 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, episode 764 for Tuesday, June 4th, 2019. Thanks, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take all your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, the things we find, and we answer your questions, we share your tips, we share our tips. The goal is that every week we get together, we each learn at least five new things. The Mac Observers for this episode include PDFPen 11 from Smile, Captera.com slash MGG, and Experian.com slash MGG, easy for me to say. We'll tell you more detail about each of those in a few moments here. For now, here in San Jose, California, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here still in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Doing just dandy. OK, that's good. Are we on a lag? I feel like I feel like there was a little delay in you and you replying to me. But no, it seems like our pings are OK. All right, I'm obviously here in in San Jose, as I said, and I'm here for Apple's WWDC conference. We are recording the show on Tuesday because we wanted to make sure we had the opportunity to talk with you all after, of course, all the stuff from the keynote and the State of the Union and the hands on. Well, it wasn't a hands on room. It was an eyes on room and all of that good stuff. So we will get to that and all of those announcements shortly here. Should we answer some questions first, John? Should we just like get right into some some good stuff here? Sure. OK, cool. Hey, for those of you that are in the San Jose area tomorrow, which would be Wednesday the 5th at 4 p.m. Pacific at San Pedro Market Square, San Pedro Square Market. I can't remember which way I'm supposed to say that. We're having a very informal Maki Gab, Gig Gab, Small Business Show. Any podcasts that I wind up doing or being a part of Mac Observer stuff, staff and stuff will be there. Kelly will be there. So yeah, come, please just, you know, join us. It'll be a blast. So with that, I think we have a slew of cool stuff found to go through, John. Sounds good. Yeah, very cool. Cool. Alan is the first one and he reminds us that more and more transit systems around the world are adding the ability to use Apple Pay to pay for their services. The latest iOS update, 12.3.1, if I'm not mistaken, it may have been there in 12.3, but certainly a recent update offers an Express Transit Pay option on both iPhone and Apple Watch. This allows you to pay for the train or the bus without having to authenticate with Touch ID, Face ID or a PIN code. The part he says that you may want to point out is that on the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR, you can use power reserve with your Express Transit card. So if your iPhone needs to be charged and you have set up the Express Transit Express card setting, you won't get caught unable to pay for the bus or the train. So what you want to do is go into settings and then scroll down to Wallet and Apple Pay. And that's where you will see below your cards, you will see an option for transit cards and Express Transit card. You get to pick one and make that your Express Transit card. And then it does exactly what Alan described, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. So pretty cool stuff, right, John? So where's this? Where's this again? Right. No, no, I don't get this. OK. Well, I thought you did. So go into settings on your iPhone, go to Wallet and Apple Pay. And then scroll down below your cards above transaction defaults. Do you have an option for transit cards? Look at that. There it is. Express Transit card. Sweet. And this is a cool thing. We did this in London. Next time I'm in Manhattan, I think I can do this. Can you now? Yeah. Well, they actually, the last time when I was there, I was visiting my friend Barry hanging out. I noticed that they had the RF symbol on the turnstiles. And it said something like, you know, coming soon. Oh, very cool. OK, I didn't realize that that was coming to to Manhattan so soon. That's great that we used it in London a few years ago when we were there. And it was a man, it made just it made life so simple. Obviously, it makes life simpler if you live somewhere. But if you lived in and worked in Manhattan regularly, you would get whatever kind of metro card or you needed so that you could do the same sort of thing with their tap to pay or whatever. It's really nice when you're visiting and you don't have to stop at the thing and get a card and put money on it and all of this stuff. You just have your phone and you just go. So I think it's an even better option for tourists than it is, even for those people that that are regularly using it. But obviously, it's great for everybody. So good stuff and even more fun. Yeah, I don't know if I've mentioned this, but. The Chase Bank in my area has NFC on their ATM. You did mention that. Yeah, that's pretty cool, man. Yeah. Yeah, I think that it's a NCR. So but no, that's really cool. Just like, you know, you don't need the physical card. Right. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Cool. OK, moving on to the next one here. And that is comes from listener John, who says things are used every day, got me to thinking. I'll try and pronounce this. Gerbert Stagg's checker is always running on my Mac. So what is it? It's German for birthday birthday checker, or at least it's supposed to be. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it even close to correctly. He says, to quote the late Tim Verporten, it does one thing and it does it well. And he says, I'll add very well, very easily. You can populate it from your contacts, but even nicer. You can just add it on your own, add on your own to its list. He says, I put birthdays and anniversaries in there. Then in Gerberts, tags checker prefs. You customize how long before the date you want the notification. And each day, then it counts down for you in a tiny box with a name and how old or how long the anniversary is or whatever. He says, I've used it when Tim first announced it announced it on his show 10 plus years ago. He says, but it's grown and it's now in a 64 64 bit version. I would not have a Mac without it. It's from Earthling Soft, which has some other neat stuff as well at Earthlingsoft.net. So thanks for that, John. A great little tip and a nice way to remember Tim Verporten. So that's like a double win in my book. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Anything on that one before we move on to before the next one here, John? OK, I have to check it out, though. Yeah, I'm I'm pretty happy with what calendar does. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. Listener John says, I was going through some things and realized after searching the MacGearb site that I use a great little utility every day constantly called choosy and that it hadn't been mentioned on the show since MacGearb 247 back in 2010. He says, it's come a long way since you mentioned it the first time. And I thought I would put it back on the front burner for you. Choosy will set itself as your default browser and then let you select which browser to use when you click a link in Mac OS. He says, this is super helpful as I tend to prefer Safari, but there are some sites that act up or simply don't work in Safari and I need to open them in Chrome or Firefox. The advances are not only can you choose which browser to use, but you can now set rules like if the domain contains X in, you know, if X text is contained in the name of the domain, use Chrome to open by default so you can set some rules so that, for example, if you're connecting to a Google Hangout, you definitely don't want to use Safari anymore. It will appear to connect, but sometimes you can't hear the audio from some of the participants. So you're much better off. It's a Google product use Chrome, right? So there you go. He says it's a $10 utility and it's critical in my minute to minute workflow. So thanks for that. That's great. We love that. I love things like that. Cool. Any thoughts before we move on here, John? Yeah, I think I'm going to check that out as well. I had one situation the other day and I kind of guessed correctly, but I had a gift card from a local store and they have a website and they're like, yeah, punch in the number and it'll tell you how much is on it. And I did that and it said something like, you know, a server failure. And I'm like, what? What? I'm like, let's try this again in Firefox and work. Great. Nice. Why? Yeah, why? I mean, it was doing a real simple, you know, operation. It's like, you know, look this number up in the database and show how much money's left. Crazy. But apparently, Safari can't handle that. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Yeah, whatever layout they were using or whatever it is. Yeah, sometimes one browser is just better than the other. That's how it works. Two of you have written in now, both Doug and Joe have written in about something called Unraid. And he says this is Doug's note, but Joe's note was equally as informative, if not more so. He says, having heard about products like Synology and QNAP on the show, I was researching the merits of each and stumbled across Unraid. Unraid is a Linux based OS originally developed as NAS software that runs on almost any PC or Mac hardware. It has all the features one might expect from an off the shelf unit hosting file shares, being able to take advantage of mismatched drive capacities, single or dual disk parity, and so much more. The primary feature that appealed to me, though, he says is that rather than striping the data like Raid or even Synology does, it stores individual files on a single disk, which means that accessing a file only spins up the disk containing it, not the whole array. He says this also means that in the event of simultaneous drive failures, more than the number of parity. So if you have one drive parity, you can lose one drive and still be okay. Dual drive parity, obviously two drives and still be okay. But if you lose more than that, it only loses the data on the failed drives, not the whole array, as would be the case with something that sort of relies on all of that working together. He says it supports plugins, Linux dockers, as well as virtualization. So aside from running apps specifically designed for Un Raid, it can run full desktop Linux, Windows or Mac OS. Thus, one could also use it to run, say, a VPN, a mail server, host a website, media server, pretty much anything else. So it's all at Un Raid.net. So this sounds like a really geeky thing that you could perhaps use with old Mac hardware, right? If you've got something that's not gonna run the latest Mac OS anymore, you know, you wanna do something different with it, Un Raid might be an interesting way to go. I suppose because the files are stored sort of individually on drives, you don't get the speed benefits of RAID where you're able to read from and write to, you know, kind of all the drives, you know, in a level way. But perhaps, you know, like there's different, it's pros and cons, it's all goes. That's pretty cool. Thanks guys for sharing that. Did you check out Un Raid, John? No, but I can see why you, I'd like what was mentioned at the end that you can run some server things because you used to be able to do that with Mac OS server. Right. Not anymore. Right, right. That's right. Now it just does device management. But yeah, so for people that miss having VPN and mail and all that stuff, on your Mac server, well, get this instead. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's pretty cool. And then one last cool stuff found from listener Gray, and I'm finding it here, running an iPad for our notes and all of that stuff. In episode 763, so the last episode, he says a quick tip suggested using the reminder app to save URLs for later reading. He says, I use an app called pocket at getpocket.com to save web content. There is an iOS app which has a good read function for listening to articles while driving or say dog walking. The Safari extension adds a button to the Safari toolbar as well in order to automatically save things to pocket. So it very tightly integrated with things. And yeah, he's right. Pocket's been around for a very long time. And I know that there are a lot of you that really like the way it works and use it. So I don't know if we've ever mentioned it before on the show and I don't know why that is, but now we have corrected that wrong. So that's a good thing. Anything to add to that, Mr. Braun? Yeah, that's... Because of course on the Mac, you can do save as to save your content. So I guess this is pretty much duplicating that. And I guess Safari on iOS doesn't do that. Safari on iOS, I mean, it does. You have reading list, right? So you can use that. No, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. And also, okay, but this is... I'm sure this does more than that. It does more. Yeah, exactly. And you can do the share sheet as well. Right. Right. You can do a share. Yep. Yep. Nice. Cool. All right, well, we have some... There were some things that happened yesterday, John, in terms of, you know, in our little world here of Apple and Mac and iPhone and all that stuff. So obviously we want to talk about that. That's why we delayed the show a day. But first, I want to take a minute and talk about our first two sponsors, the first of which is Kaptera at capterra.com.mgg where you can go for free today to find all the tools that you need to make an informed decision when choosing software for your business. This could be your, you know, your main business, your side hustle, or even just projects that you have around the house, right? We all like to try new things. That's why we just finished this segment about cool stuff found here on the show, right? 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Someone else has already gone through it and you can, you know, you get to look at the reviews. It's how we're all used to these review sites, right? Now you've got one for software. It's so cool. So as I said, visit capterra.com.mgg for free today to find all the tools to make that informed software decision for your business. One more time, capterra.com.mgg, that's C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A.com slash M-G-G, software selection simplified. Easy for me to say. Actually, it did come out, that came out okay. Software selection simplified. Try that 10 times fast. No, no, you don't have to. Just go to capterra.com.mgg and you're good to go. Our thanks to capterra for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for this episode is Experian Boost. Experian is on a mission to help boost America's credit score. And truly, I've tried this, right? It will help so many of you and it's so, so cool the way this works, right? So you go to Experian.com slash M-G-G, that's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N dot com slash M-G-G and Experian Boost works by giving you credit for all the utility and telecom bills that you're already paying and adding those to your, sort of the body of things that it checks for your credit report and for your credit rating. So if you pay your bills like your water, your gas, your electric, your cable, your cell phone through your checking or savings account, you can factor these in and in your credit rating. So you factor these in and instantly raise your credit scores, right? This is the first time a credit bureau is allowing consumers to submit these types of things to be factored in and only Experian is doing it. It's so cool. And John and I are both obsessed with our credit ratings as it's a pretty good thing to me and Experian can help you really kind of jump ahead, you know, assuming you're on time with all of that stuff. It's very, very cool. Only positive payments will be factored in and in the rare situations where your score goes down from boosting, you just disconnect those things from boost and your credit score goes back to where it was. So it really is totally under your control. Such a cool thing and nice to actually feel like you have some sort of instantaneous control over your credit report. So go check it out. Go to Experian.com slash M-G-G-E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N dot com slash M-G-G. It'll only take you a few minutes to go through this. I've done it myself. It's totally legit. Really, it's totally fine and it's totally easy. Check it out. Experian.com slash M-G-G-E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N dot com slash M-G-G and our thanks to Experian for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. I just used the yesterday, Dave. Did you really? Yeah, very cool. Well, I was talking to my local bank about a possible refi and one of the questions they asked me is, well, what's your credit score? And I'm like, oh, here, check it out. Because they have an app and I showed them and they were like, wow. Yeah, right. Wow. Yeah, there you go. Right. That's such a cool thing. Our thanks to Experian. All right. Now on to some things that happened at WWDC here yesterday. I want to start with Mac OS, the next version of Mac OS, which Apple announced called Mac OS Catalina, which will be Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. And so there were some interesting things as we saw this in the keynote. And then John and I actually both took the time to watch what Apple calls their state of the union after the fact that really kind of digs a little bit deeper into some of the things that you hear in the keynote and can offer some perspective. So we'll kind of be mixing and matching both of these kinds of things here. But I suppose the place to start, we'll start with Catalina where Apple started, which is iTunes, right? Which is fine. Well, we happen to be speaking to an audience of podcast listeners here. So this is actually sort of relevant. iTunes is now going to be broken up, right? And Apple says it's gonna be, there will be no more iTunes in Catalina, but Apple says there will be three apps. I think that that's incorrect. There will be four apps, but we'll talk about that. The first is an app called Music, right? And the Music app will be there to play your music, either your local music or Apple music, whatever it is, that's what music will do for you, right? And I think that seemed pretty straightforward. Any thoughts on that, John? That was part one. That's part one, okay. Have a music app, then part two, which will be of interest to anybody who's listening to this. Yeah, the podcast app. They're now gonna have a podcast app. There's something cool about this podcast app, though, because it doesn't just let you listen to podcasts. It lets you use, it uses machine learning to let you search and find things that were discussed in that show. So if, for example, you say, man, I wanna listen to that show where John and Dave mentioned machine learning. And then you go to the site and you search the site and for whatever reason, we didn't put machine learning in the show notes. Doesn't matter. It actually parses through the audio to go and find the episodes where we talked about these things. That's pretty cool. And because it's Apple, this all happens on device and all of that good stuff. So I'm pretty excited about that, if only just from the technical side of it, right? I mean, that's pretty cool, right? Sure. What's next? A lot of features they added machine learning, which I think, well, can be good or can be bad because that's on your algorithm. Right. Yeah, I think, I like to explain machine learning. So certainly, in a case like this, right, the, they could write an engine that when you say I wanna look for the phrase machine learning, it goes and from the start just parses through every bit of audio that you have on your computer, hoping to find something that matches this audio signature that looks like machine learning. But that's really, really slow, right? The cool part of machine learning is that it's all done with lots and lots of samples, right? So thousands and thousands of samples are thrown at this engine, to your point, it builds the algorithm from that. And oh, yep, there we go. I knew, you know, I talk with my hands. This is why I don't have a microphone in front of me in the office and I just knocked it. But with machine learning, you don't have to do all that expensive computation in the moment. It's already done ahead of time. They just, they do lots and lots of samples of these things. And now the machine has this sample set and just like, oh yeah, do we have anything that looks exactly like