Upgrade - 70: I Could Call My iPhone a Muffin

Episode Date: January 4, 2016

Myke and Jason ring in the new year with discussions about CES, Twitter, awards, mailbags, and last year.

from relay fm happy new year this is upgrade episode number 70 today's show is brought to you by casper and squarespace my name is mike hurley and i am joined by the 2016 version of mr jason snell hello mike hurley how you feeling today? Do you feel ready to go for the new year? I do. It is that moment where you've got to become engaged in the new year. The holiday break is over. I had to set my alarm last night, which was interesting because I haven't done that for the last two weeks because I mostly set my alarm so that, you know, as you know, I work out of my house. I could pretty much get up anytime. But I got to get the kids up and off to school. And so I had to do that last night. I was like, oh, yeah, alarm clock. And I woke up

this morning when the alarm went off and I thought, wow, it's really dark because I've been waking up a little bit later. But that's OK. It's sort of after a couple of weeks i think it's a good feeling to get back in the back in the swim and i feel like ready to go and enthusiastic about about doing it so that's good for me how about you yeah yeah feeling pretty good i mean i'm still i decided to like ease in today you know i'm like in the transition period because i've been kind of working all the way through the break anyway just not as much as usual uh but now i'm back on regularly regularly scheduled programming this week which we haven't been for the last two weeks so that's going to be the yeah the interesting part of coming back from this break because i haven't done that in the last over a year i haven't really taken a break where i've been at home um and because even when i go on holidays

the majority of the time i record everything in advance or something like that but this one has been just just straight out like we're just not doing them for a couple of weeks on a couple of shows and that's been that's been nice uh but i'm happy to get back into it it's it's at idg we used to have uh they used to sort of give us the week between christmas and new year's off and uh doing this myself i can't do that. I've enjoyed kind of working a lighter schedule, but I also am not abandoning. We used to like have a bunch of people would sign up for like a half day where they would be monitoring the websites

and posting some stories and stuff. And that's how you cover the break. And of course, when it's just me and Dan has been on vacation, so it was literally just me at Six Colors. So I've been doing a little bit of work on that and I had some some podcast stuff to do. But it was a light schedule. And that was kind of that felt fine. That was kind of enjoyable that it was just a reduced schedule. And one of the nice things about not having all the ads sold, a lot of times ads don't, people don't want to buy

ads after Christmas, because they want to market before the holidays and not after. So I was very happy to make the decision with Clockwise, for example, to not do episodes the last couple weeks of the year. Nice to have a break. And now we'll spin it back up and get going. But that was by not selling the ads, we had the option of doing those shows or not. And during the course of the year, we would still do shows without sponsors just because consistency is important. But at the end of the year year it felt like it was good take a little vacation from it and then come back fresh in the new year so it's a it's good to to be able to have that flexibility and to do some of that but now yeah we're back to uh full schedule as you say fully scheduled talking about the holidays i received a uh lovely gift package from you yes Yes, I'm glad you got it.

Yeah, it included a couple of things. It had some brain balls, which are sitting on my desk. Mini brain balls, we'll call them. That was an incomparable... Some members of the incomparable crew, if they received a package from me, I ordered some foam brain balls, and I sent those to people. So you also received some brain balls but the most wisely i will i have it in my hand right now it is my new kind of whilst recording fiddling with something

toy that's what it's for um and you you sent me something that was very curious i didn't really understand what you could send me until i unfurled it and realized it's a very large uh sort of canvas object right yes exactly and i realized you had sent me an actual mailbag yep it's true i went on ebay i had this flash where i was like you know what would be funny is if there was a mailbag i could send to mike to celebrate mailbagging. And I went on eBay and they had vintage U.S. Postal Service mailbags. And I bought one. Actually, that was my second auction that I had to do before I could finally acquire it. And then had to ship it to the U.K., which was a challenge.

And not cheap to ship things to the U.K. But in the end, the mailbag is in your possession. And it's big. I don't know what you're going to put in it, if anything, but you could put a lot of mail in that bag. I'm just saying. Yeah. At the moment, it hasn't got anything in it, but I might put like the mail I don't like can just go in that bag. It can be where all my bank statements go into the mailbag. Thank you very much for my mailbag. Yes're welcome i'm glad it was i just that was a good idea too good to pass up the the mailbag and a special a special thing for you and

me so i'm glad you got it should we do some follow-up it's a great idea uh this is all follow-up mainly from a couple of weeks ago uh because obviously we did the uh illustrious upgradies last week um angus wrote in to say and this is in response to somebody from a previous ask upgrade segment about having a stuck app update on the apple tv angus wrote in to say to force a tv app update you can go to the apps page in the app store and update directly from that page right which kind of makes sense right so something's stuck you you know because it won't because it's got an update pending, go to the store and instead of letting you download it again,

it will let you download the new update, which is a good top tip there from Angus. Although I have not run into this, mainly because I don't use many apps on Apple TV. Nor have I felt the need to do an update. That would be like you find out that there's an update and um and then and that enables something and why don't i have that feature oh i guess maybe i need to force an update no i've never had that experience on the apple tv because i'm mostly just

sort of using it there aren't any uh apps that are cool enough really i think you know that i've got like exciting enough features right now which are compelling you to force these updates. But I do believe it will change eventually. Sure. Sure. Listener Jason wrote in to say, I wanted to make a plug for Mike's choice of 1Password for Mac because of 1Password for Teams.

So Jason wanted to just point out the greatness of 1Password for Teams. Now, I have not actually used this yet, Jason, but I believe that you have. I've used it a little bit. I set up one, a team for the Incomparable Incorporated. Right now, there's one vault in there that is for all of our kind of sort of, it's like bank and corporate credit card and log into other kind of data stuff that my wife and I both use because she's sort of the

CFO of the company. She's got a business degree and she does the payroll and all that stuff. And so this way, instead of me sending her a password or her sending me a password, we have a shared vault. And then I also have a vault for hosts that I haven't rolled out to people yet, because I've been waiting for this to roll out across all the one password apps. But I have a lot of hosts who need to know the logins for the FTP server, where you upload your podcast files, and for the CMS, where you post your podcasts. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put those in the host vault and share that with the hosts so that they have access to that instead of me having to, you know, tell every new host, here are all the passwords for all the logins that you need to do this, you know, as a guest host. Instead, I'll just be able to say, let me invite you to the one password vault.

So it's fun. to the one password vault. So it's fun. It's a nice idea that you can share different levels of access with people in your work group. And then it sort of just kind of melds in with your one password, your personal one password vault

when you can separate them out if you want, but you can also just, I think by default, it's all vaults. And so when you search for something, if it's in your team vault or it's in your regular vault, it all works together. It's very cool.

Yeah, this is something that I really should look into a little bit more because me and Stephen obviously share a bunch of stuff, like a bunch of logins. And usually what happens is we just iMessage each other the 1Password links, right, to add them to our individual accounts, like our 1Password apps.

