511: A Potentially Warm Take

Hello and welcome to Connected Episode 511. It's made possible this week by our sponsors NetSuite, Squarespace, and one password extended access management. I am your keynote chairman, Stephen Hackett, and I'm joined by our annual chairman, Mr. Mike Hurley. Hello, I am annual chairman, Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Federico Vitticci, Ciao Federico. Soptermann, how's it going? So, welcome back to the show.

So, thank you. Thank you. I wasn't here, and I just want to let the people know that I have no idea what you did last week, because Stephen forbid it. Stephen told me you must not listen to the show. Yeah, and I have not. I just saw the title, the Ticilin picks. I have no idea what it's about. Literally no clue. So, is it fair to tell him what it was about at least, or do we don't even do that? I think even knowing what it's about could taint it. It's got to be...

Is there a point at any point in 2024? Will I be able to listen to this episode? Possibly. It's unknown. It's unknown. It's unknown. Okay, so I guess I got to delete it from my hue. I was really actually should do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, not even this year at all. No. In a year you can. The danger is... In a year. We could create a space-time rift if you listen, and so we have to be really careful about that. There's a real problem. Okay, well, I hope it was a fun episode.

It was. It was. It was. It was. It was. It was. It's a drive-jump on the show. Did you know John was on the show? John was on the show. I knew that. That's the only thing. And John told me the connected was fun. Good. That's it. Good. Good. As everyone says, connected. John really does have a way with words, doesn't he? That's a way. That's a way. That's a way. That's a way. That's a way. That's a way. That he does. He does. Mike, tell us about next week.

So we're off next week because we're going to be live in London. We look forward to seeing everybody at the Hank Niamh Paya, who's coming out. So we're going to be doing a live show, which I'm very excited about. It's going to be a good time. Have I all and we're very excited. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. I am knee-deep, shoulder-deep, ID pin planning. It depends on the way that you look at it. But I'm excited. Everyone's coming into town now. People are starting to arrive.

And yeah, I'm really, really, really looking forward to our show at the Hank Niamh Paya. Yeah, a bit of a bummer update that I need to share. Unfortunately, I won't be there. So, we're in this book and with the guys obviously. It's a, I don't want to get into details. Everything's fine. Just not really a good time of year for me to live. And we're good. Obviously, I'm going to miss a lot being there. And I know that it's incredible milestone for relay. It doesn't feel like

10 years at the same time. It feels like forever, which usually it's a good feeling to have. I will, I'm very bummed that I can be there. But regardless, I know that you will both do an incredible job. And I know that you're going to have the time of your life with everybody coming in. So, yeah, I just felt like I needed to share just in case you know. Because anybody was coming with the TG fans. The TG fans. The TG fans.

They're going to be out there. It's a shame. It's understood but disappointing but not you are not disappointing. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all want it to be together, but unfortunately, life finds its own ways sometimes. That is the ways, the ways that you want them to find. That's the full quote. That's the full quote. It's shrunk down in Jurassic Park. Yeah. We had some follow up. So we had a lot of follow up that we can't talk about because Federico's here.

I didn't really anticipate that being a problem. So if you sent feedback about what we did last week, thank you. I read it all. I'm sorry. But we did have someone point us to an Apple support document that I was not aware of and anonymous wrote in. Federico, I'm going to read this Federico. Know that it's coming from our listener or not from me because it's a little into antagonistic, I think. I keep hearing Federico ignore this point about Applebot crawling content

robbing the shop. I don't know. I'm not ignoring it by going without ever pointing this out. If robot instructions don't mention Applebot but mention Googlebot, the Apple robot will follow Googlebot instructions. This is an important distinction. So other than the spiciness, I want to know what you think about this. I don't think it's an important distinction. And I think, and I don't think I am, I think this person was probably playing.

Gotcha. No, because first of all, even Googlebot extended is a relatively new addition to web crawling. So forgive me if I have not paid attention in the last six months. You know, with, I mean, Google AI answers are something that are still rolling out literally. It's like a feature that is launching now. So forgive me if I have not implemented the Googlebot extended blocking. Obviously, I do not want to block Googlebot. So they, I'll tell you what's the important

distinction. The important distinction is recognizing that I don't want to block Googlebot because I still want my website to be indexed on search engines. Yeah. And Applebot is also something that people want. Exactly. Exactly. Because I do want Mac stories to show up in spotlight. For example, if you are a suggested website, that's made possible by Applebot. But more importantly, why is it exactly like I failed to understand this point?

Why is it that I should be okay with Apple doing what Google does? Like this, this part does not compute with me. And I feel like it's quite ironic that we spend, you know, in the Apple community, a lot of people hold the Apple to a higher standard. But in this case, the argument would be, oh no, but they do what Google does. Therefore, it's okay. I thought we were expecting better from Apple. Are we not? So yeah, I disagree with at least. I mean, I don't think, I mean, again,

we will probably keep mention this for a while. We were not expecting Apple to do things the way they did them. Yeah. And also, I would just mention like, just as a general, like, role of thumb with feedback, just because we don't mention something explicitly. That doesn't mean we don't know it. Yeah. Like not everything needs to be explicitly drawn out every single time. Like, yes, this is an interesting distinction that if you don't mention Applebot, but have restrictions

around Googlebot, then Apple will follow them. Okay, great. But that doesn't change the fact of what's happening. They're still doing the situation was that Apple, like, because that's imagined Google that Federico did know about Googlebot extended, right? And he could have made a decision about Google bot extended. Applebot extended didn't exist until after they've already crawled. Right. Uh-huh. Yeah. So they they didn't it. The situation is not different. Apple did not give a choice. And

just follow Google is not necessarily the way to do things. And like, it doesn't it didn't it didn't give people a choice. You there is a scenario in which someone could say, I want Google to do this all of it. I don't want Apple to do it. And part of the reason for that could be if I'm ever going to make any money out of this, Google's probably going to be to on the work it out. Like if if published it there was like a history that if publishers are ever going to make money,

Google is the company who has a history of that being the case. I don't think that's going to be the case going into the future. But if you were to take the optimistic take, right? Like if you look at what Google pay or like what you know, like Google sending traffic to people or YouTube paying creators, like all of those scenarios tend to be better off for the creator. I still don't believe that any of these things will have a better offer creator, but that could be a decision I can

imagine someone making. Apple is never going to give creators any money ever for anything. So that could be a decision somebody would make. And just Apple being like we'll just follow the Google rule is not it's not an it's not a wholly acceptable way of doing things. That's just what they decided to do. But it doesn't mean that every publisher like they were given no agency, given no choice. They just went and did it. That's the issue. Talking about locks.

Stephen, you got a home kit lock. I did my first one. Okay. What do you want to know? What do you think of it? It does. It does. What did you get? And how does it? How does it work? Yeah. So I got the aquara aquara. Akara. Akara. You 200 smart locks. So this is there as of the scoring their newest smart lock. It works with matter and Google home and home kit. And most interesting to me, the home key support or mechanism with an iOS and watch us where it basically

puts a card and wallet. And when you bring your device near the lock, it senses it and then locks it, which is pretty cool. Yeah, this is this is like the it's called what is it called home home key? Home key? It's the feature I think. Home key. Because I have car key for cars. Home key for imagine such a world. The naming incredible. But that's the key feature of things, right? Is that you can just walk up to and then I don't think this lock is getting it.

