 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 875 for Monday, June 7th, Special Keynote and State of the Union Edition 2021. Folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we usually answer your questions, share your tips, share your cool stuff found with the goal being each of us learns at least five new things. Today, though, we have a bit of a special off-cycle episode because today, Monday, June 7th, 2021 was the first day, is the first day of Apple's WWDC 21. And we watched the keynote and we watched the State of the Union and we have a lot of thoughts swimming in our heads. So we're going to talk to you about those here as usual in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Travel Connecticut, this is John F. Braun and our special guest. Today, we have, yes, joining us is, well, let's see, he taught three different generations how to program. He's written 30 books, including the Macintosh Programming Primer. He is currently the executive editor of the loop. Dave Mark, thank you so much for joining us for this special conversation today. My great pleasure and honor, really. It's great to have you here, man. I can't believe we've done this show as long as we have and haven't had you on. Let's put it that way. Well, you know, I've learned so much about podcasting from doing the Del Rump report. You probably didn't want me before. Okay, well, that's fair. No, I'm acceptable, I think. You are acceptable. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. All right. So we've got lots to talk about here, but let's start with first impressions. Dave, hot takes from the keynote and or State of the Union today. Yeah. First, I'd say it was so rich, so much to absorb. I've watched so many keynotes over the years, and this was an incredible keynote. It started weird to me. Like I felt like I was on mushrooms or something. Just it was like a psychedelic, weird, odd, open. I'm used to that sort of Tim Cook walks out on stage and says, good morning. And that's the thing, right? And that's right. This was like weird. You're like, well, that was that was the stuff that was in the the at home dub dub DC kit that they sent everybody, right? That's right. That's exactly right. There were a few things that I really, really loved. I know we're going to talk, you know, in detail about all this stuff, but I loved the new the Safari redesign was super interesting to me. I'm a fan of efficient design and they clearly somebody got it in their heads that we're really going to try to make the most of the screen real estate, all that stuff. We'll talk about it. The the OCR stuff they're doing, the optical character recognition of, you know, you put up an image and then it grabs the text and then you can click on the text and select it. All that good stuff. The thing I forget what it's called, but where you can universal, whatever, where you can just use your keyboard and your mouse and and use it on your Mac, use it on your iPad without any extra setup. Wow. Yeah, that's continuity on another level. Yeah. Yeah. I could go on and on and on, but universal control. Yeah, that's universal control. But John, what's your hot take here? Yeah. So when I saw universal control, I was like, hey, it's auto sidecar, which I think it really is, right? Yeah, it's sidecar too, right? It's yeah, sidecar on the house. It's just smarter. It's just you drag to another screen and it does it. The two things that occurred to me when I watched the keynotes. So number one, they sure locked a whole bunch of people with this one. For those that are recognized, Sherlock was a piece of software in the early days of the Mac that did search and it did it well. And then Apple decided to add search to the OS. So they basically, you know, kick these people in the, you know, they were like, sorry guys, but we want to put this in the OS. So too bad for you. And Apple has done this in the past and you can't blame them. I mean, sometimes they do a better version. Sometimes they do a not better version of what somebody else does. So but in this case, like for example, one thing they jumped out at me is that they announced Airplay to the Mac. We had a listener literally like two weeks ago say, how do I do this? And there is a third party product that will allow this. Well, they kind of got Sherlock because Apple now has it for free and they you got to pay for their product. So and some other things. And I guess the other thing was kind of a little disappointment. I have a friend of mine I was talking to that he used to work with because I'm like kind of semi retired now. But anyways, he does like really high powered analysis work. And he usually does it using something of either MATLAB or MathCAD, which are pretty more in the Windows environment. And he's like, I need a Mac and I believe he does for the analysis he does. He's like, I need a Mac that has 64 gigs and they don't have it. So I'm kind of disappointed they didn't announce what we'll call, you know, M2 or whatever is hardware that they made literally no hardware announcements at all. And they were strongly rumored, right? They were strongly rumored that we were going to see maybe a 16 inch MacBook Pro, maybe a 14 inch or whatever. I was surprised. But it was so jam-packed. You wonder if they said, you know, we're going to have a separate event to announce this or is it wrong and they're not going to do it. No, I think you're right. I think there's going to be an event in a couple of months to talk about new hardware. Yeah, I would think so. Yeah. But that was not the time. That was software. Yeah. Well, it's OK. So let's talk about software. Mac OS Monterey, which is the name, assuming you've watched the keynote or at least read some of the news folks. And I'm kind of jumping into the first thing that gave me a little pause, which was when they talked about automation in Mac OS Monterey. And the quote was shortcuts. And so they are bringing shortcuts to the Mac, bearing the lead a little bit here, which is great. And it didn't it originate on the Mac or was workflow an iOS? Workflow is iOS only. Yeah. So this is the first time this is seen on the Mac in this way. Shortcuts is the future of automation on the Mac. You can import automator workflows into shortcuts on day one. And the third quote, this begins a multi year transition, which tells me very clearly that Apple script and automator are going away in favor of shortcuts. You don't think you don't think I think going away. I do. They may bury it in that it's not the first choice. But I don't know what I'm with you. Well, a lot of people were surprised because they were like, you know, when they came out with shortcuts on iOS, they're like, well, where's the Mac version? Right? Just shortcuts. I'm not a big shortcuts person. I'm aware of it. I've played with it. I've built a couple of shortcuts just because that's my nature. But is shortcuts built on that same Apple event model down to the, you know, how data is represented the way Apple script is? No shortcuts. And remember, shortcuts started as workflow, which was a third party app. So they could only leverage public APIs. And to have inter app communication, what they did was they leveraged