You’re Not a Mac App Yet
Casey:
Hey, guys.
Casey:
There's a lot of people here.
Casey:
Hi, everybody.
Casey:
How we doing?
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
This is wild.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, we got to start the show.
Casey:
All right, so we have to start with follow-up, as we always do.
Casey:
So I quit my job.
So that's good.
Thank you.
Marco:
Anyway, so it's WWDC time.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
I swear we will talk about that, just not tonight.
Marco:
Maybe not on this show.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, it's DubDub.
Casey:
No, we're serious.
Casey:
No, we're done.
Casey:
So DubDub, it's now.
Casey:
It's happening.
Casey:
The keynote was good, I think.
Casey:
We'll talk about it.
Casey:
For a boring year, I have, I was going to do a visual aid, but that's not useful.
Casey:
Remember, this is a podcast.
Casey:
So there was apparently nothing happening this year, yet I have three pages of notes about nothing, as it turns out.
Marco:
It turns out nothing, there was a lot of nothings and a lot of somethings.
Marco:
And yeah, I honestly, we did our predictions last week, and we talked about what we expected and everything.
Marco:
And even though there was no new hardware, which is always the flashy, easy thing that we all want all the time, which is kind of unreasonable, but we all like hardware.
Marco:
Even though there was no hardware, it was still a really good WWDC.
Marco:
And there's still a lot of stuff to keep us busy, at least a lot of us busy this summer and into the fall.
Marco:
Do you need help?
Marco:
I know a guy.
Marco:
Yeah, my app doesn't seem tested enough.
Marco:
It doesn't have any prescriptions.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what it is.
Casey:
But I guess we can try to do this in keynote order and we'll probably bounce around a little bit.
Marco:
Let's do it.
Marco:
Let's start with that migration video.
Marco:
That was awesome.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm glad.
Casey:
So I was scared because the internet connection in there, I know this is the first world problems, but the internet connection in there was terrible on my phone, on my laptop, whatever.
Casey:
So I'm tweeting saying, oh, this was enjoyable, and waiting to just see this wall of tweets about, oh my god, that was so stupid.
Casey:
I can't believe they did that.
Casey:
This is lame.
Casey:
And I actually didn't see any of it.
John:
I can give you some of that now if you want.
John:
I don't think it was stupid.
John:
So I kind of knew what the theme of this video would be.
John:
And it's smart, because you've got a bunch of developers in the audience.
John:
And if you include developers in the video, like we knew some people in the video, people in the audience will feel like they're part of the experience.
John:
It's not pandering so much.
John:
It's like, how could that room full of developers dislike a video that featured developers?
John:
And it was silly.
John:
And they got David Attenborough to the voice and everything.
John:
I try to have a good attitude about it, but I also think if you wanted to game this and say, what video can we show that the room is guaranteed to like, you show that video.
John:
So I do think it was a good video, but I also kind of felt like I was played.
John:
We were all played.
John:
Did anyone hate the video in this room?
John:
No, only you.
John:
One person.
John:
One person over there hated the video.
John:
But who was not going to like it?
John:
We'll get to the video at the end, too.
John:
It's smart.
John:
Smart Apple PR.
John:
Good job.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, I really enjoyed it.
Casey:
And in fact, I saw that you had retweeted something I'd said.
Casey:
And I was very nervous for a fleeting moment that that was like a, how did this dummy like this video kind of retweet?
Casey:
Like one of those retweets are not endorsement kind of retweets.
Casey:
But then I realized that you liked it as well.
Casey:
Everybody loved the video.
Casey:
How could you not love it?
Casey:
How could you not love it?
Marco:
I would say best Apple video in their events in years.
Casey:
What was the one with the blind gentleman walking through the woods?
Casey:
I thought that one was really good.
Marco:
That was excellent, too.
Marco:
But this one, I think, played to the audience so well that, like, you know, if you were that kind of person to enjoy poking fun at ourselves and knowing, like, the developer stereotype, this was awesome.
John:
Well, that's my other complaint about it, is that it leaned pretty heavily on, like, oh, we're basement dwellers who are hiding in our houses and don't go outside and the sun hurts us, which is, you know, it's the stereotype, but it's not...
John:
Not everybody.
John:
Some developers are riding surfboards, making iOS apps, base jumping.
John:
They're doing all sorts of things.
John:
What developers are those?
John:
He's sitting in the front row right here.
John:
Look at him.
John:
He's a rock climber.
John:
Anyway, I mean, yeah, it's fine.
Casey:
No, I thought it was good.
Casey:
So then we start with iOS because that's the only thing that matters these days.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
And perform it.
Casey:
Who clapped for that?
Casey:
Did I hear somebody clap for that?
What?
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Have fun doing your iOS development and Xcode for iPad.
Casey:
Yeah, where's that Xcode for iPad?
Casey:
How's that feel, Teach?
Casey:
Anyway, so we start with performance, which I was very happy to hear that performance is a real priority, which is great.
Casey:
And obviously they said iOS 11 goes all the way back to these 2013 era devices or whatever it was, and you can kind of see where this is going.
Casey:
And apparently iOS 12 will go to the same set of devices, which I think is great and impressive.
Casey:
I'll believe it when I see it, but hopefully the Apple engineers are starting to carry these ancient phones, which I kind of feel bad for them.
Casey:
Well, it's not even ancient.
Casey:
I say that jokingly, but it's not even that old.
Casey:
But anyway, I hope these engineers are carrying these old phones so they can see what the day-to-day experience is like and really live it.
Casey:
And I feel like I've heard some rumblings that that's the case, but one way or another, concentrating on performance helps everybody.
Casey:
Even those of us with brand new phones, it helps us too.
Marco:
I think also there was some degree of handling and damage control from the battery gate thing and from iOS 11 adoption being not that high relative to how long it's been out compared to previous releases.
John:
Yeah, the phone throttling is what you're talking about with the battery thing, right?
Marco:
Yeah, the battery throttling, yeah.
Marco:
And for years we've had this problem of
Marco:
Old phones run new OSs really slowly.
Marco:
And that really hurts Apple and the ecosystem in the long run because it makes people not want to upgrade their software and makes them less happy with their devices over time.
Marco:
So anything they can do to fix that is very important.
Marco:
And it has seemed like, until fairly recently, it seems like that has not been enough of a priority.
Marco:
So for this to be, like, the very first thing they tell us in this conference, like, that's a pretty good sign.
Marco:
I also took it as a sign that I didn't have that much else in iOS 12.
John:
But it turned out to be kind of wrong because they did go through a lot of things.
John:
But to start on that, it's like, oh, so this is the OS where we just make things tighter and faster and remove bugs, which is great.
John:
I think that's a good idea.
John:
But I got that signal.
John:
Also, the adoption thing, it was like...
John:
First, they did the 50% in seven weeks, which is a weird measure.
John:
Like, who cares when you get to 50%, right?
John:
And then they did the other one.
John:
It was like 81% year.
John:
And isn't that low?
John:
Like, it wasn't like 10 in the 90s and 9.
John:
Like, it seemed a little bit low.
John:
And I think part of that is the fear of like, oh, I upgraded the OS and now my phone is slow.
John:
So they're definitely counteracting that.
John:
And regardless of that also being good PR, it's the right thing to do.
John:
So I'm glad they're doing it.
John:
But did they actually talk about bug fixes, though?
Marco:
No, they just assumed.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Marco:
Right, that's the thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it was all about performance.
Marco:
And my favorite thing was at the end of that segment, Craig said, only after mentioning performance, he said, if this was all to be done with iOS 12, we think this would be a great release.
Marco:
And the whole room laughed.
Marco:
The whole room of people that we were watching it with, everyone burst out laughing because it was so... It was like, really?
Marco:
That's... It kind of was...
Marco:
That segment was kind of the beginning of, I think, a running problem throughout this presentation.
Marco:
Granted, I like the presentation's content overall.
Marco:
I like what we got today.
Marco:
I like what was announced.
Marco:
I like what they've been working on.
Marco:
But the presentation seemed a little messy, and it seemed like it really lacked editing.
Marco:
And this was one example, this whole segment, where it really did seem like they were padding it.
Marco:
It seemed like they didn't think they had enough to say, and so they were just padding everything.
Marco:
And Craig going through, here's all the releases we've done for the last few years.
Marco:
that one, and that one, and that one.
John:
They're just providing context.
John:
I mean, if you want to yell something, padding, I would say the Lego demo.
John:
There's always something like that.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, demo padding's always a problem.
Marco:
But, you know, it did seem like there was a lot of, like, just, you know, actual, like, intentional time-wasting going on.
John:
I would characterize that as this is what you do if you're not in a rush.
John:
Like, remember the last one or whatever where they were in a super big rush where they just got to go, go, go?
John:
This is what they would do if they had more time, and they had more time this year.
Yeah.
Casey:
So then we got AR stuff, and is it USDZ?
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
Is that right?
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Universal scene descriptions.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't have anything particular to say about that.
Marco:
So I didn't really get it during the keynote, but in the State of the Union, what clarified for me was that this is just like a file format that the OS will be able to look at and deal with everywhere.
Marco:
Safari, messages, mail, everything.
Marco:
So
Marco:
AR in general is a thing that I'm not that excited about because I haven't really seen any compelling killer apps for it yet, except measuring things, which Apple just Sherlocked amazingly.
Marco:
But I think what finally clicked for me is the idea of like, like I was just doing backpack shopping, like we all do.
Marco:
And one of the...
Marco:
And one of the issues I had was I never, it was hard to tell from pictures online, like how big is that?
Marco:
And this is the problem I always get when trying to like shop for things online, like how big or small something is, it's often hard to tell scale online.
Marco:
And it was kind of cool to think like, what if in a few years, like on product pages of online stores, in addition to having all the little photo thumbnails and you can make the photo bigger, what if one of them was a used file and I could just download, I could like view that and see like how big that is.
Marco:
on a table or next to my existing backpack on the floor in my room.
Marco:
The idea of being able to visualize objects, to get an idea of scale, like when you're just seeing something online, that I think would be a really killer feature of that.
Marco:
It might take a while before we're ever at that point where all the retailers have these things for all their products and everything like that.
Marco:
But if we get there, that would be really cool.
John:
It's coming soon.
John:
And in a couple of years, we'll get back to that, what is it, the Amazon...
John:
show, whatever one that lets you try and clothes, like you want the backpack on your back.
John:
So ARKid in two years will let you put the backpack on your back and have someone like take a video of you and see how the backpack looks on you.
John:
Same thing with clothes, not just have like, oh, here's a shirt, this is how big it would be, but like map it onto your body.
John:
We're not there this year, but come back in three years and see if we're not mapping clothes onto our bodies.
John:
We're already putting Memoji things on our faces, so.
John:
Hey, that was awesome.
Casey:
We'll get to that.
Casey:
And so one other thing to mention about ARKit 2 is you can have shared experiences, which I can see being pretty neat.
Casey:
And they did that demo with like, I forget what the name of the game was.
Marco:
A slingshot thing?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
It was basically like a slingshot thing or whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter what the name of it was.
Casey:
And interestingly,
Casey:
After the keynote, when all of the attendees were getting lunch, they actually had a couple of stations where they had tables and iPads, and you could actually go and play the game.
Casey:
Now, as with all things, the line was forever long, so I didn't try it, but I saw this happening.
Casey:
It did look kind of cool.
Casey:
I could see how that would be neat.
Casey:
Yeah, if you have a pool table-sized table in your house.
John:
Those tables were huge.
John:
Like, the slingshot table was huge, the Lego table.
John:
Who has a table that big?
John:
It's like King Arthur's table.
John:
Well, not only that.
Casey:
Not only that, but an empty table that big.
Casey:
That isn't just like a runway.
John:
Yeah, it's just like a giant and has wood grain on it so the AR kit can pick it up.
John:
I don't know what kind of houses these people have, but there's no clear horizontal surface that size anywhere in my house, including the floor.
Marco:
You've got to fight really hard to get your little phone spot on the door.
Marco:
That's all I want.
Marco:
That's all you need.
Casey:
Then photos.
Casey:
Photos, there's going to be share back suggestions, which I thought was really cool.
Casey:
So if you share a series of photos with a friend or whatever, and it stands to reason that that friend will have some photos from the same event, I guess we'll look at the geotag data and the timestamp and whatnot and try to figure out, based on your own photo library, do you have things that maybe you should share back?
