Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:08 ◼   ► From Reel AFM, this is Connected episode 422.

00:00:13 ◼   ► That's a lot of episodes.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by our excellent sponsors,

00:00:17 ◼   ► Squarespace, Hover, and ExpressVPN.

00:00:20 ◼   ► I'm Federico Vittucci, and it's my absolute pleasure to be joined on this very fine day

00:00:25 ◼   ► by my co-host, from the United States of America, Mr. Stephen Hackett.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Hello, Stephen.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Hello, Federico.

00:00:31 ◼   ► How are you today?

00:00:33 ◼   ► I am doing fantastic.

00:00:35 ◼   ► How about you?

00:00:35 ◼   ► I'm good.

00:00:36 ◼   ► How are you in the pod cabin?

00:00:39 ◼   ► How are things over there?

00:00:40 ◼   ► There's calendars everywhere, man.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Everywhere.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Calendars everywhere.

00:00:46 ◼   ► How many have you sent out already?

00:00:48 ◼   ► I've sent out about 700.

00:00:52 ◼   ► And I've got about 500 left.

00:00:54 ◼   ► So I'm a little over halfway through.

00:00:56 ◼   ► How are you--

00:00:58 ◼   ► What are techniques not to lose your mind when doing this?

00:01:02 ◼   ► - Well, I've had a good friend of mine, Ian,

00:01:04 ◼   ► who's listening.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Hi, Ian.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Ian has been helping me in the evenings.

00:01:08 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:01:09 ◼   ► - A couple of evenings a week packing.

00:01:11 ◼   ► So part of it is having someone else here to talk to, right?

00:01:13 ◼   ► - Okay, right.

00:01:15 ◼   ► - If it's just me, I'll listen to a podcast

00:01:19 ◼   ► or watch something on YouTube.

00:01:21 ◼   ► You just gotta keep your mind busy

00:01:23 ◼   ► because it's not a lot of thinking, right?

00:01:24 ◼   ► It's just kind of like reading what goes in the envelope,

00:01:27 ◼   ► packing it, closing it up, printing the label.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Nights that I've helped, or if someone else was helping me,

00:01:32 ◼   ► we've done it in batches.

00:01:34 ◼   ► So like last night we packed 100 identical packages

00:01:38 ◼   ► of one calendar and one set of stickers,

00:01:40 ◼   ► and then we like taped all those up

00:01:41 ◼   ► and I could print those labels en masse.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And so you find little efficiencies as you go.

00:01:45 ◼   ► - Great point on the listening to a podcast.

00:01:48 ◼   ► I think that's something that I've,

00:01:50 ◼   ► it may sound obvious, but like it's something

00:01:52 ◼   ► that I've been appreciating lately a lot,

00:01:55 ◼   ► like having voices to keep you company when you're doing something that is

00:01:59 ◼   ► extremely boring. For example,

00:02:01 ◼   ► we spent the past two days at our new place.

00:02:04 ◼   ► We had to clean some of the rooms with these,

00:02:08 ◼   ► I think it's called like buffered acid.

00:02:12 ◼   ► It's like a,

00:02:13 ◼   ► like an acidic solution that removes like stuff that is left

00:02:18 ◼   ► over from, from, you know, construction. So like,

00:02:22 ◼   ► paint, you know, little drops of... Cock. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. And they told

00:02:28 ◼   ► us like, look, the best way to do that is to go buy some like buffered acid and diluted

00:02:34 ◼   ► a little bit in water and, you know, put a mask on and have fun. And that took me a while.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And so even like a couple of days ago, I listened to an entire... No, I finished an episode

00:02:46 ◼   ► of Upgrade. I listened to another episode of Upgrade. I finished the latest episode

00:02:51 ◼   ► of Cortex and I was still working on it. And I was like, man, it's, first of all, it's

00:02:56 ◼   ► nice, you know, to, to, to, to just do this. And you know, you, you, you're listening,

00:03:02 ◼   ► you're doing two things at the same time, but also AirPods Pro, like that was like four

00:03:08 ◼   ► hours of, of just listening to audio and they were totally fine. Podcast, we, we just talked

00:03:13 ◼   ► about blogging in the pre-show for Connected Pro members, but I guess we should also appreciate

00:03:20 ◼   ► podcasting as, you know, especially the kind of podcasting where you can listen to and

00:03:26 ◼   ► sign up everywhere on any platform you want. I guess this is appreciation time for RSS

00:03:32 ◼   ► feeds today.

00:03:33 ◼   ► They're holding the whole place together. You may notice that we are without Myke Hurley

00:03:38 ◼   ► this week, Myke Nadina.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that guy.

00:03:41 ◼   ► You just admitted to listening to four hours of his podcast.

00:03:45 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:03:46 ◼   ► He and Adina are moving this week,

00:03:49 ◼   ► so we gave him the week off so he could focus on that.

00:03:52 ◼   ► So I would say maybe on Twitter,

00:03:55 ◼   ► send him a tweet with the box emoji in it.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Or, yeah, no, no, the box emoji is fine, yeah.

00:04:02 ◼   ► Do you think Myke listened to us?

00:04:04 ◼   ► I just spoke about listening to Myke for many, many hours.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Do you think he listens to us

00:04:09 ◼   ► while he's doing the new house stuff?

00:04:11 ◼   ► - I hope so. - Maybe.

00:04:12 ◼   ► - I hope so.

00:04:13 ◼   ► - You would think.

00:04:15 ◼   ► - I mean, we just had an NPU episode about Ventura,

00:04:18 ◼   ► so maybe he's listening to me and David talk about that.

00:04:20 ◼   ► - All right, so we have proper follow-up, I think, Steven.

00:04:24 ◼   ► - We do. - Okay.

00:04:26 ◼   ► And the first follow-up item is by courtesy of MacRumors,

00:04:31 ◼   ► who just a few days ago received what I believe

00:04:34 ◼   ► has to be one of the shortest statements

00:04:37 ◼   ► that Apple PR ever sent out.

00:04:40 ◼   ► I don't remember, did we cover on last week's episode

00:04:43 ◼   ► of Connected the gambling ads on the App Store?

00:04:45 ◼   ► I think we did.

00:04:46 ◼   ► - I think we-- - We spoke about the,

00:04:49 ◼   ► briefly maybe?

00:04:50 ◼   ► - I think we did.

00:04:51 ◼   ► I'm trying to look through our notes from last week.

00:04:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, anyway, I think we spoke about the

00:04:57 ◼   ► new ad slots. - Yes, we did.

00:04:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, because, again, I'm so confused

00:05:01 ◼   ► because I know that Myke and Jason

00:05:02 ◼   ► also covered the topic on upgrades.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I was like, wait, did I hear these on upgrade

00:05:06 ◼   ► or did I also speak about this?

00:05:08 ◼   ► But yes, we spoke about the new ad slots on the App Store

00:05:12 ◼   ► on the Today page and on the Product pages,

00:05:14 ◼   ► more specifically about how so many of those Product pages,

00:05:18 ◼   ► the first result in the You Might Also Like section

00:05:22 ◼   ► was an ad typically for gambling apps, for online casinos,

00:05:27 ◼   ► but also adult live chats and psychic apps,

00:05:33 ◼   ► all kinds of questionable utilities from the App Store.

00:05:37 ◼   ► A few days ago Apple sent a statement to MacRumors, congrats Joe Rossignol for getting the statement

00:05:44 ◼   ► from Apple PR, saying "We have paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories

00:05:51 ◼   ► on App Store product pages."

00:05:52 ◼   ► Wow.

00:05:53 ◼   ► That's the statement.

00:05:55 ◼   ► We have paused the ads related to gambling and a few other categories.

00:06:00 ◼   ► So yeah, that took Apple, well I guess first of all kudos to Apple for doing this in less

00:06:06 ◼   ► than 24 hours. What's going to happen next? We have no idea at the moment, I think.

00:06:12 ◼   ► It's unknown. I mean, are they going to backtrack on this? What is it going to look like? On

00:06:18 ◼   ► the newest episode of the talk show, episode 361, you joined Jon Gruber and y'all talked

00:06:24 ◼   ► about this for a while and the different, different paths Apple could take to, to walk

00:06:31 ◼   ► this back? Like do they remove some of those ad types like in the you might

00:06:35 ◼   ► like section? Are they just going to have rules around what isn't allowed? Right?

00:06:42 ◼   ► What types of ads? That seems like a slippery slope to me. Like how do you... I

00:06:47 ◼   ► mean there's so much about the App Store rules that are slippery slope but...

00:06:50 ◼   ► Exactly. I just I just don't know what that what that looks like. I mean I'm glad

00:06:55 ◼   ► they paused it and I agree with you. It's good they did it quickly. Maybe they were

00:06:58 ◼   ► surprised by it. I kind of think they probably were but they shouldn't have been that that's

00:07:04 ◼   ► really my concern. Like if this surprised Apple about the types of ads that won all

00:07:09 ◼   ► those bids and got all those ad spots, they're surprised by the type of application developers

00:07:14 ◼   ► who would do that type of companies that would would have that kind of money to throw around,

00:07:19 ◼   ► then they clearly are in over their heads when it comes to any meaningful advertising

00:07:24 ◼   ► product. And hopefully this is a wake up call to those folks.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems so strange to have this tension within the same company.

00:07:35 ◼   ► The same company is effectively trying to have it both ways. They're trying to say,

00:07:40 ◼   ► "Well, we think the modern style of advertising on the web is not great, and that's why we're

00:07:49 ◼   ► going to offer users tools to directly limit that kind of personally identifiable advertising,

00:07:57 ◼   ► because those ads are creepy, they're not great, we don't think they make for a good experience.

00:08:02 ◼   ► Which I agree with, and that approach from a technological perspective and ethical perspective

00:08:09 ◼   ► seems to be directly aligned with Apple's interests and the sort of image that they want to present of

00:08:15 ◼   ► the company. But at the same time, the same company, when it comes to growing services revenue on the

00:08:22 ◼   ► apps or they're like, "Well, but what if these ads... No, no, no, these ads are good. They're

00:08:27 ◼   ► not like the creepy ads on the web. These are the better ads." And I just feel like

00:08:33 ◼   ► maybe it wouldn't be nicer to just say, "You know, no ads at all." There's really no good

00:08:40 ◼   ► because if you allow more relevant ads, that's the problem. And it's kind of an ironic problem

00:08:49 ◼   ► to have. Because if you allow more personalized and relevant ads on the App Store, it's very

00:08:56 ◼   ► likely that unless you are really into gambling and adult live chats and whatever, you're

00:09:03 ◼   ► not going to see those types of shady ads. You're going to see actually relevant ads.

00:09:10 ◼   ► So for example, if I open Overcast, maybe I will see an ad for a competing podcast client.

00:09:15 ◼   ► Or if I open a text editor, I will see something about automation, because I'm that kind of

00:09:20 ◼   ► user.

00:09:21 ◼   ► But if you do that, then you run into the problem of people saying, well, you're going

00:09:27 ◼   ► to limit relevant ads on the web because they don't benefit you, but on the App Store you're

00:09:33 ◼   ► going to allow them.

00:09:35 ◼   ► So Apple is like, well, OK, what if we just don't make the ads relevant, so our message

00:09:41 ◼   ► is consistent.

