Upgrade - 51: Fight Against the Fiddly Bits

Episode Date: August 24, 2015

This week we break down what adding Force Touch to iOS might mean, highlighting the difficult design and marketing choices Apple has to make when it rolls out new products. Also, Jason shocks Myke by saying something nice about pens, we address some WarGames and Twitter follow-up, and we answer your #askupgrade questions.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 51 today's show is brought to you by squarespace build it beautiful stamps.com postage on demand and go to meeting make it easy to meet with your team whenever you need to wherever you are my name is mike hurley Hurley, and I am joined, as always, by Mr. Six Colors, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. What color am I today? Green. Okay, today's a green day. Good. I have colors for six of the days, and on the seventh day I rest. No color.

No color. Have you picked the day that's transparent it's on the uh the sabbath but for people for for my religion i just made up the sabbath is is tuesday tuesday when a lot of apple announcements happen yeah i'd like to be i'd like to be completely transparent on that day i have no color whatsoever. Can't trust me on any other day. Nope. Just Tuesdays. Yes.

It's good we record on Monday then, I suppose. Yeah, it is. It is. How's it going? Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. Start of a brand new week. It's raining here in London a lot today, even more than usual.

But yeah, I'm down from the high of the Relay birthday week. It was a great week last week. Lots of really fun and exciting things happening. If you haven't seen it, I would love it if you would go and read the article that TechCrunch wrote about us. It's a little bit of follow-up and follow-out. Yeah, that's it. Great article. I actually was kind of embarrassed by it because it's so detailed.

I'm like, wow, that's a lot of words that that guy wrote about Relay. 3,000. Mm-hmm. great great article kind of i actually was kind of embarrassed by it because it's so detailed i'm like wow that's a lot of words that that guy wrote about relay 3000 and uh did you notice about uh the part where i said about uh and and romaine quoted it about how many people have come to relay because of because of your fine self yeah i am relay's rainmaker you are just what it turns out i i am i'm the cool finder. I'm the rainmaker. I'm making it rain right now on you in London. I should make it rain here in California. We need the rain. Yeah. Don't give it to me. We've got tons of it. You need it more than I do. I made a horrible mistake. I just got back from a sort of long weekend trip to Spokane,

Washington for the World Science Fiction Convention, which more importantly was also a meeting of many incomparable panelists. And we did a couple of podcasts and we did a live incomparable radio drama at the convention. And I got to meet some cool people and hang out with a lot of those. So many of my podcast pals are people I don't get to see in person like almost ever so that was pretty cool we got to we got to actually see each other um in person it was very very cool and we recorded clockwise we did dan moran and i were in clockwise number 100 came out last week and dan moran and i were in the uh in a hotel room in spokane washington recording

that and you and steven were nice to actually host the shows for us. And so you weren't there, but you were there in spirit. I always am. Wherever you are, you're there in spirit. Wherever you are. Wherever I am, yes. You're one

of my little Jedi ghosts that urges me on to do good things whenever I'm, I don't know, walking around. So at the moment, I'm going through a phase of buying an incredible amount of input devices for my Mac. It's the season. I currently have on my desk, I am not exaggerating, I have three mice, a trackpad, and a Wacom tablet. Are you shopping around? Because I know you've got your two-fisted input device method.

Have you decided that it's more efficient to have three mice and a tablet? And you're driving one with your nose, as you do, because you're a nose toucher. As I want to do. I'm putting them through their paces, and we spoke about it a bit on Connected last week. And on this week's episode of Connected, I'm going to talk about a new purchase that I made. I've bought a new mouse, which is quite a stupendous piece of equipment. So I was just interested, because this is what I'm thinking about right now. What do you use?

I have a Magic Trackpad. I was actually listening to all of the trackpad discussion. This is some more follow-out too on ATP. All of their talk about mice and trackpads and tap-to-click versus actual, which I hate. I hate tap-to-click. I know.

See, tap-to-click is the podcaster's friend. Oh, no, it's not. No, not this podcaster. It's my enemy. Oh, because it's silent. And I will see it defeated in all its places. I am adding things to our show notes right now in complete silence because I'm tap to clicking. Do you hear that, Mike?

Do you hear me clicking? Do you hear me clicking right now? Yes, it's like thunder in my ears, Jason. No, that's a lie. You cannot hear my click. My click of my little magic trackpad is essentially silent. But I used to be a trackball user. For years, I used the trackball.

And only a couple years ago, probably longer than that now, three or four years ago, I switched to the magic trackpad because I love the trackpad gestures. And I use those all the time. And so when I'm, and when I'm editing podcasts, there was a bug at some point, I don't know whether it was an early version of, um, it might've been in an early version of El Capitan, um, uh, where at some point, um, whatever service reads, uh, multi-touch crashed in the background. I've had this. I've had this. So I was in Logic and I was trying to scroll and trying to zoom and I'm like, why is nothing happening?

And I had to reboot and then it was fine. But I had that moment of like, wow, I really rely on trackpad gestures to do what I do. And that's why I switched to the trackpad. I've had it just break in certain scenarios on our capitan so like for example i can scroll web pages but can't scroll in the notification center to get the joint stuff they just be like really weird weirder yeah but yeah that that explains why it wasn't working i didn't put two and two together that i was running the

beta i assume that's what it is is that there there's, I mean, because apps can lose it, but this was like system-wide, I just couldn't do gestures anymore. I was like, this is really bad because I do rely on it. So that's always been my thing. So I don't do tap to click, but I do use the magic trackpad. That's my input device. I used to use a Kensington trackball for years and years and years and liked it because I liked the big, as they mentioned on ATP, I like the fact that you can do kind of big gestures to move the,

for me, mouse use was always, you know, it's super like your hand is tight, your fingers are kind of grasping that mouse, and then you're kind of very carefully moving it around. And what I liked about the trackball is that you can make big gestures, just kind of roll the ball up into the corner and then click and things like that. And I essentially still do that. The habits from those days serve me pretty well with the trackpad because I can still just sort of like flip my finger across the trackpad and the cursor goes in the general direction I want it to go. What – okay, so why do you have the graphics tablet since you are not uh an artist gray uses one and he uses it for audio editing i told you to stop hanging out with this guy he's a bad influence i know and he suggested it to me to try and it's surprisingly compelling as a as a way to do fine audio editing.

So I'm trying them all out, because right now I can't decide which of this incredible new mouse that I have, again, no spoilers, and this Wacom tablet, and the Magic Trackpad, and my Logitech mouse that I have, the MX mouse, between all of these things. Oh, I also use a Magic Mouse. All of these things, I'm trying to work out what is the right one for me at the moment. Because I'm trying to do a couple of things. I'm trying to prevent RSI problems, right? That is something I just need to be considerate about. So I'm trying to use the right kind of stuff,

good ergonomic stuff. But I'm also trying to find what is the thing that can make me the most efficient with audio editing. Because as well, I use two hands right now, but I would like to not have to do that. And also trying to find something that can be replicated wherever I'm working.

