Upgrade - 97: We Used Our Power For Pizza

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

Listeners suggest naming schemes for Myke’s devices, Jason and Myke adapt to Apple’s new public betas, we discuss the future of iPad software updates, and Jason gets frustrated by the lack of updates to iCloud Family Sharing.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 97 today's show is brought to you by the lovely folk over at hover and ring my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by the incomparable jason snell hi mike how are you i'm very well. How are you? It's good to be back. We're starting the week right, as we always do with a podcast. So we had a ton of follow-up and suggestions for device name schemes. We did.

So many that I can't read them all. No. But we have picked a few. So I have a new device naming scheme i have chosen one and i'll get to that but i wanted to just read out some of the suggestions that we got because it might help uh inspire some upgradians to name their own devices in a cluster so this is after last week which this just came up about naming devices and and people having kind of schemes like jason has uh all monkey names for his devices so first up brian suggested fictional evil artificial

intelligence like ultron hal 9000 skynet i don't know what wopr is whopper it's from war games which is a movie from the 80s that i guess you haven't seen i have seen it but didn't remember the name that's the big well the whopper is that big computer with the blinking lights yeah the thing that actually predicts the wars right yeah yeah it's i mean we think of it i probably think of it as joshua that's the you know because it's maybe after dr falcon's son but that's what it is actually called the whopper which there's a parody of war games that shows that it's a giant hamburger which i always thought was funny. That works, yeah. Now that you're saying it, I'm remembering it.

So there's a mic at the movies out there of War Games. I think that was an analog one. But I'll put a link to the Incomparable episode. It's episode 8 of the Mic in the Movies feed over at the Incomparable. Oh, yeah. There it is. Oh, we did it together. So how did you not know that anyway? All right.

It was me and you? Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm getting lost in all the movies. We have some important Mike at the Movies related news at the end of the show today. Yes. That's a tease, Jason.

You did a great job. Thanks. People are going to be worried the entire show that we're canceling Mike at the Movies. No. It's going to be saying what our next one is. We're one oh okay good okay everybody rest easy don't be don't be tense while listening to this podcast now you know it's gonna be okay it's all good uh mikey suggested european cities um on knives and swords i had a lot of people suggest swords to me and this this posed two questions one i didn't know this was a thing

and two why did people suggest like have i ever spoken about my sword collecting i don't think so i here's my theory is you are as we've said on the show before you are uh for some people the only english person they know and in the united states so many uh things about england are swords and sorcery and king arthur and things like that and also um american movies tend to use english accents as code for old timey medieval stuff so everybody even if they're not in england they speak with an english accent and that's the code for old time stuff. So I think that a lot of Americans think that English people actually are walking around with swords. Or if not, they have a sword on their wall that belonged to an ancestor from the old times.

Well, a lot of people were suggesting like samurai swords. I don't, I've got no theory for that. Yeah. So I don't i got i've got no theory for that yeah so i i don't know i mean i don't know if i've ever given the impression that i uh that i collect samurai swords but there we go do you do you own a sword i don't own any swords okay i don't uh ed was in the right market when looking at things that i collect when he suggested obscure pen terms and brands that sound cool. That was a good one. And Andrew suggested the great beards of history.

So you have like a Rasputin. Clearly two of my passions. So I appreciated those. The next one was Jamie who suggested Pokemon. Because there are 150 of the original and then hundreds and hundreds more. So I could have every device ever

and I wouldn't run out. The reason I wanted to mention this is because of pokemon go oh yeah so pokemon go is an absolute phenomenon yes and not available where you are because it's only the u.s australia and new zealand i believe yes so pokemon go if you don't know it is a new iphone game it is an alternate reality game in that you walk around in the real world with your phone out, and it's using the camera, and you're looking through the camera, and then Pokemon appear, and you're told to go to specific places for Pokemon, or you go to different areas for gyms and stuff like that that have been marked on actual real-world maps. areas for gyms and stuff like that that have been marked on actual real world maps yes um and it is i've i can't recall ever seeing something like this with an iphone app or a game before i'm

gonna put a link in the show notes to a little roundup of stuff over on mac stories which has got some pictures of some people that have uh like taken pictures and tweeted them or videos there are people all over america right now playing this game and clustering together and it seems like a real phenomenon like a kind of i don't know like some kind of social thing which is very different right like it's turning into a big thing have you tried pokemon go yet uh i tried it briefly but my family went out last night while I was talking on the phone. They all went for a walk. And what my wife said was, we finally have found a reason for my son, who loves video games, to actually go for a walk enthusiastically, which is to look for Pokemon.

So they were playing it and my daughter got like 20 Pokemon, and they discovered there's a historical marker near my house that is a PokeSpot, I guess, or maybe that's a gym. And then there's also a memorial bench over by the school that's in my neighborhood, and that is the other one. So they found the locations of a nearby PokeSpot and a nearby gym and also caught a lot of pokemon and they were you know they were walking out they did a nice i mean it was like it out for like half an hour no it's more like an hour doing it so i've only done it briefly but um there's a lot of enthusiasm in my house for

it i'm so excited like the reason i think that this is hitting a lot of people is because this is what pokemon is right like being out in the world collecting them like this is what the game is right the kids that go out into the world and they collect pokemon like this is the closest to actually being able for us to do this in our world and i think that's why it's hit with so many people right like if you've ever played pokemon this is what you dreamed of being able to actually go out into the world and catch pokemon and i'm i'm seeing reports that it is going to be launching in europe within the next few days and i'm very excited for it um i know that if i downloaded it from a us app store account which i have used in the past i could get the game but

it seems like for people that have done that they've actually not enabled poke spots in those areas yet so it's kind of pointless so i'm just waiting but there was one other thing that i wanted to talk about which was the effect that this has had on nintendo now nintendo's stock price has like their market cap has raised by seven billion dollars over the last couple over the last day or two because of pokemon go now the reason that this is very interesting is they have nothing to do with this game. Well, that's not entirely true, right? They have something to do with Pokemon, but this game is not a Nintendo game. So Nintendo earned 33% of the Pokemon company, right? I believe Nintendo also is one of the three investors in the mobile development company that built the game.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me right if they are but what i mean is like this isn't a nintendo game this is a game from the pokemon company yeah and and and produced by uh what neantic yeah who is a alphabet company did you was an alphabet but but is now um it is now owned by what nintendo the pokemon company and google ah okay okay well that makes sense but anyway like it's just very interesting right that people are just looking at this and saying pokemon oh that means nintendo and their stock has gone through the roof it's just a really interesting cause and effect um which i mean as i guess in some instances quite rightly pointed out why so many people believe they were right that nintendo should be making mobile games i think this is definitely what the market wants it It's still, I think, time will still tell, I believe,

if this is the right thing for Nintendo as a company. I think so, but you can see the enthusiasm here that perhaps this, I think what people, what the investors are hoping is that this is a sign that the kind of stuff that Nintendo is good at could translate in this way, where, in fact, Nintendo doesn't have to build their own hardware, even, to have their kind of intellectual property that they have and their attitude toward games and building software,

that could be applied and be successful. Even though this is a thing that Nintendo is only, I don't even want to say tangentially, Nintendo is involved in this, but this is not like a core just Nintendo kind of thing. You see, I haven't played played it so i can't attest to this but i would be very surprised if there was even a nintendo logo when you know there's not it's the pokemon company right it's it's all it's it's pokemon brand because this isn't the first

