It's time for episode 609 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Monday, June 9th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where your time starts now. My name is Dan Morin, and I'm joined across the internet for this very special episode by my good friend, my pal, the one and only Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah?
I'm doing well, Dan. I have, you know, watched everything that has taken place, had comments on all of it, and very much was sort of doing one of these. And then I realized, no, I can't actually see you in the crowd. Look closer. Look closer. I'm waving at you all the time. Well, this is, of course, the show where we talk four tech topics with two fantastic guests. And we are live this week from Apple Park, at least most of us.
So to my left in the flesh is YouTuber Christopher Lawley. Welcome back, Chris. Thank you for having me, Jeopardy! champion Dan Morin. Thank you for fulfilling your contractual obligations. I am officially your hype man. To my left, though not in the flesh, but I suppose to Dan's right. is developer and Mr. Widget himself. It's David Smith. Hello, David. Hello. It's great to be here. I mean, it's an exhausting day, but it's a very exciting day.
Well, speaking of which, let's kick things off here. One of the things I was most intrigued by is the new additions to Spotlight in macOS. The Spotlight, a feature I did not really have on my bingo card for getting updated. I'm curious to know if those features appeal to... you and whether you use a similar product right now, Raycast or Alfred or LaunchBar or whatever, and whether this will change what your decisions are. Chris, let's start with you.
Yeah, so I use Raycast right now. And when we're sitting there watching the keynote, I'm like, yeah, they are gunning for Raycast. A lot of the action features, clipboard history and stuff like that. There are a few really niche things I do with Raycast that it doesn't look.
like spotlight is going to be able to do those but boy it's getting real close like it can probably do about 80 now of what i do on raycast now the bummer thing for me is uh that spotlight improvements are not coming to ipad os they're just mac os uh so that's great on the mac but uh i i would have loved to have seen them on the ipad but
This for me, especially over the beta period, I will probably be disabling Raycast and giving Spotlight the old college try because I am very impressed, especially with the actions and the keyboard shortcuts or the... I forget what they're called. It's just like two letters or something and it autofills. And that looks pretty cool. Yeah. For me, you know, I, what ends up happening is I will see these cool new tools and I'll download them and I'll use them.
And I get sketched out about all the data that they have on me and that they're getting on me. And then occasionally, yes, I even go as far as to start reading a privacy policy. And then I can no longer live in the land of denial. And I have to go, OK, never mind. I don't want this. So honestly, in that vein, I am happy that Apple has introduced this first and foremost, because now I can look for or, you know, count on that.
privacy implication there. I have forever been a spotlight user. I've tried, again, the different tools and none of them stuck for me and also didn't make me feel a little about. And so seeing all of this stuff. come is very exciting, especially because I use the keyword search extension tool that I think, Dan, you told me about in Safari. So I'm really used to using those little key combos to get stuff. David, what about you?
Yeah, I mean, I think when I look at that, what I'm most excited about is taking something that's like a Raycast or a Quicksilver back in the day, any of these kinds of tools that are... make you more productive but making it accessible to everybody in a way that I think as much as Raycast I think has a future because it's going to deal with every possible niche and every little action and nuance.
This, I mean, giving everybody in the world a clipboard history is amazing. Because as soon as, once you have one of those, your productivity and the number of times you will reference it is just dramatically higher. And I feel, to your point, Micah, I like that it's...
It's Apple doing that. Something like a clipboard history is something that you really need to trust because you're going to copy and paste some very sensitive and very private things at some point. And so it's nice to feel like that data is staying inside. the Apple privacy bubble, which makes me feel really good about that.
Yeah, no, I think these are all great points. Like the clipboard history thing, I think is great because it's a key example of one of those features that once you have it, you will be so sad when you don't have it. Like how many times have you accidentally copied over something in your clipboard and be like, oh man, I had that thing.
and now I need to go get it again. I've used a bunch of tools for years. I used Quicksilver. I used Alfred for a long time. I switched to Spotlight a long time ago when they first started adding the app launching just because I felt like... kind of like what Mike says, like, oh, as much as possible, I like to use the built-in tools because they're integrated nicely. But to see them finally extend that also tells me, like, it's...
I'm enthusiastic about it because it feels like it's letting the power users on the Mac be power users and it's recognizing. People like to use these power user tools. Let's see if we can do stuff with them that like those third party tools maybe can't do as well. And that's great. And give access to more people who aren't going to install those tools. Awesome. Thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Chris.
Yeah, so surprise, surprise, my topic is about iPad. iPadOS got a pretty big update at the keynote, and I'm kind of curious, how is this going to change the way you look at the iPad? you use the iPad either for personal or work or is this going to affect you at all? Is there something the iPad is still missing that you really want to see? How is iPadOS 26 going to affect your iPad usage?
