Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► Previously on the prompt. So are we done? Yeah, apparently yeah like big time done

00:00:05 ◼   ► We just end like this like like like, you know, we just know I'm gonna do the wrap-up

00:00:10 ◼   ► Yeah, but no epic ending like like I don't know Steven makes a big revelation or something

00:00:16 ◼   ► Steven make a revelation

00:00:18 ◼   ► So that is it for the prompt

00:00:22 ◼   ► Welcome to The Prompt, a weekly panel discussion on technology and the culture surrounding

00:00:29 ◼   ► Apple and related companies.

00:00:35 ◼   ► It is the 20th of June, 2018, and this week marks the fifth anniversary of the three of

00:00:42 ◼   ► us podcasting together as a trio.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Our original show was called The Prompt, and we're honoring that today by using all of

00:00:49 ◼   ► our old sound effects and segments.

00:00:51 ◼   ► I'm your host Stephen Hackett and I'm joined as I have been for half a decade by Mr. Federico

00:00:57 ◼   ► Vittucci.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Hi, what do you mean we have an old show?

00:01:01 ◼   ► We like, are we not doing the prompt?

00:01:03 ◼   ► We're doing it.

00:01:04 ◼   ► We're not doing the prompt anymore?

00:01:09 ◼   ► What are you referring to?

00:01:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:11 ◼   ► I don't understand.

00:01:12 ◼   ► Hi, it's weird.

00:01:13 ◼   ► How are you?

00:01:14 ◼   ► Some sort of weird time loop today.

00:01:15 ◼   ► And of course, Myke Hurley.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Hello mate, it's Myke from the prompt.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Here I am. It's nice to talk to you all today. I don't know how to make my, how can I make

00:01:25 ◼   ► my accent stronger? I don't know. Move your hands. I don't know. I'm on the prompt.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I'm not going to eat the pizza. Is that what the stereotype is like? Is that what you guys

00:01:38 ◼   ► imagine me? I talk about. Yeah, but you do talk about pizza a lot though. Do I? Yeah.

00:01:45 ◼   ► Like we had a conversation in San Jose about the fact that I think you only try to have

00:01:50 ◼   ► pizza once a week or something.

00:01:53 ◼   ► Would you say that's a lot in terms of conversation?

00:01:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:58 ◼   ► I mean, I'm just saying like that pizza is prevalent in your life.

00:02:02 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Sure.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Okay.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Mamma mia.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I don't know what you want.

00:02:08 ◼   ► It's a me.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Let's do the follow up.

00:02:11 ◼   ► Steven, where's your accent?

00:02:14 ◼   ► Where's your accent?

00:02:15 ◼   ► It hasn't.

00:02:16 ◼   ► It's still here.

00:02:17 ◼   ► No, come on.

00:02:19 ◼   ► You go back and listen to that episode one and you are a very different boy.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:24 ◼   ► There's a link in the show notes to the first episode of The Prompt and please don't listen

00:02:29 ◼   ► to it.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But it's there.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Everything sounds terrible.

00:02:32 ◼   ► The content was good, but everything, like the audio quality, our annunciation, it's

00:02:38 ◼   ► all very bad.

00:02:39 ◼   ► But you can go back and listen to it.

00:02:42 ◼   ► It is five years and one day we have been recording together.

00:02:47 ◼   ► And it is wild to think that the prompt occupied one year

00:02:52 ◼   ► and then the rest has been connected.

00:02:53 ◼   ► So we must honor it.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - It's pretty wild.

00:02:58 ◼   ► - And how do we honor the prompt?

00:02:59 ◼   ► - By doing some follow up.

00:03:01 ◼   ► We have perhaps the most important follow up

00:03:03 ◼   ► we've had in five years.

00:03:05 ◼   ► The teaching scale has migrated,

00:03:08 ◼   ► I wanna say graduated from a mere workflow

00:03:11 ◼   ► a full-scale iOS and iMessage app.

00:03:16 ◼   ► - Of course.

00:03:17 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:03:18 ◼   ► And it's incredible.

00:03:19 ◼   ► - Thanks to that deep and open framework.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And now you can take full advantage

00:03:23 ◼   ► of the power of the teachy scale in iMessage.

00:03:25 ◼   ► - There you go.

00:03:26 ◼   ► - It's perfect.

00:03:26 ◼   ► - It was created by Adam who is @born2bgeek,

00:03:30 ◼   ► we're the number two, @born2bgeek on Twitter.

00:03:32 ◼   ► It is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

00:03:34 ◼   ► It is an app on its own, it is an iMessage app as well.

00:03:37 ◼   ► It has drag and drop on the iPad,

00:03:39 ◼   ► which is like, all right, of course it does.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And I love that it does.

00:03:42 ◼   ► - It beat Google Docs to it.

00:03:44 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:45 ◼   ► - So it's wonderful.

00:03:47 ◼   ► I have been using it an awful lot.

00:03:50 ◼   ► I think we all have really,

00:03:51 ◼   ► because there is nothing better than the TG scale

00:03:54 ◼   ► and now you can all go ahead and download it for yourself

00:03:58 ◼   ► and there's a link in the show notes.

00:04:00 ◼   ► - I sent one to a friend on iMessage,

00:04:03 ◼   ► a friend who doesn't listen to the show

00:04:05 ◼   ► And they were very confused as to what was happening.

00:04:09 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:04:13 ◼   ► Let's assume everyone knows what it is, that it's universal.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Oh, Federico, I mentioned the show notes.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Federico, where can people find show notes?

00:04:21 ◼   ► Oh, god.

00:04:22 ◼   ► So the show notes are this incredible technology

00:04:25 ◼   ► that enables us to share text with people

00:04:28 ◼   ► who listen to the podcast.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Even though the podcast, it's audio, we are able,

00:04:32 ◼   ► thanks to the show note feature, to share

00:04:35 ◼   ► text and hyperlinks on the web page for the prompt. So the way that you can find the show

00:04:45 ◼   ► notes is you gotta... So now that you have an Apple Watch and there's WebKit on the Apple

00:04:49 ◼   ► Watch, here's what you need to do. You need to install watchOS 5 on your watch and you

00:04:56 ◼   ► need to call a friend and have this friend navigate using a web browser on a Macintosh

00:05:03 ◼   ► computer to relay.fm/connected/198.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Which is confusing, you know, but we don't worry about that.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Yes, it's a temporary name, don't worry about it.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Slash 198. So you go there and you tell your friend to copy the link. Once the friend has

00:05:19 ◼   ► copied the link, the friend needs to open messages on the Macintosh computer and it needs to send you

00:05:25 ◼   ► a message with the link, with the hyperlink that he copied from the web page. So the friend

00:05:32 ◼   ► messages you the link and here's where you come into action. You grab your

00:05:38 ◼   ► Apple Watch, you put on your wrist, you open the message on your wrist, you tap

00:05:42 ◼   ► the link on watchOS 5 and it'll open in a WebKit mini Safari view on your

00:05:49 ◼   ► watch and that's where you can find the show notes on your wrist. The show notes

00:05:54 ◼   ► on your wrist, it's 2018, technology is amazing. So as you listen, as you listen

00:05:59 ◼   ► on your home pod, please don't do this while you're driving your car, it's gonna be dangerous.

00:06:04 ◼   ► So as you listen through, you know, these magical notes flowing and beaming through

00:06:09 ◼   ► the air of your living room, you can just glance at your wrist and tap on links on your

00:06:16 ◼   ► watch. I feel like I made a mistake asking that question. No, no. I've been preparing

00:06:22 ◼   ► these instructions for five years. Finally somebody is asking. I was just waiting for

00:06:27 ◼   ► watchOS 5 to finally share this titchy tip. He started the note in Evernote, he had to

00:06:33 ◼   ► go back and find it. So yeah, that's where you can find them. Have you heard about WorkChat?

00:06:40 ◼   ► There has been some debate about how you pronounce the next version of macOS. I know, I know

00:06:46 ◼   ► how. How? It's French. It's Mojave. I think it's Bondi. Bondi, I think. So we had said,

00:06:57 ◼   ► I had said. Mojave, with an E. That spread rather quickly, I feel like, to some other

00:07:04 ◼   ► podcasts that I think one even credited me for like, "Oh, Stephen told us how to say

00:07:09 ◼   ► it." Don't ever take my advice on how to say things!

00:07:12 ◼   ► Stephen can't say anything. This is a problem that me and Stephen have with "Ungeniused"

00:07:18 ◼   ► in that it can sometimes take some time, or some very interesting wrangling of things.

00:07:26 ◼   ► I have made a decision. I'm not gonna bother. I'm just gonna say it however it comes out.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Like it's either gonna be Mojave or Mojave. I'm just gonna say it. I'm not gonna stress

00:07:36 ◼   ► over this one. Because I can never remember it. And then everyone's telling me how to

00:07:40 ◼   ► say it and then everybody tells me to say it a different way. So I'll just go how the

00:07:44 ◼   ► wind goes and however I say the name of the operating system is how I say it.

00:07:49 ◼   ► I think it's Italian. It's Mojave. Mojave.

00:07:52 ◼   ► Mojave.

00:07:53 ◼   ► That's a great, a third way to get it wrong.

00:07:56 ◼   ► Awesome.

00:07:57 ◼   ► I want to talk a little bit about dark mode and WebKit and Safari.

00:08:01 ◼   ► So there was a thing going around where if a web page ended up setting their background

00:08:06 ◼   ► color correctly, Safari, while in dark mode on, how did you say it, Federico?

00:08:12 ◼   ► Mojave.

00:08:13 ◼   ► Mojave?

00:08:14 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:08:15 ◼   ► Sounds Jamaican too.

00:08:17 ◼   ► It's really just an international word.

00:08:18 ◼   ► Could be.

00:08:19 ◼   ► That it would set the page background as a dark color where it would default to white,

00:08:23 ◼   ► otherwise. And this led to some people wondering can Safari on Mac OS infer what

00:08:31 ◼   ► appearance you're in and then set like a different style on the website. We talked about this last week with

00:08:37 ◼   ► Mac Stories how you have a toggle on the site for light mode and dark mode and it

00:08:42 ◼   ► seems like there is a media query prefers dark interface but it doesn't

00:08:49 ◼   ► actually work in the betas and then it came out that that was a private thing

00:08:53 ◼   ► and that Apple's may be moving through the standards bodies to like actually

00:08:58 ◼   ► have this integrated into WebKit and CSS is like a proper thing and like a weird

00:09:04 ◼   ► Safari only deal. So right now at least as it stands today there's not like an

00:09:11 ◼   ► official way to do this but it seems like one could be coming and I hope it

00:09:16 ◼   ► because I like dark mode, but anytime I go to browse,

00:09:19 ◼   ► everything is like, it's like opening a browser

00:09:22 ◼   ► just facing the sun, everything is bright and white.

00:09:25 ◼   ► And it would be nice to have some,

00:09:27 ◼   ► for web developers who care about this,

00:09:30 ◼   ► like most websites probably don't need to do this,

00:09:31 ◼   ► but like, it's not like mine that's primarily read

00:09:34 ◼   ► in Safari, either on iOS or Mac OS.

00:09:37 ◼   ► Like, it would be nice for me to have that available

00:09:39 ◼   ► to my readers, and so I'm hoping that this

00:09:43 ◼   ► becomes an official thing, a supported thing,

00:09:45 ◼   ► a public thing and we can all just kind of move into this new era together where at least

00:09:52 ◼   ► some websites have a light and a dark appearance.