But like the next version of this is using ultra wideband. So you just walk up to the lock and it will open. Right. So ultra wideband is support for smart locks is coming in iOS 18 and watch us 11. And that will obviously require different hardware. And I'm sure Akara and others will will move on that. And that is interesting. But this seems like something that is maybe a little bit better fit for me because my like my because my studio is in my backyard. I wanted a

bit more, I don't know like intentionality about unlocking. And I just wasn't sure about like how close do you have to be for the ultra wideband? Does it sense that you're moving towards it? I think the thing about ultra wideband is its precision. I think that's the benefit of it over Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a distance. But like ultra wideband would know you were walking towards the door. Maybe so. But nevertheless, this is this is a fantastic system because you don't

have to do like open the app unlock the lock or whatever. Yeah. And Bluetooth wouldn't work for you. But because you're so close all the time. Right. And it has a fingerprint. So you have the lock mechanism that goes on the inside of the door. And it works with the lock that's already there. So it's like turning the deadbolt in my case on my very American door. And it has a keypad that's weather proofs and go outside. It has a keypad on it. So you can you can use a pin code to

get in. In the car app, you can set a temporary pin. So it's like if you know, if it's an Airbnb situation or you're letting your dog sit or in or something, you can give them a pin code that's only good for a set amount of time. But it also has a fingerprint sensor on it. So I can also walk up to it and touch it. You know, I think I registered both my thumbs and both my index fingers. And I can touch it and it will it will unlock. And the installation wasn't too bad. I've got pictures

and stuff on on the blog post. I will say and this is true for a car really across the board. Their documentation is pretty bad. And yeah, can confirm. I don't know what that's about. I have some theories. You're buying products from a Chinese company. There it is. That's it. I think that's it. It's not like it's it's this is a totally fine thing. But like I don't know how much of a presence. I don't really think they have much of a presence outside of China, but they so

worldwide. Yeah. And I think that they're they are not putting the work into localization. I mean, you can see it throughout the app. The app is just like weird. It weirdly words things. It's fine. One of the things I do like about a car is a lot of their products you can use about ever touching the car app, but you may just lose some features because of that. Yeah. And there there was a thing in the initial version of the blog post. I had something that was

incorrect. So I had to go back and edit it after a couple of friends pointed it out where this thing will work with matter. And I don't have any matter stuff enabled on my network. And in the setup flow for the lock in the a car app, it's like, Oh, if you want to use matter, you have to upgrade to the new hub, which is the M3. Is there their current hub that supports matter. But turns out that's not true. You can enable matter with a firmware update on the M2 hub,

which is one that I happen to have. And I ended up not doing that yet because when you enable matter, basically you're going to have duplicates of everything and home kit. You have like the standard to do it for this. And I don't even do it. So yeah, that for this particular product, like it gives you no benefit. Like only if you were tying, like if you, you know, if you had a home alarm system, like let's imagine that ring actually do what they promised and support

home kit, which I don't think they're ever going to do as a matter, sorry. I don't think they're ever going to do it. But if they had done that and you had like a ring alarm system, right, you could like tie these things together somehow. But I do have ring alarm system. And the way I do that is home bridge, which explodes every six months. But that is what yes. But that means you don't need matter, right? Because you can, you can just rebuild home bridge. Yeah.

You know, it's like it's like changing the batteries in the smoke alarm. You know, you do that and you rebuild home bridge and you're good to go. This is exactly why I have no interest in those. Yeah, it can be. It's really frustrating. But this, it's pretty great. I mean, the home key things are awesome. And I have it set up on the, you can see in the picture, I have it set up on the door frame because I have the regular door and then I have a storm door with like a screen on it.

And when it's nice outside, I leave the regular door open and the screened open. So I can like get fresh air and like hear the kids in the backyard or whatever. And so I have it in between those. And I can just walk up and I do with my watch and just like put my wrist up to it. It unlocks. And I've really enjoyed it so far. And of course, you can do interesting automation stuff based

on your locks. And I've done, I've tinkered around the edges of that. I feel like it's easy when you're automating things with locks to like get yourself in a situation that's probably not the best safety wise. Yeah. So, so I've, I've had fiddle with that a little bit. But it is, it's pretty great. And I mean, like the other car stuff, I've got a bunch of their water sensors, like under the sinks and I have one in the pan for my hot water heater. And I have a couple of

there. They have these like, they don't sell them anymore. I don't know what happened. But they have these buttons. And basically you can just use them as home kit triggers. So I have two of those. I do have one of those. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, Cara, mini buttons. Something that's coming. Yeah. And I've got two on our fridge. And one opens a close to the garage door. And the other turns on a lighting scene that basically turns on the lights across the front of the house.

So you can just hit the button. And all their hardware is great. It's really the localization and some of the directions where things, things fall down a little bit. And this lock is currently 20% off for prime day. Oh, nice. Yeah. So I want to like what we're talking about is I give like a massive recommendation for their doorbell, the G4 smart video doorbell. Oh, yeah. I have one and I love it. And what makes it so good compared to other products is it is home kit and it is wireless.

Like it's powered by batteries. Yeah. So it's yeah. Yeah. Nice. Which is there's nothing else. It's the only product that does this. Yeah. And the way that they do that is the chime that you have inside is actually what's connecting to home kit. And then it is then creating a connection between itself and the camera. That's cool. No, like sections. So it's very clever the way that it's doing it. They make a lot of products that no one else kind of does. Like I was interested in like water

sensors for a while. And at least at the time, they were really the only company making them that worked with home kit. And the way they do that with home kit is super smart. They basically act like an alarm system in home kit. So like if one of those gets tripped, my phone is going to go nuts. And that's exactly what I want it to do. If there's water in a cabinet under a sink, interrupt my podcast recording to tell me that. You know. Yep. So I have one of those. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. My. For my irrigation system. And I think it's very clever how they use the the critical notifications of IUS. So that even if you are in a focus mode or you have like notification silence, like it's always going to make a noise. Yep. And a loud one at that. It makes me sleep better. Honestly. Yeah. They have like their little temperature sensors, temperature media sensors are great. And I have a couple of their cameras too. They have a camera

that you can make look like a cat. It comes in the box. Look cat. Yes. I'm realizing now that I have a lot of our car products because they make such good stuff. Like their products are really, really good. And this the camera. I don't remember which one it is, but I'll put I'll put it in the show notes. The camera, the camera is a good because they are also hubs. So you don't need a hub. You can connect us a hub and then you can connect other things to that. And again,

it's like you can it's the hub G3 camera hub G3 is the product I'm talking about. Like you can just use it in home kit and you can use it as a camera. But then if you go into the car app, you can change what the like you can move the camera around up and down and turn it around. Like stuff like it's just like clever stuff that they do. I think they make they make really,

really good products. Oh, I'm going to buy a door sensor right now. I don't use their door sensors, but I like the idea of having those because I the door sensors I have are like tied to the alarm system that we use. That's good stuff. I've got I got one door. I mean, all my doors are like that, but I got one door, particularly that would be very handy to know its status because you can't really see it easily. And it's $14 on prime day. So doing that. I put a lot in a

car one on the fridge. Oh, that's clever. So you know, if the fridge door is like stuck open, if the fridge is open, yep. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Net Suite. Here's some quick math, the less money your business spends on operations, multiple systems, and delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you get to keep. But higher expenses are everywhere now from materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, everything

costs more. So to reduce cost and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to Net Suite by Oracle. Net Suite is the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform and one source of truth. With Net Suite, you reduce your IT cost because Net Suite lives in the cloud. That means there's no hardware required and it can be accessed from anywhere. So you're reducing the costs and maintaining multiple systems

because you get one unified business management suite. You improve efficiency by bringing all your major businesses processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move to do the math and see how you'll profit with Net Suite. Look, I'm a small business owner. I understand these challenges and concerns and finding ways to cut costs and boost business performance are critical and Net Suite makes it really easy to do so.

So by popular demand, Net Suite has extended its one of a kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head on over to netsweet.com slash connected to learn more. That's in ETSUITE. NetSweet.com slash connected. Our thanks to Net Suite for their support of the show and relay them. Vision Pro is available worldwide now, which is not well. Not well. Thank you. Not completely worldwide, but more countries. They have it in a lot of Asian European countries, it's in Canada too.

And a couple of people wrote in about this Jonathan, including them, of like pointing out, it is interesting in all of the newsroom pieces that they've done. They show the dual loop band, instead of the solo loop band. Yeah. And yeah, I read a report, I don't remember where this came from now. It might have been from Montgomery and actually that that has just become a directive. Like Apple's kind of refreshed the way they're doing install stuff and the dual loop band is

one of the things I've refreshed to. It is more comfortable, I think, than the solo loop. And I will also, I wanted to bring this up because I now am a solo top boy. So I did the solo top because okay, get a solo band now because they're out in the UK. So I was waiting for them. So the solo top is where you take two of the solo loops, like the knitted one and you get this 3D printed adapter and you can then use two of those instead of the dual loop.