URLs. And it's that whole URL scheme. Now, now that it is, you know, acquired by and part of Apple, I'm presuming that they're using more than just URLs. And so maybe some of what we know to be automator features will actually become first class features of shortcuts. I'm a little worried. My instinct here is that Apple script, it's just not an identical model. You know, there's so much you can get so deep with Apple script into the way Apple models or, you know, data models, yeah, instructed. It just feels like they wouldn't just throw that all in the trash. And yet, remember, South Sequoian doesn't work at Apple anymore. So we don't have that internal champion anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm worried, Dave. That's my problem. Well, did they I have not heard they're, they're replacing Apple script. Well, the fact that they said this begins a multi year transition and shortcuts is the future of automation on the Mac, like those two things together worry me. But maybe I shouldn't be worried. Maybe this is just me holding on to the past. And maybe the future of shortcuts is this all powerful thing that we will embrace and no one love. That's what this click that clicks for me that last statement. I'm not well, I'm not worried because that's not a thing. You know, that's not a thing for me that it's not like I built my livelihood on Apple script. So so I but I do get that there are plenty of people who who really depend on Apple script and they've built infrastructure that depends on Apple script. But I would say if I was if I was guessing that we're going to see the things you can do with Apple script migrate so that you can also do them with shortcuts. Let's hope it means I'm a maturing of shortcuts to reflect a more built inside the kimono as it were. Yeah, you know, in with with the private APIs or whatever. But what do I know? Right? It's, you know, what it's all guessing. It's all good. Well, they did say you can import Automator workflows into shortcuts on day one. So I think perhaps this this tempers some of my concern, right? Because at least the Automator portion of automation on the Mac seems to be preserved going into shortcuts. The Apple script is the one that remains the question. And somebody wrote code, right, to understand Automator and then convert it into what it needs to be to be. So presumably that means shortcut can understand the complicated things that Automator and Apple script bring to the table. Let's hope. Yeah, we'll find out. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. You mentioned, so while we're on the subject of Macroist Monterey, Dave, you mentioned Safari. Talk a little bit more about what you like about the new tab groups and tab bar there. Okay. So for folks at home, the Safari stuff is, I mean, it's a real reinvention of the interface. It's like they took all the, let's just talk about Monterey, the Mac version of Safari, but it's impacting every Safari iPad iPhone, right? Yep. But the Mac version, they basically said, look at all these things that are on the screen. If you look at, folks at home, if you've got a Safari window up on your Mac and you look at it, there's a lot of wasted screen real estate there. And they're trying to push that out. It's like bezels on a display. They're trying to reduce it, reduce it, make your content be the thing that you're looking at rather than all the controls around it in the ways of magic things. So I like what they did. I think there's some things that confuse me. For example, there's a reload button that you see on your screen right now on your Mac, on your Safari window. There's that circle, you know, snakey to get some tail kind of thing. And then there's the back and the forward buttons. Every Safari window has something along those lines. They're less than greater than signs, whatever. But I think every browser, you use those things. And they appear to be disappearing. It was very quick in the video. You know, it's not like they said, here, well, let's walk you through every element of the interface. It was more, I'm going to show you a quick little example of using this thing. And then it was gone. But in that short amount of time, one thing I saw was there's no reload button. And I asked about it and someone, whether they were, I don't know who this person was who told me this. So I didn't vet it in any way. But they said it's everything's converting to they actually sent me a screenshot of something. And I don't know what the screenshot was of. But it said, basically, we're moving to pull to refresh on your iPhone, right? When you when you want to like in Twitter, for example, you want to reload your Twitter feed, you pull down on the screen. I think eight bits was the inventor, not eight bits, but yeah, but pulled to refresh is the that original Tweety or whatever it was called. Yeah, Lauren Brichter's thing. Yeah, Lauren Brichter's thing. Thank you. That's the correct way to refer to it. But it, you know, pulled to refresh, we've had it forever. And it would be interesting if that was true that you're, you know, first, how do you do that on a Mac with, you know, but it's not, it's not a thing. But clearly it's gone. If you look at the screen to watch the video, you'll see there's no, there's no refresh button anymore. Yeah, I'm wondering, I'm wondering if they've, I mean, it'll be curious, we haven't none of none of the three of us have installed any of these betas yet to begin experiencing this, but it'll be interesting to see what Apple does with this. And of course, the beta process is a beta process and sometimes major features change, not always, but sometimes for sure. And one thing I can say with certainty is it's going to work, right? They're not going to make it so that, oh, yeah, you can't refresh anymore. No, it's going to work for sure. Yeah. So another, another piece of this, I'd say is the, so, so I do a lot of, of tab groupings where I'll bring up a window, I'll open up 17 tabs, and that's because I'm, for example, every morning I'm writing my loop content, right? Sure. And I read for hours before I write a word. And I get every time I find an interesting article, whatever I'm reading through all my sources, I save that it's, and it's another tab, another tab, and I end up with maybe 16, 17 tabs, and then I call those down to whatever makes the cut for them for my morning loop writes. But I build a tab set, right? That, that window that I have open, and then I might have another window with all my sports stuff or another window with all my programming stuff, whatever it is. And I, I find I get frustrated sometimes because a cat will step on my keyboard and close a window. And then I have to laboriously reconstruct from history what I had open. It's not easy to do. No, no. This feels like a great solution. No, I think tab groups is, is sort of the new bookmarks, you know, that we used to manage years and years ago. John, what about you? What are your thoughts on macOS Monterey? Um, like I mentioned, the AirPlay feature, I thought was really neat because it replaces the functionality of something you used to have to play for. Could you talk about that a little bit about what it is? Well, we had a listener write in a couple of weeks ago saying, how do I airplay to my Mac? And I'm like, can you even do that? I mean, obviously, you can airplay from your iDevice to your Apple TV and stuff like that or from your Mac to your Apple TV. But the question was, can I airplay to my Mac? And normally you can't. But we found a third party product. I can't remember it off the top of my head that allows both audio and video. You can make your Mac a host to allow AirPlay audio and video streaming. And so I was pleasantly surprised that Apple was like, Hey, guess what? Now you get this for free. So because some people have a need for that. I mean, hey, you got this, you know, fancy computer here. Why can't you stream audio and video to it? Well, now you can. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they release easier than you could in the past. That's it. They make it easier. Yeah. So I mean, you could probably hack something together with screen sharing and audio, but now it's a lot easier. I noticed. Go ahead, John. Sorry. No. And then I'm looking at the list here also. The other thing is that they kind of you know, we're we're seeing now the kind of consolidation, if you will, of Mac OS and iOS and all the OSes, because a lot of the features they're offering on both because I mean, there's always been a shared code base, but they're really enforcing this a lot better now in that. Oh, here's this new feed, because I noticed this, they were like, here's this new feature on iOS. And oh, by the way, it's a new feature on the Mac as well. It's like, oh, okay, well, that kind of makes sense because you're you're sharing the code. The privacy stuff. I want to get to the privacy stuff in a minute because I want to treat that as a separate topic because I really think it is a separate topic. Before we leave Mac OS Monterey, though, I want to note something. They during the keynote, they at the end of each segment, they will throw up a graphic that sort of lists, not lists, but highlights many of the features of whatever it is Mac OS 15 or Mac OS Monterey, sorry, not 15 iOS 15, those sorts of things. Looking at those graphics, there's almost always something on there that they did not talk about. And one of the things for the Mac that they did not talk about is something called low power mode. Now, to your point, John, this is something we've seen on iOS. But now it is part of Mac OS Monterey. I don't have any details about what low power mode means, but it's definitely a feature of Mac OS Monterey as announced by Apple today in that graphic. So we'll have to find out more. But that's kind of an interesting thing, don't you think? That's that is interesting. I like because then there's always been some form of low power mode like power nap or whatever. I don't even remember all the things. Yeah. No, I think this is going to be my guess is it and this is truly a guess, folks. My guess is that it is mainly focused on M1 Macs, where they can turn off the high power cores or shift more things to the low power cores, depending on what you're doing. They could, you know, maybe turn off. I don't I don't know what they would turn off, but they could certainly turn off background operations like checking mail in the background, which is what they do on iOS. Right. Like there's, there's different things that they could do and we will get to find out, but it is there. So we will get to find out. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. All right. Go ahead. The other thing in Monterey that I thought was duh, why didn't they do this sooner? And again, third party products offer this functionality already like parallels access, but universal control. Sure. Which we talked about in the beginning. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. Yeah. Is another one that jumps out at me is that it's kind of doing what other third party products do, which is let you run and the demo was brilliant. I thought just it's like, Hey, here's my Mac and here's my other devices. And hey, I just kind of bop between them and and it makes it a whole fluid experience. And I thought that was just well done. Yeah. So I want to jump in on that. We're never going to, we're going to never going to leave Mac OS Monterey, which is totally fine. That's okay. That's good. That's good. Yeah. But first, absolutely, John, I'm with you. I loved it when I saw it, but it, but it raised some questions for me that I thought was very interesting, which is you can sort of drag, like you could drag a Safari window from your Mac to your iPad say, right? You can drag a file from the finder, I believe, from the finder to the file manager in iPad OS. Where is the limit on what you can drag? Like, could you do you're playing a game and steam on in some way? Could you? Well, yeah, they would never know a no way. I think I think it's limited to OS level functions. I was joking about that last bit. No, but some Apple apps will will already have that cross pollination. So I just wonder where, like, is there this API that if you support it, you get to have your stuff dragged from, you know, what, like that was really interesting to me. And I'm looking forward to learning more about that. Yeah. Same. Same. Yeah. All right. Let's, let's talk about privacy because this was a big one for me. The like, so there's two things that that Apple announced with privacy as I see it, you guys might have more. The first is very much focused on mail, which is that mail has now has constructs in it that will keep all of those tracking beacons that are buried in email addresses, the little pixel trackers that are buried in email, not email addresses that are buried in email messages that track your IP address and then your location. And then because you've loaded the pixel, that tells someone whoever owns the pixel that you have read the message. They are now obscuring everything from all of that. So that theoretically, people don't even know that you've opened their email. They don't know who you are. They don't know where you were when you did that. And this, I can think of a million cases where maybe not a million, but many cases where this will cause some issues for the way certain people do business, but, but it totally fits with what Apple does. And I applaud them for it. I think it's great. I think it causes more good than harm, though it will cause a little bit of harm. And that's okay. And then there's iCloud. So I want to put that sort of on a shelf. And then there's iCloud Plus, which has three things in it. And I'm going out of order intentionally. It has HomeKit Secure Video, which will open to more than five cameras, which is great. There is Hide My Email, which lets you create obfuscated email addresses so that email gets to you, but no one knows what your email address is if you want to use it. They say that the pricing on iCloud Plus remains the same, which is... Tell me you didn't think, as they were going through this, when you saw that plus sign, you were thinking only $5 more on iCloud a month. Well, especially with the third feature, which is what they're calling Private Relay, where it sounds like they've essentially recreated the Tor network, although hopefully quite