Upgrade - 421: Summer of Automation

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Before the sun sets on the Summer of Fun, Jason has rounded up three Apple automation experts--Federico Viticci, Rosemary Orchard, and Matthew Cassinelli--to discuss the present and future of user automation on Apple's platforms. Also, Myke and Jason debate the iOS 16 music scrubber.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 421 today's show is brought to you by source graph fitbod door dash and doppler my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley it's very exciting it's a summer of fun summer of fun DoorDash, and Doppler. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. It's very exciting. It's the summer of fun. Summer of fun! Summer of fun! Oh, I realize I haven't said that in a couple of weeks.

We got a special episode for you. You know, you're here now, and then you're going to go away, and then you're going to come back. And in between, we'll have a special episode. All of this episode was recorded in advance, in various stages of advance, which is fun. Indeed. So we have some guests later on, which we'll talk about in a minute. This was recorded after we recorded episode 420.

We did. But then we put the thing in from further back in time and brought it forward. And that's how time works. So anyway, 421. Here we are. I have a Hashtag Snow talk question for you okay comes from sava who wants to know jason what's your tea set up when you're not at home because of well i mean unless you take the robot with you i don't take the something more elaborate what happens um so we do pack tea bags just in case there's no tea that we like, because that happens.

We were just traveling, and day one, there were two English breakfast tea bags left at the hotel breakfast. And so we used those. And then we came back the next day, and guess what? There were none, because we apparently finished that off. So then I used the English breakfast tea bags that we brought. So we bring some tea with us. Um, usually in scenarios where we can't, we don't have a kettle or something like that. Um, we will bring tea bags just in case, uh, for that very reason, like they've got hot water, but not the tea that we like. Uh, if we've got access to a kettle, I have a little pot that holds, it's like metal.

I got it on Amazon. It holds actually the same amount of water as the tea robot. And it's like a thermos and it's got a tea strainer in it. So I can actually, if I have a kettle, I can pour the hot water in over the leaves and then remove the leaves. And I've got a thermos dispenser thing with four cups of tea in it, which is perfect. So I bought that. It's a good fit. And I will take that when I travel, if I'm going to be somewhere where I can make tea with boiling water. But if we're just going to Oregon and we're staying in one of these motels,

that's got a hotel breakfast, we just bring the tea bags and deal with it. Making water, you know, for tea in hotel rooms is terrible because it used to be that there was a coffee maker, but the water you get out of the coffee maker just tastes like coffee already because they use it to make coffee um and now they now it's all like pods all like coffee pod things which you can't the nespresso nonsense even more you can't uh get the just get me the hot water out of it so in the end you, in situations like that, we will either go down and use the hot water from the hotel

or we stay on the street we stay on when we go to Oregon is next to a Starbucks. You just go over there and they actually have black tea for us to drink. So those are our choices.

The typical answer is just find a Starbucks or whatever, right? Because you can get those basically everywhere. Yeah, and bring the emergency tea bags in case the place that you're staying doesn't have any tea that you want to drink.

But like I said, if I have access to a kettle, if it's an Airbnb or something like that, I will bring the little pot and it works great. Yeah, I will say as a coffee drinker, I do envy tea drinkers. Why? Because it's easier, I think, to get a possible version of what you're looking for. Oh, that's probably true.

I view it from the other perspective, which is in America, especially, it's a coffee culture. And so everybody knows how to make coffee. We were out to breakfast the other day and well, yeah, we'll get to it. But like we were out to breakfast the other day at a place that served hot tea. And they were like,

even though they serve it, they were confused about like, they brought it, they brought it in a little thing with the leaves in it, which was really nice, but they didn't have a strainer. So you're like pouring the leaves out. And we had to get them.

And that just happens a lot where people don't know. Or they bring it and they expect it to just sit forever in the hot water, which is like, well, no, you can't do that. It gets all bitter and bad. But they don't know because they only know about really how to do coffee. Now, to your point, though, I appreciate the fact that if you like good coffee, it can be harder to come by and harder to make for yourself and all of those things. I get that.

Yeah. I will say that bad coffee is everywhere and really bad. That's what I hear. Don't like it. Get a McDonald's coffee. Especially in – you know what, actually? McDonald's coffee for like high street coffee pretty decent interesting i have heard that from other people that the mcdonald's

that mcdonald's seems to have realized that that they would not be able to sell food to people if they couldn't have decent coffee in their stores so they i think they do a pretty decent job interesting i think they are of of the you know there are there are chains in the uk like in my opinion the worst is costa coffee i don't care if you like costa coffee i think costa coffee is terrible i prefer mcdonald's coffee to a costa coffee any day of the week all right how about starbucks that's my choice all right um if i if i have to go if like i'm if i need like a chain coffee that's the one that i'm gonna gonna go for because i know that there's some uh level of reliability out of it i always recommend the blonde roast at starbucks because it's not really, really, really dark, which Starbucks is very dark roasted coffee.

I mean, obviously, I would always prefer the small coffee shop, the independent coffee shop, but you can't always get them. They're not always available. Right. Well, that's the thing about chains that's great, is that there's usually a consistency there. And if you find something you like consistently at a chain, it may not be great, but it's consistent, and you at least know what you're going to get.

There's something to that. If you would like to send in a question of your own to help us open an episode of the show, you can just send in a question over Twitter with the hashtag SnowTalk, or you can use question mark SnowTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. You can get access to this Discord if you're a RelayFM member. You can go to GetUpgradePlus.com, and you can become a to this discord if you're a relay fm member you can go to get upgrade plus.com you can become a relay fm but free relay fm member and also get access to upgrade plus which is longer ad free versions of the show every each and every single week

which is amazing even on episodes where we record them in advance you still get extra content because we care about you and we want you to have the extra content that we promised you. So I said that there was something coming up today. So on this episode today, Jason, you're going to be joined by Rosemary Orchard, Federico Vatici, and Matthew Castanelli to talk about what? Automation. Could you imagine it?

The automation, Apple automation in specific. Like the Avengers. Automation All-Stars. Yes. Automation All-Stars. Automation Avengers, if you like. That's fine. To talk about the present and

future state of automation shortcuts and otherwise on Apple's platforms. I've brought in Rosemary Orchard from the Automators podcast and Federico from all the things Federico does that are related to automation. From Federico's business,

Mac Stories, et cetera, connected Mac Stories universe. And Matthew Cassinelli, who used to work on Shortcuts and now does Shortcuts stuff at his website, which is just MatthewCassinelli.com. Very clever. And he is his own brand.

But they're never usually talking about automation together, so I got them together. So you got that to look forward to. Jason mentioned Automators, relay.fm slash automators. That's a place where you can go to get Rosemary and David Sparks' show all about automation here at RelayFM. Jason, I noticed you posting something

about the iOS 16 audio scrubber right did that a few weeks ago yep the scrubber you seem to like it yeah and I'm not sure in the beta what they've done is they've taken the little little dot away that indicates where you are in terms of volume or in terms of location in a track and replaced it with a contrast. It's like a light gray and a dark gray or something. There's a contrast between them that shows the progress. But more than that, the dot is gone, which means the touch target of where to drag is gone gone and that's good because you can actually touch anywhere and then drag left or right to move the progress or volume up or down and i think it's a less less precision being required is a good thing i've heard counter arguments that maybe they could leave the dot or some other more more noticeable indicator of status while making the whole area

swipable. And that would be a compromise. The thing that I like about it is that I like that the whole area is swipable. So you don't have to feel like you have to hit the little tiny target or you miss and then nothing happens. And also I like the fact that when you hit it, it expands, it gets bigger. So it's more visible as you're swiping. I think that's actually a nice effect. I think I'm just going to get used to it. Cause I think when I immediately saw it,

I was like, Oh, you can't do it anymore. Like you can't scrub anymore. That was my immediate reaction. I don't know why I thought that was the case, but that's just how it looked. Because the bar looks the same. Really.

No control. No control. This feels very iOS 7 to me. It is. And that's why I think that I saw people pushing back against it and I initially thought, oh no, what have they done? And then I used it and I thought,

Oh no, this is, this is better. I actually like this better. I can see there's an argument that the keeping it in the bar and having it be, uh, you know,

two shades of gray is perhaps a little too subtle. If you're trying to get a quick read on where you are in a song or what the volume level is. Um, I get that. I'm not sure the little dots are the right approach. I don't know because the little dots are, they are a little skeuomorphic. I'm not sure the little dots are the right thing to do, but I can see the argument that there ought to be

something a little more visible about where you are in the spectrum from far left to far right. visible about where you are in the spectrum from, you know, far left to far right. And, um, I think that's a fair, I think that's a fair point, but I really love the behavior. I love not having to hit that little tiny touch target. Cause I think it was unreasonable. And I cannot tell you how many times I tried to grab the volume slider and slide it up and missed and did a whole gesture that did nothing because I didn't get it exactly pixel perfect on that little teeny tiny dot. And that's stupid, right? Like you've got that whole bar there, view it, view it as a little scrubber bar that you can touch anywhere to adjust it either direction. That interaction is better, but the visual that one, that you can touch it and that two, like at a glance, where are you?

I can see the arguments i definitely i think the contrast got better in later betas in early betas i actually looked at it and i couldn't i thought it was just a gray bar like i didn't even realize there were two contrasting bars because and i think they i think they've amped up the contrast i think in later betas it looks better. Here's the thing. After I read your article, I liked it more because I realized you could do the thing where you could start the scrub from anywhere.

I would never assume that that's something you'd be able to do, though. I would always just assume, until I was told by you, I would just assume I have to get my finger to try and be basically basically where the middle is like where it used to be you know yeah so how do you communicate that if you're apple um that's that's a that's a question uh you can't and then what will happen is uh some point in nine months from

now someone will tweet i can't believe that nobody knew you can do this and then everyone goes wild it'll be a TikTok video and it'll be like oh my god look at my finger it goes back and forth and that'll be like a bazillion people will watch it and reveal that that was a feature that was there

and Jason will say like I wrote about it in July and they'll say go away old man no one reads your blog turn it into a TikTok and then there'll be a bunch of other articles written about has Apple's discoverability issues gone too far with software and like why can't

Apple make a tips app but they do and no one wants to use it and then we go around and around and around yeah why isn't this more skeuomorphic I want the volume slider to be made of like a wood grain. Sure. This episode of Upgrade is

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for yours. Just click the link in the show notes to let them know that you heard about them from this show. Our thanks to Sourcegraph for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. Okay, it's time for the summer of automation with my special guests. Let me introduce them to you now from Mac Stories and the Connected Podcast and so much more. Federico Vatici. Hi, Federico. Hello, Jason. Thank you for having me.

