A Ding in the Room
Casey:
Where's there a good summary of what the hell happened in the keynote?
Casey:
In your notes.
Casey:
God damn it, John.
Casey:
I didn't take good notes.
Casey:
What do you want from me?
Marco:
Oh, you guys are the best.
Marco:
So we are here live in California, almost on vacation.
Marco:
We are in my hotel room.
Marco:
So any weird audio things that might or might not be here, that's the Park 55's fault.
Marco:
Definitely not ours.
Marco:
Yeah, so we just got out of the State of the Union.
Marco:
And so I guess there's a lot to cover here.
Marco:
I don't know how much we're going to get to today because we have a bit of a time limit.
Marco:
Let's just try to get started, huh?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So what was the first thing that was covered in the keynote?
Casey:
Was it, I don't even, it was all a blur.
John:
WatchOS.
John:
WatchOS was the first one.
Casey:
WatchOS, yes.
Casey:
WatchOS 3.
Casey:
Holy crap.
Casey:
It turns out that WatchOS 3 is actually the first non-beta version of WatchOS, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
Man, did it look good.
Marco:
Well, we haven't used it yet.
Casey:
I said look good.
Casey:
I didn't say it was good.
Marco:
Yeah, but honestly, no, I mean, you know, I'm kind of a watch skeptic at this point.
Marco:
Are you?
Marco:
A little bit.
Marco:
But no, I mean, I think it looks great.
Marco:
And I was really, really hoping that they would...
Marco:
kind of just rethink the watch, rethink the app paradigm, rethink the difference between the glances and the app and everything else.
Marco:
And I think they did.
Marco:
And it looks really good.
Marco:
I'm very tentatively optimistic about it, honestly.
Marco:
I think it shows that they are... By getting rid of the glances and by consolidating the app with the face and everything, it looks like they are actually...
Marco:
willing to reconsider and rethink fundamental things about how the watch works and that is awesome and because because you know it kind of needed that you know i think the overall the overall impression that that i think we're getting from apple for about the watch during this is please use apps like that's kind of like you know first of all please make apps for and then secondly like they are they are being much more forward with users including things like the
Marco:
like the complication gallery they showed up at the end of the State of the Union there, they're being more forward with users about how they discover that they can put apps on their watch.
Marco:
And by making the apps better, hopefully they'll make them a little more sticky and useful for people.
Marco:
So overall, it looks great.
Marco:
And I really hope that it ends up performing and just being as good as it looks in the Keynote.
Casey:
Yeah, as the one of the three of us that I think is most enthusiastic about the watch, I was overjoyed by what I saw.
Casey:
It looked unbelievable.
Casey:
Apple apparently has made tremendous strides on making app launching considerably quicker.
Casey:
As far as we know, all of that is software.
Casey:
It doesn't require any new watch hardware, which presumably is coming sometime soon, but no formal mention was made of it.
Casey:
It looked awesome.
Casey:
And there were some other features that I thought were really good.
Casey:
The emergency thing that they did.
Casey:
So if you mash down on what was once the completely useless contacts button, but is now the, like, what is that, the glances button?
Casey:
Or not glances, but like the app switcher.
John:
It's like the app switcher.
John:
The dock button, right?
Casey:
Right, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, so you mash down on the dock button, and it shows you what today is the three sliders, which is power off, power reserve, and lock device.
Casey:
Well, if you hold down on the button long enough, it will eventually place an emergency call to the local emergency number in the particular locality that you're sitting in.
Casey:
And so if you're in Hong Kong and you have an American watch, it will call whatever the appropriate number is in Hong Kong.
Casey:
If you're in America, regardless...
Casey:
If your watch happens to be British, it will call 911.
Casey:
It's very, very cool.
Casey:
And it will also, I guess, send a push notification to emergency contacts with your location and, I guess, whereabouts or whatever.
Casey:
It looked really, really cool.
Marco:
Yeah, this is, I mean...
Marco:
I worry a little bit about how easy it is to invoke, like if you just hold down the button, because it's not that uncommon to accidentally hold down a button on your watch if it's pressing against something.
Marco:
So to have an action that only requires it to be held down for a long time with no additional confirmation step, I think there's a bit of a risk of false alarms there.
Marco:
But overall, the idea of this feature is really nice.
Marco:
Implementation details aside, the idea of it is great.
Marco:
And it's yet one more reason why some people might want the watch, yet one more benefit some people might get from it.
Marco:
I don't expect this to be extremely widely used, but for the people who do use it, it'll make a really big difference in their life.
Marco:
And that's nothing to just sneeze at.
John:
I think you can't make it too complicated, though, because if you're in a situation, you can't really make it be an interaction.
John:
You can't really make it so, okay, well, to call 911, do this, then look at your watch, then place your finger precisely to touch this thing, then do that, then confirm and double confirm and insert both keys.
John:
It really has to be the...
John:
All I can do in this injured state is grow up for my watch, feel a physical button and hold it down for a really long time.
John:
And even that may be beyond the physical abilities of someone who's in a real dire emergency.
John:
I mean, a more clever, well, I don't know if more clever and even more prone to false alarms implementation would be if it notices like your heart rate going down to unsafe levels or something.
John:
But then again, some people have really low heart rates.
John:
And I don't know, you know, like you're trying to make it sort of the this watch.
John:
is actively monitoring whether this person is alive and healthy, and when they're not, it sends notifications.
John:
I don't have to call 911, but at least sending their location out to their emergency contact or whatever.
John:
Overall, for all the Watch 3 things, I don't want to be mean to Apple, but it kind of makes me wonder...
John:
the watch has been in development for a long time and they launched it with one of only two physical buttons on the device being a feature that basically nobody used and they fixed that and watch os3 great good kudos we're all talking about this you know they've consolidated things and they've i think that was one of the biggest applause lines when people realized they repurposed that huge button on the side yep
John:
It's just something that people lose.
John:
I'm like, when you were testing it internally, did you have testers bias?
John:
Were you so enamored with the idea of contacting the other five people on the watchOS team and sending them scribbles or whatever, that you convinced yourself that that is actually such an important feature that you deserve this big button?
John:
I think it reveals a...
John:
a flaw in their testing group or methodology or some other bias that they missed this.
John:
And it's also a shame because of Apple's release cycles that they kind of had to wait for an entire year for them to fix this because it required a big rethink.
John:
Like, I feel like almost all the things that they're revamping here, with the exception of the tech stuff of making it launch faster, but almost all the other revampings seem like things they could have discovered with a broader test group when they were coming up with the first design.
John:
And the rest of the stuff, like...
John:
Making it launch faster?
John:
It's not really making it launch faster.
John:
It's making it be already launched.
John:
It can be already there.
John:
Keep more stuff in memory so you don't have to launch it because you're never going to be able to launch it fast in this slow hardware.
John:
That seems like a good rethinking.
John:
I've heard some people say that it's actually still not quite streamlined enough and that you could streamline it further so that you could control the entire watch with...
John:
just the physical buttons for example when your fingers are sweaty the sweaty finger people are very angry like the idea that trying to use your watch at a certain point your finger becomes useless because it's got it's too too sweaty right and so they want to be able to quickly hit physical buttons to stop and start a timer on their workout and stuff in situations where their finger cannot precisely interact with the screen in any way so i think there's still ways to go in terms of accessibility for can i use the watch like a regular watch without touching the screen at all
John:
I'm not sure that's a use case that Apple cares about at this point, but definitely watchOS 3 is a huge step in the right direction on all fronts, especially if it performs the way they showed and especially if whatever hit there is to battery life is not noticeable.
John:
Because one thing I think people have mostly not been complaining about is that my watch dies in the middle of the day.
John:
So maybe they have a little bit of battery to spare.
John:
Maybe they can squish things down and there'll be enough overhead for all these background updates and stuff like that.
Marco:
Well, I mean, the watch battery is a bit of a problem for the 38mm users who use workout mode a lot.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But beyond that, yeah, generally, you're right.
Marco:
I mean, when I was wearing the watch, I would finish most days with like 50% battery left, which is great.
Marco:
But you weren't using the apps on the watch.
John:
That's true, yeah.
John:
To see how this works out in practice was like...
John:
Because the apps were so cumbersome to use, you wouldn't use it for that.
John:
And so now if they become better to use, I don't know, the whole pressure is that we want people to be in and out of the app quickly, small, quick interactions, and your interactions can't be quick if you can't start them until, you know...
John:
three ten seconds past they also were talking about how the current app won't go away for a much longer period of time so if you're in the store looking at a shopping list every time you bring the you know you look at the shopping list you somehow navigate to it and you check off the item you just got and then you put your arm down you walk 20 feet in the aisle pick up another item pick up your watch again it's like i have no idea what you were just looking at here's the time
John:
like i was just looking at the grocery list find the grocery list again even if it's as simple as like hit the button swipe swipe to the dock go back into the it will remember oh you were just looking at your grocery list and stick on that and this is kind of like a mind reading thing where when you want it to be on the last thing you were looking at you're frustrated that it's not but if you just want to show the time you're frustrated that it's showing the previous watch so this is another delicate balance and i hope they sort of user tested this more uh in the real world maybe now that the watch is public they could they could have been all wearing it maybe that was the flaw in the methodology if you try to wear it secretly you
John:
With a small group of people, you're not going to learn.
John:
It's so easy to convince yourself that little wheel of people is super awesome and you can send each other digital touches and stuff.
John:
And then once it's out in the wide world, you'll be like, you know what?
John:
I don't find myself using the wheel of people that often.
John:
We have this whole big button.
John:
Let's use it or something else.
John:
But kudos to them for not being stubborn and saying...
John:
you know they didn't come up with the right paradigm the first time so let's try again instead of trying to just let me just do minor tweaks and maybe we can adjust and it's as if they changed the purpose of the home button on ios like yeah like it used to be when you push the home button you went back to the big grid of icons we turned out that's totally wrong and we're gonna use it for something else they got that right the first time on the phone they did not get it right on the watch yeah
Casey:
Yeah, we should probably move on from the watch pretty soon, but a couple of other notes.
Casey:
A lot more support for people who are wheelchair bound, which I thought was really, really cool.
Casey:
That was great.
Casey:
And among other things, the stand notification now says time to roll, take a break and push around for one minute.
Casey:
I thought that was really awesome.
Casey:
I can imagine if I was in a wheelchair, I would think that's amazing and certainly more inclusive.
Casey:
They did a lot – well, they sort of did a lot with faces.
Casey:
So there's different faces, newer faces, more customizable faces.
Casey:
Yet, unless I'm missing something, you can't, as a third-party developer, make your own face.
Casey:
It's just the complications are a little bit more robust now.
Casey:
Is that kind of a fair summary?
Marco:
Yeah, that's basically it.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, you have –
Marco:
basically no ability to make faces at all but complications suck less you know before before like one of the reasons why we haven't seen you know incredibly useful complications from developers is that there's been all sorts of limitations in place and honestly underscores way better to you know qualified to talk about this than i am because i because basically i from what he told me i discovered there was nothing for me to do there really uh before
Marco:
Just things like how often can the complication update its own data from its app versus just try to guess from a timeline what it should be discovering and stuff like that.
Marco:
So with this release, some of those limitations have been lifted.
Marco:
I mean, they haven't been removed.
Marco:
Maybe the limits have been raised or some new things are possible that weren't possible before in a complication.
Marco:
But it seems like the major advantage that watch apps have is that kind of unified glance approach
Marco:
slash app mode, and if you're configured as a complication, you're more frequently kept in memory or something.
Marco:
I don't know the details, but you have higher privileges in the system, and you're refreshed more often, and you can respond faster because you're kept more in memory.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You know, for people who want to configure one or two apps as their complications, those apps will be substantially faster to respond than the other ones in the system.
Marco:
But we will see how that shakes out.
John:
And all the apps will have background refresh so that the big slam on the old watch was that a lot of the times when you went to anything, any kind of screen, very often you saw old information.
John:
And by going to the screen, you triggered...