a bit faster, where it's bouncing your traffic through two different servers so nobody knows who you are or where you're coming from, not even Apple's servers in the middle. But also, they're encrypting everything. Correct. Right. So let's think about it. And they say no performance lag. Right, which is unlike the Tor network. Right. But that's really interesting to me that they've essentially taken this and done it. It's effectively like a multi-layered VPN, although I'm sure someone out there will have a better terminology than that. Feedback at MackieGap.com is the email address to yell at us and tell us what we got wrong. I would say a VPN tends to fool somebody into thinking your traffic originates from another country, say. Sure. Whereas this wouldn't do that. It's maybe no country of origin or whatever. My concern with that, and my friend Dave did say feedback at MackieGap.com, just to make sure you guys heard that. I said feedback at MackieGap.com. Okay. Good. Feedback at MackieGap.com. Well, we usually do it in threes, Mark, but we'll let you add one. What concerns me is similar to what they did with the MAC address randomization and iOS. This is going to break things that I may not want broken. Fair. I may want people that email me to know that I opened it or know my location or make my... And to tell you the truth, so some of the... In iOS now, they have a thing now where it's like, oh, do you want to share blah, blah with blah, blah, this info with this person? And I'm like, honestly, call me crazy, but for most of them, I'm like, I like this vendor. So, yes, I will allow them to continue to track me because... And I'll talk about it in a future episode. But the other day in Instagram, I got an ad for a product that I've been looking for for ages and it popped right up. Because they know what I like. It was a charging cable, multi-tip, and it's animated and stuff. And I've been looking for this. And then they know this because I look for it every time that on Amazon and stuff like that. And all of a sudden it came up. So, not all tracking is bad, in my opinion. But Apple lets you make that choice, right? They wouldn't... Well, they'd let you make the choice. And I think that's good here. The mention of masking all this in mail, it sounds like they're going to by default do this. And I'm not happy about this. Just like when they by default would randomize your Mac address, that caused a lot of grief for a lot of people. Because if they tied their Mac address to their DHCP, all of a sudden it broke. And they're like, what did I do wrong? And it's like, you did nothing wrong. Apple just kind of made a choice for you. One thing about this private relay that I want to find out more, and I'm almost certain that I will be able to watch a dub dub session this week to answer this question, is what apps does it affect? Because it sounds like it might only affect Safari. And I would like it to be able to affect other things. Very specifically, I would like to see it affect the podcast app. Because just like there are pixels that are being put into our mail, some podcasts, not this one, but some podcasts are allowing pixels to be put into the download of the podcast. And you have no, the worst part about that is, there is no way to opt in. You are just like if the host, publisher, whoever chooses to do it, you are tracked. And then they track you by going to, you know, when you go to different sponsors websites, and they correlate it all together. Again, it's fine if you want to opt into being tracked, but podcasting doesn't really have a way of doing that. So I would love to see Apple fix that problem through private relay with more than just Safari. And we'll find out. You know, I have an app that I use a fair amount that is now broke. I literally just today got an announcement from them that basically said, we've done everything we can to work with Apple. We cannot find a solution that Apple will accept. And it's called Mailplane. And it's basically a Google Mail app. That's on my end. I heard the squeaky door. I'm like, did someone just walk into my room? A haunted house. That's cool. But basically, the app does that thing where they put up a, you know, in effect, a web page with, you know, Google Mail on the web page, but they do it, they hide everything they can hide. But it's now not going to work anymore. And they sent out a letter saying, basically, we'll be happy to give you your money back, but we can't fix this. And now it's end of life, which it just makes me sad because I'm so used to it. I now need to find a mail client. And I don't know what to what the good Mailplane is, but maybe I'll use Monterey's mail. I'll give it another shot. Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'm trying Apple Mail. I used to use third party mail clients. I, you know, I chose them very specifically for their features. And I ran into that scenario, maybe not quite that draconian and end, but I ran into that sort of functionality limitation scenario too many times that I decided I'm just all in on Apple Mail. Hopefully it remains extensible, at least as it is now, so I can use things like Mail Acton and SIG Pro and, you know, the little plug-ins for Mail. But that, yeah, because of that exact thing where Apple can just like decide, hey, today's the day, that doesn't work anymore. I can't have that done to my email. One of the things that you, it just came up with you and me today was you said, I'm, you know, I send mail and then I get a delay. I use that in Mailplane. Is that a thing in Apple Mail that I can send a mail and have it be delayed? It's not, but it is a thing in SmallCubed is the company that makes a, what they call the SmallCube Suite, which is really a collection of four plug-ins. One of those plug-ins is called Mail Acton and Mail Acton lets me do that among many other things, but that is a mail plug-in or it's a mail plug-in. Yeah. I'll put it in the show notes and I'll, because, you know, we're buddies here now, I'll send you a link to the thing, but yeah. Yep. Yep. No, Mail Acton is great for that. And as a, as a side delaying my email and I choose to have it delayed by two minutes by default that you can choose whatever you want, including none, you know, no delay, but that two minute delay has a saved my bacon more times than I care to admit. And both in terms of like, I really don't want to send that email, but also you hit send, you go focus on something else and then it hits you like, wait, I should also say this or I should, while I'm in this, I should ask this question and I can go and edit the message and rework it and send it all off. And then it's like, all good. I also, I also have it warn me if the word attaches in the email and yet there is no attachment. Yep. Yep. Same thing. Yep. That's funny. So yeah, SmallCube Mail, Mail Suite, which has Mail Acton in it is your answer there. So, sorry to derail the conversation, but that's, that's a good one. So is there any more on privacy before we jump to the next thing? I want to make sure whatever we talk about that we do talk about the developer tools at least briefly, because I think there's some things in there that are important. In fact, and I also want to make sure we talk about notifications because there were some things in the state of the union that explained a lot more detail about the whole notifications thing. So if, if you guys don't have any objection, I'd love to jump to notifications here and then we can jump to whatever's next. Yeah. So this part was really interesting and I got to bring up my notes here from the state of the union. So the state of the union is Apple's sort of second keynote of the day that's very much focused on developers and they focused one section of it on focus, the whole new focus infrastructure that exists inside of iOS 15. And one of the things that changes dramatically in iOS 15 is, or gets enhanced dramatically, is notifications. We have notification grouping, what do they call it? They called it something that I'm forgetting. Anyway, but they talked about four different notification levels. Right now, we have one notification level or type, but now there are four. There are passive notifications. There are active notifications, which are the current ones. So that's what we currently have are active notifications. There are time sensitive notifications. These are things that hang on the lock screen a little bit longer. They're announced by Siri and they will bypass the notification summary. So an active notification might get put into the summary, but the time sensitive ones will be displayed separately. And then there's a fourth one called critical notifications that can play a sound even if your device is muted. But these require a special and Apple approved entitlement in order for the app to be able to send this kind of notification. So not everybody is going to be able to do this, which is good because otherwise it'd be a mess. But I found that that was very interesting that how they're breaking that out and that's how they're deciding to put things in the notification summary or not. Any thoughts on that, Dave? Okay, I guess you're talking, yeah. Focus, right? That's what we're talking about. Yes. My only concern is that it's nice to have a level of granularity. I'm afraid, I want to see how they pull it off because it sounds like it may be a bit too complex for most people to deal with. It might. It's like, so wait, now I got to create like these levels of notification importance and stuff. I was like, I don't have time for that. Well, there's the developer side where you have to sort of create a scheme of priority numbers. We're going to make this kind of thing, this kind of a notification, I'll give it this number and I'll give this one a lower number. That's just so they can work. I don't think that's terrible for a developer. I think as a user though, and I haven't seen it, so it's hard to say. But as a user, that's where I worry that the complexity is going to get in where I have to sort of grade everything and figure out I have 17 levels of allowing notifications. I mean, am I going to be able to deal with all these things? Is my dad going to be able to deal with all these levels of notification? In the State of the Union, they talked about how there will be, they didn't use this term, but I will because it's what made sense to me, Siri's suggestion style recommendations where your iPhone will suggest to you, hey, you might want to call this app a work app or this app a home app or maybe relegate this. And one of the things they said there, which I thought was huge, again, these buried little nuggets that we find in the State of the Union was they said, for example, it can offer to mute a single conversation, a messages conversation for a limited amount of time. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to mute a single messages conversation, but only for a day or only for an hour. And so it sounds like we will get that granularity in messages. And again, they didn't announce that, but if Siri's going to be able to offer to have me do it, hopefully I can do it on my own. Yeah, no, that actually makes a lot of sense. When you use that example, because I certainly would, I just do it the way it normally was. And then there'd come a time when everybody's chatting about this thing that's happening that I just don't care about. And it's going on. And I know that it's a temporary meeting for a day would be great. I'll just look for that and I'll set it and I'll react to that. That's how I'd learn that that particular version. Yeah, so I like this. Yeah, like that. Yeah. So that part I like, there was something else that they they showed in messages. Craig Federighi showed that you could pin a message to come back to it later, but he was using it for like when somebody sent a news article or something, but he definitely showed that you could pin a message. I hope that we have the ability to pin any message we as the user choose because so many times I'll get a text message from someone. And often what I'll say is, Hey, can you message me again so that I leave it on red so I know to come back to this because otherwise I'm not going to remember to come back. I want to I want to mark a message as unread. Correct. Just like I can with an email just like because it's it's my reminder that I have I have a text that somebody sent me that is so important to me because it's telling me I have to do a thing. Yeah. And I'm doing everything I can to not accidentally read that message because I'll lose it because then you lose it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I want to peek into it without making it read. Or like you said, just simply make it unread would be the would be the key. So is it is you brought up Craig Federighi? I did. And I just want to say and if we're if we want to push this off, that's fine. But if we can take a moment, he has become my favorite part of every single keynote. And part of it is I think and I clearly Apple gets this and they're playing it up. You could see that they they're turning the dial on Craig to 11 because he did some magic stuff today. Like he pushed a button and then a hole appeared. And I an iPad fell out of the out of the sky and there was hands and did you hear the little Foley edit there where it went? Yes. Then he caught it. And then he had like the secret agent car to go to the secret last supposedly secret lab. That was that was a beautiful. It was like, hey, it's a nice car, Craig. I don't know what type of car it was, but it looked pretty fancy. Yeah, we don't have to talk about it more. I just wanted to mention that because it is interesting that they have made him sort of the the I mean, he's a smart guy. So to call him comic relief is is limiting unintentionally. But but he is like he is a personable. He is a charismatic guy. And they are absolutely embracing that, which they should. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. No, I love it. And I just so appreciated all the different things he did. He ran. He jumped out of a screen at one point. Yeah. He just he. No, he's the rock star. Yeah. Yeah. He's the rock star. Yeah, which is fine. They need one at least. Yeah. All right. Can we is there more on notification center? Can we talk about developer tools a little bit? Sure. Sure. Can we talk about just one cross platform feature that that kind of we don't have to end with developer tools. I'm just right. We're done with notification center. That's all. Oh, yeah, we are. But no, one thing I want to toss up here that kind of caught my attention was the whole sharing thing, especially from an IP standpoint. So like all of a sudden I can stream all my stuff, be it my music or my movies to my friends. And it's like, I mean, when you think about it technically, I mean, I can invite all my friends over physically. And we could all listen to the same music and watch the same movie. Now they're allowing that virtually. But the IP implications and the copyright implications on that to me, I kind of have me scratching my head in that. But, you know, Disney is on board and a whole bunch of big players are on board allowing this. So I don't think you're going to be able to. I don't think you're going to be able to join that party. Say that whole thing again, Dave, so that people hear what what you're saying about this. And I apologize for interrupting you, John. But but I was just saying that I think the way this is just the way I heard it. If let's say the three of us wanted to have a party and we all wanted to watch that new Cruella movie, right, then we all need to have access to it to be able to watch it. Or Ted Lasso is a better example. We all need to have access to Apple, Apple TV plus. If you don't have access to it, I don't think that you get. Remember, there's no flying over the internet, right? None of my none of my video data is flying over the internet. It's purely a sync code. It's like simpy. It's it's like, you know, it's all right. I see. We're at three minutes and 11.7 seconds in. They talked about this in the in the state of the union. In fact, they showed code examples for developers how they could integrate this. And it's literally one step. In fact, they made the joke. They're like, this is step one. And there is no step to it's you share that simpy code. And that's it. But it's just like the, you know, the Netflix feature, which name escapes me. But the one which does the same thing, like you can watch a show on Netflix house party or something house party or whatever it is, you can do it with Plex, although that's that's a little different. But you all need to have access on your own. Okay, to that media. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think there's any issues because like you said, you're not concerned. It's a fair concern. No, they yeah, they it's a fair concern. And I think they solved it. But but I it's really interesting. You know, that's one of those that's one of those things that I feel like might be a byproduct, a silver lining, if you will, of us all pandemicking for the last year, right? Like, like, would they have prioritized this type of feature? Were it not for us all getting into the habit of doing this with other people's services? Right? So but but even without pandemicking, like, you know, my my daughter, her boyfriend lives far away now because that's where he is at the moment. And they're watching a series on Netflix together. And and they can sync it up. And that way they can even be on the phone and talk with each other or certainly texting with each other. And they're seeing it exactly at the same time. And it it works. And it has that has nothing to do with pandemic. So yeah. So one of you and I don't remember who was brought up zoom. And the fact that this could impact zoom, well, all the FaceTime stuff, sure, could impact zoom. And I I mentioned that I noticed that after the keynote, not before, but after the keynote, Zoom stock went up. Yeah, I just thought it was a weird reaction. But apparently this is not bad news for Zoom. Yeah, I think you're right, John. I think it was pre show. But but you mentioned a few things got surelocked. And and in a sense, Zoom was was one of those. But I really like Zoom probably doesn't earn a whole lot of their revenue from people using it at home personally. My guess is that most of Zoom's revenue is is earned from the business market and not even the individual business owners, the site licenses, that sort of thing. I don't think we're going to see people using FaceTime for a lot of business, certainly some, but not in this. I don't think it compete. I don't think Zoom and FaceTime compete with each other even after the announcements today. I don't I think they serve two very different markets. And so I mean, I could be wrong about this. I like your analysis because it makes it feel it makes it it makes it logical that the price went up because Apple is legitimizing the market. Exactly. Yeah, fair. Although to look at the stock market on keynote day has always been a bit of a risky prospect, right? Apple could announce the next great thing in the stock dips. It's like, is anybody paying attention here? Like I thought everybody knew, but you know, whatever. So yeah. Yeah. And and the whole like Zoom with breakout rooms and all of that stuff that that FaceTime just doesn't currently have now, of course, Apple could add anything they want. But yeah, I don't know. Developer tools. Okay. The this is this really got interesting with with two things. Xcode cloud is really kind of blew me away, especially when I dug into it, watching the state of the union. So yes, Xcode Xcode cloud. Boy, man, let's say that 10 times fast. They must have rehearsed this because I'm having trouble with it. Xcode cloud is a allows you to collaborate for sure. And that's what it sounds like it is when you hear the name or at least that's what I thought it was when I heard the name. It was some sort of cloud collaboration thing. And that's awesome. But that in it. Yes, it has that in there. However, that's not what Xcode cloud is. What Xcode cloud is, is you getting to leverage Apple servers to build your apps and do all of your UI and unit testing and all of that without doing it on your computer and also without leaving Xcode. So you could and you can set all this stuff to happen as a developer, you know, you push a change and you can have it build on every push if you want. And my guess is because you're using Apple servers to do your builds that they're going to happen way faster than you could probably do them in your own offices. So one little piece of this that I puzzled about and I still don't know the answer to it and this may be my lack of understanding of all the different pieces of this chain. But specifically, it sounded like I could run tests on every single device that Apple makes and historically has still continues to support not has ever made but continues to support without my having to go out and buy 17 different iPhones and iPads and Macs. Am I did you get that sense? Absolutely. Yeah. And you can set it to do those tests on every build or whenever you want it to like you don't have to stop and say, hey, go do these tests. And also if you have they use an example of, you know, when you have an intermittent bug, right, one that crashes sometimes but not all the time, you can have it. I think by default, it runs a test until it hits a crash. You can have it run a test a hundred times. And if you get a crash 50% of those, well, that gives you different information, right? Right. And