A Squirmy Soup of Rectangles
Marco:
Hello everybody and welcome to our WWDC 2021 live but not in person but still live spectacular.
Marco:
Although most people who hear it won't hear it live but some of you are hearing it live so here we are it's our live spectacular.
Casey:
I have been in a crabby mood all day for no reason whatsoever.
Casey:
You ever have one of those days?
Casey:
It's like, you know, it's the Mondays, even though it's, well, I guess, is it Monday?
Casey:
What is the, yeah, it is Monday, isn't it?
Casey:
Golly, I'm loopy.
Casey:
Didn't sleep well last night.
Casey:
Again, nothing in particular, just, you know, a random night where I didn't sleep well, been kind of grumpy all day.
Casey:
And I went through the keynote and just very briefly, I thought, okay, that's fine.
Casey:
And then I watched the State of the Union, and I was like, no, actually, there's more here than I thought.
Casey:
And then I took my 11 Pro, and I put the beta on it.
Casey:
So this is an older phone.
Casey:
Well, not older, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
It's not my daily phone.
Casey:
I put the beta on it, and I've only fiddled with it for a few minutes.
Casey:
But I think...
Casey:
Crab apple?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm trying to self-censor so you don't have to bleep me later.
Casey:
I'm trying to make your edit better, man.
Casey:
You're welcome.
Casey:
So anyway, I was curious, do you guys, if you'll do a very brief opening statement, if we are even capable of such a thing, how was your general sentiment of the entire day?
Marco:
I think I had a similar opinion as I think many of the reactions I saw online at first and during like on Twitter and stuff, which was it seemed kind of boring from a developer's perspective.
Marco:
There is a bunch of stuff from a user's perspective.
Marco:
But from a developer's perspective, there wasn't a lot that was shown off in the keynote.
Marco:
And the State of the Union really honestly didn't.
Marco:
expand on that very much like i i kind of expected like hey we're gonna get to we're gonna get to all the really deep technical stuff in the state of the union and it it kind of we kind of didn't but once you start looking into the api diffs and the new apis and and stuff like that it becomes a lot more of an update of a meaningful update at that kind of level you know i would almost compare it to like a speed bump update in the hardware
Marco:
Where you don't necessarily, there's not like a lot of like in your face, like, wow, massive new thing for developers here.
Marco:
But there is a lot of under the hood stuff that has been updated.
Marco:
And a lot of it is not going to affect everyone.
Marco:
You know, it might only affect you if you use certain APIs or whatever.
Marco:
But a lot of it is stuff that I think everybody would use and has been waiting for.
Marco:
Things like, obviously, Swift having async await and actors, that's a pretty significant change to the APIs that we all use.
Marco:
And so that's a huge thing that's going to affect all of us in various ways.
Marco:
And there's stuff like underlying framework changes.
Marco:
There's this completely new text engine.
Marco:
They revamped StoreKit.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff like that that many apps will find themselves benefiting from at some point.
Marco:
And then there's always the whole...
Marco:
little miscellaneous API niceties that come up.
Marco:
I noticed there's now an API for decoding and thumbnailing images.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
Off the main thread.
Marco:
We've all had to
Marco:
paste snippets from Stack Overflow into our code base or import single class libraries and functions to do these very common tasks.
Marco:
To have that built in is just a little nicety.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of stuff like that.
Marco:
There's a meaningful update to SwiftUI and
Marco:
I wouldn't at first glance call it like super revolutionary, but it's a nice point update to SwiftUI basically.
Marco:
And so we have a lot of stuff here, none of which is especially headline grabbing for developers for the most part, but a lot of just kind of general niceties that form this kind of speed bump update to the software basically.
Marco:
And in a year that was probably massively disrupted by all the COVID work from home stuff, I would imagine like...
Marco:
This is pretty good considering all that.
Marco:
So I'm happy with it so far.
Marco:
I mean, again, this is day one.
Marco:
I haven't had time to look at it yet.
Marco:
Happy with it so far.
Marco:
And also, I think developers kind of need a break.
Marco:
It's kind of like the iOS 12 year where like...
Marco:
iOS 12, we kind of all got a free summer that was mostly a summer off, if we wanted it to be.
Marco:
Because there weren't that many breaking new features that we had to implement.
Marco:
And I think this is going to be one of those summers as well, which the whole world needs right now.
Marco:
We need a time off, a break.
Marco:
And I think this is going to be that kind of thing where...
Marco:
On one hand, I don't see a lot of new ground for apps to have new capabilities that weren't possible before and to open up new markets.
Marco:
I don't see a lot of that kind of change, but I also don't see a lot of...
Marco:
crap that we all have to adopt that's just kind of a churn, like new system-wide UI themes or stuff like that.
Marco:
That kind of stuff where you're kind of obligated as a developer to do a bunch of work that kind of blocks the rest of your feature work until you do that.
Marco:
There's not a lot of that either.
Marco:
So ultimately, I think it's going to be a really nice kind of lower-key summer and fall where we're going to be able to work on
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
And it's funny you brought up the last year because it occurred to me earlier today, and I meant to bring this up earlier, that this feels like the last two WWDCs feel like what you would expect given the timelines of COVID overlapping all of these two events.
Casey:
So last year's WWDC, COVID really became a thing in March.
Casey:
And granted, I am sure that that is the crunch time for Apple to really and properly get everything across the finish line.
Casey:
But at that point, they had had quite a lot, most of the year even, or most of the season perhaps, to work on these new features.
Casey:
And last year's WWDC was very impressive.
Casey:
I mean, widgets alone I think was a really big deal, and there was plenty more beside that.
Casey:
This year, I feel like, certainly at a glance...
Casey:
I don't feel like there's a lot to be excited for for developers at a glance.
Casey:
And I didn't even think there was that much to be excited for as a user at a glance.
Casey:
But I think part of that is because this was a full year of COVID that Apple had to work through.
Casey:
And Apple is famously a company that does not do remote work well or didn't anyway.
Casey:
And so I think it's not really that surprising, like you had said, Marco, that this year is perhaps less splashy than last year was since that train had already left the station for WWDC 2020 and there was nothing they can do to stop it.
Casey:
This year, you know, they had to fight with all of the uncertainties of the whole of 2020 in order to deliver anything.
Casey:
But again, I really think that my initial take was wrong.
Casey:
And the more I think about it, the more I think there is some really interesting stuff here.
Casey:
John, I interrupted you.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
What was your quick opening statement?
John:
I think we always talk about WWDC as this sort of balancing act, specifically the keynote, where especially when it's all virtual like this, the keynote is expected to be viewed by many, many people and in many ways targeted at a much larger audience.
John:
When we're there in person, it's like, yeah, we're in the room, but we understand that the keynote is not just for us.
John:
It's a whole week-long conference that's just for us.
John:
The keynote is kind of for
John:
the public or whatever.
John:
So there's always this balance between how much developer-focused content versus how much Apple just saying, here's, you know, because part of WWDC is there's a new version of iOS, there's a new version of tvOS, a new version of macOS, here's what they're called, here's the features they have, right?
John:
Sometimes those features require developers to do new stuff, but sometimes they're just new features.
John:
And this is the time when Apple announces those things, right?
John:
So we expect there's going to be a lot of content that's like, oh, look, here's a new feature in the OS.
John:
It's our feature, and there's no SDK for it, and just FYI, it's there.
John:
But sometimes there's tons of developer-facing features.
John:
Oh, Xcode is released, or we've invented a new programming language, and you're all going to be using it soon.
John:
Or Apple Silicon sometimes is big developer-focused.
John:
And then on top of that, there's the context of what we talked about the past couple episodes of
John:
developer sentiment and the epic trial and all the you know legislative stuff going on and antitrust here and in Europe and all the other stuff like that sort of looms as a shadow over this and last week I think it was Marco more or less predicting like there's not going to be any overtures in this WWDC keynote to try to like you know
John:
extend the olive branch or whatever to developers.
John:
And for the most part, that was right.
John:
But I think Apple still has to kind of walk that line.
John:
We want developers to be excited about the new stuff we're going to announce.
John:
And this is the developer conference.
John:
So it's not like we're going to have this sort of mournful tone where it's like, oh, I know everyone doesn't like us, but here's some new stuff, right?
John:
So they have to, you know, be enthusiastic.
John:
But they also...
John:
It's difficult for them to sort of find the right balance, and it really depends on who the audience is.
John:
Maybe you don't care about any of this stuff, and you think your relationship with Apple is awesome, and you're just super excited.
John:
Like, that audience needs to be served as well.
John:
You know, and some developers are cranky about it, and they need to be, you know, like...
John:
I think it was a difficult situation, right?
John:
So they always have some kind of gag openings.
John:
This time they had a gag opening that was like, you know, if developers could design the intro of WWC, how would it be?
John:
And depending on your point of view, it's like, oh, this was a fun little, you know, because they do those gags all the time.
John:
It's obviously well-produced, highly polished, pretty funny as far as, you know, these things go.
John:
But if you're in a cranky mood, you watch that, you're like...
John:
Well, I'm not excited about WWDC, so these people who are supposed to be developers being excited makes me cranky.
John:
But if you're actually enthusiastic about, you know, what's going to be announced and looking forward to it, you're like, oh, it's a little funny opening.
John:
And I think that is sort of the...
John:
The difficulty of this year's WWDC, aside from all the COVID stuff that you talked about, aside from all the like, what do they have to announce and what do they not have to announce?
John:
There is that difficulty of how does Apple present itself to the world and to its developers amidst that larger context.
John:
And I think Apple did an okay job of it.
John:
And I think there was a slightly different tone in the State of the Union than there was in this one.
John:
But in general, there was just a lot of stuff for them to announce.
John:
So mostly it was like, okay, we're going to describe all the things.
John:
And the final thing I'll add is like...
John:
uh you know no hardware this year right so uh that was that we brought this up on a couple of past shows without an intel roadmap or any external sort of third-party hardware uh limiter or gate on apple's releases if apple doesn't tell us when they're ready with their whatever new chip that's going to go in the new pro max we just don't know uh what is the new hardware just not ready
John:
Maybe.
John:
Or maybe they're going to announce it two weeks after WWDC and the only reason they didn't do it now is because they had so much content.
John:
I mean, despite the fact that we were saying this is boring and there's not too much exciting stuff, it's not like they were padding it.
John:
There was a lot of stuff in it.
John:
And I'm trying to wrap up this intro as fast as we can because I think as we go through this keynote, there was actually a lot of things.
John:
Granted, a lot of them are end-user features, but still,
John:
It's not like they spent 10 minutes on an AR table demo, right?
John:
It's not like they had five game developers come up and show their games, right?
John:
It was just thing after thing after thing.
John:
And as usual, they didn't even hit on like 50% of the stuff that's available.
John:
State of the Union, which we're probably not going to get time to cover much of, I think didn't have too much extra technical detail, mostly because they spent a long time going into much more depth on a few topics that they decided were important.
John:
which is a different approach than they've done in the past where they do sort of a survey course of like quick hits on technical stuff that they didn't mention at all in the keynote, right?
John:
And each little quick hit would be like, and here's a new thing.
John:
Go to this session to see more.
John:
And here's another new techie thing.
John:
Go to this session to see more.
John:
And here's another new techie thing.
John:
Instead, they really concentrated on a handful of things they thought were important and really spent time with them, which is reasonable because, again, there's a whole week worth of sessions.
John:
And I've gone through the sessions and sort of like, you know,
John:
bookmark them or whatever to like know the ones that are going to watch there's a ton of really interesting good sessions granted like marco said most of them being like oh here's a framework that you already use but it has new features and you're going to want to use them because the new features are like things that you've always wanted to do or things that weren't possible before or
John:
or just enhancements that just make you smile.
John:
If you have any experience with the API, like, wow, that's great.
John:
Like even something as simple as like SF symbols.
John:
Now you can do a multiple colors.
John:
Cool.
John:
Like I saw that in the Apple apps during the keynote and I was wondering what the deal with that was.
John:
And now I can A, use them myself and B, make my own.
John:
That's not a big deal to anyone who's not a developer, but that's exactly the content that you would expect to see in WWDC.
John:
So sorry for making this go longer, but yeah, I think we need to dive into the announcements because there actually are a lot of small things.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's dive in.
Casey:
Opening video, I don't think there's really that much else to say about it other than, hey, there was a DeLorean.
Casey:
That was neat.
Casey:
I actually enjoyed the Memoji audience that Tim walked out in front of.
Casey:
I mean, it's cheesy and weird, but given that we live in a weird time, I thought it was kind of cute.
Casey:
And then here we are at iOS 15.
Casey:
So there were several themes.
Casey:
There was stay connected.
Casey:
There was focus, I think.
Casey:
I'm trying to get these right now.
Casey:
Stay connected.
Casey:
Explore the world around you.
Casey:
And one other that I apparently didn't take good enough notes.
John:
I don't think you have to remember these themes because we will never see them again.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
So let's start with FaceTime.
Casey:
There's spatial audio for FaceTime, which, again, if I had a device that supported spatial audio, I'd be more enthusiastic about this.
Casey:
But it seems clever.
Casey:
So my understanding is if you're in a multi-person FaceTime call,
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
And then if Marco talks, it'll sound like he's coming from my right ever so slightly.
Casey:
So it helps you, I guess, have a little bit of spatial awareness as to the conversation.
Casey:
And it makes it feel, one would assume, more real.
Casey:
It's a little thing, but I think that's pretty cool.
John:
I think there's a good use of spatial audio because, you know, I've been a little bit down on trying to use it for TV or music or other contexts where like the audio is professionally produced to be a certain way.
John:
And now this thing is trying to mess with it to make it sound like it's coming from a place that it's not.
John:
But, you know, like that's that doesn't appeal to me.
John:
But this is a perfect application like in a FaceTime call.
John:
you know you're probably not playing high fidelity music to each other although they did emphasize that if you don't like this feature you can turn it off uh but you know it's just people talking and they they there were a bunch of features uh related to facetime that were just like making it easier to hear people talking the noise canceling the the uh maybe that was the thing i was thinking of turning off the thing the thing with the leaf blower where they're trying to like isolate the person's voice uh and remove background noise um and then spatial audio like if you're you know if you are talking to your whole family on an ipad
John:
spatial audio making voices slightly more distinguishable by position it's fine it's cool like i mean i you know grant you probably can recognize the the voices of your family anyway but like this is a perfect application of this type of thing and i'm glad to see it spread throughout their uh uh their product line uh and to that end one other thing is that the grid view which is now a feature because the previous floating boxes and everything are
John:
Some people found unappealing.
John:
So now you can have a plain old grid view.
John:
And one of the things they added to the grid view is kind of like the tvOS high contrast selection that we talked about on a previous show.
Casey:
I knew you would be so happy about this.
John:
That has come to FaceTime.
John:
Now the person who's speaking can get a nice white outline around the little round rack that they're in.
John:
uh which is neat um i'm you know i'm i'm liking these i mean it makes some sense like i don't know if this is just coincidence or if it's just that prioritization but like with covid everyone working from home a lot of the features that we're about to talk about with ios of this whole stay connected thing are features that would help if you are spending a lot of time working from home doing like you know video conferencing with people
Marco:
Yeah, it's a really good direction to go.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, you know, the sooner they can get this out, the better, because people really have needed this for a long time.
Marco:
And if anything, it might be a little bit late for the like massive wave of COVID shutdowns.
Marco:
But, you know, first of all, COVID isn't over yet.
Marco:
And it's probably a long time from being totally over in all places in the world.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
I think we're in for an era of a lot more remote work than we had before.
Marco:
Cause I think a lot of people will choose to, you know, if they're, if their businesses will allow them to, and I think many will, um, I think a lot of people will choose to stay mostly or entirely remote who have been remote for this past year.
Marco:
Um, so I think, I think this will actually be really nice if they can get people to use it.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
On that point, getting people to use it, I mean, FaceTime has always been very, very good for one-to-one family and friends use.
Marco:
It's been great for that.
Marco:
I still haven't really seen anybody that I know use group FaceTime.
Marco:
And one reason for that is because it was, until this, Apple device only.
Marco:
But the fact that they made a web view for FaceTime, like a web participant interface for FaceTime, that is a pretty big deal.
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
I couldn't believe it when I heard that.
Casey:
And they actually mentioned Android, if I'm not mistaken, during the keynote.
Casey:
And it won't be native, like you had said, but the fact that it's even possible is tremendous.
Casey:
You know, when we used to travel, you know, do you remember that?
Casey:
Do you remember going places?
Casey:
That was fun.
Casey:
When we used to travel, you know, when we would hand the kids off and typically, you know, we would have like one-
Casey:
set of grandparents have them for a couple days, and the other set have them for a couple days.
Casey:
And my in-laws are all on Android devices.
Casey:
And so we would use Google Duo, which was fine, to be honest.
Casey:
And then we would use FaceTime with my family.
Casey:
But to have just one system
Casey:
on my end anyway, that works for anyone, would be really, really nice.
Casey:
And so I'm very curious to see what the implementation feels and looks like on Android.
Casey:
I'm sure it won't be stupendous, but if it's at least decent, that'll be really great.
Casey:
And Apple also pointed out, by the way, that they are still encrypting end-to-end, even on the web.
Marco:
I think one very limiting factor here is going to be that it seems like the web version I think only is available through the FaceTime links feature where you kind of schedule calls with a web link in advance.
Marco:
I don't think there's going to be, at least from what they showed today, I don't think there's going to be a way for people on Android or web or Windows or whatever to initiate a FaceTime call themselves or to have FaceTime between each other without somebody on an Apple device being in the call.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, they might.
John:
Here's the thing about the web thing.
John:
We know other companies have done web-based teleconferencing before, like Google Hangouts or whatever, right?
John:
And all those systems, to use them at all, for the most part, they want you to be logged in with whatever their identity is.
John:
So you're logged into your Google account, and then you can initiate a Google Hangout or whatever the hell they're calling the things these days.
John:
meetings, right?
John:
If you are like, you know, a bunch of people who don't have Apple devices, what are the chances that your friends or relatives who have Android devices are logged in somewhere with an Apple ID?
John:
Chances seem pretty low, especially if they don't have any Apple devices.
John:
And that is Apple's identity system.
John:
So the idea that someone else would initiate a call, but they don't have any Apple devices, they would have to make an Apple ID, log in, and then maybe, we don't know if this is true, but maybe there's a web interface to FaceTime where if you're logged in with your Apple ID, you can initiate a FaceTime call.
John:
But even before we get to whether that is the case or not, again, what are the odds that someone is going to sign up for an Apple ID?
John:
So it's nice that they did the web version,
John:
If their real play was like, we want to be the end all be all video communication thing for the world, regardless of platform, like what they finally came around to after many years with Apple TV Plus, which is like, look, we can't just be on our own devices.
John:
We have to be in every single television.
John:
We have to be on Roku.
John:
We have to be everywhere.
John:
They're not doing that yet with FaceTime.
John:
This is a baby step in that direction.
John:
But if they wanted to do that, they got to make an Android app.
John:
They got to let people send and receive calls from like their Google account.
John:
And it doesn't seem like they want to do that.
John:
So this is kind of weird because a lot of the features they rolled out are sort of catch up with Zoom, like where you can blur the background and you can share documents and watch things at the same time.
John:
We'll talk more about this in a little bit.
John:
Tons of awesome features that I love that I've wanted for years and years.
John:
but the sort of cross-platform, heterogeneous, non-all-Apple family play is still questionable.
John:
Like, I like the FaceTime links, and I like the fact that they're doing something, but it seems like it's kind of, if you were in a friend group or family that was like this, and everyone was doing it on FaceTime, and you've got, like, this link, and you have to use the web view, and, like, everyone else is in the native app, it just doesn't feel like it, you know, you're on equal footing with everybody else, and I feel like you'd probably resent that and say, why can't we all just use Zoom?
John:
That stinks everywhere.
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, people who choose to use Android or Windows probably aren't super into having a first-class experience with their computing devices.
Marco:
Oh, here we go.
John:
I mean, but at least they feel like everyone's used to using Zoom or used to using whatever they use.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It really depends on the group.
John:
Like, you know, when...
John:
When I think about my use of video conferencing, I have to use Microsoft Teams at work because that's what everybody uses.
John:
And at least that's homogeneous where it's like, look, everyone in my company uses Teams.
John:
So, you know, everyone's going to be on Teams.
John:
We all complain about Teams together and commiserate.
John:
Other things for like school stuff for my kids, that seems to be all on Zoom.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, with my family, it's FaceTime because we're mostly Apple.
John:
So there is kind of this idea that within a particular group, there's a platform that we all agree on.
John:
It's just that when all the things that I described, it's an equal experience, maybe not a great experience, but an equal experience for everybody.
