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Connected

64: We Hugged a Lot

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:05   From Relay FM, this is Connected episode number 64.

00:00:10   Today's show is brought to you by Linda.com, Andrew Carroll of NCH Tax and Wealth, and Harry's.

00:00:16   My name is Myke Curley and I'm joined by the man of whom I have touched the face, Mr. Federico Vitticci.

00:00:26   Oh, hey Myke!

00:00:27   Hello!

00:00:28   That was the most awkward introduction of all time, how are you?

00:00:31   Hello! I'm doing great! Long time no see, Myke.

00:00:35   Not really, if anything.

00:00:38   So we're gonna talk about this a little later on in the show, but me and Federico have now met in person.

00:00:42   Yes.

00:00:44   Which happened yesterday as we record this, which was a very, very beautiful thing.

00:00:48   And we're gonna get to that.

00:00:50   We should also mention, we've just completely forgotten about him. Steven's not here today.

00:00:55   Oh yeah, that guy.

00:00:56   He's unfortunately a little under the weather right now and has probably the worst thing

00:01:02   that can happen to you when you make your living producing audio content.

00:01:06   He has lost his voice.

00:01:08   So I wasn't too keen on the idea of him just being on the call and just tapping his desk

00:01:13   like to get our attention every now and then.

00:01:15   So Steven isn't here today and we wish him to get better very soon.

00:01:20   So maybe we'll be able to hear from him again next week.

00:01:23   Yeah, I'm sure he'll come back with a bunch of links to old Macs, some new things he bought.

00:01:33   He's slowly, surely replacing your role as a serial buyer.

00:01:41   Every time he comes back, he has some new equipment or old Macs or crazy old accessories.

00:01:48   Well he has that new Nexus, right?

00:01:49   Which we wanted to talk about.

00:01:50   He has a new Nexus!

00:01:51   So he completely ruined one of the topics today. One of the whole topics of this show was Stephen talking about his new phone

00:01:57   But he's not here. I actually do believe that before he lost his voice he recorded an episode of material talking about his

00:02:03   Experience and I think it's gonna be out this week. So is it going to Android? I don't know. Maybe he is

00:02:10   You know what? I'm gonna say that. Yes, he is. He's switching to Android

00:02:16   He can't he's not here to defend himself. So yes, Stephen Hackett has switched

00:02:21   That's why he's not here today

00:02:25   We wouldn't let him on the show anymore because he loves his Nexus so much that he has now switched to Android

00:02:32   well

00:02:34   Okay

00:02:35   So because Stephen is not here. He's not it's not gonna be here anymore is he likes Android too much now to come back

00:02:41   We're gonna do follow-up

00:02:45   You know instead of Steven we're gonna do the follow-up and Myke

00:02:48   I see a new hashtag in the in the document in front of me. Yeah, what is going on here?

00:02:54   Do you remember a few weeks ago when we had the mysterious Apple TV tipster Carlos? Oh Carlos. Yeah, how's the guy?

00:03:02   He's good. He's feeling good because Carlos was right

00:03:05   If you remember what we were talking about was the fact that Carlos told us that you cannot use

00:03:12   Siri to control or search or find anything about music on the app. Yeah, it's crazy, which is crazy

00:03:18   Wait, we're gonna talk about the Apple TV a little later on today

00:03:21   But I wanted to mention it right here that Carlos it was right and I see

00:03:25   a lovely post on this website called Mac stories

00:03:29   That Apple made a statement to BuzzFeed that early next year. Yeah, there will be

00:03:36   Full Siri support for music on the Apple TV, which seemed really really weird

00:03:42   Yeah, especially because you know early next year means anytime from January to April. I think yeah

00:03:50   It could be the first four months

00:03:52   So yeah, you gotta wait for an update and it's especially weird where you know, you're paying for Apple music

00:03:57   You're a subscriber and it totally makes sense to have you know streaming on the app on the new Apple TV

00:04:02   But nope, for some reason it's not ready yet and we gotta wait a few more months to get

00:04:08   it.

00:04:09   Just kind of a disappointment.

00:04:11   One of the many issues of this first version of the Apple TV.

00:04:15   It's fair to call it a first version.

00:04:17   It is a 1.0.

00:04:18   It's brand new.

00:04:19   It's TV OS, right?

00:04:21   That's the difference.

00:04:22   It's not the box.

00:04:23   It's what's on the inside that counts here.

00:04:25   And that's what's causing all the problems.

00:04:27   about the inside, we were sent a couple of tweets about this. There is a Teletext app

00:04:35   for the Apple TV. And it's quite funny, there is a really, really excellent thread that

00:04:41   I will find and put in the show notes of the guy who made this app, kind of coming to discover

00:04:50   us as a thing. Oh really? Yeah it's really great like he's very confused at first.

00:04:57   It's very confused I can imagine. And then listens to the show and is

00:05:00   disappointed because he thought it was a show about gonna be a show about teletext.

00:05:04   It's like a podcast an entire show about teletext. Yep I mean you know

00:05:08   worse things have happened I guess but yeah it's it's very fun to watch him. So I would love to be

00:05:14   able to link to it but you cannot obviously link to any Apple TV apps but

00:05:19   I guess if you just search teletext in the App Store you'll be able to find

00:05:23   everything that you need about that but yeah it was it was just kind of a

00:05:27   beautiful thing to watch this unfold. Look at that teletext bringing people

00:05:32   together. It really does it really amazing piece of technology still

00:05:36   holding up on the on TV OS. Amazing absolutely. We're bringing teletext back

00:05:43   into the new generation.

00:05:45   Back in style, you know, all those flat colours, that bold typography, those icons very crisp,

00:05:52   absolutely.

00:05:53   It's one of those technologies that never, never dies.

00:05:58   We got a great link sent in to us from a guy called Rod, and Rod sent in, this is by a

00:06:05   guy called Larry Salibra, and he has been looking a lot like Steven was about moving

00:06:11   from Evernote to Notes, the Apple Notes app. And he has actually built a script

00:06:16   which he's put in, which he's put on his blog, to help you do this. I haven't tried

00:06:22   this out so I cannot speak for it but I just wanted to put it in the notes

00:06:28   because for people that are looking to do a migration like Stephen did this

00:06:32   might be a great way to do that. But make sure you of course have a gajillion

00:06:37   in backups in any way that you can, because I don't know what might happen.

00:06:41   Maybe it deletes all of your notes, I hope not, but you never know, right?

00:06:46   >> Yeah.

00:06:47   I mean, this is nice.

00:06:50   I mean, actually, consider this, because obviously no one's going to make an iOS version of these

00:06:57   scripts as standalone apps.

00:07:00   So I may have to use a Mac for this when I eventually decide to move from...

00:07:05   I'm still basically keeping Evernote around, not for new notes, not for anything new, just

00:07:10   for existing notes because I don't want to go through the migration process.

00:07:13   I'll eventually have to.

00:07:16   This is useful.

00:07:17   Thank you Larry.

00:07:18   I will try this I think.

00:07:19   Yeah, I'm wondering whether I'm going to actually do a migration like this or if I'm just going

00:07:25   to start replicating things, right?

00:07:27   Because what I have in my Evernote tends to be like travel documents and stuff like that

00:07:31   and when I went to Indianapolis I just typed a lot of the stuff up and copied and pasted

00:07:35   it from emails, right? Because usually what I do is I just forward it. But I

00:07:38   actually quite like the idea of having everything just in one note in just

00:07:42   simple plain text. I quite like that as opposed to trying to like dig through

00:07:47   PDF versions of emails or whatever. So I don't know, I want to test it a little

00:07:52   bit more but I must say like you know just as a follow-up on follow-up

00:07:57   I'd love the Notes app. It's so fantastic. It's just it's perfect for what I need.

00:08:02   It's so simple and it always works well. It does exactly what I need.

00:08:06   Yeah, absolutely. And for me, like the best feature is it always reconciles changes from multiple devices.

00:08:14   Yeah, it does a great job. I don't know how they do as good a job as they do with that.

00:08:19   But they really really do. I completely agree.

00:08:21   Yeah, and it's funny right because I remember being like when they announced it I was kind of just like whatever Apple Notes

00:08:28   Come on, and I really really like it. I just I

00:08:31   I just wish they would not have a texture background.

00:08:35   - Yeah, you know, it makes sense when you're drawing

00:08:40   with a stylus, I guess, and you're, you know,

00:08:44   like the feeling of ink on paper.

00:08:47   Like that's the only instance of the texture

00:08:49   making any sort of sense, but I totally agree.