Here's what I'll say about it because I feel like everyone that uses it, it like goes wild for it. I would say it's fine. Like it's more for me. It's more comfortable and it is more easily adjustable, but it is not as big an improvement improvement for me as I expected based on other people. And this is, I think, for me based on the fact that I found the dual loop to be comfortable

where most people don't. Interesting. So I think if you, I think that's maybe your, the thing to consider if you're considering this, if you already find the dual loop comfortable, I would say I'm not sure that it is worth the amount of money that I had to spend on a second solo band. Yeah, they're pricey. They're really expensive. And like, you know, I'm sure it'll be better when I have other people trying it out, but, you know, for adjustability.

Like, adjustability is like it's way better. And what I'll say is I need to do some more tests on this. Like I've been using my vision product the last couple of days and the eye tracking is just so unreliable. And I don't know if it's related to this. So I might need to do some, some testing if like something's happening. And now it's not eye tracking me as well. But like, I had to stop using it today because I was, I was really getting frustrated because I just couldn't.

It would just would not work. Maybe you need to do the calibration thing. Yeah, I did. It didn't help. But I mean, like, I was so on the beta, right? So like, I know, I've got way too many factors here that are going on for why it wasn't working. Sometimes I genuinely feel like it's like a weather thing. And I think it's something with my eyes. Like I think that there might, sometimes there might be something going on with my eyes and it's

just not not as reliable. But it's the thing I've had on and off over using the vision pro. But like, today it was just like particularly annoying. But I do feel like maybe I've thrown too many factors at it. Because what I was doing today is I'm like deleting all my apps and reinstalling my apps because it's the app store now. And I can I'm nearly done. So I've just been going through slowly and like delete one thing and install another thing because if I try and do an update for an app,

it's like, put your old password in. It's like, well, I don't want to do that. So yeah. But so, so, so by your thinking that you have unreliable eyes, there is your potential. Really? There is I'm not rolling that out as well that my eyes are unreliable. No, no, it's not necessary though. Like I, okay. I'm reliable. No, so we got it the first time. I don't think you did. Well, I'm taking the word I,

like like I like eyes and I'm putting it on. Oh, yes, please explain it. Oh, he's explaining it. Yes. I mean, you didn't laugh. So you didn't laugh. So I just figured that like you didn't get it. Which is fine. Do not get it like no one. Do you want to join us to clap for you? Should we? Yeah, please. I can do one now. Please clap. Thank you. Thank you. Two claps. That was well. Two claps. I liked it. Is this how I am? Is this how people view me?

Yes, Stephen. Yes. Now you, you understand the pain now. Oh, okay. No, actually, Mike was worse. Mike was worse. Way worse. But yeah. Big news. The HomePod Mini has been updated. You guys excited? What's the point of this? So Apple had a newsroom release on July 15th. Today, Apple introduced HomePod Mini in midnight made with 100% recycled mesh fabric. The internet freaked out.

Didn't they already make a black one? Yes. A space gray one. Let me tell you, they look identical. In my blog post, I took Apple's own press images and all I did was put them side by side in Photoshop and hand on heart. I cannot tell the difference between the two dark ones. Oh, let me play this game all down a second. So I'm opening 512. Is there? Okay, I'm not reading the text. Okay. I don't read the text. So which one is what? Okay, so you have the image on the left and image on the right.

And I got to make out which one midnight is. I'm going to say that mid. Okay, so the one on the left seems a bit darker. Is midnight darker than space gray? I'm going to go ahead and say that midnight is the one on the left. Nope, other way around. Oh my god, no. Midnight is lighter than space gray. Now we know. Now we know. Wait, midnight is lighter than space gray? Apparently so. Okay, I'm done. Can we move on? So the other ones not made of 100% recycled materials?

Like is that what they're set? Is that the thing? I don't think so. So in the 2021 press release, when they added the different colors, all it says is a mesh fabric. They don't say anything about recycling. So recycle. So I have here the 2020 product environment report for the Humboldt Mini. Oh man, the receipts. 90% recycled plastic in the mesh fabric. Okay. So the press release was for the additional 10%. And this may be impossibly

difficult color change. Well, okay, very exciting. Sure. Very exciting. This obviously got people very worked up saying that how dare Apple update the Humboldt Mini without preparing it for Apple intelligence is still powered by whatever the Humboldt Mini is powered by. You know, some seven everybody knows that 10% of recycled mesh fabric is all you need for Apple intelligence. That's, you know, I forgot about that. You forget about that. It's the mesh of intelligence.

You know, it's like a brain. The Apple mesh intelligence. Uh-huh. See, I meshed those two words together. Yeah, that was good. Thank you. Do you like to be clapped? Please. Clap me daddy. Okay. So, uh, that Humboldt Mini, up next, Mike, what is happening with your AirPods? All right. I have a problem with my AirPods. And this is just one of these things that I want to say. Oh, yeah. Are you sure it's it's AirPods and not your unreliable years?

I don't know. Okay. There could be a lot of things. I want to explain the situation that I'm having. So AirPods in this is usually happening when I'm on a train, but not exclusively. Sometimes it happens randomly. My AirPods in and I'm listening to something. Sometimes listening to something I'm playing a game. The game I'm playing right now, by the way, is Peglin. I have been playing this game all day, every day, for months.

This game rules so hard. Thank you, John Voys for doing this to me. I love this game. It is a pebble rope like, which is just a beautiful sentence, fantastic video game. Love it so much. Anyway, so playing that, listening to a podcast, like one of my favorite podcasts, like NPC, you know? No, thank you. Although I have recently started listening to Intidietha, so I've been listening to a lot of that and they're all just one episode. You know what I mean? I'm halfway through their

15 hour episodes. They put out a couple of days. Oh my god. We listened to a podcast that put out in a 15 hour episode. You know, I've heard you all mentioned that a couple of times and it blows my mind. Yeah. That episode is so long, it will never appear on Spotify. Like that's a thing now. Smart speed is going to save you five hours when you're it was hilarious to me where I was like, I was like, because they just put out another episode

today, which is six hours and 40 minutes long. They don't always do this. It just so happened to happen two in a row. Yeah. And they're like long term projects that they do, which are really cool. And I want to listen to the GameCube one. I've really been looking forward to the GameCube one, because I want some GameCube recommendations. And I was like, well, surely I'm nearly done with the games that are decade episode and I ate hours left. It's like, oh man, I'm never going to get there.

Anyway, so I'm listening to podcasts or whatever. And what happens is all of a sudden, audio stops and the transparency or noise cancellation fails. So you know if you ever go from like transparency mode to like off, right? Yeah. If you ever try that, you know, you can like turn it off. You just be like, no, I don't want any of this. So like I hear it and usually it happens in one ear first. So I say the left ear will, the transparency will fail. Then the right one,

all audio stops. It disconnects from the disconnect from my phone completely. And I have to wait then what will happen is it goes and reverse the transparency mode will kick back in again. Then it will reconnect to my phone. And then I can listen to audio. Like essentially, my air pods are rebooting. And this happens. Sometimes I'm on a train journey, like a 15 minute train journey and it will happen multiple times. At first, I thought it was like I was going through

a specific area. Like I know this is a thing where sometimes Bluetooth connections can be knocked out, but that's not the case. It happens at multiple points, different points. And sometimes I'm not on a train at all. So this is a very weird and actually very annoying thing that I have, I'm having happened to my air pods. And I want to put this out there into the world of like, am I alone in this? Just just to set the record straight. I am not doing any betas here. My phone is not on the

bay. It's happening on my phone. I wouldn't even know how to do anything with our pods bay. Or if that's even a thing, I am just using the devices as a regular human would be using them. And this keeps happening to me. So essentially, it's like they're just like, they're just like rebooting. Which is very strange. Have you ever have you ever had this happen to you? No. No. Okay. No. No. You don't know about your say Tina on your phone. What's the point?

