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Connected

356: Poke a Hole in the Toolbar

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:06   From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 356.

00:00:10   Today's show is brought to you by Fitbod, Hullo and Bombas.

00:00:14   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined by Federico Vittucci.

00:00:17   Hi Federico.

00:00:18   Hello, Myke. How are you?

00:00:20   I am very good, my friend. I'm very good. How are you?

00:00:22   I'm actually, you know, this is this.

00:00:26   It's way too hot in Rome right now.

00:00:29   So I have installed all these new HomeKit thread-enabled sensors made by Eve on my balcony

00:00:37   and it says 35 degrees, which is like, it's unacceptable at 7pm.

00:00:42   7pm, 35 degrees is how, why?

00:00:46   We've been having those kinds of temperatures here over the last week, you know.

00:00:49   Really?

00:00:50   Yeah, it's been disgusting.

00:00:51   It really is.

00:00:52   It's been very rough for us.

00:00:56   And it doesn't help that this Mac Mini that I have, which is an Intel Mac Mini, it gets

00:01:01   really, it gets quite warm.

00:01:04   It gets surprisingly hot, those things, don't they?

00:01:07   Right?

00:01:08   Why though?

00:01:09   Like, I really want to get an M1 Mac Mini Pro at some point or M2, whatever it's going

00:01:14   to be called, I don't know.

00:01:16   It gets surprisingly hot, actually.

00:01:18   I don't know if maybe there's something wrong with my Mac Mini because it's not even warm,

00:01:22   it's hot.

00:01:23   place my hand on it. It kind of bothers me actually. My Mac Mini is way too hot and I

00:01:30   feel like it's contributing to the hotness of the room.

00:01:35   You should just replace it with another Intel NUC.

00:01:39   Just litter those things around the apartment.

00:01:42   I mean I love my NUC and we're going to talk about that later but man Windows is just gross.

00:01:48   I can tell you that. I mean, it's beautiful for what it does functionally speaking. I

00:01:55   appreciate it. But man, it's not something that... Like, it reminded me why I moved away

00:02:02   from Windows 13 years ago. Not for me.

00:02:07   Big Money Hackett isn't here today. I believe he's in a jungle somewhere taking pictures

00:02:11   of computers. I think that's what he's doing today.

00:02:13   Yeah, swimming in a pool of money.

00:02:14   - He's swimming in a pool of money.

00:02:15   - A computer safari, yep.

00:02:17   And then, yeah, he's swimming in his pool of money.

00:02:19   Which, by the way, if you wanna contribute

00:02:21   to that pool of money,

00:02:22   make the money pool a little bit bigger.

00:02:23   Three days to go as we're recording this

00:02:26   on Steven's Kickstarter.

00:02:28   I'll put a link in the show notes if you wanna back it,

00:02:30   but this will be your final warning.

00:02:32   And aren't we good friends that he's not even here

00:02:35   and we're promoting his money pit?

00:02:37   - Yes, I think we are really good friends.

00:02:40   - I think we're good friends.

00:02:41   For this reason, we are entitled to 15% each.

00:02:45   -Ooh, that's a good, nice. -Of the proceeds.

00:02:47   That's a good percentage.

00:02:49   Yeah, I mean, you know, 30% divided by 2, 15% each.

00:02:52   I feel like that's a good compromise.

00:02:54   -We're fair. -So, Steven...

00:02:56   Yeah, we're really fair.

00:02:57   So, Steven, you can send in the check to my address.

00:03:03   Both of those checks I will take care of,

00:03:04   maybe in my... -No, I don't want to check.

00:03:07   -No? -No.

00:03:08   Who does anything with checks?

00:03:10   It's not 1974. I'll take electronic payment.

00:03:14   Some people do. Some people do use checks.

00:03:16   I think that's bananas. I don't understand that.

00:03:19   I think I've only used a check once in my life.

00:03:22   When I needed to rent our current apartment many years ago,

00:03:28   the owner wanted a down payment with a check for some reason.

00:03:32   I believe we used a check similarly when we were buying our house for something.

00:03:36   I don't remember exactly what it was for.

00:03:38   It wasn't like the deposit or anything, but I know that there was like one thing where they needed a check

00:03:42   And it was just like I don't know how this is helpful for anybody because if I I could just send you the money right now

00:03:47   And you'll have that immediately

00:03:48   Rather than waiting for me to mail this check to you and then four more days for you to receive the money

00:03:54   But yeah, yeah, I don't know

00:03:56   All people I have received my Ricky mascot

00:04:00   I'm jealous. I guess posts bad for you, huh? Yeah

00:04:07   Yes, so I'll put a link in the show notes, but you may remember this we spoke about this ages ago Ellen

00:04:12   Wonderful listener who's in our discord?

00:04:15   Shared that they had made a Ricky mascot and we then commissioned Ricky mascots for each of us

00:04:20   Mine has arrived and now sits next to my iMac. My Ricky mascot came with additional features. I have medals

00:04:28   Because I am the current reigning champion the consolidated royal leader of the Ricky's

00:04:35   Both annual and keynote. So I have a little annual and keynote medal one of each for my little mascot Ricky

00:04:42   That's incredible

00:04:45   Looking at me now. I love this little thing. You named him Ricky. Oh that is that is the official mascot name

00:04:52   It's just Ricky. I kind of feel like I wanna I wanna

00:04:55   Call I want to call him the Italian version of that

00:04:59   Maybe mine should be Richard because that's like super British right to be like Richard

00:05:04   So, so, but what would you, how would you say "little Richard" in, in, like, with a British way?

00:05:11   Like "Richie"? Is that, no, that's not British, right?

00:05:14   Well, I could just say "Richard". What's wrong with "Richard"? Does it have, it could be "Richie"?

00:05:18   Because it's "Ricky". It's like, it's a smaller version of "Richard".

00:05:22   Okay, we could be "Richie".

00:05:24   "Richie"?

00:05:24   Yeah.

00:05:25   In Italian, I guess it could be "Ricardino".

00:05:28   Well, that seems like you've, you've taken a long one.

00:05:31   Why couldn't I have "Richard", but you can have "Ricardino"?

00:05:34   Okay, so you can have Richard. I feel like you're going to be like "Ricci", right?

00:05:39   Like R-I-C-C-I. Okay, so Steven will have Ricky, you will have Richard, I will have

00:05:45   Ricardino. Okay, so it's Ricky, Richard and Ricardino.

00:05:50   Yes. By the way, I know I said it really badly,

00:05:55   but I also kind of like that, because you've got like all the fans like "Ricardino", that's

00:05:58   his name. I can roll the full R's, baby, if you want

00:06:02   I can do a Riccardino.

00:06:04   See?

00:06:05   Mm-hmm.

00:06:06   I feel like rolling the middle R is just showing off.

00:06:09   Really?

00:06:10   Yeah.

00:06:11   The one in the middle.

00:06:13   I don't think you need to roll both of them.

00:06:15   Riccardino.

00:06:16   Yeah, well, it comes natural.

00:06:17   Well, of course it does, because you're just this beautiful Italian over there.

00:06:22   Did you see MKBHD's video about the iPhone models?

00:06:27   Oh, this is the one with the...

00:06:29   Yeah, this is the one with the huge camera bump, right?

00:06:32   Oh yeah, I've seen this.

00:06:33   Yeah, yeah.

00:06:34   So I just wanted to point it out because I think we kind of mention it every time because

00:06:39   history has shown that whoever it is that gets these camera models for MKBHD tends to

00:06:46   be pretty much on the money.

00:06:49   It's big camera but…

00:06:50   Yeah.

00:06:51   It's big.

00:06:52   It's big.

00:06:53   Yeah, it's chunky.

00:06:54   It's like half of the phone on the big phone.

00:06:58   Yeah, it kind of is.

00:07:02   I mean, this is the trend, right? You look at other phones and that camera bump is, you

00:07:07   know, Apple uses a square version. Huawei uses the tall rectangular one. And this is

00:07:16   like, these phones, the backs of these phones, they are becoming like, it's not like the

00:07:21   back of a phone with camera module. It's the camera module that also has the back of the

00:07:25   phone in it.

00:07:26   Yeah, we're starting to get to a point where percentages are mattering. Like how much of

00:07:31   percentage of the back of your phone. This is cameras. It's just all cameras. Yeah, I

00:07:36   mean honestly at this point considering the 12 it got so big I kind of don't care how

00:07:42   big it gets now because we passed like an event horizon I think on it and now it's just

00:07:47   like with the 12 Pro Max it's such a large camera bump I just kind of feel like at this

00:07:52   point I kind of don't care how much bigger it gets because it's already gotten too big,

00:07:56   you know?

00:07:57   I mean at this point if you just want to feel the entire top section, you know, and extend to the right side as well

00:08:04   I feel like at that point just go for it, right? That could happen with the periscope cameras

00:08:09   Yeah, I mean or you want to put like another two lenses up there

00:08:12   Just go for it. I mean at that point you already surpassed like the threshold of like half

00:08:20   You know if you draw a vertical line in the middle of the of the Apple logo on the back of the iPhone

00:08:27   In these mock-ups, the camera module is already way past the halfway line.

00:08:33   So, I mean, just go for it and fill the entire top section.

00:08:38   Right?

00:08:39   We're getting there. I think it's...

00:08:42   I don't know, but you look at older iPhones,

00:08:45   and it's like, "Huh, remember when cameras used to be small?"

00:08:49   And like, not this huge thing, but also...

00:08:54   These phones, they take incredible pictures and videos, so I'm fine with it.

00:08:59   And honestly, the bump doesn't really concern me because I'm using a case.

00:09:04   Yeah, that doesn't really bother me anymore.

00:09:06   But there's still a few people, when these reviews come out, that get so upset about,

00:09:12   "Oh, when I put my phone on the table, it wobbles."

00:09:15   It's funny to me that every video you see that, it's like, if it's...

00:09:19   That was, I think, novel when it was the first time, but it will do it every time now.

00:09:24   Like, I don't know who's still surprised about camera bump wobbles.

00:09:29   Yeah, so I'm fine with it. I use a case on my iPhone, so the bump doesn't really annoy me at all.

00:09:40   It's just when I look at it, I recognize, "It's a big bump. It's getting bigger and bigger every year."

00:09:47   So, I mean, hopefully this means that the cameras will also get better,

00:09:51   and I am really excited about the rumored improvements to the ultra-wide camera

00:09:57   coming to the iPhone 13 this year.

00:09:59   I feel like I really want to use the ultra-wide camera more,

00:10:02   but every time I do, you know, the low-light performance isn't great

00:10:06   and those pictures, you can really tell the difference.

00:10:09   You can get great pictures out of it under the right conditions.

00:10:13   Under the right conditions.

00:10:14   There has to be a lot of light, preferably direct sunlight.

00:10:17   Like, when I took pictures of the Coliseum in bright daytime light, those were beautiful.

00:10:25   And you could see that it was taken with the ultra-wide, but it was not that grainy or

00:10:31   low quality.

00:10:33   You go there in the evening or you go there on a cloudy day and you start having problems.

00:10:40   So I'm looking forward to these improvements in the '13.

00:10:44   But yeah, it's a big bump.