How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you for being back on Upgrade. I think maybe the last time you were here, you successfully predicted the downstream podcast. So thank you. Yes, I did. For doing that. You got the name a little bit wrong, but close enough. I'll give you full points. Close enough. No, thank you. Thank you. You were sort of the inspiration. You got in my head. I was like, oh, that would be a good podcast. Maybe we should do that sometime. Do these points count for the connected quiz? Consult Mike, I guess. Ask him if they count. It's like turning in a coupon or something. I got this

coupon that Jason wrote that says 100 points. I got a coupon from Jason. Does it count? And he'll discount it to one point or something like that. Rosemary Orchard is also here from Automators and iOS Today and rosemaryorchard.com and so many other things. Rosemary, welcome. Hi, thanks for having

me. I'm excited to be here. I mean, especially with all of you awesome people. It's, we're doing cross, like, I wanted people from all over who don't always talk every week about automation to talk together, to get together. And that's also why I invited Matthew Cassinelli of the perfectly named MatthewCassinelli.com. Hello, how are you? Hello, thank you for having me on. I'm super excited.

This is going to be a great conversation. Yeah, I think so. A few years ago, there was that Masters of Automation event in Santa Clara that Paul Kent put together and Sal Segoian was there. And I believe the Shortcuts team was present but silent because they had been absorbed. Were you at that, Matthew? I was not. I think I knew that they were there, though.

They were there. It was funny, too, because we're all talking about Apple automation and they're like, because they hadn't been announced. There was nothing. They were in sort of stealth absorbed into Apple mode. And we did an upgrade episode way back when about that. And I thought this would be a fun way to revisit automation and also not bore Mike. So Mike can take a step back. I mean, not excite Mike too much with automation talk. I know he

gets a lot of it from Federico too. I wanted to start with the personal. I wanted to start by asking all of you sort of like what, when we talk about, we talk about user automation and creating like computers are dumb. And so you create tasks that computers are good at and that humans shouldn't have to worry about. And that's like the core of what doing user automation is all about. And we all write and talk about automation professionally. But I'm curious about your own personal use, the stuff that you are really using the most these days in your lives to automate your lives. Rosemary, what about, let's start with you. What are you automating with these days?

I mean, my house. That's one of them. And the shortcuts app, of course, is another. But, you know, it really depends on what the problem is that I'm looking to solve. Is it that I'm struggling to wake up in the mornings, in which case, you know, automated curtains and blinds are a useful solution? Or is it that I need to be able to add a consistent list of things I need to do to prepare for going into the office for a day to my house list, in which case, you know, shortcuts is, or well, actually combined with drafts in that case, are going to be my automation weapon of choice. Is it a weapon? I don't know.

Can be. Tool seems a little bit minimizing the effect that automation can have, because it really can have a huge effect on everything in your day and actually help construct your day, I find. But yeah, I've been doing a lot specifically home automation related. But of course, all of the personal automations and shortcuts are constantly, especially thanks to the betas, going through some kind of evolution. What about you, Matthew? I've been automating like every inch of my life. And so that's been a little bit of an undertaking and way, way too much, I think.

Because I've kind of been going for... I still am trying to teach people about all of the possible capabilities. And I got so into it myself that I feel like I started to recognize I needed to share more with people. And so I have been focusing a lot more on my actual workflow and publishing articles and doing live streams and kind of stacking all those things within a week, because that's one of the big things is it's multimedia and it's a lot of context switching. And so shortcuts is really good for setting you up for the right context when you

need it and then hiding things when you don't need it or i guess that's part of ios now too but i'm doing tons with focus modes and widgets and then also like stream deck on the mac to kind of replicate that experience there focus modes i am only i still i'm just sort of like i have one i have a focus mode that i use sometimes uh when i'm writing and sometimes I forget. Or what I do is I'm writing and then somebody bugs me and I think, oh, right, this should be focus mode so they don't bother me. All right, team, we have a mission. Yeah, I just have not gone down that path as much.

Yeah, the way they did it in iOS 14 was kind of weird. So I think it's probably better this year. Yeah, yeah, probably so. I think it's probably better this year. Yeah, yeah, probably so. Federico, I know you've talked about Obsidian a lot, but is that your big automation right now, or are there other things that you're doing that are key to what you do?

Well, yeah, so I really go back and forth on this because I've been through the various stages of life where I try to automate everything, right? And you try to automate your house and how you listen to music and when you work out and and then over time i kind of realized two things that if you at least personally when i try to automate everything and anything it's easy to lose control and it's easy to forget like things start happening and then you realize oh I didn't realize I set up this automation months

ago. And so, and also I should mention that, you know, sometimes, especially when you live with someone else, your partner doesn't necessarily appreciate all the crazy automations you've set up, right? So you've got to be especially mindful of what you're setting up in the house and if the other person or other people agree with what you're doing. So I've been through that stage as well. But I think lately what I realized is that, yes, there's, I would say, 50% of the automations that I use on the Mac and now also on the iPad, I want to say, in some shape or form integrate with Obsidian.

But the other types of automations I think are most useful on the iPhone. And these are automations that are used for, they are work related, but also for personal use. And I really like it when they just happen reliably and consistently without any input. So to give you an example, something that I do all the time is when I copy a link to a tweet from the official Twitter app, the Twitter app appends all those ugly tracking parameters to the tweet. And I don't really want to have those things in my URL when I send it to somebody else. So a simple automation that I have is whenever I close Twitter, that's a trigger that you can use. It cleans up the link for me. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to do anything else. I set it up months ago.

It uses a regular expression to take care of the unnecessary part of the link I don't want. And it cleans up the link for me and it pastes it back into the clipboard. And that's the kind of automation that I find myself relying on most these days. There's the Obsidian commands, for sure, but there's also the stuff on the iPhone that it just happens, but I'm very judicious about it, I guess. I have maybe five of these. I don't want to overdo it. It's a lesson that I've learned, I think, over the past couple of years. Is it basically doing, like, it's looking when you leave Twitter, it looks at the clipboard and says, is there a Twitter link on the clipboard? And if so, I rewrite it and put it back on the clipboard. So when you exit Twitter, that clipboard gets cleaned up to something nice.

Yeah, exactly. And only if it's a link to a tweet, not a link to a profile, for example, or not a link to an image, right? So it looks at the type of link and it cleans it up and it copies it back so that by the moment I'm opening iMessage or Discord, the link has already been cleaned up. That makes perfect sense. I really like that sort of thing. And there is a lot to be said about reliable automations, right? I'm sure all of us at some point have created something to demo something

to somebody else and then forgotten about it. And then gone, wait, why is my phone doing this weird thing? I had a really weird issue with an alarm going off at like 6.25 p.m. every day for a week until I realized it was one that I'd set up to demo, I think it was on iOS today. It's like, oh, right. I really need to start disabling those like the second I finished the show. I have a lot of unnamed i mean i know this is just sort of uh more for people like us than for regular people but like my shortcuts file window is littered with badly named or not named shortcuts that are like let's try this or here's a sample and then it just stays there forever. And every once in a while, I think,

what are these things? And the answer is they're all garbage. And I just have left them there. I create those in a folder. So I have a specific folder for demo, which I always go to before I start creating like random examples like that, because then I know I can just nuke everything

in that folder and it's gone. Because otherwise, especially now, because this is something the Shortcuts team have done to try and improve things right they're they're giving things like a name from like a variable or the first action step but that means that it's no longer really easy to find all of your untitled shortcuts um it's just automatically with like a search in the app which is it's both a great thing and also a bit of a shame. I think for the vast majority of users, this is a win. And possibly, us here on the podcast

are the outliers going, this is potentially a bit of a problem because I can no longer find the unnamed shortcuts in my library. I had a shortcut that used the iOS 16 action to search shortcuts and I searched for the word new shortcut so that I could find the ones

that I hadn't finished yet it's too much for your shortcuts this is what Federico was talking about about getting too too deep down in I mean you say that but also it is a very easy way to find those ones specifically and especially combined with the new delete shortcut action um like I'm using that to clean up my demo folder now, which is great. But you know, it's surprising actually how far very short action shortcuts can get you. Like Jason, my immediate instinct to you saying you don't use focus modes is you press the stream deck button when you start recording. Yeah. Why don't you tie focus mode into that triggered via a shortcut, and you can have it auto turn off after two hours or whatever it is. Or you could have the turn off tied into the other side of the button that stops your recording so that it turns off your focus mode.

You're absolutely right. Because I find that a lot of the benefits from automations are actually small building blocks that then you stick together so that you have a bigger thing. So, for example, you know, Federico's tweet, that ends up building part of a bigger workflow for him, I'm guessing in some cases, but not in every case. But it's a very useful building block, which you can reuse as you need to. And, you know, I think that's where automation can really become a much bigger and easier thing for people to understand when they realize, you know, actually, I've got lots of little Lego bricks together and I can stick them together and I've got a little wall

and then you've got a house and then you've got a castle. And before you know it, you've got a moat and a trebuchet and there's, you know, no chance of invaders, even though that's not what you're aiming for. But hey, your curtains open

and close automatically. It's funny that you mentioned that because that's actually one of my favorite automations right now. And it's a very simple home app automation. But I did get some blinds for my office one of my favorite automations right now and it's a very simple home home app automation but i did get some um blinds for my office after being in it for seven years and in the summer just basically i would run outside and i had a thing that i would throw over the roof that would block

the sun from shining right in my face in the in the afternoon and i finally got some blinds that are uh they're uh they're the they're smart blinds they're lutron casita some blinds that are, they're smart blinds. They're Lutron Casita smart blinds. And the automation is great because it's keyed on sunset. And I was able to figure out how many hours or minutes before sunset does the sun shine in my face. And now they go down at that time. And it's just as the sun is starting to hit my desk. at that time. And it's just as the sun is starting to hit my desk and they go back up, um, right before sunset after the, but after the sun is already kind of behind the, uh, house next to mine. And I love that one, but most of my, um, most of my active automations are, uh, I've been

doing a lot of stream deck stuff. And I know before we started recording, I mentioned that, um, my favorites are the basically press to start recording kind of thing because I like the tactile nature of that and not having to open Audio Hijack and get the right thing out and press the button and having the ability to just press this one button. And now that Audio Hijack has JavaScript scripting inside of it, having it be able to fire off the exact right thing. scripting inside of it um having it be able to fire off the exact right thing um and then at the end when i press that button and it changes because i'm using keyboard maestro as an intermediary it is changing um the the content of the button really wish that there were other ways of doing that um really wish that stream deck well i mean really wish stream deck was better the stream deck i mean it does have that toggle, right? It's got that, I can't remember what it's called now in Stream Deck terms.