00:09:55 ◼   ► Yeah, totally. I was actually under the impression that Apple already submitted a proposal to

00:10:02 ◼   ► the standards body to have this media query for dark mode. So I'm surprised that they're

00:10:08 ◼   ► still trying to find a solution that everybody can agree upon. So absolutely, I mean as someone

00:10:13 ◼   ► already has a manual dark mode on max, or you can go on the toolbar and there's a button that you

00:10:18 ◼   ► can press and turn on dark mode, I would love to offer some kind of preference where it just

00:10:23 ◼   ► follows the system behavior and otherwise people can override using the manual option in the

00:10:28 ◼   ► toolbar. So yeah, totally. Hopefully this will be done by September. I don't know when these

00:10:35 ◼   ► companies get together and try to make these decisions. How long does it usually take? I have

00:10:40 ◼   ► no idea, but hopefully within 2018 we'll have a universal preference that everybody can

00:10:46 ◼   ► adopt.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I like the idea of them going through the standards bodies for this because it is a

00:10:53 ◼   ► good idea and it would be good if all web browsers could use it and there be like a

00:10:59 ◼   ► universally agreed upon way of doing it.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And also, you know, it makes sense for if the iPhone and iOS is going to get a dark

00:11:07 ◼   ► mode at some point, which it probably will at some point.

00:11:10 ◼   ► It makes sense, I guess, to have it all set out for everything.

00:11:14 ◼   ► And having a standard in place that people can work to, I think, is a good idea.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And because I would love it, right?

00:11:21 ◼   ► I use dark modes for many things, including the websites that I use that operate them.

00:11:26 ◼   ► And I would love to be able to kind of just set a toggle in Chrome or whatever and just

00:11:30 ◼   ► have everything shown up to me with a dark background, because that's just my personal

00:11:33 ◼   ► preference.

00:11:34 ◼   ► It'd be great.

00:11:37 ◼   ► I think they'll get there.

00:11:38 ◼   ► You know, I think some of these tweets are from like WebKit engineers and they seem like

00:11:41 ◼   ► they're moving forward this the proper way.

00:11:44 ◼   ► It's not just a problem on Apple devices.

00:11:46 ◼   ► Like Windows 10 has a dark mode and the Windows users have the same deal in Edge or Chrome

00:11:52 ◼   ► on that side of the fence too.

00:11:53 ◼   ► So I think this would be great for everyone and so I hope that it gets done properly and

00:11:58 ◼   ► not just like a bunch of weird hacks.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Today's episode is brought to you by Linode.

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00:13:31 ◼   ► So in true style of the prompt, let's talk about photos and photo services.

00:13:38 ◼   ► So Federico, can you tell us, can you give us a breakdown as to what is going on with

00:13:44 ◼   ► photos in iOS 12?

00:13:45 ◼   ► Because I don't think we spent any time talking about this yet.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Tips of teaching.

00:13:50 ◼   ► Sure.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So my overall comment, and I'm going to dig into some specific features, but my overall

00:13:55 ◼   ► impression is that while Apple had some new features and design changes for photos in

00:14:03 ◼   ► iOS 12, despite the fact that rumors were saying Apple is going to have new photos functionalities

00:14:09 ◼   ► next year, it's still not a major update. There's some nice changes, but if you go back

00:14:16 ◼   ► and read what Mark Gurman was saying a few months ago about Apple using new AI features

00:14:22 ◼   ► for photos, sort of to compete with Google Photos, I think those features are still in

00:14:28 ◼   ► development and we're probably going to see a new UI for photos next year.

00:14:33 ◼   ► That said, there's some nice changes that we can cover for photos in iOS 12.

00:14:38 ◼   ► The first one is the new "For You" page.

00:14:41 ◼   ► So "For You" is not a new name in terms of Apple applications, and in this case "For

00:14:47 ◼   ► You" aggregates in photos a bunch of different functionalities.

00:14:52 ◼   ► So in this single page you will see sharing suggestions, your memories,

00:14:57 ◼   ► well, memories is not a new feature, you will see activity for shared albums,

00:15:02 ◼   ► which means whether somebody joined a shared album or comments on shared photos,

00:15:08 ◼   ► and you will also see albums, or actually groups of photos,

00:15:12 ◼   ► that you've recently shared with somebody else.

00:15:15 ◼   ► And I want to talk about sharing, because Apple sort of mentioned this feature during

00:15:19 ◼   ► the keynote.

00:15:21 ◼   ► It's using a new system and by sharing with other folks using iOS 12 and by talking to

00:15:26 ◼   ► some folks at WWDC, it is my impression and it is my understanding that actually that

00:15:31 ◼   ► Apple is using this new system where you don't need to re-upload photos.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Once you're sharing some items that are already stored in iCloud Photo Library with someone

00:15:42 ◼   ► else who's on iOS 12, Apple will not re-upload, will not re-scan and re-index those photos,

00:15:49 ◼   ► It'll just use the photos that are already in iCloud,

00:15:53 ◼   ► in the iCloud servers, and it'll just mark them as shared,

00:15:57 ◼   ► so that you can share the full resolution version

00:15:59 ◼   ► with somebody else instantly.

00:16:01 ◼   ► That's why there's no waiting time.

00:16:03 ◼   ► That's why there's no uploading.

00:16:04 ◼   ► That's why people get the original photos,

00:16:06 ◼   ► besides some effects that Apple removes for privacy concerns,

00:16:11 ◼   ► such as, for example, I think you will not

00:16:13 ◼   ► be able to edit the depth map of a portrait photo

00:16:17 ◼   ► if you receive a portrait picture for someone else,

00:16:19 ◼   ► because Apple believes that for privacy reasons,

00:16:21 ◼   ► other folks shouldn't be able to alter the blur

00:16:24 ◼   ► of the background of a photo.

00:16:25 ◼   ► That's super clever and super, you know,

00:16:27 ◼   ► of course Apple is doing this.

00:16:28 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:16:30 ◼   ► - Can I ask you a question on that?

00:16:31 ◼   ► 'Cause it seems a bit confusing to me.

00:16:35 ◼   ► My understanding is like the way that Apple collects data

00:16:38 ◼   ► is everything's like anonymized,

00:16:39 ◼   ► so they can't work out that I'm me.

00:16:42 ◼   ► So like how can they work out

00:16:46 ◼   ► how my photos can go from place to place?

00:16:48 ◼   ► Like it seems a bit confusing.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Like how can your phone know what my photos are

00:16:55 ◼   ► from iCloud if it's all kind of like scrambled up

00:16:58 ◼   ► in the cloud up there?

00:17:00 ◼   ► - I think first of all, when you're sharing photos

00:17:03 ◼   ► and you're asked to pick a recipient,

00:17:07 ◼   ► of course the other person needs to be an iCloud user.

00:17:11 ◼   ► But I don't think the individual photos

00:17:15 ◼   ► are anonymized in that way.

00:17:18 ◼   ► there's some ways that Apple can say this specific file,

00:17:22 ◼   ► even though we're not looking actually at the file,

00:17:25 ◼   ► but we have a reference to the file,

00:17:27 ◼   ► that means we can share this file with somebody else,

00:17:30 ◼   ► and we can put it in a shared space

00:17:31 ◼   ► between these two iCloud addresses.

00:17:34 ◼   ► - So it's still not like, you know,

00:17:36 ◼   ► I don't have, there's not like the Myke Hurley drawer

00:17:39 ◼   ► in a server somewhere, where all my stuff is kept, you know?

00:17:42 ◼   ► - I don't think it works that way.

00:17:43 ◼   ► - Okay, that's good to know.

00:17:44 ◼   ► But do you see why it confuses me?

00:17:46 ◼   ► - Sure, yes.

00:17:47 ◼   ► if they're not keeping all of my stuff labeled as me,

00:17:51 ◼   ► how does it get shared?

00:17:52 ◼   ► But I guess maybe it's like creating some identifier

00:17:55 ◼   ► for the image which is shared with you,

00:17:57 ◼   ► and then it's just pulling that down

00:17:58 ◼   ► from whatever bucket it's all kept in.

00:18:02 ◼   ► It just seems like some of this stuff,

00:18:04 ◼   ► like I only ever ask questions

00:18:05 ◼   ► because they make such a performance about the privacy stuff

00:18:10 ◼   ► that I see this a lot, right?

00:18:12 ◼   ► And I understand it, they make such a performance about it

00:18:15 ◼   ► that when they do do a feature like this,

00:18:17 ◼   ► Google like feature it's like well how are you doing it then and like I think

00:18:20 ◼   ► that it's it's important to question it because you know if then if they make

00:18:26 ◼   ► such a song and dance then I want it to be completely private because that's

00:18:29 ◼   ► what they're offering me because otherwise I would just because Google

00:18:32 ◼   ► Photos has a feature just like this right and they unveiled it like a year

00:18:36 ◼   ► or two a couple years ago maybe right where I that it would recognize people

00:18:41 ◼   ► and automatically share stuff with them if I wanted and it seems apples doing

00:18:44 ◼   ► the same and it's like well obviously they're taking different approaches and

00:18:48 ◼   ► what do those look like so I appreciate that. Yeah so I mean of course I don't

00:18:53 ◼   ► know the technical details of how can files be specifically you know tied to

00:18:59 ◼   ► an iCloud user but I think the moment that you're uploading something to a

00:19:05 ◼   ► server I mean Apple has your data in this case they may anonymize your data

00:19:11 ◼   ► but your photos are on a server somewhere, otherwise they wouldn't be able to sync to another device.

00:19:16 ◼   ► That said, the thing you mentioned about sharing with other people,

00:19:21 ◼   ► that's the second aspect of this, which is Apple made a big deal out of this intelligent sharing, which takes into account,

00:19:28 ◼   ► I believe, face recognition, so based on the people that you are recognizing photos,

00:19:33 ◼   ► but also they take into account the location of a photo and the time of the day to make

00:19:40 ◼   ► and educated guests about the people that you could share a selection of photos with.

00:19:45 ◼   ► The idea being that if Myke, Steven and I go to a restaurant and I take a bunch of pictures

00:19:50 ◼   ► and I go back home and I have pictures of the three of us, photos will say "Hey, do you want

00:19:54 ◼   ► to share these pictures with Myke and Steven?" because it looks like you guys were together

00:19:58 ◼   ► at lunch. And on your end, photos in iOS 12 will offer a "Share Back" feature so that once I share

00:20:05 ◼   ► an album with you, photos on your end will say "Oh, it looks like I may also be able to contribute

00:20:10 ◼   ► to this shared album. So let me share back some photos that I have on Myke's device.

00:20:16 ◼   ► And same for Steven. The idea being that...

00:20:18 ◼   ► I'm excited about this feature. It sounds really good.

00:20:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:22 ◼   ► What it stops is like the "leave the restaurant, stand outside for five minutes and everybody

00:20:26 ◼   ► opens airdrop." Right? Like, because that's how I feel like my life is like, you know,

00:20:31 ◼   ► you can understand it's like "oh, can you airdrop me those photos? Oh, can you send

00:20:33 ◼   ► them to me? Can you send them to me?" This just feels like a nicer way to do it. Where

00:20:37 ◼   ► There's less of a requirement for us to be in the same physical space together to get

00:20:43 ◼   ► the full resolution image.

00:20:45 ◼   ► And I think that's kind of great.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Yeah, because we've all been in that position.

00:20:48 ◼   ► We did it at WBC, a shared iCloud, a shared album, a bunch of people were adding pictures

00:20:55 ◼   ► to it.

00:20:56 ◼   ► But in the back of my mind, I know all of those are down-resed, and that makes me annoyed,

00:21:00 ◼   ► because I would like full-size copies.

00:21:03 ◼   ► And so if Apple is moving things to a world where that's in the past, even if I lose some

00:21:09 ◼   ► editing, I totally understand and am glad you can't do depth map editing and the other

00:21:14 ◼   ► stuff.