00:10:47   If you are a year over year upgrading person, this is not going to be one of those years

00:10:52   where you'll be able to reuse your case.

00:10:54   You know, like that used to be a thing and it has been a thing but I feel like it's stopping.

00:10:59   I reckon by the way, I can say this especially now that Steven's not here, I don't think

00:11:03   this is 12S, this is 13.

00:11:05   I feel like this is going to be a pretty decent jump year over year.

00:11:10   I honestly feel like they're not going to do the S upgrades anymore.

00:11:14   I don't think so either.

00:11:15   Like at all.

00:11:16   at all. And I think especially one of the benefits for doing this is the competition's not doing that

00:11:21   anymore. Exactly, so if you do it it feels like you're falling behind. Like oh yeah Samsung has

00:11:27   the Note 25 and you have the 13s, it's like well you're a step behind aren't you? Because they

00:11:33   already went up to 20 Samsung, so they're already like six in front, you can't keep going and get

00:11:40   that lead on you. Yeah if anything you should jump forward and say well it's so advanced that with

00:11:46   We decided to go from the iPhone 13 to the iPhone 17.

00:11:49   And like, and you gain back those numbers if you do this enough times,

00:11:53   sort of like Microsoft did with Windows when they jumped from Windows 8 to 10.

00:11:57   I wonder if Apple will ever do that.

00:11:59   I mean, they did that, though, once.

00:12:01   Yeah, they went from 8 to 10.

00:12:02   There was no iPhone 9.

00:12:03   There was no iPhone 9. So, I mean, maybe they could do that again.

00:12:07   I just want them to get rid of the numbers.

00:12:08   I'm going to keep saying this until they do it.

00:12:10   I don't I don't have a better solution, but I hate the numbers now.

00:12:15   So you're like what? Use the year? Like iPhone 2021 for example?

00:12:21   That wouldn't... but no, but it's still numbers though. I just don't want numbers anymore.

00:12:26   The new iPhone, right?

00:12:28   I would be, I think, mostly fine with that.

00:12:30   I don't know, I feel like the numbers make it easy for people to describe what it is.

00:12:34   But we get by with all the other products.

00:12:36   Like what, for example?

00:12:38   iPads, Macs...

00:12:42   Well, okay. Yeah.

00:12:45   But maybe the iPhone specifically requires a little bit more context

00:12:54   because it is one of the products that does get reviewed,

00:12:58   like renewed every year, which isn't typical,

00:13:02   but like for the rest of Apple's product line.

00:13:04   But I just think at a certain point, like once we're up to like iPhone 17,

00:13:09   I just feel like we've gone too far.

00:13:11   Like, you know what I mean? Like, that number, once you're kind of like on the past the midway point of the teams,

00:13:17   I just feel like it's getting a bit clunky now.

00:13:19   So, when I was a kid and I was playing Final Fantasy VIII, I thought,

00:13:24   "Oh, imagine when I'm older, Squaresoft used to be called Squaresoft, not Square Enix.

00:13:31   They will have to change the way that they name these games, because Final Fantasy XV is gonna look ridiculous."

00:13:38   That's what I thought when I was a kid playing Final Fantasy 8.

00:13:41   And now there is Final Fantasy 15 and there's Final Fantasy 16 coming out.

00:13:45   I get it. It's kind of ridiculous to have these large numbers as a modifier next to a product name,

00:13:52   but also they seem to get the job done in explaining to people what the product is.

00:13:57   So I think they're gonna stick around for a while.

00:14:04   I mean sure, iPhone 30 potentially sounds ridiculous, right?

00:14:09   Oh, is that the iPhone 31?

00:14:11   I don't think we're gonna get that far with the iPhone.

00:14:13   Yeah, me neither, me neither.

00:14:14   But I think for now the numbers will stay.

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00:15:46   how to do the exercises and you get all the steps.

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00:15:52   time and I don't want to be picking up my phone constantly during my workout because

00:15:56   I feel like sometimes I can get distracted. So being able to just see like, okay, I'm

00:16:01   doing this part next. And you can even adjust the reps and the sets on the watch too if

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00:16:30   Our thanks to fitbod for their support of this show and relay.fm.

00:16:34   So we were hoping to get the Federico Vittiti MagSafe PopSocket review today, weren't we?

00:16:42   Yeah.

00:16:44   Nothing's arriving for you!

00:16:45   No, they're still stuck in Northern Italy for some reason.

00:16:50   Maybe they got like magnetically stuck to something.

00:16:52   They can't get them out of the truck, you know.

00:16:54   Maybe they're stuck somewhere in Milan and they're just, you know, they're stuck here.

00:16:58   I don't know.

00:16:59   The postal service here is not great.

00:17:03   Not great.

00:17:04   But I can tell you about something else MagSafe related,

00:17:09   which is sort of a dream come true for me from one of my favorite brands,

00:17:14   Friends of the... I mean, they're not really friends.

00:17:15   They're not friends.

00:17:16   or buy any. Friends in the sense of Federico buys a lot of stuff from them.

00:17:21   I mentioned this brand before, PITAKA. I've used their cases before. They are

00:17:30   carbon fiber cases. They're super thin and scratch resistant.

00:17:34   They're not actually carbon fiber, right? Like, this is like a whole big thing. This is a whole

00:17:39   big controversy in YouTube for reasons it's not worth getting into. It looks like carbon fiber,

00:17:44   but it's like this other material, but it's still like a super strong material.

00:17:48   Yes, and it looks like carbon fiber, so it's kind of to give you the sense of the pattern

00:17:53   that you will see on these cases. So, Pitaka, so I get an email. Actually, this is a fun story.

00:17:59   So I use, really friends of the show, SaneBox. I use SaneBox myself to organize my email.

00:18:06   And every once in a while, just to make sure that I catch false positives,

00:18:10   I go into my same black hole folder.

00:18:13   And I noticed last Friday, I believe,

00:18:16   that an email from Pitaka had gone to the same black hole folder.

00:18:20   Because maybe I accidentally trained same box a while back.

00:18:24   Anyway, they announced a new line of MagSafe-compatible wallets.

00:18:30   So they have two models, the Wallet 2 and the Wallet 2 Pro.

00:18:36   Now, these are modular wallets that are compatible with MagSafe.

00:18:42   So, in the Wallet 2 Pro, you can put...

00:18:46   So this is a slightly chunkier version of the Wallet 2, because you can put two chip

00:18:52   and pin cards and two magnetic strip cards.

00:18:57   That right there is one of the reasons why I wanted to get this product.

00:19:01   I've been using the Apple MagSafe Wallet case for the past few months.

00:19:07   It's not kind of falling apart at this point.

00:19:09   I noticed that one of the layers that holds the outer leather part is now unglued from

00:19:21   the inner layer.

00:19:22   Ah, you're perfect.

00:19:23   You're perfect MagSafe Wallet.

00:19:25   I'm not upset.

00:19:26   Leather products.

00:19:27   This happens.

00:19:28   This happens, right?

00:19:29   this happens. I've been using that a lot, but it's limited to three cards, and lately,

00:19:35   especially with the digital vaccine passport thing that we have called Green Pass, I've

00:19:41   realized that soon I will have to carry at all times a fourth card around with me, which

00:19:48   is called the... I mean, it's basically a card for the public healthcare system that

00:19:53   is issued to every Italian citizen. And I will have to carry that around, because that

00:19:58   contains proof of my vaccination. So I started thinking about this and I

00:20:04   realized, okay, well, I guess we're gonna... maybe I will not carry my credit card

00:20:10   around anymore but just my ATM card. But then, like, this Wallet 2 Pro came around

00:20:16   at just the right time. So four cards and that was enough to pick my interest. But

00:20:22   then I opened the product page and I noticed that they're selling this idea

00:20:25   of a modular design. So I believe the modular design applies to the slimmer Wallet 2 model

00:20:35   as well, but like I mentioned, I prefer the chunky look of the Wallet 2 Pro. So with the

00:20:43   modular design, what you can do is, it appears you can swap in different layers of the wallet.

00:20:52   So for example, you can add an extra layer if you want to store more cards.

00:20:57   Or you can add a money clip, which is literally like this little money clip that you attach

00:21:02   to the wallet if you want to store some cash with you in the wallet.

00:21:08   You can add a tech module.

00:21:10   So the tech module is this small layer where you can store lightning adapters, a SIM card

00:21:16   ejector tool, a USB-C cable.

00:21:21   You can also add, what else? There's a box layer that lets you store like keys and coins.

00:21:29   A little box. It's a little box. You can check out the photo. There's five coins and a key

00:21:38   in the box layer. And you know, I'm all about modularity, right? I'm all about making a

00:21:44   thing your own by adding different components to it. I feel like this product speaks to

00:21:51   my heart. And so I went in and I put in an order for the entire suite of accessories.

00:21:59   So you got the tech module. I got it all, man.

00:22:03   The box layer. The box, the money clip. And I walk around

00:22:06   with a wallet that's like six layers thick. It's gonna be bananas. You'll just be walking

00:22:11   around with a box that has a phone stuck to it.

00:22:14   So okay, real talk. Mostly I'm interested in this because I want to write about it.

00:22:20   But also for everyday usage, I don't think I'm going to be...

00:22:26   What's interesting for me about this design is I can add the parts that I need based on

00:22:32   what I'm doing.

00:22:33   So when I'm going to the beach, for example, I need to have cash.

00:22:36   Because the little bar that's on the beach, they don't let you pay with an ATM card or

00:22:45   a credit card.

00:22:46   It's cash only.

00:22:47   So I've got to have cash.

00:22:49   Or when, say that I'm going to the center of Rome and I need to park my car, usually

00:22:56   I gotta have some coins to pay for a parking ticket, right?

00:23:01   So I could add in the box layer in that case, for example.

00:23:05   So I don't know, this design I think is really intriguing.

00:23:08   I'm a big fan of Pitaka cases.

00:23:10   What is the deal with the, like, why do they say two chip and pin and two magnetic stripe

00:23:16   cards?

00:23:17   what the difference is supposed to be.

00:23:19   I feel like maybe the chip and pin cards are ever so slightly thicker than the magnetic strip cards.

00:23:25   I don't know, could be wrong.

00:23:28   Because they're also talking about degaussing.

00:23:30   So I wonder if it's like, that's like anti-magnetic.

00:23:34   So maybe they have like, you can put two chip and pin cards in one part,

00:23:38   then they have a little layer and you can put the other two.

00:23:41   WinterCharm is saying there is a minor thickness difference between the two.

00:23:44   Interesting.

00:23:45   Alright, fair enough. I did not know that.

00:23:47   Yeah.

00:23:48   So yeah, this thing, I suppose if I add in all the layers, it's gonna look ridiculous.

00:23:55   And I absolutely cannot wait to do this to my phone.

00:24:00   I wanna see what happens.

00:24:02   So to prepare for this Pitaka case, I got a black leather case made by Apple.

00:24:10   I had a red one and I felt like, you know, maybe a black one could be a better combo, visually speaking.

00:24:16   So I'm using a black leather case at the moment and I'm waiting for the Pitaka wallet coming from China.

00:24:24   It says, so I got it in parcel and it says "Port of Departure" from the Yanwen facility.

00:24:33   We'll see. I'm probably gonna get this at some point in September because it's gonna use the Italian Postal Service.