00:09:43 ◼   ► But in return, those ads suck, and they're not relevant to you at all.

00:09:48 ◼   ► And we're just going to leave them open to companies outbidding each other, and therefore

00:09:52 ◼   ► the company with the most money is going to be the company with all the ad slots displayed

00:09:57 ◼   ► to users on the App Store.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And that's not a great experience either, because those ads are not relevant, and all

00:10:03 ◼   ► the companies with deep pockets are the shadiest companies around.

00:10:07 ◼   ► Therefore, this is not exactly Apple-like either.

00:10:11 ◼   ► So maybe the solution was to just say, you know what?

00:10:14 ◼   ► No ads.

00:10:15 ◼   ► We're just, we're going to go and we're going to try and find ways to make money in other

00:10:20 ◼   ► ways.

00:10:21 ◼   ► And ultimately, I just have to agree with Myke, with something he said last week on

00:10:25 ◼   ► the show and something he said on the upgrade.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Why is this necessary?

00:10:31 ◼   ► Like was this really necessary?

00:10:33 ◼   ► I mean, I get it that you're trying to show Wall Street the message of like, well, no,

00:10:37 ◼   ► Our services revenue is still growing in places,

00:10:41 ◼   ► even though it's actually declining

00:10:43 ◼   ► on a year-over-year basis.

00:10:44 ◼   ► But still, like I get the impetus to do this,

00:10:48 ◼   ► but the final product, I mean, come on, just look at it.

00:10:52 ◼   ► It's terrible.

00:10:53 ◼   ► - It's really disappointing to see them go down this road

00:10:56 ◼   ► and argue with you about the tension

00:11:01 ◼   ► that is within Apple over this.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And I'm sure there are lots of people at Apple

00:11:04 ◼   ► who would agree with us,

00:11:05 ◼   ► who really hate the fact that this is going on.

00:11:08 ◼   ► - I think so.

00:11:09 ◼   ► - I'm positive and I get that.

00:11:12 ◼   ► And I hope that they find some sort of middle ground

00:11:15 ◼   ► that everybody's comfortable with.

00:11:17 ◼   ► I mean, for me, I don't love ads in the app store.

00:11:20 ◼   ► I'd rather they not be there.

00:11:22 ◼   ► But for me, the one that's the most egregious

00:11:26 ◼   ► are ads at the bottom of the developer's product page

00:11:29 ◼   ► under the other apps you may like.

00:11:31 ◼   ► I mean, that algorithm of the native suggestions

00:11:34 ◼   ► already pretty bad. But having an ad there feels especially

00:11:38 ◼   ► gross, because that's the one little sliver of the App Store

00:11:41 ◼   ► that a that a that app developer has to to showcase their work.

00:11:47 ◼   ► And having an ad on that from someone else that they don't get

00:11:50 ◼   ► any money from just seems seems wrong to me, regardless of

00:11:54 ◼   ► Apple size or what we may feel about them. It just seems plain

00:11:58 ◼   ► wrong. Yeah, let's switch gears a little bit. I want to tell you

00:12:01 ◼   ► about the Apple Watch Ultra Trail Loop Band.

00:12:06 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:12:07 ◼   ► - I picked up my Apple Watch Ultra

00:12:10 ◼   ► with the standard Alpine band,

00:12:13 ◼   ► which is like the bright orange one

00:12:14 ◼   ► with a little like S hook in it to clasp.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And it was really comfortable,

00:12:21 ◼   ► but I found myself kind of in between sizes.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And also the bright orange was just,

00:12:26 ◼   ► it's a lot to contend with every day.

00:12:28 ◼   ► Sometimes it's great.

00:12:29 ◼   ► Other times it's just, it's just too much.

00:12:33 ◼   ► And so I've picked up the White Ocean Band,

00:12:35 ◼   ► which I like a lot,

00:12:37 ◼   ► but I've wanted to try the Trail Loop as well,

00:12:40 ◼   ► especially for sleep tracking,

00:12:43 ◼   ► because the Ocean Band being like a rubbery band,

00:12:48 ◼   ► sometimes it gets hot, you know, if you're sleeping

00:12:50 ◼   ► or like, you know, sometimes it's comfortable

00:12:52 ◼   ► when you go to bed, but it's like too tight or too loose

00:12:55 ◼   ► when you wake up.

00:12:57 ◼   ► And so I, I just happened to be perusing the Apple store app

00:13:02 ◼   ► for something else.

00:13:05 ◼   ► I was like, oh, I wonder if that band's in stock

00:13:06 ◼   ► at my local store and sure enough it was.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And so I picked up one,

00:13:10 ◼   ► the black and gray with the orange tab.

00:13:13 ◼   ► - Oh, that looks good.

00:13:14 ◼   ► - They have a couple of different colors.

00:13:15 ◼   ► They got yellow beige.

00:13:17 ◼   ► Nothing makes me want to buy something more

00:13:18 ◼   ► except having beige in the name.

00:13:20 ◼   ► And then there's blue and gray.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And then there's the black and gray.

00:13:23 ◼   ► And like a bunch of the other bands that are fabric-y,

00:13:27 ◼   ► that one side of the band is one color

00:13:29 ◼   ► and the other kind of rail, if you will,

00:13:31 ◼   ► the other side is a different color.

00:13:33 ◼   ► But I don't mind it so much on this

00:13:34 ◼   ► because the black and gray is really pretty similar.

00:13:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, the black and gray one looks fantastic.

00:13:40 ◼   ► And what's the name of the little orange thing?

00:13:43 ◼   ► Like the pool, what's it called?

00:13:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I forget what it's in the literature.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Basically it's a pool tab.

00:13:50 ◼   ► So you can like-- - Yeah, pool tab.

00:13:51 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:13:52 ◼   ► So what's interesting about this, unlike the

00:13:55 ◼   ► the other fabric bands, the what is it?

00:14:00 ◼   ► The Sport Loop?

00:14:01 ◼   ► I'm trying to find the official name.

00:14:03 ◼   ► Sport Loop.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Sport band.

00:14:06 ◼   ► Sport Loop.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Yes.

00:14:08 ◼   ► Sport Loop.

00:14:08 ◼   ► So the Sport Loop,

00:14:11 ◼   ► the way it's supposed to work is it doubles over.

00:14:15 ◼   ► So if your watch is on your left hand

00:14:19 ◼   ► and you're looking down at it,

00:14:20 ◼   ► the excess band would be towards you

00:14:25 ◼   ► And then the tab is pointed away from you,

00:14:27 ◼   ► like around the outside of your wrist, if that makes sense.

00:14:30 ◼   ► And this one, Apple's directions have it opposite.

00:14:33 ◼   ► So the tab faces you.

00:14:35 ◼   ► And I think the reason that is there is like maybe

00:14:38 ◼   ► so it's less likely to get snagged on something.

00:14:42 ◼   ► Maybe when you know you're doing extreme things.

00:14:44 ◼   ► But I found it weird because I've worn a sport loop

00:14:47 ◼   ► on my Series 7, again for sleep tracking.

00:14:52 ◼   ► And it was like very strange that this one went the other way.

00:14:55 ◼   ► And I also just didn't like the tab facing me.

00:14:57 ◼   ► I kind of liked it on the outside a little bit more.

00:15:00 ◼   ► And so I switched it around from what Apple's directions say, and it's totally

00:15:04 ◼   ► fine.

00:15:04 ◼   ► It totally works either direction.

00:15:05 ◼   ► And I got to say it is super comfortable.

00:15:08 ◼   ► It is thinner than the sport loop.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Like it's not really, you know, the sport is kind of like a woven feel.

00:15:15 ◼   ► This is not that this is way thinner than a sport loop way lighter weight.

00:15:21 ◼   ► And I think it's really comfortable.

00:15:22 ◼   ► Of course you have the fine grain control of just Velcro to put it wherever you

00:15:25 ◼   ► want it, but it is, it's really soft.

00:15:29 ◼   ► And I think maybe even it's, it's got a little bit of a stretch to it too.

00:15:33 ◼   ► It's really nice.

00:15:34 ◼   ► I've been, uh, it's only been a few days, but I've been really happy with it so far.

00:15:38 ◼   ► I really like the look of this and it should, but hold, no, this is not going

00:15:43 ◼   ► to be compatible with my Apple watch.

00:15:45 ◼   ► Is it most of these are compatibility, 44, 45 and 49 millimeter.

00:15:50 ◼   ► Alright, okay, so I can use it.

00:15:54 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:15:55 ◼   ► Yeah, man.

00:15:56 ◼   ► This looks really nice.

00:15:57 ◼   ► I never liked the sport loops.

00:15:58 ◼   ► I have one of those beige and yellow sport loops, I think.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Not really a fan of the beige also, because it gets super dirty super quickly, and you'll

00:16:08 ◼   ► always end up washing the thing, which I just don't like the look.

00:16:13 ◼   ► But this new one with that little orange detail, it looks really nice.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, it's still a fabric strap

00:16:20 ◼   ► So, you know the sport loop is kind of like the sweatpants of the Apple watch

00:16:24 ◼   ► Like this is a little bit that too. I think it's a little bit nicer looking than the sport loop

00:16:30 ◼   ► But if I were gonna and I wear this to like a nice meeting, you know

00:16:33 ◼   ► I may dress it up a little bit, but it's super comfortable

00:16:36 ◼   ► And I think if I think it will hold up better because it's that darker color

00:16:40 ◼   ► Even the orange Alpine loop they've been pictures

00:16:44 ◼   ► Online and like David Sparks has had it where it looks really dirty because it's a brighter lighter color and that's inevitable with something

00:16:51 ◼   ► Light where like your watch is just gonna get dirty, right?

00:16:54 ◼   ► You can't you can't really avoid that right having a darker band really helps with that

00:16:59 ◼   ► And I think that it would look better over time because of it this episode of connected is brought to you by

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00:17:59 ◼   ► I know I've mentioned this before I built my brother's nonprofit site on Squarespace and they use a

00:18:06 ◼   ► different partner for donations to their nonprofit and they had updated their

00:18:11 ◼   ► forms so I needed to go into the Squarespace side and get the forms

00:18:15 ◼   ► embedded and it was really really easy to do that and do it in a way I know

00:18:19 ◼   ► that's safe and secure. Head on over to squarespace.com/connected for a free

00:18:24 ◼   ► trial there's no credit card acquired and when you're ready to launch use the

00:18:28 ◼   ► offer code connected to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a

00:18:33 ◼   ► domain name. Once again, that's squarespace.com/connected and the code

00:18:38 ◼   ► connected for 10% off your first purchase. And to show your support for

00:18:42 ◼   ► the show. There was a story last week about iCloud.com. A website, honestly,

00:18:49 ◼   ► Federico, that I forget exists all the time.

00:18:52 ◼   ► Well, yeah, it's still out there. And there's even a beta version of it now.