I think the next time I come to London, I need to stand over your shoulder and watch you edit something. And you need to take me to whatever secret bunker Gray lives in, or works in, adjacent to wherever secret bunker he lives in. And I need to watch how he edits too because i i'm fascinated i don't understand how this could possibly work yeah i'm tempted to actually try and make a video of this at some point because i've had a couple of people say like with this two-handed mode that i have so i use the trackpad over my left hand for gestures zooming and panning stuff like that and then a mouse and my right hand for like to do precision editing and i use the keyboard as well with like keyboard gesture keyboard shortcuts to keyboard

gestures i stroke my keyboard uh with your nose naturally and i use a bunch of keyboard shortcuts right and so between those three things that's how i use logic and this is to some people makes perfect sense because they do it themselves but to other people they're they're very puzzled by it so i'm thinking about maybe at some point trying to make a video of some description to just try and highlight what exactly what i'm doing here yeah yeah because it's i i wonder and the idea of using a i know people who use a pen input for interface and they really get into it. But I don't know. I have a hard time conceiving of editing audio that way, but maybe so. I've created my own crazy way of doing audio editing in order to be as fast as I can in logic.

But I just have one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the trackpad, just like I do when I'm using my computer for everything else. And, and, uh, you know, I've got keyboard shortcuts and I've got, you know, pointing and panning and zooming all happening with the one trackpad. That's the, why they make all these different pointing devices, I guess, is that everybody can come up with their own thing that works for them. But it's just funny. I have a hard time even conceiving how you do it. So I would love to see, yeah, I guess, is that everybody can come up with their own thing that works for them. But it's just funny. I have a hard time even conceiving how you do it. So I would love to see, yeah,

I'd love to see a video or something. Yeah, maybe I should work on that. Should we do some follow-up? We'll start off with some follow-up on Mike and the movies last week. Yeah. So War Games follow-up. So there will be some very light spoilers for this 80s movie.

Would you like to go ahead and explain sure what we received yeah so nolan we we talked a lot about like why do they come toward the end of the movie just right into the last at the beginning of the last act of the movie um when the kids are on the beach and they're and they've decided the world's going to end and they're kissing and it's just going to be this nice romantic moment at the end of the world and then there's bright lights and a helicopter and like what is going on in that scene um and you know we talked about did the army come for them but falcon but falcon is there but there's like an army or norad or something there's like lightning bolt symbol on the side fake probably uh on the side of the helicopter so it's a military helicopter but falcon is there so we're wondering sort of like and it's a military helicopter, but Falcon is there. So we're wondering sort of like, and it's never really explained.

And then they're rushed to NORAD and they go in through that big vault door that will crush them if they don't just sort of sneak in there. So Nolan wrote in and said, it seems to me that Professor Falcon has come to his senses, calls NORAD. So he was convinced sort of by the kids argument, calls NORAD and has enough heavy pull with them to get the kids and get a helicopter and go save the world. And McKittrick, Dabney Coleman doesn't know anything about it. So there's no way he found them to get them. And isn't he surprised to see Falcon when they arrive? So that's his suggestion. Nolan's suggestion is that Falcon is somehow involved in this. I think that's valid. I think it's also valid that in this moment where it looks like they're going to DEFCON 1,

that they might pick Falcon up from his retirement and call him into action for this just in case they need him at the end of the world and he picks up the kids. But it's not ever clear. But it is true that Falcon seems to be potentially more complicit in what happens than I was giving him credit for. My headcanon is that Falcon made a telephone call.

Yeah. It could be. When they get to Norad, he still doesn't seem entirely convinced, but it may just be that he's decided he wants it may be that he's decided he wants to see it he wants to see the end of the world he wants to either get more information or just watch while the world burns that may be what he's doing there because he he still seems to need convincing at the end although that may also be part of his thing with matthew broderick where he's basically he sees himself in the kid and he wants the kid to work it out. He started this. If the kid can work it out, then the kid can solve it.

And so maybe it's that he's not really undecided so much as he's, he wants to guide Matthew Broderick to do it instead. I don't know. I have to watch it again. Let's do that. Let's take a break and we'll watch the movie. We'll let you know what we think uh kevin wrote in uh and pointed out and this is i i will stand by the fact that it's totally insane that there's a school group touring the headquarters of america's nuclear uh nuclear missile arsenal um however according to listener kevin uh until the uh until 1999 you could uh call up and say i'd like a tour of norad

and they would give you a tour of norad i that's crazy but there you go i'm i he sent us a link to an article about how um the tours were curtailed in 1999 um and i wonder if uh after uh 9-11 if they if they stopped them all together that i don't know but in the eight in the 80s in the 80s you could take a tour of norad something i don't know if you know the answer to this but i just thought of it was the movie filmed there uh i don't i don't think so i think they built a giant set in fact i think there are some articles about famously about this this huge set that they built for uh john syracuse talks about that a little bit in the incomparable episode about it it's a spectacular huge control room set that they've got right because i mean the outside shots though i mean yeah i think so although i mean they there are lots of establishing

shots that are you know the the cheyenne Mountain complex, the Stargate, the TV show uses those because that's where it's set. The whole secret, you know, not even secret, government base inside a mountain is a, you know, that's, it's a real thing and a movie and TV trope. But I don't know if that footage is from there or not. It might be. But they've got some action stuff, you know, where they're trying to get inside the gates and all of that and you know i'm pretty sure there's not a bank vault door on the entrance although maybe they just use that door they use that door a lot well it might not look like that the door in war games looks like it's from a bank vault yeah like from a bank vault set right it doesn't look to me like that would be something that the that the actual

facility would use it probably use something a lot less interesting looking than a shiny bank vault. Yeah, they probably shot that part in a bank or something like that. Yeah, or they've got a bank vault set somewhere, you know, in some movie studio lot that they used. I don't know. Anyway, that was good feedback. And I heard from a lot of people.

We got a lot of nice mentions on Twitter from people who were excited that we talked about war games because it definitely, especially people of a more nerdy persuasion of a certain age. And this includes me. It holds a it holds a special place in our hearts. And like I said, this would not make my top 10 films, favorite films list like some of the movies we watched on this show. But it still holds a special place in my heart because it was, you know, anybody who was into computers in the early 80s,

this was the movie that spoke to us, really, for the first time. Like, that's somebody like us. And he almost destroyed the world. We still have some more follow-up to get to, but let me take our first break for this week's episode and thank our friends over at GoToMeeting from citrix for sponsoring this week's show so i want you to think about all of the time money and hassle that it takes to hold a meeting at work

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You have to just coordinating calendars with people is an absolute disaster and a mess because people have to think about their traveling time and maybe they're on the 31st floor so they're late because they have to get to the 10th floor. You don't want to have to do any of this because there is a better way and that way is GoToMeeting from Citrix. You can meet your clients and co-workers online. It is the smarter way to meet. GoToMeeting makes it easy for you to be able to meet with your teams wherever you are,

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I could watch the slides that were being presented because my iphone my small little iphone 3g i could watch the slides that were being presented because you can share your screen right you can review it and get feedback and i would be able to watch the slides and sales director and he was talking us through what was going on and i could watch it right there on my phone your team is able to join your meeting by just clicking a link no signups no bumps. You just enter your name and you're good to go. You can also turn on your webcam and with HD quality video, it's just like being in the room. With GoToMeeting, everyone sees what you're seeing. So you and your team can get on the same page and get going quickly. Stop wasting time with the crazy logistics of arranging meetings. Go and sign up for GoToMeeting today. You can try it out for free for 30 days, and there's absolutely nothing to lose.