00:24:39   decides that. So yeah, I'm probably getting this in a month if things go well.

00:24:46   Let's hope it'll work with your new phone.

00:24:48   Well, you gotta think that MagSafe at least will stay compatible, right?

00:24:52   You gotta hope.

00:24:54   You gotta hope. I mean, I really think it will. So obviously, I will have to get a new case,

00:24:59   but I feel like existing MagSafe accessories will stay compatible. It'll be a really silly move to

00:25:07   to break MagSafe compatibility on the second year of MagSafe.

00:25:12   So yeah.

00:25:14   - I did have this thought the other day

00:25:16   about the MagSafe battery pack,

00:25:17   where like what makes it better

00:25:19   than the other ones that they've done

00:25:20   is it will last more than one phone.

00:25:22   You know, where the cases were just,

00:25:25   it will last, it will work only with the phone

00:25:27   that you've got, possibly.

00:25:29   - Possibly, yes.

00:25:30   - I have a roundup of iPad mini rumors for you.

00:25:34   - Okay, this product, okay.

00:25:36   So last week, Chance Miller at 9to5Mac reported that a new iPad Mini would be introduced this

00:25:43   year with a design similar to the latest iPad Air which was styled like the iPad Pro and now pretty

00:25:51   much every other product that Apple makes, right? Like thin bezels, flat sides, that kind of thing.

00:25:56   It will be powered by the A15, it will feature USB-C and a smart connector, and there are other

00:26:03   reports that also suggest that Touch ID will be in the power button. What could you do

00:26:09   with a smart connector on an iPad Mini?

00:26:15   Use a magic keyboard with it.

00:26:16   Do you think they would make one that small? I mean I guess they could.

00:26:19   Oh yeah.

00:26:20   Did Apple ever make a keyboard for the iPad Mini? I don't think so. I have used them back

00:26:26   in the day, but I don't think Apple ever... They don't make an iPad Mini keyboard.

00:26:31   Was there a smart keyboard for the iPad mini?

00:26:35   No, because it never had a smart connector.

00:26:38   Okay.

00:26:39   Right?

00:26:40   I think they're going to make it.

00:26:42   I feel like they're going to sell this iPad mini as a great way for iPad users to get

00:26:48   work done in a sort of extremely mobile scenario, right?

00:26:54   You're an iPad Pro user, now you can take these things with you on the go, and you still

00:26:59   and you still have USB-C and a Magic Keyboard for it.

00:27:03   It's basically like a small iPad Air,

00:27:05   if you consider USB-C, Smart Connector,

00:27:07   and Touch ID in the power button,

00:27:09   which I struggled, like again,

00:27:11   Touch ID and some other display rumors,

00:27:15   I struggle to believe,

00:27:16   but I feel like A15, USB-C, and Smart Connector

00:27:19   is a pretty safe bet at this point.

00:27:21   - I feel like if they're gonna go with the larger screen,

00:27:24   which we'll get to in a minute,

00:27:25   they have to go with Touch ID

00:27:26   'cause there won't be a home button anymore.

00:27:28   So touch ID in the power button seems logical.

00:27:32   Digitimes suggested that this iPad mini would also feature

00:27:36   a mini LED display like the 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

00:27:40   Then display analyst Ross Young stated

00:27:43   that while this display would be 8.3 inches

00:27:46   because of the bezel shrinkage,

00:27:48   it will not feature mini LED this time around.

00:27:51   My personal kind of like

00:27:57   barometer would say would not have mini LED?

00:28:01   I can't imagine how that could be possible, feasible,

00:28:06   or within the price range right now.

00:28:09   - Yeah, unless like we joked on our message,

00:28:12   like is this an iPad Pro mini?

00:28:16   - But like, could they, I just can't imagine a world

00:28:18   where they put it in the mini before the other 11 inch Pro.

00:28:23   - Exactly, exactly.

00:28:24   - Right?

00:28:24   iPad Pro doesn't have Mini-LED. If they were adding Mini-LED to a smaller iPad, I think

00:28:31   it should be the 11" first, not the iPad Mini first. So I will agree with you and say no

00:28:37   Mini-LED on this iPad Mini. But I would be super happy with this device,

00:28:42   right? 8.3 inches, A15 processor, USB-C, smart connector, Touch ID, in that little form factor?

00:28:51   This is the dream.

00:28:52   That sounds choice, man.

00:28:53   I'm into it.

00:28:54   It is for me, like, over the past couple of years, I've talked about it on App Stories,

00:28:59   I've written about it on the club, I've been searching for the perfect device to get my

00:29:03   reading done.

00:29:05   And I went from an iPad Pro to an iPad Mini to a Kindle to a Kobo.

00:29:10   I feel like this iPad Mini, just because I keep going back to the iPad eventually, I

00:29:15   I like my Safari reading list, I like my shortcuts, I like the apps that I have, like Shonen Jump,

00:29:21   for example, to read my manga.

00:29:23   I keep going back to the iPad, and I feel like this iPad Mini right here could be the

00:29:29   dream device for me.

00:29:30   Like it's got the new design, doesn't have the bezels anymore, doesn't have the home

00:29:34   button anymore, slightly bigger display, but still much smaller than my usual iPad.

00:29:40   Yeah, just, I will literally throw money at the screen for this device.

00:29:45   I need it. I need it in my life.

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00:32:10   Our thanks to holo for the support of this show and relay FM.

00:32:16   We have to talk about it.

00:32:17   Right?

00:32:18   Alright, look.

00:32:19   Alright, now look I know, look I get you.

00:32:21   Listener, passionate one, I get you.

00:32:23   You're like, can I listen to them complain about safari again?

00:32:27   Can I go through this again?

00:32:29   Like here's the thing, what else are we going to do passionate ones?

00:32:33   a new beta of iOS is out, they've made even more changes to Safari.

00:32:37   Do you think we're just gonna stop talking about it now?

00:32:40   No. Here we are, we're back in it, we're back in it again, Federico, what is happening with Safari now?

00:32:46   Summer of Fuuuunny! No, wait, wrong show!

00:32:50   Summer of Pain!

00:32:52   Okay, so, beta 4 came out yesterday, public beta 4 came out just a few minutes ago, I believe.

00:33:02   Okay, Safari. Changes both on iPad and iPhone. Let's start from the iPad. So as we knew before,

00:33:14   the setting that we saw in Monterey Beta 3 is now available on iPad. So if you go to Settings >

00:33:22   Safari, you can now choose between the regular Tap Bar design or the Compact Tap Bar design. So

00:33:30   the compact one is the new design with the unified tab and address bar and the

00:33:36   other one is the the one where the address bar and the tabs are separate

00:33:42   however this does not mean that you get the old Safari design from iPadOS 14

00:33:49   you get a hybrid version where you have the address bar at the top, tabs in the

00:33:55   middle, and your bookmarks, your favorites, at the very bottom of the toolbar.

00:34:02   And tabs, they still do not look like old tabs, they look like the tappable...

00:34:08   I don't know how to call them... cells?

00:34:11   They're not buttons, they're not tabs, they look like someone poked a hole in the toolbar

00:34:16   and stuck a web page title in there.

00:34:21   So yeah, it's a separate top bar and address bar design, but with the new look of iPadOS 15.

00:34:28   Now, obviously I... oh, and I should say the separate design is the default one.

00:34:37   So like on the Mac, the new compact style UI is not the default anymore, but if you

00:34:45   want to, you can choose it as an option in Settings.

00:34:48   This makes me mad and sad.

00:34:50   Okay, why?

00:34:52   You'd spend all this time

00:34:55   Right?

00:34:56   Yeah.

00:34:57   Designing something different

00:34:59   and putting in all the work and showing it off and like making it like

00:35:04   "Hey, this is this thing that we want to do and we have all these good reasons that we want to do it"

00:35:08   and then you put it out there and people don't like it and

00:35:13   Yeah, so you see then create a second mode, which is not the old one

00:35:19   It's now an adapted version. But then you ship both of them and default to the one that you

00:35:27   didn't think was the good idea. It's kind of like, why are you shipping them both, right?

00:35:32   I think my main thing, I will say for me with Safari, with all the Safari changes,

00:35:39   I do not hate them as much as everybody else. I don't think that they're good, right? Again,

00:35:44   and I will preface all this to say I've only used this on an iPad, right?

00:35:48   I know that a lot of the IR is actually focused on the iPhone and I can see that.

00:35:52   But from my experience on the iPad, I found it to be okay.

00:35:56   Like even with the new version, like what they've put in beta 4,

00:35:59   I think it's like way uglier than the version it's replacing.

00:36:04   Like the tiny little thin tabs now because they've put the address bar back,

00:36:09   I really, I don't like it. Like the really thin long tabs as well,

00:36:13   if you only have a couple of them.

00:36:15   I think visually, for me, the compact version looks better,

00:36:20   but I also then don't like that I have to tap each tab

00:36:22   to try and get the URL.

00:36:24   Like it's just, okay.

00:36:26   But the thing that like annoys me about this is like,

00:36:28   this whole situation,

00:36:32   that they're not committing to anything.

00:36:35   All they're doing is just like adding

00:36:38   or like making these little weird changes

00:36:40   and we've got way more of these to talk about.

00:36:42   And I kind of just wished they would choose a path and just either stick to it or completely...

00:36:50   Or like, you know, like force it through. I don't think... I just... I feel like this weird, like spread out approach...

00:36:57   It's just not really helping anyone. I think I saw you retweet someone who said this of just like...

00:37:03   "Don't ship this in point O."

00:37:05   Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

00:37:08   Okay, so let's unpeel the layers of this big Safari onion that we have.

00:37:15   Okay, so first of all, I see a bunch of people on Twitter try—and this usually happens in certain circles—

00:37:24   "Oh, but think of the Safari engineers, what they must be living through."

00:37:29   Like, okay, so first of all, like, nobody died, this is fine, we're just critiquing a browser, right?

00:37:35   We're not going to war. I understand that there's frustration, there's people working on it.

00:37:41   But look, it's a browser, it's not a tragedy, we're just talking about it.

00:37:44   I mean, I do feel bad for these people, right?

00:37:47   I mean, there's worse things in the world, right?

00:37:50   I mean, it's a browser toolbar, right?

00:37:53   But hey, we're critiquing a browser, this is what we do.

00:37:56   Okay, so, nobody hates no one, right?

00:37:59   I see tweets, "Oh, the Safari team should get fired." No.

00:38:02   No, that doesn't make any sense.

00:38:05   Safari is one of the best apps for iPhone and iPad.

00:38:09   Nobody should get fired.

00:38:11   And this is the second layer.

00:38:12   Redesigns, sometimes they don't scale, right?

00:38:17   You think you have a really good idea,

00:38:21   and this is a byproduct of how Apple operates, right?

00:38:25   They design new features in secret

00:38:27   and they do these big reveals, right?

00:38:29   And sometimes, most of the times, it goes well.

00:38:34   Sometimes it doesn't.

00:38:35   And we talked about this last week.

00:38:38   Web browsers are one of those features where you have

00:38:42   decades of established UI conventions.

00:38:46   And especially on iPhone, you have over a decade of muscle memory

00:38:50   to account for.