It's like a two-way switch or something like that. And it does, I mean, the challenge there is that it's not very smart. Whereas my automation is actually getting a response back and evaluating it and deciding whether it's truly on or off and changing based on that. Whereas, uh, the stream deck thing, if it gets out of sync, it's just stays out of sync on,

on its, on its toggle. I also have some multi switch toggles. So for upgrade, I, I, I go through, um,

the state where I, I press the button and it opens the zoom chat and the, the show doc. And then I press it again and it starts my recording and I press it a third time and it stops the recording and moves the recording into Dropbox for Mike. So it's a three stage thing and I changed what's on the button for all three stages. And recently I, um, uh, upgrade, I think we mentioned this on upgrade recently. There was an episode where the first 10 minutes of my audio is from zoom because I forgot to start recording.

And that led to an automation, which is something that Rosemary, I think you mentioned about that, kind of like you start to build, where I ended up with a new step in my process. When I press that button the first time to just connect to the Zoom, it starts almost like a throwaway disposable recording of my microphone. And then when I press it again to start the actual recording, Audio Hijack actually has this built into its automation library. If it's less than 15 or 20 minutes of audio, it just throws it away. And because I've done the right thing. But what it does mean is that if I don't press that button, done the right thing. But what it does mean is that if I don't press that button, I have a recording anyway that I can send to Mike. And that's just, at that moment where I thought, okay, this needs to be better. This automation needs to improve because it's not serving this failing of mine, which is I didn't press it a second time. So how do I fix that? And that led to

another step. Is there any reason you wouldn't just use like multiple buttons instead of the same one? Because that's kind of my, I don't know, this might be too much Stream Deck technique, but like I have pages and I just use multiple pages and have one step for each part of the process. I'm trying to be as minimal as possible. So I do have multiple profiles in Stream Deck deck but i don't like the idea of having multiple pages and having to do a lot of stream deck work i kind of want to keep it to in this

case the five by three grid of my little stream deck here and i kind of i would rather you know i have an upgrade button so it should know and the incomparable button is the same way where it goes through three states and it changes based on that and And that's basically my preference. I think because I started out with a Stream Deck Mini, my focus has always been like multi-use buttons. Well, it's whatever you feel comfortable with, right? Because the best automations are the ones that actually work for you. And it doesn't matter if it works really well for me or for Matthew or for any of the people listening, it's got to work for you, the person who's actually using it, which is one of the reasons why I think, you know, some people do struggle with things because

they're looking at how somebody else is doing something and maybe they don't have that piece of hardware or they don't, you know, they're not sure that whether or not NFC tags are going to be the right thing for them and things like that. And you get very stuck into the, well, this is how, you know, other people do it. So being able to reshape it to fit whatever your actual needs are. And also, as Federico mentioned, the needs and the wants of the other people in your house, which may not be blinds opening and closing

automatically all the time and lights turning on and off to let you know that it's time to go do this thing. Flashing lights in the whole house when you're not the only person living in your house is probably gonna... It's not good. At the very least,

not necessarily make you everybody's best friend. So, you know, you've got to figure out what works. And that certainly sounds like it would work for me. Though my concern would always be the it's got out of sync situation,

which you alluded to with the two-state button. Yeah, that's nothing worse than an automation that doesn't know whether it's open or closed or on or off. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's where Keyboard Ma that doesn't know whether it's open or closed or on or off. Yeah, I mean, that's where Keyboard Maestro is really good with the Stream Deck because it can just say, hey, you're in this state now because it can maybe pull audio we are with Apple automation and where it's strong.

And then we'll talk about where it's weak. I would say that one of the things that I love about my current state of automation is that I've got all this stuff working together. I wrote a Six Colors piece a while ago about how you can integrate a command line script and a shortcut and a keyboard maestro thing and a stream deck thing. And they all just kind of work. And on the other hand, it is kind of ridiculous that I have to go through sometimes three or four different tools in order to get what I want. And so it strikes me that sometimes I would, you know, I want the tools to be a little

bit better so I don't have to do it. It's nice that I can, right? But I have those moments where I think like stream deck buttons is a great example where like, I've got to use keyboard maestro if I want to set the exact image on a stream deck button because keyboard maestro doesn't. And I'm glad that it does, but I have things that are entirely handled in shortcuts, except for the keyboard maestro image part that has to be in. So I ended up having a keyboard maestro macro that runs a shortcut and sets an

image. And I don't love that, but that's where we are right now. I wanted to mention before we take our first break that the other automations that I'm using a lot are, and this goes to like, everybody's going to have to build their own for their own jobs, but it's my favorite stuff, which is I find a menial or, you know, boring task that should be automated. And so like I built inspired by Federico actually, and one of Federico's shortcuts involving Safari, I built a shortcut that lets me select the text from my Mac world column that I write every week. And I run the shortcut and it converts it to Markdown and it gets the link of the URL

and it opens up WordPress and puts in, using the WordPress API, it puts in that as a post to link to it from Six Colors. And I don't have to clean it up because it cleans it up. I don't have to paste in a link because it puts in the link and the headline and the story text and checks the box that says what kind of thing it is, which is an offsite link. And I love stuff like that where, sure, I could do it. But first off, they post that thing in the morning. So I'm invariably writing that thing like from bed when I'm drinking my tea.

I would rather not think about it and not have to precision post or precision paste things in various places when the shortcut can handle it for me. Or when I post the Six Colors podcast, it's the same thing. It's an automator finder service, but basically I right click on the MP3 of the podcast and say, this is the six colors podcast and it uploads it opens mars edit puts the url of the mp3 puts the title of the podcast in the title field checks the box that says this is a podcast and it's just i love that stuff where it's just you know not that i couldn't do those five steps but i'd rather do one step that'd be easier yeah yeah i need that exact workflow right now because I'm doing

that exact thing manually every time I publish my article. And that's a good example of the exact kind of thing that I would automate and takes me 10 to 15 minutes and instead could take me one minute and I can move on and immediately keep going, which is very powerful. I think that's the prize when we talk about automation is it's stuff like that, which is it's not the overwhelming, oh God, Jason's got a stream deck and he's got all those buttons and what they're going to do. And Rosemary's entire house is completely automated. It's more like, do you have a really awful, boring, you're totally capable of doing it, but it's literally like an eight step process you have to do five times a day. Yeah. You could probably automate that. And your life will be-

Even if you automate two steps right you're right just start by doing two of it yeah i have like thousands of shortcuts and the average of them has eight steps in it and that's exactly why i just kept going and kept solving new problems and then it's like oh god i need i can't believe we barely still even have folders so yeah all right um let's take a break and then when we come back we are going to talk I can't believe we barely still even have folders. Yeah. All right. Let's take a break. And then when we come back, we are going to talk about where we are now with Apple's automation story. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by FitBud.

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And that's 25% off if you do. FitBod.me. That's F-I-T-B-O-D.me slash upgrade. And you'll get 25% off. Our thanks to FitBod for the support of this show and relay fm all right um back for the summer of automation i wanted to ask our uh our esteemed panel of automation experts who have not on it they're not phoning it in they didn't automate this uh they're actually here um where let's start with the positives here. Where do you think Apple and its platform automation, and you can include apps that are on the platform as well, where are they strong right now?

And then we'll follow that up after we're done with this praise part where they fail. Federico, let's start with you. Where do you think Apple's automation story is actually doing pretty well right now? Federico, let's start with you. Where do you think Apple's automation story is actually doing pretty well right now? Well, I think they're doing pretty well on the iPhone and iPad, where the story of the shortcuts app seems to be more complete than on macOS. And I think they're doing a good job there in terms of giving users multiple options, right? So you have the personal automations that you can only set up on the iPhone and iPad, and you have the home integration, you have the share sheet, you have Siri, you have spotlight integration.

And I think, as I mentioned before, setting up these personal automations on the iPhone and iPad, and especially on the iPhone, because it's always with you, can be so valuable in terms of saving time, cutting down steps from processes that you find yourself doing manually every single day. I also think they're doing a pretty good job

in terms of catching up. And I think if you look at this year's release of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, what is new in shortcuts, you will see a lot of catching up in terms of bringing actions for apps that had very minimal, if at all, maybe, integration with shortcuts before. And so you have these new Safari actions, for example, that just got added in the latest iOS 16 beta. You have voice memos actions, you have clock actions, you have better mail integration. You have better mail integration. So it's good to see that they are paying attention to apps that were sort of integrated with workflow, really, back in the day, that got brought over to shortcuts. But the shortcuts app wasn't really taking advantage of them.

And so with iOS 16, they are catching up and allowing users to create more integrations than ever. And from a design perspective, the shortcuts editor itself, I think we've seen, it's been a long path, it's been a long journey in terms of getting to this state of the shortcuts editor. getting to this state of the shortcuts editor. Obviously, you know, we've been through two, three redesigns in the past four to five years for shortcuts. And last year, obviously, they redesigned the whole thing and they rebuilt the whole thing with SwiftUI. And that caused a variety of problems, especially on macOS. But I think now the design of the shortcuts editor

again on iPhone and iPad I haven't really played around with Ventura yet so I can comment on that but I think at this point I really like what they're doing in terms of doing things like choosing variables drag and drop is more reliable picking properties from an individual variable

or magic variable so I think the story is also pretty strong there but I would say overall reliable, picking properties from an individual variable or magic variable. So I think the story is also pretty strong there. But I would say overall, by far, on iPhone and iPad, you have still the strongest shortcuts, story and presence, if only because on macOS, you're still missing those key integrations like the personal automations and the integration with the share sheet, which is maybe happening now, but it's still kind of half-baked.