00:18:57 ◼   ► So yeah, that's what I want to talk to you about. So beta.icloud.com is

00:19:03 ◼   ► now live and it has a lot of the features that iCloud.com has had for a while. I want

00:19:09 ◼   ► to talk through those in a minute. I gotta say I really like this design. Me too and

00:19:15 ◼   ► like I was thinking about it, I was taking a look at the screenshots that we had on the

00:19:19 ◼   ► site and I was like, "This reminds me of something and I can't quite put my finger on it, but

00:19:23 ◼   ► what is it?" And I realized today, "Oh, this is like the iPad home screen, but on the web

00:19:30 ◼   ► You have your medium sized widgets and the Excel widgets, and it's like, what if iCalc.com

00:19:36 ◼   ► was your personal dashboard and you had, Apple calls them tiles I believe, but these are

00:19:42 ◼   ► widgets.

00:19:45 ◼   ► And I actually think they even have the same features and look of the iPadOS widget.

00:19:53 ◼   ► Actually I may be wrong there because I don't think that a Notes Excel widget exists on

00:19:58 ◼   ► on iPadOS, on the home screen.

00:20:00 ◼   ► It does on iCloud.com.

00:20:02 ◼   ► So you have a really nice rectangular notes widget

00:20:05 ◼   ► that shows you your recently edited notes in two columns,

00:20:09 ◼   ► which is very nice.

00:20:10 ◼   ► But yeah, this feels like having an iPad home screen

00:20:13 ◼   ► on the web that you can customize and add

00:20:15 ◼   ► all the little modules that you want,

00:20:17 ◼   ► choosing from the compatible web versions of iCloud apps.

00:20:22 ◼   ► That's, I think it looks really nice.

00:20:24 ◼   ► - There's an element here where you can rearrange

00:20:26 ◼   ► the sections of it or hide things you don't use.

00:20:30 ◼   ► And when you go into that mode,

00:20:31 ◼   ► all the little widgets like enter jiggle mode,

00:20:34 ◼   ► like they do on the iPhone.

00:20:35 ◼   ► I can just imagine the meeting where some manager

00:20:38 ◼   ► just tells some poor web developer,

00:20:40 ◼   ► "Okay, when they edit the widgets, they're gonna do this."

00:20:43 ◼   ► And he whips his phone out,

00:20:44 ◼   ► like puts his phone in jiggle mode.

00:20:46 ◼   ► But it just, it made me laugh.

00:20:47 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, this little bit of whimsy

00:20:49 ◼   ► is now carried onto iCloud."

00:20:51 ◼   ► And as someone pointed out in the Discord,

00:20:54 ◼   ► Apple has used beta.icloud.com before,

00:20:57 ◼   ► 'cause iCloud's been through a couple of redesigns.

00:20:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:21:00 ◼   ► - iCloud launched what, with iOS 5?

00:21:03 ◼   ► - Yes. - I think that's right.

00:21:04 ◼   ► - I think you're right.

00:21:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it was like linen and dark and moody

00:21:07 ◼   ► for a long time, and then it's changed

00:21:09 ◼   ► as Apple's designs have changed.

00:21:11 ◼   ► - I remember when they rolled out,

00:21:13 ◼   ► that's right, the beta website has been around for a while.

00:21:18 ◼   ► I remember when they rolled out the metallic identity

00:21:24 ◼   ► for icot.com and they had that shiny sort of brushed metal logo.

00:21:29 ◼   ► I'm not kidding. They had that sort of metallic logo and the logo had a,

00:21:34 ◼   ► like a light reflection on it.

00:21:37 ◼   ► And depending on like how you moved your cursor,

00:21:41 ◼   ► the reflection would move or something. Do you remember this?

00:21:45 ◼   ► Then they had that, that light effect on the steel cloud in the icot.com

00:21:51 ◼   ► steel cloud in the iCalc logo and it was actually quite nice looking. And then they did the

00:21:57 ◼   ► thing a couple of years after that with the moving blobs of color, I think. Anyway, it's

00:22:05 ◼   ► been through various, you know, yes, thank you, Zach, for posting. That's the logo that

00:22:11 ◼   ► I meant on the Discord. They've been through various visual identities. This new one has

00:22:18 ◼   ► this bubble wallpaper, very, I would say,

00:22:22 ◼   ► tiger-y looking as a wallpaper, right Steven?

00:22:26 ◼   ► Like those blue bubbles in the background,

00:22:30 ◼   ► kind of retro as a look.

00:22:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it looks good.

00:22:33 ◼   ► - I think it's a very nice design with all the modules

00:22:36 ◼   ► serving as both shortcuts to jump into those full-on web apps,

00:22:41 ◼   ► but also as a preview tool for the kind of content

00:22:46 ◼   ► that you will find in there.

00:22:47 ◼   ► I think this is -- obviously this is going to be super nice to have -- well, maybe not

00:22:53 ◼   ► super nice, but nice to have for folks who have a Windows machine, right? And you just

00:22:58 ◼   ► want to check on your -- or maybe you just have a Windows machine at work and you want

00:23:02 ◼   ► to check on your iCloud stuff at work. Now, it would still be preferable to -- you

00:23:08 ◼   ► know, ideally, Apple would make Windows versions of everything. There would be a Windows app

00:23:14 ◼   ► reminders, a Windows app for mail.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Like, that's never going to happen, right?

00:23:19 ◼   ► Apple's--

00:23:20 ◼   ► I don't think so.

00:23:20 ◼   ► --competitive advantage via--

00:23:22 ◼   ► yeah, their competitive advantage

00:23:24 ◼   ► is to have native apps on their own platform for everything.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Still, this is a nice compromise.

00:23:29 ◼   ► Apple has been working more closely with Microsoft.

00:23:33 ◼   ► Just three weeks ago, I believe, they

00:23:36 ◼   ► announced Apple Music for Xbox and Windows,

00:23:40 ◼   ► as well as the iCloud Photos integration.

00:23:42 ◼   ► So yeah, they've been doing things.

00:23:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'd like to see more of it.

00:23:45 ◼   ► I mean, they seem more happy to extend their services

00:23:50 ◼   ► to other platforms when it's content services.

00:23:55 ◼   ► And I think they view iCloud differently than that.

00:23:57 ◼   ► I think they think about iCloud as almost an extension

00:24:01 ◼   ► of their OSs, which means they sell hardware.

00:24:04 ◼   ► Which is a bummer, but I guess they don't want to reward

00:24:06 ◼   ► people who have an iPhone and a PC, which is dumb.

00:24:10 ◼   ► I mean, iCloud for Windows is very basic,

00:24:12 ◼   ► but I would like to see those other services make it over

00:24:15 ◼   ► there, those other applications to make it over there.

00:24:17 ◼   ► But at least they are all on the website.

00:24:20 ◼   ► And that's been true for a long time, where

00:24:22 ◼   ► Photos and iCloud Drive and Notes and Calendar and Mail

00:24:27 ◼   ► and Reminders, all that stuff, you can get to on the iCloud

00:24:30 ◼   ► website.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Now in the beta, they have also--

00:24:34 ◼   ► this may have been there in the production one,

00:24:36 ◼   ► but at least it's more prominent now.

00:24:38 ◼   ► You can get to home kit secure video.

00:24:41 ◼   ► You can get to where you set up your custom email domains

00:24:43 ◼   ► or learn about private relay, you know,

00:24:45 ◼   ► kind of showing you more of those iCloud plus features

00:24:49 ◼   ► that they rolled out in the last couple of years.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And you can also manage your storage.

00:24:53 ◼   ► And that UI looks, you know, very similar

00:24:55 ◼   ► to what you have on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac,

00:24:58 ◼   ► where you can see the breakdown of,

00:25:00 ◼   ► okay, I got photos taking up this much space,

00:25:02 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera.

00:25:03 ◼   ► If you're like me and you're an iCloud family,

00:25:05 ◼   ► I can see how much space I take up

00:25:06 ◼   ► versus how much my family takes up.

00:25:09 ◼   ► And you can also do some data recovery on iCloud.com.

00:25:14 ◼   ► It's very ham-fisted.

00:25:17 ◼   ► So like you can back up your entire contacts database,

00:25:20 ◼   ► but it doesn't tell you like what's in it.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It just tells you like the date and time of that backup,

00:25:26 ◼   ► and you can download it and restore it.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Same thing with calendars and your Safari data,

00:25:33 ◼   ► but you don't have data recovery

00:25:36 ◼   ► for a bunch of the other things that now incorporate iCloud.

00:25:40 ◼   ► And I'd like to see Apple do more of that.

00:25:44 ◼   ► I mean, right now it's kind of handled like in Notes,

00:25:45 ◼   ► you have, what is it?

00:25:46 ◼   ► 30 day trash in Notes, same thing in Photos.

00:25:50 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:25:51 ◼   ► - So those are app centric right now.

00:25:53 ◼   ► And I'd like to see Apple bring more of that

00:25:56 ◼   ► to these recovery tools.

00:25:58 ◼   ► So you can feel more confident

00:26:00 ◼   ► in having your data accessible to you

00:26:02 ◼   ► in case something terrible happens.

00:26:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Anyway, I really like the look of this.

00:26:10 ◼   ► It's still kinda the one thing I forgot to mention.

00:26:13 ◼   ► The performance of this web app is still not fantastic.

00:26:18 ◼   ► It's still kinda slow and clunky to use.

00:26:22 ◼   ► I don't know, I feel like I'm now used to web apps

00:26:26 ◼   ► that are super snappy to use,

00:26:28 ◼   ► like switching between even complex projects,

00:26:30 ◼   ► like in things like Notion, for example,

00:26:33 ◼   ► or in the web client for Kraft,

00:26:35 ◼   ► like switching between different things

00:26:37 ◼   ► and different sections and pages is usually snappy.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Here, it feels like there's a person on the other hand

00:26:43 ◼   ► just slowly cranking away the other web app

00:26:46 ◼   ► that you wanna open, like, "Hey, let me open that for you."

00:26:49 ◼   ► And it's like, it takes you five seconds

00:26:51 ◼   ► to move between places.

00:26:53 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Still not fantastic, but it looks nice

00:26:59 ◼   ► and it's better than nothing, I guess,

00:27:01 ◼   ► which is not high praise, but still, I'll take it.

00:27:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I just loaded it up.

00:27:06 ◼   ► It is slow.

00:27:07 ◼   ► That's been true forever.

00:27:08 ◼   ► I mean, I remember when they announced MobileMe,

00:27:10 ◼   ► Phil Schiller was like,

00:27:11 ◼   ► "We built a website that feels like an app

00:27:13 ◼   ► "and that's still the way they think about it."

00:27:15 ◼   ► I loaded up notes, two things.

00:27:16 ◼   ► My notebooks are in the wrong,

00:27:18 ◼   ► or my folders are in the wrong order on the web,

00:27:20 ◼   ► so I'm afraid to open notes on my computer

00:27:23 ◼   ► and that sort be wrong.

00:27:24 ◼   ► but it does sync the recently deleted.

00:27:26 ◼   ► And so I can recover those from there,

00:27:28 ◼   ► but I guess, you know, you have to go into notes

00:27:31 ◼   ► and maybe they could just make that more clear around them.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Also, I just want to read this to you.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Notes are available here,

00:27:37 ◼   ► being recently deleted, for 30 days.

00:27:40 ◼   ► After that time, notes will be permanently deleted.

00:27:44 ◼   ► This may take up to 40 days.