That is the thing for it. Very tough. I'll stop. Yeah. Right. Like it's serious. I've got I've I've no no no. Yeah. The stuff in that is interesting to me. But like right now, I'm gonna I will put it on, but I will probably wait for at least another beta. Because I mean, we're gonna talk about the beta in a second, but like they regress some stuff that I was excited about you. But like I there is nothing that is like really drawing me in. There are lots of things I'm interested

about. By the way, Federica, I'm very happy that you got on the back on the right side of history with the photos design. Yes. Absolutely. It is good. The photos redesign is good. That's good. It's good. It's good. I'm fine now. I'm happy that you. Yeah. But I like that you what one, I love that it happened. And two, I like that you wrote about it. Because I think for me, that was always the point of the thing that you had to sell. I have a I have a I have a potentially warm take.

The best time. Hold on. Stay with me. I think in the Apple community, a lot of so-called pundits, they have this weird obsession with being right and they don't understand, then being wrong and being wrong in public actually makes for great content. Okay. That's my warm take. Okay. So like I see what you're saying, which is like a lot of people may make a decision and they won't ever change from that decision. Where yes, if you change your decision, you get two blog posts.

Exactly. You know what I mean? And maybe you could change your opinion again and you get a third one. Well, then you just look like an idiot if you do it too much. There's the maximum. There's a balance is what I'm saying. Right? Yeah. Anyway, yes, photos. Photos is good, but probably, you know, you're fine just waiting for maybe even a couple more

betas actually. I mean, I saw that that's my thought. Like it's way I would get like really really so probably expect the next one to have Apple intelligence or at the very least the new Siri. But we'll see. Yeah. I am, I think I am at that this point kind of waiting on that, at least because it would be like, well, I might as well jump in and try it because I've tried some of these features

out on my iPad, right? And like I feel like that is going to be best to try on my iPhone, like on my iPad mini because obviously if there's any feet intelligence, they're not going to work on that poor little thing, but it gets very hot and very slow, very hot, very slow. But anyway, we'll come back to that in a second. Going back to my iPods problem, find a very frustrating. If anybody has experienced this, please let me know. This is my feedback. This is the end of it.

This is the feedback. The feedback is given. It's given. It's happened. What's the feedback number for people at Apple? Tiny topic three on connected episode 511. This episode of connected is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform

for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, or maybe you have one that just needs to refresh, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, products, services, and even content. Squarespace has everything you need, all in one place, and all on your terms. You can start a completely personalized website with their new guided design system,

Squarespace Blueprint, which I love the name. Choose from professionally curated layout and styling options to build a unique online presence from the ground up. Tailor to your brand or business and optimized for every device. Then easily launch your website and get discovered quickly with integrated optimized SEO tools so you show up more often to more people and grow the way you want. You can also integrate flexible payments to make checkout seamless for

your customers using simple and powerful payment tools. Except credit cards, PayPal and Apple Pay, and in eligible countries offer customers the option to buy now and pay later with After Pay and Clear Pay. We talked about selling. Let's talk about selling content. Squarespace has the tools you need to sell exclusive content on your site by adding a paywall to sell content or courses. And of course, you can sell files that your customers can download, like PDFs, music, or e-books.

It's all really easy. And I love that about Squarespace. Building an e-commerce site is hard. Having a blog or a podcast or an art gallery, you got to know a lot of different tools to make that work. And Squarespace puts it all under one roof. It all works together. It all knows about each other. It's really awesome. So head on over to squarespace.com slash connected for a free trial. And you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash

connected. You decide to sign up to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for this. Probably your favorite podcast. I thanks a Squarespace for their support of connected and relay FM. So we spoke about beta as a second ago, but public betas are out over on Mac stories. This has been a slew of articles covering iOS 18, Mago, Sequoia, WatchOS 11. And they're out. People are running them. There was some confusion because the day the public betas were supposed to come

come out. There was a new developer build, but it was of beta three and it regressed one area Mike that you talked about. So why don't you tell us about that and then we'll get Federico's take on the public betas. Yeah. So they they republished beta three. Presumably it was then going to be the public beta because Apple have done that before. I don't remember when, but I remember this happening before of like redoing a developer beta and then the public beta came out. And in that

reissuing, they removed the feature where stickers could become emoji. My expectation is that was just and I will say I use it. This is kind of broken like it worked, but it was like shaky. And I'm hoping that they just need to do some tweaks because it would be really weird to not have this feature. So like I feel like it's just one of these things that it will appear maybe in beta four or a five again, but that they did remove that feature. It's a bummer. It's a real bummer.

Yeah. Yeah. There's no public beta for VGNOS either. So that's probably good. They used to not do a watch public beta. Remember for years. And I think just the complexity of restoring one of those devices. If it goes sideways is that's that's I'm okay with that being. Is it is still like a horror show if you messed that up because it's still really bad on the watch. Yeah. Probably maybe they just finally gave me to go back. I mean, it can be fun. That's for sure. Like just by virtue

of not having a USB cable, you know, like that's not and being a slow device. Like it's not going to be fun. The restore process, which I have not done in many years probably only happened once to me, but I'm going to bet that it's not pleasant. You know. Yeah. On watch, I'll give a shout out to Jonathan who wrote your watch over 11. The imagery. Yes. It's really good. Yeah. Jonathan has a template that I actually want to steal. Yeah. You should eventually. No, you can just be like

not stealing. He works for you. Mine now. I made this. I made this. Yeah. Jonathan is a this is something that we did not share publicly, but actually Alex was been doing the previous Watch West coverage and annual reviews been doing them for 10 years. Alex decided to wrap it up with Watch West 10. So going forward, Jonathan will be taking care of the Watch West coverage and the annual review on Mac stories. Can I can I considering the time as past. Can I talk about what happened

at WWE see when it came to watch us 10 and Alex. Do you remember that? All right. So at what? at WWE see last year Alex was expressing a what is the opposite of desire? Non-desire to write the Watch West 10 review. He didn't want to do it. Oh yes. Yes. At one point, he pitched having Jeremy Budge do it. I remember now. Alex was trying to go out and is so bad. I remember it was very funny. And like we just like the whole week just hearing him pitch different people to

you to do it to do the review. Walking by somebody like, Hey, do you want to write something for Mac stories? Like really? Honestly, I was around Alex enough that week that it did feel like that so I'm going where he doesn't want to do it. Well, he would have asked you, but you're tied up with TV OS. No, I got fired. It was the shame. And there's this unfortunately, we're in an arbitration right now. There's legal proceeding. I was sharing more. I can't I can't share

anyone. And I also can't write any reviews because of the way in which I was fired. Interesting. Yeah. Are these proceedings in the room with us right now? Please point to the proceedings. If you can see the proceedings, unfortunately, I can't talk about this right now. You'll be hearing from John Void. He's my lawyer, which is the second question. Oh, that works. Yeah. That works. So it's suing itself. Interesting. Interesting. You know, some people like that short.

Okay. No, but I'm very excited about Jonathan taking care of this and he's done a great job. I think with the with the public preview testing things that I would have never tested. So yeah, we're going to be a watcher. S 11 review on Mac. So is this here? For me currently feature for feature. I am most excited about watcher was 11. I actually, I agree. Like right now, the live activity is in the smart stack. I want that.