and you get full screenshots of it being tested on all devices in all different modes, portrait, landscape, dark mode, light mode, like it. I realized for us as users, we don't really care about this. However, knowing what it is like to be focusing on doing your development or doing anything that is immersive and then having to back out of that to do a build and wait for the build server and wait for your tests. And OK, it's all in the same computer. So now my CPU is like skyrocketing. I think this I think it's possible we may not be able to give this enough of a of a highlight to really show the difference that it's going to make long term. I think this is huge. Huge. It's not my favorite thing of the developer tools. But go ahead and you say because I know you got two on your list. OK. Well, my second one was was Swift concurrency. Really? You don't have my number one thing on your list. That's the beauty of having three of us here. Oh, I may have it on my list. But that's that's the beauty of having three of us here. Just and I know that's one of those the concurrency thing is just one of those things I've heard developers complain about the ones that say I don't want to move to Swift because concurrency is a difficult thing to do. It's it's convoluted. I want to be able to have stuff run on separate threads. And the examples that they showed in the State of the Union made it very obvious that the whole multithreading of Swift is is brought yet more to a first class citizen, which I I'm hoping that the developers that were complaining about moving to Swift because of this actually now moved to Swift. And don't just find something else to complain about. I just wrote a big audio processing app in Swift. So all and all of this is Swift. And I had to deal with a bunch of concurrency issues. And, you know, dispatch cues and yeah, you know, your interface has to run on the main and all that stuff that and I honestly, when I started, I really didn't know my way around all the different dispatch cues and what to use when and, you know, how to how to set really how to wrap things properly. And so I ended up making a lot of mistakes. And it's testing can be with concurrency can be really difficult because it's hard to know what's, you know, suddenly why did that cause it to crash, right? It's not tied to a piece of user interface, right? You didn't push a button and it crashed. It was, you know, four processes running at the same time. And they, you know, sometimes they would run into each other and sometimes they wouldn't. So I love this concurrency to make to simplify it because it really is some really naughty code. Yeah. But it wasn't my favorite thing. Well, that's why I always like writing embedded code because typically embedded code is single threaded. Well, right, right. Multithreaded code, the possibility for disaster grows exponentially as I'm sure you've found because oh, now I got to keep track of a hundred things happening at once versus one. Then again, having multiple cores and being able to do multiple things at once is cool as long as it's managed properly. Well, we as users like apps that run with concurrency as developers, as developers, we like the simplicity. Yeah. So, John, you're, I'm waiting for that other shoe to drop. What's the, what's the other thing you were going to? I think they mentioned something about being able to develop apps on the iOS device. I think you've got it. Not, well, almost not on iOS, but on iPadOS or iPadOS. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Playgrounds. Playgrounds and iPadOS are now, I've been saying this for so long that the iPad will never be my main machine until I can build an app and put it on the app store with that machine because if I have to, if I have to go back to back OS and write all my code and all that stuff, then I might as well just work on my Mac. And now I'm like, wow. Playgrounds on an iPad, which you've always had, Playgrounds on an iPad, but Playgrounds on an iPad where you can, without touching a Mac, you can hit submit and put your app on the app store. That's amazing. I think that's gigantic. Oh, that's huge. Yeah. No, you're right. It is bigger than concurrency, for sure, because it opens the door for so many people in so many different ways. Yeah. I really wasn't judging the relative merits of them. I just wanted to include that one. Of course. Yeah, that's why we're all here. Yeah. Yeah. No, for clarity, you can build iOS and iPad OS apps with Swift Playgrounds on iPad. So you can't build Mac OS apps in Swift Playgrounds on iPad yet. Yeah, yet. Yeah, fair. Although it's going to be able to build an app. I would almost guarantee this. You're going to build an app. It's going to it's going to be buildable on on an iPad. You're going to build it in Swift UI and some future version of Swift UI, and it's going to have all it's going to have all the Mac elements you need to build an app that maybe won't run as natively or as pretty or as perfectly as your Mac apps run, but then it'll run on a Mac and someone who wasn't sophisticated would run it and think it was built in a native Mac app. Yeah, I believe that's true. I believe it's coming eventually, if not, you know, next year, maybe the year after. Yeah, fair. Fair. So the feature, I think, is across platforms here. But Dave, I wanted to ask you about this. Now's a good time. Is there any talk about this? If we're done with Yeah, we're done with the developer stuff. We're also at about the 53 minute mark. So we said we'd go 30 to 45. So we're going to push an hour, which is fine. But let's, yeah, let's let's wrap up. All right. What's your Well, you actually have it on the agenda here already, but to dig in. So I thought that the audio enhancements that they offered were pretty compelling. And you being our audio guru, you know, the spatial audio, voice isolation, wide spectrum, all of that stuff. Then you mean the new AirPods enhancements? Well, I'm not. Well, well, one, well, so FaceTime, they, you know, they said that there are new features. And yes, some of them are in the AirPods. So we're kind of crossing worlds here. But I thought that was kind of neat. I think it's all AirPods. I mean, the spatial audio that's in FaceTime is AirPods, right? Like that's not anywhere else. It's not just FaceTime. I mean, you need to have a device that represents the spatial audio to your ears. Okay. And so the AirPods are that thing. And so, yeah, this is all the enhancements to AirPods, which I think is great to see that that they're adding that to more things. They're adding spatial audio to M1 Max, right? I'm looking at my notes here. Yes, spatial audio comes to M1 Max. AirPods, it's not an audio thing, but AirPods get better fine. My support now they are findable whether or not they are in their case, which tells me that's kind of like having an air tag in your AirPods case ish. I'm not quite sure how they're doing it. There I my guess is that they're using the Bluetooth that's in the AirPods themselves, but but that's fine. If it can do it while it's in the case, a firmware update to the AirPods should be able to do that, which would be great. I can take my air tag off my AirPods. Right. But