 Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 776 for November 2nd, 2023, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. Back after a long hiatus that I can't even explain why it happened, this week our guest is one of my favorite recurring guests, Adam Anks, publisher of the long running internet-based email newsletter, Tidbits, you might've heard of it. It's great to have you back on the show, Adam. Thank you, and I have to say, I am sitting here, you actually are across the pond, because there's a pond in my front yard facing west, and I'm in New York. So by definition, you are across my pond. Perfect. We've also been known to accept alcoholic drinks as ponds. The definition is fairly liberal. Well, a few weeks ago, you published an article in Tidbits entitled, iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens. Now, my audience knows I'm an advocate for accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren't good at technology. If you throw in gender along with that, such as a phrase I hear all too often, it's so easy. Your mother could do it. The top of my head pretty much blows off. So I got ready to read your article with a desire to learn any tips you could provide to making the iPhone more accessible to seniors and ready to jump down your throat if you applied that elderly people cannot be technically competent. And I have to say, I was delighted to find that you pushed none of my hot buttons and you gave terrific advice. So can we start with how you explained that this wasn't downplaying the competence of folks over a certain age, like maybe me, I'm a Medicare now for crying out loud? Yeah, yeah. So it's terrible because you're absolutely right that there's no requirement that people over some age somehow like cease to be able to like know how to use a mouse or whatnot. But simultaneously, we have to acknowledge that there are physical and cognitive declines that come with age for, well, pretty much everyone sooner or later. And so it really comes down to individual situations. And so one of the things I was, I tried really, really hard to do because even in the discussions that had sort of triggered this article, people were doing that, you know, well, I'm 75 and I have no trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, of course not, you know, but that doesn't mean, you know, someone who's in their 60s couldn't be suffering early onset Alzheimer's or something like that, you know, like some sort of tremors or... Or tremors, right? I mean, like arthritis in the hands. It can make using mice and tucky boards and stuff difficult. Eye sight can be a problem that you're starting to like bump up the font on your iPhone. Well, yeah, you can do that but you may need to do it a little bit more. And again, not to say that someone who's young might not need to do that too, but it does happen. And so it really just came down to, you know, be sensitive about the fact that there's no guarantees, no nothing that's like gonna be true of everybody but it is worth talking to the person and seeing what they're having trouble with and honestly comparing it with what you know about them. I mean, like, I mean, this was really aimed at people who are helping friends or family. And so, because I mean, let's face it, probably the people who are reading tidbits fall into that category. Well, frankly, they're reflirting tidbits. They're on the older end of the spectrum because they've been doing it for 33 years, just like us. But when you're helping someone, you tend to know what their strength and weaknesses are. You know, that I've been helping my parents and my in-laws for years now with various tech things. And, you know, for the most part, they're just fine. But on the other hand, there's a few things I know. Yeah, I don't expect them to be able to do X, Y, or Z because it's just not something they're gonna be good at. One of the things that I was thinking about when you were saying these are probabilities that these declines will happen to you if you're lucky enough to live long enough. And one of my blind friends says, he says, think of yourself as currently abled. Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. No, actually my wife works as an editor in the, oh my God, I think it's the whole name. The Yang Tan Institute on Disability in the Workplace at Cornell. And so basically it's a group of researchers and outreach people and they, you know, they do tons and tons of stuff about disability in the workplace. And that's one of the things that they're very big on that the disability is really, really widespread. And the one that, there's only one really interesting disability that isn't considered one, which is vision. So you can wear glasses and you get perfect vision. That's not considered a disability. So, but, you know, you know, it's, you know, basically that's the one we've really, really solved. Oh, okay. So you're saying realistically, if you can get perfect vision with glasses, then it's not a disability. Precisely. That's right. One of the things that bothers me is that if you get glasses, nobody looks at you as less. Right. But we still look at people with a hearing aid is, oh, you're old. You know, you're falling apart. And I think we need to get past that. Or like my father-in-law was very resistant to, even using a cane and eventually he wouldn't use a walker. But my mother was like, well, wait a minute, if I get a walker, I can walk faster and more securely and not fall down. Why wouldn't I do that? And if we can get into that mindset, then it's like, maybe she's not disabled because now with a walker, she can walk perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah. So any of that, it is absolutely the case. And as I said, the simple fact of the matter is that some people will be lucky enough that they don't suffer from arthritis or hearing loss or tremors of any sort of that kind of thing. That's absolutely fabulous, but a lot of people do. And so- And if we can learn about how to solve those things and if it ever does happen to us, we're ready to go, but we can help other people. Right. So you had early experience in this area with your grandmother and grandfather, grandpa Bernie and grandma Estelle. Yeah, yeah. They're my grandparents in New York City. And yeah, long, long ago, we gave them an SC-30 and they had a modem and- Oh, actually, did they have a modem? Yeah, they must have had a modem. Boy, that's just gone back a long ways. And the SC-30 was not new. Let me tell you, this was probably back in, no, I don't know, the Performa days or something like that. But yeah, so they were never significant computing people. And but they could do a little, they could do an email and things like that. And that was about it. And then we switched them to one of the gumdrop IMAX when those came out. And that was about the time we got an IMAX from my other grandmother, who lived much more close, and then sort of watched them honestly be able to do less and less. And, you know, my grandma still, you know, she was sharp as attack the entire time. I mean, she did not have mental issues in the slightest in terms of declines. On the other hand, she was physically a disaster. I mean, she couldn't turn on light switches. So, you know, typing completely was right out. You know, she could use the phone if she had memory buttons