Casey:
So if I took pictures of this at some point and I sent them to you guys, then your phone would automatically say, hey,
Casey:
Do you want to give this back to Casey because it seems like it's relevant?
Casey:
And I think that's super cool.
Casey:
And that, to me, is a really great example of Apple doing the things that Apple does best because it's intelligence that doesn't necessitate going and taking all of your data, putting it in the cloud, and then having it come back.
Casey:
It's all done on device.
Casey:
And there's no reason that shouldn't be possible.
John:
So I thought that was really neat.
John:
So Gmail, if I'm getting this right, Gmail has something like that where when you're emailing somebody, it says, do you want to also email Marco and Casey this information?
John:
And I think that's incredibly dangerous because I'm a voice.
John:
to bring and accidentally click and send something somewhere I'm not supposed to.
John:
I get why people like it, but I worry about UI that suggests actions that I'm not actually taking that I could accidentally trigger.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
But this was an additive thing, right?
Casey:
What I find is in iOS messages, I get a lot of the same.
Casey:
I'll want to email maybe, or not email, I want to message maybe just you, John, and then it'll offer Marco as another person.
Casey:
And I feel like that is so in line with what I'm doing that I either absentmindedly or slip and tap
John:
But then when you're saying snarky things about me, and you accidentally brush my name, I'm not going to get the message.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
That's the last thing I want.
Casey:
And so what ends up happening is, I have to pay even closer attention, but this looked like it was more additive, where it was a different piece of UI, not exactly where you were already operating, if that makes sense.
Casey:
So I echo what you're saying, but I think in this case it'll be OK.
Casey:
That was the only thing about photos that I was really jazzed by.
Casey:
I hear there's a really good e-book about the photos app that you should check out sometime.
Casey:
If you ever wanted to know anything about photos, look up Jason Snell.
Casey:
That guy knows a couple things.
Casey:
But was there anything else useful about photos?
Marco:
I think a lot of people were pointing out that Google Photos has done a lot of this stuff either this year or last year, and that's true, but a lot of us don't use Google Photos or don't want to use Google Photos, and so it's nice to have that option here.
Marco:
The only thing that I was a little disappointed by is that they didn't seem to mention, which means we probably haven't gotten, syncing of the image recognition data between your devices.
Marco:
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
Marco:
Didn't that come last year?
Marco:
No, last year they would sync the corrections you'd make.
John:
The ones you confirmed, that was all they were syncing.
Marco:
Like any data you entered, they would sync that, but they wouldn't sync the baseline recognition.
Marco:
So every time you get a new device, you still have to wait for it to burn your battery all day while it's doing all the recognition.
Marco:
So that part, I really hope that we do get that at some point.
Marco:
It should have already been there, but oh well, it seems like we're not getting that.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's a solid feature release, I think.
Marco:
Doesn't blow me away, but otherwise, pretty good.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Microsoft.
Marco:
Microsoft is right here in San Jose this week to support all of you iOS developers and all of our favorite podcasts.
Marco:
They are actually right here at AltConf again, and they're also sponsoring this show, the talk show live tomorrow, and RelayFM's Connected Live on Wednesday.
Marco:
Microsoft, they're cool.
Marco:
They sponsor a whole community, and I really appreciate that.
Marco:
So anyway, they believe any developer should be able to build, deploy, and scale your apps without having to worry about managing services or underlying infrastructure.
Marco:
So whether you are an Objective-C or a Swift developer, Azure has what you need to ship your apps faster and with more confidence.
Marco:
There's all kinds of stuff that you can do with Azure.
Marco:
So for example, you can build in the cloud, you can test on real devices, you can automatically distribute to beta testers and the app store and monitor your apps with real-time crash reports and analytics.
Marco:
You can even add things like pre-built AI services into your apps to make them more intelligent.
Marco:
And if you're, for instance, a game developer, you can get a complete backend platform for your iOS games with real-time analytics, power management, live ops, and more.
Marco:
So here's what you need to do.
Marco:
They've set up a page where you can learn all about building intelligent iOS apps that scale.
Marco:
That's aka.ms slash iOS and Azure.
Marco:
So that's once again, aka.ms slash iOS and Azure.
Marco:
So very special thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring our live show and really our entire community of developers and podcast fans for years.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Microsoft for sponsoring our show.
Thank you.
Casey:
So imagine you're me, and you're sitting in the keynote, and you're sitting next to Federico.
Casey:
And then we start hearing about Siri shortcuts.
Casey:
And we see this icon that just looks like it may relate to some app that Federico has used from time to time and maybe has evangelized a teeny bit.
Casey:
And suddenly it becomes clear to Federico that we are looking at workflow, but better.
Casey:
His eyes were saucers, you guys.
Casey:
It was magical to be next to it.
Casey:
So we have Siri shortcuts, which is basically workflow, but well, not first party, but first party and system integrated, which looks amazing.
Casey:
I am super excited about this.
Marco:
And fully integrated with Siri, too, because it's a pretty massive upgrade.
Marco:
And we'll talk about the Siri shortcuts thing more generally, but the shortcuts app, so there's the API of making these shortcuts for the app.
Marco:
Then there's the shortcuts app that users can use, which that's basically workflow.
Marco:
And it answers the question of why did Apple buy Workflow?
Marco:
What has that team been doing?
Marco:
And the unfortunate answer to those things is, well, they got absorbed and they did something boring.
Marco:
In this case, this was a good answer.
Marco:
They kept doing awesome things with Workflow, and now it's part of the system in a really great-seeming way.
Marco:
I haven't actually tried it yet, but it looks awesome, and I think this is going to be great.
John:
I'm confused by Siri, the shortcuts thing, because I can't tell...
John:
how powerful it is or isn't.
John:
The demos, I still don't quite understand it.
John:
I kept thinking of your use case because it's the one we talk about on the show so much.
John:
You can have these little save series shortcut things in your app camped out so that you can make a shortcut to that location to perform an action, but does that mean...
John:
If I wanted to tell Siri to play an episode of a podcast, I'd have to start an overcast and hit a button there and go into it.
John:
I'm very confused by it.
Marco:
So the API basically looks like, and I haven't played with this yet, but it looks like I, as the app developer, can tell the system what you're doing at any point.
Marco:
And I can also, like in like a UI or NS activity, NS user activity, there we go.
Marco:
user activity, and the system can index those, and then I, as the app developer, can expose a vocabulary to the system.
Marco:
So I could maybe do things like expose a vocabulary of all of your playlist and subscribe podcast names with the word play in front of them.
Marco:
So I could have you be able to tell Siri, play ATP, and, well, if that was actually the title of our show, that would work.
John:
You could have the vocabulary.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I'll have to hard code that exception.
Marco:
But otherwise, play Accidental Tech Podcast, and then it should then be able to launch my app with that as the trigger.
Marco:
So that actually, you know, last week I was kind of asking for some kind of generic action, verb, object kind of system.
Marco:
I think this gets us a lot of the way there.
Marco:
If this works the way I hope and think it does,
Marco:
This is a huge upgrade for SiriKit and for the usability of apps with Siri in lots of ways that interact with the Siri watch face and the suggestion of the lock screen and stuff like that.
Marco:
I think this, to me, is the most exciting feature they announced today.
John:
When they did that thing where it's like, I'm heading home or whatever, and they did a series of 20 steps of setting up the HomeKit thing and turning on music and doing all that stuff.
John:
that seems cool to me and i i fear for the automated the people who are into automation so much because this may be like a honey pot for them and they will just find themselves setting up these crazy automations that but i also started thinking like a rube goldberg machine and that once you once you initiate this action the boot knocks over the fish bowl and the cat chases the fish and the egg and like it's this series of things happen that you don't have any way to like pause or revoke certain sections of it or stop and it's just all gonna happen and so
John:
I fear that you make some kind of shortcut that does 27 steps and accidentally initiate it and your whole house goes crazy.
John:
But this is version one.
John:
I think if you use cautiously and if it works the way you describe, I think it'll provide a lot of extra functionality.
John:
But we'll see what the real enthusiasts, let's say, do with it.
Marco:
I mean, that's the best thing.
Marco:
It's like, this is exactly the kind of thing that nerds both love and probably shouldn't have.
Marco:
We're going to like, you know, like somebody's going to come over to our house and be like, check this out.
Marco:
Go to DEF CON 3.
Yeah, right.
Casey:
The thing I want to know about it, though, and this is the one disadvantage of doing the show on the very first day, is that it seemed like, to your point, it was just NSU user activity, but it didn't seem like there was too much extra specifically for Siri involved.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I haven't had a chance to look at the API, so I might be getting this dead wrong.
Casey:
But it was in the State of the Union, I believe, that they said, hey, look, one line of code where you just flip a Boolean is true is
Casey:
And you will be opted into Siri looking at the things that your users do.
Casey:
And the way I read it was that it would look at, you know, oh, I play ATP all the time, right?
Casey:
Anyway, I play ATP all the time.
Marco:
Well, you play Accidental Tech Podcast all the time.
Casey:
You get my point.
Casey:
Or maybe in some other app, you know, I do the same operation over and over and over again.
Casey:
And then it would see that this operation that has been opted into this, you know, Siri shortcuts thing is something that you do a lot at the same time every day.
Marco:
And it would suggest it.
Casey:
What was that thing?
John:
Proactive or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I think they call it just Siri suggestions now, but it was what we were going to call it proactive.
Marco:
So there's another API.
Marco:
They said you can opt into that, but then there's also the new Siri Intense, an expansion of that API.
Marco:
So this is one of those questions we'll have to actually answer next week.
Marco:
But it does look like it's a pretty good-looking system.
Marco:
I really am very excited.
John:
Underscore, did you implement this already?
John:
Tell us how it works.
John:
He's over there.
Marco:
Not yet, okay.
Marco:
Wait an hour or two.
Casey:
By the end of the show, he'll have like three apps that use the system already.
Casey:
Yeah, by next week, I expect it in the App Store.
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
So then we talked a little bit about apps, which by and large, I didn't get that much that really revved my engine, except they are letting third-party mapping applications use CarPlay, which as a person who has a CarPlay car, that is magical.
Casey:
And this means...
Casey:
This is one of those times that the curmudgeon Casey thinks, oh, Apple would never allow that because, oh, it's Apple Maps or nothing.
Casey:
You know, Apple Maps is perfect if you live in the Bay Area.
Casey:
Why wouldn't you want Apple Maps?
Casey:
But in reality... That's how they talk.
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly how they talk.
Casey:
You just got to throw in a groovy here and there.
Casey:
That's how California works, right?
Casey:
You should put an avocado on it.
John:
With an avocado on it.
John:
This is called not pandering to the crowd.
Casey:
This is the opposite of pandering to the crowd.
Casey:
Most of them probably aren't from here.
Casey:
But anyway, having used CarPlay a fair bit in Aaron's car, I actually really, really like it.
Casey:
And I've been surprised at how much I like it.
Casey:
But it is infuriating if we ever try to use it for anything that's more than a very short trip, that we can't use Waze or Google Maps or something like that.
Casey:
Because especially Waze carries advantages that I think no other mapping application really does.
Casey:
Having Apple allow third-party mapping apps onto CarPlay I think is an unbelievable improvement and will dramatically change the usefulness of that entire feature in my mind.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
It's one of those things, it seems like every year we get one or two things that we thought Apple would never do.
Marco:
This was one of those things.
Marco:
I never expected them to open up the display of CarPlay to other navigation apps.
Marco:
That seemed totally out of the question and they did it.
Marco:
Got to give them credit for that.
Marco:
It's going to be awesome.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm really stoked about that.
Casey:
They talked about a lot with Do Not Disturb and associated technologies, which seemed really good.
Casey:
And I was really excited about it until they started showing you graphs about how addicted you are to your phone.
Casey:
And this is something I don't want to know.
Casey:
Because I'm going to be really embarrassed and upset about how much I use my phone.
Casey:
And Aaron is going to be so unbelievably vindicated it is not even funny.
Casey:
So this is going to be a tough fall around the List household, I am quite certain.
Casey:
But as much as I joke, I think the features are really great.
Casey:
And it seemed like they were very well thought out.
Casey:
They're showing you useful data in what appeared to be useful ways.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Again, I joke, but I do think I have an unhealthy relationship with my phone, and I do want to get better about putting my phone away and not paying attention to it when I really shouldn't be.
