100: Tepid Takes
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(upbeat music)
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- From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode number 100.
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Today's show is brought to you by 123 Notetaker.
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My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined, as always,
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by Mr. Federico Vatici.
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Ciao Federico.
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- Ciao Myke, how are you today?
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- I'm great, thanks, Tixi.
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And I'm also joined by your friend and mine,
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Mr. Steven Hackett.
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Howdy Steven.
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- Howdy Myke.
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I'm so excited for today's episode
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that we should just jump straight into follow-up.
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But first let me boot one of my 13 iMacs
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so I can really get the flavor of this ancient K-base.
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And speaking of K-base, this ancient K-base is actually--
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(upbeat music)
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- From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 100.
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Today's show is brought to you by Hover
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and TextExpander from Smile.
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My name is Myke Hurley and guys, we did it.
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Mr. Steven Hackett, congratulations on episode 100.
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- Feels pretty good, right?
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Nice round number.
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- We finally made it to a 100.
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- Yeah, the prompt in, never did that.
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- Nope, we did now.
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Federico, you are here too, 100 episodes under our belt.
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- Yeah, I'm really happy it doesn't seem real.
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It's a big milestone, guys.
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I feel like we're podcast professionals at this point.
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We are people familiar with the matter of podcasting
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because we reach 100 episodes so congrats, cheers and let's do the show.
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The clap scores are going up, I can feel it.
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Is this the last episode or are we still going to carry on?
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No, we're still going.
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Are we still friends even after 100 episodes?
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I don't know, it's like you know when you watch a TV show like Friends, right, and it's
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a really long running thing and you end up becoming so attached to them that you wish
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they were friends.
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Or like the Mythbusters, you know the Mythbusters weren't friends and it always makes me sad
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to think that. So I feel like we should just leave an air of mystery around it and just
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not let anybody know if we're friends or not. Maybe we're just super professionals and we're
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just really good at acting like we're friends.
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That's kind of sad but I can live with it, okay.
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I mean one of the reasons that we might not be friends anymore is something like #TGMNT!
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Why? That's awesome! Why is it a problem?
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I don't know, well it depends what you think about the applications that I have pulled
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Okay. I have I've gone through the #teachimenti hashtag from last week. This is with the beginning
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of Federico's mentorship program that we were talking about because Federico dreamed of being
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a mentor for his business cards. So I have picked out some people who have put their applications
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with the hashtag #teachimenti. Okay. Wolfgang, Wolfgang needs pasta guidance under the mentorship
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program. Is this included in the package? Will you teach people about how to cook pasta,
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what pasta to eat, that kind of thing. Is that going to be included in the
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Techie Teaches Mentorship Program?
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Well, I mean, pasta is an essential element to the well-being of someone who wants to study
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the program because you gotta eat food to continue living, of course. And I feel like
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the best food to have energy and mental clarity is pasta. So, of course, pasta guidance would be
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included in the package and I appreciate that Wolfgang said no pineapples just
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tomatoes and I feel like Wolfgang is making a good point. I'm not putting
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pineapples in pasta I'm not going that far. Well someone is somewhere in the
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world that someone may making pasta with pineapples I mean if they make pizza at
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this point the you know the damage is already done someone is surely making
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making pasta with pineapples.
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Pumpkins good in pasta.
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Pumpkins are good for Halloween and that's about it.
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So yes, Wolfgang.
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Pasta is included in the package.
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I would also like to just say Wolfgang instead because I like that and just in case he is
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Wolfgang I just wanted to say that because I like doing that.
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Chase wants to learn blogging from you Federico and I wondered is blogging a skill that can
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be taught or are you born with the ability to blog?
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No it's a skill that you learn and that you need to practice every day for a long time
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and it depends on I guess the kind of blog that you want to have so when I started I
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want to make stories to be more like dozens of articles every day and to always be on
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the tech news beat and to do breaking news, rumors, that kind of stuff.
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But with time I figured that it wasn't what I wanted to do, I wanted to have a more relaxed
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and sort of analytic approach maybe.
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And so I shifted the kind of website that I have to be, in terms of quantity, to be
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smaller than other websites.
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But definitely blogging, especially when it comes to the tools that you need to use, the
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decisions that you make and to not fall for the new technology that comes out, that locks
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you in and then after a couple of years it's gone and you ended up with a blog that is
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based on a CMS that is no longer supported and you don't know what to do.
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So there's a lot of things to understand about blogging, especially if it's a tech blog or
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a video game blog or a music blog.
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The landscape has changed in the past few years, especially with Medium and people taking,
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sort of doing more video updates instead of articles with YouTube and that kind of stuff.
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But definitely blogging, it's something that you need to learn, that you can learn, you
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need to learn blogging.
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So this feels like it's going to be a cornerstone of the mentorship program.
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Absolutely, especially because it's great that you're able to share updates on Twitter or Snapchat, whatever,
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but I feel like having a permanent blog, a space where you can type words and direct people to a link, to a page where they can read you,
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with an RSS feed, I'm kind of a traditionalist in this sense, I feel like having a blog is a key element of the program.
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blogging and food definitely. So first up two applications, really good ones.
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Okay, Reed missed the point and wants to dress up as a manatee. Is this accepted?
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It can be a mascot I guess. You can dress up as a manatee, I do.
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It's a pretty terrible mascot. I mean mascots are supposed to be like aggressive and exciting.
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A manatee is neither of those things.
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I bet a manatee could be aggressive. You know there's a David Attenborough documentary out there
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where there is an aggressive manatee. You just know it, like eating a penguin or something.
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It's not like... Can a manatee bite you? I don't know. Is it an aggressive animal?
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I mean anything can bite you, you know? Not anything. Pretty much. Anything that lives
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can bite you. I just don't see like a bunch of people cheering for the manatee team. How
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do you dress up as a manatee and a mascot? Basically you just look like a big grey underwater
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potato. It's a terrible mascot. Joel wants to learn Italian and I wondered
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if Italian is a required language for your mentorship program?
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No, it's not.
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Not because I don't have pride in my country, but especially because it's a very limited
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And, you know, I got a lot of criticism when I switched my stories from double languages,
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so it started as a blog in Italian and in English.
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And then after a few months I just decided to do it all in English.
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And the first few months I got a lot of people emailing me and making fun of me on Twitter
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because I was, you know, kind of like the pretentious Italian who wanted to write in
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And to be fair my English was kind of terrible back then and I still need to improve of course
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because it's not my first language.
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But you know there's only 60 million people living in Italy and everyone else doesn't
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live in Italy and people abroad don't speak Italian. So it's a fancy language to learn,
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you know, especially Italy is a beautiful country, so when you come in Italy if you
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can speak a bit of Italian, or if you know Italian and you want to speak Italian abroad,
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it can give you that little exotic, fascinating sort of tone to your persona, but it's not
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a required language for the program.
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Is Python a required language for the program?
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No, honestly not. You're free to use your preferred programming language of choice,
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whether it's Python or Swift or Objective-C. I'm not too fussy about the language that
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you want to use.
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Jake wants to apply for the program. Jake already works you at MacStories. Does this
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help his chances?
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I don't know why Jake did this.
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I don't know how much higher he could get in the program than he currently already is,
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and we talk every day and I feel like Jake is already part of the program.
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Do you think that Jake is maybe signaling here that as a boss you're not really a mentor?
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I'm not sure how I want to reply to that, Myke.
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I feel like Jake just wanted to be out there with the hashtag and wanted to be part of
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the conversation, but Jake is in many ways the perfect candidate for the program because
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he emailed me a few months ago and we started talking and then we started, you know, let's
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do something together, why don't you write for Max Stories and then we invited over to
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Slack and...
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So is that all you need to do to work for Max Stories, just email you?
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Well most of the time, yeah, what do you want to do, come knock at my house and say yeah,
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what am I for Max Stories?
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I don't know.
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Yeah, it might help, I don't know, it shows initiative at least.
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No, that's creepy, please don't do that.
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Jake has it right because you are paying him to be in the program.
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I think people would pay the mentor if there's money exchange.
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I mean, obviously you're doing this out of the goodness of your own heart.
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But you know, if you were like a
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productivity guru on the side of a mountain, people would pay money to come see you.
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But Jake is making money and being potentially mentored. I think Jake's doing it right.
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See, that's what he meant, basically. Jake doesn't want me to pay him anymore. So thank you Jake.
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That's so kind of him, isn't it?
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You're saving me money now.
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It's really sweet of him.
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And also, we spoke about the importance of pasta.
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Simba wanted to understand if the ways of Titti Espresso would be taught as part of
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your mentorship program.
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Is this another cornerstone of the program, Espresso?
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Simba is, according to his tweet, a long-time AeroPress user.
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And let me tell you, Simba, there's no AeroPress in the program.
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The only real coffee of course is espresso.
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Don't you do that, Myke.
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AeroPress makes espresso, it's just not the espresso that you are used to having served here.
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That doesn't make any sense.
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Yes it does.
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It's like...
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No, no, it doesn't...
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AeroPress makes espresso.
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The espresso machine makes espresso.
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Not the AeroPress.
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No, there are other ways to make espresso rather than an espresso machine that you have.
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It's like people when they go to the lake and they say "I went to the beach".
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No, you do not go to the beach, you went to the lake.
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the same thing Myke. The beach is by the sea, the lake is the lake.
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People are telling me in the chatroom that it's not espresso. Well, you can make espresso.
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The internet tells me that you can make espresso. The internet is wrong, Myke.
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Well, well, okay. Well, who knows. So what's the next step for the program?
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Well, this is all on you. I mean, I've given people what they're looking for out of the
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program. I've given you some real candidates here. So now it's all on you, Federico. You've
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got to spin up this thing, apply for some grants and stuff to help pay for it all.
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I feel like I need some artwork or some landing page done.
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Yeah, well we have a domain which can be pointed towards anything you need and we can move
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on from there. I'm excited to see where this mentorship program is going to go next. So
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#teachmente.
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What's the domain name?
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So teachmente.com.
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No, I think it's Mentor Stories.net.
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Steven knows the website.
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It is MentorStories.net.
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MentorStories.net.
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MentorStories.net.
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So you go there and you'll find everything you need for the mentorship program conducted
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by Federico Vittucci.
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On last week's episode it turned out that Federico was a prophet, if you remember.
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He predicted multi-pad life.
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But we have had another prophecy told in an earlier episode of The Prompt.
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In episode number 54, we were talking about...
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I think we were just talking about the Android Wear watch.
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I think that was what the episode was about.
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And Luke had written in that at around 38 minutes, me and Steven joined forces to create
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the prophecy of how you will be able to unlock a Mac with your Apple Watch.
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So this is the idea of using things that the phone can be aware of contextually to not
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then need to provide you with the need to put your key in.
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So like for example to put your passcode in or to put some sort of unlock code in.
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could maybe unlock your phone by wearing your smartwatch or something like that.
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Any sort of Bluetooth device that you have attached to you.
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There was a OS X app, an iOS-like app that did this, right?