00:08:53   - This is gonna make everybody happy.

00:08:56   A guy called Ricky Mondello discovered

00:08:58   that something new to Beta 2--

00:09:00   You know who the guy is.

00:09:01   No.

00:09:02   He's the guy who makes Safari.

00:09:05   Ricky's one of the Safari engineers.

00:09:07   Oh, okay.

00:09:08   Well, there you go then.

00:09:09   He didn't discover it.

00:09:10   He put it in there.

00:09:11   Yes, he created it.

00:09:12   Now that's very clever the way that you tweeted this.

00:09:14   Yeah.

00:09:15   Right?

00:09:16   Because it makes it look like something like Steve Trout and Smith, right?

00:09:18   Like I just discovered this thing.

00:09:20   Alright then, so the guy who made this feature, iOS 9.2 Beta 2 Safari View Controller can

00:09:26   now be dismissed using an edge swipe in apps built with a 9.2 SDK, no extra code required."

00:09:31   I cannot believe that he didn't get the idea from this from Tapbots, right?

00:09:37   That must have been where the inspiration came from.

00:09:40   I guess especially from the positive reaction from people to that feature.

00:09:48   Everyone I know on Twitter and that I heard from readers, everyone is loving the new swipe

00:09:55   gesture because it's just so much better. It's fantastic. It helps me get out of that

00:10:00   view which otherwise you're stuck on, right? That's the problem.

00:10:05   I'm gonna give you a detail. It's not just on the iPhone, this new swipe gesture on iOS

00:10:10   9.2, it's also on the iPad. On every device you can now swipe and you can dismiss Safari

00:10:16   View Controller. So this is gonna be extra better.

00:10:20   I would really like to see them put the done button at the bottom there.

00:10:25   Yeah. In the meantime, until they redesign completely Safari View Controller, this is a good solution.

00:10:32   As a kind of stopgap solution for now.

00:10:35   Sure. Yeah, it works out for the time being.

00:10:38   Yeah.

00:10:39   Okay, I think we've actually reached the end of the follow-up. And it wasn't too much of a disaster, I don't think.

00:10:44   No.

00:10:45   I think we kind of got through that okay.

00:10:46   okay yeah we didn't die no one died okay yeah it's just a shame that Stephen can

00:10:52   never come back you know he's enjoying the Google Play Store right now probably

00:10:56   those pirated apps from the Google servers that's exactly as all he does

00:11:02   now he can't talk to him anymore let's take a break and then we'll talk about

00:11:06   when Myke met teaching okay this episode is brought to you by Linda calm the

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00:13:45   and Relay FM. So I'm going to put a tweet in the show notes of a picture that you took

00:13:52   of me where I am incredibly excited and shaking a little bit and incredibly emotional because

00:14:00   I had just seen you get out of a taxi cab in London, England.

00:14:04   Mm-hmm.

00:14:05   Yes.

00:14:06   It was a very, very beautiful day yesterday.

00:14:08   Yes, it was a very beautiful moment and an amazing entire day.

00:14:13   So we met for the first time in like, how long since we've known each other online?

00:14:18   Like four years, three years?

00:14:20   Well, I asked you, this is part of my presentation at Release Notes, I found an old DM, and I

00:14:28   I asked you if you would be willing to do a podcast with me back in 2013.

00:14:34   So we've been, and it was early in 2013, so we've been working together for about two

00:14:38   and a half years now.

00:14:40   So almost three years basically.

00:14:42   Yep.

00:14:43   And I'm pretty sure I was already listening to your podcast.

00:14:46   So remotely we've known each other for a long time and yesterday we met for the first time

00:14:52   in your city, in your land, in the land of Britain.

00:14:58   What do you want to discuss Myke? It was amazing.

00:15:02   It was very beautiful. So Federico is here conducting special business.

00:15:06   Yes.

00:15:07   And it was a special business trip. You were in and out in one day.

00:15:10   So we didn't even get to spend as much time as we like.

00:15:13   But there was lots of hugging. We hugged a lot.

00:15:15   I kept touching you to ensure that you were real.

00:15:18   I was real and you were real.

00:15:20   And I looked after you, didn't I? I took you to the plane.

00:15:23   Oh yeah.

00:15:24   you on a train. You used Apple Pay on the tube? For the first time, I had no idea how Apple Pay

00:15:32   worked. It was really fast, really quick. You activated the sensor for me and I just needed

00:15:37   to place the iPhone on the little pad and it's just amazing. I keep thinking I want to use Apple

00:15:44   Pay in Italy but no announcement yet. What did you think of the tube? It was surely...

00:15:53   So two thoughts. Better organized and I mean more modern, like people actually form decent lines.

00:16:02   So better organized, more modern than the one in Rome. Cleaner for sure. No weird smells.

00:16:11   Yeah, the one in Rome, depending on the station.

00:16:14   It was rush hour as well, so it was super busy.

00:16:16   The second thought, and this applies to people in London in general, at least from what I

00:16:22   saw yesterday.

00:16:24   People are really quiet and they don't push too much.

00:16:28   No, just a little bit.

00:16:31   In Rome, they push a lot and they're super loud, especially when you get on the metro,

00:16:36   that's what we call it here.

00:16:39   There's always some kind of smell or some kind of argument and there's people pushing

00:16:44   and there's a lot of pit pocket.

00:16:48   What's his name?

00:16:49   Pit pockets, yeah.

00:16:50   Pit pockets.

00:16:51   lot of people trying to see your wallet basically on your phone. It was very organized. I keep

00:16:59   thinking of organized in London, like people waiting in line and there's no screaming,

00:17:04   no yelling, no people fumbling for their tickets. Everyone knows that they need to be done at

00:17:09   the little – what's the name – the gates?

00:17:12   Yeah, the little gates where you go through the trains. This is the thing, right? You

00:17:17   were in a business district basically during rush hour on a regular day in the week. So

00:17:23   like everyone is like super focused, they just want to go home. So like people know

00:17:28   what they need to do. And yeah on the whole like people are quiet. Like there was one

00:17:31   point where me and you maybe took a little bit too long at the barrier and people start

00:17:35   like you can hear it. It's the most you get in the UK so people are coughing. So that's

00:17:40   what it is. Oh but something I forgot to mention. I brought a special guest with me for you

00:17:45   Oh yes, yes, I saw CGP Grey.

00:17:52   The man, the myth, the legend.

00:17:54   The robot.

00:17:55   Yep.

00:17:56   So he's real, or at least he appears to be real.

00:18:00   If he's a robot, he's a very realistic one.

00:18:03   I even almost touched CGP Grey, you know?

00:18:09   You shook his hand, didn't you?

00:18:10   Well, I shook his hand, but I also, he wasn't expecting me to touch his watch.

00:18:15   Yeah, that was quite a funny moment.

00:18:17   So Gray has the full black link bracelet watch.

00:18:24   - Looks amazing. - The DLC one,

00:18:26   so diamond-like coating.

00:18:27   And me and Gray have spoken about this in the past,

00:18:30   and I said to him, "Can I try it on?"

00:18:33   And he looked at me like I was insane

00:18:35   and told me that I couldn't.

00:18:36   But Federico sees it and he's like, "Oh!"

00:18:38   And he just reaches out and touches it.

00:18:40   And there's nothing Gray can do because it's too late now.

00:18:43   So what I have learned is you just need to be bold like an Italian. That's what I've learned.

00:18:48   Yeah, it was just natural for me. I don't know. I realize now it can be strange for people in

00:18:56   other countries to just instinctively reach out and touch someone else's hand or wrist.

00:19:01   We are in Europe, right? We are in Europe, but we are not European.

00:19:11   If you spent more time here, I think you would really start to see that.

00:19:14   There is a lot of Europe where the customs are very... they're closer together, I think.

00:19:21   But the UK, it's a completely different place.

00:19:27   I feel like as a country, in terms of habits and general behavior,

00:19:36   were more similar to Spanish people, you know?

00:19:39   - Okay.

00:19:40   - I feel like we're, you know, always kinda,

00:19:43   I wouldn't say loud necessarily, but you know,

00:19:48   maybe talkative, you know, just always,

00:19:51   I don't know, in London, people seemed really quiet.

00:19:54   And you seem different than most people.

00:19:57   Could be because I know you, but you almost don't,

00:20:00   like everyone looked too serious or too like,

00:20:05   like smile for a little, you know? Like everyone was super focused and super quiet and no touching,

00:20:10   no pushing, no... it almost felt too precise.