00:27:46 ◼   ► So they don't even tell you how long

00:27:48 ◼   ► you have to recover them.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Why is there a 10-day discrepancy there?

00:27:53 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:27:54 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Also, as Myke points out in Discord, excellent copywriting.

00:27:59 ◼   ► It's just confusing, let alone kind of a bad thing.

00:28:02 ◼   ► So yeah, so if you do use iCloud on the web,

00:28:04 ◼   ► a lot of people may have a PC at work,

00:28:06 ◼   ► but they want access to their stuff.

00:28:08 ◼   ► That's a little bit better for you now, so that's good.

00:28:11 ◼   ► Let me ask you,

00:28:11 ◼   ► do you use the private relay thing on your devices?

00:28:15 ◼   ► I do not.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, me neither, okay.

00:28:18 ◼   ► No.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Because I remember that I tried it in beta

00:28:22 ◼   ► and it kind of killed your internet speeds,

00:28:26 ◼   ► then I think it has since been fixed.

00:28:30 ◼   ► And I know a lot of people who use it.

00:28:32 ◼   ► I just feel, I don't know,

00:28:33 ◼   ► I just feel kind of weird about putting something

00:28:36 ◼   ► in between me and my internet connection.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Even though like I know plenty of folks

00:28:42 ◼   ► who use one of those content blockers for ads, for example,

00:28:46 ◼   ► that are actually like a VPN that is always on.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Like I have a VPN and I use a VPN,

00:28:53 ◼   ► but it's more of like an on-demand type of thing.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Like when I wanna watch a TV show on HBO Max, for example.

00:29:00 ◼   ► And we don't have that in Italy, that's when I use a VPN.

00:29:04 ◼   ► But I know a lot of people who have these different kinds

00:29:07 ◼   ► of VPNs, always enabled, they're actually ad blockers

00:29:10 ◼   ► or DNS filtering systems, right?

00:29:13 ◼   ► That are always enabled, always in between your device

00:29:17 ◼   ► and your internet connection.

00:29:18 ◼   ► And I don't know, I've had a couple of bad experiences

00:29:21 ◼   ► with these things before, and like web pages,

00:29:24 ◼   ► they stop working, or I don't know,

00:29:27 ◼   ► you get like, sometimes, like I'm using my bank's website,

00:29:32 ◼   ► for example, and it's not working right.

00:29:34 ◼   ► So I always end up second guessing the thing

00:29:37 ◼   ► that I just enabled in between myself

00:29:39 ◼   ► and my internet connection at home,

00:29:42 ◼   ► and I'm like, yeah, maybe that's the culprit,

00:29:44 ◼   ► maybe I should disable it.

00:29:46 ◼   ► - I wanna talk a little bit about the new mail app

00:29:48 ◼   ► with you for the first time in a long time.

00:29:51 ◼   ► Mail got a bunch of updates this year

00:29:54 ◼   ► with remind me and follow up.

00:29:58 ◼   ► And they have a feature if you say

00:30:01 ◼   ► that you attach something and you forgot it,

00:30:03 ◼   ► that is, hey, you forgot an attachment.

00:30:06 ◼   ► One of them in particular though

00:30:07 ◼   ► has really just been killing me.

00:30:09 ◼   ► And it's the feature where you mention a recipient.

00:30:13 ◼   ► So say like I write an email, say Federico and John, comma,

00:30:16 ◼   ► I love app stories, but I only include your email and say,

00:30:20 ◼   ► hey, it looks like you mentioned this other guy.

00:30:23 ◼   ► Do you need to add a recipient?

00:30:25 ◼   ► And as far as I can tell,

00:30:26 ◼   ► there's no way to turn this feature on and off.

00:30:27 ◼   ► You can turn off the remind me, but not this one.

00:30:31 ◼   ► And it's done a thing to me over the last several days

00:30:36 ◼   ► where the email address that's in my email signature,

00:30:41 ◼   ► which I want to talk about in a second,

00:30:43 ◼   ► that triggers the add a recipient error.

00:30:48 ◼   ► So my email ends with my name

00:30:52 ◼   ► and then my email address underneath it.

00:30:54 ◼   ► And every time I send a message,

00:30:57 ◼   ► actually not even every time,

00:30:58 ◼   ► most of the times I send a message,

00:30:59 ◼   ► I get this pop-up saying,

00:31:01 ◼   ► "You may have missed a recipient.

00:31:03 ◼   ► "You wanna add this person."

00:31:04 ◼   ► And what it has pulled out is my own email address.

00:31:08 ◼   ► This is just has blown my mind.

00:31:11 ◼   ► This made it out the door.

00:31:12 ◼   ► first of all, this is so dumb.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Like, I don't understand.

00:31:16 ◼   ► Like, and as you describe in your post,

00:31:19 ◼   ► like the, what's even more ridiculous about it

00:31:22 ◼   ► is that the system should know that's your signature

00:31:25 ◼   ► because you saved it as a signature

00:31:28 ◼   ► in the mail preferences.

00:31:30 ◼   ► But I think you mentioned this before.

00:31:33 ◼   ► Can you explain to me again

00:31:35 ◼   ► why you like having your email address in your signature,

00:31:40 ◼   ► even though people can see your email address

00:31:43 ◼   ► from the from field?

00:31:46 ◼   ► - So I do it for a couple of reasons.

00:31:47 ◼   ► I tweeted a link to this article yesterday

00:31:50 ◼   ► and a bunch of people were like,

00:31:51 ◼   ► "You're an idiot for having your email."

00:31:52 ◼   ► Okay, okay, whatever, here's why I do it.

00:31:54 ◼   ► I do it for two reasons.

00:31:55 ◼   ► One, in the context that I email people professionally,

00:31:59 ◼   ► it's pretty common practice to have your contact information

00:32:03 ◼   ► at the bottom of an email.

00:32:05 ◼   ► So if someone needs to find something of yours,

00:32:08 ◼   ► don't have to like go hit reply and like copy your message, your you know, your address or something

00:32:13 ◼   ► just right there in the photo, right? It's very common in professional settings to do that. I

00:32:17 ◼   ► don't put my phone number anything's my phone number is not relevant to hardly any of my work,

00:32:21 ◼   ► but my email address is my title is for my relay email addresses, which is what I used in these

00:32:27 ◼   ► screenshots, which are now also on the front page of Mac rumors, which is cool and kind of funny.

00:32:32 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:32:32 ◼   ► I haven't gotten any weird emails yet. So we'll see if that happens. The other

00:32:38 ◼   ► reason is more for me and again it may not be for you but I have three email

00:32:42 ◼   ► addresses I have my personal Gmail I have Hackit.fm which is like 512 pixels

00:32:47 ◼   ► and any freelance I do that sort of thing and then I have my relay address

00:32:51 ◼   ► which is what's used the most often and each of my signatures I have my email

00:32:56 ◼   ► address in there I use it as a secondary check that I'm sending the right message

00:33:00 ◼   ► from the right account because with three accounts it's pretty easy to mess

00:33:04 ◼   ► that up and and mail makes it pretty easy you can there's a from menu that you can choose from

00:33:09 ◼   ► but i like it is just like one last check that okay i'm sending this from the right place

00:33:14 ◼   ► and again you might not care for those reasons but i do and uh this bug has me thinking maybe

00:33:21 ◼   ► this isn't the way i should go and like it's wild to me that it doesn't ignore the signature

00:33:27 ◼   ► you know the signature is just text right there's nothing special about the signature in apple mail

00:33:32 ◼   ► In some email apps, it's like a thing, like a separate HTML entity or like its own kind

00:33:36 ◼   ► of separate thing.

00:33:38 ◼   ► Mail just slaps it in the message, right?

00:33:40 ◼   ► So it's just text.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Like you can't pattern match what's in my signature settings with what's in the message.

00:33:47 ◼   ► Can you just ignore my own email addresses in the recipient thing?

00:33:52 ◼   ► And why can't I turn this feature off?

00:33:53 ◼   ► Now I want to leave it on because I think it's a useful feature.

00:33:56 ◼   ► But if it triggers every time I send an email to anybody, you know, it's not doing very

00:34:01 ◼   ► much good.

00:34:02 ◼   ► On the topic of mail, something that I noticed that I also dislike, and I think it's more

00:34:07 ◼   ► of a... not a bug, more of a decision, I think.

00:34:11 ◼   ► I really like the "Remind Me Later" feature to set off emails for later so that you can

00:34:18 ◼   ► snooze them, basically, and they appear at a later date and time.

00:34:22 ◼   ► It's really nice.

00:34:23 ◼   ► But the thing I discovered that I think are the ones that John mentioned in his Mac OS

00:34:28 ◼   ► Ventura Review, is that "remind me later" does not work for SaneBox folders or any other

00:34:36 ◼   ► mailbox that is not the inbox.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Yeah, ridiculous.

00:34:40 ◼   ► It's ridiculous because I'm a longtime user of the SaneLater and the SaneNews folders,

00:34:49 ◼   ► and then I also have a custom folder that I call the SaneBetas, where all my TestFlight

00:34:55 ◼   ► betas go into.

00:34:57 ◼   ► And these are very nice ways to sort of filter your and automatically organize your incoming

00:35:04 ◼   ► email based on different criteria.

00:35:07 ◼   ► And there are so many times where there's a newsletter in the same news folder or an

00:35:14 ◼   ► email from a random reader that I don't want to promote to the full-on inbox, but I still

00:35:23 ◼   ► want to make sure that I don't forget about it for later.

00:35:27 ◼   ► you just don't have the option in those folders.

00:35:30 ◼   ► You just, the button disappears.

00:35:33 ◼   ► And I think it's wrong and I don't understand why.

00:35:36 ◼   ► The way this feature should work,

00:35:38 ◼   ► take this message from any folder, right?

00:35:42 ◼   ► And let me set up a reminder.

00:35:45 ◼   ► And when the message is quote unquote "due" again,

00:35:49 ◼   ► put it again at the top of that folder.

00:35:52 ◼   ► Like, I don't know if this is a limitation

00:35:56 ◼   ► of how Gmail integration works with Apple platforms,

00:36:01 ◼   ► because technically these are labels,

00:36:04 ◼   ► but they show up as folders in Apple Mail.

00:36:08 ◼   ► I don't know if that's the issue here,

00:36:10 ◼   ► but what I know is that I shouldn't be forced

00:36:15 ◼   ► to keep everything in my inbox

00:36:18 ◼   ► if I wanna use the remind me later feature.

00:36:20 ◼   ► It should work for any folder or label,

00:36:23 ◼   ► and surface again at a later date and time at the top of that folder.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And right now it doesn't.

00:36:30 ◼   ► And it's been like this for the whole summer,

00:36:32 ◼   ► which makes me think this is a conscious, deliberate decision on Apple's part.

00:36:36 ◼   ► And I think it's wrong.

00:36:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I do too. I think that feature should be available in any mailbox.

00:36:42 ◼   ► The other kind of related feature to that is the follow-up feature.

00:36:47 ◼   ► So the setting says "Mail will remind you about messages that haven't received responses."

00:36:51 ◼   ► So I emailed John about a sponsorship,

00:36:54 ◼   ► but he doesn't email me back.

00:36:55 ◼   ► And it like pops up,

00:36:56 ◼   ► you get a little follow-up badge next to it.