John:
And this FaceTime thing is now going to be some of the participants get fancy native apps on their iPad or iPhone.
John:
And some people are looking at a Web page that hopefully works on their Android phone.
Marco:
I will say also the audio stuff they mentioned very briefly.
Marco:
John mentioned voice isolation, the ML-based filtering, filtering out background noise.
Marco:
That's a really cool thing.
Marco:
This is not the first software to ever do that, but it's not that common yet, and Apple can probably do a pretty good job of it.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to hearing that.
Marco:
Also, they threw in right at the end there, there's also an option for what they call wide-spectrum sound, which picks up all frequencies of audio.
Marco:
Because normally, all of these video chat and audio chat apps, they normally apply very, very heavy filtering and gating to the audio to try to cram it down into the smallest bitrate possible.
Marco:
And they optimize it for speech.
Marco:
And they throw out anything that is probably not speech frequencies.
Marco:
And so to have this option to not do that, I think it's going to sound incredible because we're so accustomed to phone calls and phone call like experiences sounding the way they do with like the very aggressive voice only compression to turn that off and to actually hear all of the audio frequencies without all the aggressive filtering and gating and everything is probably going to sound incredible.
Marco:
So I'm actually really excited to try that out.
John:
That actually relates to the other thing, which is a share play business, right?
John:
So one of the places where what you're describing comes into play is if you're on a Zoom meeting or whatever, and there's a song you want someone to play, and you play it on your phone, and you hold your phone up to the microphone or something, it sounds awful, right?
John:
Because it's taking music and then just trying to...
John:
narrow it through whatever filters they have to just be speech and plus it's like going out of a tinny speaker into a microphone right if what you actually want to do is have multiple people on a you know video conference together either listening to or watching something at the same time why bother even trying to smuggle it over the connection that you're talking over if it is a thing that is available on the internet we can all watch it together let's all watch ted lasso together
John:
Right.
John:
And we're all watching presumably full fidelity streams from our own location that are synchronized with each other.
John:
Again, lots of other sites and apps have done this and services like Netflix.
John:
And, you know, I know a bunch of people who have done this.
John:
My kids have done it where you simultaneously watch with a bunch of friends, again, mostly because of COVID because you can't all be in the same house.
John:
Um, but just the basic functionality, like this is all, you know, makes sense in the context of COVID, but even setting aside COVID, all of these features are features that are useful outside of the context of COVID to be able to share media at full fidelity, to be able to share documents, screens, all screen sharing.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
Like, uh, how many times do I do tech support for my parents where they have to point one of their iOS devices, cameras at the screen of another iOS device, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I can screen share on the Mac, but when they have a problem with their iOS device, it's like, and then I'm trying to correct their, you know, I can't see the screen anymore and it's not in focus.
John:
And it's a really difficult job screen sharing in iOS.
John:
Like the idea that we have this incredibly high bandwidth connection between each other where we can see each other in real time and video.
John:
And the only thing we were using it for is to just see people's faces.
John:
It's so great to finally say, let's,
John:
Let's share a document.
John:
Let's look at charts.
John:
Let's share a song.
John:
Let's watch a video at the same time.
John:
I really hope this gets wide adoption because this is exactly what I wanted.
John:
I always hated the feeling that I was connected with somebody, but the only things I was allowed to send over this connection was just a picture of myself.
John:
And I've wanted to do anything else, like if we're on a call with the family.
John:
And even if we just want to look at some recent pictures, oh, did you see that picture I recently added to the shared album?
John:
Oh, Uncle Joe isn't in the shared album.
John:
Oh, I can add you.
John:
Can I just show the picture right now so we can all look at it together?
John:
Because we're all on a FaceTime call and somehow I can't bring up a photo.
John:
This is going to be a big quality of life upgrade for sort of communication over the Internet for people who have iOS devices.
Marco:
Yeah, SharePlay is really exciting for those kind of like... I don't know how many people are going to do what Apple demoed with watching a movie together.
Marco:
I think it's great to have that capability.
Marco:
But again, I think because group FaceTime seems to have not really taken off so far, that might be kind of optimistic.
Marco:
The whole time I was watching that, I was thinking...
Marco:
back to iMessage apps and when that debuted.
Marco:
And Apple had this idea that how this would work in practice where people would install these iMessage apps and then coordinate stuff inside iMessage and pick your takeout orders from your takeout order iMessage app altogether.
Marco:
And in practice, nobody really did that.
Marco:
I think with SharePlay and FaceTime,
Marco:
I think that's probably going to be how it ends up.
Marco:
I bet most people are probably not going to be using it to watch movies and stuff together.
Marco:
But if you can use it to do things like screen sharing more easily or showing a photo like that is probably going to be a really nice improvement.
Marco:
And that's going to be probably very widely used.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with both of you guys that having some ability to screen share is likely to be a tremendous and very, very awesome feature.
Casey:
I have using Plex done, you know, watched together a couple of times.
Casey:
And this was mostly with my brother-in-law and his fiancee.
Casey:
And
Casey:
It does work well, and I'm sure Apple's would work just as well, if not better.
Casey:
It works well, and I actually enjoyed watching a couple movies that way.
Casey:
But the thing of it was, I don't think I would necessarily enjoy having a FaceTime call with video all happening while we're watching a movie.
Casey:
I feel like...
Casey:
I want to be able to watch something together, especially something as long as a movie, but I don't want to have my face on screen the entire time.
Casey:
I want to be able to get the movie going and do the play-pause thing where if they pause, it pauses me.
Casey:
If I pause, it pauses them.
Casey:
but I want to be able to chat about the movie or something over iMessage.
Casey:
I don't want to necessarily do that over FaceTime.
Casey:
And I hope that that's a thing.
Casey:
They always showed it, or at least any recollection I have, is that they always showed it as, oh, we are video chatting and simultaneously watching Ted Lasso, which is just not something I'm personally into.
Casey:
But it very well could be that...
Casey:
that it will work in this more flexible way.
Casey:
We just don't know yet.
Casey:
And it is worth noting that in the State of the Union, which we're probably not going to get to today, they did mention that there's a whole API for this.
Casey:
So you can, as an app developer, do your own cut of this.
Casey:
And in fact, I swear they said it was a demo app.
Casey:
Some people on Twitter said it was notes, but they had something where
Casey:
They were doing like a digital whiteboard with three different people on iPads with pencils, all drawing on the same whiteboard at the same time.
Casey:
And if I understood them right, the implication was that this was all done using these new APIs.
Casey:
So even though I have no particular need for this for anything that I'm working on, I'm very interested to see what does this API look like?
Casey:
Can you provide...
Casey:
some arbitrary data that, that Apple will just sync in real time.
Casey:
So you can do this like whiteboard app, or is that just, is that being treated as video?
Casey:
You know, how's that all working under the hood?
Casey:
And I'm very curious to look into it, but I haven't had time yet.
John:
And related to that are the things where they will gather up items shared with you, like via messages.
John:
If someone sends you a photo or whatever, and sort of pull them into the apps that they belong in things, people, if they send you a link, those are visible in Safari.
John:
If they send you a podcast thing, that's visible on Apple podcasts.
John:
I was saying TV show visible on Apple TV.
Um,
John:
Like sort of this unification, because we all have this experience of like, where was that thing?
John:
Did someone email it to me?
John:
Well, because we're old, we'll look on our email.
John:
Was that in a message?
John:
Now I have to go to messages and try to scroll backwards in a message thread or do a search.
John:
And if that content was just simply surfaced where we, you know, if it was a photo, it will be surfaced somewhere in the Photos app.
John:
And if it was a link to a website, it'll be surfaced somewhere in Safari.
John:
It's not quite where we want to be in terms of what if I don't use the podcast app?
John:
What if I don't use Safari?
John:
What if I, you know, I use Netflix and not Apple TV?
John:
Like, but baby steps here.
John:
But, like, just I feel like all these features are sort of raising the bar, raising the floor of, like, what can we expect as the baseline feature set?
John:
And the baseline feature set of sort of communication on the Internet has really gone up in recent years, especially with the sort of COVID forest advent of, you know, video conferencing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
a thing that you know not too many decades ago it's like well that's great if you have a good connection but you're not going to be doing it normally and now it's just kind of like status quo like at the very least real-time audio communication maybe with some grainy video um and i would say within all the apps like slack and teams and everything the expectation that you can share some portion of your screen either your whole screen or a window or share a document or do stuff like that that's sort of what people expect from their devices and
John:
Again, Apple is held back by the need to have all Apple devices or have some subset of the people be on the web, and so that's still a problem for them.
John:
But within smaller circles of people who all do have Apple devices, even if it's just within a single family or just two or three friends –
John:
The expectation that there's things you can do when communicating that are richer than just sending plain text messages or sending photos back and forth or maybe doing a FaceTime call that you can sort of integrate all these things together.
John:
I think people will just become accustomed to doing that.
John:
I think a lot of the features that Apple is doing here are catch up with things that people already are accustomed to doing from their work experience.
John:
So I think this is.
John:
necessary changes for the times, but also I look forward to this sort of, uh, you know, I said raising the floor of like, this is just, you know, what kids will eventually expect when they're adults that of course you can do this from all your devices with all your friends, even if it's in a different app, depending on your platform.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So next we learned a little bit about messages and they've revamped a few things in there, particularly like the way photos look, for example.
Casey:
There's, as you mentioned, I think, John, it was a second ago, there's like shared with you that you can see in messages and Apple news and other places as well.
Casey:
They made a very brief mention and showed that
Casey:
If I understood it right, it looked like when somebody sent a picture of like an event that you were also at to you via iMessage that it like somehow ended up inside photos as kind of like that group.
Casey:
You know, everyone's at this, everyone's at the keynote.
Casey:
We all took pictures of each other and we sent them to each other and it all just ends up in the right spot in photos.
Casey:
I really wish they had expanded upon that.
Casey:
I don't know much about it, but that looked very interesting to me.
Casey:
And it seemed like in a way it was like baby steps into like a family sharing across multiple families.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like a broader family sharing.
Casey:
And I thought that was very interesting.
John:
I think it's like what I just said before, that if things are sent to you rather than having to go to the message app to dig them out because they are photos, that information will be surfaced in the photos app.
John:
I don't know.
John:
And I suspect not that they're not like, oh, they're suddenly part of your photo library.
John:
Right.
John:
I think it's just sort of a view into data that exists, like wherever messages stores that I'm not sure when we all get these devices and start actually using them to communicate, it should become clear.
John:
But it definitely doesn't seem like, you know, because you wouldn't want it's kind of like the old Google Contacts thing.
John:
You wouldn't want every single picture someone sends you via messages to be a permanent addition to your photo library.
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm pretty sure that's not what they're doing.
John:
But it is nice to be able to just go to photos and click on shared with me and be able to scroll through a list of photos and find that thing that was sent to you a week ago.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So next we talked about focus.
Casey:
And like I said earlier, at first glance, I was kind of like, okay, but I do have iOS 15 beta on my old iPhone.
Casey:
And I played with this more than I played with anything else about the only thing I played with really.
Casey:
And at a glance, I really like it a lot.
Casey:
So what this is,
Casey:
is you know we have do not disturb today and imagine you had n number of peer things that are equivalent to do not disturb but set up differently so out of the box it comes with do not disturb driving sleep and then personal and work and some of these are set up some of them aren't but the idea is oh and you can also create a completely and totally custom one um and they also have a
Casey:
But if you create a totally custom one, you get to choose a color and an icon, kind of like shortcuts.
Casey:
And then it says, OK, notifications from people.
Casey:
Choose the people you want notifications from when this focus is turned on.
Casey:
So if you're in this mode, let's say it's work or whatever.
Casey:
Then you can say, well, I want Marco and John and Aaron to be able to blow through and I want to be able to receive their notifications.
Casey:
But my parents and my brothers, eh, they're not good enough.
Casey:
They can wait.
Casey:
And I wouldn't see notifications from them.
Casey:
And so you can choose whatever contacts you want.
Casey:
Then says, OK, notifications from apps.
Casey:
Choose the apps you want notifications from when the focus is turned on.
Casey:
So it's the same story.
Casey:
So maybe I want notifications from Slack.
Casey:
But I don't need notifications from Twitter.
Casey:
Really, probably nobody ever needs notifications from Twitter, but you get the idea.
Casey:
And so you can choose what apps you would like to have notifications from.
Casey:
And then in certain contexts, both apps, and we learned this in State of the Union, apps can say, well, this particular notification is really time sensitive.
Casey:
Say your DoorDash order has just arrived or something like that, or your Lyft is here.
Casey:
And I'm very curious to see if shady developers will abuse the snot out of this.
Casey:
I certainly hope not, but do expect it.
Marco:
I guarantee you they will.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But the idea is, if you're a good, honest developer, then you'll say, most of these Lyft notifications are just marketing or what have you.
Casey:
They're not that big a deal.
Casey:
But this one, that your drivers hear...
Casey:
That's time-sensitive.
Casey:
And so in the focus, you can optionally say, hey, if there's something time-sensitive, even if it's from an app that I haven't specifically blessed to be in this focus, then you can say, okay, we can allow that to come through.
Casey:
And then...
Casey:
I believe in iMessage, it will say, hey, this person is trying to focus.
Casey:
And it's very much like do not disturb while driving.
Casey:
Yeah, this person is trying to focus.
Casey:
But if this is really important, you know, tap this link or whatever, tap this button and we'll allow you to bust through that.
Casey:
And again, I've only played with it for a few minutes.
Casey:
I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but this looks really, really cool.
Casey:
And it seems like a very aptly and very well done balancing of flexibility with, oh my God, I don't want to spend 30 minutes setting up this focus, you know, because I can...
Casey:
I can fathom ways that it would be nicer to have more granular customization, but then you're going to be spending all this time setting up all of your different focuses and tweaking them just right.
Casey:
And unless you're CGP Cray, that's probably not something you want to bother with.
Casey:
And this seems like it's really struck the right balance between flexible and also not a pain to set up.
Casey:
Now, do either of you guys, I don't think you do, John.
Casey:
Marco, do you have the beta on anything yet?
Marco:
Only on a test iPhone.
Marco:
It's my old iPhone 7, actually.
Marco:
It isn't even signed into my real Apple ID.
Marco:
It's like, you know, a test ID that I have, like, signed into nothing.
Marco:
You know, purchased nothing.
Marco:
I have to, like, it's weird.
Marco:
It's always kind of funny, like, trying to get files and stuff to it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's not my Apple ID, so I have to airdrop stuff over.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
But ultimately, I am very, very happy to see this focus.
Marco:
Focus.
Marco:
Their focus on focus.
Marco:
Because I love Do Not Disturb, and that has really... Just using Do Not Disturb and the auto DND settings for every night when I'm asleep, that was such a big iOS quality of life improvement.
Marco:
And the one big complaint most people had about Do Not Disturb was we would like more granularity on what this means.
Marco:
And it seems like they've given that to us and more with this focus system.
Marco:
This, I think, is going to be probably the most noticeable and noteworthy change for iOS power users in all of iOS 15.
Marco:
Because every power user I know uses Do Not Disturb in some way.
Marco:
And so to have these kind of like multiple contexts where you can set different modes you want to be in for different conditions and to have each one of those be more customizable to begin with, that's a great thing.
Marco:
Um, as for the notification, uh, like priority system, uh,
Marco:
I do think that will be largely either abused or ignored by many apps because everything about notifications is largely abused by tons of apps, and the rules are never enforced against them.
Marco:
So I do expect it to be widely abused, including by Apple for their own promotions for all their own ads.
Marco:
I guarantee you it will be abused.
Marco:
That being said, if you ignore or if you don't expect much out of the notification priority features –
Marco:
And if you instead just look at the focus system as a whole and its customizability and its rules and everything, I'm very excited about that.
John:
I think the challenge with all these systems, like, you know, where iOS 15, 15, that's the time when you get down to, okay, now it's time to actually even add more flexibility on top of the notifications.
John:
And I think one of the prerequisites of this system is like,
John:
What they added in past releases, you know, when a notification notification comes up at that moment in that notification, you can take actions to be like, don't show me these anymore.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like as opposed to digging through, you know, an app or whatever.
John:
And so that's trying to meet the challenge of these features and the challenges.
John:
What if you're not an iOS power user?
John:
We want people who just buy a phone and use it to also see some benefit.
John:
Now, you might look at this and say, this is just for the people who want to tweak everything just so.
John:
That's a power user feature, and it's great.
John:
We want those to be in the OS, right?
John:
By 15, that's when you start adding those.
John:
But I think Apple also feels a need to try to make it so these features are useful to other people.
John:
Some of that involves annoying prompting.
John:
Do Not Disturb is a great example.
John:
We all use it.
John:
We all probably can't live without it.
John:
I think we've all met people who have been iPhone users for years who have no idea that Do Not Disturb exists.
John:
And very often those same people will complain, I hate all these notifications that I'm getting.
John:
And I shut down my phone at night so the notifications won't wake me up.
John:
And you tell them about Do Not Disturb that you can set times when you don't want to be disturbed and it won't bother you.
John:
And they're like, really?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm like, yeah, it really works.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's the level most people add is they don't even know about do not disturb, which is the simplest of simple things, let alone this whole world.
John:
Right.
John:
So to get people on board with features like this, Apple has to sort of in the onboarding, prompt them and say, you know, oh, is there some time you don't want to be disturbed?
John:
Maybe tell me about it now or at the time you get a notification.
John:
hey, do you want to see notifications like this from now on?
John:
Kind of like the whole thing of like, oh, this app was tracking your location in the background.
John:
Do you want to keep letting it do that?
John:
We find that annoying because we're like, yes, I already made that decision.
John:
Why are you asking me again?
John:
But the reason Apple prompts for this is they want to let more people benefit from these features than just the people that know about them.
John:
And there is some fallout for the expert users of being like, why are you bothering me with this?
John:
But I feel where Apple is coming from.
John:
And I think...
John:
A lot of these features that, you know, with the apps giving notification types that we can filter out or whatever.
John:
Yes, they will be abused by third party apps.
John:
They'll say everything I have to say is the highest possible priority.
John:
But because if Apple has done a good job with this feature, which I think we've done a middling job because you can at the time you're annoyed, take action.
John:
And if an app does that to you a bunch of times, you can take action and say, stop sending these.
John:
And also because Apple seems so proactive in inferring behavior and saying, we've noticed that this app has spammed you with a bunch of notifications.
John:
Are you sure you aren't allowed to have notifications?
John:
And prompting you, extra, extra prompting you with a button right in your face saying, no, I don't want to see them anymore.
John:
It will allow some kind of feedback loop.
John:
between the user and the annoying app, even if they have no idea otherwise how to go into settings and disable the thing.
John:
And then as for Apple's notifications, I think Apple will actually correctly categorize all the notifications.
John:
I think part of the bind Apple has been in is they want to send these notifications.
John:
Yes, sometimes because they just want to upsell things and make money because some business unit needs to have more people sign up for a thing.
John:
I get that.
John:
But also sometimes...
John:
Even just for the notifications I got today from the developer app.
John:
There are notifications that they want to send you, and I want that app to be able to send notifications, but not all notifications are equal.
John:
I think most Apple apps that aren't directly tied to trying to get more people to pay for a thing...
John:
will in fact and even the other ones will correctly categorize their notifications and prioritize them and say this one's informative this is the highest priority i don't think the apple apps will say the highest possible priority is to say hey you might want to sign up for you got a free month of apple tv or plus or whatever maybe i'm wrong maybe they will mark that as highest priority but i think these uh
John:
notification levels are exactly what apple needs to do the writer thing with their own notifications because they're they're going to send them they want to be able to send them but they would love to be able to identify categorize them and say this is a notification not a big deal this is a casual one maybe you look at this if you don't want to and then allow it up to the user especially the power user to perhaps filter out the ones that are reminding me for the 19th time that some app is using my location always and do i still want to do this
John:
They didn't say that that was something you could do in the OS, but that's what I'm thinking in the direction we're going.
John:
If apps categorize their stuff, and if I have enough control to filter them out, maybe power users will have to see less of the stuff that is annoying us as well.
Casey:
Yeah, I just, I really, really like this focus feature, and I barely played with it, but I'm really, really into it.
Casey:
And I'm starting to have, what was it, iOS 5 with Notification Center?
Casey:
I'm having bad thoughts, guys.
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
Bad thoughts, and oh my gosh, I still, oh, iOS 5 was rough.
Casey:
And I think Marco and I both, if I remember correctly.
Marco:
That was the one that we installed Beta 1 at WBDC.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
and then immediately regretted it, deeply regretted it.
John:
I was going to say that because iOS 15, and in general, this whole release is not so many major new features, lots of small ones, that it actually will be way more stable than iOS 5, and it probably will be more stable than iOS 5 was.