Rosemary, what about you? Yeah, I mean, I have to say I agree with Federico and it does feel a little bit like it's been playing catch up, but I do feel like they're definitely watching what people are doing and then responding to that with adding new features. So a really great example of this is, you know, a lot of people were trying to do things like switch their backgrounds automatically, like the home screen backgrounds, the images there automatically, and their watch faces based on focus modes or other

things that they were doing in the last version of iOS. And that's actually now baked into the focus modes in iOS 16, setting your watch face and changing your background. And I have to say, I feel like they're not taking away from shortcuts. You can still do, you know, you can still set your wallpaper, you can still set up watch face in shortcuts. But they found a better place to put that, that surfaces that for users in a much easier way than adding shortcuts actions which you know even somebody who's a little bit technical who's

not encountered it before trying to choose your watch face it's tricky because you just don't have a picture like and watch faces you know you've got two different um uh modular complication ones and you don't you don't know which one's which. You have to go look in the Watch app and assume that the order is the same, which it is. It's a side note for anybody who's listening to that. But they've taken what people are doing, and they've just made it easier for them, which I feel is great. And I'm really glad that they're doing that. And similarly, it seems that they've

listened to developers. They've made it easier for them to add shortcuts actions and surface those for users. So inside of the shortcuts app, in the section at the bottom, so on the iPhone, you would tap to go to the shortcuts menu area and on the iPad and the Mac, it should just be at the bottom. They've got app shortcuts right there. I feel like this again is them, you know, responding to users and developers and just bringing it all together. And it certainly feels like they are doing a good job with pulling that all in. And, you know, as Federico said, you know, we've got new actions in various apps, like they're directly integrating with focus modes with the whole set your filter on mailboxes and set your tab group in Safari. Yes, tab groups get some love. That's good to hear. You know, I feel like that by adding to

this and taking it so, you know, I have a podcasting focus mode, but then I can customize further within that with shortcuts. And so if I want to have a separate one for automators versus iOS today versus nested folders, I can do that, but I can also just leave it as podcasting, or I can try and handle it all inside of, you know, the focus modes themselves and split it up into three, but it gives me more, more flexibility and choice, which as a power user, I greatly appreciate. But I also think, you know, is good for your average user in that they've got quite a bit that they can do. And when they want more, there's a safe place that they can go to find out how to do this without

running into something that says jailbreak your device now, which I feel like is just not a good option for, let's face it, the vast majority of users. Matthew, what do you think about where Apple's automation is working right now? Totally. I agree with all those points. Those are definitely, like, integrations are a lot better, and I love that they've been listening to our needs as the power users, because that stuff definitely affects us a lot. I think I'm still just super psyched on the app shortcuts and the capabilities that they're adding to that. I've been following Alex Hay, who makes Toolbox Pro,

and he's been diving really deep into just what you can do and the kind of capabilities that actions can have now that they couldn't really. And I don't think I really totally realized they couldn't have that before. So I think that the story of how powerful actions are hasn't matched what even shortcuts itself could do. And it's kind of confusing. Or even Apple's other apps weren't adopting that same level of capability. And so now I think we're starting to see that with the actions that they're developing.

And we're going to see that from developers too. So it should be a lot better like why can't this be automated it can now i guess it's still going to take time to to roll out there and i think for me still just the whole scripting interface even though it's still confusing for new users i think it's still i still can't really do much in something like Zapier or if this than that, beyond a couple of steps. And just, I have some ungodly shortcuts that do all this kind of scripting capabilities. And that's still something that's only ever been approachable to me. I've never learned how to code and probably never will, but I am like a full-on developer because of shortcuts. And so that still is really understated about how much potential there is.

I mean, even just the way, like we were talking about before, we all use shortcuts kind of differently, and there's like 50 ways to run one single shortcut. So there's so much out there. And I think getting the entire industry up to speed with what shortcuts can even do is still like a huge thing because it's still constantly in development or i mean we can talk about the the next part too but they kind of focused on the the mac and then now they're like here's the siri story and didn't talk about the mac this year which is kind of confusing

so you mentioned shortcuts um being i and agree, underrated a little bit. Anybody who lived through the launch of Automator, which had such promise, and you know, Sal came up on stage, who you all know, and demoed Automator, and I was like, oh, I get it. I get it. And for whatever reason, Automator really didn't get a chance to flourish. I think it was a little too complicated and it didn't have enough capabilities block by block, this is what Automator was supposed to be and never made it there. And to Apple's credit, they bought it, they integrated it, they advanced it. And it is, I mean, for all of the criticisms that we will often, and I think justifiably levy at Apple and at the Shortcuts app for the issues that we all have with it, I think it is worth taking a moment to praise the fact that it

gives you access to that level of power, but fulfills a lot of that automator promise, which is you build a block by block and it's visual and you don't need to write lines of code and it could be easier. Sure. You know, are there things about it that are head-scratching absolutely but like i having lived through automator and the promise and the basically failure of automator as a thing i i think the number one thing on my list is about apple's automation today is that they have the vision to grab workflow and turn it into next generation automator, but one that succeeded rather than failed like automator did. And that's my number one praise for what Apple's doing now is that shortcuts is good. Is it great? I mean,

maybe, but it does have limitations, huge, but it is so strong in so many ways and I think has so much more potential yet to be realized. and I'm waiting for those shackles to be removed so I can do even more because it's just the fact that I still have a single file list of 3,000 shortcuts in the main menu that can't scale the interface is the problem. Not anything that shortcuts can actually do. And so I think so much of it is growing pains and I'm just waiting for those to get resolved

so that other people can join us because we're all doing this. And I think everybody else kind of looks at it and is like, that seems cool, but it hasn't gotten there yet. And we're like living in this future of drag and drop programming that Apple still hasn't even seems like they don't even like tell their audience about. And so I'm like, hello, let's do this. this this is so cool and i love doing shows like this because it really is like it's so powerful and it still hasn't even gotten started yet so i'm just stoked on that i have one more thing that i'll say positively before we go a little negative or at least constructive criticism uh which is as somebody who's been

using the mac since the 90s i actually i did not expect the mac's automation story to be as good right now as it is i thought the i thought the transfer first off i didn't expect shortcuts to actually come when it did i i mean i wrote articles like several of us did demanding that it happened, but then it happened and it's usable. That's the thing that really, I mean, from last summer, even early on last year, it was usable. And the fact that today, as we're on the precipice of going to Ventura, I have many Mac automations that are based in shortcuts. And I really didn't think that would happen that quickly. I really thought we would be in a painful transitional period where the shortcuts didn't quite do the job and the old stuff was falling apart and that you

wouldn't be able to do what you needed to do on the Mac. And that hasn't been the case. There are still cases where I don't reach for shortcuts first on the Mac. And that hasn't been the case. There are still cases where I don't reach for shortcuts first on the Mac for various reasons. But an increasing number of those are me reaching for an old system out of habit and not because shortcuts can't do the job. Sometimes it's because shortcuts can't do the job, but a lot of times it's not.

And so I would put that in a win column for Apple is that it may be going slower than people would like and it is kind of complete. But I have to say I didn't expect shortcuts to be as functional on the Mac as it is or that Mac automation would be as sort of not broken during this transition. Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, but like I thought it would be a lot worse. And actually, it's fine. It actually is pretty good. Yeah. And I would add to that that maybe one thing that Apple did really well, because I was also surprised by how solid the automation story is on macOS, but they have enabled people like me who have been using workflow and then shortcuts on the iPhone and iPad for years and then decided, you know, I actually want to check out macOS again and I want to play

with this M1 Macs. But they've made it possible, they've created this path for people like me to just so seamlessly take all of their shortcuts and make sure they will continue working on the Mac, right? And so they've made it easier for someone like me, who used an iPad for seven years and then decided, you know, I want to try and work on a Mac for a few months and see what it's like. And when I did, all my shortcuts were there and they were just mostly working. And I mean, the problems were problems at a technical level with, you know, SwiftUI and how the shortcuts app itself was made, you know made under the hood, but the core of the

automation technologies were all there. And I think that's pretty remarkable that that's been possible in just a single release if you think about it. I've been using the Mac for less than nine months probably. Not Mac with shortcuts, I mean. I think every single one of my shortcuts works on the mac now except for unless it uses something specifically for ios yeah and it was fairly easy to get those things i'm sure we all did it where you end up with the if this is a mac do this if this is an ipad do this yeah but you you can it was so easy

like i i had some that ran out of the box and others where I added one additional step to say, no, no, do it this way on the Mac. And then it just worked. All the other logic remained. All the other shortcuts elements from iOS remained and worked fine on the Mac. It was just that last thing in Safari or whatever that had to be slightly tweaked. And pretty good for a first release. All right. Let's turn it a little bit, not necessarily negative, but constructive.

Where is Apple's automation story lacking right now? And what would a teacher say they need to apply themselves a little bit more? Federico, let's start with you again. Well, okay, so if I had to play devil's advocate here, I would say that the weakest point of Apple's automation story is the risk of an identity crisis, maybe, where the shortcuts app

might end up being too difficult for new users and not advanced enough for power users. So that, I think, is the single most important weak point where I think Apple should pay close attention here. Because you could argue, and I think Matthew actually wrote about this last week, you risk of sort of making it too difficult for new users to get started with shortcuts and to understand the power of shortcuts and what it can do.

But at the same time, you also, you know, if you only devote your attention to that part of the user base, you also risk of upsetting power users who are waiting for, I don't know, more control over, you know, conditional blocks, like more control over these advanced scripting actions

or things like keyboard shortcuts. Like you need to take care of both sides of the equation here. And I think in iOS 16, and I mentioned this because, you know, if I had to point out the negatives, I would say in iOS 16, I see a lot of taking care of the new users and maybe very little of taking care of the advanced users. Because as Rosemary mentioned a few minutes ago,

you have those new app shortcuts that make it super easy to get started and to discover these shortcuts that developers can bundle into their apps. And they are ready right there in the shortcuts app waiting for you, no need to set them up. That's great. And that's, you know, something that you're doing

to introduce people to shortcuts. And I love it. But maybe I would have liked to see something, you know, anything, something for power users as well. So maybe that's the single weak point that I want to point out here. And then, you know, there's specific stuff like, yeah, for example, macOS still doesn't have personal automations. That's something that really surprised me and I don't understand why. Or,

you know, if I can mention two more, why is it that on the Mac I can set up shortcuts with hotkeys and I cannot do the same on my iPad Pro despite the iPad Pro having first class keyboard support now you know there's so many of these inconsistencies like shortcuts on the Mac has quick actions in Finder now we also have quick actions in files for iPhone and iPad in 16 except for shortcuts. So if I had to sum it up here, I would say consistency. Consistency can still be a weak point,

because you still, as much as things have improved, I mean, we just discussed this a few minutes ago, you still don't have that feature parity between platforms. Rosemary, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with Federico, and it feels to me like the shortcuts team needs internal support within Apple so that when something appears in the files app, then somebody from the files team, possibly the same person that did this in Finder on macOS, would then work with the shortcuts team to bring those quick actions

in. Because I don't, I mean mean i suspect it's part of the the problem from that perspective is the fact that they do keep things a secret um until pretty late in the day just to avoid leaks and also um you know because if they drop something um you know they don't want everybody to know necessarily what got dropped or versus made it in and things like that though apple are doing a better job at WWDC of saying, and these features are coming this year rather than in September. And then it appears in March or whatever, which I think is good. Don't load all the pressure onto people to have it absolutely perfect for September or October when the Mac beta ships. But I feel like there needs

to be some more internal support from various things because because I know, you know, like, if you're an app developer, when you write an app, you have to write your own shortcut support. You know, and I'm pretty certain it's the same within Apple. So the mail has to write its own shortcuts, actions and support. And maybe somebody from the shortcuts team collaborates with them on that. I don't know, and I'm not going to pretend to know, but it feels like there needs to be somebody who can pull those people together and say, hey, mail, you need to step up or messages. What's going on here? We need the ability to get your most recent message. Why isn't there a shortcuts action for that? Because, you know, maybe, you know, it depends on, you know,

what APIs and so on are available to them internally to fetch and call data. But the shortcuts team can't possibly do everything. And I feel like they're getting an awful lot heaped upon them, which just makes things really difficult. And I have to say, I do feel like perhaps whoever is testing shortcuts maybe needs, or maybe they just need more testers

because I can't paste a shortcuts action on macOS. You just can't. You can copy an action. You can duplicate an action. And on iOS, you can paste an action. I have yet to be able to, in over a year, paste an action on macOS. And it's things like that, which give people a really bad impression of an otherwise absolutely amazing application. You know, I had an issue, fortunately, it's now resolved in the latest beta, but in the last beta on iOS, I would start searching for something and the search wouldn't update. And so, but I would, something would appear. So I'd start scrolling down the list. And then I'd realize that these are not my search results.