Just visit GoToMeeting.com and click the Try It Free button, and you'll have your first meeting up and running in just minutes. Once again, that is GoToMeeting.com for your free 30-day trial. Thank you so much to Citrix GoToMeeting for supporting this show. Really a great, just a really great product. I used it a lot and it saved my bacon a bunch of times, especially when I was late for meetings and I couldn't attend them on the train.

You want their special product, LateToMeeting. Yeah, I'll pitch them on that one. That's a good idea. So I see something here that excites me, Jason. A link from Six Colors in our show notes here. Yes. With the title on notes, the pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Yes. What do we have here? Well, I don't believe it. Don't believe it. It's not true. But there's a really interesting story that I linked to that ran on KQED, which is the local public broadcaster here in the San Francisco area, actually, talking about a study published in the journal Psychological Science where they did tests about people taking notes in the classroom. Students taking notes by writing them down on paper or by using a computer.

And what they found, first round they found, is that people tended to write verbatim what was being said when they did their transcribing on the computer. Whereas on a piece of paper, you can't write that fast. Nobody can write that fast. So they were doing summaries. They were trying to boil things down. And for a long time, people have felt, and there have been studies, I believe, to show this, that the act of processing what you've heard and boiling it down

into something in your notes helps you to remember it. In fact, I can think of a slogan that reflects that. My favorite paper manufacturer, Field Notes. I love my Field Notes notebooks. And they said, they say their slogan is, I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now. And I think that really does come from a place like I know that that's the way I feel. I'm a big pen and paper guy. I think a lot of people know this um and when i write things down when i take notes i feel like it engages other parts of my brain and it helps me process the information in a better way um and i'm able and i think that i'm able to do faster on pen and paper things like make emphasis or something in an interesting way right so i can like circle it and i can put an exclamation mark next to it,

which is, I think, more difficult for me anyway to do something like that on a computer. I can change the colour of it, but it doesn't feel right. It doesn't have that tactile feel of circling it twice and underlining it and drawing a little arrow that comes out the side. You can do all of this stuff in apps like OmniGraffle, but it takes longer to do, to draw the circles and draw the arrows.

And there isn't that visceral feeling about it anyway for me like there is with pen and paper, which is why I continue to be very excited about the idea of an iPad with a stylus. of a stylus. So what these, and I see what you're saying. That's one of my favorite things about taking notes on paper is that you end up circling things and drawing things. They encourage people in this study to doodle as well, which I believe improved. I think one of the groups was encouraged to doodle and doodling improved recollection, which is also interesting. Talk about engaging other parts of your brain. You're engaging outside the language centers, right? Arrows and circles and little smiley faces and stick figures and things like that are coming from a different place than the language centers, than generating the words. And certainly they're coming from a different place than things passing through your ears to your fingers in a transcript where you may not have any real recollection of what's being said. You're just trying to get a string of words down, which is a problem. Anyway,

in the study, they then went back and told the people on the, another group on the computers to not do verbatim transcription and instead think about and try to summarize. And the note takers still did better. And they had the verbatim note takers study their transcripts that they had written and then come back the next day. And the note takers still did better. So the suggestion, and there's more studying to do, they want to do more on this. But the suggestion here is that perhaps just the act of writing with pen on paper and listening to what somebody is saying is going to be more effective as a learning tool

than bringing in a computer. And this was all with a laptop. Bringing in a computer and typing in your notes. And I can totally see that. I totally, I can totally see that. I have always been a, even when I take notes on a computer, I've been a summarizer, but I'm a much worse note taker on the computer than I am on a piece of paper. It is, it is, here it is, even me and my hatred of paper and pens, admitting that I think they're a better note taking medium in general for that.

And all of my handwriting is terrible. I can usually recognize it at least soon after I've written. Don't show me something I wrote a year ago without any context. I won't have any idea what I said, but I can do it for the near term. I am curious about how this might be different if you use like a tablet with a with a stylus, like you said, for this rumored iPad Pro, would that be essentially you're writing in ink, so it doesn't matter. And it would have the same impact on your brain.

And then so that I'm curious about. I don't know. I also wondered, I wrote a piece for Macworld a couple years ago about writing articles on an iPad using the software keyboard, just very slowly tapping away on an iPad on its screen. So not being able to type my 120 words a minute, but much slower and how the writing, my writing style was different when I did that. Because I think, again, I was engaging some different parts of my brain and I was also slowing myself down. So I had to more carefully consider every letter and every word and the sentence construction. I couldn't just zip past that sentence to the next one.

I had to get it all down. And as a result, I thought about it in a different way. And I wonder if that is also something that would be similar here, that if you were just typing it in on your phone or your ipad would you do a better job because you're forced to summarize because you just couldn't get it all down otherwise that i don't know i'm curious but i thought it was cool and it was pen related so i wanted to bring it up for you too you know it's gonna make me happy i i did i did but um yeah i don't i it seems totally reasonable to me that that would be that would be true that uh that and probably people who, you know, students are told, bring your laptop to class and take notes.

I would hope that this kind of research would lead people in education to suggest to, you know, keep the laptops closed. Plus they're a distraction, but keep the laptops closed and, you know, get out your pen and take notes during class. And because that's probably the most effective way to remember what you're being taught. So I want to just do one last piece of follow-up for this week, which is a recommendation that Matthew Panzarino made on the last episode of The Talk Show with John Gruber about the Magic Rex Twitter account. Are you familiar with this? Do you know what this is?