John:
But I think there's a whole bunch of
John:
weird uh api differences in ui kit that will make your apps render weirdly and so i would still recommend not installing the beta but yeah i can see where you're coming from case that you want this i want to get in on this new focus stuff uh asap but it'll be before here before you know it so just be patient
Marco:
On the topic of installing the first beta too, many of the new features in iOS 15 are social features that kind of require all the people you talk to to be on 15 to be very useful to you.
Marco:
I don't think this is a big summer for non-developers to have much reason to install the beta.
John:
You should all share your test Apple IDs with each other.
Marco:
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Marco:
This is the ARS Design Award Reader's Choice Award back when Apple took a break from having ADAs.
Marco:
And the only password manager to ever be recognized by Apple is an ADA finalist this year for inclusivity.
Marco:
So check it out today, 1Password.com.
Marco:
I love this app.
Marco:
It's a fantastic password manager, 1Password.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to 1Password for keeping my stuff secure and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Hear me out for a second.
Casey:
Do either of you guys use Scribble on the iPad?
Casey:
That's the thing where you can use the pencil to handwrite in a field that you're supposed to be typing into, and it will automatically convert that handwriting into text.
Casey:
Do you use that, John, at all?
John:
No.
John:
The whole reason I use computers, as stated in the past, is so I don't have to use my handwriting to enter text.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
What about you, Marco?
Casey:
Do you ever use that?
Marco:
No, because I always have the keyboard on my iPad.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, the reason I ask is because the next thing they spoke about was live text.
Casey:
And I think this is more broadly useful by a fair margin, but it struck me as a very similar thing where I forget that Scribble even exists.
Casey:
And then I'll use it like here or there and think, wow, this is so freaking cool.
Casey:
Even if it's not the most efficient way to get text in the iPad, it's so freaking cool.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And then I'll forget about it again.
Casey:
Well, live text seems like it is even cooler, but I wonder if I'll have the wherewithal to use it like ever.
Casey:
And so what is it?
Casey:
So live text is you can take like an image.
Casey:
So in your camera roll or coming off the camera,
Casey:
And you can use the click and drag text selection on text that it finds in the image.
Casey:
And it's not like overlaying like Google Translate does, where it overlays text, like computer-generated text, on top of the text that's in the image itself.
Casey:
It's a very hard thing to do verbally.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
You're actually taking like the loop and all that and selecting the text in the picture.
Casey:
There's no overlays or nothing.
Casey:
You're just literally selecting the text in the picture and you like copy and paste it.
Casey:
You can do this on past photos.
Casey:
You can do this on a picture you've just taken.
Casey:
You can do apparently visual lookup.
Casey:
So you can like, you can ask.
Casey:
something, Siri or photos or something.
Casey:
You can ask it what kind of dog you're looking at, what kind of flower, what's this piece of art, what's this book, different landmarks and stuff like that.
Casey:
This looks extremely cool.
Casey:
It looks like, what is it, TextSniper or something like that?
Casey:
Yeah, TextSniper, which is an app that somebody had mentioned on a podcast not long ago and is super cool.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
It looks like it's that sort of a thing, but built into the OS.
Casey:
And from a technical perspective, it is mind-blowingly cool.
John:
This is a lot of catch-up slash Sherlocking of existing apps on other platforms, right?
John:
So most of these features have existed elsewhere in various forms.
John:
Even on iOS, I had an app that I just uninstalled, sorry, that did the same thing.
John:
It would do OCR in your photo library so your searches could find it.
John:
But of course, it had to do it in its own app, and it took a long time to grind through your photo library.
John:
Having this built into the actual photo library and having it basically be an OS-level app
John:
Function is great.
John:
And the demos they showed were pretty impressive because, you know, OCRing straight up computer text is not that difficult, but they showed it OCRing handwriting font.
John:
Like it does a really good job.
John:
And, you know, it's mostly for situations where you have an image and not text.
John:
Surprisingly, in this modern age, or perhaps not surprisingly, because bandwidth is so relatively cheap, you will find yourself coming across lots of places where you see an image of text.
John:
i mean twitter alone is just filled with it right and sometimes you just want that text and yeah we mentioned the app tech sniper i downloaded and installed tech sniper today on friends recommendation why because the developer app on mac os does not let you copy and paste text from like wwdc session titles or descriptions and so when i'm talking about sessions or pasting in descriptions and very slack channels and we're talking to stuff but i couldn't copy and paste it
John:
tech sniper to the rescue right so i love for this to be a sorry tech sniper but i love for this to be an os level function this is sort of the fate of all features that would be great as os level functions apple will eventually get around to it right that's just the nature of a platform and i don't begrudge apple that like that's what platforms should do
John:
um and so i'm i'm very happy to see this being integrated into photos this being i'm presumably maybe is it an sdk that you can use in your own apps probably they do that with most of their i think there already was an sdk to do this with some of the ml vision stuff from a couple years ago yeah but it does a really good job like casey said the ui for it is really neat um
John:
The stuff with photo lookup, I hope that works better than it does.
John:
It sounds better than it does currently because it sounds like it's an enhancement of existing thing.
John:
Like very often I will try to find pictures of my dog and I'll just do dog search in the photos app and I'll be disappointed that it misses some obvious dog.
John:
Or I'll look for book or something like – I don't think it was – I don't think it was about that.
Marco:
I think it was only about text that was in the images.
Marco:
So like it will now – No, no, no.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
You're both wrong.
Casey:
What it was –
Casey:
So this is, I have taken a photograph of a dog.
Casey:
What is this dog?
Casey:
Is it a Sharpay?
Casey:
Is it a Shih Tzu?
Casey:
Is it a Beagle?
Casey:
Tell me what breed of dog it is.
Casey:
Or here's a leaf.
Casey:
What kind of leaf is it?
Casey:
So you already know to some degree what it is, or I guess you don't even necessarily know what it is.
Casey:
My point is you're not looking through your photo library to find a Beagle.
Casey:
It's the other direction.
Casey:
You have a photo of a Beagle in front of you,
Casey:
And you want to know, what breed is this?
Marco:
I have sheep.
Marco:
I want brick.
John:
I mean, this is all kind of combined into the same thing.
John:
But yeah, it's basically just like an enhancement.
John:
End users don't make these distinctions we're trying to make about what tech and what SDG is this.
John:
They just know that they have photos on their phone.
John:
How easy is it to find the picture of the photo you want?
John:
And how easy is it to know what this is a picture of?
John:
And there's a bunch of stuff.
John:
in this keynote about that, even like the AR stuff of like, where am I in the city based on photos and stuff like this is, you know, part of, if you look at the WWDC sessions, these are individual frameworks, individual SDKs, individual APIs.
John:
But if you look at from the user of the phone, this is just like things that my phone can suddenly do.
John:
And if they work well, it's miraculous and delightful.
John:
I tend to lean on both Google Photos and Apple Photos
John:
hoping that their intelligence is enough to let me find this the book example for i took a picture of my one of my hardcover copies of the stand and i wanted to find that picture but i have tons of pictures so like you know well the good thing about this with live text is i could have just typed the stand and would find it but live text didn't exist when i was doing this search so good for live text that would have saved me this but what i did type was book
John:
And I was shocked to know that, like, a picture of a hardcover book sitting on a table, Apple Photos couldn't identify that as a book.
John:
I mean, maybe it was a weirdly shaped book.
John:
Maybe, like, whatever.
John:
It's ML.
John:
Like, you don't know why it didn't find it as a book.
John:
Maybe it just didn't index that thing.
John:
But anyway, improvements in that.
John:
Like, because when it works, it's great.
John:
And it's frustrating when it doesn't.
John:
Improvements in that are welcome.
John:
And LiveText is going to be a huge improvement in that.
John:
Because I can tell you from experience with that other app, which I think was called Memo or something.
John:
OCRing text out of your photos is incredibly powerful.
John:
Like when you've lost all hope of finding a thing, if you just remember a word or two, it will narrow it down so fast.
John:
And it's just such a relief versus scrolling through months and weeks and trying to find it.
Casey:
I'm really, really into trying this.
Casey:
And I just haven't had the chance to try that on my test phone yet, but it looks super duper cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There were some miscellaneous other things that I think for the most part are kind of not that interesting.
Casey:
But somebody, I guess John, added some information about secure paste.
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about that?
John:
I grabbed a bunch of random blanks off web pages and threw them in here.
John:
This wasn't in the keynote, but I'm trying to lump them in the right sections.
John:
This was about how you can do copy and paste, I assume, without making that little, you know, the little notification that comes down that says an app has like copied or pasted something.
John:
I think this is like...
John:
uh you know an api that lets people avoid that it basically it lets you uh it basically lets an app not see what's on the pasteboard or the clipboard or what they call it on ios i can't tell if they're using next terminology or mac terminology the app can't see what you've put there until you choose to paste then suddenly it comes out of some secure area and flows into the app and that will avoid the little popover thing and
John:
I don't know the details of it, but I like the idea that, like, you know, because we all noticed when all of a sudden, I guess it was, what, 14?
John:
When that little notification, a little white capsule kept going down from the top and showing us the things we're pasting and everyone flipped out about it when it first came out because some apps were, like, copying and pasting over and over again because of, like, bugs in the code or maybe they were doing nefarious stuff.
John:
And then a year later, now we have a way to do copy and paste in a more secure way to avoid that whole issue.
John:
So I just like things like that at WWDC.
Casey:
That is cool.
Casey:
I didn't know about that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So then they have explore the world around you.
Casey:
And I think we could hopefully blow through this pretty quickly.
Casey:
Famous last words, a wallet got a bunch of improvements, mostly emphasizing, you know, taking your keys or using, you know, Apple wallet as a key for all sorts of things, cars, hotels, work, amusement parks, like Disney world.
Casey:
Uh, apparently they will let you, and I don't know if this is like a region limited thing, I would assume so, but you can scan like a driver's license or another, uh, and some other sort of identification card and
Casey:
And I wasn't paying close enough attention, but apparently you will be able to do something with the American TSA to like communicate your driver's license information to a TSA checkpoint without having to actually have your license on you, which is kind of neat.
Marco:
Yeah, it said that the ID support is in, quote, participating U.S.
Marco:
states.
Marco:
And the TSA is, quote, working to enable support.
Marco:
So this is the kind of thing that, like, this is going to be great if everywhere that you go adopts it.
Marco:
But that's a big if.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that, like, I can see this working probably better in Europe.
Marco:
And I can see the U.S.
Marco:
just having, like, you know, massive state-to-state differences and just it becoming kind of like a, I don't know.
Marco:
I'm pessimistic not for Apple in this case.
Marco:
I'm pessimistic that U.S.
Marco:
state governments will all coordinate and get their crap together to actually support this in a meaningful way.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If we look at who supported the COVID exposure app, like Massachusetts, a supposedly forward-looking techno-literate state –
John:
Didn't support it until like a year into COVID and anything having to do with ID cards.
John:
Every state has their own policy and they're not going to let any tech company tell them how they want to deal with IDs in their state.
John:
So it's kind of like when they say we have single sign on for cable companies and it's supported in select cable companies, which includes charter.
John:
That's it.
John:
Just charter.
John:
No, not Comcast, not Verizon, not AD&T, just charter.
John:
And so whatever the charter equivalent of states, I don't know, Rhode Island, like there's going to be like three states that support this.
John:
The TSA thing, I hope I'm wrong about this.
John:
I hope more states adopt it, but it's just so hard to do that.
John:
TSA thing I have more hope for just because look at how Apple Wallet and the boarding pass thing went.
John:
There's not that many airline companies and they are not states.
John:
And so it's easier if you can get the airline companies on board to persuade the TSA, you know, a bunch of big donor.
John:
Like one of the cases where our completely bought and sold government works for us.
John:
Well, having these big companies that give a lot of money to reelection campaigns get what they want.
John:
So maybe TSA will be slightly easier.
Yeah.
John:
If they're able to ram this through because they're big money donors.
John:
I'm trying not to be depressing.
John:
It's reality.
Marco:
Also, I feel like the ID stuff, like, I mean, you know, one of the contexts that you might need to have an ID is if you get pulled over by a police officer.
Marco:
Now, are you going to want to hand your unlocked phone to a police officer?
Marco:
Are you nuts?
John:
I mean, they might have a thing where like, you know, it locks onto that screen or something like, but yeah, there are a lot of unanswered questions.
John:
But don't worry, no police officer is going to accept that as valid identification anytime soon.
Marco:
I feel like it's a very ideal thing if we could get to a world where somehow we could do this all conveniently and securely that was accepted everywhere.
Marco:
But in practice, I think you're going to have to carry your ID with you still.
Marco:
And so it's a nice thing to try to get rid of your entire wallet, just like Apple Pay with credit cards.
Marco:
It's a nice thing to want to get rid of your entire wallet in practice.
Marco:
This will be convenient for places where this is accepted, but there's still going to be enough places where it's not that you're going to have to still carry your ID with you.
Casey:
yep i agree uh they spoke about the weather app for a little while it aesthetically looks really good and it seems like the dark sky influence has been very heavy on it which makes total sense um but i don't have too much to say other than it looks good i didn't see any sort of api for dark sky information which was a bummer but it very well could be that i missed it again we're recording the night of the keynote so yeah it's like it's like we thought uh the first party weather app is better thanks to dark sky
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
Um, maps got a handful of upgrades.
Casey:
There are new maps.
Casey:
The fancy pants, new apps are coming to several new countries, uh, over the next few months.
Casey:
There's an interactive globe, which is cool, I guess.
Casey:
However, one thing that blew my freaking mind is in certain.
Casey:
And of course it's like San Francisco and nowhere else in certain locations that
Casey:
they have dramatically improved... I wouldn't say imagery, but rendering.
Casey:
And it looked as though they were painting... The paint on the roads is being shown on the map.
Casey:
So if you zoom into San Francisco, you can see dashed lines in between lanes.
Casey:
You can see crosswalks.
Casey:
You can see stop written on the road.
Casey:
I don't know how this is happening.
Casey:
This is the coolest freaking thing I've ever seen.
Casey:
I just think it's fascinating and so neat.
Marco:
It's probably going to be one of those things like it's great in California because like their satellites can actually see the paint on the road and it's still painted.
Marco:
Whereas, you know, you bring it to an area with weather and it's like all the paints all rubbed off from all the ice and crap that we have here and all the potholes.
Marco:
Is it going to render all the pothole patches?
Yeah.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
No, like I'm looking at, and I don't have any idea where this is in San Francisco, but I happen to be on Bryant street and you can see where there's a left-hand turn lane with the left-hand turn, you know, arrow on it.
Casey:
There's a four-way crosswalk.
Casey:
There's a median, which apparently has two trees within it.
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
This amount of detail is extremely cool.
Casey:
And then I guess when you're doing directions, it has, again, it's a very difficult thing to describe verbally, but it will show like overpasses and things in 3D space.
Casey:
So when you're going in a place where you have like cloverleafs or all sorts of different things all happening on top of each other,
Casey:
you'll be able to see that in 3D space, which will make it so much easier to look at your phone or CarPlay and then look at reality around you and say, oh, I get it.
Casey:
I see what I'm supposed to do.
Casey:
I just think this is extremely, extremely cool.
Casey:
But unfortunately, only 10 cities this year.
Casey:
And I concur with both of you that even though Philly, I believe, is one of them, I'll believe it in the Northeast in particular when I see it.
Casey:
But this is super, super cool.
Casey:
And they also have like a nighttime mode where they do like some funny, funny in a good way, like clever things with lighting.
Casey:
So it looks like, you know, the moon is shining really brightly.
Casey:
Maps has actually been really good for me.
Casey:
I use maps almost always.
Casey:
The only time I don't use maps is when I'm going on like a longer trip when I know traffic will be a problem and then I'll use Waze.
Casey:
But Maps is really good, and it's only getting better.
Casey:
I mean, remember how much and how badly we used to make fun of Apple Maps because it was trash?
Casey:
And they've turned that ship around, and they've turned it around nicely.
Casey:
I just think this was very, very cool stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, as usual, it's all going to come down to how good is it in your area?
Marco:
Because that's one thing that Apple Maps has always been inconsistent in that way.
Marco:
Even from the very beginning, when people were complaining about it a lot more, as you said, there were areas where it was great.
Marco:
And then there were areas where it wasn't.
Marco:
And so I hope they're able to actually deliver greatness in more places than just the Bay Area.
Marco:
Actually, I was kind of disappointed when they showed the Bay Area as their example area.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, are they not aware of the optics of this specific problem?
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I feel like that was just kind of inviting this kind of criticism.
Marco:
And it would have been nicer to show somewhere else that they had made really good because, yeah, we know it's going to be great in the Bay Area.
Marco:
But, you know, is it going to be great where all the rest of us actually live?
John:
They're still iterating on the basics, too, like setting aside the things announced at WWDC.
John:
I've noticed over the past several months that Apple Maps has been getting more detailed and more specific with just its voice directions when driving in the car.
John:
Go past this light and at the next light do a thing, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or even just the new intonation of the voice assistant when it's time for you to make a slight left turn.
John:
Have you noticed that over the past several months?
John:
No.
John:
Like in 700 feet, make a slight left turn.
John:
And then when you actually get to the turn, the voice says, make a slight left turn.
John:
It's just so satisfied that you're going to do it.
John:
But no, just like more voice things.
John:
Stay in the left lane to stay on this road, right?
John:
Stuff like that that it used to just not say anything about before.
John:
It would just tell you when the turns were.
John:
That kind of enhancement is super important.
John:
And I have to say, again, being consistent based on your area, I'm not in an obscure area.
John:
I still, on a weekly basis, do competitions between Google Maps and Apple Maps.
John:
And I have to say that Google Maps...
John:
still is better about understanding where the traffic is and routing me around it in a sane way.
John:
Apple Maps very often takes me on just, you know, Mr. Toad's wild ride.
John:
Like, I have no idea where it's taking me.
John:
It's like, are you kidding?
John:
What are you doing, Apple?
John:
Like, it gets me there.
John:
It's not, like, wrong about the roads, but it is making poor choices.
John:
So I'm excited about the enhancements.
John:
I really think Apple Maps has been getting better, setting aside everything at WWDC, and then this, on top of all the enhancements they've making just...
John:
day over day, week over week, year over year, you know, outside the app.
John:
I think Apple Maps really is getting better, but it still has some weaknesses against Google.
Casey:
Really quickly with transit, there's better Apple Watch integration.
Casey:
And what I thought was really neat was I guess they didn't already have disembark notifications or at least they brought it up at the keynote.
Casey:
So if you're on the subway and you're coming up to your stop, it'll, you know, touch, it'll boop boop you on your wrist or whatever and say, hey, it's time to get off the subway.
Casey:
But what was really neat for me.
Casey:
And I haven't been to New York City in a long time, but I was a pretty decent subway navigator, especially for someone who's never lived there.
Casey:
But inevitably, anytime I popped out of the subway, I would look around and ask, where the hell did I just pop out into the real world again?
Casey:
I have no idea what block I'm on.
Casey:
Which way is north?
Casey:
Which way is south?
Casey:
Who's on first?
Marco:
I don't know if it's on third.
Marco:
I will often need to like walk half a block up in one direction to see, oh, I went from 45 to 46.
Marco:
Okay, now I know which direction I'm going.
Marco:
Like you have to like see the next block street sign before you realize.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I'm glad it's not just me.
Casey:
That makes me feel actually quite a bit better.
Casey:
But anyway, so there's now exit assistance.
Casey:
And what that means is, well, so they said, oh, you pop out of the subway and you need to look around to figure out where you are.
Casey:
I thought, okay, okay, that makes sense.
Casey:
You know, presumably they'll just use GPS or something like that.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
What they've decided to do, which I think is super cool and hopefully useful, is you take your phone and you kind of do a scan, like a panoramic of the buildings that are near you.
Casey:
And then it'll say, oh, you're on the corner of 47th and 6th.
Casey:
You need to go this way and put an AR like arrow on the screen to show you exactly which way you want to walk.
Casey:
What a cool and clever implementation.
Casey:
And especially since in cities, oftentimes GPS is really spotty, especially, you know, big, tall cities like New York.
Casey:
I think this is super duper cool.
Casey:
And I really look forward to trying this in 15 years when I finally get back to the city.
Casey:
I just think this is super neat.
Marco:
The actual solution to this kind of problem is for the actual transit authorities to mark in the sidewalks when you get out what direction you are.
Marco:
Back when I was working in the city, there was a brief time where somebody did that.
Marco:
They were just kind of guerrilla spray-painting compass arrows right on the sidewalk when you get out.
Marco:
And it was amazing.