But it probably makes sense for us to look into one password for teams it seems like a good solution yeah yeah it's a it's a cool idea it's a cool idea if you need to share in secret information you know in a work group that's what it's for and uh steve wanted to write in to share some artwork that he and his daughter had created in the pigment coloring app following our upgradey suggestion for pigment as the best thing over the year which as reminded me i will put in the show notes jason a link to some of my favorite uh work that i have done um nice in in the pigment app oh boy do i love this app so much it looks like so is pigment are the things that you can you can color in pigment are those specially kind of marked up

so that it knows where the borders are and things like that oh yeah yeah yep so it's not just because my my initial thought was it's too bad that you can't like take a picture of something and then color that in yeah a piece of paper but it seems like what they're doing is some special markup information about about sensing you know all the lines and all the regions and things like that in order to make it a better experience yeah it is 100 that like yeah there is a mode where you can click inside of an empty field um and if you just color you don't go over the lines so like they're doing analysis to work out the the specific areas and plus the way that the app works it's a subscription that you pay and you get new books as they're generated or as they're added into their library um but yeah it's uh that's how it

works and yeah it would be quite nice i think someone should still make that app um but that seems a little bit more tricky as to how you get that you still have to buy the books and then you have to take the pictures right so right if you've taken a look at my at my pigment work there i'll put a link in the show notes oh i have i haven't you want me to yeah i just want i just want you to appreciate wow the beauty wow these are four of my favorites they'll be in our show notes if you want to find them. That's awesome. Yeah, I love it. The Lion one is the one that I like the most. I worked really hard on that one.

It looks great. I love this coloring, man. It's fantastic. It's so much fun. Alright, let's do some follow out. I have a couple of little things that I want to talk about. The first one is relay related. MacPower users, the institution that is Mac Power Users, will be celebrating their

300th show in a couple of weeks time. And for this occasion, myself and Stephen are going to be taking the reins and we're going to be talking to and interviewing Katie and David about the show and about their workflows and stuff like that. And we want you guys to get involved um so if you will tweet with the hashtag mpu300 me and steve will be able to collect up those tweets and we'll be able to include your questions to katie and david um in honor of their 300th episode of mac power users which is kind of astounding in and of itself. We're talking about podcasts with really high numbers. Yes.

The Incomparable. We need to do something. I am considering converting the Incomparable to David and Katie's schedule, which is they do a bonus episode every month. Is that right? Yeah, they do like a live.'s mpu live

yeah so i'm thinking about that because i that's why i've gotten behind them uh but it's we're at we're at because there's cheating uh you need to just do 20 bonus episodes in a week yeah well we practically did that one for star wars yeah that's almost what we did it almost killed me to be you know it's things that I edited that other people were on. We did post, if people don't know, we posted four episodes about Star Wars The Force Awakens on The Incomparable in the course of a week after the movie came out. Four different panels, four different hosts. I only hosted one of them. So in the end, we ended up with, I don't know what that is, seven and a half hours of people talking about Star Wars.

But this follow-out is not about that. It's just I wanted to mention the incomparable 281, which was our latest episode posted over the weekend. It's our year-in-review episode, and there's a few things that are good about it. It is a long episode. It's two and a half hours long. The first hour is our most common panelists, most popular panelists on the show, talking about the things that they liked for 2015. So if you're looking for recommendations for great movies and TV shows and books and comics and other stuff, video games, that there's one of the listeners compiled all of the things that we mentioned, and it's in the show notes, which is great because I didn't do it. I was too exhausted

from putting it together. So I think it's fun just on that if you don't regularly listen to the incomparable and then the uh the second half of the show is uh favorite moments of the and episodes from the podcast from the year including a lot of very fun uh clips which took a lot of time to put together but it's kind of fun so it's a nice wrap-up of 2015 both stuff and also for the podcast itself so people should check that out yeah most definitely most definitely i'm nearly finished with the episode um and i enjoy it immensely uh the whole there's something very special at the very end of the episode oh i haven't gotten there yet good the skeletor thing this time far exceeded my expectations um just yeah

yeah because that's for people who don't know um the an ongoing story in our end of year wrap up you can't even attempt to explain this man well i'll just i'll just say steve lutz uh many years ago uh did a funny thing involving picking a skeletor in a draft that we did and since then in every successive annual episode, he's picked as his favorite thing from the previous year. Well, the first time he picked Skeletor, him picking Skeletor, in every successive episodes, every subsequent end of year recap, he's picked his picking of Skeletor from the previous year, hoping to create a recursive clip loop that would consume the universe where it was just clips of

clips of clips of clips of clips of Skeletor all the way down but it has changed in various interesting ways over the course of the last four years so that that usually is a plot point in the incomparable year in review uh episode and it is no different this year but it's a very different take on it this year and last up before we move into our little topics that we have this week, we have a smorgasbord ahead. We've got an exciting week at Relay. We have a new show launching called Canvas. I listened to the pilot just the other day.

Yes, Relay.fm members got access to a pilot episode. But there's all going to be out later this week. It will live at relay.fm slash canvas there's nothing there yet because it's not live uh the show is fraser spears and federico vatici talking about how to do things on mainly ipad but ios and like the they really go in depth into how to make things happen how to live and work on iOS. And to take it one step further, the entire show is edited on iOS by Fraser. So Fraser is recording on iOS and editing on iOS.

Federico isn't because I mainly won't let him so he doesn't have the equipment that he needs because of our other shows. But yeah, these guys, they live and breathe iPad. And it is just going to be a fantastic show. And we have one other announcement later this week that will happen at the same time.

Oh, that's exciting. I, as somebody who's using the iPad Pro a whole lot more and my laptop a whole lot less, I'm, even episode one, I wrote down a whole bunch of things because there were no show notes because it was just the pilot and it'll have complete show notes when it posts. Just so

many great ideas for ways of doing things, as well as listening to the experts pinpoint, with pinpoint accuracy, the places where iOS still falls short. And I think that's really interesting. This is not just a yay, yippee, iOS is great kind of podcast. They are using it day to day. They're in the trenches. They know where it's not good enough. And that was really interesting too

because I had moments where I'm like, oh, so that's not just me. That's actually hard to do. Good to know. So yeah, Canvas, people should check it out. And I look forward to hearing your secrets. Yeah, it's going to be another fun week. We like to do this.

You posted a tantalizing image suggesting some of the secrets that might be happening. But you never know from the image. You'd have to be a very, very keen observer to get it. All right, so should we take a break? Yeah. This week's episode is brought to you by Casper, an online retailer of premium mattresses that you can get for a fraction of the price that you'll find in stores. Casper is revolutionizing the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers and showrooms, passing those savings directly to you, the consumer.

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then Mr. Snell. So last week, we did the Upgradies, and you mentioned the Eddies. Yes. And I just, it was just, whilst I was thinking about this episode, I was like, I would like to know a little bit more about the Eddies. Because the Eddies are,

they are kind of, and they have been a respected awards in the mac community something that i am trying to force with the upgradies so i feel like i need to know a little bit more about the eddies so for next year uh i can fully institute the upgradies as a completely prestigious and well-respected awards ceremony. So what were the Eddies and how did they begin? I just realized that as far as I can tell, that Mack World didn't do the Eddie Awards after I left, which means that they left it. The last one was the 29th annual.