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I think that sort of thing is really pretty cool and you could see Apple could do that
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with the continuity and handoff stuff because the devices starting this fall will know much
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more about each other and I for one would like that if I'm near my computer and I walk
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up to it that I had the option to unlock it based on proximity I think it could
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be really nice. I think it just goes to show that while Federico is a truly
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gifted digital prophet if you will. No no. Clearly his skills have rubbed off on us
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over time. Yeah and I think that really the three of us should go into some sort
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of digital prophecy network like maybe maybe we could lay in a pool of water on
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our backs and predict the future. Yeah, yeah, I like this. And like different
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technology CEOs, they come to us and we tell them what we think is gonna happen
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in the future. And we could have precognitive thoughts about their
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technology. What you want to do is to host your own Burning Man event. Yeah,
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that's a good idea. There's going to be like tents and there's going to be like people in
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some kind of desert, maybe you know some kind of landscape across Texas, I don't
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I don't know, and all the CEOs and people from big companies can go there and use different
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tools and substances, if you will, to follow the event and then listen to your predictions.
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I think that's good.
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We'll get right on that.
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Let's not do the relay con again and let's do this kind of event instead.
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It's a natural pivot.
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I just wanted to mention, obviously we are at episode 100 today, which is one of those
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times when you look back.
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So I would just like to encourage people to continue looking back through our archives
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over the prompt and connected and continue to let us know about all of the things that
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we got right because I am almost certain that there are many, many, many more.
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What's the expression?
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Even a wrong mic.
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A broken mic is predicting things correctly once every little while.
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I think it's that.
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It's something like that.
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A broken mic is right across 100 episodes.
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Yep, all the time.
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So there's a hashtag all about it.
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If you remember last week, I've done all the follow-up this week.
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This is the change in episode 100. I'm continuing.
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No, I'm continuing.
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It's all I had.
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Austin Evans did a great video, I'm not letting you do it,
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about the mechanical iPad keyboard case from Razer.
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So you can go and see.
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I don't really know what to think about this thing.
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It's kind of what I expected.
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it's clicky-clacky and the stand looks good.
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There's a part of me that's like, "Oh, that looks nice,
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"but I don't want the big thick keyboard attached
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"to my iPad when really the, what is it called?
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"Do I have the smart cover?
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"Smart keyboard case?"
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- Smart keyboard, Myke. - Smart keyboard.
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- Smart keyboard.
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I'm not joking, I cannot remember the names of this product.
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- You should get that checked out by your physician, Myke.
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- It's too late, it's too late for me now.
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That's already enough from weight and thickness.
00:17:02
◼
►
I wouldn't want to bolt a keyboard to the side of my iPad but I mean it looks like if
00:17:06
◼
►
you do want to type on it a bunch like if you take your if you're writing your next
00:17:11
◼
►
novel or something and you want to take your iPad down to the coffee shop to write on it
00:17:14
◼
►
it looks like maybe a more pleasant keyboard to people that are more used to writing keyboards
00:17:19
◼
►
than then with what the smart cover keyboard can do what do you think Stephen you can say
00:17:26
◼
►
something you're allowed to talk but you just can't drive the follow-up that's this is harsh
00:17:31
◼
►
I mean it's fine. I think that iGuthia thinks people are gonna be like the keyboard.
00:17:34
◼
►
The whole thing seems kind of janky like it has a kickstand which
00:17:37
◼
►
is sort of laughable until you realize that you can adjust the pitch of the screen.
00:17:42
◼
►
So like in the smart keyboard you're locked to that one angle.
00:17:45
◼
►
But it seems like the whole thing is a little bit sloppy. Like the keyboard and the
00:17:49
◼
►
top case can come apart so you can like set your iPad
00:17:52
◼
►
further back if you want to. And it's all held together by magnets and
00:17:57
◼
►
in his video Austin is like sliding them over each other and it comes apart and
00:18:00
◼
►
it just seems like it could use a little more refining, but the keyboard, which is the important part,
00:18:05
◼
►
seems pretty good. So I think Jason Snell bought one, so I'm looking forward to seeing what he thinks.
00:18:12
◼
►
Jason and I have, I generally agree with his comments on keyboards, so I'm curious to see how he feels about it.
00:18:21
◼
►
Yeah, I've got to say that the adjustable viewing angles is something I would really want.
00:18:26
◼
►
It frustrates me. What frustrates me the most is the viewing angles are completely different on the 12 9 and the 9 7 with the keyboard cases
00:18:34
◼
►
This is completely different
00:18:37
◼
►
Absolutely 100% different like the 12 9 leans way more back like to the point that I don't put the 9 7 in the
00:18:43
◼
►
like where you have the keyboard behind and it's kind of standing up like a regular smart cover because
00:18:49
◼
►
As I said before the 9.7 is basically a like vertical
00:18:53
◼
►
Like it's just like straight up and it falls over. I don't like it. So yeah, they're completely different which is very frustrating for me
00:19:01
◼
►
Steven was on an episode of Mac power users
00:19:04
◼
►
talking about old Macs probably
00:19:06
◼
►
We talked a lot about the behind the scenes
00:19:10
◼
►
Relay the network is in just a month is gonna be turning two years old
00:19:14
◼
►
So we kind of talked through some of that some of the business end of it
00:19:17
◼
►
So if you're curious about how relay works kind of behind the scenes
00:19:20
◼
►
The first half of the episode is really about that.
00:19:23
◼
►
And the second half of the episode is...
00:19:28
◼
►
The second half of the episode is really
00:19:30
◼
►
looking at my work at Five
00:19:30
◼
►
looking at my work at Five
00:19:53
◼
►
because as digital profits we could influence the Mac Power users in naming our episodes
00:20:00
◼
►
Episode 331 is called "Steven Hackett, Collector of Macs."
00:20:03
◼
►
Episode 317 is called "Myke Hurley, Collector of iPads."
00:20:07
◼
►
Those Mac Power users, crew, there are some smart cookies over there.
00:20:12
◼
►
And the last piece of whole lot this week...
00:20:14
◼
►
Myke, you have...
00:20:15
◼
►
I won't let you do it.
00:20:16
◼
►
I won't let you do it.
00:20:17
◼
►
I know you want to and I won't let you.
00:20:19
◼
►
Last piece of whole lot this week, this is kind of like what Steven and Jason did with
00:20:23
◼
►
with Liftoff, they did a pilot episode that went out as a B-side when they were kind of
00:20:27
◼
►
trying to work out the show format. I have done a pilot episode of a show called "I
00:20:32
◼
►
Love to Test" which I'm working on with Adina Nemsu and Tiffany Arment and we have,
00:20:38
◼
►
we're not ready to launch the show yet, we still got a lot of work that we want to
00:20:41
◼
►
do on it but we've all been playing Pokemon Go, obviously, so we decided that this felt
00:20:46
◼
►
like a really good kind of pilot-y type thing, we could just the three of us get together,
00:20:51
◼
►
We all play Pokemon Go and we talk about it and at the end we write as to whether we want
00:20:55
◼
►
to keep testing it out or whether it's become something that we love or whether it's something
00:20:59
◼
►
that we hated.
00:21:00
◼
►
I love to test is a kind of a show where we will test anything from apps to Airbnb experiences
00:21:07
◼
►
to weird Amazon stuff, anything.
00:21:09
◼
►
So go and check it out, see if you like the format, we're working on it and I hope that
00:21:13
◼
►
you enjoy it.
00:21:14
◼
►
And that's it.
00:21:15
◼
►
It'll be in the show notes, but it's on our B-Sides feed, relay.fm/b-sides, not a good
00:21:21
◼
►
URL /22 but it will be in our show notes which are easier to find because it's connected
00:21:26
◼
►
/100 this week. So it's easy to find. Steven I don't like that b-size URL but there's nothing
00:21:32
◼
►
to do about it now maybe or maybe you can fix it. Too bad dude. Maybe you can fix it.
00:21:36
◼
►
I could do 301s. You should do 301s to it. I don't know what that means but you should
00:21:40
◼
►
do it. It's literally two lines of code I can't I cannot be bothered. That makes me
00:21:44
◼
►
sad it's because I took the follow-up away isn't it? It is. Never mind. Alright let's
00:21:48
◼
►
Let's take a break and thank our first sponsor of this week's episode and that is Hover.
00:21:54
◼
►
We love Hover.
00:21:55
◼
►
I actually have a page open, I have a tab open right now at Hover to buy some one, two,
00:21:59
◼
►
three, note taker related domain names.
00:22:01
◼
►
We were talking a little bit earlier in the show about MentorStories.net.
00:22:06
◼
►
That is a Hover domain that Steven purchased I think whilst we were recording the show
00:22:11
◼
►
Hover is so easy to go in and just buy domains super quickly.
00:22:16
◼
►
That's what I really like about them because when all you need is just that domain or email
00:22:20
◼
►
address for a joke to play on your friend or for a project that you're working on or
00:22:24
◼
►
whatever, there's always a reason that you just want to get through that process as quickly
00:22:27
◼
►
as possible.
00:22:29
◼
►
That's what hover gives you because you don't have to opt out of page after page of add-ons
00:22:32
◼
►
and stuff that you don't have to look at or read.
00:22:34
◼
►
They give you everything you need, right?
00:22:37
◼
►
Who is privacy?
00:22:38
◼
►
Which is what keeps your personal information private.
00:22:41
◼
►
You have to give all of your personal information to register a domain name like your email
00:22:45
◼
►
address, phone number and home address but this can be published online basically if
00:22:49
◼
►
you don't have whois privacy.
00:22:51
◼
►
Hover know this which is why they enable it for free on every domain you just get it lumped
00:22:55
◼
►
in you don't need to ask for it they just do it which is totally the way you should
00:22:58
◼
►
do it with anything domain related that's what I love about them.
00:23:02
◼
►
Hover believe you don't have to pay for things that you should already have included in the
00:23:06
◼
►
domain they make it so easy to go in make the search and get out as quickly as you like.
00:23:11
◼
►
Go and find the perfect domain name for your next idea or for that great joke you want
00:23:17
◼
►
to tell for a friend or just to get a cool domain to forward to something else.
00:23:21
◼
►
Go to hover.com, use the promo code Bondai, Bondi Bondi, which one was it?
00:23:26
◼
►
Was it Bondi?
00:23:27
◼
►
It was Bondi, right?
00:23:29
◼
►
B-O-N-D-I at checkout to save 10% off your first purchase.
00:23:33
◼
►
We're really going classic in the jokes there.
00:23:36
◼
►
B-O-N-D-I Bondi.
00:23:38
◼
►
Thank you so much to Hover for their support of this show and Relay FM.
00:23:42
◼
►
I actually don't remember, was it Bondi?
00:23:47
◼
►
I can feel the rage building inside of you.
00:23:51
◼
►
All of Australia being angry at you.
00:23:53
◼
►
So why don't you take over now?
00:23:54
◼
►
I can't be trusted anymore.
00:23:56
◼
►
That's about...
00:23:59
◼
►
Stood to my responsibilities.