00:20:14   Well I guess I would be more quiet, but like I was just super excited to see you so I was

00:20:18   making a lot of noise.

00:20:20   I don't know, could also be that the city was like very cloudy. Like I was just coming

00:20:27   from a super sunny day in Rome and London was basically grey.

00:20:33   Yeah.

00:20:34   It's that time of the year.

00:20:36   Uh-huh.

00:20:37   So I don't know, that with the combination of, you know, these people just super focused,

00:20:44   super like, ignoring you in a way, you know, it was very strange.

00:20:49   Not terrible, but just very strange, you know?

00:20:53   We are strange people.

00:20:54   I hope that this won't be the last special business trip that you make.

00:21:00   And then maybe next time I can actually take you to some of my favorite restaurants.

00:21:03   Why should it be the last? I hope it won't be. I hope it won't be. That's why I say I hope it won't be the last.

00:21:08   Okay. Yeah, you were awesome Myke. I should tell the listeners

00:21:12   Myke took care of me

00:21:16   He was incredible

00:21:18   You know, he took me from one part of London back to the airport. He never left me alone

00:21:24   He got it all figured out for me. I didn't have to care about you know, any of the details. So if you ever

00:21:32   if you ever need to be in London consider becoming friends with Myke a few years in advance.

00:21:38   If you're ever going to be in London just ask Myke, he'll sort it out for you. You need a train ticket,

00:21:47   he'll buy you a train ticket. I had a disclaimer, consider becoming friends with Myke a few years in

00:21:52   advance so you can rest assured he will take care of you. You are a very good friend Myke, thank you.

00:21:58   It's a pleasure, absolute pleasure. There was something I wanted to ask you about which I

00:22:02   mentioned last week right so Apple had their Q4 2015 results and I don't really

00:22:08   think it's worth too much talking about the things because it's basically

00:22:12   exactly as we expected right so iPhone sales were higher than the previous

00:22:17   quarter and beat expectations iPad sales were the lowest they've been in a long

00:22:22   time right I mean none of this is a surprise except max sales maybe which is

00:22:27   like the highest Mac sales on a quarter that there's been in years, right? But the

00:22:33   revenue stuff is not, I mean it's basically the same as every other

00:22:36   revenue discussion we've had over the last two years. You know, iPhones are up,

00:22:40   Macs are doing okay, iPads are going down, but still selling more iPads than Mac.

00:22:44   But you know, undeniable they're going down. Which is why, you know, it goes back

00:22:48   to us talking about the idea of the iPad Pro and what Apple are potentially

00:22:53   gonna be looking at doing there to try and bolster the iPad line to maintain

00:22:57   Tim's bullishness. But what I wanted to ask you was how you go about assembling all of

00:23:05   the charts and graphics that you do to put on the site and how you make that data, where

00:23:12   does the data come from, do you have like documents that you just update every year,

00:23:16   like how does that part of it come together? Because you put it together really, really

00:23:20   fast.

00:23:21   Ok, so it's all automated on my end, at least the final part.

00:23:28   So the data comes from Apple of course, every time they release the actual announcement,

00:23:34   the press release, if you look closely there's a link to what they call the data sum, it's

00:23:40   a summary like a table, it's a PDF document with a breakdown of units and revenue.

00:23:48   to be more complex to read in the past but since Apple changed the way they report units

00:23:53   and revenue, I think 2 to 3, 4 quarters ago maybe, it's become even easier to read and

00:24:01   to find the latest data. So you get from this Apple PDF, you get two columns, one is units

00:24:08   and the other is revenue and it's organized by device, so or rather like segment or product,

00:24:15   iPhone, iPad services, other, or region.

00:24:18   So you got all these numbers, and what we do is Graham,

00:24:22   my co-writer at Mac Stories,

00:24:25   he has an Excel document that he put together

00:24:30   with a bunch of formulas to generate charts,

00:24:33   and he takes care of this document.

00:24:36   I never make changes to the formulas.

00:24:39   He's created all these different commands behind the scenes.

00:24:44   So I just need to enter the same numbers that I see in the Apple PDF.

00:24:50   So he created this quick entry box in the spreadsheet.

00:24:54   I only need to enter like 10 numbers and all the charts and the historical data is generated

00:25:01   by the Excel formulas that he did.

00:25:04   And he actually added, what's it called, a moving average chart a few months ago.

00:25:10   Now he's considering adding more comparisons in the future.

00:25:13   But the thing is, I don't understand anything about Excel.

00:25:17   I just know how to enter numbers and how to export images.

00:25:22   So he prepares the day before.

00:25:24   He takes a look at the Excel document.

00:25:27   He makes sure that everything is okay and he sends it to me.

00:25:30   We prepare a draft of the article in advance so we can just fill in the numbers and post

00:25:35   the article right after the announcement.

00:25:39   So we look at the expectations from analysts.

00:25:42   look at the year ago quarter data.

00:25:45   We do all of that beforehand, of course.

00:25:48   And when I get the Apple data summary on my iPad, now it's even easier because I can do

00:25:55   split view.

00:25:57   I can see two apps at the same time.

00:25:59   So I replicate the numbers from the data sum into the Excel document.

00:26:03   I double check this quick entry box that I have in the spreadsheet.

00:26:08   I tap once on an image, so I got another sheet which is just images, I tap once on a chart

00:26:15   and I select copy.

00:26:19   And then I have this workflow in the workflow app which is basically like three actions.

00:26:25   It takes the clipboard, so the contents of the clipboard, it gets an image from the clipboard

00:26:32   and it exports the image with iOS extensions.

00:26:36   So I copy in Excel, I open Workflow and again I can put the two apps side by side to speed

00:26:42   up the process.

00:26:44   And I tap Play, I run the Workflow and in two seconds it prepares the image and it exports

00:26:53   it to the share sheet.

00:26:54   So I can just upload it with my Python script to my CDN, it's optimized and in another two

00:27:00   seconds I have a URL to the image back in my clipboard which I can then paste into a

00:27:05   editorial and update the post on WordPress with another workflow that I

00:27:10   have that is custom made for Mac stories. So for just one image, like once I

00:27:15   have the spreadsheet with all the images I can now with these new workflows I can

00:27:20   go through the entire series of images in like five minutes at most.

00:27:26   That's mind-boggling. I mean would you ever like consider doing a screencast or

00:27:32   something at some point like this stuff is just so fascinating it is fascinating

00:27:37   but it's also very custom made from XORs like the Python part right it

00:27:43   communicates with Kraken which is this web service that we use oh I remember

00:27:47   that yes I remember you going many many weeks through this process of trying to find an image

00:27:54   resizer so for those following it works great we've been using it for almost a

00:27:59   a year now, super happy, the API is great,

00:28:02   works with Python, optimizes images.

00:28:04   It's been saving me a lot of money.

00:28:07   So for instance, I got this script that goes to Kraken

00:28:11   and uploads to my Rackspace CDN container.

00:28:16   So it's like, would it be useful to other people?

00:28:19   Sure, but that's very specific need.

00:28:22   How many people use Kraken and Rackspace Cloud files

00:28:26   and then need to paste the link into editorial

00:28:29   and use another workflow to update a post on WordPress.

00:28:33   I guess when I tell you how it's done, it's fascinating.

00:28:37   But in practice, the Python scripts are really ugly

00:28:41   because I don't care about clean code.

00:28:44   I just want to get the job done.

00:28:46   - Yeah, no, I get it.

00:28:47   I get it.

00:28:48   So listening to you explain it

00:28:50   is what's really fascinating to me.

00:28:52   But as you say, you could basically,

00:28:56   what you'd be doing is recording it for entertainment.

00:28:59   Like people can't really get too much out of it

00:29:01   because they would have to be writing for Mac stories, right?

00:29:04   - Yes.

00:29:05   - 'Cause that's how it works.

00:29:06   But I mean, you know, it's interesting.

00:29:08   I like to hear it because, I mean,

00:29:11   if you trace back to the beginnings of this show

00:29:14   and like, you know, to the prompt and back further,

00:29:17   like just listening to the way that you have optimized

00:29:20   all of this stuff so it works on an iPad,

00:29:23   it's just so fascinating to me.

00:29:25   As I try and personally put more thought into using an iPad

00:29:30   more in my daily life,

00:29:34   there is just an element of all of this

00:29:36   which is really, really interesting to me

00:29:38   as to how can I start to leverage the incredible power

00:29:42   that some of these applications have

00:29:44   to get some of the work done that I need.

00:29:46   And it's just something that I'm starting to think about

00:29:49   a little bit more.