00:36:59 ◼   ► I cannot understand the logic that Mel uses

00:37:01 ◼   ► to choose what should be followed up on.

00:37:03 ◼   ► What it chooses for me to know about

00:37:08 ◼   ► just doesn't make any sense.

00:37:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, I never, no, I think I had it work once

00:37:16 ◼   ► a few weeks ago and it was totally random.

00:37:18 ◼   ► And I thought, why are you doing this?

00:37:20 ◼   ► like it was probably incorrect or something

00:37:23 ◼   ► and it never did it again.

00:37:25 ◼   ► That also feels like something where,

00:37:29 ◼   ► like maybe it would have been preferable

00:37:31 ◼   ► to have some kind of manual check.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Like maybe the way that I would have done it

00:37:36 ◼   ► is don't try and be too clever about it yourself,

00:37:39 ◼   ► but maybe put in a little checkbox or something,

00:37:42 ◼   ► like a little indicator

00:37:43 ◼   ► when you're composing a message to someone

00:37:46 ◼   ► where you can manually say,

00:37:48 ◼   ► hey, I'm gonna send this message now.

00:37:50 ◼   ► But if I don't hear back in a few days, again, let me choose.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Let me pick a date and time.

00:37:56 ◼   ► If I don't hear back, show me this follow-up reminder.

00:37:59 ◼   ► Maybe like the manual approach would have been so much easier

00:38:03 ◼   ► and it would have saved you a lot of machine learning

00:38:07 ◼   ► operations that are happening who knows where on your phone.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Like let me have a manual check to say, hey,

00:38:14 ◼   ► if I don't hear back, remind me, please.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Like follow-up reminder, yes.

00:38:19 ◼   ► Otherwise, no, just send this email out into the void

00:38:24 ◼   ► and who knows what's gonna happen.

00:38:26 ◼   ► But I would have preferred the manual option, I think.

00:38:31 ◼   ► - Me too, that would be an awesome setting.

00:38:34 ◼   ► As it is, I've turned it off because,

00:38:36 ◼   ► it doesn't do what I expect it to do.

00:38:39 ◼   ► And it's the only, as far as I can tell,

00:38:42 ◼   ► it's the only of these new features that have any settings.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Like the others, I can't find a way to turn

00:38:48 ◼   ► to turn them off. Maybe I've just missed them going through the settings, but

00:38:52 ◼   ► strange. And again, I'm so glad Mail is getting

00:38:56 ◼   ► work. I just hope that they continue to push this, because there's other features

00:39:00 ◼   ► that I would like to see, like snoozing, and there are

00:39:04 ◼   ► some additional controls I would want over these new things.

00:39:08 ◼   ► Let me ask you a question. Mail, Safari,

00:39:12 ◼   ► and Reminders. You can only keep two

00:39:16 ◼   ► of these three apps, and they're gonna receive annual attention and updates from Apple.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Which ones do you pick?

00:39:25 ◼   ► I would keep Mail and Safari, probably.

00:39:28 ◼   ► Mail and Safari.

00:39:29 ◼   ► Because I feel like it's easier to find another task manager.

00:39:31 ◼   ► Interesting. Well, that's true.

00:39:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:39:35 ◼   ► I would probably keep Safari and Reminders, I think.

00:39:41 ◼   ► Because it's equally easy to find another email client.

00:39:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, on the Mac, yes. I mean, you got MimeStream, which is a really good alternative.

00:39:51 ◼   ► That's a good question. I like that. It's like, if you go on a desert island, you know,

00:39:57 ◼   ► you'll have three apps with you the rest of your life. What do you use?

00:39:59 ◼   ► Oh, well, that's a bigger question, though. Like, if you go on a desert island, well,

00:40:04 ◼   ► that's also a great question. I want to play this game. So on a desert island, three apps

00:40:08 ◼   ► for the rest of your life. I assume you have an internet connection on the desert island.

00:40:13 ◼   ► I think so, which does kind of make the hypothetical to kind of dumb, because you could just like

00:40:17 ◼   ► text somebody where you are, but we'll play along.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Well obviously music. I would have said Marvis, but as it stands now, the music app is the

00:40:27 ◼   ► only one that shows you lyrics, so I'm gonna go with that. Music. Safari, because you know,

00:40:34 ◼   ► worst case scenario, you're always gonna have a web browser.

00:40:37 ◼   ► Yes.

00:40:38 ◼   ► to use web versions of other things. Music Safari. The third one is interesting, because

00:40:45 ◼   ► like, I could say shortcuts, but what good is shortcuts if you don't have other apps

00:40:50 ◼   ► to automate? Right. I mean, time tracking doesn't make much sense because you're literally

00:40:55 ◼   ► on a desert island for the rest of your life. I spent six hours this week building shelter,

00:41:00 ◼   ► Two hours starting fire.

00:41:06 ◼   ► One hour fighting wild animals and trying to survive.

00:41:10 ◼   ► Ahh.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Music, safari.

00:41:14 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:41:16 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:41:18 ◼   ► I would say camera because yeah, you're gonna take pictures, but I mean, after a while,

00:41:22 ◼   ► it's certainly gonna be the same island over and over.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I think it's some sort of like a survival app.

00:41:28 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe there's an app that tells you like what kind of food, what kind of plants you can eat and what kind of plants you can't eat.

00:41:34 ◼   ► But you still have a web browser.

00:41:35 ◼   ► Oh, that's true.

00:41:36 ◼   ► So keep that in mind, like that web browser accounts for all of that plus YouTube plus Netflix plus, you know, the web version of Discord.

00:41:46 ◼   ► Like you can communicate with people.

00:41:48 ◼   ► It counts as an email client because you can use Gmail on the web.

00:41:51 ◼   ► So what is something that is like not a web, not a web browser.

00:41:57 ◼   ► and make sense on a desert island?

00:42:00 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Huh.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Maybe books?

00:42:03 ◼   ► Yes.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Yeah. Uh, yes. Books. You're gonna have something to read.

00:42:10 ◼   ► You don't have web versions of Apple Books and Kindle that work in Safari, I think?

00:42:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think.

00:42:17 ◼   ► I think the important question that you didn't ask was, like,

00:42:21 ◼   ► what's the device that you have on the desert island? Is it iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC?

00:42:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I kind of assumed iPhone. Like it was just in your pocket when the plane crashed.

00:42:29 ◼   ► iPhone for the rest of your life with just three apps on it.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Yeah. And with an internet connection.

00:42:35 ◼   ► Of course.

00:42:35 ◼   ► Okay. Music Safari books.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Sounds good to me.

00:42:39 ◼   ► Yeah, because I mean, yeah, sounds good to me because you can have reading lists for articles.

00:42:44 ◼   ► You're going to miss iMessage.

00:42:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:46 ◼   ► Still, you can use Twitter if it's still around and you can use other web clients, I guess.

00:42:53 ◼   ► You can use FaceTime on the web.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Can you just face them on the web? Yeah, Safari, Books, Music. Yeah, okay.

00:43:03 ◼   ► I like it. Sarva said, "Door Dash, Task Rabbit."

00:43:07 ◼   ► No, they don't deliver to the desert island.

00:43:11 ◼   ► That's right, yeah. Please order some water from Walgreens and a life raft. Can you come

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00:45:19 ◼   ► I don't want to relitigate our choices, but some real time follow-up.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Amazon does have a Kindle web app, but we can't, we can't go back to the,

00:45:26 ◼   ► we are off the desert island now. Okay. Okay. Okay.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Have you played with shared iCloud photo libraries yet? Oh no, not,

00:45:34 ◼   ► not at all.

00:45:35 ◼   ► I think this is the kind of feature that if I enable it and something goes

00:45:39 ◼   ► wrong, Sylvia is going to hate. I am not touching this for now.

00:45:44 ◼   ► I leave that to you and Jon and other more courageous people than me to test.

00:45:52 ◼   ► But tell me about it.

00:45:54 ◼   ► So I have been playing with it and I've got some early thoughts about it.

00:45:59 ◼   ► I think a lot of it is really good and well thought out.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And I think in particular the way you get photos into the shared library is pretty good.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And so you set it up kind of like a shared note or shared reminder, right, you select

00:46:15 ◼   ► to you want to have access to it and they get a link, I just used iMessage and iMessaged

00:46:20 ◼   ► Mary is like, hey, click that link on your phone.

00:46:23 ◼   ► And then they're in it.

00:46:25 ◼   ► And that's the setup is very fast.

00:46:27 ◼   ► And you know, basically everyone starting this process is probably merging more than

00:46:33 ◼   ► one library.

00:46:34 ◼   ► So like in my case, my wife and I both have really big libraries and there's a lot of

00:46:38 ◼   ► overlap is gonna take me a long time to sort all that out. But photos has a lot of really

00:46:44 ◼   ► cool tools to help populate the shared library. Pretty, pretty easily, you can of course,

00:46:51 ◼   ► manually move them. So you can select a bunch of photos and right click on the Mac or in

00:46:55 ◼   ► the little more menu on iOS and iPad OS and just say, move to shared library. And it's

00:47:00 ◼   ► not like downloading and re uploading them. If they're coming from you, it's just very

00:47:05 ◼   ► quick. And then they're in the shared library and the other person or people can see them.

00:47:10 ◼   ► It also has sharing suggestions, which I think is probably the best way to get started where

00:47:15 ◼   ► photos will look at who's in the photo, photos of people that you've told it. So like in

00:47:23 ◼   ► the in the mail, in the mail, in the Mac settings, you can just add people and say I want suggestions

00:47:28 ◼   ► based on this. So if I put Federica, if I put you in there, any photos that it sees

00:47:32 ◼   ► of view, it's going to suggest to me in a new section of photos called sharing suggestions,

00:47:38 ◼   ► that hey, there are these 400 pictures of Federico, you know, do you want to move on

00:47:41 ◼   ► to the shared library, and you can review all of them and like, you know, maybe I want

00:47:44 ◼   ► to uncheck some of them, maybe some of them I don't want in the shared library for whatever

00:47:48 ◼   ► reason, pretty straightforward. And I think you could do a lot of bulk moving that way

00:47:53 ◼   ► pretty quickly, especially if you've already kind of gone through your photo library and

00:47:58 ◼   ► done all the faces stuff, which I've done a lot of over the years. You can also have the camera app

00:48:04 ◼   ► save shots right into the shared library. So if you're on a trip and you say, okay, until we get

00:48:11 ◼   ► home, we're just going to have this on and everything we take is going to end up in the

00:48:14 ◼   ► shared library, you know, fantastic for family vacations and that sort of thing. You can have

00:48:19 ◼   ► it suggest things based on participants that are nearby. So like if you and Sylvia are at the beach

00:48:26 ◼   ► and you're both taking pictures and you haven't told it explicitly that you want to share things,

00:48:30 ◼   ► well after a little while the sharing suggestions will say, "oh hey, you all were together, you know,

00:48:35 ◼   ► for this moment, you know, in the photos language, do you want to add these to the shared library?"