00:38:52   And so it's really tricky to get a redesign right.

00:38:55   When you don't get a redesign right, you should get feedback.

00:39:00   And that's what Apple is doing. So they're moving in the right direction in terms of

00:39:04   how to deal with people.

00:39:06   They're listening, they have a public beta,

00:39:09   and they're opening the Mac beta to Big Sur

00:39:12   and Catalina users.

00:39:13   That's the right approach.

00:39:14   Now, I feel like,

00:39:17   at this point it's pretty clear,

00:39:21   so whether you agree with the people

00:39:23   who criticize Safari or not,

00:39:26   I think it's pretty clear

00:39:27   that it's a very polarizing design, right?

00:39:30   And I feel like if I were Apple

00:39:33   and I was looking at this, I would say,

00:39:36   "Okay, maybe I think it's a disaster.

00:39:39   "Maybe I love it."

00:39:41   Whatever my preference is, it's obvious at this point

00:39:46   that it causes a lot of reactions

00:39:49   and it causes a lot of discussion.

00:39:51   Maybe it needs more time in the oven, so to speak,

00:39:56   before it's ready for the public.

00:39:59   This is what I think is going on at the moment,

00:40:02   where you have this com—

00:40:04   you know, Apple is a big company, and, you know, over the years we've gotten to know some of the people that work at Apple, right?

00:40:10   And you know how sometimes—I think it's only natural—

00:40:14   between different teams, you have different kinds of tensions, right?

00:40:18   So maybe design is pushing in one direction,

00:40:21   maybe Safari is pushing in a slightly different direction,

00:40:24   and they're trying to balance it all, for the sake of the customer, obviously.

00:40:29   And so I feel like right now we are in this weird limbo where they're still trying to explore whether the original idea

00:40:36   can be tweaked enough to make it work,

00:40:40   because they believe in the core idea behind it, which is, and I'm

00:40:45   referring to the compact design in general, what if we reduced UI Chrome in a browser

00:40:52   and made everything more compact? They believe in the core principle of that idea.

00:40:58   I do too. I think that, like, in theory, good idea.

00:41:02   Yeah, in theory, good idea. What I think we're seeing in practice

00:41:06   is that on a device like the iPad, where

00:41:10   people want to be productive, they want to be efficient, they want to manage

00:41:14   a lot of tabs, right?

00:41:18   You know, maybe they have a different set of priorities

00:41:22   from what they want in a browser, right? They want to have more UI,

00:41:26   They want to see everything clearly. They don't want tabs to jump around.

00:41:31   They want to have a sort of spatial recognition of their browser environment.

00:41:35   They want to make sure that everything is in the right place.

00:41:38   Right now, even if you disable the compact design and go back to the separate address bar and top bar,

00:41:47   I feel like there are still too many trade-offs

00:41:51   with this new design. First of all,

00:41:55   the legibility of the tabs really isn't there. You go back and you look at Safari in iPadOS 14 with the

00:42:03   sort of classic tab design,

00:42:06   everything is just more clear to read and to look at, and it

00:42:11   looks more cohesive with the rest of the browser.

00:42:15   Another big issue of this new design is that, again, even if you disable compact mode,

00:42:22   It's still impossible to tell or nearly impossible to tell which one is the active tab

00:42:28   It's too low contrast it it's very confusing

00:42:32   You can hide the active tab if you scroll it away off screen

00:42:38   It doesn't look good. I don't think it looks good and I feel like

00:42:43   Yeah, the the non compact one is slightly better than compact for me

00:42:51   But I still look at Safari 14 and I'd be like, you know, that looks really good and now

00:42:57   There's a second again. This is like an onion

00:43:00   There's a set there's another layer to this which is am I the problem sort of like the Simpsons meme, right? Am I the problem?

00:43:07   No, it's the kids who are wrong. So I've thought about this. I've thought this about myself, right?

00:43:12   Am I the problem? Am I too, you know, am I old and

00:43:17   against trying new designs and new ideas. And I've had this accusation

00:43:22   moved against me on Twitter by a bunch of people who don't follow me, and it's a fair question, I think.

00:43:27   And I think about it and I'm like, well, I look at myself and the kind of person I am,

00:43:32   I mean, I try new things every day. I'm very open to changing my workflow.

00:43:37   In fact, people make fun of it sometimes, like, oh, you're constantly changing apps and changing how you work.

00:43:43   So I feel like I'm not the kind of person who is against change

00:43:47   But I've used these things long enough that I think I have a pretty good pulse on

00:43:53   When something works and when something doesn't now, I'm not Johnny Ive, you know, you may disagree with me. It's fine

00:43:59   I mean not even Johnny Ive is Johnny Ive anymore. It doesn't work at Apple. So it doesn't really matter

00:44:05   But I don't know I look at it. I

00:44:08   don't think this is gonna work and

00:44:13   I have the new standard design on iPad.

00:44:17   I still think it doesn't look nearly as good

00:44:21   as the old Safari.

00:44:22   And as I said before,

00:44:24   there are many things in the new Safari

00:44:26   that I would keep.

00:44:27   The customizable start page, it's great.

00:44:30   Tab groups, I love them. - Tab groups is so good.

00:44:32   Love tab groups. - Tab super,

00:44:33   the sidebar on iPad, very good.

00:44:35   - Love it, yeah, super good.

00:44:36   - The new look for search results

00:44:40   when you search for something in the address bar.

00:44:42   Very nice. Keep it. It's just those features, leave them in, they're really good. You don't have to use

00:44:50   the new UI for them. You can keep the sidebar, just go back to a regular toolbar, regular tabs,

00:44:56   offer a compact mode if you really want to. That to me feels like,

00:45:05   To go back to your point to why do you have a setting, right?

00:45:08   I feel like that's, I don't know, I may be wrong, it feels like the pet project of someone that

00:45:18   really really wanted to get rid of the extra, you know, 40 pixels on screen and be like "we don't

00:45:24   need tabs and an address bar anymore, nobody cares about that, nobody cares about buttons".

00:45:31   I don't know. I feel like that's the kind of feature that is wanted by someone

00:45:37   high enough to warrant, you know, live in a setting in.

00:45:42   Now, if that theory is correct, is that a good way to design software?

00:45:48   Probably not. I don't know. We'll never know the truth. So it's fine.

00:45:53   Let's move to the iPhone. On the iPhone, you can see what happens when a company

00:46:01   enters what I call "panic mode" for a redesign that is not working. The result

00:46:09   is that they're keeping... so on iPhone they're keeping the compact UI in Safari.

00:46:16   They're not offering a setting to revert to the old sort of two toolbar approach.

00:46:24   What they're doing is they're stuffing the tab bar full of icons and full of

00:46:30   buttons. So as of iOS 15 Beta 4, in the tab bar on the iPhone, you will get navigation buttons,

00:46:39   a reload button, a Safari reader button, a share button, and then of course there's the existing

00:46:46   tabs button. And I shared a screenshot on Twitter, and John Gruber sort of expanded upon my screenshot.

00:46:55   There's a total of, I believe, nine different touch targets in that small top bar at the bottom of the screen on iPhone.

00:47:05   You look at it, you look at the... everything feels like it's all over the place, right?

00:47:11   It feels like someone took a bunch of buttons from a drawer and just spilled them all over the top bar on the iPhone.

00:47:19   Like here, you wanna have buttons? Have some buttons.

00:47:22   It's ridiculous. It's the smallest reload button anyone's ever seen.

00:47:26   Like it's not even a button.

00:47:27   It's like reload is like a character of text that's next to like...

00:47:33   It's like if you just said, "Oh, do you want to reload this page?"

00:47:36   Just tap the letter A in the text and then it will reload for you.

00:47:41   And then the thing that annoys me most is sometimes it seems like,

00:47:45   and you can tell me I have not used this, I've just seen your videos,

00:47:48   that sometimes the reload buttons were placed with other buttons.

00:47:51   It's like different buttons in the same place, and if you got a reader view, it actually

00:47:56   becomes a reader button.

00:47:57   So how do you reload a page that has a reader button?

00:48:00   Well, it flashes for a second, right?

00:48:03   When you're opening an article, the reader symbol flashes on screen for a couple seconds,

00:48:10   and then is replaced again by the reload button.

00:48:13   So it just tells—and this has been going on for a while in Safari, but just now it

00:48:19   gets very confusing because you have the only place where UI is happening is this small

00:48:26   bar at the bottom, and it feels like everything is going on all at once in that small top

00:48:32   bar right there.

00:48:35   Amusingly enough, the reload button and the Safari reader button, and I believe the navigation

00:48:43   buttons as well. They break Apple's own human interface guidelines for minimum

00:48:50   acceptable size of a touch target on iOS, which should be 44 points. And I believe

00:48:57   some of these buttons are like 25 or 26 or something. So I look at this top bar

00:49:04   and I see, you know, this is choosing to die on a very specific hill, right?

00:49:14   Which is, no, we need to have a top bar at the bottom.

00:49:19   And you can imagine, like, there's PR, and there's, you know, people from PR talking to, you know, to folks like us,

00:49:28   monitoring feedback on Twitter, monitoring Reddit and articles,

00:49:33   And going back to these meetings and be like, "Okay, so folks have been complaining about the fact that there's no share button,

00:49:40   there's no reload button, and because you chose to, you know, to insist on this design, you're like, "Okay, so people miss buttons?

00:49:47   Well, we're gonna keep this design because we really believe in this design,

00:49:51   but we're giving them buttons." And the result is the equivalent of the Homer car from The Simpsons,

00:49:57   where like, this is trying to do all at once.

00:49:59   It's the Swiss Army knife of toolbars on iOS at the moment where

00:50:03   You want navigation you have arrows you wanna you want to have a real a reload button

00:50:09   It's in there, but it's small you want Oh Safari reader. It's also in there, but it's small and it flashes

00:50:15   What about share sure there's a share button? Well, what about I don't know opening tabs. Hey, there's a tap button, too

00:50:22   Okay

00:50:22   But I want to open the URL if you know where to tap you can actually open the address bar

00:50:28   Cool, great. What about swiping between tabs? Oh, we love swiping between tabs. In fact,

00:50:34   the tabs that you see on the left and right, those are also buttons. Okay, so I can tap those.

00:50:40   Well, yes, you can tap them, but you can also swipe across them. Oh, wow, fantastic.

00:50:44   And what about the bottom of the screen? Well, at the bottom of the screen, there's the Home indicator.

00:50:47   But if you swipe just above the Home indicator, you can also swipe the top bar up, and you can see the tab view.

00:50:55   Fantastic. What about some other menus that I missed from before?

00:50:58   Well, you can long press the top bar and you get a bunch of things.

00:51:02   Oh, yeah, well, you can press the navigation buttons and you get history,

00:51:06   or you can press the center of the top bar and you get a bunch of options,

00:51:10   or you can press tabs and you get another context menu.

00:51:14   How many features did I just subscribe? 20-something?

00:51:20   This is a UI element that is overloaded with function.

00:51:26   This is not even function over form. This is function exploding over form.

00:51:32   It's like this is so stuffed with commands and different options.

00:51:38   I honestly have no idea how a normal person will understand this.

00:51:43   I don't know where to begin.

00:51:46   So.