Casey:
And I think that in a lot of ways, this is going to be a really great help for people like me who recognize that I've got problems, but I hope that this will enable me to solve them.
Casey:
And things like having, what do they call it, an app timeout or an app limit?
Casey:
I forget what the term was.
Marco:
Yeah, there was an app timeout.
Marco:
We call it app limits.
Casey:
OK.
Casey:
So I can only use Twitter for like an hour a day or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
I think that from... Even though it's too long.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
But that's like 1 24th of how much time I spend on Twitter in a day.
Casey:
But be that as it may.
Casey:
I think that this is, I think it's going to be a really great feature.
Casey:
And I hope that when it comes out, I pay attention to it and I stick with it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Self-imposed security state sounds great.
John:
But I can imagine kids watching this video and going, oh no.
Yeah.
John:
Because what kind of kid wants this kind of graph and limits?
John:
If they make that easy, as it appears to be, to be able to apply those limits or even to just get a readout on them, kids are going to hate this.
John:
Yep, my kids are going to hate this.
John:
Not that I know.
John:
I already know what it is.
John:
It's like 99% YouTube.
John:
Maybe I'll be surprised.
John:
Maybe they use the calculator sometimes.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
The whole angle of this, too, of working it in not only as a self-productivity slash time management tool, but also working in two parental controls and to have parents able to set limits and everything.
Marco:
This is an area of features that, especially Amazon did pretty well with their tablets for a while, and Apple was kind of getting ripped over the coals for not doing the same thing.
Marco:
Well, they did it now, and it looks pretty awesome.
Marco:
It looks pretty full-featured.
Marco:
So it's another example of Apple kind of coming late to something, but then doing a really good job of it, it seems.
Marco:
So I hope it works out.
Marco:
And it looks like a pretty rich feature set.
John:
So it looks pretty good.
John:
And Google just beat them.
John:
We talked about their digital well-being thing that Google did.
John:
And this is the case where it's like they got to do it and say it all first, and Apple had to come after and say, we're also doing that.
John:
Apple's take was a little bit different, but still configuring your devices to stop you from using them, which apparently is very popular.
John:
So Apple's smart to do it.
Marco:
It was also nice to have Apple's focused more on apps and how you spend your time on your phone.
Marco:
Not necessarily like, you should spend less time on this device that we make all of our money from, but you should maybe know how you're spending that time.
John:
They did have a how often you pick up your phone.
John:
Regardless of what app you use, how many times do you sleep and wake your phone?
John:
How much are you taking your phone out of your pocket?
John:
I feel like that was the overall thing.
John:
It's not just about the apps, it's about don't be on your phone.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I thought it was really good.
Casey:
Another thing that was related to that, I think, or around the same time in the keynote was we started talking about notifications.
Casey:
And one thing that we've all been asking for, and they kind of just flashed on screen and then didn't really make much of it, but I really am interested in is, I think they called it tuning notifications.
Casey:
Instant tuning.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So I don't want to see these notifications anymore.
Casey:
And right in the context of the notification itself, you can just bloop bloop and say, don't ever bother me about this again.
Casey:
Or I didn't get a chance.
Casey:
I didn't get a good look at what the options were.
John:
There was two options.
John:
One was like don't make noises for this thing and one was don't show this.
John:
And honestly, I'm surprised it took them so long to do this feature because how many of us, you see a notification but you can't, you're like, oh, I'd have to go into settings and find where that app is and scroll, scroll, scroll and find it and turn off notifications.
John:
Right there is when you want to take action against it.
John:
Although, they did say press into.
John:
Does that mean it's like force press?
John:
Yeah, I wrote that down.
Marco:
So Craig said a couple of times, he said press in instead of saying 3D Touch.
Marco:
Maybe they finally figured out 3D Touch is a terrible name.
John:
But if it's 3D Touch, nobody's going to know that feature exists.
John:
That's true.
John:
So you're going to have to tell everyone in your family, if you see a notification you don't like, press really hard on your phone screen.
John:
Not that hard, just a little bit.
John:
And then dismiss that thing.
John:
And they'll be like, oh, that's great.
John:
And then the next question will be, why does Apple do that?
John:
Why do you have to press hard?
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
There's no room for a button.
Casey:
There's no room for anything.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It looked really good, though.
Casey:
And that's one of those things that I only got a glance during the keynote, but I'm really looking forward to seeing more about that.
Casey:
And I think it's not that clever inherently, but I think it's well done, and it's the right way to handle that problem.
Casey:
Additionally, they're grouping notifications now because...
Casey:
As I've gotten slightly better about not using my phone constantly, I will occasionally come back to my phone to 3,000 notifications.
Casey:
And I actually have tuned a lot of my notifications already to go away.
Casey:
And I'll still have what feels like, well, yeah, maybe not.
Casey:
But I guess I've got a long way to go.
Casey:
But I will still come back to just a mountain of notifications.
Casey:
And it's just, where do I go from here?
Casey:
Like, this is not helpful or useful.
Casey:
How do I even know what's the most important thing on this list?
John:
Because if they group by app, does that help you?
Casey:
Potentially, because at least I can scan and see, okay, which of these apps is the most important, which I will inevitably conclude Twitter, but it really is probably iMessage or something like that.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I think that was really good.
Casey:
And there was something else, like Deliver Quietly, I thought was really cool.
Casey:
I think, John, you mentioned that a second ago.
Marco:
It would go straight to Notification Center and not show up as a loud, alerted thing.
John:
They're shuffling all the deck chairs in this Titanic, but it's like...
John:
Like the thing where I don't want to, you know, my phone wakes me up in the middle of the night and I want to see all the notifications around, you know, right?
John:
So hide them all until the morning.
John:
They're still there.
John:
They're still going to be there.
John:
Oh, we have a button when you want to see them.
John:
I guess, like, I don't know.
John:
I don't know if this is appealing to people, but like the notification is still going to be there in the morning.
John:
I don't want to be bombarded with them in the morning.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't have a good read on it.
John:
people's relationships with their phones, I guess.
Marco:
I think you could compare it a lot to RSS readers where a lot of times people go through this cycle with RSS readers where they would start using an RSS reader.
Marco:
They'd start cleaning because it was too overwhelming before.
Marco:
They'd start cleaning and they would subscribe to like 50 high traffic feeds.
Marco:
And then two days later, they would have 10,000 unread items and they would say, RSS readers are too hard to manage.
Marco:
I'm overwhelmed.
Marco:
The actual solution to that is
Marco:
use some self-control with the feeds you subscribe to.
Marco:
But that wasn't a good enough solution for a lot of people.
Marco:
A lot of people are like, but I want all of this sometimes, but not other times.
Marco:
And you, app, magically figure it out.
Marco:
So notifications, I think, are a similar thing, where people want a lot of notifications.
Marco:
Most people are not like me.
Marco:
Most people don't cut them down to the bone.
Marco:
most people get too many notifications.
Marco:
But what they want to do about that is not to turn off an entire app's notifications.
Marco:
What they want is for there to somehow be a more manageable setup to this.
Marco:
And so, you know, I have a hard time understanding that because that's not how I use my phone, the same way I never had a problem with RSS reader overload.
Marco:
That's not everybody.
Marco:
Most people have this problem of notification overload and don't deal with it like the, you know, the quote, correct way.
Marco:
So the system has to accommodate that, accommodate the way people actually use their phones.
John:
This has made a new form of anxiety, though.
John:
Now, when you wake up in the middle of the night and look at your phone and you don't see any notifications, you're wondering, I wonder how many notifications are hidden.
John:
Did I just get a text from my mother saying somebody died?
John:
What's going on?
John:
That's something you worry about every single night?
John:
My goodness.
John:
I don't worry about it at all.
John:
I'm saying if you're waking up and you're like, oh, I see these notifications, I now have to sit up and text people at 2 a.m., aren't you also wondering what you're not seeing?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I obviously don't know.
Casey:
I think for me, so having a
Casey:
an infant at home there are times when i'll pick up my phone at like three in the morning and just want to know what time it is and inevitably because i have no self-control i'll see oh mike has already been up for three hours and he sent me like 13 messages about something important and so i might as well answer them and so then the next thing i know it's like five in the morning and i've been up for two hours and i'm gonna and i blame it on mike but really the reality of the situation is it's all my
John:
fault.
John:
But imagine that you had a baby monitor notification too.
John:
You'd want those to go through.
John:
I think we still need more flexibility.
John:
Just grouping by app, it's an improvement.
John:
It's a step in the right direction, but I think there's still a lot more that can be done in terms of prioritizing notifications and setting up rules and help set up a workflow or whatever.
John:
We didn't get that.
Marco:
It's called a shortcut, John.
Marco:
There was also Do Not Disturb enhancements.
Marco:
It didn't seem like there was a lot of enhancement to it, but there was some, and some, you know, for such an incredibly basic system that we had before, some enhancement is nice.
Marco:
And they were clever.
Marco:
Yeah, like it was like, you know, it would read your calendar, and so one of the options you would get when you turn it on is Do Not Disturb until the end of this calendar event, or until this evening, or for one hour, or for, like, if you leave a geofence area.
Marco:
Those are all clever things.
Marco:
I wish the system was still a little bit more under your control and a little more powerful, but those are all welcome.
Marco:
It's better than nothing.
Casey:
I thought it was really good.
Casey:
There were clever examples.
Casey:
I think they said in the keynote, do not disturb until you leave the movie theater, which I thought was a great example, because presumably you don't want to be that person who's getting all sorts of messages and whatnot in the midst of a movie.
Casey:
The phone should be intelligent enough to know you're at a frigging movie theater, so when you leave the movie theater, that
Casey:
That might be an appropriate time to start letting you see these notifications.
John:
I feel like this is kind of like self-driving cars where we're in this uncomfortable, weird middle period where it can't do everything for you.
John:
People don't have the expectation that I will just have my phone, I won't touch it, and when I wander into a movie theater, it'll go to Do Not Disturb, it'll silence itself, and when I leave, it'll turn back on, it'll hide things.
John:
It'll do everything for me because it knows.
John:
We're not there.
John:
People don't expect that.
John:
But we have these features that are close to that that will suggest
John:
If you use this feature, it makes it easy to do that.
John:
But you still have to initiate it.
John:
So I wonder how long it will be before our phones get smart enough to be like you said, where they do all that stuff for you.
John:
But right now, we always have to nudge it.
John:
Like, do the thing.
John:
I'm in the movie.
John:
Do the movie thing.
John:
Maybe I can set up a shortcut there.
John:
I'm leaving the movie.
John:
There's these different points where the phone is asking you to do something.
John:
It won't do it unprompted.
John:
But it wants you to sort of lead it by the nose.
John:
But the things that we'll do are more sophisticated.
Casey:
The other thing about this that I thought was that it was another instance of force press, too, or 3D touch or whatever.
Casey:
Push in.
Marco:
Yeah, press in.
Marco:
We're not pushing.
Marco:
Pushing is aggressive.
Marco:
Pressing is nice.
Marco:
Are you sure?
Casey:
Can I press you, Marco?
Marco:
Nope.
Casey:
But anyway, that's another example of where I think it's semi-undiscoverable, and I'm a little worried about that.
Casey:
But all in all, I am two thumbs up on these improvements, and I think they looked really good.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks and the Weightless Wireless Trex Air Bone Conduction Headphones.
Marco:
I have these right here in my hand.
Marco:
You can see how incredibly tiny these are.
Marco:
They weigh nothing.
Marco:
Here, are those heavy?
Marco:
Nobody can see them, Marco.
Marco:
It's a podcast.
Marco:
It is a podcast, but just... 900 people can see them.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But they are super tiny.
Casey:
I have a pair as well, and they are great.
Casey:
They're super great to run with, especially to listen to podcasts.
Casey:
Maybe even pair them with your Apple Watch, which we'll talk about later.
Marco:
Yes, we will.
Marco:
So yeah, so the Aftershocks, bone conduction headphones, these things are great.
Marco:
So the way these work is they basically sit on your... Here, you can actually...
Casey:
I will model, ladies and gentlemen.
Marco:
So these actually sit in front of your ear rather than in your ear.
Marco:
And so what this means is... Man, you look good in those.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Should I just leave them on for the rest of the show?
Marco:
Yeah, it's a good look.