game that the pokemon company have had on ios um i think they had a game pokemon shuffle i think which was a 3ds game which they turned into an iphone and android game so you know this this isn't their first foray but it's it's the combination of everything that this game does uh that is making it so popular so it's very interesting to see and it's very i'm sure that there are some very interesting conversations occurring inside of nintendo headquarters right now as they're trying to uh work out where they're going to go next with this but i'm really excited and i'm very happy for nintendo and the pokemon company that this is happening i hope that it's going to push them to actually develop a real pokemon game for uh

mobile platforms because that's something that i would love but yeah anyway that is a brief aside but uh pokemon go and everything it's doing fascinating absolutely fascinating and i'm really interested to see what this is like next week right will it last nobody knows we'll wait and see scott suggested fictional cat names um and i guess this is to go in kind of hand in hand with the uh mac os cat names i guess or is that that might be how what scott uses i think that's some people are not recommending for you they're recommending they're saying what they use yeah yeah yeah that's what scott's doing here yeah yeah he's saying what he

uses yeah and it's like you know it's in the idea to spark ideas for me so he suggested like uh the cheshire cat and then years ago they had a boot camp installation which was called schrodinger's cat which that just really made me laugh i thought that was right yeah um asia asia suggested star wars related names and gave me some ideas like the imac could be the death Star, the iPad Pro could be the Millennium Falcon, and so on. I like those. Neil suggested comic characters with specific kind of verticals. Like for example, Wi-Fi being Asgard, MacBook Pro being Odin. iPhone is Thor, Watch is Mjolnir, and the iPad is Beta Ray Bill. Sure. So Neil is a big Thor fan, obviously. And those are, I think, what he uses. So, yeah. Kenyon suggested 80s movies titles.

Sure. Back to the Whopper again. Rob suggested mailbag related things like Pouch, Sack, Satchel, which I really enjoyed. Satchel! Sorry. Hi there. Hi. Many people suggested wrestlers, including Jimmy,

and that is what I have decided to go with. Oh, look at that. So I've gone with wrestler names. You've got a little screenshot of all your devices that are named things that I don't have any idea what they are, but they're important to you, and that's the most important thing. That's why I'm not even going to bother saying the names on the air, because it won't mean anything to anybody who doesn't follow wrestling,

because I've chosen current wrestlers, not classic wrestlers. So I'm just going to put the screenshot in the show notes so people can go and see that if they want to. But this is all bringing me around to mention that my wrestling show on The Incomparable is going to be debuting this week on July 15th. So it's called The Ring Post. There's already an episode zero up,

so people can actually go and listen to your introduction and subscribe to the podcast now. Exactly. So you can go now. And the first episode goes up, yeah. This is part of... Currently, we're in two very big weeks, if you're a wrestling fan so that's

why i did it now wrestling weeks i see you gotta you gotta do that when the that's like when i launched six colors i wanted to take time off but i couldn't because it was the week the iphone came out so that's the perfect time so you're you're you know you're you're timing it perfectly mike striking while the iron is hot it's wrestlemania happening no that's in uh kind of march april time how about the royal rumble is the royal rumble happening that's in january i'm really impressed i i'm i'm that's it i've done all the wrestling i know is done now good well you did you did a good job so if you want to go and check it out if you're interested in wrestling uh or if you know like many people started listening to the pen addict because they just wanted to listen to something that someone was really excited about, then you might enjoy The Ring Post for the same reason because it's something I'm very excited about.

It's something that I enjoy. So you can go there. Go to theincomparable.com slash ringpost or just go to ringpost.fm and it will redirect you. Yeah, and people have asked, we've talked about this this before but people asked why is that not a relay show and you and i both thought that it was a a better fit for the incomparable and then it's about an entertainment product that you're really enthusiastic about and that that might be an episodic tv show yeah exactly it's the same it's the same reason that that uh upgrade and clockwise aren't on the incomparable because i felt that that wasn't that what that network was about and uh yeah so that's where we are yeah like if you boil it down it is a fictional television show

so that's why it's on the incomparable because that's what the incomparable is all about exactly we have some very important uh pineapple pepperoni pizza follow-up pizza follow-up this okay so uh two pieces of pepperoni and pineapple news and these keep trickling in people spot pepperoni and pineapple in the one not everybody you'll be surprised to know not everybody went out the week we talked about pepperoni and pineapple pizza uh or the week that tiff and marco talked about it on top four right no nobody just runs out not everybody runs out and immediately buys pizza right sometimes you Sometimes you just are living your life. And then you're sitting somewhere at a pizza restaurant, let's say, and you think, hey, I should try that pizza. So we've had trickling over weeks and weeks, people reporting back about

pepperoni and pineapple. And generally, positively, I have to say, somebody sent in an ad for a Domino's pizza, you know somewhere that was like get this get any large or something but the photo that they showed in the ad was pepperoni and pineapple like you know how did what's going on what's happening i think maybe you know i'm just saying the pepperoni and pineapple train is rolling down the track and then listener frank wrote in to you and me and said i sat down at a bar someone left three slices of pepperoni and pineapple pizza jason was right now i think the implication here from frank is that he tried this leftover bar pizza yeah i have many questions

about enjoyed it uh which i first would say frank you're a braver man than i to just discover left pizza and even though it's at a bar it's not like it was in a garbage can or something it's at a bar it's a and and try it which is sort of the implication here um although although maybe he's just saying that he saw it and noticed it but but the other question is why did they leave if it was so delicious why did they leave it behind i'm but but the other question is why did they leave if it was so delicious why did they leave it behind i'm troubled by the fact that pepperoni and pineapple pizza was abandoned at the bar so i'm not sure whether this is good news or bad news frankly um i've found the dominoes ad and i've put that in the show notes too great great so i wonder if

like i'm doing this because i have recently ordered a few pepperoni pineapple pizzas from domino's um so who knows there was recently i think this is just before wwdc somebody wrote in uh from wisconsin and they went to their local pizza shop and they asked for pepperoni pineapple and the pizza person i don't uh pizzolio or something uh sure uh it's a barista really frankly yeah okay we'll need to yeah let's yeah let's ask federico what the official italian name is for a pizza professional anyway it is something along the lines of pizzolio i just can't say it correctly right but uh they kind of gave them a look and was like real afm which was amazing it's happening i'm just saying it's

happening one day people will look back and say you know hawaiian pizza used to be made with ham but now we just make it with pepperoni because everybody preferred that thanks real afm yep so good but i'm just troubled why those three pieces were left behind. Never leave pepperoni pineapple pizza behind. Take it with you. Get them to put it in a box. Take it with you. Just reheat that stuff.

So that was from Matthew, that tweet about the... Thank you. In Rochester, Wisconsin. That's amazing. That's amazing. Truly, Mike, the grip of relay on the minds of humans on Earth is broad, clearly. I think that this is our crowning achievement. Oh, dear.

That's too bad. Really. This is our legacy. Well, this is the thing is, you know, if somebody tells you, yes, there will be one thing you do in your life that has an impact beyond all others, but you will never know what it will be. And you can try and try and try to make big impacts if you like. But that doesn't mean that any of those will come to anything. In fact, it might simply be that people like a kind of pizza a little bit more. Oh, well, what an epitaph that will be. Somebody go to my grave when I die and just put some pepperonis and pineapples on.