I kind of can't believe they let it lay there the year before the 30th, but they had lost all their staff. So how would they have put it together? That was a very difficult time for them. But yeah, so the Eddie Awards, I wasn't around when they started, but they were started. So Macworld and Mac User Magazine back in the 80s decided to start awards. Macworlds were the Editor's Choice awards and they called them the eddie award and they got a statue that looks kind of like an oscar holding eddies now i get it i never understood that and so and the statue was kind of like the oscar guy sort of but he's holding a classic uh mac above his head and it's an actual statuette with uh i've got one right here so maybe next year i the the just the pngs that i send people

are not sufficient we need to actually make real statues or rosettes or something by the by the end we i think that was one of the problems that they had was that the statues cost a lot of money and the marketing department got cheaper and cheaper but um but so and the mac world had world class awards and it was i i don't really understand how the world-class awards worked, whether they were entirely editor's choice or, or what, you know, whether they had a different process for it. It was a big process. We spent months compiling potential award winners and the way it worked with a Mac user, Eddie's was that the, they weren't fixed categories every year, sort of like the Upgradeys. We would change it based on where the interesting products were in the market. And so we did that for a long time. When Macworld and Macuser merged in 97, there was a question about what would happen with the awards. And I think, for whatever reason, the Eddies won out,

I think because they were more iconic and interesting, and Macworld had not done a particularly great job of stewarding the world-class awards. It was okay, but the Eddy Award was like everybody wanted that statue, and they liked... So we kept it, along with the mouse ratings, which came from Macuser. We kept the Eddies from Macuser

and moved those over to Macworld, and the same process happened. So, you know, over the years, I would say that the process became a lot less time intensive because the staff kept getting smaller and it was a huge amount of time. Uh, cause as a junior editor at Mac user, I, I spent a lot of time basically researching products for the Eddie awards. And, uh, and we had, you know, we've split it. We had like four different groups or five different groups of editors who met every other week to go through the potential nominees and all that. It was crazy. And then in the end, by the way, they there's like the proverbial smoke filled room where they go in and the and the winner and the winners come out and it was not like of a pure democracy. It was very much like there would be debate and there would be a consensus. We would attempt to reach a consensus and sometimes that would fail. But in the end,

something would get put forth. And then usually that list would then be viewed by the editor-in-chief and not entirely followed sometimes. Mostly, but it was a it was a whole process it was it was not there's no way to pin it down either it was a it was a complex process but um in the end people you know love being for a long time we had nominees and uh and and uh winners uh eventually i think we just announced winners because being a nominee and not a winner was kind of lousy. But the reason they did it that way is that it used to be that the night before Mac world expo in January,

you would have, um, uh, an awards ceremony. And in fact, my first day on the job at Mac user in 1994, I'm going to say my first day on the job as a full-time employee was, I didn't even go to the office.

I put on a rented tux and went to the awards ceremony. That was my first day on the job. So do we need to get a venue now as well? Well, by the end, there was no ceremony. In fact, one year at Mac User, we just did it on AOL. user we just did it on aol so it didn't it didn't uh we didn't always have a uh have a ceremony uh and a venue and and and stuff like that it's a digital age now but yes if we really wanted to class up the upgradies we would we would put on uh outfits and do a live stream i think i suppose a video stream of us announcing the upgrade so that's something for you to shoot for all right

think about that one that's not too difficult to do for, for 20, for 2016 upgrade. We need is just a top half of a tuxedo each. That's true. We could, we could just have nothing but our, our pants on.

And I mean, pants. So yeah, no, that's the wrong way around. No. Anyway. So yeah, it's anyway, it was it was fun um it was uh people people really vied for it it was a marketing thing uh they could put any winner on their on their

boxes did that help do you know like did that actually help these companies who could tell i think it was generally um part of the marketing story was this is this is an award winner this got a ratings were the same way right five five mice or five stars from macworld or whatever back in the day and the awards it's all cumulative but there was a time when things were boxed and then even in the latter day just went on their websites to say that this is a legitimately beloved piece of software. I mean, people liked it. They also really liked the recognition. I mean, I still hear from people who got those Eddy trophies and just they love them.

And especially the smaller developers having that, it's like that's their chance to win an Oscar. I mean, the Apple Design Award is the only thing left like that, I would say, in our industry. Yeah, maybe I actually haven't gotten around to sending out the rosettes this for the for the upgradies of this year so maybe i should do that maybe maybe i'll be presently surprised and everyone will be very excited to receive their upgradies the only person that has received their upgrade so far is casey for atp i sent it to him casey was very excited

because he also took the one one of you know the one that we went for i think it was was it most disappointing or something like that one of the awards that we gave was something that he suggested so he felt he won two upgrade is uh for for some reason because that's just yeah he didn't he didn't um but he was influential he was an influential a thought uh leader an influencer in the upgradies process he's a two-time winner of an upgradey um so yeah he doesn't need to be so greedy up greedy that's what we call people that that are multiple winners up greedies this is getting very convoluted uh jason how was your 2015 yeah i put this in the document it's the it's our little mini mini thing i wanted to ask ask you how you're how it's the beginning of the

new year i think it's worth a moment of reflection um my 2015 was pretty great this was my first year as a completely independent worker uh first complete year. And I think it went pretty well. I learned a lot. There are plenty of things to improve on. But I was taking a walk with my wife. We were walking the dog last night and just before the rain started. And we were talking about the looking at the finances and doing the books from last year and all those things and you know it struck me that that you go into something like this and you you you have hopes and you think that they're legitimate and based on reality but you never know and um and we came through the year and said oh look we didn't have to sell our house and move into the countryside and raid the children's college savings account and things like that. We, you know, we, uh, we did it and it worked and, you

know, there's no guarantee for 2016, but in 2015, I was able to transition to not getting paid by an employer and, uh, stay afloat. And that was great. And then on the podcast side, I haven't counted how many podcasts I did in 2015, which I'd like to do. The Incomparable as a network did 480 some episodes in 2015. That's 1.2 episodes a day or something like that. And I calculate out 17 days of content that were posted on the Incomparable network in 2015. And then there's, you know, Liftoff and Clockwise and Upgrade over here that I was involved with. But I'm not involved with all of the shows over on Incomparable.

So that part I haven't figured out yet. But it was a very productive year. And one of the reasons I do that end of the year show for Incomparable is that it's kind of fun to take a moment and look back and say, yeah, we did a bunch of stuff this year. It goes by in a blur. And I think it's good to stop and say, at some point, it's good to stop and reflect on what's happened. Otherwise, I think you miss it. You miss that it's good to stop and reflect on what's happened otherwise i think you miss it you miss that it's very easy to downplay accomplishments and uh meeting goals because you're moving on to the next thing and so taking a you know when you get to the top of the

mountain to take a breath and look around before you proceed down the mountain or up to the next mountain i think it's a good thing yeah i had a pretty great year um i ticked off a bunch of bucket list items uh which is kind of awesome like i gave my first conference talk at release notes which i was really proud of i think it went really well um we got a couple of links from daring fireball which is something i've always wanted. And John linked a couple of episodes of this show, mainly just me and you complaining, which I do enjoy quite

a lot with you, in case the listeners hadn't noticed that already. The business has done really well. We had a great, you know, we had a fantastic year. We grew so fast, and we did so much new stuff um we brought on i mean our our roster of hosts or our hosta as i was going to call them yeah faster of roasts

our hosta of roasts right now is superb um i'm so proud of the amount of people that we have and all the people that put their trust in me and Stephen to host their content on our lovely home. Yeah, I couldn't be happier with 2015. I know that I want 2016 to have the same kind of feeling that I'm very, you know, very happy about. But for the love of all that is holy, I cannot take the amount of work again because I don't think I would be able to cope with it. We couldn't be twice the size that we are already. It just wouldn't scale. So 2016 for me, in a lot of ways,

is about scaling back and looking at time and trying to analyze it a bit better. I've made some changes to my schedule. The inquisitive has gone away away um upgrade is every two weeks not upgrade analog i'm sorry it's a terrible way to tell you analog is every two weeks yes analog as fortnightly it's joining liftoff as an excellent fortnightly series upgrade remains weekly yes unless we decide to do the mac power users thing and just do a fifth episode out of spite or something. But we're looking at probably not. But, you know, so I'm that's kind of what my 2016 goal is, is about like using my time more effectively because 2015 was such a great foundation year.