John:
okay now this application gets to do something to update its information and again that kills the whole get in get out quick nature of the watch the new system is background refresh for all apps privilege for i think it's for all apps definitely privileged uh if it's a if it's a complication and the little demo they gave was update all of your ui so it always matches so that you're never in a situation where the glance shows one thing but if you launch the app it showed something else of it but if you you know saw in the complication it shows a third thing that just keep them all in sync all always up to date and you
John:
In the old regime of watchOS 2, you couldn't do that because you weren't running until they activated you, and by then it was too late because you were supposed to already have the information.
John:
So they've learned that lesson.
John:
They've implemented, hopefully in a way that, again, doesn't kill your battery and sorts out the limited memory on the watch in a way that actually enables the applications you use frequently to be all up-to-date, all consistent.
Casey:
Yeah, and it all looked really, really good.
Casey:
It was funny that they actually showed a demonstration of watchOS 2 and how crappy it is to load an app on watchOS 2.
Casey:
And it was Kevin Lynch, I believe, basically said in so many words, look at how crappy this is, you guys.
Casey:
But don't worry, we fixed it.
Casey:
So it's all good.
Marco:
Yeah, well, Apple's willing to critique their own past work once the problems go away.
Marco:
Yeah, I was about to say.
Marco:
Once the problem's gone, then we're cold.
Marco:
It isn't how crappy this is.
Marco:
It's look how crappy this was.
Marco:
And now we've fixed it.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
A couple of quick other watch highlights.
Casey:
Scribble, I think they called it.
Casey:
So you can actually do handwriting on the watch and that'll turn into text.
Casey:
I don't think that's going to be terribly convenient.
Casey:
However, I do applaud the fact that it's a possibility, that it's something you can do, because sometimes you maybe don't want to dictate, and maybe you only want to write one word, like the example on the Apple website that goes through all the different stuff on the watch is the word Starbucks.
Casey:
You may not want to dictate that necessarily, but at least you can scribble out S-T-A-R-B, and it would hopefully figure out what you want from there.
Marco:
I would never want to be heard saying the word Starbucks.
John:
naturally i'd be too embarrassed this feels more like an accessibility feature for people who have difficulty speaking to it because i can't think of a situation where i mean you can whisper to the watch bring it right up to your face and say starbucks you whisper it it's like a prayer like but because scratching out those letters graffiti style it's not graffiti you can actually write actual letters on the little watch face especially if you have the small watch
John:
Oh, boy, that does not sound like a good time.
John:
And dictation for people who haven't tried it dictating on the watch, like dictating anywhere, if you're afraid to be talking to your devices, just do it a few times to realize, wow, this is faster than I could type on a keyboard because it usually is for most people.
John:
It's really efficient.
John:
But yeah, it's nice they added there as an option.
John:
And that's definitely a kind of a watchOS 3 feature.
John:
hey, we'll throw it in.
John:
We can do it.
John:
Maybe it'll be good.
John:
Maybe it'll be bad.
John:
Maybe a few people use it in certain situations.
John:
But why not?
John:
Certainly, it's not sucking your battery up.
John:
It's an input mode.
John:
And yeah, it's better than digital doodles to each other.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
And it also supports Chinese, which... Yeah, that's a big feature.
John:
That was cool.
Casey:
Which is really impressive.
Casey:
And actually, that's a great mini segue.
Casey:
There were a handful of people of color on stage.
Casey:
There were a handful of women on stage.
Casey:
And I thought,
Casey:
Every single one of the people of color and women on stage absolutely killed it.
Casey:
We'll talk a little bit more later about the woman whose name escapes me that did the music demo, who I thought was fantastic.
Casey:
And the woman who did the scribble, the Chinese scribble demo.
Casey:
I could have practiced that character, a couple of characters for six weeks and would have screwed it up.
John:
Yeah, that's difficult.
John:
The amount of space... I mean, it looks so big up on the screen.
John:
Oh, it's drawing a Chinese character.
John:
But think of, like, some of those strokes were so small.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Like, the finger must have been covering the entire thing.
John:
I don't know enough about Far East text input to know how important it is to be able to do this on the watch.
John:
Like, is dictation worse in Chinese or Japanese or other languages like that?
John:
Because...
John:
I don't know.
John:
It still seems like it would be faster to dictate, but certainly drawing out characters or at least selecting radicals or whatever and combining into characters.
John:
When you have languages that don't just have 26 letters, it's a big feature.
Marco:
Well, and also when you have a language like that where the density of how many characters you need to express the message that you're trying to send...
Marco:
When you have only a handful of characters versus having us type out five words, I think it's more compelling because it's less time to input this thing on this device that has very limited input capabilities.
Marco:
But overall, I think the doodling of characters is – it's the kind of thing where it's going to be one of those fine balances where –
Marco:
It has to be a very short thing you're trying to doodle, and it has to be way faster than taking out your phone and just doing it there.
Marco:
So it's all down to the implementation and the context in which you're doing these things.
Marco:
If it's going to be a big pain the first few times you do it, you're probably just going to say, all right, I'm just going to take out my phone from now on to do this thing.
Marco:
So it has to be really good.
Marco:
And it's probably not going to be that widely used, but it'll be nice for occasional use, I think.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Getting back to the diversity topic.
John:
We've come to this before.
John:
There's only so much Apple can do here because they're the high level C level executives, the people on their like important people page are mostly all white guys.
John:
Right.
John:
And you have to wait for them to die or retire to be replaced until you can fix your diversity problem at the top.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, like that's just a problem they face from years and years of years.
John:
not paying enough attention to this topic.
John:
So they're fixing it in presentations the best they can.
John:
They still have, you know, Craig Federighi and Eddie Q and, like, everyone else up there, like, doing it and Tim Cook and, like, the whole... The people who are really, really in charge at the very top, but right below them, the people who do the demos, there's no reason that those have to be a bunch of people who look exactly like them, right?
John:
And so they're doing...
John:
they're doing a good job they're doing it and it's amazing like they could have done this many years ago but it's taken a long time for them to realize you know like the first time they did it be like we'll have one woman presenter like keep trying like you know like well okay we'll have two women presenters but both white good you're making progress it's like they're they're slowly working their way up to it and
John:
And like you said, all the presenters are great.
John:
And of course, they're going to be great because, again, these aren't just random people they picked out of Apple employees.
John:
If you look at their titles, they're in charge of or intimately involved with the products they're presenting.
John:
They're not like random drop-in people.
John:
They know their stuff.
John:
They're enthusiastic about it.
John:
And like everyone else on stage, they rehearse the hell out of them.
John:
So everybody's good.
John:
So that was nice to see.
John:
Like I said, it's still going to be years and years before Apple
John:
You see that at the very top, but I hope all presentations are – like this should be like the minimum bar now for below the top level.
John:
They should all be like this and quality-wise as well because – yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought it actually added to the quality of the presentation as a whole to hear different voices.
Casey:
And because these people were, like you said, so freaking good at doing these presentations.
Casey:
I mean, a handful of these people were the first time I'd seen them on stage.
John:
They're better than Craig's first time.
Casey:
Oh, God, yeah.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, I freaking love Craig now.
Marco:
They're better to Eddie Q now.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Poor Eddie, come on.
Marco:
Let's not be mean.
Marco:
I love photos.
Marco:
I can't wait to do it.
Casey:
So anyway, so that's watchOS.
Casey:
And I think the best summary of the watchOS part of the keynote, which up until the State of the Union was my favorite thing I'd seen so far today.
Casey:
But the summary page for the preview page for watchOS, which I mentioned briefly earlier, it says at the top of the screen, watchOS feels like a whole new watch.
Casey:
Which is kind of uncomfortable that they're like, hey, well, this old stuff was crap.
Casey:
But hey, we fixed it.
Casey:
We're cool.
Casey:
We're all good, right?
Casey:
But it's true.
Casey:
I mean, I'm really, really excited about where this is going.
Casey:
And the watch looks really great.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So next, tvOS.
Casey:
The only thing I really got from that that I was really excited about, there were two things actually.
Casey:
One, dark mode, which is something I didn't even know I wanted.
Casey:
I know I wanted it.
Casey:
I know you did.
Casey:
As soon as I saw it, I was like, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
That's really good.
Casey:
And supposedly single sign-on, which supposedly will fix all those problems.
John:
That'll be awesome, too.
John:
So dark mode, I've noticed recently that some tvOS apps have been implementing their own dark mode.
John:
Like they've been responding, I guess, assuming user requests for it.
John:
And I'm like, why do people care about dark mode?
John:
It's not just aesthetics.
John:
But aesthetics is one thing.
John:
Just ask Marco.
John:
People sometimes like dark mode for their applications.
John:
Second thing is people watch television in darkened rooms sometimes.
John:
And if your UI has a white background and you come out of any kind of video, which usually doesn't have a white background, it can be extremely sort of shocking and glaring.
John:
And this is not why they did it.
John:
But for me specifically, I have a plasma TV and pure white on a plasma TV draws a lot of extra power and can make your Transformers whine a little bit.
John:
And it's the situation.
John:
It's again, this is not why they did it, but I'm excited by it.
John:
And also because I watch TV in a semi-darkened room at night.
John:
So.
John:
it kind of boggles my mind that they decided to go with white for their tv ui because they know people watch tv in kind of darkened rooms and you know when the show is over and you hit the menu button you don't want your eyeballs blown out especially since non-plasma tvs have incredible brightness like led tvs can go super super bright and sometimes people haven't turned up that bright so they can see them in bright sunlight it's just not a good plan and the single sign on is the other major pain point for like
John:
you know when you install applications you got to go through this little dance and go to a website and type in these codes and i think that stops regular people from installing too many apps because it's a pain in the butt if there is a single sign on that you can do once and handle all that for you and people implement it which i'm sure they will because people want you to install their apps this will be great so two thumbs up
Marco:
Yeah, it seems, I mean, the single sign-on, I don't, honestly, you know, because I don't have cable and, you know, I'm probably never going to see this myself, but the dark mode, just going back to that for a second, you know, we saw, like, with watchOS, with the updates, it seems like watchOS is getting, like, a major course correction.
Marco:
And with iOS, which we'll get to in a little bit, I'm sure, it seems like the design language has been updated to some degree as somewhat of a course correction, somewhat just refreshing things, making things new.
Marco:
Things like buttons are now more visible as buttons, and some of the text is a little bit thicker to be more legible and stuff.
Marco:
The TV getting dark mode, I wonder if that is kind of like a half step in a course correction where like, you know, the previous Apple TV was all constantly dark background.
Marco:
You know, most other TV boxes do dark background because, you know, all the reasons that it basically works better for TVs, the way TVs are actually used and TV hardware and everything.
Marco:
The new Apple TV getting this all white theme up front, honestly, I consider that a design misstep.
Marco:
And I think, you know, they should have, like, instead of just offering dark mode, they should just make tvOS 10 or whatever it's going to be called, just make it dark.
Marco:
Like, just re-theme the whole OS to be dark, because most of the other design elements don't have to change.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons they're able to offer a dark mode without a whole ton of work.
Marco:
Like, almost all the rest of the design works, whether it's a light or dark background.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Why not course correct all the way and just re-theme tvOS to be dark and not have this weird setting and have to, you know, have everybody dual design their apps?
John:
Part of the reason light mode, that they chose light mode, is it was a differentiator.
John:
Because like you said, every other TV box was like a blackish background with stuff on it.
John:
And Apple was different.
John:
Different in a bad way in this case, but it is differentiated in the market.
John:
It seems like they don't want to get that.
John:
Even their dark mode is not black like the old Apple TV.
John:
It looks like it's dark gray.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
But anyway, this is not, the things that are most wrong with tvOS,
John:
are mostly involved inside the applications themselves how do i navigate how is it presented and that's not an os level problem that's like a problem of how do you implement the your app for showing tv shows and movies and individual apps can fix that apples may still be not particularly convenient to use but the netflix app or whatever can continue to make a pleasant experience within the framework that's provided
Casey:
The other thing that's worth bringing up with regard to the TV is the new remote app that was at Q promised like three months ago.