Sprinkle it on the... Anyway, let's move on. Jason, allow me to take a moment to talk to you about domain names. Thank goodness. Hover is one of our sponsors for this week's show when I was setting up the ring post website and I mentioned the URL ringpost.fm recently

Hover was where I went to buy that naturally, it was actually quite funny I was thinking up names for what the show could be and as I always do with this stuff i just go to hover and i just keep typing in words until i see the domain available and then that's the one that i'll buy because domain names are so important and it's so easy to find and buy them with hover um they have over 400 domain extensions to end your domain with. All the classics like.com and.net are there,

.co. They also have.design and.tech. Oh, Jason, we could buy something.pizza. And I believe that there is a allthings.pizza is something that I own, which I think goes to connected. Who knows? There's many pizza-related domains that you could buy, many pepperoni ones, many pineapple ones, and you could buy them all at Hover. And then once you've found that domain that you're looking for, you can just use Hover Connect to set up your domain automatically with your website in just a few clicks. You don't have to dig through help articles or be on the phone with someone for six hours

just to get your domain working anymore because Hover have fixed that and sorted it for you. Find the perfect domain name for your idea or even for just that joke that you're trying to tell. Go to hover.com right now and use the promo code BETA, B-E-T-A, at checkout. You'll save 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Hover for their support of this show and RelayFM. So a couple of weeks ago, Federico wrote this article on Mac Stories about his thinking about the fact that we didn't have many iOS 10 features for the iPad. year about like with the release of iOS 9.3, that we're going to see more staggered releases of iOS and that more iOS features for the iPad would come in one of those staggered releases, right? So we would see maybe 9.3 or 10.3, I should say, in March with some iPad updates that we didn't see in September. And I wanted to see what you thought of this, Jason. We spent a lot of time, maybe in February, March last year, talking about the idea of Apple moving to a more staggered point release with bigger features. Is this something you think is going to happen?

Well, I know it's hard for me to separate this from what I know about, like Federico said, that this is what he thought would happen. And so that really kind of led me down that path. Also, you know, we got the word a little before, I think it might've been Federico, it might've been somebody else said, yeah, there are no iPad features to speak of in iOS 10.

And we've gotten, I think some hints since then that this is what's happening. I'm not, it's hard for me to say because it doesn't feel like speculation so much as it's informed. It's like this mixture of what people want and what people hear through the grapevine might be happening. But because it's Apple, we don't really know for sure. It's not like they've made a declaration. But it makes a lot of sense. The idea that, you know, we can't imagine Apple as this company with

superpowers. Apple has limitations. And there's only so much they can do. There's literally only so much they can do in terms of operating system development at a time. They already do a lot. So the iPhone is their most important product. iOS updates coincide with the release of the iPhone. ios updates uh coincide with the release of the iphone all makes sense right so why would you not prioritize iphone features and uh if you want to do things for the ipad but you just you can't prioritize them for the major release it really makes sense to hold them back and say what we'll just do those later we'll do those in a 0.1 or 0.2 release especially since the ipads seem to come out you know after the iPhone generally anyway, right? They come out a month or two later.

So why would you not? And if they don't come out then, then that's fine too. You could even shift them a little further back. They're not as high priority as the iPhone. And so by taking them out of the big drop that happens in the fall and September, you actually, I think it might be good for the iPad in that way, in that they're not fighting with the iPhone for prioritization of the main release. Instead, they are on their own track, essentially,

for features to be picked up and rolled out a few months later. I think it's great, actually, in that way. Now, let's see it happen, right? Because the alternative is that, yeah there's no ipad features that means there are never going to be any that would be sad but if most of them trail by a couple of months i'm okay with that i would be you know i want them to be doing work on the ipad i think giving ipad separate prioritization is a good thing for the ipad what if we end up with new iPhones and new iOS in September and then new iPads and updates to iOS in March? Like, and this just rolls out now.

Like, imagine that world. That feels pretty good, right? A six-month alternating kind of schedule would be great. I think that would be fantastic and and i mean i've advocated here before for the idea of apple being a little less focused and and chained to a this annual update schedule and and uh so this is a this is a perfect example right ios is a platform that supports two major product lines, iPhone and iPad. And why not separate them in that way? Not separating the operating system, just separating the emphasis. And there could still be iPhone features in a half-step release six months later. But what if that's the

story? Is that the next step after BuckFes and things like that is really more iPad-oriented because the iPad, that stuff gets out of the way of the iPhone launch in September. So I think it'll be good. I think more ways Apple can kind of spread out its priority list instead of trying to have it all land at once in September. The more, the better, I think. Yeah, I think it would be really great for iPad owners because you end up with some new features in September

and then more focus features in March, say. Or let's say we're just going to pin it to those dates. Because you get some of the iPad enhancements, right? If you look at stuff like messages, so like the iPhone enhancements, they're coming to the iPad. So you get those in September. And then when March rolls around, you see things like updates to multitasking

and updates with drag and drop and stuff like that. So you end up, if you're a keen iPad user, like I definitely am, and I know that you are becoming more and more, I believe, as time goes on. Oh, sure. That could be a really nice scenario. However, I am worried that it's a little wishful thinking. Well, that's the little chill in the back of my neck when we talk about this.

It's really easy to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're working on features for you guys too. Just wait. And then are they going to happen? Are those going to happen? Or is that not the case, right? And that's, I do worry that there's a little bit of bargaining happening here, which is we're saying, oh, well, we really need changes to the multitasking screen on the iPad, but it's not an iOS 10. So rather than be sad and hope that it's there in a year and think about a year longer of having that bad multitasking screen, um, we instead start wishcasting a little bit about, well, maybe in November or January or March, we'll get that thing that we all dreamed of. And like I said, it's hard to pick this stuff apart. I seem to have gotten through the grapevine indications that that is the plan, but it's all through the grapevine. And again, at any point, it could be amplified by our own wishcasting. So I think

it could be amplified by our own wish casting. So I think the truth is until it exists, it doesn't exist. And so that's the, and right now it has not been announced and people can install iOS 10 on the, on the iPad and see what's there today. And there are some features in there that are good for iPad users. I'm really happy about that external keyboard change that, you know, you can finally turn off autocorrect on the hardware keyboards and leave it on for the software keyboards. There's, there's good stuff in there, but there's a lot of stuff that is kind of, uh, high on the wishlist that's not in there. And yeah, I, I, I hope they're working on it. I really hope they go to this kind of schedule because it, it also means there's more attention

being paid to the iPad because the iPad is not going to win feature arguments against the iPhone every fall or every spring when they're deciding what they're going to put out at WWDC and then ship in the fall. It's not going to win. I mean, it's a fraction of the audience of the iPhone. And while I think it's important and I think Apple is behind the iPad, it's also, you could argue, irresponsible to over-prioritize the iPad when the iPhone is so important to your core business. So this is great. It unhooks the iPad development cycle from the iPhone development cycle. I mean, they're still the same OS. They're still going to pick up the features. But if you get me, this idea like you don't have to compete, we're going to save a bunch of iPad features in a little box.