I can now build on that going forward. Well, yeah. And you guys with Relay, you guys built the business and dealing with growth is a i mean that's a challenge with all businesses and you know you did a lot of this stuff you and steven with your own you know with your own two hands and at some point you have to either manage the growth you have to pick your spots or you have to um or you have to well manage the growth you have to figure out a way to grow without just using the power of your own will and steven's own will because you will run out of that yeah and so you got to start to use it wisely and and uh and yeah it's a it's a challenge but it's a good kind of challenge it's a good kind of challenge to have to see how how well relay has done that that's been one of my highlights i would say of 2015 too is getting to

be a part of of that process and uh and talk to you guys and work with you guys about how you're growing relay that's been a lot of fun too so I've got podcast networks to the left of me and to the right of me but uh it's been it's been fun stuck in the middle with Dan with podcasts an interesting thing happened a couple of days ago that is definitely sitting quite beautifully within your wheelhouse. And that is Twitter for Mac got updated. I lost that bet. I should have made a bet with somebody. Well, I shouldn't have.

Somebody could have come to me and said, I bet you by the end of the year there'll be a major update for Twitter for Mac. And I would have laughed and laughed and laughed and then lost a lot of money. December 30th. Yeah, they slid it out there at the end. It almost felt contractual, like for some reason. And it's not even a rumor. I've had several people say it's not a rumor. It's true.

There was a third-party developer who was contracted to do this app by Twitter. Twitter didn't want to use their own internal developers. And people were complaining about that. I don't know. That sounds actually kind of brilliant to me. I mean, if Twitter had a whole team of iOS developers and couldn't really, or of Mac developers and couldn't do it, if Twitter's internal development processes are falling apart for a lot of this client stuff, then taking the money they'd spend on internal developers and hiring a developer shop to do it for them, it's not necessarily a bad idea. And apparently that's what they did. There was a rumor that it was Black Pixel. I don't know if that's true, but they do a lot of contract work

that they can't talk about because it's for clients. So it wouldn't shock me for clients who want to not talk about who built their app for them. But it definitely seems like it was an outside developer of some sort. And I think it's an interesting move. I wrote a piece on Six Colors that we can put in the show notes about it. I think it's fascinating because it's got some things that feel very new. And then it also has bugs and weird interface things. And so my initial thoughts about it were very much like it's great that there's a new version it's got a lot of problems i hope that they're going to do updates from now

on that that's my big fear with it is that they put it out the door and especially if this is a contract job that they walk away i have some i have a super weird theory about this app like which is very strange and i can't really reconcile in my brain why it would work this way but it definitely seems that way is that even though twitter has outsourced this application directly is the new twitter for mac that it seems to be using the api that all other third-party developers have access to because it doesn't have any of the first-party features like polls, cards, hash flags. This was pointed out by Jeremy from Emojipedia. I saw him tweet it today. It seems like they have the same limitations. I think that's not entirely accurate because the notifications tab has all of that activity that you see on Twitter that I believe you can't access via the standard API.

There's a way to build it, though, because Tweetbot did. I mean, and I think that they have some server infrastructure in place now to manage all of that. But I think it's not. I don't know. My impression is that there's more detail in the notifications tab than is available to a standard third party app. But yeah, it's possible. Well, let's just

call out the irony of the fact that Twitter killed third-party apps or tried to kill them slowly over time by all of their restrictions, and then they went to a third-party developer to develop their app. How about that? Yeah, I mean, there is a kind of a precedent being set now in which it looks like they are attempting to undo some of that. Also, one of the reports that we saw from people who say that they know, people who used to work at Twitter, that I saw kind of streamed by on Twitter, is that this was a back and forth inside Twitter. Like, let's not do a Mac app. You know, let's not update it anymore. No, let's do it. No, let's not do it. No, let's do it.

There was a lot of back and forth about this. And what I wrote on Macworld, and I don't know whether they saw that, and I don't know whether that was just one little added poke at them along with all the other ones they were feeling or not. As a writer, I kind of assumed that although people can see my stuff, it very rarely has an impact on decision making. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to start thinking that way because then you end up with an ego that's too big to fit for the front door. Exactly right.

So I don't know, but I will say, so with no linkage intended here at all, what I wrote was that Twitter either needs to embrace their job as a steward of their platform

on various operating systems or it needs to get the hell out of the way and let third parties, because, you know, there are third parties who will be happy to make great Mac apps, and some already exist for Twitter. I know you don't like it, but TweetBot for the Mac is fantastic. It's very impressive.

And you know what? I love Twitterific on iOS, and the reason there isn't a great version of Twitterific on the Mac, and it's just the old version that's been around forever, is because of what Twitter did to the developers. Icon Factory can't bother to invest in it because it's not worth it to them because of what's happened. So again, pick one. Either make a world-class, amazingly good Mac app, or just let the developers make good Mac apps because they already are. Just get out of the way. Let them make some money. Let them follow your guidelines. And so I don't think that this release of Twitter for Mac 4.0 really tells us anything.

It's a mystery. Like, is this a commitment or is this like a last gasp? Are there going to be bug fix updates ongoing? Because this is a good start. They have some design issues. I mean, I wrote about it in that piece that we linked to that I mentioned earlier. It's really spacey. It's got lots of white space. And given that two-thirds of the Macs that are out there are laptops, that seems like a mistake to just take up huge amounts of space. The tweets are huge the the space between the little icons and the toolbar is huge there's some fundamental bugs like um you can you can set notifications about like whether you want to see it when there are new tweets in your timeline or

just replies or something like that but they aren't honored by the accounts in the sidebar you know there's a bunch of there's a bunch of weird things that, again, if this is the beginning of ongoing development of Twitter for Mac, it's fine. But I'm not—we'll have to see. I'm not sure, given the stories here, that that's true. Because if it's an outsourced thing, is Twitter paying that company to continue developing it? Is that part of the story? The fact that it got kind of slid out at the end of the year makes me a little concerned that perhaps it is a contractual thing, like it needed to ship in 2015 for contract reasons or for payment reasons, tax reasons. I don't even know,

but maybe it's a coincidence, but it just, I'm not convinced that this is a commitment to the Mac by Twitter. And it gets us back to what we've been talking about throughout 2015, which is what's the commitment level here? Because Twitter, for me, I have to use an app to use Twitter and I'm on, I'm at my Mac a lot. And, um, and so I'm not going to just keep it in a webpage. It's not going to happen. That's why I don't use Facebook is that I'm not going to keep loading Facebook in a webpage. So I go to it occasionally. I don't know. I don't know. It's weird. It's a weird story. It continues to be weird. What Twitter is, uh, is so I I'd like a clear signal from Twitter and maybe this is it, but we won't really know until we see whether this thing sits for a year or

whether it gets, uh, updates every month or two. It doesn't have all those things. It does have, I mean, it doesn't have polls and cards and things like that, but it does have native tweet quoting and support for animations and videos, things that are not new features on Twitter, but that the Twitter for Mac app didn't support. So it does actually support a whole bunch of Twitter features that were not previously supported. But then there are all these other features that it doesn't support, and Jeremy's right.