Yeah, for me, I have a MacBook Air and I've long said on this show and others that it is my favorite computing device that I think I've ever owned. And that is because it is this lightweight device that can do all of the things. I wanted to do. And despite owning more than one iPad, which is too many iPads for someone who doesn't really use an iPad, I don't use them. And so I am really excited about this. It was the first beta that I installed to give it a look.
and see where things are right now. I am very excited about the windowing system. It is Windows. I've got... a bajillion windows open right now. Ha ha ha. I get to brag about that at least all over the place. And I that's just how my brain works. So seeing that fully come to iPadOS, I think, is very exciting. And then.
I think this change is going to sell a whole heck of a lot of iPads because suddenly you've got people who can do their little podcast they're doing or their big podcast that they're doing and not have as much of an issue kind of getting into that. It's I'm just very excited. to see more people make more use of these tablet devices that, at least for me, kind of sat to the side. What about you, David? Yeah, I think when I saw what I thought was most intriguing is the...
They were in some ways pitching it as a bifurcation that there's they made very clear that the sort of the way that you would expect to use it currently once one app at a time full screen. The sort of version that I think a lot of people go to the iPad for because of its simplicity is absolutely still the first, like that is the primary use case, the way it's built. But then rather than making the sort of advanced mode.
be limited because it's an iPad. They essentially just built Mac OS into iPad OS in a way that I think it's wonderful to have both extremes in one platform. That it can be the simple... you know, one screen at a time, very easy to understand, very sort of learnable and safe to someone who perhaps...
It doesn't like the complexity of multiple overlapping windows. But if you are the person who wants that complexity, who wants that power, who wants that ability, absolutely it's there and you can really dive into it. And I think that... And bifurcation was the part that I really liked, where I feel like a lot of the iPad multitasking things in the past felt like half steps that didn't quite get to the place that this one does, that it feels much more powerful and compelling.
This all made me really... angry. And I'll tell you why. It's because now it's a lot harder for me to decide which device I'm going to use. It used to be very clear, right? Like, okay, if I'm traveling and I need to record a podcast, I have to bring my MacBook Air, right?
If I want to be able to do all this work, I have to bring a MacBook Air. If I'm just going away for the weekend, it's like I might watch a few TV shows with my wife or something. I'll just bring the iPad. That's super convenient. But now I feel like it's much more of an open choice. Like I can decide on a case by case basis. Well, maybe.
the iPad is more valuable for this. And I don't have to be constrained by what seemed like the previous use cases. So it's a harder choice now. It's like, do I, should I bring my MacBook Air? Should I bring my iPad? Should I bring both? That seems totally silly. Then now they all do this. Like they do the same things in some ways.
And I think that's good because it means the choice is not forced upon you. It is a choice of preference. It's how, what is the device I want to use? How do I want to use it?
What are the use cases? Like having the iPad versatility, like I can take it with me in the keyboard case, but I can pop it out of the case if I need to just carry around a little tablet. That's great. That is something the Mac can't do. And similarly, you know, there's some stuff still that I feel like I'm going to be using.
spotlight or whatever on the Mac. I want to bring that for some of my more power user things, but it still feels a little bit more like the choice is not being constrained. And I can actually just be like, what do I feel like using? And that's pretty great. Chris, why don't you wrap us up? Yeah, I was so giddy during the keynote. I was so happy. I shot straight up when I started to see the windowing features.
uh you know we don't have a ton of time to go in all the stuff but like just the high level stuff the windowing stuff the ability to it's you're not limited to four windows at a time uh when using stage manager or stuff like you don't have to use stage manager at all it's another layer on top of this windowing system it's great uh kind of like what david was saying it's great if you want to just use a single app and go full screen you're in tablet mode it's great and then you can
Plop it into the Magic Keyboard case. You have the fancy new triangular pointer that's more accurate. You have the red, green, yellow lights to do the typical macOS stuff. There's a menu bar on the iPad now. There's a menu bar recording podcasts locally. All that stuff. Like, this is everything that Federico Vatici, the other big iPad person, him and I, right after the keynote, compared notes of our wishlist. And this single release checked off a lot on both of our lists.
So for me, last time I was on Clockwise, I mentioned I was using a 16-inch MacBook Pro at the time. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be using that going forward. We'll see. It's two topics down, two topics left to go here at Clockwise, which of course means it is halftime. And this week's episode is brought to you by Grist.