00:24:00
◼
►
So we wanted to check in with Federico on his review and this really was spurned by
00:24:05
◼
►
by a tweet that you had yesterday showing a screenshot of what I believe is Scrivener.
00:24:11
◼
►
So, how's the review going? Are you using Scrivener for it? How's that process going
00:24:18
◼
►
Well, the review is going great, I think. I'm making better progress than last year
00:24:25
◼
►
by this time. I'm a little over halfway through. And before you freak out when I tell you the
00:24:32
◼
►
word count, keep in mind that I will cut down a lot. The last year I removed about
00:24:38
◼
►
7,000 words from the final product, so when I tell you that I'm about 25,000
00:24:45
◼
►
words in, don't, do not freak out yet, because there's going to be, there's
00:24:50
◼
►
going to be a lot of editing, so...
00:24:52
◼
►
Dude, people are going to write blog posts about that length, you know?
00:24:56
◼
►
I feel like I've already read like 15,000 of those words.
00:24:59
◼
►
Yeah, so I was gonna say, I've seen it all.
00:25:01
◼
►
So I've been sending Myke and Steven little snippets of sections just to get an idea if
00:25:09
◼
►
they like the direction that I'm going.
00:25:13
◼
►
And since the last five days, basically I'm mostly alone every day for ten days because
00:25:22
◼
►
my girlfriend is busy at a dance event in Rome.
00:25:25
◼
►
So I wake up at 10am, by 11am I start writing and I stop writing at my 8pm.
00:25:32
◼
►
I just eat lunch and I do some exercise but then I'm always writing.
00:25:37
◼
►
And I was able to go from 5 or 6 thousand words last week to 25 thousand since Friday
00:25:45
◼
►
or Saturday.
00:25:46
◼
►
So I'm really going for it and that's why the reason why is I prepared a lot of research
00:25:52
◼
►
beforehand I had a lot of notes and I had of course a lot of thoughts and hot
00:25:57
◼
►
takes I guess by September they will no longer be hot but you know it will be
00:26:03
◼
►
warm takes. Tepid takes? Warm takes? I don't know so yeah I as you can see
00:26:11
◼
►
warm takes. I have a lukewarm take on this. As you can see from the screenshot I switched to
00:26:21
◼
►
Scrivener. Of course you did! So there's a lot of background here, Myke, and a lot of backstory and a lot of
00:26:27
◼
►
back and forth with the Scrivener developers. So I told you guys about my
00:26:33
◼
►
questions and concerns with using Ulysses and whether it was able to scale for this kind of project.
00:26:39
◼
►
And what I realized... We should say, Scrivener for iOS is like imminent, right?
00:26:44
◼
►
Coming out tomorrow. Coming out tomorrow. And it's a fantastic iOS version of Scrivener.
00:26:49
◼
►
It doesn't have all of the features of the Mac app, but it's, I would say, 80% the Mac
00:26:57
◼
►
version on iOS.
00:26:58
◼
►
It's super powerful, it lets you do almost everything you can do on the Mac.
00:27:03
◼
►
And it's got a lot of features, of course, and it works great on the iPad Pro, it's on
00:27:08
◼
►
So my concerns for Ulysses were mostly about the fact that I wanted to split up my review
00:27:17
◼
►
in different documents and different folders, if you will.
00:27:22
◼
►
And in Ulysses I could do that with multiple sheets.
00:27:25
◼
►
But then when I was looking at Scrivener and I realized I could do different kinds of groupings,
00:27:31
◼
►
so I could do folders, I could do documents with sub-documents, and I could also apply
00:27:36
◼
►
some visual indicators for each document to visually tell me the state of a document.
00:27:46
◼
►
So for example, in the document list in Scrivener, which is called the Binder, you can have labels
00:27:53
◼
►
for documents.
00:27:56
◼
►
And I came up with this color-based organizational system that I use to show me visually which
00:28:05
◼
►
documents I need to tackle next.
00:28:08
◼
►
So the documents that I'm working on are labeled with a yellow color.
00:28:14
◼
►
And so when I'm looking at the binder and when I'm looking at my mind map in iThoughts
00:28:19
◼
►
in Split View, I can look at the map, look at the topics, take a look at the binder,
00:28:24
◼
►
see what's next, and I can concentrate on that.
00:28:28
◼
►
But the real benefit is how I can embed research inside the same Scrivener project.
00:28:35
◼
►
And unlike Ulysses, which only lets you add notes or images to a sheet, you can have a
00:28:41
◼
►
a root level research folder in Scrivener where you can put any kind of file.
00:28:45
◼
►
You can put PDFs, photos, videos, documents from other apps.
00:28:49
◼
►
How do you get them into Scrivener?
00:28:52
◼
►
Document pickers.
00:28:52
◼
►
Is it a document picker or you open document pickers?
00:28:55
◼
►
You tap an icon, brings up a list of document providers.
00:29:01
◼
►
You choose it and you import the file.
00:29:03
◼
►
Could I be looking at a screenshot and add it to Scrivener,
00:29:06
◼
►
like in the photos app, or do you have to be in Scrivener and bring things in?
00:29:10
◼
►
Well, in iOS 10 you can because there's a new extension for iCloud Drive.
00:29:15
◼
►
Well, actually no, because Scrivener doesn't work as a document provider, so what you need
00:29:20
◼
►
to do is a workflow that takes the image and uses OpenIn to send it to Scrivener.
00:29:24
◼
►
You can use the OpenIn menu to...
00:29:27
◼
►
I would like to recommend, there is an episode of Canvas, which is a great show that Federico
00:29:32
◼
►
does with Pharesis Spears, if you are completely baffled about what I'm talking about with
00:29:37
◼
►
document providers here, with pickers and providers and why they're different.
00:29:40
◼
►
It's episode number two of Canvas, it will be in the show notes. That is the only reason I
00:29:44
◼
►
understand this in any way because I listen to Fraser and Federico explain it
00:29:48
◼
►
to me because it is mind-numbingly confusing.
00:29:51
◼
►
So I started putting all of my PDF documents and screenshots into Scrivener
00:29:57
◼
►
and the great thing is you can go crazy with multiple levels of folders and
00:30:02
◼
►
nested documents. So in the research folder, which is the default location for
00:30:07
◼
►
research material, I added a master folder called screenshots and then subfolders
00:30:13
◼
►
for apps. So like Apple Music or Home Screen, Lock Screen, Safari. And inside
00:30:20
◼
►
each folder there's images labeled with a beta version they were taken on. So I
00:30:25
◼
►
have like Apple Music, Download, Dialogue, Beta 2.
00:30:29
◼
►
How would you have previously collected this stuff?
00:30:34
◼
►
It was a mess. In the Photos app, there was no tagging, I was constantly losing screenshots,
00:30:40
◼
►
and I was constantly making, creating notes, referencing a screenshot that I later needed to find manually into the Photos app.
00:30:49
◼
►
It was terrible, and I was wasting a lot of time.
00:30:52
◼
►
This way I can have the same project but it's split into two different sections,
00:31:00
◼
►
the draft of the review and the research material.
00:31:03
◼
►
And the research material I can organize by folder, I can organize by beta,
00:31:07
◼
►
and I can reference at any time because there's a feature called Quick Reference
00:31:11
◼
►
that allows you to basically create a split view inside Scrivener,
00:31:16
◼
►
so you can have a PDF or a screenshot by the left side and a document by the right side.
00:31:21
◼
►
But that's not even the best part.
00:31:23
◼
►
Scrivener is not a markdown text editor. It's mostly a rich text writing application.
00:31:32
◼
►
You can export as markdown, which I'll get to in a minute, but the core writing experience is meant for rich text.
00:31:38
◼
►
And it's not just like bold and italics and lists. You can do text highlights, color text, inline footnotes,
00:31:49
◼
►
and of course all kinds of other indentation stuff.
00:31:54
◼
►
The text highlight was intriguing to me because when I'm writing a document,
00:31:59
◼
►
especially when it's July and we're just at Beta 3 and there's going to be more Betas coming out,
00:32:05
◼
►
some stuff is going to change by September.
00:32:08
◼
►
But I need to write now.
00:32:10
◼
►
And because I'm writing now, I need to have placeholders for stuff that is a bug in the current Beta,
00:32:17
◼
►
or that I will need to add at a later stage because I need to try apps or because I need to wait for betas,
00:32:23
◼
►
or even we're trying to have a different layout for the review of Mac Stories this year, if possible,
00:32:30
◼
►
so I'm marking sections or paragraphs that I would want to have with a special layout on the website,
00:32:39
◼
►
I'm highlighting them in green.
00:32:41
◼
►
I'm highlighting stuff that will need to be revised in yellow and I'm highlighting bugs
00:32:49
◼
►
and problems that I need to look over again in the future beta in red.
00:32:53
◼
►
Finally, I'm leaving placeholders for images highlighted in blue.
00:32:58
◼
►
So when I'm looking at the document now, the result is I can see my text, which is of course
00:33:03
◼
►
black on white page, but then I see all of these different colored placeholders, so at
00:33:09
◼
►
a glance I know okay this section has a lot of yellow sentences which means I
00:33:15
◼
►
need to write more content or this section has a bunch of red highlights
00:33:19
◼
►
that means there were bugs and I need to try this functionality again or if I see
00:33:24
◼
►
a lot of blue stuff I know well there's going to be a lot of screenshots in here
00:33:27
◼
►
so this kind of... Why is this different when Scrivener though like this
00:33:32
◼
►
highlighting like what about Scrivener is helping you do this and maybe
00:33:36
◼
►
your applications can't, like Word? Well because I don't like Word first, you know,
00:33:41
◼
►
and Word doesn't let me export as Markdown and it doesn't let me organize
00:33:47
◼
►
you know the research stuff and the documents like in Scrivener.
00:33:51
◼
►
Can you explain the exporting as Markdown a little bit because if I'm
00:33:55
◼
►
following this correctly, I obviously haven't tried Scrivener, it's not a
00:33:59
◼
►
a markdown app like Ulysses?
00:34:04
◼
►
you have different export options which include plain text, rich text and PDF.
00:34:13
◼
►
screen reader support for this markup language called... I'm not sure about
00:34:17
◼
►
how you pronounce that, it's called YAML maybe. It's spelled YAML and it's a
00:34:26
◼
►
to create a template for exporting a document with meta tags.
00:34:30
◼
►
And Scrivener also has an option called Convert Basic Markdown,
00:34:36
◼
►
which only works for some rich text content such as bold and italics.
00:34:42
◼
►
It doesn't work for block quotes and lists, which I'll explain...
00:34:46
◼
►
- What about links? - Supports links, Myke.
00:34:49
◼
►
And footnotes. So the most important stuff,
00:34:52
◼
►
you know, bold italics, footnotes, and links
00:34:54
◼
►
are the elements that I add most often in my review.
00:34:58
◼
►
So those elements are converted from rich text to markdown.
00:35:03
◼
►
And the thing about Screener is
00:35:06
◼
►
I got in touch with the developer
00:35:08
◼
►
and he was super responsive
00:35:09
◼
►
about this implementation of meta tags.