It's the stuff that basically just renders in web views and is not in any of the apps. in web views and is not in any of the apps. So I have like, when I look at this, I see that this is a sign of Twitter deciding that they are going to do something because you're not going to, well, I mean, who knows, but you'd like to think they're not going to pay the amount of money, which is probably a large amount of money to have this thing built.

If it just is, this is all it is. And there probably is an element of updating that is going to be required and the reason that i look at this and can see that it came out in the way that it did is this project's been in the works for an amount of time and there was a contractual agreement to have it something out before the end of the year and that's why it's the way it is because it is in some ways regressing from the previous app, like in bugs and stuff like that. Yeah. And a lot of them are just having a look at some of the stuff. I've included a link in the show notes

to Federico's piece on Mac Stories, and he includes some tweets and vines from people who are finding bugs, and they're just bugs you'd find using the app. Yeah. So, I mean, I look at this, and I'm like, this is probably the start of ongoing development of the Mac app,

but there needed to be something before the end of the year. Because December 30th is a really weird time to release something. It feels like a beta to me. I mean, it just feels like a beta. There's a lot of weird things about it that it feels like a beta. And that's not bad

for it to be a beta, but it's not bad for it to be a beta but it's not played as a beta it'll auto it'll auto update if you've got auto update mac app store stuff turned on your old twitter app will just disappear and be replaced by this new thing that does not work at all like the old thing um and uh our our friend uh will run for fun in the chat room says you know why even have an app they don't make a windows app i just use the web or tweet bot well i like i said i think using the web is not a good enough thing for a lot of people on the desktop because uh i think personally i think using the web for twitter sucks and i would like it in an app um that that but but that's my large point here is i'm okay with twitter saying you know, we're not going to do apps on PCs,

on Mac and Windows. We're not going to bother. But if they do that, I would like them to also say, it's a third party opportunity. We have a new developer relation. They can sell their apps. Here's what they have to do. The token limits are lifted. Go to town. We're happy to have third parties who want to be our partners on platforms that we're not supporting, but we're going to focus on iOS and Android. I'd be fine with that, but that's not what we have. We have a mystery about what will be the new direction of Twitter and what does this app mean? Is it a commitment to supporting more on the Mac or is it sort of a last gasp? We don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I would like to see them at least do what you said, like just say like, you've got the web or there's third parties. Like that just makes more sense to me. Like why are Twitter bothering? Why are they bothering to make desktop apps? I actually don't understand what the point of this app is. It's like, just use the web, right?

And if you don't want to use the web, go to a third party, and they should be embracing that. I'm okay with that. I actually think, yes, if I was managing at Twitter, that's probably what I would suggest. I would say, you know what? Mobile is super important and growing. Traditional computers, not so much. And we're on the web there. Our web client will always be, you know, our web page will always be fine. And there are developers who are dying to develop for those platforms for Mac and Windows and

whatever Linux too. Sure. Anything you can find over there. Just let them. Let's let them. Yeah. Let's revise our developer guidelines, set some rules in place, let them go to town. It'll be good for us. It'll be good for the users on those platforms and we'll be done. And if we want to keep a tight grip on,

or a tighter grip on mobile, because it's so important to us going forward, fine, make that call. But right now it's just a mystery. And somebody actually asked in the chat room, Stoic Squirrel, excellent username, by the way, are the token limits still in place? And I think my answer is, as far as we know, Twitter has made no announcement saying, we take it all back, developers, do whatever you want, or that. I haven't seen anything about that.

that i haven't i haven't seen anything about that it wouldn't surprise me if twitter has sent signals to some ios and mac app developers that the rules are flexible it wouldn't surprise me i don't know that i haven't talked to any of them about it they have um but they've been blogging recently and and they've basically what they've said um is that we hear you about that right that that's what they said like we understand about the token limits we get that we know it's a problem we hear you so they're not they're not ignoring it it implies they're working on something but haven't haven't made an announcement about it yet and that's that's that's, that's fine. Um, you know, I suspect, I suspected for a while now that there's a, that, you know, the, there are some relationships at play here, like Twitterific as an innovator and the inventor of the blue bird to represent

Twitter and the inventor of the word tweet. I get the impression that they have, uh, some special relationship with Twitter, right down to the fact that they get to use the word Twitter in their app name and that hasn't gone away. But I don't know. I mean, that may be a very limited thing. Who knows? I mean, how can you have a relationship with a company that keeps having all of these changes in direction and in management too? Your relationship is purely a contract, which was a legal thing that you both agreed to. And that's that. That's what that relationship most likely is. Probably so. So we'll see.

We'll see how it goes. Anyway, I'm using it. I don't love it. I might use TweetBot instead, although I have issues with TweetBot too. So we'll see. We'll see. I'm using it to get used to it and see. I want to use it enough that a lot of the newness of it sort of fades away and then i can decide whether i like it or not but i do have

tweetbot and um they're they're uh you know it's an it's an option they are whilst they have shown in the past that they can be slow in certain areas um tap bots are committed to the app and i've shown that in a way that twitter currently haven't right no and then maybe a little bit more time and it will be absolutely great but right now i think it's too early to say oh this is perfect this is what i want oh and i should say um people also bring up tweet deck which is also done by twitter tweet deck is good for certain people who have very specific needs you got that big twitter dashboard yeah you're looking at because you're doing lots of stuff but as a kind of day the way i use twitter

which is a little thing on the side of my screen that i can scroll through and then go back to what i'm working on um tweet deck doesn't work for me and also i'm offended by the fact that it's got that multi-column interface but because it's's essentially a webpage in disguise. Um, no, I've said this before, I'll say it again, you know, it doesn't snap to the columns. So, um, you know, you, you can't, if you set it to be like the width of one column, um, the scrolling, like it doesn't scroll to the next column. It doesn't set it to two columns. It sort of just is this continuum of various columns that you can scroll across. I don't know. It's not a good Mac app. It's kind of a fake Mac app. And it's good for people who want to do what it provides, but I don't think it's a good client. They should just kill the Twitter app and focus on the... What were we just talking about? I've lost the name.

There's so many tweets and twits and bots now. TweetDeck? TweetDeck. Decks. Focus on TweetDeck. I'm like, no. TweetDeck is like a pro social media maven kind of tool. It is not a regular person app.

I do agree with that, that though i do think they should just kill the mac app work on tweet that i can give the like the reins of the mac the standard mac app over to third parties that would be fine with me because tweet that could be a lot more than it is um like twitter could could own the market of the professional tools there are a couple of other tools i think radianian 6 is one that is like a, one of these social media management tools. Twitter should build that, right? And sell that to people

like rather than what Hootsuite does and companies like that. Twitter should make that and that's what TweetDeck should be. And so I think they should put their efforts into that and just let TweetBot and Icon Factory make the Mac app. Yeah.