And I'd have to scroll back up and tap into the search bar again, at which point it would then start doing the search. And it's, you know, this is a beta. I should expect it in a beta. And, you know, kudos to the Short scene for killing that problem in in the latest in the latest edition but it does feel like we end up with issues that end up persisting for a long time the touch targets for dragging and dropping actions being off is something that i genuinely really struggle with like you have to like when you're dragging something your mouse um or finger could be an inch or two above or below the action you're actually trying to move it's like being in the london underground mind the gap you got to find the

place where the gap is not where your finger is and then let go and then the gap suddenly sometimes doesn't appear and then you have to try and like scroll up or down as well and things like that it you know it just makes it very difficult um for, power user or new user. And it doesn't give a great impression. Now, you could argue with the dragging and the dropping that most new users are just going to tap an action to add it. But then you look at the suggested actions in a shortcut to add, and it suggests adding an if. Okay, cool. And then I try and add something below the if, and it doesn't go into the if, which, I mean, fair enough. Does it go in the if or the otherwise?

The computer can't tell. So then I try and pick it up to drag it, and I pick it up, and oh, this time it's actually worked. But that's because it was the last action in the shortcut. If I try and pick up an earlier action, then it just kind of... Yep, we've all been there. Especially, yeah, yeah. When your shortcuts start scrolling off the bottom of the screen,

I think that's when it happens. I try to build replication steps to send those in because I know that actually knowing how somebody has broken something is really important when you're trying to solve the bug as a developer. But I feel like the shortcuts team needs a bit more support for things like this because it is very difficult to do everything by yourself. And nobody should be an island. And, you know, if they got support from other teams for developing, you know, other great actions, you know, so Maps, for example, got multi-stop as a feature.

So I immediately look in shortcuts for add stop to route. No, that's not something that's there. And that's not in shortcuts for add stop to root. No, that's not something that's there. And that's not the shortcuts team that has to add that. That's the Maps team. But the Maps team haven't done that. Is that because that's not been prioritized? That goes back to Federico's larger point, which I think is a great overall point, which is it doesn't yet seem as if there's a cultural buy-in, if you want to say it that way, at Apple for shortcuts actions. That if you are making an app at Apple

and you're adding new features, one of the items on the checklist needs to be shortcut support. And I get why it might not be there in a beta at the beginning, but it does feel like you should never ship a new feature without asking yourself

the question what are the shortcut actions that go with this feature and some apps do a better job than others but like that should just be back in the day again i'm sorry in my day uh there was a time when there was scrutiny placed to apple script support in apple apps and then it went away and and and then they lost all of that kind of the muscle memory of that. But I think they need to build that back in culturally because, yeah, exactly. If Maps is going to add this feature, one of the questions they need to ask themselves is how do you get to this feature in shortcuts? And sometimes it feels like they just don't ask the question. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, it would just be great to have more support everywhere

because I'd love to see some shortcut support in CarPlay. You know, give me a button that I can tap in CarPlay that, okay, I can only interact with my voice. Fine. That's an entirely reasonable limitation. It shouldn't be popping up, you know, too many things or whatever, but give me a button in CarPlay that I can press that starts my preferred playlist and pre like, and sets maps to direct me to a specific location with these three waypoints along the way that I've planned out at home and I've set this up and maybe it's a route

that I do regularly. Maybe it's not. Maybe I'm doing it as a one time thing. It doesn't matter. But it would be really cool to see things like that. But, you know, I feel like the shortcuts team is not small,

but I feel like they're being stretched, especially now they're on multiple platforms. And it would be really great if they got some more support so that they could continue doing the great things that they're doing and, you know, fix some of the problems that they've got, like paste. Get them some help. Rosemary says get them some help. Matt, what do you think about what are the tops of your to-do list for Apple with automation? Yes.

I noticed the way you phrased that, The top of the to-do list, not the entire thing. Well, I mean, we would be here for hours. Exactly. It's a podcast. We could theoretically go an infinite amount of time, but probably we shouldn't.

I definitely think the new user thing is something that I think they maybe still have room for just in terms of they haven't... I think it's clear that shortcuts as a whole hasn't fully launched in some way, where they haven't mentioned it in the keynotes enough to be the user feature. And I think now we're kind of at the place where it's the integration from being workflow is settled.

And so just in case people don't know, I literally worked at workflow. So I've seen some of the inside too that I can't talk about. But I do think the integration, even just having these new app shortcuts capabilities in the APIs, now Apple's own teams can use those too. So that's kind of been something that's always like, how do Apple's teams build actions the same way that developers do in many ways? And they have to have that functionality in the is to be able to go to that depth. And I do think the integration with the other teams is kind of the same thing. Like being able to build those actions does require the mail team to do it, not the shortcuts team, because otherwise the shortcuts team is building half of iOS at that point. But I think the other side where shortcuts is part of the OS

does mean that every part of the OS needs to have shortcut support also. And that same, it needs to go back and forth. And that's just, I see this all the time. People are so confused. They're like, why can't I just change the setting? Why can't I change the accessibility settings still? Like, that's the other thing is,

people have wanted these things for the last three years everyday users have been asking for it i think weirdly like i don't necessarily ask for it as much because i assume that they're doing these things and then sometimes it doesn't happen and so i think there is this realm where like the four of us or like people who listen to relay have this thing of like, this is where shortcuts could be or should be. And I don't know if people inside of Apple have that same opinion or even know what we're thinking sometimes, because we are just like the people who are using it to the full extent. And they're the people working on it or even like I did workflow support for a while.

And so just like knowing how many parts of the app this integrates or the OS this integrates with does make it extremely complicated. And so I think that feedback process and the bugs and everything definitely needs to get resolved sometime soon. Because there is just that it's like, if we don't report these issues, I don't think they're going to get fixed. And that is something that has been true in my experience. And I don't want to be true. And I would love for Apple to proactively fix those things. But it is sort of weirdly on the power users right now to report that those things are broken.

Otherwise, there is some part of, like, how would they ever know? Because I have 3,000 shortcuts and I'm running like 10, all this data through it and they're never just in that situation. And I could see, so this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's a good one, which is, look, all of us are in the top 1% of shortcuts users, right? All of us. And there is an argument to be made that Apple shouldn't be catering to the top 1% of shortcuts users, right? It's like, but what about the regular users? But I think the truth is, especially for something this new with this much potential, we are exploring what's possible with shortcuts. And as a result, as Matt said, we're also falling into the holes that nobody else knows are there. And so it's useful for us to be explorers and to try this stuff out and to push things to the limit. Because in theory, I feel like regular users will benefit from what we discover. We're the ones that are out there on the frontier. But when we come back and say,

oh, you know know you ought to do this it's not you ought to cater to me and make this thing that nobody else is going to want it really is more like i found it first but in two years some you know regular user is going to find it and and and you don't want you need to fix it by then right we may be a little ahead of the curve but they're coming they're right behind us the question is though when they arrive are they still going to run into this like that's what doesn't make sense to me yes i know that they will run into this and this will stop them in their tracks right so that's that's part of our our role i feel like as explorers is not necessarily to advocate for esoteric features that are only of interest to us, but more like that we go down this path

and we discover things and say, oh, I wonder if you could do this. And then you discover there's a roadblock or there's a bug and that we can raise the flag and say, this is actually important and hope that it gets handled eventually. Like folders is a great example, right? Which is most people aren't gonna have

a thousand shortcuts, okay? But folders are still important. Like folders should, organizational structures need to exist. which is most people aren't going to have a thousand shortcuts. But folders are still important. Organizational structures need to exist. And they finally did them in a way. And I'm glad that they did. But it wasn't just to solve the problem of the person with a thousand shortcuts. It was for anybody.

I have folders with four shortcuts in them. But I love it because it narrows it down. Like, let me look at those shortcuts and, and I don't need to have a thousand to use that feature. One other thing I wanted to mention about this stuff is we talked about editing, but editor bugs and minding the gap and all of that. And I don't know, cause I'm, I'm going to ask next about the future. And I know that kind of is similar to where it's failing now. But I just want run shortcuts and places you can't. And the share menu is so key to shortcuts on iOS and is kind of a fake thing that doesn't really work on the Mac that they made to look like iOS, but it doesn't do the things iOS does. And it's like, they've got to fix all that stuff. But the other thing I wanted to mention is in the editor itself, in the shortcuts app itself, sorry to get programery on you, but like, okay, I want subroutines. I think it's terrible.

Yeah, run shortcut doesn't cut it anymore. Well, this is the thing is I don't, and a wise, like a wise figure inside Apple would say, but do you really want subroutines? And the is no you're right wise figure i just made up i don't want subroutines it's like maybe you want to run and run a shortcut it's like yes i know you can run a shortcut from within a shortcut and that acts like a subroutine so if you don't give me subroutines you need to give me like a bundle you need to let me bundle up shortcuts yeah so i can send to i can build a shortcut that does some amazing things, but requires, like I had a friend who just sent me his little shortcut package that he worked on and it's brilliant, but he had to send me a readme file that included five iCloud links to download

five separate shortcuts to run in order for it to all work. And it's like, that's the worst. It's the worst. So, you know, that's at the top of my list actually is, I think that these things are so powerful and yet you can build, here's my problem is, I can build something really sophisticated, but I can't share it with anybody because it's way too complicated to give it to anyone else. And that's not, in the long run, that's not good enough. I need to be able to share something complex and have it work. And that either means a subroutine has to be embedded in a shortcut, or I need to be able to collect multiple shortcuts together and package them in some way so that I can share them with one link. I think that's like the same kind of thing with the

power user needs for that it's like we're trying to do these things specifically to help new users too and so there are like who else is going to do that if not us because apple doesn't have like a content marketing arm or something to like share shortcuts ideas and i mean maybe they should also that's another area of like it should be in the app store and have stories about shortcuts. We should say they made some effort. I know Federico had his profile there. They were talking to me about it.