00:29:50   So I'm just becoming more and more interested

00:29:53   to hear about some of the bat poop crazy things

00:29:57   that you do with your iPad.

00:30:00   And it is mad, it really is mad.

00:30:02   And like, I hear you do it and I'm like,

00:30:05   could someone do this as quick on a Mac?

00:30:07   Like, I don't know.

00:30:08   - Oh, I tried for many years, believe me.

00:30:11   - I mean, for some reason for you,

00:30:12   this OS just matches with your way of working, right?

00:30:17   That is what this fundamentally is like.

00:30:20   it really fits with your brain.

00:30:24   'Cause you know, you look at somebody like Jason, right?

00:30:28   So Jason does a very similar thing on six colors,

00:30:31   and he's able to put his stuff up real quick, right?

00:30:34   So he has obviously worked out a way to do it on the Mac

00:30:38   that makes super sense to him.

00:30:40   So it's just really interesting to me to see

00:30:43   how you're able to do it

00:30:45   compared to how other people are able to do it.

00:30:46   It's just something that I find quite interesting.

00:30:50   - Yeah, I spent many, many weeks trying to optimize

00:30:55   to the point where you start wondering,

00:30:57   is the time I spend optimizing really worth the effort

00:30:59   in the end?

00:31:00   And the answer is for these very daily and recurring tasks,

00:31:05   yes, absolutely.

00:31:07   Because the time that I saved, you know,

00:31:10   with these workflows to automate markdown

00:31:13   or image uploading, I mean, for the iOS 9 review,

00:31:17   I had more than 200 screenshots.

00:31:21   And doing that without my scripts would have been crazy.

00:31:24   So yes, I may have wasted a couple of weeks trying to find the perfect image uploading

00:31:29   and optimizing service, but it saved me a lot of money because images are optimized

00:31:35   and my CDM bill is lower.

00:31:38   And it saved me a lot of time that I spent reading and rereading again the article.

00:31:43   So you've got to be careful with the kind of optimizations and how much tweaking do

00:31:49   you want to do because it can be a rabbit hole.

00:31:52   You can spend your life optimizing for this potential future where you always need to

00:31:58   be more optimized.

00:32:00   So you've got to find an area, I guess, where you really see the practical benefits of scripts

00:32:07   and automation.

00:32:08   That's how I look at this problem.

00:32:10   Alright, let me take a break and I want to talk about one of your favorite applications,

00:32:17   Outlook and what is going on with Outlook and what Microsoft are up to because it's

00:32:22   interesting to say the least.

00:32:24   But first I want to talk about one of our lovely sponsors and that is our good friend

00:32:28   Mr Andrew Carroll of NCH Tax and Wealth.

00:32:31   So this is a simple ad about a difficult thing.

00:32:35   Taxes.

00:32:36   Taxes are a nightmare.

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00:32:53   how to get all of the paperwork set up, how to get all the tax stuff in place is

00:32:57   just something that most people have no idea of how to do. Like where are you

00:33:02   gonna learn this? Otherwise you've got to put the time in. It's just something that has to be

00:33:05   done, you have to deal with it and when you're trying to just make the thing

00:33:09   that you want to make it can be really easy to just fall into a trap where

00:33:13   you're not being efficient enough and you end up paying too much tax right

00:33:17   because you're not putting the effort and time into it that you're gonna need.

00:33:19   So maybe you are a freelancer right now you're doing some work on the side and

00:33:23   Maybe you are fully independent, right? You have your own business or you have a dream of doing something like this one day and being an independent content creator.

00:33:30   This message is for you. Andrew Carroll, CPA of NCH Tax and Wealth is a big fan of all the great shows at Real AFM and is also our accountant as I mentioned.

00:33:40   So I vouch for him. He knows what he's doing. He's done some great work for us and he has a solution for all of you.

00:33:46   He's written a new ebook. It's called The Freelancer's Guide to Escaping Taxes.

00:33:50   all about how to understand what you need to do to make sure you're being efficient

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00:33:59   ending up being in a situation where you're paying more tax than you should be. Andrew

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00:34:30   cpaandrew.com/relay. You can also find Andrew on Twitter, he is @cpaandrew. Thank you so

00:34:36   much to Andrew Carroll of NCH Tax and Wealth for sponsoring this week's episode of Connected.

00:34:41   He's such a great guy, he just had a kid. Congratulations to the Carroll family.

00:34:47   is becoming a part of Outlook, right?

00:34:50   This was announced earlier this week.

00:34:52   So Sunrise was a calendar app.

00:34:54   Outlook was previously an app called a Comply.

00:34:56   Microsoft bought them both

00:34:58   and is now starting to roll Sunrise into Outlook.

00:35:03   - And now they're making a baby.

00:35:04   - Yes, they're basically making Outlook Junior.

00:35:08   And Outlook Junior, unfortunately,

00:35:10   kills off his mom Sunrise, right?

00:35:13   - Wow, that's creepy.

00:35:14   - Is that how this ends up?

00:35:15   This is it, right?

00:35:16   This is what they're looking to do.

00:35:17   They're looking to roll Sunrise into Outlook and then kill Sunrise.

00:35:20   Yes.

00:35:21   So tell me what's going on here.

00:35:23   Is it perfect if they put exactly what we need?

00:35:25   No, not yet.

00:35:28   Basically the change right now is on paper because the Sunrise that they merged into

00:35:35   Outlook is not really Sunrise.

00:35:38   With the latest update on the App Store, they refreshed the interface of Outlook a little

00:35:43   bit and they apparently got the Sunrise team to redo the interface of Outlook to kind of

00:35:48   polish the way the emails are displayed, conversations, the icons are new, there's a bunch of new

00:35:56   indicators for events and unread emails.

00:36:01   It's more polished.

00:36:03   But the calendar section is really the pre-existing Outlook calendar, only a little more refined.

00:36:13   But if you were hoping to find all the many great touches of Sunrise, like when you type

00:36:18   an event that contains a specific word like "meeting" or "doctor", you get a custom icon

00:36:24   next to the event's name, so it helps you visually organize your calendar based on icons.

00:36:31   There's no such thing as custom icons yet.

00:36:34   Or there's no support for integrations with third-party services.

00:36:38   So you could get your to-do list tasks or your foursquare checking information right

00:36:44   alongside your calendar events.

00:36:46   Microsoft says that all of these pre-existing features will come back to Outlook in the

00:36:52   future and they're looking to release updates before the end of the year to bring feature

00:36:57   parity between Sunrise and Outlook.

00:37:00   Until that time they say we will keep Sunrise on the App Store until we have the same functionalities

00:37:05   on both apps so we can discontinue Sunrise and move all users back to Outlook.

00:37:11   And I gotta wonder, will it be too much to take everything that made Sunrise great, but

00:37:18   it was a dedicated app, and push it into Outlook, where the calendar view is a tab of the app.

00:37:27   Of course it can be a full app, it's a section of Outlook.

00:37:31   So I wonder if it will be too much or if maybe we'll end up with some kind of lightweight

00:37:37   version of Sunrise with some of the features that used to be the entire app.

00:37:43   We don't know yet but there's a lot missing right now so it's not really Sunrise.

00:37:49   There's a promise of Sunrise coming to Outlook and we got a more cleaned up interface in

00:37:55   In the meantime, we're still not looking at Sunrise inside Outlook.

00:38:01   We gotta wait a few more months, according to the Microsoft blog.

00:38:05   So on the Sunrise blog, they said that you can expect features like interesting calendars,

00:38:10   connected apps, and our three-day view to show up before the end of the year.

00:38:13   So this maybe shows a commitment to bring some of the more interesting things from Sunrise.

00:38:18   In my opinion, if they can do this, if they can pull this off, this is killer, right?

00:38:24   Oh yeah.

00:38:25   because okay so I'm still in mailbox land okay anybody that's listened to Cortex a couple of

00:38:31   weeks ago knows that I am in absolute just disarray about my email application situation

00:38:37   but I am using Outlook as well so I'm like using them both I'm trying to like slowly move over to

00:38:46   Outlook because I really like that app I think it's got a lot of great stuff the watch stuff is

00:38:50   really good that works really great I like all of that the app itself works really nicely the

00:38:54   search is pretty good so I'm trying to like get into the mindset of using an

00:38:58   app like that. My main problem at the moment is outlook on the desktop sucks

00:39:02   sucks it's nothing like this one and and if if Microsoft like just turn around

00:39:08   said here is outlook and it has all of the great features from the iOS versions

00:39:12   I would switch tomorrow that's the only thing that's kind of like holding me

00:39:16   back is right like oh you know it because outlook can do a bit of that

00:39:20   email manipulation stuff right like the snoozing of emails and stuff like that

00:39:23   So if I want to do that, I want that to be mirrored across all of my platforms

00:39:28   and the Outlook Mac app is not so good right now. So I'm kind of like floating

00:39:34   between the two of them, but the Outlook app itself is just... it's fantastic.