Yeah. And there are some others out there I know that people like that are other Twitter clients that are third parties. It's fine. I think that's what we all want. And I don't know whether that's the best thing for Twitter or not. But it would seem to me, other than the fact that they have to create new guidelines and they have to maintain an API in a relationship with third parties, although they're already sort of doing that, they would have to put some effort perhaps into opening new API stuff for their new features when they roll out.

But that seems like it should be job one, right? Here's a new feature and the API that goes with it. Maybe they don't do it for experimental features like polls, which I think is still an experiment and doesn't work very well and might be a bad idea. I don't know. We'll see what they do, but that would be, I think

that would be the best thing for them to do is on platforms where they don't care, just let the people who care work on it and it benefits Twitter in the end because people are using their service. Just make everybody see your ads, everyone's happy yeah well maybe not everybody's happy but i think you get my point ces is this week um we're kind of approaching day one uh you're going to ces mike not this time i'm not either now you've been we've i think we spoke about this last year you've been to CES a few times

I've put a link to a post from The Verge where they're talking about the trends that should be expected this time around cars are probably going to be the biggest one and there's something that I'm very interested in there are big rumors that

in Ford's press conference which is at some point over the next couple of days, they're going to be announcing a partnership with Google to build autonomous cars. This is heavily rumored and would be very, very interesting if that is coming to pass. It would mean Google is first. There was a story today that GM has invested a gajillion dollars

into Lyft to help them build autonomous cars. It's definitely the thing. 2016 is going to be the year of the autonomous car. They're not going to be out, but there's going to be a lot of news about them. I think that's going to be the biggest trend this year. And so, yeah, just CES is coming. I've never been, right?

I know you have. I would like to do it one day just just to see it i just want to see what ces looks like it's a really big trade show and a big parking lot and packed with people and lots of electronics and you know it yeah that's what it is if you like crowds and lots of weird crappy stuff in aisle by aisle after aisle and then other places where it's just wall-to-wall tvs ces is the place for you because it's got all that stuff i hate it but you know i can tell i hate it i mean it's just a spectacle that i've always seen from afar and have therefore been kind of just a little bit interested in what it is you know i'm just like curious to see what ces actually looks and feels like but not needing

i mean i think it would be different going and not being in the situation of being forced to go to cover it like i would be going out of choice and it might be a little bit easier for me if i did decide to do it i am considering it for next year just just to see so what i would say is though that if you go you you're gonna have to cover it right if you go you're going to have to bring a microphone or a little podcast set up and do some interviews and have it be live from ces on relay i think you would need to do it that way yeah but so but it's it's yeah it's it's fine it's it's a it's news that has to be covered and that's why we always covered it i i find it very low uh low content for the effort

but if you target it if you've got your meetings with you with vendors um meetings with vendors who are announcing products is valuable at ces actually i will say look at me i'm saying something positive about ces um if you line all up, because there are major announcements that are made there. And so if you've got that stuff, that's good stuff. The problem is if you end up wandering the show floor looking for things, because there's very little, there's a lot of junk, and then there's diamonds in the rough. But the return on your investment for that, for the grind, and I hate wandering in crowds, on your investment for that for for the the grunt and i hate wandering in crowds especially like um like trade show crowds because they don't people are stopping everywhere and and they stop right in front of you and you're going to barrel into them and people don't behave like normal human beings

when they're at a trade show um that's that's just it's awful it's a waste of time to do that but there are there is a lot of good news that comes out of CES. For me, that's the difference. I actually think if you go there for the spectacle, you will be much more let down than if you go there with a lot of meetings and know what you're covering if you're covering the event. Anyway, the best way to appreciate CES is from afar because you get to see the, uh, the announcements that are interesting.

It's nice for, for a large port portions of the consumer electronics industry to make all their press releases drop in a, in a few days because there's a big load of news and that's nice. Um, very little phone stuff gets announced there though, because that all gets announced at mobile world Congress in Barcelona instead, uh, in a, in a month and a half or something like that. So, uh, but it's, so it's good to watch it from afar. And I've already seen, there was some news today about TiVo doing, uh, uh, an Apple watch app that, uh, they appear to be announcing and that, uh, you speaking of Ford, it sounds like a Ford sync three system. that's their in-car entertainment system is going to support android auto and um carplay so um all the ford all the ford cars with that entertainment system next year at some point will support um

both android auto and carplay which is kind of cool so there's stuff like that that will happen over the course of this week that'll be there'll be some really great news mixed in with all the crazy stuff yeah i i there are there is some cool stuff that comes out of ces right that that's just one of the things that will happen this week you're right like a lot of the the other types of things now like mobile world congress and things that and you know shows like that are splintering it a bit, which is making things different. And individual announcements. I think I mentioned this last year when we talked about it. A lot of the major vendors realized that

they could do what Apple does, which is call an event and get people to come and cover it. Own your own stage and your own environment and your own timeline. And you're the only news of the day. You're the only news that day where CES, it's so easy to get lost in CES. So if you're Microsoft or Amazon or Google, then you just don't, or Samsung even, you know, you just don't do it.

Yeah, that was the big news a few years ago, wasn't it? That Microsoft pulled out. Because they always used to open CES, didn't they? Yeah. For a long time, it was really the Bill Gates show at CES. That's what it was. It was a Wintel kind of event. It was what are Microsoft and Intel doing?

And it was a big PC show. And it's not that much anymore either. Their PC guys are there too, but a lot of TVs, some cars. I mean, it's really like eight trade shows in one. There's so many different things there. And a lot of it is not for the press or general consumer. It's for distributors to pick up products and distribute them in various markets. And so that stuff is less interesting to everyone else too. But yeah, if you're Microsoft, you just hold an event now and you don't need to bother with CES. There will be some keynotes and things at CES where they're using the platform to get things out.

But, you know, that's the beauty of it. If you're Microsoft or Google and you've got a big thing to do, you've got your own shows to do it or you've got your own. You can call an event to do it. Do you reckon Apple are going to announce anything this week? They always do something in the past. They always have done something during CES week just to prove a point, I think. It's possible.

It's possible. I don't know. We would find out Tuesday, probably. That's usually when they do those press release announcements. I don't know. I don't know. They may be moving away from that game, too. They did a lot last quarter, so maybe we're in a little quiet period for Apple here. That has got to be be something it's a fun thing to do right like people are

announcing stuff you announce one piddly little thing and it takes all the news away for an afternoon that's it's true i mean that is such fun i would be surprised if they stopped doing it but if they haven't got anything to announce then they can't announce anything we'll see alright are you ready for some Ask Upgrade? I am. This week's episode and this week's Ask Upgrade segment is brought to you by Squarespace you can start building your own website today at

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You can choose from very beautiful templates or all, as I say, professionally designed and they don't look like stock things that you're going to find somewhere. You go to a Squarespace website, it just looks like a really nicely designed website. And one of the key things that they do here is allowing you to customize things. You can choose from different fonts, different colors, different layouts. You can drag around widgets. You can have a gallery here. You can put a store over there because they have complete commerce functionality. The Squarespace commerce platform, you can add a store to your site if you want to.