00:21:15 ◼   ► I agree with the decisions there.

00:21:16 ◼   ► So I can't unblur something and then see some incriminating evidence on Federico's desk.

00:21:21 ◼   ► I really see a laptop instead of an iPad, and I've called him out for using a Mac at

00:21:25 ◼   ► work.

00:21:26 ◼   ► I understand that.

00:21:28 ◼   ► So I'm excited about it too because photos are meant to be shared and if we're all going

00:21:36 ◼   ► to use iCloud for all of our stuff then that should be native.

00:21:39 ◼   ► I shouldn't have to figure out how to offload stuff via AirDrop or email or something later

00:21:45 ◼   ► to get people their images.

00:21:49 ◼   ► So I tried this new sharing suggestion feature with Sylvia.

00:21:53 ◼   ► She's still on iOS 11 of course.

00:21:55 ◼   ► And I don't think the system is actually working for people who haven't updated to iOS 12,

00:22:00 ◼   ► obviously.

00:22:01 ◼   ► She got this link that took her to an iCloud web page in Safari.

00:22:08 ◼   ► And in Safari, she got -- actually, she got a web preview of the photos that I shared

00:22:13 ◼   ► from my photos app, which was kind of nice because I've never seen that kind of web preview

00:22:19 ◼   ► for shared iCloud photos before.

00:22:22 ◼   ► And then she tapped on a download button that was on the webpage, and Safari downloaded

00:22:27 ◼   ► like a photos.zip archive.

00:22:29 ◼   ► Perfect.

00:22:30 ◼   ► Perfect.

00:22:31 ◼   ► I don't think that's supposed to happen, and I think the problem is I'm sharing from iOS

00:22:37 ◼   ► 12 to an old system.

00:22:40 ◼   ► But I also tried to open the link that I sent on iMessage in our iMessage thread, and I

00:22:50 ◼   ► got this custom, which I think is what's supposed to happen, my iPhone opened this sort of custom

00:22:57 ◼   ► quick look preview with a grid of photos that looked really, really nice. So ideally, you

00:23:04 ◼   ► shouldn't go to a Safari web page, you shouldn't hit the download button, you will get this

00:23:08 ◼   ► preview and there will be a button that says "Add these pictures to photos" and that's

00:23:12 ◼   ► it.

00:23:13 ◼   ► That's cool. I like that a lot.

00:23:15 ◼   ► So what else? No meaningful improvements to memories that I know of, so the photos are

00:23:22 ◼   ► still very much behind what the Google Assistant offers in Google Photos.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Still suffering from amnesia, right? It has no memories?

00:23:30 ◼   ► Yes. Yes, Myke.

00:23:31 ◼   ► Yep. Mm-hmm. Thank you.

00:23:33 ◼   ► There's a better import flow if you use SD cards and you connect them with the dongle

00:23:39 ◼   ► to your iPad or to... Does it work on the iPhone? I guess it does.

00:23:42 ◼   ► I guess so.

00:23:43 ◼   ► Yeah, you all got some progress indicators, new icons, new labels that make it easy to

00:23:48 ◼   ► see which pictures you've already imported and which ones are new and you need to store

00:23:56 ◼   ► in the Photos app.

00:23:57 ◼   ► The Albums page has been updated.

00:24:00 ◼   ► Now it's organized in media types and there's a list of all the kinds of albums that are

00:24:07 ◼   ► automatically generated by your device at the bottom of the page.

00:24:10 ◼   ► like slow-mo or screenshots or I don't know burst all those kind of media types

00:24:16 ◼   ► that photos can recognize. The other big feature is the improved search so

00:24:23 ◼   ► there's a new search page and finally you can now search for multiple

00:24:27 ◼   ► variables or tokens so you can combine them stuff like dog beach 2017 and you

00:24:35 ◼   ► will find pictures of your dogs at the beach last year for example so you can

00:24:39 ◼   ► combine these multiple values into the same search query. What is kind of weird

00:24:44 ◼   ► is that you cannot type these variables in natural language, so you cannot open

00:24:51 ◼   ► the search box and say "dogs at the beach in 2017". You need to type a word, tap on

00:24:56 ◼   ► the suggestion, type another word, tap on the second suggestion and combine all

00:25:01 ◼   ► these pre-made tokens together. It's not like an actual sentence. Yeah, it's kind of weird.

00:25:06 ◼   ► That's really weird. But like I couldn't even type "dogs beach" I would have to like type

00:25:11 ◼   ► one tap it, type another tap it. At least in beta one, let me check out beta two, but

00:25:16 ◼   ► I would be surprised if they changed this. So I'm going to the search box and I'm typing

00:25:21 ◼   ► "dog beach" and no, because it doesn't know what a dog beach is. See, that's the problem.

00:25:30 ◼   ► I see what's happening. You need to tap one by one. That's not elegant really is it? But

00:25:36 ◼   ► But it works. So once you can choose between recognized items or creatures or, you know,

00:25:44 ◼   ► objects, you can choose locations, you can choose times and days. It works. In theory,

00:25:52 ◼   ► there's more categories. So for example, this is kind of funny. In my photos app, there's

00:25:59 ◼   ► Apparently there's some top suggestions for categories of pictures. There's dog, there's

00:26:06 ◼   ► badger dogs, there's Newfoundland dogs, and finally there's hot dog.

00:26:12 ◼   ► I love which one I want.

00:26:17 ◼   ► The single picture of a hot dog, which isn't even a hot dog, it's the burger Myke and I

00:26:22 ◼   ► had at Five Guys last year.

00:26:26 ◼   ► I have no memory of that. Oh, you mean In-N-Out. Woof, you're gonna make some people real mad.

00:26:30 ◼   ► Sorry, In-N-Out.

00:26:31 ◼   ► You just committed a cardinal sin.

00:26:33 ◼   ► No, I'm sorry. I'm Italian. I'm justified. I'm Italian. I get American brands confused.

00:26:39 ◼   ► I'm the foreign guy. Please don't be upset. Yeah, multiple search tokens. And the search

00:26:47 ◼   ► page is nice. It combines all these different, for example, you have categories, moments,

00:26:52 ◼   ► places, dates, and I suppose at the top, at the very top people. So yeah, it gets the

00:27:00 ◼   ► job done and I don't know if it's still as intelligent as Google Photos but it appears

00:27:05 ◼   ► to be slightly better than last year. And finally, the very last feature, portrait mode

00:27:12 ◼   ► on compatible devices has been updated with this improved depth map technology. I need

00:27:18 ◼   ► to look into this still, Apple is using this new API called portrait segmentation. The

00:27:24 ◼   ► description from the developer webpage says that the camera now generates a mask when

00:27:29 ◼   ► it detects a person and it intelligently and elegantly separates the person from the scene.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And judging from some tests that I've seen, for example, Serenity called Well-Do, and

00:27:41 ◼   ► my very informal and non-scientific tests, it appears to be doing better when you recognize

00:27:48 ◼   ► people in a portrait photo, but not dogs, because dogs are not people. Even though dogs are very good boys and girls,

00:27:54 ◼   ► they're not people. So,

00:27:56 ◼   ► when Apple improves their dog recognition technology, that'll be better for everyone, but so far

00:28:02 ◼   ► it seems that portrait segmentation is just for humans, not for dogs.

00:28:05 ◼   ► Hot dog recognition, that's what I'm looking for.

00:28:08 ◼   ► All right, well, I mean, overall it sounds good. I mean,

00:28:11 ◼   ► any improvement to this stuff is always a

00:28:15 ◼   ► a welcome thing because it's there, there's nothing I can do about it, right? Like, this

00:28:20 ◼   ► is where my photos go. Like, they go into this app. And that's just how that is. Speaking

00:28:25 ◼   ► of which, what are our photo management workflows these days? Stephen, what are you doing for

00:28:32 ◼   ► photo management? I'm just interested.

00:28:35 ◼   ► I've got everything in iCloud Photo Library. So anything I take with my iPhone is just

00:28:40 ◼   ► automatically uploaded. Anything I shoot with my big camera, I shoot in RAW, edit on the

00:28:45 ◼   ► Mac and then store high quality JPEGs in photos.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I got a bunch of albums, I have some smart albums,

00:28:54 ◼   ► and I've been pretty happy with it.

00:28:57 ◼   ► In fact, about six months ago,

00:28:59 ◼   ► or whenever they updated the Google uploader for the Mac,

00:29:02 ◼   ► the new one is like super crashy and gross,

00:29:05 ◼   ► and I just sort of quit uploading Google photos

00:29:07 ◼   ► like six months ago, and I'm just doing iCloud.

00:29:10 ◼   ► I have, on my iMac Pro, I have it set to download

00:29:14 ◼   ► all the full res files, so those files get backed up with Time Machine, Backblaze, etc.

00:29:19 ◼   ► etc. So yeah, I'm all in on Apple.

00:29:22 ◼   ► I have many islands going on. I have iCloud Photo Library, right? Like everything is just

00:29:28 ◼   ► taken on my phone and it goes up into iCloud Photo Library. I still use Dropbox with Federico's

00:29:33 ◼   ► Hazel scripts.

00:29:34 ◼   ► God, really?

00:29:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:36 ◼   ► Oh wow, is it still working?

00:29:39 ◼   ► Yeah, mostly because I set it up in like 2015 or whatever and it just works, right? So like why

00:29:47 ◼   ► stop it? I have like a terabyte of Dropbox space or something which is just massive, right? Like

00:29:54 ◼   ► I'm so I'm I use like 10 or 12 percent of my Dropbox space so I think I just let it keep

00:30:00 ◼   ► going and it just keeps going so every time I open the Dropbox app on my iPhone or whatever it just

00:30:04 ◼   ► start sucking up some photos. It just does it periodically, right? And so they're just

00:30:09 ◼   ► there, so it's just an extra place. And then that gets synced up with backplays, right?

00:30:16 ◼   ► So like that's kind of, I think that's probably my main route into how they get kind of put

00:30:21 ◼   ► into a backup system as well as Time Machine or whatever which is going on with the photo

00:30:25 ◼   ► library. So I've got a bunch of backups. Up until today, I thought I was also using Google

00:30:32 ◼   ► Photos.

00:30:33 ◼   ► Until today?

00:30:34 ◼   ► It turns out that this stopped uploading in January 2017 because I was having my uploads

00:30:42 ◼   ► going from the Mac and it seems like the Google Photos uploader isn't open anymore.

00:30:50 ◼   ► So like, I guess that just doesn't work.

00:30:54 ◼   ► But it's fine because I never use it, right?

00:30:57 ◼   ► Like it was always just like another place where I could do searches, but I never ever

00:31:01 ◼   ► do it.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Like my searches, they happen based upon my memory of where the picture was taken or whatever,

00:31:08 ◼   ► right?

00:31:09 ◼   ► Like I found myself, the reason that I haven't noticed in six months that Google Photos isn't

00:31:15 ◼   ► backing up anymore is because they haven't tried to search for an image in Google Photos

00:31:18 ◼   ► in over six months.

00:31:20 ◼   ► So I'm kind of just like, whatever, like I'm not going to bother trying to fix that.

00:31:23 ◼   ► iCloud and Dropbox does everything that I need personally.

00:31:28 ◼   ► I'm just using iCloud, really.

00:31:32 ◼   ► I keep all my photos in iCloud Follow Library.

00:31:34 ◼   ► It's been working great for me.

00:31:36 ◼   ► I don't do any custom script anymore,

00:31:39 ◼   ► because I don't have a Mac that runs scripts.

00:31:41 ◼   ► And of course, I don't have a Mac Mini that

00:31:43 ◼   ► can run scripts in the background,

00:31:45 ◼   ► because Apple is not making those either.