that? And it's very, very quick to go through because it doesn't have to sort of reinvent the wheel every time, which is kind of cool, I think. So yeah, any more thoughts on that, John? Nope. Okay. And then the TV app. So to me, that's what we expect. It lets you watch TV in movies and they say that it's got a gorgeous interface and sure, like that's fine. Great. Anything remarkable about the TV app for you, John? Nope, not really. Okay. So the interesting thing is Apple said there are three. Go ahead. Now that I think about it though, you know when I'm looking at this and the thing is a lot of people that suggested that they should break up the band as far as taking iTunes and making components out of it. But now that I think about it, Dave, and I'm looking at my phone, that's kind of how IRS does it now. Well, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So it's putting that both platforms are using now the same paradigm as far as how you access or learn about new stuff. Yep. But there is something that concerned me, Dave, and I think I missed the part where they talked about this. The thing is that iTunes does these three things. Kind of. But what about the device management aspect of iTunes? Updating or backing up and stuff like that. Where does that go? Well, that's why I say that they've moved it into four different apps, not just three. The fourth app is not a new app, but it has new functionality and that is the Finder. In Catalina, and Mac OS Catalina 10.15, the Finder is where you will, if you plug an iPhone into your Mac, that's where you're going to see the device listed and you can, in theory, do some or all of the things that you are able to do in iTunes. Now, of course, they've been limiting and limiting the sync and management functionality in iTunes for a while, which is why we like stuff similar to iMazing, right? Like, that's why iMazing exists because people want to do more and want to have a little more granular experience and all of that, but yeah, there you go. So, fine, which is great. I always hate it when, and they did this in the demo the other day or yesterday, when they plug the, and they say, here's what happens on your Mac now when you plug in an iPhone and the answer is nothing. It doesn't go launch some app. Like, no, just, I want to plug it in and I want to say, let it charge. That's fine. No problem. I don't need iTunes to launch. I don't need photos to launch. I don't need, right? Like all of that stuff. So that was, I like the concept. I'm also very glad that things like iMazing exists so that I'm not just locked into whatever Apple wants. Looking, there's one interesting thing that I noticed about Catalina and this came up. I think you and I both noticed this during the, during the State of the Union, where Apple... Yes, and speaking of that, let me just offer a little bit here. But I was scratching my head because the keynote you could watch on Apple TV or through a browser, but the platform State of the Union. So I'm running the WWDC app and it actually created a calendar entry and I went to the URL for this thing and it said video coming soon. And I'm like, well, what? Where's the stream? I'm streaming this. Yeah. What I did, and I think this may be the only way if you're not there, is if you run the WWDC app, you can, it would stream the live video of the event. And what I did, Dave, is that I took the, I took it and aimed it at my Apple TV so I could watch another big screen versus the little screen. So you aimed it at your third generation or older Apple TV, right? Yeah, there was an icon that let me mirror the video. You used AirPlay. To the Apple TV. Right. Well, if you had a fourth generation or newer Apple TV, you would have the WWDC app on your Apple TV and you could watch it that way too. There is also an unofficial WWDC app for the Mac that someone has written at www.io and that would also have let you watch this. It basically does what the iOS app does except just does it on the Mac. So yes, lots of options, but you're right. That's how you could stream any of the sessions, I think, this week is just in the app either on your TV or elsewhere. So yeah. But the thing that caught our attention was when they said, and I'm gonna find my notes here to get there with us, when they said that I, Mac OS Catalina, where am I looking at this? I know I've got it somewhere here. Oh yeah, Mac OS Catalina, I mean, they sort of buried the lead by saying it makes the system volume read only to protect the system volume. And it was like, wait a minute, what system volume right now on the Mac? We have, well, we have two volumes. We have the recovery volume and then we have the other volume that is our boot disk, right? We know of one volume on the Mac and it has Mac OS on it, it has all our applications on it, it has all our documents and all our data. Well, that changes in Catalina. There are now two partitions that you will be using in an active sense and the still then the third, presumably the third recovery partition. One of these is your user data partition which will be read right, you will be able to put stuff on it, it'll have your applications and your data and all of that. And then the system partition, or I shouldn't call it partition because we're talking about APFS, it's a system volume, will be a read only volume that is just for Mac OS. So it's kind of like where we started going with system integrity protection and now we're going even further. What do you, what is your gut reaction to this, John? I'm curious if you and I had the same reaction. I think we did quite surprisingly. It's going to cause some grief for developers, especially ones that want to write things that get intimate with the system or make it do. So, okay, so we- Interesting things at a low level because those system integrity protection kind of did that as well. I'm just thinking it's going to put even more restrictions on what developers can do that write tools, not so much apps. I think apps are okay, but what I'm going to call system tools that change the nature, how the OS works, something like, I'll think off top of my head, like default folder. I mean, I don't know if they can still do what they do with the way this is architected now, right? So- Maybe they can. We'll have to see. Well, I have an answer for that, actually. Earlier in the state of the union, they talked about something called driver kit. And driver kit moves kernel extensions out of kernel space and into user space, which means, right, that now some of those things, and they listed a bunch of them. I didn't get the whole list. Actually, I probably have it on my phone. I think I took a picture of it. And it's of course in the slides, but things like virtualization, endpoint security, network interface cards, all of those things. And if you think about it, a network interface card, if someone's developing something different or new, that has to be currently a kernel level driver. It's gotta run at the level of the system. Well, with driver kit, essentially that lets you patch into the kernel portion of the system with something that's running in user space. In theory, keeping things separate and only running in approved channels and all of that. So I think at least at sort of a fundamental level, I think they've thought through, certainly not everything, but the most common scenarios where this might be an issue. My gut reaction on having these two separate volumes, you know, the system volume and then the user volume is really, I kind of like it. And I'm surprised to say that, because as you said, it takes control out of the user's hands and the developer's hands, but it also makes things way more likely to remain stable because you're not mucking about with your system volume. Like, I assume we'll still have a recovery volume, but this mitigates a lot of the need for that, right? Because if the system volume is untouchable, then that's a good thing. I mean, obviously there can still be corruption and things like that, but you're not gonna mess it up by installing something. And that's kind of cool. I'm actually wondering, this is very Unix-like, by the way, to have a system volume, a user volume, then they're in Unix in a sort of default, at least old school scenario. I don't know how it's done today, but I think it's still the same way. They would then also have a temp volume and then a swap volume where all your virtual memory files go. I'm wondering if perhaps behind the scenes, there are more volumes. Are they gonna use a separate volume for swap? They should. APFS, to think about doing this 10 years ago with HFS+, you would literally have to create separate partitions and chop up the disk. And that's sort of a non-trivial thing to implement. Whereas with APFS saying, hey, I want another volume out here. APFS is like, okay, here it is. That's fine, because it's all logical and virtual. So it's not putting the data in specific parts on the disk. It's just saying, okay, you wanna have this part. You wanna have one view of this disk that goes this way and another view of this disk and these volumes, the data, it doesn't matter where on the physical disk or hardware is the data is stored. It's just here's how you're going to access it. And so my biggest concern about this, John, is remember back in the fall when we started seeing all of those people writing into us and us also experiencing problems with the volumes that had been converted with high Sierra from HFS+, to APFS. Well, for those folks out there that have not yet wiped their drive clean to sort of solve those weird problems, now we're doing this with it. And I fear that doing all of this on a foundation of a weirdly upgraded, migrated volume this will cause more people to have to decide to do that wipe clean. But I think if you're doing this on a volume that's APFS out of the gate, I think this is a great idea. It will definitely be a headache for us troubleshooting-wise. There's no question about that. But I think in the grand scheme of things I'm actually really happy about it. So, what do you think sort of big picture about this? I think it's in line with their whole privacy, system integrity systems, the concern about that stuff. Yeah, cool. So now from a developer point of, so another thing that they