 Hi, this is Alice and Sharon in the middle of Silicast podcast. It's to thepodfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, November 19th, 2023, and this is show number 967. While we will have a live show next week on Thanksgiving weekend, it'll be Sunday. We might be still down at Lindsay and Nolan's house, so, you know, a good chance of seeing the grandkids, because I know how you love that on the live show, but it'll be a lot of listener content that's already been contributed, and I'm really excited to get to take most of the week off to play with the kiddos. Last week I forgot to tell you that I got to be on the Daily Tech News show again with Tom Merritt and Roger Chang this time, and I had a total blast. We talked about prognostications from Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo about Apple's future stuff. We analyzed Sony's portal, and then I shared the perfect note-taking app. Spoiler, I use eight of them. Anyway, you can find a link in the show notes to the episode entitled Apps for Noteworthy Events, or you can search in your podcatcher of choice for Daily Tech News show and subscribe. Just recently, Bart did a presentation to the Mac and Awe Mac users group. They call themselves Maya Mug. His talk was entitled Staying Ahead of the Baddies, and he was talking about security and what we could do about it. Luckily, they posted his awesome talk on YouTube, so we can all enjoy it. And of course, I put a link in the show notes to that video. After our annual break from Programming by Stealth, that seems to happen at an unknown time for an unknown length of time every single year, Bart and I are back with a new episode of Programming by Stealth. Bart introduces us to a language called JQ and a terminal command called JQ, which together are used to help us query JSON files. We can see pretty versions of them, and we can also manipulate them. And we don't learn a lot of commands in this episode, but Bart walks us through a few examples to help illustrate why we care, or shall I say, the problem to be solved. I'm sold on the idea, having just mucked about in a config file for Homebridge just this week that was in JSON, so I'm really excited to learn the rest of this. You can find this episode of Programming by Stealth in either the chitchat across the pond feed or the Programming by Stealth feed in your podcatcher of choice. Last week I told you how DVDpedia, the DVD cataloging database, was being sunset by the developer at brugie.com. I explained how I exported all of my data in a CSV file, plus the images, and then I imported them into Under My Roof from binary formations, the app I used to catalog everything in my home. When I finished the article, Sandy Foster in the live chat room said she was sure glad to learn about this because she uses another one of the pedias. She uses Bookpedia. She's cataloged all of her quilting books and would now need to look for a new solution. She's not really interested in maintaining a database of everything in her home, so Under My Roof would be overkill for her. When I posted my article about the process, Brian Blankenship on Mastodon thought Under My Roof sounded like a great tool but he's a Windows user and wondered if I knew of an equivalent for him. In response to Brian, I explained that I haven't personally used any tools like this on Windows, but whenever I'm asked about alternatives for Windows users, I usually started a site called Alternative 2. You enter the software for which you want an alternative, and then you can filter the results by things like, you know, what platform you want the tool to run on, whether it's open source, and the pricing model. The results are kind of hit or miss, but if there is a good alternative, it might just show up on this site. I filtered Alternative 2's results for Brian down to just Windows inventory programs and I wished him the best of luck. But then I got to thinking. Here's Brian and Sandy, both looking for a way to catalog some stuff and for which Under My Roof might not be the right answer. What if Sandy and Brian could just use a normal database program to import their data? Now I knew Sandy had cataloged books and I went back to Brian on Mastodon and I asked him what kind of items he was hoping to track in a database and how he had his data now. He answered, I have two goals. One to catalog my CD and DVD collection, and two to have a household inventory. I've ripped my CD collection and most of my DVDs and Blu-rays so I can create an import file if that's possible with your solution. And I have a few different yet incomplete spreadsheets with lists of household goods. Well, this was going to be perfect. I know how I could help both Sandy and Brian and maybe some of you. My favorite freemium database program is Airtable from Airtable.com. Back in 2018, I wrote an article entitled, I finally understand databases because of the free Airtable app. And I've actually been using it ever since. Steve and I use it to manage what shows we're watching on TV. And we also use it to manage all of our interviews from trade shows like CES and the C-SEN Assistive Tech Conference. Now Bart always says follow the money to make sure a free tool isn't a creepy tool or as he likes to call it, a freepie tool. I'm glad to say that Airtable does have fee-based plans for teams and businesses at $20 and $45 per month per seat respectively. But