Although they said, we really want them all to be things that use apps that are in the app store. And I was like, well, I don't have as many of those. See, that's even like a weird limitation sometimes. That's sort of one of the reasons I didn't want to do this at Apple is I can tell people how to use shortcuts the way that we use shortcuts

and not like the Siri-approved way or something like that. I mean, the question of why should Apple listen to the top 1% of users or to power users, I think is an interesting one. Because if you just look at the numbers, it doesn't make sense. It's not logical to listen to 1% of your user base. It makes much more sense to listen to 99% of people and do what they want. And that logically makes sense.

But not to get political over here, but it's kind of similar to the question of why should the government fund NASA, if you think about it? Like, why should they do it and that's because and i mean sure i'm here for the space analogy with jason obviously but the idea is you are you are investing in pushing the limits and in pushing the limits and in discovering new frontiers you are gonna first of all you're gonna discover something but also you're gonna develop a system, but also you're going to develop a system, you're going to develop a structure to make sure that better tools are possible in the future. And that's the idea.

Listening to power users, not just to make me and Rosemary and Matthew and Jason all happy and we're going to dance together and clap our hands. Thank you, Apple. No, it's not because of that. It's to make sure that you can build the structure to make sure that your app can scale in the future. And in the process, you may also listen to power users and discover, hey, power users are asking for this thing.

We're going to do it in a slightly different way, but we now understand the problem. Yeah. I think this is really the thing of, you know, they need to solve the problems that people are actually having, not give us the solutions that we're asking for. Because that's the difference, isn't it? You know, I say, hey, I need you to give me Y, but actually my problem is X. There's a whole phenomenon called the XY problem, where actually, you know, you need people to explain their real problem with you so that you can solve it with all of the data that you have, which is obviously more than we have. But I feel like they are definitely tripping up in certain places. And one of the areas I've really loved them to listen to us, and I'm sure

many other people in, is they don't fail gracefully right now if you've got a shortcut if i share a shortcut with any of you that contains an omni-focus action and you do not have omni-focus installed you will get an unknown shortcut action in your shortcut you have no way of knowing what what that action is what app that action is from um or what it's supposed to do you're just missing a whole chunk of data okay so I want to share this with somebody who's using Things. And they now have to either ask me for a screenshot or download OmniFocus

to actually see what that action is and how it works. You'd think there'd be an App Store opportunity here for cross-marketing. Well, I kind of feel like this is where app clips could really actually integrate with shortcuts, where if every shortcut action could be kind of not bundled as an app clip, because obviously it's not actually going to do anything. But the thing is, is they know what data it's taking, and they know what data it's returning, and they know what the name of it is. It feels like maybe they could extract that information. But right now, there's just no way for me to know what that action is supposed to be.

And if it's an app that has offloaded itself from my iPhone or my iPad, I kind of have the same problem. I'm just lucky enough that the app icon is still there. So I can then redownload the app that's offloaded itself spontaneously from my phone, despite the fact that the offload action was definitely turned off, but it's now disappeared in a recent beta, which is really a bug that I need to file because I was looking for that this morning and I was like, I can't turn off offloading apps. This is a problem. For the record, this problem, by the way, was an AppleScript problem, too. If you had an AppleScript script that didn't have one of the apps installed. It would give you Apple event jargon instead of the logic. And you're like, what?

Yep. Yep. So it's I was going to say that I think a lot of shortcuts fail very gracefully in the sense that they just are silent and you don't know if they ran or not. Well, yeah, but I kind of feel like that's that's part of the problem. And I can't add a reveal file in Finder action on my phone, even though I know that I'm going to be using this action on my Mac. I know that I don't have Finder on my phone, but actually it would be really cool if the action worked in files, please.

But it would be smart for them to not lock things out and to let me choose to put a vibrate action in a shortcut and write it on my mac and just ignore it if i'm on that too because i don't or on an ipad but like let let us fail gracefully more easily because right now it is very frustrating when you're looking at a shortcut and you go i have no idea what actions this is using i i can see six actions and there's an if statement in here. And that's the only one of them I can read. Well, especially new, new users, like assume they're

the problem. And that's what makes me like, genuinely sad a lot of times when I see people learning about shortcuts, because they're like, Oh, I just can't figure this out. And I'm like, no, it's totally shortcuts. It's not this for coming from Apple. People expect it to just work and be very obvious. And shortcuts has some level of that. But there is just basic handholding. Like I wrote in my story that Federico mentioned, it's like the action description for set playback destination is like it sets the destination of the playback. And I'm like, OK, like what? Yeah.

Just getting a little bit further. destination yeah and like this is all stuff that I I really cared about and wanted would probably have done if I was there at Apple being like let's do this kind of thing so that's why it does like I just want that and the new user who eventually becomes the power user like kind of I I do think of just my story. I didn't know any of this stuff. And I read Mac stories from Federico. I did get to sit next to the team, which I think made a huge difference. But nobody else has that experience. And so going from 0 to 100, and what does it look like

for someone who's at 0? And also, what does it look like for someone who's at zero and also what does it look like for someone who's at 100, all of those need to be accounted for because otherwise, like, what are we going towards if you get to the point where I am and it starts working worse because you are so into the app? That doesn't make sense to me either. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Doppler.

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peering into the future use your crystal ball i'm not actually asking for predictions i'm asking for a wish list more than anything else. We know what's in the betas. So we basically know what we're going to get this fall. What then? What's on your list for the places in automation that Apple needs to go next? Federico?

So if this is a wish list and not a set of predictions, I would say that the one thing I want is more integration with iPadOS multitasking. I think that's a big gap in the shortcuts functionality at the moment. There's no integration with iPad. Well, there's extremely minimal integration

with iPadOS multitasking at the moment, meaning you can only split the screen between two apps. There's no integration with Stage Manager whatsoever. That's the new multitasking mode from this year, and shortcuts doesn't have any actions for Stage Manager. But really, there's no integration with multi-window on ipad at the moment one of the one of the things that i that i've always wanted well that i've wanted to do for the past three years not always but for the past three

years i've wanted to use shortcuts to put together these workspaces for me and by workspaces i mean take a specific window from a specific app and let me assemble a workspace for me in an automatic way. That's still not possible because shortcuts doesn't have any knowledge of multiple windows from the same app on iPadOS. Like it just doesn't have that integration hooked in at the moment. So in the future, I would love to see better integration with multitasking and multi-window on iPadOS. And the same goes for keyboard shortcuts,

like to have a proper story when it comes to running shortcuts from the keyboard on the iPad, just like you can on the Mac. And I guess bigger picture, what I would love to see is, as I mentioned, the consistency, right? And the modernization of some of the older integrations. And I do think that for the next few years, we're going to get that because if 16 is of any indication, I think Apple is going to continue down that path. I think we're going to get eventually new Apple Music Actions, multitasking actions, new photos actions. There's a ton of new functionality in photos that is completely absent

from the find photos action in shortcuts. So I do think that kind of feature parity and that integration with the system level apps is going to continue. And then I would say longer term, maybe even next year, not necessarily many years from now, I want to understand what the story will be regarding shortcuts and AR or VR, whatever it is they're going to do in the future.

Because I do think there is incredible potential for running shortcuts via your voice, and that we've been able to do forever, right? Using Siri. But in doing that in combination with seeing visual feedback from the shortcut or choosing between options, like the combination of a voice-first activation method,

but with the visual feedback provided by a headset or maybe down the road glasses, that is really fascinating to me because that type of device is exactly the type of device where you don't want to click around a lot. You don't want to interact with a classic interface for several seconds or minutes. Having a pre-built shortcut to do something for you is ideal. So, I mean, we have shortcuts on the Apple Watch. Why not do it on a headset or glasses too? So that is a prediction slash wishlist. But if Apple is going down this path, and I mean, obviously it seems like they are, I hope that shortcuts will play a role in that. Because having Siri and shortcuts and visual feedback all in one device, that's really

compelling to me. Rosemary, what do you think? What's your wish list? All right. So everything Federico just said, I'm just going to steal all of that. Just reinsert. And then, I mean, I have a number, it's kind of more of a odds and groups list. I already mentioned earlier that I'd really love for the shortcuts team to have more support. And I'd really like there to be a person at Apple whose job is automation in all the things so that they get somebody, you know, they get all of the different teams in there. So whoever was implementing stage manager also had to have support from somebody and that would have been put together so that then there would be the stage manager support for shortcuts for

Federico and everybody else who's loving it. I'm still, you know, kind of on the fence about stage manager. I'm sure I'll get around to actually liking it in a couple of months, but that would be the first one. But I think also a better way to showcase shortcuts and everything it can do and it does would be really good for everybody everywhere because it works for the shortcuts team because it will then promote their things inside of Apple. It works for the new users because they get to download great shortcuts from a shortcuts gallery. And it works for us power users because it gives us somewhere to share things. And I kind of envision this as sort of an app store-like process where people can submit and it goes through a few processes and then it would appear in the shortcuts gallery. Because

the shortcuts gallery is really a massively mixed bag quality-wise. Some things are great. And then I just looked at one of the examples they've got there earlier. Email schedule to yourself. This is using set variable. And you know what it does is it gets your calendar events and it repeats each one. And it gets the title from the calendar event and it sets the variable title to the title from the calendar event. And so on and so forth with a whole bunch of different information. And then it says, hey, if the count of the locations is greater than one, then add that information and so on and so forth.