00:35:13
◼
►
So he came up and he told me how to do it
00:35:16
◼
►
with this syntax to modify the standard template
00:35:21
◼
►
so that when I export my review, it starts from an H2 header in HTML or Markdown,
00:35:29
◼
►
you know, the two pound signs before a section, you know, the two hashes.
00:35:34
◼
►
I don't want to start from H1 because H1 is the title of the review.
00:35:39
◼
►
So all my sections need to start from H2 and go deeper in the nested levels,
00:35:45
◼
►
so H3, H4, sometimes H5.
00:35:48
◼
►
If you're feeling crazy.
00:35:49
◼
►
when I do subsections.
00:35:51
◼
►
And I needed to modify the template for that,
00:35:53
◼
►
which I cannot do in other apps.
00:35:55
◼
►
And the screen reader developers were kind enough
00:35:57
◼
►
to tell me how to do that with a template modification.
00:36:01
◼
►
And as soon as I saw that, and as soon as I understood
00:36:03
◼
►
that the only problems would be block quotes and lists,
00:36:08
◼
►
I was like, you know, I don't care.
00:36:10
◼
►
I can automate that later workflow.
00:36:12
◼
►
I can do some cleanup of the markdown text.
00:36:15
◼
►
- So you'll just do some like find them a place type stuff.
00:36:17
◼
►
Exactly. I will do some final replays with some rejects at the end.
00:36:21
◼
►
And everything else, the research, the rich text, the way that I can organize my review,
00:36:29
◼
►
collapse sections when I'm done with them, or expand them when I need to get back into
00:36:33
◼
►
a sub-document, the way that I can scroll documents, glance at the colors, and know
00:36:39
◼
►
"Okay, I need to do more work here", that's amazing. That's frankly amazing.
00:36:43
◼
►
And I almost didn't...
00:36:46
◼
►
You know, last week I was super skeptical about Scrivener,
00:36:50
◼
►
but then I spent two days playing with it, and then I just started writing.
00:36:54
◼
►
And I really think I've been keeping this good pace, good progress,
00:37:01
◼
►
because my writing tool isn't slowing me down.
00:37:05
◼
►
And I'm not trying to fiddle with it to make it work for me,
00:37:09
◼
►
because once I set it up, you know,
00:37:11
◼
►
I have my shortcuts for text highlights,
00:37:13
◼
►
I have my shortcut for footnotes, and I'm done.
00:37:16
◼
►
I don't need anything else.
00:37:18
◼
►
- Dave in the chat room is asking,
00:37:20
◼
►
are you writing in rich text or are you writing in markdown?
00:37:23
◼
►
- I'm writing in rich text.
00:37:26
◼
►
The only markdown that I keep is plain text,
00:37:28
◼
►
basically inside the,
00:37:30
◼
►
so it's like writing in markdown inside pages.
00:37:32
◼
►
The only two elements that I'm keeping in plain text
00:37:35
◼
►
are the blog quotes and the lists.
00:37:38
◼
►
That's why by the end I will need to do some find and replace because Crevener does some character escaping with
00:37:44
◼
►
With a major sign for block quotes in markdown, but that's no big deal
00:37:49
◼
►
I already have the rejects in workflow that does the find and replace for me
00:37:53
◼
►
Is it weird to not be writing in markdown?
00:37:56
◼
►
Well, it's not weird because I got used to it with Ulysses
00:37:59
◼
►
Oh, yeah, because you already had to change your markdown way of life anyway, right? Because it uses its own language system thing
00:38:06
◼
►
You know, I really got into the mindset of I want to have markdown at the end.
00:38:13
◼
►
I don't particularly care about having markdown as I'm writing, because unless you have some crazy
00:38:20
◼
►
automation like editorial or bbedit on the Mac, plain text slows you down.
00:38:25
◼
►
You know, you need to type
00:38:27
◼
►
brackets or you need to manually do the footnotes and the scrolling, go to the bottom of the document, go back to the top.
00:38:33
◼
►
So unless you have an automation environment set up, any other markdown tax editor slows you down and I can afford that.
00:38:40
◼
►
So after months of Ulysses, you know, they do similar things with the bold and the bold
00:38:46
◼
►
formatings and the italics and especially the links and the footnotes.
00:38:49
◼
►
So it was no big deal to switch to Scrivener in that sense.
00:38:53
◼
►
But as long as I can have markdown at the end and as long as I can do some, you know,
00:38:57
◼
►
call up the workflow extension and do my find your place with the rejects, I'm okay.
00:39:03
◼
►
So yeah, it's been going really well. I'm finishing up the messages section now,
00:39:10
◼
►
which is one of the three big ones. I would say messages, Siri and notifications are the three big ones.
00:39:19
◼
►
And I've done many many other medium ones, so like, well, lock screen and widgets actually was a big one, so that's done.
00:39:27
◼
►
I will need to do design, but I want to wait for later betas because I feel like Apple is still kind of
00:39:33
◼
►
finalizing the design changes that I want to have on iOS 10.
00:39:37
◼
►
I need to do Apple music, but that's gonna be fun because music is fun. And then it's gonna be everything else.
00:39:42
◼
►
CallKit and the other extensions. I need to wait for developers to send me betas.
00:39:48
◼
►
If there's going to be betas, I don't know.
00:39:52
◼
►
I'm confident that by Saturday when I will stop being alone every day and when we plan
00:39:59
◼
►
to go on vacation after that, I'm confident that I will be in a better position than last
00:40:06
◼
►
So it sounds like Scrivener is giving you a bunch of tools at once.
00:40:10
◼
►
You have almost some layout stuff.
00:40:12
◼
►
You have status, you have research, and you have your writing.
00:40:16
◼
►
Which is like, that's really attractive to me.
00:40:18
◼
►
I'm not doing anything long-form like you are at the moment but I can see how
00:40:23
◼
►
a system like this could be useful where you're running around keeping up with
00:40:27
◼
►
stuff like in your to-do list or in Dropbox and subfolders like having it
00:40:31
◼
►
all in one place does seem attractive.
00:40:34
◼
►
How is the the sync working out? I've read some stuff about the Scrivener syncs
00:40:38
◼
►
packages on Dropbox are not using iCloud.
00:40:41
◼
►
Is that been good for you or you just using it on one iPad and just letting the
00:40:46
◼
►
the syncing just be your backup?
00:40:48
◼
►
- No, I'm using it on every device.
00:40:50
◼
►
And I feel like the fact that there's no automatic syncing,
00:40:54
◼
►
you need to hit a sync icon manually.
00:40:56
◼
►
It's making me more disciplined
00:40:59
◼
►
in the sense that I'm sitting down,
00:41:01
◼
►
I write a section, and every time I hit save.
00:41:05
◼
►
It's not as convenient as modern stuff,
00:41:10
◼
►
but it's also very sort of a classic environment
00:41:15
◼
►
in the sense that, okay, I'm writing and I need to save it.
00:41:18
◼
►
And also I have this workflow that every time I compile
00:41:23
◼
►
the draft, because I wanna look at it,
00:41:25
◼
►
in addition to the Scrivener package in Dropbox,
00:41:28
◼
►
I compiled the entire contents of the draft
00:41:33
◼
►
and I save it in a text file also in Dropbox.
00:41:37
◼
►
And I'm also saving it in iCloud Drive,
00:41:39
◼
►
just to make sure that I have redundancy
00:41:41
◼
►
for all of my backups.
00:41:43
◼
►
Speaking of compiling, just a quick note,
00:41:46
◼
►
one of the benefits of organizing documents in folders
00:41:50
◼
►
in Scrivener, in the binder,
00:41:51
◼
►
is in addition to compiling the entire document,
00:41:54
◼
►
so looking at the total word count,
00:41:56
◼
►
you can compile the contents of a folder, just a folder.
00:42:00
◼
►
So when I was writing the messages section yesterday,
00:42:03
◼
►
I felt like I was writing a little too much,
00:42:07
◼
►
and so I compiled the contents of the messages folder,
00:42:10
◼
►
and I was able to see the word count from all of the documents contained in the messages folder,
00:42:16
◼
►
pulled together, and a total word count just for that section, which is very useful,
00:42:21
◼
►
and I've never been able to do the same in other text editors.
00:42:24
◼
►
So, I had many concerns about using a tool that's meant for book writers, or screenplays, that kind of stuff,
00:42:34
◼
►
whether it could work for an IAS review, but as it turns out, I have many of...
00:42:39
◼
►
I share a lot of the same problems as people are writing novels or you know any other long manuscript because that's what it is
00:42:48
◼
►
So to to be able to have these tools to organize my work and to navigate my work and to embed research
00:42:55
◼
►
into the same project
00:42:56
◼
►
I feel like it's really helping me out and I think the progress that I made in the past in the past week is
00:43:03
◼
►
picked by itself
00:43:04
◼
►
I'm not paying attention to the text editor, I'm just writing and I'm letting the text editor help me instead of me
00:43:12
◼
►
taking care of the app.
00:43:14
◼
►
It's the other way around and it feels great because I can just sit down and get to writing, look at the labels.
00:43:19
◼
►
For example today I was looking at my sidebar.
00:43:23
◼
►
The iMessage apps document was highlighted in yellow from the night before and I was like, yep,
00:43:30
◼
►
I need to get this done today. So, you know.
00:43:33
◼
►
I've been very very disciplined guys. I feel like I'm a grown-up now.
00:43:38
◼
►
So if I'm following this properly, Scrivener is not your text editor now?
00:43:43
◼
►
No, no, no, it's still Ulysses. It's still on my home screen.
00:43:47
◼
►
It's what I need to use for Cloud Max stories and it's what I want to use because-
00:43:52
◼
►
Because you have a bunch of automation stuff built into Ulysses.
00:43:56
◼
►
I have a lot of automation and really, Scrivener doesn't work for, you know, blog posts and that kind of stuff.
00:44:02
◼
►
I'm using Scrivener just for the iOS 10 review.
00:44:05
◼
►
Because basically the iOS 10 review is a book.
00:44:08
◼
►
Like it is book length and it has chapters and sections and everything.
00:44:12
◼
►
It's effectively a book which is what Scrivener is built for, right?
00:44:16
◼
►
I'm trying to be... I'm trying to have it be shorter than last year.
00:44:21
◼
►
So last year it was about 45...
00:44:23
◼
►
I don't mean just in word count though.
00:44:25
◼
►
I mean just like in the approach of the project. - Structurally.
00:44:28
◼
►
Yeah, structurally.
00:44:29
◼
►
It is, it is, yes.
00:44:30
◼
►
There's chapters with sections and subsections.
00:44:35
◼
►
And it's like a long process of lots of iteration.
00:44:38
◼
►
Like it is effectively, you know, the skeleton of what it is, right?
00:44:42
◼
►
It is writing like a nonfiction book.
00:44:45
◼
►
Yeah, because there's also like I don't have characters, of course, in the in the book.
00:44:51
◼
►
There's a few fictional elements which Myke knows about.
00:44:54
◼
►
Don't spoil it. I'm not going to.
00:44:57
◼
►
There's a few fictional elements as examples.