00:39:39   And they seem to be really dedicated. Like it's iOS 9 compatible,

00:39:44   it's split-screen compatible, it's... you know? They just released the WatchOS 2 app.

00:39:49   like this is whoever's building this whether it's like technically Microsoft

00:39:54   or it's still the Accomplete team right I don't know how it actually works it

00:39:59   seems like things are going pretty well there so I guess we can probably hope

00:40:05   that it's gonna be okay right that they are gonna do what they said they were

00:40:10   gonna do oh yeah they even said they got 30 million active users each month so

00:40:17   So that's a lot of people using Outlook.

00:40:22   I think they made a great choice with acquiring a company because clearly they had some kind

00:40:26   of vision for the future of this app.

00:40:29   And Microsoft, unlike Google, is being extremely conscious of the fact that they cannot force

00:40:36   their own metaphors for functionality and interface from another platform onto iOS.

00:40:44   being extremely good citizens when it comes to adopting interface, paradigms on iOS, new

00:40:52   technologies such as iOS 9, support for bigger iPads, multitasking, watchOS, they're really

00:41:00   doing a good job there.

00:41:03   The idea of integrations coming to Outlook via Sunrise, it's not only interesting I think

00:41:09   because of the potential utility in the calendar.

00:41:12   So you see all these other details about external services

00:41:17   into your list of events.

00:41:19   But when you think about it,

00:41:22   having Todoist integration into Outlook,

00:41:25   it could mean that you should be able to save emails

00:41:27   from the email part of Outlook into Todoist

00:41:32   because you'll be no longer connecting a service to Sunrise.

00:41:38   you will be connecting it to Outlook,

00:41:41   which is the entire email app.

00:41:43   So the potential for doing even more

00:41:45   with the integrations is huge.

00:41:49   You could connect your email inbox to a task manager

00:41:53   and save emails as tasks,

00:41:55   and then you could also see tasks in the calendar.

00:41:58   You could do a bunch of crazy things there.

00:42:00   - 'Cause apparently they're gonna be integrating

00:42:02   with Microsoft-owned Wunderlist as well,

00:42:05   or Wunderlist, I should say.

00:42:07   - Yeah, they said they don't plan to do the same thing

00:42:10   with Wunderlies to kind of--

00:42:13   - No, not to like swallow it up,

00:42:14   but there was a post on their Dev forum, I think,

00:42:18   which was, it basically said that they were looking

00:42:21   to have task integration built into Outlook.

00:42:24   And VillaList is obviously top of that list

00:42:26   'cause it's part of the same company.

00:42:28   Yeah, that would be a disaster, right?

00:42:30   Trying to bring that inside of Outlook.

00:42:31   Like you got to stop somewhere.

00:42:33   - Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to stop somewhere.

00:42:36   That's why I'm both kind of concerned and curious to see what they do with all these

00:42:42   integrations to see how much they can enhance a calendar client without an email client

00:42:49   without making it too complex or too complicated to use because there's too many options,

00:42:55   too many settings.

00:42:56   It's great I think that they're trying to modernize email by looking at all these integrations

00:43:03   and trying to be, we want to embrace all these new iOS technologies, we want to be a great

00:43:10   iOS app. And that's great. But I don't want to see them doing too much. Just to say, hey

00:43:17   we've got all these features, we've got all these options and now people no longer know

00:43:20   how to use the app. So that's always a risk of course, feature creep. You don't want to

00:43:26   do that. So I guess we'll see how it goes before Christmas. They said before the end

00:43:31   of the year they want to do updates with sunrise features so we'll see how it goes.

00:43:35   Yeah, yeah I'm gonna keep my eye on this one I hope that it goes where we hope it

00:43:42   will I mean there's a lot of potential here to make a real killer productivity

00:43:46   app and Microsoft is still the company that can make that kind of stuff

00:43:52   happen especially now very exciting Federica yesterday when we were embracing

00:43:59   for the afternoon. Twitter exploded and turned faves into likes and replaced the

00:44:06   styles of hearts. How do you feel about this? I don't feel. I mean whatever, right?

00:44:16   It's an icon. I think people are reading way too much into

00:44:22   this. Like, I understand that the fave among some circles of tech nerds, it's like an institution,

00:44:30   right? It's the fave religion, like the fave meant this and it meant that, there's the sub-fave,

00:44:39   and there's... You need to realize that these nerds are the same people who are at the same time,

00:44:45   they're arguing for the future of Twitter, Twitter needs more people, Twitter needs more friendly,

00:44:50   And when Twitter does something that's more friendly and more understandable, they scream in revolt.

00:44:57   They're just "Oh my god, Twitter is killing us!"

00:45:00   You know? I just don't understand.

00:45:03   I mean, you want to save a tweet, now it's a heart instead of a star?

00:45:07   Whatever! You can still do the same thing.

00:45:09   It's just for the common user who doesn't know Twitter, doesn't know me,

00:45:14   could be more familiar with Facebook.

00:45:16   let's not hide the fact that people know Facebook more than Twitter.

00:45:19   If you really want Twitter to be more popular, I mean they tried with the stars for a few years

00:45:27   at this point, so try something new, could always be good for the business. You know,

00:45:32   you gotta make it more approachable for millions of other potential users. And I know that

00:45:38   hearts, likes won't save Twitter if the company needs any saving, if they won't bring 200 million

00:45:47   new users to Twitter tomorrow morning. But it's, you know, changing a product is a series of many

00:45:54   changes, many little changes. And it's easy to be, you know, the kind of armchair critic who knows

00:46:01   best, what's best for every company in the Valley.

00:46:06   I think, as usual, with any of these changes and memes that explode on Twitter, a lot of

00:46:16   nerds need to chill and to understand that the world doesn't care too much about faves.

00:46:26   And I say this as someone who over the years has accrued like thousands upon thousands

00:46:34   of faves.

00:46:35   I love the fave, I love the star.

00:46:37   But if Twitter decides that it needs to try some new things around like moments, likes,

00:46:43   all these other changes to make sure that more people get to know Twitter more easily

00:46:50   and if the functionality doesn't go away, I'm all for it.

00:46:54   And I don't particularly mind having a heart in my Twitter stream.

00:47:00   I think we need more hearts.

00:47:02   My feeling about this is it's just a different icon.

00:47:06   It acts in the exact same way.

00:47:09   You can put your own feeling onto it.

00:47:11   But the thing is, the reason I think this works is so many other social networks use

00:47:17   hearts.

00:47:18   And I know that people are saying that Facebook is, you know, they call it likes and they

00:47:22   a thumb and do that for a reason. But Facebook owned Instagram uses hearts. Vine uses hearts.

00:47:30   Periscope uses hearts. Apple Music uses hearts. Exactly, but like considering the fact that

00:47:36   three of the companies that Twitter owns uses hearts for their system like this,

00:47:40   it makes like you know they have like... Vine uses hearts, Periscope uses hearts. It makes sense to me

00:47:47   that twitter uses hearts and it might upset you right because you like the stars but i would say

00:47:54   to most people that are upset at this remember how everybody felt when twitter instituted the

00:48:00   retweet you know like the official retweet people were really mad about that oh yeah like like the

00:48:07   world was ending basically i would try not to worry about this if all the things twitter could

00:48:12   do this is not too bad. I wanted to see what you thought of it and you feel pretty much

00:48:18   exactly the same as I do which is good to see. Yeah I feel like you know there's always

00:48:24   some tension between the, so I call it the idealistic nerd who on paper is all for change

00:48:33   you know we need to change, we need to evolve, technology needs to embrace more people and all

00:48:38   all those ideals. But then when change is upon the idealistic nerd, he tends to hide

00:48:49   and be defensive about it and say "No, I don't want change. Why are you changing

00:48:53   this?" So on paper, you're pushing for "I want more people of all extractions,

00:49:00   people who understand other popular networks, other popular pieces of software. I want those

00:49:05   people to also understand my software. So beforehand you say "yeah we need to be more

00:49:09   open, we need to change, we need to explore" and then when you do get the change it's

00:49:17   the end of the world as you know it. And that's just such a peculiar and I don't want to

00:49:26   say silly but I'm going to say you need to understand and I realize this is a very

00:49:33   specific problem because the world doesn't care about faves and likes but we are talking

00:49:39   about it so you need to understand that these things people don't care about but if you

00:49:45   change them, if you make the entire package in a bunch of places, so it's an icon there,

00:49:53   it's a menu here, you know if you make all these little changes they do add up over time

00:49:58   So people may not care about the history or the politics behind the fave and the like,

00:50:05   but a social network like Twitter is a bunch of little features.