Casey:
Yeah, when he was on the talk show.
Casey:
Yeah, you're right.
Casey:
It was on the talk show, wasn't it?
Casey:
That's here now.
Casey:
And to be honest, I don't really see why that's totally remarkable.
John:
For people who play games, they can have multiple controllers because you can use any iOS device as a controller.
John:
That was the other big announcement in the State of the Union that tvOS games can finally require a real controller.
John:
Again, a misstep that seems...
John:
Remember, there was the bouncing back and forth when the thing was released about the copy.
John:
But this is... I don't know how you can come to that decision and not realize the implications.
John:
It's not like anything has changed radically in the market since then.
John:
They've just heard the cries of everybody else.
John:
And those same cries... If you just got any... Five developers into the room and said...
John:
you know you can write games for apple tv oh but you have to you you have to make them usable on this terrible little remote it's like seriously no you have to why because we want everyone to be able to play them well then there's certain kinds of games we just can't make well try harder and then i don't know i it's they still seem weird about games apple is always weird about games this is a step in the right direction um
John:
those controllers are still super expensive and they show you know we have a support for four controllers a family that buys four controllers plus the price of an apple four controllers cost like what twice as much as an apple tv yeah because there aren't they like aren't they still like 40 or 50 bucks each i don't know it was at least 50 but i'm not sure their gaming story is still muddled as compared to the consoles but uh but you know time march is on
Marco:
I mean, console controllers aren't cheap either, but overall, you're definitely getting into console price territory if you're planning on buying four controllers.
Marco:
But I think if that ends up working out, like if we get cool multiplayer games, that could be really great.
Marco:
That could be an awesome thing for the platform.
John:
If they cared, they'd make a first-party controller, but I dread them doing that based on the design of their first-party remote.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But yeah, that was tvOS.
Casey:
And I mean, I think it looks good.
Casey:
We really should have Joe Steele on or something like that to see if he's happy.
Casey:
But to me, it looked good.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
Casey:
After tvOS was iOS 10.
Casey:
So when I said iOS, I really meant OS 10, which isn't OS 10 anymore.
John:
Yeah, I like the beginning.
John:
They had Tim Cook come out and say, we have four platforms and listed them off.
John:
And they didn't do the rename then.
John:
You know, like they...
John:
It was a weird kind of, I don't know how they arranged a presentation if that was an intentional tease or they just realized, oh, at this point we can't tell them it's macOS.
John:
So Craig got to come out and do his renaming slide that he's done for the past few picking place names in California.
John:
Only this time it was about changing it to lowercase macOS, Casey's favorite name.
John:
Yeah.
John:
yeah that was fine we expected it uh what did they talk about well i will say though i i did kind of expect them to just go with mac os 12 i didn't expect the california names to continue oh no i totally expected that because so many places in california it's such a great branding because they ran out of cats cats were a good branding too but they ran out but they won't run out of place names in california and i think and i think the place names are better than years and they're better than numbers by the way the version is 1012 so not that it matters anymore but
Casey:
And also Sierra is a way better name than freaking El Capitan, which I still hate.
John:
Well, that time is over now.
John:
Thank goodness.
John:
Sierra is a good name.
Casey:
So in macOS Sierra, there is a Siri, which looked very powerful.
Casey:
And toward the end of the Siri demo, it appeared as though it was doing a very Google Photos style.
Casey:
Like, show me the files that involve, I don't know, I'm trying to think of whatever example they use.
Casey:
But, you know, show me the files about the party I'm throwing.
Casey:
No, show me the ones I worked on with Aaron or something along those lines where you're refining a search query.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
fairly abstract well and it's kind of abstract right show me the files about the about the party we're planning you know or something along those lines and it was able to piece together what that meant know the ones that i worked on with erin and then bring down a shorter list i didn't like that it was very um goofy in the initial response i was trying to be funny be like here's your files you're a master file there i love the way you work like
Marco:
Yeah, the whole Siri being what it thinks is funny and clever.
Marco:
I think that time is over.
John:
I think we need to drop that.
John:
There's a place for that, but it's not when you're in the middle of an interaction and narrowing searches.
John:
The fact that everything was in Notification Center was weird, and they have another mechanism for saved searches.
John:
Speaking of the photo stuff, a lot of the features that we're going to talk about in the context of iOS, I think it's pretty clear now that they're also available on the Mac.
John:
The photos and the deep learning and the blah, blah, blah.
John:
A lot of those are like, oh, and also on photos on the Mac.
John:
which is great like but they just didn't demo it in the context of the mac you know back in the days for ios all these features would have been demoed like here's you know face detection for example when it was shown in iPhoto it was shown on the mac in iPhoto all the stuff here with face detection and stuff i assume is all that better all be available on the mac but they didn't demo it in that context so surely siri would fit in with that but really it seemed like
John:
The new impressive features of Siri were mostly reserved to be shown in connection with iOS.
John:
I'm assuming some of them are on the Mac.
John:
But the fact that Siri exists on the Mac is good.
John:
The UI and having stuff in Notification Center, maybe not so good.
John:
And my hope unification of Spotlight and Siri doesn't seem to be in the cards.
John:
They still seem to be separate things, which seems silly to me.
Marco:
It kind of bothers me how Notification Center is kind of like the junk drawer on OS X of where they shove new features, most of which come from iOS.
Marco:
The way they do that is just by having this iOS-like drawer on the side.
John:
It's like an iOS simulator that's hiding off the right end of the screen and it's in tall, skinny mode.
Marco:
Like I do wish there was like a little bit, you know, maybe more native seeming or more, you know, more integrated, you know, integration of these features.
Marco:
But, you know, I guess, you know, that'll work itself out over time as they, you know, work through these designs and as they see how these features are used.
Marco:
yeah overall uh it looks pretty cool i do think though i i will go back and say like i think there i think the room for siri to have any kind of personality or wit uh i think that's over because that gets old first of all that it doesn't translate well to a lot of different cultures you people you want to have that wit when you're conversing with it in a funny way not when not when you've started doing a task
Marco:
I think it gets old after five seconds.
Marco:
Once you're past that point, you don't want your computer to be witty.
Marco:
When you type in commands in the command line, do you get witty responses from Bash?
Casey:
Sometimes.
Casey:
I like it occasionally, but the problem is...
Casey:
there's no way to tell when i'm going to receive it and think oh that's that's really cute and when i'm gonna see your filing is styling like come on really they don't have they don't have the personalization stuff down like the whole thing we're talking about with google is like it should learn my preferences if you love the thing to be funny that for those people it should be funny if
John:
the people don't like it to be funny it should learn that it doesn't want them you know that is not even in the cards in terms of personalized uh interaction with syria that it will learn from what you do and how you interact with it what it is you like and don't like and that they need to get on that it also like it's kind of no good if it's being funny and also not doing what you wanted yeah that's the worst so like then you really hate it you're like why are you being funny you just failed at what i asked you to do so like it just it doesn't here are some here are some websites i found for why are you being funny
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
I can search the web for that if you'd like.
Marco:
Seriously.
Marco:
I just think the chances of that not being annoying are so low that they should just not do it.
John:
We've got the tabs in Windows, or Windows and Tabs.
Casey:
Oh, no, we forgot a bunch of things, actually.
Casey:
So going back, the unlocking the Mac with watch proximity, really dig it.
John:
Or touch ID on the keyboard of your Mac, just saying.
Casey:
Yeah, maybe.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
I really dig the proximity thing.
Casey:
What I want to see, though, is how is corporate IT going to like that sort of thing?
Casey:
I suspect that anyone who has a job that has more than just a few people at it will probably have the kibosh put on that immediately or kibosh, however you pronounce the stupid word.
Marco:
I got a lot of flack about that.
Marco:
Honest question.
Marco:
Do companies that have that kind of strict security requirement often use Macs?
Casey:
I mean, so my company issued me a 15-inch MacBook Pro and issues a lot of developers 15-inch MacBook Pros.
Casey:
And the VPN software we use, which is Checkpoint VPN, also includes an on-device firewall that prevents all sorts of crap, like AirDrop.
Casey:
Why is AirDrop filtered by my on-device VPN?
John:
It doesn't even have to be a secure company.
John:
As soon as you have an IT department, they want to lock all that stuff down.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's annoying.
Casey:
So I don't run the VPN on this computer unless I actually... It's not even installed unless I need to do something for work involving the VPN.
Casey:
And then I will install it, do my work, and uninstall the VPN because it's that much of a nightmare.
Casey:
But anyway, I really like the idea of unlocking the watch by proximity.
Casey:
Really dig it.
Casey:
Universal clipboard.
John:
I love this.
John:
This looks amazing.
John:
Universal clipboard looks like a good idea, but...
John:
As someone who uses the clipboard to store lots of crap, I saw it as a potential for data loss, where until I get into the right mindset, I don't have the idea that copying something on my phone will squish what's on my Mac.
John:
Now, I use a clipboard history thing, so it won't really squish it.
John:
It'll just push it down.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
But it's still a little weird.
John:
For regular people, I think it'll be fine if it works well.
John:
Historically, continuity has been weird and flaky.
John:
And if this is built on top of continuity, I don't know.
John:
But many third-party applications have proven that this is something people want.
John:
They want to be able to copy on their iOS device and paste on their Mac.
John:
I find myself about to try to do it before I realize that I don't have any of those apps installed and it won't work.
John:
Like continuity, if this works, I will come to rely on it.
John:
But if it's at all flaky, I will just go back to pretending it doesn't exist.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to it, though.
Casey:
It looked super impressive to me.
Casey:
I still miss PaySpot from way back in the day.
Casey:
I'm hopeful that it works well.
Casey:
A few things that Apple has done today make me think they're really, really going all in on iCloud, which is bold.
Casey:
I mean, some things that are server-side with Apple, like messages, seem to work pretty well, generally speaking.
Casey:
And the CloudKit-based things that Apple's done, like Notes, for example, seem to be working well, generally speaking.
Casey:
But I am very scared about having this all rely on some sort of server side.
Casey:
I'm assuming, maybe not, maybe it's only local, but I'm assuming some server side thing on Apple's part.
John:
Well, no, the one I'm thinking of and the one I tweeted about when I said I'm scared, hold me, was the disk optimization process.
John:
Like the idea is good that people run out of space in their Mac.
John:
They have no idea what the hell to do about it.
John:
And Apple can sell you more space in their iCloud drive thing.
John:
If they, you know, they'll transparently take your files and, and take the ones you haven't used in a while, push them up to the cloud and free up the space.
John:
And it will all be transparent to you.
John:
And you'll save a lot of room on your Mac.
John:
And like, this is basically automated cleaning that people don't do manually, which is all great.
John:
Like I'm all for this feature concept wise and implementation wise, especially if it's entirely transparent.
John:
Well, not entirely transparent.
John:
You would still want some way for people to know, did this file get pushed up to the cloud?
John:
Lots of people have expressed the idea, I want to be able to tell that it shouldn't push these files up to the cloud.
John:
I don't know.
John:
There are lots of pitfalls in terms of the implementation of this, but the real one is...
John:
if it doesn't work like reliably all the time or at least as reliably as Dropbox, then it's just like a giant potential data loss button where you can turn this on and Apple will selectively hose certain ones of your files transparently in the background without you knowing and with no way for you to fix it.
John:
So this is a feature that I look at and say, I'm never turning that on.
John:
I'm terrified of this feature based on my past history of using iCloud Drive and
John:
The complete undebuggability of it and the non-flexibility of it, whereas something like Dropbox is focused.
John:
It's a single folder.
John:
You can have selective sync.
John:
There are badges on all the icons through an official API that they support.
John:
I know when things are synced.
John:
I know when they're not.
John:
I have a web interface to see its version of truth.
John:
All the tools available to Dropbox, even though they're fidgety or whatever...