I mean, if but if I remember the demo, they were showing the directional stuff working. So is there a UW, UWB chip in the AirPods or in future AirPods? Directional stuff for finding your AirPods or direction? Yes. Oh, yes. Did they show that working? I thought they did. I thought they're like, hey, you want to find your AirPods and you lost them. You can, you know, right. But it's just like with air tags. I didn't, I don't remember. It may well be. I don't remember seeing that. I just thought it was, you can, you can do the, you know, play a sound on them and find them that way. And you get proximity, but not direction. But I could be totally wrong. I mean, there was like, like you said at the beginning, Dave, this was a dense thing. I missed a lot. I'm sure we all did. Yeah. There's even more. There was the thing when you were talking about AirPods, there was a thing where they showed you could have your AirPods in your ear and you would hear people talking and you could turn, in your ears, you could turn off the back, somehow process machine learning, I guess, turn down the background noise. So you're in a crowded restaurant with hard surfaces, you know, that kind of makes it hard to hear everybody around the table. And then someone's taught. And if they're the directional thing, I think, if they're talking at you, there's like a, it detects their sound coming directly at you and it filters out the stuff that's not coming directly at you. Something along, you saw that. Yeah. No, it's the I mean, essentially, it's a bipolar microphone, right? Because you've got microphones on each AirPods. So it knows what sound is coming into both mics equally effectively that's, let's assume that's the person in front of you. And let's filter everything else out. That's my guess as to how they're doing that. But it's a great, fantastic feature. Yeah, because they've had similar things before where you can use your iPhone, like you slide your iPhone across the table and use the microphone on your iPhone to feed your AirPods. And you can do that. But this makes it even better because it's just, yeah, because way less obvious, I think. I don't know. I mean, you still have your AirPods in. You probably need to tell people what you're doing. Otherwise, they think you're listening to music. I'm on the phone with corporate headquarters in New York. Sorry. Sorry. That's right. The only other thing that occurred to me is who has a person walking through the house with a leaf blower that I thought was a good demo of the ambient noise. You don't? Yeah. How do you clean your kitchen? Yeah. Yeah. I never thought of that. Okay. Yeah. There you go. I'll give it a shot. All right. Do, John, do you have anything else to chime in with before we wrap this thing up here? Let's see. Okay. This kind of jumped out at me. The live text thing. We've seen hints of this thing. Basically, they're offering their... So they've been doing hints at OCRing things. And you and I have seen this. Notes will be able to... Certain Mac apps can OCR things, but here they pulled out all the stops. And the demo of that, it was like, oh, here's a picture of a restaurant. Oh, here's the phone number of it. Let me see if I can OCR it. Hey, let me call them. The enhancements that they made of photos, both from that and then, again, the groupings and stuff, I think they're doing more smart things with spotlight and the metadata. And it kind of crosses worlds. But I thought that was cool too, is that the OCR engine is everywhere now. And for the most part, I think it's pretty useful. How about you, Dave? You got one last thing that comes to mind? I would just say it's amazing to... So first, yes, there was so much we didn't cover. Of course. But I noticed how much of stuff is becoming universal now. And John made a great point about OCR becoming... The OCR engine is now being available everywhere. They're doing that. You're just seeing it in example after example after example of, here's a thing. Here's this new object scanning thing that they're doing. And you can get at those objects in every all over the place. And they're doing a much better job or not a much better job, but they're clearly going in the direction of creating packages that you can use in all of your apps and creating APIs that are available and then eating their own dog food. In other words, having the Apple apps use these things. And I loved it. I just thought this is real. They're really doing... They're running very, very hot. They are running hot. Yeah, I agree. The one last thing for me would be the on-device Siri. The demo that they did of that where it was just like the responsiveness of it. If I could have even half that responsiveness of it, that was amazing to me. And it seemed like, at least we were meant to believe, and I'll believe it at face value, that that was happening in real time. They weren't time shifting it and cutting forward on things. In addition to the privacy and all of the other things that that brings, the responsiveness of on-device Siri recognition was pretty amazing. And I'm pretty stoked about that. So that would have been... For anybody that's had the A lady and the red ring saying, I can't reach the internet, try again later. Sure. I mean, I always shake my fist when that happens because sometimes my internet's out, but it's also sometimes I got a cycle power on a unit and then it comes back. And I'm like, so yeah, so being able to do local processing, I'm going to do that. Where it'll pay off, I think is with car play, because there have been times in the car where I've got a weak signal and it's like, look, I just want you to open the podcast app. This is, you do not need the internet for what I'm asking. Good call. Good call on that. Right? They just listen, process, decide if you need the internet after you understand what I just said to you. So yeah. This has been great. Dave Mark, thank you for joining us, my friend. This has been a blast. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. This has been fun. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. You can tell people where they can find you, Dave. Well, on the loop is the best way. I'm on Twitter, Dave Mark, D-A-V-E-M-A-R-K, simple enough. Perfect. But on the loop, loopinsight.com, you can read. I write a lot of stuff and some of it's maybe good. I think most, I think all of it's good. I mean, let's say most of it just to be, you know, to leave room for experimentation, right? Because you're not making mistakes. You're not trying hard enough. So there you go. Yeah, it's good. All right. Cool. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you for everything, really. And make sure you check out macgeekgab.com. As we mentioned, you can find us on Twitter at macgeekgab. You can find him on Twitter at Dave Mark. You can find him on Twitter at John F. Braun. You can find me on Twitter at Dave Hamilton. And we'll see you next week. Dave, there's something at the end of each episode, we like to say three words to our listeners. Just generic good advice. Might there be three words of inspiration you would like to share with our listeners? I would say, whatever you do, don't get caught. That's good advice.