Does your team deal with a load-bearing spreadsheet, one that technically still works but threatens to collapse, or maybe does collapse despite being incredibly important, or maybe one that gets mangled but it's edited by a whole team because everyone has their own unique approach? It could be that you're trying to do modern work on old tech.
That's why Grist is modernizing the spreadsheet, so you can collaborate in real time from anywhere, build drag-and-drop dashboards, analyze data using spreadsheet formulas or Python, and control access to your data so the wrong people don't see that column of notes that's for your eyes only. The secret is that Grist is a spreadsheet...
Database hybrid. It gives you the benefits of a proper database without losing the interface you and your coworkers know and love. Here at Clockwise, we rely on load-bearing spreadsheets. They prop up the entire podcast, and we've been using them for a decade. And they threaten to...
collapse every once in a while. We have to remake them every once in a while. And maybe they're not the perfect way to do the job that we're trying to do. And it could be that there's a better way. But we are hidebound people stuck in our ways. And you don't have to be like us. You can be better.
With Grist, you're in control of your data wherever it lives, whether it's on their SaaS, on your desktop, or your own servers. Grist is open source and fully self-hostable. Give your load-bearing spreadsheets a break without breaking them or breaking down. Try Grist for free at getgrist.com slash clockwise. Let's get grist. And with that, halftime is over. Micah, what is your topic?
Yeah, so I think that while WWDC, of course, is this developer opportunity, right, this developer event, it is at times also a way for us to get a little glimpse into perhaps what Apple sees. And that means that we can see features that are released for the software that are coming up for the software that it thinks that many people are going to like. And I thought that some of the kind of group chat.
improvements and group chat features were one of the places where we could look because we've seen kind of a feature parity with some of the other group chat applications out there. So I just kind of wanted to talk to you all about that area. of voice and text and video and messaging and ask you, what's a feature from that zone that stood out to you or that you're excited about? David, we'll start with you. I mean, I think the thing that it seemed very...
The group chat messages, updates that they're doing there feel very like they're trying to make sure that iMessage is competitive with WhatsApp. I use WhatsApp quite a lot, and there's so many of those features that are...
You miss when you're going back to iMessage and you do a big group chat and you have a large group and you don't know if you're having real time interaction, knowing who's typing, which is just useful to get a sense of like, what's going on? Is it active? Is it not? Having backgrounds, those types of features, I think just. Make that more useful and make it a much more compelling thing, which I mean, messages has the benefit of being the built in thing for the built in.
default messaging app. And so I think bringing that to parity in some of these areas where some of the competitors were better, had a stronger... presence is just a nice thing and it's nice to see messages get pulled forward in that way because sometimes messages can feel like it's the same app that it's been for several years and it doesn't get quite the love that some other places do.
Yeah, I don't use as many other group messaging apps. I do use WhatsApp on occasion, but I mean, messages is kind of my default. And so it's always nice when they bring in things that are those little quality of life improvements. I agree. The typing indicator is really, really good because. You miss those even just going from a one-on-one iMessage to a group iMessage. It's bizarre to have to go, okay, why is this not do is here?
I think in general, messages as an app that does communication, not just in group chats, but overall feels like they've pushed a lot forward this year. For me, the biggest improvement in that entire messaging realm is going to be the addition of spam filtering, which I could not believe was not there before. And it was dry. I mean, we've all gotten those texts now, right? Especially the ones that look like they're just like the random.
oh, hey, you left this at my house or are you coming by to eat chili today? They're so random and weird. And it's like, oh, God, I just I hate that I have to deal with this. And so adding in functionality to be like, we are going to find those things and not. notify you about them.
deal with like unknown texters even and be able to separate those out as well a lot of that just makes life easier in terms of having to triage all these things that we deal with all the time in the same way that spam filtering for mail has been around for so long because we don't want to have
to wade through spam so i'm heartened by a lot of those improvements as well and i think it does show well that they're trying to keep messages current and competitive chris yeah um basically what david and dan said uh For my podcast, Comfort Zone, my co-host Neilion gave us a challenge to...
for me and Matt, who are both Americans, to use WhatsApp for the week for our group chat. And Matt and I were so excited when that week was over so we could run back to messages because that's just what we use. That's what we're used to. But we also saw that WhatsApp has... a lot of features that message didn't have.
