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Connected

100: Tepid Takes

 

00:00:00   (upbeat music)

00:00:02   - From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode number 100.

00:00:11   Today's show is brought to you by 123 Notetaker.

00:00:14   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined, as always,

00:00:17   by Mr. Federico Vatici.

00:00:18   Ciao Federico.

00:00:20   - Ciao Myke, how are you today?

00:00:22   - I'm great, thanks, Tixi.

00:00:23   And I'm also joined by your friend and mine,

00:00:25   Mr. Steven Hackett.

00:00:26   Howdy Steven.

00:00:27   - Howdy Myke.

00:00:28   I'm so excited for today's episode

00:00:29   that we should just jump straight into follow-up.

00:00:32   But first let me boot one of my 13 iMacs

00:00:35   so I can really get the flavor of this ancient K-base.

00:00:38   And speaking of K-base, this ancient K-base is actually--

00:00:40   (upbeat music)

00:00:43   - From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 100.

00:00:51   Today's show is brought to you by Hover

00:00:54   and TextExpander from Smile.

00:00:56   My name is Myke Hurley and guys, we did it.

00:00:59   Mr. Steven Hackett, congratulations on episode 100.

00:01:02   - Feels pretty good, right?

00:01:03   Nice round number.

00:01:04   - We finally made it to a 100.

00:01:06   - Yeah, the prompt in, never did that.

00:01:08   - Nope, we did now.

00:01:09   Federico, you are here too, 100 episodes under our belt.

00:01:13   - Yeah, I'm really happy it doesn't seem real.

00:01:16   It's a big milestone, guys.

00:01:17   I feel like we're podcast professionals at this point.

00:01:22   We are people familiar with the matter of podcasting

00:01:26   because we reach 100 episodes so congrats, cheers and let's do the show.

00:01:33   The clap scores are going up, I can feel it.

00:01:35   Is this the last episode or are we still going to carry on?

00:01:38   No, we're still going.

00:01:40   Are we still friends even after 100 episodes?

00:01:43   I don't know, it's like you know when you watch a TV show like Friends, right, and it's

00:01:47   a really long running thing and you end up becoming so attached to them that you wish

00:01:51   they were friends.

00:01:52   Or like the Mythbusters, you know the Mythbusters weren't friends and it always makes me sad

00:01:55   to think that. So I feel like we should just leave an air of mystery around it and just

00:02:01   not let anybody know if we're friends or not. Maybe we're just super professionals and we're

00:02:04   just really good at acting like we're friends.

00:02:06   That's kind of sad but I can live with it, okay.

00:02:09   I mean one of the reasons that we might not be friends anymore is something like #TGMNT!

00:02:14   Why? That's awesome! Why is it a problem?

00:02:18   I don't know, well it depends what you think about the applications that I have pulled

00:02:22   Okay. I have I've gone through the #teachimenti hashtag from last week. This is with the beginning

00:02:30   of Federico's mentorship program that we were talking about because Federico dreamed of being

00:02:34   a mentor for his business cards. So I have picked out some people who have put their applications

00:02:39   with the hashtag #teachimenti. Okay. Wolfgang, Wolfgang needs pasta guidance under the mentorship

00:02:46   program. Is this included in the package? Will you teach people about how to cook pasta,

00:02:51   what pasta to eat, that kind of thing. Is that going to be included in the

00:02:54   Techie Teaches Mentorship Program?

00:02:57   Well, I mean, pasta is an essential element to the well-being of someone who wants to study

00:03:05   the program because you gotta eat food to continue living, of course. And I feel like

00:03:12   the best food to have energy and mental clarity is pasta. So, of course, pasta guidance would be

00:03:20   included in the package and I appreciate that Wolfgang said no pineapples just

00:03:25   tomatoes and I feel like Wolfgang is making a good point. I'm not putting

00:03:31   pineapples in pasta I'm not going that far. Well someone is somewhere in the

00:03:36   world that someone may making pasta with pineapples I mean if they make pizza at

00:03:40   this point the you know the damage is already done someone is surely making

00:03:44   making pasta with pineapples.

00:03:45   Pumpkins good in pasta.

00:03:47   No.

00:03:48   It is.

00:03:49   No.

00:03:50   Yeah it is.

00:03:51   Yeah it is.

00:03:52   So...

00:03:53   Pumpkins are good for Halloween and that's about it.

00:03:55   So yes, Wolfgang.

00:03:57   Pasta is included in the package.

00:03:59   I would also like to just say Wolfgang instead because I like that and just in case he is

00:04:03   Wolfgang I just wanted to say that because I like doing that.