Marco:
And of course, the MTA got rid of them all.
Marco:
In the absence of obvious...
Marco:
help from subway and city authorities to make this easier with just like a sign or a thing like that on the sidewalk.
Marco:
This solution by Apple is one of the most ridiculously overly engineered to solve such a simple problem.
Marco:
But I see why they had to solve it because the cities won't do it.
Marco:
But the idea of like, okay, instead of having a compass rose painted on the ground when you got a subway station, we're going to build this entire like AR vision network to look at all the buildings around you and make a giant database like that.
Marco:
It's completely ridiculous, but necessary.
John:
i mean but that that is the future if they ever get around to having some kind of glasses this is exactly what you want you want people's names hovering over their head and you want arrows showing you where you have to go yeah fair enough i mean we're not there yet but like yeah by all means please do lay down the groundwork because i don't know how many people will do it and take out their phone and if it's easier than you know but like i would just be happy if the stupid compass and the phone worked better like when you have map on directions and you hold your phone flat and you just want the compass to rotate so that it like what i'm always want is i want the map
John:
on my phone to be aligned with the map in real life so if i come out of the subway station and i'm looking at my map that's in the process of giving me directions please rotate the map so that the direction i'm facing matches you know what i mean like and sometimes it does that and sometimes it doesn't and if it doesn't you can be very confusing so i would be happy if just that worked but hey if ar is we can jump all the way to show me where the arrow goes i'll take that as well i just want to know where to go
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:
Again, I wear this every single day.
Marco:
All of my underwear is theirs.
Marco:
And about, I think, two-thirds of my shirts at this point are theirs.
Marco:
And I have their undershirts.
Marco:
I have their workout shorts.
Marco:
I just ordered more because they got some new colors that I wanted to try.
Marco:
I love Mack Weldon stuff.
Marco:
See for yourself.
Marco:
For 20% off your first order, visit MackWeldon.com slash ATP podcast and enter promo code ATP podcast.
Marco:
That's MackWeldon.com slash ATP podcast, promo code ATP podcast for 20% off.
Marco:
Mack Weldon, reinventing men's basics.
Casey:
There are some improvements to AirPods.
Casey:
I don't know if it's really actually the original AirPods or just the AirPods Pro and Max, but there's conversation boost with ambient noise reduction.
Casey:
This is particularly for those with hearing impairments, and I think that does require AirPods Pro.
Casey:
But the example I used was you're at an outdoor dining table with your partner, and you're trying to understand the
Casey:
the waiter or waitress that's, you know, helping you out.
Casey:
Well, you can turn on this conversation boost thing where it will try to focus in on whoever's talking and boost just that, which I thought was super neat.
Casey:
There's announced notifications.
Casey:
So a lot of times there's actually, I was listening to upgrade earlier and,
Casey:
and there was a funny conversation between Mike and Jason about this, but you can announce text messages.
Casey:
So, you know, I don't want to say that word.
Casey:
The assistant will pop in and say, oh, Marco just sent a text and he said he misses you.
Casey:
And that...
Casey:
That is a thing that some people like, some people don't.
Casey:
But now you can do that with notifications, which is kind of neat.
Casey:
But the most cool thing to me was they're doing improvements to FindMai.
Casey:
So apparently they're going to use the Bluetooth Low Energy beacon-y stuff to ride on the same network as AirTags.
Casey:
So you can hopefully, if you lose your AirPods and it's near somebody else's iPhone, you can still find them.
Casey:
They're even doing that proximity view where you can hone in on it.
Casey:
Home in on it?
Casey:
Where did I just have this conversation?
Casey:
Home.
Casey:
Home in on it?
Casey:
Thank you.
John:
We're going with home.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
So home in on it.
Casey:
And then there's also a separation alert.
Casey:
So if you walk away and your AirPods are not with you, it'll start yelling at you and saying, oh, you forgot me.
Casey:
I'm very curious to see how that works, because I don't care if I walk away at home, but I do care if I walk away at a picnic table in a park that I was working at.
Casey:
So I'm not sure how intelligent that is.
Casey:
But still, I think that's a super neat idea and certainly long coming.
Casey:
And then finally, in the AirPods section, spatial audio on tvOS and also M1 Max, which was pretty cool.
Casey:
And then finally, Dolby Atmos audio is starting today for Apple Music People.
Marco:
Yeah, this is all really cool.
Marco:
The Find My Network support, I think, was the biggest surprise for me because I didn't realize that they would be able to do it.
Marco:
And it does make sense.
Marco:
They don't have the U1.
Marco:
They can't do the precise positioning.
Marco:
like you know with where you could like see it in your couch but it has bluetooth so you can at least get like a rough idea of distance to it and you know the fact that it uses the find my network so even if you like drop an airpod like as you're running somewhere and it's not even near your house like you you can still then find it later because it uses the find my network that's really cool
John:
Only on AirPods Pro, though.
John:
Regular ones apparently don't have whatever Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon thing they need.
John:
That makes sense.
Casey:
That's so frustrating.
Casey:
I really need to get it in there.
Casey:
See, I mean, I'm having the damn Apple TV problem again because I really feel like I should just bite the bullet and get AirPods Pro.
Casey:
But it's got to be any day now, right?
Marco:
They've been rumored to have new AirPods and AirPods Pros for like the last year.
Marco:
Any day now it's coming.
Casey:
I'm playing the Apple TV game all over again.
Casey:
All right, moving right along before I get depressed about that.
Casey:
iPadOS.
Casey:
Home screen was, I think, one of the two big features.
Casey:
You can put widgets on the home screen proper now, which, I mean, it seems pretty obvious that they wanted to ship that last year, just didn't have the time.
Casey:
App library comes to the home screen, and including it looked like an entry in the dock,
Casey:
I don't know if I love that.
Casey:
I don't know if I love that the app library is in the dock.
Casey:
Yeah, see, I hope it's optional or it disappears some way somehow after some amount of time.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But I like the idea of the app library not really digging it living in the dock all the time.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Maybe it doesn't.
Casey:
We're not really sure.
Casey:
multitasking it is not the complete rewrite and revamp that everyone i think was kind of hoping for some quietly some not but as as said i think it was from craig but maybe somebody else easier to discover easier to use and even more powerful um and so now there's a multitasking menu so hey guess what if you have nothing but gestures nobody knows what the hell to do but if you have buttons people can figure it out
John:
Well, you also have to know which thing to tap to hit that menu.
John:
But yeah, you're right.
John:
This is not an overhaul.
John:
Apparently, Apple, that thing you described, easier, better, right?
John:
It is an enhancement of the existing system.
John:
And we all know the existing system could have used some enhancements.
John:
But still, Apple is very married to the idea that the way iPadOS works when it comes to multiple things is that the screen is divided amongst multiple...
John:
you know apps that don't exist in windows that don't have any kind of chrome and they're just slowly making concessions while still firmly resisting the idea of window chrome or of windows and i'm not saying they're making the wrong decision but like this wwc was a clear expression of their intent we want it to work like this you're splitting up the screen among apps
John:
But we recognize that the existing system for doing that has weaknesses.
John:
So let's shore up those weaknesses.
John:
Let's not fundamentally throw it all out and just everybody gets windows and they all have closed boxes on them, right?
John:
They didn't do that at all.
John:
So this is yet another run at this exact problem.
John:
They said, we are going to make this work.
John:
we are committed to splitting up your screen into pieces we're going to add keyboard shortcuts for it we're going to add you know more discoverable uis more obvious uis so hey do you want this to be on the left half of the screen or the right and in particular i think the most important feature i say this as someone who has not used this os and is not an ipad power user but my impression of the most important feature of multitasking is the ease with which you can
John:
take a thing that was filling half the screen and get rid of it and pick a different thing to go there.
John:
Because it seems like that was way too complicated before.
John:
And this is a step in the direction that I talked about in the last show of making this a more generic system, right?
John:
So the splitting up of the screen is fine.
John:
But before there was this whole sort of marriage between the apps.
John:
And once they were two of them were in a pair, they kind of stayed in a pair.
John:
But you might have another instance of that app that's not in the pair.
John:
And it got all confusing.
John:
And now it seems to me from looking at the demo in the keynote,
John:
It's more composable of like, oh, so you got a bunch of stuff on the screen.
John:
At any moment, anything that's in any portion of the screen, you can remove that thing and put a different thing there or remove that thing and expand the one that was there to fill the whole thing now.
John:
There's some new things thrown in the mix.
John:
Oh, now there's a shelf.
John:
You've got the dock.
John:
You've got the shelf.
John:
You've got slide over.
John:
You've got the app library.
John:
You've got...
John:
the little menu that comes down there's a lot of stuff it is still way more complicated than the simple oh so you have a bunch of windows and they have title bars and you can drag them around right but you know this is this is apple's expression of their intent they want to make this work all right and so i think everything they've done is an improvement but i think it's not real in some ways it's getting simpler like what i just said like it's simpler to be able to mix and match apps the way you want to
John:
But by adding yet another UI element, which is the shelf for holding the little minimized thing, it's still hard to explain this model to people.
John:
I think it will be easier to use, but you can explain to somebody how windows work.
John:
Even though we have all sorts of weird windows, like, hey, my Chrome window looks so weird and has these tabs on the thing, and Finder windows look different than that, and Safari windows are going to look even weirder.
John:
We'll get to it in a little bit.
John:
but you can more or less explain windows exist there's usually some way to close them to maximize them to minimize them you can resize them from all the different edges and you can drag them around somehow and apps are going to have multiple windows and you know you can explain it ipad os is a lot more to explain but i think this is a big step up from where they were now i think the question is is this enough
John:
Right.
John:
And I think we'll have to sort of defer to the iPad experts to say, does this sort of solve all the problems you had?
John:
And now you feel it is powerful enough to do what you want.
John:
And, you know, it's kind of like the notifications.
John:
The other question is, what about the people who aren't power users?
John:
Does any of this help them at all?
John:
Or are they equally terminally confused?
John:
Because very often, you know, I'll have a relative accidentally put something into slide over and have no idea what happened to be super confused and just be like, whatever that was, I never want to see it again.
John:
Right.
John:
because they want the just full screen ipad experience and you know you've been able to get that by turning off that preference to not do that but i think that's a shame because i think you know the ability to look at more than one thing at a time shouldn't be a power user feature and that is the challenge right you're not just satisfying the power users also you want someone to be able to do what i think comes naturally to everybody on a mac or pc which is like i'm gonna have two web browser windows and they're both next to each other
John:
Imagine that.
John:
Or I'm going to have a web browser window over here and a document that I'm writing over here next to each other.
John:
It shouldn't be a power user feature.
John:
I'm not sure this achieves that, but I think it will achieve making iPad power users much less frustrated.
Marco:
Yeah, I think this ultimately... I mean, I haven't had a chance to play with it yet because I wanted to wait until at least tomorrow before I put the new beta on anything that's logged into my Cloud account.
Marco:
But I'm glad they went this direction at least.
Marco:
They went the direction of we're going to have actual...
Marco:
Sort of visible UI for managing the multitasking windows on iPad.
Marco:
That's what they really needed, because before it was all just hidden behind these gestures that you had to figure out, which were not necessarily always obvious.
John:
it's still hidden behind a little thing that you have to know to tap on like it's three dots right so it's yeah it's it's at least the dots yeah i mean it's not great it's better than nothing but it still is not the same like i'm saying they do not want to put window chrome on because window chrome is like always visible and again mac apple seems to be allergic to window chrome on mac os as well which we'll get to yeah we'll get to that the war the war on window chrome continues
Marco:
Yes, but to have this be a button that you can tap and then do things with or to, that is a huge advance for the discoverability of the multitasking gestures and stuff.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
I can see why... There's lots of reasons why they're not just doing Windows on iPad.
Marco:
They're not doing that for lots of reasons, many of which are good reasons.
Marco:
One of the ones that a lot of people don't necessarily think of, but that is pretty important, is...
Marco:
The way iOS works with RAM and with virtual memory and the fact that it lacks a swap file means that every device has a hard RAM limit.
Marco:
And that means that there's a limit of how many apps can be on screen at once.
Marco:
If they had a free-form windowing system, you would have the capability as a user to put tons of windows on screen at once.
Marco:
More than the actual OS and its memory architecture would be able to support.
Marco:
Or it would have to have really weird...
John:
arbitrary seeming limitations like maybe after you created your sixth window on an ipad pro then it would it would close your you know your oldest last used one or something like it would have weird effects no it would it would do what it does now it would it would freeze dry them right like i'm not saying that they recommend doing that but this is how this is how it works today is when you go to the app switcher some of those apps you see an image of the last live thing they updated when they had when they had time the cpu some of those things are just
John:
Cardboard cutouts of an app that is no longer running, right?
John:
And you can't tell because it's just the app switcher, right?
John:
But if you had a scenario where you describe where like an arbitrary number of overlapping windows were there, some of those windows would be owned by an application that is currently running and could in theory update them.
John:
And some of those windows would be fake cardboard cutouts, just basically an image that the OS saved last time that app was running.
John:
And...
John:
If it wasn't like a video player or something, you might not notice.
John:
Like, huh, nothing's changed in that window in a while.
John:
I wonder if that app is actually running.
John:
But yeah, like this, that limitation is, it's mostly historic.
John:
Like, you know, we've got 16 gigabyte iPad Pros now.
John:
This will eventually take care of itself through the march of time.
John:
But for now, it is a real thing.
John:
I don't think that's the strongest reason to not have it, but it is certainly a practical reason today and for the foreseeable future until everybody's, you know, iOS devices have...
John:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
But in general, I do think that there's lots of things that are fundamental to iOS apps, to iOS itself as the OS, to iOS hardware, that make freeform Windows more difficult than you might think, you know, when you first think, oh, they should just have freeform Windows.
Marco:
There's a lot of stuff that gets in the way.
Marco:
There's the RAM limit.
Marco:
There's screen size limits.
Marco:
There's app size limits where, like, you know, apps just weren't – iOS apps were not designed to be below a certain size, and so you have to have these arbitrary, like, limitations on how tall the windows can be.
Marco:
They also weren't designed for things like live resizing, and so that, you know, that makes things more complicated.
Marco:
Like, there's –
Marco:
There's a lot of reasons why freeform windows on the iPad would be a very big challenge and would possibly come with massive weird side effects.
Marco:
So I understand why they're not doing freeform windowing.
Marco:
And as long as they're going to keep doing their screen kind of tile splitting arrangement that they've been doing, it sure does look like this is a pretty big improvement to making that more usable to more people.
Marco:
There's still a lot of room to go, but this is a big improvement.
John:
Yeah, and I mean, you kind of left out the primary reason why they don't want to just go with Windows is because the whole point is the iPad is not a Mac, right?
John:
And the people who love the iPad love it for many reasons that have to do with how it's not like a Mac, right?
John:
The simplicity, you know, even when I talk about the, mostly asking is complicated or whatever, the fact that it can be used more simply, the fact that it is sort of has fewer sharp edges, right?
John:
There's no point in the iPad if you're just going to make it a Mac without a keyboard, right?
John:
it needs to stay an iPad.
John:
So I understand why Apple is going with this.
John:
Like, you know, it just, like I said in the last show, people want, I think, the flexibility of the Mac, but they do not want the Mac baggage that comes with it.
John:
And part of that baggage is, you know, just plain old Windows menu pointer, like just the old interface, because we know that has a lot of sharp edges.
John:
We know people are not good at managing Windows, and it's not a task that they relish, and generally don't want to do it.
John:
And that's part of why people love the iPad and the iPhone so much, because it doesn't ask them to do those things.
John:
So...
John:
you know it's not what apple is doing is not easy uh and so you know if if they make improvements every year eventually maybe they'll converge on a good solution the only thing i worry about is adding interface elements and new uh new cap new proper nouns that people need to know or understand maybe is not the path but you know baby steps
John:
Oh, and speaking of that, they have the menu bar thing.
John:
Don't call it a menu bar.
John:
It's not a menu bar.
Casey:
I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this.
Casey:
And it wasn't really brought up, but for a moment.
Casey:
And I feel like I saw it on a screenshot or like a video of a device that was being used.
Casey:
And I was like, what was that?
Casey:
What was that?
John:
and we'll put a link in the show notes to a video uh from steve we have two videos showing what the interface looks like when you're using it and the weird thing is how it appears now it's a power user feature i suppose like one of the things about catalyst apps is they you know that you can define menus in them and the menus will appear on the mac but that same information is available those catalyst apps on ios but the ios doesn't have a menu bar so how do you surface that
John:
and apparently if you hold down the command key it will show you keyboard shortcuts but it will also show you essentially a little menu bar floating on the not quite bottom of the screen showing all the commands for file edit insert format in this you know screenshot in this thing and the commands have keyboard shortcuts that you can type but you can also tap them with your finger you can also use the arrow keys to navigate across the menu bar and then up into the menu items and
John:
It's a little bit strange.
John:
It's a little bit of a power user feature.
John:
It is obviously not meant to be the main interface, but it is more or less in keeping with the function of the menu bar on the Mac, which is these days, most Mac apps don't expect you to be going up to the menu bar over and over and over again when you're using the app.
John:
The menu bar exists to hold the full functionality of the app
John:
But in general, if you're going to be efficient, there's a few commands you're going to use frequently.
John:
You're probably going to use the keyboard shortcuts for them, and only when you're like, where is that command, would you go up to the menus.
John:
And the extreme scenario being, say you're using a very complicated graphics editor, where you can never remember where the heck the grid snapping manager palette window is.
John:
You go up to the help menu, you type grid, and you know, like...
John:
Like, but I'm not saying it's the junk drawer, but it is like the user accessible, visible place for all the functionality on the app.
John:
iOS has not been like that historically.
John:
And historically, the keyboard shortcuts are a thing that only people who had keyboards connected to their iPads even knew existed.
John:
And when they did, it was just a little overlay.
John:
This is a big step up.
John:
This is like...
John:
Now we're revealing to you a bunch of functionality in this transient interface element that's not on the screen all the time.
John:
It's not like you have this bar taken up.
John:
There's no menu bar.
John:
But when you ask for it, oh, here are all the functions that we think are accessible or relevant to you in your current context.
John:
So I don't know how apps are going to deal with this.
John:
It would be nice if Apple sort of
John:
led in this direction.
John:
This is what a lot of people were disappointed about.
John:
It was like, oh, where's Final Cut Pro for the Mac?
John:
Like, where's Logic Pro for iPadOS, rather?
John:
Where are Apple's Pro apps for iPadOS to show us all how should we think about a full-featured Pro app on the iPad?
John:
How should, if you did have Final Cut Pro,
John:
on the ipad what would it look like would it have this menu bar thing what would the interface look like how should we do this i mean third parties are plowing bravely ahead and i'm sure they will adopt all these features and in fact they have invented their own sort of menu systems and menu bars and palettes and even internal windowing interfaces but thus far apple hasn't really led in this area but i am glad that they are at least thinking about it and providing some interface elements and some sort of
John:
access for power users to get this functionality from the keyboard, even if they don't remember the keyboard shortcuts or even if there aren't any keyboard shortcuts, just using the arrow keys or whatever.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So then they had a long segment about notes.
Casey:
And more than anything else, they said, oh, we'll have tags.
Casey:
We'll have this activity view thing.
Casey:
But quick note, and apparently, speaking of completely undiscoverable gestures, if you swipe up from the bottom right of your iPad screen, then Notes is aware of the app that you're using when you do that and will let you take notes on whatever it is you're looking at.
Casey:
This was a little fuzzy to me.
Casey:
I don't really have a clear view of where the guardrails are for this, where the limits are for this.
Casey:
But basically, for Safari, for example, if you do this quick note thing, it'll take note of what...
Casey:
page you're on.
Casey:
It'll let you drop the URL in there real easily.
Casey:
And additionally, if you have text highlighted, or I guess maybe if you copy paste text into this note, when you go back to that page in Safari, it'll actually highlight that text that is in your note to tell you this is something you cared about before.
Casey:
i really want to dig into this as well once i get this on my ipad and maybe a couple betas from now in principle this looks super cool because you can basically take notes on anything in your ipad uh you know the files are in the computer uh but you can take you can take notes on just about anything and if it's as smart as they say it is it looks really really slick but i really want to play with it before i say too much more about it
John:
I'm reminded of my vague recollection of one of the features of NCSA Mosaic was that you could add annotations to web pages.
John:
This was a feature of the browser, and I suppose if there was something on a web page, maybe it was just annotations about the page itself.
John:
But the idea that as you were browsing the web, you could sort of mark it up with your own stuff, and then when you went back there, you could see your own notes.
John:
I think that's what this is trying to accomplish.
John:
I do wonder how they're addressing sort of the challenge of the web being that URLs don't work the way they're quote unquote supposed to.