Yeah, I've been using it for a while. So it's a Twitter account that you follow. It's at Magic Rex, R-E-C-S. And it DMs you every now and then with a recommendation of somebody you should follow or a tweet that you should look for. So I've been following it for a few weeks now, and I'm happy to say that I really like it. It works really well. And I have basically what it does is it's maybe every few days, I think it's been happening for me. It will send me a DM, be like Jason, John and Casey, but all followed this person. And it gives you a link to their

account and you can just go look at them or uh three people you know follow uh favorited this tweet in the last seven seconds right and and so that tends to be what it's unearthing is interesting people to follow that i don't know or maybe should know uh and also it's it's highlighting to me tweets that people think are important which tend to be either big news stories or things to congratulate someone on but it's it's helping me find like all of the things that it's suggested to me so far was stuff i didn't know about so i think it's fantastic. Casey List, John Syracusa, Daniel Jalkut, and one more, because it ran out of space, followed Tanya Latner, who is the new president of the LLVM Foundation, which was just created,

right? Well, we follow a lot of the same people. So that was like, here is an interesting person. And a lot of times I end up following those people. And then a few days ago, I got one that was a tweet by Dan Morin was just favorited by David Lohr, Tony Sindelar, and Paul Weimer, who's another science fiction podcaster. And that was Dan's tweet with pictures of us recording the live incomparable in Spokane. So as it was going on, not only did Dan post pictures without me knowing, but I got a direct message sent to me from Magic Rex saying, people like this, which was also cool. So, and then I'll just share one more, which is Tiffany Arment's tweet of the people at the museum sitting on the benches and it's three older ladies and Marco. That one got favorited by a lot of people really fast. So,

yeah, Magic Rex is great. It's not, I wouldn't say it's spotty enough that, you know, it feels to me like a good technology demonstration of the power that Twitter has, speaking of our past episodes, the power that Twitter has to do some amazing things with their data. And I wish that it was more customizable and it could happen more often and I could see it in more places than just what magic rex spits out every couple of days um but it's uh but it's great for what it is i just i wish i think it's a good example of how powerful uh features are that they could build internally into a twitter and uh and make uh the service that much more useful. So they mentioned it on the show, and it kind of makes sense that this

technology is powering a lot of the recommendation stuff that Twitter does in the official app. But the thing that makes this different is this is highlighting maybe the most pertinent things rather than because it's a permanent fixture in the Twitter app. It's not always that useful. things rather than because it's a permanent fixture in the twitter app it's not always that useful yeah yeah this is um yeah it's i mean what i love about it is how personal it is it is based on who you know um and then from that it's floating things out just like nuzzle does a great job with news because it's based on who you know and so everybody's magic wrecks are going to be different but it's bubbling under the surface of twitter and they're, they're using it in a few places. And this is what we've heard is that, you know, there are things going on on

Twitter to use this stuff even more. And it's great. Yeah. I recommend that people follow it because it's not going to be sort of like, um, you know, Oprah is tweeting about things, right? It's not that unless you love Oprah and follow Oprah and a bunch of things like that, it's going to be these really targeted at the people that you follow and who follow you. So top tip. Good one. Good tip. False touch. Talk a bit about false touch today. This is a topic that's been doing the rounds a little bit, but we haven't spoken about it too much here. So this is mainly in the idea, this is in the news right now,

because everybody is expecting that false touch will probably be the marquee feature of the S line of phones that's about to come out. Because, you know, you end up with something like Retina or something like that. This false touch will end up being the thing you know retina siri that type of stuff so what are your feelings about false touch on bigger uh platforms you know like the ipad and the iphone so these big screens that we have oh it is you're right it is funny this is the um this is like the feature feature that keeps creeping. And so we're all just sort of speculating that it will continue to creep across the product line, even though we've only seen it in the Apple Watch and in the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, right?

Yep. Yeah, I wrote an article, which I think is not out yet, for Tom's Guide about this, for my good pal, Philip Michaels, who works over there now. And he asked me to write about like sort of like how it will change how we use our phones. And it's an interesting question because if I can back up for a second. On the Apple Watch, it's like a necessary added dimension of functionality. Like you there are things that you can only do by force touching on the Apple watch. Like you can't,

I don't believe you can like, uh, get into the watch face editing mode without a force touch on the watch face. And then it brings up the customization mode. Um, so there, and like, if you're like in the workout app,

if you want to end the workout, you force touch and then press end workout. That's how it works. But on the Mac, it's a, like a, another, it's not even a right click. It's a, it's that three finger tap. Essentially in most cases, they can, apps can modify it to be other things, but it's the three finger tap, which is kind of weird. It's like, you know, define this term or open quick look, which you can also do with the space bar, which is right there.

And I think that's, so I think even though developers can do things with it, they also can't, in most cases, they can't require it because it's only on a couple of models. And when I think about how you apply that to iOS, to the iPhone, and potentially to the iPad as well, I start to feel like it's going to be like the Mac. That, yeah, maybe there will be a way for developers to detect and change their interfaces based on whether a device has forced touch or not. Maybe. But are any developers going to really go through the effort of having sort of two versions of their apps interface and appearance based on

whether something's got force touch or not? Or is it more going to be shortcuts? And that's my gut feeling is, and I do think 9to5Mac did a story that said, you know, shortcuts is sort of what is anticipated for that feature.

And that seems right because you can't, it seems unlikely that it will be mandatory features. It may be that you can force touch on an empty part of your launcher screen, the springboard, and it'll say, would you like to change the wallpaper or something like that. That might happen. And certainly there was a 9to5Mac, I believe, rumor story about how you might be able to force touch on a location in Maps and have it jump to directions from your current location to that location. Things like that. Shortcuts, right? That's nice. That's a good feature.

But given that it's only going to be on these brand new phones, if the rumors are true, and brand new devices, you just can't make it a mandatory gesture. Plus, on top of that, and I think we see this with the Apple Watch right now, is it's not really discoverable. You can discover it by accident, but you basically need to be told in a little getting started guide or something, you have to say, you know, you need to push hard to on the, on the screen, and then it tells you things, and then you can do things with those things. You have to explain it. Oh, if I push harder, something happens here. And that's, that's harder to communicate to people. And a lot of people won't get it and they won't get the differences. So I think it's, it's problematic. I think it, it starts to, it starts to feel to me like it's kind of a power user feature. Um, and I'm not sure, you know, I'm sure there'll be a great demo of something just

like the quick time, that weird quick time thing with where you kept pressing harder on the track pad on the Mac book and the video played faster. Um, that was kind of a cool looking demo, but it's completely useless. Yeah. That's one of those things. It's like it's for the one person who needs it. Great. But who actually really needs to do that? Like very often. So much so that it's like this is a marquee feature of this technology. Right.

Then again, I don't want to draw the MacBook parallel too far because on a MacBook or a Mac in general, you've got keys and you've got a click and a right click and modifier keys and all of these different interaction methods. And on the phone, you don't, right? On the phone, you don't. On the phone, it's touch. So you can tap, you can tap and hold, you can do multi-ouch but you know you can't hold down a couple of keyboard uh a couple of keys and click in order to get something special to happen on an iphone because those things aren't there isn't you know we were talking on a little bit last week about the complexity of these devices like isn't that a good thing that you can't do that i think it's a good thing but i think that there are probably cases where um you know i don't think those kinds of gestures are for everybody

but i think it's nice to have them for the people who want to use them as long as they don't get in the way of the other people um so as a you know theoretically a power user, I look at that ability to have an extra dimension in my gestures and in my usage of that touchscreen device. And I think, well, that's great. You know, I can learn this. I can get over the learning curve here and I'm going to be way more efficient and powerful with what I'm doing on these devices. That's great. But there are a lot of open questions there, right? There's, there's, is this going to get in people's way? And, and how do you market a power user feature

to for a product that is very, you know, has even fewer power users by percentage than, than the computer does, right? Because smartphones are even more a real person device, does, right? Because smartphones are even more a real person device, regular user device than computers are, I think. I feel like, you know, maybe I'm wrong with that, but I feel like this is a simpler device that people expect even less to need to learn how to do all the crazy power user features of. So, you know, that's my concern here is, you know, just think, I mean, Mike, think about this. How many people are going to say, oh God, why did this thing happen when I tapped on my iPhone? And the answer is, oh, well, you tapped a little too hard.