demonstrated, actually I think they rebranded that I think is nice, but they highlighted this a lot more than they did in the past. Well, they now call it project catalyst. What formerly known as Marzipan, right, that's right. Yeah, and they showed more of that. I don't think I ever saw it in action, but it was really neat while he was up on the stage there. He's like, here's how you target another platform using this system. And it's like there's a checkbox that says Mac OS. It's like this. Across platform, I've always liked looking at cross-platform frameworks and architectures. I just wanna stop you briefly here. For anyone who doesn't understand, Marzipan now called project catalyst is a way to take apps that you've built for iOS and build them on the Mac without having to write a completely separate code base. As John said, in theory, it's one checkbox. There's probably more to it than that. Like you wanna add some menus and things like that, but in practice, you get to have a large chunk of your code base shared and you've already written it. So that's the benefit here. And Apple started doing this with Mojave. We've got with the Home app, the Stocks app, the Voice Memos app and something else that I can never remember off the top of my head. Oh, the news app. They're sort of crumming apps, but it was their way of sort of experimenting with this in a larger scale. But yeah, I'm with you, John. I think that's pretty good. Did you have more to say? Sorry, I interrupted. I just wanted to make sure people understood what we were talking about. Oh, no, that's okay. I'm wondering if, I mean, I don't know if there was, I mean, they updated the various apps. I mean, they added tweaks. I mean, nothing, you know, maybe, you know, cheer or anything, but all the, you know, photos and notes and reminders and Safari, you know, that they're adding or extending them or making them better. Yeah. Oh, so here's the other thing I noticed. Yeah. Speaking of targeting other devices, I guess what you'll be able to do in this version is extend your desktop. Well, you can already do that, you're saying. So what's the big deal with that, John? You can extend it to an iPad. That's cool. I think that's really cool. In fact, I want to do it right now while I'm doing this show. So I'm running Evernote on my iPad to read people's questions and tips and cool stuff found and then managing the show from my Mac. And there are apps. There's like Air Display and Duet Display that you can set up to do this. And I've used them in the past and they've always been a little wonky, but they might be totally fine right now. But having the ability to just use your iPad as your second screen on your Mac, especially for, you know, when you're traveling or whatever, this would be fantastic. So I did not want to upgrade my devices before we recorded the show, but I wish. Right, I mean, for obvious reasons, but I will, after this, I will make a clone of my MacBook and then throw caution to the wind and maybe I'll just do it on the clone. I don't know, but anyway, it's fun stuff. So yeah, I wish I, I like that. They call that sidecar, right? Which is pretty good. Pretty good. And activation lock on any T2 equipped Macs. I like this, like for your iPhone and your iPad. If somebody steals your Mac or you lose your Mac, it's a lot less, a lot less valuable to someone if they can't even install an OS on it to kind of start from scratch. So I'm stoked about that. Should we? And I'm looking here at the system requirements. Thank goodness it'll run on. They claim it'll run on the MacBook Pro 2012 and later, which is what I have. So did any, is there anything that will run Mojave that won't run Catalina? I don't think there is, but I could be wrong about that. Yeah, I think they sort of did that with Mojave already. So yeah, cool. I wanna talk about the Mac Pros and everything. I'm gonna take 10 seconds here and just highlight the fact that our WWDC coverage, the fact that Kelly and I are able to be out here and Kelly, Brian and I are able to do all the coverage that we're doing is because we have coverage sponsors. My Amazing, Smile, Carbon Copy Cloner, Sanebox and Direct Mail for Mac. They're awesome people. We'll put links to them in the show notes. Please go visit them and tell them you love them and thank you for all of this because they make this kind of extra thing very possible in a way that it otherwise wouldn't be. So is it time to talk about the Mac Pro, John? The Mac Pro? The Mac Pro. You know one that looks like a garbage can? No, the one that looks like a cheese grater. So here's my- So that was the first thing that I thought when I saw it is that rather than looking like a garbage can, it looks like the cheese grater Macs evolved. Right. Quite a bit smaller. A little bit, yeah. I mean, it's still a hefty thing and if you put the wheels, it can have wheels on it now. You've probably seen pictures. If you haven't, I encourage you to go see them. I wasn't able to touch one, but I was able to be in the presence of several of them and I mean, I guess it's a little smaller than the old cheese grater Mac but not that much, you know, it's basically, but it's a tower, right? And I think with this, you know, I am one of the people who agrees with the sentiment that Apple got it right. This is the big, okay, fine. There's probably a different sentiment that they might say that might include some expletives, but this is their way of saying to all the people that have been moaning and groaning about, we want a Mac Pro, we want something modular, we want something powerful, we want something that, you know, can go the mile with us and can be upgradable down the road. This is their way of saying, okay, fine. Here it is, right? Like that's it and to that point, so is the Pro Display XDR that they came out with. It checks all the boxes, including the one that requires you to get a second mortgage to buy it, but it's the, okay, fine. You know what, here you go. You complained, you said you wanted these things and I think for a lot of people, this Mac Pro will be the thing that, you know, people have been waiting, they've been on the fence saying, oh, you know, I need a more powerful Mac, Apple doesn't make me what I want, blah, blah, blah. Now they're like, okay, fine. And if you're willing to spend, what? You know, it starts at six probably seven, eight grand, the one you want. If you're willing to spend that and that's what you need, great. But I think for everybody else and most people are in the everybody else category, including all those who say they want a Mac Pro but don't necessarily need one, this especially with the price on it will cause a lot of folks appropriately to kind of take a step back and look and say, okay, what do I really need and does an iMac Pro solve that problem for me? Or does a regular iMac solve that problem for me? Or does a, you know, i7 Mac mini solve that problem for me? And for most people, the answer will be yes to one of those other three things and you don't need the Mac Pro. But for those people that have been, you know, coveaching at Apple for a number of years, here it is, okay, fine. There you go, there's the Mac Pro. Done, checks all the boxes. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you can get, I mean, it's almost like you want it, you got it. That's it, you want it. Intel Xeon with up to 28 cores. Who needs 28 cores? Well, somebody out there probably does. 1.5 terabytes of RAM, eight slots, slots. I love slots. Yeah, PCI is new again. And two, let me see. Yeah, different flavors of PCI and two, 10 gig ports. So you can really get this thing moving that you'll pay, oh, you'll pay. Oh, you'll pay, that's right. Yeah, and that monitor, right, like it's crazy. I was sitting there with a bunch of members of press and actually, well, Marco Armin, I suppose as a member of the press, but also a very well respected developer. We were sort of sitting in a row and Marco's sitting next to me and we looked at each other and was like, so the monitor is five grand, but they just said the stand is $1,000. Is that for an extra stand that you might have at work or something? No, turns out no, no. That's just for the one stand, the one that you need with the monitor. So yeah, you will pay for all of these things. And to be fair, most people, even the people who need and can justify buying a Mac Pro, they don't need the monitor. Like that monitor is truly for the graphics obsessed, which, and who are out there? I mean, it's great that it exists, but it's just not for most of us. And that's okay. So I think, right? Yeah. The other thing I like too, is that if you look at the machine in just the right way, so it's like two layers. So it's like a dual layer cheese grater and that there are circles and then there's another layer. It almost, if you look at it just the right way, Dave, it looks like an alien. It does. I tried to get a picture of that when I was in the whatever the demo room, but they had, they'd said you can, there's two rules. You can't touch anything and you can take all the pictures you want, but you can't use a flash. And without, and the way the lighting was in that room, I could not, at least not with my iPhone, get a picture that really showed that dual layer because you're, I had the same thought. It looks like an alien. Yeah. It's pretty cool. You did get a very nice picture of Tim and Johnny. Man, talk about right place, right time. I was, they had the, they had several things set up. They had just the monitor stand. They had just the stainless steel frame of the Mac Pro and then they had the Mac Pro and a monitor on a table. It's sort of right as you walked in in the center of this whole display. And I had taken some pictures from the front and I'm like, about now I want pictures from the back because, you know, that's, I wanna have them. And I had seen that Tim Cook was in the room as I was walking around to the back. I actually bumped into Johnny Ive. I didn't realize, you know, he was there. I mean, it's very crowded or whatever. I was like, oh, yep. Okay, there's Johnny Ive in his sweater, whatever that's all about. And so I went around the back and to, you know, start taking some pictures and I waited my turn. And, you know, as other people get out of the way, I got right up to like the table. And that was the moment where on the other side of the table, Tim and Johnny just came together. I was like, oh, there you go. There they both are right there. So I probably stood there for three minutes just getting all sorts of different shots. I'm sure people hated me, but, you know, it's like, whatever, right place, right place. And then I moved out of the way and other people were able to get their shots and all that stuff, but yeah. And I think when, for the type of work, for people that need this level of computing from what I saw, cause some people are like, oh my gosh, it's, you know, $5,000 base or entry price, I think, right? Yeah. For the base. $6,000, right? I think it's $59.99. But yeah, whatever. Okay, maybe that was it. If you're that worried about it, it's not for you. No, but if PC vendors make machines that cost this much too. Totally. If you need the juice. Yes. You know, I'm sure you can get, I'm sure, you know, if you wanna get a Dell that does what this does, but the thing is that there was a, I guess most people felt kind of a gap because the former top of the line was kind of limited and that, you know, you could only go so far with it. This thing you can go. As far as you wanna go. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I think my, you know, I'm thinking my next machine once I get tired of the Mac mini. Yeah. I think it's gonna be an iMac. I don't even think, I don't need an iMac Pro. I may think I want to. Sure. I wanna think that I need that level of machine but I really don't. You don't, right. I think I can get by with just, you know, the middle of the road iMac. I would agree. I would, I'm waiting for iMacs to hit the refurb store the 2019 ones and then I will replace the machine in the office because I need to kind of roll that machine up to the studio and et cetera, et cetera. So it's time, but you know, I always buy as much CPU as I can but it's because I roll these machines around and you know, the iMac that's in the studio that we record the show on every week is a 2011, right? So it's eight years old and it's totally fine but it can't run Mojave, you know, it's done with High Sierra, which is okay for the show for now but eventually not gonna be okay. And so I need to, you know, I need to kind of keep these things rolling around. But yeah, no, I agree. I like the hyperthreading on the processors. So I would not buy the i5 for that reason in the iMac, but otherwise, you know, and that might just be me being weird, you know, like maybe probably doesn't matter. Again, for what I do, it probably doesn't matter. All right, let's go ahead. Well, you know, I'll say the only, the last thing. So if you're into the developer thing and this thing kind of made me chuckle having been a developer on the dark side for many years. Sure. They were showing one thing with the current, with the next version of Xcode that just made me say, guys. I think it's SwiftUI is what you're talking about. Just to put it in perspective, yeah. So the last time I used Xcode, building a UI was painful. Whereas my primary development environment in another life was Visual Studio. And there's a good reason that was called Visual Studio is building a UI was trivial in that you would do it visually. Sure. And they were showing this thing in the platform state of the union how they've improved the tool where you can do it visually where you either develop the code and you see the visual representation right away or you can fiddle with the visual and it does the code. I'm like, Microsoft's been doing that for a real long time, guys. And Xcode, I think it's been a little while since you've used Xcode. It's gotten sort of incrementally better than what you experienced. But this SwiftUI thing is a remarkable change as I understand it. I don't do a ton in Xcode, but I've done some. And then obviously we have been chatting with developers here and everybody's like, oh, thank goodness. Like, yeah, finally, it's like, it's what we should have had 10 years ago or whatever. So yeah. So we've talked for a while about WWDC, about 25 minutes here. And we focus on the Mac and the Mac Pro. Is there anything from say, watchOS, TVOS, iOS 13, iPadOS that we might want to talk about, John? Any two or three highlights from each of us, maybe? Sure. You know what? While you think of that, I'm going to... No, I got it right in front of me. Yeah, but I'm going to do this anyway just because of the timing and pacing and how we are professionals here. I'm going to take a minute and talk about our next sponsor, which is Smile with PDF Pen 11. So this is new, right? So even if you're a PDF Pen user, you might want to stop for a second and listen here because PDF Pen 11 includes several new features, the first of which is a split view mode for comparing pages in a document. That's pretty cool. So now we're taking this tool that lets you manipulate and edit PDFs and now we can kind of look at them differently, which is very cool. It's got a new font bar for easier text editing. And yes, that means you can edit the text in a PDF with PDF Pen 11. That's also very cool. They now support continuity camera so that you can scan documents with your iPhone and pull them right into PDF Pen 11. It adds the ability to have add multiple items into the library simultaneously, making workflows much faster and PDF Pen 11 users can edit multiple form fields at the same time. This is very, very cool. You've known because you listened to this show that PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro are your ultimate PDF viewing and editing apps for the Mac. You can add headers and footers along with watermarks to your documents. You can also, you know, they've got edit tools. Like I mentioned, you can OCR a document if it just happens to be a scan of words, either way, once you've done that or if they are just words in the PDF, you can edit them in there. Such cool stuff. And what they've done with PDF Pen 11 really makes this app like it leapfrogs itself, which is exactly what we like to see. So you gotta go check it out. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast. I know it sounds like a generic link. Guess what? It is cool news though. When you get there, you get to pick which podcast. I don't think I need to coach you on this next part. So just go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Let them know where you heard about it. Check it out and really take the time to enjoy it. It's one of my favorite apps and I think it will be one of yours too. Our thanks of course to Smile and PDF Pen for sponsoring this episode. And as I mentioned earlier, also for being a coverage sponsor for us here at WWDC. So very, very cool stuff. Our thanks to them for all of their cool stuff. All right, John. My favorite things beyond the Mac. Let's go there. Yeah. All right, some of the things I noticed even though I don't have one, maybe I'll get one. But a number of things in the watchOS caught my attention. Watch only apps, which not being a regular watch user, I guess that's a big deal. I guess it's a big deal. Yeah. Well, the nice part I think about that, yes, it's nice to have an app that can just be written for the watch and doesn't also need to have a phone interface built just to make it possible to use on the watch. Like, I think that matters more from a developer standpoint than a user standpoint. But, you know, that when developers can have more flexibility, it's better for us users. And so, yeah, I'm with you on that. I like that. That's good. Yeah. A watch app store. OK, sure, sure. Yeah. One thing I think that is useful for people like you. And when I say that, I mean, a musician. The noise app, I thought was really a good idea that that noise app. So I am still rocking the O.G. Apple Watch. And by and large, it's totally fine. Like, and this watch has been great to me. I it is the watch. It hasn't been replaced or upgraded or, you know, serviced or anything since the release day back in April of whatever, you know, four years ago or something. So and it's fine. Like, I really have no. There's nothing about the new watches that compelled me to upgrade. I don't wear my Apple Watch every day. I like to wear other watches, too. It is the watch I wear most often, though, in that, you know, in terms of risk time, it gets more risk time than any other watch that I own. But, you know, it does what I need. I get my notifications and things like that. And it's totally fine. Yes, I would like the nicer screen. Yes, you know, I'm sure the battery life on my watch could be improved if I were to replace it. But when I saw that noise app the other day, man, it was like, OK, like I am obsessed about my hearing. I work really hard to protect it. I get really upset when I'm in a scenario mostly just upset with myself for not being as protective as I should be. But I get really upset when I'm in a scenario where I know my hearing is, you know, potentially being compromised and I haven't been able to, you know, protect myself against it or whatever. I I literally have a pair of custom made earplugs within arms reach right now while I'm traveling and sitting here podcasting. I don't need them for the podcast, obviously. But but that noise app that like that's probably the thing that will make me buy a new Apple Watch. So that's very cool. And and I remember, you know, I thought you were nuts, but you and I went to a live concert together a number of years ago. Yeah. And you were like, you should probably get these any modic or some brand. Yeah, you should probably get some earplugs. And I'm like, why are you telling me that at a concert, they're going to play the sound so loud that it could damage my hearing. And you were like, yep. Yes, that's that's what I'm telling you. Yes. Yes. And I was so glad that I got those things. I forgot how how much attenuation they added. But I think you got the etymotic E.R. 20s, which are 20 dBs of attenuation. And I and I really like those earplugs. While we're on the subject, I am going to give my my three recommendations for earplugs these days, because here we are. And it's sort of a passion of mine. So the etymotic E.R. 20s are still totally fine. They are a triple flanged thing that you put in your ear. Most people can fit these fine