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their plans start at just eight dollars a month and they'll give you a free domain name if you sign up for a year and when you do sign up make sure that you use that offer code upgrade at checkout you'll not only get 10% off your first purchase, you'll also be showing your support for this show. Squarespace, build it beautiful. James wrote in. He loved our discussion about the iPad Pro. We did mention, I wanted to say this a little bit earlier on.

I don't want to talk about it yet because i think i've we've killed people with ipad pro talk but i really want to talk about at some point just how big a difference this device is making to the way that i work we'll do we'll do a check-in i think i think giving it some time not only giving people a little break from it but giving some time for both of us to spend with it is uh is going to be helpful i just want to say this i want to make this bold claim the ipad pro is the best thing apple did in 2015 didn't we give it an upgradey no we didn't have that category i mean we gave it a category for our favorite thing right yeah but i just think flat out the ipad pro is the best thing that they did um and it's very surprising anyway james said he feels that something that we missed on iOS

is that you can't tag photos with faces and keywords and stuff like that. And that is making it harder for him to use photos on iOS as compared to the Mac where he gets access to all of these features. And as I have called you many times, you are the photos app man. What is your opinion about this? Well, he's right. It's a limitation of photos for iOS that's not there in the Mac. There are a few things going on here.

The keywords thing, I think that's a good point. There are UI questions about how you keyword batches of photos or individual photos. And are you doing that on your phone? But are you doing that on an iPad? Maybe you are. Having features missing from photos on ios is an issue if they're on photos for mac the faces thing is interesting um and and it goes back to the way that apple is handling face data apple isn't syncing face data and they they say that's a consequence of their commitment to privacy

issues that they don't want sort of facial recognition information being available publicly. It stays on your Mac. And all that really gets tagged when you do iCloud photo library is who are the faces in the individual photos. But the facial recognition engine isn't in the cloud. It's on the Mac. but the engine, the facial recognition engine isn't in the cloud. It's on the Mac. So the question is, one, could they put that on the iPad or on iOS in general? They probably could, but you go back to UI issues and are people going to be tagging faces on iOS or not? And then there's that question of syncing. I think Apple feels like they benefit from the most common

use case being that you've got a Mac and iOS devices and there's the one Mac and that's where the facial recognition database lives. And it gets much more complicated when you have other devices that are also trying to run the facial recognition database. So I think it's a complicated problem and I'm not quite sure what the solution is, whether it's moving it to the cloud or coming up with some other way for these devices to interact with the facial data. But it's true. Over time, you would like those features on the Mac to also be on iOS, and they aren't. I still have a Mac, so it doesn't bother me too much. And I don't use those features very often. But if you were trying to go iPad only, and I think that that's not

unreasonable, especially if the thing that is important to you is photos, that it might be an issue. That's it. I mean, it's a naughty problem, and I don't know whether they're going to solve it this year or not. Because Apple knows how often people use faces and keywords and photos, and they may figure that that's a power user feature that they're comfortable not ever putting on iOS. I don't know. When you look at the competition, Google gets to do a lot of really great things by having brains in the cloud working on this stuff, right? in the cloud working on this stuff, right? So, you know, that's my gut feeling is that maybe somebody at Apple should make the argument that moving some of the face recognition stuff

up into iCloud might be valuable, but that would only be for people who are using iCloud Photo Library. So I don't know. I don't know. It's a hard one. I think that's why it's not there is that this is a difficult problem

because of where faces started, which was on the Mac. Listener Nick wrote in, is thead pro comfortable to use all day do you use it flat or propped up on a stand do you have a sore neck from looking down so using the ipad pro more um more than my imac now uh is basically meaning that i work from comfortable locations now i work from the sofa a lot i work from comfortable chairs i work in bed i just have the thing on my lap with the smart keyboard that's tends to be how i work now yeah um i i have been yeah so i'll use it on on the on the couch um and and when i'm having my first cup of tea in the morning in bed uh and then the other time that i'll use it i'll sometimes use it sitting at my

dining room table with a with a stand and sometimes i'll use it standing with the ipad on the uh the bar in the kitchen which is a nice sort of standing configuration. And that's mostly where I'm using it now. I have a sit-stand desk here that I could put it on, but I tend not to use, I've got the computer out here. If I want to work out in the garage, I will use a computer. But if I go in the house, what I do is I use the iPad and not bring in a laptop. And it's a nice change of scenery.

And so that works for me. I think that that's the beauty of the ipad pro is um i'm not using it in one location all day i'm moving around with it i'll be at the desk or i'll be at the table then i'll be up at the bar then i'll be on the couch then i'll go back to the table i'll kind of move around and i think that's one of the things that that appeals about it. Definitely. Listener Luke, might DVR capabilities be the reason for Apple's poorly explained fourth-gen TV storage options? I don't think so, because first off, I think that Apple doesn't want to make a DVR.

Yeah, I think even when they do whatever it is that they do, it will be like Netflix. It won't be like TiVo. It's all going to be streaming and if you want to do maybe there'll be a buffer a stream buffer if you've got a live tv service there'll be a stream buffer or maybe it's a maybe the buffer lives on the server right and you you can back through that uh that buffer that exists on the server for the live channel you're watching but i expected to be very much like the bbc iplayer you can watch live and then everything else just goes into a catch-up catalog exactly and and so um apple's not going to build something with a cable card and there's something like that for the u.s cable market it's not going to happen um and hd video is is um enormous so other than

caches uh that the apple tv doesn't have the capacity to store anything meaningful my tivo has like a four terabyte hard drive in it it's um yeah the apple tv is not gonna be able to handle it and uh it's not built to it's it's also it's built for a world where everything is available streaming and you stream your video when you want to watch it yep i think that's what's going to happen yep okay then next up we have from robert uh did you mention a favorite apple watch charging stand i don't use one and i know that you do so i thought we should probably mention it uh yeah and i haven't um i haven't checked out a bunch of stands, so I don't have a favorite. I bought the nightstand from Elevation Lab, and I use it, and it's fine. There are probably other ones that are better.

What I like about it is it's got the orientation properly to use it in nightstand mode, where it becomes your alarm clock. And that's what I use now as my alarm clock, is my Apple Watch. It's another benefit of being an Apple Watch user. And so that's what I use. There may be other ones. What you want is a stand that lets you charge it and hold it sideways. So, although you can also just lay it on the table, and that works too. I kind of like not doing that and having it on the little stand instead. But, you know, is it essential? No, I don't think it is essential, but it's fine. It keeps my little charger in place. And that's what I like about it. And, you know, the magnet, I wish the magnet was stronger on the Apple Watch charger because it wiggles a little bit, but

that's what I'm using and it's fine. Next up, we have a question from Ben. And Ben wanted to know, at what speed do you both listen to your podcasts? Ben recently went down to 1x and everyone sounds so different than at 1.8, which I believe he's saying he listened to previously. Hi, Ben. 1.8, which I believe he's saying he listened to previously. Hi, Ben. How are you doing?

Thanks for your question. I listen one tick up usually in Overcast. Oh, you do? Maybe one or two ticks up. That's one of the reasons I love Overcast is it's the first app that i have uh podcast app that i listen to where the faster speeds don't sound don't don't have like weird artifacts uh that on other the standard like audio method in order to speed up audio every i feel like you get these like tick tick tick tick tick things that weird artifacts that happen and uh it's all smooth and overcast. So a lot of podcasts I'll listen to one tick up, maybe two.