You pushed a little too hard. Oh man, I just realized what's going to happen if my mom gets one of these. She's just going to push everything hard, just force touch everything. Well, I feel like she would do it, right? Enough accidentally that she's going to feel like she's breaking stuff. Like things, it's going to, basically what will happen is for the idea of many people, like the idea of touching the screen performs an action. And when that starts to, what seemingly appears to be sporadically performing different actions that adds a layer

of complexity right so for as long maybe for the last three years my mom has used an iphone and she's actually using it now to like use the internet and buy things online and stuff like that so she is now feeling comfortable with this device but now if she starts every every now and then she presses it and a menu pops up that she's never seen before. Like that's gonna, I mean, and I know this is really taking it far, but like I'm using this as an example,

knowing her as I do, that she would start to feel less confident with it again because things are happening that she doesn't understand that are new. And these are the challenges that Apple, I mean, as we've said so many times on the show, I'm sure this conversation has been had. If they are putting force touch into these devices, these conversations have been had by the people who are building these products,

right? Like, how do we do this in a way that it doesn't get in the way of people who don't understand what's going on, but gives us some advantage, gives some users, some percentage of users, some advantages by using this. How do we make it understandable, not get in people's way, not confuse people? And, you know, my point here is that this is a tricky one to me. It strikes me that this is a little bit of a challenge to do this. And maybe, you know, maybe the force force touch stuff if it's in the iPhone will be very very specific and it's gonna have a haptic you know haptic

feedback so you're gonna be able to really tell that it's a very different thing than a tap but it's still gonna be a challenge if if you you want it to be accidentally triggered as little as possible but you also need people it to be triggered properly when people want to trigger it. And you need to find a way to explain to people that they can trigger it because they're probably not going to, you know, unless you make it really easy to click by mistake, force touch by mistake, it's going to be hard to find. It's not going to be discoverable. So it's a real challenge.

And not every device has it. That's the other thing, right? So you can't just say, well, the good news is we can just assume that every single one of these, with the Apple Watch, every device has force touch, right? Every single Apple Watch will have force touch. It's just, you can assume that it's going to be there, but you're not going to be able to do that on iOS

for years and years, if ever. Well, we'll see. I actually have some stuff. I have some different examples that I want to bring up about this. One that goes into the Android world. But before we do that, let me take a break and thank our second sponsor for this week. And that is Squarespace. You can start building your website today at squarespace.com. You want to use the offer code UPGRADE at checkout, and you'll get yourself 10% off Squarespace. Build it beautiful.

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your domain, make sure that you use the offer code upgrade at checkout. It's going to get you 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this show. I would like to thank Squarespace for helping us out today. Squarespace, Buddha beautiful. So I want to talk about something I think is quite interesting, about a potential use for false touch, borrowing something that I've seen on Android. So there is a launcher called Action Launcher, and I've used them before, and they were actually a previous sponsor on Material,

right, our Android show, a Google show on RelayFM. And one of the things... It sounds exciting. It is. It's full of action. Action Launcher. So I'll tell you what I like about it. So for people that don't know, you can install So I tell you what I like about it. So for people that don't know, you can install what's called a launcher into Android, which basically is a kind of replacement for your home screen.

So a lot of them have specific functions and stuff that they can give you. And one of the things that I like about Action Launcher is you can set these shortcuts that you can have on folders or on apps. So what you would do is if you have an icon and instead of tapping the icon, you swipe on the icon, it would give you an action that you can predefine or would do something. So let's say, for example, you had the phone icon, right? You could set that every time you swipe on the phone icon, it will call a specific person that you require. Or you have a folder, right? You have

your photo folder. And you can tap on the folder and you can open the camera or the photos app or photo editing app. But if you swipe on the photos folder, you could program it to open the camera and take a picture immediately. So you can customize these and give actions to icons and folders by swiping or tapping and you can predefine them. That's the type of stuff I'd like to see false touch do, right? So it's like I have my tweetbot icon. If I just false touch on a tweetbot icon, it opens it immediately to the new tweet field or something like that.

So this is the type of stuff that I think would be really cool to do. But I don't see Apple doing this type of stuff because of the amount of boxes and ticks and user customization so that i what that's the sort of thing that i would like to see and where i see there could be utility in something like this but i'm just not sure if i would if i can envision a world where apple is letting you do that type of tinkering. Yeah, I mean, right. Apple is going to fight against the fiddly bits. They're always going to fight against them. That was almost English.

The fiddly bits. I'm also trying to comprehend how you swipe on an icon. So you just swipe on it. Aren't they small? Well, yeah, but instead of, so like your your finger so you sort of touch it and then slide yeah you just swipe okay right so you touch and slide up so it doesn't register the when you move away right all right touch so you put your finger on the icon and then flick basically right i guess that's what you're saying yeah but you don't need to be that precise about it right you just swipe in that part of the screen and it recognizes it it may be i don't it maybe

sounds complex but it's it really is very so it's like playing a game right when you play a game you swipe on certain parts of the screen to make things happen yeah like it's the same kind of idea okay all right i believe you maybe uh i could think of some things like um apple could because one of the fascinating things about this is we've had developers about all summer to work on ios 9 stuff right but there's going to be things in new iphones potentially that are are that they're going to have access to but they're not going to know about them until the phone comes out, which is understandable, but it's frustrating, right?

It's like, you know, here's all these cool things that you can spend all summer building. Oh, and here's a brand new feature in our most popular product that you get no time to, you get no warning. It'll be out in a week and a half. Good luck.