John:
So the same URL can have very different content depending on all sorts of factors.
John:
URLs themselves are filled with garbage that may change.
John:
Sometimes the query string is super duper important.
John:
Sometimes it's not.
John:
So if you have – even just for the tab group stuff that we'll get to a little bit later, if you are associating a note with a URL, the chances of you being able to ever get back to that exact URL may not be 100%.
John:
And so I do wonder how reliable – because people just expect it to work.
John:
Like if they're just like logged into their Amazon account and wandering from product to product and –
John:
they're on their wish list and put an annotation and then they get logged out of Amazon and they go back to the product page and they say, where are my notes in this product?
John:
Well, it's because you're not logged in and because you weren't looking at the product page, you were looking at it in your wish list.
John:
And that's even in Amazon, which is pretty good about URLs in that URLs actually are somewhat stable and do represent what it is that you're looking at.
John:
Other websites are not so kind and the URL has little bearing on what you're looking at and the same URL can have 20 different things on it and the same page can have 20 different URLs and
John:
Yeah, good luck.
John:
But it seems cool in theory.
John:
And if Apple can do some sort of smart normalization or some other way of sort of, you know, being fuzzy about it and saying, well, this looks vaguely like the page where you made annotations, we'll give it to you.
John:
But yeah, we'll have to try it.
Marco:
i mean it's most likely based on the system that i almost no one knows about um the ns user activity api uh which kind of gives apps the the ability to say like okay here's what the user's currently doing in my app here's what's currently you know on screen or they're currently working on whatever um and then and you know you give it identifiers or metadata or whatever and then you can that's how handoff works like it basically hands off that data to a mac app or to the watch app or whatever and then
Marco:
The app resumes from whatever identifier or metadata was in that user activity object.
Marco:
But there's a feature that no one has known about except Merlin, I think, where you can – like just in an app, like viewing something in an app, you can usually hold in the Siri button and say, remind me about this.
Marco:
in whatever time interval or whatever and by saying remind me about this it looks at the current uh ns user activity of the current app that's on screen and actually saves like basically like a deep link to that um and it works in a bunch of different places you know voicemails safari tabs and stuff like that
Marco:
so it's probably using that same system and if that's what it is and now i don't know how it gets from you know the having that link in the quick note to then going when the app shows the page to then like highlight that proactively i mean it maybe it you know maybe it has some new api for that or something or maybe it's just a private thing for apple's apps but that's probably how it works
Casey:
Yeah, I had made the same assumption.
Casey:
It's funny, on a more broad note, it seems to me like over the last few years, more and more and more stuff is driven by NSUserActivity.
Casey:
And if your app is something wherein it makes sense to emit anything through NSUserActivity, it seems like ever increasingly...
Casey:
It is time to embrace that API.
Casey:
It's used for intents and widgets, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
It's used like everywhere.
Casey:
Like you said, handoff, it's used in so many different places.
Marco:
Siri, all sorts of stuff.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Translate for iPad looked cool.
Casey:
You can do handwriting practice, which is neat, especially for languages that don't use, you know, letters that like I'm used to, you know.
Casey:
Um, there's an auto translate feature with no button taps required.
Casey:
I think this would be a little socially awkward to just plunk an iPad down on like a, uh, clerk's counter, you know, when you're trying to buy something in a foreign country, but Hey, if it works, that's super cool.
Casey:
Uh, so I really dig that.
Casey:
There's also system wide translation.
Casey:
You can select text anywhere in the system and you know, there's a, now a translate option in that little popover or not popover, but the little like tool bar thing, whatever, uh, is where you can translate text, which is neat.
John:
john you want to take us through some miscellaneous that you you have accumulated yeah there's stuff harvested from apple's web pages and various tweets and stuff muting notifications you can mute an app or messaging thread temporarily for the next hour or for the next day this i'm assuming this is more sort of just in time stuff like i don't want to stop this app from sending me notifications but i don't want it to bother me for the rest of the day
John:
You get more enhancements.
Marco:
Love this, by the way.
Marco:
Just muting an iMessage thread for an hour.
Marco:
If your friends are all talking about something just flooding you with notifications in a thread, you don't want to turn off notifications completely forever, but you don't really care or can't deal with it right now during this hour.
Marco:
That's a fantastic feature.
John:
And it's another challenge of like power users will know it and love it.
John:
How do you surface this for people who otherwise wouldn't know about this feature?
John:
Because everyone will benefit from this.
John:
They just might not know, oh, if I have to hold down, it's another hidden UI versus present UI.
John:
If you present it as a button or an option that is obvious to people, they will definitely take it because it's a useful feature.
John:
If you don't, then maybe only quote unquote power users will find it.
John:
Apparently the text magnification loop is back on iPadOS, the little thing that shows you a magnified version.
John:
Oh, thank God.
John:
It was always a good idea because, yeah, the iPad is bigger.
John:
And I do like how they change the text selection to be sort of more, I'm saying more Mac-like.
John:
But, like, you know, the iPad is bigger.
John:
It should have different rules about text selection.
John:
But bottom line is your finger is blocking part of it.
John:
And the whole point of that loop is show me the thing in my finger is blocking.
John:
So I'm glad that's back.
John:
This one is super cool.
John:
I didn't see any demo of this, but it's just text from Apple's web page.
John:
Apparently...
John:
Apple has some kind of built-in two-factor authentication system.
John:
So, you know, we talked about using whatever, the Google Authenticator or Authy or all the other apps that let you store your two-factor authentication for various websites.
John:
Some services make you use their Authenticator app, like Steam makes you use theirs.
John:
Some Microsoft sites make you use the Microsoft Authenticator.
John:
But then other ones are more generic.
John:
Apparently, Apple itself in the OS now has some way to generate two-factor codes.
John:
And if you integrate with it,
John:
it will do what the other two-factor systems could not which is you can autofill the code right rather than having to go to authy tap the code to copy it go back to the place where you are pasted into the little field hope it handles your paste correctly and all that stuff the apple one will be integrated right into the system
John:
I kind of love it.
John:
I know it's unfair to those other apps because they can't do this kind of integration, but this is the kind of integration I want.
Casey:
I wouldn't be so sure.
Casey:
Sponsor of this very episode, 1Password on iOS.
Casey:
I don't feel like I've ever broken the code as to when it works completely and when it's
Casey:
when it doesn't.
Casey:
But generally speaking, at the very least, it will copy that six-digit code to your clipboard.
Casey:
But a lot of times on iOS, it will actually properly fill in that one-time use code automatically.
Casey:
So once you enter your username and password, and you've used 1Password to do that in the iOS integration into 1Password to do that,
Casey:
or vice versa, then when you proceed to the next screen and ask for your code, a lot of times it will actually enter.
Casey:
iOS will drop it in there for you, and you don't have to do anything else.
Casey:
In worst case, it's paste.
Casey:
It's already there waiting for you.
John:
Yeah, the web integration has always been good with this because of web extensions, which they've just got made better and better.
John:
Now you can have web extensions that span all of Apple's platforms, and web extensions do have the power to do this for you.
John:
The Apple one, though, is going to be able to integrate with native apps that 1Password doesn't have access to.
John:
So I'm glad they built this in.
John:
My fear is nobody will use this because we all already have our own people who use 1Password.
John:
Apple is never going to match the feature set of 1Password.
John:
They're just not going to because that's an entire company dedicated to this one feature.
John:
I don't use 1Password, but I use the Google Authenticator.
John:
I'm not going to move all my stuff to something else.
John:
Other people use Authy, and they love Authy.
John:
How does the built-in Apple thing fit into this?
John:
Oh, and by the way, when I use Chrome on my Mac, it has its own password thing that's not built into Apple's thing.
John:
Apple is late to this game, so I'm glad they're doing something because I think this should be an OS-level feature.
John:
But boy, they're super late.
John:
And I'm not sure, kind of like a lot of the stuff they're trying to do in TVOS, I'm not sure they're going to be able to get everybody on board.
John:
Hey, everybody, stop using your more full-featured third-party apps and use the built-in one because it's built in.
John:
And the only way you get a benefit from this is if just everybody converts to supporting the built-in one.
John:
And Apple hasn't even been able to do that with Apple Pay, which is an amazing service that they weren't particularly late to.
John:
So I'm not optimistic about the chances of this feature, but I like the idea of it.
Marco:
In general, I think this has all the same benefits and drawbacks of all the rest of Apple's built-in password management stuff.
Marco:
I'm a 1Password user.
Marco:
Yes, they are sponsoring this episode, but I've been a user since way before that.
Marco:
And I do all the 2FA stuff in 1Password because it's amazing to have that and to have it be synced.
Marco:
Not to worry about John losing his Google Authenticator phone.
Marco:
That's a bad place to be.
Marco:
But I...
Marco:
The reason why I haven't converted over to use Apple System is that I like 1Password because it is reliable and because there is an app that I can go to that's like the center of all this information.
Marco:
I can go there and easily manage it and everything.
Marco:
Apple seems to be allergic to the idea of making apps that expose their functionality in an app.
Marco:
There's all this magic stuff that happens throughout the system, and a lot of it never makes it to an app or never has an app made for it.
Marco:
It's on the Settings app.
John:
Yeah, kind of.
John:
A tiny app called Settings.
John:
Yeah.
John:
yeah well yeah but that's a separate issue there was a shortcut that someone posted that was basically like it would put an icon on your home screen that said passwords and all it would do would jump you into settings to the password section and most people had no idea that that section was even there i don't even know where it is either because who can find anything in settings these days so you're right if that was a separate app a it would be easier to find and b they could add features to that app instead because now they're stuck like well if we own it if it wants to do anything that the setting app can't do well tough because settings app can do like a series of screens that go from left to right and that's basically it
Marco:
Right, and I've been in that settings area occasionally, and it's miserable to try to actually use that to find something or to edit or change something.
Marco:
It's very clunky.
Marco:
And there's also issues that I've had with iCloud Keychain stuff with just reliability of whether iCloud Keychain works correctly on a device.
Marco:
and sometimes I'll have a device where it just breaks, and my passwords just don't autofill, and I don't know why, or they're just not there, and it persists that way until that device gets restored or updated or whatever.
Marco:
They still have basic reliability problems sometimes for me, and that's why...
Marco:
I don't keep anything important only in iCloud keychain.
Marco:
I'll use it for if some website that I don't intend to really use very much has a registration form and iCloud fills in an auto-filled secure password, I'll be like, sure, whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, click, click, click, okay, whatever.
Marco:
But anything that I want to keep long-term, I keep in one password because I still don't feel like I can trust Apple's system to really be reliable and a safe data store yet.
Marco:
And I don't know that this is going to change that.
Marco:
And anything that uses a 2FA authenticator,
Marco:
I'd rather have in something like 1Password where I know I have a form of backup of that seed code for that.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I don't see myself using this in the future, but maybe that'll change.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I think it's important that it exists because you know the barrier to getting...
John:
someone in your family to use two factors oh i gotta download an app and which app do i have to use and do i have to pay for this app just having something anything built into the os for two factor is really important for the people who otherwise don't know or care about this stuff because then they don't have to get a separate app they don't care about the details at least we have something again assuming it meets some minimum level level of reliability which i think
John:
this is probably close to like this is not as pure a win as the thing they did where like when you get uh the messages app would uh would extract the code and let you paste it in right because that was just like let me just save you a step this should save even more steps but it does require a little bit more buy-in than just merely existing and using messages
Casey:
All right, we are running long, so we've got to pick up the pace a little bit.
Casey:
So we'll just say, hey, you can build and release an iOS app from Swift Playgrounds.
Casey:
That's cool.
John:
Somehow.
John:
The good thing is I personally don't know any more about that.
John:
But yes, that is a big, huge deal, and they did not elaborate on it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the one thing that I expected to have a lot more info in State of the Union, and there was a little bit more information, but that's about it.
Marco:
But I think one thing, they didn't show the App Store Connect interface at all.
Marco:
It seems like you still have to use App Store Connect to manage everything.
Marco:
I would imagine you're probably still going to get all your rejection notices in App Store Connect too, and probably not in Swift Playgrounds.
John:
I don't think it's clear at all.
John:
Like someone tweeted, I retweeted someone's snarky tweet that says, so where in Swift Playgrounds do I enter my Dunn's number?
John:
Because going from zero to I put an app on the App Store, it's way more complicated than what they expose in Playground.
John:
So they showed like...
John:
You know, oh, these products are cross-compatible with Xcode, which is awesome.
John:
It's great that you're not stuck.
John:
Like, if you started on an iPad, you're stuck in this little baby version of the thing.
John:
No, apparently the project will work in both places.
John:
But then they showed, like, the settings.
John:
Like, how do I look at my app settings?
John:
And it is so simplified in a refreshing way.
John:
Like, have you ever looked at the Xcode, you know, settings for your project?
John:
It's just...
John:
it's huge and there's so much stuff and just like it is a very developer interface and on playgrounds it's like oh here's a little pop over with a couple of like on off switches like and nothing else is exposed now it's probably all buried in there because it's cross compatible with xcode but yeah many many questions remain about this but if we're waiting for xcode on ipad uh this is not it but hey you can apparently develop a real live native swift ui
Marco:
app on your ipad and put it on the app store so this is a huge step it is monumentally important and we will learn more about it as we watch the sessions that detail this yeah it really i mean this is massive we don't really have time to talk fully about it yet and we don't know enough about it really to talk too much about it yet but being able to build ios apps on ios is a huge deal it's a massive deal for so many reasons and
Marco:
I don't think we're ever going to get full-blown Xcode on iPads because what that means is so contrary to how everything works on iOS.
Marco:
Things like different files and file management and different tools being all integrated together.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that iOS is terrible at and not designed for.
Marco:
So I'm not expecting to ever get...
Marco:
quote, Xcode for iPad in the way that we know Xcode today and the way most developers build most apps of any complexity.
Marco:
But to be able to build apps at all and put them on the App Store and get them rejected in four or five days for providing too little functionality, that's really magical.
Marco:
And I hope that this becomes a thing that helps get people into app development more.
Marco:
I have concerns about SwiftUI being the, like, education side of things because SwiftUI is something that looks very easy but is not.
Marco:
And it looks very... Oh, so Swift.
Marco:
Well, right.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I mean, the whole idea of using Swift as an educational language I think is kind of comical.
Marco:
But, you know, type one parenthesis in the wrong place and God knows the error message you're going to get from SwiftUI.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
for people who are already, who know enough to use Swift and Swift UI or can plow through the probably pretty steep learning curve on some of this stuff, if all you have is an iPad, then now you have access to make apps.
Marco:
That's something you couldn't do before.
Marco:
It's something that I honestly never thought we would get.
Marco:
So to have that at all is amazing.
Marco:
And even though there's going to be probably a lot of little rough edges to what that means in reality, that's still a great thing.
Casey:
Yeah, and it's another tick in the scoreboard for SwiftUI.
Casey:
And, you know, this app that maybe I'll release before I die, it's entirely SwiftUI.
Casey:
And I do like it, but there's rough edges everywhere.
Casey:
And honestly, I don't think that many of those rough edges have been sanded down this release, but we'll see over time.
Casey:
But nonetheless, it seems that SwiftUI is the thing that is most portable, which is an obvious thing to say, right?
Casey:
It was always designed to be portable.
Casey:
But, you know, widgets have to be SwiftUI.
Casey:
They said something about how these apps that you write on the iPad have to be SwiftUI, right?
Casey:
And apparently they are portable between Xcode and the iPad or in Swift Playgrounds, but it's unclear exactly how that works.
Casey:
And if you start to dip into traditional UI kit, like what happens?
Casey:
So yeah, if you're not on the Swift UI train, if you're not at least being, you know, functionally able to read it, if not write basic stuff, I think it's coming on time for you to learn.
Casey:
Moving on, I'm going to try to do this quickly and it's not going to work.
Casey:
Privacy, mail privacy protection, hide your IP address, hide your location.
Casey:
App privacy reports are available.
Casey:
Siri now has on-device speech recognition, which, yes, is a privacy thing, but looks like it's going to make Siri online.
Marco:
way faster also i just said the name of that assistant like three times in a row i apologize but it'll happen um so the point is it'll be way quicker as you tell it to shush as it's trying to parse what i just said so that's exciting um no that's that is massive by the way we blew right past the mail and safari thing i do want to get the back to that in a second but like having on-device recognition it's funny most people have forgotten or never knew that ios devices did very briefly have this feature and
Marco:
Right before Siri was released, Siri came with the iPhone 4S.
Marco:
The iPhone 4, and I believe 3GS also, had on-device speech recognition for a limited amount of functionality.
Marco:
Even back then, before Siri, it had this feature.
Marco:
It was based on the same feature that Macs have had forever.
Marco:
And you could do very simple, a limited set of tasks with on-device speech recognition before.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
And Siri was actually, in these ways of latency and being able to do it offline, Siri was actually a step back in those areas.
Marco:
And we are now finally closing that gap.
Marco:
And I am very much looking forward to this because...
Marco:
One of my biggest problems with Siri is that it's inconsistent.
Marco:
And my second biggest problem with Siri is that it's often slow.
Marco:
Now, where I really want this is on the HomePod.
Marco:
That's where I really need this.
Marco:
But having it on the phone is a good start.
John:
Yeah, I wonder if the HomePod, I mean, they touted it as like, oh, a feature of our neural engine.
John:
Is the HomePod not powerful enough to this?
John:
I wish it was because, yes, responding faster.
John:
And I tweeted, I hope this is a dramatic change because obviously everything in the demo looks really fast.
John:
And I got some replies saying, yes, it is a dramatic change.
John:
So I give this a huge thumbs up.
John:
I really hope this works the way they showed it.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Very much so.
Casey:
Marco, you said you wanted to talk about privacy again for a second.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The, the, um, the mail and Safari privacy protection features where they, they, uh, hide your IP address, uh, from tracking pixels and mail messages, uh, and from something in Safari, I assume it's just the identified trackers from the, uh, like the tracking, uh, detector thing in Safari.
Marco:
Um, like, cause it's obviously not going to be proxying all of your image loads and all of your script loads through from everything you browse in Safari.
Marco:
That seems unlikely.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And mail, I assume with mail, it's probably, again, it's probably only tracking pixels that they can identify that way.
Marco:
Probably not all mail images.
Marco:
But the idea that they're doing something to...
Marco:
effectively like proxy or vpn your image requests to hide your ip from people who send you mail that's a very good thing um how they implement it is it it depends a lot on how they implement it like how effective this is because one thing people can still do is they could still see like if they generate a unique url for each email that is sent
Marco:
They know if an image gets requested that's in your email, they know that your email was delivered.
Marco:
Unless the way it's implemented is Apple loads all image requests for all of these tracking pixels, even if you haven't opened any emails, which would dilute the value of that somewhat as a data point.
Marco:
That has its own issues with how and when it was open and everything.
Marco:
So we'll see how this is implemented.
Marco:
But overall, the idea of Apple Mail tackling the problem of mail tracking pixels is a great thing.
Marco:
Because if we think the web is bad with tracking everything, mail is no better.
Marco:
And typically mail, with a few exceptions, like this is one of the advertised features of Hay, but with a few exceptions, most mail clients have done nothing to very little about trying to block email-based tracking for inline images.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Most people don't use the settings that Apple has offered for years of just don't load inline images because most emails get totally broken if you don't load inline images.
Marco:
So most people, you know, need those or leave those on an iOS has been on by default.
Marco:
Uh, I don't know if it's default on the Mac, but anyway, um,
Marco:
To have something like this that can let you load inline images sometimes or most of the time, but still block tracking for the really creepy ad tech side of this, that's fantastic.
Marco:
They are going to anger so many email spammers.
Marco:
I mean, marketers, excuse me.
Marco:
But I don't care.
Marco:
Email marketers have...
Marco:
have stomped all over our privacy for so long with tracking pixels that they deserve no sympathy.
Marco:
And I'm very, very happy to see Apple taking a stand on this.
Casey:
Definitely agree.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We had a section on iCloud, which is a little bit unexpected.
Casey:
They have some account recovery tools now, which are great.
Casey:
Among the things you can do is you can designate, say, like a partner.
Casey:
to be a recovery contact.
Casey:
So if you are like John and you lose the one and only phone that has Google Authenticator, or in this case, the one and only phone that has your iCloud login, you can, on your new phone, say, oh, I need to recover.
Casey:
And then the six-digit code that would normally go to your phone instead would go to your partner.
Casey:
And you would have them read the six-digit code off to you, and then you can be let back into your device.
Casey:
Similarly, a digital legacy.
Casey:
So if you pass away,
Casey:
These are the people who are allowed to have your iCloud information, if not credentials, if that happens.