And once we ship iOS 10, we're going to work on those. It would make me very happy. Yeah, right. Which is I think why we both are sort of saying, there's a little bit of caution that needs to happen here because it's something we want. And that doesn't necessarily mean, again, because we used our power for pizza instead of computer things,

we may not get it, even though we want it. So, since last week's episode, the public betas have been released. I currently, just to give an update on my beta status... Oh, I like that. I like that. It's time for the beta status. My beta status has oh i like that i like it's time beta status it's time for the beta status um i have not my beta status has not changed uh i'm still running ios 10 on air 2 just so i can see little bits and bobs but that's all i'm doing right now um i'm not running anything on my iphone because the canary app is currently crashing on launch and that is an app that is far too important to me

ah um i don't want that app crashing it's my home security system yeah it needs to work so i'm going to give a mic top tip to people that are interested in installing betas if there are applications that are super important to you apps that you use every day because you love them, or apps that are important for another reason, like your home security system, what I always do is I will go to the Twitter account of that company and look at their app replies. Because if their apps are crashing on betas, you'll see it in the app replies because people complain, right? betas, you'll see it in the app replies because people complain, right? So then you'll know. That's how I knew that the Canary app was crashing on the public beta because people were tweeting at them

and telling them. So I have not and will not be installing it on my phone until that is fixed, which might not be until iOS 10 is released. Well, this is why we always warn people, and I did it again last week. Some people complained about it. They're like, why do you, you know, it's fine. It's the, and I got some people complained about it.

They're like, Oh, why do you, you know, it's, it's fine. It's fine for me. And it's like,

yeah, okay. I had a guy who was a QA professional QA tester, a software tester say it's fine. I'm like, yes, thank you. Professional software tester.

However, the general public should, should probably not install an iOS beta because of that. Exactly that. Because it may work fine for you. But then if you've got an app, this happened to me, I think last year or the year before, there was an app that I used all the time and counted on and it just didn't work. And so I installed iOS 10 on my iPhone last week and watch OS three on my Apple watch. Because actually my,

iOS 3 on my Apple Watch. Because actually my, and I think I said this, my iPad is my most important iOS device, I decided. I use it way more than my iPhone. I agree. That said, I'm already feeling it. I was listening, when I was in the shower this morning, I was listening to the Flophouse on Overcast. And this is not the first time this has happened on iOS 10. It's happened for this last week, which is I get in the shower shower and about one minute later, it pauses. The audio just stops. Because this is a bug in iOS 10 right now is that audio to external devices sometimes just pauses just for no reason. It just does. It's a bug. It's fine. It's a bug. But it means, oh, well, I, you know, it essentially has stopped me listening to podcasts on Bluetooth devices now because, um, it paused, they pause all the time in my car when I'm using Bluetooth headphones. And that's just, so this is why regular people shouldn't install betas. I'm willing to take that hit, uh, especially because I have to write about this stuff, but it's, stuff. But it's dangerous.

And if there's one thing that you rely on, like you rely on that Canary app, that's enough of a reason not to. And there's a reason why I've got my iPad Pro not on the 10 data is that I want one device I can rely on. 10 data is that i want one device i can rely on yeah i'm uh i'm probably going to install on the beta one of the developer betas on one of my ipad pros probably the 9.7 in a couple more revisions maybe three or four um just so i have a device that i'm using every day that has it um and whilst that is a critical device, you know, I know, I know, it's crazy, but I have a backup, right? I have a whole nother physical iPad that I can use. But also, the applications in there, whilst I use them every day, there's nothing like canary, right? So like, if tweetbot crashes, I can just use a Twitter app, right? Like, if quip crashes, then I'll just save

my notes into another application and copy and paste them on another device, right? But something like Canary on my iPhone can't be replaced. Exactly. And I'm at the point now where I'm just thinking, if it's an issue for the Canary app on my iPhone, then I'll just make sure that Lauren's iPhone's got the Canary app. That is the other thing that I've got is I've got a backup of another iPhone that's around enough of the time that, especially for something like that, when I'm out of the house and she's out of the house, we're usually together and traveling. So it's fine.

But yeah, it's complicated and everybody's going to have to make up their minds about it. The problem with iOS, and I wrote about this on this on six colors last week is you can't reboot to the other partition and go back to ios 9 right on the mac you can do that on the mac you can beta test sierra by installing it on another device or partition or external drive and then just reboot into it and then reboot back out of it but i iOS, you can't. You can revert. It's painful and messy. And so we rely on our phones especially,

and you can't easily get back to the old version if it's a disaster. So that really raises the bar in terms of what's worth doing on, you know, what's worth installing a beta on. Yeah. So, you know So if you really, I'm not going to say to you, don't do it, right? Because I have done it and I will do it

and I've done it for years, but I would just say, make sure you do your due diligence before you do it. And if there is an app that is incredibly important to you, then just check it out before you go ahead and do it, right?

That is true with any software upgrade, not just betas. Any software upgrade. When it comes time to the Sierra update in the fall, that's part of the advice I always give to people is go online. If there's a mission-critical app that you use, go online and find, go online. Go to your modem. Beep, beep. Go online.

No, just do a web search okay do a google search for your app and the operating system you're thinking of upgrading to and see if there is a message board thread a thousand posts long that says oh it doesn't work ah because that might be a sign not to update yet right it's pretty simple and yet people don't do it and i feel so bad because they're like oh no now this program that i use every day suddenly doesn't work. And it turns out, yeah, there's a whole thing over there. There's an article about how it's one of the apps that doesn't work. And it's going to be three months before there's an update and you shouldn't update. So again, it's just that's one of the unfortunate things about how the software stuff works is that OS updates break software.

And if you rely on that software, don't update. And fortunately now you can search the web and find fairly readily on like day one, day two, what's broken. And then just not update. So you said that you're now, you have Sierra on an SSD boot drive, right? You've got a completely external drive which you're running the beta on. Right. So I had a 13-inch MacBook Pro that was supplied by Apple when I did my hands-on with the first developer beta. And so I've got that, but that's Apple's, and they're going to want it back soon.

And so I've got that, but that's Apple's and they're going to want it back soon. And I want for this, plus, you know, it's this laptop that's sitting behind me. Like I want the ability to sit here at my desk with my iMac and work on my, like my photos book that I have to update for iOS 10 and Sierra, any other stuff I want to do. But I'm not ready to install it on my main uh partition and for all those reasons for for last summer i had to reboot into a generic yosemite install whenever i wanted to do a podcast because it broke the the uh the l capitan betas broke all of my usb audio so um i didn't want to make that mistake this time so i bought an external ssd and installed sierra on that and i can boot onto that at any time yeah i am i'm going to stay away

from the mac os betas there's nothing in there that's super exciting to me um that that would draw me to it right like i will be holding off installing sierra when it's released for a while uh because of the type of work that i do i'm scared something's gonna break well i'm torn between these two issues right which is i have to use and ultimately i will have to use it on my real data because you you really can't yeah uh just reboot i said this last week you can't reboot and go to do i'm using a beta and then reboot back and do your work because you're not using the beta you're noodling around in that beta for 20 minutes and then you're going back and doing your and living with it right and that's why i always want to end up putting ios on something

right because on that air too all i'm doing is getting the occasional message and just looking at that like again i'm just seeing what the message stuff is. But I'm not using the new widgets or anything like that. I'm not doing that because it's not a device that I'm actually getting work done on every day. So what's probably going to happen for me, because I am both a person who's writing about new tech and somebody who relies on stable systems to do my job. And the podcasting is much more about this than writing. Writing, you can write anywhere. I mean, even there were betas of OS X last summer