But they could like offer app developers the ability to build shortcuts a you know shortcuts in on a force on a force touch on the icon in the launcher screen and the question is is that a single action you know you can decide what the force touch does or could it bring up uh you know could it bring up an options menu um right there or what you know or would it launch the app and then the app could choose to bring up an options menu um i feel like that's the kind of thing that apple would would probably do is they keep it they keep it simple like that like uh you know and that would be a nice that would be better than not offering it right the ability to force touch on an icon in the in in the home screen would be better than not

offering it and then they could just say and then you figure out what to do with it you'll know when you're whether your app was brought to the foreground by a force touch or not and you can decide to do something with that. And it could be as simple as like, you know, I don't even know what, something that jumps you immediately into the action, like, you know, the Netflix app just starts playing, it leaves off, or like the videos app knows that you have something paused that you went away from a while ago and you forced touch on it and it just starts playing it. It doesn't ask you, it doesn't have you tap the play bar. It just, you know, it just plays maybe, maybe stuff like that. And then somebody else might, uh, bring up a menu and say, Oh, what would you like? Uh, especially for some

automation stuff that actually might be kind of cool, but, um, you know, but it would probably be punted to the, to the app itself, right. Rather than Apple giving some new user interface element in the launch screen to let you make decisions. Although that would be cool too if they did it, but it doesn't seem like them, does it? No, I mean, it does definitely make sense in the idea that the developer would decide. Or maybe, I don't know,

maybe it's something you could enable in app setting. I don't know. This it's something you could enable in app setting. I don't know. This is the thing, right? This is the battle between features and complexity, and it's where feature creep, right? It's the idea. Things just become more and more complex over time. But they kind of have to because there has to be reasons that the products,

you know, there needs to be a reason that we want to buy the six plus s well well i mean this is it right this is this is one of the things apple struggles with and i like when we have these conversations because i do think that these are the conversations that happen inside apple all the time and that a lot of people who follow this stuff don't think about like they don't think that these things happen. You know, well, it's obvious they should do this. It's like, yeah, but then once you start to pick at it, it's much more complicated than all of that. Okay, just to get idealistic for a minute.

Introducing new features just so you've got something to flog with the new version of your device is not a good enough reason to do it. It's not, it's not a good enough reason to add a new feature just so that you've got something to sell. I know realistically you need to do that because you want to sell, you want to sell products and saying, well, this phone is a little bit faster than the last phone. You know, people don't really care. You want to find something that you can, you can demo and you can, you can promote really well and say, look how, look how awful or look how awesome this is. Not awful. Look how awful this other product is. But our product is beautiful. Um, you got to do that. That's the real world, but that's how companies get in trouble. I think is saying,

yeah, we got this crap. It's not really very good, but we got to sell it because you know, how else? Otherwise we got no new product. And yeah, that's the danger here. I think with this kind of stuff, you maybe see it with a lot of Android phones because the market is more competitive there, right? Because you have the iPhone and then for many, I think maybe not Samsung, but everybody else, it's all the Android phones, right? I think Samsung at this point have established themselves in the general mindset as a brand, right, that have their own thing. Although they are not impervious to doing this themselves. Like seemingly adding features for the sake of adding a feature without a lot of the thought that needs to go into it. So, for example, when fingerprint scanners came onto other phones, they seemed to be just not very good. And now, if you look at all of the phones coming out now,

the fingerprint scanners seem to be as good as the iPhone. They seem to work quickly, and you just touch them. For example, I think it's when Samsung first put their fingerprint scanner in, you had to swipe your thumb on the home button. But now you just... Yeah, you had to move it down like it was a... Like you need to slide it across so it could scan the whole fingerprint. And now you just hold it down like you would on an iPhone.

So, like, that's the difference, right? It's in... We have to add something, so we'll add a subpar version of something to get it out there. Apple, again, not, they also, there are obviously times where they would make compromises, right? They are not like perfect. They will do things, I'm sure that are more akin to this, but at least try and do it in a, in the best way that they possibly can. Because I don't want to paint them as the perfect company, because they definitely aren't with this sort of stuff. And there will be a pull or a push from the marketing team to be like, you need to give us a feature. There has to be a feature to sell. There just has to be, right?

You can't just say, oh, the the 6s is just faster like because that doesn't work right it is faster and they always make a point of that but there always has been the thing right so the 3gs had video recording didn't it and then the 4s had siri um and that's as far as my they always there remembers. There's always something. There's always a marketing feature. And the 3GS had an S for speed, if you remember. And maybe one of the things we've seen with Apple and new features is that they are restrained sometimes in what they do, especially with the first iteration of a feature. Like NFC, people are talking for ages about NFC. When's NFC going to come to iOS?

Oh, you've got an NFC chip in Android. You can do all this crazy stuff with it. You can scan little cards and automatically log into the Wi-Fi and all that. And when Apple did NFC, what did they do? They said, it's for payments. It's only for payments. Nobody gets to control it. And in this first version, it's completely locked down where nobody has access to it except the system. And that was it, right? I would like to think that at some point, Apple might open that up, but they may never open it up.

They might say, look, the only application we see for this technology is payments and that's it we're done that's it um so with something like force touch we may see apple part of what apple's doing is telling the story it's to sell the product they will tell a story and the story may be a good story or or we may look at it and say oh that's kind of little that's kind of weak do people really want that will it really work like that that's part of of the skepticism that goes into people talk about that reality distortion field. But, you know, and when you're sitting there as a journalist, you have those moments of like, I mean, you fit that in too. You're like, I don't see if this is a good example. Like, I don't know if people would use that.

That's part of the set of questions when you haven't used the product yourself and you're just listening to what they're saying. Do you buy their story? Does that story make sense? Is that a story that's going to appeal to consumers? Are they going to be able to make good on what they promise? Apple's generally, generally good at that. Not perfect, but generally good at that. So maybe Force Touch is going to have a very specific story, a very specific set of uses, and the developer story may be extremely limited. Or the developer story, you know, sometimes what they do is they tell this a very specific story about what Apple is doing with it. And then to the developers, they're like, well, here's the API as you guys figure it out. That happens sometimes too, where, you know, Apple's done enough, they think, to

make their case for why you could use this on a fundamental, you know, system level and, and, and with their apps. And then the third parties kind of just get turned loose to figure out how, what they want to do with it. That's a possibility too,

but it wouldn't surprise me if this all starts out very limited. Um, because that's one way that Apple can sometimes be careful about this stuff is to just dial it back a little bit. Like, I know you want to use force touch for this and this and this, and you want to have a launcher and you want to have this, you know, no, all it does is this, whatever that thing is, if they can tell their story, if they can tell their marketing story. Um, you know, I also don't know, cause I don't know enough about iOS, the iOS game world.

I also don't know if game developers look at something like this and say, oh, this would be really great for us because X or whether it's irrelevant to them. But sometimes that can come into it too, where there's a very particular story they can tell and bring a couple developers on stage and say, you know, iPhone games are going to be way better because we've got this extra pressure sensitivity thing that we can use now. Which again, may or may not be realistic, but they may find some people to say it. Unreal will have Infinity Blade Force

and you know. It would be great for a Star Wars game. Well I was thinking about I was thinking about when I used to play, what was it? Was it Starcraft maybe? And you would maybe that was the game.

You know, in some games where you end up, you're clicking to select things, but you can like command click or right click on a location. And it's basically like send the thing I selected over there. It's like a good shortcut. It's like a click shortcut. Cause those are the, there's sort of two things you might want to do. And I can see something like that, right? There's some games where it's going to be really convenient to be able to tap on something to do this and force touch on something to do that. You know, there are examples.