00:45:00
◼
►
But I don't have characters, but I have this folder called "Big Themes"
00:45:06
◼
►
where I'm keeping track of the underlying takeaways from the review.
00:45:13
◼
►
So recurring ideas or topics or problems that I developed throughout the entire review
00:45:20
◼
►
and that by the end I should ring together in a cohesive and hopefully good conclusion.
00:45:28
◼
►
We'll see how it goes.
00:45:30
◼
►
What does Scrivener cost?
00:45:33
◼
►
And is it just an iPad app?
00:45:35
◼
►
iPad and iPhone.
00:45:36
◼
►
Oh, interesting.
00:45:37
◼
►
Yeah, really, it's an impressive app.
00:45:40
◼
►
And I know that it took them a few years to get it done.
00:45:44
◼
►
And my understanding is that by the end--
00:45:46
◼
►
Basically, from as long as the iPad has existed,
00:45:49
◼
►
this app has been working in some way.
00:45:51
◼
►
It's become like a meme, you know?
00:45:53
◼
►
By the end of the process, the developer, Keith--
00:45:57
◼
►
I don't remember the last name, was kind of fed up with the delays and he just took it
00:46:02
◼
►
upon himself to finish the iOS app.
00:46:05
◼
►
And they have updates planned and they're super responsive, like they fix all of my
00:46:09
◼
►
problems, they give me a list of fantastic suggestions for Markdown.
00:46:15
◼
►
I'm really happy.
00:46:16
◼
►
Again, I'm using it just for this project, just for the iOS 10 review, and I don't recommend
00:46:25
◼
►
it for blog posts unless they're really long. I don't feel bad going with two text editors
00:46:32
◼
►
on my devices, if only because I don't see Scrivener as a text editor. I see it as the
00:46:39
◼
►
book writing application and it's a word processor maybe, I don't know. But Ulysses is my text
00:46:45
◼
►
editor and Scrivener is what I do with the iOS Turner View.
00:46:48
◼
►
Alright, well, exciting stuff man. I'm happy you found a new tool. What the perfect time to come along for something like this for you?
00:46:57
◼
►
Yeah, really it's, I feel like, you know, we're past the first half of July, so this is really the key, a key moment for me.
00:47:08
◼
►
I need to finish the most important sections right now. I can keep the conclusion, I can keep the
00:47:15
◼
►
everything else section. Also there's something that I want to ask you guys and maybe our listeners.
00:47:24
◼
►
I'm thinking of doing... you know how I used to do before I decided to do full-on reviews? I used to do
00:47:32
◼
►
separate articles for a new version of iOS. I used to do a story and I used to
00:47:37
◼
►
do tips and tricks. Now I'm thinking of having a, before the conclusion, having
00:47:45
◼
►
some kind of TLDR section where I relist all of the tidbits and the tips and
00:47:53
◼
►
tricks from the main review that you might have missed or if you just want to
00:47:58
◼
►
see those. Could be fun, could be interesting, could be useful to people.
00:48:03
◼
►
You should definitely do that.
00:48:06
◼
►
What I'm doing now is, I forgot to mention this, when I'm writing and I realized that I mentioned
00:48:11
◼
►
maybe a little known feature or a little detail,
00:48:16
◼
►
I highlight it in orange. So when I'm going through the first
00:48:21
◼
►
reading of the draft, I can see that that's a candidate for the "too long
00:48:26
◼
►
and read section. Maybe there's gonna be a final section before the
00:48:30
◼
►
conclusion, I don't know, we'll see.
00:48:31
◼
►
Alright this episode is also brought to you by Smile and TextExpander which is simply indispensable.
00:48:38
◼
►
Now it's very quickly right, Smile is sponsoring today, they want me to talk about TextExpander
00:48:43
◼
►
but I want to say something else about Smile so let me just talk about TextExpander real quick.
00:48:47
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It allows you to type just a few characters and it'll expand anything you want.
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Email addresses, chunks of code, marketing copy, driving directions.
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you can put emoji in there to do. I've recently added a Pokemon one with the correct accent
00:49:01
◼
►
in E. Whenever I type Pokemon it automatically changes it. Many people, I'm sure Stephen
00:49:05
◼
►
has a Mac OS one, right, because of the new Mac OS naming. TextExpander is super super
00:49:11
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powerful. You can have fill in snippets so you can customize responses. They are now
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a subscription service. Subscriptions start at $40 per year and it includes all of the
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apps which is now Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows which is currently in beta and the new Text
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Expander sharing service keeps all of your snippets on all of your devices all the time.
00:49:30
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►
You have discounts for registered users and the team subscriptions that you can now buy
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include organization focused snippet and team management, detailed access control, consolidated
00:49:40
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billing. If you're a team and you have Text Expander everyone will have all of the snippets.
00:49:45
◼
►
It's like a common knowledge bank, which is so awesome.
00:49:48
◼
►
But, so that's it.
00:49:50
◼
►
Go get Text Expander.
00:49:51
◼
►
It is fantastic.
00:49:53
◼
►
I love the app.
00:49:54
◼
►
What I wanted to say about Smile is we're at episode 100.
00:49:57
◼
►
Smile sponsored episode one,
00:50:00
◼
►
and they have been with this show every month.
00:50:04
◼
►
We have had a Smile sponsorship, sometimes more than one,
00:50:06
◼
►
for the entire run of this show.
00:50:08
◼
►
So I just wanna thank them for doing that.
00:50:11
◼
►
It means a lot to all of us.
00:50:13
◼
►
Smile have been a great supporter both in this way and they've just been a great company
00:50:18
◼
►
to work with over the whole history of Real AFM and especially this show.
00:50:22
◼
►
So I want to thank everyone at Smile for helping make this show happen every single week.
00:50:27
◼
►
Go and check out TextExpander.
00:50:29
◼
►
Thank you, Smile.
00:50:31
◼
►
I forgot to mention, guys, I have a favor to ask to our listeners.
00:50:37
◼
►
So if any developer was working on an iMessage app or a SiriKit app, but especially the iMessage
00:50:43
◼
►
ones. If you're listening to this right now, I'm looking for examples of iMessage apps
00:50:50
◼
►
and I have a few questions to ask about the new messages framework and how you can implement
00:50:56
◼
►
interactive messages and collaborative messages in iOS 10. So feel free to send me an email
00:51:03
◼
►
or send me a tweet and I would be really happy to be able to ask these questions.
00:51:09
◼
►
So you're looking for not stickers, you're looking for people that are using the iMessage
00:51:13
◼
►
frameworks to build apps.
00:51:15
◼
►
Apps can also present sticker browsers, but not just sticker packs, iMessage apps.
00:51:21
◼
►
And then what you do with the iMessage app, I don't care, as long as it's not a sticker
00:51:28
◼
►
It's kind of confusing to explain, iMessage apps can also be stickers.
00:51:32
◼
►
But yeah, iMessage apps with the Messages framework, not the sticker pack.
00:51:37
◼
►
Matt Barney wrote in and he sent us a link to a YouTube video which highlights an implementation
00:51:44
◼
►
of 3D Touch on the iPad Pro with the use of the Apple Pencil.
00:51:49
◼
►
So currently this is only showing in the notification center view.
00:51:53
◼
►
You can press hard on the little X and you can clear all notifications.
00:51:58
◼
►
Now this is completely useless just to be in this part of the OS only that one little
00:52:03
◼
►
thing but what it is showing, whether purposefully or not, maybe the code is just left in, it
00:52:09
◼
►
hasn't been removed in the most recent beta, but it is showing a way that Apple can implement
00:52:14
◼
►
3D Touch on the iPad Pro. Interesting, right?
00:52:18
◼
►
Mm-hmm. And it's the only instance where the Apple Pencil is being used to replicate 3D
00:52:24
◼
►
Touch. I've tried to 3D Touch all of the things on my iPad Pro and it's the only place where
00:52:30
◼
►
you can really apply pressure and you can change the level of the force that you apply on the screen
00:52:37
◼
►
and you can see the clear icon zooming in and out.
00:52:41
◼
►
So it's the only place where it works.
00:52:43
◼
►
And I'm not sure whether it's a bug or it's a single feature.
00:52:47
◼
►
Well, it can't be a bug, right? Because it works.
00:52:51
◼
►
I guess it can be a bug or maybe there's just like one single engineer who really wanted this feature.
00:52:56
◼
►
But that's peculiar, I think.
00:52:59
◼
►
I wonder if we're looking at the first indication of Apple trying to bring 3D Touch to the iPad via the Apple Pencil,
00:53:09
◼
►
given the lack of a real 3D Touch, so to simulate the interaction of 3D Touch without a 3D Touch-enabled display,
00:53:17
◼
►
using the force mechanism and the different levels of pressure of the Apple Pencil in the iOS SDK.
00:53:25
◼
►
I don't know. I guess developers, in theory, should also be able to do this right now if they want to.
00:53:32
◼
►
It's just odd to see it in a system feature. Because you cannot do the same anywhere else.
00:53:39
◼
►
So if you try to press on an icon on the home screen, you're not going to get the quick actions.
00:53:44
◼
►
You're just going to get wiggling mode. So we'll see. I don't know. Maybe it goes away.
00:53:48
◼
►
Maybe it stays. Maybe there's an expansion of this 3D touch-like interactions with the Pencil. It's interesting.
00:53:54
◼
►
Initially I was worried, right?
00:53:56
◼
►
I mean, it has been long documented,
00:53:58
◼
►
my love of being able to use the Apple Pencil
00:54:00
◼
►
to interact with UI and navigate the operating system.
00:54:03
◼
►
So initially I was like, oh, they're making some change,
00:54:05
◼
►
that's bad for me.
00:54:06
◼
►
But if Apple do implement this, this is actually good for me.
00:54:09
◼
►
This is validation of the Pencil being used
00:54:11
◼
►
to interact with your user interface, right?
00:54:13
◼
►
- Right, yeah.
00:54:14
◼
►
- Like if this is a thing that is brought in,
00:54:17
◼
►
well, they have to keep my feature
00:54:19
◼
►
'cause it would be crazy otherwise, right?
00:54:21
◼
►
You'd be using your finger and your Pencil
00:54:22
◼
►
at the exact same time. It would be really weird. So I think that this kind of validates the UI
00:54:27
◼
►
navigation continuing to remain.
00:54:29
◼
►
It's basically Johnny saying Myke was right.
00:54:34
◼
►
Well, I think it's clever
00:54:36
◼
►
and we've spoken a lot about 3D touch and the iPad being weird.
00:54:39
◼
►
Maybe it's a problem with the size of the display and
00:54:42
◼
►
technical issues there.
00:54:43
◼
►
But putting in the pencil is sort of a genius move, right? It is. You can already
00:54:47
◼
►
do pressure sensitivity and I don't have a problem
00:54:50
◼
►
with them tying it to a hardware accessory.
00:54:52
◼
►
At first, my first reaction was like,
00:54:54
◼
►
oh, it's kind of gross, you have to have a pencil for that.
00:54:57
◼
►
But if you look at the other devices, the iPhones,
00:55:02
◼
►
like it's only available on some of them.