And this is kind of bringing them on parody. I don't think messages will probably take Europe back. Maybe. I don't know trends. But it's nice for us that live out of messages because everything I do is out of messages. I will not. download another messaging app i want everything in one place uh and kind of basically what dan said too my absolute favorite feature that was announced for messages is the spam filtering i get at least three to four
spam text messages every single day. And as somebody with ADHD, if I get one of those at the wrong time, and it pulls me out of like, I'm actually focusing on work, and it pulls me out of that work, it's game over for an hour or two for me to pull myself back into it. Yes, less distractions, less me having to deal with stuff that, you know, isn't relevant to me. Absolutely. So honestly, I just am so excited that I'm no longer going to be bullied for getting people to download apps.
specifically poll apps, because that is just so common in group chats that I have. And everyone always goes, oh, there goes Micah again. No. So now it's going to be built in. And the picky choosy friend can add another option to it. I thought that was very clever. And that was one of those moments where you said, OK, there was somebody who said, but, but, but. And everyone went.
Yes, absolutely. We have to add that feature. And I just thought that was chef's kiss. But what if we ask poll? What if we had polls? Exactly. So very excited about polls coming to messages. All right. That is my topic.
Let us go to our next one, which comes from David. Sure. So I think I wanted to talk about the redesign, which is one of these things that I feel like has been, it was rumored. It was been sort of talked about. There's been a lot of just discussion about it. And it was lovely to see.
to see the see the result like i as a developer who lived through the ios 7 translation where i lost a summer and you know didn't see my family for three months because it was a it was a very wholesale redesign and rethinking back then this feels very it was just really interesting it was compelling and different like it looks very different if you run the the beta it looks very different but in a way that felt very
natural and intuitive and evolutionary rather than just like throwing everything out and getting going but what did you what was your first impression yeah i mean it is in some ways it was much more modest redesign than ios 7 ios 7 into ios 6 ios 7 was just night and day i mean
totally throughout the design language overnight. And I think it's a lot harder to do that in the year 2025 when people rely on their phones for so much all the time. You can't wake up the next day and be like, oh my god all my apps look totally different right like you were going to freak out uh and so trying to capture you know a lot of the stuff that that ios has been moving towards over the last several years
And then apply on top of that kind of a different look and feel, I think is a really smart approach. It's also interesting to me that, you know, obviously we heard from the rumors that it was going to borrow a lot from Vision OS. And that's clearly true. And I think that some of it's out of necessity because... vision os has a interface that is very dependent on what it is and how it interacts with the world and so you weren't going to be able to necessarily change that to match other things
which is why a lot of the other devices are more brought into line with Vision OS. I do think the challenges are going to be with finding those specific... things to each platform in each device, though, because having looked at some of this briefly, I feel like, you know, as is often the case, iOS is kind of the most important platform. A lot of it is driven by that, by ancillary ways. iPadOS obviously comes along with it.
the Mac doesn't necessarily behave in the same ways and it has different views and different capabilities. And so a lot of the things that might look good on iOS and iPadOS don't necessarily... translate to the Mac in that way. So I'm going to be interested to see through the design process if there's more tweaking and sort of attention to specific details on some of the devices that make it work better for those types of devices.
for the overall look i think it's i think it's really interesting i think it might look good i am always fascinated to hear what the average user thinks about these things though because i will be like yeah this looks really cool and then you'll hear the average either being like yeah this is amazing it looks great or like oh Oh my God, I cannot believe my phone looks like this now.
Chris? Yeah, I'm really liking the new design so far from what I've seen. And I have exactly one beta installed. It's been a busy day. So I only have one beta installed. But what I've seen so far, I really like. what it looks like i like the translucent glass design of it there's a few areas where it feels like it might take a step too far but you know that's a beta stuff will happen over the summer things will change whatever but it's definitely not as dramatic
the iOS 6 to iOS 7. We're not throwing out the green felt. There was no green felt to throw out. But it's nice to see that it's not just like... a wholesale will rethink everything from the ground up in fact there is i don't even want to call it a regression but there's almost a step back if you look at the photos app last year the photos app got rid of all buttons at the bottom all navigation buttons at the bottom
Well, now there's two navigation buttons at the bottom. There's your library and there's the collections. You don't scroll up or down to go to the two. And kind of to Dan's point where like it's curious what the average person thinks of this. I thought I love the Photos app.
in the beta last summer i thought it was i i absolutely loved it i was sold on it almost immediately and then people got it and i was like what do you mean you don't like it like i thought this is fantastic but uh so it's not a wholesale like worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's definitely like, you know, it's an evolution. It's a step. And in some cases, they're, you know, even going back and fixing a couple of things and previous updates.
Yeah. Look, I remember when Windows Vista came out. And I remember how excited I was for the look. of Windows Vista. And I had to hack... the Windows machine I had at the time to make it actually do it because it could not handle it. It did not have the capabilities to do so. So I'm all about a glossy, beautiful, dynamic. You're talking about maybe macOS.