to push one button on a phone. So, yeah, so like, you know, that was a situation where, you know, as long as Grandpa Bernie was okay and he was barely physically fine, that, you know, she would literally tell him everything to do and what to type and all that. But that's how they'd been driving for years. This was like, that was their relationship. I mean, boy, I don't know that everyone could do that. But that, you know, she'd been telling him how to drive and how to navigate for decades. So, you know, this is how they worked. They were a team. And, you know, eventually when, you know, when he died, she was obviously no way that she could use the computer ever again. So, you know, she didn't. And then my other grandmother, she started to have, you know, started to have dementia. And, you know, it turns out computer use is pretty early on the things to go. You know, that was like she just couldn't figure out how to use the, couldn't remember how to use the computer. This is back in early days of macOS 10. So she could still damage it in ways by moving things around accidentally. And so eventually we just sort of, you know, took it away. Yeah. So again, very sad, but, you know, nowadays, in some ways it's easier because I think iPhones and iPads are more obvious to people who maybe, you know, don't have either the history of just like technology being built into their bones or they, you know, it's more obvious because you're that direct manipulation. I have always said that there's something about the iOS interface that is tapping into our DNA, not learn stuff. And the two examples I'd like to give is hand a very, very small child, like two years old, an iPhone and they'll eventually figure out how to get to photos and start looking at pictures. Likewise, a friend of mine's mother had dementia and they would bring an iPad to her and open up photos and she would look at the photos and zoom in and zoom out and smile and laugh. And it was intuitive to her. She didn't learn it because she couldn't learn anything at that point, but she was very happy with that. And so it's tapped that, you're probably right. It's that direct interface, not the indirect connection that really makes a difference. And I do think, you know, you know, I think we have to be careful though not to go too far also, which is, so I just did something about, you know, talking about the difference between touch ID and face ID because Apple moved all this stuff, you know, like in one you swipe up from the bottom to get control center, and then you swipe down from the top right to get control center. How do you get to the home screen? I'm like, these are not intuitive in any way, shape or form. They're completely arbitrary, completely nondiscoverable. There's no way you'd guess and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, some aspects of the touch interface are great, others are truly maddening. And, you know, I mean, this is, I mean, actually one of the things that comes up in fact is the difference between touch ID and face ID. So, you know, someone who's had a touch ID phone for some years, well, the question becomes what happens when they need a new one? What do you get them? Yeah, now, you know, I went back and forth on this particular, we're kind of jumping in the middle of our agenda, but that's okay, we're fine, we're fine. So there's pros and cons to this. So you've got somebody who's used to touch ID and I'm gonna do what I said I hate. I'm gonna generalize and say that as we get older, we become less plastic in our willingness to accept change. I think there's something to that, but I would also suggest that I think society in general is becoming more resistant to change. I've been seeing this in younger people as well, just like don't want to do it, you know, too much is too much going on. So, yes, I think that's not, it's not an unfair characterization of older people, but I think it's also hitting people at a younger age too, yeah. Well, the example I was gonna give was, my brother had a touch ID phone and he needed a new phone, it was very, very old and he was trying to, I was talking to his wife and his daughter and they were saying, no, we've gotta get him a touch ID phone because that's the only thing he's gonna be able to use because he's not very technically savvy. Bro, you got no mental difficulties at all, but just set in his ways, man, doesn't like tech, doesn't want new tech. And I said, the problem is, look at his age, he's too young, he's gonna outlive touch ID phones and he's gonna have to learn someday. Will he be better at learning that later or today? Maybe he's resistant today, but that is not a curve that's gonna get better over time. Precisely. And you know what, I mean, I have people, you know, some of the folks on tidbits talk, you know, people saying, you know, I'm 96, really not getting another Mac. You know, this one's good for me. Yeah, yeah. And like, yep, that's fair, but wow, if you're 72 or something like that, probably gonna be multiple iPhones in your future. You hope you're gonna outlive that. Yeah, precisely. You started this out by talking about the approach you do when, or you would suggest that we do when talking to somebody about a new phone. What kind of, what is your approach on that? Well, I mean, certainly familiarity is a big one and there's nothing wrong with familiarity. Obviously, given your caveat of the, well, it's gonna happen sooner or later and it's gonna be harder in the future. But the other thing that is worth thinking about is that, I mean, right now, Touch ID phone means an iPhone SE. And, you know, that's basically Apple's smallest phone now. And so one of the other trade-offs that you get that becomes possible when you buy a new phone is you can get a bigger screen. And so simply one of the big advantages is, well, if the screen size or what you can read on the screen is also being an issue, switching to Touch ID or Face ID might be require learning some new stuff. But here's the benefit. Big advantage of that, yeah. Here's the big advantage of that in terms of. I know two women who bought Apple Watch Ultras because they've refused to wear bifocals. Yeah. They're like in their late 40s, early 50s and they don't wanna wear bifocals and they can't see the screen on the smaller watches. And they love it. They're like, look, I don't need glasses. Like, did you see the size of the font on your, you can get a lot more on that screen, but they're perfectly happy. So I should leave alone. Yeah. And people who do that usually have these tiny, tiny wrists and the whole thing's like sticking out on the sides. It's like a ham radio tape to their arm. Yeah. Whatever works, whatever works. So yeah, no, I think that's sort of what's important. And that's kind of why I was emphasizing that, oh wow, it's really important to like talk to the person and see, think about their strengths and weaknesses in terms of like, you know that they're having trouble seeing stuff, then here's one of the reasons why you could encourage them to move up to even one of the big phones, you know, the pluses of the Pro Maxis, you know, that that might be when you, because one of the things Apple does a pretty good job with in accessibility is making, you can make stuff big. Big, and you talking in your article about how to turn on bold text too. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was a big one. For me, honestly, you know, for a long time, I was using wearing contacts and then having to go with reading glasses or computer glasses and distance glasses and sunglasses. And that's why I gave up the contacts because I'd have so many glasses involved. Like I could just wear a pair of glasses. I did the same thing. I did the same thing. I was wearing glasses and contacts and I was like, wait a minute. Why am I doing both again? I did it for years before I made that connection. It took me a long time too. But now I have these, you know, infinitely progressive lenses and blah, blah, blah. It all just works much more easily. But before then, I was really getting into that, you know, I can't read stuff. I was bumping, I was going to the bold text. I was going to bumping up some of the sizes and things like that. And so I get it. Like I know how frustrating it can be when you just can't quite read the damn thing. I have one suggestion. I didn't see in your article, when I started to lose my close vision, I noticed it at work before I noticed it at home. And I realized what was going on. I was using this horrible PC laptop, not horrible being redundant, but it was a terrible HP display and it was super dim. When I came home, I was using an Apple display and at full brightness, the brightness of the screen contracts your pupils. And if you know anything about photography, you know that a smaller aperture gives you a longer depth of field. So more is in focus. So the brighter you set your screen on your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac, the smaller your pupils are going to be and the better you're going to be able to focus. Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense. The one thing that I have also run into, which I find fascinating is again, as this happens in middle age for a lot of people, is sensitivity to light either high or low. Right, it can go the other way. That can be a terrible thing. So I like things to be bright. I do not like dimness, whereas my wife's the exact opposite where she does not want stuff super bright. And I'm often coming into the kitchen and turning on a second set of lights because I can't quite see, but she's obviously comfortable that way. And so we're often different in that regard. Josh Senors, who used to work with on tidbits, same thing, he really did not like bright things being super bright. So I guess that's the list of questions, right, is to say. Precisely. Let me turn the brightness up for you and see whether that helps you see better or does it bother you? Right, right. That would be an approach to take. I do find it interesting because Apple keeps pushing how like, we're making this brighter every time. I'm like, well, I'm sure some people appreciate that, but really that's not my issue. What about other things you talked about, arthritis, motion problems? So well, before that, the funniest one that actually that someone, a woman said that her parents had run into as they got barely significantly older was their skin stopped working with touch interfaces. So it's a capacitive touch interface. And like, I can't even quite envision what's involved with that. Maybe sort of a dry certain kind of dryness. I actually lick my finger before I touch, touch ID on my Apple keyboards at them. Okay. So yeah. I can't pay with Apple pay without licking my finger. So face ID for the win there. Right. Precisely just gets you one less thing you have to touch. And less licking of my screen and stuff. Do not be licking the screen. It's not sanitary. I'm sure. I wash my hands a lot. Well, what was it that, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think, one of the, one of the books they had, they'd sent off the telephone sanitizers. It was a whole class of people. Job that they had. So yeah, so I think the, yeah, arthritis, you know, that's an interesting one because the, again, you never quite know what's involved. And so that's one where I think you'd not just have to ask someone, but you'd have to like watch them and see what they have trouble with. Are they moving? Yeah, precisely. I could see different kinds of keyboards and pointing devices being better or worse, but I can't predict what they'd be, you know, like. Steve's dad has neuropathy, so he can't, he doesn't have a sensation in his fingertips. And so he won't even try an iPhone. So that's out of the picture. But when he's on his Mac, it's really tedious to watch him type and he's a dedicated, dedicated one password user. Just like he's done testimonials for the show. He's 86 now and he's just as happy as he was at 80 with it. But he, we were watching him, we were replacing his Mac and Steve said, you know what, I'm gonna buy you, I'm gonna pay for it. I'm gonna buy you a new keyboard and you bought him a Touch ID keyboard and it took him quite a while to get, understand how to do it. He has to hold one hand with the other hand and lay it down. He is in love with Touch ID because now he doesn't have, we gave him a 75 character password with a goat in the middle of it to make sure it's secure. And now he doesn't have to type it and he is so happy. So that's where maybe somebody with arthritis would actually be better off with Touch ID as long as they don't lick their finger first. Well, and also I would say it is actually worth investigating other keyboards. So I'm a big, big, big clicky keyboard kind of guy. I like my DOS keyboard. I mean, I get, and I'm old school. Like I don't, I don't, I get the impression that like man, keyboards have gone seriously niche. You can get them with, you know, 17 different switch types and LEDs under them. And, you know, they can pulse and all that kind of stuff. I don't do any of that stuff. But, but just like that big, old Apple extended keyboard feel might be better for some people than the really low, low travel key is that and are all of Apple's keyboards now. I can actually feel it. Yeah. I did something funny. I installed a menu bar app called Clack. Starts with a K. It gives you clicky keyboard sounds on a regular keyboard. And I swear it makes a difference. I use it on my MacBook Air because the keys are a little too mushy for me. I want it to be more clicky. And now I can make it sound clicky. I swear it's easier to type on now. You know, it may be one of those things would be interesting to do some true like human factors research on that sort of stuff, but it's entirely possible that there's just a little bit of an auditory pathway. That there's somebody, two different MacBooks, one with this Clack thing installed, one without same identical keyboard save. We're testing these two different kinds of keyboards. Which one are you more comfortable typing on? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I find tricky with like, taping speed is like, typing speed is all one of those like, oh, type this passage. Oh, I don't know how to do that. Like, that's something from high school. You know, where you would actually type a piece, you know, type something from a one piece paper into a two paper. So like, I compose. Like, I can never tell you how fast I type because it's how fast I'm thinking about what I want to say at that particular moment. So you're like, I'm a fast typist, I think, but I don't really know, you know. So, so yeah. But again, all the variables. So, you know, mice versus trackpads. There's some funky, funky stuff still out there. Trackballs are still available. Not very many, but they still exist. I use this thing called a contour designs roller mouse, which is a bar that goes slides back and forth and rolls. I saw that ages ago. Yeah. It's been around forever. I mean, it goes back to one of the early, was it the outbound laptop? One of the, one of the super early, like Mac portable, out, out, you know, laptops back in the day. Use that for the first time. But it works, works fine. But it's, you know, it puts the pointing device right in front of the space bar. So you're not going off to the side to use something else. That's, that's my thing. It actually like laptops better. Cause again, trackpads right in front of the keyboard wrap it off the side. I hate the trackpad on laptops being right in front of me. I'm a huge trackpad fan, but it's because I have an external one. So it's more comfortable out than, than kind of trying to bring my fingers in front. But let's, let's go back to focusing on the pun intended on the, on the iPhone. So you give specific, specific instructions on how I like to increase the, the tech size and bold text and you've got great screenshots. Of course, this whole article is linked in the show notes. You, you got into one for, you talked about reduced transparency and increased contrast. Talk, talk a little bit about what those do and why those are important. So increased contrast is, it's again, one of the, one of those things you just sort of have to see to believe. I mean, like, it's just, it makes that really like, you look at it like, oh, wow, everything pops a little better. And this is actually important that this guy who used to write for us a while back, Charles Moorer, he and his wife are, are vision specialists. He was a photographer. She's actually a researcher in vision stuff. And, and so one of the things that he pointed out in some stuff was that the human eye is designed to see contrast. And we actually care about contrast more than detail. So, you know, if you, I mean, there's an old tidbits article I could find probably and send you where he showed, where he illustrates this. You know, you look at two photos, one with more detail, one with more contrast and you're gonna, you're drawn to the one with more contrast. So for any kind of scenarios where you're like, your vision isn't just not as sharp as it should be, bumping up that contrast to the increased contrast switch can make the whole thing a lot easier to see. Cause Apple likes to feather stuff. Like they like these smooth transitions between, between objects and stuff like that. I just check it on and I like it. See? Yeah. So just anybody who's playing along and not looking at the show notes right this minute, it's settings, accessibility, display and text size. And then there's a bunch of options, one of which is reduced transparency. Increase contrast. I'm sorry, increased contrast. Yeah. And it basically just makes the light gray a little darker gray and the dark gray, a little darker gray and the text a little darker. I might leave that on for a little while and see what I think about that. Yeah. So what is reduced transparency do then? So reduced transparency is another one of these things that Apple likes doing. Or like, oh, we wanna pretend that all these things are like sort of translucent pieces of plastic. And so that when you have one thing over another thing, you can kind of see through it. And that can be a problem again, just it just kind of muddy stuff for some people. And it doesn't really, in my mind, it doesn't really ever improve anything. That I don't believe in the iPhone interface that it's actually helpful to believe that you're on top of something from a functional standpoint. I don't think it's helpful on the Mac either when it comes to how to do it. No, I don't think so. And I turn it off. I actually turn it off all the time because I take screenshots, right? So it's screws with your screenshots because- Oh my gosh, I never thought about that. That's exactly what I need to do. Yeah, because I want my screenshots to be gray in the background or whitish, lightish color anyway. Whereas who knows what it's on top of, the screenshot is on top of, it could be half yellow and half blue. Right, right. Just because that's the window that's behind it. So yeah, reduced transparency, I actually encourage people to turn off, certainly for documentation purposes, but just see what you think because I think the whole thing just looks a little crisper in terms of not having whatever bleeding through. I'm looking for it on the Mac now. I'm not paying any attention to you because I'm gonna go turn this off. Turn it off right now. Reduce transparency, boom. Well, let me increase contrast while I'm at it. Ooh, that's a little- On the Mac, it's a little OS7-ish. Yeah, yeah, the bar is there. It's a little excessive. The one thing you'll notice immediately reduced transparency is the menu bar stops being, it just gets a gray background. Oh, you know what? I'm not gonna do it because that's gonna ruin all the cool new features in bartender five that let you have these different colored tints of your menu bars. At least until I'm done doing my screen cast about bartender five. Yeah, so in any event, so those are two that I actually, increased contrast depends, reduced transparency, honestly, I think it's worthwhile shutting off for most people. I don't think it adds anything and it just makes the whole interface a little bit, I don't know, coherent in some ways and unpredictable. You know that this is always gonna be this color rather than, well, whatever's behind it's now changing the color. It's not bad enough that they made every window look identical, but then they make it look different just based on what's behind it. So you really can't recognize it. One of my favorite things, oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say that I noticed I'm always amused when I'm seeing someone writing something that has screenshots and the screenshots are like bright pink because I think they just don't know. Like they don't really see it, but I'm like, wow, you had a hell of a background on there, dude. You had your Barbie background up. That's right. Now I'm wondering if you've been mocking my screenshots all these years. Well, anyway, moving on. In this category, I've talked about this on the show before, but one of my very few changes I make on an Apple TV is in accessibility, display, focus style. You can turn on high contrast and that puts a white box around whatever's been selected. You ever look at the Apple TV and you're like, I don't know which thing I've got selected? Oh, oh, I'm glad you told me about that because I don't know what it is. Some of these apps, right. You just can't tell. Like they make it enough bigger, but the Apple TV app in particular is terrible. I'm like, I have no idea. I mean, I'll actually literally move so I can see something change. Absolutely, it puts a white box around it. So accessibility, display, focus style, high contrast. Yeah, and I think one of the lessons of this is that everyone should go into accessibility settings and just play. Turn them on, see what happens, because oh man, some of these are just better. Like we are not recommending this