And there's just a nicer way to do that that is not so long winded for a user so that they actually can just sort of see it and quickly understand what it means instead of what is set variable, get variable and add to variable and all of these things. No, like that's, that's complicated. So I think that that would be really nice for them to do because it would showcase app developers, it would showcase shortcuts and just all the right things. And I think another way to help expand upon this for people would also be adding more smart folders. We already have folders for all of the shortcuts

that are on your Apple Watch. And there used to be, and there is no longer, a folder for your sleep shortcuts, where all of the shortcuts that were enabled in your sleep focus would show up, which if you don't have a schedule set for sleep, then you can't turn that toggle on. It just doesn't appear at all inside of your shortcut settings,

which can be a bit confusing. But it would be really nice if I could see all the shortcuts that have got that enabled. And I've just gone looking again. I definitely can't see things like that. And so I feel like improving smart folders and the existence of them. Give me a smart folder for all of my shortcuts

containing actions from OmniFocus things, drafts, etc. So that then I can share them with that developer and then they can showcase shortcuts more. And, you know, also for us power users, give us some things that we want, like collapsing and expanding actions and action groups. Allow me to add a comment to every single action just by sort of annotating it that can then appear above that action so that when I move the action, it moves with it. And allow me to fold an if action inwards, you know, just like you can fold if you've got the file list

view in Finder, like you can fold a folder open and closed and you can see the files in it or not in it. Let me fold if and repeat actions and so on and so forth and name my repeats and things like that. I feel like that's the sort of thing I would really love to focus on because it feels like some of these would definitely serve power users more to start with. But I think that that will then end up feeding all of the other users because my concern is they're focusing a lot on the new users. And it's not that they're going to lose the power users, but I feel like those new users are going to very quickly hit roadblocks.

And those are roadblocks that will not have been fixed. And I know that it's really difficult to split your focus and your attention. And there are a limited number of people with a limited number of hours in a day or a week or a month or a year. And so, you know, it would be good for them to get more support for that. But it is one of those things where folding actions seems so silly, but then you look at a whole bunch of shortcuts in the shortcuts gallery and think, wow, these could really benefit from letting me just fold this if action because I just want to skip past it and things like that. So hopefully we'll get to see some of that. I hope so. I love let's make all these dreams

come true. Matt, what's on your wish list? I think I have a very high-level one that I just want to see is I want shortcuts to have a segment in a keynote. I want Apple to say, you should use shortcuts. I think they should tell, especially because of the whole aesthetic home screen trend and people using shortcuts to customize their phone to have the app icons that they want. Like this is no longer an unknown entity. And I do suspect that they're waiting until it is better so that they don't tell people and they all come in and then it doesn't work the way they expect it.

So I do think that's kind of that weird middle ground that we're in. But I do think that that has to happen in order for shortcut for it to just be like, okay, now it's time to use shortcuts for just the average person, because I think it'll, it'll be at the right time when it'll work for them. But until then, I don't think people are going to be like, okay, I, this is the future of programming or whatever like that. Cause there is that whole story that just isn't told yet and when it they put their weight behind it it's going to be a lot more powerful there's going to be a lot more adoption and users just won't be like i don't know it doesn't it's not really clear what they're doing with this it'll be like oh okay they just told us what they're doing with this sort of thing

i feel like like steve jobs had a better handle as a showman you know because he was a master at it i think he had a better handle on the power of aspirational items in a keynote that maybe modern apple is so disciplined and on message that they've lost it a little bit and i'm reminded of a wwc i went to a very long time ago now. And there was this dude with a beard who was doing a demo using Apple's automation technology about how he had gotten classified ads set up for like a newspaper out of their database into QuarkXPress by running an Apple script. into QuarkXPress by running an Apple script. And it was the most amazing demo I had ever seen. And I thought to myself, and I think probably the dozens of people in the room with me also were thinking this like,

oh my God, I didn't know you could do this with a computer. I need to do this. I need to do this. And it was like, was I gonna build an Apple script that looks in a database and then builds a layout in QuarkXPress? No, but it started me down a path. It was aspirational.

That was Salsagoyan, by the way. And then he got hired by Apple. And he got hired by Apple in part because he gave these amazing demos. And to this day, Sal's best thing that he does is inspire you to try stuff by saying, did you see this thing that I made? So when Matt said, I want to see shortcuts in a keynote, I mean, we've seen it as like, here are shortcuts. And then we saw, here are shortcuts on the Mac. But like, I would love to see that aesthetic home screen thing. I would love to see a moment in a keynote where somebody said, look what you can do. We put together shortcuts and focus modes and personalized lock screens and all those things.

And look, you tap this. What happened to your phone? You tap this. Oh, my God, this other amazing thing happened to your phone. How does it work? Well, we use the power of our technologies back here, and you can learn more about it if you like. But isn't it amazing, right?

It's just that aspirational aspect. They don't need to explain every step, but they can blow you away with something and make you go, oh, I want to learn how to do that too. And that's what I would like to see. I'm going to ride on your coattails there, Matt, and say, yes, wouldn't it be nice if there was an aspirational bit of shortcuts in a keynote at some point? Because that's, I mean, can you imagine just like Steve Jobs

introducing something like shortcuts? It's like, oh, now all of the power of technology is just in these little buttons and you just have to drag. It's like so cool. He would be like, am I out in the wilderness? Boom. And he would touch a thing and say boom. And his phone would totally change and he'd be like, huh?

Right? And then, right? I can picture it, right? And that's exactly it. It doesn't have to explain it all. It doesn't have to be like, oh, well, we've added this feature and it's it's very important it's sort of like look what you can do with the stuff we made and i i and shortcuts has that power right in it and you're right maybe not quite yet is the time but wouldn't it be nice if we got to the time where they could say you use shortcuts to do this not

let me explain shortcuts to you but like just look what you can do with our devices. Totally. Because they, I want them to be excited because they use it too, is another part of it. Because I think that is something that I think people inside of Apple do seem excited about it. And I think I just want to see that expanded out to the users too, because it seems like people sort of don't believe in it for some reason. And probably because they opened it and couldn't figure it out. But once that is gone and other people are doing what we're all doing, I'm so excited for that time.

Because even just like I've done so much, but there's no way I can solve everybody else's problems. And everybody has these unique situations. And they all have the capability to do it too. That's what gets me is just that it once you get past that learning curve if apple can lower that huge jump that you have to get into then everybody can cut like this is learning to code but you don't have to learn how to code and i think that's so cool anything else on your list

matthew i was uh i i cut you off there with my enthusiasm for your keynote. I think some of the galleries that, like, honestly, the one that Rosemary mentioned was made before we added Magic Variables to the app. And then, like, that was my job at a certain time was making the gallery. And I can see stuff in there that I made, and I haven't worked there in like four or five years. So I am a little like some of that. I just don't, I don't know. It is kind of just confusing because it's one of those things that's sort of like if the person who would have done that didn't work there anymore, they're just not doing that.

And I don't want that to be the case for shortcuts. I think it deserves more. and i don't want that to be the case for shortcuts i think it deserves more and i'm going to throw in one last uh wish list item and i know this is going to be esoteric but rose mentioned carplay i'm going to mention the apple watch and say i i use my apple i have a cellular apple watch and i go without my phone a lot uh if I'm walking the dog or running or whatever, I'm using my Apple Watch on cellular without a phone. And I know it's a weird little thing, but I wish shortcuts was more capable on the Apple Watch. I'm not going to write the shortcuts on the Apple Watch, but there is an invisible gap between, you know, will this run if my phone's not around? And some of them will, and some of them won't. And I wish, I wish more of them would run. And I wish it was also clearer, especially when you say, put this on my Apple watch. I wish

it was much clearer about whether it can run independently or whether it has to talk to your phone in order to get what is done because there is something not just the ui but the the siri interface being able to say into your apple watch um do this thing or i use it for like what's the temperature now right like it's because it's me it's weather automation but um I love it. And yet there are other tasks that it just will spin on forever and then finally come back and say, essentially, I can't find your iPhone. It's like, well, why do you need my iPhone? And the answer is, well, there's a trap somewhere in that shortcut that requires an action that must talk to my iPhone and I don't have my iPhone. So I'd like it to be better. And that's, that goes back to the number one point, which is consistency across platforms. And like,

and when, when your platforms aren't consistent, either try to make them more consistent or communicate why they're not consistent. I do wonder if that could be resolved with this sort of app clippy type idea that I mentioned, you know, because if you've got the app for that action on your Apple Watch, if it can have those shortcuts actions and support for that built in, now, obviously, you know, your Apple Watch is pretty slimmed down, but, you know, it would be really cool if at the very least you would get some kind of marking that would say, hey, this isn't going to work, you know, like when your HomePod's like, I'm sorry, I can't do that. And you don't know that it can't do it because it didn't understand, or if it ran in some kind of limitation, you know, like when your HomePod's like, I'm sorry, I can't do that. And you don't know that it can't do it because it didn't understand

or if it ran in some kind of limitation, you know, maybe just don't respond on the HomePod with this action. You already have that whole competition. Exactly. Of devices. HomePod is a whole other story where I feel like that like ruins the potential

for like half my shortcuts because it'll just capture the Siri part and then say it can't do it. And it's like, okay, tell the computer that can do it to run it, please. Are there other devices in this house? Well, then perhaps. Yeah, like, yeah.

Did you take over from one of them? Well, thank you so much for letting me geek out about automation on Apple's platforms. I really appreciate it in this special summer fun, summer of automation episode of Upgrade. One last time, let me thank you all. Federico, people can listen to you

on Connected and App Stories and read you at Mac Stories. Anything else that you'd like to promote? Anything else? Well, I'm hanging out on the Cloud Mac Stories Discord these days. And I'm posting pictures

of the new desk and the new office space that I'm building. So yeah, that's another place where I'm hanging out. Nice. Very nice. Rosemary Orchard, I've got you down. Automators here at Real AFM. iOS Today on the Twit Network. RosemaryOrchard.com.

Anything else you'd like to promote? And thank you for being here. Oh, no problem. I mean, I also hang out in various discords. I'm usually hanging out in the RelayFM discord, but I'm also in the ClubTwit discord where there is a weekly shortcuts corner where people can submit questions that I solve.

And every so often, Micah throws me a curveball and gives me one that I've never seen before to solve live on air, which is always really good fun. But yeah, other than that, Take Control of Shortcuts 2 has shipped. So anybody that's got the first one gets a discount off of the new one,

unless they bought it in the last 90 days, in which case it's free. And other than that, there's a whole host of shortcuts, shortcut apps, and so on, shared in the book that you can just download. So certainly worth checking that out if you haven't already.

Nice. And thank you, Matthew Casanelli. MatthewCasanelli.com seems to be the one-stop shop for all the things you do, right? Isn't that the point? You got to funnel it all through the personal blog. I mean, I've got my What's New in Shortcuts newsletter that I do on Sundays. And just like, I look at every tweet that ever mentions shortcuts and pretty much put all the best ones in there. And then I've been doing YouTube streams and I'm coming back with videos,

but it turns out translating, learning to code into shortcuts is very challenging on videos sometimes. But yeah, you can check that out too. Nice. Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. can check that out too nice well thank you all for being here thank you thank you thank you jason

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How long do you think it will be until a Mac update is small or boring enough for them to simply announce it via press release? Oh, wow. what a question i had some criteria on this i want to see if you if you agree with me right okay there's like a couple of things a couple of things i think are going on i think they're going to keep doing them as events if there's a new chip provision right so wherever it's m's M2, M2 Pro, right? Like every time they're going to have a new chip, they'll do it as part of an event, I think, for the foreseeable future. Because it's, hey, it's new.