Marco:
So what this means basically is there's nothing blocking your ears.
Marco:
So you don't get all sweaty in the summertime or when you're exercising.
Marco:
And also, you can hear the world around you
Marco:
While you also hear the podcast or the phone call that you're listening to inside the Trex Air.
Marco:
And so it ends up being really useful for situations like if you're running outside or if you're doing stuff around the house where you also want to hear what's going on in the world around you.
Marco:
You need to hear ambient noise.
Marco:
If you're outside, you want to hear like if there's a car coming or something like that.
Marco:
Or if you're in your house, you want to hear if someone knocks on the door or something like that.
Marco:
So the aftershocks are wonderful for that.
Marco:
And they're so small and so lightweight, you barely even feel them.
Marco:
This is 1.06 ounces for this.
Marco:
And everything else about it is great, too.
Marco:
The battery life is great.
Marco:
The Bluetooth reception is great.
Marco:
Of course, it's wireless.
Marco:
The Bluetooth reception is great.
Marco:
They have a two-year warranty.
Marco:
It's everything you want out of a Bluetooth headphone, especially great for talk content.
Marco:
That's what I really use mine for.
Marco:
They're a little small for music, but for talk content, they are awesome because you can just hear everything around you as you're doing what you need to do.
Marco:
And it's just so nice in the summertime.
Marco:
As I said, they don't make you sweaty.
Marco:
They are waterproof, so you don't have to worry if you're sweating all over them or if you're working out or if you get caught in the rain or anything like that.
Marco:
They're just wonderful.
Marco:
you can check out the Aftershocks new weightless wireless Trexair bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
They retail for $180, and you can snag a pair for $30 off by visiting ATP.Aftershocks, that's with a Z, .com, and using code ATP30.
Marco:
That's, once again, ATP.Aftershocks.com and code ATP30 to save $30 off the weightless wireless Trexair bone conducting headphones.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for letting me hear my podcast all summer long as I walk outside and I can hear everything around me and I don't get all sweaty.
Marco:
And also for supporting this show.
Casey:
All right, so we're almost through iOS.
Casey:
We have to talk communication.
Casey:
I am happy to report that your tongue now exists for your Animoji, which is extremely good news.
Casey:
I'm very excited about this.
Marco:
I love the deadpan delivery that Federighi did with this feature and whatever the next one was, the Memoji, I believe.
Marco:
His deadpan of, like, we have a new feature, tongue detection.
Marco:
You can now detect your tongue.
John:
Does anyone know if it's levels or if it's a binary tongue out or tongue in?
John:
This is what I need to know.
Casey:
I thought it was, I thought it was, I believe it was analog, you could say.
Casey:
But, but, but no, I am actually.
Casey:
They're computers.
Casey:
Yeah, fine, fine.
Casey:
But no, all kidding aside, I think that looks good.
Casey:
And certainly, you know, the handful of times that like Declan has played with my phone and with Animoji, he tries to stick his tongue out and he's confused why it doesn't work.
Casey:
And I think it adds a little bit to it.
Casey:
They added a few new animals.
Casey:
Let me see if I can read my own chicken scratch.
Casey:
The ghost, the koala, the tiger, and the T-Rex, which was good.
Casey:
And they did Memoji, which was one of those moments where I was conflicted in trying to figure out, do I hate this or do I think this is amazing?
Casey:
And the conclusion I came to is, this is probably going to be amazing.
Casey:
And the reason I... LAUGHTER
Casey:
Go ahead, go ahead.
Casey:
The reason, Captain Kumrajian, why I think this is going to be good is because they seem super configurable.
Casey:
Now, let me tell you, if you happen to be friends with John Siracusa and create yourself a Mii on a Nintendo platform, you better bring your A-game or you will for years hear about how your Mii looks nothing like you.
John:
Because people make the Mii of the person they want to be.
John:
Like, so it doesn't look like them.
John:
Like, you know, everyone goes to the thing and it's like their hair is a different, it's like darker than it usually is.
John:
And they go to like the weight slider and they make themselves how they used to be 20 years ago.
John:
And their face has some characteristic about it, but they don't put that characteristic in because they always hated their chin.
John:
So they make a really tiny chin.
John:
It doesn't look like them.
John:
It looks like just a random person.
John:
Anyway, I think if someone comes over to your house and sees your little Miis lined up, they should be able to say who everybody is in the family.
John:
They shouldn't say generic male boy, generic female woman.
Marco:
I'm going to go home and update my Nintendo Miis to have a giant head of hair.
John:
Didn't I make you one, Casey?
John:
Didn't I make you one?
John:
No, you never made me one.
John:
We need to fix this.
John:
Anyway, I think Miis are relevant, though.
John:
Nintendo did this first with the Wii.
John:
You can make little avatars of yourself, and it was actually fairly limited configurability, but people got creative with it.
John:
And then Xbox did it.
John:
Microsoft did it.
John:
What do they call them, Xbox?
John:
I don't even remember.
John:
Avatars.
John:
And the Xbox ones were less cartoony than the Nintendo ones.
John:
They looked more like these Mimoji.
John:
And that's where I think we're in this weird kind of uncanny valley where they start to look like Pixar people from Toy Story, where they didn't quite know how to do people yet.
John:
A little bit like, you know how dolls are scary, right?
John:
It's kind of scary doll people.
John:
The Miis were so clearly cartoony,
John:
And so simplified, when you start making them look more photorealistic, especially when you put them on the head of people, it's kind of like that horse head mask, right?
John:
I'm a little bit creeped out by it.
John:
I don't like them to be that photorealistic.
John:
I wish they were more like the ones on Nintendo platforms and less like the Xbox ones.
John:
And I wonder how many people are going to make one for themselves.
John:
Because honestly, anybody in your life, if they made one of these and they tried to video conference you with a thing on them, wouldn't the first thing you'd say was get that stupid thing off your head?
John:
You don't want to see.
John:
It's not cute.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
First of all, I think it is cute.
Marco:
But I think they struck a pretty good balance of cartoony but also being expressive, like having a wide range of expression.
Marco:
And it kind of fits the style of their emoji, so you basically can make your own emoji face in Apple style.
John:
I agree with that, but like Tim Cook's face is long, right?
John:
And so when Tim Cook was there, you could tell they wanted it to be him because of the glasses and the gray hair, but it didn't look like Tim Cook because Tim Cook's face is long, but it was like a round little emoji head.
John:
So it looked like Tim Cook wearing like a scary doll head.
John:
I don't like it.
Marco:
You could even- Can't sleep a plan will eat me.
John:
Their system was so... They don't even get the references in person.
John:
I didn't even hear you.
John:
I didn't even hear you.
Marco:
It's all right.
Marco:
Anyway, I feel like the Memoji system looked so impressive at how expressive it could be that you could even see how uncomfortable Tim was.
John:
You could see him really forcing... There's a little bit of sweat on the side of his forehead.
Marco:
Yeah, really forcing that smile.
Marco:
You could just tell, like, I can't wait for this to be over.
Marco:
You could just tell, like, that is not Tim Cook's game at all.
Marco:
Do you think he uses that a lot at work?
Marco:
No, goodness.
Marco:
I think he does.
Casey:
No, in the...
Casey:
The struggle I have with this is sitting here now, truly, I'm really enthusiastic about this.
Casey:
I think this could be really fun.
Casey:
But I think that I have two problems.
Casey:
Number one, I'll never be able to use this with John because he'll criticize my Memoji.
Casey:
You don't FaceTime me anyway.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
You don't FaceTime me anyway.
Marco:
Would you like me to?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
We can start doing this podcast with group FaceTime, which is now a thing.
Marco:
Hey.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
Well, hold on.
Casey:
Give me a second.
Marco:
We can make a YouTube version.
Marco:
This is all three of our Memojis.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
Let's do it.
You heard it here first.
Casey:
You heard it here first.
Casey:
We finally figured out how to use YouTube.
Casey:
We finally cracked YouTube, you guys.
Casey:
It just happened.
Casey:
I'm sure no one else will have this idea.
Casey:
No, not a single person.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I'm really enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
I think it could be really fun, especially all kidding aside.
Casey:
If I can dial in my Memoji in a way that looks representative of me, I think it could be really fun.
Casey:
But that being said, I thought Animojis were going to be really fun, and I used them for a week and never looked back.
Casey:
So I'm not convinced that this is really going to move the needle on Animoji use, but...
Casey:
Sitting here now, I am enthusiastic about it, and it does look like it could be a lot of fun.
Casey:
All right, so group FaceTime.
Casey:
That is something that I think we all kind of expected to be around now.
Casey:
Yeah, it's called Apple Hangouts, right?
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
Casey:
Actually, it's Apple Meat now, isn't it?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
That sounds really weird.
Casey:
Anyway, but there's group FaceTime.
Casey:
There's group FaceTime now, and everyone sitting around me was like, OK, yeah, that's cool.
Casey:
It'll be like three or four people.
Casey:
That's great.
Casey:
32 people?
Casey:
How is that manageable?
Casey:
That's great.
Casey:
I'm excited about it.
Casey:
But how is that manageable?
Casey:
We don't know that it is.
Casey:
Well, fair.
Casey:
But it did look really cool.
Casey:
It had that Apple visual flare, which I'm not sure if that's the appropriate time for visual flare.
Casey:
There was a lot of dead space there.
Casey:
It looked aesthetically neat, but I'm not sure that that is the most appropriate or useful way to represent a whole bunch of talking heads.
Casey:
But nevertheless, all told, I'm really interested in this.
Casey:
I think it's really cool.
Casey:
It would be nice, because I have two younger brothers, both of whom live in different parts of California.
Casey:
My parents live 45 minutes away from me.
Casey:
It would be cool to have a family get-together, which I'm sure will never actually happen.
Casey:
But hypothetically, in my fantasy world, it seems like it would be neat to be able to do that.
Casey:
Maybe once a month, we could all get on group FaceTime and just kind of hang out for a few minutes.
Marco:
You are the only person in the world who wants to create more family get-togethers.
John:
You can tell which squares are your parents because it's facing the table or the ceiling.
John:
I can only see the top of your head, Mom.
John:
Look down.
Marco:
I think it's also really cool the way it's integrated into messaging groups also.
Marco:
So if you have an iMessage group, you can just go into a FaceTime thing with everyone.
Marco:
That's a really cool feature.
John:
I'm still waiting for parity with iChat.
John:
Because in iChat, correct me if I'm wrong, we used to be able to share a document.
John:
And often, if I'm on a FaceTime, it's like, oh, we took this cute picture of the dog or your grandchild.
John:
Take a look at it.
John:
I want to serve up the picture as well.
John:
It seems like it would be an easy thing to do.
John:
But instead, we end up pointing the phone at a computer screen to show them the picture.
John:
So we're getting there.
John:
But it also gave me a little bit of PTSD flashbacks about massive video conferences at work.
John:
You know, because we have those cameras where whoever's talking, it'll focus on them.
John:
There's a couple of cool cameras that'll do this.
John:
They'll take the screen and split it up, and as the person talks, their square will get bigger.
John:
To your point, it's more space efficient than what they did, but yeah.
John:
I'm glad they do a multi-person.
John:
The first person to do a 32-person thing, they'll probably put it up on YouTube, speaking of, but that just seems like too much.
Casey:
And actually, I did think the demo was really cool.
Casey:
And one of the things that on a meta level that I thought was interesting is like, what was that demo prep like?
Casey:
That must have been really, really interesting.
Casey:
And, you know, it seemed like everything behind them was at least mildly staged, of course.
Casey:
And you have to have, I mean, it looked like there were 15, 20 engineers on the call.
Casey:
And from what I gathered, that is...
Casey:
That is legitimately the FaceTime team.
Casey:
That wasn't mock-ups.
Casey:
That wasn't actors or actresses.
Casey:
That was the FaceTime team.
Casey:
And just the administrivia of getting that demo done just seemed like it would be an immense amount of work.
Casey:
But it went off.
Casey:
It played really well.
Casey:
I thought it was really awesome.
John:
They make the construction crew be the first to walk over the bridge they built.
John:
It's that kind of thing.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Good motivation.
Marco:
Yikes.
Casey:
All right, so anything else on iOS?
Casey:
I think we're good, right?
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by Audible.
Marco:
Audible is also right here at Alt Conf.
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:
They're doing a nice raffle.
Marco:
Visit the career site at audiblecareers.com and you can join the company that is changing the world one listener at a time.
Marco:
So once again, go to audiblecareers.com if you are a developer and you are interested in working at this company to build software used by millions of listeners.
Marco:
Thanks very much to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's talk WatchOS.
Casey:
We've got to pick up the pace.
Marco:
Don't worry, TVOS will save us a lot of time.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Competitions are a thing.
Casey:
So if you're at WWDC, I assume this is either similar or vaguely related, maybe not.
Casey:
But if you're at WWDC and you're an attendee, there's actually an app written by Lose It where you can form a group of up to four people.
Casey:
And based on how much you complete your rings during the day or during the week, you accumulate points and eventually you can get to the point that you can win some sort of free swag at the end of the week at DubDub.
Casey:
This sounded at a glance very similar, but it also seemed like more personal.
Casey:
Like I could challenge you, since you never wear your watch, to some sort of competition, which I will obviously win.
Marco:
Surprise, you win.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But in principle, I like it.
Casey:
I think it's a good idea.
Casey:
I'm just going to keep cruising and somebody interrupt me.
Casey:
Workout starts stop automatically or semi-automatically.
John:
This is kind of like the thing nudging you.
John:
It doesn't start automatically, but it suggests to you, you know, it looks like you're writing a letter.
John:
No, it says it looks like... It looks like you...
John:
You started a workout.
Casey:
I got that reference, John.
John:
Good, thank you.
John:
It looks like you started a workout.
John:
And then if you say yes, it retroactively counts all the parts for you, but it won't actually start at it.
John:
I was talking to somebody, I think it was Scott McNulty, who was saying he uses Fitbit because it doesn't ask him anything.
John:
It just starts the workout when he exercises, so he doesn't have to think about it.
John:
So the Apple Watch is still not at that point.
John:
It still wants you to nudge it and say yes, which is good for not accidentally starting workouts, but bad...
John:
I mean, say you do the whole workout and it automatically stops it.
John:
Does that notification go away?
John:
You don't get credit?
John:
I find it still this uneasy middle ground between complete automation and needing you to give it the go ahead to say that you're in a workout, which I feel like it should know.
Casey:
So the next thing they talked about was walkie-talkie.
Casey:
And so now we can all be Dick Tracy, which is super exciting.
Casey:
Legitimately, we can all be Dick Tracy.
Casey:
And as a kid who enjoyed the movies, and I never read the comics, but the movie.
Casey:
Anyway, I think that's amazing that we can have this walkie-talkie on our wrists.
Casey:
That being said, I grew up in the Northeast during the time that Nextel phones were a thing.
Casey:
Do you remember this?
Casey:
Push to Talk?
Casey:
Oh, it was the worst.
Casey:
And you would be in the grocery store.
Casey:
Hey, did you want bananas?
Casey:
No, I wanted apples.
Casey:
It was like a billion decibels and it was terrible.
Casey:
If you don't remember this, consider yourself very lucky because A, you're probably young and B, you didn't have to deal with it.
Casey:
But it was the worst.
Casey:
So I'm very curious to see if anyone ever uses this feature for any reason.
Casey:
But I am in full support of it being a thing.
Casey:
I just can't imagine a time that I would use it.
Marco:
yeah i i think it's gonna be this is like a much better solution to watch to watch quick communication than digital touch and everything so i i think this is a good it's a good move i don't know what what kind of adoption it'll get but it looks pretty good to me the only thing is like when when the message comes in to your watch does your watch just start making noise or do you have to like accept it and to play it yeah i don't know yeah like i think it's pre-announces with a buzz and a beep but i don't know again i don't know if you need to like do something to allow it to happen
Marco:
Like if you know your friends are like out somewhere like sensitive and you can just make their watch start talking, that would be pretty fun.
Marco:
There's probably some kind of like, you know, taps you and you have to tap to play it.
John:
It doesn't replace your walkie-talkies though, sadly, because they said Wi-Fi and cellular.
John:
So again, if you're without signal, it's not like the watches are radio to radio communicating with each other.
John:
You need internet access.
John:
As far as I could tell from the keynote.
Marco:
Yeah, you totally do.
Marco:
And yeah, I got like a thousand tweets when that was announced saying that they were like my walkie-talkies were no longer necessary, but trust me, they are.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Moving along, Siri shortcuts are in the Siri watch face, which is exciting.
Casey:
One of the things I was really looking forward to was enhancements to the Siri's watch face.
Casey:
This isn't quite as much as I wanted, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Marco:
To me, this is a really good thing, because what we're seeing with the watch, and we'll get to some of the audio stuff in a second, but like,
Marco:
I think what we've all seen as developers is that it's hard to maintain a watchOS app that's a really compelling, good experience for most apps.
Marco:
For most apps, we seem better served just using notifications as your UI that happens to also show on the watch.
Marco:
So the combination of notifications getting better and getting more interactive, as well as having the new Siri shortcuts being third-party capable to show up in the Siri face and everything, and the Siri watch face itself, which it kind of came after my time of using the watch,
Marco:
you know, a lot of our friends love it.
Marco:
Like, it seems like the Siri watch face is very popular and it kind of seems like the entire model of having like regular watch apps, like third party watch apps and even complications and everything seems like that is on the way out or being strongly de-emphasized now that we've learned, you know, both we as developers and Apple and users have learned like, what is the watch really better at?
Marco:
Like, what's the best way to use this device?
Marco:
It does seem like we're moving away from apps more and more and more towards smart suggestion things as part of the Siri face and more interactive notifications.
Marco:
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
John:
I don't know.
John:
When I saw this, they spent so much time.
John:
I was like, hey, we enhanced the Siri watch face.
John:
And then they showed feature after feature after feature, all of which only worked as far as I could tell in the Siri watch face.
John:
But it's like...
John:
Is that a watch face or is that just how the whole watch should work now?
John:
Because what if you don't want to use the Siri watch face?
John:
A lot of people I know have an Apple Watch and don't use the Siri watch face.
John:
They can't get any of these features, is my understanding from the demo.
John:
All those features might as well not exist, but a lot of them are useful features.
John:
So it's like, okay, if you want your watch to be really useful, the trick is that the tech nerds will tell you is you have to use the Siri watch face.
John:
And they're like, but I want to see a picture of my kid.
John:
I don't want to use the Siri watch face.
John:
So I think they have to figure out, is this how the watch works or is this just how one watch face works?
John:
or make third-party watch faces and let them all integrate the same way the Siri watch face does?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, right.
Marco:
I think this is the answer to why there aren't third-party watch faces and also why Apple hasn't really added a lot of their own watch faces.
Marco:
I think what they're probably seeing, the same thing that our friends who use the Siri watch face are seeing, which is, oh, this is actually better.
Marco:
This actually is the watch OS, really.
Marco:
This is the one default interface to the watch.
Marco:
The idea of watch faces is probably on the way out, too.
Marco:
Do you think most people use the Siri watch face?
Marco:
I see Apple Watches all the time.
Marco:
They do not use a Siri watch face.
Marco:
But the question is, if the Siri watch face was the default, would customers hate it?
John:
People look for the watch faces.
John:
They pick the ones they like how they look.
John:
The Siri watch face doesn't look good in the screen where you swipe through the things.
John:
They're like, I like this one.
John:
I like that one.
John:
They don't know all the functionality that would be exposed by that.
John:
Maybe they'll default it.
John:
If they default it, then that's how they'll win.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
But I mean, it's a good sign, no matter how you slice it.
Casey:
Moving right along, web content in text messages and things like that.
Casey:
You can get basic web content in there, which I'm really excited about.
Casey:
So if somebody sends you a tweet or a link to a menu, I think they even said that they would be able to display.
Casey:
Good luck with that on the Flash website.
John:
You can't even see that in Safari anymore because they deprecated the whole podcast.
Marco:
Well, maybe that's why Kevin Lynch is on the watch.
Marco:
It'll show Flash.
Casey:
Oh, there it is.
Casey:
But they said they would use reader view if such a thing was possible, which I thought was great.
Casey:
We could probably go on for three hours about this, but we'll hopefully keep it pretty short.
Casey:
But podcasts is a thing on the watch in a first party sense, which is great.
Casey:
And additionally, there's APIs.
Marco:
Talk about a roller coaster of emotions, by the way.
Casey:
Yeah, I can imagine.
Casey:
I can imagine.
Casey:
You had a stressful couple of minutes there.
Casey:
But also there's a third-party API for playing background audio, which from what I understood from Underscore when we were chatting over lunch, it's a pretty robust API.
Casey:
And I didn't get a chance to look at the ins and outs of it, and I don't know if you have, Marco, but it seemed like you can now do a legitimate overcast on the watch, which I, for one, am really excited for.
Marco:
Yeah, I haven't actually tried it yet, but I did look at the APIs, and they look pretty good.
Marco:
It looks like Apple looked at my blog post of why I can't make a watch app and did every single thing on it.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
I really, really hope it works out well.
Marco:
The downside is I'm going to have a busy summer, but this is in a very good way, because I've wanted to bring that feature back ever since I killed it.
Marco:
I get emails every single day about it, and it's such an obvious feature that my app desperately needs.
Marco:
Not only that, but we also now have volume control widgets on the watch that we can embed.
Marco:
Thank goodness.
Marco:
Let's talk about it finally.
Marco:
Like, literally about half of the people who have my app and have a watch paired to their phone don't have the app installed.
Marco:
Because if you have it installed, it's actually a worse experience for controlling your phone's audio than if you don't even have it installed at all.
Marco:
Because it doesn't have volume control.
Marco:
And now it appears, again, I haven't tried this yet, but it appears that I can do that.
Marco:
That's almost as big of a deal as the standalone podcast playback.
John:
Yeah, I'm really excited for that.
John:
Can we give a brief shout out to that woman who did a presentation while exercising?
John:
Oh, God, yes.
Casey:
That was amazing.
Casey:
No, thank you.
John:
You could not have paid me enough to do that, and she handled it like a champion.
John:
That's like public speaking on hard mode.
John:
Oh, it's expert.
John:
It's expert mode.
John:
You do not want to be out of breath, and I was so tense because she would get more out of breath, and she increased the tension.
John:
I'm like, don't really increase the tension.
John:
Just pretend you're doing it.
John:
We won't know.
John:
That was pretty amazing.
John:
I'm not sure how good of a demo it made, but it was good theater.
Casey:
It very much was.
Casey:
And we should take a moment to note that by my count, there was Tim, there was Kevin Lynch, there was Craig, there was the gentleman from Adobe, and there were the Lego two or three people, which is a lot of dudes for sure.
Casey:
But every other Apple person that was brought on stage, I think literally every other one was a woman, and in some cases, not a white person, which is tremendous.
Casey:
And we've been banging this drum for a long time.
Casey:
And I was really happy to see that there was definite progress in that department.
Casey:
It's not perfect.
Casey:
I got a handful of angry tweets in reply to me congratulating Apple on this about, oh, well, they didn't have this, they didn't have that.
Casey:
OK, yes, I understand that.
Casey:
But this is a great step.
Casey:
And this is a lot better than it was
Casey:
a couple of years ago when I started to be aware of it and started to pay a lot more attention to it.
Casey:
So I'm really pleased with Apple that the diversity on stage is looking way up.
Casey:
And that was great.
Casey:
Yeah, we can do that.
Casey:
We can absolutely do that.
Marco:
So we also had an Apple TV update that contains nothing for developers.
Casey:
Yeah, Apple TV is still a thing.
Casey:
Moving on.
Marco:
This is something where our friend John Gruber likes to sometimes say that you look at other companies' keynotes that are often too long or too bloated, and you can kind of see the org chart in what gets in the keynote, and every department has to have their say and has to have their keynote time.
Marco:
This kind of felt like that.
Marco:
This kind of felt like we have to say something about tvOS.
Marco:
But it was entirely about, like, new consumer-level features and features that are built into their own media players and stuff.
Marco:
Like, there was nothing for developers at all in there.
John:
There was another one of those releases where they tout features that rely entirely on how much adoption they get from big third parties.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
So, like, great, it'll integrate with all your cable as long as you have charter cable.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
Comcast, Verizon, we don't know who those people are.
John:
Zero sign-on.
John:
We'll figure out what network you're on and not have you sign-on if you're on charter cable.
John:
It's like...