Dan, I would have more clear windows on Mac OS if I could than what I'm seeing in Tahoe. Give me more. I know that eventually that'll change when I can no longer sort of see what's on the screen very well. But for now, I'm loving it. I like the, I think the ADHD thing that we were just talking about, there's an aspect of when I think about why I like Windows, it's sort of the...
the ADHD, but also anxiety space of right now I can see, okay, I've got this open and this is open. And even though I'm not looking at that, I know it's still there. So it hasn't gone away. So having more of this layered look and feel of being able to see what's behind, I think is going to make
make me feel less anxious about things in general whenever I'm working on my machine. So I'm very excited about the look and feel coming across the whole platform. Very not excited about what you were saying, Dan, in terms of how the average person is going to react, because then I will have to sort of calm them down and say, everything's going to be okay. Let's walk along and figure this out. David, why don't you run us out here? Yeah, and I think...
What I love about it is I think there's a lot of it that seems to have learned lessons from the way that people use their phones. I love the way that the tab bar collapses and can sort of spring up and these kinds of behaviors where... is designed very much for a thumb at the bottom of the screen. They're pulling a lot of behaviors and a lot of navigation and a lot of things down there in a way that isn't cluttered.
And isn't overwhelming and elevate. I mean, I feel like it's one of those phrases that has been said many times in an Apple design video that it elevates the content and makes the content shine. And I think there's a lot of this that is very much.
about elevating the content of the app to whatever that is, whether that's an image or a photograph or text or something, it elevates it in a way that... is hopefully still preserving legibility and discoverability but in a way that can get out of your way when you're not using it and i think that's exciting and i think as a developer it feels like this is the
culmination of a lot of the work that Apple's been doing recently towards SwiftUI and the changes in the underlying architecture that developers like myself use, because now... this is actually a really easy thing to do. Like in a lot of this work, I've recompiled one of my apps at lunch today and ran it and it looks...
pretty good. And a lot of this behavior is very out of the box and straightforward if you've been using Apple's tools in the way that they've been encouraging you to use them for a long time now. And I think that... makes it much more likely that this will be widely adopted. That if you're an Apple developer who's been doing things the way that Apple has been nudging you for the last couple of years...
This migration is going to be fairly straightforward, not nearly as painful, like not a brutal summer of having to rebuild everything. It's a summer where you get most of it for free and then you have the time.
to invest and refine and make it just that really nice little extra thing. And I loved in one of the videos today, they were talking about it's a lively and joyful... interface is what they're going for and i think that is a wonderful goal to have in a design language something that feels fun and nice and when you touch things they move in a way that feels just
you know, joyful in a way. And I think it's a lovely approach to it in a way that some designs can feel very stark and cold. And this is designed to feel much more organic and lively. So Widget Smith looks like a tape deck now is what I'm hearing. Exactly. All right. That is four topics down. We have just enough time for a bonus topic. Before we get there, I really want to mention really quick that you can pick up some clockwise swag over at clockwise.social shirts, T-shirts, tote bags, phone.
cases uh all that great stuff go to clockwise.social and you help support the show we appreciate it all right for our bonus topic really quick i want to know do you have a favorite This was inspired by David and I being in the green room and sniffing the various scents. Chris, do you have a favorite scent? Aroma? Smell?
You know, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Now, you know what? I do have a favorite scent. We were recently in Disneyland and they pipe this cookie smell into the... downtown disney or not downtown main street disney they pipe that smell in so you go into all the shops and buy all the suites and it totally worked on me it absolutely worked on me Bought so many macaroons. Any kind of tree scent, cedar, juniper, any evergreen. Oh, I love that smell so much.
trees what about you david yeah i love the the smell of heather like the like being up in the up in the mountains and you get especially after it rains you'll get this very just lovely heather smell. It's a little bit damp, a little bit musty, but just a very, every time I think about it, it reminds me of beautiful hikes I've taken. So I love that smell. Evergreen was pretty close for mine, but I think I'll go with the baking bread. I mean, come on, fresh baked bread. Can't beat that.
It's the best smell in the world. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Okay, we've got a brand new feature. We've got a brand new feature for our members, Clockwise Unwound. It's a short weekly segment after the main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about a tech topic. If you'd like to get that, plus ad-free episodes, just go to... relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year and you'll help support the show.
And with that, we have reached the end of this very special episode from Apple Park. So all that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest, Christopher Lawley. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.
and David Smith, a.k.a. underscore David Smith. Thank you so much for joining us. It is my pleasure. It's one of my favorite days of the year, so it's great to share with you guys. And Mike and I will be back next week, but until then, we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock.