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Connected

82: All Things Pizza

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:06   From Relay FM, this is Connected. Today's show is brought to you by our friends

00:00:11   at Igloo. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by Mr Federico Vittucci. Hi Federico.

00:00:16   Ciao Myke. Ciao Federico and howdy Mrs Stephen Hackett.

00:00:20   Greetings from the south. Howdy y'all.

00:00:23   Wow. Wow, nice accent Myke.

00:00:27   I need to address something, a horrible travesty.

00:00:32   So after we recorded last week's episode, within 10 minutes, we had news that we would

00:00:40   have definitely wanted to discuss on the show.

00:00:43   And also an entire topic was completely invalidated by some follow up news.

00:00:49   It was within 10 minutes, Google Docs on the iPad Pro came out, which we'll talk about

00:00:54   a second and Flexbright got pulled from the App Store. That was great, that was just a

00:01:00   great way to post a show. So I posted the show, some people may have seen the beautiful

00:01:05   spelling error of Ricktext instead of Richtext, and then all the news went wrong. So Steven,

00:01:12   never leave us again, because it's clearly the only thing that changed is you weren't

00:01:15   here and then everything went to hell, basically.

00:01:20   - Yeah, I was ill.

00:01:21   Not faking, as some people suggested.

00:01:25   - Yeah, whatever.

00:01:26   - Yeah, so this Flexbrite app turns out not so much allowed.

00:01:31   And it was pulled, and you guys spoke a lot about this

00:01:36   in the last episode about what does working with Apple mean?

00:01:40   - It means it doesn't exist, that's what it means.

00:01:42   - It means you get pulled from the app store

00:01:44   for breaking the rules.

00:01:46   My sort of big question for this,

00:01:48   so we see this sometimes, right?

00:01:49   see an app that in the old days would add tethering or you know something like

00:01:53   this something clearly outside of what Apple wants in the App Store and I

00:02:00   always wonder like if the press makes that worse so like if this if this app

00:02:04   had had no press could they just exist in the App Store forever or because it

00:02:09   was on the front page of MacRumors someone at Apple was like oh that's not

00:02:14   cool and then went and pulled the trigger. There's no really way to know the

00:02:18   answer to that right it's a very chicken and egg problem but I always

00:02:20   always just think about that when you see some big hyper profile thing come

00:02:24   out and then it's gone in eight hours I don't know but it's gone yeah without a

00:02:29   shadow of a doubt it getting noticed by the press is what made the app die yeah

00:02:33   it's not good because it got through right like they didn't put it back

00:02:36   through for another review it got into the store and then MacRumors puts it on

00:02:41   the front page does a little interview with them and then apples like alright

00:02:45   and then just pulls it out, not Apple.

00:02:49   - Yeah, and the best part is whenever stuff like this happens,

00:02:53   there's people on Twitter, they're like,

00:02:55   "Yes, this is Tim Cook's Apple.

00:02:58   This is change, Apple is changing."

00:03:00   And of course, two days later, the app is gone.

00:03:02   (laughing)

00:03:04   - Same old, same old, basically.

00:03:06   - This may be Tim Cook's Apple,

00:03:08   just not for app review, I guess.

00:03:11   I mean, it makes sense, right?

00:03:12   If you think about it, there's Night Shift coming out in maybe next week.

00:03:18   And the app is clearly not as good as Night Shift, and I could have understood the motivation.

00:03:25   We want to give people with older iPhones access to this kind of feature.

00:03:29   But it just was so weird.

00:03:31   And the developer is saying, we worked with Apple.

00:03:34   And the motivation that they gave to MacRumors, it was along the lines of, well, we didn't

00:03:40   necessarily use private APIs.

00:03:42   was our own framework, which is a public framework built

00:03:47   on top of APIs that developers cannot use.

00:03:49   Which means, yes, we were using private APIs just

00:03:53   in a fancy way.

00:03:54   So we were hoping not to get caught, but whatever.

00:03:57   We got caught.

00:03:58   Maybe next time.

00:03:59   Did you see this tweet from Amar?

00:04:01   Basically, Flexbright taking like 69% battery

00:04:07   as background activity.

00:04:09   Not really.

00:04:10   Not what you want at all.

00:04:12   His second is PDF expert. He's a power user making those PDFs on his iPad.

00:04:17   But I just chuckled when I saw that screenshot.

00:04:20   Clearly this app was not well designed and not something Apple wants around.

00:04:25   Speaking of apps that aren't well designed, we talked about this a second ago.

00:04:30   Google Docs got updated for the iPad Pro. I'm going to put that in scare quotes because...

00:04:34   That was such a good segue.

00:04:36   Yeah, perfect. Very well done. Very well done.

00:04:40   I mean, iPad Pro support with a very big footnote here.

00:04:45   - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:04:46   - So it supports the larger screen now, right?

00:04:49   So you don't get the enormous toddler-sized keyboard.

00:04:54   But there's still nothing that we actually want.

00:04:58   So no slide over, no split view.

00:05:00   - It's halfway there, right?

00:05:02   So somebody who's still using Google Docs every day,

00:05:05   it's way nicer now.

00:05:06   I'm very happy that they did this.

00:05:09   I want them to go the whole way, naturally,

00:05:11   and go for split view, which I think, you know,

00:05:13   I'm still holding on to the hope that it will happen,

00:05:16   but we're not there yet.

00:05:18   So like, it's a step in the right direction,

00:05:21   but it's still a few steps behind,

00:05:24   which prompted Federico to rain hellfire and brimstone

00:05:28   upon Google in a little piece on Mac stories.

00:05:31   - It's kind of ridiculous, really.

00:05:34   You know, a company the size of Google

00:05:36   taking this many months to finish what has to be the final product, which is, you know,

00:05:43   proper iOS apps with iOS 9 features. It's now mid-March, and they're only starting now

00:05:50   to have, you know, multitasking support and full resolution support on the iPad Pro. And

00:05:55   in general, there's a John Gruber tweet that he sent me, you know, with a comment that

00:06:01   we cannot quote on the show, but basically saying that the Google's iOS apps are not

00:06:07   really good, and I'm paraphrasing here. And I truly believe that Google has been going

00:06:13   downhill when it comes to what they offer on iOS. They used to make, I mean, they make

00:06:18   pretty amazing web services. Whatever you think about, you know, Google and privacy,

00:06:22   I think it's undeniable that Google makes solid web services, and I use them every day,

00:06:26   I depend on Google services. And some iOS apps are decent, or that I say good apps,

00:06:31   such as Google Maps, for example, even if it lacks some of the features on Android,

00:06:35   it's a good iOS app. But the majority of Google apps on iOS have really seen a decline in

00:06:41   terms of quality and in terms of feature adoption with the latest iOS versions. I don't talk

00:06:48   about it, but even if you look at the Google Calendar app for iOS, it's only an iPhone

00:06:52   and it doesn't really use any iOS interface paradigm, which is not new, but I mean it

00:06:58   doesn't have an iPad version and it lacks so many of the features of Google calendar

00:07:03   on the web. And you can see this in many many Google apps, YouTube, Google Docs, Google

00:07:09   Chrome was even, you know, it doesn't have many of the features that I want to see in

00:07:13   a browser. It's a very sad state and a lot of people say "well, it's not in Google's

00:07:19   interest to make solid iOS apps because Google is a web company. And to that I respond that

00:07:25   it to, at least my opinion is, Google is a company that wants users to use their services

00:07:32   as much as possible. To collect data, to make better services, to feed the AI that they

00:07:38   use with more data, and to not have a solid iOS ecosystem is ultimately detrimental to

00:07:46   Google's very business, which is to have as many users as possible, collect data, make

00:07:52   better services, sell advertisements. And I believe that having a native iOS experience

00:07:59   is key to that business strategy.

00:08:01   I think that their apps got really good, and there's still points where they are good.

00:08:08   I think Chrome is very good. I use it every day and I have no problems with it at all.

00:08:14   Chrome is one of their apps that they actually update pretty quickly.

00:08:18   It's had Splitview for a long time, I think it was like a couple of weeks after multitasking

00:08:22   came out it got Splitview and it looks great on the iPad Pro.

00:08:26   I think that is an app which I do like and I think it works well.

00:08:30   And they have other apps like the Drive app was updated with Splitview again very quickly.

00:08:35   They just seem to have these weird pockets where it's falling behind and I wish we knew

00:08:40   why.

00:08:42   There's obviously a reason, I don't know what that reason is, but at this point it's a shame

00:08:48   to see because for a while, you know, Google were making some of the best apps on iOS and

00:08:53   something's changed and we cannot see what that is.

00:08:58   Before we move to the next follow-up item, I have a favor to ask you guys.

00:09:04   So I was contacted privately by a friend of mine, Luca, he's one of the Italian co-hosts

00:09:09   of Easy Apple, one of my favorite Italian podcasts, and he asked me today, and I'm quoting

00:09:16   here, to put an end to the pineapple pizza travesty on Relay.

00:09:21   Oh no.

00:09:22   So I need you guys to tell me what's going on with pineapple pizza.

00:09:26   What is pineapple pizza?

00:09:28   So this is a conversation that's mainly occurring on Upgrade right now.

00:09:33   Jason's favorite pizza is pineapple and pepperoni.

00:09:38   And John Siracusa, on last week's episode of Upgrade, told Jason that that's ridiculous

00:09:47   and that basically Hawaiian pizza, which is ham and pineapple, is the closest that you

00:09:53   can get to being real pizza and having pineapple on it, but it's still on the fringe.

00:09:58   But now I, this weekend, am going to make and consume pineapple and pepperoni pizza.

00:10:03   So that's kind of where we are with it.

00:10:06   is this is a dude this is not your pizza although I'm pretty sure I saw Hawaiian

00:10:10   pizza in Palermo I actually think I had one so it's one of those things that

00:10:15   they do for the tourists that came I had it at that local pizza store that I told

00:10:19   you about where Italian people were queuing up it exists I can just say God

00:10:26   bless John Siracusa because he sees the light you know I mean but I can let you

00:10:33   guess my stance on pineapple pizza and, you know, these types of Americanism that we see

00:10:42   in Italian food. But it's a different thing, though. Right? I mean, what if I come up with

00:10:50   an idea and it's like, let's make, you know, beef ice cream. Is that really ice cream?

00:10:56   Sure it is. But it's somebody else's interpretation on it. If you're making, like, if you're

00:11:02   freezing cream of flavoring beef. It's just beef flavored ice cream, right? Like this

00:11:07   is just pizza with different toppings on it.

00:11:09   I guess. I guess. Well, you know, we live in a democracy, so everyone's entitled to

00:11:16   their taste. I mean, some tastes are wrong, but you know, whatever. I don't get too upset.

00:11:23   I'll tell you what, Myke. Because I'm a person with an open mind, when we get together, me

00:11:30   and you and Steven and Jason, I will taste pineapple pizza.

00:11:34   It's surprisingly good. The sweetness and the saltiness, it works really well together.

00:11:39   I'll tell you what, I'm open to tasting pineapple pizza. I don't fully condemn pineapple pizza

00:11:46   for now. I'm not ecstatic about the idea, but I'm open to tasting pineapple pizza.

00:11:52   So this will be long term follow up for like a few months time or something?

00:11:56   a few months and we'll chronicle the experience with videos and photos.

00:12:01   We can finally put this to bed.

00:12:03   Yes.

00:12:04   What else do we have on the follow-up docket?

00:12:07   I was just going to say real quick, I'm really proud that the business that you and I have

00:12:11   built is the preeminent podcast network for All Things Pizza.

00:12:17   It's not a goal we set out to have.

00:12:18   ATP, that's what we should call the network now, All Things Pizza, right?

00:12:22   I don't think that's ATP.

00:12:23   Yeah, I'll just buy the domain right now.

00:12:26   OK, great. ATP.fm, all things pizza.

00:12:28   No, no, you know, why don't you buy ATP.pizza, one of those new TLDs.

00:12:33   Does it exist?

00:12:35   Let's see. ATP.

00:12:39   .pizza. I don't think there is a .pizza.

00:12:41   No, there has to be.

00:12:43   Come on, there's .plumber.

00:12:46   Hang on, new .pizza domains.

00:12:48   It looks like some people are saying that it exists.

00:12:51   New pizza domain names. Yeah, it's a thing, Myke.

00:12:54   Wow. Can we get AT? .pizza. So what would we get? AT.pizza, though?

00:12:59   Not ATP.pizza, because then it would be allthingspizza.pizza.

00:13:03   Allthingspizza.pizza.

00:13:07   We'll see. We'll do our research on .pizza domain names.

00:13:12   Excellent. Excellent. So the next item is a little bit

00:13:17   follow-up, a little bit mini topic, but it came up, and I think it was

00:13:22   interest all three of us because we, at least two of us, own both of these products.

00:13:28   Sonos had a blog post last week that is unfortunately full of business speak but

00:13:34   I think what's happening is that they're laying off some people and they are

00:13:38   interested in voice technology. They actually call out the Amazon Echo

00:13:44   specifically in this blog post saying hey you know we think there's some

00:13:47   interesting stuff going in here with the

00:13:51   power of voice control and some home

00:13:54   automation stuff and basically what I

00:13:57   think is happening is that Sonos is

00:13:59   making some sort of change in direction

00:14:03   some sort of pivot from just high-end

00:14:05   sound system stuff that's smart to

00:14:09   something that is a little more

00:14:11   intelligent about the world around it

00:14:14   and there's been lots of suggestions that maybe they're going to partner with

00:14:19   Amazon and somehow have Alexa as a service on top of the Sonos speakers.

00:14:26   I still think it's crazy that Apple hasn't looked at Sonos, but I don't know.

00:14:30   Federico, I was specifically curious what you thought about this, owning both.

00:14:35   I mean, there's a big gap in things like sound quality between Alexa and the Sonos

00:14:40   systems, but at the same time it is kind of interesting to think like what could

00:14:45   an Echo be like with really good speakers built in.

00:14:48   Yeah, I've been thinking about these blog posts because it's very confusing

00:14:52   and I struggle to understand what they were trying to say. So my first idea

00:14:58   was maybe Sonos should just work to be like a third-party service that is

00:15:04   supported by the Amazon Echo. I don't know if that's what they want to do

00:15:09   because the idea that I get from the post is that they want to try to be like

00:15:15   to build more intelligent speakers so they want to create their own Amazon

00:15:19   Echo. I would love to have an Echo that sounds like my Sonos just because you

00:15:27   know the convenience of the Echo I'm using it so much and I'm using it so

00:15:33   much to play music that because of that convenience I'm not using the Sonos

00:15:38   as much as I used to in the couple of weeks that I had the Sonos but didn't have the Amazon

00:15:43   Echo. So I think I would love to have an Amazon Echo that sounds better like the Sonos. I

00:15:51   don't know if Sonos can make a service, a system that is as intelligent as Amazon with

00:15:59   Alexa. I don't know if Sonos is the kind of cloud company that can ship that kind of AI.

00:16:07   And I know that I... I mean, my Sonos is in the living room. I'm not using it much these

00:16:12   days because I'm playing Spotify with Alexa all the time. So, I don't know what I'm going

00:16:18   to do with the Sonos, because it's just sitting there, catching dust, and I'm constantly asking

00:16:24   Alexa to play music and, you know, to do all kinds of other things that we've talked about

00:16:29   before. So in theory, I would love to use the Sonos with Alexa. But in practice, that's

00:16:35   not gonna happen anytime soon I guess. And I don't want to buy a new Sonos even if they

00:16:41   come up with some kind of assistant Sonos speaker like two months from now, which I'm

00:16:46   skeptical about but, you know, just trying to imagine here. So I don't know. I don't

00:16:51   know what I'm gonna do and I don't know if Sonos can do it. I just know that I'm listening

00:16:57   to music with the Amazon Echo and I love the experience. The speaker is not great but it's

00:17:01   good enough, you know?

00:17:03   Yeah, I think I come down basically the same place that, I mean, Sonos sounds so much better,

00:17:10   but Alexa is so much more useful as a piece of technology in my home that I'm willing

00:17:16   to make that trade-off.

00:17:18   And I think that ultimately a company like Sonos is going to need something smarter in

00:17:27   their product, right?

00:17:28   That it may not be enough just to have something that sounds really good.

00:17:32   And of course they're doing a lot of cool stuff with all the streaming services and

00:17:39   everything and they go into that in a blog post.

00:17:40   But I think ultimately as we move forward, there's going to need to be some sort of voice

00:17:47   control or integration with other things to really have a speaker like this earn its keep.

00:17:53   At least in my house and I think in a lot of people's houses.

00:17:55   So I'm curious to see what they do here.

00:17:58   obviously hard to read at any time that a company has layoffs. But if they can make

00:18:07   whatever decisions they need to make and move forward from this, then I think ultimately

00:18:11   that's good. And I do like Sonos. I like them as a company. I like their products. So I

00:18:15   think it's going to be worth keeping an eye on the next little bit to see, you know, does

00:18:20   this go anywhere or was this just sort of a way to package up this bad news and then

00:18:28   just keep going on the same path?

00:18:32   You know what would be interesting? If Apple manages to get their home kit act together,

00:18:40   imagine if they create some kind of standard for manufacturers of speakers and there's

00:18:48   a specification to have Siri built into these speakers, so they open up the standard for

00:18:54   the type of microphone that they want to use, or other technical specs that manufacturers

00:19:01   have to follow. So in the same way that you currently can have different types of thermostats

00:19:08   or different types of sensors, you could buy one of these Siri speakers. They're not made

00:19:14   by Apple but they use HomeKit and Siri technology to let you ask things. Of course that hinges

00:19:21   upon the premise that Siri should be good enough and that HomeKit should be more reliable

00:19:28   and faster. It's interesting, sort of like a mix of HomeKit and maybe the "made for iPhone"

00:19:34   specification because I don't see Apple making a speaker in the near future but maybe if

00:19:40   they're observing this kind of trend of the convenience of Siri in the home with

00:19:47   the speaker that plays music and does other things, it will be interesting to

00:19:50   see that kind of product. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's gonna be a really

00:19:56   exciting category of devices over the next couple years. Of course there's like

00:20:03   the elephant in the room like what if Siri shows up in a box but even even if Apple

00:20:08   doesn't enter this race like there's lots of interesting stuff to keep an eye

00:20:11   on so I think it's gonna be fun. And then you get you one of these speakers Myke

00:20:16   you'll be all set. I've been too busy registering allthings.pizza.

00:20:21   Seriously? Yeah I've registered it goes to points to real AFM. Which one? AT.pizza?

00:20:26   No allthings.pizza. Allthings.pizza. Perfect. The DNS is propagating but that exists.

00:20:34   - No, yeah, no, it works for me, that's amazing.

00:20:36   - All Things Love Pizza.

00:20:37   - AT.pizza, Hover says you have to make an offer, so.

00:20:41   - Yeah, I'm not doing that.

00:20:42   - I'm not going to do that.

00:20:43   - That's why I went for All Things, All Things Love Pizza.

00:20:46   - What's next, Myke?

00:20:47   - So continuing the discussion of audio apps,

00:20:49   I just wanted to take a moment to talk about Overcast 2.5,

00:20:52   'cause there's a couple of features in there

00:20:53   that I really love.

00:20:55   Marco is a friend, but I am a big fan of Overcast,

00:20:59   it is the app that I use every day.

00:21:01   And he's looked at a bunch of great things

00:21:04   He's looking at trying to make this sound better when you're listening for a speaker

00:21:08   and all that sort of stuff.

00:21:09   We've linked to his blog post, it's in the show notes so you can go and get it.

00:21:12   But my two favorite things in Overcast 2.5 are patron features.

00:21:16   So if you support Overcast through patronage, you can get access to a dark mode, which I

00:21:22   adore.

00:21:24   It basically turns all the UI like a dark gray and blue, which looks especially good

00:21:31   when you're listening to Under the Radar.

00:21:32   the colors seem to match perfectly.

00:21:35   It also looks really good with Cortex,

00:21:37   and as such, Marco's using Cortex

00:21:40   in the kind of the PR pictures, which is nice,

00:21:43   but it does look good together.

00:21:44   And also the file uploads feature.

00:21:47   It's great for two things.

00:21:49   So file uploads, I've been using it

00:21:51   for a couple of months now,

00:21:53   and I'm really happy to say that I like it.

00:21:55   (laughing)

00:21:56   It's good for me as a podcast producer,

00:21:58   especially if I'm putting something like chapters

00:22:00   into an episode, which I do every now and then.

00:22:02   I like to check that they work properly,

00:22:05   so I upload the finalized episode to the uploads feature,

00:22:09   and then I can test it in the app.

00:22:11   And I also put things like audio books in there

00:22:15   and stuff like that.

00:22:16   It really is good, like I'm listening to an audio book

00:22:19   in Overcast right now because of that.

00:22:21   Has to have no DRM on it.

00:22:24   That happens however that happens.

00:22:25   But it's excellent.

00:22:28   I really love those two features.

00:22:30   And if you're a Overcast user,

00:22:31   I strongly recommend becoming a patron

00:22:34   to get access to both of those things,

00:22:35   because I think they're excellent.

00:22:36   Also the dark theme, the dark mode,

00:22:39   uses the San Francisco font,

00:22:41   which is, it just makes Overcast look very different,

00:22:44   but I do really like it.

00:22:46   So I think you should go and check it out,

00:22:48   and there'll be some links in the show notes

00:22:50   to go and read more about it,

00:22:51   including Federico's lovely review,

00:22:53   which also features some beautiful

00:22:54   podcast artwork throughout.

00:22:58   There you go, Avocast 2.5, go get it.

00:23:01   All right, should we take a break?

00:23:02   - Let's do it. - Yes.

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00:25:34   you're just really running with that aren't you?

00:25:38   why not? I mean I've got I've maybe got another half an hour for it to be funny so

00:25:44   I'm just going to keep going with it. There you go. It's my turn to talk

00:25:48   after listening to you guys talk about home speakers

00:25:52   which are not so interesting to me. Tell you what is interesting to me,

00:25:55   Android. Android is interesting to me and

00:25:59   last week, to everybody's surprise, Google dropped the

00:26:03   first developer preview of Android N, the next version of Android, which will be

00:26:07   fully unveiled at Google I/O with more additional features.

00:26:10   But out of the blue, they dropped Android N.

00:26:13   And Android N has a couple of things in it

00:26:15   which are improvements for developers

00:26:17   and improvements for the users.

00:26:20   And one of the things that I want to talk about,

00:26:22   because this is something we talk about all the time

00:26:24   on this show these days, is split screen.

00:26:26   So Google have now built split screen into Android.

00:26:30   It didn't exist previously as a core pure Android feature.

00:26:34   Some other OEMs like Samsung have built it into their own

00:26:40   custom software, their own custom skins on top of Android, their forks as you may say,

00:26:45   but it has never been in Google's version. So I want to kind of talk to you guys about this

00:26:51   because I think it's a few interesting things. There's a few interesting design decisions that

00:26:54   Google have made which contrast with Apple. So one thing is it's available everywhere,

00:27:00   phones and tablets. So this is an interesting decision because I mean I have a Nexus 6P here,

00:27:08   which is the screen is about as big as the iPhone 6 Plus.

00:27:13   So I was wondering like is it that useful on a phone? And

00:27:17   one of the things that I've found from using an iPad more frequently, Federico

00:27:20   you can confirm if you feel this way as well,

00:27:22   is there are just times every now and then

00:27:25   where I wish I could look at two apps on my iPhone side by side just to check

00:27:29   something. Not to work in the same way that I do on

00:27:33   my iPad, but there are just things that happen

00:27:35   I'm like I wish I could see two things at once.

00:27:37   Do you ever feel that?

00:27:38   Sometimes, sometimes, especially with Twitter, yes.

00:27:42   Yeah, there are times where I'm doing something and I just want to be able to look at two apps at once.

00:27:47   Like maybe I'm looking at something in an email and I need to check a spreadsheet, right?

00:27:51   And I don't want to work like that a lot on my iPhone, but there are times where I want it.

00:27:55   And that's what you get here with this Android N split screen stuff.

00:28:01   So the way that you do it is quite interesting as well.

00:28:03   as well. You open an application, then you long press on the multitasking button and it

00:28:08   cuts the screen in half and then you can choose another application and you can look at them side

00:28:14   by side. You can adjust it with a little slider in the middle, very similar to iOS, and then you can

00:28:18   also turn your phone into landscape and look at the two apps side by side. And in landscape it

00:28:24   works a lot better and you just have kind of two tiny apps side by side to each other. So

00:28:30   It's definitely useful, I think. I think that there is some utility there and I'm hoping that

00:28:35   this is something that we might see on the iPhone at some point in the future. But one of the

00:28:40   reasons I find this implementation very interesting is Google are forcing this on all apps, pretty

00:28:48   much. There are a few exceptions that I've found. Some games won't work, but developers haven't had

00:28:54   to do anything specific to allow for this to occur.

00:28:59   This is very different to Apple and I think that this implementation, the implementation

00:29:04   routes that both of these companies decided, really kind of show their difference. Google

00:29:09   will take universal support over a little bit of weirdness, because some apps do break

00:29:13   and crash in places, but Apple will take less overall support for a feature for a better

00:29:18   experience where it does work.

00:29:21   And I don't know what the right approach is.

00:29:24   Yeah, I've thought a lot about that.

00:29:27   And it is interesting to me to see, like, we're seeing the downside of Apple's approach

00:29:33   a little bit right now, where apps that so many people depend on and love and use every

00:29:37   day, maybe not love, no one actually loves Google Docs, that users are stuck, right?

00:29:45   But then you're also seeing the downside of Google's approach, where some things right

00:29:49   now might be broken or weird or not work you know quite correctly so I don't

00:29:54   think either one is necessarily like bulletproof as far as issues but I do

00:29:59   think from the platform perspective I think Android's approach may be a little

00:30:03   bit better because it brings the whole platform forward together you know you're

00:30:08   not going to run into something major that doesn't major out that doesn't

00:30:13   support the feature because everything supports the feature out of the box and

00:30:17   and it's um, you're right, it is a different approach.

00:30:21   I think even Apple has treated the Mac and iOS

00:30:25   differently in this regard, that they'll do things

00:30:27   on OS X like Time Machine or in OS X Lion

00:30:31   they changed the way Save As works, or God knows why.

00:30:34   And that was just the way it worked, right?

00:30:36   The system changed and so your app changed with it.

00:30:39   And iOS, Apple has been much more conservative

00:30:42   saying, hey, you know, even with iOS 7

00:30:44   we have this new design, you're not even gonna

00:30:46   get the keyboard until you build against iOS 7 right the very very conservative

00:30:51   approach to make sure that third-party apps remain stable or as stable as

00:30:57   possible under Apple's watch. So I'm not I'm not sure which way is right I think

00:31:03   from the platform perspective Google and the way Apple treats OS X is probably

00:31:07   better but I think from the from the stability and the you know perceived

00:31:14   quality standpoint that the way iOS does it may be better. So that's probably, you know,

00:31:19   just kind of pick your poison. Yeah, and that's exactly what it is, right?

00:31:22   And as I said, I think it speaks a lot to those two different companies and the way

00:31:27   that they work. But I've got to say the ability to know that the majority of my apps are just

00:31:32   going to work like that is great. And like this isn't an accident. Part of the way that

00:31:38   Android has been built for a long time is with these size classes, which Apple has adopted

00:31:42   more recently. And that's why it works like this because so many applications have already

00:31:47   started to adopt this because it's just the way Android works because of all the different

00:31:51   screen sizes anyway. So it's not like it was an accident, this has been a long time coming,

00:31:56   so now this is kind of just one of the results of that. But it is very interesting, there's

00:32:03   a couple of other things that I really like about this. So, well, one, Google Docs works.

00:32:07   So I have that in split screen. This is something you'll like Federico, you can have multiple

00:32:11   Chrome tabs side by side. That's nice. Because Chrome tabs from Android M, they became like,

00:32:21   when you look at multitasking, instead of seeing Chrome as just one app, it shows you

00:32:26   every single tab as well in the multitasking view, so it breaks them down. So you could

00:32:31   look, say you were on the allthings.pizza website, then you went to Slack to tell your

00:32:34   friends how awesome it was, and then you opened another Chrome tab. When you open multitasking,

00:32:39   they will be stacked chronologically like that.

00:32:41   So I initially didn't like that change.

00:32:44   I thought that that was kind of weird to say that,

00:32:47   like Chrome tabs are as important individually as apps.

00:32:52   But now when I look at a change like this,

00:32:54   I'm like, oh no, that makes sense.

00:32:55   'Cause now that has enabled the ability

00:32:57   to look at two Chrome tabs side by side,

00:32:59   which is something that, you know,

00:33:00   I have to kind of hack around that on iOS

00:33:04   by looking using two browsers, which is kind of strange.

00:33:08   is another thing that you're gonna like Federica, you can drag and drop data including text.

00:33:12   Yeah, I saw that. So how does that work in practice?

00:33:15   So I was just playing around with it then, I opened it with a client and a Slack client

00:33:19   and I wrote out a message, I highlighted the message and just held the text for a moment

00:33:24   and then I could just drag it to another text input window. It's pretty simple. It works

00:33:27   exactly as you'd want. I didn't have to try and look up anything to see how that worked,

00:33:31   it just worked the way I expected that it would.

00:33:34   Nice. That's gonna, that has to happen on iOS eventually.

00:33:38   Yeah. So this is my feeling, right? This is very early, right? Which is why there's some

00:33:43   of it that are a bit wonky, but this fact that it works so well now is a credit to Google

00:33:49   and the way that they've built their operating system and thinking about these things. And

00:33:53   there are a couple of features in here that I really hope that Apple adopt for iOS 10.