00:48:41 ◼   ► And then you can automatically have it add photos and videos taken at home, which I think is also

00:48:46 ◼   ► pretty good, not for people like you or me who work from home necessarily, but say that you and

00:48:51 ◼   ► your partner both work outside of the home, you know, if you're taking pictures at work they won't

00:48:55 ◼   ► end up there. But if you're at home in the evening together, or whatever, those photos show up. So

00:49:00 ◼   ► that all feels like a lot of vectors into this, that when you overlap a couple of them, I would

00:49:07 ◼   ► imagine that once people are kind of used to how this works, that you probably won't need much

00:49:11 ◼   ► manual sharing in the future, maybe when you first set it up, but I could see down the road. Okay,

00:49:17 ◼   ► like basically, this just kind of works the way I expect it to. And I think all that's

00:49:20 ◼   ► honestly pretty good. Do you have anything that like jumps out at you there that maybe you would like to see

00:49:26 ◼   ► some other factors there or do you feel like they've kind of covered the main ones for how you would use this?

00:49:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that covers all the all the

00:49:35 ◼   ► different sort of scenarios in which I would like to share a photo with someone like I think that's yeah, I think that I

00:49:41 ◼   ► cannot think of other

00:49:43 ◼   ► conditions or like filters for that. So yeah, that seems that sounds pretty good actually. I think they've also done a good job at

00:49:50 ◼   ► helping you understand where a photo lives. And so, and all the versions of photos, you can select my library,

00:49:58 ◼   ► shared library or combined so you can see both your local library and the shared one together. For me, at least on the Mac, and even iOS, that's basically an instant toggle. It's not like it has to like quit and like reload the library just like basically filters it very quickly. That's pretty great. I think that's a really nice way, especially in the beginning, if you're doing like bulk moving,

00:50:20 ◼   ► leave the view on just my library. And then when you move them to the shared when they

00:50:25 ◼   ► disappear, right, because now they're in the the view you're not looking at. And I think

00:50:30 ◼   ► that's going to be a nice way as I you know, continue to sort through these over the coming

00:50:33 ◼   ► months to kind of keep tabs on what I've moved and what I haven't. photos in the shared library

00:50:40 ◼   ► pick up a little icon. So it's similar to like the iCloud families like kind of two

00:50:44 ◼   ► little figures, one's kind of shorter than the other up in the corner, very

00:50:49 ◼   ► similar to how they'll show like if it's a live photo or it's a video, you know,

00:50:52 ◼   ► you kind of get that little, I guess it's like a status icon or like a attribute

00:50:57 ◼   ► icon, very similar. So you can very quickly see at a glance and you can turn

00:51:02 ◼   ► that off if you don't want to see it. I've left it on because it's very

00:51:04 ◼   ► minimal. It's not, you know, impacting my view of the photo in any way. And you

00:51:10 ◼   ► can or I guess one thing you need to know is about storage. So okay, it counts

00:51:17 ◼   ► against the iCloud storage space of the person who initiated the shared photo

00:51:21 ◼   ► library. So in my case I initiated it, I shared it with Mary. So over time my

00:51:27 ◼   ► iCloud data usage will go up as she moves a lot of photos from her library

00:51:32 ◼   ► into the shared one. Now we're an iCloud family so it's kind of like rearranging

00:51:38 ◼   ► water in the same bucket, like it doesn't matter to us, because we're, you know, under

00:51:41 ◼   ► the threshold of our account.

00:51:43 ◼   ► But if you, you know, have issues with iCloud storage space, and you want to adopt this,

00:51:49 ◼   ► just know that you're going to be using more space.

00:51:51 ◼   ► And so you may end up needing to bump up a tier, but maybe the other person can bump

00:51:55 ◼   ► down.

00:51:56 ◼   ► It's just something to consider, right, especially if you have really large photo libraries.

00:52:01 ◼   ► For us, we're on the two terabyte iCloud plan.

00:52:04 ◼   ► And we have about 1.2 terabytes of data.

00:52:06 ◼   ► And so I'm not worried about about, you know, running out of room.

00:52:11 ◼   ► But one thing I do need to keep an eye on, especially on my laptop is local disk space,

00:52:16 ◼   ► because I have photos set to download all originals.

00:52:19 ◼   ► And again, as the shared library grows, I will have more of my local disk.

00:52:24 ◼   ► Now I want that because I can back them up a time machine and backblaze.

00:52:28 ◼   ► But again, something to be mindful of is just that your concept of the usage of that you

00:52:34 ◼   ► you have in photos in terms of disk space and storage, that is going to change as you

00:52:40 ◼   ► move forward with these with these settings.

00:52:44 ◼   ► And so for us, my alcohol usage will go up, Mary's will go down, our disk usage on our

00:52:49 ◼   ► computers is both going to go up because we're going to be merging two really big photo libraries.

00:52:54 ◼   ► And so so something to keep an eye on, I think, interesting about the the storage counting

00:53:01 ◼   ► against the surge of the person who initiates the sharing.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to do this with...

00:53:09 ◼   ► How many people can you do it with?

00:53:11 ◼   ► Is it just another person?

00:53:14 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:53:15 ◼   ► I think it's more than that.

00:53:16 ◼   ► That you can share?

00:53:17 ◼   ► But I know you can only be part of one at a time.

00:53:19 ◼   ► So you couldn't have one with Sylvia.

00:53:21 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:53:22 ◼   ► And then another one with your mom.

00:53:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:24 ◼   ► Because that's what I was thinking.

00:53:25 ◼   ► It doesn't have to be everyone in the family.

00:53:27 ◼   ► So Mary and I share one, but the kids don't have access to it.

00:53:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I can't find quickly how many people can be in it.

00:53:33 ◼   ► Maybe the Discord can tell us.

00:53:35 ◼   ► Yeah, because if I'm gonna do it,

00:53:37 ◼   ► I think I'm gonna do it with Sylvia.

00:53:38 ◼   ► We are part of the same family sharing setup

00:53:41 ◼   ► on Apple platforms.

00:53:43 ◼   ► So that should work pretty nicely.

00:53:46 ◼   ► Basically what you and Mary are doing.

00:53:48 ◼   ► I think maybe doing what you did and just moving up,

00:53:53 ◼   ► like just a few photos initially,

00:53:56 ◼   ► instead of like, I don't know, 15 years of photos,

00:53:59 ◼   ► That's probably the right approach.

00:54:01 ◼   ► Like, just take a few of the recent ones

00:54:03 ◼   ► from, like, the past three months or something

00:54:05 ◼   ► and see how well it works.

00:54:07 ◼   ► And over time, you progressively start moving more and more

00:54:11 ◼   ► things into it.

00:54:13 ◼   ► That's probably the way to go.

00:54:14 ◼   ► So I'm going to consider it.

00:54:16 ◼   ► Have you used the control that you get in the camera app

00:54:22 ◼   ► so that when you are on a vacation together or something,

00:54:25 ◼   ► And you should see a button in the camera UI.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And that photo is taken and immediately added

00:54:33 ◼   ► to the shared library.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Have you found that to be useful in practice?

00:54:37 ◼   ► We were back from our vacation before this came out.

00:54:41 ◼   ► But just in testing, it works great.

00:54:43 ◼   ► I mean, I was just playing with it for the show.

00:54:45 ◼   ► I turned it on and took a picture of my desk.

00:54:47 ◼   ► It's like, oh, it showed up in the right library.

00:54:49 ◼   ► I think that's going to be a really useful thing, though,

00:54:52 ◼   ► because it's just like an ad hoc thing.

00:54:55 ◼   ► because maybe we're together and we don't want that.

00:54:57 ◼   ► I mean, we do, but maybe not everyone does.

00:54:59 ◼   ► And so I think it's just about giving people

00:55:03 ◼   ► the optionality to best fit their needs.

00:55:06 ◼   ► As a real-time follow-up, I found it.

00:55:08 ◼   ► You can be an iCloud shared photo library

00:55:11 ◼   ► with five other people.

00:55:13 ◼   ► So it's a total of six, six people.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And they have some stuff in here about

00:55:21 ◼   ► when you join a shared library,

00:55:24 ◼   ► your photo library database is backed up and stored

00:55:27 ◼   ► for six months.

00:55:28 ◼   ► So if you have some sort of mishap,

00:55:30 ◼   ► you can, I guess, somehow roll that back.

00:55:33 ◼   ► I don't really know how that recovery works,

00:55:35 ◼   ► but I'll put a document in the show notes.

00:55:37 ◼   ► People can read about that.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Where this falls down for me is in the organization

00:55:44 ◼   ► of the shared library.

00:55:45 ◼   ► So I use faces and places, and I don't use a lot of tags,

00:55:50 ◼   ► but I got a handful of tags I'll use in my photo library.

00:55:53 ◼   ► but the bulk of my organization takes place in albums.

00:55:57 ◼   ► And that's like from, you know, the aperture

00:55:59 ◼   ► and even iPhoto days where a lot of these other features

00:56:02 ◼   ► weren't there yet.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And so I've got a bunch of albums

00:56:06 ◼   ► and the internal logic of what's an album and what's not

00:56:08 ◼   ► is not perfect, right?

00:56:09 ◼   ► I have like a vacations folder,

00:56:12 ◼   ► but then I also have some albums

00:56:13 ◼   ► that are like specific vacations.

00:56:14 ◼   ► Like it's a bit messy,

00:56:15 ◼   ► but it's just kind of been there for a long time.

00:56:18 ◼   ► And in the shared photo library, there are no albums.

00:56:23 ◼   ► You can't create them.

00:56:24 ◼   ► You can't move an album into a shared photo library.

00:56:28 ◼   ► You can move its contents

00:56:30 ◼   ► and all the other metadata comes over.

00:56:32 ◼   ► So faces, places, tags, ratings, all that stuff comes over,

00:56:36 ◼   ► but you cannot make an album in the shared photo library.

00:56:39 ◼   ► And that is a bummer for me

00:56:42 ◼   ► because that's been my workflow for years and years.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Now, Mary on the other hand has like three albums

00:56:47 ◼   ► and like she just searches for everything.

00:56:49 ◼   ► And I'm torn on thinking, did Apple does not get to this

00:56:54 ◼   ► and maybe we'll get it next year?

00:56:58 ◼   ► Or do they think albums aren't the way to go anymore

00:57:01 ◼   ► and they think that the moments

00:57:04 ◼   ► and all the other metadata is enough for most people?

00:57:07 ◼   ► I don't know, but I wish there were albums

00:57:09 ◼   ► in the shared photo library.

00:57:11 ◼   ► Are you a big album user?

00:57:13 ◼   ► What's your kind of organization?

00:57:14 ◼   ► - I don't have any.

00:57:17 ◼   ► I just keep everything in the, like I don't use albums.

00:57:21 ◼   ► I just, when I want to find something, I use search

00:57:25 ◼   ► and I search by person or by location or time.

00:57:30 ◼   ► I have never used albums.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - I mean, I think that's where I'm headed

00:57:35 ◼   ► 'cause I really want to use shared photo library.

00:57:38 ◼   ► The thing that kind of bugs me about,

00:57:41 ◼   ► maybe they'll fix this,

00:57:42 ◼   ► this seems like a UI bug in the photos for Mac app,

00:57:46 ◼   ► But if you move to the shared library,

00:57:49 ◼   ► your albums still show up in the sidebar,

00:57:51 ◼   ► but they're all grayed out.