Marco:
I think it's a when, not an if.
Casey:
Well, fair, fair.
Casey:
No way, man.
Casey:
I'm living forever.
Marco:
I mean, that would be nice, but I think I'm realistic here.
Casey:
Fair enough.
John:
I think a lot of these features, the recovery and the legacy features, like some services, depending on, you know, again, where you have your identity.
John:
Let's say you have a Google account.
John:
Google has similar features, but like Apple, Apple has an identity system.
John:
It's Apple ID.
John:
And you essentially need to use it to be in the Apple ecosystem and use all their stuff.
John:
And I imagine one of the biggest headaches for Apple is people coming to the Apple store or calling support and saying, I can't get into my thing.
John:
I forgot my password.
John:
And Apple, because they have real security, for the most part, there's little to nothing they can do for you.
John:
And Apple can't solve this problem by giving themselves a backdoor or by like, oh, Apple should be able to get in because that's what people think.
John:
People think, well, you're Apple.
John:
Of course you can give me my stuff back.
John:
And the technical nuances of, like, why Apple can't and shouldn't do that are lost on people.
John:
They just want their pictures of their kids back, right?
John:
So this is a human solution to that problem, which is we will encourage you to put other humans in the circle of trust for your thing.
John:
Obviously, there are downsides because you've got to be careful you put in that circle of trust.
John:
But in situations where, like, if they encourage it with the correct framing, like someone you really do trust or whatever...
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
It's a little bit fraught, but I'm glad this feature exists just because I think a lot of people do have someone – they do want to have a backup.
John:
They don't want to just rely on their carefulness and their memory and their bank safety deposit box of recovery codes or whatever.
John:
Every kind of service that has an identity that has lots of valuable personal information should have systems like this that people can use if they want.
John:
Because without it, it's all too easy to find yourself in a situation where very important, precious, you know, precious things to you.
John:
Again, photos of your kids are lost forever.
Casey:
And then I think it was after the keynote, somebody had discovered that there's going to be temporary iCloud storage for device transfers, which I was like, wait, what, when I read this?
Casey:
So I think John put a blurb in the show notes.
Casey:
Now when you buy a new device, you can use iCloud backup to move your data to your new device, even if you're low on storage.
Casey:
iCloud will grant you as much storage as you need to complete a temporary backup free of charge for up to three weeks.
Casey:
This allows you to get all your apps data and settings on your device automatically.
Casey:
What a great idea.
Marco:
Yeah, this is awesome.
Marco:
My only thing, I tweeted this as well, is that I hope they someday soon extend this to software updates as well.
Marco:
Because I know so many like real life people who don't pay for iCloud storage and their phones are always full or very close to full and they don't do software updates.
Marco:
Like they don't update to the latest iOS for like a year or more or they just do it until they get the next phone because their phone doesn't have enough space to run the software update.
Marco:
And this is such a great thing to do this for phone upgrades.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Also apply this to software updates.
Marco:
That would be incredible because so many people hold on to way too old a version of iOS only for this reason that their phone doesn't have enough space to update and they don't want to pay for iCloud.
Marco:
And so, yeah, to have like a temporary thing that Apple can can, you know, spare a bit of space for a day while their phone updates.
Marco:
That would be pretty great.
John:
Maybe Apple knows the metrics on that because people buy new phones once every year, two years, three years, whatever.
John:
But OS updates come way more frequently than that.
John:
What percentage of Apple's phones are in this situation where they would need this temp storage?
John:
And because OS updates tend to roll out to everyone more or less at the same time and Apple pushes them super heavily, I wonder if they would end up over committing storage.
John:
Again, Apple knows these numbers.
John:
You know, we don't, but it seems plausible that they might prefer the sort of, let's say, more evenly spread distribution and lower frequency of phone upgraders as opposed to OS updates, which are not evenly distributed and much more frequent.
Casey:
Then we get into iCloud Plus, because you can never have enough pluses.
Casey:
This was weird to me.
Casey:
Not bad, just weird.
Casey:
And it seems like, if I were to summarize it, it's an Apple-provided, don't call it a VPN VPN.
John:
Well, before you get through this and the features, so you just said iCloud Plus.
John:
We all saw that, and we all thought...
John:
hmm here's a new brand for a thing that historically when apple has done this it's like a new thing that you can pay for like it didn't isn't that what everyone thought when you see icloud plus and that's that's purely apple's choice of like we are coming up with a new branding we're explicitly using a branding that we've used before to imply that this is a service that you're going to pay for and now we're going to list the features
John:
And so go ahead.
John:
So you've got the private relay VPN thing.
Casey:
So you've got private relay VPN thing.
Casey:
You've got hide my email, which gives you like a randomized email that will forward to your real email address.
Casey:
Apparently you can get custom domain or you can use custom domains with iCloud, which was new to me.
Casey:
I don't believe this was mentioned on the keynote.
Casey:
And then HomeKit secure video.
Casey:
You can have unlimited cameras.
Casey:
I think you're limited to five right now, if I remember right.
Casey:
And the video does not take up any of your allotted storage.
Casey:
It's considered separate.
Casey:
And gentlemen, I'm super excited to tell you that they have, and I'm quoting, the same low prices that they offer today.
John:
So this is getting back to my intro.
John:
The only reason we thought this would be something you would charge for is because you started it by branding it like one of the things that you charge for.
John:
And then at the end, you're like, oh, we don't charge for it.
John:
Aren't you glad?
John:
It's like, well, the only reason I thought you were going to charge anything is because you made me think you were going to charge something.
John:
So I don't...
Marco:
So it seems like what they've done is rename iCloud paid plans to iCloud Plus.
John:
Well, yeah, you have to already pay.
John:
That's why they say the same low price.
John:
If you already pay for iCloud extra storage, then you get this extra stuff.
John:
But if you don't pay for it, you don't get it.
John:
But the branding as iCloud Plus is confusing to me.
John:
And I'm not begrudging them.
John:
I think these features are all good features, particularly the custom domains.
John:
I mean, it's probably more of a techie thing.
John:
Custom domains are a really good idea.
John:
I encourage, especially everyone who's listening to a tech podcast, you should, and I say this as someone who doesn't follow this advice myself, but you should.
John:
I kind of do.
John:
I have my own domain.
John:
But anyway, you should have your own domain.
John:
definitely for your website probably also for email but it's a pain who wants to have if you're not super techy you don't want to like sign up for an email service oh i gotta have my own email domain or whatever it's just easier for me to just use one of the third-party ones well here you go if you're if you're willing to tolerate apple's mail system at all um but don't want to have an email address that's at me.com at mac.com at itools.com and
John:
at icloud.com uh now apparently somehow through some system that we don't yet know you can just i guess you register a domain do you pay for the domain i don't know how it's going to work but having a custom domain uh that's not i'm hoping that's not owned by apple would mean that in theory if you ever move elsewhere you could keep your same email address we don't have the details on this we don't know how it will work but in theory i like the idea of this
Casey:
Yep, I agree.
Casey:
All right, health.
Casey:
They added walking steadiness as a mobility thing.
Casey:
They added descriptions of lab data, trends.
Casey:
You can share your health data with your doctor, and then you can also share your health data with family members so your family members can see, oh, you know, this trend is that their resting heart rate is up a lot over the last month.
Casey:
Maybe you should encourage, you know, Nana to go and get checked out or something like that.
Casey:
It's good stuff.
John:
It's a good use of like they have all these sensors, especially with the Apple watch, like literally strapped to you.
John:
And even just your phone in your pocket can pick up things like the walking steadiness.
John:
And so this is all, you know, a extremely like the health app.
John:
We don't talk about it too much.
John:
It's just been there and it's slowly advancing.
John:
But there's been a lot of buy in on the health app.
John:
Most health applications.
John:
on ios integrate with the built-in health app because it is made from the beginning to be integrated with and it's actually pretty good and every year gets a little bit better and the more they integrate the sensor data combined with like diagnostic info combined with finally somehow depending on your country or state getting integration with the actual health care system like the doctors and everything to the extent that they can succeed in that it makes everything better yep
Casey:
WatchOS 8.
Casey:
Health, it's got a new mindfulness app, including Reflect, which asks you to reflect on particular prompts throughout the day.
Casey:
So the example they showed was, think about something you love to do and why it brings you joy.
Casey:
There's Sleep App, which now includes respiratory rate.
Casey:
There's new workout types for Tai Chi and Pilates.
Casey:
They've gotten a new, seemingly famous fitness instructor, Jeanette Jenkins, who I personally had not heard of, but apparently she's going to be doing Fitness Plus workouts.
Casey:
And they're also doing an artist spotlight series.
Casey:
So I guess in most Apple Fitness Plus workouts, you'll get a smattering of different music.
Casey:
And for these, the entire workout is one artist.
Casey:
Also in watchOS 8, they spent a lot of time on photos, which seemed like an interesting choice.
Casey:
But one little tidbit they dropped was that the photos face is the most popular watch face, which I thought was not surprising, but interesting.
Marco:
I wrote that down too.
Marco:
Actually, I did think it was surprising, but it makes sense.
John:
It shows how much people who buy the Apple Watch really care about watches and watch faces.
John:
They just want a picture of their kids.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
They have support for when you have a photo on your watch face, if it was taken with portrait mode, they do this like fake 3D.
Casey:
They called it dynamic composition.
Casey:
I see this a lot on like Facebook and stuff.
Casey:
Did that seem creepy to you?
Casey:
I did not care for it.
Casey:
I've never really liked it personally.
Yeah.
Marco:
I like out loud said, when they scrolled in the face, like inflated.
Marco:
I did not like that at all.
Marco:
Maybe I'm in the minority.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I didn't really care for it either.
Casey:
You can apparently respond to things a lot better.
Casey:
So they talked about composition.
Casey:
You can use the digital crown to to move your cursor while you're entering stuff during like scribble.
Casey:
And they have GIF search, which is exciting.
Casey:
I thought that was pretty neat.
Casey:
And also, on one of the, like, word cloud slide sort of things, they mentioned that you can do multiple timers, which is very exciting, too.
Marco:
Oh, that's nice.
Marco:
I mean, for me, like, I mean, watchOS, I think, is probably the section of this that seemed to have the least changes for developers to do anything about, and even possibly for Apple, you know, as well.
Marco:
It seemed like a pretty quiet year for the watch.
Marco:
But there was one...
Marco:
big api change that finally i think will be nice um it's we didn't get custom watch faces uh still still holding out hope but i had complained uh man maybe a month or two ago about how like you know two years into having always on watch faces in the hardware every app would just do like it would just blur the background when the watch face went to like sleep mode yep yep yep
Marco:
And so now they have an API in watchOS 8 where your app, so they kind of, they branded it as like always on screen apps, but that's not quite what it is.
Marco:
What it is, is there's an API to describe how your app should look instead of just being blurred out when it is the foreground app and the display goes into that like half sleep mode.
Marco:
So now you can specify, like, you know, okay, well, when it's in sleep mode, make these modifications to the SwiftUI interface.
Marco:
You know, this thing gets dimmed, this thing gets hidden, this thing gets blurred out because it's sensitive info, like whatever it is.
Marco:
You could now specify exactly how that will look for your UI.
Marco:
So that should allow...
Marco:
things to be just much nicer for the always on screen watches and i hope that apple has done that same thing to their own apps uh because like this is bothering me like literally earlier today i was trying to like do a stretch that i had to hold for some amount of time and i had the apple watch on so i'm like all right i'll launch a stopwatch app and i'll hit go and i'll just start the stretch and as soon as the screen goes to sleep it blurred and you can't even see this and like really the stopwatch get like nothing like
Marco:
So I'm very glad to see this support coming.
Marco:
And hopefully Apple has done their work to update their apps to do this.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
HomeKit got a section.
Casey:
They talked about HomeKey.
Casey:
Apparently you can use one of the tubes to ask for something to be played on the Apple TV, which is kind of neat.
Casey:
They talked a little bit about SharePlay stuff.
Casey:
Uh, for they, they showed that if you're going to sit down and watch TV that you can, I, and I wasn't clear on the user interface here, but apparently you can like say of the four of us that live together, uh, it's only me and Aaron that are watching TV or TV right now.
Casey:
And so it'll show like more adult offerings or I can say, Oh no, it's me.
Casey:
It's Aaron and it's Declan and Michaela.
Casey:
And they'll show like more family friendly options, which I thought was kind of neat.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
You can use the HomePod Mini as Apple TV 4K speakers.
Casey:
You can do lossless audio on the HomePod Mini later this year.
Casey:
There's voice recognition to know who's talking to them.
Casey:
There's Siri on third-party devices.
Casey:
I said the thing again.
Casey:
There's the two behind third-party devices, which I was very surprised to see.
Casey:
However, it requires the HomePod to be like the receiver of these communications because they don't want to send them up to third-party servers.
Marco:
Yeah, the way I interpreted that was the thermostat can listen to your command, but it just probably sends the audio to a HomePod.
Marco:
So you have to have a HomePod somewhere in the house.
Marco:
So it's basically acting as a remote microphone to your existing HomePod, not its own HomePod that talks directly to the internet.
John:
But can the HomePod talk back to the thermostat and tell it to do something, or is it just one way?
Casey:
I think it's one way.
Marco:
Yeah, they didn't go into too much on that, and I don't think that feature is out yet.
Marco:
A lot of what they mentioned in the keynote and the State of the Union is stuff that is actually not in the betas yet, and a lot of it they said coming later this year or coming this fall.
Marco:
So a lot of these features are things that we can't actually see or test yet.
Casey:
Moving right along, there is Matter support in iOS 15.
Casey:
I think we talked about this just last week, but this is the thing that was formerly connected Home over IP or CHOIP.
Casey:
That's now rebranded Matter, and there's support for that in iOS 15, whatever that means.
Casey:
There's a better Apple Watch app for Home, which is really a low bar because the Home app is really bad.
Casey:
And then there's package detection on video cameras, so it'll let you know if a package has been delivered.
Casey:
And then we get to macOS Monterey.
Casey:
And oh, we're out of time.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, it's been great, everybody.
Casey:
Thank you to our sponsors, MacWeldon1Password.
Casey:
And yes, please, we'll talk to you next week.
John:
Why are you trying to skip macOS?
Casey:
You're sitting on a Mac all day.
Casey:
You love macOS.
Casey:
I was expecting a much more violent reaction from the two of you.
Casey:
That joke felt real.
Casey:
I don't know why you're down on macOS.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
Oh, here it is.
Casey:
So macOS Monterey, and they talked about several different things.
Casey:
There's FaceTime improvements.
Casey:
There's a low power mode, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
Do we know any details about that, though?
Marco:
It said it reduces the clock speed of the CPU, reduces screen brightness, and does something to background apps.
Marco:
I don't know the details, but that's how it was described in its various feature pages.
Marco:
And finally, I've been using these on my Intel Macs, I've been using these Turbo Boost disabling utilities for years because it really does make a very big difference to drop the clock speed maximum.
Marco:
It makes a huge difference in power usage and
Marco:
you know you don't necessarily need that all the time you know they're much of the time you want full power but it's really nice to have the option to turn it on when you want to do things like operate a laptop in your lap and have it not melt your legs uh or go on a very long flight and you want to maximize your battery life as long as you possibly can so to have that built in what's a flight
Marco:
So to have that built into the OS, like, first of all, it's easy.
Marco:
Like they should have done this years ago.
Marco:
I'm glad they're doing it now.
Marco:
And that's going to be great because doing it like my nerdy hacky way is both difficult and limited.
Marco:
You know, if they doing it their way, where it's built into the OS, they can be smarter about things like not running photo indexing and other like CPU intensive things during low power mode.
Marco:
So hopefully they've done a deep integration here with all the various like processing demons in the system.
Marco:
And that I'm looking forward to.
Marco:
Even though my current laptop, the M1 MacBook Air, has such a ridiculously awesome battery life that I probably wouldn't use it right now on this hardware.
Marco:
But certainly in the future, I bet I will have hardware that I will use this on.
Marco:
And for everybody out there who still has Intel Macs, this is fantastic.
John:
It would be nice if this thing worked the way 4G and 5G do on the phone, where basically it will not use 5G unless it thinks it really needs it to save battery life.
John:
Even though it will show 5G in the menu bar and the status bar, like when 5G is available, it will just use 4G.
John:
Until the OS thinks that it's actually needs to send and receive data that would be beyond the bandwidth.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know how it makes a decision, but I can imagine.
John:
Well, first of all, I can imagine.
John:
So you feel especially with an M1 just putting in low power mode like permanently all the time because it's plenty fast to do what they do with their Mac just all the time.
John:
And hey, bonus battery life.
John:
But most people would feel that if they tried to do something, like if they're trying to build an Xcode, you don't want to be in low power mode or whatever because it probably spawns a lot of background threads.
John:
So it would be great if you could say be in like auto mode, which is like be in low power mode all the time until it seems like there is a bunch of stuff, you know, queuing it.
John:
Threads have priorities, right?
John:
There's a big range of priorities.
John:
Setting aside the Unix nicing of processes and stuff, macOS itself has specific priorities for different kinds of things that run.
John:
And so at any given time, macOS knows how much stuff is user-initiated high-priority stuff, how much stuff is background.
John:
It knows which processes are spawned from daemons versus which ones are spawned from interactive applications and all this stuff.
John:
And so it can get a kind of idea of like what load am I under?
John:
And then for the background processes, it kind of knows when's the last time I ran photo analysis.
John:
So I can imagine, which they didn't talk about here, but I can imagine a future enhancement of this auto mode, which is like just be in low power mode essentially all the time.
John:
Because I'm willing to sacrifice how up to date my photo analysis is by letting you only run it like, you know, at half the interval you normally would, right?
John:
Only letting you run it for five minutes out of every hour, right?
John:
It's different than putting in a low power mode permanently because it would still do those high part.
John:
When you hit build in Xcode, it would ramp up to full power and then settle back down.
John:
And it wouldn't stop photo analysis from ever running.
John:
It would just make it run less frequently because with a low power mode as a manual switch,
John:
obviously it will it will prompt you to go into that when you get low on battery like the phone does which is great and some people want to be running at all time which is also good but most people like human nature being what it is you want to run it you want it to be fast up until you realize you're almost out of battery and then you want it to be low power but then you run out and you would have actually been better served in that scenario with it being in this auto mode so there's room for enhancement here and i'm optimistic about it um
Casey:
All right, so moving right along within macOS.
Casey:
Focus is synced across all your devices, supposedly, so you'll get all your different, you know, working, eating, playing, sleeping, whatever.
Marco:
And by the way, that's awesome.
Marco:
I love that we're now in a world where major iOS features come to Mac at the same time.
Marco:
Like the fact that it's even available in macOS now instead of like three years from now, that's a good change.
Marco:
I'm very happy about that.
John:
Yep, agreed.
John:
Like the FaceTime stuff too.
John:
And a lot of that has to do, we mentioned, you know, like the weather app being enhanced in iOS.
John:
Like that's, I think they rewrote the whole thing in SwiftUI.
John:
A bunch of stuff has been redone in SwiftUI and SwiftUI is much easier to be cross-platform or like even just the messages app being Catalyst or whatever it is.
John:
Like,
John:
The frameworks and how they span the platforms, whether it's Catalyst or SwiftUI, is what lets us have these features at the same time.
John:
Because it's not like they made a custom AppKit version of all this stuff.
John:
Like, why do we get all the FaceTime improvements?
John:
Well, I guess I'm assuming it's essentially the same app on both platforms.
John:
Same thing with the Focus stuff.
John:
Like, the background demons might have always been the same thing, but it's always the UI that's a stumbling block.
John:
And now that you can share some or all the UI across all their platforms, you know, it's a big payoff for that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Quick notes and notes is also being updated to have all the new fancy, you know, take a note on whatever you want stuff, which is very cool.
Casey:
And then we talk about continuity and more specifically universal control.
Casey:
Holy freaking crap.
Casey:
This looked amazing.
Casey:
So to back up a half step, if you think about the way things are today is that you have sidecar, which is you can set an iPad next to your Mac and you can fiddle in control center and system preferences.
Casey:
I forget exactly where it is.
Casey:
And you can say, all right, I would like this iPad to be effectively an external display for my Mac.
Casey:
And then you can have that act like an external display, as though you plugged in another display to your Mac.
Casey:
I use it not infrequently, actually, and it works really, really well.
Casey:
It's really, really well done.
Casey:
I really, really like it.
Casey:
Well, now you have universal control, which is like not really the same thing.
Casey:
And correct me, gentlemen, if I go off the path here, but it's kind of like Synergy, which you may have used years and years ago, like I did.
Casey:
But basically, you can have your iPad next to your Mac and
Casey:
But rather than having it be a screen, so it's not the same as Sidecar, what you can do is you can drag, let's say you're looking at an iMac and your iPad is to the right of the iMac.