00:31:48 ◼   ► So this is in iCloud.

00:31:50 ◼   ► And I'm also using Google Photos as a backup.

00:31:55 ◼   ► But I don't particularly care about it,

00:31:57 ◼   ► so I have this to do in things that says,

00:32:00 ◼   ► upload pictures to Google Photos like twice a week. But I'm on the free tier so it's not

00:32:06 ◼   ► the original quality. I just keep it as a backup because it's free and because if, I

00:32:14 ◼   ► don't know, iCloud explodes, I have this backup. But I feel pretty confident in iCloud. I never

00:32:20 ◼   ► had a single problem. Of course, now I'm going to have problems because I said it on a podcast.

00:32:26 ◼   ► But yeah, looking back at a few years ago where we were trying a new photo service,

00:32:33 ◼   ► photo management service every couple of weeks, things have really changed.

00:32:37 ◼   ► I mean, we used to have Loom and Everpix and what was the other one that got acquired and

00:32:44 ◼   ► kind of disappeared for a couple of months?

00:32:46 ◼   ► Dropbox Carousel?

00:32:47 ◼   ► No, Carousel 2, but no, that system, that service that disappeared for a couple of months

00:32:55 ◼   ► and it kind of held people's pictures hostage.

00:32:58 ◼   ► Then it came back.

00:33:00 ◼   ► But it was a quite--

00:33:01 ◼   ► Wasn't that Everfix?

00:33:03 ◼   ► PhotoLife?

00:33:04 ◼   ► No, it wasn't Ever-- something with--

00:33:06 ◼   ► PictureLife.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Pass the ball in the chat.

00:33:07 ◼   ► PictureLife.

00:33:08 ◼   ► PictureLife.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Oh my god, PictureLife.

00:33:11 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a long time ago.

00:33:14 ◼   ► These services, they're--

00:33:16 ◼   ► I mean, they've been essentially replaced

00:33:18 ◼   ► by iCloud and Google Photos.

00:33:21 ◼   ► I don't know people that use Windows computers and devices,

00:33:25 ◼   ► what they use but yeah probably Google Photos probably Google Photos probably

00:33:31 ◼   ► quick piece of follow-up thanks to Kate in the chat room I said I haven't

00:33:35 ◼   ► searched for an image in six months it's 18 months because it was January 2017

00:33:39 ◼   ► January 2018 right as I mentioned is when the the images stopped backing up

00:33:44 ◼   ► so it's been 18 months since I tried to use Google Photos for a search so I'm

00:33:49 ◼   ► good I'm good yeah it's all good don't need it

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00:34:56 ◼   ► to use and you don't have to play those games of working out if people have seen their invoices

00:35:00 ◼   ► or not because it's all listed right there. It's very, very easy to keep track of. If

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00:35:22 ◼   ► connected in the how did you hear about us section. Thanks to FreshBooks for

00:35:25 ◼   ► their support of this show and Relay FM. Federico you mentioned that iOS 12 beta

00:35:31 ◼   ► 2 is out and I had a few questions to ask of you about beta 2 and also I've

00:35:38 ◼   ► seen some stuff going around online that I wanted to run through like a couple of

00:35:42 ◼   ► little changes which seemed cool. One of them which is one that I cannot believe

00:35:46 ◼   ► has taken until now to fix. iPhone only apps no longer appear on the iPad and the iPhone

00:35:55 ◼   ► 4 size when multiplied by 2x is now like in the iPhone 6 size instead. So still not right

00:36:03 ◼   ► up to date but is looking a little bit better, looking way less squished. Again, like this

00:36:10 ◼   ► is one of those things where like, yeah, I'm sure not a lot of people use it but for the

00:36:13 ◼   ► people that do, why on earth did it take this long?

00:36:15 ◼   ► Why is it still a feature though? Do people really use iPhone apps on an iPad?

00:36:22 ◼   ► This is like the much much worse version of Project Marzipan. iPhone apps on an iPad.

00:36:30 ◼   ► This is terrible.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Well I will just say, I never do this, but the one that I've linked to here from a guy

00:36:37 ◼   ► called Saeed on Twitter who found this feature, he's the first person I saw reporting it,

00:36:42 ◼   ► He's using Instagram? And it's like, yeah, okay.

00:36:44 ◼   ► Right? Like, if you want to look at Instagram on your iPad, that's what you got.

00:36:51 ◼   ► You can use the website. But yeah, I get it.

00:36:54 ◼   ► The website is not very good.

00:36:56 ◼   ► I don't think you can view stories on the website, for example.

00:36:59 ◼   ► Yeah, you can. I think you can actually.

00:37:02 ◼   ► Yeah, it's I mean, it's terrible, but I think you can.

00:37:05 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, okay. Well, yeah, no, you're right.

00:37:08 ◼   ► You can. Oh, it's not good.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And there's a lot of audio playing in my ears.

00:37:12 ◼   ► It's not good. It's not good. Yeah, I know. But it's in theory. But yeah, I got it. What

00:37:17 ◼   ► some people, you know, that single app that is still not available. Like, I get it. Still

00:37:24 ◼   ► terrible feature. I don't know why Apple keeps it around.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And I saw you talking very happily last night about the speed of interaction with notifications

00:37:35 ◼   ► now.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it's impressive, really. There was this, I don't know if it was an artificial delay

00:37:41 ◼   ► or if it was a technical problem.

00:37:43 ◼   ► But now when you press down on notifications on the cover

00:37:47 ◼   ► sheet and the lock screen, they now almost morph from--

00:37:53 ◼   ► they transform from the little notification preview

00:37:55 ◼   ► into the expanded version.

00:37:57 ◼   ► And it's instant, and it feels so nice

00:38:02 ◼   ► because you press down, and the preview pops open.

00:38:06 ◼   ► And it's even better if you're pressing down

00:38:09 ◼   ► on a notification that is a message because it means you will open a reply screen and

00:38:14 ◼   ► the keyboard comes up immediately.

00:38:17 ◼   ► So if you check out the video that I posted on Twitter, you can see a Slack notification

00:38:21 ◼   ► that opens a message composer to send a reply.

00:38:25 ◼   ► The keyboard comes up immediately and it's so nice.

00:38:27 ◼   ► And the same is true for iMessage, the same is true for notifications that load custom

00:38:32 ◼   ► previews such as Skyroad Weather.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I'm really happy about this and I'm also really happy about the fact that when you expand

00:38:39 ◼   ► and I message notification, you can now do tap backs from the notification itself. So

00:38:45 ◼   ► if you want to send a thumbs up or a "aha" to someone else, you can now do so from the lock

00:38:53 ◼   ► screen. Honestly, there should be a thanks tap back. There should be more of them in general.

00:38:59 ◼   ► There should be more of them. Yeah. I use them a lot, like we all do, right? I'm a big convert

00:39:06 ◼   ► of the tapback. At first I thought it was kind of silly and it took me a while to get to use them.

00:39:11 ◼   ► And if you don't know what we're talking about, this is that thing in messages where you can like

00:39:15 ◼   ► double tap on a message and it pops up those little options. You could put like a heart or

00:39:18 ◼   ► a thumbs up or a thumbs down on like attached to a message and iMessage. I use them a lot. I mean

00:39:24 ◼   ► honestly what I would prefer is them to just straight up rip off Slack's emoji reactions.

00:39:30 ◼   ► Yes, agree.

00:39:32 ◼   ► That's what I would prefer for them to do rather than just to add other things like

00:39:35 ◼   ► just let me put emoji on messages, like it would be really good.

00:39:39 ◼   ► I think that many social networks and apps like conversation apps

00:39:44 ◼   ► have ripped off this feature for good reason, because it's really good.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I like that a lot on Slack, and I think that Apple should look at doing something like that.

00:39:52 ◼   ► I mean, stickers are great, yes, but sometimes it's just way cleaner

00:39:56 ◼   ► and more simple to just use an emoji, so I would love to see that.

00:40:00 ◼   ► There's also some splash and welcome screens for screen time and app limits,

00:40:04 ◼   ► limits, which kind of go into talking about this a little bit.

00:40:08 ◼   ► And this is just allowing me to segue into asking Federico,

00:40:11 ◼   ► what have you been using this screen time and app limits and what has been your

00:40:15 ◼   ► because you're the only one of the three of us that's running the beta yet.

00:40:17 ◼   ► I'm going to ask you if it's safe for me to install.

00:40:20 ◼   ► OK, we got to change that.

00:40:23 ◼   ► Well, we'll see.

00:40:24 ◼   ► We'll get to that in a second.

00:40:25 ◼   ► But I want to know what your experience has been like with those two features.

00:40:29 ◼   ► It's been interesting.

00:40:30 ◼   ► So in beta 1, screen time was kind of slow to load,

00:40:36 ◼   ► because I have two devices.

00:40:37 ◼   ► And I could tell when I was opening the screen time

00:40:39 ◼   ► page in settings that it was pinging the network to load

00:40:43 ◼   ► data for the other device.

00:40:45 ◼   ► So there was this delay when opening screen time.

00:40:48 ◼   ► And there's still some delay in beta 2,

00:40:50 ◼   ► but it's faster than before.

00:40:52 ◼   ► I set a limit for the social networking category of apps

00:40:56 ◼   ► of one hour and 45 minutes every day.

00:41:00 ◼   ► no more social that just a little less than two hours basically. It's what I'm shooting for.

00:41:08 ◼   ► And it's been interesting because it's... you get a notification when you're approaching your limit

00:41:14 ◼   ► time. It says you got five more minutes of social networking that you can do. And

00:41:20 ◼   ► it's been fascinating to see just how frequently I reach for the tweetbot icon on my phone and on my

00:41:28 ◼   ► iPad, even when I'm doing just normal things like I'm writing an article and I need to take a break

00:41:36 ◼   ► for 30 seconds because I'm drinking a glass of water or something and I open Tweetbot. Like those

00:41:42 ◼   ► extremely brief moments of downtime, I just instinctively reach out for Tweetbot or Instagram

00:41:51 ◼   ► on my phone and having the limit and the full screen message that says you've reached your limit

00:41:57 ◼   ► And you can override that.

00:41:59 ◼   ► There's a button that says basically, I don't care.

00:42:01 ◼   ► It doesn't say, I don't care.

00:42:02 ◼   ► It says ignore limit.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Might as well be, I don't care.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Just let me in.

00:42:07 ◼   ► - Let me rot my brain, gosh darn it.

00:42:09 ◼   ► - It's super easy to ignore the app limit,

00:42:13 ◼   ► but still seeing the message is a reminder

00:42:17 ◼   ► that it's basically, you know, Gray would say past you

00:42:20 ◼   ► saying, oh, well, really I set this limit

00:42:24 ◼   ► and now I feel kind of bad because I made this decision

00:42:27 ◼   ► and now what am I doing here? So that's been working quite well for me. But I've been in

00:42:34 ◼   ► the situation where I'm texting you or texting John and be like, "So what's going on on Twitter

00:42:39 ◼   ► today?" And just, you know, it's strange.

00:42:42 ◼   ► Yeah, so I think that this isn't going to help you ultimately in the long run where,

00:42:47 ◼   ► like, you're setting these limits and you're just like, "Give me that fix, man. Give me

00:42:50 ◼   ► the fix. What's happening?"

00:42:52 ◼   ► No, I just mean like if something, for example, one of my articles got linked on Daring Fireball

00:42:59 ◼   ► the other day and Jon was like, "Did you see this on Twitter?"

00:43:02 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh no, thanks.

00:43:04 ◼   ► I had no idea."

00:43:07 ◼   ► I should have like a Twitter butler, someone who searches Twitter for things that are of

00:43:13 ◼   ► interest to me and gives me an off-Twitter summary of things that I may be interested

00:43:20 ◼   ► in checking out because my when my app limit is on so that's...