in their ears and they stay in and they're comfortable. And everything that I'm going to mention that the eddies definitely fit this. Attenuate the sound down, as John said, without making it sound like you just stuffed your ears with cotton. That will protect your hearing. It will also sound like crap, right? Because you lose more high end than low end when you just stuff your ears with cotton or whatever. The eddies have a flat attenuation or relatively flat attenuation. So you just lower the sound, which is good. I also like the dubs earplugs. Do you BZ earplugs? Those I found to be not only very comfortable, but but they sound really good. So I also recommend those. And then our our new favorites, and I say our, I mean, in my house, because the people that live with me also wear earplugs whenever we go to shows. The new my new favorites are something I found at CES this year called the loop earplugs. And and and those these are all universal fits. You don't need to, you know, get sized in an audiologist or anything. You can do that. That's truly the best way to go. But it's not only inconvenient. It's expensive. These are all things that you can buy for twenty or thirty dollars and and you're good to go. So I'll put links in the show notes, of course. So very nice. And the final thing. And I think you and I both had a certain person in mind who was really glad that they announced this last feature in Macho S. Dave. And that's cycle tracking for the ladies. I agree. I'm surprised it took this long for that to make it to the watch. Because what many people said when health first came out was well, they're not taking women's health into consideration. And my reply was, well, they're not there. There's nothing gender specific in the health app for either sex. Correct. Correct. Yeah, you would think that if because my understanding is that, you know, they had all sorts of, you know, physicians and health professionals work on all this. It's like, did nobody think of putting that in for, you know, putting that in because that's, you know, it's good information to know if you're regular. Yeah, totally. Or your preggers or something like that. Regularity refers to a different bodily function. But but yes. But yeah, yeah, your point is correct. Yeah. And the nice part is it's not just limited to watch OS. They've also got this coming in the health app in iOS 13. So you can have it on your phone, even if you don't have an Apple Watch, which is great. I mean, I remember when we were, you know, not to get overly personal and I won't, but, you know, when we were in our our days of having babies and all that, like cycle tracking was most definitely a part of that process for us. And and in general, it's a it's a good thing, whether or not you're you're, you know, looking to have children or anything. Like it's it's yeah, it's good. So yeah, that was great. Yeah. All right. Let me look through things here. Yeah, I'll go. I'm just trying to keep up with the show notes and all that stuff here, man. So looking through my notes here. I, you know, I think this is probably on both of our list, but the sign in with Apple button or sign in with Apple functionality is a pretty awesome thing that allows you to allows an app developer to say, OK, cool. I want to just like you see with, say, Facebook or Google. Now there's another option that iOS and I think Mac app developers to can and watch app developers, certainly can put into their apps that says, great, just sign in with Apple. It signs in using your Apple ID. If they need an email address, you can choose to share your real email address with them or an anonymized one that will go through Apple's relay servers, but it's unique to each app and you can shut them off if you start getting spam or whatever. But at least it gives the app developer a way to contact you if necessary. And again, this is all permission based, but it's great. And man, I looked at the code sample for it during the State of the Union. It is I think literally one line. It is sign in with Apple button. Like that's the function and and done. It's right there. All good. It's just like they built the framework. So I'm pretty stoked about it. Yeah, my only thought. So one at the very least, it's another OAuth, I guess, you know, in a sense. We log in. Sure. Yep. I guess the thing that got me is that they were kind of gently suggesting that the people that make the other sign in technologies are doing more than allowing that, right? That they are not just they are acknowledging that when you. Yeah, when when you OAuth with Facebook or with Google, by default, they give away more than Apple will. Apple, like if a developer needs your email address, like that is the only way the only way to sign in with Facebook or Google is to allow that developer to have your actual email address that's on file with either Facebook or Google. And there's no other way around it. So it's like, if you want to use this sign in, you have to, you know, that that's going to be divulged. And there can be other things that they they ask for in that sign in, right? And I'm hoping they add this to Safari. I'm hoping there's a way to do this on the web, too, because it would be great for like people signing up at Mac Observer, right? Or for our MacGygab premium at MacGygab.com, premium, right? Like that would be great because we can do that with Facebook or Google now. But we need your email address for your premium account. And therefore you have to let Facebook or Google give us your email address. And there are other things that you can go and ask for. But no one is doing this in a way that that doesn't share your data if you don't want them to and yet still give you the functionality that you need. So I was pretty stoked about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was kind of setting up for that. I think that they did more than that. And actually, this was pointed out by our pal Kiwi Graham here in our chat room, which where's our chat room? Am I like our chat room is at MacGygab.com slash stream. I think you got that right, man. Yeah. And one of the people in the Pina Gallery, and I say that in the positive sense and that I think a Pina Gallery, somebody everybody should have. Yeah. Right. Oh, man. Unless they're allergic to peanuts, in which case, then I'm mildly allergic to peanuts, but it really I can eat a peanut butter sandwich and I'm totally fine. But I yes, no, without the chat room, like it is such a valuable thing to us and to all of you as listeners, because these folks that and you can join. There's no, you know, you don't you don't have to be an expert at anything to be there in the chat room. You can just have fun with us because you will catch things that we don't. Even if you don't think you're an expert, you will still catch things. And it's so nice to have you folks catching things on the fly for us so that we can correct them right here in the episode and not have to wait a week. So it's awesome, adding all the context. And yeah, yeah, it's good. But so he so he encapsulated kind of what you said is Oauth without Apple solution is Oauth without spilling any other info to the provider. Yeah, I like I like that. That's good. Yeah. OK, so are you telling me that if I use some of their systems, that's why if I go like in one place to like look at a product or something and then I go into another place and I see an ad for it. It's like, how did they know? Well, that's part of that something else. Yeah, it could be. I mean, there's all that tracking is is done either with cookies that they leave behind, but now that people have been, you know, I say people people like Apple have been working to make sure that cookies in Safari are compartmentalized and anonymized in the right way so that they're only there for the things they should be there for and not for tracking you. They also build heuristics like. With JavaScript, I can run a piece of JavaScript. We don't do this at Mac Observer, but I'm just saying in general, if you visit Mac Observer, we could theoretically run a piece of JavaScript that looks at a lot of details about your browser, like say the exact size of your browser window and pixels. We get to get that information and we might actually use it for some things like, you know, which layout of the site should we show you? If you're on a phone, we show you one layout and that sort of thing. But we don't store that data and attach it to your user account. But someone could. We could. We just choose not to because we're not those kinds of people. But, you know, there's a lot of different things like what? How do you have? I think you can even get fonts. But there's like lots of different data points that you can get just about someone's browser. And even if I don't know your email address, I know when you come, we don't know, but we could know when you come back because of just the way you have your browser configured. And and so there's like all of these things that can be used together to track you around the web and they are and and that's what freaks people out. So, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's that's what I got. All right. Yeah, man. What did you have another one? Or should I go again? I don't know. But where are we here? I'm looking. Well, I'll just spit it out here because I have it highlighted. Something I thought was interesting. Is that they made mention that, I guess, multiple vendors are going to be rolling out HomeKit enabled routers. It's next on my list. That's great, man. Yep. OK, well, we're in sync then. Yeah, three vendors or or links this Eero and then they mentioned a cable company, but they said, you know, several cable companies, right? And I think is is what they said for for initial roll out. Well, I got Spectrum on my spectrum. That's it. Yes. OK, cool. Yeah, which is a cable company. So, yeah. So tell me, like, how did you interpret this HomeKit enabled router thing? Um, it can't be a bad thing. I mean, you know, rolling out. I don't think I do anything HomeKit based because none of my. Although I could, I don't because I just followed other paths here. Sure. It took it took people a long time to incorporate HomeKit if they decided to do it at all in their thing. So just having having it available in the