Right. And also the smart stacks promise to actually do what it is said they would do last time, which is like reflow them a bit better. And I'm sure in watcher was the watcher was 10. Like I haven't checked this, but this is my memory that they said live activities would be in that and that never happened. Training load. I'm really interested to see the judgment that my Apple watch will put on me after my workouts. I'm like, is that going to be good about? And also the

vital thing. And I can tell you can send. Yeah, please share that story. I walk like last week in the evening, I started feeling a sore throat. And I was like, um, uh, usually, as we know, it's pretty much a sign that something is going on. Sure enough, we'll come up the next morning with a notification from the vitals app on my Apple watch running the watch was 11 beta saying, there's three data points that are outliers here. And specifically, it's your temperature,

your heart rate and your respiratory rate. It was like, boy, I'm dying over here. But but it was like your temperature is like 1.5 degrees higher. And your heart rate is really off. And your respiratory rate is also kind of off. And that persisted for multiple days. Of course, I got sick and, you know, and sure enough, I got a fever and I got a cough and everything. So,

and, and then, um, it did it for like three days. And what was cool about it is that I could tell that I was getting better because every morning, like, there was going to be like one fewer data point. So like, the one day, the temperature was okay, but the two other values were still not. And then it was just the heart rate that it was still high. And then it stopped. So the vital stuff, I know

that it's not new data, like all these data points, you could manually check in health before. But I think it's the UI and the bringing them together, making them very actionable, like in the way that, like, it's presented in plain English. It tells you every morning when you wake up, it doesn't require you to go open health on your phone. You can just do it all with a very simple UI on the watch. I think it's very cool. And I think it's going to help a lot of people. Yeah. I, well, don't worry,

Stephen, I got you. Uh, I see this data in sleep plus plus like it, because it underscore uses it to form like a sleep, like a readiness score is what we call it of like pulling in. I think it's some of these are all of these things as a way to show you how prepared you might be for the day. But I don't check that every day, like I, I actually check that usually because of something that I'm feeling. I like the idea of my watch actively reaching out and telling me like that something's

changed. Like I think that's cool. Uh, and in terms of, in terms of, um, Sequoia, John, uh, John wrote about it, um, is takeaway, I think, pretty much an agreement with him. Um, there's that, two features that are really cool, like the iPhone mirroring and the iPhone notifications, like that's going to be, that is the highlight of my Sequoia. And I think it's, it's going to be something that a lot of people are going to use, especially nerds. I think people like us,

we're going to be all over that feature. Um, but otherwise, and that is also pretty much my sentiment right now in mid July with iOS and iPad or S18, we're all just waiting for Apple intelligence stuff to show up. And, and so what you're left with in Sequoia in iOS in iPad OS is a lot of smaller like app-related features. Yeah. On iOS, you do have the customization to sort of salvage this release without Apple intelligence. You, you have control center, uh, which is

customizable. And for me right now, it's the highlight of iOS 18. You do have the home screen stuff. Um, and, uh, the, the photos app, which as we have established, I am now a fan of it. And I think it's, I'm curious to see what Apple does now that there's a public beta. Uh, I don't think we are witnessing the kind of backlash that we experienced three years ago with the new Safari because the new stuff, that version of Safari was bad. This version of photos,

it's, it seems like it's more of a subjective thing. I wouldn't say it's an objectively badly designed photos UI. I don't think that's the case. No, I think the case Safari was not good and unlike unhelpful for people. I think that in the new photos design, they came at it from the thing of, they're rehabbing this stuff and nobody looks at it. And people like this kind of stuff.

And so let's show it to them. But in a way where we're not taking away what they're used to, like all you need to do is just swipe to get, like you just continue to rolling if you need to go further. Like my expectation is the, like, I would say 90% of the time when people open the photos app, what they want is one of the last 20 photos. And they're still visible. They're still there.

Yeah. And so you can still get to those if you want to. But now you're also going to be pulled into like, Hey, look, here's these pictures of you and your friends and hey, look, here's this. And hey, look, there's that. And so I think that is like, I think the design has come from a from a sincere place, not just a, how can we rethink this application, which is what, what Safari felt like, wherever that was the case on the. I saw some people say, oh, but I don't

want to discover photos in my library. And like that to me is like a mind blowing comment, like, I'm sorry. Why are you even taking, why are you even taking pictures? Like if you don't want to read this cover in memories and photos, like, it's almost like saying, no, actually, I don't have an analogy. It just seems wild. That's really strange. That's with. It's really strange. It's really strange that you may be against the idea of rediscovering photos and memories

when you do have a photo library. Like, you know, anyway, we'll see if Apple listened to, for example, one feedback that Apple may want to listen to is if you set your grid to be fully expanded on the, on the phone, so you swipe down and you see just the grid and you force quit photos. Maybe something that Apple could implement is remember the state of photos. Right now, if you expand the grid and you force quit photos, the next time you open photos,

the grid is not fully expanded. So maybe that's something that Apple could do. But honestly, I don't think it's, I think it's a pretty good design. And I think Apple is onto something with this idea of, look, you can still do just the basics. And that's literally 60% of the screen by default. But if you want to, you can keep, you can keep scrolling and find stuff because and there's so much that's what people want. You can change so much about what the app shows you

and where it shows you it. Yeah. Like, that's like the second shoe to drop for me with this design. Which is like, oh, so you don't ever want to see, you know, X or Y thing. Just get rid of it. Yeah. Like, I just think that's very, it's very, I love it. And I think that's a good job. What I also think it's wild is that we've gone from photos being a completely non-customizable app to photos being Apple's most customizable app ever. Like second only, I mean, at this point,

to shortcuts, really. Yeah. And shortcuts is the app that literally is designed to let you create stuff. So it's customizable by design. But what you can do in photos, it's wild. Like, rearrange stuff, modify pin collections. Like, I hope it, like, I hope that Apple is now entering. It's actually, this is a pretty good sentence that I should say for my iOS review. See? This is something that we spoke about on the pre show, Mike, where can people get connected,

pro? Well, I'm saying connect to pro.co is where you can go to get longer ad free versions of the show. We were talking about Federico preparing for his iOS review and what his plans are for that this year. Yeah. What I was going to say and the sentence that I wrote down is that I hope that we are, Apple is now entering its second era of customization. The first one being visual customization

with the home screen, lock screen widgets. And I hope that iOS 18 is pointing at the more functional customization in the sense of like, look at photos and look at control center. That's my theory. Yeah. Which I literally just saved. So yeah, that's good. That's good.

It's been, it's been interesting this year. I feel like there's been more overall, like, change and evolution in some areas than maybe we've seen in past years, like particularly around like the tinting and some of the home screen stuff on iOS 18. I don't know. It feels like things are maybe a little bit less set in stone this year, which is, which is always interesting. It's interesting to see how Apple solves these problems as time go on, right? I think we talked about Safari. Obviously,

the biggest example of that sort of in modern Apple history. But even, even those other features, you know, they're continuing to evolve and continuing to change. And that's always really interesting to watch. I think I'm gonna change the color tinting. Do you think you think that's done now? Oh, I think it's done. I think it's done. I think it's done. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's

a time to pause now, right? I have seen I can kind of on one hand. I have seen two, three examples of a pretty good looking tinted and custom icon layout on the home screen, like a solid photo on threads of a person with wallpaper. And on the left side was like this sky scraper with like orange lights. And on the right side, the person had put just like a vertical row of two icons, tinted orange. And I was like, yeah, that, you know, that looks pretty good.

It's done something that I would ever use. And you got to wonder, like, especially on social media, how many of these screenshots are done for Cloud? And like, do you actually use your phone like that? But I do think that there will be enough people using phones with custom with weird and beautiful icon custom icon layouts that it's justified for Apple to do it. Not something that I will ever do. But hey, you cannot like customization only when it just happens to be your kind of customization.

Customization. It's kind of like democracy, you know, you got to love it all the time. Otherwise, you're not going to love it ever. So that's the thing. That's the way to say it. I just, I just, I just want to be able to use dark mode and not have dark icons though and dark widgets. Like I want to be able to separate those things out a little bit and like be able to pick and choose like dark mode or not, dark widgets or not dark icons or not. And yeah, I don't like that. I have that.

Here's the thing I also don't understand. I don't understand this. They can do whatever they want with this people. I don't know why they tint the wallpaper. I don't know why that's the thing. Like, like, make it dark wallpaper darker. That is like a very strange setting to even exist to me. Like, I'm not really sure what that serves. Like, there is very, I am concerned that there are user interface designers and Apple that don't understand what dark mode is. Like what people

are using dark mode for and the the tinting is one of them. Like, I don't like, when people choose dark mode, it's not like, oh, I can't stand bright color. Like, even like the way that they're doing this, like dark mode tinting of apps. Like, look at an image here in Federico's article. And it's like, they make the WhatsApp icon a little less saturated. Like, why though? Like, what they're trying to get people to use messages. That's anti-competed of behavior.

I guess. But like, I just don't understand for what reason is felt to do that. Yeah, the strange and I'm concerned about the way that they're doing to dark mode. Because like, I just don't really like in general Apple's dark mode icons. I don't think. No, I think some of them look great and some of them look not good at all. And what is the vibe check from both of you? Small icons, large icons. I don't like the large icons. Yeah. I'm just not just looking at the large icons.