I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. This would be good for games because any additional input you can give on a piece of glass is useful because they're extremely limited. Exactly. Exactly. This is adding, like I was saying about,

you don't have keyboard shortcuts or anything like that. So there are cases where more complexity will make things easier because you'll have more methods of input. A lot of times more complexity makes things harder, but sometimes it makes it easier because complexity in the sense of nuance of input, right? right that that that yes it is weirder if you have like i can touch or i could i could force touch what do i want to do here but if you know if all you can do is touch and there yet there are three or four things you might actually want to do in that situation you know then you end up having to have a menu button that you have to tap that brings up options that you have to tap on and you know adding that extra dimension makes actually ends up making it easier. I also imagine an iPad of a stylus and you press down on the screen with the stylus and then it opens a little tool palette around you and you select the tool in your drawing app, you know, like I could see it being useful there, um, in that, you know, a simple tap will activate this,

but if you press it, we'll bring up something. I twitterific for ios and i love it i use it all my time all the time on my ipad but and my iphone and you know when you for some features you have to sort of you have to select the tweet and then you have to press the you know not everything's out on the tweet you've got to press the button and then it brings up some options and you choose and i could see like that could become like second nature you don't need to hit that button you just need to force touch. And then the options come up and you press and you're done. I could totally see that. That is a perfect example of they have a tap and hold to switch accounts.

We have to tap a particular icon and then you wait and it pops up and then you pick another account. That would be a perfect fit for a force touch because it would instantly know you were trying to do something different and give you the option there there are lots of examples so this is this is where the speculation kind of goes off the cliff though because the real question is how is apple going to sell this as a user feature assuming this is a big deal what's the story they tell how does the how does this make this a bigger a better product in a way that makes people want to buy a new phone? Where does it fit into that story? Because that's the marketing story.

And then there's the real story. And it's best when those things overlap. And they don't always. Shall we do some Ask Upgrade? I think that's a great idea. Jason, would you love to tell the people who is sponsoring Ask Upgrade this week? Ask Upgrade this week is sponsored by Stamps.com, our friends at Stamps.com. And most of us are trying to find more time every day to get things done.

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been as funny when the person received this, this, this thing in the mail. Um, and so this is a perfect example. It's like, I'm getting a bunch of work done. I've got, I've got stuff to ship. I print the postage, I put it on the packages, job done. So use a promo code called upgrade. It's the name of the show for a special offer at stamps.com. You'll get a four week trial and there's $110 bonus offer that includes the digital scale and up to $55 in free postage. So don't wait, go to stamps.com. And before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade that stamps.com click on the microphone and enter in upgrade. And thank you so much to stamps.com for on the microphone and enter in upgrade and thank you so much to stamps.com for

supporting upgrade and hashtag ask upgrade jason cliff would like to know why is the sound quality of facetime audio so much different than the sound quality of a standard call the iphone um i'm going to assume that this is like a good quality facetime audio call um and if you've ever done a facetime audio call you'll realize it sounds very different um and the answer is that standard calls are um even if they're you know entirely cellular to cellular they're using the standards of the of of pots of the plain old telephone system, which is a very limited set of audio bandwidths, frequencies, basically. It's old. It's based on the old analog telephone world, and it's something that we still haven't gotten rid of. However, things are changing. Now you can make calls via IP.

You can make calls using this high quality, you know, there's a high quality phone call format now that is supported by some cell carriers. And if you're on a cell carrier that supports it and you call somebody on your carrier, sometimes the sound quality is way better. And sometimes if you call somebody who's on another cell carrier that supports it, and those two carriers have agreed to talk to each other, then those will sound way better. If you've got a relatively modern iPhone, I think a five or later. So eventually this is going to, you're going to hear this in a bunch of different places. And eventually we'll say, Hey, remember when phone calls sounded terrible? But one way around it is just to not use the phone system for that call and instead use the internet. And that's what FaceTime audio does. So it's like Skype. It's using a computer codec to encode your voice. And it has a much wider range that is better fitted to the human voice than the old telephone system was.

And so it sounds better. So, you know, the sooner we're all not making standard phone calls that sound terrible, the better. It is really strange. I mean, you know, the sound that comes out of a standard phone call is just not as rich as the sound that comes out of something like a podcast or even a Skype call or a FaceTime audio call. So, you know, that's basically it, is that it's, when you fall back to the actual phone service, you have to go to the lowest common denominator sound, and it's a very limited frequency range facetime audio is the closest i've heard to actual people so like it sounds the most like the people that i'm talking to like it sounds very very

real um yeah i have failed to use this new high quality um call thing that they that they added um that's that's never i've never been on a carrier i guess that supports it or talk to somebody who was also on that carrier who supported it on a device that supported it but facetime audio you know as long as you've got another device that'll do facetime it works great i had a i had a whole phone call uh the other week with lex friedman that was on facetime audio and it was very he was at an airport and i could hear um you know i could hear people around him i could hear the i could hear the announcements uh it was crazy the you know the detail compared to what we uh just assume a phone call sounds like so like i actually dislike the way it sounds

because for that reason like it sounds too real like i prefer the way skype sounds skype has a what i feel to be like a warmer sound to it yeah they do some they do some compression and they do some stuff with it that that is different i mean it all gets processed right but they do some different stuff with skype than they do with facetime so on episode 38 of the prompt on 5x5 me and steven tested this. So we were having this kind of discussion, and we went from the local recording to Skype to FaceTime to show the difference in sound. So I'll put that in the show notes.

Plus, it's old enough that if you listen to it, you'll get to hear how different we both sound. Right, so next up we have Daveave dave would like to know jason which vaser mount are you using for your imac oh yeah uh this uh we were talking about my desktop again and my uh my attempts to make it uh make it cleaner and every time you talk about what's on your desk and people look at a picture they ask what's that thing in the corner we talked about this this is how we got on the whole orange nerf brain topic way back in the day we will link to my post from last november what's on my desk but the answer is i bought the visa mount imac 5k imac

which means it doesn't come with a foot it can never have a foot. If I want to put it on, set it on a desk, I'll need to buy a VESA mountable stand for it. But I wanted it off the desk. I wanted it on an arm and the arm I got actually came with my, with my desk. Um, but it is a, a, a, a right angle products, hover series to spring arm. I don't know. I literally, the people who made my desk said, would you like an arm? And, you know, check this box

in the order form if you want a Visa mount arm. And I did. And so that's what I did. And I have an adjustable sit-stand desk. That's the desk. It's what I did. And I have an adjustable sit-stand desk. That's the desk. It's the Vert desk.

And that's in that story too. That's what I was just about to ask you. I didn't remember that. Yeah. Yeah, Wirecutter loves this desk. They called it noticeably cheap. They didn't love it. They didn't love it.

But I think it's fine. It is small and fits in my little office space here and is exactly what i wanted lucas asked are the step counts from the apple watch automatically added to the health app on the iphone i tested this jason today good that's good because i was going to say why did you ask why did you add this to the you're not supposed to add things i can't answer to ask upgrade i don't know the answer so So tell me, Mike, what happens? I didn't know this, so I wanted to test it. And this was early this morning when I was doing the prep for the show. So I opened the health app on my iPhone and it showed that I had taken 380 steps in the day. Again, very early in the morning. Okay. Very early in the morning.