John:
They even said it.
John:
They announced single sign-up before, and nothing happened because none of us have those providers, so we're all still typing in those three-letter codes.
John:
They did say 50% year-over-year growth on Apple TV, which I think was good, and they did tout the things they have to tout, which is like, Apple TV, we support all these standards.
John:
We do Dolby Vision, and now we have Atmos.
John:
That's all good.
John:
Thumbs up.
John:
But they still face headwinds, as Tim would say, in the market in terms of they want to make the experience easier, but Comcast and Verizon do not want
John:
them to make the experience easier, and they are at an impasse, so I wish them luck, but I'm glad they're adding the tech features to the Apple TV, even if they're not able to integrate and make the user experience as good as they could.
John:
They can fix the remote any time they want, though.
John:
No one's stopping them from doing it.
John:
They even touted you could use cable company remotes, like, oh, how far we've fallen, where people are applauding for the ability to use the Comcast remote with their Apple TV.
LAUGHTER
John:
Which, by the way, you can do now.
John:
It has always learned.
John:
You can learn with your IR remote, but there's no trackpad on it.
John:
But now it said you can also now trigger Siri from third-party remotes, which is something you couldn't do before.
John:
But I don't know which microphone you would talk into.
John:
Some of the Comcast mics do have, or other cable companies do have microphones.
Marco:
Or maybe they're opening up.
Marco:
Maybe at the fall event, we'll see a new remote from Logitech that is like an alternate TV remote that includes the microphone and everything.
John:
Third-parties make the controllers.
John:
Third-parties make the remotes.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Honestly, that's not a bad solution.
John:
It's not a great solution, but it's better than what we have now.
John:
With your next Mac, I was going to say you have to buy a Logitech mouse and a Microsoft keyboard.
John:
That's what you have anyway.
John:
No, you use the Apple mouse.
John:
Anyway, I want them to make better peripherals.
John:
Speaking of the Mac.
Casey:
Yeah, so how do we pronounce this?
Casey:
John, you were trying to explain this to us earlier.
Casey:
I already forgot what you told me.
John:
Some random person on Twitter said Mojave.
John:
Is it Mojave or Mojave?
Mojave.
John:
Mojave.
John:
Long E. California people say Long E. All right, we'll do that then.
John:
Did you see that the closed caption person spoiled the name, apparently, in the caption stream?
John:
They hit the wrong button or something early on, and if you were watching the closed captions, you learned the name of the new macOS before they announced it.
Casey:
But that was in English, not Chinese or whatever.
Casey:
All right, so I'm going to try to speed run this, and I'm going to make it probably four sentences before I get stopped.
Casey:
See, I didn't even finish that sentence.
John:
I didn't even finish that sentence.
John:
Come on.
John:
We're talking about the Mac.
John:
I just want to say how they framed it.
John:
First of all, he came out and said, we love the Mac.
John:
which is a, you know, doth protest too much thing even though that is the incorrect interpretation of that phrase from Shakespeare.
John:
Look it up.
John:
But everybody knows what I mean.
John:
Everyone knows the reverse one.
John:
And he said, this is a release that's chock full of new features.
John:
So that was like the first two sentences they said.
John:
This is not zero new features.
John:
This is not a rebuilding year.
John:
They tried to pitch this as chock full of new features.
John:
And there were new features, but I'm not going to say it was chock full.
John:
I don't...
Casey:
all right anyway go ahead so the other thing they said thank you dad the other thing they said was it's inspired by pro users and designed for everyone which i thought was a great line i'm not i haven't decided how much they achieved that but i thought it was a great line so dark mode is what we all knew was coming uh dynamic desktop which has things like desktop stacks which i thought was a very cool and clever implementation that again is a great example of apple doing apple things in a great appley way well that's
John:
facts thing, I was trying, it was racking my brain to figure out where I'd seen that before.
John:
I was like, did they, was that in like Mac OS 8 when it was Copeland?
John:
And did they implement that in like a beta of Mac OS 10?
John:
I couldn't recall and eventually figured it out.
John:
It was, God, this is a terrible name, but it was the pile metaphor.
John:
You can have piles.
John:
And I think it was from Apple's Advanced Technology Group in 1992.
John:
The same thing.
John:
It was like a paper on how you can pile things and how it's a reasonable way of organizing stuff.
John:
And so now, finally, they've shipped this idea they've had forever.
John:
I'm unconvinced of how
John:
good this is because yeah you have a messy desktop and then they all go sorted into piles and you can scrub over them but I think if you did that to someone's messy desktop they'd be like where's all my stuff where did it all go it's like oh don't worry all your images are in the image pile it's like no but I had it arranged the lower left was these things like I feel like they don't recognize and I've said a million times the reason people use a desktop is it's the one place on their computer that they can always find and spatially arrange things
John:
And it's not arranged well, just like people's houses and desks aren't arranged well.
John:
But it's the one place they know where to find.
John:
And it does not move.
John:
And if you put an icon in the lower left and a big clump of icons, they're always in the lower left.
John:
So I guess I could say, if you want to run this experiment, find someone with a messy desktop, show them the piles feature, and watch the horror on their face when all their icons get sorted into piles.
John:
There better be an undo for that.
John:
I think it's an interesting feature, and I think people can use it, but they're like, oh, you can sort by tag.
John:
It doesn't just have to be by kind.
John:
If you were the type of person who tags your files on your desktop, your desktop doesn't look like that.
John:
It's meticulously arranged.
John:
So I am not sure piles.
John:
or stacks or whatever the hell they're calling them is the greatest feature.
John:
But hey, at least they're doing something to the Finder, right?
Casey:
It's better than nothing.
Casey:
So then they have gallery view.
Casey:
So I guess RIP cover flow.
Casey:
I guess we're done.
John:
It's already gone, isn't it?
Casey:
This is the triumphant return of non-3D cover flow.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
But it did look good.
Casey:
It had a sidebar where you could get a whole bunch of metadata about pictures, for example.
Casey:
You could plug in automator actions on the side.
Casey:
It looked really nice.
Marco:
That's a big thing, though.
Marco:
That little quick action thing in that little sidebar that's new now, that I think is going to be really useful long term.
Marco:
So it isn't just automator actions.
Marco:
By the way, shout out to automator on stage.
Marco:
Who was expecting that?
Marco:
Anyway, so it's automated actions or you can put in like shell scripts or Apple scripts as those actions too.
Marco:
And then apps can I think also expose their own actions for relevant file types and everything.
Marco:
That sounds great.
John:
Like as a Mac user.
John:
And Siri shortcuts too, right?
John:
Oh no, I forgot.
John:
Not on the Mac.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
As a user, that sounds like it's probably going to be a really useful feature just in day-to-day usage of the Mac.
Casey:
Definitely.
Casey:
QuickLook seems like it's gotten a lot of the brains of preview, which is very excellent.
Casey:
I think that looks really good.
Marco:
It's a little weird that QuickLook has now become an editor.
Marco:
Fair, but I still think it's good.
John:
It's like the markup.
John:
It's all the iOS stuff.
John:
We'll get to the screenshot stuff in a second.
John:
But yeah, you quick look, and now you've got the little markup icon, and now you can scribble on it and save it.
John:
It's convenient.
John:
You can do lots of stuff without going into an app.
John:
It's like OpenDoc resurrected in this weird way where these little views have all these little tools that now spring around them and different share actions and stuff.
Marco:
But what happens if you make some edits that you don't necessarily, I guess you don't save it, but what if you click away to a different window and then that window disappears?
Marco:
It's a quick look window.
Marco:
Do those just get saved without you?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's kind of odd.
Casey:
I mean, it looks neat in principle, but I agree that it's also odd.
Casey:
Continuity camera.
Casey:
You skipped over the screenshots thing.
Casey:
Did I?
Marco:
Oh, my bad.
Marco:
Again, the screenshot editor coming to iOS 11 or from iOS 11 basically like that kind of feature coming to the Mac where you take a screenshot and it kind of shows a little overlay of it and you can pick it up right there and start editing and everything plus the additional enhancements to screenshot capture to make it easier to capture
Marco:
screenshots and screen recordings and everything.
John:
And video and movies so you don't have to use QuickTime Player, the bad one.
Marco:
Yeah, like all that stuff.
Marco:
This is, again, this is more stuff that I think we will actually really use this as Mac power users.
Marco:
I think we will, trademark, I think we really will use these features all the time because it's just like things that enhance data to use for the Mac.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I'm actually very happy with the overall amount of things that we got today.
Marco:
Because for the Mac in particular, it really does seem like Tim's statement about, like he said, it's chock full of features inspired by pro users but designed for everyone.
Marco:
That's what the Mac always has been.
Marco:
The Mac has always been a thing that was very powerful if you were a pro user or a power user.
Marco:
You could really get very powerful with it.
Marco:
But it was also progressive power.
Marco:
New users could get a good look at it and know how to use it.
Marco:
These kinds of features...
Marco:
we really haven't seen these added to the Mac in a while.
Marco:
During the uncertain times of the last few years where it has seemed like the Mac might be really abandoned, we really haven't seen anything like this get added in any meaningful numbers.
Marco:
And to have all this stuff in this release,
Marco:
I think Tim's statement was actually correct.
Marco:
I think this actually is new features, maybe chock-full.
Marco:
I'll leave that up to you and Chalk and Barry to decide.
Marco:
But these really are, I think, useful everyday features that they're not going to create a whole new article on 9to5Mac about them necessarily.
Marco:
They're not totally headline-grabbing things.
Marco:
But I think these are things that are really going to be very useful to us every day, all day, as we use our Macs to do things.
John:
Yeah, I think one of the best examples is that like the screenshot functionality.
John:
Most of the functionality for screenshots, not the screen capture, but the screenshots has been there, but only if you know like, oh, command shift three is a screen, command shift four, but then you hit space bar, switch from window to, nobody knows that except for like nerds, right?
John:
And now they just did a simple thing, put an overlay on the screen with little buttons.
John:
They still might not know what they mean, but it gives you a fighting chance.
John:
There's no way you're going to discover like command shift four space bar.
John:
You will not...
John:
You will not discover that.
John:
But if you see an overlay, you'll try all four buttons, and eventually you'll get it.
John:
So that's the type of stuff they could have done years and years ago, and they just got around to it.
Casey:
So hopefully continuing my not-so-effective speed run.
Casey:
Oh, before we move on.
John:
This is legit.
John:
I'm not trying to do this to you.
John:
Screen recording, right?
John:
So they integrated screen recording.
John:
And when I saw the screen recording feature, they used to be in QuickTime Player, like you could record the screen or regions of it or whatever, and now it's integrated in the screenshot.
John:
And all I could think was that last year, converting the Windows Server to Metal, this is what you get out of it.
John:
You convert the Windows Server to Metal, and now you can integrate screen capture presumably in a more efficient way without having an app because it's all built.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's what I thought about.
John:
redoing infrastructure and causing kernel panics on Steve Trout and Smith's machine constantly to rewrite the whole Windows server in metal, because you know you're going to deprecate over in GL, gives you stuff like, now I can do system-wide screen capture as just a thing as part of the screenshot tool.
Casey:
continuity camera.
Casey:
I didn't get why that was so exciting.
John:
They put crappy cameras in the MacBooks and you have a much better camera on your phone so if you want to scan a document.
Marco:
Yeah, like the camera on the top of the MacBook hasn't changed since like 2005.
John:
You could hold your paper up to it, but I won't be able to see anything.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
No, but I
Marco:
I think it is a little bit questioning.
Marco:
They can remotely enable the camera.
Marco:
Is that a creepy thing or a security problem?
Marco:
But I think that will be another one of these everyday useful features.
Marco:
Because so often, I want to take a picture of something in my room or something to show someone in Slack or something.
Marco:
There's lots of uses for this.
Marco:
And I take the picture on the phone, and because Photosync is too slow, I will airdrop it to myself between my phone and my phone.
John:
Or even you put it in Dropbox and wait to appear on Dropbox in your Mac.
John:
This is all sort of weird.
Marco:
This is yet another thing that's just going to save time.
Marco:
Again, a solid feature, probably, if it works well.
Casey:
Then they showed us news, stocks, voice memos, and the home app.
Casey:
And it was funny.
Casey:
I was probably not the only... Well, myself and I was sitting next to Chris Harris on the other side in the keynote.
