around.

They're compatible. There are versions that will run iOS 16. The supplies last still. They continue to last, I guess, in people's hands, in people's pockets. So we wanted to bring you on to talk about accessibility and the current state of affairs of accessibility. One of the things about this vertical idea is what's going on this summer and into the fall in terms of Apple's OS cycles. So one of the things Apple takes pride of talking about is accessibility features. They pre-announced them before WWDC this year. And so, you know, when you think about what's going on with accessibility on

Apple platforms right now, what are the features that are jumping out at you? Well, I will say this is the second year they've done that pre-announced before WWDC, and we love it. It's great in accessibility land. We feel like we have our own special day of Apple attention. So yeah, this has been a pretty good year for accessibility land. We feel like we have our own special day of Apple attention. So yeah, this has been a pretty good year for accessibility features. We haven't seen them all yet. The first one I want to talk about is live captions, which I think a lot of people in and out of the accessibility world are pretty excited about. I'm really excited about this one. Yeah, you'll be able to have captions on your FaceTime call or basically any audio on your devices. And it's not

in the betas. It'll be out in the fall is what I heard an accessibility person say the other day. But that's pretty exciting because it feels like, you know, sometimes Apple introduces something new and you're like, is it going to be good or is it going to be not good? And I feel like this is in their sweet spot in terms of machine learning and transcription and the stuff Apple's good at. Seems like live captions is going to be a win for them. I worry about the quality of live captions. Do you worry about that? Like, I mean, it's something is better than nothing, but I've seen some auto captioning stuff and it's real bad. And that's my concern is that it's going to be this feature that they're like, here it is, you got it. And then I'm going to look at it and think, oh, no, no, this is no good. This is

nonsense. Oh, yeah. I mean, YouTube's is terrible. There's there's a lot of and I will tell you that the people who use this stuff on a daily basis will are the first ones to say, you know, something better than nothing. Yeah, sure. But sometimes it gets in my way because I actually want to use this for work or school or whatever I'm using it for. I feel like Apple has as high a degree of likelihood of success as anybody does. I mean, Google didn't always do a great job in the other places that it's in some of the video conferencing software. And it's, you know, some is good, some is bad. But I guess I'm going to give Apple a little benefit of the doubt just because I feel like they wouldn't have done it unless they

had a reasonable degree of confidence. Now, whether it's going to be as magical as some people think, in other words, being able to caption any kind of audio effectively, my guess is it's probably optimized for something like FaceTime because it's their own protocol and they have the ability to, you know, process the audio and send it on through and turn it into text. Whereas if you're just capturing audio aloud, like a podcast or something crazy like that, I don't know. I'd be curious to see whether there's a fall off there. A Twitter account that I see a lot and is very funny is called MLB Closed Captioning. It's MLB underscore CC on Twitter. And it's literally – and again, so what's the workflow here from a technical standpoint, right?

Because you've got to have a speech-to-text recognizer that is on the live audio stream and is processing it. And it's not just as simple as a transcript because you have to process it in real time and have, like, where does it break? Where is there a pause? Because you have to flip pages, right? You have to go from caption page to caption page. It's a really hard problem. Where is there a pause? Because you have to flip pages, right? You have to go from caption page to caption page. It's a really hard problem. And I don't know what the technical workflow is for something like Major League Baseball game live streams.

But the Twitter account's hilarious because it's some real amazing nonsense. And that's funny. But if you're trying to detect, because I've had this, I've been in a, it's been a while, but've been in like a restaurant or a bar or something where they've got sports on, but they've got the captions turned on. And it's unintelligible, right? Like it's such, it's so bad. Whether they're doing it automatically or they've got a person doing it, it's usually late and it's often kind of laughably, just you can't even recognize it. So that's my concern with live captions is that you're going to end up with Meow Machine, a leadoff hitter with a single into center field. And I don't know who Meow Machine actually is, but like I say, I think Meow Machine's a great guy. I want his baseball card right now. I mean, he is a machine. I think

there's an ESP meows and there's an issue as well with just audio quality and, you know, FaceTime calls are generally pretty good, but they can be random. If there's background noise, again, you're trying to do any kind of audio. So you're going to have a pretty great variance in audio quality and how you're capturing all this audio. Yeah. There's, there's an awesome opportunity for failure. Uh, I'm just, I'm still looking forward to it. And again, I'm tempered by the fact that I do know a lot of people who use this stuff for actually getting stuff done and being productive. And they are skeptical, not specifically of the Apple stuff, because the last time I talked with them, it was before this was announced. So I haven't really had a chance. But I suspect that they would tell me seeing is believing or reading is believing. All right. What else is on your agenda in terms of features Apple is working on? Well, door detection is a fun one. This requires a LiDAR-equipped device, so a 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 13 Pro, 13 Pro Max, or the iPad Pro that has a LiDAR

sensor. And there's this previous feature called people detection that was in iOS 15. Door detection does a little more than that, but it uses the same technology. So what door detection will do is identify for you the presence of a door, the kind of door it is, whether it's open, whether there is text on the door, like a room number or a sign or something like that. So basically it will give you all the information you need as a blind or visually impaired person to find and interact with a door. And the people detection feature previously just would point to here's a person. Here's how far away that person is. It didn't give you all the sort of identifiers like it's a male or a female person. It was mostly about space and distance, but space and the existence of a person. space and the existence of a person. But door detection just takes what you can do with LiDAR, that next step. And for a lot of blind and visually impaired people, it's actually far more useful than people detection. People detection was great in the social distancing world, and Apple made a sort of a play on that, although I suspect they had that planned long before

COVID. The interesting thing about it is it's inside the magnifier app, not an app a totally blind person would typically use, or an app that you'd often use for distance stuff or for when you're walking around navigating. That's something that you would use to read something close or to read signage, but it's as good a place as any to put it. Otherwise, you have to put it in the camera app, I suppose. And so it's a really interesting proof of concept in terms of what can we do with LiDAR in terms of identification and navigation of objects. And so a lot of people are pretty excited about door detection, assuming that they have the phone. Obviously, you have to have a LiDAR-equipped device. We don't know what kind

of LiDAR capability we're going to get with the next level of phones. This is my concern. And of course, Apple won't ever answer the question of, hey, how expensive is a LiDAR sensor? Because even though lower end phones, you're wanting to differentiate the cameras and the higher end phones and LiDAR is part of the way you do that. If you put that in lower end phones, blind, visually impaired people would be more likely to buy it. And I know plenty of people who have bought Pros and Pro Maxes just for the LiDAR or the anticipation of this door detection thing. lidar or the anticipation of this door detection thing well i mean as well the initial thing that i thought of and many thought of when seeing the door detection is that this looks like prime for some kind of ar device as well right which would which would rely quite heavily on uh lidar and sensors like that do when you see things like this door detection and what Apple is hopefully able to do with it, do you get excited about an AR device for this kind of stuff? Or, I mean, tell me, is that kind of device, would it actually be useful to the accessibility community, like it's some kind of mixed reality headset? Well, probably not as such. As such, I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would like to use it in a mixed reality context, either for gaming or for entertainment or for any of the number of ways you can have enhanced experiences. But I think a lot of people in the accessibility community, especially blind and visually impaired people, they think about it purely in terms of navigation.

If you have a headset or glasses, and probably glasses is a better example because… A headset feels too heavy duty, right? Yeah, absolutely. Like, just for detecting doors and things like that. There are headsets that have been, you know, Samsung and other VR headsets that have been modified to be used as a tool for blind and visually impaired people to do stuff like magnification, watching television, navigating around. And they're enormous, and they're heavy, and they're hot hot and they cost $3,000. And no, thank you. But glasses as a navigation aid, because there are

already tools out there. There are companies that have put out combinations of a phone and a pair of glasses that will assist you with navigation. And usually there's a person on the other end of the phone line who's able to see through your glasses over an internet connection that says, okay, go to the right. That's where the intersection is. And so these are provided as services. They kind of worked and they kind of didn't. It ended up being more expensive, and now those are more AI-based services. But the idea that you could have LiDAR and a camera and this kind of intelligence in a pair of glasses that somebody could use as a navigation aid, whether it was backed up by somebody in a call center helping or whether

it was simply, okay, I can identify doors, I can identify people, I can read signage with live text, that sort of thing. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. And it also says that whatever the first product is, whether sometimes when a brand new category comes from Apple, you have a question about the accessibility, not that they didn't think about it, but how long are we going to have to wait for accessibility? And so for me, it feels like doing these sort of proof of concept features so early on is kind of a signal that, hey, whatever we produce is going to have accessibility of some kind built in from the get-go. I like the idea of making the whole world accessible using technology. That's really cool.

Yeah, just put some glasses on. Yeah, let's see. Where have we seen that before? I don't know. Some guy in the 23rd century. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

I wondered if you could explain to me what Eloquence voices are, whatever. I was trying to be eloquent there. So Eloquence is a line of voices from a company called Code Factory. They're available in a lot of screen readers for Windows, most notably JAWS, which is the leading screen reader on the Windows side. And so a lot of blind people know Eloquence. They like it. They're used to it. Eloquence has several voices. The main feature that Eloquence provides is the ability to play text at a really, really high rate of speed and for it to still be understandable. So the voices aren't super high quality. They're not as good as, say, an Alex or some of the other Apple voices. But you can listen to them really, really fast and be productive. So a lot of blind people love Eloquence.

really fast and be productive. So a lot of blind people love eloquence. And what Apple has done is added eloquence as a voiceover and speech engine voice. So you won't see it on Siri, but you'll see it in voiceover. You'll see it in speak screen, speak selection. And this is funny because this wasn't really highlighted when Apple did their announcements for global accessibility awareness day before WWDC, but it was announced around the same time sort of separately. And the blind community, the Twitter blind community, just went nuts. And this is what they're excited about. The eloquence voices, because they're familiar, there are eight of them. One of them is named Shelly, by the way, which of course means it's great. But they are available in enhanced versions.

There are also some additional enhanced voices outside of the eloquence world. The interesting thing to me, first of all, is, okay, Apple has gone outside and they've gotten some voices that are familiar. Apple wants to tell a story. And I believe them, that there's a lot of user feedback that people said, why can't you get Eloquence on macOS and iOS? And I believe them, but I also believe that it was just, you know, a way for them to get this sort of optimized performance thing for somebody who really wants to read at a high rate of speed or interact with speech at a high rate of speed. So just as a quick example, so I'm pretty good with speech, but I'm not super fast. I can listen to something that's about 60, 65 percent and navigate pretty well. Eloquence voices, you can listen at 85 percent

and do pretty well. They're kind of amazing for that. But again, they're not as good as some of the other options. But besides the eloquence voices, Apple has added a bunch of other enhanced voices that so far from my limited listening, because those are in the betas, sound pretty good. And they've also added a whole bunch of languages for voiceover, which is pretty exciting. They do that on a regular basis. But there's just a great big language update. But the thing to me that was the most fascinating is just like how eagerly the blind community, including people who aren't particularly devoted to Apple, but who may have used an iPhone, but are sort of like, boy, I sure wish I had Eloquence on here, how excited they are about this. Because I imagine the benefit of things being read to you quickly is the way that voiceover

works if people haven't experienced it before, if I'm saying this correctly, Shelley, please correct me if I'm wrong. It's reading parts of the UI to you so you can understand what you can interact with. And I guess if the thing that you want to interact with is the 14th thing it's going to read out, the quicker it can get to that before you confirm it, the better, right? It's the UI, but it's everything. It's anything you want to read. It's a web page. It's a book.

It's a document. And so once you're good at it, you want to interact as quickly as you can. And it's funny because whenever we do speech-based demos, every demo, everybody I've ever encountered who's tried to do a live demo, the first thing they have to do is dial their speech down about 30 points so that a person who isn't used to it can listen to it, which I love. I just, I think that's great. That's like our little hack. Like we're listening to things really, really fast. And like Eloquence, I was amazed at how high you could get. I still don't think they're the greatest voices, but they are really fast. Kind of reminds me of the, you know, there are fonts that are optimized for people with dyslexia, right? Right. And they look, like, unattractive as fonts.

You know, if you kind of look at them sometimes, it's like, this looks a little weird, but I guess that's, again, it's like the point, right? Like, it's designed in a specific way that, like, with the voiceover stuff, things said really fast, I can understand it, but the voices are tuned specifically, right, to sound good at high speed. Yes, and the thing, too, is that inside voiceover, one of the mechanisms that makes voiceover easy to navigate is the rotor, which basically you interact with by twirling two fingers on the screen like you would an old-style television dial. And you can use a rotor function to turn your speech rate up or down. So you might have a

standard speech rate that you like, but let's say you're trying to consume technical content or a great novel or something like that, and you want to consume it at a different speech rate. It's pretty easy to do that, and you can also change voices in that way. You could put multiple voices in the rotor, so you might have a high quality voice like in Alex, which is universally regarded as kind of the best voice out there. But then you might also say, hey, I want an eloquence voice. I want Shelly in my rotor because when I read something that I want to read really fast, I can read her at 85%, but then I can switch back to Alex when I want to comprehend a little differently. Well, so what's missing in macOS and iOS in this new round? What things are you disappointed maybe that they haven't done?

lags behind. It doesn't get updated to the extent that iOS VoiceOver does. They have the same name, but because they're in different operating systems, they operate differently, which actually leads to one of the issues with VoiceOver on the Mac. But it has not been either updated consistently or evangelized to the development community. There's still a lot of third-party apps that do not support macOS VoiceOver, and there's not nearly as much pressure on those developers as there is in the iOS world. And so, for example, I can give you sort of what sound like niggly little feature things, but in VoiceOver, the default behavior is to group items. And so it's supposed to be easy to navigate over a large UI because you move from one group to the other, and then you can dig down into the group if you want an individual item. But the problem with that as a default behavior is that you end up skipping over UI elements that you might want to. And it would be nice if there

were more choice in that way. A lot of people in the past year or so have had issues with voiceover hanging in Safari in the sense that it will say Safari not responding because voiceover is just taking that much longer to load up and read the web page. So they're just sort of ongoing limitations with voiceover that could probably be addressed if there was more focus on fixing them. Yeah, I think this is fascinating because Apple obviously is very committed to accessibility and talking about accessibility features, and yet they have to make choices and prioritize things.

And it's interesting to see the places where they're... Are you concerned sometimes that they are more concerned about having new features that they can put out in a press release than advancing their existing features? Sometimes, yes. I mean, and they tend to be very separate. So a thing like live captions that we talked about or door detection, obviously that's not a direct voiceover feature. So voiceover is kind of the bread and butter of accessibility. And there are times when

that doesn't get the support or love that I think a lot of users, especially Mac people, people who long ago committed to the Mac either as their only system or as a primary or a prominent system in their world, because I know people who still have two or three operating systems lying around because we're nerds, but there are people who feel like macOS voiceover has been ignored. And again, the developer evangelism part is relevant too, because if Apple is paying attention to iOS voiceover and if they're doing sessions at WWDC about that, you're going to focus more on how iOS voiceover interacts with apps and you're going to use examples of how apps can be made accessible and less so on the Mac. And I think because Windows has had such a huge installed base institutionally, like any organization that serves blind or visually impaired people, whether it's through the government or whether it's providing software or hardware to those populations, is often super Windows-based. And so even though a lot of people have Macs and have chosen Macs, especially after they got iPhones,

I think there's a feeling that there's less need to be as aggressive with making voiceover on the Mac the best it possibly can be. And now we have the issue that with Catalyst apps, the Catalyst apps versus AppKit apps behave differently in VoiceOver. So if you're a VoiceOver user and you're used to AppKit apps, and then all of a sudden you get into a Catalyst app, you're going to have to learn a few new things. And there are ways around...

That was a concern I had when Catalyst first came out, and it was not something that I could even quantify. I was just like, oh, this is going to be weird because, again, iOS voiceover and macOS voiceover, they share the same name, they do the same thing, but they behave differently for logical reasons because voiceover is keyboard-based and voiceover on the Mac is keyboard-based and voiceover on iOS is gesture-based. So there's still some challenges there. I think it's a good operating, it's a good implementation of a screen reader. It's very much usable. But I think that people find barriers

often when they want to use a specific app or as I was describing with web browsers, where they get just something weird and they go, why is it like that? It wouldn't be something that would be tolerated if it were for a mainstream audience, honestly. What else? Well, I'll mention a couple things. Braille support is one, and I'm not a Braille user. And when I say Braille support,

what I mean is people who are Braille users will connect what's called a Braille display to their iPhone. And so the output of voiceover from the iPhone is on the Braille display in Braille characters as well. And also you can type from the Braille display to the iOS device and have it converted to text. And this is useful for people who are native Braille users. It's also useful for people who are deafblind, so they can't hear the voice spoken on the iPhone, but they can use the Braille display to physically interact with the iPhone.

So Braille displays are a big productivity tool for people in work and school who want to both use it with and without an iOS device. And every upgrade cycle, there seems to be a sort of a weird, incongruous Braille bug. It should be noted that iOS versus Android, the Braille support is, it's not even comparable. iOS support for Braille is far superior. The trouble is that every time there's an upgrade cycle, there seems to be some almost insurmountable Braille bug that is allowed to go out with the shipping software. It is often fixed eventually, usually by the 0.2 release, but you've engendered a lot of ill feeling among Braille users. And the bugs are sufficiently different from one another

that I can't tell you whether there's something in common that's being done in the upgrade cycles and the new releases that's causing those Braille bugs because they're so different from one another. But there is a sense in the community that those Braille bugs are allowed to fester even after the software has shipped. And so that's unfortunate.

And the last thing I would say, and this is, people have different levels of desire for this. There's some people that believe that the app store should have accessibility ratings or labels so that whether developer does it or whether Apple does it,

there should be basically a rating that says how accessible an app is. I can see that there's all sorts of problems with how you delimit, delimitate, how you determine that, how you say is something accessible to voiceover, who makes that judgment, how accessible does it have to be?

But I do feel like if you had some sort of a nutrition label that where the developer could say, I've consciously made my app voiceover compatible. I support dynamic type. I support assistive touch and switch control and all the other accessibility features that are available within those software that I as a user at least can make a choice. Oh, do I want this Twitter client or do I want that Twitter client? Because it's declared itself to be accessible. And then you've also made the developer accountable. So

if I download it and it's not accessible, then I can go back and I can say to Apple or to the developer in reviews, hey, this is not as advertised. And it feels like making that available and then subsequently Apple evangelizing that through the developer program and saying, hey, you should declare your nutritional, your nutrition label for accessibility would just be an encouragement to other developers to do it and would show up the developers who didn't. I think that's a really great idea. I mean, if I'm remembering correctly, the privacy focused nutrition labels are also self-reported by the developer. So they wouldn't have to like staff up to check every little feature, right? Because Apple wouldn't need to, but they could create this system. And as you say, right, then the developer has to say they've done it. And then, well, then they can be called to task if it turns out that they didn't. But I think that nutrition labeling, I think they do it in two different ways now. Is that right, Jason? They do like a

privacy one. I think there's another one, but I think this would be a great idea. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, the privacy one is fairly new, I think. And I think there's another one, but I think this would be a great idea. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, the privacy one's fairly new, I think. And I think it's great. And it's funny because it's so far down on the page that you kind of don't notice it unless you're looking for it. But the thing about an accessibility label too is that I could search for it. I could go in the app store and I could say, find me accessible Twitter clients. I can't say Twitter apparently. Find me a Twitter client that's accessible. Find me note-taking apps that are accessible. Most of them are. That's not a good choice, but there are some inaccessible Twitter clients, inexplicably. And yeah, I feel like it would be,

I think there are people out there who would like Apple to enforce it in some way. And I see many problems with it, even going beyond just the idea of the volume of work that Apple would have to do, because then Apple has to not only say they're accessible, they're basically taking responsibility for the developer's work. And the developer says, you know, I support voiceover, I'm fully accessible. But then there's one button that isn't labeled properly. And then whose fault is that? Who should get the grief for that?