where BBEdit crashed all the time. And Rich Siegel said it was Apple's fault. I'm going to take him at his word, but BBEdit crashed all the time and I write in BBEdit. And the answer was I wrote in something else, but it's like, there are other apps I could use. And I wrote in something else while BBEdit crashed and then it got fixed. And that was great. Podcasting is different, right? I, there aren't a million different ways to do podcasting. Like I need my tools to record and edit and talk, uh,

over IP with the people I'm doing podcasts with. And that, that is, that requires a stable platform. So last year it really bit me. Um, and this year, I think what I'm probably going to do at some point is the old switcheroo,

which is at some point I will feel like the sierra beta is far enough along that i will install it on my main system but i will turn that external ssd into the refuge that is um that is using el capitan right and and and then if i have any technical issues i can always do what i did all all last summer, which is reboot into the stable system to do that part of my job and then reboot back into the unstable beta to do that part of my job. But this time sort of planned instead of the last time where I was – I wiped out my boot camp partition because I desperately had to install Yosemite because all my podcasts were failing and it was not a good scene. So I want to talk for a second about the SSD. You know, it's a hundred bucks I bought on Amazon,

a 256 gig Samsung USB 3 SSD. And it's incredibly small. If you're thinking of like portable hard drives, this is an SSD. So there's nothing to it at all. In fact, I've got it tucked into the mounting bracket on the back of my iMac where there's a mounting bracket for the VESA mount because I've got my iMacs on an arm. And there's a little space there where there's nothing. And so the drive just sits in there. So it's like an internal drive in the sense that from the front of the computer, I can't even see just sits in there. So it's like an internal drive

in the sense that from the front of the computer, I can't even see that it's there. It's just kind of clinging. It's like a barnacle. It's just clinging to the side of the iMac. And it's fast. It's USB 3, so it's fast. And that's worked pretty well.

And so for me, $100 for 256 outboard, I've heard since Marco Arment told me that he's got like two gigs on an external usb ssd that he uses for a lot of his extra stuff and is very happy with it too so i just i'd never bought an external you know ssd that was not a not like a little thumb drive but like a big um drive drive kind of thing and uh it's cool so i'm using that that's my that's my boot drive now for for sierra yeah i was looking at those samsung um ssds on amazon here uh just kind of seeing what they were like and i was interested in one of the maybe what getting one of the bigger ones

that's right they they get they go i mean marco was saying that that you can get a uh a small hard drive enclosure just a generic hard drive enclosure, and then buy one of Samsung's internal SSDs that are made for laptop drive size and save a lot of money that way. And I decided I didn't want to do that for this. I just wanted something super small and easy and I could drop it in, but we'll see how it goes with this because, you know, on my iMac, uh, I feel the storage crunch. I absolutely do. And I've got the, uh, what, I think I've got the 500 gig drive and I feel the storage crunch. Uh, I'm always moving things off to my Drobo, um, because i've got big podcast files and things like that especially when i'm doing video so so yeah i i would consider if this goes well i would

consider using it once the beta is done either as just outboard storage or doing something like when marco has described and to save a little bit of money you know finding a cheap ish ssd and enclosure and then like velcroing it to the back of my iMac or something just to get another, like a terabyte of flash or something. That would be great. Yeah, like the, I could get like one of the 250 gigabyte ones that they have, that you have for like a hundred pounds here. But I was kind of interested in like some bigger storage,

but that gets expensive real quick the the terabyte so yeah so the drive that i bought which was the samsung t3 uh is is 256 it was a hundred dollars but the the it gets expensive rapidly so the 500 is is 200 and the terabyte is 360 and the two terabyte is uh 750 so it gets it gets yeah it gets more expensive i i thought 250 that's good enough for my booting into the beta i mean that's half the size of my internal storage now so i've increased my internal storage by a lot if if this is basically it's not quite as fast as internal storage, but USB 3 is pretty fast. So yeah, I got the one terabyte in my iMac

and I even sometimes feel the crunch, right? Like because of the types of files that we do and just some videos that I make, like the Cortex YouTube videos, they take up a bunch of space and it adds up quite quickly. And there's just some stuff that I would like the Cortex YouTube videos they take up a bunch of space and it adds up quite quickly and there's just some stuff that I would like to offload but I would want a relatively chunky drive to offload it to which brings me back to that whole like network attached stuff which I

am going to do at some point and you know I'm very happy that I've got the Drobo and that it is although it does make some noise it's uh kind of on the other side of the room for me. And so it's not really a problem. And if I had a better place to put it that was completely out of the attached, fast storage for working on is something that I would do with something like this SSD and would not really do on the Drobo that's attached by Ethernet. All right, should we take a break? Yeah, I think so. This week's episode is also brought to you by the ring video doorbell this is so cool i think this is so awesome with ring you'll be able to see and talk to anyone who is at your door from anywhere in the world using your trusty smartphone and you can protect your home and loved ones today if you go to ring.com upgrade and for a limited

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And I thought a thing we've had on our list of things to talk about for ages now um and it it i i thought it was worth talking about now things are a little quieter in the summertime so that's good um but it's a it's a problem and i actually just reached a a conclusion since apple changed the pricing on icloud a little bit last fall, I realized that I need to get over my stinginess about this and just give in. I have to learn to love big brother. So the story is, there's family sharing in iCloud now. So my wife and my daughter and my son all now have separate Apple IDs, but they're all on the family account. And what that means is that if I buy an app or they buy an app, we all basically can use those apps. There's some limitations. I think in-app

purchases don't translate, but it's good. Everybody's on their own plan. They've got their own backup. And yet there's some stuff that's shared between us. They've got their own backup. And yet there's some stuff that's shared between us. So it's a nice idea. I have to say, I'm disappointed that they didn't announce any expansions of iCloud family sharing in iOS 10 because it seems like it's so a first step. And where's the second step?

And I was hoping we would see it at WWDC or in the iOS 10 betas, and it seems to not have happened. Although I'm going to hold out hope that it's something that could be added because it is so intertwined with Apple services that this may be something that comes later as we get closer to the fall. But again, as we said before, could be wishcasting on my part. So here are the challenges with it. Although we can sort of share apps and stuff now instead of the old model, which was everybody just was logged into the same Apple ID and you know, I would enter my password in on my daughter's phone when she wanted to buy a game. Now, she can do that. And she can ask me and I can give her permission. And it's it's it's better

this way. But here's what we can't do. Like I have a terabyte of iCloud data for photos because I have a huge photo library and also I write a book about photos and I need to write about the experience of syncing my photo library with iCloud. So terabyte, it's great. I'm not using it all. My photo library is like 550 gigabytes

or something like that. Wow, that's big. It's big. It's every digital photo that I've taken since 2001. Yeah. Yeah, I knew that you kind of had everything, but that's a lot of photos, right? It's a lot of photos.

And it's useful for a stress test of iCloud Photo Library, right? One of the funny things about that is like over time, it was okay, right? You had this building photo library and over time, storage got cheaper. So the fact that the photo library was over time storage got cheaper. So the fact that the photo library is getting bigger kind of scaled. But then something happened, which was SSD and cloud storage. And then it became way more expensive to store those files. Yeah. And so now the idea is you do optimized storage on your Mac.