I looked at my watch and my watch said that i had taken 380 steps i opened pedometer plus plus which reads the information from the phone right and it said zero so my deduction from this is that the health app takes the data from the watch and probably and my understanding from talking to people like david smith about this type of stuff uh that the health app takes data from the phone and the watch and i think kind of works it out within a region between them so it can say oh you've walked this much um but then i there is some stuff coming with ios 9 and watch os 2 as steven has reminded me in the chat room that will make it even better and they'll be able to share with each other because

at the moment the watch can share with the phone and the phone can share with the watch but developers can't take access of that data so so i have pedometer plus plus right now tells me tells me i've taken 16 steps today yep and that's because I've been walking around with my watch. But not the fun. We can talk about this on a future show, but I did install the watchOS 2 beta, and I've actually been using my watch as my alarm clock the last couple of weeks. And so I just got up and put the watch on. And so I've taken 300 steps so far this morning.

But the phone, I haven't been carrying the phone around and so it only it's only measured 16 and so pedometer plus plus is only showing 16 but the health app will will show that same 300 steps so you go it's getting better watch os2 will help a lot of this stuff i think this is talking about apple sort of like taking a first step and then and then refining with the second version of it i think we'll see a lot of that with when ios 9 and watch os2 ship aaron has asked have either of us found any good third-party apple watch bands i haven't i've seen people tweet about them but i haven't i haven't tried any um i did do an order uh for that company that says they're making lugs that are uh that

are compatible with standard watch bands and uh hopefully they will actually i'm still 50 50 on whether that product will ever actually ship but i'm i'm waiting for the stuff to come from the made for apple watch program or whatever they're calling it because I don't think any of that stuff is out yet. Like I will look at third-party watch bands when I can find them on the Apple Store website. They're the ones that I'll look at because I just want to know that the lugs that are holding on my Apple Watch

that I consider to be so dear to me are going to keep closed, right? And the Made for Apple Watch that I consider to be so dear to me are going to keep closed. And the made-for-Apple Watch products, the lugs come from Apple. Apple provides the lugs, and then you tie into them as a watch band designer. So that's what I'm waiting for. And finally today, Rob has asked us what YouTubers we watch and how do we feel about YouTube?

I mean, I like YouTube. One of the things for me, and I haven't really included these so much, and I don't really say them, I follow a bunch of different YouTube accounts and pick and choose from stuff that I like, and accounts that I like that aren't necessarily YouTubers. Like, I like watching the Verges videos and Polygon's videos and Tested.com's videos, but I don't really consider them to be YouTubers in the same way. They're not like individuals. They're just companies who also put their videos on YouTube, so I don't really think that they count as much. But the two YouTube personalities that I enjoy the most and watch every single video, of course, CGP Grey.

And my new kind of favorite YouTuber who I've been binging is MKBHD, Marcus Brownlee. Right. I would hope that everybody that listens to this show is at least familiar with him because he is probably one of the most important people in tech journalism today. Like it just is. He goes to every single event. Like he's given all of the stuff that, you know, he's given all pre-release hardware and the guy's super smart and he creates very informative, very entertaining videos about technology. And I am becoming a very, very big fan of his work. So I would thoroughly suggest subscribing to MKBHD's channel. All right.

And then I am a 44-year-old man, so do I even watch YouTube? I do. Let's see. I subscribe to some silly stuff. I subscribe to Anglophenia, which is a thing that's from BBC America, where British people tell you funny differences between British things and American things. I enjoy that. It's very funny.

Alton Brown, the food TV network personality i'll describe him as a host of of uh former host of good eats which is one of my favorite uh certainly my one of my favorite informational tv shows of all time um he has a youtube channel that he hasn't updated a lot lately i think because he's so busy with uh the various competition shows that he is a host of on the Food Network. But his YouTube channel is fun. It's like the second coming of Good Eats in a way. He's got a lot of things that he makes and explains how he makes various food items on that channel that are pretty cool, along with some food-related items.

You have to watch the videos to see, but they're good. Smarter Every Day is great. You may know that guy from the, a lot of people link to the thing about the bicycle, how if you reverse the, if you reverse the behavior of a bicycle and how you pedal a bicycle to go forward, it basically basically everybody falls off and it takes a long time to unlearn your bicycle riding behavior that you've you've uh you've stored away and then relearn how to ride a bicycle the proper way or the this new inverted way um that's a there's some great videos there and then uh phil plate the bad astronomer uh has uh is doing some videos that are part of this larger series of crash course videos that are again tied to tied to pbs i believe but he's got a

uh it's called crash course astronomy and i just enjoy astronomy things uh so i i list that but mostly i just bounce around and watch what the internet wants me to watch and i don't you know i even though i have some youtube subscriptions i don't necessarily you know go to them regularly i i a lot of times it's just uh what people suggest and i go and i go watch those i should say in contrast to my kids who absolutely if you ask them this question could list probably 30 youtubers that they love so like what I tend to do when I'm eating lunch or whatever, I open up YouTube and I either watch a video from somebody that I'm subscribed to. Because I subscribe to a bunch of channels. And the reason I do this, I don't necessarily watch all their videos, is I subscribe to channels that I've seen videos of that I'm interested in. Because then when I go to YouTube's homepage,

it suggests videos to me. And quite a lot of the time, I just open up a video and watch it because it seems interesting. Yeah, and I've got like Geek & Sundry, which is where the tabletop stuff from Wil Wheaton is, was, is. I don't know. I can't remember with Geek & Sundry.

I've got a bunch of stuff like that in there too that that it's stuff i i actually i just it has not crossed the threshold for me where there's enough new stuff in there that is stuff i really want to watch that i that i check my youtube subscriptions regularly that hasn't happened uh so much yet i i would not be surprised if it if it did with that. Like I agree with you, but the thing is, I also know that if I looked and actually went in and found stuff and was actively trying to find stuff, it would become that. I just don't spend enough time looking. I know that there is lots and lots and lots of stuff in there that I'm sure I will find

fascinating, but I just haven't really gone in and done that work I suppose yeah so there we go I've put a bunch of links to those YouTube accounts we've spoken about as well as many other things that we've spoken about today if you head on over to relay.fm

slash upgrade slash 51 you can find them or they should be showing up in your podcast app of choice perhaps with chapter marks who knows not today slash upgrade slash 51, you can find them. Or they should be showing up in your podcast app of choice. Indeed. Perhaps with chapter marks, who knows? Not today. Too busy for chapter markers today?

Just testing, Jason. Just testing. If you would like to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can find Jason on Twitter. He's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. And he is over at sixcolors.com and i am i mike i m y k e and you can find uh my shows and and other shows that jason does as well including clockwise and liftoff over at relay.fm thanks again to our sponsors this week the lovely

stamps.com squarespace and go to meeting foreting for helping us out. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Bye, everybody.