John:
don't seem to be available in this and historically speaking apple has not been as good and reliable as dropbox and so the things about this so this feature really scares me especially since it looks so attractive to people who are novices and just like oh yes please take care of my storage for me yeah if they turn that on and it just hoses everything that's going to be a bad experience how are you even going to recover someone from that i don't know this is
John:
Maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic about this.
John:
Implementation-wise, it seems like it's a good idea, but there are so many places from user interface to reliability to performance where it just seems terrifying to me.
Marco:
An interesting thought experiment, I think, would be if Dropbox offered this exact same feature, would you enable it?
John:
Like OS-wide, not just in its Dropbox folder.
John:
Would you enable it?
John:
I don't think I would enable it for Dropbox.
John:
I don't think I would either.
John:
And Dropbox, I trust way more than things like iCloud Drive.
John:
It seems like a good idea, but I think there are better solutions to this problem, which we'll get to in a little bit.
John:
Yeah, the tabs and windows thing, that seems like they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel.
John:
Like, oh, we added tabs to most things.
John:
You know what?
John:
We should just make this an official API that you get for free if you use NSDocument.
John:
It's easy to implement, and you can just mix windows together with tabs.
John:
Lots of applications have tabs.
John:
It's nice to have a unified interface.
John:
It's a recognition that...
John:
tabs are as common as buttons and sheets and text input fields and combo boxes and all the other controls they have instead of having to roll your own tabs here's a standard control for you know not tabs as in the old style one where you'd switch through different like what is it called like the segmented control now it doesn't even look like tabs anymore but those actually look like tabs back in the day but web browsers have the no each tab is actually the entire window and you can tear them out and combine them it's nice to see that be a system level feature
John:
They're kind of boring.
John:
They look like Safari tabs, and I'm not sure Safari tabs is the best implementation of tabs, but it's a nice idea.
Casey:
And I think you get it for free if you're an NSDocument subclass or something like that.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know the details, but I think so.
Marco:
I mean, I think that's great.
Marco:
As a user of OS X, I mean, I'm not really a Mac developer, but as a user of OS X, I think that's going to be awesome.
John:
yep picture in picture not a problem i feel needs solving but not a bad thing i mean yeah for people who use full screen it's totally a problem that he's solving because full screen is like i would like to be full screen that's how i work i swipe on my pad from side to side but sometimes i also want to keep my eye on the game i wish they had more than one picture in picture so you could stack them up of course you would want more windows no i mean like that's right you got a 5k iMac you can have four games like they should be able to like tile them the four football games from uh the espn app yeah all right
Marco:
I think it'll be nice because so often I want to have a video going from... Usually it's YouTube.
Marco:
Occasionally it's Vimeo, but usually it's YouTube.
Marco:
So I'll have this video going and I'll want to move it to the side of the screen so I can do something else at the same time or so I can watch some other window.
Marco:
And you have to have the, you know, if you want to do that now with before picture in picture on the Mac, you have to have the entire browser Chrome around that showing somewhere and kind of move the window in such a way that you like, you know, you move half of it off screen.
Marco:
And it's kind of it's kind of clunky now.
Marco:
So this will be nice for that, too.
Casey:
I didn't think about the full screen stuff.
Casey:
That's a very good point.
Casey:
Well, let's see what else they do.
Casey:
The messages improvements, which we'll talk about in a minute, comes to the Mac as well.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's most.
Casey:
Oh, Apple Pay for the web, which is kind of exciting.
Casey:
And I don't know, I think that was most everything.
Casey:
The big flagship feature seemed to be Siri, which is similarly solving a problem I don't think I have.
Casey:
But that really deep contextual search does sound pretty interesting, and I am curious to try that.
John:
So even though they didn't announce it at this segment, this is the part where we should talk about the new file system.
Ding!
John:
Because it is only available on the Mac right now.
John:
That's true.
John:
It was not announced in the keynote.
John:
I found out about it after walking outside of the keynote when everybody else found the update of the W80 sessions to show the secret ones.
John:
And session 701 was the one about the new file system.
John:
And then everyone found the developer documentation online.
John:
Didn't even get, as far as I'm aware, a note in one of the little word clouds.
John:
And that's mostly because even though there's going to be sessions on this and there's technical documentation and it was announced in the State of the Union, this is not a feature of any of the operating systems betas that they shipped.
John:
And it's not going to be a feature of any of the operating systems that they ship in final except in experimental form.
John:
The new file system will be for 2017 because, as we all know, 2017 is the year of the file system.
John:
But they announced it.
John:
They announced it now, and they're getting people working on it now.
John:
What the hell is the name of it?
John:
It's got a terrible name.
John:
APFS, right?
John:
Yeah, it's called APFS.
John:
The A stands for Apple.
John:
The P stands for pull?
John:
I guess.
John:
I don't know.
John:
P-U-L-L?
John:
i don't know no it's like apple like a apple file system it should be afs but afs is andrew file system and ifs is probably also anyway it's got a name it's called apfs uh it is only available on the mac and you can do a limited number of things with it now you can so far it will be on all the platforms eventually you can't boot off of it now it has all sorts of limitations all which i assume are because like it's not done yet right and so this is how they're sort of
Marco:
testing the waters with it and letting people play with it i mean they're also kind of like saving people from themselves here like you know it's not bootable and you can't time machine with it and stuff because they really don't want you to be installing a beta file system on your main drive and with your only copy of your data and you know people would do that if they didn't have these restrictions
John:
yeah and it has a lot of interesting features almost all the ones i would expect it to have more than i more than i had hoped because i had heard things that made me think it wasn't gonna have too much first it's flash only yeah which we expected um and that's great because it means they can optimize it for that case uh it has cloning of files uh
John:
which is you would think it's just not just like hard links to files but it's not because they're copy and writes you can basically duplicate a file more or less instantaneously and they will diverge slowly uh part of that is uh the same underlying technology i'm assuming they're using for snapshots which means you can take a point in time snapshot of the entire file system you can i think you can clone an entire file system i would assume um you can revert to a snapshot which they said is great for classroom classrooms where they can just you know have the initial state and let the kids use it and revert it's also great for apple stores
John:
I'm sure they're all loving it where they can, at the end of the day, revert all the demo devices to their previous state.
John:
If you are a backup program, having a point in time snapshot to work out, which is great.
John:
And, you know, the fact that it doesn't work with Time Machine, it's because the new version of Time Machine is going to take advantage of all these features and be a million times better than it used to be.
John:
It supports extended attributes because it has to.
John:
And this Apple documentation will put a link in the show notes.
John:
It basically goes through, like, here's why HFS Plus sucks, in not so many words, and it goes through all the things, like, oh, HFS Plus could do things where your thing was inconsistent on disk and has no atomic operations, and things wouldn't be committed, so if something happened at this point and your thing could get corrupted, they try to be nice about it, but...
John:
yeah uh and the session description for 701 is we're going to tell you why this file system is better than hfs plus which is shooting fish in a barrel but it's uh it's better fast directory sizing you ever try to get the size of a big folder and it says calculating and calculating like they have a way to do that uh you know atomic operations limited atomic operations
John:
This is all great stuff.
John:
Being able to make containers and put multiple volumes in the same container and having them all see that size.
John:
So instead of partitioning, say you have 100 gigs, you can put three volumes in 100 gigs and they all look like they're 100 gigs.
John:
They're not.
John:
There's only 100 gigs of space and they're going to fight for it.
John:
But there's no like, let me divide the 100 gig partition up into 50-50 or 33-33-33.
John:
That's not how this file system works.
John:
uh it's they could all share the space and then they will slowly accumulate into the space it supports raid one zero and just uh you know concatenated volumes and jbod where you just uh take a bunch of disks and make one larger volume out of it uh the only real thing it's missing and i don't think it's something they can't add later i hope is any facility for data integrity at the file level to account for bit rot so say you have a
John:
And you keep them around and keep copying them from disk to disk.
John:
How do you know that bit flip errors aren't slowly corrupting your files?
John:
The answer is for now at the file system level, you still don't.
John:
But this seems like a thoroughly modern file system.
John:
And the fact that that feature doesn't exist now, I don't mind too much because all the other things are doing it.
John:
It's like they're saying all the right things.
John:
Everything in this documentation says modern, sleek file system that's going to enable UI features that are better.
John:
It'll make Time Machine better.
John:
It'll make backup apps better.
John:
It'll make it easier to roll back to known good states.
John:
So many nice, friendly features can be built on top of this file system.
John:
This is what the world has been waiting for for a really long time.
John:
Still upset there's no data integrity, but because it's so modern, I see no reason they can't add that later for systems that can support the CPU overhead that that's going to add.
Casey:
So, as far as you can tell, so far so good.
Casey:
Two thumbs up?
John:
Yes.
John:
No, I like it.
John:
I'm happy.
John:
The name is stupid.
John:
But, you know, the name is stupid and no data integrity, which is, again, it's not a small thing.
John:
Like, when I've talked about it in the past, data integrity is, like, one of the biggest reasons I want a new file system.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All the other reasons are still super important, and it's just so great to see Apple finally moving on.
John:
And like Marco said, this is all platforms, from the watch all the way up to the Mac Pro that they never update.
John:
It's the whole line.
John:
They made a file system for the future that spans their entire product line, which is...
John:
exactly what you could hope for and like this is just the first version look at all the crap they added to hfs plus and in their old documentation like uh we don't have an hfs plus extended attributes were tacked on wasn't that crappy well here it's not tacked on we thought of it from the beginning it's a super important feature good job guys so i'm i'm excited i'm happy i am optimistic i am ready for 2017
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, by the way.
Casey:
APFS is optimized for flash-slash-SSD storage and can be used with traditional hard disk drives.
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised that they can even do that.
John:
Well, they just did that because you can make, like, in the current command line tools, you can make, like, an image, like a volume container image, like a disk image of it.
John:
I'm assuming people will screw with it.
John:
One thing we didn't touch on is one of the current limitations is case-sensitive only.
John:
I'm not quite sure what they'll do there because a lot of the Unicode normalization and case folding comparison crap in HFS Plus is a reason a lot of people hate it because it's complicated and doesn't do what people expect.
John:
And it's not non-deterministic, but it's complicated to know what exactly it's going to do.
John:
This is like when you name files.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What is the file name?
John:
And HFS Plus has really complicated rules about what a file name is, case sensitive or insensitive.
John:
This is case sensitive only for now.
John:
I'm assuming they will implement case insensitivity, but it's still, I think, an open question.
John:
Will they implement case insensitivity in the same weird way that it's implemented in HFS Plus?
John:
And by the way, HFS Plus on iOS has always been case sensitive.
John:
I think so, probably for performance and simplicity reasons.
John:
Yeah, like, I mean, no one sees the file system on the phone, so it's fine.
John:
But case sensitive is simpler to implement.
John:
And if they do away with the file name normalization stuff, we'll put some show notes links for Unicode normalization because we don't have time to explain it now.
John:
If they either do away with that and just make it a giant bag of bytes and leave it up to the OS, that would be one easy enough solution.
John:
Or if they come up with a more streamlined, modern way to do their case folding for the case insensitive things and handle that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm not quite sure what they'll do, but a lot of the scary limitations are just because this isn't done yet.
John:
And this is only sort of a toy for people to play with on the Mac, but it will be rolling out everywhere next year.
Casey:
So I have one other important question.
Casey:
So I do not have a ticket to WBDC.
Casey:
I'm going to layers.
Casey:
I was sitting in my hotel room streaming both the keynote and the State of the Union with a handful of other people.
Casey:
And for the State of the Union, it happened that almost everyone in the room was a developer.
Casey:
And for the State of the Union, they said, OK, it's time to talk about the new file system.
Casey:
And literally everyone in the room, of which there were like six of us, all of them verbally at the same moment said, ding.
Casey:
As I'm sitting there watching the talk, people are on Twitter saying, oh, my God, there was a ding.
Casey:
And I thought, oh, that's funny.
John:
They heard you.
John:
They heard you in your room.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I thought, oh, that's funny.
Casey:
And then I realized, no, no, no, these people are not being funny.
Casey:
There was a ding.
Casey:
Is that true?