00:51:48   Once again to go back to the original to the first layer of the onion

00:51:52   Nobody hates no one here. It's just a browser, okay

00:51:57   We don't hate Safari engineers. We love Safari engineers. We love Safari, but

00:52:04   we have this problem to

00:52:07   Deal with right now, which is this is the browser that millions

00:52:12   billions of people use every day

00:52:15   0.2% of those people listens to a tech podcast, right? They don't know what is going on. They

00:52:26   have no idea what is going on. So let's look at ourselves right now, we, bloggers and YouTubers

00:52:32   and tech podcasters, as sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of other people in September,

00:52:40   This Safari doesn't work on the iPhone.

00:52:44   I understand if you believe that it's convenient to put everything in a single UI element at the bottom of the screen,

00:52:53   but I think it's obvious enough that we have reached the point where you're trying to stuff too much functionality and UI into a single place,

00:53:05   place, to the point where you, Apple, as a company, are contradicting yourself and your

00:53:11   own human interface guidelines.

00:53:14   So once again, maybe there's something to this idea of a bottom UI. Maybe not, but maybe

00:53:21   there is. So here's my proposal. Actually, I have two proposals. The first one, which

00:53:29   which is trying to find the middle ground. Let's revert to the old design and offer compact

00:53:35   mode without some of these additional buttons from Beta 4 as an optional setting. So basically

00:53:41   do what you did on the iPad, return to the top toolbar and the bottom toolbar. And it's

00:53:49   fine.

00:53:50   I will say, right, if they just ship iPad Safari like this, we'll get used to it and

00:53:57   will live with it, I feel like... It's not great, but yeah. It's not perfect, but... I just wonder, like,

00:54:03   why is it necessary for it to look that? Like... Let's just imagine for some reason me and you

00:54:10   don't understand it is, right? Like, it's like, whatever. Okay, alright, cool. Okay, yeah. So that's my first proposal, right?

00:54:18   Go back to the separate approach and offer compact with fewer buttons, because right now

00:54:27   all those icons down there? No, don't do that. But offer that as an option. Second proposal.

00:54:34   Sometimes redesigns, they don't go well, and it's fine. Put this on the shelf for now.

00:54:42   Go back to the original Safari design, keep the features that can coexist with Safari,

00:54:52   the start page, tab groups, if possible, the new search results. If you can keep those,

00:54:59   save this design for 15.1 or 15.5 or 16 next year, and you can try this again at some other point.

00:55:08   That's my modest proposal, because right now, obviously, the conversation on Twitter

00:55:20   is all over the place. I showed this again to Sylvia, like I have... Sylvia is my test person

00:55:28   for Safari. I was like, "Hey, they did a bit of an upgrade on the iPhone since you last saw it in

00:55:35   Beta 1. Wanna look again?" And she looked at it, it's like, "Oh, it's still at the bottom, huh?"

00:55:40   It's like, "Yeah, yeah, I don't like it." So, I don't know.

00:55:49   It's also fascinating, one last thing that I wanted to mention.

00:55:52   Did you see that blog post from a former, current, I don't know, Google engineer,

00:55:59   who worked on a similar design for Chrome for iPhone years ago?

00:56:04   And eventually the feedback was so, once again, polarizing, that they decided it was too confusing for people

00:56:11   to have that kind of design on iPhone for Google Chrome.

00:56:16   And they moved away from it.

00:56:18   Now, if you ask me, those screenshots from that Chrome UI, that actually looks better

00:56:26   than Safari, in my opinion. Because in all this, it's like also the question of why does

00:56:32   that top bar on iPhone have to be a floating one? Why are you getting it in the way of

00:56:38   WebP... like, it's a whole thing.

00:56:41   I think I said this to you privately, but I was in this beta for Chrome back when I

00:56:47   using Chrome where they brought the all of the UI down to the bottom so the address bar

00:56:52   the tab bar and in Chris's article there seems to be some more radical stuff that I didn't

00:56:59   see I loved having it on the bottom I felt like it made sense like I love the idea of

00:57:07   having a bottom toolbar but it doesn't have to be the floating one with less functionality

00:57:15   No. There are bottom toolbars on iOS in a bunch of places. Maps, shortcuts as a thing that

00:57:24   expands from the bottom. And look, it's a complicated conversation because

00:57:30   I could have accepted or maybe understood a bit more if this Safari was coming from a place of,

00:57:41   Oh, look, we have this new UI convention in iOS 15 this year. Safari is using it, but if you

00:57:48   developers want to use it too, you can. It's a new native UI element. But no, this design is specific

00:57:56   to Safari and Safari only. And so there's that. And what we're seeing right now, this sort of

00:58:07   backtracking on iPad and sort of semi-backtracking on iPhone where they're keeping the thing,

00:58:16   but they're stuffing it full of buttons that people complain... like,

00:58:19   I feel like in previous weeks on our podcast and in blog posts,

00:58:25   we were not complaining about missing buttons because we meant

00:58:33   put them in the toolbar at the bottom, we were just saying the new design sacrifices buttons

00:58:40   that were previously top-level icons. And I feel like our feedback has been misunderstood, where

00:58:50   the feedback of "Oh, we're missing buttons" became "Oh, so what I hear you're saying is you want more

00:58:57   buttons in that top bar at the bottom. But no, that is not the solution to stuff that

00:59:04   toolbar full of icons, right? So, yeah, it's... once again, I just want to say, I don't hate

00:59:13   Safari, I don't hate nobody, I hate no one, honestly, I have no patience for negative

00:59:19   feelings, I said this before, I'm gonna repeat it again, but we're looking at a product that

00:59:24   as a controversial design, and I feel like it could use a ton of work.

00:59:28   And I don't think it's going to be ready in five weeks.

00:59:32   Potentially four, because Apple needs to flash the firmware on the new iPhones soon enough.

00:59:39   So that also explains the panic mode, right?

00:59:43   We think of iOS as being finalized on September 10.

00:59:47   No, it has to be finalized, I want to say, early August?

00:59:52   middle of August, right? And you can imagine how this causes a lot of problems, because

00:59:58   you gotta send the firmware to China to have it flashed on new iPhones, so you gotta get

01:00:04   moving quickly. I would say, let's pause the project. For now, go back to the original

01:00:14   design and we'll reconsider again next year.

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01:02:45   So I know that we were just like super negative, right?

01:02:49   For a bit, you know, like we have some complaints.

01:02:51   So Federico came up with a great idea today to end the show talking about, we're going

01:02:57   to talk about three things each that we really love right now. Just all positive,

01:03:01   all good stuff. So we're gonna round Robin between two people, which isn't

01:03:05   just taking turns really. It's tiny Robin. Two Robins back and forth.

01:03:11   That's me and you. Do you want to start? Yes. So, and for context, these are three

01:03:17   things that may or may not be tech related. Can be products, apps, whatever.

01:03:23   Just three things I love. So the first one, I have a new portable music player.

01:03:29   So this I guess will be called a DAP, which is different from a DAC. So this is

01:03:35   a portable player. It's called the Astell & Kern CAN-Alpha. So the CAN-Alpha is the

01:03:41   name of the model that I have. Think of this, Myke, you're familiar with the

01:03:46   portable Walkman that I had before? It looks a lot like it. All of these

01:03:51   portable players, they sort of have that style. This is a chunkier, heavier, warmer, because

01:03:58   it gets quite a bit warm, portable music player made by a company called Astell & Kern. They

01:04:04   make really good audio equipment. And this is a bit of an upgrade for me, and I got it

01:04:12   for a couple of reasons. First of all, Astell & Kern, one of the premium brands in this

01:04:17   Space, this is their first model with a 4.4mm balanced output. So they have a 4.4mm jack

01:04:26   that you can use on this thing, and I've increasingly switched all of my headphones to use 4.4mm

01:04:33   balanced cables, so that was already interesting for me. And I'm trying to keep it all consistent

01:04:40   in terms of the cables that I have and the sort of sockets that I use and all that kind

01:04:46   stuff. Now, I was looking for... I was also looking to upgrade the kind of experience

01:04:53   that I get from these portable music players, and this one gives me a lot more features than my Sony

01:05:02   player, which for context was the WN1A. That was my... and I still have it, the other Sony Walkman

01:05:11   that I have. So the CAN-alpha has Bluetooth 5, Wi-Fi support, an LED indicator that shows

01:05:21   you music quality, so it turns green, blue, or purple, depending on the kind of music

01:05:27   file that you're listening to. It's got native DSD playback, you don't need to worry about

01:05:33   that, but most importantly, it runs Android, and it's a Rune-certified player. We're going

01:05:40   We're gonna talk about Rune later.

01:05:42   I just wanna mention Android.

01:05:46   This thing, you can install a selection of Android apps on it.

01:05:54   It's a quite complex process where you need to install Android file transfer on a computer,

01:06:02   and you need to drag APK files

01:06:08   that you download from directories like,

01:06:11   what's it called, APK Pure, and there's another one.

01:06:15   What's the name?

01:06:16   APK...

01:06:18   Mirror.

01:06:20   That's the one that I used.

01:06:22   These are websites that let you download,

01:06:25   in theory, verified APK versions of Android applications.

01:06:30   And you can install a selection of apps.

01:06:33   You cannot install, say, Twitter,

01:06:36   or, I don't know, Gmail on this thing.

01:06:40   You can only install compatible music apps.

01:06:45   You can install Tidal, you can install CodeBues,

01:06:48   and you can install Apple Music.

01:06:50   So that right there was one of the features

01:06:53   that picked my interest.

01:06:56   So I've mentioned this before,

01:06:58   how with the launch of the lossless tier in Apple Music,

01:07:02   I would be able to unify my music streaming habits

01:07:07   into a single music streaming service.

01:07:10   I wanna listen to Apple Music with my AirPods

01:07:13   or via my iPhone speakers,

01:07:15   when I just wanna put some music on in the background

01:07:18   and I don't care about music quality.

01:07:20   I just wanna have some music going on.

01:07:22   But now I can also use Apple Music with my good headphones,

01:07:28   with my DAC when I want to sit down and just enjoy music.

01:07:32   And that for me is sort of like a secondary use of Apple Music

01:07:37   that lets me evaluate, if you will, albums, before I go out and purchase them,

01:07:44   to add them to my collection.

01:07:46   Well, the CAN-alpha, it lets me unify everything about my music setup.

01:07:53   I can listen to Apple Music on this thing,

01:07:55   I can listen to my local library because it's got an SD card slot and I can also stream my

01:08:03   music collection from the Intel NUC that we mentioned last week via Rune and

01:08:10   Myke I absolutely love this thing. So

01:08:15   Using Rune on this device is quite

01:08:20   Incredible. So the way that Rune certified

01:08:24   devices work is

01:08:26   So you run run server on a server in your house my case

01:08:30   It's an Intel knock you can run it on a Mac you can run it on another PC

01:08:35   You can run it on a NAS you there's a bunch of ways that you can run run server

01:08:40   Then on the iPhone I can control I can browse my library

01:08:45   But we run ready devices like the can alpha

01:08:50   Because it's got Wi-Fi

01:08:52   you see it in Rune in the list of compatible output devices.

01:08:58   And what I can do is, I can control Rune on the CAN-alpha from the iPhone.