And those, although I have, actually, it's that Mac mini that's attached to the Drobo. That's where my canonical photo library still lives. But you can theoretically now have it live in the cloud, not have the originals on your Mac or your iPhone. And pay Apple to store it on iCloud. And so there are different tiers. Apple changed the tier structure. I'm paying the same. I didn't actually get a price cut

when they changed their tiers because what they did was eliminate the 500. I think there's a 500. Maybe I'm at 400 gigabytes. I was in the 500 gigabyte tier, and now I'm in the one terabyte tier, and I couldn't go down because the next one down is too small for me,

so I'm still paying $10 a month or something like that for this. But here's the problem with it. I can't share my giant cloud of data with my family. So I was in the position where I was paying basically the max you can pay for iCloud storage, $10 a month for a terabyte. month for a terabyte. And my wife was still getting errors on her iPad and iPhone that she couldn't back up because she was out of five gigabytes of space. Now, it's a separate conversation about whether five gigabytes should be the amount for the free storage, because I feel like this leads to bad user experience. And it makes it feel like Apple's just trying to get money out of you. And I think they need to raise the bar a little bit.

I know they need to make money from services or they want to make money from services. That's great. But you've got to walk that line between how many people do you annoy with your automatic backup failing because you don't have enough storage space and wouldn't you like to update? It may be worth reconsidering whether it's worth it to Apple. like to update, may be worth reconsidering whether it's worth it to Apple. But the point is, I spend a lot of money on a terabyte of storage, of which I'm only using about half. And meanwhile, my wife is being bugged that she can't store anything in her backup. And it doesn't make sense to me that this is one of those areas that I was hoping that Apple would change, where essentially a family can buy an allotment

or one person's allotment covers the whole family. Now, you see, what's so interesting when you started talking about this is that was what I just naturally assumed you were moving towards, was talking about the fact that you realized you could save the backups across the whole family. Nope. So like with the way that iCloud family sharing works I'm going to keep calling it that is there one kind of master account so like when you set it up I assume that it gets set up by one person and then you assign people that are in your family is that how it works yeah so there's a

master ID and then you say who is this I'm adding this person and they are an adult I'm adding this person and they are a child and there are different permissions for adults and children right see that's why it makes no sense that you can't then pull the data that that one person buys i know right because what's the point of everyone buying their own stuff if then it's all being like if you have the same photos all being saved independently to a backup. Well, all right. So you've stepped in another related minefield there too. So, so, and this is why I say it's so clearly that the iTunes family stuff is a first step and we're waiting for the second. Where is the second step is iCloud photo library. Similarly, I can't share that across. So I can't say that my wife and I both get to use our

iCloud photo library. She can't see it on her devices. I can share photos with her using the sharing system, but I can't, she and I can't both be on the iCloud photo library on our separate Apple IDs, even though we're in a family. It's just completely separate. So that makes, she now, if she wants to make like a calendar or something, she just comes out here and sits in my iMac and does it because her computer is on her Apple ID. Her phone is on her Apple ID. It also means that the picture she takes with her iPhone,

I occasionally need to bring her iPhone in here and attach it to my computer and import it so that it goes in our iCloud photo library. Yeah, so messy. I talked to Apple about this last year and they, you know and it's not like Apple doesn't think about this stuff. They said that some of the issues are, if you're in the family, do you want your stuff shared with people in the family? And I get that. My daughter's a teenager. I probably don't want her photos in my library, and she certainly doesn't want her photos in my library, right?

So I can see that an absolute sharing and merging of photo libraries is probably a bad idea. So it's a more complex system. But my wife and I are perfectly happy to share our photo libraries. That should be one photo library. And it's not, and it's frustrating. And my daughter, I would like her to be able to opt in or create a space for her inside the photo library or be able to share or push photos that she does want to have saved in the family photo library to the family photo library

these would all be nice but right now there's just there's just nothing there so not only are we not sharing data we're not sharing photos even though um there are many cases and there are some workarounds like um we you can log in as the other person right so so we tried that for a while um can log in as the other person right so so we tried that for a while um where where my wife's uh apple id was she used my apple id on her ipad or her iphone um and that will work but it also causes all these other problems because so many the way iCloud works so many things come along with iCloud that that are just you have to be logged in as the primary for this thing to work. So a good example is Find My Friends. Find My Friends, you can't be logged into iCloud and see my iCloud photo library, but also be on your own Apple ID looking at Find My Friends.

It doesn't work. So on my wife's iPhone, she can't log in as me because if she does, then she disappears from Find My Friends, which means I can't see her. Only one device per Apple ID can be the official location for Find My Friends purposes. So at that point, her dot disappears from the map because she's no longer logged in as her. She's logged in as me. And either my dot on the map is represented by my iPhone, or it could be represented by her iPhone and confuse everybody, but it can't be both. So it's like a catch-22. You're at a point where you can't have both of these features. So you end up using your own Apple ID and not having access to the photo library. So it's, again, it's clear this is where they need to go.

I just, I'm a little disappointed that nothing happened at WWDC. And although I wish that we'll hear more that this may change, I feel like we would have heard. So I don't know where it's gonna go. I've kind of, in the meantime, it's kind of broken me to the point where my mother always asks about her iCloud backup and my, my wife's frustrated by the iCloud backup warnings. So at this point, I'm going to, I'm going to suggest that they both just sign up

for the 99 cent a month plan for 50 gigabytes, just literally just to shut up Apple's complaints about it and get their devices backed up which is it's i mean it's 12 a year it's not a lot this is why i've basically given up it's like it's 12 a year now should apple provide probably we just had this conversation in the chat room probably some sort of related to how many devices are on your apple id that instead of having five gigabytes free per apple id maybe it should be five gigabytes per device associated with the Apple ID up to a cap or something like that. That would solve it, because really, I think once you have an iPhone and an iPad and an Apple ID, it gets complicated. I just think fundamentally five gigabytes is ridiculous. It's the 16 gigabyte iPhone problem.

Yeah. Yeah. And if the rumors are true and the new iPhones this fall are going to start at 32, then maybe this is a good time to take that number and either increase it to 10 or change the system to be an allotment per associated device that every iPhone comes with 10 gigabytes of cloud storage. And if you want more, you can pay for it. Because wasn't iCloud introduced with five gigabytes? Like that's insane. I think this has been it since the beginning

is the five gigabyte free on your apple id and then you pay beyond that and it's yeah i think it's it's not and like i said i think it creates a bad user experience because it gives people people get these errors if my family and friends are any indication they get these errors oh it says that i'm it can't back me up and it's because there's a a different device backup it's their old iphone is still in there or they've got a you know an iphone and an an iPad and they're taking up space and, and you get this and yeah, you can pay Apple a ransom to get those things to stop. I feel like it's, it's too happens too much and that it should be simpler, but, but, you know, easy for me to say that I have, have basically given

up and for the cost of $ dollars a year to get my mom to stop saying why do i have this error what do i do it's just just pay the twelve dollars just get apple to i you know i give up just give apple the money i just did this with my mom about two or three weeks ago i was just like we're just you're just gonna pay this now because i'm not gonna keep having to fix this for you every couple of months or whatever that you run into this like let's just start paying this now um and i explained to her why she would want it and that kind of stuff and when i explained it to her she's like yeah no i want my photos and i you know i want my backups and she was fine with it but like nobody

had explained it to her before because it hadn't become a problem until then and then it was fine when it was explained i mean going back a couple of steps, I understand some of the problems around the photo sharing stuff, right? Like how it's a decision that has to be made and there isn't kind of a right decision as to whether everybody's photos get saved together or not because they're on a family plan.