00:50:08   So they may not care about the behind the scenes stuff as we as geeks do, but the overall

00:50:15   product can be beneficial to people like my mom who doesn't understand Twitter and she

00:50:23   uses Twitter just to read my tweets in English.

00:50:27   I don't understand why she does that, but if her icon, which she knows, is simpler to

00:50:34   use and more understandable than a star, and my mom starts using likes on Twitter, I guess

00:50:42   that's a good thing.

00:50:44   So you know, change is a weird beast.

00:50:51   We appreciate the idea of change, but many times when they change our software, we are

00:50:57   mad about it.

00:50:59   And I guess, you know, this will be an unpopular opinion, but we'll be fine.

00:51:09   That's what I think.

00:51:10   We'll be fine.

00:51:11   It's hard.

00:51:12   It's not, you know.

00:51:13   It could have been a worse icon, you know.

00:51:16   It could have been, I don't know, a dollar.

00:51:18   It could have been a lamp.

00:51:20   A little egg?

00:51:21   It could have been a little egg.

00:51:23   It could have been a bird.

00:51:25   It's a heart.

00:51:26   So you know, unless you're CGP Grey who's a robot, everyone has a heart and will be

00:51:32   fine.

00:51:33   Well, I want to know that I heart you.

00:51:35   I heart you too, Myke.

00:51:37   And I also heart Harry's, who sponsored me.

00:51:40   Wow, that's perfect.

00:51:41   Look at that.

00:51:44   It is November, which means it's time for Movember.

00:51:48   If you've never heard of Movember, Movember is a time during the month of November when

00:51:53   you will see guys grow crazy looking moustaches in support of men's health issues.

00:51:58   So I remember when I was working in the company that I was in before I quit to become independent

00:52:04   and during this time working in the city or working in big buildings it was always funny

00:52:09   to see loads of guys with varying levels of terrible moustaches.

00:52:14   Some people would have great ones, some people could barely grow them but it was a lot of

00:52:17   fun and it was a great way to benefit a good cause by raising donations from friends and family.

00:52:23   Well, Harry's is the official razor partner of the Movember Foundation and they will be donating

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00:52:53   they're great to use. I mean you know people say about me with my beard, of course I have

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00:54:34   thank you so much to Harry's for their support this year. So the Apple TV now we

00:54:42   on upgrade this week me and Jason were joined by Joe Steele and we kind of

00:54:46   really went into the device and picked it apart and said the things that we

00:54:50   liked and kind of focused quite a bit on the things that we didn't like from a

00:54:53   kind of hardware perspective the setup stuff and things like that but I wanted

00:54:57   to talk about some different things of you today Federico I wanted to talk

00:54:59   about apps and games. So first off though, because we haven't had the chance to talk

00:55:06   about this yet, I want to get your thoughts on the hardware itself. What do you think

00:55:11   about the Apple TV? Do you like the remote?

00:55:15   The Apple TV is fine, it's just a small box. The TV remote I do like with two potentially

00:55:27   major reservations. First one is the trackpad is okay for navigation, I don't think they're

00:55:37   doing, at least developers or Apple, I don't know who's to blame here, I don't think the

00:55:43   trackpad does a good job for games. It's too small, I find myself struggling to control

00:55:51   games with the trackpad so I have to use a controller and I just don't think it makes

00:55:57   for a good input mechanism for games.

00:55:59   At least those that I've tried so far.

00:56:01   Could be that those games are conversions from iOS and will get an Apple TV only exclusive

00:56:08   game in the future that truly understands the trackpad.

00:56:12   That day is not today.

00:56:14   problem is that I'm constantly getting the orientation of the remote wrong

00:56:21   because the controls on the remote are exactly in the middle

00:56:27   and the remote is entirely black and there's a symmetry between the top half

00:56:32   and the bottom half so when I'm picking it up in the dark because I'm watching

00:56:37   TV or playing a game and I want to change something with the remote I'm

00:56:41   constantly switching the bottom half for the top one. So I'm either swiping on the wrong part of the remote or tapping a button instead of the other because it's basically upside down.

00:56:56   And I know you can feel the remote by touching the different surfaces of the glass and the trackpad, but it's not enough for me to quickly understand.

00:57:09   whereas the old one at a glance you could tell, ok, the controls are at the top

00:57:14   so this is the right orientation of the remote

00:57:17   now it's mostly symmetrical between the two halves of the device

00:57:25   and I'm really struggling to pick it up in the correct way

00:57:29   or to at least by feel quickly adjusting it in my hand

00:57:33   so I make sure that I'm controlling the right end of the remote

00:57:38   But aside from that, which maybe it's something that I will get used to, I don't know,

00:57:43   I think it's fine. It's a nice upgrade from the previous Apple TV.

00:57:49   And I'm not a huge TV, what do you say, consumer.

00:57:54   I don't watch TV, I only watch TV shows and the occasional comedy movie.

00:58:02   So, you know, I'm not a movie person. I know that.

00:58:05   Yeah, it's a shame that Steven isn't here this week because obviously me and you have

00:58:09   spoken about this, we don't really have much to say on a TV front, which is why I was more

00:58:13   interested in your opinion on apps and games, right?

00:58:15   So maybe he can fill us in about how he's using it as a TV box.

00:58:19   Just a quick aside, someone wasn't happy about my comments on not knowing Fassbender, the

00:58:27   actor from the Steve Jobs movie, and that person said that I sounded condescending.

00:58:33   I'm sorry if I did but it wasn't meant as a slide to people who watch movies.

00:58:38   I think everyone should have his own hobby and there's nothing wrong about watching

00:58:45   movies it's just I don't watch a lot of movies.

00:58:50   I do keep up with the occasional gossip from Hollywood and Fassbender is a name that I

00:58:57   haven't heard before.

00:58:59   I asked my close friends and my parents if they knew who this actor is, I showed them

00:59:04   pictures they didn't know him.

00:59:07   I was just saying from my limited understanding of pop culture and famous actors from Hollywood,

00:59:13   I've never seen this person before.

00:59:15   Now this listener got really upset at my tone and I'm sorry if you did but it's just you

00:59:21   know I don't know this person so I was just... and I like to make fun and crack a few jokes

00:59:27   here and there. But I'm not condescending. I think people who watch movies, people who

00:59:31   play video games, people who read books, they're all obvious and it's great.

00:59:35   I think what we've learned is just nobody in Italy knows who Michael Fassbender is.

00:59:39   Probably.

00:59:40   He has an Italy problem. We need to get onto his agent.

00:59:43   Yeah, yeah. Anyway.

00:59:46   I want to talk about some of the things, some of the games and stuff that I've liked. Now

00:59:50   we both have the Nimbus controller, right?

00:59:53   Yes.

00:59:54   Now I wasn't going to get one of these, but I tried out a few games and I could see some

00:59:58   potential in them, so I decided that I'd pick up the controller.

01:00:02   Because like Alto's Adventure is a game that I love very dearly, and I tried playing it

01:00:06   on the Apple TV with the remote and it's kind of broken, you know?

01:00:10   You have to click the remote to make Alto jump, or any of the characters that you're

01:00:15   playing.

01:00:16   I play as Maya, she is my favourite character, I think she's the best.

01:00:20   You should really be tapping I think to make it work, because when you click on the remote

01:00:23   There's like a there's this stuff every slight delay, but that's all it takes but on the controller using the Nimbus controller

01:00:29   It's brilliant. It works perfectly and I found that with so many games like crossy road

01:00:33   Mm-hmm sucks with the remote trying to move the little guy around you can't do a quick enough with a d-pad on the Nimbus controller

01:00:40   It's awesome. Right? Yeah, like so geometry wars. I wouldn't even attempt to play geometry wars big

01:00:48   with the remote because Geometry Wars is a double stick a double analog stick

01:00:52   game right it always has been that's how you play it again works pretty good on

01:00:57   the Nimbus controller I'm not a big fan of their analog sticks I don't think

01:01:04   that they're very great and very comfortable yeah the rest of the

01:01:07   controller itself is good it feels good in the hand it's not massively expensive

01:01:11   it's the price of a controller but you know Geometry Wars plays well on it

01:01:16   Asphalt 8 as well I tried out, which is fine. My problem with that is like that

01:01:21   game is graphically quite intensive so every time I was selecting something it

01:01:26   was having to download more content right you know like the whole on-demand

01:01:33   content or whatever it's called the on-demand something it was having to

01:01:37   download a lot of those it plays fine it tries to be a console game it doesn't

01:01:40   look like a console game but it tries to be one and it you know again does a good

01:01:44   job with the controller. So overall like this is just again shown to me like why

01:01:50   why isn't there a controller like that is the only real way to play games on

01:01:55   this thing except for Beat Sports which is charming and I love it.