Casey:
Was there a ding in the room?
Marco:
There was a ding in the room.
Casey:
Did it come from the PA?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
But there was a ding.
Marco:
There was a ding in the room.
How?
John:
Next up, let's talk about file systems.
John:
All right.
Casey:
That's magnificent.
Casey:
And I am very impressed.
Casey:
So I just want to put that out there that someone had the wherewithal to either simulate or bring an actual bell with which to ding when it was time to talk about the file system.
Casey:
Did the person on stage hear it?
Casey:
Could you tell?
John:
That's going to be cut out of the video, first of all.
John:
And second of all, it's a big place.
John:
I think the only people who heard it were the people who were in the proximity of
Casey:
of the day i don't know some people on twitter were saying they were like second row or something like that well let's put it this way the reaction in the room shows that some people knew what the thing was about other people didn't know and didn't care well but that's fair but did you notice did the person the the person speaking at the time did they even notice that this was happening i don't think so anyway i just want to say for the record i did not make the ding well god knows i didn't because i was all right well somebody spent eight dollars very well to make that ding
Casey:
Approximately.
John:
Yeah, we assume.
John:
I'm just saying I would never interrupt or disrupt a live presentation by Apple in that way.
John:
No, of course not.
John:
You wouldn't.
John:
I would not do that.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Anything else on MacOS?
Casey:
Oh, we forgot.
John:
One more on MacOS.
John:
It doesn't support my Mac.
John:
yeah that's right john has to get a new mac pro to run the new file system it's amazing so they stopped supporting my mac and i wondered why and asked marco and he came up with what i think is the actual answer pretty much on the spot uh why won't they support the 2008 mac pro which is my model they support the 2009 mac pro they're 64 bit x86 machines they're plenty fast it's not like my machine is too slow to run mac os sierra what's the deal why is my mac not supported
John:
And the answer Marco came up with, and then until I hear someone say otherwise, sounds like the answer is, my CPU doesn't have the Intel decryption-focused instructions.
John:
I forget what they're called.
John:
You said AVX or something?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I forgot.
Marco:
It's like the hardware AES acceleration and stuff like that.
Marco:
Like the Intel added instructions to the CPUs somewhere around that time.
Marco:
And I think you fall on the wrong side of that.
John:
And so a lot of the ARM, you know, the ARM system on a chips have these instructions.
John:
The modern x86 CPUs have these instructions.
John:
Encryption, by the way, we didn't mention this for the new Apple file system.
John:
Encryption is built in both full volume encryption and also per file encryption.
John:
Right.
John:
like ios uses but this is built into the file system instead of built on top of it like you can totally tell this is a file system made for apple's devices because these are exactly the features they need that they previously had to implement on top of the file system now they're built into it you can run it without encryption it's not like it requires encryption but for the sake of simplicity of implementation they basically said uh we're not gonna put like conditional code and have a a have a code path that doesn't use
John:
uh we're not going to like disable encryption on the 2008 max and we're not going to say if you do the encryption we'll do a second code path that doesn't use those instructions they said fine just not support it i mean it's an eight-year-old computer at this point it's totally understandable luckily i have a 2009 mac pro at work so i'll be okay there and i'll be able to use it but yeah they stopped supporting my mac with the current version of the mac operating system so my my 2008 mac pro was able to run every version of
John:
of mac os 10 and os 10 more or less but not well i guess not every version because 10 zero didn't have an x86 version yeah i don't think you could run any of them until what 10 yeah until 10 until the x86 transition anyway whole point is my mac is not supported and they did not release a new mac for me to buy uh so we'll keep watching on that front
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I don't even want to think about the horror.
Marco:
So what are you going to do this fall when this becomes the new version?
Marco:
Are you just never going to have the new version of OS X?
John:
I'm going to install it at work, and I'm not going to install it at home, and we'll see how long that remains tenable.
Marco:
wow i mean by that point they could have announced new mac pro that i order i don't know but it's not it's not an issue that i have to deal with for a couple months yet i love that this is like this is this is like the the roller coaster of syracuse uh keynotes it's like you know you have like amazing file system news like you know no one expected a new file system to ever happen just like you know when swift came out it's like swift i did
John:
you okay yeah but no one else so like you know you've been waiting for this for like forever it finally happened but also they're going to force you to finally upgrade your mac pro that's not bad use that that's good news all they got to do is make a new mac like that's fine like they're again i don't think there's it's a perfectly valid decision to not support an eight-year-old computer like oh totally like it's fine i'm i'm i'm not upset about that at all i it will be handled
John:
It's kind of amazing it made it this far.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
So leaving aside hardware gripes, what's the next bit of low-hanging fruit?
Casey:
The file system has been conquered.
Casey:
Copeland's been conquered or preventing Copeland 2010 with Swift has been conquered.
Casey:
What's the next bit of low-hanging fruit that you're really, really waiting for?
John:
I think it affects the Finder.
John:
I mean, I'm trying to find it.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Don't get them started.
Marco:
You don't know what you're saying.
John:
The Finder is the one I kind of gave up on because it becomes less and less irrelevant to fix it.
John:
So if they can make it irrelevant, it's fine.
John:
There are still many things that I wish they could fix about it.
John:
That's a whole other show.
John:
We can talk about it some other time.
John:
I mean, that's the big one from way back when.
John:
But if I'm forced to come up with an entirely new list, like...
John:
I can still complain about services forever.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
I will not run out of things to complain about.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
Oh, no, I know.
Casey:
I know you won't run out of things to complain about, but I am curious to hear what your top four complaints are these days.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
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Casey:
iOS 10.
Casey:
It's a thing.
Marco:
It's iOS X, Casey.
Casey:
Oh, my bad.
Casey:
iOS X. That's right.
Casey:
It's a thing.
Casey:
It looks good.
Casey:
It actually looks different.
Casey:
You talked about this earlier.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They've refreshed the design like a half step.
Marco:
Yeah, that's well put.
Marco:
It's not like a total redesign of the system, but it's like a .5 of the iOS 7 style design, which I like.
Marco:
They have made many of the fonts a little bit heavier weight.
Marco:
They've introduced a new super heavy bold for San Francisco that's in use in the news app and in music to really massively draw attention to headlines, which I don't think I like, but we'll see in use.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Overall, all around the system, there's little improvements to the text to make it a little bit thicker, a little bit heavier, a little bit more bold, which makes it easier to read for a lot of people.
Marco:
Moving on from text, though, the big change is they've introduced buttons that look like buttons, which is awesome.
John:
And windows that look like windows, like the little widgets.
Marco:
Yeah, everything's now like these little rounded window-like things, which I like this new style a lot.
Marco:
I like this design.
Marco:
I like that Apple's moving it forward.
Marco:
I think this will prove to be more usable than the pure iOS 7 look just because things are starting to have shapes again, and text is starting to become more legible, and this is all good stuff.
Marco:
So I think, having not actually used the beta yet, we'll see how this is in practice, but tentatively, I give the design improvements whatever thumbs up that I can give.
John:
Yeah, the lock screen changes in particular.
John:
It's Apple finally, not giving up on, but thinking better of their attempt.
John:
They always wanted to say, you can have an arbitrary image, and we will display text on top of it in a minimal way that remains remutable.
John:
And it's really hard to do that without...
John:
deciding having an algorithm kind of like their itunes like album or thing like should we dark in the background and use light text should we light in the background and use dark text and what about they they love stuff showing through and like if it was all about usability you would say use an opaque light background with dark text on top of it that's easy to read like but they don't want to do that so they're creeping up on it so they said no we won't we're not even trying to mess with your background anymore we're going to put these white essentially windows on top of it and they're not
John:
opaque white you can still see stuff through them with the whole vibrancy like but it's just it's just more readable it's clear what the units are it's clear where they begin and end the text on them is easier to read because it is dark text on a light background always it doesn't depend on the thing that's behind it um and those are all those are all good decisions especially if they're going to add functionality to that screen which they are uh to make it
John:
More straightforward UI and to give up on the dream of it being like this beautiful text that is laced onto your image like minimally as if it's just been sprinkled there with stardust.
John:
And in practice, what that translates to is hard to read, can't tell what the hell is going on.
Casey:
And the lock screen now has widgets on it, and they actually literally use the word widgets, which I thought was a little surprising.
Marco:
Yeah, it's interesting.
Marco:
What they basically did was they took what used to be your TodayView widget or your Notification Center widget, you know, whatever you call those things, and they're now kind of sticking those in more places, which, like, you know, I never thought it was worth Overcast having a TodayView widget because— Because no one's going into their TodayView to find out what's up with Overcast today.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
It didn't seem like it was that kind of app.
Marco:
And I personally never use Today Widgets because I don't look at my Today View.
Marco:
But now they're putting those now on the lock screen.
Marco:
They're putting those on 3D Touch when you preview an app.
Marco:
So now this is going to give way more apps a big reason to have Notification Center Widgets or to have these widgets.
Marco:
Now it's no longer Notification Center Widgets.
Marco:
It's no longer Today View.
Marco:
Now it's just your app's widget.
Marco:
and they can put those in more places.
Marco:
And as both a developer and a user, I'm looking forward to this.
John:
This sounds great.
John:
They did a lot of stuff with the lock screen to make it so that you don't accidentally dismiss it with the touch thing.
John:
I thought I saw someone tweet that, maybe this is just the beta, but instead of just placing your thumb over the touch ID to unlock it, that you actually have to press the button in, you can't just tap the touch ID to get through that screen?
Marco:
Yeah, I believe that was Ryan Jones who said that.
Marco:
I believe that's correct from what everyone else.
Marco:
It's kind of unclear as to like, you know,
Marco:
what sequence of buttons you have to hit or not hit to do that, but that's roughly correct.
John:
Right, and the whole thing where you don't touch any button, just raise it up at the table and it will show you the lock screen, because they want you to do more on the lock screen.
John:
There's going to be more information there, hopefully, and you can customize it more, and so they want a way to get to that without you accidentally unlocking it.
John:
It's kind of weird that they have, like...
John:
designed out all the delays which are basically bad but that people had you know those delays had become part of the ui for people who would be dealing with their phones and they don't want to put the delays back in because unlocking your phone real fast when you want to pick it up and actually use it is a great feature but they still wanted to find a way to let you use your lock screen so hopefully we'll be able to
John:
develop new habits and hopefully this sort of raise feature and pressing the button will work itself out into a situation where you can get into your phone as fast as possible but are never frustrated by accidentally getting into your phone and really you want to work with your new fancy lock screen yeah and this uh this solves this raised to to view or raised wake i think they called it
Casey:
It solves a problem that I actually don't have because I am really good at hitting the side button in order to see my notifications.
Casey:
But I am the only person or one of the only people I know that doesn't get annoyed by the way the new Touch ID works.
Casey:
And so this is clearly solving a problem for the overwhelming majority of people where, like you said, they mash down on the home button.
Casey:
Suddenly they're right through the lock screen and they didn't get to see any of the notifications that they wanted to see.
Casey:
And I do that occasionally.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I'm pretty good at avoiding it.
Casey:
What was interesting, though, and as a potential security issue, is you could interact with these widgets on the lock screen pretty interestingly.
Casey:
Like, you could respond to a text message, for example, right on the lock screen.
John:
So you're letting someone take your locked phone and respond as if they're you?
John:
Right.
John:
I'm not quite sure.
John:
Right.
Casey:
How this all works out in practice.
Casey:
What I'm about to describe was clearly not shown during the demo.
Casey:
But what I would suspect is if you ever have your phone and it's locked and you swipe up and go to the camera, take a picture, and then you want to go to your old pictures that you had taken previously or to send one, in order to do that, it has like an interstitial, if you will, saying, OK, enter your passcode or touch ID or what have you in order to perform an action like that.