00:43:24 ◼   ► People would like to apply for that job how do they do it?

00:43:27 ◼   ► They can send a resume to Steven.

00:43:30 ◼   ► Oh no.

00:43:32 ◼   ► With the Twitter butler for Tichi it's the TBT the Twitter butler for Tichi that's what

00:43:38 ◼   ► it stands for.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Hashtag TBT if you want if you would like to apply just send out a tweet with the hashtag

00:43:44 ◼   ► TBT and that's how you apply for this job it's very easy to do.

00:43:49 ◼   ► So is beta 2 good for me to put on my iPhone?

00:43:57 ◼   ► Yes, I think so. I mean, are you gonna travel soon? Probably. You're always traveling.

00:44:13 ◼   ► I think it's fine. I mean, I traveled from the US back to Italy with Beta 1, and as long

00:44:20 ◼   ► as you reboot your phone every couple of days, I think you're gonna be totally fine.

00:44:25 ◼   ► I mean, I expect that I'll be on Beta 3 before I go anywhere again. Right? Like, I expect

00:44:31 ◼   ► probably another Beta to drop before I need to travel anywhere.

00:44:34 ◼   ► Honestly, I don't want to be the guy that on a podcast says "You're totally fine with

00:44:40 ◼   ► beta you should put the beta and then something happens and I'm the guy who told you to put

00:44:44 ◼   ► the beta on your main phone. But I can tell you from my personal experience that it's

00:44:48 ◼   ► been totally okay and actually it's been better than iOS 11 in terms of performance and battery

00:44:54 ◼   ► life and just general stability. Wait, your performance on the beta so far, including

00:45:02 ◼   ► battery life, has been better than your performance than iOS 11 was or from the beta?

00:45:07 ◼   ► Yes, totally. No, no, no. From iOS 11. Yeah, totally. It's so much better.

00:45:12 ◼   ► That's so weird. Okay, fine.

00:45:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean...

00:45:16 ◼   ► Maybe I'm going to do it.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Yeah. What I would suggest is do not get anywhere close to, you know, anywhere near the WatchOS 5 beta.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Oh, I never... I've never ever installed a WatchOS beta.

00:45:30 ◼   ► Yeah, that seems like a recipe for disaster.

00:45:32 ◼   ► disaster. Yeah, I've been running into some really fun problems such as the workout app

00:45:39 ◼   ► not counting calories anymore during a workout or showing me the right BPM. I can't believe

00:45:47 ◼   ► you actually installed WatchOS 5 considering how important it is to you to get that tracking

00:45:51 ◼   ► information these days. Yeah, never again. I made a terrible mistake and I actually told

00:45:57 ◼   ► Sylvia about this, like, "Did I tell you what I did?" She's like, "No, what have you done?"

00:46:03 ◼   ► So I put the bot choice beta on my watch, and so she was like, "What's the problem?

00:46:07 ◼   ► Don't you always put betas on your devices?" And then I explained that there was a bug

00:46:12 ◼   ► with the workout app and not counting calories and basically forcing me to stop my workout

00:46:16 ◼   ► and resume the workout all the time, and she just said, "Well, there you go, you're stupid."

00:46:21 ◼   ► So that's, I mean, funny enough, she's right, I was stupid.

00:46:26 ◼   ► She's right. I mean she has a point so never again, never again watch us beat us.

00:46:34 ◼   ► There was no shortcuts app yet, we were hoping the shortcuts app would show, it still may,

00:46:40 ◼   ► but nothing yet. I was wondering though, because you can set up Siri shortcuts, so I was wondering

00:46:47 ◼   ► if you have set any up yet and if you're using them.

00:46:50 ◼   ► I have some of them on my, I mean just the basic ones, the custom phrases.

00:46:57 ◼   ► Actually even added a new one today.

00:46:59 ◼   ► So I have in my show, I have five custom shortcuts.

00:47:05 ◼   ► Now the page is not loading, which is interesting.

00:47:08 ◼   ► So anyway, there we go.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Okay, I got from the top, coffee time, which turns on a scene that turns

00:47:20 ◼   ► on my coffee maker. So I have this device which is a Wemo switch that is connected to

00:47:26 ◼   ► my espresso machine and before people ask it's a Saeko Poemia coffee machine you can

00:47:32 ◼   ► find it on Amazon. I know people are gonna ask so I will give you the link Myke or Steven

00:47:37 ◼   ► I will find the link and give it to you because people are gonna want to know which one I

00:47:41 ◼   ► use.

00:47:42 ◼   ► I found it.

00:47:43 ◼   ► Okay there you go. Is it silver?

00:47:45 ◼   ► No it's black.

00:47:47 ◼   ► No, I need to give you the link.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Anyway, coffee time triggers a HomeKit scene that--

00:47:55 ◼   ► so I don't have to say, Siri, turn on the coffee maker.

00:47:59 ◼   ► I can just say, coffee time, and it works.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Actually, I tested this today, and it works with the HomePod

00:48:05 ◼   ► already, even though the HomePod gives me an error message that

00:48:10 ◼   ► says, personal requests need to be enabled on this device.

00:48:13 ◼   ► But actually, it triggers the scene.

00:48:15 ◼   ► So thanks for-- your error is misplaced in this case,

00:48:21 ◼   ► because you actually did what I asked you to do.

00:48:23 ◼   ► Is there a beta for the HomePod?

00:48:26 ◼   ► No.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Does the HomePod get updated with your phone?

00:48:28 ◼   ► Nope.

00:48:29 ◼   ► It doesn't.

00:48:29 ◼   ► It just kind of knows about this.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Well, because it's the-- I think it's going back to the phone,

00:48:36 ◼   ► and the phone knows what to do.

00:48:37 ◼   ► But the HomePod says, oh my god, I

00:48:39 ◼   ► don't know what I'm doing here.

00:48:40 ◼   ► So it just gives you this error.

00:48:43 ◼   ► Show me the review.

00:48:44 ◼   ► it's my second shortcut. It opens the review.md markdown document for my iOS 12

00:48:51 ◼   ► review in Dropbox. Which I thought was fun.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Is that the place you want to open it?

00:48:57 ◼   ► No, but it's the only one that supports shortcuts right now.

00:49:02 ◼   ► I was playing with it and I was like, "Wah!" I mean, sure.

00:49:05 ◼   ► No, dude, just write that thing in Notes. You'll be fine.

00:49:08 ◼   ► >> Yeah, sure. Stop my timers,

00:49:12 ◼   ► opens workflow and the stop timers workflow that I have.

00:49:17 ◼   ► So whatever is running in toggle stops the toggle timer.

00:49:23 ◼   ► >> You move back to toggle?

00:49:24 ◼   ► >> No, that's a different topic for another time.

00:49:27 ◼   ► >> Got you.

00:49:27 ◼   ► >> Save it for next week.

00:49:29 ◼   ► Check my links, opens this note that I keep in Apple Notes.

00:49:35 ◼   ► It's a general storage place for links that I come across, and it's actually called "link storage".

00:49:42 ◼   ► So just random links of things that I need to check out at some point, and I made a shortcut that says "check my links".

00:49:49 ◼   ► So it opens the note. And finally, "Text the guys", which opens the iMessage thread that

00:49:55 ◼   ► the three of us and John Voorhees shared together, so we can talk about, you know, our jobs and

00:50:03 ◼   ► What making fun of John's Memoji?

00:50:06 ◼   ► You know the usual

00:50:08 ◼   ► The everyday stuff the everyday stuff so text the guys opens our iMessage thread

00:50:14 ◼   ► And these are my five shortcuts. I expect to be setting up a ton of these once I get the shortcuts app

00:50:20 ◼   ► Is this?

00:50:23 ◼   ► Is it something you feel like you're playing with a lot because it's new or you are already finding that it is beneficial to?

00:50:31 ◼   ► have these available to you via voice?

00:50:33 ◼   ► The the coffee one and the timer one and the iMessage one are

00:50:41 ◼   ► These are useful. The other two I just set them up because I was playing with it

00:50:46 ◼   ► So I don't think I have a good grip on whether this is actually useful or not. And it's also kind of

00:50:52 ◼   ► Like the automation that I want to set up

00:50:55 ◼   ► will be useful once I get the shortcuts up

00:50:58 ◼   ► and once I get full support with the HomePod

00:51:00 ◼   ► and the Siri watch face.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Right now, and there's people saying,

00:51:03 ◼   ► "Oh, shortcuts are already changing the way

00:51:05 ◼   ► that I interact with my phone."

00:51:07 ◼   ► I can kind of believe that,

00:51:09 ◼   ► but also I don't think we've seen

00:51:11 ◼   ► the real potential of this yet,

00:51:13 ◼   ► because first of all, apps need to reconsider

00:51:17 ◼   ► how they integrate with the basic Siri shortcut stuff.

00:51:21 ◼   ► So the user activity stuff and the SiriKit intents,

00:51:25 ◼   ► What we see today is a super small glimpse

00:51:29 ◼   ► of the things we'll see in September

00:51:31 ◼   ► with actual support from developers

00:51:34 ◼   ► and the shortcuts app on our devices.

00:51:37 ◼   ► So right now, sure, maybe a couple of them are kind of useful

00:51:40 ◼   ► but also I know that I'm just setting them up

00:51:42 ◼   ► because it kind of works

00:51:44 ◼   ► but it's not the real deal right now.

00:51:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, cool.

00:51:49 ◼   ► - All right, so that's Beta 2.

00:51:50 ◼   ► We'll find out next week if I've installed it.

00:51:53 ◼   ► I think I was more inclined to be on the dev track than the public track anyway,

00:51:59 ◼   ► because I figure if I'm going to do it, I at least want to have the most

00:52:02 ◼   ► up to date features, but we'll see. We'll see.

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00:54:39 ◼   ► So I think it's about time for our weekly picks, right?

00:54:41 ◼   ► weekly segment, the weekly picks that we do here on The Prompt every single week.

00:54:45 ◼   ► Weekly picks.

00:54:46 ◼   ► I'm going to start. I've picked three things today. We're going to do this round robin,

00:54:51 ◼   ► of course, and they're very different things. And the first thing that I want to talk about

00:54:55 ◼   ► is an iOS game called Pocket Run Pool. It is a wonderful game by the amazing independent

00:55:03 ◼   ► game developer, Zach Gage, who is responsible for flip-flop solitaire, really bad chess,

00:55:08 ◼   ► and now Pocket Ron Paul is another outing like this, it is a pool game, but like every

00:55:14 ◼   ► Zach Gage game it has a fresh take on a known game type. So for example in Pocket Ron Paul

00:55:21 ◼   ► you're not trying to like go up the scale in pool to like either get for the higher point balls just

00:55:30 ◼   ► by looking at the color of them or you're not playing against anyone. What happens is every

00:55:35 ◼   ► ball has a number attached to it and the pockets have multipliers and they go from like 2 to

00:55:42 ◼   ► 10 I think and it goes around the table and basically what you have to do is score the

00:55:45 ◼   ► highest score so really you need to hit every single ball into the 10 times multiplier pocket

00:55:51 ◼   ► to get the maximum score. That's the standard game then there are different game modes there's

00:55:56 ◼   ► a high stakes one where you get different conditions that are added to the game and

00:56:01 ◼   ► you bet money, like not real money, well it actually can end up being real money, but you

00:56:06 ◼   ► bet credits which you can then use in-app purchase for to get more credits and if you do remove ads

00:56:10 ◼   ► you get a bunch of credits or something. And they also have an instant tournament where every day

00:56:14 ◼   ► there's like, you can go into an instant tournament where they just set a table and you have to just

00:56:20 ◼   ► try and score the highest you can and there's winners for that. I love this game, for a few

00:56:27 ◼   ► weeks I was like top in the world at the standard mode just gonna say no bragging

00:56:34 ◼   ► and I'm up there now still because I have you can the maximum score you can

00:56:40 ◼   ► get is 800 like that's so you've you've hit every ball into the 10 times

00:56:44 ◼   ► multiplier and you've not lost any lives I did that twice so my top scoring game

00:56:50 ◼   ► center was listed as 802 and a couple of weeks after the game launched is that

00:56:55 ◼   ► gage tweeted "oh I can't believe people have done this" and I was like "oh that's me!"

00:56:59 ◼   ► So I like this game a lot and I'm good at it. As Steven knows, I'm very good at iOS

00:57:04 ◼   ► based pool games.

00:57:05 ◼   ► It's true, what's the one that we play all the time?

00:57:08 ◼   ► Well, okay, so we used to play Game Pigeon, which is an iMessage game, and we played the

00:57:15 ◼   ► Game Pigeon pool game for many months and Steven never beat me.

00:57:20 ◼   ► Very good at it.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Now, now we play, if Steven ever instigates a game with me, we play Battleship, which

00:57:27 ◼   ► I'm very bad at.

00:57:29 ◼   ► So I have noticed over the last few months that whenever Steven sends me a game, it's

00:57:34 ◼   ► always Battleship.

00:57:37 ◼   ► Never pool anymore.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Yeah, it is.

00:57:39 ◼   ► Weird.

00:57:40 ◼   ► But that's a fun app though, Game Pigeon.

00:57:41 ◼   ► I like that.

00:57:42 ◼   ► It is fun.

00:57:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:44 ◼   ► But it's not a weekly pick.

00:57:45 ◼   ► It's not a weekly pick.

00:57:46 ◼   ► Well, not yet.

00:57:47 ◼   ► Ignore that.

00:57:48 ◼   ► Forget I ever said it.

00:57:49 ◼   ► It's trash.

00:57:50 ◼   ► So that's my first pick, Pocket Rumple.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Alright, so I'm up next and my first weekly pick is Lear, which I believe is French for

00:58:03 ◼   ► to read, I think.

00:58:06 ◼   ► It's an RSS client and it's one of the best ones on iOS.

00:58:10 ◼   ► Honestly, if you're looking for a powerful RSS reader on iOS that supports all the major

00:58:16 ◼   ► services these days, there's two options for you.

00:58:18 ◼   ► One of them is Fiery Feeds and the other is LIR.

00:58:21 ◼   ► And LIR, I like it because it's got the iOS 11 design style that looks really nice on

00:58:26 ◼   ► both the iPhone and iPad.

00:58:28 ◼   ► And recently, the developer of LIR took inspiration from Fiery Feeds and the old F.E.V.E.R.

00:58:37 ◼   ► self-hosted service to implement a feature called Hotlinks, which Fiery Feeds also has,

00:58:43 ◼   ► and Calm Feeds, which is the opposite.

00:58:46 ◼   ► So with hotlinks, it's a way, sort of like a nozzle, but for RSS, to see a summary of

00:58:54 ◼   ► the links that everybody is talking about in your subscriptions.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And you get this view where you can see the actual link and the articles that mention

00:59:05 ◼   ► the link.

00:59:07 ◼   ► And column feeds is a way to determine which websites that do not publish often you want

00:59:13 ◼   ► to see in this view.

00:59:14 ◼   ► So for example, at Mac stories, we

00:59:16 ◼   ► may publish a couple of posts per day.

00:59:19 ◼   ► And if two items per day fits your definition of a column

00:59:22 ◼   ► feed, you will see Mac stories in here, or I don't know,

00:59:25 ◼   ► six colors, or dating fiber.

00:59:26 ◼   ► You know, these blogs that don't have the verge,

00:59:29 ◼   ► like 25 articles a day, you will see them in this view.

00:59:33 ◼   ► So these are two convenient ways to sort of break down

00:59:37 ◼   ► your subscriptions into different types that are not

00:59:40 ◼   ► necessarily based on folders.

00:59:43 ◼   ► Also I like the fact that LIR looks nicer than Fiery Feeds.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And it's got the drop bar on the iPad, I think on the iPhone too, so it kinda, again, inspired

00:59:57 ◼   ► by Bear in this case, you know, you can pick up multiple articles in your subscription

01:00:01 ◼   ► list and you can drop them on this floating bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.

01:00:07 ◼   ► And once you drop them there, you can take action, of course, on those.

01:00:11 ◼   ► You should always take action. That's a reference.

01:00:15 ◼   ► You can copy them, you can share them, you can mark them all as read at once.

01:00:20 ◼   ► So that's also another interesting feature.

01:00:23 ◼   ► The only problem maybe with Lear that I know Steven mentioned before is that the text view is kind of janky.

01:00:29 ◼   ► I don't think the text extraction feature is as good as Fiery Feeds or others.

01:00:35 ◼   ► but overall, Lear looks really nice.

01:00:39 ◼   ► The hotlinks and column feeds features

01:00:41 ◼   ► are really convenient and if you haven't looked

01:00:44 ◼   ► at Lear in a while, because I think I wrote

01:00:47 ◼   ► about this a few months ago on Mac Sorrys,

01:00:50 ◼   ► it's worth a look again.

01:00:51 ◼   ► So that's my first pick.

01:00:53 ◼   ► - Mine is gonna be a Mac app that I use

01:00:57 ◼   ► almost every single day.

01:00:59 ◼   ► It's a free app written by Marco Arment called Forecast

01:01:02 ◼   ► And if you edit podcasts, this is admittedly a smaller target

01:01:06 ◼   ► than a pool game.

01:01:08 ◼   ► But if you edit podcasts, it's a tool worth having.

01:01:10 ◼   ► So you can export away from something like Logic

01:01:13 ◼   ► and drop it in.

01:01:14 ◼   ► And it will convert it to MP3.

01:01:17 ◼   ► You can set the bit rate.

01:01:19 ◼   ► It's multi-threaded.

01:01:19 ◼   ► So if you have something like an iMac Pro, for instance,

01:01:22 ◼   ► it's very fast because it splits that out

01:01:24 ◼   ► over all the possible cores.

01:01:28 ◼   ► And you can manage your chapters.

01:01:29 ◼   ► So the way that I edit, I drop markers in Logic

01:01:32 ◼   ► for all the chapters, and then I name them in Logic,

01:01:35 ◼   ► and that gets transferred via the WAV file into forecast.

01:01:39 ◼   ► But if I, for instance, want to set chapter art,

01:01:41 ◼   ► or have a link in the chapter name,

01:01:43 ◼   ► or if I made a typo in Logic, I want to fix it,

01:01:46 ◼   ► I can do all of that in forecast,

01:01:48 ◼   ► and then save the MP3 out to my drive,

01:01:52 ◼   ► to upload to the server or whatever.

01:01:54 ◼   ► So it's one of those things that you don't need this

01:01:57 ◼   ► to produce a podcast, but if it fits into your workflow,

01:02:01 ◼   ► it makes things a lot nicer and a lot quicker

01:02:06 ◼   ► than dealing with Logic's MP3 export,

01:02:08 ◼   ► which can be a little buggy sometimes.

01:02:10 ◼   ► So I was excited to play with this in the beta,

01:02:12 ◼   ► and like I said, it's something that I use every single day.

01:02:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, I do too.

01:02:16 ◼   ► I love forecast.

01:02:17 ◼   ► Even just the speed of the MP3 encoding makes it,

01:02:22 ◼   ► even if I have a show that doesn't have chapters in it,

01:02:24 ◼   ► I'll still always run it through forecast

01:02:26 ◼   ► because it's so much quicker than having Logic do the MP3 encoding.

01:02:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:32 ◼   ► So it's really, really great.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Am I next?

01:02:36 ◼   ► Yes.

01:02:37 ◼   ► You are.

01:02:38 ◼   ► Well, something's happened, though, in the document.

01:02:41 ◼   ► I mean, I should be next, right?

01:02:43 ◼   ► Why am I all the way down here?

01:02:45 ◼   ► What have you done, Myke?

01:02:46 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:02:47 ◼   ► I didn't do it.

01:02:48 ◼   ► Just follow the doc.

01:02:49 ◼   ► Oh, gosh.

01:02:50 ◼   ► Something-- no, I am following the doc.

01:02:51 ◼   ► And it's Federico.

01:02:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:53 ◼   ► It's an interior round robin, so it rotates each time we go around.

01:02:57 ◼   ► Jeez, what are you doing to us?

01:02:59 ◼   ► This is not the way it's supposed to be.

01:03:01 ◼   ► This isn't how round robins work.

01:03:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like it.

01:03:06 ◼   ► My second pick is Codex.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Codex is like a lighter version of Sublime Text for iOS.

01:03:16 ◼   ► It's a text and code editor for the iPhone and iPad

01:03:20 ◼   ► iPad that has been modeled after Sublime Text, which is the popular editor for Mac and Windows,

01:03:27 ◼   ► and Chrome, I don't know, Mac and Windows is what I'm gonna say, Linux maybe? I don't

01:03:33 ◼   ► know.

01:03:34 ◼   ► It's got all the features that you know from Sublime Text, except plugins. So you have

01:03:39 ◼   ► extremely customizable keyboard shortcuts. You can go into the settings and customize

01:03:43 ◼   ► everything that the app can do. You have features such as multiple cursors. This is one of the

01:03:49 ◼   ► best features from Sublime Text that I remember. Back in the day when I used to use a Mac for

01:03:56 ◼   ► work, there was a period of time, sort of like a year, I think, that I used to write

01:04:01 ◼   ► in Sublime Text and I actually made my own plugins for Sublime Text. That was my first

01:04:08 ◼   ► experiments with JSON, you know, and writing...

01:04:12 ◼   ► Snow?

01:04:13 ◼   ► I experimented with JSON, Myke, which is not creepy at all.

01:04:19 ◼   ► Multiple... Jesus Christ.

01:04:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I was JSON curious, so that's why I wrote my plugins.

01:04:29 ◼   ► You can place multiple cursors in the text editor,

01:04:38 ◼   ► which is really useful if you're doing things like...

01:04:41 ◼   ► I mean, if you're editing code and you want to change a character on multiple lines, but

01:04:45 ◼   ► also if you're writing prose and markdown, for example, you may want to turn list into

01:04:50 ◼   ► an ordered list.

01:04:52 ◼   ► So you can use multiple cursors to add multiple asterisks on different lines.

01:04:56 ◼   ► You also can have multiple selections, which is useful because if you want to replace a

01:05:00 ◼   ► word and you don't want to, I don't know, for example, you don't want to use regular

01:05:04 ◼   ► expressions to search for the same word in the entire document, you can just highlight

01:05:09 ◼   ► a word and then say "highlight all the different repetitions of this word in the same document"

01:05:18 ◼   ► and then you can act upon them all at once. You have a built-in "find and replace with

01:05:23 ◼   ► rejects" if you want to get dirty and write your own regular expressions to search for

01:05:28 ◼   ► something. You have commands such as "select the next occurrence of this selection" or

01:05:34 ◼   ► or find other, you know, the one that I mentioned, find other occurrences of the same selection.