Like I totally get that issue, right? That maybe your daughter doesn't want all of her photos synced with you and vice versa. And my photos synced with her. Yeah, like daughter doesn't want all of her photos synced with you and you know and like vice versa and my photos synced with her yeah like you don't want all of that like that's kind of you know nobody that's not a good solution but i can also see why some people would want it right so i can see that there's an issue with that but you know going back right to the start of the conversation the the idea that the data that is bought by you as kind of the master account is not shared, especially when you can buy a terabyte, is madness.

It should be shared. I'm going to end up spending whatever it is, $10 a month on my account and $1 a month on my wife's account. Just because that's what I have to do yeah yeah it's it's just it's it's dumb it's dumb and again i'm happy to give apple money but but it's not only should should it be shared but there should be more connections and hey what they did with the family stuff was a first a good first take right it was a first take my question remains where is step two where are you moving this service forward how are you rolling this out and and again i would expect that to be something that's integrated with ios 10 and that that is to have been announced at wwdc it doesn't mean that that's necessarily the case

it could also be that that's something that's just rolled out with changes to the service and it comes later because it's harder to roll out beta versions of your service because you've got people on the existing and people on the new. And it's possible that there was another shoe to drop here, but it seems less likely since there was no real hint of it at WWDC. And that's, you know, it's great. I like to be generous to a certain degree with first takes from any technology company because it's hard, right? I mean, first 1.0 products are not, at some point you have to ship, right? Great artist ship. Famous words from Steve Jobs. You got a real artist ship, you got to ship it. But it's a 1.0.

It's going to have limitations. I can forgive a lot of limitations in a 1.0 because I know how hard it is to get a product out there. It doesn't mean to say that 1.0 gets a pass, but I can forgive it. Assuming that there's follow-up and the sense that we know that this isn't the final version, we have a lot more work to do. Here we go. We're doing updates. We're getting it. We do. Here we go. We're doing updates.

We're getting it. We're addressing all the issues. We're moving forward. The problem I've got with the iCloud family stuff at this point is that it's a 1.0 and I see no indication that there's a 2.0. So where is it? Maybe it's coming.

I hope it is. But in all the months that this has been on our to-do list, it hasn't changed. And really all that's changed for me to talk about it now is that I gave up. I gave up and realized that with the new pricing plans, $12 to get those dialogue boxes to go away, $12 a year is probably just worth it just to shut up the warnings and let my mom have her stuff back up and let my wife have her stuff back up and not worry about it and maybe even my daughter i mean and again twelve dollars a month

it seems really dumb but especially since i've got 400 gigs free on my own account but that may just be where we are it's too bad it's too bad so there's nothing that we can do to help you if you're in woes with your family sharing problem but there are things that we can help you do and help you with and that's what ask upgrade is all about and the first question this week comes from jacob and jacob says i'm recording the first episode of my podcast this week it's an interview style show any tips to make the guest comfortable yes jacob i do have some Make sure that you are very well prepared. Have lots of questions ready, more questions than you think you're going to need.

One thing that I always did was write down questions that I know the answers to, because if you know the answers to them, it will also help you prepare some follow-up questions, right? So you ask someone a question, they answer it, and you already know what their answer is going to be, so you're already ready with some follow-up questions as well. So the idea is if you're well prepared with questions, you won't be fumbling so much because fumbling like, let me see now, what question shall I ask you, that makes your interviewees feel uneasy because you don't feel prepared. don't feel prepared. Try and chat with them a little bit before you begin the actual recording to build a little bit of rapport with your interviewee. Make them feel at ease that this is kind of a little bit more relaxed and they're not kind of under the spotlight. And understand that it's going to be difficult your first time. You're not going to be perfect.

Just have fun with it and try not to beat yourself up about it. Know that you're going to stumble around a little bit as you try and find your way but if you accept that that's going to be the case then you'll feel better about it and remember that the editing is king you can take out any of your problems in the edit any suggestions jason yeah uh i mean you you did a podcast every week about this for a long time where you were interviewing different people and so i think you're the you're the master here but preparation is good um anticipating answers You did a podcast every week about this for a long time where you were interviewing different people. And so I think you're the master here. But preparation is good. Anticipating answers, anticipating responses is great.

Keeping it natural. You know, James Lipton in the actor's studio at the end famously would ask a series of questions from a list. But before that, it seemed much more natural. I think that's an important point not to make it feel like you're just listing questions off. And actually, one of the biggest failures I see with people who are interviewing is they ask an interesting question and their guest responds, and there are very clear follow-up questions to be had. This is a conversation. So what would you do in a normal conversation with a person you would follow up on what they just said and kind of continue down that path for a little while at least and in bad interviews what i see is somebody says something they've answered the question

on a basic level they left a lot of strands for follow-up to to dig down deeper into some of what they said and the person on the other end just asks the next question. And it's totally unrelated. And you can't do that because if you over-prepare and you stick to your list, it's also a bad interview. Because at that point, it's just a questionnaire. It's not a conversation. And you want it to be a conversation. So you mentioned James Lipton.

Yeah. and you want it to be a conversation. So you mentioned James Lipton. Yeah. He is one of my interviewing heroes. A lot of the style that I developed over the years with Inquisitive when it was more of an interviewing show came from him. And I ended up developing some standard questions for some of my shows that

i would ask of everyone yeah in the style that he did what do you want to be known for right yeah well actually yes exactly uh inside the actor studios was a was a great um it was a great it made a great mark on me it was a real kind of just the thing that i looked to as an inspiration so if you're interested in ever interviewing anyone there's real kind of just the thing that i looked to as an inspiration so if you're interested in ever interviewing anyone there's a bunch of inside the actor studio on youtube just go and watch that because it's just a masterclass and you can see that he has an outline because he will do that thing in the show i mean some of this is because they also they edit the show but you can see where he'll there'll be a pause and then he'll say, and then Tom Hanks, and then you made Saving Private Ryan.

And the audience cheers. And then he goes into his question. So he's working from an outline because he is sketching these people's careers and all of that. But the important thing is inside those questions, there's a conversation happening. It's not just a questionnaire. At the end end he does the questionnaire and it's just it's a shame that i think that sometimes people think of that show and think of the questionnaire at the end the questionnaire is fun but that's not the interview

yeah it's just like a it's just a fun little segment simon asked uh do you guys ever use trello or any other project tool for larger projects? I do use Trello, actually. Me and Stephen use Trello to manage some of our sponsorship stuff. So the way that Trello works is you kind of have these boards and then you move cards from board to board.

So we'll do stuff like, you know, if we've contacted a company or a company's contacted us, and then if we're in the process of working with a company, if we've sold spots of a company, and we can move the card of each related company from board to board as they kind of move through our process of sponsorship and advertising sales. So we use them for that, and it's fantastic.