they still have it for free for an individual or very small teams like me and Steve. And with that you can get unlimited bases, a thousand records per base with up to five editors, one gigabyte of attachments per base, and a few more features. I asked Sandy to export a CSV file from her bookpedia database so I could test to see if Airtable might work for her. Sandy's always up for a good experiment and was even more enthusiastic since this might solve for immediate problem. It sounded like Brian could make his data available in the same way. Airtable's available as a stand-alone app for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, or you can just log in with your free account at Airtable.com. Before I dig in though, if you're a voiceover user, I hate to tell you that not enough of the interface is accessible to make it usable with a screen reader. It's close, but then you just hit a brick wall. I started by trying to import the CSV file and it pops up an overlay window that isn't accessible by voiceover. I tested it on the macOS app and via the web. I tried with voiceover on iPadOS and hardly any of the buttons were even labeled. Big fish shake to the people at Airtable. Now my testing with iPadOS with voiceover was also informative because I discovered that there is no way to import data from the iOS version of Airtable. Luckily, you can run Airtable via the web and the import functions work even on iOS. So if you're blessed with a gift of sight and you have a desktop or web version of Airtable, we can get started. I promise it's easy and awesome from here on out. When Airtable starts, you can create various workspaces on the left and then using the button in the bottom left, you can add a new base or database. Once you create a new base, there may be two different ways to import the CSV file. I saw a sidebar on the right showing a bunch of nifty options. But you can also see in the default grid view, a button that says plus add or import, kind of looks like a new tab. But when selected, you'll see that with a free account, you can import a CSV file like we want. But you can also do it from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. There's a pop over to see even more sources, including Apple Numbers, Calendar, Contacts, XML and more. Now this is good news for Brian because he already has a spreadsheet started on his home inventory, so he could just start from there without needing to go through the intermediate step with a CSV file. After selecting CSV, we get the overlay I mentioned earlier asking us to drag and drop or copy and paste files. We can also select import from several of the typical cloud storage providers. In this case, I'll just drag Sandy's Bookpedia CSV from my desktop and I selected upload. One important point about Airtable that I should probably should mention. Airtable syncs through their cloud. So as soon as you hit upload, you've put your data onto their servers. Now in Sandy in my case with our DVD and book collections, that's not really a concern. But when I saw the option to upload my contacts, it gave me a little hitch of my giddy up, if you know what I mean. I'll leave it up to you to read, understand and make your own decision of whether you trust Airtable's privacy policy. Okay, back to the fun part. The next question will be whether you want to create a new table or import it into the default table that you started with. I chose new table because that default table had fields I wasn't interested in and I didn't want to clean it up if they got all mushed together. Now Airtable then pops up a little mockup of what the data will look like when it's imported with a note at the top that says, check to make sure it's right or let us know if something looks wrong. Below the mockup is an option to adjust the import and a button that says all fields. This button pops up a list of the fields that will be imported and all can be unchecked except for that first sacred field that I talked about last week. Sandy's book PDA export included the number of pages in each book and she didn't give a hoot about that. On doing this import, she could simply uncheck that field and her new database would be cleaner right off the bat. Now one of my favorite things about Airtable is how easy it is to create different field types. By that, I mean you can define a field type as text, number, date, checkboxes, multiple selects, single selects, phone numbers, emails and more. In this import mockup, Airtable auto selected field types for Sandy's data. For example, since she has several books by the same author, it shows single select as the field type. That means that when she adds a new book, she can go to the author field and just tap on these little single selects. It's really a cool way of doing it. Airtable delightfully color codes the different options in the select fields in these nice pastels. So it's very easy to see the distinctive options in addition to reading the text. So I hit import and in about seven seconds, I had a beautiful grid view of all of Sandy's quilting books. While this grid view is nice enough, the real fun in Airtable will come when we create new views. But first, we have to eat our vegetables. Remember, we still need to get the book cover images into Sandy's database. As you may recall, CSV files can't contain images, so we're going to have to drag them in one by one from