router. Now, who is it? Is it the deco that has that kind of the thread thing we were talking about? Yeah, that's right. Yep. OK, yeah. It's a home kit, but they bake their own. I mean, not their own. They baked. Yeah, not thread. The euro has thread. Deco has Zigbee in in some of the skews and the M nine plus. Yeah, that's right. My reflection is just, hey, it's better to have more of this, you know, Internet of Things Smart Home stuff incorporated in your network equipment. Yeah, it's it's interesting, right? Because it it theoretically, these home kit enabled routers will have filters in them to keep home kit devices from sharing data that you don't want them to share with the outside world. And I'm curious to see, I mean, I know it can be done. I'm just curious to see how it's implemented and what functionality it's going to limit, right? You know, is it limiting my ability to use, say, the vendors app to control my my device because it's now because the vendors app can't communicate with the vendors cloud. So does that mean like I just don't know what it means? But I'm with you that it's a good idea. The devil's in the details. I guess that's my my my thoughts on that. Yeah. Um, let's, you know, very quickly, I think it's it's worth saying iPad, the word iPad OS. I was going to say they introduced a whole brand new operating system. Well, no, they really didn't. But they kind of did. They still like, yeah, I mean, on the surface, they did. Right. The iPad is a different device than the iPhone. There are things even prior to yesterday, things in iOS that exist only for functionality on the iPad, like split view and slide over and and those sorts of things, right? They don't exist on the phone. It wouldn't make any sense for them to exist on the phone, especially not the everything but the largest phone, but even there, prob's not. So, um, I feel like yesterday with them, you know, calling this iPad OS, I think that was more of an acknowledgement of where we are than than any major change. It's just, okay, look, you know, the reality is watch OS and iOS and iPad OS and TV OS and Mac OS share a lot of the same stuff at the core. I think they call it foundation or foundation kit or something, right? And then there's all the user interface stuff on top of that that makes it iOS versus Mac OS versus whatever. And and so I think carving out this separate thing that's like, yeah, you know what? There's all these frameworks that are iPad only. Let's just call it iPad OS. That's fine. We're, you know, we're dealing with it anyway. Let's just let's just do that. And and I think it allows them to kind of give a little more love to the iPad. And in terms of of PR, right? Like, hey, there's a new new, you know, version of have you seen the new version of iPad OS that adds X, Y or Z? It won't be confused with, well, do I get that on my iPhone? No, no, no, that's iOS, which is for I guess, iPhone and iPod touch. So I wonder how it's going to impact development of apps moving forward. Because last I checked Dave, for a lot of iOS apps, there's an iPhone version, and then there's an iPad version. And the developer has to make two separate ones, or at least for a lot of the apps that I use is sometimes but also they can make, you know, fat apps, if you will, that are that are both iPad and iPhone, and they just have the different views and user interface elements. Like, there's a lot of apps that I use that look different on each, but it's it I bought one app, you know what I mean? So I think this just this just acknowledges that it's, you know, it's like, it's another checkbox, right? In the in in Xcode, there's the checkbox to build on the Mac now for your iOS app. There's the checkbox to build on iPhone. And then there's the checkbox to build on iPad. I think it's, I don't think it, I don't think it makes anything more cumbersome. At least I hope it doesn't that would be terrible. So. What do you got next, man? You want to do do we do we have anything else to do? We can we have a little more time we could answer a question or two, if we want to do that. Yeah, and I think one of them I may answer actually, but no, the last thing that I just thought was was kind of funny was when they said, oh, now you can read SD cards with the files app. It's like, okay, I mean, I guess that's something to get excited about, right? Oh, no, like, if you're that person that needs those, that's really what's exciting about it. If you're if you are that person, then it's just exciting. If even if you're not that person, no, from sort of the 10,000 foot view, it's like, okay, finally, we're acknowledging that we need to be able to interact with our files at from a file centric view, this app centric view that Apple tried to push as the only way of doing things on iOS for so long, was just flawed for any, anything beyond very simple work. And so acknowledging that by saying, yeah, if you plug an SD card in, that's also available in the files app, like, thank goodness. So I that's that's where I saw that. It's like, an acknowledgement of, yeah, no, no, this is here to stay. We're, we're, we're on, we're on the right path now. So I think so. You want to answer Chuck's question, John? I mean, we change gears entirely before we wrap up the show. Yeah, hold on, let me, let me find my way here. Yes, no problem. You know what I'm going to do while you find your way, I'm going to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers that had stuff coming at least before I before I left. Because for whatever reason, my workflow is like, I really can only do these when I'm at my one computer in the office, but I should fix that. Anyway, it really does make a huge difference to us. All your premium support, if you are interested in able, we would we of course would love it. If you are not, that's okay too. But I want to take a minute, we want to take a minute and thank all of you who are not only interested in able, but whose contributions came in since the last time we did this. So one time contributions, $50 each from Charles from Virginia and from Ken from California. Thank you. You both rock. On the monthly $10 plan, we have Scott from California. Thank you. Tony from Massachusetts, Ken from Honolulu, Michael from Iowa, Dave from Illinois, Clive from West Sussex, Jeff from Indiana, and Joseph from Georgia. Thank you all. And in the biannual group, so $25 every $25 every six months, Mark from Knoxville, Ian from Cardiff, Timothy from Iowa, Jim from Massachusetts, Beth from British Columbia at 35 every six months, Andrew from New Jersey, Monroe from Morgantown, and Steven from Devon. So thanks to all of you, you rock. All right, John, you want to take us to to Chuck? Yes, sweet. This is a good one. I think we may have to brainstorm on this. Well, we'll see. But anyways, Chuck says, a fresh backup of my wife's MacBook Air with a 500 gig, I think it's a 500 gig SSD has been running overnight for 16 hours plus and has only transferred 16 gigabytes of data to the external time machine hard drive using the top left USB port into the power port. My wife's machine is using the most recent Mojave OS. She was near memory capacity. Before she trimmed files and archives, we bought a new one terabyte hard drive to make a fresh time machine backup. The older 500 gig drive didn't have enough space. The new drive is USB USB three compatible and the drive was erased and freshly formatted with the recommended Mac OS extended journal. Before starting the backup, we use the about this Mac storage optimize options. What might be the causes such a slow backup? Should we quit fresh format and simply clone her drive record before going through the cleanup? I got a few options for you to check. So first, yeah, that does sound kind of slow, Dave. I think we agree with that because in theory, if you got a USB three drive, so USB three in theory can go up to 640 megabytes per second, right? So you can do the math sure that the amount that was backed up is pathetic. Now you may not actually see that speed, especially if it's like a rotational drive, because they just can't go that fast in either direction. So it may not support that level of throughput. But what I'm suggesting is that you test the drive itself and see what kind of throughput you get running something else and the something else Dave that I'm going to suggest this something like black magic speed test. Okay, so there may be something wrong with the drive. Even though it's new, it could be defective, it could be your interface, it could be your cable, it could be that USB port. I don't know. So step one, see use a benchmark utility and see the maximum oomph you can get. So that may identify a problem. It could be your backup drive. At the very least, it rules out that as the as the issue, which is smart. Yeah. The second thing is that it could be an issue with the source drive. Fair. So right in that time machine may be seeing corruption or permissions or some weird thing. So run this utility at the very least run this utility first aid on that drive or another repair utility to verify that there's nothing wrong with the source drive. Sure. Yeah, fair. Yeah. So that'd be option number two. Option number three, Dave, is that, well, you know, maybe time machine is trying to tell you something, but you just aren't hearing it. The time machine is not very good at telling you things. So I wouldn't blame that on anyone. Yeah, that's right. Right. However, many utilities, almost everything saves information, especially if something goes wrong, but also something goes right to a log file. Now, unfortunately, since they changed the log file format, you used to be able to go to the console and search on time machine and get time machine messages. Well, you can't really do that anymore because they changed everything. But fortunately, there's a great company out there called Eclectic Light. Howard Oakley is the man. He writes so many good utilities. We talk about him all the time here on the show, and this is what you're about to say is another one. Yep. So there's not one, but two utilities that he offers. So one is called consolation. And as you can probably guess, it's kind of a replacement for the console. So you fire it up, you can specify time machine messages, you can specify