Casey:
anything that's destructive or that involves something leaving the phone i would guess that the same sort of thing would happen here but without question that is not what they showed during the demo yeah and the same thing speaking of the widgets like of doing more stuff from the lock screen the same kind of situation present a problem presents itself there is like
John:
to make the lock screen more useful you want people to be able to do more things but to do more things to show more information that shouldn't be on the lock screen like i don't want to yeah imagine you had these rich widgets that could show you all sorts of contextual information about your day and things that have happened to different applications do you want anyone to be able to see that when they raise your phone like that's why on the mac a lot of the sort of notification center stuff says hey should this show on the lock screen or should it not i'm sure the same things will be on ios uh but it's it's a type of granularity even i have trouble deciding like going through each individual app and saying do i want
John:
It's kind of useful, but then what if someone comes by my Mac and sees a message from my wife that's floating in a corner in a box that I don't want them to see?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's difficult privacy-wise.
John:
I think what Apple is creeping up on slowly, slowly, slowly is a screen on your phone that is not springboard, that is not the big grid of icons.
John:
that has a bunch of information that you can customize that third-party apps can contribute to.
John:
I don't think the lock screen is that screen.
John:
I think that's another screen.
John:
Android users were telling me exactly what screen it is.
John:
Like, why don't you have real widgets that don't have to be the full width of the thing that you can customize and have sort of like a dashboard, if you will, for the phone that you customize to contain all this information, and that's not really the lock screen.
John:
So I think they'll arrive at that eventually, but they're not there yet, and right now they're just making the lock screen better than it was, which I think is good.
Casey:
Yeah, a couple other quick hits, and then there's some other big ones.
Casey:
Maps looks improved.
Casey:
The turn-by-turn looked a lot nicer to me.
Casey:
The traffic, instead of doing little dots, it's an actual highlight, which looked better.
John:
And you can zoom out without fighting with your goddamn phone, just like squeezing.
John:
How many times I fought with the phone with like seven fingers on the screen?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
zoomed out so i can see where the oh no it's the worst yeah i completely agree with you um they also did a very cool thing which i think ways are has already done for years but if you're about to make a turn they'll zoom way way way way in and if you're not going to make a turn for a while it'll zoom way out which i really really like that's nice um they also had some contextual stuff a lot of this a lot of today's announcements were about trying to infer context for many of the operations you're doing and that's not just limited to maps
Casey:
And that actually brings me nicely to Siri improvements.
Casey:
They touted a lot of different Siri improvements, including a Siri API.
Casey:
And one of the things that I thought was most interesting about the Siri API was that they said without saying that this is all natural language and kind of implied that unlike Alexa, which I've not used to be completely fair, but I've understood to be, and I think one of you guys actually said it, to be very much like a command line.
Casey:
Yeah, I said that.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So what Siri is is not a command line.
Casey:
Siri is not just a command line where you have to do subject-verb action or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
It's more flexible in the syntax that it accepts.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And actually in the State of the Union, when they went through the nuts and bolts about how that works from a developer perspective...
Casey:
One of the things they said in so many words was, hey, listen, this could happen.
Casey:
This same command that you're trying to perform could be verbalized in one of six different ways.
Casey:
And that's on us to figure out and to extract what the actual—they had the different components of a Siri command.
Casey:
I forget what they are offhand.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Whatever those components are, it's on us, on Apple, to extract what those particular, like the verb, the subject, the action, whatever, are.
Casey:
And we will give that to you developers.
Casey:
So that means it's on Apple to parse out how exactly it is the user structures that sentence, which, assuming it works, is how I think it should work.
John:
But that's a big assumption.
John:
Well, that's what the intent system is about.
John:
And that's why it's limited to certain kinds of applications, I would imagine, is because
John:
Siri determines the intent of, like, what is this person trying to do?
John:
And then creates a structured message for that intended action.
John:
So if the intended action is some kind of messaging, that's the one they show, like, it's like, there's a recipient, there's the content of the message, and maybe a few other bits, and it gives the application...
John:
that structured information the application has no idea what you said i don't even know who you can get that information from the application but because it's an application that says i handle you know if someone if the intent is to message somebody that's a thing that i can do so siri will figure out you're trying to send a message you're trying to send it to this person you're trying to send it with this app
John:
And then we'll hand off to the app.
John:
Here is the information.
John:
Here's here's the user's intent.
John:
They want they want to talk to you.
John:
We chat or whatever.
John:
They want to send it to this person.
John:
And here's the message.
John:
And that's why you have to have structured like what can't be for all apps like, oh, I just want to make an app.
John:
And if someone says this, I want my app to do that.
John:
No, it has to be one of the intents that they support.
John:
I don't know how many different intents they support, but it's a limited set of like.
John:
It's like five or six.
Casey:
Yeah, so it's right here.
Casey:
So they announced that the following are supported in SiriKit.
Casey:
Messaging apps, VoIP calling, payments, ride booking, photo search, and workouts.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
Only those six.
John:
And each one of those things has a structure of the message that the application has to be ready to handle.
John:
And Siri handles the I'll figure out what they said a bunch of crap.
John:
And what they mean is I want you application to do this thing.
John:
And it's one of the short list of supported things.
John:
Which is, it's limiting because you can't say, oh, I had a game and I want people to say, I want, you know, please foodle the whatever.
Casey:
Challenge John at a game.
John:
No, but even like something within the world of your app, like, you know, change armor, put on the good armor on character or whatever.
John:
Just make some Destiny.
John:
We wouldn't understand.
John:
I know.
John:
Yeah, if you wanted to, that's not going to have integration with Destiny.
John:
But yeah, like imagine something that only made sense in the realm of your game.
John:
You can't support that because in the Siri API, you have no facility to say what you want.
John:
You know, I want people to say this and I want this to happen.
John:
That's not how it works at all.
John:
So this system is much more flexible, but also more limited.
John:
And it allows people to add Siri support.
John:
without knowing anything about how siri works or caring how it works or even caring that they use siri because an intent can be expressed by anything an intent could be expressed by a hand signal by sending an email to yourself by putting text messages in by waving your arm like your application has no idea how the intent was expressed by the user it is totally divorced from it which i think is super smart but it's also going to mean that the rollout of siri is going to be limited and i think it's fine for it to be limited especially since the classes they chose are good common classes of applications i'm
John:
Sure, this will expand outward, just like extension points have expanded outward for the places you can extend on iOS and on the Mac.
John:
But I think it's a very clever API, and it is better than, let's just do the simplest thing, which you say a bunch of stuff, and you identify an application, and then we translate it to text and hand it off to your app, because that would have been a disaster.
Marco:
yep couldn't agree more yeah i mean like the system as it stands now like i have kind of mixed feelings about it because you know they didn't basically give me anything i can use for overcast because they didn't create or release one of these like intent structures that is play media item or control control media playback in this app a media intent is a gimme though like that's something they will i feel like they will do
Marco:
well it depends on why it's not there now if it's not there now because they just didn't get to it sure if it isn't there now because maybe they wanted to protect apple music i hope that's not the reason uh i that there it is possible that's the reason i hope that isn't it and knowing apple that probably isn't it no i mean they would want to control like if it was that was the case you'd be able to have to talk to siri to control all media playing in any of the native media controllers right
John:
Yeah, I guess.
Marco:
But yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, because like right now you can say, you know, play this artist's name and it just plays it in Apple Music.
Marco:
And that's one of the big reasons why people choose Apple Music over its competitors.
John:
I'm thinking like video services.
John:
Like they're not competing with YouTube at this point, but there's still no, you know, show me the latest whatever video on the whatever channel on YouTube.
John:
well and they have that on the apple tv like they they did add that to apple tv to the apple tv series where now you can you know youtube is part of apple tv's universal search but not an ios and youtube is on there as well anyway like hopefully it's not a political reason but technologically speaking a media media playback intent or even like something i don't know do they have like an email and i guess maybe that falls into the category of messaging i think it's messy i mean emails only for old people like us it's not like young kids are doing
John:
anyway like this is promising siri finally has an api it seems like a reasonable good api that they expand out to new intents and by adding new intents i don't think there's any particular complexity they add it's just like the intents address categories not individual apps so they didn't pick select partners any intent that they add if they make a media playback intent they're not making like an overcast intent or youtube intent they're going to make one that encompasses huge numbers of applications just like they have with like the the intents they have now so
John:
I think the possible number of useful intents in the world is, like, low hundreds, you know, right?
John:
And that will cover thousands upon thousands upon thousands of apps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, overall, I'm very happy with how they implemented this API.
John:
I agree.
Marco:
It seems like a very smart way to do it.
Marco:
It is, as you mentioned earlier, like, you know, because it kind of abstracts a way of dealing with the language and some of the, like, some of the details of how the person structures their statement, it abstracts all that away for the developers.
Marco:
So, like,
Marco:
It's really easy to do things like implement a messaging app because you don't need to like, you know, if you say like, you know, send a message to John that I will be late.
Marco:
And, you know, if it's like, does the app need to know that I said that before I will be late?
Marco:
Or, you know, does it just get I will be late?
Marco:
And, you know, it abstracts all that away.
Marco:
It deals with all that for you.
Marco:
That's awesome.
John:
I mean, you can blame all the stupid bugs.
John:
I'm like, well, I don't have a choice.
John:
I get this.
John:
The intent sent me this.
John:
It thinks the message is this.
John:
And if it includes that, we all just complain about Siri some more.
Marco:
Yeah, because that abstracts away dealing with so many language issues and different languages and different constructs.
Marco:
So it's great for the developers that it supports, and I hope in the future it supports more developers.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
And I want to double down on what you said a second ago, which is it supports like 30-some languages or something like that, which is quite a bit different than most of the voice-enabled stuff.
Casey:
There are certainly Amazon's, if not Google's.
Casey:
There were a couple of other things that were mentioned that I'd like to try to breeze through pretty quickly because there was another big section in the iOS stuff.
Casey:
The quick stuff I'd like to breeze through is Apple Music got a refresh.
Casey:
This was when Bozeman St.
Casey:
John came up.
Casey:
I may have pronounced that wrong, but she was awesome.
Casey:
She was great.
Casey:
There was one small part where she was trying to get a bunch of completely nerdy developers to try to sing or rap rappers to light with her.
John:
That was part of the joke, though, in the end.
John:
Because it was a long setup for realizing this is not happening and you guys need to practice.
Casey:
But it was, other than that, which got a little bit cringeworthy, I thought she did an unbelievable job.
Casey:
And to my recollection, the best first-time performance of anyone I've ever seen on an Apple stage.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
One of my few tweets during the thing was like,
John:
being cooler than eddie q is admittedly a low bar but she achieved it handily like because really i mean it's a tough call like it you want someone to be up there to show enthusiasm for music and it's hard to do that demo all the time as someone snarkily tweeted like once again apple shows us how to enjoy music like we all understand how to enjoy but like but really like if you're going to do an apple music demo
John:
you can't really demo it as like a series of screens and stuff like the whole point of the thing is the music and even though the message of this one was like you can find your stuff more easily or whatever there's always going to be a part where they show enthusiasm for music and you need a presenter up there who is clearly enthusiastic about it and bottom line is you have to have someone who is relatable and uh even though a lot of us are old in the audience like we can't relate to eddie q getting down and i don't blame it's not his fault like you know a little bit
John:
You can't.
John:
Everyone gets old, man.
John:
Everyone becomes uncool or uncooler than they were before.
John:
And it was just a silly choice to have him up there doing that.
John:
Bring someone else who is better at this than you and who is more relatable.
John:
And they did.
John:
Hallelujah.
John:
And it was better.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, it's still a really tough gig because...
Marco:
That audience and that setting is really not conducive to, like, we're going to talk cool about music, and we're going to get everyone all excited about our cool music.
Marco:
You can't do that in that room, no matter how cool you are.
John:
But you can do it by being funny.
John:
Craig killed it once again, right?
John:
You have to be relatable to that audience, but you can do it...
Casey:
you can do it through humor you can do it through self-deprecating humor but i actually think that she was a different kind of funny like again that one cringeworthy part aside i thought she was a different kind of funny and arguably more funny than anyone else on stage and the thing that was so striking to me was the that she was a different kind of funny instead of the dad jokes that have been that's all you can do if you're a dad agree agree that is that is the entirety of your repertoire but
Casey:
But in a way that I've never seen an Apple keynote be funny, her portion of the keynote was a different kind of funny.