00:04:07   Chase wants to learn blogging from you Federico and I wondered is blogging a skill that can

00:04:14   be taught or are you born with the ability to blog?

00:04:17   No it's a skill that you learn and that you need to practice every day for a long time

00:04:22   and it depends on I guess the kind of blog that you want to have so when I started I

00:04:29   want to make stories to be more like dozens of articles every day and to always be on

00:04:35   the tech news beat and to do breaking news, rumors, that kind of stuff.

00:04:42   But with time I figured that it wasn't what I wanted to do, I wanted to have a more relaxed

00:04:50   and sort of analytic approach maybe.

00:04:53   And so I shifted the kind of website that I have to be, in terms of quantity, to be

00:05:00   smaller than other websites.

00:05:01   But definitely blogging, especially when it comes to the tools that you need to use, the

00:05:06   decisions that you make and to not fall for the new technology that comes out, that locks

00:05:12   you in and then after a couple of years it's gone and you ended up with a blog that is

00:05:18   based on a CMS that is no longer supported and you don't know what to do.

00:05:22   So there's a lot of things to understand about blogging, especially if it's a tech blog or

00:05:26   a video game blog or a music blog.

00:05:29   The landscape has changed in the past few years, especially with Medium and people taking,

00:05:34   sort of doing more video updates instead of articles with YouTube and that kind of stuff.

00:05:41   But definitely blogging, it's something that you need to learn, that you can learn, you

00:05:47   need to learn blogging.

00:05:49   So this feels like it's going to be a cornerstone of the mentorship program.

00:05:52   Absolutely, especially because it's great that you're able to share updates on Twitter or Snapchat, whatever,

00:06:02   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,

00:06:11   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.

00:06:21   blogging and food definitely. So first up two applications, really good ones.

00:06:26   Okay, Reed missed the point and wants to dress up as a manatee. Is this accepted?

00:06:32   It can be a mascot I guess. You can dress up as a manatee, I do.

00:06:38   It's a pretty terrible mascot. I mean mascots are supposed to be like aggressive and exciting.

00:06:43   A manatee is neither of those things.

00:06:45   I bet a manatee could be aggressive. You know there's a David Attenborough documentary out there

00:06:50   where there is an aggressive manatee. You just know it, like eating a penguin or something.

00:06:53   It's not like... Can a manatee bite you? I don't know. Is it an aggressive animal?

00:06:59   I mean anything can bite you, you know? Not anything. Pretty much. Anything that lives

00:07:04   can bite you. I just don't see like a bunch of people cheering for the manatee team. How

00:07:09   do you dress up as a manatee and a mascot? Basically you just look like a big grey underwater

00:07:14   potato. It's a terrible mascot. Joel wants to learn Italian and I wondered

00:07:19   if Italian is a required language for your mentorship program?

00:07:23   No, it's not.

00:07:25   Not because I don't have pride in my country, but especially because it's a very limited

00:07:32   population.

00:07:33   And, you know, I got a lot of criticism when I switched my stories from double languages,

00:07:41   so it started as a blog in Italian and in English.

00:07:44   And then after a few months I just decided to do it all in English.

00:07:50   And the first few months I got a lot of people emailing me and making fun of me on Twitter

00:07:55   because I was, you know, kind of like the pretentious Italian who wanted to write in

00:07:58   English.

00:07:59   And to be fair my English was kind of terrible back then and I still need to improve of course

00:08:04   because it's not my first language.

00:08:06   But you know there's only 60 million people living in Italy and everyone else doesn't

00:08:13   live in Italy and people abroad don't speak Italian. So it's a fancy language to learn,

00:08:19   you know, especially Italy is a beautiful country, so when you come in Italy if you

00:08:23   can speak a bit of Italian, or if you know Italian and you want to speak Italian abroad,

00:08:28   it can give you that little exotic, fascinating sort of tone to your persona, but it's not

00:08:34   a required language for the program.

00:08:36   Is Python a required language for the program?

00:08:38   No, honestly not. You're free to use your preferred programming language of choice,

00:08:44   whether it's Python or Swift or Objective-C. I'm not too fussy about the language that

00:08:48   you want to use.

00:08:50   Jake wants to apply for the program. Jake already works you at MacStories. Does this

00:08:54   help his chances?

00:08:58   I don't know why Jake did this.

00:09:00   I don't know how much higher he could get in the program than he currently already is,

00:09:04   but...

00:09:05   and we talk every day and I feel like Jake is already part of the program.

00:09:10   Do you think that Jake is maybe signaling here that as a boss you're not really a mentor?

00:09:14   Ooh.

00:09:16   Oh wow.

00:09:17   Oh.

00:09:19   I'm not sure how I want to reply to that, Myke.

00:09:22   I feel like Jake just wanted to be out there with the hashtag and wanted to be part of

00:09:28   the conversation, but Jake is in many ways the perfect candidate for the program because

00:09:34   he emailed me a few months ago and we started talking and then we started, you know, let's

00:09:38   do something together, why don't you write for Max Stories and then we invited over to

00:09:42   Slack and...

00:09:43   So is that all you need to do to work for Max Stories, just email you?

00:09:46   Well most of the time, yeah, what do you want to do, come knock at my house and say yeah,

00:09:50   what am I for Max Stories?

00:09:51   I don't know.

00:09:52   Yeah, it might help, I don't know, it shows initiative at least.

00:09:54   No, that's creepy, please don't do that.

00:09:56   Okay.

00:09:57   Jake has it right because you are paying him to be in the program.

00:10:01   Oh!

00:10:02   I think people would pay the mentor if there's money exchange.

00:10:06   I mean, obviously you're doing this out of the goodness of your own heart.

00:10:08   But you know, if you were like a

00:10:11   productivity guru on the side of a mountain, people would pay money to come see you.

00:10:14   But Jake is making money and being potentially mentored. I think Jake's doing it right.

00:10:21   See, that's what he meant, basically. Jake doesn't want me to pay him anymore. So thank you Jake.

00:10:28   That's so kind of him, isn't it?

00:10:30   You're saving me money now.

00:10:31   It's really sweet of him.

00:10:34   And also, we spoke about the importance of pasta.

00:10:37   Simba wanted to understand if the ways of Titti Espresso would be taught as part of

00:10:42   your mentorship program.

00:10:44   Is this another cornerstone of the program, Espresso?

00:10:47   Of course.

00:10:48   Simba is, according to his tweet, a long-time AeroPress user.

00:10:54   And let me tell you, Simba, there's no AeroPress in the program.

00:10:59   The only real coffee of course is espresso.

00:11:01   And...

00:11:02   Don't you do that, Myke.

00:11:04   AeroPress makes espresso, it's just not the espresso that you are used to having served here.

00:11:08   That doesn't make any sense.

00:11:10   Yes it does.

00:11:11   It's like...

00:11:12   No, no, it doesn't...

00:11:13   AeroPress makes espresso.

00:11:14   The espresso machine makes espresso.

00:11:16   No.

00:11:17   Not the AeroPress.

00:11:18   No, there are other ways to make espresso rather than an espresso machine that you have.

00:11:21   It's like people when they go to the lake and they say "I went to the beach".

00:11:24   No, you do not go to the beach, you went to the lake.

00:11:28   the same thing Myke. The beach is by the sea, the lake is the lake.

00:11:32   People are telling me in the chatroom that it's not espresso. Well, you can make espresso.

00:11:37   The internet tells me that you can make espresso. The internet is wrong, Myke.

00:11:41   Well, well, okay. Well, who knows. So what's the next step for the program?

00:11:47   Well, this is all on you. I mean, I've given people what they're looking for out of the

00:11:52   program. I've given you some real candidates here. So now it's all on you, Federico. You've

00:11:58   got to spin up this thing, apply for some grants and stuff to help pay for it all.

00:12:04   I feel like I need some artwork or some landing page done.

00:12:08   Yeah, well we have a domain which can be pointed towards anything you need and we can move

00:12:14   on from there. I'm excited to see where this mentorship program is going to go next. So

00:12:19   #teachmente.

00:12:22   What's the domain name?

00:12:24   So teachmente.com.

00:12:25   No, I think it's Mentor Stories.net.

00:12:28   Steven knows the website.

00:12:30   It is MentorStories.net.

00:12:32   MentorStories.net.

00:12:33   MentorStories.net.

00:12:34   So you go there and you'll find everything you need for the mentorship program conducted

00:12:39   by Federico Vittucci.

00:12:42   On last week's episode it turned out that Federico was a prophet, if you remember.

00:12:47   He predicted multi-pad life.

00:12:50   But we have had another prophecy told in an earlier episode of The Prompt.

00:12:57   In episode number 54, we were talking about...

00:13:02   I think we were just talking about the Android Wear watch.

00:13:05   I think that was what the episode was about.

00:13:08   And Luke had written in that at around 38 minutes, me and Steven joined forces to create

00:13:16   the prophecy of how you will be able to unlock a Mac with your Apple Watch.

00:13:23   So this is the idea of using things that the phone can be aware of contextually to not

00:13:31   then need to provide you with the need to put your key in.

00:13:36   So like for example to put your passcode in or to put some sort of unlock code in.

00:13:43   could maybe unlock your phone by wearing your smartwatch or something like that.

00:13:48   Any sort of Bluetooth device that you have attached to you.

00:13:52   There was a OS X app, an iOS-like app that did this, right?

00:13:58   I think that sort of thing is really pretty cool and you could see Apple could do that

00:14:02   with the continuity and handoff stuff because the devices starting this fall will know much

00:14:07   more about each other and I for one would like that if I'm near my computer and I walk

00:14:12   up to it that I had the option to unlock it based on proximity I think it could

00:14:15   be really nice. I think it just goes to show that while Federico is a truly

00:14:23   gifted digital prophet if you will. No no. Clearly his skills have rubbed off on us

00:14:29   over time. Yeah and I think that really the three of us should go into some sort

00:14:34   of digital prophecy network like maybe maybe we could lay in a pool of water on

00:14:41   our backs and predict the future. Yeah, yeah, I like this. And like different

00:14:45   technology CEOs, they come to us and we tell them what we think is gonna happen

00:14:50   in the future. And we could have precognitive thoughts about their

00:14:53   technology. What you want to do is to host your own Burning Man event. Yeah,

00:15:01   that's a good idea. There's going to be like tents and there's going to be like people in

00:15:05   some kind of desert, maybe you know some kind of landscape across Texas, I don't

00:15:10   I don't know, and all the CEOs and people from big companies can go there and use different

00:15:19   tools and substances, if you will, to follow the event and then listen to your predictions.

00:15:26   I think that's good.

00:15:28   We'll get right on that.

00:15:29   Let's not do the relay con again and let's do this kind of event instead.

00:15:32   It's a natural pivot.

00:15:34   On it.

00:15:35   I just wanted to mention, obviously we are at episode 100 today, which is one of those

00:15:38   times when you look back.

00:15:40   So I would just like to encourage people to continue looking back through our archives

00:15:44   over the prompt and connected and continue to let us know about all of the things that

00:15:49   we got right because I am almost certain that there are many, many, many more.

00:15:57   What's the expression?

00:15:58   Even a wrong mic.

00:16:00   A broken mic is predicting things correctly once every little while.

00:16:04   I think it's that.

00:16:05   It's something like that.

00:16:06   A broken mic is right across 100 episodes.

00:16:09   Yep, all the time.

00:16:11   So there's a hashtag all about it.

00:16:13   If you remember last week, I've done all the follow-up this week.

00:16:17   This is the change in episode 100. I'm continuing.

00:16:19   No!

00:16:20   No, I'm continuing.

00:16:21   It's all I had.

00:16:22   Austin Evans did a great video, I'm not letting you do it,

00:16:24   about the mechanical iPad keyboard case from Razer.

00:16:27   So you can go and see.

00:16:29   I don't really know what to think about this thing.

00:16:31   It's kind of what I expected.

00:16:33   it's clicky-clacky and the stand looks good.

00:16:37   There's a part of me that's like, "Oh, that looks nice,

00:16:39   "but I don't want the big thick keyboard attached

00:16:42   "to my iPad when really the, what is it called?

00:16:45   "Do I have the smart cover?

00:16:47   "Smart keyboard case?"

00:16:48   - Smart keyboard, Myke. - Smart keyboard.

00:16:49   - Smart keyboard.

00:16:50   I'm not joking, I cannot remember the names of this product.

00:16:54   - You should get that checked out by your physician, Myke.

00:16:56   - It's too late, it's too late for me now.

00:16:59   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...

00:19:27   Sorry.

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

00:19:59   the same.

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.

00:20:11   It's true.

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

00:22:10   last week.

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?

00:23:28   No comment.

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?

00:23:45   Yes.

00:23:46   Okay.

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.

00:23:55   Thank you!

00:23:56   That's about...

00:23:57   Mm.

00:23:58   Mm.

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

00:24:17   these days?

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

00:27:07   the iPhone.

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?

00:34:03   Basically,

00:34:04   you have different export options which include plain text, rich text and PDF.

00:34:12   A new

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

00:34:24   way to add

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

00:40:05   year.

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

00:42:47   right and

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?

00:45:32   It's $20.

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   It allows you to type just a few characters and it'll expand anything you want.

00:48:51   Email addresses, chunks of code, marketing copy, driving directions.

00:48:55   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   powerful. You can have fill in snippets so you can customize responses. They are now

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00:49:21   apps which is now Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows which is currently in beta and the new Text

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00:49:30   You have discounts for registered users and the team subscriptions that you can now buy

00:49:35   include organization focused snippet and team management, detailed access control, consolidated

00:49:40   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

00:51:26   pack.

00:51:27   So, yeah.

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.

00:54:33   Oh yeah.

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.

00:57:16   Yeah.

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

00:58:20   space.

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

00:58:42   there for.

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.

00:58:55   Is it?

00:58:56   You took away follow-up, Myke.

00:58:57   Mm-hmm.

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

01:01:18   versa.

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

01:02:40   the time.

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.

01:03:23   - Exactly.

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

01:03:56   the face.

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

01:05:08   the review.

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

01:05:22   the API.

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.

01:07:22   Yes.

01:07:23   Right.

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

01:09:04   cases.

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?

01:10:12   Exactly.

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

01:12:53   available.

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   The problem is, not the problem, maybe the...

01:13:08   That annoys me that it's only available in messages.

01:13:11   Yeah, right.

01:13:12   I guess it's more difficult for Apple to,

01:13:15   I mean, you gotta have a developer implementing

01:13:18   a specific type of text field.

01:13:20   I don't know.

01:13:21   I've been thinking about this, honestly.

01:13:23   - I wonder if it's them just making a statement, right?

01:13:27   That you can talk about emoji in messages,

01:13:30   but don't do it in your emails.

01:13:31   - Exactly. - I can kinda see them

01:13:33   making a sort of like dad statement about it.

01:13:35   - Don't make bad decision for me, Apple.

01:13:36   Like, I wanna tweet crazy emoji too.

01:13:39   - No, go to your room.

01:13:40   Get this, when you select a word...

01:13:43   I had this problem yesterday.

01:13:46   So I typed "love" into an iMessage conversation.

01:13:51   And I hit the emoji keyboard, did a scan, and "love" was orange.

01:13:57   I typed "love" and it brought up not a single emoji replacement,

01:14:02   but a pop-up with three possible choices.

01:14:04   And they were like choices of different emoji, heart emoji.

01:14:09   So my idea is that Apple brings up this menu

01:14:14   and over time they're looking at how many users

01:14:18   pick one emoji from those possible candidates

01:14:21   so that over time with differential privacy

01:14:24   that if a trend surfaces that maybe people prefer

01:14:27   the single red heart instead of the two hearts,

01:14:31   that becomes the new default

01:14:32   when the emoji keyboard highlights love.

01:14:35   It's not gonna bring up a list,

01:14:37   it's just gonna suggest a default

01:14:38   that a lot of people use, as collected by differential privacy.

01:14:43   But there's a second way that I used to be able, before Beta 3 that came out yesterday,

01:14:48   I used to be able to suggest emoji to you, and that was through the Quick Type bar, you

01:14:52   know, the suggestions above the keyboard available for predictive languages.

01:14:57   Used to be, again until yesterday, and I'm really sad that it's gone from Beta 3, at

01:15:02   least for a lot of people, including me, used to be that you're typing anything in any app,

01:15:08   not just messages, and when there's a word that matches an emoji, an emoji is suggested

01:15:15   in the QuickType bar.

01:15:17   So you can either decide to replace the word with the emoji, so let's say that I'm typing

01:15:22   "I'm walking the dog", and as soon as I type "dog", the dog emoji comes up in the QuickType

01:15:28   bar, you know, the suggestions.

01:15:30   So if I leave a space, I can put the dog emoji next to the word, so "dog", space, "dogEmoji".

01:15:38   If I don't put a space after the word "dog" and I hit the emoji, it replaces the word.

01:15:43   And it used to be awesome, because it suggested emoji for popular words, so pasta, pizza,

01:15:50   beach, sun, heart, love, you know, that kind of stuff.

01:15:54   Really popular words, didn't suggest more specific stuff like, I don't know.

01:15:58   Well I mentioned this on upgrade, I'll say it again here.

01:16:01   On Gboard, if you type in "butt" to double-T, you get a peach.

01:16:08   It didn't work for ISD, and I tried.

01:16:10   Oh, you did?

01:16:12   Yes, I did, with many other words, Myke, that I cannot repeat on the show.

01:16:16   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   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   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   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

01:21:32   data.

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.

01:21:44   Yeah.

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.

01:23:35   - No, no.

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.

01:23:57   - Yes.

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.

01:26:42   Adios.

01:26:42   4

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