Casey:
Well, you drag your mouse cursor all the way to the right edge of the iMac screen, and I guess just keep pushing a little bit, like through the muck, if you will, or through the air.
Casey:
And then suddenly you will be taking control of
Casey:
of the mouse cursor on the iPad and so as you mouse around using the mouse that is connected to your iMac you're actually controlling the cursor on the iPad and then you can even pick up and drag things like an image for example from the iPad back to the left to where your iMac is and then paste it on your iMac and then they were saying actually you can do this with three different computers and maybe even more than that so say you have your your MacBook Pro to the left of your iMac well you can take
Casey:
and you're using just the keyboard and mouse associated with your iMac, you drag all the way to the right, you pick up an image, you drag all the way to the left, through the air, through your iMac, through the air again, and then drop it on your MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Holy freaking crap, this looks so cool.
Casey:
And if it works at all, I will be deeply impressed.
John:
This is the same functionality as continuity that we know and love, and it just shows how the interface to it can make such a difference.
John:
So we all know, like, whether we like this feature or not, oh, I bring up a web page on my phone, and suddenly I see the little thing pop up next to the dock that it knows like I'm on a web page on my phone, and hey, do you want to open that web page on your Mac?
John:
For reasons we'll get into a little bit, webpages may not be a best example because there's another solution to that.
John:
But the idea is that that's continuity.
John:
Oh, my devices are aware of what's going on in the other devices if I'm signing the same Apple ID.
John:
So I can get that thing over here.
John:
The addition here is now with this magic traveling cursor is that your intent of like, hey, I would like to open that web page here on my Mac.
John:
Normally that you'd express that intent by on your Mac clicking on the little icon that's next to the dock, right?
John:
use the cursor to fly over to my other device you know and we can do that in the same of those third-party apps because they all know about each other and you can sort of transition control from one device to another and grab something and bring it back and that long trip across devices is expressing the same intent as if you had clicked on a little thing that's next to the dock it's just doing it in a sort of more direct way it's more direct manipulation as opposed to like
John:
oh, here's an option for some functionality that we have to put in the UI somewhere and you can express your intent by clicking on it or something.
John:
Now just go get the thing and bring it back.
John:
But in the end, it's doing the same thing, which is like, oh, so there's something on that device and you want it over here and continuity knows about you and you've expressed your intent through that drag and now we'll connect all the dots.
John:
And it's more complicated than that when you're dragging a file into another application and they all have to be aware of this.
John:
And so the demo is not necessarily gonna be universal across all your apps, especially in the beginning.
John:
but it's super cool.
John:
My question when I saw this demo is, how does this system know the relative positions of your devices?
John:
How does it know which one is on the right, which one in the middle, and which one on the left?
John:
Does it require a U1?
John:
Do you arrange it like you arrange displays?
John:
Because that demo where they dragged from an iPad across a MacBook Pro to an iMac only works if something understands how they are positioned on the table.
John:
Otherwise, it gets very confusing real fast.
John:
Like, you know, what if you had dragged from the iPad to the laptop and then quickly picked up the laptop and put it on the other side of the iMac?
John:
Now how do you get to the iMac screen?
John:
Like, how does it know where things are relative to each other?
John:
A lot of questions about this interface, but the demo, it was probably the most technically impressive demo.
John:
And I really liked the, even though, you know, in the end it's like a simple magic trick.
John:
Right.
John:
But like, it was, it was like, like you said, it's like mind blowing before you think about like, you know, the logistics of how it's done.
John:
that when you bring the mouse cursor from a Mac onto an iPad, it shows up like, cause the iPad cursor is that little circle.
John:
It shows up as like a little circle, like, like as a bulge, like there's a membrane between the two and you have to press a little bit harder on, you have to drag a little bit more on your mouse to burst through the membrane.
John:
And now you're onto the iPad a little bit disconcerting, but it's, I thought it was a very, it's a very clever interface.
John:
You know, all the stuff they've done with cursor on the iPad is very clever and very iPad and very interesting and well done.
John:
And this is just an extension of that.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm going to be super sad when they say that, oh, this doesn't work with Intel Max and it doesn't work with my two-year-old iPad.
Casey:
It's going to be a real bummer for me.
Marco:
Oh, what a bummer.
Marco:
You're going to have to replace your hardware with new hardware.
Marco:
I feel so bad for you.
Marco:
You've definitely not been looking for excuses to do that.
John:
You're going to do it anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Early today, I actually said to Aaron, you know, I don't feel like there's anything that I'm going to want to buy after this is over.
Casey:
And sitting here today, that is true.
Casey:
But knowing me, I'm sure I'll have some thousand dollar trinket I want by the end of the day.
Casey:
And she just like rolled her eyes and groaned because she knows it's probably true.
Casey:
uh moving right along airplay to to the mac so the mac can now act as an airplay receiver so you could have say an ipad or something like that an airplay not to your apple tv well you could do it to your apple tv but instead to your mac which is really really cool and apparently that's both video and audio which i which i'm super excited by
John:
I always forget this functionality doesn't already exist.
John:
And I try to do it.
John:
I'm like, oh, you can't do it.
John:
And there's a million third party apps that do it.
John:
But like it should have always been built in.
John:
And now it is.
John:
So sorry for all the third party apps that have been filling this gap for years.
John:
But Apple eventually caught up.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Shortcuts coming to the Mac, which is extremely exciting.
Casey:
So I wrote down a few quotes that were said during the presentation.
Casey:
The future of automation on the Mac is shortcuts.
Casey:
This is just the start of a multi-year transition, was the word used.
Casey:
But they also said Automator will still be supported.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I'm not sure what that means for Automator.
Casey:
I don't really use Automator, to be honest with you, and I don't really use AppleScript either, so I'm not personally shedding tears about this.
Casey:
And Shortcuts definitely looks like it's going to be really, really nice, and it looks like it wasn't just like a throw it across, chuck it over the wall sort of thing.
Casey:
It looks like they actually spent some time on it.
Casey:
I'm excited about this.
Casey:
I don't do that much with shortcuts, but the things I do with shortcuts on iOS, I really, really would hate to lose out on.
Casey:
And so being able to do similar things on the Mac would be really, really great.
Casey:
So I'm really into this.
John:
Automator is not long for this world, Casey.
Casey:
No, I don't think so either.
John:
I agree with you.
John:
The key is that shortcuts can import automator workflows, so that's a sign that automator is going away eventually.
John:
When I saw shortcuts on the Mac, I'm like, well, people seem to like shortcuts, and we needed an automation store and the Mac.
John:
I think there are going to be differences because there are different things you can do on a Mac.
John:
In particular, if you can import automated workflows and those automated workflows have like run shell script, like that's, you know, obviously a thing that you can only do on the Mac.
John:
And I think that's perfectly fine.
John:
My hope for shortcuts on the Mac is that potentially it would be easier to make an edit and deal with shortcuts in a Mac interface because...
John:
As someone who does actual programming for a living, I don't mean to make it sound bad, but as someone who does traditional programming and not automation for a living, I'm used to writing computer code, and I find that much more efficient...
John:
than trying to use Automator or Shortcuts to accomplish the same thing.
John:
And in many ways, I find Shortcuts frustrating.
John:
Obviously, I'm not the target audience for this, but what I hope is that, oh, now I have a Mac and a keyboard and a mouse cursor.
John:
Maybe it will just be less frustrating for me to deal with Shortcuts or even just to debug Shortcuts or to sort of step through them with a debug interface now that I'm on a Mac with a big screen and multiple windows.
John:
I really hope that is a result of this because I don't, as much as Shortcuts has been great on iOS,
John:
I don't want to give up the flexibility and the power of automation on the Mac so that it has to fit into the envelope defined by what automation is able to do on iOS.
John:
And it seems like that's not what they're doing, again, because you can't import automated workflows.
John:
But I really hope Shortcuts expands to fill the problem space of the Mac, let's say.
Marco:
I don't see that, honestly, happening.
Marco:
Shortcuts is like big Duplo blocks.
Marco:
You can build stuff with it that, if you're not a programmer, it can help you get more powerful use out of your devices, and that's great.
Marco:
But you are a programmer, John, and I don't think it's ever going to satisfy... Programmers, we have much different and more sophisticated standards when it comes to automation tools and scriptability and stuff like that, and I don't think...
John:
shortcuts is ever going to appeal to us um but it's not designed to and well but i feel like just using it on a mac just being able to have a mouse cursor and a keyboard and multiple windows may make it easier and maybe like some kind of better debugger and the fact that it can import automated workflows means it must be able to essentially run an arbitrary shell script or run an arbitrary apple script script and that's always been the escape hatch for programmers and these things is
John:
I need to get the data from something that supports shortcuts, and then I can go off into my own land of me just running my command line stuff, and then I can feed it back into the app, right?
John:
So if I take a side diversion into, you know, a Python script or something, that's where I can do all the actual work, and shortcuts are just kind of glued all together.
John:
And we'll see.
John:
I'm not deeply into Mac automation, but having some kind of story, you know, the future of automation on the Mac, having any answer to that question is better than the limbo we've been in for so many years where Apple's scripted.
Casey:
exists and is still kind of supported but it's not clear that it's long for this world and shortcuts i mean they put their stake in the ground this is the future of automation on the mac like it or not yep safari got some under the hood changes like better power efficiency uh there's a more unified extension like api or interface or whatever uh but more than anything else safari got a visual like revamp and uh
Casey:
Earlier this evening as we were recording, I was fiddling with Safari on this iPhone.
Casey:
And I went into it wanting to and expecting to hate it.
Casey:
And I don't think I hate it.
Casey:
I actually think I kind of like it.
Casey:
On the phone.
Casey:
I haven't tried it on the computer yet.
John:
Yeah, this is interesting where they showed the redesign on the Mac first and then said, oh, and by the way, it's totally different on the phone too.
John:
But the way it is on the phone is not the way it is on the Mac.
John:
On the Mac, they have really, really rethought how tabs work.
John:
As soon as I saw this, I thought of, when was this, 2014?
John:
The last time they tried to make a radical change to the way tabs work on Safari was what I call toppy tabs.
John:
It was much less radical than this change.
John:
And they did not fall through on toppy tabs.
John:
It was a beta.
John:
They tried it.
John:
People didn't like it.
John:
They backed off and went with more traditional tabs.
John:
This redesign is like nothing I've ever seen in terms of a tab interface.
John:
And I'm, you know, we'll have to see when we use it.
John:
You know, Casey's tried it in iOS.
John:
And I think the iOS changes, which we'll get to in a little bit, are a good idea.
John:
But the Mac changes, boy, I'm not sure their head is in the right place in terms of these changes.
John:
Right.
John:
So they they made their pitch.
John:
They made their emphasis.
John:
They said now, you know, this has been a trend in a lot of Mac apps and web browsers have always done this to some degree.
John:
but it's kind of this false scarcity of screen space on desktop platforms or even laptops.
John:
Now the top bar on your web browser takes up even less room, leaving more room for your content.
John:
How do they pull this off?
John:
Well, if you look at an existing Safari window, if you have a bunch of tabs on it, you've got a top bar that has back, forward, my reload button, window widgets, an address bar, and extensions, right?
John:
And then under that bar,
John:
You have tabs, if you have tabs at all, right?
John:
I said, we can save some space if we combine the bar that has back forward in the window widgets and the address bar with the tabs.
John:
So instead of being one on top of the other, we put them all on the same row.
John:
And that was their pitch.
John:
And this, you know, it's a thing that they did.
John:
Inarguably, it saves space.
John:
But at what cost?
John:
Like, have we all or do we all feel like we are massively cramped for vertical space on a web page such that we can't give up, you know, 44 points or one centimeter of space on our screen?
John:
And the cost is now that top bar.
John:
It's kind of like in the finder.
John:
Let's just jam everything in one thing.
John:
So the window widgets are up there.
John:
The back forward button are there.
John:
The tabs have morphed into a combination tab slash address bar such that when you click on one of the quote unquote tabs, it expands to become the address bar, which causes the position of all the other quote unquote tabs to change as the thing expands.
John:
And then if you had any extensions in the top of your bar, now those are all buried under a pop-up menu, which we know Marco loves when you bury things in a pop-up menu.
John:
You don't have a customizable toolbar anymore.
John:
What you have is a tiny little, little tiny space left over of like maybe where you can, I don't even know if you can put anything there that's third party.
John:
And then in the address bar, you get an access to where your extensions used to be.
John:
And every one of your tabs becomes the address bar when you click on it, causing all the other tabs to move around.
John:
At first glance, I think this is not an improvement.
John:
And I'm trying to think, like, is it not an improvement for me because I have a lot of tabs?
John:
Is this an improvement for people who don't have a lot of tabs?
John:
Hard to say.
John:
I think the squirminess of this UI will be disconcerting even to the most casual user who doesn't have thousands of tabs, right?
Yeah.
John:
The whole thing with tab groups, oh, now I can save a group of tabs.
John:
Nobody's going to do that except for the super nerds.
John:
I can look at that and say that is a power user feature that I think people have shown.
John:
Not only do they not follow through with that kind of organization...
John:
But I don't think they even want to like to have to name tab groups and to manage them is asking more than it is to ask people to manage their windows and people already don't want to do that.
John:
So I do wonder about the wisdom of these decisions.
John:
I see the trade offs.
John:
I see the pros.
John:
I see the cons and I look at it and I think this is not the right decision.
John:
specifically the squirminess of the ui that every time you tap on a tab the address bar expands or whatever a magazine just tap on it to switch it it doesn't do that and maybe nobody uses the average matters bar maybe that's what i'm missing like that no one ever looks at the address bar and really just people are going to click on these as tabs now they're just funny looking tabs i don't for me certainly this doesn't look like an upgrade and for casual users i'm not sure this is an upgrade
Casey:
For macOS, I'm not loving it.
Casey:
Having never used it, just looking at it, I'm not loving it.
Casey:
But on iOS, it moves the address bar down to the bottom in a little floaty thing that disappears when you're scrolling around the web page and it becomes just the URL at the bottom of the screen.
Casey:
And then when you scroll back to the top or you tap at the bottom of the screen, then there's a bar that shows the URL
Casey:
the ellipsis more button, and then a tab button.
Casey:
And the tab interface is way better.
Casey:
What I also like is this little like pill box or this pill that's at the bottom of the screen that's, I don't know, maybe 50 points above the multitasking handle.
Casey:
If you grab that and slide it left or right, much in the same way if you grab the multitasking handle and slide it left or right, it'll go between recently used apps.
Casey:
Well, this is one way that you can go between tabs.
Casey:
And so I have three tabs open.
Casey:
I have my website, Google, and ATP's website.
Casey:
And as I swipe on the bar that holds URLs, I can flip between them.
Casey:
And additionally, if I am on the rightmost one and drag from right to left, it'll give me the option or it'll open up a new tab, which is kind of neat and convenient.
Casey:
so on ios or at least on on on iphone i guess i should say specifically it seems really nice actually but i haven't tried it on ipad and i definitely haven't tried it on the mac and i am not expecting to like it on on certainly not on the mac and i'm 50 50 on the ipad
John:
On the phone, it seems like they're addressing reachability, which I think is super important.
John:
It's kind of the same thing.
John:
We're like, oh, now all the functionality is hidden behind this thing, but it's always kind of been that way in Safari.
John:
If you wanted to do anything, you'd first have to do something in Safari on iOS to get to the controls, and then your controls might be buried under two layers of menus somewhere.
John:
Now, at least...
John:
you can get like it's it's harder it's i mean we all experience this if you spend a lot of time like going into reader view or do anything like that it's hard to go way up there to the top of the screen if you have a one of the larger phones maybe marco finds it easier than us but it's harder to get to the top your thumb tends to be closer to the bottom and switching tabs same deal you have to first activate the thing that lets you get to the tab switcher and then you're into the tab switcher being able to swipe sideways which you can kind of do with the existing interface too but anyway and
John:
Again, not having used this, but looking at it, I see how the tradeoffs they're making make sense on the phone that may make it actually more efficient to do common operations still at the cost of like what they've always been sacrificing, which is like, look, we don't think people care about the address bar.
John:
We're going to hide everything behind two taps or whatever.
John:
Like all that's the same as it always been.
John:
I.
John:
kind of like on the Mac, I would say on the larger phones, there's room for a bar that is always visible on webpages.
John:
I know they're like, we want that webpage to get the whole screen, and we don't want to take any space from it, and all the UI will disappear except for this very minimal little, like, I know what they're getting at, but our phones aren't the size, they aren't 3.5 inch screens anymore.
John:
Like, at what point do we decide that it is worthwhile to have an always visible user interface element that conveys information other than just that very, very subtle, like, thing with the address at the bottom they're putting there, so...
John:
I think I agree mostly with the trade-offs as compared with the previous UI on iOS.
John:
But overall, I think there's still a little bit too much devotion to the idea that there should be literally nothing on the screen in Safari except for the web page.
John:
And I think that is an unrealistic goal and it's not a goal worth chasing.
John:
I'm okay with having some visible UI and I think they may still be underselling that.
Marco:
Yeah, I've been playing with it on my wonderful Jet Black iPhone 7 here, and I don't like the iPhone bar.
Marco:
I like having the controls at the bottom.
Marco:
As John was saying, with reachability on modern phones, that makes sense.
Marco:
I just don't like the implementation of this.
Marco:
If you're in the compact mode, where the bar has shrunk to the rectangle at the bottom...
Marco:
The transition when you show the bar makes it so much taller and then it drops this giant drop shadow around it, too.
Marco:
So it ends up being like this like floating blob with a huge shadow over a pretty big part of the Web page that's still showing behind it and under it.
Marco:
And so it's it kind of looks very cluttered.
Marco:
in a way that, like, I'm surprised modern Apple is so anti-clutter, but instead they've actually increased clutter with this UI, and also hidden controls under even more modes.
Marco:
So, you know, regular mode, as you're scrolling down a web page, the bar is skinny.
Marco:
Suppose you want to reload the page.
Marco:
What you have to do now, you have to tap the bar to, like, show it, which you had to do before, but then you have to tap the dot, dot, dot, ellipsis button, and then under that is a reload button.
Marco:
So, it's like...
Marco:
again, it's like junk drawer design school here of like, let's solve our complexity needs by shoving things into junk drawers and modes and hover states and all these, like, it makes it clunkier to use and it adds more taps and adds more time instead of just making common things visible.
Marco:
I don't think this design is a success.
Marco:
I'm with John.
Marco:
If they just had a toolbar at the bottom that was always tappable and ready to go, that would be an improvement.
Marco:
It wouldn't look as nice in marketing shots, but it would be an improvement.
Marco:
It would only be 20 points taller than the temporary bar they have there now.
Marco:
As you're scrolling down with the full-time bar that just shows the URL and the lock for HTTPS,
Marco:
the thing that you tap to reveal the rest of the controls the rest of the controls are not that much bigger just always show them then like it's if that's what you're going for like just always show them like i don't see why i don't see what they're gaining by this um and and going back to the desktop safari
Marco:
I don't know what problem they're solving.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
I mean, they just said, it's vertical screen space, apparently.
John:
You really need that one centimeter.
Marco:
But here's the thing.
Marco:
Again, as you both mentioned, there's been so much obsession by Apple design about...
Marco:
Making your content as big as possible.
Marco:
Fill the screen as big as possible.
Marco:
Shove everything else out of the UI.
Marco:
Bury it all in junk drawers.
Marco:
You don't even see the junk drawer's handle until you hover over something.
Marco:
And then maybe the handle appears.
Marco:
That's been their philosophy for so long.
Marco:
But for a web browser, what if my tabs are my content?
Marco:
My tab list that I have open is a huge part of the content I am looking at when I'm using a web browser on a desktop.
Marco:
I don't have any need to bury my tabs or to shrink the amount of space they take up.
Marco:
I want my tabs to be huge, and I want to have as much real estate as possible to show as many tabs as possible with as many words in their titles as possible.
Marco:
Even on my massive playground-sized monitor I have here,
Marco:
Like I still have, you know, my Safari window still has like right now I have eight tabs open and this is only the one that I have opened for recording.
Marco:
But the one I minimized has so many tabs.
Marco:
I mean, there must be, let me see, ballparking, maybe 20 tabs in my like my main current Safari window.
Marco:
And of course, they've all shrunken down to the point where they're only icons now because I have so many of them and I should close some so I can get the text back.
Marco:
But with this new design, I will see the text for even fewer of them because they now have even less width in the UI to consume and to display the text to tell me what they are.
Marco:
This has been a challenge in web browser design ever since tabs were introduced.