01:01:59   Did you have you played Beat Sports? Oh Federico you've got to get Beat

01:02:03   Sports. Yeah is it a single-player multiplayer game? It is single-player but

01:02:07   you can have multiplayer but I think the multiplayer is a bit weird but play the

01:02:11   single player. I'm telling you it's great. You know you were just saying a moment

01:02:14   ago about like the game design for Apple TV? That's it.

01:02:18   Okay. Because when you play on the iPhone you just swipe left and right I believe

01:02:24   like when you're doing two-player that you use an iPhone for it you swipe left

01:02:27   and right is my understanding I think that's how you do it. But you you use the

01:02:31   little remote it's like a bat to hit so you like swing the bat around. That is

01:02:35   the game designed for the Apple TV. Takes advantage of what is in the Apple TV

01:02:40   remote and it's great. The rest of them need the controller.

01:02:44   Yeah, I agree. I've only been playing, I've played a bunch of Cross

01:02:59   played the first 30 minutes, didn't stick with me, I never finished the game.

01:03:05   Now I'm playing on the TV, the game has been remastered to full HD, 60 frames per second,

01:03:12   it looks fantastic on the TV, and okay, it's really, I wouldn't say a rip-off, but it's a Zelda clone.

01:03:19   [laughs]

01:03:20   Yeah, Oceanhorn is basically an homage to Zelda.

01:03:26   Very strong one. Down to some of the music, I can see some similarities there.

01:03:33   The controls, the items, the entire mechanic of moving from island to island that's basically been lifted from Zelda Wind Waker.

01:03:44   It's very Zelda inspired, let's say. But it's a good game, you know?

01:03:50   the atmosphere is good, the colors are fantastic, looks great on the Apple TV, plays very nice

01:03:56   with the Nimbus controller and it's the closest thing to a Zelda game I could have right now,

01:04:03   especially following the disappointment of Triforce Heroes on the 3DS and not showing

01:04:11   the new Zelda on the Wii U. I want to play some Zelda-like game, I can play Oceanhorn

01:04:16   on the Apple TV. It's a good game. You can tell where it comes from, but it's a good

01:04:22   game.

01:04:23   Now my understanding was that charts had made their way to the Apple TV.

01:04:28   Yeah, but only...

01:04:30   Not for me!

01:04:31   Only in the US App Store, I think.

01:04:35   Right, okay. Yeah, weird that that's not there. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's

01:04:39   just because there's not enough apps?

01:04:43   Why?

01:04:44   Most of Apple TV apps, they're available in more than just the US.

01:04:55   Maybe logistics, maybe I don't know.

01:04:58   Maybe the guy who works at the European office is just sleeping.

01:05:02   I don't know.

01:05:03   No idea.

01:05:05   No idea.

01:05:08   There's no real reason here because the Apple TV came out in a bunch of countries at once.

01:05:13   Apps tend to be available in multiple markets on the App Store, so why is there no top chart

01:05:18   section outside of America?

01:05:22   I don't know.

01:05:23   No idea, Myke.

01:05:24   It's a weird omission, that's what I'm going to say.

01:05:27   I saw a tweet go by.

01:05:29   I saw this thing as well.

01:05:31   So this is from a guy by the name Myke Piatek-Heminis, I'm going to say.

01:05:38   And he had an app called Seasonality TV, which was number 31 in the top grossing overall

01:05:46   in the tvOS app store.

01:05:48   With only, and he says, in four days, total four days, the app had made $200.

01:05:55   Now I don't think that's very good numbers wise.

01:06:03   That doesn't feel to be number 31, right?

01:06:07   $200?

01:06:08   So I think what this maybe highlights is the limited market that is currently existing

01:06:13   for the Apple TV.

01:06:15   Yeah, for sure.

01:06:17   And I also, I want to say, I think Apple didn't help third party developers with this launch.

01:06:24   The App Store was especially limited, no categories to browse, search of course was too difficult

01:06:33   to do with the trackpad because there's no remote update to type on the iPhone.

01:06:37   So they weren't exactly helping developers with, say, ways for users to find their apps.

01:06:47   And so I would say that maybe those games and those apps that were featured on the front

01:06:51   page, they got some nice sales, maybe, I don't know, I'm not those developers. But for all

01:06:58   these other guys with apps on the Apple TV app store, you gotta give people an easier

01:07:06   way to find their apps. So you cannot link to apps. If you wanna search for an app, you

01:07:11   gotta type the name on the trackpad.

01:07:15   Because you can't search by Siri for apps either.

01:07:17   search for Siri, using Siri, there's no categories to browse, so now you have top charts, but

01:07:24   what about the first 4 to 5 days when it's, you know, the first day, the moment you get

01:07:28   a TV out of the box, you say "Ok, what am I supposed to download here?" That's when

01:07:33   you gotta give people ways to discover apps. So instead, what you got them is a featured

01:07:40   page on the App Store. So imagine this, imagine if the Apple Watch launched to a single App

01:07:47   store with no categories, no ways to search easily, and without the iOS app store as a

01:07:53   back end, which is where I would argue most people found apps for the Apple Watch.

01:07:59   It's really problematic if you're an indie developer and you were hoping to get some

01:08:02   kind of promotion or visibility, not necessarily to be featured, but to be found, and that's

01:08:08   a problem.

01:08:11   Imagine a department store where they just showed you what's in the windows and you couldn't

01:08:17   go inside and you had to talk to a guy through a little hole in the window and

01:08:21   tell him what you wanted. And he's like I've got tons of stuff in the stock

01:08:25   in like in the back here like if you want something and you're like well

01:08:28   what you got and he's got well just tell me a letter and we'll start the search.

01:08:33   It's not how it works man like you gotta you gotta try and surface it like already

01:08:39   there's not a ton of ways for people to discover things in the iOS App Store.

01:08:44   giving people even less places to find things in the in the Apple TV App Store

01:08:49   is not great. I mean I want to mirror this like so to underscore this point a

01:08:54   little bit I'm looking at the Apple TV App Store right now and it's the best

01:09:00   looking App Store right like those little the way you can like I don't know

01:09:06   what you'd call it but like move the little cards around and see the 3d

01:09:10   effects. It's awesome! The whole UI is one of my favorite UI

01:09:16   designs that Apple has ever done. It's so clean. I love that all of the artwork

01:09:21   doesn't have names anywhere until you hover over them.

01:09:24   And the artwork is nice rectangles which enable more interest in

01:09:30   design. I think all of that is great but there's just some parts of

01:09:34   it that just make it very 1.0. And the problem is

01:09:38   reason why, like I think people that are being a bit critical of this, I think

01:09:44   it's justified when Apple was saying like this is the future of TV right like

01:09:48   this is the best thing ever so you expect it to be super super awesome and

01:09:51   there are some really great things about it right but I'm just being like this is

01:09:57   a slow burner for me like there is a lot of work that needs to happen from

01:10:01   developer side from Apple side to really make this the next big platform.

01:10:07   I think there's the potential there. There's some really interesting stuff

01:10:11   that you can do with this type of technology and to have something

01:10:14   connected to such a big screen but I think that there is a lot more needs to

01:10:18   be done and one of the first things that needs to happen is Apple need to make a

01:10:21   video game controller because they need they need to just just put their money

01:10:25   where their mouth is with it right. The Nimbus controller is great and they're

01:10:28   promoting it awesome but I think it would make a bigger statement if Apple

01:10:32   made one. It doesn't even have to be good they're just gonna make one right just

01:10:35   to say like this is what you do this is how you make this. So there's a brand

01:10:39   new show on RealAFM today called Under the Radar. It's by Michael Arman and

01:10:44   _DavidSmith. We are honored to host this show it's about development.

01:10:48   They talk about kind of everything that goes into being a developer and it's a

01:10:53   weekly show no longer than 30 minutes which is fantastic. So let's get started.