the separate export images made by Bookpedia. Last week when I talked about importing my DVDs into a database, I explained that the images for the cover art were in numerical order by when I had added them to the database. I happened to get into a conversation with Connor, the developer from Brugge, and he explained there's a UID field that you can reveal, and that's that little number that I see in the order of the DVD images. Anyway, if I had had that, I would have been able to reorder and sort things in under my roof in order to make it faster and easier to import my images. That's something important to know. All right, anyway. Now we're back to Sandy and her Bookpedia database. The first thing I needed to do was create a new field to hold her book cover images. If you scroll to the right of your existing fields, you'll see a plus button. From there, you can name your field, and you have to select the field type. In this case, we want attachment. If you hover over attachment, you'll even see a tool tips telling you that this field is for images, but also for documents or other file types. You can add a description to the field, but I figured book covers as a title field or as a field title would be sufficient. The book covers will be the showy part of this grid view, so I think dragging this field as far as possible to the left would look good. Remember, though, the title field is sacred, so it's going to stay on the far left, and the images can go into the second column over. Now attachment fields, when selected, show a little message that says Drop Files Here, inviting Sandy to drag in her book cover images exported by Bookpedia. There's to be no magic here. She still has to drag each book cover image in one by one just like I did in Under My Roof. The other thing of note is that it takes a few seconds for the image to show up in Airtable as you drag it in. I assume that time is because Airtable is sending the image up to the cloud. The good news is she doesn't need to sit there and wait for it, she can start finding the next image while it's still working. Once the tedium of importing the images is complete, the fun can begin. The main reason to keep an inventory in a database instead of a simple spreadsheet is the ability to create completely different views of the data depending on what you want to see. The main view is called the grid view and it's just as boring as any spreadsheet except in this case it's like in color and it's got some images in it. At the bottom of the Airtable window there's a section that says Create and it lists several views you can add with a free version of Airtable along with a few that require a team account. One of the ones that might be fun for Sandy is the Kanban view. Kanban is a Japanese term for signboard and it's often used in manufacturing or encoding to develop a visual way of looking at data. The key thing about Kanban is that it's really pretty and yet it organizes the data in useful ways. In Airtable the first thing to do with a Kanban is to choose a grouping field. In Sandy's case a good grouping, yeah I hear it Steve, anyway a good grouping might be by author. The resulting Kanban view shows the book stacked vertically by author with their pretty book covers. I've only dragged in some of the book covers for the screenshot and the show notes but it still looks really cool. Now we don't get much information beyond the title and the pretty cover in this default Kanban view. If Sandy wants to see more information in each card she can go to customize cards and toggle on other fields such as the publisher, genre, and location. But let's say Sandy wants to see the books by their location. She could create a new Kanban view and stack it by location or she can select stacked by author and just change the current one to location. I played around with that and very quickly I could see that Sandy has a little bit of data cleanup to do because of tiny typos in the locations. It'll be a matter of seconds for her to use the single select field in the grid view to choose the correct locations and then her Kanban view will be beautiful. I think the gallery view and air table might be a great option as well. If Sandy is a very visual person she might like the gallery view which makes little cards for each record with a pretty book cover showing prominently. She can turn on and off info about the books like maybe she wants to show the location she's entered so she can find the book on the right bookshelf. They look much like the Kanban view but they're simply in alphabetical order. Of course air table provides sorting on all of the fields in a simple drop down at the top of the table. With over 200 books cataloged Sandy might like to take advantage of the filter option at the top. Sandy's tagged the books with genre so she could filter to find just the type of book she's looking for. I could go on and on and on about how much fun you can have with air table and setting up views for your data but I think you get the picture. I think for Sandy and Brian air table might be a great free alternative to buying a dedicated application for doing inventories. I would be remiss if I didn't explain why I would still choose under my roof for me. It's the difference between building your own structure and having a tool tailored to this specific task. Under my roof already has separate areas expecting photos receipts and warranty information. It notifies me when my items go out of warranty. It has a special area for my insurance information. When I got my Apple watch repaired there was already a place for that information to be recorded. It even knows my devices are going to have serial numbers. But I also understand that not everyone will do the work to maintain this level of information so air table might be a much easier place for the Brian's and Sandy's of this world to get a better handle on the things they do want to inventory. Every once in a while I start working on a topic for the show and as I dig in I realize it's way more complex than I first realized. More rational people would back away and just move on to another subject. But if I don't hit a roadblock I just keep digging and sometimes I descend into madness and this is one of those times. I really recommend that you just skip this entire subject rather than descend with me. But if you continue to listen just blame yourself okay. I told you this is going to be this is going to get deep. All right let's start with a history lesson. Way back in 2015 Apple introduced live photos. A photo taken in live on the iPhone captures like a second and a half before and after the photo is taken. Then in software the phone chooses what it considers the best key photo but you can go into the editor in photos and adjust the key photo to get that perfect moment in time. In my opinion it's the only way to take photos of children and pets. The other feature of live photos is that you can use some fun effects like bounce and long exposure to create interesting images and videos. A year later in 2016 Apple introduced portrait mode which allowed us to take shallow depth of field photos mimicking what we can do with a big girl camera. Over the years the quality of portrait images has gotten better and better and can create very compelling photos of people and pets. But if you choose to take a portrait photo it's not a live photo. You had to choose between the cool shallow depth of field or the ability to capture just the right frame. If you capture that perfect smile in a portrait photo that was awesome. But if you missed it the photo was useless. The problem at this point in the story is that we had to choose between live and portrait photos. Before you took the shot you had to decide if you wanted to be able to select the best photo in a live photo or risk it and try to get a fabulous portrait photo of a person or pet. With the advent of the iPhone 15 models of the entire line and with iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma Apple gave us almost the best of all worlds. If you take a photo of a person a dog or a cat sorry burden reptile people but you take it even in live it can become a portrait photo. I know it sounds too good to be true right. Well this very cool feature has some tricks to it. We're going to go through how to know you're taking a live portrait photo. Limitations on live versus portrait in these photos how to edit the depth of field and how to share these images so the recipient can also edit the depth of field. And there be dragons. I took two photos to demonstrate the first item on our list how to know you're taking a live photo. The first photo I took was of my laptop which no matter how much I love it is not a person dog or cat. The second photo I took was of my cat Ada and of course she's named after the first computer programmer Ada Lovelace. In the upper right of the camera app while taking each of these images I made sure that the live photo indicator did not have a line through it so I knew I was taking a live photo. Down below just above the shutter button I made certain I had selected a regular photo you know just as photo not pano or portrait or any of the other options. As I pointed my camera at the two different subjects there was one subtle difference in the on-screen information. When I pointed at my cat the camera showed a little f in a circle as an overlay on top of the image in the bottom left. When I looked at my laptop with the camera app there was no little f showing. This f is the indicator to let you know that you'll be able to change the depth of field on the photo you're about to take. Now if you don't see the f when you point your iPhone 15 at a person dog or cat you may have to toggle on this feature. It should be added by default but if you don't see it open settings camera and then scroll down till you see portraits in photo mode. The text below the toggle says automatically capture depth information if a person dog or cat is prominent in the frame in photo mode so you can apply portrait effects later. In traditional photography with big girl cameras you have a dial that changes what's called the f stop. As the f stop number gets smaller the lens opens up more which creates the shallower depth of field. Think about how it's harder to focus driving at night that's because your pupils dilate super big and then you have a shallower depth of field. Anyway Apple have chosen the f symbol to indicate that you'll be able to change the effective f stop inside the photos app. What's interesting here, I'm learning a wee bit about traditional photography, is that the iPhone 15 has been instructed to take a live photo but it's still going to let us change the depth of field. After you take the photo in live but not portrait of a person cat