00:55:04
◼
►
If you buy a new iPhone, they have 3D Touch.
00:55:07
◼
►
And so it's, you know, I think it's fine.
00:55:08
◼
►
I do think it's a worthwhile experiment on Apple's part
00:55:12
◼
►
because for 3D Touch to really take off,
00:55:16
◼
►
and I would argue that it really hasn't
00:55:18
◼
►
the way that Apple maybe wanted it to.
00:55:20
◼
►
Like it has to be available on more
00:55:21
◼
►
devices and if you can't do 3D touch on
00:55:24
◼
►
the iPad for whatever reason for mics
00:55:26
◼
►
you know it's going to topple over a reason
00:55:28
◼
►
for like technical issues whatever the
00:55:29
◼
►
problems are you have to figure
00:55:32
◼
►
it out and a big part of that in iOS 10
00:55:36
◼
►
is all the widget stuff and you have
00:55:38
◼
►
like the short look and long look sort
00:55:40
◼
►
of metaphor and to have 3D touch even if
00:55:43
◼
►
it's through a hardware accessory is
00:55:45
◼
►
key for like iOS 10 to sort of make sense
00:55:48
◼
►
in places and Apple's clearly leaning into 3d touch in new ways. So I think
00:55:53
◼
►
it's good I agree with you that they shouldn't screw with the UI stuff in
00:55:58
◼
►
fact in the YouTube video the guy attempts to pull down the notification
00:56:01
◼
►
center with the pencil which I try to do all the time because you can't grab the
00:56:05
◼
►
edges of the display with it but um I just sort of chuckled because I find
00:56:09
◼
►
myself making that error. It's more than just the display edges like there's this
00:56:13
◼
►
weird like level of kind of meta UI like for example you can't act you if you've
00:56:21
◼
►
got devices if you've got two apps in split view and you hit that little thing
00:56:24
◼
►
in the middle to detach them the pencil can't do that like it's anything related
00:56:29
◼
►
to the stuff that comes in from the sides interacting with it and it just it
00:56:34
◼
►
just doesn't do it used to do it you used to do some little parts of it but
00:56:38
◼
►
when they made the changes they completely removed all of that stuff
00:56:41
◼
►
which I don't care about, it doesn't bother me, but it's just an interesting thing.
00:56:45
◼
►
Apple doesn't want the Pencil doing that sort of meta UI.
00:56:49
◼
►
Yeah, you just got to get used to what it can and can't do.
00:56:53
◼
►
But I don't think this is by accident.
00:56:57
◼
►
I mean, I guess it could be, but I don't think it is. I think it's maybe them
00:57:00
◼
►
experimenting with this, and I think it's a nice addition.
00:57:03
◼
►
And I think having it as the clear all button is sort of a funny way to introduce it.
00:57:07
◼
►
Since I was five, I've complained about not having
00:57:11
◼
►
a clear all button in Notification Center.
00:57:13
◼
►
Is that on the iPhone Federico?
00:57:15
◼
►
With 3D Touch.
00:57:17
◼
►
Yeah, of course.
00:57:18
◼
►
Okay, I didn't know.
00:57:19
◼
►
I don't remember that.
00:57:20
◼
►
Yeah, like on the Apple Watch, yeah.
00:57:22
◼
►
Okay, that's great.
00:57:23
◼
►
I don't have the beta on my phone yet.
00:57:25
◼
►
No, neither do I.
00:57:26
◼
►
I think it's a good move.
00:57:28
◼
►
I hope that it expands.
00:57:30
◼
►
While we're on the topic of iOS 10, can we talk about the widgets for a minute?
00:57:36
◼
►
Like I'm just really struggling with iOS 10 widgets on my iPad.
00:57:41
◼
►
What's your idea here, Stephen?
00:57:45
◼
►
So I'm gonna set aside that like a lot of them just don't work because developers need to update.
00:57:49
◼
►
That's not what I'm talking about, right? Like not a problem.
00:57:52
◼
►
I totally understand that if I were a developer, updating my widget for iOS 10 would not be on my to-do list for this week.
00:57:58
◼
►
But I think the interaction especially on the the lock screen of what's available when
00:58:04
◼
►
your device is locked versus when it's not locked I think is confusing.
00:58:08
◼
►
I think that I think the widgets kind of don't look very good like I know that's personal
00:58:15
◼
►
taste but like I just don't find them particularly attractive I think there's a lot of wasted
00:58:21
◼
►
Um, but I don't know. I just, I, I, I wanted to find them useful and so far, like I wanted
00:58:29
◼
►
to have my iPad to set up these widgets. I'm going to use a word and you guys don't mock
00:58:33
◼
►
me for it. I wanted to use it as a type of dashboard, right? I could like quickly glance
00:58:37
◼
►
and see to dos and upcoming events and weather and like just, I mean, that's what they're
00:58:43
◼
►
You wanted to ripple when you drop a widget there, you know, like a little ripple effect.
00:58:47
◼
►
Does that make you feel better?
00:58:48
◼
►
You were so... hmm... bully.
00:58:51
◼
►
That's a harsh word.
00:58:56
◼
►
You took away follow-up, Myke.
00:58:58
◼
►
Took it away.
00:58:59
◼
►
But I don't know, I'm not finding them like that engaging, and maybe it is my confusion
00:59:05
◼
►
of like, I don't know what's available when or where.
00:59:08
◼
►
I don't know, maybe I need more time with it.
00:59:10
◼
►
Maybe it's that on the iPad they're jankier than they are on the phone.
00:59:13
◼
►
Again, I haven't run them on the phone, but I don't know, I'm not finding myself loving
00:59:17
◼
►
this new system?
00:59:20
◼
►
I feel like there's some performance problems right now
00:59:24
◼
►
where a lot of widgets use too much memory and so they download every single time
00:59:29
◼
►
and there's some design issues where the compact design of widgets
00:59:35
◼
►
is not really compact in the sense that there's some wasted space at the bottom of
00:59:40
◼
►
some compact widgets.
00:59:42
◼
►
So they need to improve the design and I feel like throughout the betas that will get better.
00:59:46
◼
►
And in terms of the design itself, the change from the translucent notification center to
00:59:52
◼
►
these standalone units of content, that's very intentional in the sense that you can
01:00:01
◼
►
have a widget that resembles the interface of an app more than it was possible with the
01:00:06
◼
►
previous design.
01:00:07
◼
►
And I feel like that will be more clear as soon as a lot of third-party apps adapt to
01:00:12
◼
►
the new design and as soon as you can see the benefit of compact mode and expanded mode,
01:00:19
◼
►
even if you look at the Apple widgets right now, especially the weather one and the notes
01:00:24
◼
►
one, I think it got me a lot of time to get used to this, but the notes widgets for example,
01:00:32
◼
►
it looks like part of the notes app was taken out of notes and put into a widget and in
01:00:40
◼
►
the sense that the interface is more consistent between the app itself and this new white
01:00:47
◼
►
transparent widget.
01:00:49
◼
►
And it wasn't possible before because with the old notification center, with the dark
01:00:57
◼
►
background it was really difficult for developers to have consistency between the looks of an
01:01:01
◼
►
app and the looks of a widget.
01:01:04
◼
►
So in that sense, by the final version, I want to see, and when third-party developers
01:01:10
◼
►
adopt, I want to see what's it going to feel like to switch from app to widget and vice
01:01:19
◼
►
And the problem with the authentication is developers will be able to choose, I think,
01:01:28
◼
►
whether your personal data can be displayed on the lock screen or not.
01:01:35
◼
►
And right now Apple believes that your personal notes, your activity stuff, and I don't know
01:01:40
◼
►
if your calendar stuff as well, they believe that it requires authentication.
01:01:46
◼
►
I would like to see some kind of setting to say, "Look, it's fine.
01:01:51
◼
►
Always show me my stuff on the lock screen.
01:01:53
◼
►
I don't mind if someone picks up my phone and takes a look at my notes."
01:01:57
◼
►
But to understand what Apple is doing, the new default for unlocking a phone, the two-step
01:02:06
◼
►
process is key.
01:02:08
◼
►
So Apple thinks that you pick up your phone, the display comes on with "Raise to Wake",
01:02:14
◼
►
then you swipe, you see the widgets, it says "You need authentication", so you just place
01:02:18
◼
►
the finger on the Touch ID and it authenticates.
01:02:21
◼
►
So without the widgets and the unlocking process go hand in hand in this design.
01:02:29
◼
►
So you pick up the phone, swipe, place the finger and you can see the dashboard.
01:02:34
◼
►
I would like to have settings to say I don't care about privacy, show me everything all
01:02:42
◼
►
I don't think Apple will have this kind of control in their own apps.
01:02:45
◼
►
I feel like developers will be able to do that and I feel like a lot of users like me
01:02:50
◼
►
and you will say, "Look, you know, todoist, it's okay, show me my tasks on the lock screen."
01:02:57
◼
►
I don't know, we'll see. I feel like widgets are, you know, a big change.
01:03:03
◼
►
I mean this is probably an obvious thing, but I can see how we get there. Every widget
01:03:10
◼
►
that I have used on iOS 10 that I'm using on iOS 9, I hate it, right, it looks terrible,
01:03:16
◼
►
it doesn't work, I don't know why everything's white.
01:03:18
◼
►
But all of the iOS 10 widgets that I've used,
01:03:21
◼
►
I really like, so I really like the notes.
01:03:24
◼
►
- James Thompson, the developer of Peacock,
01:03:26
◼
►
he has worked on some new widgets.
01:03:29
◼
►
It's like short, like the compact and expanded,
01:03:32
◼
►
and I'm on the beta, and I love the compact widget.
01:03:36
◼
►
- If you look at what James is doing,
01:03:38
◼
►
so he tweeted screenshots.
01:03:39
◼
►
If you look at the custom interface
01:03:41
◼
►
that he did for Peacock and the widget,
01:03:43
◼
►
Would that have been possible in iOS 9 with the old lookup widgets in Notification Center?
01:03:50
◼
►
The answer is no, because the custom interface would have been just ugly, like a punch in
01:03:59
◼
►
By moving from that unified dark background to separate cells of content with a white
01:04:07
◼
►
background, developers can now do these edge-to-edge custom interfaces that don't look like it
01:04:13
◼
►
stick out too much, they feel like they're like mini interfaces, taken from apps and
01:04:20
◼
►
placed inside a widget.
01:04:22
◼
►
Before that would have been terrible, and we've seen really terrible interfaces inside
01:04:27
◼
►
widgets in iOS 8 and in iOS 9, and what you mentioned Myke about iOS 9 widgets look terrible,
01:04:34
◼
►
iOS 10 ones look very nice, that's exactly why Apple is doing this, because they want
01:04:41
◼
►
to say "Update your widgets for iOS 10, consider the two modes, consider the new design and
01:04:47
◼
►
look at what we're doing with the weather, with the notes widgets, with the calendar
01:04:51
◼
►
widget" and I truly believe that once every developer updates their app for the iOS 10
01:04:57
◼
►
look, they will look really really nice.