the format, and how far back you'd like to look for time machine relevant messages. So I try consolation. There's also a higher level utility that does I think some higher level analysis, and that may be I probably run this first, but it's called the time machine mechanic. Ah, okay. And that will tell you, you know, at a high level, some of the recent activity as far as how much was backed up or if some errors occurred. So it's pretty much what I got for that, Dave. You know, so I mean, I mean, an initial time machine backup usually takes a long time. But no, I mean, his observation is that this amount of data should have gotten copied over long ago. So I yes, ish, right. I mean, if we were time machine is not a block level copy, or it is a file level copy. And what I mean by that is it isn't just going and grabbing raw data chunks from your disk and blasting them over to somewhere else. It's going and reading each file and then writing that file to your time machine destination. So if there are tons and tons of very small files, that can actually be that will be slower than backing up say, you know, a gigabyte of file backing up a gigabyte of data that is one movie file will go much faster than backing up a gigabyte of data that is 5000 tiny little text files, right? One might take, you know, the latter might take 100 times as long as the former, because there's all the setup and overhead of starting to read a file, creating a new file in the destination. Okay, wrapping it up, closing the file on both sides, go to the next one and do it over and over and over again. Whereas with one big movie file, it's just like, okay, open it up and just blast the data. So it's possible that this is actually all normal. And looking like you said, with consolation, et cetera, you might be able to start to see, okay, what is it backing up? And that might help give you an idea of is this all okay? And is it just going to take some time? Because I have, you know, lots and lots of small files on this computer that that I'm that I'm waiting to back up. So that that's all it might be normal. But it seems, I mean, I've seen time machine backups take a very long time. This seems a little more than normal. So I agree. Check you were smart to write in and and doing all the things you mentioned, John, make good, makes good sense to me. Let's rule out the drives. Let's, you know, make sure that hardware isn't the problem, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, you may also want to consider, as I think he suggests, that is maybe use a cloning tool. And actually, that's something that I think both you and I do, Dave, that I make a backup with both time machine and carbon copy cloner. Absolutely. Because you should always have at least you should have more than one backup. Absolutely. And we had we had another question we may get to in the next show that talked about that. And having a single backup is is is not a backup. It's it's a single point of failure. As we call a single point of failure, because that backup gets clobbered. Yeah, you got nothing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I would suggest that you may want to, yeah, consider a alternate tool like carbon copy cloner in addition to use a time machine. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And you know, that that also makes me think about with Catalina and the multiple volumes, like what does a clone look like now, right? Because the clone currently, yes, it it saves the recovery partition. But you know, like it, it doesn't it just clones the one volume. Now, it relatively trivial, I would assume for a clone cloning tool vendor, like, like the folks at Bombay with with carbon copy cloner, you know, Dave Nainian over at SuperDuper, like to clone both. But that's going to like, there's a little bit of different, you know, there's stuff going on there. So yeah, it's it's it things change. This is why they release the developer betas before they even released the public betas. And it's why the entire beta period is called a beta period, because they need people to be get have time to test these things. So it's fun to participate in the betas. But no, that if, for example, you were to install the beta today, like I probably will cloning that, I don't know, like how will carbon copy cloner or SuperDuper deal with that? I don't know. Can't expect them to work on day one, at least not perfectly. So interesting stuff. But we will talk the thank goodness, Mackie Cab will be here throughout all of it. And we will continue to talk and enjoy and, you know, figure out how we're going to do all this together. Because that's that's what that's what we do. Right, John? I think it's time to bring the band back into the mix here. Well, you flew the band out there, man, we are well, it's we had all this great WWDC coverage sponsors. So we were able to, you know, we had a little little extra taw there and we brought the band. So yeah, it's good. It's good. Or did they take the bus? I didn't say we flew the band. We brought the band. Okay. So yeah, I mean, okay, I don't even know where I got it. I don't know where that's gone. Yeah, I don't know where that's gone. I will say, yeah, flights for this were it was crazy, John. And I didn't book. I mean, I booked later than I normally would have, but I still booked like a month ago. It was more than $1,000 round trip to get from, you know, the Boston ish area to the San Jose ish area. And it wasn't any cheaper to go to San Francisco versus San Jose. So I was like, well, I'll just fly into San Jose and I'm 10 minutes from the hotel. But well, that's what I was going to say is like, well, it's San Jose. It's not as big. Wow, that's because you know, I'm doing my flights for for Vegas. No, Chicago Mac stock, right? I'm sorry. Yes, you're right. Chicago area. Yeah. And even though I'm flying out of Bradley, I mean, they're like on the order of like a couple of hundred bucks. Yeah, right, right. If I do Midway or or or D. Yeah, this this should have been normally like current normal prices should have been like somewhere between four and 600 bucks round trip for this trip. And it was it was four digits. And I'm not flying in first class or anything. You know, I feel like I should be for what I paid. But but alas, I was back in in steerage. So I mean, I'm doing my travel now because my understanding is that the sweet spot for a lot of airline pricing is probably two months before your trip. Somewhere much what I'm doing because the event is pretty much happening in about two months. Yeah. So I think if you get too close. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's at the end of July. Right. Yep. Yeah. Like six weeks. But I always heard that that was kind of the sweet spot as far as getting great. So I think so. You think so? I think I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, it depends, right? If there's, you know, what they call an airfare war, then all bets are off, right? Because the prices can drop if, you know, if you've got the airlines sort of playing race to the bottom against each other. But you can't wait around for that unless you're willing to, you know, pay the damages if that doesn't happen, which is most often the case. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, this trip for whatever reason is crazy. I don't know what it was. It's the most I've ever spent on a round trip ticket in, you know, continental U.S. But whatever. Yeah. I mean, I guess it could be supply and demand. I mean, there were a lot of people all go into the same place. Yeah. But like it was the same price to fly to San Francisco or Oakland. Like I looked at all three and it was just, I don't know. I don't know. But what else? Like I had to be here. So it's how it's how goes. Let's see. Where are we here? We want to, well, we want to thank all of you for listening. I want to thank all of our sponsors for the episode. Of course, Experian Boost at Experian.com slash MGG Captera at capterra.com slash MGG PDF pan 11 from smile at smile software.com slash podcast. And of course, as I mentioned a couple of times in the show, our WBC coverage sponsors, I amazing smile again, carbon copy, cloners, same box and direct mail for Mac. All great, great companies that really, truly made a lot of this coverage possible. I want to thank you, John, for I don't know, for for doing, for being able to do this every week with us. It's awesome doing this together. And you can find us. I don't think once during the show, did we mention how to contact us? Feedback at Mackeycap.com is where you can email us. I don't think you did mention feedback at Mackeycap.com. I believe this would only be the first time we've mentioned feedback at Mackeycap.com in the episode. Of course, if you're a premium listener, premium at Mackeycap.com. And you can call us at 224888 geek, which John is 4335. Go to Mackeycap.com, sign up for the newsletter and get the show notes delivered into your inbox. So you've got all the links right there. We've heard from so many of you how valuable you're finding this. And it's great, right? Because you're listening to the show, you're, you're driving, you're jogging, you're walking the dog, you're doing whatever. And you hear that thing and you're like, oh, I'm definitely going to go back and like look at Mackeycap.com and and check that link out. And that's great. But you forget. And then you don't go back to Mac. You don't even remember to go back to Mackeycap.com let alone to click the link. Well, now you don't have to remember because these will be delivered into your inbox every week. And there you go. So check it out. Mackeycap.com. Thanks to Cash Fly, of course, for sponsoring and for, well, for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, our sponsors that aren't in this episode like Eero and Otherworld Computing and Bare Bones and all of that stuff. Thanks to all of you. Thanks to the folks at Apple that worked hard to make all the great stuff that we got to talk about. That's pretty cool. Pretty good in Dub Dub DC, I think, John. Hey! Got any lasting advice for us, my friend? I got some advice for you. Next time, I think you should book your flight a little earlier, Dave, because I think this time around I think you got caught. You might be right.