Casey:
And even as a fellow white man, like most of the people that were always on the Apple keynote stages, I really enjoyed this different kind of funny.
Casey:
I thought it made for a better keynote, having this different kind of voice.
Casey:
And I really thought she did an unbelievably good job.
John:
And as always, the trick to being a good presenter is you have to be comfortable with yourself.
John:
And she was.
John:
And it makes you like even even if your presentation doesn't go that well, if you're comfortable with yourself and you roll with it, that's that makes the audience more comfortable.
John:
And if you can express genuine enthusiasm for the new thing that you're showing and like as for Apple Music itself.
John:
They're trying to make it nicer to use by making it easier to find the stuff that you actually care about and addressing the idea of like, hey, I get on a plane and I have no idea what the heck is on my phone.
John:
Right.
John:
So they address that directly and said, oh, now we have a special view.
John:
Like, I feel like they're addressing it once again, addressing user needs that I feel like they should have known a year ago, but didn't.
John:
Now they've discovered them.
John:
They've rearranged things a little bit.
John:
They've added a limited amount of features.
John:
Is that enough to make Apple Music better?
John:
Is it still going to fight with people's metadata and give you bad versions of stuff and do all that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I hope not.
John:
But Apple Music, I still feel like that's the albatross around Apple Music's neck.
John:
For the people who should be the biggest fans of Apple Music, music lovers who have huge music collections, Apple Music, I still think, feels like the enemy because it's going to screw with your music in ways that you don't understand.
John:
And it's like a giant beast to wrangle and you say, no, thanks.
John:
As opposed to, say, iTunes Match, which had the potential to be just as bad, but was not just as bad.
John:
That it would mess with your music in fairly predictable ways and the upside was pretty big.
Casey:
Yep, I still use iTunes Match and still love it.
John:
yeah if they if they cancel itunes match that would be terrible because i don't want to use uh you know like we want like photos we want we want the the photo style refresh we're still waiting for the photo styles refresh of music apple is supposed to be it but it's a bad job uh we want all our music everywhere and we want to control it and we don't want apple screwing with it and messing it up
Casey:
so that's a perfect segue to the other thing i wanted to very briefly touch on which is photos and basically it was hey we're doing google photos but we're doing it on device with no mention of google any anywhere but that's that's expected yeah and i mean that's basically what i saw and what i saw looked to me like it was taking all of the best bits of google photos like arbitrarily searching for handbrake or controller like
John:
They didn't do that demo.
John:
They didn't do the... Like, they said, hey, we'll notice that there's water and there's animal.
John:
They didn't pull up a search screen and say horses.
John:
Like, I continue to think that Google will do this better.
John:
Obviously, I'm going to do the controller test.
John:
And by the way, update on... We didn't have any follow-up in this episode, but a small amount of follow-up.
John:
Once I uploaded all of my photos to Google Photo and I typed controller, guess what it found?
John:
Exactly the controller pictures that it found before and also the ones that they just hadn't been uploaded yet.
John:
So Google Photos totally aced the controller test.
John:
It found all my controller pictures.
John:
And so that's going to be my first test because all my photos are already uploaded to Apple's photos in the cloud thing.
John:
and when this feature rolls out, as I assume it will on the Mac as well, I'm going to type controller, and I can almost guarantee that it will not find it.
John:
So it's just a question of how much better is Google with this than Apple.
John:
There was no demo.
John:
We have no way to judge.
John:
The fact that Apple is doing this at all is great.
John:
Maybe someday they can get family photo libraries.
John:
By the way, I was heartened by that.
John:
Speaking of family photo libraries...
John:
There's new sharing features in CloudKit that allows collaboration on notes and everything.
John:
I know something you can use this feature for, Apple.
John:
You can have a single photos library for an entire family and share it among them so everyone's photos can go into one big pool.
John:
Yep.
John:
That was not announced.
John:
Maybe not this year or whatever.
John:
Or maybe that's a fall event feature, or maybe that's a next year.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it could be.
John:
It scares me a little bit, too.
John:
I'll see how well it works in notes.
John:
But anyway, the photos features, like Casey said, it's like, we're going to try to do things that Google Photos did.
John:
We're going to have the privacy angle that we're not going to do at server side.
John:
We're going to do it client side.
John:
How are we going to do it client side without hosing your battery?
John:
Presumably, they didn't say this.
John:
I feel like they should have.
John:
oh don't worry we won't destroy your battery we will do it when it's plugged in at night and we won't start doing it until it's been plugged in for a certain period of time we won't start doing it until you're above 80% like that is I assume what they're doing because I can tell you from seeing face recognition bring down many a Mac I do not want face recognition running on my giant 70,000 photo library even just the bandwidth to download the originals do the recognition and chuck them out of storage again it's just you know so I assume it will do this when it's plugged in they're doing it on device instead of in the cloud because Apple's bad at cloud and because they love privacy
John:
I hope they do a good job.
John:
They didn't demo anything to let me know they were going to do a good job, but good for Apple for playing catch-up once again.
John:
Fingers crossed.
Marco:
Yep.
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Casey:
So the other big thing on iOS 10 to me anyway was messages.
Casey:
And some of this made me feel like the old man I really am.
Marco:
Oh, I think the entire thing shows that all of us, including most of the people in that room, are too old to understand why anybody would want to use these things.
Marco:
I totally understand.
John:
It amazes me that iMessage has been so boring for so long in light of every single other messaging application having all these features, having stickers and animations and Snapchat child features, annotations.
John:
Apple had the tech, especially making a picture and scribbling over it.
John:
They have all the pieces there.
John:
This is once again catch-up where Apple finally realized, hey, messages applications let you type text and emoji back and forth to each other are super boring.
John:
And tons of people use other ones that have all sorts of features like stickers and weird animations.
John:
And now they're doing all that, which is great.
John:
Again, it is plain catch-up, but it amazes me that they know it's the most used application on their platform.
John:
They spent so long...
John:
Not even being able to send the messages in the right order and have them delivered on all devices.
John:
They didn't even mention anything about this and like the proximity thing.
John:
So now if I have seven devices on my desk, will it not make all of them ring at the same time because it knows I'm there with my watch?
John:
Like they didn't mention any of that.
John:
Like messages has been so far behind everybody for so long and they didn't catch up entirely.
John:
But a lot of the features they put out is like all those things everyone else is doing.
John:
We are finally doing them as well.
John:
It would be nice if they were adding these features after making every other part of messages, the boring part, rock solid and stable and not annoying and presence notification and messages being on all devices at all times and working out all the privacy things.
John:
But they're not.
John:
They're going ahead with these things.
John:
And I think this is just the price of entry.
John:
This is not like a radical feature.
John:
It's like Apple has woken up and realized if you have a message application, you need to support these things.
John:
And your message conversations will be as annoying as the people you or as exciting, let's say, as the people you message with.
Casey:
John was looking right at me when he said that, FYI.
Casey:
No, a lot of this looks really good to me.
Casey:
The Emojify or whatever they called it where you type text and then it will, I think, yellow highlight and underline individual words and give you not only the option of converting that word, say, pizza to emoji, but if you have something like, I don't know, girl, then if you tap girl, it'll give you several contextually relevant, hopefully, options that you can convert the word girl into a different emoji.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I feel like that is not the way people use emoji a lot of times, though.
John:
It's not.
John:
Like it's forcing a particular style.
John:
And they said in the presentation that people will finish a sentence and want sort of an emoji capper.
John:
Like that's how a lot of people use emoji is sort of like to express something after you've written the text.
John:
Going back into the text and replacing the nouns with emoji, yeah, people do that sometimes.
John:
But it's not as common in my experience as or at least you'd want it in addition to have a thing at the end.
John:
And what I want to see is more like Slack's autocomplete where you enter emoji autocomplete mode.
John:
You want to find this that right emoji cap.
John:
That's what they said in the demo.
John:
But you didn't find the emoji cap.
John:
You just went back in and changed a bunch of nouns to emoji, which is a good feature.
John:
And you should have it.
John:
But you should also have a way to, you know, quickly sort of inline autocomplete emoji stuff.
John:
in the message anyway.
Casey:
It still makes sense to me, though, because it's considerably faster to type words than to scroll through that damned emoji list, trying to find the right emoji.
Casey:
So it made sense to me.
Casey:
Speaking of writing, you can write with your own handwriting, kind of like on the watch, but better, which is exciting.
Casey:
You can do the same thing that Google showed, where you can make the text that expands and shrinks.
Casey:
But I think you pointed out, John, that it will land, and its resting state is full-sized
John:
that's what we talked about like a lot of things a lot of the things we saw demoed are exactly what google demoed and it's allo thing like you know down to the whisper and shouting and the the bigger emoji and all the other stuff only apple did some of them better and the whisper is a great example if you want to be like whisper and have tiny text you can do that but it stays small just for a second and then comes back to what i assume is whatever the normal size is so if you have your font size cranked up on in ios for accessibility that your whisper will start out microscopic for a second get the effect but then it's
John:
It doesn't stay that way.
John:
It goes large again.
Casey:
One of the things I like most, and I can't verbalize why, but I really liked Invisible Ink.
Casey:
I thought that was really, really cool because it's like, hey, I'm showing you something that's... They're both shaking their heads and laughing at me right now, but if you're showing something that... You like the worst stuff.
Casey:
Hey, it is what it is.
John:
I think it's cute.
John:
I think there's an emotional aspect that works, but here's the thing that worries me a tiny bit about it.
John:
Invisible Ink, the feature,
John:
makes people's phones act exactly like the crazy haunted gadget that some people believe their phones are like so the first time you send this to somebody who doesn't know what this is they're like oh i've got a virus my phone is haunted the letters are all scrambly i can't see anything
John:
I'm sure they'll get over that and you'll explain it.
John:
I think it is a good feature.
John:
It's a clever feature.
John:
It is another feature that will confuse people who are less savvy.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Especially since it's not obvious what you're supposed to do with it.
John:
It's not obvious that you should swipe it to make it go away.
John:
Right?
Casey:
so that's fair and it looks exactly like what people think bugs look like in like movies like oh i've got a bug in my thing all the text is all scrambly the aliens are into it it looks like it looks more like sand is covering it but i mean your point is still fair um it seemed to me like the new messages is a combination of um slack with the responses on individual uh lines which i didn't
Casey:
I never caught how you engage that, but you can like thumbs up an individual message that somebody else sent.
John:
It's like reactions, do you think?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or is that like flagging for your own purposes?
John:
Do they see your thumbs up?
John:
I think they do.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
My impression was that they see it very much like the way Slack works, if you happen to use Slack.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I like that a lot.
Casey:
So, you know, the example they have on the introduction iOS 10 page and they call it tap back.
Casey:
So here you go.
Casey:
Just tap to send one of six quick responses that let people know what you're thinking.
Casey:
And so they have an example of somebody saying head to Santa Cruz question mark.
Casey:
And then the tap back is a little thumbs up.
Casey:
And that's actually really convenient because especially if you're like on the go, you can just basically say, yes, I acknowledge what you've said.
Casey:
I agree with it.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
We're good.
Casey:
Rather than having to write out a text message.
Casey:
So it's a combination of Slack, Snapchat.
Casey:
I jokingly celebrated during the keynote that I don't have to learn how Snapchat works anymore because it seems like a lot of those features have come into iOS.
John:
This is way more limited than Slack.
John:
Oh, absolutely.
John:
Like I tweeted, it's baby Slack.
Casey:
yeah it's snapchat for parents yes which makes it perfect for us yeah exactly um some of this stuff is also a little weird like the uh let's celebrate say things like happy birthday or congratulations with animations that take over the entire screen and you can have like bubbles fly or balloons excuse
Casey:
me fly off.
John:
And confetti and fireworks.
Casey:
Those all look really good.
Casey:
They Sherlock underscores confetti.