01:10:58   That is the whole thing. I just need to say I can't help it. I need to say that.

01:11:04   lost count of the amount of times I've seen people say let's get started today.

01:11:07   So it's riffing on developing perspective and that's it

01:11:10   right so developing perspective which was Underscore's show previously was 15

01:11:15   minutes so there's two of them now so it's 30 minutes so it's basically the

01:11:19   merging of developing perspective and build and analyze so that's the

01:11:23   promotional part that I wanted to talk about but they had a great discussion on

01:11:26   their episode that came out today about adapting to the market and both of them

01:11:30   were talking about the fact that right now neither of them have anything in the

01:11:36   store right but they both got the dev kits but the problem that they found was

01:11:41   trying to devote the time to make something for another platform right so

01:11:47   they both have iOS apps they both have iPad apps they both have services that

01:11:52   need to run they both have watch apps so it was like to be an independent iOS app

01:11:57   developer and to be like you know a fully good one if you as you'd say you

01:12:01   have to do a lot of work on a lot of different platforms and it's I listening

01:12:06   to the way that they were talking about it it feels like that there is potential

01:12:10   harm for this platform because it is yet another one to work for which is

01:12:17   unproven and the only way it is proven it's like a chicken and egg scenario

01:12:20   right you need the apps to make it a great platform but to make it for to

01:12:25   incentivize people to make the apps the platform has to be great.

01:12:29   Yeah. What do you think? Do you think that the Apple TV has the potential?

01:12:37   Yes but it needs time, you know, and it needs many updates. Especially when the

01:12:42   this potentially strongest advocates for your new device. So people like us, they

01:12:50   are annoyed by some very clear limitations that you should have seen coming. You gotta

01:12:57   make those people happy first. People start recommending the product, the product becomes

01:13:01   more understandable by the masses. So search the remote, you gotta fix these basic things

01:13:08   I think. And with the device, and especially App Store Discovery, I feel like we're repeating

01:13:17   the same mistakes over and over. And I would strongly advise developers to consider carefully

01:13:27   whether they want to make their apps and games universal downloads on iOS and tvOS or standalone

01:13:34   downloads on tvOS. So, you know, do your math, consider your costs for making software for

01:13:44   iOS, TVOS, then you gotta use some web components, iCloud, maybe have a watchOS version. It's

01:13:51   a lot of platforms, man. It's a lot of different devices that you gotta account for. So if

01:13:58   you're a developer, don't just maybe jump on yet another TV version of your app. Like

01:14:03   many developers did watch kit versions of their apps back in April. And how many of

01:14:10   you are using those apps now anyway. So maybe take your time, you know, it won't be the

01:14:15   end of the world, the TV is not as quickly adopted as a new iPhone. So you get time,

01:14:21   consider the platform, see where it's going and I would strongly advise Apple to start

01:14:26   releasing updates to fix these basic annoyances and to take a good hard look at the App Store

01:14:31   and consider how if they want the future of the TV to be the Apple TV, and if that future

01:14:40   includes apps, you got to make it easy for people to support apps, to find apps, to install

01:14:47   and manage apps.

01:14:49   We need updates and we need time.

01:14:51   We got to check back after the next few updates to see how it's going.

01:14:55   I'm not sure how I feel about the universal app.

01:14:59   Yeah, me neither.

01:15:00   I feel like this really should have been one where they didn't do that.

01:15:05   Yeah.

01:15:06   I mean, let me say, right, as a consumer, it's really great that I just went to my

01:15:11   purchase tab and downloaded a bunch of video games for free, right?

01:15:15   That's cool as a consumer, but that it feels dangerous for the development

01:15:22   community to be like the expectation that this is like, this is something

01:15:26   completely different.

01:15:27   This is a TV.

01:15:28   It's not iOS, right?

01:15:30   It's not even, it's not called iOS. I know it is iOS basically, but it's not called that.

01:15:35   This was a scenario where Apple could have said, you know, like you're used to with many of your apps on the Mac and iOS,

01:15:42   your preferences and your saves will sync across using iCloud, but you need to pay again for this stuff.

01:15:48   That, I believe that's what should have happened because we're talking about the idea of how difficult it is for developers

01:15:54   to have to put another system in. Well now for many of them this is adding another system in,

01:16:00   more development time, for no more money. That's a problem to me I think.

01:16:05   Yeah, yeah. I don't know what to think yet, yeah. I guess I wanna-

01:16:11   Services like Netflix, services like YouTube, right?

01:16:15   Yeah I mean of course.

01:16:15   Free apps that benefit from being everywhere, like of course they remain free. But Crossy Road

01:16:22   and Transistor and Oceanhorn. Like I feel like you should be paying again for these

01:16:29   games. I really do. It's difficult, it's really difficult to think about it because

01:16:34   you know like I think about it as a consumer like me and you always

01:16:37   complaining on virtual about the fact that you have to play like that Nintendo

01:16:42   don't sync your game saves and stuff like that and they do don't do cross by

01:16:46   and cross by is really great but I don't know man it just it feels it feels like

01:16:51   it's really kind of making it difficult for people to make money. It's difficult

01:16:57   because I like I'll be honest about it like I'm I'm can't you kind of sit in

01:17:01   the middle of it you can be a friend to developers and understanding what they

01:17:04   go through and then you think about it as a consumer and it's like it's awesome

01:17:07   that I pay $2.99 and I've got this game everywhere. It's a real kind of tough

01:17:12   line but I feel like this was one where they at least could have just started

01:17:18   again and made people pay again but that hasn't happened and I think that

01:17:23   ultimately that may be a problem for Apple TV. Did you have anything else that

01:17:29   you wanted to add on this? Yes, just a note, not on the TV but a quick note

01:17:33   before we end the show, I got an email about an update to Evernote on the

01:17:39   App Store which now supports sketches in Notes. You can now draw sketches and it

01:17:47   It supports multitasking and it's been updated for the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil support.

01:17:54   This is interesting, right, that they're doing sketches exactly like notes, basically.

01:17:59   Of course.

01:18:01   And part of me says they must have felt the pressure from the Free Notes app, but also

01:18:08   Evernote owns Penultimate, you know, the sketching app.

01:18:12   So I wonder if it will be kind of merged into Evernote like Microsoft is doing for Sunrise

01:18:18   and Outlook.

01:18:19   But it's interesting that Evernote is now trying to do the same feature set of the free

01:18:25   Notes app and with support for the iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, it will be interesting to test

01:18:30   this to see what they're doing here.

01:18:34   I think it is going to be interesting over the next few weeks, right?

01:18:38   the rumor is maybe next week the iPad Pro goes on sale, I saw that on 9to5Mac.

01:18:45   It's going to be interesting over the next week or so to see the apps that are being

01:18:49   updated and if they're going to take advantage of the iPad Pro.

01:18:51   So this is another one, right?

01:18:54   This is another one that is potentially going to be adding more work in for these people.

01:19:03   Yeah, I don't know.

01:19:06   I want to see if it's yet another feature in Evernote, you know?

01:19:11   Like another one?

01:19:12   We'll see.

01:19:13   We'll see how it goes, Myke.

01:19:15   Alright, I think it's time to wrap up.

01:19:18   We wish our Android loving friend Steven Hackett to get better soon.

01:19:22   But if you want to find the show notes for this week, you'll find us all online.

01:19:26   There's a few things that you can do.

01:19:28   You can go on over to relay.fm/connected/64 if you want to find our show notes for this

01:19:36   week.

01:19:37   If you want to find Federico online he is @Vittici on twitter and he writes over at

01:19:42   MaxLories.net and I am @imike on twitter if you'd like to follow along there.

01:19:48   I'll mention it again, go check out Under The Radar, it's a great new show from RelayFM,

01:19:52   we're so excited to have a development focused show on the network.

01:19:57   I feel like it was one of the last things really in our technology coverage that we

01:20:02   were missing on the network.

01:20:04   And so I'm really really happy that we have something that's focused now on indie app

01:20:08   development and we have two fantastic indie app developers to kind of talk about this

01:20:13   stuff.

01:20:14   So go check it out.

01:20:15   It's only 30 minutes every Tuesday so it's not going to take a massive chunk of your

01:20:20   listening time either.

01:20:22   Thanks again to our sponsors this week, the great people over at Harry's, Linda, and of

01:20:27   course our lovely accountant Mr Andrew Carroll for supporting this week's episode.

01:20:32   Most of all, thank you for listening.

01:20:34   We'll be back next time.

01:20:35   Until then, say goodbye Federico.

01:20:36   Arrivederci.