01:09:06   So I can select songs on the iPhone.

01:09:10   I can change the volume level of my CAN-alpha player from the iPhone.

01:09:16   Why would you want to do that, though?

01:09:18   because it's got a bigger screen and it's an iPhone

01:09:23   and it's like, you know, this thing has a small display.

01:09:26   - So you would like say, I don't know,

01:09:28   you've got your headphones on, it's plugged into this thing

01:09:31   and you would do this because it has like the,

01:09:34   a balanced output, if people don't know what it means,

01:09:37   it basically just means it can support

01:09:38   really great headphones and it sounds super good,

01:09:41   et cetera, et cetera, like we don't have to go

01:09:42   into the particulars, but then you see,

01:09:46   you just have it like plugged in and sitting on the table, whatever, you just use your

01:09:49   iPhone to choose the music.

01:09:50   Yes, yeah, exactly.

01:09:51   And I just use the iPhone, and if I want to text, like I'm using the iPhone, but I'm also

01:09:55   listening to music and, you know, having a really good time with it.

01:09:58   So controlling Rune, like it's incredible because when you think about it, you have

01:10:03   this server on a little computer that is sending lossless music over Wi-Fi to a portable music

01:10:11   player, but I'm controlling all of this from my iPhone.

01:10:15   - On a third device.

01:10:16   - On a third device.

01:10:18   It's fantastic.

01:10:19   And we're gonna talk about Room later.

01:10:21   And yeah, I've also used Apple Music for Android.

01:10:27   And it's nice because,

01:10:28   so this is a bit of an adventure,

01:10:32   I actually wanna mention this.

01:10:33   So Apple Music for Android added lossless

01:10:38   and high resolution lossless and spatial audio support

01:10:42   with version 3.6 of the Android app,

01:10:45   which came out last week.

01:10:47   Now, this has been in beta for a while.

01:10:49   So when I got the CAN-alpha player last month,

01:10:53   and I started looking around on Google,

01:10:55   I ran across this thread on the head-fi forums,

01:11:01   where someone was frustrated by the inability

01:11:07   to install the Apple Music beta

01:11:10   on the CAN-alpha player they had.

01:11:13   So what this person did, because you gotta install

01:11:17   these files in a specific format,

01:11:20   and that version of the Apple Music Beta

01:11:22   was not available in that file format.

01:11:25   So what this person did is they took the beta build

01:11:28   and they manually recompiled it

01:11:31   to include iResolution lossless support.

01:11:35   And they posted a link to download that app

01:11:39   from their iCloud Drive account.

01:11:42   Now, this sounds incredibly sketchy, right?

01:11:45   You're downloading an Android app that someone compiled

01:11:50   and posted on a forum, right?

01:11:53   But I really wanted to test lossless playback.

01:11:56   So I thought about it and was like,

01:11:59   boy, am I seriously considering downloading an app

01:12:04   that some random from a forum compiled and hosted

01:12:09   on an iCloud.com link,

01:12:11   and I gotta put in my Apple Music credentials to access this service, I gotta be careful,

01:12:16   right? So what I did is, it was late at night, it was like 2am, Sylvia was sleeping,

01:12:21   I downloaded the app that the random person from the forums made, I inspected the packages,

01:12:30   I downloaded the official build from Apple, and I difed the two apps side by side using

01:12:39   kaleidoscope on my Mac. Just to make sure that this person did not add in any weird code for,

01:12:45   like, stealing your password or whatever, you know? And sure enough, the only code that I

01:12:51   saw was different was the flags to enable lossless playback. So, you know, I just took an extra

01:12:59   precaution to make sure that nobody was stealing my passwords. But now, of course, Apple has

01:13:05   released the official version, I have it running on the CAN alpha. It's fine, right? Animations

01:13:13   are not as smooth as on iPhone, you get the weird Android font, but it works! And I can

01:13:22   listen to lossless playback on the CAN alpha, which, to sum up, it's a little device that

01:13:28   is quite chunky, it's a chunky boy, I love it. If you enable the high output setting,

01:13:34   It can drive even the most, well not the most, it can drive medium difficult headphones with

01:13:41   a slightly higher impedance than others.

01:13:44   It can get quite loud, it can get quite warm.

01:13:48   But I really love this thing and I wanted to mention it because if you're looking for

01:13:52   this kind of portable music player, check this out.

01:13:55   You can listen to all kinds of music with it.

01:13:58   So we're gonna go from your weird hobby to my weird hobby.

01:14:03   Yes, I was hoping this would be the case.

01:14:05   Yes.

01:14:06   I want to talk to you about the Stella 65, which is a keyboard kit made by a company

01:14:13   called Space Holdings.

01:14:14   Okay, let me see.

01:14:16   Okay.

01:14:17   This is a, I say a kit because you receive this and it is unbuilt.

01:14:23   It is what is known as a stacked acrylic keyboard.

01:14:28   So if you take a look at the images, you'll see it.

01:14:31   otherwise I can explain to you. It's basically a... right there's there's eight

01:14:38   layers of acrylic, so acrylic plastic, that you sandwich on top of each other

01:14:44   to make the whole case itself. And so every part has got its cutouts and you

01:14:50   you know you lay them on top of each other and then you always put in the PCB

01:14:55   which is the circuit board and then you put the other two on top right and then

01:14:58   and that makes the whole keyboard case,

01:15:00   and you end up with this kind of sandwich.

01:15:03   I recommend people go and take a look in the show notes

01:15:07   at the link, 'cause they got a bunch of images.

01:15:09   It will make complete sense once you've seen it,

01:15:12   but maybe for me to explain it could be tricky.

01:15:15   - Is this to, so this sandwich approach,

01:15:18   is it to increase customization,

01:15:21   to make it easier to change stuff in the future?

01:15:23   Like why not make it like a single piece?

01:15:27   It's incredibly cost effective to do it this way.

01:15:32   So if you were making a single piece, you have to basically either injection mold it,

01:15:37   which is incredibly expensive to set up the tooling on, or you'd have to take a block

01:15:42   of something and mill it out.

01:15:44   This keyboard is made by a relatively small company using machines that they can own.

01:15:50   So they just have a laser that can cut acrylic and they just need to cut eight of them for

01:15:56   each keyboard, right? Including there's some feet which are also cut from acrylic too.

01:16:02   And stacked acrylic keyboards, which is what this is known as, this kind of style, they

01:16:07   have a pretty nice sound to them. They're just known to sound pretty good. A lot of

01:16:12   keyboard like hobby stuff, it's design, sound and feel. Like how it feels to type on. Is

01:16:19   it, does it feel like there's a lot of resistance, is it stiff or is it a little bit more flexible,

01:16:24   kind of thing. So they're the kind of the three things and I think like for me

01:16:28   these stacked acrylic cases in general they kind of tick all the boxes they

01:16:32   look great they sound great and they feel really nice to type on. So this

01:16:39   is a kit in the sense of you have to not only build this keyboard you are also

01:16:44   doing the slaughtering of the switches into the circuit board. There are two

01:16:48   different ways to build keyboards you have that you also have something called

01:16:51   hot swap which just means you just put the switches in you just push them in and it works

01:16:55   but this one you have to like get a soldering iron and solder and you are soldering every switch into

01:17:02   the board right so it is that next level up but i will say like it is not difficult to do like it's

01:17:09   it's scarier than it is difficult right like just doing it for the first time is tricky.

01:17:13   One of the things that makes stacked acrylic just like acrylic keyboards cool and nice to look at

01:17:19   in general is if you have an RGB enabled PCB, right, like a circuit board, the RGB

01:17:27   light is diffused really nicely in this type of frosted acrylic. So I included an

01:17:33   Instagram post that I made of my built one. You can see like the RGB basically

01:17:38   flows through the entire keyboard rather than just coming up through the keys as

01:17:41   you might be more typically aware of like a boards made of aluminium or

01:17:45   something. Oh that's cool. So it looks really nice. So I've had this keyboard for a while.

01:17:52   I built it and I was using it with some silent switches which means it could sit on my desk

01:17:57   with me here and I could type on it and you wouldn't hear it but it still feels really

01:18:01   nice it's just quiet. They really are silent? Well I can tell you right now okay so I have

01:18:06   another keyboard I'm currently typing on a keyboard right now I'm just typing all the

01:18:10   keys and you can't hear it. But if I had another one of my keyboards you would and the way

01:18:14   it's done is they put these tiny little pieces of silicone into the switches. It's quite

01:18:18   complicated but there's still a feeling. It feels like maybe 70-80% of what a non silent

01:18:26   version of the switch would feel like because I have the non silent version of this exact

01:18:30   switch I'm using but it doesn't make sound which is obviously important to me because

01:18:35   I can't be sitting and clicking away all the time. I built this keyboard before like that

01:18:43   and I wanted to change it up because I got these switches.

01:18:47   So switches are what sits between the key cap

01:18:49   and the keyboard, right?

01:18:50   It's the thing that you press down on.

01:18:52   I got some switches that were glow in the dark.

01:18:54   They were made out of glow in the dark material.

01:18:57   And the thought that I have,

01:18:59   which would be pretty cool with this board,

01:19:01   is the RGB, like the LEDs,

01:19:04   would charge the glow in the dark material.

01:19:08   And what's cool about this board

01:19:10   is when you look at it from the side,

01:19:12   you can see inside it, so it's not frosted.

01:19:16   So like the acrylic is clear on the edges.

01:19:19   So when I turn off the IGB on this keyboard now,

01:19:22   all of the switches glow.

01:19:23   - Nice. - 'Cause it's glow

01:19:26   in the dark.

01:19:27   So this was like a fun little thing for me.

01:19:29   And the reason I went to bring this up specifically

01:19:31   is like this little project felt like a good example

01:19:34   of the progression that I've had over the last year

01:19:36   in this hobby, in the sense of like,

01:19:37   I've already built this board,

01:19:39   then I got some new components and I had an idea.

01:19:41   So I de-soldered the keyboard, which I have this,

01:19:44   it's like a reverse soldering iron, right?

01:19:46   I have, it's got a de-soldering gun,

01:19:48   which has a soldering iron to heat up the solder

01:19:51   and it has a vacuum pump to suck it up.

01:19:54   - Wow.

01:19:54   - It's quite an intense piece of machinery,

01:19:57   but it's really fun.

01:19:59   And so I de-soldered the entire keyboard

01:20:01   and I rebuilt it again.

01:20:03   And then one other thing that I noticed,

01:20:04   which also made me feel like I've come far with this is,

01:20:08   when I rebuilt it, the day or so after,

01:20:11   I noticed that one of the keys,

01:20:12   sometimes when I pressed it, it would repeat.

01:20:16   So like I was tapping the delete key

01:20:18   and it would start deleting more than I wanted it to.

01:20:23   So I was like, okay.

01:20:24   So I just took the board apart again

01:20:26   and I reflowed the solder and repaired it.

01:20:29   And like, and that's the thing that like, I never,

01:20:31   I would have been like, you know,

01:20:32   maybe even six months ago, like, oh, well,

01:20:34   I just want to press that button.

01:20:36   Right? Like that would have just been the way

01:20:37   I would have dealt with it.

01:20:38   But now I feel like I can diagnose these issues

01:20:42   and just go and fix them,

01:20:43   because I understand how these electronic components

01:20:47   work together.

01:20:48   So that was my Stellar 65 keyboard kit.

01:20:51   If you have ever done soldering or you've tried soldering,

01:20:54   I really recommend it.

01:20:55   If you haven't, you know,

01:20:57   this is a really fun little project

01:20:59   and there are other projects out there

01:21:00   where you can like buy cheaper kind of like

01:21:02   macro pads and stuff.

01:21:04   There's a company that I bought stuff from in the past

01:21:06   called Board Source.

01:21:07   I could just buy some cheaper projects with them

01:21:09   and practice your soldering on,

01:21:11   and then you could build something

01:21:12   as beautiful as my Seller 65.

01:21:14   - Nice.

01:21:16   That looks really, really lovely.

01:21:18   - Yeah, it's very nice.

01:21:19   I like it very much.

01:21:20   All right, what else have you got?

01:21:22   - Okay, so moving a few things around here.

01:21:25   I wanna mention Rune as the second thing I like.

01:21:29   So we covered this, I think, last week.

01:21:32   So, Rune, R-O-O-N,

01:21:35   It's an app, so it's described as the ultimate music player

01:21:40   for music fanatics, and I think I get it now,

01:21:45   now that I've been using it for a while.

01:21:47   So, Rune is like Plex, but just for your music,

01:21:52   for people who are really into music.

01:21:56   That's how I would describe it.

01:21:58   Now, what makes Rune special, again, like Plex,

01:22:02   It runs on a sort of server environment,

01:22:05   can be your PC, Mac, NAS, whatever.

01:22:08   You give it a folder of music files

01:22:12   and it analyzes those music files

01:22:14   and it builds a library for you.

01:22:16   Again, very similar in concept to Plex.

01:22:19   There's a couple of things that make it special

01:22:21   and also quite expensive as a product to license.

01:22:26   First one, it integrates natively

01:22:30   with a lot of third-party hardware.

01:22:34   So, makers of desktop DACs, portable DACs,

01:22:39   portable music players, headphone amps,

01:22:44   so many of them over the past few years

01:22:46   have been getting their equipment Roon-ready,

01:22:50   which means it's officially compatible with Roon,

01:22:54   and those devices, they show up,

01:22:56   to make it extremely simple,

01:22:58   they show up in the list of compatible outputs in Roon.

01:23:03   This is true for my portable music player,

01:23:05   and it's true for another piece of equipment

01:23:08   that I will mention in the post show

01:23:10   for connected pro members.

01:23:12   - Get connect to pro.co if you wanna hear more

01:23:15   about this software. - Thank you.

01:23:17   So yeah, there are Roon certified devices,

01:23:22   much like you have AirPlay certified devices, right?

01:23:26   that integrate natively with this technology.

01:23:29   The second thing that speaks extremely close to my heart

01:23:34   is amazing support for music metadata.

01:23:39   So you give Roon a folder of albums,

01:23:43   of your music collection,

01:23:45   and it fills in all the missing pieces for you.

01:23:48   Are you familiar, Myke, with the iPhone app

01:23:53   called MusicSmart?

01:23:55   Is this the one that fills in all of the, like, composer data and stuff?

01:23:59   Yeah, it's the iPhone app that lets you see, like, who's the composer of a song on Apple

01:24:03   Music or the mixing engineer or who played the cello in a specific song.

01:24:12   Rune has this feature taken to the extreme.

01:24:17   So Rune fills in all kinds of metadata you could possibly want to know about an album

01:24:23   or a song or a performer.

01:24:25   Shows you the genre, the recording date, the studio,

01:24:29   the composer, the mixing engineer, the production engineer.

01:24:33   Shows you each of every performer on a song.

01:24:38   And then it creates connections between this metadata.

01:24:41   So it's kinda like obsidian but for music,

01:24:47   if you think about it.

01:24:49   So for example, the other day I was in Rome,

01:24:52   And a little section popped up.

01:24:55   There's a Discover tab where you can go in and see

01:24:58   all of these suggestions.

01:24:59   And it was like music produced by Chris Walla.

01:25:03   Chris Walla, former guitar player of Dead Cab for Cutie,

01:25:06   also a music producer.

01:25:08   So what Rune did here is it noticed Dead Cab for Cutie

01:25:12   in my library.

01:25:13   And it noticed also that Chris Walla was a producer

01:25:17   for a bunch of other songs in my library.

01:25:20   And so it surfaced this very specific recommendation,

01:25:24   of course, with the photo of Chris Waller,

01:25:25   because he fetches all this metadata from the internet.

01:25:29   I was like, okay, that's cool.

01:25:31   But then you can get very specific and accurate,

01:25:36   because it also learns from you, suggestions over time.

01:25:41   So I'm looking now, for example, let's see.

01:25:45   Released this month in 2010, The Suburbs by Arcade Fire.

01:25:51   Or, let's see if I can get some more specific recommendations.

01:25:59   For example, if I'm scrolling, there's a featured performer. So Andrew Watt.

01:26:07   A performer that played guitar ukulele and a bunch of other instruments on.

01:26:15   "Normal F Rockwell" by Lana DeRay, "Plastic Arts" by Miley Cyrus, the 2018 album by Shawn Mendes, and "Nine" by Blink-182.

01:26:24   So, Andrew Watt, a performer based in New York City, seems like? Yes.

01:26:29   Versatile, New York-born, multi-instrumentalist.

01:26:37   So, Rune is the kind of product that puts the focus on the music, but not just the music.

01:26:44   on the people behind the music, right? Which is the kind of thing that I've talked about a bunch over the years.

01:26:54   No music streaming service does this, right?

01:26:57   Because so few people care about this kind of stuff. But,

01:27:02   if you think about it, this is also what software is great at, building these kinds of connections,

01:27:09   using metadata to find links between "oh yeah, this person actually played this instrument on different albums".

01:27:17   This is the kind of experience that is impossible to have in Apple Music or Spotify or Amazon Music, whatever.

01:27:24   You can sort of kind of get there with MusicSmart,

01:27:29   but it's more

01:27:32   full featured in Rune.

01:27:34   And I just love this thing. It's like it opens so many new ways to look at your music library.

01:27:44   And there's another thing that I want to mention, which is another feature that I've always wanted.

01:27:48   There's a feature called "Recordings". And this one, this feature, it shows you all the possible versions of the same song.

01:27:58   So, for example, in the recordings section of "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis, I can see

01:28:05   the regular version of "Champagne Supernova", or the remastered version, or the live version

01:28:12   at Wembley, because I have an album of that.

01:28:15   And that is so cool, because, like, yeah, I am the kind of person who wants to listen

01:28:19   to different recordings of the same song, like a demo version, or a remaster, or a live

01:28:25   version, you know?

01:28:26   Again, the kind of stuff that no music streaming service does, Rune does, and it does really well. So

01:28:32   Yeah, I love it. It's expensive, but if you're the kind of person who

01:28:36   wants to take your

01:28:39   personal music library to the next level

01:28:42   This is cool. So the website is runelabs.com

01:28:47   I'm going to

01:28:49   reinforce my love for Croft

01:28:53   You know all the cool kids these days. They're running arms open towards obsidian

01:28:58   And I want to talk about why I think crafts perfect for someone who's just like me

01:29:05   I think the more that I am putting into craft the more I am learning to love it

01:29:12   They also make a lot of advancements to the application to the service

01:29:17   and I appreciate them even if they're features that I don't want to use because I feel like they do a good job of

01:29:23   Not disrupting the product so like they just added this like calendar daily pages kind of mode

01:29:31   But I never see it because it's in its own view and so unless I press the calendar view

01:29:36   I don't see that part of the application so that's fine. It's there

01:29:39   It's doing a saying great for people that want it, but that's not how I use it. I think craft does

01:29:45   as

01:29:47   as good a job of dealing with mixed media as any app like this I've ever tried.

01:29:53   Text images, links, sketches, and these are things, this is exactly what I want.

01:29:57   I want sometimes singular notes that include all of those things in them.

01:30:03   It's really nice and easy to format text.

01:30:06   I like that it has the backlinks features, like I can link two notes together if I want

01:30:11   to.

01:30:12   I've done this with a few notes, but I don't want to do it all the time, but I like that

01:30:15   there if I want it. I love how easy it is to share an entire note as a web link

01:30:22   with somebody. So I just find this super useful for like if I've already done all

01:30:27   the work with something and someone wants to see it or I want to share it with

01:30:29   somebody I could just create a private URL link that I can give to them and

01:30:33   they can just look at the note. But then it also has the full-on collaboration

01:30:37   stuff too, right, where you can add people in and you can collaborate on a note

01:30:42   together and I assume that this is gonna become like they're gonna have like a

01:30:46   hybrid between the two of these things for their web version like that's my

01:30:51   expectation right it's basically like more could be more like Google Docs I

01:30:54   guess and I'm keen to see how that progresses like their syncing is pretty

01:30:59   fast and if they can keep improving that then we could be entering Google Docs

01:31:03   level of like functionality which would be great right I just think that for me

01:31:08   For me, craft is just what I need. It looks great, it works great, and it's just got the right amount of features without being over complicated.

01:31:16   And I find the overall experience of using the application to feel really good on all platforms.

01:31:22   It feels native everywhere because I think it pretty much is native everywhere.

01:31:28   It's by far and away the best catalyst app that I've ever used.

01:31:32   Oh yeah.

01:31:33   It doesn't feel like one at all.

01:31:36   I only knew it was a Catalyst app because there was a bug in Catalyst apps on Mac OS,

01:31:42   which is nothing that they could do.

01:31:43   And it was when I saw this bug, I was like, "Oh, it's Catalyst."

01:31:48   And so that was a big surprise to me.

01:31:50   I adore Kraft.

01:31:52   I think it's fantastic.

01:31:53   And so I thoroughly recommend it.

01:31:56   Nice.

01:31:57   And obviously, my final thing is going to be about Obsidian, right?

01:32:01   You just mentioned Kraft, so I just wanted to mention something about Obsidian.

01:32:04   Of course you do.

01:32:05   You're a hipster.

01:32:06   Yes, I am. I am a Markdown hipster.

01:32:09   Okay, so this is an Obsidian plugin made by...

01:32:16   How do I get the developer's name right?

01:32:18   Made by...

01:32:20   How do you open profiles on GitHub?

01:32:23   Christian...

01:32:24   Bae...

01:32:26   Christian...

01:32:27   Christian Begerbach...

01:32:29   Hooman.

01:32:30   Hooman. I'm sorry.

01:32:31   That's quite a great name.

01:32:33   Yeah, I kind of love it.

01:32:34   Christian Begebach-Humann.

01:32:37   QuickAdd.

01:32:38   This is the hot plugin in the Obsidian community at the moment.

01:32:43   This plugin has it all.

01:32:45   Like, what's the...

01:32:46   The Stefan...

01:32:47   It's got templates.

01:32:49   That's good. That's good.

01:32:53   No, but seriously, QuickAdd.

01:32:56   So this plugin, it lets you capture

01:33:00   text into existing notes.

01:33:04   It lets you create new notes starting from a template, or it lets you execute multiple actions, one after the other, with a macro system.

01:33:15   Now, this plugin, it feels like... the reason I love it is that it feels like it's made by someone who thinks exactly like me,

01:33:24   and has exactly my preferences when it comes to dealing with notes and dealing with markdown.

01:33:33   So, I pasted a screenshot in the show notes. I don't know if we can use it somewhere to show you the kind of tool.

01:33:43   I'll find a way.

01:33:45   Thank you. Myke finds a way, just like nature, to show you the kind of setup that I have with QuickAdd.

01:33:53   So, I created a menu in Obsidian. That's one of the things you can do with QuickAdd.

01:33:59   you can create your own custom menu that does a bunch of things.

01:34:03   So the first thing you can do with QuickAdd, you can type text into a prompt,

01:34:11   and that text, you can choose to have it appended to a section of a Markdown document.

01:34:19   So, say you have a Markdown Note, and you have a section of that note, like an H2 section.

01:34:27   In QuickAdd, when you're building these actions, you can say, "Yeah, I want to add this text

01:34:34   at the end of this section." So you can see in my note, for example, I have an iOS Review Dashboard

01:34:45   note. There's multiple sections in the note. One is called "Tweets." And so what I can do in QuickAdd

01:34:52   is I can go in, I tap the thing, and it says "IUS 15 tweets". I choose that one, I paste

01:34:58   the tweet, and it gets appended not to the very bottom of the document, but to the bottom

01:35:04   of the section. Which, for the kind of weirdo like me who likes to structure notes using

01:35:10   headings, this is like, you're gonna instantly fall in love with this feature. Second thing

01:35:17   you can do. You can combine QuickAdd with another plugin called "Hotkeys for Starred Files"

01:35:27   to make a button that opens a specific file. So you can see in my menu there's two buttons

01:35:37   called "Open Table of Contents" and "Open Review Ideas". If I tap that button, QuickAdd executes a

01:35:44   a macro and it opens a specific file for me. You can go even deeper with macros and you

01:35:53   can chain multiple steps together. This is the case for the last button that you can

01:35:58   see in my screenshot called "Open Dashboard and Preview". So, quick add here, it allowed

01:36:05   me to create a macro that said "Open a specific file", wait, like there's a wait action that

01:36:14   you can put in the middle. And then the last step is Toggle Preview Mode. So basically

01:36:21   you can chain together multiple steps to create a macro, and the macro you can then execute

01:36:26   from a button. What's incredible about this is that what I'm showing you right here is

01:36:32   a pretty primitive example of what you can do with QuickAdd. Other Obsidian users are

01:36:37   building incredible things with QuickAdd, because in addition to what I'm showing you

01:36:42   here, you can integrate with templates. So you can create really complex notes from a template.

01:36:50   You can run JavaScript in QuickAdd, which is not something I've tried because I don't have the time

01:36:57   for it, but if you want you can install scripts and run them from QuickAdd. In the macro section,

01:37:06   you can chain together any command from Obsidian.

01:37:11   There is literally a search bar in QuickAdd

01:37:14   that says search for a command,

01:37:17   and you can chain 10, 15, 20 different commands together.

01:37:22   So a good way to think about QuickAdd,

01:37:24   it's like, imagine a very, very, very small version

01:37:29   of shortcuts built into Obsidian,

01:37:32   where you can create your own enhancements

01:37:35   for Obsidian, which is already kind of a powerful tool,

01:37:40   QuickAdd lets you take it a step beyond.

01:37:42   So all this to say, this plugin is free.

01:37:45   So go check it out, say thanks to Christian,

01:37:49   and I won't be surprised if this becomes

01:37:53   a core built-in plugin in Obsidian in the future.

01:37:58   It's really, really good.

01:37:59   - Does seem nice.

01:38:01   - Yeah.

01:38:02   - Last thing, TrainBeacon.

01:38:04   This is an iOS app for checking train times

01:38:07   and checking routes and stuff.

01:38:09   - Oh, is it UK only?

01:38:12   - I don't know.

01:38:13   - Okay.

01:38:14   - I use this app for one thing, it has a widget.

01:38:18   - Ooh.

01:38:19   - So I have set up two widgets in like the one,

01:38:23   you know, the small widget size.

01:38:25   One is for my train that I need to get

01:38:27   from home to the studio.

01:38:29   And one is for the train from studio to home.

01:38:32   And then on my home screen all the time I have the upcoming train times from now for the next four or five trains so I can plan my routes.

01:38:41   This app has a bunch of other stuff like it's got like this big AR but I never open the application. I use it just for this one thing. It's exactly what I wanted and it's perfect.

01:38:51   It's really great. It tells me just when the next train is. I love it. It's very simple. But if you're like me, this probably is for you.

01:39:01   This looks nice.

01:39:02   It's very nice.

01:39:03   I like it, I like it.

01:39:04   Good pick.

01:39:05   So we have now restored balance to the episode.

01:39:08   So see we like things, but just like we like things, we love things with a passion.

01:39:14   So we get passionate with things that we don't like or we feel like could get better.

01:39:24   We want to like things, that's all.

01:39:27   then sometimes we love too much and then too much love comes out as anger.

01:39:35   Thanks so much to our sponsors for this week's episode, that is Fitbud, Hallo and Bombas.

01:39:40   And also thank you to members.

01:39:41   If you can go to getconnectedpro.co you can also support the show, you'll get access to

01:39:46   the Relay FM members Discord, but also longer ad-free episodes of every episode of Connected.

01:39:53   If you'd like to find us online you can go to maxstories.net for Federico's work and

01:39:57   He is @Vittici, V-I-T-I-C-C-I.

01:40:00   You can go to follow me on Twitter as well.

01:40:03   I feel like @imike, I-M-Y-K-E, and Instagram as well.

01:40:06   And you can find Steven.

01:40:08   He's @512pixels.net.

01:40:09   And @ismh, don't forget, there's a couple of days left

01:40:12   to back his Kickstarter campaign.

01:40:15   Federico, if we were going on a first date together--

01:40:21   I have a question for you.

01:40:22   If we were going on a first date together

01:40:25   And you had your really expensive little hi-fi thing.

01:40:30   What is it called?

01:40:32   The--

01:40:32   - The CAN alpha.

01:40:34   - CAN alpha.

01:40:35   We had that with you.

01:40:36   And we were somehow in range of your NUC

01:40:40   so it could pick up your audio.

01:40:43   Do you actually put audio files on it as well?

01:40:46   So you have some-- - Oh yeah.

01:40:47   - Okay, great.

01:40:47   So you have some audio files on it.

01:40:48   - They're plugged in, they're stored

01:40:49   on a Samsung Thunderbolt drive, yeah.

01:40:55   Wait, what?

01:40:57   Oh, you mean the NUC, right?

01:40:58   No, no, I mean on the CAN alpha.

01:41:01   Oh, on the alpha, oh yeah, there's an SD card, yes.

01:41:03   Okay, I was like, wait, what?

01:41:05   No, no, no, I meant-- I was actually

01:41:06   confused about that.

01:41:07   The tangible drive is connected to the NUC,

01:41:09   the SD card is into the CAN alpha.

01:41:10   Perfect, okay, that makes more sense now.

01:41:13   So we're on a date, on our first date.

01:41:16   Okay.

01:41:17   And I noticed this Walkman of yours.

01:41:19   I keep calling it all the different wrong names,

01:41:21   I apologize.

01:41:24   And I say "what is that thing?" and you explain it to me and I say

01:41:27   "Let me hear it, play me a song. What song would you choose?"

01:41:31   Ahh, just one?

01:41:33   It's the first song I'm gonna be able to listen to from this thing.

01:41:36   Which song?

01:41:37   So this is the first date, this is like a romantic date.

01:41:42   So you're probably trying to impress me.

01:41:45   Okay.

01:41:46   Right?

01:41:47   And like, if I also set the mood, like what kind of mood?

01:41:51   Okay.

01:41:53   Well you tell me, you're the one who can choose.

01:41:55   You know, you're either set in the mood here

01:41:57   or you're trying to like impress me

01:42:00   with how good your music taste is or something.

01:42:03   - Okay, okay, okay.

01:42:04   Let me give you three different mood scenarios, okay?

01:42:12   We've been drinking, come back.

01:42:16   I want to impress you with some music

01:42:19   but also kind of fun, groovy mood.

01:42:22   I got just the right song for you.

01:42:24   - Okay.

01:42:25   - "Lose Yourself to Dance" by Daft Punk.

01:42:27   - Ooh, that's good.

01:42:28   You're on a Daft Punk kick right now, aren't you?

01:42:30   - I am. - Yeah.

01:42:31   - Once again.

01:42:32   But that song, you know,

01:42:34   with the Nile Rodgers playing in the background

01:42:38   and, you know, Pharrell doing the vocals,

01:42:42   just an exquisite song to listen to.

01:42:44   - Really good, very good.

01:42:46   - Very good song. - Great pick

01:42:47   for the first pick.

01:42:48   We are in a more sort of a pensive mood, you know?

01:42:53   Okay, we're reflecting on things.

01:42:57   "Exile" by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver.

01:43:00   - Ooh, okay, very moody.

01:43:03   - Okay.

01:43:03   Just when the vocals from,

01:43:08   when Justin Vernon comes on at the beginning of the track,

01:43:12   you know, he's got a baritone voice, I believe,

01:43:16   And that really comes through depending on the gear that you're listening to.

01:43:21   We're going to talk about that in a few minutes in the pro show,

01:43:24   but I feel like you listen to that.

01:43:26   The first, the first minute of that song at just the right volume level,

01:43:31   glass of red wine, perhaps the match made in heaven.

01:43:35   Or we can be in a really cheesy,

01:43:41   romantic mood.

01:43:42   It's sort of like a wrong calm scenario, right?

01:43:46   You just, you know, you want to go for the hits.

01:43:48   You want to go for the classics.

01:43:50   Okay.

01:43:51   I would say I'm going to be that guy.

01:43:54   And I am going to say, I put on XO by John Mayer.

01:44:00   You know, just classic John Mayer song.

01:44:04   It's, you know, a lot of people make fun of John Mayer

01:44:08   because he's John Mayer.

01:44:09   I think, you know, I also make fun of John Mayer, but he's also a really good guitar

01:44:14   player and I love John Mayer's voice.

01:44:17   So I'm going for the cheesy one, it sounds great.

01:44:21   Anything from old John Mayer, like I have, what's in my library, I have "XO" is a single,

01:44:27   but I also have "Continuum" from 2006, and I also have a...

01:44:34   I'm totally blanking out on the names of John Mayer albums.

01:44:37   The search for everything from 2017, it sounds great.

01:44:42   Really, the guitar and the voice, you know, it's got that sort of darkish, warm voice

01:44:50   with the right headphones or the right speakers.

01:44:53   It's John Mayer.

01:44:54   You cannot go wrong.

01:44:55   So yeah, quite a selection of songs.

01:45:00   Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Connected.

01:45:02   We'll be back next time.

01:45:03   Until then, say goodbye, Federico.

01:45:04   AdiĂ³s, dechĂ©!

01:45:05   [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:45:09   ♪ You just love to dance ♪

01:45:14   ♪ You just love to dance ♪

01:45:18   ♪ You just love to dance ♪

01:45:22   [Music]

01:45:24   [