Well, the developer, clearly. Yeah, I don't think Apple maintaining that would be a good idea i mean we see issues with app review right like where something clearly should be allowed through app review but it doesn't get there through app review or vice versa and then well they're supposed to be monitoring that whole process but they don't fully so well shelly thank you so much for being part of this vertical experience that is happening. We're building. It's building blocks.

We're building upward with each segment here this week. And thank you for being one of the key building blocks in making a podcast. My pleasure. I feel like you're creating your own AR experience. It's the vertical upgrade experience. There you go. That's right. Except no substitutes.

Asport by name. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by DoorDash. Ordering all your summer essentials with DashPass by DoorDash is a great way to get everything that you need. And during the summer of DashPass, you can save money and access members-only offers that will help you feel easy and breezy all summer long. Say hello to summer savings during the summer of DashPass

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order up to 15 of value when you sign up for doordash during the summer of dash pass using promo code upgrade 2022 that is upgrade 2022 for 50 of your first order of up to 15 of value dash pass benefits only eligible on orders that meet the minimum subtotal. Terms apply. A thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Our final guest of this episode is David Smith, developer of WidgetSmith, Podometer++, and many other apps, and podcaster on Under the Radar on RelayFM. Hi, Dave. Hello. Welcome to the verticals.

It's very high up here. You're on the stack. welcome to the verticals. It's very high up here. You're on the stack. We're just building a whole stack of segments here because it's the summer of fun. And this is a thing we decided to do. But it's also the summer for developers like you, summer of working on your apps and looking at what Apple is doing with new technologies.

We talked to James Thompson about that earlier. He's lowered down on the stack down there. And I wanted to talk to you about widgets. This is the widget vertical because, I mean, Widget Smith, Watch Smith, you spend a lot of time with widgets and complications. And this year we've got new widgets that are inspired by watch complications.

And so I thought that you would be the right person to talk to about widgets. Just, did you look, everywhere you look, do you see widgets now? Widgets are my, yeah, widgets are my livelihood. Widgets are what I do. It's a funny thing because especially because widgets often are used as like a throwaway term when people are describing.

It's like, oh, you know, just, you know, just cranking widgets or, you know, when people are making widgets, it's like, well, that is actually what I do. That is my profession. You're cranking widgets. You ever look at like a wall clock and go, what is a clock but just a physical widget? Yeah, just a widget. Everything's a widget. Yep.

Yeah. So what are your, I mean, obviously the thing we're most excited about probably is the new lock screen widgets in iOS. Because not only do they suggest strongly that there's going to be an always on display on some iphones this fall but just in in more broadly the idea that you've got uh some little glanceable data items that you can put on your lock screen that's great but like how how has that been for you how have they been in these early beta months in practice what what has been your process in trying to figure out how to build tools to make little widgets that live in your lock screen yeah no i mean it's definitely been a lot of fun and i think it was very relieving at wwdc this year to see widgets

get a lot of attention and be something that's one of the sort of marquee features of ios 16 when you know like widgets are very important to me from, you know, sort of personally and professionally. And so in last year, you know, it's like iOS 14, widgets exploded. It was a big deal. Like, you know, Widget Smith was like viral on TikTok and it was this whole big thing. And then iOS 15 came around and it was very quiet on the widgets front. I mean, essentially the main change was just they came to the iPad and we got an extra

size there. But otherwise, widgets were essentially unchanged from 14 to 15. And as someone who cares a lot about widgets, that's always a little bit worrying that if this is going to be a feature that Apple rolls out and then doesn't go anywhere and that just kind of it is what it is. And maybe they regretted the decision or this is all they ever had in mind for it. And that's not the best place to be.

Ideally, if you're working on Apple's technology and this is how you make your living, you're going to want to be sort of in the mainstream of where Apple is pushing the platform and what they care about, where they're putting their attention, their engineering resources. And so last year was a little bit worrying. I mean, it was fine. It was nice to have a quiet summer, but it wasn't something that made me feel good long term.

the marquee feature of iOS 16, I'd say, which is, you know, lock screen customization. And that customization is certainly also a direct result to a sort of reflection of iOS 14's sort of aesthetic craze, where it became one of the reasons which became popular was because people used it to customize the feel and aesthetic of their iPhone. And now they're, you know, Apple is fully embracing that to some degree, or at least they're starting to embrace that by letting you choose, you know, sort of things that they've never been able to change before. So you can change the font of the time on your lock screen and you can, you know, they have all their image effects and color stuff that you can apply to it. And they added lock screen widgets. And that's exciting. I think just from

a fundamental, for me, that's cool that Apple is engaging with that in a way. And then they're, you know, they're implementing widgets in a way that as someone who has a lot of experience building watch complications is sort of straightforward and makes sense. And while I think they could have gone in a different direction, I mean, obviously, technically, there's a lot of different things they could have put done for how they implemented widgets on the lock screen, but they chose to essentially take, you know, watchOS complications and put them onto the lock screen. It certainly, from my perspective, it made it easy for me, you know, so as I've been implementing them, you know, at this point, you know, just

maybe, what are we, about a month past WWDC, you know, I have a fully working version of lock screen complications in WidgetSmith that's in beta testing and is sort of there. It wasn't a big leap for me to be able to do this because it is very much adopting technologies in the way that I've been doing on watch complications for years. And so it's been relatively straightforward and nice. And I think it's a bit of a, there's certainly a tension I feel there because there are limits to what doing the complication kind of desaturated sort of frosted look that they've taken for

lock screen widgets. So I'm going to every now and then I'll call them complications because that's just what they are in my head. But yeah, I think there are limitations to that, but also I i can sort of it you know so that they're not full color then they don't there's things that i can do on a home screen widget that i can't do here but i mean the reality is i'm glad that they exist i'm glad that they're there and because of they're coming from something that's already you know an existing technology that um you know if you're uh an app sort of an app developer who's been on this platform for a while you'll feel very comfortable making it.

And so overall, I'm thrilled. And it's been sort of a good first month getting them built out. Is it true that the Apple Watch complications are now also using the same format as the lock screen complications are on iOS? So the answer to that is slightly complicated, but the short version is yes. The complication question is complicated. It is. It's a complicated complications. So what they've done in watchOS 9 is they've gone through and updated all of the watch faces to support a new format of complication that uses WidgetKit, uses the same technology that exists on iOS.

And even from a code level, the lock screen widgets are technically in the same family as the Apple WatchOS new complication system, with the exception that on the watch, there's a corner complication that doesn't exist on the iOS lock screen. But otherwise, the round, the watch, there's a corner complication that doesn't exist on the iOS lock screen. But otherwise, the round, the rectangle, and the flat text style are exactly the same. And so if you opt into that as an app developer, you can share exactly the same code between your

lock screen complications and your watchOS 9 complications. Where it gets a little bit complicated is just in terms of the sort of backwards compatibility mode side of that. So if you want to support watchOS 8 complications, then you may need to have two different, you know, sort of incarnations of your complications. Or if you only support the new style, then they won't be available on, you know, older watches and they won't appear at all on the series three style. Um, you know, Apple watches, the, the 38 and the 42 millimeter watches, they just don't exist there, which is probably in some ways why watchOS 3, uh, series three watch is finally, um, deprecated and won't get watchOS 9. Um, so it's a little bit complicated then, but I think moving forward, it's like if you can ignore the complicated past sort of backwards compatibility side of things, then yes, moving forward, widgets and complications are now under a unified system

that makes things a lot simpler. And especially on watchOS simplifies things dramatically. So there are now four families of complication that exist on watchOS, you know, so you have the circular, the rectangular, the text and the corner, and that's it. There's only those four. Whereas previously on watchOS, I think we've had something like maybe 10 or 12 different families because there are all these slightly different variants of things where depending on which watch face it was, like the simple watch face had a different set of complications than the utility watch face and things where there were these limitations or just tweaks that Apple did in the way that they structured complications initially. And so they've

gotten rid of all that. And now it's all, it's all Swift UI and it's all sort of homogenized onto this basic, there's four different types of things, three of which exist on the lock screens, four of which exist on watchOS. Would you say that you were prepared for this moment because you made Watchsmith and spent a lot of time thinking about complications? Did that, when this lock screen widget thing gets announced, do you sit there and go, I mean, you were literally, I could watch you because you were right in front of me

when this happened. We all were looking at you. It's like, oh, it's that Jurassic Park moment, right? It's complications. I know this. I was thinking about you, Dave. I couldn't see you, but I was thinking about you. We were all watching Dave in that moment. We really were. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly, especially given the history of Widgetsmith, which is that I made Watchsmith first, and that was an app that I made for making custom complications on the Apple Watch. And that was an app that I made maybe nine months before

WidgetSmith was a thing. And that's where I started. And that's complications were the thing that got me excited about customization and about aesthetics and about sort of giving users that kind of control. Because that was something that I personally felt that I was missing on my Apple Watch, that I didn't like, that all my complications on my Apple Watch looked very samey, and I couldn't feel like I could make them my own. And so I made Watchsmith to be able to do that. And so then, you know, widgets were announced. And it's like, well, I essentially have all of this infrastructure. And I've thought about this problem a lot. So I can go ahead and, you know, sort of move it onto iOS with WidgetSmith. And then, yeah, so this feels very much like kind of coming full circle.

And now I'm taking the learning and, I mean, in many ways, the code that I built for WatchSmith is now being repurposed back into WidgetSmith for the lock screen side of the complications. And it's just sort of all kind of wrapping up nicely. And so, yes, I mean, I think if you've been a good little Apple developer and been supporting iOS and watchOS for a long time, and so you've been doing complication work, lock screen complications or lock screen widgets are very straightforward or very trivial. Like I could got them up and running very easily. And the way that they're doing a lot of the theming and stuff is very similar to the way they do the theming on, you know, on watchOS where on watchOS, you know, you can have, you have a complication, you can give it a tint color, you know, you can make your watch

red or pink or whatever. And the way they do that and the way that they're dealing with colors and saturation and all that kind of stuff is very, very similar and very familiar. And I think in a world where if, if one, if we are to sort of speculate that there will one day be a sort of an always on, you know,

iPhone, I imagine all the same, you know, the same technology that they use on watchOS right now for doing the always on, you know, always on complications will transfer over exactly. It would be my expectation and seems, you and seems likely based on what they're saying.

So yes, I feel very prepared for this. It was a very easy summer in a way that some summers I've been a developer for, this is my 13th WDC, 14th WDC, something like that. And some years it's just a train wreck. This year was not one of those years. This year was like, I got this. I know exactly what I'm doing. And it was no problem to get going nobody's gonna out underscore underscore am i

right no that's right it's not gonna happen yeah so you mentioned a couple of times both like the the aesthetic stuff for ios 14 and kind of what that was what propelled widget smith to the masses and you mentioned about with ios 16 the effect that people have customization of colors and stuff. Now, as I've been playing around with some of these widgets, I'm kind of seeing that there is the way that I'm viewing this is there are some similarities and some differences. And I don't know how it's going to shake out because this time it isn't the widgets really that can customize the look of the lock screen it's apple's tools that do that and then you add widgets in as part of it do you have any kind of feeling about if this is going to be as big a deal as the original ones or is it still too early for you to tell i think

that's hard to say certainly and i mean i think's system, in a way that I think is very clever, and I'd be curious to see if an iOS 17, it extends into the home screen beyond the lock screen. Their system seems very much built around giving you really good tools to get something that is cohesive and looks good very easily. And they have really good pre like sort of built in features. And they do a lot of machine intelligence to like work out which photos you might want on your lock screen, which photos would look good as a lock screen image. And they're, you know, with which filters you can apply to those images and which color schemes

are applied are intelligently suggested. And the end result of this is something that is pretty, is very easy to get something that looks pretty good. I think the difficulty there is it's obviously that I think that approach will work very well for the majority of people, like 80, 90% of people, it'll be great. I think the difficulty is it, you know, sort of at certain point it ends and you can. And if you want to make it more different, you can't. Apple has created this very nice sandbox in which you can play. But if you wanted to do something different, if you wanted a different font for your time, you can't. If you wanted to use a different font for your widgets, which is something in WidgetSmith, you know, something in, in WidgetSmith,

that's something I can do. I can give you a font that's different. So if you wanted a monospace font or you wanted any of the, I think I'm, you know, I have 20 something fonts in WidgetSmith. If you wanted to use one of those, that's great for your widgets, but you can't change the time. And so it will look a little disjointed. And I think there's a slight tension there in terms of, you know, I think the approach they're taking here will work really well to give people who aren't, you know, I think as much as iOS 14 and aesthetics and customization was a big feature in terms of, you know, millions of people used it. There are billions of people who use iPhones.

And so I think there is still a tremendous number of people in just, you know, just from my own experience with WidgetSmith, who are people who are discovering customization now to, you know, nearly two years on. And so I think it's interesting to see that Apple is, you know, in a very Apple-y way, making that accessible, making it easy to get started. And then by doing that, it's a lot less fiddly. It's a lot less, you know, a lot of the customization and aesthetic stuff that you want, you could do in home screen widgets required a little bit of,

you know, fiddling around. And I mean, if you're, especially if you're going to go down the road of like custom icons and things, like it is very fiddly and takes a lot of patience and time and isn't something that necessarily everyone would want to do.

Whereas this version, you know, is set up such that even if you have, you know, three different third-party widgets from three different companies, they will all generally start to, you know, they will fit in well and look of a kind, even though those developers didn't do that, you know, intentionally.

They're just, it is fundamentally like, if you choose a color, all those lock screen widgets will get that color. And, you know, the developers didn't have to do anything to do that or have the ability to override that. So it feels like there's a little bit of a tension there where as someone who makes a tool that is all about super, super custom widgets, it's a little frustrating sometimes that there are some things that I can't allow my users to do.

But I think overall, it's an exciting thing that it's making this feature and customization so forefront of what's big in iOS 16 and making it so accessible and such an easy way to get started that hopefully then it gets people interested and then potentially down the road, it makes them more interested in using other types of customization or if the feature is successful in Apple being excited about continuing to kind of go down this road and allow even more down the road. Yeah, this is why I think it could be still pretty successful because the iOS 14 widgets, there wasn't really any push from Apple as like, we've redid this thing, like the home screen is now more beautiful,

plus you can add widgets to it. It was like, it looks as it always did. There isn't anything new, but you can add widgets on top. And so then people had to take it upon themselves to prettify their home screens and then put all their widgets in to match and or vice versa. But with the lock screen, it is very easy to make a very attractive lock screen. And you can customize the font of the time and all that kind of stuff. So then because you put that work in, adding some widgets onto the lock screen of your own feels like a natural step to it. So I could imagine there will be a lot of demand for widgets once people found this feature and played around with it. So I could imagine it having a lot of success but just from a different starting point we'll see yeah and i think that that certainly is my hope i mean it's like i think i've been through enough ios launches that it's no it's no that it's very hard to

predict what's actually going to catch and what's actually going to flop and it's like my i think my expectation is that this will be more you know of, there'll be a broader range of customers who feel like, you know, feel excited and feel empowered to be able to take these steps of customization. And then we'll just sort of see if that spills over and kind of grows out from there.

Because, and I think it's like, at the very least, you know, I think most people have a custom lock screen already. It's something that people are very comfortable with and is very standard features that I think you have a picture that is meaningful to you

and you put it on your lock screen. Like that is, I think, very, very common. Every now and then you'll see the default people. If you're just like, I guess one of the curses of being an iOS developer

is I'm always like, if someone's next to me on the bus, I'll have a tendency to just kind of peek over and see, you know, sort of how they're using their phone. And, you know, sometimes you'll see the, you know, like the default iOS lock screen, you can kind of get a sense of when they got their first iPhone, because it will be,

you know, is it the aerial view of the beach? Or is it the one from iOS 14? Or you can kind of get a sense of when, where their lock screen came from. But most people I would say have a picture and going down that road, it's like now, if you want to set a picture as your wallpaper, it's like we'll jump you into this customization and aesthetic screen kind of right away. And even if, you know, so you'll very naturally be made aware of this, even if you don't read the tech news or listen to tech podcasts. I was wondering just as a, obviously WidgetSmith, there's so much you can do. And you mentioned earlier, the palette is really constrained for lock screen widgets. How do you feel about what Apple has put there?

Not necessarily in terms of the look, but in terms of the functionality. Is there enough there with those circular widgets, with the rectangular widgets, and with that little text item that goes above the time? Does it look like that's flexible enough to satisfy a lot of what people might want to do with these widgets? Or do you think that there, do you already have a wishlist of like, oh, I wish they had given me this capability that isn't in there? Yeah. I mean, in a weird way, it reminds me a lot of kind of the, my, my thinking around kind of custom watch faces on watchOS and complications there, where complications, and in this case, the lock screen widgets, I think in and of themselves are very capable, very well designed.

You can do a lot with it. I don't feel particularly constrained around them. I have essentially full control over that canvas that they give me, and I can put anything in there that I want, and it's very flexible, which is great. I think the bigger limit I feel is that they're kind of small and they're, and they're, there's only, you can only have up to four of them. You know, you could have four circles or, you know, two rectangular ones or, you know, rectangle in two circles. And that's about it. And you can have the little text one at the top and you get one of the text ones. And I feel like the middle of the lock screen is this big open space. And it's frustrating, I think, to me that that space is not available for widgets for users to take over and control.

And it reminds me in a lot of ways about these feelings I've had about custom watch faces, where I have a lot of ideas for things that I would love to make, and I'm going to have made, but aren't in a way that I can actually deploy anywhere else, like made custom watch faces that have different content as that center, sort of that main content view. And I look at, you have an iOS 13 Pro Max, it's a giant screen, and there's this huge, especially now that notifications are sort of by default going to be kind of down in the bottom. You know, that middle section is just empty. And sometimes that's great if you don't want to put anything there because you have a picture

of a loved one there and you don't want, you know, like a widget over their eyes. Like, great. It's nice to have a big open space. But it feels a bit limiting and frustrating to me that you could very easily imagine like the small widget size or the medium widget size that you can put on your home screen, you could put in that spot. And then you can do a lot more or put data in a way that has more flexibility and you'd have more control. And I think that's where I feel frustrated more. Like the actual what they gave us is great and I think it can do everything.

I just wish I could do more with it and put more content in there. Cause I think that would create even more use cases, you know, that would be available to me. And it's just kind of same thing in the watch space on the, you know, on watchOS where it just feels frustrating that it's like, well, if I have content that can fit into this little circle, then that's great. If it doesn't fit into that little circle, then it's just, you're done and it doesn't work and it doesn't kind of apply and it doesn't give the user the agency over their screen in a complete way. It just gives them some agency about some of it. I like the portrait watch face. I really do. I like that portrait effect and they brought that to the phone. Yeah. The difference between the portrait watch face and what they've done on the phone is that the portrait watch face lets you put a complication at the bottom at the top of the stack and on the iphone

the portrait effect covers the complications or the widgets it covers them and you can turn have it so it doesn't but then they go over the face of the person because it's usually somebody's head who's slightly eclipsing. Yeah, if you use complications at all, it turns off the depth effects. Is that true? Yes. Because I've had it where I've turned off the depth effects. Oh, yeah, well, that's it. You turn off the depth effects and then it goes over you.