No, no, no. Look, I have not used it on my phone yet. Right? I have not cried it on my phone. But in every image that I say, I don't like the large icons. They're too big for me. Yeah, but after a while, like, I'm telling you, I also thought, like, oh, this is going to be like all persons home screen. You know, like, oh, giant icons because grandpa can read the labels. But after a while, you do get used to them.

And they make you appreciate, especially if you have like nice icons on your home screen, it makes you appreciate the icons more. And then when you go back to the smaller ones with the text, you're like, oh, these are small and have text underneath them. They look, or I don't know, maybe it's like a novelty bias type of thing now, but I'd really like my chunky icons. I'm going to try it when I put it on my phone. But I've just, I'm not sold on it.

Yeah. Something that I was thinking while I was working on the preview article, for all the thoughts that I shared about AI, and I'm not like, I, this is not an AI segment. But over the past week, I have found myself very much look forward to the new series, especially because of the text activation that it's going to be possible, like the text mode. I was at the beach and I wanted to do a bunch of things.

And obviously I had to do them like, for example, I had to turn off a specific light that I left on at home. And I had to open the home app and you know, find the room and find the accessory and turn it off, which was fine. It took me 20 seconds. But I had the top like, it's going to be so nice when I can just tap the virtual indicator and be like, shut down, balcony light. And it's done.

So like that idea of going from just an assistant to a smarter assistant that is also like, like basically like a tiny command line on your phone, it does make me very excited. And I was kind of wondering if you also had like, if you've been thinking about this at all, like, anticipating the new series. I anticipate it in faith. Like, I am going to choose to believe it will be as effective as they showed us. If that bears out, then I am excited about this.

And so like, and at the moment, I am choosing to believe that that is true. So I am excited for a much more capable system. Like, that's what I am looking forward to. Like the ways in which you can trigger it is nice to know you are, it's nice, fine. But like, that's not like, we're not going to get the capability until later on. It seems like they've full capability.

That is what I am most excited for because I want to be able to have a natural conversation with my devices and have it do things for me. Like, that's what I want to be able to do. I use this example already, but I'll say it against them. Like, I had to do this saying where we have like a selection of tickets for the live show that we're giving out to the family members of hosts and friends and stuff like that. So I had a like 100 page PDF and every page on the PDF was an individual ticket.

And I needed to do, I needed to split that PDF into individual PDFs. And name them with the seat number, which was on the PDFs. The way I did this was I created a shortcut to separate it. But then I could not come up with a way to extract that one particular piece of information. And then rename the file as that. But I have no idea and I don't actually think that Siri will be able to do this. But that's what I'm aiming towards.

Like, that's what I want to be able to say to my computer, take this PDF, separate it into individuals, take the seat number and rename each file with the seat number. Computers should be able to do that task, right? I don't think that's... Yeah, I don't think the series they showed... No, neither do I. But to get to there, I think is this middle part, right? Of like, Siri will understand when I want more. Siri will be able to talk to applications.

There are Siri intents and like, you can see a scenario where we get to that, which on the face of it, a computer should be able to do that. I know computers can do that. I know people can make this work, right? But like, the combination of OCR, you could make it work. But the amount of time it would take to do that, I just did it, right? Like, it took me like 10 minutes and I'd rename them all, like, not even that.

But I would like to be able to just give one command to my computer and it, like, and it activate all of the things needed to do that and just provide me with the result. Like, in seconds, I think we're on the path to a computer being capable of doing these things for us, like a personal computer. But to get there, we got this part in the middle. And is that part in the middle?

I'm also excited about the idea of being able to have a communication with my phone and it's surface information for me and then perform simple actions. Like, I am excited about that rather than a, I ask the assistant a question and get an answer and that's the end of it. That is like, all Siri has been for like 10 years and like, I am ready to move past that and give it another shot, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it's not that computers can't do those things, right?

You could make something to do that on a Mac, but you have to know how to do it. It's about unlocking those capabilities not only on a new type of device, like an iPhone or iPad, but for people who aren't going to open Automator or shortcuts or the command line. And yeah, but even then, like if I was the type of person where I was having to do that task frequently, I would work out the way to do it. Like, I know I could do it.

I could get some help from some friends to maybe write a script for me. Like, for example, Jason created a script for me, which I did some modifications on and like he did some modifications. And we got it. So like every year when we do the upgrades, I can have it go through the calculations and try and like pull together the way that people write things. So like breath of the wild and Zelda, breath of the wild, and like try and like lump those together to make to make that job easier.

And I, while that took a lot of effort, I need that every year. So it's good to have done the effort because then it saves me time in the long run. But this task about the PDF I needed once, right? So like it wasn't worth doing the effort. But it's just still asked the computer once, right? Like, and it do it that one time because there shouldn't be any setup for me. Yeah. Like even just to have not written the shortcut, right?

Like that's the part where like I knew I could get shortcuts to separate this PDF for me into individual PDFs. Like I should at least be able to say like, hey computer, take this PDF and split it up for me. And it do that part at least. And I would expect that new Siri should be able to do that. Like from my expectation, if it's in shortcuts, it should be able to do it. That is like a absolute minimum bar for me. I have no idea if I'm going to get that.

Like whenever this probably ships next year. But like that for me is like the, if it's in shortcuts, it should be able to do it. If it can't, I don't understand why. Yeah, I don't think I don't think we're too far off from what you are envisioning here, especially if like Apple is going to add more domains to the app intents. And they're going to roll out the app integration, of course, in the iOS sitting cycle.

And it sounds like from Mark Gurman's report, one of those that Siri will also get like the ability to chain multiple commands into one. So I think there's a, there's a scenario in which like late 2025, say early 2026, maybe what you just described is actually a reality. That'll be amazing. Yeah. This episode of Connected is brought to you by one password extended access management. Imagine your company security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between buildings.

Those are the company owned devices, IT approved apps and managed employee identities that you know about. But then there are the paths that people actually use the shortcuts through the grass. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps, non employee identities, like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths, but a lot of the security

problems take place on the shortcuts. While one password extended access management is the first security solution that brings all of those unmanaged devices, apps, and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy and every app visible. One password extended access management solves the problem traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. It's security for the way that we work today.

And it's available now to companies with Octa and coming later this year to Google Workspace and Microsoft Intra. So check it out at onepassword.com slash XAM. That's one password.com slash XAM is a link in the show notes. I thanks to one password extended access management for the support of Connected and all of Relay FM. I wanted to close this week with a couple of app stories. Hey, that's the stories of apps. The stories my name is John Voorhees. I used to be a lawyer.

I came to Mary on a boat. On a week for a week if people were asked us it took a week. We found that out today. Yeah, took a week. UTM SE is a retro PC emulator for the iPhone iPad and Vision Pro. And I think out of everything that has changed in the app store in the last couple of years, for some reason this is the one that blows my mind the most. That I can emulate Windows XP on my iPad. What is happening? Did you see my hot take on threads about this? What you saying was wrong.

So I responded to probably a new live hotel. Saying that using with Windows XP with UTM SE on an iPad, you have a better multitasking than stage manager. Yeah. So, you're saying that this has changed. This has changed within the last month. This app has been on a well-wind. And it was rejected a bunch of times. Things were changed. It was rejected. And now it's here. Everything that I found, no one is really saying why? I don't know why it got approved. Well, there is no why.

Isn't that also like a smashing pumpkin song? Probably. There is no why because the idea is that, I mean Apple is now letting... The way I look at it is, if Delta is successful and old story is so successful, we also got a letter on the app store because that's what the people want. And we're going to give people what we'd rather have people be happy on the app store, than be happy on a third party store. That sort of might take away.

Well, because this one was making headlines because they rejected it from notarization to be on all store initially. Like, that's what the big problem was with this. Because that's not something that Apple should be doing. Right? But they did it. And then it became a whole thing. And then some stuff got changed. And now it, as you say, is also on the app store as well as being in Delta. Oh, sorry, in old store. So like, this thing, like, I just don't... What happened? Why is this now available?