01:04:59
◼
►
Right now they look ugly because they cannot take advantage of the white background and
01:05:03
◼
►
the compact mode.
01:05:05
◼
►
There's some many many other problems that I want to mention and that I mentioned in
01:05:09
◼
►
For example, I have many questions and doubts about showing the widget.
01:05:15
◼
►
When you 3D touch on the icon of an app on the home screen, I have some problems with
01:05:23
◼
►
I feel like Apple should be a little more flexible with the control that they give developers,
01:05:27
◼
►
but that's maybe a topic for another time, sometime in September.
01:05:32
◼
►
All right, so Federica, you wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about some stuff that
01:05:38
◼
►
was announced in iOS 10 that I remain to be a little bit confused about and I'm hoping
01:05:42
◼
►
that you can help.
01:05:44
◼
►
And this is around differential privacy and data collection in iOS 10.
01:05:48
◼
►
These are things that Apple mentioned a bunch and I'm a little bit confused about it.
01:05:53
◼
►
Are you able to shine any more light on what this differential privacy stuff is and what
01:05:58
◼
►
data Apple is actually collecting and if they're sharing it at all of our devices?
01:06:04
◼
►
So let me have a disclaimer.
01:06:06
◼
►
at the top. There's entire research papers, mathematical algorithms, and really smart
01:06:16
◼
►
people working on differential privacy. It's a very complex topic based on some real math,
01:06:26
◼
►
which I don't fully get, but I was able to understand the basics as a layperson. And
01:06:33
◼
►
And I feel like a good way to understand differential privacy is, imagine you're on a stage and
01:06:39
◼
►
there's a lot of people watching you perform.
01:06:42
◼
►
And imagine that you ask a question to those people and you're asking those people to vote
01:06:46
◼
►
and you're asking them about their favorite food.
01:06:48
◼
►
And there's like 3,000 people answering you and yelling at you.
01:06:53
◼
►
But from those 3,000 people, you can hear trends emerge.
01:06:58
◼
►
So you can hear a lot of people screaming pizza, and you can hear a lot of other people
01:07:02
◼
►
yelling coffee, and then you can hear a bunch of other chatter that you don't really understand.
01:07:08
◼
►
That's the idea of differential privacy.
01:07:09
◼
►
It's a way to surface trends from crowdsourced data without being able to identify anyone.
01:07:17
◼
►
So in this scenario, we are the people in the audience, Apple is on stage.
01:07:24
◼
►
a way to collect data, to crowdsource collecting data, and anonymizing that data by adding
01:07:37
◼
►
what is called noise. So Apple is taking the data, but only bits of that data, adding random
01:07:44
◼
►
noise to not be able, at a later stage, to identify any single individual. So in the
01:07:52
◼
►
case of, you know, if Apple goes rogue and they want to steal people's names from
01:07:57
◼
►
that data, they won't be able to identify anyone because, you know, that data
01:08:02
◼
►
doesn't match any single person.
01:08:05
◼
►
Do you know if the data is anonymized before it leaves your device?
01:08:08
◼
►
Well, that's part of the way that it works, part of the algorithm, right?
01:08:14
◼
►
My understanding is iOS collects a portion of the data.
01:08:18
◼
►
and then transmits it. It never leaves your device as identifiable.
01:08:23
◼
►
No, according to Apple at least, the way that it's built is to not be identifiable for the single user.
01:08:31
◼
►
So even if Apple, again, they go crazy or if they get hacked, no one will be able to say,
01:08:39
◼
►
"Okay, my curly from London said that his favorite emoji is the eggplant one."
01:08:46
◼
►
That's the idea.
01:08:48
◼
►
Now, there's a few different areas of iOS 10 when Apple is using differential privacy
01:08:56
◼
►
to collect data.
01:08:59
◼
►
And according to the company, at least initially, they will be limited to four specific use
01:09:06
◼
►
Words that users add to their dictionaries, emoji type by the user, deep links, and lookup
01:09:15
◼
►
hints within notes. So I have many questions here, and I want to start from the lookup.
01:09:21
◼
►
So lookup is the new interface for the dictionary. It used to be called "define", so when you select
01:09:27
◼
►
a word in iOS 9 and in iOS 8 before, you get the "define" option to look up the word in the
01:09:34
◼
►
dictionary, and that's all that it is, it's just a dictionary. In iOS 10 it's called "lookup",
01:09:38
◼
►
and it's more versatile in the sense that it's more like "spotlight". When you select a sentence
01:09:43
◼
►
or when you select a single word, you don't just get the dictionary definition.
01:09:48
◼
►
You get the dictionary definition at the top, but also you get suggested websites, you get
01:09:54
◼
►
Wikipedia results, you get iTunes results, web videos, I think images also.
01:10:01
◼
►
So it's more like what you can do with Spotlight, only done for text that the user has selected.
01:10:08
◼
►
Why does it need differential privacy to do this?
01:10:10
◼
►
Why can't it just run a search?
01:10:13
◼
►
Apple says "Lookup hints within Notes". So they're talking about only the Notes app and only when the user
01:10:21
◼
►
brings up the lookup interface. But what's a lookup hint? I don't fully understand. So maybe they're looking at
01:10:29
◼
►
users who are typing stuff into Notes, then the user looks up something and maybe whatever they tap,
01:10:37
◼
►
app they choose as an option is used to crowdsource the result? I'm not sure.
01:10:44
◼
►
So, you know, and this is a common trend for my questions here.
01:10:49
◼
►
"New words that the users add to the local dictionary?"
01:10:52
◼
►
I never fully understood how iOS adds a word to the local system dictionary.
01:11:00
◼
►
I just feel like over time iOS learns by itself words that I'm typing.
01:11:06
◼
►
Yeah, because you can make it, you can kind of force teach it something.
01:11:10
◼
►
Like, you can make a mistake enough times and then it ends up being a word in the dictionary.
01:11:14
◼
►
But there's no full interface where I can go and be like, "Okay, hit +, now I want to
01:11:20
◼
►
add this word."
01:11:22
◼
►
It just learns over time from you dismissing the autocorrect.
01:11:27
◼
►
Like a problem in my life, and this is serious, I'm not joking here, sometimes I type in the
01:11:32
◼
►
word "podcaster" and it corrects it to "podcasters".
01:11:35
◼
►
is a problem I have brought upon myself. But it happens.
01:11:40
◼
►
Alright. Yeah, so basically Apple is looking at words that people add to the local dictionaries.
01:11:46
◼
►
I guess the idea is to be able to surface new words, such as when people say, I don't
01:11:52
◼
►
know, imagine that Steven comes up with a new word, like "mikes", and "mikes" identifies
01:11:59
◼
►
people from London and if enough people start saying you are a mike, then iOS sees that
01:12:07
◼
►
as a new word that people use, like a built-in urban dictionary, I guess? I don't know. Could
01:12:13
◼
►
be. Emoji type by the user. So there's two ways, at least there used to be until iOS
01:12:22
◼
►
beta 2, two ways that iOS could improve emoji for you. One is only available in
01:12:30
◼
►
messages and that is the one that they showed on stage at WWDC. You type a
01:12:36
◼
►
message, you say "hey wanna go for dinner and have a pizza?" You type that in an
01:12:41
◼
►
iMessage conversation, then you open the emoji keyboard and the emoji keyboard
01:12:46
◼
►
does a scan of the text and it highlights in orange words that have an emoji replacement
01:12:54
◼
►
So you tap the word, dinner becomes the knife with the fork emoji and pizza becomes the
01:12:59
◼
►
pizza emoji.
01:13:00
◼
►
So it's a way to let people emojify their sentences with just a few taps.
01:13:05
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The problem is, not the problem, maybe the...
01:13:08
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That annoys me that it's only available in messages.
01:13:11
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Yeah, right.
01:13:12
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I guess it's more difficult for Apple to,
01:13:15
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I mean, you gotta have a developer implementing
01:13:18
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a specific type of text field.
01:13:20
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I don't know.
01:13:21
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I've been thinking about this, honestly.
01:13:23
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- I wonder if it's them just making a statement, right?
01:13:27
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That you can talk about emoji in messages,
01:13:30
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but don't do it in your emails.
01:13:31
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- Exactly. - I can kinda see them
01:13:33
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making a sort of like dad statement about it.
01:13:35
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- Don't make bad decision for me, Apple.
01:13:36
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Like, I wanna tweet crazy emoji too.
01:13:39
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- No, go to your room.
01:13:40
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Get this, when you select a word...
01:13:43
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I had this problem yesterday.
01:13:46
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So I typed "love" into an iMessage conversation.
01:13:51
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And I hit the emoji keyboard, did a scan, and "love" was orange.
01:13:57
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I typed "love" and it brought up not a single emoji replacement,
01:14:02
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but a pop-up with three possible choices.
01:14:04
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And they were like choices of different emoji, heart emoji.
01:14:09
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So my idea is that Apple brings up this menu
01:14:14
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and over time they're looking at how many users
01:14:18
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pick one emoji from those possible candidates
01:14:21
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so that over time with differential privacy
01:14:24
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that if a trend surfaces that maybe people prefer
01:14:27
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the single red heart instead of the two hearts,
01:14:31
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that becomes the new default
01:14:32
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when the emoji keyboard highlights love.
01:14:35
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It's not gonna bring up a list,
01:14:37
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it's just gonna suggest a default
01:14:38
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that a lot of people use, as collected by differential privacy.
01:14:43
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But there's a second way that I used to be able, before Beta 3 that came out yesterday,
01:14:48
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I used to be able to suggest emoji to you, and that was through the Quick Type bar, you
01:14:52
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know, the suggestions above the keyboard available for predictive languages.
01:14:57
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Used to be, again until yesterday, and I'm really sad that it's gone from Beta 3, at
01:15:02
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least for a lot of people, including me, used to be that you're typing anything in any app,
01:15:08
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not just messages, and when there's a word that matches an emoji, an emoji is suggested
01:15:15
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in the QuickType bar.
01:15:17
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So you can either decide to replace the word with the emoji, so let's say that I'm typing
01:15:22
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"I'm walking the dog", and as soon as I type "dog", the dog emoji comes up in the QuickType
01:15:28
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bar, you know, the suggestions.
01:15:30
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So if I leave a space, I can put the dog emoji next to the word, so "dog", space, "dogEmoji".
01:15:38
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If I don't put a space after the word "dog" and I hit the emoji, it replaces the word.
01:15:43
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And it used to be awesome, because it suggested emoji for popular words, so pasta, pizza,
01:15:50
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beach, sun, heart, love, you know, that kind of stuff.
01:15:54
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Really popular words, didn't suggest more specific stuff like, I don't know.
01:15:58
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►
Well I mentioned this on upgrade, I'll say it again here.
01:16:01
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On Gboard, if you type in "butt" to double-T, you get a peach.
01:16:08
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►
It didn't work for ISD, and I tried.
01:16:10
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►
Oh, you did?
01:16:12
◼
►
Yes, I did, with many other words, Myke, that I cannot repeat on the show.