So they won't overlay the complications at all? Because I thought I've seen that where the complications are are there but they're just overlaid with content regardless this is my point is i love that depth effect i still want to be able to see put them put them somewhere and i get that there's a lot going on at the bottom of the phone in terms of notifications and all that but i almost think i wonder if i could opt to put my widgets at the bottom of the screen instead with the notifications above it or something like that. Right.

And perhaps they'll get there and it'll be more flexible. But I had that moment where I'm like, oh, these are great. But like, here are two fun features and I kind of can't do both of them at once. Yeah. And I think even in the same way, it's like what you're saying with, you know, on watch OS very often is you can say, do you want the time at the top? Do you want the time at the bottom? Do you want, you can move things around on that face that makes

sense for that image and for makes sense for your use case and what you're interested in and you know obviously it's it's like i am i don't want to look at gift horse in the mouse and say like i don't i like i'm not excited that we can control this but i could very easily immediately have 10 ideas for things like other things that i would like to play with about changing this around that moving, moving, moving the time around, moving the widgets around. Even if it isn't that I get full control, it's like you're saying I could, if the widget bar rather than being below the time is above the, above the notifications and buttons on the bottom, like, sure, why not? Like it seems arbitrary that it isn't something that you can change. And that, that arbitrariness about where the dividing lines are is frustrating.

Sorry, David, we built these circles and we hung them right under the time. That's where they have to go. Like, OK, I mean, yeah, it's software. It could be somewhere else. But well, anything else we should, you know, the observations you've had about living the widgets life and the complications life this summer that you think we should watch out for? Yeah, no, I mean, I think the other thing, the only thing that really I think about is, obviously, it's like it's widely rumored at this point that there may at some point come an always on version of this. And I think what's intriguing to me about that is going to be to think about how that's visually going to look in terms of if it's going to be something that is more akin

to the way it's done on watch os or if it's going to be a different take on that and i think by what that i mean is if you have like what you're saying the portraits um uh watch face on your apple watch and the in always on mode it still shows the background image it still shows that picture it just dims it and it becomes darker, but it's still there. And I'm curious about this. And when I started to think through, because at first I was like, oh, the way they're doing the widgets here where they're all sort of these fainted, these sort of, there's no color. They're all kind of these faint outline versions of things. It made me wonder if it's like in the always on mode on an iPhone instead, the screen's going to go black, you know, sort of fully black and then have no color.

Have you noticed what happens when you're in sleep focus? When you're in sleep focus, it blacks out the screen. It takes the picture basically away. Okay. Yeah. No, I could see that. Yeah. In the beta.

So I, and I had that thought too, which is like, oh, I wonder if this is kind of like what they're going to do for an always on display where they're being much more aggressive in sleep focus. Because I was wondering, like, where'd my picture go? Why did my picture disappear? And the answer is I was in sleep focus because I was coming back on an airplane and it was past my bedtime. And I realized, oh, they're taking away content because I should be asleep right now. Yeah. And they're dimming the screen too. Like they're lowering the screen brightness as well.

And so it definitely seems like that. And I think that's just interesting as a difference of approach. Whereas you'd think like the watchOS version would be the most power constrained because it's this tiny little computer on your watch with a tiny little battery. But yet there they show, you know, the the whole screen is lit up with your image, just, you know, in a dimmed version. Whereas it seems like they may be heading in a direction on the iPhone that instead the screen is mostly black, just with a little bit of gray instead, which is just an interesting choice. And it just sort of makes me wonder what that's going to

actually look like in practice. And it's like, I'm certainly excited for that. I think it'd be super cool either way, but it's just interesting to see that they didn't go the same way potentially that they went on, uh, on watchOS here. Well, Dave, thank you so much for giving us the, the widget and complication update that I knew we needed this summer. We don't always need it, but this summer I think we needed it. And I, I'm, I'm very excited to see all of this stuff and, and to see what you're working on, uh, because I, I have faith that the underscore apps will be providing me with all sorts of different options on my watch and on my lock screen this fall. Yeah, all the widgets you could ever want is what I hope to provide. Excellent. That's what I

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All right, Jason, so I have some hashtag ask upgrade questions for you. Vertical. Vertical. No, we're done with the verticals now. This is just a regular part of the show. The lasers, they're shooting upward. They're vertical lasers. I don't like the sound of that.

Chaya asks, what are some of your favorite podcasts outside of relay fm the incomparable or max fun what you go first all right i got a list for you all right okay so uh first off is the various shows that are part of kind of funny these are split into games and entertainment they have podcast feeds that you can find but i actually consume their podcasts over youtube because they make video versions of everything and then i listen to them as well via the youtube app it's like a whole different way that i've been consuming podcasts like i think actually these days sometimes most of my podcast listening is happening like podcast quote-unquote listening

is happening on youtube some weeks because I'm consuming kind of funny shows. I just prefer to have the video if I can have it, if they make it, because they do a decent job with it. And so I like the video. So that's where I'm watching it on YouTube. However, I have three shows and one more. So three other shows that I like that are all TV recap shows. There's the Always Sunny podcast, which that's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Philadelphia I listened to all of it then they started a video version and now I watched a video

version of it because they're good uh West Wing Weekly which is a recap show the West Wing uh that finished in 2020 that is just audio uh Talking Sopranos is a soprano recap show uh so obviously always sun the always sunny podcast is hosted by the three main guys of always sunny like the guys who created it and starring it west wing weekly uh has uh joshua and josh melina josh melina was on west wing and then talking sopranos is also two of the acts of some sopranos i like listening to people that make TV stuff talk about how they make TV stuff like I just like that and then my last one would be dithering which is

John Gruber and Ben Thompson's podcast which is not about a television show it's strangely not about a television show okay I just had to make up a list while you were talking dithering was on mine too. So yes, John Gruber and Ben Thompson.

I've mentioned before the podcast with Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur, which is a sports podcast that is also just ridiculous and they draft things. So they are akin to us. No wonder. Dragon Friends, which is a great actual play, D&D podcast with a bunch of comedians from Australia.

Uh, so good. And improv people, they're just very good at what they do. Um, some other ones that I'm trying, uh, one that I'm trying out that's new,

but I I've liked so far is one called origin story, which is about the words. It's a very kind of meticulously researched, um, about the real stories behind misunderstood and abused ideas in politics that's ian dunt and dorian linsky that's a uk-based podcast they try very hard to figure out like where these politically charged words actually came from um let's see uh hello from the magic tavern is a classic i haven't listened to that in a little while i need to to it. But that is great. That's an improv podcast where they basically are in a fantasy setting, but everything that they say that they improvise becomes part of the canon and they have to go with it. So it's a very extended improv that just goes on forever and builds the world.

do a shout out to panic and the also the play date podcast in particular a panic is doing some fun work as a podcast producer i think kristen morgan is doing that but um some fun stuff there if you're interested in panic and the play date and uh finally friend of the show lex friedman uh has resumed your daily Lex. That's the theme song. It's super catchy. And it's literally Lex Friedman just kind of talking about a thing for about four minutes every day. I think it's very fun and funny.