01:05:40 ◼   ► You have shortcuts on the iPad, you have an external keyboard to open and close the current

01:05:45 ◼   ► document and Codex is actually taking advantage of the iOS 11 document browser so that you

01:05:52 ◼   ► can open any text file with any syntax from any other location from the Files app, which

01:05:57 ◼   ► is really convenient because this lets me, for example, save a text file into working

01:06:02 ◼   ► copy, which is my GitHub client on iOS, and then use codecs to edit in Markdown, just

01:06:09 ◼   ► by opening the working copy location and selecting a text file. You have a mini-map, just like

01:06:14 ◼   ► Sublime Text on the right side of the screen, there's a mini-map that shows you the structure

01:06:18 ◼   ► of the entire document, and it follows your scrolling position, so it updates in real

01:06:22 ◼   ► time. Really, if you write code on an iPad, or if you're crazy enough to want to edit

01:06:30 ◼   ► markdown or HTML, you know, if you're writing for the web and want to have a code editor

01:06:37 ◼   ► to do that, which sounds crazy but believe me, kind of makes sense once you use it. Codex

01:06:42 ◼   ► I think is the best option on iOS right now and I'm pretty sure that it's still free,

01:06:47 ◼   ► which is crazy because the guy that makes the app just wanted to have a sublime text

01:06:52 ◼   ► counterpart for himself and he just kind of released it on the App Store. So I think it's

01:06:56 ◼   ► awesome. It's codex with a K. So that's my second pick.

01:07:01 ◼   ► What are you using it for?

01:07:03 ◼   ► Really, it's awesome for editing markdown. For example, when somebody sends me like a

01:07:09 ◼   ► Word document for an interview and I select a text from the Word document and I paste

01:07:14 ◼   ► it in a text file, usually there's a bunch of weird characters that are still in the

01:07:19 ◼   ► document. So I can use rejects or I can use multiple selections to clean up the document

01:07:24 ◼   ► manually. So that's really useful. But also just to edit, you know, when there's something

01:07:30 ◼   ► that is syntax heavy, lots of links or lots of lists, lots of formatting going on. I prefer

01:07:37 ◼   ► to do this in an actual code editor, that in something like Ulysses, which does weird

01:07:42 ◼   ► things to my markdown.

01:07:44 ◼   ► It's an app I had no idea existed on iOS.

01:07:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I feel like Federico, your picks are like, they're good, but so far I've been pretty

01:07:52 ◼   ► like skill, I've never heard of either of the applications that you've picked today,

01:07:56 ◼   ► so I guess that's pretty good, I guess that's what this weekly segment is here for.

01:07:59 ◼   ► This is why we do the segment every week. It's every week every five years. That's how

01:08:06 ◼   ► it works.

01:08:07 ◼   ► This is good. That's the most ultimate round robin.

01:08:11 ◼   ► Steven, you're up for some reason.

01:08:16 ◼   ► I'm going to pick solver. So this is a great app for both Mac and iOS. And it uses iCloud

01:08:22 ◼   ► sync. So you can have a document open that you're working on your Mac, and then you need

01:08:26 ◼   ► to reference it later on iOS or vice versa. It's all there all the time, which is really

01:08:30 ◼   ► great. And it's it's like a mix between a calculator and a spreadsheet. So I use it

01:08:36 ◼   ► a bunch for work. And I'll do something like I'll have an amount, and then I need to deduct

01:08:41 ◼   ► several amounts from it. And in a spreadsheet, you could just go out to the cell next to

01:08:45 ◼   ► and say, OK, this expense is Federico.

01:08:47 ◼   ► This expense is Myke.

01:08:48 ◼   ► This expense is John.

01:08:49 ◼   ► But in Solver, you can do that just as text.

01:08:53 ◼   ► So you can do like 100 minus 50, and then a parentheses, Myke,

01:08:57 ◼   ► minus 18 parentheses Federico.

01:08:59 ◼   ► So it's an easy way to visually parse what you're doing.

01:09:02 ◼   ► And it does some parsing with some colors and some layout

01:09:05 ◼   ► stuff to make it really easy.

01:09:07 ◼   ► It's not the most powerful calculator app out there.

01:09:11 ◼   ► But I don't need that.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Most of the time, I just need something

01:09:14 ◼   ► sort of like quick with some notes attached to it. And so Solver has really become something

01:09:19 ◼   ► I use on a very regular basis in sort of like the administration side of Relay FM. And it's

01:09:25 ◼   ► pretty awesome. So podcast editing and calculating so far is where my picks live.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I'm picking a feature of an application. I'm going to pick Spark 2's team features. This

01:09:42 ◼   ► This is something we spoke about a few weeks ago about Spark 2, and they updated the app

01:09:48 ◼   ► to add a bunch of team email sharing stuff.

01:09:51 ◼   ► On the whole, I do not like Spark the application.

01:09:54 ◼   ► I don't like the design.

01:09:57 ◼   ► I love the design on the Mac.

01:09:58 ◼   ► It looks nice and professional on the Mac.

01:10:00 ◼   ► Not so much on iOS that still has this weird UI that I'm not a big fan of.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I don't like...

01:10:07 ◼   ► I like that they have a bunch of customization options but don't have great ways of surfacing

01:10:12 ◼   ► them. Like for example, if I swipe on a message, I can only do a select amount of actions.

01:10:18 ◼   ► Well what I would really like is to pop up a menu with all of the possible actions, right?

01:10:22 ◼   ► Like I can have this on airmail, but you can't do that. It has a bunch of things in it that

01:10:27 ◼   ► like just general UI weirdness in places, like sometimes I think things are really slow.

01:10:32 ◼   ► I hate the fact that you can't swipe on the full left edge to go back anywhere. All it does is just

01:10:38 ◼   ► swipe through your emails which nobody wants. There's a bunch of weird things this application

01:10:42 ◼   ► does but I have switched to Spark 2 for my email because the email sharing stuff is unbelievable

01:10:49 ◼   ► and has changed the way that I work. Being able to share email directly with my with our assistant,

01:10:56 ◼   ► with my sales assistant has changed the way that we work. We were typically either like,

01:11:02 ◼   ► I would forward something to her and I would go into Slack and be like, "Can you look at this

01:11:06 ◼   ► email or like give her some comment be like oh I sent this email to you or

01:11:10 ◼   ► create a PDF and share it in slack but now I just share the email directly and

01:11:14 ◼   ► type a comment I don't need to add any context because the context they're all

01:11:18 ◼   ► in line and then she will get future emails in that chain we can talk about

01:11:22 ◼   ► them then I can say hey can you fill out the spreadsheet that's attached to that

01:11:25 ◼   ► and send it back to me and she could just fill it out and then upload it

01:11:28 ◼   ► straight into spark I can take it attach it to the email and send it like it is

01:11:34 ◼   ► It's broken down some frustration barriers that we'd had in the way that we were communicating

01:11:40 ◼   ► about the things that we were receiving.

01:11:42 ◼   ► I absolutely love it.

01:11:46 ◼   ► We both love it.

01:11:47 ◼   ► We're so in on it.

01:11:50 ◼   ► And a huge thumbs up from me.

01:11:52 ◼   ► I will take the things that I get for that in front of me.

01:11:54 ◼   ► Because again, as I've said many times, there is no perfect...

01:11:57 ◼   ► No email apps are good.

01:11:59 ◼   ► There is always a problem.

01:12:00 ◼   ► They are all bad.

01:12:01 ◼   ► They are all bad in their own way.

01:12:03 ◼   ► And the way that Spark 2 is bad is different to the way that Air Mail is bad, but Spark

01:12:09 ◼   ► has features that are really good that other apps don't have.

01:12:14 ◼   ► So I'm all in on Spark 2 for now.

01:12:18 ◼   ► I just wished that they would make the iOS app look as clean and professional as the

01:12:26 ◼   ► Mac app does.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Like, it's just simple stuff.

01:12:30 ◼   ► The apps don't look that vastly different, but they do look different.

01:12:34 ◼   ► Am I wild on this one?

01:12:35 ◼   ► Do you guys agree with me on this?

01:12:37 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I think that makes sense.

01:12:40 ◼   ► I kind of agree with that. Yeah.

01:12:43 ◼   ► Like that. It's just some weirdness about like I can't even explain it.

01:12:46 ◼   ► But yeah, just for some reason, the iOS app feels like a toy in its design.

01:12:51 ◼   ► The Mac app feels professional in its design.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Sometimes the iOS version feels like I'm reading a PDF

01:12:59 ◼   ► instead of doing email.

01:13:00 ◼   ► I don't know how to describe it.

01:13:02 ◼   ► It doesn't feel like

01:13:03 ◼   ► doesn't feel like a managing

01:13:05 ◼   ► stuff.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Feels like I'm dealing with the PDF

01:13:09 ◼   ► viewer.

01:13:10 ◼   ► Which I hate that splash screen

01:13:12 ◼   ► too.

01:13:13 ◼   ► So, you know, when you open an

01:13:14 ◼   ► application and you get that, what

01:13:16 ◼   ► is that screen? It's got a name to

01:13:17 ◼   ► it, right? When what is that called

01:13:19 ◼   ► when you see a screen while the app

01:13:20 ◼   ► loading?

01:13:21 ◼   ► That's correct.

01:13:23 ◼   ► No, but there's a isn't there a

01:13:24 ◼   ► particular name in iOS for

01:13:26 ◼   ► apps like for this thing in

01:13:28 ◼   ► development because like you have to have one of these screens which typically just

01:13:32 ◼   ► show somebody's logo or whatever when an app's been loaded out of memory. I know it

01:13:36 ◼   ► as a name for it because I've heard people say it but Sparks is like really heavily

01:13:40 ◼   ► branded with like clouds and it's like lovely

01:13:43 ◼   ► The storyboard artwork?

01:13:44 ◼   ► Storyboard yeah I think that's it or launch whatever it's called but like Sparks is like

01:13:50 ◼   ► branded with like a clouds and a tagline like you don't need to sell the app to me

01:13:55 ◼   ► Why don't you like clouds Myke?

01:13:57 ◼   ► I mean, why don't you like clouds?

01:14:00 ◼   ► It's not necessary.

01:14:01 ◼   ► And it's like things like that where I'm like, why are you overbranding?

01:14:06 ◼   ► Their branding is too heavy and it doesn't work.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Like I said this, email apps should be clean.

01:14:12 ◼   ► They are professional environments.

01:14:13 ◼   ► I don't need clouds in my email app.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Like, we're good.

01:14:19 ◼   ► But yeah, I can't explain a lot of the frustrations

01:14:22 ◼   ► that I have other than the way that I've said them.

01:14:24 ◼   ► If this doesn't make any sense to you, then cool.

01:14:26 ◼   ► Like, email apps are very personal, I think.

01:14:29 ◼   ► And I love some of the-- I love the features

01:14:31 ◼   ► of this application.

01:14:32 ◼   ► I typically don't like the design of this application.

01:14:34 ◼   ► So-- but Spark 2, if you work with anyone,

01:14:37 ◼   ► you should check out their email stuff, because it's amazing.

01:14:40 ◼   ► They're sharing stuff.

01:14:41 ◼   ► So good.

01:14:42 ◼   ► All right, Steven, you're next now.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Yes.

01:14:45 ◼   ► You chose part of an app.

01:14:46 ◼   ► So I'm going to choose a piece of hardware.

01:14:49 ◼   ► And I've gotten a lot of questions about how

01:14:52 ◼   ► you should run the Mac OS beta.

01:14:54 ◼   ► And my answer is an external SSD.

01:14:56 ◼   ► so you don't have to partition your internal drive.

01:14:59 ◼   ► So if something goes wrong, you just reboot back to High Sierra

01:15:03 ◼   ► on your MacBook or whatever.

01:15:05 ◼   ► And I really like the Samsung T5 SSD.

01:15:08 ◼   ► It's a replacement to the older Samsung T3, which is still for sale,

01:15:11 ◼   ► and you get it a little bit cheaper, but it's a little bit slower.

01:15:14 ◼   ► And it's great.

01:15:15 ◼   ► It's super small.

01:15:17 ◼   ► It's lightweight.