We can show you some graphs. We can, Johnny Cerugy can talk to you in the lab, right? If there's a new design, definitely an event, right? Of course, because that's like a once in a blue moon kind of thing. Like here's a brand new computer. We've had a lot of it the last couple of years.

Doesn't usually happen this way, right? Here's a brand new industrial design for every single Mac. For me, I would like think the first kind of like, no, one of the things to remember is that they used to do this because they didn't really have full control of everything, right? Like Intel set the roadmap and they would deliver the

chips when they could or when they would so sometimes apple would want to put a new chip in a mac and there wouldn't be an event to tie it up to so they just here's a press release and now it goes and i would kind of assume now that they have control of the timing of everything so why not add it to when they release something else right like maybe like if they put an m2 pro chip in a mac mini and it wasn't at the time that they introduced the m2 pro in a in another product for some reason maybe they would do that but i don't know i imagine for the foreseeable future they'll just tie them to events apple controls everything right because they control everything so they might as well i think yeah i think my guess is that the first time we get a

boring press release update it will be for a product that is getting something boring out of sync with something else for some reason but i agree it probably isn't going to happen but like let's say you know maybe next year or the year after there is a M2 to M3, let's say, upgrade that is not interesting. Like if they weren't updating the Mac Mini to support a pro chip, I could see them saying, you know, oh, well, we and the Mac Mini gets the M2. But even then, if it was presumably they would just do it as part of an m2 product rollout and and say so but since we have m2s now i could see a scenario where if there's no yeah if there's no pro chip in the cards for the mac mini they might do that by press release but i i think it's going to be that confluence of factors that'll lead to something like that and it's a lot less likely

now that they're staggering their chip rollouts and their product rollouts uh based on you know their own schedule so so i think it's going to be a while yeah and as well because there's just so much new still going on like they they can still like it's still exciting right like at a certain point it's like the m6 pro chip is probably not going to be that exciting like we know what it means at that point like if they're just going to put an m6 mac pro in the current version of the macbook pro and the imac pro like that might not be worthy of the time in an event to then like if it was ready in july would you hold it to october or would you just put it out? Like at that point, we might be far enough down this road that it's not so exciting anymore, right? But for the next few, like if they have the M2 Pro chip

and it's going in the current MacBook Pro and there's nothing new to announce, I could imagine that being in an event because M2 Pro is going to be fun and interesting in its own way, right? It's new. Right. Yeah. Nick Lake asks, you're handed the keys to apple park and

told that you get to make changes to one apple device so it's perfectly catered to your desires based on hardware specifications what device do you choose and what changes are you making my answers are so simple for this that i'm just going to get them out there because they're going to surprise no one because i speak about these things all the time. I want an Apple Watch without a screen, like just a fitness band, right? Like a nice looking, basically like just an all the way around Apple Watch strap, right? That can just track all my fitness and I can put that on my right arm and then I can wear whatever watch I want on my left arm and be truly happy you know that's all i need for true happiness uh or an apple tv home pod combo like either a soundbar or whatever

just put those two things together and i'll be happy so i'm not sure that's in the spirit of this question which is sort of like nope i know jesus one apple device yeah but i i see i see what you do. I mean, arguably, it's an Apple Watch without a screen. My first one is a little bit more. The second one, I'm just throwing it in there. But the first one, the specification is remove the screen part.

Put all the guts inside of the watch band. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, could it be like taking an iPhone 14 and making it mini? Yeah, well, that is exactly where I was going to go. Why don't we just do an iPhone 14 mini then? iPhone 14 Pro mini. Okay.

How about that? About four hours of battery life. I mean, who needs battery life really yeah that's what external batteries are for anyway uh but yeah something like that um the other thing i was going to say is something that's the size of a mini but folds out into something larger or even better um how about a uh like an ipad like a folding ipad that gets goes from smaller to bigger because i love i do love the iPad. I have more. An iPad Mini with an OLED display.

Oh. Interesting. Or a micro mini LED or whatever it's called. The good one in the iPad. Give me that because, I mean, honestly you could just give me the iPad Mini with the same display that the iPad Air has in it and I'd be happy because I don't care what anyone says maybe it's technically the same display it's not as high

quality like the mini's display is a binned version of the displays they use in the other iPads for sure because it's just not as good so the ship has sailed on this because of the purchases I've made, but what I really want to say is M2 Pro iMac at 27 inches. That's really the one that would be the one that I would have bought, but now that I've got the display, it's not going to happen. Or put an M2 Pro chip inside of the studio display. Just ready to go.

All right. Just ready to go. She's ready to go. Or, while we're at it, we're on fire now. Touch ID in a trackpad. That's a great one. Touch ID in the Magic trackpad is a great one. I'll also throw in... We're all over it now. We're all over it now.

The Magic keyboard for iPad with a function row. Oh, that's good. Yeah, okay. I had to put that one together in my brain for a second.. Oh, that's good. Yeah, okay. I had to put that one together in my brain for a second. But yeah, I like that. With a function row so you can control media and brightness and stuff that you can't do on Apple's keyboard for the iPad, which is frustrating. I had somebody, Jason Heiner, who I have collaborated with a bunch who works at ZDNet.

He wants that. And he said also with Touch ID on it. And I was like, I don't think Apple's going to do Touch ID on an iPad keyboard, even though there are iPads that don't have Face ID, and it might work better than Face ID in certain circumstances and all that. I get it, and yet I don't think they're going to do that. But a function row, that I can slide through. Actually, no, I don't think you need that.

Because the Touch ID is so close, even if it's, you know what I mean? You don't need it i agree apple pencil with a button on it instead of the tapping thing the tapping thing doesn't work reliably enough just put a button on it and it will open it up to a whole set of features so nick who said one apple device what did you expect what did yeah you choose we've given you a bunch now you can choose dom wants to know how did you both choose your twitter usernames okay well mine is my first initial and last name right but the question has been my login why j why not jason snell why jay snell because it's been my login on everything forever since I first got a custom user login in college to a Unix system. And so they're all just JSNL if I can get them. But do you remember

why did you initially choose JSNL? I didn't. First initial last name was assigned to everybody at UCSD in 1989. I don't understand how these universities work. I didn't go to university, neither did I would I have ever when there was a Unix machine. So I didn't know that it was first level. I don't know about that. What are you talking about?

Unix is eternal. It's still everywhere. I guarantee you. It's on your Mac right now. Yeah, but no one's assigning me a username. Or anyone, right, in university. I don't know. You have two children in university.

Were either of them assigned a Unix username? No, but they were assigned a single sign-on username. Okay. So they're still assigned a username. I will tell you right now, I hate my Twitter username. I hate it. Oh, I also want to mention my kids are also Jsnell, but they have to put numbers and stuff after their username

because there are so many Jsnells at the university. You ruined the... Not me. But there's multiple in the family. That's true, too. So if you had to have family Unix usernames, then you ruined that for them. So iMike, would you prefer to be Apple Mike now no i would prefer at mike hurley which is a twitter username

that i own but i feel like at this point i've gone too far down the rabbit hole you know like i'm in it now i was i don't know it was 2015 and no, was it 2005? Oh my god, I just did that thing. Yeah, you just drop a decade. That's what happens when you get old. Oh, Jesus. That feels so gross. It's 2005 and I needed a username

for Gmail. And I was like, oh, I did it. which one came first to the gmail or twitter i think i'm up to the first and i was like oh i know what i'll do this the ipod's cool and everything was i back then right everything was i back then you know that was the cool thing to do. And so I was like, I'll get iMac. It's like iMac. That's fun, right?

And now here I am all these years later. And I would love to be at Mike Hurley. I would love it. I would love it. But I feel like at this point, I can't do it. I was going to do it a while ago, and Stephen recommended I don't do it. He said it's too inbuilt now. It's part of the personal brand.

But when I set up new things now, I tend to go with Mike Hurley more often than not, to be honest. But here I am. I'm iMike and I don't like it. I think you could change it. I think you could move your user to Mike Hurley. But it's the inertia.

Steven's just saying that because he did it too. Yeah. Because he's ISMH and that's his initials with an I before it and he can't be Stephen Hackett because of the Genesis player the Genesis guitar player or whatever but I could be Mike Hurley if I wanted to be but here I am

and Simon wrote in haptic keyboard feedback on iOS 16. Yes or no? Yes. Oh, yeah? I tried it and didn't like it. I don't know why.

I like it. I've liked it on every other phone that I've used. I cannot explain this. This doesn't make any sense, all right? But look, I'm just telling you how I feel. It made me feel nauseous. Do I know why? No.

Weird. But maybe the day I tried it i wasn't feeling great maybe i was because i was going through my covid right so maybe i have linked these things together and so for me if i use the haptic keyboard when i was 16 it makes me remember what it was like to have covid and now i can't get rid of it. But if I turn it back on, I tried it. Like I tried turning it back on a couple of weeks ago and it made me feel nauseous again to use it. Does that make any sense?

You're suffering from long haptics. Long haptics, yeah. No, I like it. I think it's pleasant and it's good to have that extra feedback. And typing on the iPhone mini, you know, it's a little cramped. I bet. And it's kind of good to have. Yeah, just imagine, right, Mike?

Imagine a little phone. Weird. And so having that feedback, it's a bonus. I like it. I enjoy it. Yep. I'm sad I can't use it because it's a feature I wanted. And then they added it, and now I can't use it.

So, you know, it is what it is. If you would like to send in a question of your own to be answered on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use the question mark AskUpgrade in the Real AFM members Discord. Thank you if you are a Real AFM member, especially if you support Upgrade.

And thanks to our sponsors, Doppler, DoorDash, Fitbot, and Sourcegraph. If you'd like to find Jason online, you can go to at Jason L, Jason E-double-L. Unix, and you can, you know, the oft-known Unix name. Vax and VMS generated name.

I-Mike, you say. It's funny, right? Like the iMac. Yeah, it's funny, right? It's funny. Jason is at, I already said that one, sixcolors.com go there and read some stuff that jason writes sure thank you to our guests of this week's episode matt castanelli federico vatici and rosemary orchard there'll be some links in the notes so you can go and find

their projects go follow them and thank them for uh being on this week's episode like we have uh that's it that's it That's it. That's it. That's it. Say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.