Those are mine. That's it. What's the name of the Origin Stories podcast? There are a million podcasts called Origin Story. It's called Origin Story. But like it has no more information to it? Let's see. In my podcast player,

it is literally called Origin Story from Podmasters is the name of the network, I guess. Origin Story with Ian Dunt and Dorian Linsky. That's what I was looking for. Thank you. I found it and they will all be in. The show notes in case people want to add some new podcasts to their queue. Let's try them out.

Champ asks, My dad is still running Mac OS Catalina and he refuses to upgrade. I know I can't force him, but can you suggest some arguments for me to present to him? I mean, I kind of want to say that if he's running Catalina and he's okay with it, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Especially if he's got old apps that run on 32-bit, right? Because Catalina is the last stand of the 32-bit, isn't it? Or is it that, no, Mojave was the last stand of the 32-bit.

Catalina is the death of the 32-bit. Yeah, it? Or is it the... No, Mojave was the last stand of the 32-bit. Catalina is the death of the 32-bit. Yeah, that was what made Catalina so complicated. Because you remember Catalina was also the one where every app had to ask you, I think, for notifications. It was just the one where using it the first time was just horrible. It was a painful update.

It was the bad cop, right? The bad cop and the good cop, bad cop update. I don't know. So part of me says does he need to really but if he does need to mike do you have some suggestions for him yep general security and privacy is always a thing like you being as up-to-date as possible which is good for security right so that might be one thing but you can also suggest from a privacy standpoint there were a bunch of privacy features added to uh mojave that's the one right mojave yeah

um you like some of the email stuff and things like that uh one thing that you might say if you have to do a lot of technical support of your dad screen sharing over share play is a thing that you would be able to do so you'd be able to do screen sharing more easily um maybe your dad is a wild tab person and they have a thousand safari tabs what they want to organize them they could use tab groups and also live text is a fun demo you know like oh you can get text out this image and catalyst apps i think that there are more apps supported on this platform because catalyst apps are supported in cattle or in in oh coming off of catalina right that there's more modern apps that use the new versions of Catalyst that you want to have.

So there's reasons, but again, I would also not force it unless you, Champ, have a real reason he needs to upgrade. Yeah. You know, if he's okay, he's okay. It's fine. Brance asks, is there a feature that you wish was in iOS 16 but isn't? What do you think?

So I have one which I was really hoping was going to be fixed because of a couple of things that got added to iOS 16 but hasn't. So I want to be able to make a shortcut that lets me add links to Apple Notes but then when it does

that, those links are the kind of rich preview links that you get from uh the the share extension so mail in ios 16 lets you choose to automatically convert text links to rich links when you send them in emails but that doesn't happen with uh. You can't do it. So I really want this to be added. So, you know, so basically when you add something by the share extension, it adds it in notes and it has, it pulls in images. It has a couple of lines of text in the headline of the article. I love to be able to look through all of these when I'm preparing for shows.

But what I would like to do is just have a shortcut that I just tap wherever, you know, and it says like which show and I just hit which show and it's done. Because the thing with notes, it's like sorting by recency. So sometimes if I want to show that I haven't added a link to for a while, I have to like scroll through. So I would just like to be able to have like a static thing rather than at the moment, if I do that, it's just going to add a bunch of text to a note, which is not what I want. So I would like them to add it, but they didn't.

Maybe one day. I'd like to thank Brant's for bringing me down and making me sad because we all get very excited with our wish lists for new OS features. And then they come out with a new OS and we're so busy focusing on what's new in the new OS. And it's hard to go back and look and say, well, wait a second, what were all the things on my wish list that didn't come true that I should be sad about? So thanks, Brant. Now I'm sad. The lock screen stuff, the lock screen widgets that are on the iPhone, I'm sad that they aren't on the iPad. But in terms of new, new features that I wish were there, I really thought that they would add cross-linking in Apple Notes so that you could do sort of a light version of Obsidian where you could link across notes to other notes.

They didn't do that um and uh i really wanted global shortcuts to launch shortcuts on ipad like keyboard shortcuts yeah yeah and they didn't do that and also in the shortcuts category repeating shortcuts like the idea that you could say please execute this shortcut um at these times or every two hours or whatever. And the choices there are still extremely limited, and it makes me sad. Our last question today comes from Zach. How do you suspect you may use the iPad of Stage Manager on an external display differently to how you might use a Mac in your daily workflow. I mean, I don't know about you, but like, I actually don't imagine that I would ever do this. Like realistically, I can't imagine wanting to use an iPad of an external display.

And I know people might say, but Mike, you asked for it for years. I asked for it for years when I was using an iPad as my daily computer. Like if I'm going to plug something into my studio display, I may as well just plug my Mac in. That's how I feel anyway. Yeah, I am in a similar situation. I now have an external display that's ready for an iPad to be plugged into it. So here's what I think, because I actually use ipad often as a change of pace from my desktop um that i do wonder if i may try to use my ipad as a change of pace for my desktop setup to like

literally go into ipad mode instead of mac mode and sit here and the way i would be using it differently than my mac is it would be fewer apps, more focus. I feel like even if it's got a big display, I'm not going to have, like looking at my screen right now, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven windows open, right? Yeah. And yes, I could stage manage them on the Mac too, I suppose. That's what I'm thinking of, that this is it, right? Like if stage manager was just an iPad feature,

I would be using it a lot, I think. like it would really make me want to use it but considering stage manager is going to be a mac feature too i kind of don't see why i would do it so yeah yeah so we'll see we'll see i want to try it out but we we will uh we will see if you would like to submit a question of your own for a future episode of upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or you can use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which is something you get access to. If you sign up for Upgrade Plus,

you will get longer episodes of bonus content every week and hear no ads by going to getupgradeplus.com. Thank you to everybody who signed up. If you enjoyed the conversations from today, as you heard of all of our guests make sure you check out one of their podcasts for example Shelly hosts Parallel on RelayFM David hosts Under the Radar on RelayFM

and you can hear James on Total Party Kill on The Incomparable thank you to everybody who left us nice reviews in Apple Podcasts by the way wonderful people and we love you thank you for listening to this episode of wonderful people and we love you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upgrade

and we'll be back as normal next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. We're at the top of the vertical now, Mike. We're at the very top. I don't like it up here.

It's getting a little scary. The wind. No, the wind. No.