And this is like the consistent thing, which is becoming more and more frustrating about like, authorization. What Apple is and isn't allowing on the app store. And how it's changing its rules. And sometimes the rules are this. And sometimes the rules are that. It's like, I'm happy it's there for the people that want it. But is this just a consistent... The only thing that is consistent about this process is how much of a mess it is.

Yeah. Regardless of the politics of it all, printing credible that we can now have a, basically, virtual machines for retro operating systems on an iPad. You know, just technologically speaking, I think it's very cool. The chicken run Windows XP, you can run older versions of Mac OS. Steve, I mean, you should probably try this at some point. I sure. Yeah, there's something for you to do here, obviously when you're less busy.

But yeah, this is something that you can do, like, run older, like, DOS games, like whatever. Anything that is considered retro, you can emulate with UTMSC. I, UTM I have used before on the Mac to run the Linux distro that runs Home Assistant on my Mac mini server. And SE is the iPad version. So yeah, that's pretty cool. And hopefully, slowly but surely more and more of these apps are coming on the vanilla app store.

And I hope that will continue to be the case, especially with emulators that require jit, for example, I hope that Apple can relax that stands in the future, you know, progressively, but I hope they can do it. The other app that I think we want to, oh, we should also mention Delta on the iPad. Yeah, version 1.6 update finally got got got out there. Yeah, you can now run it on the iPad. You don't have to be in the EU, you can just get it on the app store.

There's some iPad specific skins, especially impressive, I think, are the DS ones. And what I think is also pretty cool is that you can use Delta with multi-window. I don't know who wants to play multiple video games at the same time, but Delta has been optimized for iPadOS and stage manager. So if you want to, you can keep, I don't know, Pokemon Red going in one window and Tetris in another. Like, you can run Mario Kart and I don't know, give me a DS game, Mike. Mario Kart DS. Well, okay, sure.

You can run two versions, two versions of Mario Kart at the same time. Sorry. I did a bad job. No, that works. That works. Super Mario 64 DS. There you go. You can excellent game. You can do that. Multiple windows. I don't know why, but you can. And so, yeah, I think it's going to be, I think the iPad is especially well suited for DS emulation because of the dual screens and you have a bigger display.

And I think especially like an 11 inch iPad Pro, for example, in portrait mode, running Delta with DS games, it's a pretty sweet setup. So that's also quite exciting and it's on the app store. This week also marked the launch of the new version of Overcast. Overcast turns 10 years old this week, which is my blowing and Mark has been talking about. I just don't think Tony, 10 years old. Yeah, a lot is something else again. And they go, where did the time go?

But Mark has been talking about this for a long time on ATP and of course, under the radar, here on Relay, talking about basically overcast was in a position where there was a lot of really old code and he was unable to move the app forward in a lot of ways that he wanted to because of all this objective C and he wasn't in the Swift Swift UI land that an app sorry today would be in. And so he underwent a massive rewrite to basically bring overcast over

into the modern times using Swift and Swift UI. And the result of that currently is an app that is more or less the old version of Overcast minus a couple of features, but built on a new foundation to move forward. And we got some links in the in the show notes for people to go check out. I'm sure actually I know that the majority of you listening are listening in overcast because it is the most popular podcast client for this and many other tech podcasts. And I'd love to know what you all

think about it. This update for me mixed bag. I have some things about it that I really like, some things that I don't like and some things that I'm kind of in the middle. So visually, a lot of the design tweaks that Marco has done, I do really like I especially like the new homescreen. I like the circle playlists. I would like to be able to remove some of them because I don't need them all, but like I only use two playlists and I think that they look nice.

I like the kind of like carousel of shows that's at the top. I expect in the future that I'll be able to like long press on these and do stuff with them, but I do like that they're up there. Like because I do sometimes just find just oh, that's just like a really quick way to just jump into what I'm listening to. I'm still getting used to the now playing screen. The way in which you access show notes and chapters, especially what I'm trying to get used to, I really like the sliding

cards that was there in overcards before or you just slide left to right. I'm much more used to I actually quite like the way to get to, there's like a quick way to get to the show notes which you just tap the artwork and like that's how I'm doing it and that works pretty well. Although like sometimes you know with some things that you when you tap something usually you tap it again to

undo what you've done and obviously you can't do that here, so you but that's fine. I don't like the chapter screen where it just like full screen like takes over that UI I'm not a fan of, but it works though, which is fine. You know, like it's working for me, but I know I got to get used to it. Like we've been using that now playing screen for like six years, like in the exact way that it was. I think that's how long it's been since that was released and so I kind of got to get used to it.

Originally I was very upset about the removal of streaming because that was how I I don't download podcasts, so I just press play in this stream. But in actuality it's not caused a problem for me and I think the way that that Marco designed the idea that you press play

and it brings up playing screen and then just goes, hmm, downloads for you. I think it's a very clever way of dealing with that problem and I'm sure because the way he described it was essentially it was just the way in which podcasts are being produced now, which is what give a lot of direct was the AI, like the ad insertion stuff. Don't aim again. He's causing him dynamic. I was going to say direct, but that's wrong. Dynamic ad insertion. That was really making things difficult for him.

It seemed like and so if this allows him to continue making like the audio effects and what kind of stuff better, great. Like that then I'm fine with it. Yeah. I really love the go back button that he's added. So if you accidentally seek or if you like skip chapters and something, there's like a little button that pops up on the artwork inside of the app. So go back and there's a little

time and it counts down and it will go away for you. This is great because I was listening to that 14 hour episode of the podcast that I mentioned earlier on and I accidentally knocked the home screen and jumped and by many hours in that podcast. And so I quickly opened it overcast and was able to hit the go back button and it took me back to where I was before I did the accidental jump. I really like the context menus for moving episodes between my I have two playlists and all

episode playlists and a queue playlist. So I just move things from the all episodes to my queue. And I like that when you kind of like tap the three dots, you get some options of like add it to the queue, add it to next and the queue. I just like the way that is designed. And similarly when I'm in my queue playlist, how I can tap on something and just like make it jump right to the top, I'll go right to the bottom. I like those buttons out there. But something that I miss is that you

can no longer drag and drop multiple episodes or episodes between playlists. I used to do that a lot. This is kind of like the the back and forth is where I am with this app where like there are things that I like about it. There are things that have changed that I don't like about it. And that's because I've used this app in its the state that it has been in for six years is an incredibly long time for an app to remain in a state. I actually think that is a testament to how good the design

was in my opinion. Then that it has maintained for that period of time. I can't imagine any other app that I would still want to use. Often not changing for that amount of time. So I think that was a testament to the work that Marco had done. But like the back the kind of like for me. I am really hoping that it bears true that this rewrite allows for further iteration of the app because for me this version has not provided enough to warrant the time difference.

But like so I hope that it continues to get better because there are things that I like about it and there are things that for me are regressions. I understand the regressions but they are regressions for me. And so we'll see where it goes from here. That's kind of my feeling on it. It's like this is fine for what it is right now. And I hope that he will be able to iterate on it in the way that he

said that he will be able to because his version doesn't click for me everywhere. But I'm confident and hopeful that the app will continue to get better because there are these little shining moments in here which are like so nice like that go back button. And I really like a lot of the animations in the app now. And the app feels modern again. So I'm hoping that this is as Marco has very well put it. So I believe in completely like the foundation for the app moving forward. So that's kind of

where I am with it. I have some thoughts. So for the past year I use PocketCasts as my primary podcast client. I do need to have voice boosting and trim silence or smart speed to listen to my shows. So Apple Podcasts is out of the question. It's not something I can use. I try I use PocketCasts for a year and just last month I decided I cannot use it anymore because and I know that it's something that automatic who own PocketCasts are working on but PocketCasts is way too slow at refreshing my

podcasts. So many times it happened for example that Mike just put out a new episode of Upgrade or a new episode of Cortex and I couldn't listen because it was not showing up in PocketCasts. And I know that automatic as said they're going to they're working on improving server speeds and refresh times but I just needed you know I was so fed up that I started looking for something else. I would be surprised if they do if they're able to do this and the reason I say this has been a

fundamental issue of PocketCasts for its entire existence. And they have always said that they're working on it and it has gotten better but there's clearly something going on with their architecture which makes that complicated for them. So like I don't know in your situation I wouldn't believe it was going to improve to the point that you want it which is instant like Overcast has been and Apple Podcasts is and Castro is as well. Yep so just last week I tried Castro

with the new owners I really like Castro and for me right now it is the app to beat. I love its UI it's inbox and Q-based approach it's fast I get notifications from it I really like the now playing screen but I really I decided you know with the new version of Overcast you know that's I want to give it a try and I am giving it a try I temporarily deleted Castro and I put overcast on my home screen so this is the opinion of someone who hasn't used overcast in a long time.