Marco:
And we had various things like adding the favicons and everything that eventually made the tabs more recognizable as you tried to cram more and more of them into...
Marco:
a single window.
Marco:
But what they're doing with this redesign is allocating vastly less space in the UI for your series of tabs that you're trying to display.
Marco:
And I think that's a step backwards in order to achieve a visual design that I don't even think is nicer.
Marco:
I mean, again, whatever ideal they're trying to get here, they're extending the background color all the way through whatever's left of the title bar.
Marco:
okay fine but i didn't need that you know window title bars have existed on desktops for some time we're all accustomed to them like i that's that's something that's going to break some web layouts and it's not going to really do anything for me meanwhile the actual ui is going to be harder to use because now i have less space to show my tabs the buttons are all smaller and
Marco:
Common functions now hidden behind the junk drawer ellipses button.
Marco:
Again, another mode you have to enter.
Marco:
Submenus upon submenus upon delay states and hover states.
Marco:
Just more and more junk drawer modes to shove stuff into.
Marco:
Even common stuff that we use all the time that we should have visible all the time.
Marco:
And then finally, shoving all this into the title bar makes less draggable space if you want to drag the window around or less clickable space if you want to reactivate the window by clicking on the title bar in a way that doesn't do something else by clicking it.
Marco:
So all that dead space in title bars before, that served purposes.
Marco:
It makes things easier to grab and move, and it makes things less error-prone.
Marco:
It makes the whole UI easier to use.
Marco:
By shoving everything into the title bars like they're doing here, it continues the Big Sur design trend of making less and less dead space in the bars
Marco:
to to do things like click and drag and so it actually makes the ui i think harder to use in practice less accessible less uh consistent to use because you'll more frequently click on something accidentally and make a mistake or you'll have to like slow the mouse down you know going against fitz laws because you have to click a smaller and smaller click target because you're trying to hit like the little border of the window so you can click on it without accidentally you know changing tabs i
Marco:
I don't know who this design is for because it seems like it's designed for people who not only don't use web browsers, but don't use computers.
John:
Yeah, and they're signing themselves up for difficult design problems for no reason.
John:
Like you mentioned the background color going up into the title bar.
John:
Why sign up for that?
John:
Now you have to somehow make all your tab text and address bar readable on top of arbitrary background colors.
John:
And granted, they sign themselves up for that for the menu bar too and mostly have done an okay job of it after a couple of iterations.
John:
But why sign yourself up for that in your web browser?
John:
Now, all of a sudden, I'm looking at like one of the examples.
John:
This text, it's black text on an olive green background.
John:
It's lower contrast.
John:
That's a problem, right?
John:
I mean, people need to be able to read what those tabs are.
John:
And the squirminess is not just like, oh, it takes you longer to acquire a target or whatever.
John:
I really think that people's mental model of tabs, like based on the name and how they're used, is they're kind of like tabs would be in a paper address book or whatever.
John:
When you really break that metaphor, when you break that sort of design constraint,
John:
you know, the sort of spatial behavior of tabs by saying these aren't tabs anymore.
John:
These are just arbitrary rounded rectangle regions that grow and shrink based on, you know, like the fact that all of them expand into the address bar.
John:
Like, I'm looking at the demos now.
John:
I think every time you do click on one of them, it does expand to show the address bar.
John:
Like, I think that is counter to the notion that they seem to be committed to, which is that regular people don't use the address bar.
John:
Now you have no choice that every time you click on one of these
John:
you know, low contrast, ever changing colored round recs, it moves everything around.
John:
And so your model of like, Oh, I have these tabs and I can switch between them.
John:
Now it's like, it's just a squirmy soup of rectangles.
John:
I don't like it.
John:
And a squirmy soup of low contrast rectangles.
John:
Like again, we'll have to use this thing in real life to see what it's like, but it just seems like they are.
John:
I mean, I think they may be right about the fact that no one drags windows anymore, that everyone just maximizes their windows or whatever, but,
John:
And if you look at the top of, like, a Chrome window, they already have this problem of it being very hard to find a draggable region above the tabs.
John:
But at least in the Chrome window, the tabs are – they behave the way regular tabs do is they divvy up the space, and the only time they change size is when tabs appear or disappear.
John:
this combination of a tab with the address bar just seems like a real mistake to me and the total removal of the address of the the rest of the toolbar like we used to have a bunch of buttons in the toolbar and it was customizable and speaking of that yes i have my reload button in the toolbar um it seems like my reload button extension is just totally pointless now because you can't customize as far as i can tell the ui of what remains of the toolbar what you can do is put things under the dot dot dot widget but that's for like actual web extensions like ad blockers and stuff like that
John:
The whole point of my extension was I want to put a button on the toolbar.
John:
There ain't no toolbar left for toolbar men like me.
John:
I'm trying to do a lyric reference.
John:
You're not going to get it.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Yeah, there's no point in my thing anymore because that's just totally gone.
John:
But that's the least of the problems with this UI.
John:
The other thing I want to emphasize is they showed a demo of this as if it's a feature, and I'm not sure that it is.
John:
Oh, you've got these tab sets that you can make, and you can have these tabs, and they're synced across all your devices.
John:
maybe all the time or maybe just optionally anyway they had a mac uh and like some other device there's an ipad or something they said hey you've got tab groups in both places and they changed the active tab on the ipad and the active tab changed on the mac too that they weren't even using
John:
kind of see what they're going with there like if you do a bunch of work and you're messing around and then you like move over to your mac you want it to be where you left off but it seems perhaps ill-advised that you know that you changing tabs on your ipad would in real time change an interface element on a computer an unintended computer that you're not in front of you know a few feet away like i i'm on board with state restoration and
John:
But I'm not totally on board with the live thing.
John:
Like maybe it's just the way I use things.
John:
Like I look at different web pages on my phone than on my Mac.
John:
Like I'm doing much heavier research on a phone with tons and tons of tabs or on my Mac with tons of tabs.
John:
But on my phone, I'm doing more limited work because the web pages look different on the phone.
John:
And, you know, some of them don't work that well on mobile.
John:
I don't really want.
John:
the literal same set of tabs across all my devices like seeing this redesign of safari is making me like i was watching this and feeling glad that well at least i'll always have chrome which works like a regular web which works like a regular web browser and yes a bunch of stuff is synchronized but like it still just sort of works in a predictable way and i don't use chrome at all on my ios devices so it's kind of a separation anyway this is all harsh words for you know i haven't used any of these things and you've used a few of them but like
John:
Yeah, this Mac Safari design, like, way more radical than toppy tabs, and I kind of hope they back off on it.
John:
I don't think they will, but I don't know.
John:
I'm going to try this more in future episodes for sure.
Marco:
Well, if anything, like, the difference from Chrome could be a pretty big problem for them for Safari adoption because, you know, Safari up till now...
Marco:
has basically looked and worked like Chrome, which is the same way that the Windows Edge and Firefox.
Marco:
Web browsers that have supported tabs in the modern era all look and work pretty similarly until this point.
Marco:
So that's what people expect.
Marco:
And Safari is not the world's most popular web browser.
Marco:
So people are going to come to this on the Mac, and it's going to be so different compared to what they expect and what they are used to from their previous experience and experience from other platforms and other browsers.
Marco:
Chrome is the world's most popular browser.
Marco:
So they've now diverged in the UI so far from that that I fear that that actually might cost them Chrome converts from sticking with Safari or coming to Safari in the first place because it's too different.
Marco:
And people now have an idea of how a modern web browser UI is supposed to look and work.
Marco:
And this doesn't work that way.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
There will be more on this program, I am quite confident.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We are running along.
Casey:
So let's try to speed it up a little bit.
Casey:
MailKit is a thing, apparently.
Casey:
It enables apps to easily and securely interact with the mail app for macOS.
Casey:
There's going to be an API about it, which I'm sure there'll be a session or two about that.
Casey:
Then finally, at the end, we got a little smattering of developer technologies, which was great.
Casey:
There are some new APIs.
Casey:
There's a rotor in SwiftUI.
Casey:
There's an XC test memory graph, which they didn't really talk too much about, but looks good.
Casey:
Focus is a thing in SwiftUI now, which is really great.
Casey:
They spent some time doing object capture, which requires a Mac and some third-party software, but you can make 3D captures, 3D objects, which is pretty cool.
Marco:
That I'm actually, hold on, object capture I think is one of the coolest things that I don't think I fully understand yet.
Marco:
If it's what I think it is, which is like an easy API to use your camera to generate USDZ files.
Marco:
That, to me, I'm kind of surprised that it's not built into things like messages.
Marco:
Because imagine the... Oh, that is cool, man.
Marco:
So USDZ, as far as I understand it, I don't know much about this world at all.
Marco:
But as far as I understand, the USDZ format, which they actually announced at WWDC like five or six years ago, is basically like... It's like an image format, but for objects in AR.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And so and they and they've had these things like on their website, whenever Apple releases a new product, they will have certain abilities where like you'll be able to view the product in AR on your phones.
Marco:
You could like stick the new Mac Pro on your desk and see how big it is.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I've I've thought this is a dramatically useful technology that has been dramatically underused so far by the market for things like imagine just doing that for like online shopping.
Marco:
Being able to see how big is this object I'm looking at.
Marco:
Let's stick it in my room on my AR desk table thing.
Marco:
There's so much use for that.
Marco:
If they've just developed an API that allows you to take a few pictures around an object and automatically convert it to a USDZ file...
Marco:
That would have massive widespread use for just consumers of showing each other objects and messages and stuff.
Marco:
So I hope that's where this is going.
Marco:
It seems like it's not there yet.
Marco:
It seems like it's more of a basic API that you could use to make that app.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I hope that – if that's what this is, I hope that goes further soon and becomes more widespread because there are so many times when I would love to do that of like, okay, I have this object.
Marco:
I want to like – maybe I'm like out and I want to show my wife something from back at home.
Marco:
and so you know i'm in a store maybe i'm going shopping or whatever and so okay let me like scan around this object with my phone and be able to send this to her and she can you know pop it on her ar table with her phone and see how big it is and how it would look like that that would that kind of thing would be really cool um and any you know also just for again for online shopping like if if the inventory management apps or you know like apps that allow people to sell stuff online is
Marco:
If they could allow people to take an object capture of a thing they're selling and put that on their website super easily, that would be great too for shoppers who have iOS devices.
Marco:
There's so many uses if that's what this is, if it works well enough to do that.
Marco:
So I hope that this goes further.
John:
I think you hit on the correct point, which is if it works well enough.
John:
If you've ever used any of these things, there's a reason the professional capture studios are way more complicated.
John:
It's amazing that this does anything at all, but I think what you would end up with if you did that, first of all, you would probably...
John:
Not look silly, but question the time investment required to capture all the photos to make this as you walked around the item in the store and tried to position it somewhere so you could get all the sides of it.
John:
And then what you would transfer is something that looks a little bit like a melted wax sculpture of the thing you're trying to get, like...
John:
Because you're limited by the depth sensors and, you know, depth estimation with or without the IR sprayer or LIDAR and all that stuff.
John:
But bottom line is it's not like making really good 3D objects is difficult.
John:
You're not going to do it in a couple of seconds.
John:
They have to take a lot of shortcuts and things do look a little bit lumpen.
John:
I would imagine any place that actually sells things,
John:
if they wanted to do this involved would invest the time to get a good model made and not just as they showed in the demo video have someone put a chair in the middle of a warehouse and walk around with an iphone that'll work and you'll get a model but if your goal is to sell you want it to look really good like apple doesn't do for example you just mentioned apple's product apple doesn't do that with its products and they're not going to start believe me like they're not going to start saying oh the new mac pro we're going to walk around it with an iphone and just put that up on their website no you're
John:
You're going to have a real polished 3D model because they want their products to look good.
John:
I think this is super cool that it exists.
John:
And it's amazing that we can all do it with our phones.
John:
And it does make a much less expensive way to do essentially object capture.
John:
But I do wonder who is this for?
John:
Because every time I think other than for people, you know, like you said, doing it as a fun thing as a consumer.
John:
stores want to have a higher quality model a game is going to want to have a higher quality model no movie studios using this for object capture like it's super cool but i feel like it is limited by the capture device which is a phone which granted has lots of amazing sensors but it's not the same as like putting something at a table and spraying it with a million lasers in a controlled environment
John:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is going to be kind of as revolutionary as the measure feature on the phone, where, yeah, it's cool, but in the end, the ruler really works better.
Casey:
I echo your enthusiasm, both of you, but I think you're talking about step 30, and we're on step two, because I swear they had said at some point during the presentation that it requires some software called Cinema 4D.
Casey:
It requires macOS Monterey, so there's a lot more involved in this than...
John:
oh yeah yeah like there's a software story you know i think this is more of a framework than an app but like but the point is like the sensors are the you know the sensors and the fusion of sensor input is the important thing having a usd file doesn't buy you anything although maybe can ios just display usd files safari can like it's weird like it's it's supported in some places i don't know
John:
Anyway, but you're right, they did show them dragging a thing into Cinema 4D, and they were doing a chocolate croissant, and that chocolate croissant did not, A, did not like appetizing, and B, it looked a little melty.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I think that was State of the Union, though.
Casey:
And also, USD is a Pixar format.
Casey:
I think there was a big announcement at DubDub several years ago to Marco's point where they said, oh, we're supporting this, and you can use it in Safari, like Marco said, and so on and so forth, but it's actually a Pixar format.
Casey:
Swift.
Casey:
Apparently, the majority of the top 1,000 apps are using Swift.
Casey:
They talked about Async Await and Actors very briefly in the keynote.
Casey:
They talked about the App Store, which is, quote, safe and trusted.
Casey:
And they wanted us to know that they've paid $230 billion to developers.
Casey:
We're going to be getting what appeared to be A-B testing and multiple different pages for your apps in the app store.
Casey:
So you can tweak things, give different features for different users, all sorts of different stuff there.
Casey:
They're also introducing a concept of in-app events.
Casey:
So they said something about Pokemon Go, and I don't play Pokemon Go, but I guess there's some sort of big event coming up.
Casey:
What was the...
Casey:
What's the Switch game that everyone loved that you have to sell rice or something like that?
John:
Animal Crossing.
John:
You have to sell rice.
John:
That's exactly what the game maker wanted you to come away from.
Casey:
Did I or did I not get one of you there?
Casey:
That's all that matters.
Marco:
It's turnips, but it's cool.
Casey:
yeah okay well anyway i knew it was a rice i couldn't remember what it was point being you know if there's like this big turnip sale or whatever going on on thursday at 10 in the evening then you can you can tell apple that by some mechanism and they will potentially promote that in the app store on your device um which is kind of cool uh they they announced xcode cloud which sounds super freaking awesome except they won't tell us how much it's going to cost and that kind of ruined it for me but what is it
Casey:
It's basically Apple run continuous integration and continuous deployment.
Casey:
So you can have builds run in the cloud.
Casey:
You can have tests done in the cloud, all this being done in parallel.
Casey:
And you can go do the releases to test flight all automated.
Casey:
It is very, very cool from the sound of it.
Casey:
We learned in the State of the Union, it is super duper integrated into Xcode.
Casey:
You can today...
Casey:
Sign up to potentially be included in a beta, which I've already done.
Casey:
But that being said, they're not going to make it real until next year.
Casey:
And I think they said pricing in the fall or something like that.
Casey:
And it's a tough nut to crack because...
Casey:
If you're a little indie developer like me or Marco, you're probably not going to be very expensive to do CI and CD.
Casey:
But if you're, I don't know, Epic, for example, and you're running these humongous games and testing them across all these devices and running unit tests all the time and so on and so forth...
Casey:
it could get really expensive for Apple to run this.
Casey:
So I don't know what they're going to do about pricing.
Casey:
That seems like a tough nut to crack.
Casey:
I'm really bummed that they didn't even give a hint as to what it's going to cost, although it's understandable.
Casey:
But if it's cheap enough, this sounds super duper cool and I'm really interested in it.
John:
One question I have, and I probably kind of know the answer to this, but like, look, so if you're if you're doing development on a not so fast Mac with not too many cores, at a certain point, it may be faster for you to build your thing in Xcode cloud.
John:
I say this is someone who knows exactly how long it takes to sort of submit anything to Apple, even just notarizing a Mac app takes way longer than it would if you did it locally.
John:
In my experience, but at a certain point, like on these graphs, there is a threshold beyond which it actually is faster to have your thing built in the cloud.
John:
Technically, that's possible.
John:
I don't know what the wait times will be like on Xcode Cloud or what kind of machines they'll have building your thing.
John:
Uh, but I was trying to think of a scenario where Marco might be interested in this.
John:
Hey, if you could develop on your little Mac mini or your MacBook air instead of your upcoming 40 core, you know, arm based Mac pro.
John:
Uh, and if they use the 40 core arm based Mac pro to do your builds, if you paid the maximum amount for Xcode in the cloud, maybe that would be attractive to you.
John:
Maybe not.
John:
Maybe you still want the big honking Mac close by, but it's just a possibility.
Marco:
Yeah, it's something.
Marco:
I mean, it certainly would make development easier if you have, like, you know, a MacBook Air in the future, and you have some massively complex project, or you just try to use SwiftUI to make one view.
Marco:
So, you know, there are uses for that, but in practice, I don't know if that will actually play out that way.
Marco:
But we'll find out.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
MacWeldon, 1Password, and YesPlease.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
Did you catch this reference?
Marco:
I think what Federighi was going for.
Marco:
When he threw the iPad up in the air?
Marco:
Oh, was that a Prince reference?
Marco:
I think it was a Prince reference.
Marco:
So for people who don't know, this is most likely, I think it was referring to Prince did all sorts of crazy stuff.
Marco:
Famously, when he was playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he played with a bunch of other famous people like Tom Petty, While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Marco:
And Prince basically came in and did an amazing guitar solo, totally upstaged everyone else who was there.
Marco:
You got to see the video well into the show notes.
Marco:
And then at the end of it.
Casey:
Well, actually, right now, if you have not seen this video, it's a silly spoiler, but you should seriously spend the six minutes and watch the video right now.
Casey:
We'll be waiting for you.
Casey:
Go watch it.
Marco:
It's an incredible guitar solo.
Marco:
Even if you're not usually into like, oh, somebody told me I have to watch this music, but I don't like, no, seriously watch this.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
So anyway, so at the end of this thing, Prince wasn't even part of like the first part of the song.
Marco:
He comes out, he does this amazing jam, doesn't say or sing a word, just does this amazing guitar jam because Prince, in addition to all his other talents, was an incredible guitar player.
Marco:
And then at the end of it, he throws the guitar straight up into the air.
Marco:
And then walks off stage and the camera pans out and you don't see where they go.
Marco:
You cannot see where the guitar went.
Marco:
And it's like, what, what, where, what just happened?
Marco:
And he's just gone.
Marco:
It's like the most amazing, you know, mic drop style exit I've ever seen, especially after such an amazing guitar solo.
Marco:
So I think that's what, uh, that I think that was a reference because in part, uh, June 7th, which is today was Prince's birthday.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Marco:
I think that might have been a reference.
John:
And they had at the end of the credits of the video that no iPads were harmed during the filming of this thing.
Casey:
I did see that.
John:
Because that was my question.
John:
So he threw the iPad up in the air.
John:
But the way he got the iPad in the first place is it dropped down from above him and he caught it without looking at it.
John:
And so I had to ask our resident visual effects expert, Todd Vaziri, how was that done?
John:
Is that a real iPad that he caught?
John:
Is that a CG iPad?
John:
Was it already in his hand and they just animated the following?
John:
Lots of different ways they could have gone on this.
John:
They could have just dropped a fake iPad 17 times with a pillow underneath them at a view.
John:
I needed a ruling.
John:
Real, not real.
John:
The answer I got was inconclusive.
John:
uh so if anyone at apple knows how the how the ipad catch not the throw because the throw like when you're doing it on video is pretty easy you just you know whatever um but the catch looked to me like it is conceivable that they did 500 takes of him trying to do a no look catch of an ipad and it just kept falling onto a pillow that was out of view
Marco:
And finally, all the coolness that Federighi got from that most likely Prince guitar reference, I think was lost when he ended his prank call to the ice cream place with, gotta drop, bye.
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
Give him a break.
Marco:
Is that what young people are saying or something?
Marco:
I've never heard gotta drop.
Casey:
No, it's corporate speak.
Casey:
It's corporate speak.
Marco:
That really...
Marco:
yep yeah that was hey he's he's still the coolest executive i mean oh yeah i mean the bar is not high but i agree but i just got a drop that that's wow it's corporate speak he's got a drop or else he'll have to put it in the parking lot he did stand in the pond in his fancy shoes i'm pretty sure that was real that was nice i'm pretty sure he can afford another pair yep