Marco:
I was going to say about that.
Marco:
I think some of that stuff, again, it's going to be the kind of thing like series jokiness where it might be cool the first time you see it, but there's only a very small handful of these canned effects.
Marco:
So they're going to get old quickly, I think, and I think some of them seem a little heavy-handed.
Marco:
Overall, I think it's a fun little feature to have, but I do think the implementation of it is going to get, I think, a little annoying pretty quickly.
John:
That's how you view it, but it's a nice thing to have, but this is how entire groups of people communicate all the time.
John:
With the same limited palette of stuff that you would find annoying really quickly, but as far as they're concerned, anything that you can't do this with is crap, and they never get tired of it.
John:
Like, never meaning... Yeah, all right, that's fair.
John:
Like, if I scroll through, like, my kids' conversations, like, their tolerance for repeated... And they don't even have... They have an even smaller vocabulary now, and they're still just repeating it and everything.
John:
Like, I think this will...
John:
It's not how we will communicate, but you have to have this, and you have to have even more of it, and they will not burn out on these things.
John:
They will just keep using them and potentially abusing them.
John:
I just hope they don't crash the app, because that'll be a shame.
Casey:
Well, and to that end, there's now an app store for iMessage, which, in principle, I'm 100% behind, but in execution, a little scared.
John:
People are already doing that, buying the keyboards, like Kim Kardashian keyboards.
John:
They're responding to a market.
John:
And again, it's not like Apple is...
John:
uh like oh we are the pioneer they're catching up like this is a thing that people do on all platforms that they're finding a way to do through keyboards on apple's platforms this is what people want to do with their phones may not be what we want to do with their phones but they have to provide a way to do it even if yeah even if it's outside the realm of like if steve jobs is still alive today what would he think of this probably not up his alley probably he would want things he was a sucker for like kitschy animations right but i think i don't know if you i think he might draw the line of like the sticker stores yeah well but you know i think
Marco:
One thing that's interesting, like a theme we saw throughout this, you look at things like the integration with other services into your contacts.
Marco:
So you can write in your address book or your contact app.
Marco:
You can see, like, all right, you can call this person on WhatsApp or whatever.
Marco:
I don't know how these – is that a phone call service ever or just messaging?
John:
Just do Skype.
Marco:
Just do Skype.
Marco:
Yeah, so now you can do that.
Marco:
They have all these little hooks everywhere that are slowly adding more places where third-party apps can hook into the system and appear native.
Marco:
If you look at something like Android or Windows, but more Android really, things are kind of like the Wild West, and there are lots of ways for apps to hook in all over the place or to be everywhere, but it's done in a very Wild West kind of risky or unstable or just kind of messy way.
Marco:
What Apple has done with iOS is slowly make a system over time in which you can integrate, and when you integrate, it's as nice as the built-in stuff.
Marco:
And they're doing this very slowly over a decade, but the result is so different from what you get on Android that
Marco:
Where on Android, like, you could do way more, especially back in the day, on day one, you could do way more, but it resulted in overall, I think, a less nice system than what we're slowly developing on iOS, where now you can integrate all sorts of cool stuff.
Marco:
You can integrate, you know, certain kinds of apps in many different places all around the OS and make it seem just like the first-party integration.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But without many of the downsides of the Android-style kind of more Wild West system.
John:
And without the downsides of the Apple approach, which is, okay, you can have some integrations, but when you, say, ask Siri to contact somebody or pull up some UI, we're always going to show you ours first.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The pitch was, oh, but most of the time when you talk to this person, you do it through WeChat, that will be the first choice.
John:
We won't say, oh, well, okay, you could add that extra integration, but that's a frill.
John:
When you contact them, any way programmatically will always present you with the Apple ones first.
John:
This ties in with the ability to delete the built-in Apple apps.
Casey:
and the potential i don't know if this is confirmed yet ability to pick different default apps for things so we know so hold on really quick before we get to that i just want to say that i am all in on the on the messages stuff i'm really excited about it and during the state of the union i forget who it was but they were talking about the sticker pack specifically and they were saying oh here look at how easy it is to build these you do need xcode but but whoever it was they said they started xcode did a new project from this new template and they said okay i'm almost done literally all they have done was made a new project
Marco:
You just like drag in the images and that's about it.
Marco:
Like there's no code.
Marco:
Like you can make a codeless sticker app.
Casey:
Which is really exciting and impressive and I'm really hopeful about that.
Casey:
But I'm also very scared that that's just going to be spam city.
John:
If you want to, you can sell images.
John:
Like I'm sure people will just upload pictures of Star Wars stuff and try to sell them until Lucasfilm or whatever.
John:
It's going to be a copyright infringement nightmare.
John:
Right.
Casey:
So leaving messages behind, I'm really enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
Some things I don't totally understand, but I think it's really great.
Casey:
What John is alluding to as summarizer in chief is some people have noticed that you can actually delete like the stock mail app that comes on iOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they're like in the app store now.
John:
And if you want to get it back, how do I get it back?
John:
Go to the app store, hit the little cloud with the downward facing arrow.
Casey:
And there's been no official documentation or talk about what that means, but it could potentially mean, and it seems like it means that you can get a different default mail app.
Casey:
We're not 100% sure about this.
John:
So say you delete the mail app.
John:
Do you have no way?
Marco:
to send mail does the mail share sheet not show up anymore and that's their solution right or like you know what happens like if you ask siri for a certain feature that requires like you know if you delete the weather app can siri still get the weather there's stuff like that like they're like the system has been built for so long to assume that these certain apps are always available right so it'll be interesting to see like how they handle all this i mean whether we're going to get the ability to change default i think is a totally separate decision that like we can we can have this system that only exists so we can delete the tips app
Casey:
yeah yeah but like let's say you like tap a mail link in a way in a mail to link in a web view yeah i just tell you handler well no i'd say there's an alert so there's a tweet by mike zornak who and we'll put this in the show notes and it's a picture that he said he got from a mail to link and it says restore mail question mark you followed a link that requires the app mail
Casey:
Which is no longer on this iPhone.
Casey:
You can restore it from the app store.
John:
But that's crappy.
John:
Like, it's a half solution.
John:
Like, yes, it's great that we can delete the tips app.
John:
Like, we're all for that, right?
John:
But if I delete mail, like the share sheet, we already have a solution to.
John:
If I delete mail and I go to share a link, the Gmail share thing will be there.
John:
Good.
John:
We're all set there.
John:
But the default comes in when, oh, I tap a mail to link.
John:
Then what happens?
John:
It's nice that it's not an error or nothing happens and it gives you a button to fix it.
John:
It would be nicer if we said, hey, I deleted the mail app for a reason because I don't use it to do my mail.
John:
Let me tell you which one I do use to do my mail.
John:
And then you come up with a protocol or an intent system or whatever that says make the Gmail app conformant with this and it can replace.
John:
And maybe they have that planned.
John:
But it could be that that dialogue is coming up because we have not detected any other application on the system that can handle the mail intent or whatever.
John:
and therefore we have to bring this dialogue up whereas when you learn about this new api in a session later this week you can make the gmail app be a stand-in mail application because that's part of it you have to to be it to fulfill the role of a default web browser mail client messages client or whatever you have to be conformant with whatever way the system communicates to you how does it launch you and say you're now supposed to be composing a message the mail app does whatever the hell it does and system integrates with it once it becomes open to third parties that has to be formalized so i would say that that dialogue doesn't tell us
John:
Anything yet other than no current applications are able to be the default mail application, I still hope that we will learn that there's an easy way for them to do that.
John:
And that would be great.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
We are pretty much out of time for now.
Casey:
But before we go, Marco, how do you feel about the keynote and the State of the Union, which we didn't get to talk too much about?
Casey:
One thumb up, two thumbs up, two thumbs down.
Casey:
How do you feel?
Marco:
Overall, I think two thumbs up.
Marco:
We're going to see, you know, there's a lot of stuff that there's still the question mark of like, well, if that really works well, it'll be great.
Marco:
I think there's a lot of that.
Marco:
Or like, you know, we're kind of guessing how certain things are going to be implemented.
Marco:
So as we find out more about the details of these things, obviously, you know, my opinion might be refined.
Marco:
But overall, I'm very happy with this.
Marco:
And overall, I think it's really good.
Marco:
I mean, there were some things that we were hoping for that we didn't get, but I think we got a bunch of really big stuff.
Marco:
It's going to be really nice.
Marco:
So overall, for me, two thumbs up.
John:
John, I really like that, you know, so they pre-leaked basically no hardware, so they prepared us for that, which is, again, disappointing, but, you know, fine.
John:
I like that in the absence of hardware, they now, they had a four-platform structure to focus on, and they took us through each of the platforms, and...
John:
the kind of the good keynotes especially about software are the ones where you find yourself saying finally yes that thing that thing that's been annoying me yes you have addressed it and every single one of the sections had things that were all like yes good finally i am excited to do that that has annoyed me for a long time and you've solved it or i'm excited that you recognize like it's fun to see them recognize a problem like with the watch os thing that they didn't just say oh and we tweak things to make it a little faster it's like we we've
John:
we feel your pain we understand we didn't do a good job we're taking another run at it and of course the biggest finally of all the file system which i'm so tickled that they pre-announced even though it's still not coming in 2017 until 2017 is exactly what i talked about last week i am super happy about that um and i guess we'll just all wait patiently for the hardware that's going to replace my now unsupported mac pro
Casey:
No, I think two thumbs up.
Casey:
I thought it was really good.
Casey:
The only problem I had with the presentation was the thing I was most amped about during the keynote was the watch stuff.
Casey:
And so not that it was downhill from there, but I thought that was the most impressive stuff of everything.
Casey:
I mean, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm just not I don't enjoy the file systems as much as you do.
Casey:
They revamped emoji for you.
Casey:
They put emoji everywhere for you.
John:
They made them three times bigger.
Casey:
All right, fine.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
I feel like I'm on top four again.
Casey:
You're arguing with me, but you're right.
Casey:
So, okay.
Casey:
But no matter what, I still land on two thumbs up.
Casey:
I thought it was really, really good.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
Although I completely agree with a little bit of what each of you said.
Casey:
I completely agree, Marco, that it's a lot of assuming this works.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But we have no reason to believe it won't.
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
And I agree with what John said about, oh, finally, this is a thing.
Casey:
Finally, this is fixed.
Casey:
I think you're absolutely right.
Casey:
You nailed it.
John:
And that's like a mean way of saying...
John:
they had things that people liked they announced things that people like lots and lots of things that people like big things small things i mean that's what they're supposed to do but it's like it didn't feel like they were lacking in any of the platforms there were tons of things that uh you know good things we just had an episode was like wc is not santa claus but they still bring a lot of little gifts you know that's how presentation is supposed to work and like marco said we could unwrap them and there's a dog turd in there and we'll see but
John:
but but for now we're like there are many great gifts if something is for everybody under this tree of wwdc and in a way the hardware getting the hardware out of the picture just stops us from talking about hardware and we're just like all right all your platforms have new better things that's that is the this is the blessing of waiting all year and holding all this stuff and holding it in for one big burst is that we get to be cranky right after the point wwc is like oh they did have a bunch of nice stuff for us
Casey:
Actually, I think, John, if we've learned anything from today, it's that if it is a dog turd that's in that gift box, it's actually a dog turd emoji at three times the size.
Marco:
And it's happy.
Casey:
And it's a very happy dog turd.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
And thanks for all the live listeners who tuned in.
Marco:
We had 925 live listeners today.
Marco:
Holy crap.
Marco:
Seriously?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
So that might be a record for us.
Marco:
And thanks, everybody.
Marco:
And we'll cover a lot more this next week.
Marco:
So we'll talk to you then.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Thank you, people.
Casey:
It's very kind of you to tune in.
Casey:
And I'm sorry we weren't in the chat room.
Casey:
And I'm sorry we're basically hanging up on you.
Casey:
But we got to go.
Casey:
See you later.
Casey:
I can't believe this worked.
Casey:
Yeah, me neither.