I love that it's fast that it feels a lot more modern than before and that it shows me those like quick new episodes at the very top of the UI. Something that I immediately noticed that is a common limitation all throughout the overcast UI is that you cannot long press anywhere. Just like you cannot long press on those episodes you cannot long press on a podcast there are no context menus at all for these episodes so that is something that I wish that Marco could add.

I like that there's now like a more clear UI for having like the separation between all episodes and the queue that's all I need to do like I just want to see all episodes from my shows and then

select some of those and put them in a queue. I like that there's like a proper playlist called queue it's obvious it's simple it's large enough easy to get to and I appreciate that I can reorder episodes in the queue like you mentioned with the context menu or using drag and drop although I wish the drag and drop supported multi-item drag and drop so let me drag and drop multiple episodes

at the same time. Previous overcast could new in one time. I asked Marco about this he said this is a Swift UI limitation so okay or at least whatever I see however he's doing here like it's something that he wanted but it can't do so okay. Some fortunate. I think I like the new now playing

screen. I'm okay with the where the show notes are where the chapters are I love the the undo button and and obviously the audio effects are still the best ones like having used the pocket cast version and the Castro version the overcast audio effects are the best ones so there's absolutely no question.

Yeah I just want to make something very clear here that like yeah Marco would have to mess up this app so bad like so so bad for me to not want to use it for how good that is like yeah I thought I was too much latitude for destroying this application if he wanted to to like before I would want

to switch because of how good it is like the smart speed and the voice boost features are so so good industry leading for sure for sure I love how fast it is I was having some issues with refreshing a patreon based RSS feed this morning but you know the mark is working on some fixes for the new

version of the app already so that's fine the episode eventually showed up and I love how search because this is something that I do quite frequently search let's me search through my episodes so quickly like the research is blazing fast I needed to find a six year old episode of Into the

Aether which is one of my favorite with a games podcast and it like searching for those old episodes in overcast is excellent I'm gonna give you two things that I dislike and hopefully these are areas where overcast can improve with this new foundation the first one is I dislike that the queue is a

playlist rather than something that I can access from my now playing screen this is something that pop for example it's something that I really like about pocket casts where I can see what's coming up almost like a music player right like the queue is part of the now playing UI and so I can

manage my queue without having to dismiss the player and go back to the main view of the app and right now the queue is basically a glorified playlist and I think it should also be something that you can access from the player and the second thing and this is something that I have asked you

guys to explain to me multiple times you have and I still don't get it in the homescreen of overcast right next to podcasts it says there's a segmented control that says current and all I do not understand what this means I just want I just want to see all my podcasts and I don't

understand what's current and what's all some some podcasts are decided by overcast to be inactive because they've not published in a long time isn't that something that I could shoot for them as my personal opinion instead of overcasts opinion I have this consistent issue with

all podcast apps that do this because people will sometimes let me know why is your show not why is your show gone it's like well no that's not how it works actually you know what I'm wrong that's not what it is because I'm on current and I can see some things that are considered as

inactive so some I don't know I thought I knew but maybe I don't because when I when I when I go to current some of my shows that are listed is are inactive are there and some oh okay all right I think I got it now I think I got it now I think it shows that you have episodes that are unlistened to

in that's what is that's what it is I'm always gonna have episodes that are unlistened to yeah but that's that's what's going on this tab just makes me feel bad so this and this is what I'm trying to get to like the way I want the way I listen to podcasts is I subscribe to a

lot of shows I don't listen to every single episode of every one of those I just pick and choose and put them in my queue I'm always gonna have unlistened episodes it's it's so I'm guessing there's always gonna be something that is current what I want is I just want to see all my shows

when I tap on one I see the list of all episodes and some of them are like grayed out or they have a checkmark or something that says you've played this that's all I want like this if there was like anina purchase to spend two dollars to make this segmented control disappear I would pay for

it like just because he visually bothers me just like because everything is for me everything is current and all at the same time like this state I don't need and I don't understand so yeah but otherwise I'm really liking this update and like this is a very small thing like the audio

quality is top-notch search is incredible I like the new design and I hope Marco has a new foundation to iterate on this app now yeah my my only really kind of big thing UI wise is I don't understand why different components of what should be kind of the same thing look radically different

so the screen to manage or skip around chapters is a separate screen from the show notes which is a separate screen from the EQ and audio you know settings including the sleep timer and I think should know as a chapters could be one thing but they all interact in different ways like the EQ

and the sound effects is a panel that slides up from the bottom the other two are full screen but operate in different ways and I don't understand why they're not all similar and I would like to see that sort of stuff tidy up and that's that's feedback that I shared in the beta and again in my blog

post so we'll see if that happens but but overall I agree with you all like it's a it's an app that a lot of people including three of us love and have used for a long time and if this means that you can move it forward in ways that are meaningful again then I'm super excited for him and you know

our complaints are or I think minor if you can move the ball forward in these new ways and I seem to think that he can yeah I think that we're very consistent on that of like there are changes and changes to an app that you use this much you can question them

but none of that will matter if the app gets the improvement that we want it to get yeah I should just like consistent features and and loving care and you know moving it forwards uh yeah I'm excited for it it's doing me great you know we've been using it for a

lot of time and I like a few weeks a month or something right through the beta process and it got better during that and I know that Marcus focused on it and I know that he pays attention to what people have to say and so I expect that it's only going to get better and only going to get better

quicker too so yeah he did and I would just say like you know listening to him and understanding what he's been through to get this done he has done something quite hooky lean it's basically started again like it's a new app like he may as well give it another name and like release another

app like that's essentially what he has done here like this is not the typical like redesign like this is just like he's he went start new project basically and like maybe he should maybe should have called it overcast and knew you like like you know like those names for like like 15 years ago over

it got no yeah overcast no yeah and so yeah that I think it is quite an incredible thing and we only we only give it criticism because we love it you know yeah yeah so that yeah just want to say that to end well I think that does it for this week if you want to find links to the stories we spoke about head on over to the website relay dot FM slash connected slash five one one those links are also in your podcast player of choice there's also a link to become a member get connected pro which

is a longer ad free version of the show that we do each and every week except next week except next week I've been so I feel like I'm just going you know like when they did the the longer episode of under the radar and now he's like usually oh I know not longer than 30 minutes but like so for the

last two weeks I've been I've been I've not been I've been really restricting myself from saying every week that's fine Mike so and then like we'll get like two weeks out and I'll be okay again it's fine you know everybody will be fine if you want to find us on oh I didn't finish my

sentence you can also send feedback or follow up there's a link in the show notes for that too you can find us all online Federico is the editor in chief of macstories dot net it can be found on massadan and threads as vatichi Mike can be found found on those social networks as i mic i m y k e

he's the host of a bunch of other shows here across relay and is the host of the relay 10 show which is very exciting and you only you're only going to get that once I'm not going to I know you know I only want it once I don't need it any other time like I want it to be you but

I think or I think here's the rule if you arranged it you can host it you can host it there you go and that will typically mean that you will be back to being host again yeah yeah you you are resigning as svp of european events after this immediately immediately tender resignation

time for an election that's what y'all doing the uk right yeah yeah yeah yep you can find me on massadan and threads as isomage 86 i write 512 pixels dot net and co-host mac power users here on relay each and every sunday afternoon i think our sponsors this week net suite square space and one password extended access management and until two weeks from now say goodbye i don't even dare to cheer you out bye y'all