00:57:53 ◼   ► It's really weird.

00:57:54 ◼   ► And I think ultimately what's gonna happen

00:57:56 ◼   ► is I probably will keep a handful of albums

00:58:00 ◼   ► for like some work specific things in my personal library,

00:58:03 ◼   ► and then just rely on all the other metadata

00:58:05 ◼   ► in the shared one.

00:58:06 ◼   ► And I mean, I don't really have a choice there,

00:58:09 ◼   ► but I would love to know why this is what it is.

00:58:12 ◼   ► Was it a decision made out of policy

00:58:16 ◼   ► and like, this is where we think it's going

00:58:18 ◼   ► or was it something they didn't get done

00:58:20 ◼   ► so it's not gonna talk about it and we'll get it later?

00:58:23 ◼   ► You just never know with Apple, right?

00:58:25 ◼   ► We've talked about this

00:58:26 ◼   ► and it was like shortcuts in particular, right?

00:58:27 ◼   ► Like, oh, it'd be great if we could do this or that.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Well, do they not want it to

00:58:31 ◼   ► or they just haven't gotten to it yet?

00:58:33 ◼   ► - Who knows?

00:58:34 ◼   ► - Who knows, right?

00:58:35 ◼   ► I mean, there's no visibility into it.

00:58:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's hard to know if it was a decision

00:58:40 ◼   ► or they ran out of time or it's a combination of the two.

00:58:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:58:45 ◼   ► I can tell you that Sylvia,

00:58:47 ◼   ► traditionally, like historically,

00:58:49 ◼   ► she liked doing albums and carefully sort of

00:58:54 ◼   ► putting together these albums for like events

00:58:56 ◼   ► or other things like, I don't know,

00:58:59 ◼   ► trip to Barcelona or something.

00:59:01 ◼   ► She used to do this back in the days of iPhoto.

00:59:05 ◼   ► I think her and like, I think she stopped doing this.

00:59:10 ◼   ► And I also like my theories that a bunch of other,

00:59:15 ◼   ► like a lot of other people did as well.

00:59:17 ◼   ► When the Photos app got the really good search

00:59:21 ◼   ► for location and times,

00:59:23 ◼   ► like I think it became less important

00:59:27 ◼   ► to carefully create an album and manually create an album

00:59:31 ◼   ► for these trips or life events,

00:59:34 ◼   ► because you can just find them, right?

00:59:37 ◼   ► When search is good enough, you can retrieve exactly what

00:59:40 ◼   ► you're looking for.

00:59:42 ◼   ► It kind of defeats the purpose of spending time manually

00:59:45 ◼   ► creating an album.

00:59:47 ◼   ► And so I think she stopped--

00:59:50 ◼   ► I mean, I never started, but she stopped doing it

00:59:53 ◼   ► when she realized, oh, I can just search for photos

00:59:56 ◼   ► and find the same stuff.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe they just want everybody to get there.

01:00:00 ◼   ► I mean, those other features are good, right?

01:00:02 ◼   ► It's not like I've kept this up because I felt like

01:00:06 ◼   ► it was too messy otherwise.

01:00:07 ◼   ► It's just been something I've always done.

01:00:09 ◼   ► I mean, way back, we talked about this on the prompt,

01:00:12 ◼   ► like way back when I was using Dropbox as my photo library,

01:00:16 ◼   ► right, 'cause for a while, for years, that's what I did.

01:00:19 ◼   ► I had everything in Dropbox,

01:00:20 ◼   ► and those folders basically became albums,

01:00:24 ◼   ► and here we are 10 years later, and Apple's saying,

01:00:28 ◼   ► well, you know what?

01:00:29 ◼   ► Maybe you don't need these after all.

01:00:32 ◼   ► I found a post that you just wrote.

01:00:35 ◼   ► Tutorial, moving from iPhoto to Dropbox.

01:00:37 ◼   ► - Ooh, that was--

01:00:38 ◼   ► - You wanna guess what year you wrote that in?

01:00:40 ◼   ► - 2012.

01:00:42 ◼   ► - 2012, baby.

01:00:43 ◼   ► - That's the kind of 2012 energy right there.

01:00:46 ◼   ► And I used to have, I'll tell you this,

01:00:49 ◼   ► I think at some point I used to have

01:00:52 ◼   ► my personal Mac mini server

01:00:56 ◼   ► back in the days of Mac mini colo, now MacStadium.

01:01:00 ◼   ► I used to have my own Mac mini server that I've used for a bunch of things.

01:01:04 ◼   ► One of those things was watching a Dropbox folder for incoming pictures, and I think

01:01:11 ◼   ► I had a script, like a Hazel thing, that would rename all those pictures and apply metadata

01:01:18 ◼   ► to them so that I basically rebuilt my entire iPhoto photo library in Dropbox.

01:01:27 ◼   ► I forgot the details of how this worked, like how did it did those photos go from the camera

01:01:33 ◼   ► app on the phone to Dropbox? I don't remember. But it was a very complicated setup that eventually

01:01:40 ◼   ► I abandoned when the photos app got decent. So yeah, 2012. That's weirder, weird times,

01:01:49 ◼   ► you know, from back in the day before Everpix, before remember Everpix? That was good. Yeah,

01:01:56 ◼   ► box where the people in the discord are freaking out that iCloud photo library

01:01:59 ◼   ► is now cursed because we've talked about it as a photo sharing service oh no the

01:02:04 ◼   ► prompt curse oh our bad oh no sorry I forgot yeah because for a long time on

01:02:13 ◼   ► the precursor to the show we talked about a lot of photo sharing services

01:02:16 ◼   ► and they had a tendency to go out of business after we talked about them

01:02:18 ◼   ► sorry Apple that's that one's that one's on us our bad but overall I am excited

01:02:24 ◼   ► about this feature and I don't have like a full strategy

01:02:28 ◼   ► to how to move everything into it still.

01:02:30 ◼   ► Like it's just gonna be piece by piece.

01:02:33 ◼   ► But once it's all up and running,

01:02:35 ◼   ► I think it's gonna be really great

01:02:36 ◼   ► because I know that she has photos that I don't have

01:02:39 ◼   ► and vice versa that we want access to

01:02:40 ◼   ► because we've all done it right for years.

01:02:42 ◼   ► Like you go on vacation,

01:02:43 ◼   ► you airdrop the photos to each other,

01:02:45 ◼   ► maybe you forget or you miss some

01:02:47 ◼   ► or like it's just kind of been a messy thing

01:02:52 ◼   ► and I'm hoping this can tidy it up.

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01:04:28 ◼   ► and Relay FM. So I wanted to close out this episode by telling you about how I had an

01:04:36 ◼   ► epiphany this week. A major, major realization in my life. Sort of a turning point, how would you

01:04:47 ◼   ► call it? Like when you when you just realize something you're like "haha yes!"

01:04:51 ◼   ► That's how I'm gonna, that's what I'm gonna do. So yeah, really an epiphany.

01:04:57 ◼   ► I was just staring at my desk and very happy with my thoughts. I realized yes,

01:05:05 ◼   ► that's what I'm gonna do. That's the plan. I'm gonna start from the end of

01:05:11 ◼   ► this and then I'm gonna walk my way backwards into explaining why.

01:05:15 ◼   ► Soon, but not yet, soon, I will buy an Apple Studio Display.

01:05:23 ◼   ► Let me explain how I got to this point.

01:05:26 ◼   ► For months, we've been talking about this here on the show.

01:05:29 ◼   ► I talked about it with Jon on App Stories for a few months at this point.

01:05:37 ◼   ► What I wanted from the new sort of office space in this new room that we have, the new

01:05:44 ◼   ► place that we own, I thought I wanted to have a slightly bigger desk with just about the

01:05:53 ◼   ► same length but maybe just a bit deeper, because that's one of the things I don't like about

01:05:57 ◼   ► my current desk, is that it's very narrow. And I thought what I wanted was a gaming monitor.

01:06:05 ◼   ► I thought I wanted a gaming monitor that I could use for both serious, you know, capital

01:06:10 ◼   ► LG Gamer gaming, you know, have refresh rate, OLED quality, if possible, you know, the real

01:06:17 ◼   ► gamer stuff. But at the same time, a monitor that I could also use for work stuff. So serving

01:06:26 ◼   ► the double purpose of when you want to play video games and you feel like a gamer, you're

01:06:32 ◼   ► going to game on this thing. But when you're working on your MacBook Pro or your iPad Pro,

01:06:37 ◼   ► same monitor you can use with those devices.

01:06:40 ◼   ► Makes sense.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And for many months, for many months I thought that, and I was talking to Silvio like, well,

01:06:46 ◼   ► unfortunately all these gaming monitors, they all kind of, you know, aesthetically speaking,

01:06:51 ◼   ► they are all very sort of, they have that white guy aesthetic, you know, they're plastic-y,

01:06:58 ◼   ► and they're not really tasteful, and they have RGB lights.

01:07:02 ◼   ► They're the monitors made for people who want to tell you about their monitors, and it's

01:07:07 ◼   ► not exa—like, I don't aspire to be that person, but yet, if you want that kind of device in your life,

01:07:15 ◼   ► that's, you know, the kind of cost you gotta eat. The aesthetic and the RGB lights, usually, and

01:07:21 ◼   ► they're very bulky and plastic-y. Comes with the territory, I suppose. I said, "Well, I'm gonna wait

01:07:27 ◼   ► for Black Friday, if there's a good deal, or Cyber Monday, whatever, they're calling it now. I'm gonna

01:07:34 ◼   ► wait. It's not a priority now anyway. We're buying all kinds of other furniture for the house.

01:07:40 ◼   ► So that thing can wait. Come November, I'll think about it. But then, at the same time, as we have,

01:07:46 ◼   ► you know, we've been assembling our living room, we finally found a couch that we like. We're still

01:07:51 ◼   ► waiting for other furniture because let me tell you these days, any kind of furniture that you

01:07:56 ◼   ► order, they tell you it's a two-month wait. So anyway, we're still waiting for many, many things.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Something that I did was I started using my gaming PC, the Corsair One that I have.

01:08:10 ◼   ► It's a compact sort of tower, desktop PC. Put that behind my TV. We have a new LG 55-inch OLED TV.

01:08:20 ◼   ► It's the C1 from 2021, I believe. OLED 120Hz refresh rate, HDMI 2.1, all the things for

01:08:31 ◼   ► having a great picture quality, and also you can use it with a PS5 or a modern PC.

01:08:36 ◼   ► And I've been playing beta games, I talked about this on App Stories and on

01:08:40 ◼   ► Unwind, I think. I've been playing PC games on the 4K TV from the couch, and it's glorious, because

01:08:49 ◼   ► the one thing that I realized, like, I don't need to play at native 4K resolution, because when

01:08:56 ◼   ► you're sitting like two and a half meters away from the TV, it doesn't really matter. You can

01:09:02 ◼   ► play at 1440p and on PC you can use these upscaling technologies like NVIDIA DLSS or AMD's FSR to

01:09:12 ◼   ► upscale your image and it's still gonna look great. I mean, from a distance you're not really gonna

01:09:18 ◼   ► notice the drop in resolution, what you're gonna notice however is the performance gain, because

01:09:24 ◼   ► Because if you're playing, let's say, Cyberpunk, a 1440p instead of native 4K still looks great

01:09:32 ◼   ► from two and a half meters away, but because the computer is pushing fewer pixels, you

01:09:40 ◼   ► can get, I don't know, on my gaming PC I can get like 90 or 100 frames per second.