And then there are some podcasts where I refuse to do that, like The Flophouse, because they already talk so fast, and I want to savor every minute of that podcast because it's one of my favorites. Some others, though, I'll speed it up a little bit. ATP, I listened to sped up. And Lauren was listening to one while I was getting ready in the morning. I had it on a speaker. And she was like, is this sped up or do they really talk that fast? And I said, no, it's sped up. But I hear this from people. My policy has always been no speed is supported other than 1x. We edit all of our podcasts and listen supported other than 1x like we we edit

all of our podcasts and listen to them at 1x that's how they're meant to be listened to if you want to listen to other speeds it's unsupported it may be unsafe it may be a danger to you and your family be careful out there what about you mike i'm 1x only with smart speed yeah uh i just i just don't i mean sometimes even like with smart speed like i hear the change yeah sometimes it will like pick somebody up and make them talk quite quickly for whatever reason and i hear it and i'm like wish it didn't do that bit yeah but like it's it's smart speed's really good at doing exactly what i want which is just take out the silences and speed things up very, very slightly.

And that works for me because I like to listen at 1x and I only listen to smart speed because I can listen to basically 1x and still save some time. I don't really like the idea of speeding up shows. It just doesn't... I've tried it and it just doesn't fit with me. Yeah. I just don't like it. I like to hear it as it was intended to be

you know and i don't think silences are an issue really unless you're listening to like an npr show like i think i turn smart speed off when i listen to cereal or something because it's like you know dramatic pauses that avoid you don't get right listen up paula what ios or os 10 app do you use to make the beautiful links in the real fm show notes uh we don't use an app uh is our cms that does that yeah yeah there's a there's a cool bookmarklet in the cms that that uh whatever the latest episode is that's in the uh in the cms you can go to a page and click the bookmarklet and it sucks in the title and the URL. And that helps a lot when we're doing those.

I have that set up for when I'm doing clockwise. As people mention things, I'm navigating to the pages and clicking the button and it gets added to the show notes, which is very nice. That is exactly how I've been doing the show notes for this episode. Exactly. It works great. But it's just our CMS. If you've ever been curious, now you know. it's just our cms if you've ever been

curious now you know it's just our system that does it um we're very proud of it we love show notes in case you hadn't guessed uh and yeah you see like you know you'll get uh last week's upgrade and last week's connected had mammoth show notes you know i was working on upgrade for like five hours last week yeah with the chapters and then okay chapters could we just address chapters quickly i need to address chapters quickly because you know people don't ask they're only a couple i'm a small handful people asking they're going to ask because i did it like on two different shows last week my personal policy um on chapters is i do them in shows where i think it makes sense uh for like because it enhances a topic in some way.

So like the Upgradees, it made sense to me because there were categories. When we did the year-end review episode of Connected, I do it because every month, you know, it kind of breaks it down that way. I'm personally unsold on doing chapters just for every topic in a random episode of Upgrade. I could be changed in the future, but I doubt that because it's a lot more work for me with

the way that I edit because I don't do a full listen through edit of this show. I make notes as we record and go back in and fix things afterwards. We have a wide ranging discussion that kind of goes through topics sometimes and it would be very difficult to get all of the stops. I feel like, you know, we could totally do, you know, and it's up to you because it does take extra time. People don't understand that there are technical issues and how you tag. And I used to fix things with the incomparable before I started doing more bookmarks. If I found a mistake in the episode, I could actually just fix it in an audio editor and then re-encode it as MP3. But the workflow

that we use for chapters, you kind of can't do that. You have to re-export it from Logic again. It takes time. It's complicated. You know, we do have a follow-up sponsor topic, sponsor ask upgrade kind of structure that could have some basic bookmarks in it. But I see what you're saying too, which is it's for special occasions when there's extra structure that seems fitting for bookmarks. And super fine grain kind of bookmark detail is something that is not necessarily worth the extra work and workflow. not necessarily worth the extra work and workflow.

And just the act of going to any bookmarks is itself take, there's a hit in terms of the work that happens there. So I don't know. I do them sometimes for incomparable all the time for clockwise because clockwise is very structured. Yeah, it varies. Yeah. I just, I need extra convincing as to why I should do that

I just don't see it really elevating email me with your reasons listener Martin what's the likelihood in your professional opinion of the Apple Pencil support coming to the iPad Air 3 very likely I would say

I would say so. Yeah, I would say like 80%, 90%, something like that, that they'll do it with Apple Pencil support and possibly Smart Connector too. But certainly Apple Pencil support, it just makes a lot of sense

that eventually the iPad Air will get it. Why not the next version? It makes the iPad Air better. It makes the Pencil better. Why not? And listen to Garyary are english muffins just muffins in england i want to know the answer to this so i'm happy that listener gary asked i'm not 100 sure what i would call that what gary is showing me because

they come they come kind of together and then you split them apart or they come pre-split. And they've got little as they say, the little nooks and crannies in them. The little kind of bubbles. And then you toast them and put things on them. I had these for breakfast this morning in fact, with peanut butter and jelly on them. It just looks like a roll to me.

Well, next time you're here, we're going to have to give you an English muffin and have you name it because what we call muffins is what you call muffins okay which is muffins like chocolate chip muffins that these are little these are little they're similar to like the like uh there's they also sell australian toaster biscuits which are very much like english muffins but they're different so you don't you don't even know what these are i can't get give you a name for them but they're not muffins no they're not muffins to answer listener gary yeah they're not we don't call them the muffins i don't think i'm like googling now and i can't i cannot give you an answer as to what these things are

like i wouldn't even know what to call them I think I would probably just call them English muffins maybe I don't know I have no idea I'm completely unhelpful I don't know what that thing is I don't know muffins according to Wikipedia they're sold by the name muffins in all British supermarkets all British supermarkets wow that's that's pretty definitive, Wikipedia. I don't think so, Wikipedia. And yeah, maybe they are called muffins, but that's not what people call muffins, right? Like, they may be called muffins, like you

could call anything a muffin, but it doesn't when you say to somebody, do you have muffins? They don't give you these. They give you chocolate chip muffins, right? Like, you know, it's like I could call my iPhone a muffin if I wanted to. All right. But it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that that's what everybody knows as muffins.

I hate stuff like this on Wikipedia. This is what actually makes Wikipedia a difficult thing. It's like they're not in like every supermarket. I don't even know what they are. So they can't be like, it's not like you go to supermarkets and you can't move for muffins. They checked. Wikipedia checked and they're available in every supermarket they had somebody go around there's a tesco in bath that doesn't have them they're gonna delete that comment oh god that's it that's it i thought we'd end on a high note yeah definitely if you want to find our

show notes i lovingly crafted show notes you go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 70, where you'll also find links to support this show. If you want to, you can do that. And we would love you to become a RelayFM member and consider supporting Upgrade. If you would like to follow us online,

Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter, and he's over at sixcolors.com. And I am at imyke E. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much to Casper and Squarespace for sponsoring and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye Mr. Snell.

Here's a message for all of you fast listeners out there. Goodbye. Bye.