focus style thing on the Apple TV because oh, we're old or we have bad vision or anything like that. It's because it's a bad interface. Yes, yes. I mean, it's as simple as that. They did a bad interface and it is not clear enough to people who are highly technical and completely aware of what's going on. That's a hint, that's a hint that you did it wrong. That's a good idea to do that. On the other hand, make sure you tell them to leave, I don't know, four to five weeks open in your schedule to work your way through all of the accessibility settings. Yeah, right. I know you remember when I did my iOS 11 settings mind map, that was like 80% of my graph was accessibility. It is insane. I thought about doing it again, but I don't have that much time left. I'm 65, I'm not trying to get it done in time. You certainly wouldn't finish it before iOS 19 or 18, whatever the next one. Exactly, and on my post I promised I would never update this, so I gotta stick to that. So let's see, oh, one of the other things that intrigued me that you talked about in the article was rearranging the home screen and making that more simplified. And I had never thought of doing this for somebody. Yeah, so this is again, I think a little bit more of frankly a help for someone who was having some cognitive declines, but maybe not necessarily. So one of the problems you run into an iPhone is that there's just too much. Like there's a lot of stuff there, even if you don't have a ton of apps and let's face it, anyone who's been using the iPhone for a while probably has a fair number of apps even if they didn't really want to. And I do, I'm seeing pushback. People don't want to get another app, you know? I mean, I've kind of, I'm kind of done. I'm like, yeah, I've got so many apps, what's another one? I don't care, you know? I did a keen install on my iPhone this time. Oh. And I've been downloading them when I need them. And I can't really tell the difference. Yeah, the app library was brilliant for just like, yeah, fine, they're over there, whatever. I search for everything anyway. So, yeah, so, think of it as, I think the home screens is dashboards, right? I mean, they are. But there's some things that you use all the time. The top four should be on your dock. iPhone, I guess you can have more, obviously you can have more on the iPad. But that's the point of it. Like it's always there. Those are the most popular, you know, the most common things to use. And you want to make sure- So if you go out with the person uses the most. But if they don't ever use it as a phone because they have a landline, then take the phone out. Take the phone off, precisely. And, you know, but maybe photos or messages, we know whatever it is they use, totally fine. And then sort of the next level down is the first home screen. Because those are the things that you see every time you unlock the phone. And so, that's a fair amount of space. You know, you can definitely put, the things the person probably use it in. For many people, that may be all that you really need. You may not need to get into a second screen. But, you know, if there's those secondary apps that, yeah, oh yeah, I need this every now and then because it's how I access my bank or, you know, I have to use customer support to get to the cable company or something like that. Those kinds of weird little apps that you need every now and then, those are the kinds you could put somewhere else. And it's probably still good having them visible. They don't have to go search for them. I think search is generally not a good thing to rely on when you're helping someone else. And you're just like, oh, you could just search for it? Yeah, because that requires learning that gesture and figuring out where to type and typing and knowing the name. Right, right. And sometimes they change the names too, you know, like every now and then apps. Yes, the one you downloaded is name something else on the app. Right, right, precisely. So I really like the idea of doing that. And then within those spaces, thinking about what organization makes the most sense. And it could be by location. It could be by name. Or, you know, this is one that I, it's a little funny, but my wife thinks this way completely, which is by color. You know, my blue apps are over there. It's a blue app, you know? I'd love to tell the story. My friend, Narajah and I were working on some web development together and we were in different offices and we were constantly on the screen sharing calls. No, we weren't screen sharing. We were just on the phone. And we realized after like a year of working together that he and I think completely differently about finding something on screen. He said to me, he was telling a story about his father and he said, I told him to click on Eagle Mail. And I said, Eagle Mail? What are you talking about? What's Eagle Mail? Look at the, it's not true now, but the Mail icon had an eagle on it for many, many years. I literally never noticed it. And the way I think is in Cartesian coordinates. So when I was talking to him, I would say look in the upper left-hand corner. And when he was talking to me, he'd say look for the blue icon. Neither of us were communicating at all. So we had to go, okay, I need to talk in color. You need to talk in Cartesian coordinates. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, this is, I mean, this goes way back to when words started to do like icons on toolbars without names. And, you know, and they're like, I'm just like, I don't see them. I literally don't even see them. I could not tell you what they look like. Without the words. Yeah, like I only need the words. I don't think in pictures at all. And so, you know, so like, again, everyone's different. Don't assume the person's like you. Right, don't assume the person's like you and, you know, and, but you can, you can usually meet them somewhere, you know, with helping them, you know. Which one of these is male and they say the blue one, then you know they're Tanya. And if they say the one that says male under it, then they know it's you. Precisely, precisely. And, you know, I mean, and that's partly like why I do actually search for some things, because I'm enough of a word person that I think in words and it's not really a big deal for me to type a couple of characters and get the word to come out. Do you ever have that brain fart moment though, where you go to do the, and you're just complete blank. You have no idea what the app is called? Like it's just gone today? Not with apps or things that I'm doing like that. Where I have that, and I'm actually quite put out about this, is playing music on a home pod. I cannot think of artists' names, album names, song names, basically at all. Like I don't, I don't, I can't, there's so many of them that I can't pull them out. And like I don't, I don't, I don't even know like what I want to listen to necessarily. So you have to go with a genre like 80s rock or something instead? Sometimes that, what I'll more do is like they'll be an artist, I'll be playing certain set of artists regularly and I'll default to one of those, because they're the only ones I can remember. I mean, I'm, you know, again, I'm of the age where you used to like flip through the albums or, you know, look at all, you know, look at your rack of CDs. And I needed those kind of memory aids to say, oh yeah, I do want to listen to such and such, who I didn't, like I didn't think I wanted to listen to it, but I, once I see it, I know. Oh yeah, Peter Gabriel will be perfect right now. But like, you know, like I couldn't- Tomorrow Peter Gabriel will come to you. Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. So yeah, so it's, it's really kind of a problem. And of course the problem is, is that the more that I can only think of the certain set that I'm listening to, like, oh man, I'm really bored with these ones, the only ones I listen to. My solution is I put on a podcast, so. So yeah, so it's a perfect, it's a perfect example though of like how different people's brains work or don't work with a retrieving data. Yeah, yeah. So you did, you did some other things on simplifying the home screen. I was really intrigued with being able to create buttons for who somebody wants to call or text. How did, how did you do that? Well, so yeah, this is another one where this goes back to the whole like visual interface, right? That knowing kind of where to find something when it's moved around. So think about messages, you know, if your message is anything like mine, I don't know how many hundreds of conversations are in that list, right? So you only really notice the ones at the top. Right, right. And if I have to go down more than a scroll or stew, like I'm just gonna start typing and like try to find it again. Hope it works. So that's, you know, that works for me, but for someone who has just ended up with these things organically, but they don't really have that spatial sense of how to search this list visually, you, in messages, you can pin certain people or groups. And that's a really nice thing to do. So that, you know, I have Tanya pinned, so she's always in the upper left corner. The only problem with that is, is that you have to make sure you then know to look at your people because they're not in the list. Where's Tom Merritt? Can't find, oh yeah, I pinned him. Now I can't, there he is. Precisely. So, you know, so it can be good. Many people change their profile photo and then you can't find them again. That could be an issue too. I'm, yeah, I'm, yeah, precisely. You never know, like, oh, that's right. But so I think that, you know, again, trying to keep things in predictable places is a big help to some kinds of people. And so, pinning stuff in messages. So I thought, well, that's kind of cool. You can pin stuff in messages. Maybe you can pin stuff in mail too. No, you can't. Or in contacts, or in anything else. Like your favorites, but that's emails from those favorites, not them. Right, it's not, it's not, yeah, precisely. So, I am completely, I'm actually not even a big fan of shortcuts. I don't really like shortcuts. But we've already decided we're gonna do a whole episode on everything we hate about shortcuts, right? Yes. But I was like, this has got to be something shortcuts can do. And, and so, you know, so like, yeah, it turns out it is actually really easy to make a home screen icon that could be just, you could just do one per person if you wanted to get, you know, if you only had three people total or you could do just one for, you know, like make, create mail. And then it pops up a list of the people and you tap the name and then it creates a message to them. The people being the people you write to the most often. Right, because the kinds of, in the situations I'm thinking about, you know, again, you know, like the grandparents I've worked with, you know, when they did do email, they were probably writing to six people. You know, like, there was just, this was not, they weren't doing email per se. This was, you know, writing to this person, to that person and, you know, and that was it. You know, these relatives. So, and you know, they might conceivably receive mail from someone in reply, but that was, they weren't ever going to initiate more mail to that person or that address. So this was just trying to make it very easy to get back to the three, five, eight people that they would ever want to actually initiate mail to. And that screen, that shortcuts thing is in the, in the tidbits article and it's super simple and easily modified by literally you really can figure it out. I don't know. Even if you hate shortcuts. It's not on the Mac, right? This is on the phone. This is on the phone. I might have a chance on the phone. I've never gotten a shortcut to work on the Mac yet. I will admit not me either. We will not go into the particular problems we had, but yeah, you're telling me all this, you can't get the shortcut. I'm like, oh, well, don't use it on the Mac. That never works. Yeah, he was like, I don't understand. I've got this thing working. Then I said, it was a Mac. He goes, oh, never mind. So now we do highly recommend downloading executable code from the internet, from any source you find and installing it on your devices. No, but we know Adam and we know it's gonna be great. I'm definitely gonna try that. Yeah, it's worthwhile. And you know, again, very specific use for specific people, but something could be, you know, could be, and the idea behind it again is a simple one, but it's the provide me a menu of actions. And you know, that might actually be not a terrible thing to do in certain other cases too. So I could imagine that, you know, someone just not like getting the concept of like finding apps or whatever, and you could actually give them a menu. They could tap one thing and it would just list out the names in a text menu of the apps. Maybe I need that for those days. I can't remember the name of an app when it disappears on me. Well, that's because you don't see by color. You know, if you just looked at the blue apps, you'd be fine. I'd be fine, but Adam, be fair, all apps are blue. So, you know. But it is true. I have looked at that and man, there should be some more variability at app icons and colors because they all look. You get a green one. You're like, oh, I can see it. You also, you also had another suggestion. I liked was editing their address book to simplify it. Yeah, so this is something that, I mean, it is, again, probably increasingly a problem, honestly, because, you know, people were professionals. They retire. They take their address book, which includes every person they ever communicated with during their busy professional life. And suddenly they, you know, are now only talking to friends and family. And, you know, 10 or 15 years later, they've still got this address book with, you know, 500 people in it. All of whose addresses and phone numbers have changed anyway, because, and they were work colleagues or contacts. I'm positive that I don't know 1,263 people today, but I have that many contacts. Precisely. So, you know, like, it's a little bit like going through, going through, I mean, I don't know. I've had this a number of times where my family would tell me, like, they need to clear up space on their computer. And so we'll go through their files or we'll go through their photos or things like that, because people often end up with, like, mega duplicates of photos. And so this is a little bit like that. You can think of it as content gardening. You know, so you're just going through and it's like, oh yeah, I am never, I don't even know who that is. I am never going to talk to so-and-so again, you know, so-and-so passed away. You're like, all of those kinds of things, get them out of there, because it's not going to help you. And all it's going to do is confuse you later on when a search brings up five Peters, you know, like, oh, which one was it, you know, suddenly, whereas, you know, and again, it's a little bit like you were saying with, you know, with a touch ID switch is, you know, like, is it going to be easier in 10 years to do this? No, probably not. So, you know, like take the time and clean up your, clean up your contact list now, and then you'll be able to work with it more fluidly in the future. Do you change people's names, like change it to Sun, or? I don't usually recommend that. Abigail Van Buren. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I would actually always recommend making things familiar, but probably, you know, but usually in such a way that you're not going to lose the search. So, you could actually mess around a little bit with like the, there's the nickname field, or, you know, or ways like that, you know, like, Abby versus Abigail, that's not going to be a problem. But, you know, when a person's name is Francis, but everyone calls him Buddy, you know, you know, like, yeah, you probably should leave the Francis in there, you know, at some, you know, but put Buddy in as well. You know, that's, that's enough of a change where someone else would have no chance of ever, ever figuring out what you meant. Right, right. Now, let's talk about text input. You, you talked a little bit about dictation. I'm a big fan of dictations. I mean, it's one of those things, the only problem I have with dictation is that as a writer, I want it to be perfect. And it just, it just does things. So I'm like, no, I would never say that, you know, and I would punctuate correctly. I have to turn off the punctuation because it does the punctuation just wrong. So the latest version on, I dictate on 15 Pro and on my Apple Watch Series 9, and that's where it's supposed to be doing it and on device now and everything. And the punctuation is just bizarre. I mean, it's, auto punctuation, I don't think it works at all. I mean, it'll just like put a full stop in the middle of a sentence that is now it makes no sense. Right, right. You know, like I don't, I don't get it. One of the things that is absolutely the case, you don't see this so much when you're dictating in messages because you tend to do short things and then just send them. I dictate sometimes in an app where it's just like free form text and like it's more like I'm dictating for three or four minutes, kind of a journaling kind of app. And I will see it go back and fix stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty fun. I mean, I really, and it bugs me too because like, oh, you got that word wrong. And I'm like, but I'm gonna like, I'm gonna wait because you'll get it right. You know? Yeah, I've been trying to give you a steve of that is if you give it a minute, a lot of times it'll go back and it's like, it picked up the context and went back and fixed it. And that does work really well. But a lot of people are really resistant to doing dictation and other people. Yeah, and I don't, I mean, I don't know why they're resistant to it. I mean, some of it is that it just never is, it's never exactly what you want, right? It's always gonna make some level of mistake or like I was communicating with someone in messages, using dictation last night and it used the word gunna, G-O-N-N-A. Oh, it did. Oh gosh, I would never type gunna. Like if you wait, it pained me that it used the word gunna. I didn't quite notice earlier. And I'm, you know, I mean, like yes, I probably said gunna, but I meant going to, you know? So. If you go to hell, it's gonna be having dictation do that to your life for an editor like you that's so precise in your use of language. That's just the worst thing ever. So in any event, so yeah, so I think there are people who like to, but I really do encourage the use of it because even for someone who's a fairly good typist on an iPhone or an iPad, the dictation is just gonna be a lot faster. And. The one problem I'd worry about with recommending it for someone with any kind of motor control problems is that if it does make a mistake getting the cursor back to the right point, even by pressing and holding on the spacebar and using it as a trackpad, it's still dicey. Yeah, yeah. It's not easy. Yeah, editing is editing is tough, but is it any, but the problem is, is you're gonna end up doing that anyway because all, if you've got motor control issues, you're gonna be making a ton of mistakes. Yeah, you might make them in the backup and fix them right away instead of having to move the cursor. And then you got to remember, now that the dictation stays on, you have to remember to put the cursor back at the end of the sentence in order to keep going. The other thing that I see people struggle with is knowing which of the microphones to use. So like, if you're in messages, there's a microphone right next to where the text field is, but there's another one in the bottom right of the screen. The bone in the bottom right of the screen is dictation. The other one is record audio. So I see people make that mistake. Is that, is that audio when still there in the iOS 17? I sort of want to. I'm looking at it. You're looking at, okay, I'm using my iPhone as a camera, so I can't look at it. The, yeah, the audio messages and messages have always bugged me, you know, like that just strikes me as sort of, you know, that's wrong, don't do that. Hang on, hang on, this just in. Sorry, I'm dictating. If you tap the microphone in the text field now, it enables dictation. Oh, okay. So I'm going to hold it to record. Let me see. I don't think so, I think it's just a tap. Okay. So that's the thing is like, so now they kept it there. So you get two of them, but they do the same thing. That might help. And the other one where you, other place we get two is in Safari, because you can do the voice search in the search field, or you can type, you can do dictation, which inserts into the search field. The difference is whether the voice search automatically enters your search as well. So you're saying if, oh yeah, because you have a microphone in the search field. Right. I'm sorry, in the search slash URL field. And then the one in the bottom right, you're saying the one that's in the search field, it'll hit enter when you stop. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically do the search, whereas the one in the keyboard just types what you say. So yeah, I'm glad you said that, because I thought the audio messages thing was always problematic, like in the sense of like, well, but you don't know what the person said, you don't know if it's like an appropriate time to listen to it, it's just like, no, don't do that. It's a story so long, it's better in voice. I do like to do that. I have a friend who, I don't know what it is she's doing, but we use telegram for communication mostly, and you'll see so-and-so recording dot, dot, dot. And she's like, bump that button, and it happens all the time. And nothing ever comes out, so she eventually notices, but it might be like an hour later. Yeah, who knows what's gonna happen if she actually ever sends. I find people resistant to dictation saying, I don't wanna look like an idiot. I don't wanna look like a crazy person. You'll look like a crazy person if you dictate to your phone. It only happens if you talk like a crazy person. Yeah. So it is true that you have to think a little bit about what you're saying. And oh, the worst part is when you're like, I'm driving and Tanya's dictating messages to her phone, but I wanna edit them. And I'm like, don't say it that way. It triggers all the editor-editor instincts in me. And of course she's going to just send because that's the whole point of it. Just to do it quickly. It's even harder when you're driving and whatnot. The car's moving so she can't type as easily as she would otherwise. But yeah, so it is- To be clear, you're driving when this is happening. I'm driving and she's texting. So that's the thing is I can't even say anything, right? Cause I'll interrupt what she's saying or my words might even get into it. So I'm just sitting there going. My biggest problem is my son is 33 years old and he still thinks it's hilarious to yell diarrhea in the middle of whenever I'm texting when I'm dictating every single time. Wow. 33. Some people never grow up. It's still funny. It's still funny. Now I've started to do it to other people because it is pretty funny when you do it. I think the big picture of what you've been talking about here is kind of a rule of thumb I use with people is look at someone you're communicating with as your customer. You want them to be able to communicate with you. You need something from them. And so if you figure out how they want to communicate that's gonna be better than trying to tell them they should communicate the way you want to communicate. So you talked about a grandparent to a grandchild learning that they don't use the telephone anymore. Step one. Number two is email, maybe, maybe not. Texting, one of my favorite things is as an elderly person we have a tendency to say goodbye like to sign off on a text message but anybody under 30, 40 years old would never do that. That would never happen. You just stop talking. Yeah, I think it's very important to meet people where they are because it takes two to tango. It's as simple as that. And what's funny is that I think we usually think about all these other things as like, oh, how would the older person who might have these issues what we do to meet them? But realistically it goes both ways. Again, if they want to talk to a teenager, phone isn't gonna work, email really isn't gonna work either. But simultaneously they're probably not gonna do Snapchat. The grandchild or the grandparent probably won't do Snapchat. So that halfway might be right here in my message. Yeah, so I think that's, again, that's a little bit of that conversation. And in the case of the grandchild, talking to the parents and saying, so how am I actually gonna be able to get to this kid? I also think about time of day too. Steve's mom is in her early 80s and very tech savvy and she has started to use messages more because she knows she gets more immediate response. But I also know that if I email her first thing in the morning sometime before nine o'clock, I'll get a response. If I email her in the afternoon, it might not be till later that day. And then she feels all apologetic because she may be waiting an hour for a response to something that didn't matter. But if I can do it in the morning, that's when she checks her email. So I get a sense of that. One of the most interesting things I read about this cross-generational communication was an article talking about words we use. Notice what a younger person says if you say thank you, they will never say you're welcome. They'll say no problem. And even if you complain, they say no problem. It's like, no, it really was a problem. What is this phrase? But what young kids hear this article claim is that what young people hear when they hear you're welcome is they hear you're welcome. They hear sarcasm. Oh, really? And so we could be miscommunicating when we're both being completely polite on either end of the age spectrum there. I did see something, I think it was Maven Seth Godin talking about this, where he actually recommended it's my pleasure or something like that. That was sort of a way to get around like the no problem or you're welcome being weirdly. That's very nice. Yeah, right, right. Another one I've heard lately is I appreciate you. And it seems out of context, but it always makes me feel really good. I think that, I don't know if it started there or it was just popularized there. I believe that's a Ted Lasso. Is it? Yeah, yeah, because the Ted Lasso character says I appreciate you a lot. Yeah, interesting. So that's my guess on that one. It's my pleasure, I really like that. That's gonna make people feel good. Yeah, and the other one that actually I know about, but I refuse to cave to, apparently young people are perturbed by punctuation at the end of texts. Oh dear. Like if you put a period at the end of your sentence in a text, that's like, you know, you're mad or you're clipped, you know, clipped speech. You know, that kind of thing. It'd be as bad as a period at the end of a bullet in a list of bullet points when you read it. How do they feel about exclamation points? I hope that's okay, cause I'm a big fan. I think exclamation points are pretty heavily used now. So that's, you know, but again, in the right place. But yeah, apparently periods are like complied disapproval, et cetera, et cetera. Again, I'm like, no, it's punctuation. Get over yourself. We could do a whole episode on language and punctuation, but we better cut this off. This has been fantastic. I highly recommend people sign up for the tidbits newsletter if nothing else because it's a great resource. I always find something interesting to read in it. And this article is linked in the show notes with lots of screenshots where the background is not pink, turned by Adam to explain the different things that he does and get that shortcut from you. And so if people want to find it, it's at tidbits.com and it looks like you're pretty not on meta products, but can be found on mastodon. I see tidbits at mastodon.social and adamanks at mastodon.social. Are those good spots? Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine. I'll see everything that's posted there. Yeah, I've pretty much decided that I don't do big company social media. I mean, meta is problematic in so many ways and Twitter, well, I don't even want to start. I'm looking at meta now going, hey, it's not as bad as Twitter. You know, I actually had that issue too. For a long time I was like, well, Twitter's kind of a cesspool and I don't approve, et cetera, et cetera. But at least it's not meta, at least it's not Facebook. And at least not Instagram. And now I'm like, oh man, when, yeah. I still haven't brought, I haven't still have not come to the point where I can use the letter X without, well, I haven't used it yet. I've actually mostly just done the service formerly known as. Refer to as X Twitter. Cause then it's insulting. I like it. All right, we should probably cut this off. As always, this is super good time, Adam. Thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chitchat Across the Pon Light. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the PodFeed podcast. 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