01:09:46 ◼   ► And that you can absolutely see.

01:09:48 ◼   ► So I've been playing that, I had this realization about dropping the resolution and still having

01:09:53 ◼   ► a fantastic looking image on the TV. And also, on the couch, finally having a proper big

01:10:00 ◼   ► enough couch, like, I love it. And it's so comfy, and it's sort of what I always wanted

01:10:08 ◼   ► to have. And also, let me describe, like, what kind of person am I when I play video

01:10:15 ◼   ► games. It's usually a night when, you know, I can just play for a couple of hours before

01:10:21 ◼   ► I go to sleep or when Sylvia is not around. Because if Sylvia is around, I'm doing things

01:10:26 ◼   ► with her. We're rocking the dogs, we're going shopping, we're doing things around the house.

01:10:31 ◼   ► Like I'm not the kind of person who's going, I'm not the kind of guy who's like sitting

01:10:35 ◼   ► on the couch playing with his PlayStation and be like, "Babe, can you give me a drink?"

01:10:40 ◼   ► Like, no, I'm not the kind of person. I've never been that kind of person. So my gaming

01:10:48 ◼   ► time is mostly at night, and I love being in the living room by myself with my, you

01:10:54 ◼   ► know, Philips Hue lights, you know, dimmed, set to purple or another, you know, really

01:11:00 ◼   ► nice color, and just playing by myself with the headphones on for a couple of hours. It's

01:11:04 ◼   ► great. And so I was thinking about this a few days ago, I was like, "Why am I still

01:11:10 ◼   ► thinking that I need a gaming monitor in the office too?" If I'm gonna play video games

01:11:17 ◼   ► on the couch. It's so comfortable. The TV is 55 inches, it's big enough. I have my gaming

01:11:24 ◼   ► PC there. I have a PlayStation 5 there. If for whatever reason the TV is not available,

01:11:30 ◼   ► or I don't want to play on the couch, I have a Nintendo Switch, and I have a Steam Deck.

01:11:37 ◼   ► On the Steam Deck I can play both PC games, and I can even remote play my PlayStation

01:11:42 ◼   ► And if the Steam Deck is still not enough, I also have a gaming laptop.

01:11:48 ◼   ► Like I have a gaming PC laptop with a 3080 inside.

01:11:55 ◼   ► So like, if I want to have really good graphics quality in a portable device, and the Steam

01:12:01 ◼   ► Deck is not enough, I have my gaming laptop.

01:12:05 ◼   ► And so I thought, I don't need a gaming monitor on my desk.

01:12:09 ◼   ► I need a monitor for work. And so I started researching all my options. And yes, to answer

01:12:18 ◼   ► Zach in the Discord, I do have more PCs than Macs. Yes, that is absolutely right. I have

01:12:24 ◼   ► one Mac, but I have two gaming PCs. Yes, that is correct. So I started researching options

01:12:30 ◼   ► for like, okay, now that I had this, you know, first, once I had the first half of the epiphany,

01:12:37 ◼   ► which was, I don't need a gaming monitor, I just need a work monitor.

01:12:43 ◼   ► So I started looking into regular monitors.

01:12:46 ◼   ► So the research started, was like, OK, OLED or non-OLED?

01:12:50 ◼   ► Probably non-OLED, because if I'm gonna use this as a work monitor and say, leave, I don't

01:12:57 ◼   ► know, mail open on the monitor or something, I don't want to risk burn-in for that type.

01:13:05 ◼   ► not really necessary to have OLED quality and I'm gonna put reminders or

01:13:09 ◼   ► Discord on that monitor so I can probably live without OLED for that

01:13:14 ◼   ► display. Promotion, like 120Hz refresh rate, is that important? It's nice to

01:13:21 ◼   ► have but possibly not essential. I am one of those people who tends to notice the

01:13:29 ◼   ► high refresh rate more on smaller displays. I think the bigger the display

01:13:33 ◼   ► the less I care. Like, I can absolutely see the difference on my iPhone and iPad,

01:13:40 ◼   ► less so on my MacBook Pro. And I would imagine that the same would

01:13:45 ◼   ► apply to an even bigger display. I knew that I didn't want to have anything

01:13:52 ◼   ► above 30 inches for sure. Like, all these displays, 32, 34, these ultra-wide monitors,

01:13:59 ◼   ► no, they're too big. I don't want to, I don't, I don't, I'm not like a, I'm not like a NASA engineer.

01:14:05 ◼   ► I don't need to have this wild setup in front of me. I don't need a Bloomberg terminal on my desk.

01:14:12 ◼   ► Like, I just, I just want to have, like, I just want to have another space for Windows, essentially.

01:14:17 ◼   ► I knew that it needed to be something that looked nice, you know, once I realized, oh, I don't need a gaming monitor.

01:14:24 ◼   ► I don't need to have these wild objects on my desk full of lights.

01:14:30 ◼   ► I guess I can look for something nice.

01:14:33 ◼   ► So I started looking for something nice.

01:14:35 ◼   ► And then I knew that I needed to work reliably, as much as possible, with my iPad Pro, considering

01:14:43 ◼   ► that stage manager with external display support is coming out, and with my MacBook Pro.

01:14:47 ◼   ► So I started looking, and then I realized, I guess what I want in my life is an Apple

01:14:53 ◼   ► Studio Display because it's 27 inches. All things considered, it's probably gonna be

01:15:01 ◼   ► the display that's gonna give me fewer headaches compared to other displays when it comes to

01:15:07 ◼   ► compatibility with my iPad Pro and MacBook Pro. It looks very nice and cost-wise it's

01:15:16 ◼   ► probably more expensive than other options, but it looks good and it's made by Apple and

01:15:22 ◼   ► the kind of aesthetic I like, and I don't need, I don't want to deal with the complication of,

01:15:29 ◼   ► you know, displays from third-party companies, they're not gonna work right or whatever,

01:15:34 ◼   ► and so yeah, I'm gonna buy one. I think for Black Friday I'm gonna take advantage, assuming that

01:15:40 ◼   ► Apple does one of their coupon things, that you buy a thing and you get like a gift card or

01:15:45 ◼   ► something, I'm gonna take advantage of that. That's the plan, I think. The only thing where

01:15:50 ◼   ► I'm still undecided is the stand. Like which stand I want. Because the display, I think I want to have the regular display.

01:15:57 ◼   ► I don't need to have the nano texture one. The stand,

01:16:01 ◼   ► I'm not sure if I want to have the height adjustable one or just the

01:16:06 ◼   ► what's it called? Tilt, like the horizontal

01:16:10 ◼   ► angle thing.

01:16:12 ◼   ► Because you can choose, right?

01:16:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:14 ◼   ► You can choose between two stands. One that is also height adjustable and the other isn't.

01:16:19 ◼   ► That's right. Maybe I'm gonna go for the one that is not height adjustable. I think it's a good move

01:16:25 ◼   ► I mean you like you said the gaming is elsewhere and you need to optimize for what's on your desk and what you use

01:16:32 ◼   ► Every day for work. I think I maybe would consider the more expensive stand. It's pretty low

01:16:38 ◼   ► I mean fuck most people who have the default stand or like have an iMac end up putting it on something

01:16:43 ◼   ► And so maybe if you have like a shelf or a riser you're gonna use you're okay

01:16:47 ◼   ► But I think long term you're gonna want that display a little bit higher than the default. I'll trust you

01:16:52 ◼   ► I'll get if you say if you see if you're saying that it's pretty low and then I'm gonna regret that

01:16:58 ◼   ► Because I think it's like 500 more or something together. Well, alright

01:17:04 ◼   ► But I also it's the kind of display that I want to buy once and not think about this for years to come

01:17:09 ◼   ► So yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I get that. I get the height adjustable one. But yeah, that's the plan

01:17:14 ◼   ► So in a few weeks, hopefully, when is Black Friday?

01:17:17 ◼   ► Like 20 days from now or something.

01:17:20 ◼   ► - It's coming up. - Yeah, it's coming up

01:17:20 ◼   ► in three weeks.

01:17:21 ◼   ► So yeah, I'll get one and I will report back on the show

01:17:26 ◼   ► in terms of how it goes.

01:17:28 ◼   ► But yeah, the dream is to have the display always

01:17:31 ◼   ► on the desk and then swap in the device I need,

01:17:34 ◼   ► whether it's the MacBook Pro or the iPad Pro.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Probably have a dock in the middle, like a Thunderbolt dock.

01:17:41 ◼   ► I'm still not sure about this or not,

01:17:43 ◼   ► But yeah, that's the plan.

01:17:45 ◼   ► I have a fixed display and then swap in the computer

01:17:48 ◼   ► that I'm using at the moment.

01:17:49 ◼   ► It's mostly going to be the iPad Pro, the MacBook Pro

01:17:51 ◼   ► I'm just going to use when I record podcasts.

01:17:53 ◼   ► So yeah, I'm very excited about having realized this,

01:17:59 ◼   ► having decided this, and now I really cannot wait

01:18:03 ◼   ► because I think that display looks super nice

01:18:05 ◼   ► and I've been readjusting my desk in preparation for it.

01:18:10 ◼   ► I'm using a portable monitor that I already had to sort of see if I actually like this,

01:18:16 ◼   ► and I can confirm that I do.

01:18:18 ◼   ► I have this portable monitor that I actually want to sell.

01:18:23 ◼   ► Not the C-Force one, by the way, not the gaming OLED one that I have, it's another one that

01:18:28 ◼   ► I'm selling.

01:18:29 ◼   ► But I'm using it as a test and it works.

01:18:31 ◼   ► I really like having two monitors, one either the iPad Pro, the MacBook Pro, and the other

01:18:36 ◼   ► off on the left side.

01:18:39 ◼   ► Really works for me.

01:18:40 ◼   ► Discord on the external monitor right now. And so yeah, I'll do this and I will report back.

01:18:45 ◼   ► All right, well if you want to find links to stuff we spoke about, head on over to the website

01:18:50 ◼   ► relay.fm/connected/422. There you can get in touch, there's an email link there in the sidebar,

01:18:56 ◼   ► send us feedback or follow up. You can also become a member, get Connected Pro, which is a longer ad

01:19:04 ◼   ► free version of the show each and every week. You can find us online. You can find Myke.

01:19:11 ◼   ► He hosts a bunch of shows here on Relay FM. Myke will be back next week. Remember to send

01:19:15 ◼   ► him the package, the box emoji on Twitter. I think he would like that. He's @IMYKE over

01:19:21 ◼   ► there. Federico is the editor-in-chief of MacStories.net, the host of AppStories and

01:19:26 ◼   ► a bunch of other shows. You can find me on MacPowerUsers and I write over at 512pixels.net.

01:19:33 ◼   ► I'd like to thank our sponsors, Squarespace, Hover, and ExpressVPN.

01:19:38 ◼   ► Until next time, Federico, say goodbye.

01:19:40 ◼   ► - Adios, echos. - Bye, y'all.