00:33:59   10. But it works surprisingly well, and I think that it's very interesting. And I have

00:34:07   wanted to for a while to maybe like do a little switch to Android experiment again. And as

00:34:12   I've mentioned, I think on this show one of my issues was using a tablet. But now all

00:34:17   the tablet apps will be split screen too, so that might make it a bit easier if I do

00:34:21   decide to do this. Something that makes this stuff easier for people like me, like installing

00:34:27   Android N is for the first time now. Google is allowing over the air install and updates

00:34:33   for the developer beta's. Previously you had to like plug it into a computer and run a

00:34:41   bunch of commands that terrified me and I always got wrong even though Android developers

00:34:45   tell me it's really easy, it's terrifying for someone like me. Now all you need to do

00:34:48   is just go to the developer portal. It shows you what devices are linked to your account

00:34:52   and you just say I would like to install on that one. You check for a software update

00:34:56   and installs. It's very easy to do. Actually kind of easier than Apple's new way of doing

00:35:01   it as well. You don't download a little profile, you just log on and it's like "oh we know

00:35:06   that this is a phone attached to your account, would you like to install the beta on it?"

00:35:10   and you say yes. I like that, that was really nice. They've redesigned the notifications

00:35:15   tray, I'm still trying to get my head around this. One thing that they're enabling is quick

00:35:20   replies now, which has obviously been in iOS for a little bit. This is a new thing for

00:35:26   them. I think it might have been in the Hangouts app previously, but that was the only one

00:35:29   that had it, so you couldn't reply from notifications. They're doing bundling of notifications as

00:35:34   well now, so if you have a bunch of Slack messages, they bundle them up into one and

00:35:38   then you can kind of tap to expand them. I actually think that's quite nice because now

00:35:42   when I look at my notifications screen, it's a lot cleaner. They're doing their own version

00:35:48   of Control Center which is pretty cool. So in the notifications tray now you can pull

00:35:52   down very quickly and there's a bunch of buttons. So I have Wi-Fi, Battery, Do Not Disturb and

00:35:58   Flashlight but you can customize those. You can drag and drop the order around and drop

00:36:03   in whatever you want to be, the quick actions which is great and they have a bunch of them.

00:36:07   Like I can have Bluetooth enabled, I can enable Hotspot, I can enable airplane mode. That

00:36:12   can all be customized because that's what Android's all about.

00:36:16   You know, I got an email just last night about my control center article from January.

00:36:20   People are really mad about that.

00:36:23   But I think Android is doing it better.

00:36:25   Apple fans.

00:36:26   Yep, sorry to say.

00:36:28   And then the main other thing that they're talking about, which I don't know too much

00:36:31   about, is additions to what Google call "Doze."

00:36:36   And Doze is a system to try and reduce battery life drain.

00:36:42   So when your phone is basically doing some stuff in the background, like the refresh

00:36:49   and stuff, like we have on, what is that called on iOS now?

00:36:53   The battery saving mode.

00:36:54   Low power mode?

00:36:55   Low power mode.

00:36:56   So it's basically that, but they try and do more of it constantly to reduce the drain

00:37:00   of the battery over time, and it tries to work out your patterns of using it, is my

00:37:04   understanding.

00:37:05   So they're doing more there.

00:37:07   And Google is promising more announcements and more exciting things for N at I/O.

00:37:12   So I think it's pretty cool.

00:37:14   I think it's cool that they've announced it now.

00:37:15   I'm using it on my 6P.

00:37:17   It's very stable.

00:37:18   And I think there's a few interesting things there.

00:37:20   I like to keep my eye on what Google's doing.

00:37:22   I think that this is an interesting development.

00:37:24   So there's my Android segment.

00:37:27   The closest I can get to imagining split screen on the iPhone is reachability.

00:37:33   Remember that feature?

00:37:34   Yeah, I still use it sometimes to access the notification tray thing.

00:37:39   Yeah, me too.

00:37:41   I'm trying to imagine if maybe, you know, having two apps on the iPhone with that kind

00:37:47   of gesture would make sense.

00:37:49   I don't know, the idea of a screen on the iPhone sounds odd to me initially, but I can

00:37:56   totally understand why you like it.

00:37:58   You know, I guess it's difficult to imagine that, because we're still thinking of iPhones

00:38:05   as you do one thing at a time type of devices, but instead a lot of people are using their

00:38:11   iPhones as computers.

00:38:14   People do spreadsheets, people do, you know, they write essays or blog posts on an iPhone.

00:38:21   So it's not ridiculous to say "well I would like to see multitasking on an iPhone",

00:38:27   you know?

00:38:28   I don't know if Apple likes this type of approach, but especially after listening to

00:38:36   you, it makes sense.

00:38:37   I have to say, it makes sense to me.

00:38:39   Yeah, I don't think that you would want to do this a lot, right?

00:38:44   But there is benefit to being able to check something quickly.

00:38:49   Maybe this could be something that just exists on the larger of the funds, because it makes

00:38:54   more sense there.

00:38:55   Who knows?

00:38:56   Probably.

00:38:57   Who knows how they want to do it.

00:38:58   Like, that's how landscape support is now, right?

00:39:00   It's only on the Plus.

00:39:01   Yeah.

00:39:02   Yeah.

00:39:03   I could see them, if they do it, do it that way, where, "Hey, we're already treating the

00:39:09   Plus a little bit differently.

00:39:10   We already did some iPad-like things."

00:39:12   And yeah, I agree with you guys.

00:39:15   not something I want to dive into every

00:39:16   day but I could see it being useful to

00:39:19   from time to time just to get something

00:39:22   done real quick.

00:39:23   Alright bring us back to Apple stuff.

00:39:25   Okay so I spent some time this week

00:39:28   thinking about the Mac as I often do. I go

00:39:31   into my hammock and I think

00:39:35   about the Mac just for hours and I kind

00:39:37   of came up with three things that I

00:39:39   think would be interesting to see Apple

00:39:40   bring back to the Mac and that's of course

00:39:43   borrowing a phrase from an Apple event

00:39:44   event several years ago but I came up with three things that as I have used my

00:39:50   iPad Pro more and as the iPad has sort of eaten into some categories of work

00:39:56   that I do some things that I would like to see to see on the Mac. The Mac is still

00:40:00   my main machine I don't see that changing anytime soon but there are

00:40:04   things on iOS that that I think OS X could benefit from and one of them and I

00:40:09   think the one that is the easiest solve is actually a third-party app called

00:40:12   helium that basically does this is picture-in-picture and so as I you know

00:40:19   I write a lot of these like Apple history things alright scripts or videos

00:40:22   I will be watching a video often on YouTube and be taking notes on it or

00:40:28   finding other links that I need you know to read and sort of gathering

00:40:32   information as I write and it's it's a funny how that has really moved to the

00:40:37   iPad because of picture-in-picture so I can open up you know a video on YouTube

00:40:42   and I can send it to CornerTube, which Federico pointed me to, and I can get

00:40:46   picture-in-picture. So I can have the video playing, I can have one writer with

00:40:49   my notes, and I can have Safari open, gathering links as I go. And doing that

00:40:56   on the Mac feels really old-fashioned all of a sudden, because YouTube is

00:41:00   locked away in a browser tab, right? And I've always gotten around it by

00:41:04   having a YouTube video either in another browser or another browser window, so I

00:41:08   between it and my working tabs but it feels like constrained somehow. So anyways

00:41:13   Helium is a cool app, we'll put a link in the show notes to it, that if you're

00:41:17   looking for picture-in-picture on the Mac a bunch of people on Twitter pointed

00:41:19   me to it. It's free on the App Store. You basically paste in a very much like

00:41:25   CornerTube on iOS. You feed it a video link and then it basically just plays

00:41:31   the video itself with no other Chrome just in a floating window very much