01:15:17 ◼   ► It runs cool.

01:15:18 ◼   ► It doesn't get hot, even if you're running on it from hours.

01:15:21 ◼   ► And it has USB A and C cables in the box.

01:15:24 ◼   ► In fact, the connector on the SSD itself is USB-C,

01:15:28 ◼   ► so you can do straight USB-C all the way through to the SSD.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And you can get a 250 gig drive for like $100 on Amazon Prime.

01:15:37 ◼   ► So I know that's not no money, but external SSDs have really

01:15:42 ◼   ► come down in price.

01:15:43 ◼   ► And 250 gigs is way more than enough

01:15:45 ◼   ► to do something like running a Mac OS beta,

01:15:48 ◼   ► or even just having some really fast external storage.

01:15:51 ◼   ► I carry one that's mostly empty when we travel.

01:15:55 ◼   ► If I need to edit something and don't have a lot of room on my notebook, I can just put

01:15:59 ◼   ► it there and it's fast enough to edit from in Logic.

01:16:02 ◼   ► So I'm a big fan of it.

01:16:05 ◼   ► Really the size is what sells it.

01:16:07 ◼   ► It is, you guys remember the like the Squatty iPod Nano?

01:16:12 ◼   ► Remember that guy?

01:16:13 ◼   ► Like the sort of small short one?

01:16:16 ◼   ► It's about, I mean it's a little bit bigger than that, but that's like, put that in your

01:16:19 ◼   ► mind's eye.

01:16:20 ◼   ► much closer to that than a full two and a half inch

01:16:24 ◼   ► external hard drive.

01:16:25 ◼   ► And of course, much faster and silent and cool.

01:16:28 ◼   ► And if it falls out of your bag onto the floor or something,

01:16:33 ◼   ► it's not gonna break because there's no spinning parts.

01:16:36 ◼   ► I'm a big fan, so there'll be a link to that

01:16:38 ◼   ► in the show notes.

01:16:39 ◼   ► I've got several of them now, and I've had,

01:16:42 ◼   ► in fact the one that I'm using for Mojave,

01:16:44 ◼   ► I've had for several years, and it's always been rock solid.

01:16:48 ◼   ► I'm next and I am going to pick a Windows app called...

01:16:53 ◼   ► This is really going downhill. This is what we're not doing.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Streamlabs OBS. It is a... OBS is software that is open source that is used for game streaming.

01:17:07 ◼   ► So for streaming a computer. It's on the Mac as well.

01:17:11 ◼   ► There's a company called Streamlabs who have taken that and have built their own tools on top of it.

01:17:15 ◼   ► it's amazing. It has lots of settings, it's really easy to customize, it has lots of integration

01:17:21 ◼   ► so you can set up cool animations and stuff when people give you money on Twitch. It makes

01:17:26 ◼   ► it really, I love this, they have specific screens when you go live it changes the whole

01:17:30 ◼   ► interface so it can show you just the things that you need to see rather than the configuration

01:17:35 ◼   ► screen which the standard OBS has. So if you ever do any streaming of any kind with video

01:17:42 ◼   ► I recommend, well one, you have to have a PC, which you probably do if you're serious

01:17:46 ◼   ► about it, but I recommend checking out Streamlabs because it's a really nice improvement on

01:17:51 ◼   ► the standard OBS software.

01:17:53 ◼   ► I really like it, it's awesome.

01:17:55 ◼   ► I like it so much that I thought it was worth bringing here today, but it's a Windows app

01:18:00 ◼   ► so I'm not going to go into much more detail than that.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Is this what we used for our live show?

01:18:06 ◼   ► No, we used an app called Game Show, which is a Mac app.

01:18:09 ◼   ► is just on Windows and you would know if you were using OBS because OBS is a

01:18:15 ◼   ► dumpster fire on the Mac. Ah, gotcha. So my final pick is Drafts 5. I mentioned this

01:18:24 ◼   ► on the show. I believe it's Synco. Draft Synco. Draft Synco, yes. I believe

01:18:31 ◼   ► I talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago or last week I

01:18:35 ◼   ► mentioned it and then I had a link on Mac stories a few days ago. I'm looking

01:18:39 ◼   ► to draft Synco as a way to, as one of the possible apps where I will write my iOS 12

01:18:48 ◼   ► review this summer, which as I said I will not start writing until July, so I still have

01:18:53 ◼   ► a few...

01:18:54 ◼   ► This almost feels like it's an award, you know, like an Oscar or like a Nobel Prize

01:19:01 ◼   ► or something, like, which is the application that receives the glorious task of being the

01:19:08 ◼   ► Like, all the apps are lined up and they're waiting, and the winner is, right?

01:19:12 ◼   ► And this is like this big award show that Federico hosts where he announces the application

01:19:16 ◼   ► that he's going to use.

01:19:17 ◼   ► The winner is Apple Notes.

01:19:19 ◼   ► Kind of like a punishment, actually, because I'm going to bug the developer to add features

01:19:23 ◼   ► that I need.

01:19:24 ◼   ► But, yeah.

01:19:25 ◼   ► Don't be nice to tell him that in advance.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Give him the good feeling first.

01:19:28 ◼   ► So Draft Synchro is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

01:19:34 ◼   ► First of all, there are some problems in Ulysses that were never fully fixed by the developers.

01:19:41 ◼   ► Stuff like Ulysses just crashes on me sometimes when I'm using it in SplitView.

01:19:47 ◼   ► First of all, it hangs for like 30 seconds and it makes my iPad non-responsive, so I

01:19:53 ◼   ► cannot tap in Safari, I cannot scroll in Safari on the right side, and then eventually Ulysses

01:19:58 ◼   ► crashes and everything crashes along with Ulysses.

01:20:03 ◼   ► And I reported these bugs, they were never fully fixed, and now there's some problems

01:20:07 ◼   ► with iOS 12, so I'm like, "Eh, maybe I should look into something else."

01:20:11 ◼   ► But also the bigger theme is that I miss the traditional markdown environment of editorial,

01:20:20 ◼   ► but I don't want to use editorial, because I don't think the app is going anywhere at

01:20:24 ◼   ► this point.

01:20:25 ◼   ► And I feel like for my review, we've talked about this split process that I have of first

01:20:32 ◼   ► the writing part and then moving into an editor. And I feel like maybe with DraftSync, maybe

01:20:38 ◼   ► there's a way to unify these two aspects and have a single environment where I can do both

01:20:44 ◼   ► at the same time so that I don't have to switch contexts and apps sometime in September. And

01:20:54 ◼   ► this is the way that I used to do these reviews, actually. I used to write them in editorial,

01:20:59 ◼   ► like the same text editor for a couple of months.

01:21:02 ◼   ► And it worked great, and my life was normal,

01:21:04 ◼   ► and I wasn't super stressed out.

01:21:06 ◼   ► So maybe I should look into this again.

01:21:08 ◼   ► And the features of Draft Synch that I'm considering

01:21:11 ◼   ► for this kind of usage are primarily workspaces,

01:21:16 ◼   ► which is a way to create like a separate workspace

01:21:19 ◼   ► in the app.

01:21:20 ◼   ► So I can say in this view, I just wanna see the notes

01:21:24 ◼   ► that have been tagged iOS 12.

01:21:27 ◼   ► And these are the notes for my review.

01:21:28 ◼   ► So I can switch between workspaces with one tap,

01:21:32 ◼   ► and I can tie specific action groups to the workspace.

01:21:36 ◼   ► So for example, in my iOS 12 review workspace,

01:21:39 ◼   ► I can default to loading my writing actions, stuff

01:21:43 ◼   ► for like adding links or adding footnotes,

01:21:46 ◼   ► so writing-related actions.

01:21:49 ◼   ► And one of these actions that I already built,

01:21:51 ◼   ► that I'm going to share on Cloud Maxories this week,

01:21:54 ◼   ► is because I'm now doing draft sections for the workflow

01:21:58 ◼   ► corner section of the newsletter.

01:22:01 ◼   ► It's a single action that backs up a document

01:22:04 ◼   ► in three different places.

01:22:07 ◼   ► So I can end up with a copy of the review in iCloud Drive,

01:22:11 ◼   ► in Dropbox, and in working copy, so that I

01:22:14 ◼   ► have three different locations to back up the review

01:22:16 ◼   ► that I'm working on.

01:22:17 ◼   ► And also, I've been working on--

01:22:21 ◼   ► this action is based on the idea of I can keep separate notes,

01:22:25 ◼   ► and I can tag them with the same tag, but then I can also generate a single copy containing

01:22:32 ◼   ► all these nodes, which is basically what screen reader would say "compiling the draft".

01:22:37 ◼   ► I can do the same in Draft Synco, thanks to JavaScript.

01:22:41 ◼   ► So I'm looking into that, and the only problem that I have is that I still believe that Draft

01:22:48 ◼   ► Synco should be more accessible in terms of automation.

01:22:53 ◼   ► I think it's too reliant on JavaScript and on coding your own actions.

01:22:57 ◼   ► I would love to see JAFS take the path of editorial and workflow shortcuts of more visual

01:23:05 ◼   ► actions, more visual modules.

01:23:08 ◼   ► Even stuff like setting variables.

01:23:10 ◼   ► I don't think you can do that with a visual action in JAFS.

01:23:13 ◼   ► You need to do that in JavaScript, which is crazy.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And I can do it, and I'm gonna do it if I need to.

01:23:19 ◼   ► I don't think it's the best way to do it, though.

01:23:21 ◼   ► I think I'd love to see drafts take inspiration from editorial, from that point of view.

01:23:30 ◼   ► That said, I love the fact that the development of Draft Synco is now extremely fast because

01:23:37 ◼   ► of the subscription model that allows Greg Pierce to iterate on the app more quickly

01:23:41 ◼   ► because people keep paying for the app.

01:23:45 ◼   ► And I plan on reporting back on my experiments and my decision in a few weeks on Connected.

01:23:54 ◼   ► Which is going to be our new show after the prompt.

01:23:59 ◼   ► The prompt is happening today again and we're going to have a show called Connected.

01:24:04 ◼   ► It's still going to be the three of us, but it's got a new name, new artwork.

01:24:08 ◼   ► So if you're just coming to the prompt today, the prompt is over.

01:24:11 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:24:12 ◼   ► And it's kind of weird because we're starting connected at episode 199, but I just felt

01:24:19 ◼   ► like the right thing to do.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, it does.

01:24:22 ◼   ► So that's my final pick.

01:24:24 ◼   ► There you go.

01:24:25 ◼   ► All right, well we've done it.

01:24:26 ◼   ► We finished an episode of our podcast.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Hooray.

01:24:30 ◼   ► Yeah, the prompt is over.

01:24:33 ◼   ► If you want to find links to stuff we talked about today, you can do so in your podcast

01:24:37 ◼   ► app of choice are on the website relay.fm/connected/198. While you're there you can get in touch via

01:24:44 ◼   ► email or you can find us all on Twitter. You can find Myke there as I-M-Y-K-E and Myke

01:24:50 ◼   ► is the host of a bunch of shows. You can check those out at relay.fm/shows. If you like this

01:24:58 ◼   ► show, I bet you will find some other stuff there that you would enjoy as well. You can

01:25:02 ◼   ► You can find Federico on Twitter as @vitici, and he is the editor-in-chief of maxstories.net,

01:25:11 ◼   ► which has a light and a dark mode.

01:25:13 ◼   ► It's very, very fancy over there.

01:25:17 ◼   ► You can find me on Twitter as ismh at 512pixels.net and 512pixels over on YouTube.

01:25:24 ◼   ► Until our next episode, gentlemen, say goodbye.

01:25:27 ◼   ► Adios.

01:25:28 ◼   ► Adios.