It's actually made me a lot better at tracking what's going on because we have a good system for it that we both share, and it's made us much more effective so i really love trello for that and we've used it for some like goals and stuff like you know by quarter things you want to achieve and you can move the cards around depending on if you meet the goals or not in the time frames yeah trello is really good for that stuff it's a nice way to kind of visually track things yeah i don't think i've used trello i don't think it necessarily works the way that i i work as you can go back to our

organizational episode where i discussed my non-organizational organizational method in a calendar jason don't want uh but i i have used it uh i've used it there i'm i'm I can view some of the Relay Trello stuff. Tidbits uses Trello for all of its book production for the Take Control books. And since I write a book for them, I'm in there seeing their tracking. And that's a good example where there are a bunch of different books. They're moving through a process from, you know, essentially from left to right. It's very much like the board of cards that we used to have at Macworld and Macuser back in the day. That was our visual.

Literally every story was on a card or section, was on an index card. And you started with, you know, not in and moved to like story in, story copy edited, story to back to editor, story to art, layouts to copy edit, layouts to editor, final proof shipped. And that was left to right across the board. And every card would move from left to right across the board until it got to the end. Trello reminds me of that a lot. And the take control Trello really looks like that, where they're going through the different process of like, here are the stages we need to go in. And for that, actually, I think that's a really great way of doing it i've tried

to do some stuff with trello but i think the projects that i've been working are not so much in that i have a lot of things especially recurring projects that um that i've internalized if i'm not working on with other people i i just kind of have my own internal system i don't i don't use other tracking but i do i do a lotets, actually, for a lot of my stuff. And that has to do with more about scheduling than anything else for projects. But once you get a complex, larger project, like Simon's asking for larger projects, I think, yeah, I've been impressed with Trello. Trello is, a lot of these I see and my response is something like, oh, forget it. And with Trello, i use it and i i i get it um and i just

don't i don't think i've had the opportunity to use it as much as i probably uh i would use it if i had opportunities to use it more yeah trello is built off of a system called kanban which that was the system that you were using uh with those cards right the idea of moving from thing to thing trello's based on that, which is why it's used in development so much. This is a very, like, Kanban is used a lot in software development. So that's why Trello works so well

for so many teams for project management. It's a great tool. It's really good. Paul asked, what are the three best uses that you have for your Apple Watch right now? And what three new features from WatchOS 3 are you looking forward to? Good question from Paul.

So for me right now, the things that I use my watch for are timers, so cooking timers a lot. When I'm making coffee, I use the timer on my watch and stuff. So I'm really looking forward to the new UI of timers, where you're able to just select from frequently used times, rather than using the digital crown to try and get three minutes when you're like, oh no, four minutes, ah, two minutes. You know, I want the preciseness of that. I use it for notifications a lot, and also for my weather complication, which is from Carrot Weather.

I use the Carrot Weather complication. It's my favorite. So as well as the timer stuff, I'm looking forward to faster access to apps in general with the dock. And also the little details that will come through now that WatchOS 3 feels like it's maybe been more developed by usage. So Apple engineers and developers and designers have been

using their using their watches for a longer time and it feels like maybe watch os3 has been built with that in mind so i'm looking forward to like the nitpicky details um of watch os3 and how that will affect my usage uh my responses are very similar to yours. Now playing is the one that I would mention that didn't come up there. I use that a lot. I'm when I'm walking or running and I've got my Bluetooth headphones in there behind my the cord goes behind my head. That's how I've got them set up. And so it's easier for me to do pause play forward on my watch using the now playing widget or app in watch os three than it is to um than it is to use the little clicker on the back of my headphones also the clicker makes beeps and stuff uh where this is silent it just goes to the next thing or it pauses or whatever

which i like better so i use that but yeah timer, timer, notifications, and weather, I use Weather Underground because that lets me see my own weather station. So it's the actual temperature at my house, but same idea. And I'm looking forward to similarly background updating. So the temperature is always the current temperature instead of the last time that app happened to launch. And, you know, I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, it's going to be good. This is one of the things where I want to install iOS 10 because I want WatchOS 3. It's pretty good so far. I'm pretty happy with it. The reality is that some apps don't work right on it. And it's not surprising. I think some of them are like WatchOS 1 original apps

that didn't really get much of an update for watch os 2 and now on watch os 3 some of them you know i don't want to say they spin forever because that suggests what happens in watch os 2 which is that they launch it takes forever for them to launch it's more like they launch and then they don't do anything and that's just it's a beta and those are old apps and it's understandable but uh that's that's my only problem with it so far but uh still it's it's good it's already a better experience i would say than than watch os2 and then finally lucas asked what happened to mike at the movies so yes we haven't done one for a while um so this is that that hot breaking Mike at the Movies news that you were all waiting for. This is episode number

97, so episode 100 is coming up soon. So we're going to do a Mike at the Movies for episode 100, and Jason, would you like to tell everyone what you would like me to watch? I would. Let me give

you a hint. Con! i would um let's let me give you a hint also we're gonna watch star trek into darkness i've seen that movie isn't that the movie sure yeah let's just watch that again no we're gonna watch star trek 2 colon the wrath of khan from the 80s a movie you haven't seen because you've only seen the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies none of the old Star Trek movies none so we're gonna watch the best of them and in fact a new uh cleaned up edition just came out on blu-ray if people like Star Trek 2 you could go get that director's edition it looks beautiful um and yeah so that's what we're gonna do for the episode that posts like August

1st. We'll have our regular stuff in there and then we'll do Mike and the movies at the end where we talk about Star Trek 2. The Wrath of Khan generally considered the best Star Trek movie and one of my favorites. Electric Boogaloo. Yeah. Star Trek 2, Electric. You know, we were watching the other day, we were watching something, some old movies,

like something that we considered fairly old. It was from the 80s and there was oh no it wasn't a movie it was mystery science theater 3000 episode from from you know from the late 80s early 90s and they made a a an electric boogaloo joke and lauren turned to me and said wow i guess that's a really old reference. Like things from 25 years ago were making jokes about electric boogaloo. So maybe that's kind of an old joke. It's what I'm saying. But anyway, we will do the Rathacon. Great, great stuff in there.

I hope you like it. But you've seen Star Trek Into Darkness. So it's going to be this really bizarre thing where you've seen the thing that is, and some people really hate Into Darkness because they think that it's just a rip-off of Star Trek II. As somebody who loves Star Trek II, I like Into Darkness because I feel like what it's doing is it's playing on our expectations and riffing off of Star Trek II, but doing things differently. I like that about it. I see why some people hate it, but I really dig it.

And I like a movie that's entirely pandering to me as a fan of star trek 2 but you saw that movie and not star trek 2 so for you it'll all be happening backward if you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 97 i won't be putting a link to star trek in there so you know spoilers you know that's right i want to spoil it at the top because people will see it in there. So, you know, spoilers. I don't want to spoil it at the top because people will see it in there. What I have put in is a link to Breaking 2 Electric Boogaloo, so people will think we're going to watch that, which is fun. Because, you know, just in case you want

to know what the Electric Boogaloo joke is about, then you can go to the Wikipedia article. We'll follow that up with Step Up to the Streets. Yes, please. Please. If you'd like to find Jason online, go to sixcolors.com or he is on Twitter. He's at jsnall. I am at imyke.

I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our sponsors for this week's episode, the fine folk over at Ring and Hover. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Live long and prosper