00:41:35   like QuickTime does. It's a clever little app. I think it's a nice, it's like a good

00:41:41   example of something in the Mac App Store that does one thing really well and is

00:41:45   just you know super super simple. The other two were a little more a little

00:41:52   more technical. The second one is UIKit which you may be familiar with is

00:41:57   basically the front-end framework used by most iOS developers. It's what

00:42:04   something like Overcast uses to build its interface. That's very high level. On

00:42:11   the Mac they use AppKit which is much older. AppKit has its roots way back in

00:42:16   Next Step 100 years ago. And they spoke about this on a recent episode of

00:42:22   under the radar that this is a hurdle for an iOS developer to bring something

00:42:29   to the Mac. They can't reuse much of their front-end code that they you have

00:42:34   to sort of refactor everything using the toolset that AppKit gives you and

00:42:39   clearly UIKit can't just be ported directly right? UIKit is built all

00:42:44   around touch you don't have touch on the Mac but I do think that there's an

00:42:49   opportunity here for Apple to make it easier for iOS developers to bring their

00:42:55   apps back to the Mac and this is something we've spoken about a lot we

00:42:59   spoke about just a couple weeks ago with that you know Mac OS X has a dead

00:43:02   platform comment that the third-party ecosystem for Mac software is slower and

00:43:11   perhaps slowing down compared to the iPhone and even the iPad and you look at

00:43:17   something like, we'll keep using Overcast as an example, that has an iOS app, it's

00:43:23   great on the iPhone, it's good on the iPad, there's a web component, but a lot

00:43:27   of people, I know Casey, Alyssa's talked about this for a long time, would like it on the

00:43:29   Mac. I would like it on the Mac. And there's a hurdle there that, you know, may

00:43:38   not be worth it. Clearly in market estimation it's not worth it yet. And I

00:43:42   think that that is something that may change, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but

00:43:45   but could be different if UIKit were to come to OS X.

00:43:50   Now Federico, you spend obviously a lot of time

00:43:56   talking with iOS developers, covering iOS apps.

00:43:59   I mean, what are some other examples that you guys have

00:44:03   of like, is there an iOS app you guys would just love

00:44:06   to have on the Mac?

00:44:07   Federico, maybe you're a bad example, but,

00:44:09   like I think this is something people want.

00:44:12   Like there are iOS apps that are great

00:44:15   that would be nice on the Mac.

00:44:16   I mean, look at Fantastical, which, in my opinion at least,

00:44:19   is the best calendar app on iOS, just bar none.

00:44:22   And it's great on the Mac.

00:44:23   And I'm sure that was not an easy process

00:44:26   to build a full-blown Mac calendar application,

00:44:31   even though they had years of experience doing it on mobile.

00:44:34   Do you guys think that this is,

00:44:37   could this make a difference?

00:44:38   Is it worth Apple even investing in this?

00:44:40   - I think it would definitely allow some developers

00:44:44   to create Mac versions of their iOS apps.

00:44:48   And I'm looking at my iPhone's home screen right now.

00:44:52   Something like Spark or editorial even.

00:44:57   There's a Reddit client that I really like.

00:45:00   It's called Narwhal.

00:45:02   There's many, many iOS apps that don't have a Mac version.

00:45:06   And I would say not necessarily because it wouldn't make sense

00:45:09   on the Mac, just because it would require building

00:45:13   completely different architecture and a different app at every level.

00:45:18   And so for some developers I think it would definitely help in transitioning over to the

00:45:23   Mac and even bringing a functional version of the same app, maybe isn't as pro-looking

00:45:29   as more advanced desktop apps, but it doesn't have to be, because having a basic version

00:45:35   that runs on the Mac and respects some of the Mac's basic UI principles would make sense.

00:45:41   I feel like there's some instances where iOS apps can only run on iOS and would only make sense on iOS.

00:45:52   You know, apps that use the gyroscope or apps that use the camera or apps that are based on location services,

00:45:59   apps that require, you know, multi-touch in a different way.

00:46:04   Some of those apps, even with the, you know, framework unification across iOS and macOS,

00:46:10   I feel like wouldn't be possible on the Mac without, you know, a major rewrite anyway.

00:46:19   So, I guess what I would like to see is, I agree with you, I think there should be a way to use UIKit on the desktop.

00:46:29   Because for some basic apps that don't have fancy iPhone features, I would like to have those apps on the Mac as well.

00:46:38   or at least I would like to know that there's a way for developers to easily bring them over to the Mac.

00:46:44   But some other apps, I feel like even with the framework unification,

00:46:50   they wouldn't make much sense on the Mac because of the unique iPhone and iPad features.

00:46:55   I think as someone who, like for me, the most valuable tools that I use are cross-platform,

00:47:01   So something like OmniFocus or something like Reader even or the RSS service I use behind

00:47:09   it, something that I can get to my data anywhere I sit down to work.

00:47:14   And I think that UIKit could help with that.

00:47:19   It's clearly not a silver bullet, right?

00:47:22   There's still lots of issues with, you know, is it worth the developer's time?

00:47:27   Can they make the money back?

00:47:28   Do they, you know, have to deal with the Mac App Store?

00:47:30   A lot of people don't want to do that.

00:47:34   But I think it would open doors that aren't open right now.

00:47:39   And that was sort of my point.

00:47:42   The last of the three things I mentioned was all flash storage.

00:47:46   And you can still go today, the Mac Mini, the iMac, and then of course the 13-inch MacBook

00:47:53   Pro, the old one that's still for sale.

00:47:55   comes with spinning hard drives or fusion drives and

00:47:59   I tangled with some people yesterday about the fusion drive thing and writing a big follow-up post but

00:48:04   my basic

00:48:07   gist of this was like way back in

00:48:09   2010 when Apple redid the MacBook Airs actually, you know announced those at this back to the Mac event

00:48:16   So much of that design was built around solid-state

00:48:21   storage and the MacBook Air was really for a lot of people myself included the first time I

00:48:27   really used an SSD and

00:48:30   it brought flash storage and notebooks to the masses in a way that that no one else really had and

00:48:37   here we are six years later and

00:48:40   basically, you can still get a spinning hard drive and a bunch of machines and if you get an iMac you have to deal with the

00:48:50   400 RPM drive, which are terribly slow and

00:48:54   It it really is crazy to me that Apple

00:48:58   Hasn't moved the the ball forward

00:49:01   With this yet and and you know, there's a lot of benefits diffusion drives

00:49:05   Like I went into it in my article yesterday like it's great if you have small amounts of data or it's great if you want

00:49:10   speed

00:49:11   But also a lot of capacity without spending a thousand dollars on a you know

00:49:15   a huge SSD from Apple.

00:49:17   'Cause Apple's SSD pricing is way out of line,

00:49:19   they need to revisit that.

00:49:20   But my point in this was, you know,

00:49:25   the Mac experience is so much better

00:49:28   if you're running from flash storage.

00:49:30   And that comes from iOS.

00:49:32   I mean, at that event, he was like,

00:49:34   "What happens if a MacBook and an iPad got it on?"

00:49:36   Well, you get a MacBook Air.

00:49:37   Like, that's an actual quote from Steve Jobs.

00:49:40   Actually said it on stage.

00:49:41   Just crazy.

00:49:44   And you know the things like Instant On and crazy standby life.

00:49:49   I mean before this if you had a spinning hard disk machine you put it to sleep.

00:49:55   You know you want to get great standby life now we get just weeks and weeks and weeks

00:49:59   on these machines because this solid state technology allows the entire system to be

00:50:05   much more modern and it just kills me like you can go buy a new 27 inch 5k Retina iMac

00:50:13   and get a spinning disk in it and it's just it's a subpar experience for what I

00:50:20   think is the flagship Mac you know I think that that running machine is is

00:50:24   the pinnacle of Mac design at this point and to cripple it with the spinning hard

00:50:29   drive today in 2016 is just bananas and yes there's cost issues you know

00:50:35   I think more important than cost is used to Apple is the margin issue like they

00:50:37   could do this and they keep the prices where they are but they would eat into their

00:50:40   margin which they don't want to do. I think that it's another example of like

00:50:44   if Apple either is willing to charge a little bit more or willing to eat it a

00:50:50   little bit more they could have products that are much better experience and so

00:50:55   I don't know it's some stuff I've been thinking about I think that obviously

00:50:58   the next couple weeks and we really focus on iOS with some new devices I'm

00:51:02   you know hoping for some Skylake MacBook Pros but you know the Mac is is the back

00:51:08   seat now and I accept that and understand that but I still think that there's room

00:51:14   for Apple to make investments in it.

00:51:16   The fusion drive thing is one thing, right, because it's at least some solid state, but

00:51:22   the fact that there are just flat out hard drives spinning disks in brand new Macs in

00:51:30   new lines seems crazy. Like I understand why it might exist in that 13 inch MacBook Pro,

00:51:37   right? That, that weird old MacBook Pro with the optical disc in it.

00:51:41   Cause it's just like, look,

00:51:42   that machine just needs to be as cheap as possible for the type of people that

00:51:45   need to buy that. But a new computer introduced like the 27 inch,

00:51:50   5k, it just, there's so much amazing technology in that machine.

00:51:55   Why would you put a spinning hard disc in it? Like it just seems,

00:51:59   it just seems crazy. It really doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

00:52:03   Like if somebody wants to do it, like,

00:52:05   think that should be an option, right? Like it comes with 512 or whatever and

00:52:10   then you can put a 1 terabyte hard disk in it if you really want to, but as a

00:52:15   starting configuration it seems just wasteful of all the power that you're

00:52:22   gonna get from that machine. I totally agree because you're gonna be

00:52:26   hamstrung by that disk I/O and it's um I think clearly it's about the cost you

00:52:33   know that I think there's a school of thought that these retina machines are

00:52:36   more expensive for Apple to build but they didn't want to measure the price

00:52:42   points too much and so they're already eating into the margin a little bit

00:52:45   which is maybe why they've done this. On the smaller Fusion drives the SSD

00:52:49   portion is actually much smaller than it used to be which is lame and I think

00:52:54   they're just struggling to hit those percentages they want but I would argue

00:52:58   you that maybe there are more important things than 30% margin on iMac.

00:53:02   I agree.

00:53:03   In lieu of a second sponsor this week, I just want to talk very briefly about the RelayFM

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00:53:57   So I realized today that basically this show has been three pet topics. So I spoke about Android,

00:54:06   Stephen spoke about the Mac and now Federico gets to talk about text editors.

00:54:10   Yes, so just quickly because I presume this is going to be a recurring theme over the next few weeks if you guys don't mind.

00:54:19   Text editor corner with Federico.

00:54:21   Yes, so just a quick update. Last weekend, Stephen, Myke and I had a Slack room, a Slack channel where we talked, we planned the show.

00:54:31   And I was having a crisis over the weekend because this new app, Ulysses, is that how

00:54:39   you say it?

00:54:40   Ulysses?

00:54:41   Ulysses is how I would say it.

00:54:43   It feels like a close to Italian word anyway.

00:54:45   So you probably would.

00:54:46   It's much better.

00:54:47   It's much better in Italian.

00:54:48   Ulysses.

00:54:49   Oh, there you go.

00:54:50   Why are you even saying it any other way?

00:54:52   You know, because I don't get to decide.

00:54:54   Well, now you can.

00:54:56   On this show, you say it the way that you say it that I can't say.

00:54:59   Should I really say Ulysses?

00:55:00   Ulysses? No, come on, come on. Anyway, I was having a crisis because Ulysses came out and

00:55:09   I was intrigued. But I was also at the stage where I had something like five or six text

00:55:17   editors on my iPhone and iPad, because as connected listeners know, I've been trying

00:55:22   to get a modern opinion of all of them. So I was talking to Myke and Steve and I was

00:55:28   like what should I do because each one of these apps has a feature that I like. An editorial

00:55:35   came out with a new beta for iOS 9 and the iPad Pro and I was really struggling to understand

00:55:41   what it is that I actually need. So I sent Myke and Steven a series of screenshots over

00:55:48   a few minutes of me... It was really sad. Of me deleting every single text editor from

00:55:55   my iPhone, except editorial, because I was sure that I was going to use just editorial.

00:56:03   That's what I've always used, despite my absence from editorial for the past few months. I

00:56:10   liked the idea of going back home, you know, back with editorial. And for a couple of days

00:56:18   I was okay, I was fine. And then I realized I was preparing an article about...

00:56:26   actually two articles. I was writing one about Overcast, which came out yesterday,

00:56:32   and I was preparing an article about Spotify, because I've been trying Spotify again,

00:56:37   so I was starting to put together some ideas. And I realized often when I think of, you know,

00:56:45   articles, they start from a couple of notes and a few screenshots. So I take a screenshot

00:56:53   of a feature, of a feature or maybe of a change in an app, and that starts as kind of my angle

00:57:00   for the story, you know, my starting point. But too often I lose track of those screenshots,

00:57:08   because the Photos app doesn't let me organize screenshots besides albums and likes. So often

00:57:15   I take these screenshots and eventually I forget about them, I don't know why I took

00:57:20   them and I lose the idea that I wanted to base the article upon. So I realized, you

00:57:27   know what app lets me attach items to documents? Well, that's Ulysses. So this is a couple

00:57:38   of days after I deleted the app from my device. And I realized, well, you know, maybe I was

00:57:44   too quick to judge. Maybe I should actually try it. I downloaded the app back again on

00:57:51   my iPhone and iPad, and I tried to use it for Mac stories and for Club Mac stories.

00:57:59   And initially it was very difficult to accept some of the unique things in Ulysses. The

00:58:07   first one is it doesn't have Dropbox sync. It only uses iCloud. But again, a lot of people

00:58:13   were like "You know iCloud sync in Ulysses is super solid, never been a problem for me".

00:58:20   The other problem was it doesn't use standard Markdown when you create articles, or as the

00:58:30   app calls them "sheets", which are like documents. It uses this special version of Markdown,

00:58:35   which is called Markdown XL, which is like a fork of standard Markdown, it's got a couple

00:58:41   of different things with the formatting and the way that you insert links and footnotes

00:58:47   in a document. So those two issues were practical and also problems on principle, because I

00:58:56   don't like the idea of not using a standard or not using Dropbox. But I guess I just was

00:59:05   too into the idea of having attachments, having notes in a document, being able to take images

00:59:12   out of my photos app and into the text editor, that I started using it and I went a little

00:59:20   nuts about it. It was late at night, it was like 4am, I was playing around with Ulysses

00:59:28   and I realized that I could install custom fonts in the app. And I've always liked,

00:59:36   you know, IA Writer uses a font called Nitti. And this Nitti font, which I really, really

00:59:44   like, is not available for free. And it's like 200 euros to buy. So it was late at night,

00:59:52   I was in a sort of tech-studding fugue state.

00:59:56   So I went online and I bought the fond family.

01:00:00   Oh my god! And everyone, again,

01:00:04   we go through this time and time again and you guys say

01:00:08   that I'm the one who has the fondest. No, hold on, this was for productivity, Myke.

01:00:13   No, it didn't make you more productive. Yes it does. It's purely aesthetic.

01:00:17   No, it makes my eyes better.

01:00:20   Incorrect.

01:00:21   Okay, well, whatever.

01:00:22   So I went online, I bought the font family and I used any font on iOS to install the

01:00:29   font.

01:00:30   Then I went on my Mac, because you can only create custom themes for Ulysses on the Mac,

01:00:36   and I created a theme that sort of resembles editorial and also uses different colors to

01:00:43   highlight different types of markdown syntax.

01:00:46   So I got blue links, yellow images, red footnotes, which I feel like really helps me in the editing

01:00:54   stage because it lets me catch different items more quickly, instead of having every single

01:01:00   item highlighted in blue, while each one has a different color now, which is nice.

01:01:05   So with the custom theme, with the custom preview for the Mac Sorry HTML, the custom

01:01:11   I came up with a really nice environment. I really like it.

01:01:17   I set up groups for Max Stories articles, Max Stories linked items, and Club Max Stories stuff for the newsletter.

01:01:28   I've been using it for like a week at this point, maybe five, six days actually, in what you call it, production purposes.

01:01:39   I came up with a few workflows to publish to WordPress, to save a draft to Dropbox as

01:01:48   a second backup, just to make sure.

01:01:52   And you know, it's nice, it's fine, iCloud sync is awesome, it actually works, and I

01:02:01   saved drafts to Dropbox, so peace of mind, I'm okay.

01:02:07   And the editing tools in Ulysses are actually very nice.

01:02:11   I know that on principle I shouldn't like a non-standard plain text fork of Markdown,

01:02:17   but in practice it's really nice.

01:02:20   Adding footnotes is faster, adding links is faster, and actually when editing URLs get

01:02:29   out of the way because you have to double tap a link to show the actual link.

01:02:34   So the document is not cluttered with all these links.

01:02:38   There's a bunch of toolbars that you can use, there's menus, shortcuts, it's very nice on

01:02:43   the iPad Pro, and I think I actually like it.

01:02:50   The separation of different types of documents in groups helps me feel more organized, if

01:03:00   that makes sense.

01:03:01   When I'm in the Club Maxories group, I only see Club Maxories stuff, so it's easier to see all the content coming to a Maxories Weekly issue, for example.

01:03:09   When I'm in the Maxories group, I can see all my linked items, I can see all the articles that I'm working on.

01:03:16   It's nice!

01:03:17   Now, I know that I'm always going to need a tutorial to be installed, because of the more complex automation.

01:03:25   I mean, I use the tutorial to generate my invoices, for the business.

01:03:29   I use editorial to manage max service deals, to put together the price drops and to tweet

01:03:36   app discounts.

01:03:37   So I'll always need editorial for these advanced things, but I feel like Ulysses for writers,

01:03:46   for people who write and to organize writing, it's not terrible, it's actually pretty great,

01:03:53   and now this is the stage where I'm at.

01:03:56   This is what's going on right now.

01:03:59   I will keep you guys posted I guess.

01:04:04   This is intriguing, I've been looking at it in the App Store every now and then and I'm

01:04:08   just trying out editorial again because I don't do a lot of writing but I do quite a...

01:04:15   I do like the scripts and stuff, like I write scripts and stuff like that and they're all

01:04:19   written in Markdown.

01:04:20   So I like to have a good app for it but this custom flavour of Markdown turns me off a

01:04:26   a little bit, I think.

01:04:29   Yeah, I totally understand.

01:04:31   I only kind of remember it, right?

01:04:33   Because I don't use it enough.

01:04:35   The things that I know, I know them now.

01:04:38   I've learned them.

01:04:39   I know how to make a list, I know how to make something bold,

01:04:41   italics and a link.

01:04:42   Like, they just know those things.

01:04:43   That's really the same.

01:04:45   That syntax is the same.

01:04:47   It's just some differences for footnotes.

01:04:49   But what really matters is that when you export a document

01:04:53   and you choose I want to export as Markdown,

01:04:55   you get the standard plain text markdown.

01:04:58   So it's just when you write, because they

01:05:00   want you to save time, the syntax is a little different,

01:05:04   but not for italics, not for lists, just for links

01:05:08   and footnotes, really.

01:05:10   But when you export, even those custom things

01:05:13   go back to the standard way, so you

01:05:15   can use the markdown in any app.

01:05:16   And that's why I use workflow, because I can export as markdown.

01:05:20   It gets the normal markdown plain text,

01:05:23   and then I used my workflow to go to WordPress.

01:05:26   But yeah, I understand why some people don't like the idea,

01:05:30   and I totally understand why some people are put off

01:05:32   by the iCloud only sync.

01:05:34   I don't understand if the team is working on Dropbox support

01:05:37   because on the Mac, you can't add a Dropbox folder.

01:05:41   On iOS, you cannot.

01:05:42   I don't understand if they plan to,

01:05:44   or if it's only going to be a Mac only feature,

01:05:46   but you know what also makes me optimistic about this

01:05:50   is that it's a small team, it's 11 people, they only do this for a living, they've been

01:05:56   around for a few years, and I mean, if they don't make the app, they basically don't eat,

01:06:02   which is, you know, very sad to think about, but it also makes me optimistic about the

01:06:05   future of the app. You know, as long as these people want to live, there's going to be this

01:06:10   app. So, you know, that's, I guess, a good point. We'll see, I don't know.

01:06:16   The thing that attracts me is it's very beautiful.

01:06:19   It is, it looks nice. You can make any kind of custom theme, you can switch to dark mode.

01:06:27   It looks very nice.

01:06:28   Are you going to make me spend money?

01:06:30   I don't know, just wait. Wait a couple more weeks, then we'll decide whether you have

01:06:37   to spend money.

01:06:38   Okay, I can live with that. That's good, because I need to buy it everywhere, which I'm happy

01:06:42   to do. Because it's priced well, but it's not throwaway money. For me it's £35 on the

01:06:49   Mac and £15 on iOS. So we'll see. Alright, great. So next week, next week's episode we'll

01:06:58   be obviously reflecting on the Apple event which is happening on the 21st so we will

01:07:04   be a day or so removed from that so we'll be able to talk a little bit in details to

01:07:08   what happened at the Apple event. Is everybody excited? I'm kind of excited. I feel like

01:07:13   I'll be more excited actually on Monday next week.

01:07:16   Yeah, I think I fall in the same boat. I mean, we'll be buying a phone for a family member

01:07:22   and that's probably about it.

01:07:25   Yeah, we're hoping for some Mac stuff, right? I'm interested to see what happens to the

01:07:29   laptops. I wouldn't mind replacing my MacBook Pro with something smaller and lighter for

01:07:35   when I do need it. I just want it to have the most minimum impact possible. So I'll

01:07:40   be excited to see if anything like that happens next week. I think it's going to be an event

01:07:44   of a lot of stuff but none of it kind of really astronomical but we'll be able to see what

01:07:50   that's like next week. So you want to tune in and make sure that you go check out our

01:07:53   show notes this week you can head to allthings.pizza/connected/82 it will take you there, I object it, it will

01:08:01   work. If you want to find us online head on over to fivetopixels.net for Stephen Hackett,

01:08:08   stories dot net Federico Vitici and we're all on Twitter Federico's at the

01:08:13   teachy vit I CCI Stephen is at is mhm I am at I Myke I am y ke and the show is

01:08:20   at underscore connected f and thank you so much to igloo for sponsoring this

01:08:25   episode thank you to all of you who helped support this show directly and

01:08:28   we'll be back next time until then say goodbye guys

01:08:32   he would hurt you adios