Casey:
And the two of us kind of looked at each other at the same moment.
Casey:
And I'm sure we weren't the only ones.
Casey:
But we realized this kind of looks like cross-platform.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So at this point, I'm starting to scratch my head
Casey:
There may be something here after all.
Casey:
But anyway, I really don't have any particular care for any of these apps, but I'm glad that they're on the Mac.
Casey:
Then they talked about security and privacy.
Casey:
I didn't write any subnotes for that, so I don't even know what they said.
Casey:
But I'm glad to see that security and privacy is still a priority.
John:
It surprised me that when they were going through the, here's all the things you get notified for, like, can I have access to your location, your contacts, or whatever?
John:
And I was like, what are they going to add to it?
John:
And I thought, oh, they're going to add camera.
John:
But I'm like, but no.
John:
Don't they have to ask permission to the camera already?
John:
Apparently not.
John:
How many people have asked before, do you think Mac apps have to ask permission to use the camera?
John:
Everyone would have said yes, but no.
John:
So they're finally adding camera and mic to the permissions, which is nice.
John:
You skipped over a bunch of stuff too quickly.
John:
I want to go back to OpenGL and OpenCL deprecated.
John:
Not a surprise, really.
John:
OpenCL maybe is a little bit of a surprise.
John:
Maybe if you ask Gus here in the firm, he will say it is not a surprise.
John:
So it's all metal, right?
John:
So they got the proprietary thing.
John:
No more OpenGL.
John:
They haven't updated in years anyway.
John:
It's a third-party opportunity.
John:
I think the OpenGL group has a third-party OpenGL for the Mac.
John:
But that's kind of a shame.
John:
No more 32-bit apps after Mojave.
John:
And they listed.
John:
It was kind of painful to see them list.
John:
And this means these 32 frameworks aren't going to be there anymore.
John:
And one of them was QuickTime.
John:
And I just felt that was like end of an era.
John:
The QuickTime framework, no.
John:
Also Apple Java 1.6, nobody cares.
John:
And Carbon.
John:
And then the security stuff that you were just going into.
John:
SIP protection for third-party apps, system integrity protection for third-party apps.
John:
I was just getting done telling you what I was able to do to my work laptop to disable all the malware they install because they can't do SIP for third-party apps.
John:
So if you have root on your machine, you can just temporarily disable stuff, right?
John:
Now, all these people who make institutional malware, also known as antivirus software for your Macs and all sorts of other stuff, will be able to prevent you from, you know, I guess you can use the firmware to turn off system integrity protection, but it's making people's lives harder.
John:
I don't like it.
Casey:
Mac App Store, still a thing.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
So that's exciting.
Casey:
There are some very interesting entries, or maybe re-entries in some cases, to the Mac App Store.
Casey:
Panic is coming back to the Mac App Store, which is really exciting and interesting.
Casey:
And Bare Bones with BB Edit is going to be in the App Store, and that is also really exciting and interesting.
Casey:
So apparently Apple is trying to make the App Store a thing.
Casey:
First it was Fetch, and then it was the Mac App Store.
Casey:
And apparently they're both still a thing.
Casey:
Apple's going to courtin'.
Marco:
The only weird thing is there might be good reasons why these apps are going back, but we weren't told them in either the State of Union or the keynote.
Marco:
We have no idea.
Marco:
What changed?
Marco:
Why are these apps going back?
Marco:
They seem to leave for really good reasons.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
There has to be some good reason why they're all going back and why Apple's putting all this new effort into the app store.
John:
And if it was like changes to the Mac, obviously one of the reasons is the Mac App Store app is better, right?
John:
I mean, that's the thing they showed.
John:
The Mac App Store app is much better and it's fancier and you'll be able to advertise your products.
John:
So they didn't connect those dots, but they did show that.
John:
But then that's an obvious question that you asked.
John:
It's like...
John:
Why?
John:
These people are coming back, you would think, could they have a quote or a testimonial?
John:
I left the Mac store because X, Y, Z, but now something has changed and I've changed my mind.
John:
Maybe they didn't have time to explain or maybe it was supposed to be self-evident, but I have the same questions about
John:
How is the Mac App Store now a deal that these people want to be part of?
John:
I mean, maybe they just didn't have time.
John:
Like, sandboxing changes we might see later in the week.
John:
A lot of these apps were out because of sandboxing changes, so maybe there's some changes to the sandbox that made it feasible to come back in.
John:
But in the keynote where they had a lot of time to blow up Legos, it seems like they could have put in
John:
two or three sentences about why these apps came back.
John:
Like, oh, and these apps came back for these reasons.
John:
And if you want to learn about them, see them in sessions, whatever, whatever.
John:
But anyway, I guess it's good for Apple that they're back.
John:
But as a consumer who has bought both of those applications, I think I'll continue to do the direct ones.
John:
And that is the real problem for the Mac App Store.
John:
It's like, why are people like me preferring the direct one rather than the Mac App Store download?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think I still have work to do.
John:
This is the first big change in the Mac App Store in forever, and so that's good.
John:
That's definitely progress.
Casey:
They talked about Metal and Core ML, and what was the thing where you can make models a little easier?
Casey:
What was that called?
John:
Create ML?
John:
Create ML, thank you.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
Yeah, it's definitely cool, but in the interest of time, let's skip over that, and let's talk about UIKit on the Mac.
Casey:
It is a
Casey:
thing and it is supposedly coming next year and if the last year has told us anything we'll see what happens but it's supposedly coming next year this is really exciting i'm not sure if this is good for the mac if it's great for the mac if it's bad for the mac like i can see very very many different ways that this could end up but the fact that they are publicly acknowledging something that smells a lot like this marzipan thing
Casey:
That is, I was surprised and really into it.
Casey:
And it seems really cool.
Casey:
And I mean, the apps that they show, the news app and the other ones, I wouldn't say they looked bad by any means.
Casey:
I agree with, I think Marco, you had said a minute ago, they looked like iOS apps.
Casey:
And yes, that's true.
Casey:
But it's not like they looked bad.
Casey:
It looked a little bit off, but still good.
John:
The design is how it works, Casey.
John:
Yeah, well.
John:
I mean, they work like iOS apps.
John:
I'm clicking on the upper left corner for this little back thing with a little chevron to switch back in the view.
John:
That's not how a Mac app works.
John:
I mean, I understand the tech demo.
John:
Just push the side of your screen and move over a little bit.
John:
I'm a little bit.
John:
Push in.
John:
Yes.
John:
So when we talked about how this could go, this is like a fairly timid version of the possibilities, right?
John:
as they showed it i mean it's it's a portion of ui kit coming to the mac so if you have an application that uses ui kit and if it uses some or all the portion that they bring over then you can bring your ios app to the mac which i suppose is good for making people make mac applications but their message is still not clear on like they did the thing in the state of the union about an app kit that's the way to make max apps to the mac and we are still it is i forget what they said like
John:
I know what you're thinking of.
John:
I can't remember the exact wording.
John:
It's not deprecated.
John:
There's still a thing that they're going to support, right?
John:
So my question from when we talked about this a couple weeks ago is like, what is Apple's opinion of the best way to make Mac applications?
John:
Like, what is the new vision?
John:
They said AppKit.
John:
I thought that's what they said was that the best way to make a Mac app is AppKit.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
They were clear about that.
Marco:
They were very clear that AppKit should be what you use if you want to make the best Mac app.
John:
But it seemed to me that by bringing iOS over, what they were saying is, yes, to get iOS developers to do your stuff, but it almost seemed to me that long term, if people keep using UIKit on the Mac, and UIKit understands scrolling and resizing and mouse events and hovering and all the things and drag and drop, all the things that they have to understand, right?
John:
Why would you not make a Mac app directly in UIKit?
John:
Because UIKit is the easier to use, more modern, better fit for Swift, right?
John:
I feel like there's a tension here between... It's kind of like Carbon and Coco in the beginning where they seem like peers and we wanted to see how it would shake out.
John:
And if I was AppKit, I'd be looking over my shoulder right now.
John:
Because parts of UIKit are coming over.
John:
The part that I was excited about from a tech nerd perspective in the State of the Union, they talked about it is...
John:
Like these two operating systems are built on the same core of, you know, Darwin and everything.
John:
People don't remember because no one ever says Darwin in a keynote for the past decade.
John:
But it's there.
John:
It's the same, you know, OS under the covers.
John:
And they said that they had drifted apart, like the underpinnings of iOS, like because they really had to hack up Mac OS X to get it on the original iPhone.
John:
And they just drift apart, because this is suited to the phone, that's suited to that.
John:
And they're going to unify those things, which is something they probably should have done a long time ago, just to have less bug surface.
John:
And now the phones are more powerful than the Macs in some cases.
John:
So yeah, unify that core layer.
John:
And then that's like a level playing field for AppKit and UIKit to duke it out for the soul of the Mac.
John:
The four apps that they showed, they looked like iOS apps.
John:
They did not look like Mac apps.
John:
And I know they tried to say, look, it behaves like a Mac.
John:
I can select text and drag it.
John:
And it's like, you're not a Mac app yet.
John:
You're not an Electron app.
John:
I'll give you that.
John:
But you're not a Mac app.
John:
Amen, brother.
Casey:
No, but I think we should really congratulate Apple for dogfooding this and dogfooding it up front.
Casey:
Because what was it?
Casey:
It was iCloud core data that was a disaster.
Casey:
And it wasn't until they started dogfooding the other iCloud stuff that it really got good.
Casey:
And so I am really enthusiastic about this, tentatively, but very enthusiastic about this.
Casey:
They're dogfooding it.
Casey:
They appear to be doing it right.
Casey:
And that's really exciting.
Casey:
All in all, it was a pretty decent keynote.
Casey:
I thought it was pretty good.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, I had fairly low expectations, in part because nothing really leaked, in part because I didn't know what to make of it, but I thought, all told, it was good.
Casey:
It was not the best keynote I've ever seen, but it was good.
John:
Do you want to talk about the fact that Apple's doing a thing now where they tell you a year ahead of time something they're doing?
John:
Yeah, that's crazy.
John:
They do it with the Mac Pro, they do it with this, they do it unintentionally with AirPlay 2 and Messages in the Cloud.
John:
Air power.
John:
And air power, which is never coming, whatever.
John:
But the Marzipan thing, all the rumors were dead on, except for the part where they said, yeah, but Apple's going to talk about it anyway.
John:
When they put up that slide in the beginning that said iOS, watchOS, tvOS, whatever, macOS, I knew at that point that you saved the best for last, right?
John:
What the heck do they have in macOS that it's like would be the best?
John:
It's got to be the Marzipan thing.
John:
But they said it wasn't ready.
John:
Maybe we're all wrong.
John:
Maybe it is ready this year.
John:
Nope, not ready this year.
John:
But they announced it anyway.
John:
And it's not like they're reacting to rumors.
John:
It just, it feels like they, Apple feels increasingly that they need to put a stake in the ground to say, don't worry, we're going to fix this Mac thing.
John:
Like, not this year, not next year, but we're going to fix it.
John:
And don't worry, we're going to let you do UIKit.
John:
Not this year, but we're going to tell you about it anyway.
John:
That is, it's different for Apple.
John:
I don't know if it's bad or good.
John:
Like, it's fun for us.
John:
We learn stuff ahead of time.
John:
But it's kind of like they're, you know, Osborne affecting themselves a little bit.
John:
Like, are people really going to be diving into making, you know, starting a new app kit based Mac app right now?
John:
Or are they going to wait until next year and see how this whole UI kit on the Mac thing shakes out?
Marco:
Well, I think this is them kind of realizing that Mac OS and the Mac as a platform, especially like, you know, with the more recent focus of Mac as the pro platform by Apple,
Marco:
they're finally realizing that pros and people who use this platform for work sometimes need a roadmap.
Marco:
The other companies do this too.
Marco:
Intel gives roadmaps, Microsoft gives roadmaps.
Marco:
Big companies that deal with big businesses and pro customers tend to give roadmaps so that people can plan and make decisions and have some idea of what they're in for next year or for the next six months instead of just having occasional things randomly come and blindside them.
Marco:
So for this, if I was a Mac developer,
Marco:
And say I had an iPad app and maybe my Mac app was a lot of work to maintain because I'm not that good of a Mac developer.
Marco:
And maybe I'm having a new version that I'm planning for next year.
Marco:
Maybe I might hold that off a little bit now.
Marco:
Maybe not put a whole lot of effort into a Mac UI if my app doesn't really necessarily need to be the best Mac app in the world.
Marco:
And I have to have an iOS codebase anyway.
Marco:
This is a great thing.
Marco:
They're telling developers...
Marco:
Really major, pertinent information that we are really going to want to know a year ahead of time.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
It helps us make good plans.
Marco:
It helps us use our limited resources effectively.
Marco:
And there's going to be a lot of arguing over whether this is good for the Mac or not.
Marco:
We've had some of it on the show talking about the marzipan rumors.
Marco:
I fall on the side of it being a great thing because I think, pragmatically speaking, this isn't a question of whether I now have to use all of AppKit to make an Overcast Mac app or whether I can have my iPad app run in a little window of some kind.
Marco:
Because I was never going to do that.
Marco:
I was never going to port the whole thing to AppKit because I've already evaluated that option and decided it was too much work for what it would be worth to me.
Marco:
So many companies find themselves in this position.
Marco:
That's why we have things like Electron and all these weird cross-platform awful frameworks that make it really hard to make good apps anywhere because the cost of making apps on all these different platforms individually is too high for a lot of companies and indies to justify.
Marco:
So if they make it easier and cheaper to make Mac apps, there will be more Mac apps.
Marco:
And Mac apps that use this UIKit on the Mac thing, which I kind of took note, they never actually named it.
John:
Yeah, I was going to say that they didn't give it a name, which is kind of weird because they're going to announce it.
John:
You can brand it, but they're not ready to brand it.
John:
And by the way, some people did disassemble it and find some symbols inside the code base that say the word marzipan.
John:
So regardless of what this thing is...
John:
Regardless of what this thing becomes, at some point, some part of it had the word marzipan involved in it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Which, speaking of, isn't in new Macs, isn't the, like, the, not the EFI, but isn't there, like, the T2 or something like that, isn't that running, like, a cut-down version of iOS?
Casey:
As Bridge OS or something?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So you start iOS to start your Mac, and then we've seen disassembly of there being like an iOS subsystem on your Mac.
Casey:
So you use iOS to start your Mac to start iOS.
Casey:
It's not an iOS subsystem.
John:
It's just the UIKit framework running on the Mac.
John:
They also saw another fun symbol.
John:
It was like, you know, it was some symbol in the thing that was like underscore, something underscore Mac, something underscore iOS, and a new symbol that was something underscore iOS Mac.
John:
So it was like iOS running on your Mac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Have fun putting on all your pound defines for the million different samples there.
John:
But anyway, good keynote, John?
John:
Yeah, they did.
John:
I forgot to mention one more one-year-like thing where they announce something, and then you wait a year, and it comes.
John:
And I want Marco to be able to use his bell.
John:
So APFS Fusion Drive.
John:
That was announced along with APFS, like everybody's going to APFS in 2017, and we're going to convert everything, and we're going to support everything, and we're going to support Fusion Drive, and they did convert everything, and for the most part it went okay, but they did not support Fusion Drive, so now they do a year later.
John:
So good keynote though, John?
John:
I mean, it wasn't surprising.
John:
Even the part that was supposedly surprising, the marzipan, we knew all of that, but it was surprising that they said anything about it.
John:
I fully expected all that to be true about whatever this marzipan thing is, and then just to not say anything about it.
John:
But macOS at the end of the keynote means macOS is the star, kind of.
John:
I'm not sure it's chock full of anything, and I'm really nervous about the Mac applications.
John:
I'm making air quotes.
John:
You can't see it.
John:
But at least we'll get... I was going to say, at least we'll get Overcast on the Mac, but will we?
John:
Can we get exclusive here on this podcast?
John:
Marco, will you commit to Overcast on the Mac and tvOS?
Marco:
If it's as easy to port my iPad app as they seem to indicate that it is, yeah.
Marco:
Why would I not do that?
Marco:
To spike Casey?
Marco:
I can always hire him to do it.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
That would be kind of amazing, though.
Casey:
Well, and the whole thing with Overcast for the Mac is that was when I was sitting at a computer for 40 to 50 hours a week.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't even need it anymore.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't even care anymore.
Marco:
But that's all right.
Marco:
The port's off.
Marco:
Forget it.
Marco:
It's not happening.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
It's all over.
Marco:
It's my fault.
Marco:
As soon as you quit your job, I can make Overcast for the Mac and you've got your polo shirt.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
That is true.
Marco:
We should talk about the video at the end, too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, the ending video.
John:
Yeah, I thought that was nice.
John:
It was cute.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the first part is going to be, this is a bunch of your friends up on screen.
John:
Isn't this fun?
John:
And you can relate to it.
John:
And the second video was like, now your mom is on screen.
John:
This is like Pixar levels of knife to the heart.
John:
Like, go ahead.
John:
Try to hate this video.
John:
It's someone's mom.
John:
So it was, you know, they get you eventually.
John:
They get you in the end.
John:
You get tired out.
John:
It's like, all right, fine.
Marco:
I mean, overall, I was very happy with this keynote.
Marco:
I'm very happy with everything we got.
Marco:
Some of the presentation parts of it were kind of a mess.
Marco:
I think it needed some editing.
Marco:
But the actual meat of it, what we actually got, the new stuff we have, it looks awesome.
Marco:
It is more than I expected.
Marco:
I got almost all the major themes I wanted.
Marco:
We still don't have new MacBook Pros, and that's unfortunate.
Marco:
But other than that, we don't have a real SiriKit audio API.
Marco:
But we have a lot of good stuff I can now do with Siri.
Marco:
They got the watch stuff.
Marco:
They have all these cool enhancements to the Mac.
Marco:
We have Marzipan being a real thing.
Marco:
This is all awesome.
Marco:
I'm really happy with this.
Marco:
And ultimately, I said last time what I wanted was a sign of life that the reason the Mac has been so quiet recently is not that it's dead, but that they're just working on stuff that isn't done yet.
Marco:
And we got that.
Marco:
That to me is the best.
Marco:
They really do seem like they have recommitted to the Mac as a first-class platform that's going to continue as opposed to this horribly neglected afterthought that is kind of annoying Tim Cook.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy about this.
Marco:
Mac wasn't dead.
Marco:
It was just resting.
John:
You don't get that reference case.
John:
You don't laugh.
John:
You don't get it.
Marco:
It's a tough crowd, you guys.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you very much to our very special sponsors this week.
Marco:
We are sponsored by Audible.
Marco:
They're hiring right here at Allcom.
Marco:
Go to audiblecareers.com.
Marco:
We are sponsored by these awesome Aftershocks Trex Air bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to see those.
Marco:
And sponsored by Microsoft with their Azure platform to make you learn all about building intelligent iOS apps at scale.
Marco:
Visit aka.ms slash iOS and Azure.
Marco:
Thank you so much to those sponsors, and we will talk to you next week.
Bye.
Marco:
Don't hold that, guys.
John:
Don't hold that.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
All right, so we got... We got something else we got to talk about.
Marco:
We got to talk about these scooters.
Casey:
These scooters, man.
Casey:
What is going on with these scooters?
Casey:
So if you're not in San Jose or San Francisco or what have you, apparently it's a thing that...
Casey:
These scooter ferries just fly over the cities and just deposit scooters everywhere.
Casey:
And for almost no money, you can sign up to drive slash ride slash pilot whatever these scooters.
Casey:
Electric scooters.
Casey:
Electric scooters.
Casey:
around the city.
Casey:
And so I guess you, Marco, and Tiff, and Mike, and a few others who were here before John and I signed up for this and started driving these scooters around.
Casey:
And then yesterday, you got some for John and I to try.
Casey:
I forced you to do it.
Casey:
You forced John to do it.
Casey:
I needed encouragement.
John:
I like scooters.
John:
That was fine.
Casey:
OK.
John:
Yeah, that's totally how it went.
John:
That is not how that went.
John:
But anyway, I was no hesitation.
John:
I wasn't like underscore, like cautiously setting out, saying goodbye to his wife like he'd never see her again.
John:
Well, to be fair, these things are terrifying.
Casey:
Well, the thing is, they are terrifying and they haul ass.
Marco:
Those things move.
Marco:
This is like the progression that I went through and then watched as everyone I know went through the exact same progression is at first you start noticing that there are these scooters everywhere and you think,
Marco:
Well, that's kind of weird.
Marco:
Isn't that kind of littering up the whole world?
Marco:
And this apparently is a controversy in these towns, cities, sorry.
Marco:
It's California, the towns.
Marco:
Anyway, so there's this controversy.
Marco:
There's scooters all over the place littering up the sidewalks and everything.
Marco:
And so you first see them, and then you might see a couple people whizzing by on them, and you're like, wow, what jerks.
Marco:
And then at some point, you are bored at social policy, and you're like, hmm, there's like three of them sitting right there.
Marco:
In the middle of the sidewalk.
Casey:
Not even really arranged in any particular way.
Casey:
They're just there.
Casey:
It's like being in your house with kids.
Marco:
Seriously.
John:
Drop it wherever you are and walk out of the room.
Marco:
So you go on this progression from...
Marco:
what are those to those people are jerks to, hmm, they're right there.
Marco:
Maybe I should try one.
Marco:
I don't have anything else to do and I don't have to worry about angering the locals because I'm only here like three days a year.
Marco:
They're not going to remember me.
Marco:
So let's give it a shot.
Marco:
Why not?
Marco:
I got some time to kill.
Marco:
How hard could it be?
Marco:
On the Saturday before WWDC.
Marco:
So I signed up for the app and tried a scooter and I went through this progression of you get on it and you're like, whoa, whoa, and then you push the accelerator really hard and you're like, whoa, holy shit.
Casey:
These things are fast!
Casey:
No, they really, really are.
Casey:
If you are in town, and obviously the people I'm looking at are, but if you're ever in town, you should try it, because they are disturbingly fast.
Marco:
And you look at this progression of unfamiliar, jerk, curious, trying it, and then you're like, oh my god, this is really fun!
Marco:
And then you start rationalizing, like, okay, this has to be a good thing, because this is fun, and I want to rationalize that this is a good thing.
Marco:
So let's ignore all the problems of littering up the sidewalk and start talking about how this is going to change mass transit.
Marco:
We'll have to rethink cities.
John:
You forgot the final stage, which is when you pointed out to me, when you were describing what it was like before I had tried it, what you said was 100% true, is that as soon as you do it, you realize immediately this should be illegal.
John:
Yeah.
John:
oh yeah because there's no way heavy and they are too fast for the sidewalk and they are too slow for the road and their wheels are too small for potholes and they like we need the law to catch up with these scooters because this is not how cities should work like if you if you gave these to everybody in the city it would be with the existing roads and structure like it would be mass chaos and i just fear when people come whizzing by us like they're just gonna
John:
hit me like they're heavy.
John:
They're big and heavy and they go, they don't go that fast, they go like 50 miles an hour, but if you get into the mass, P equals MV, like these things are going to hurt you if you get hit in the back with them.
John:
So I am not a fan, but they're so fun to ride.
John:
Try it before they become illegal.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
That's why I made them try it.
Marco:
I'm like, look, we're going to come back here next year.
Marco:
There's no way these will still be legal next year.
Marco:
So you've got to try it now because, yeah, this is way too fun.
Marco:
They're way too fast.
Marco:
There's no way this is going to be a long-term thing.
John:
So check under your seats.
John:
Everyone gets a free scooter.
Casey:
And the other problem I have with it is that I think if I'd stayed on the scooter another five minutes, I would have gone from terrified to, oh, I think I've got this, to I am Evil Knievel.
John:
And that
John:
I already got in the face.
John:
They cannot take a curb.
John:
You can't go from the curb to the street because the wheels are too small.
Marco:
The very first ride he took, he ended it by trying to go off of a six-inch tall curb and just bottomed out.
John:
You can do it on a bicycle, but these things, the wheelbase is too long and the wheels are too small.
John:
They need bigger wheels.
John:
We need to get Horace Dadu on here to tell us about e-bikes because they'll be like, how can you talk about this and not mention e-bikes?
John:
They're going to change the world.
John:
We know.
John:
We know, Horace.
John:
We know.
Casey:
So try them before they're legal.
Casey:
You heard it here first.
Marco:
Thanks a lot, everyone.
Marco:
Thank you.