01:16:16
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►
That's why you keep texting me random single words all the time.
01:16:19
◼
►
Yes, be on the lookout for emoji, Steven.
01:16:23
◼
►
So, that QuickType functionality is gone from Beta 3.
01:16:27
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►
And I'm not sure if it's a bug or if it's coming back, and if it's being used for differential privacy.
01:16:35
◼
►
If I were to put a bet, I would say that Apple is using the emoji replacement in messages,
01:16:43
◼
►
but what they told the press, so the statement was "emojis typed by the user".
01:16:51
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►
It makes me think that QuickType was playing some kind of role in this, but I'm not sure.
01:16:57
◼
►
So we'll have to see if Beta 4 brings the QuickType suggestions back,
01:17:02
◼
►
and maybe we'll just have to wait for clarifications from Apple.
01:17:05
◼
►
The last part is interesting because it was supposed to ship last year,
01:17:09
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►
and it's deep links used inside apps.
01:17:13
◼
►
So last year when Apple announced the new Spotlight with rich results from apps,
01:17:19
◼
►
They also announced the ability for developers to advertise deep links, so you know, like a specific section of an app,
01:17:26
◼
►
and mark it for public indexing. So the idea was, let's say that you're a developer of a popular app with new content in the app every day,
01:17:41
◼
►
like a magazine app, and you want to mark those articles in the magazine public,
01:17:48
◼
►
because of course anyone can read those articles, and those articles
01:17:53
◼
►
can be accessed with a deep link, so it's like a URL scheme or a universal link.
01:17:59
◼
►
As soon as you mark it as eligible for public indexing, it gets beamed into
01:18:06
◼
►
the Apple Cloud, and over time users, without having to install your app, can just look
01:18:15
◼
►
for a string of text in Spotlight.
01:18:17
◼
►
Let's say that you have an article on cooking pasta.
01:18:21
◼
►
So last year Apple was saying, on iOS 10 down the road you can just look for cooking pasta
01:18:28
◼
►
in Spotlight, and without having to have the magazine app installed, the deep link publicly
01:18:35
◼
►
advertised from the developer will suggest you the content even if you don't have the
01:18:40
◼
►
app on your device.
01:18:42
◼
►
Then last year, during the summer, I had an article on this, a whole story about public
01:18:46
◼
►
indexing and the Apple cloud and what they were doing with search results.
01:18:51
◼
►
Then during the summer, the documentation for this feature was pulled from the Apple
01:18:55
◼
►
developer website and I was like "hmm, ok".
01:18:58
◼
►
And after a few weeks, they added a little note at the bottom of the document that says
01:19:03
◼
►
"public indexing for deep links will be available in the future".
01:19:07
◼
►
So they had a session at WWDC 2015 about this feature, they had documentation and then sometime
01:19:15
◼
►
in August 2015 they decided to postpone it.
01:19:18
◼
►
And of course it's coming back with differential privacy in iOS 10.
01:19:22
◼
►
So the idea again is if enough developers advertise deep links for public indexing and
01:19:33
◼
►
And if enough users tap on those links and use those apps in a differentially private
01:19:40
◼
►
way, iOS 10 will understand which content is popular and it will suggest those deep
01:19:45
◼
►
links to users even if they don't have the apps installed.
01:19:50
◼
►
A good way to understand this, let's say that enough users on Foursquare go to a bar and
01:19:58
◼
►
leave positive reviews for that bar and enough users, millions of users, open the Foursquare page
01:20:05
◼
►
in the Foursquare app for that location. I'm living in Rome, I don't have the Foursquare app installed,
01:20:12
◼
►
I'm looking for this bar, I type something like "Cocktail Bar" in Spotlight and that Foursquare
01:20:21
◼
►
page, because it was used by millions of people, comes to me as a suggestion
01:20:27
◼
►
without me having to have Foursquare on my device. That's the idea.
01:20:33
◼
►
I'm not sure how well it'll work in practice, but it's coming back with
01:20:38
◼
►
differential privacy. It was pulled last year, now Apple is hoping that it'll pick
01:20:42
◼
►
up again, and it's based on NSUserActivity, which is, you know, the API
01:20:49
◼
►
that is being used for a lot of stuff on iOS 10 and iOS 9.
01:20:53
◼
►
It's used for Reminders, it's used for Siri,
01:20:55
◼
►
it's used for Maps, it's used for Search.
01:20:58
◼
►
So it's this powerful API that is powering
01:21:00
◼
►
a lot of different parts of apps in iOS.
01:21:05
◼
►
And again, we'll have to see how well it'll scale
01:21:09
◼
►
once iOS 10 is available.
01:21:12
◼
►
And I guess this is part of the reason
01:21:14
◼
►
why Apple is doing public betas of iOS,
01:21:16
◼
►
because with these new ways to crowdsource data, to collect data, and to suggest popular
01:21:24
◼
►
content or trends or come up with new defaults, such as emoji, over time they need a lot of
01:21:33
◼
►
And the best way to collect data is to let people use apps and of course the public beta
01:21:37
◼
►
makes sense.
01:21:38
◼
►
So this deep linking thing reminds me of Android Instant Apps?
01:21:43
◼
►
Kind of, yes.
01:21:45
◼
►
really similar the idea is. I'm not sure if Apple will let you jump to
01:21:50
◼
►
content inside an app even if it's not installed, they'll maybe go to the
01:21:55
◼
►
universal link in Safari or they'll maybe open the App Store. So the difference
01:21:59
◼
►
might be that they say everybody's searching in the Foursquare app for
01:22:03
◼
►
something, what they do is take you to the relevant web page rather than the
01:22:07
◼
►
piece of content from the application. I think I prefer the Android
01:22:11
◼
►
implementation, I know a lot of people wouldn't but I think I would just prefer
01:22:14
◼
►
to stay inside of apps but yeah it's just a taste thing. Yeah I wonder if
01:22:20
◼
►
people would find that confusing I think we talked about that when Google made
01:22:24
◼
►
their announcement of like what oh I'm in the Yelp app but I don't have Yelp
01:22:27
◼
►
installed or maybe they never noticed like I just I just don't know like what
01:22:31
◼
►
people's expectations would be around that. Yeah I don't know. It's interesting though I
01:22:39
◼
►
I mean, I think being able to surface content out of apps is important.
01:22:45
◼
►
There's a lot of discussion about our world moving from the open internet to a bunch of
01:22:50
◼
►
siloed apps.
01:22:51
◼
►
And this is a way, this sort of technology keeps a lot of good things about the open
01:22:55
◼
►
web, keeps them intact in this world of apps that can't really talk to each other in a
01:23:01
◼
►
lot of interesting ways, like websites can.
01:23:03
◼
►
So I think it's positive.
01:23:05
◼
►
I think it's positive, I hope they can pull it off,
01:23:07
◼
►
and I think they can, but I think it's all
01:23:10
◼
►
about those details, right?
01:23:12
◼
►
If you lead a user down a path and suddenly they don't know
01:23:15
◼
►
how they got there or they think that they clicked
01:23:16
◼
►
on a link and something installed on their phone
01:23:18
◼
►
without their permission, that's not a good experience.
01:23:22
◼
►
But I guess we'll have to see how it plays out.
01:23:24
◼
►
- All right, so listening to this stuff,
01:23:28
◼
►
I mean, I can hear it's very complex
01:23:29
◼
►
and sounds like some interesting things here,
01:23:31
◼
►
but they're not doing anything crazy.
01:23:36
◼
►
- This is all very simple stuff,
01:23:38
◼
►
which leads me back to the idea of like,
01:23:40
◼
►
okay, great, you have this really nice way
01:23:42
◼
►
of keeping all of my stuff private, which is awesome,
01:23:44
◼
►
thank you very much.
01:23:45
◼
►
But is it holding you back?
01:23:48
◼
►
'Cause this is very simple things it's doing.
01:23:51
◼
►
It's not changing fundamentally how my phone works,
01:23:54
◼
►
it's suggesting words to me in emoji.
01:23:58
◼
►
- That you're using this incredibly private way to do this.
01:24:00
◼
►
I don't know if emoji needs to be that private, but they're doing it anyway.
01:24:04
◼
►
Yeah, it's very specific stuff and I get the idea that
01:24:09
◼
►
Apple is starting small from, you know, very specific activities that users do on iOS
01:24:17
◼
►
and you could see how in the future they could kind of expand to more complex and potentially risky
01:24:24
◼
►
areas of the OS such as, I don't know, looking at driving times or looking at how people
01:24:30
◼
►
organize their schedules, looking at how people organize specific types of emails, such as newsletters or people from contacts.
01:24:38
◼
►
But right now they're doing these very limited, very specific suggestions and data collection
01:24:46
◼
►
that won't make your iPhone suddenly into Google now, basically. It's not that.
01:24:52
◼
►
It has a chance to improve stuff that you do every day, such as typing or adding emoji,
01:24:59
◼
►
but it's not in any way revolutionary, at least in terms of impact.
01:25:03
◼
►
The underlying technology might as well be, and a lot of researchers are praising Apple
01:25:09
◼
►
for trying this new tech.
01:25:11
◼
►
Some other people are saying it's a new technology, we're not sure how it works yet.
01:25:15
◼
►
So it's a little, it's an uncharted territory right now.
01:25:19
◼
►
And Apple is starting small, four features.
01:25:24
◼
►
We don't know how well they will work, but that's what Apple does.
01:25:28
◼
►
They start small and eventually if everything goes well, they do more.
01:25:32
◼
►
If it doesn't, they just pull the documentation again, I guess.
01:25:35
◼
►
I don't know.
01:25:36
◼
►
All right, so that brings it to the end of our 100th episode.
01:25:41
◼
►
Thank you so much for listening.
01:25:42
◼
►
As always, we really, really appreciate it.
01:25:45
◼
►
Thank you if you've been with us for this whole 100 episodes.
01:25:48
◼
►
appreciate the fact that you've stuck with us for this amount of time. If you want to
01:25:52
◼
►
find our share notes for this week, they're good, they're great. They're at relay.fm/connected/100.
01:25:58
◼
►
If you would like to find us online, there's a couple of places you can do that. You can
01:26:01
◼
►
find Steven at 512pixels.net. You have the 512pixels YouTube channel as well is a good
01:26:06
◼
►
place to go. And also Steven is at ISMH on Twitter. Federico is @vittici, V-I-T-I-C-C-I,
01:26:14
◼
►
He is over at maxstories.net and I am at iMyke, I-M-Y-K-E.
01:26:18
◼
►
This show is a part of the Relay FM network.
01:26:21
◼
►
Go to relay.fm and you can see a plethora of other shows to maybe tickle your fancy.
01:26:28
◼
►
We have lots of interesting stuff there.
01:26:31
◼
►
Thanks again to our sponsors this week, the great people over at Smile and Hover.
01:26:35
◼
►
Thank you so much as always for their support and we'll be back next time.
01:26:39
◼
►
Until then, say goodbye gentlemen.
01:26:41
◼
►
Arrivederci.
01:26:47
◼
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[BLANK_AUDIO]