or dog the indicator in the upper left will have an f in a circle and the word live next to it. The drop down will be there to play around with effects like bounce and long exposure but hold that thought. When you edit the image across the bottom along with the normal editing options you'll see both portrait with an f in a circle and live side by side if you're looking on the iPhone. Now if you select live you can drag the slider to choose a different key photo but there's something new on the slider. Above the initial key photo there's a little f in a circle again. Now remember when I started the story I said Apple gave us almost the best of all worlds there's a limitation. The depth information is only on that initial key photo. If you didn't capture what you wanted and you need to change to a different key photo then you won't be able to adjust the depth of field. Now I didn't want you to be confused because if you start changing the key photo and then you change over to portrait to adjust the depth suddenly the photo changes back to the original key photo. But hey you got a better photo because you did take in live. Now I look at it as the live photo is there just in case you miss the perfect moment but you get all the benefits of portrait mode if you did capture the perfect moment. So still in the editor when you select the portrait option again with the F on the bottom you'll see the word depth and on the on the left and a dial across the bottom but it'll default by saying off. At this point pretty much everything in your image should look in focus but if you start to slide your finger along the dial you'll see little numbers popping up like F 16 down to F 1.4. We could go through why they're numbered this way but that's a whole how cameras work explanation so let's stick with what I said before. The smaller the number the shallower the depth the field. If you want to understand all that go back and listen to the very beginning episodes of Let's Talk Photography by Bart Buchatz. Alright as you drag your finger across this little dial you're going to see the background of your photo go out of focus. If you drag all the way to F 1.4 you might see part of your subject go out of focus. Say a dog with a long nose they might end up with their ears out of focus. You probably don't want that so drag it up until you see your subject in focus but distractions in the background are blurred out. But that's not all. You'll see an orange square on the screen showing you where the camera's original focus point was. You can simply tap anywhere on the image to change what's in focus. In 2014 you might remember a company called Lightro they came out with a specialized camera it was real expensive and allowed you to change what was in focus like this and now we have this capability in our pockets. If you've ever taken a picture say of two people in front of maybe some pretty scenery like there's a canyon behind them or something and then the camera focused on the scenery between them instead and the photos was useless. Now with this camera in the iPhone 15 you'll be able to fix that image and focus on the people. In the upper left next to yet another F and a circle you'll see a hexagon icon with two circles in it. Looks kind of like the metal nut on the end of a screw to me. Tap that icon and you'll be taken into the studio lighting options. Perhaps you're feeling a bit fancy and you want to choose a fabulous stage lighting effect for your cat photo. When you're in lighting mode with the nut selected the F icon changes to say the F stop you've chosen. So in my case it said F 2.8. Not sure why you need that information while you're playing with the lighting but it's there for you if you need it. If you do give studio lighting a play be sure to go back and forth with the depth of field because it can dramatically change how your studio lighting effect looks. Also if you play studio lighting this turns off live. When you flip to the live slider control it's going to be completely grayed out. At the top you'll see the word live in a box with a line through the live icon and tapping on that will make it live again but that will also turn off any studio lighting effects you might have applied. After you save your changes to the depth of field and or the studio lighting effects I think the on-screen information gets confusing. In the upper left it will still say live even though it's no longer live and the F icon has a line running behind it not across it but behind it. That would imply to me though that this isn't a portrait image any longer and that it's still live but it's actually the opposite. Under the chevron that drops down where you use to sync loop bounce along exposure you now have live live off portrait and portrait off. I played with these options for a bit and if anything I was more confused as I toggled them on and off especially when I had studio lighting applied. I was going to try to explain it to you but I'm pretty sure it's not acting exactly as they intended it because it was very confusing so we're just going to abandon that whole path and move on. Now my interest in this entire topic came up because I had a problem to be solved. Pat Dengler joined our family at a brewery nearby and we used Pat's new iPhone 15 Pro to take a family portrait. Pat is family so of course she was in it and she had set her camera to regular portrait mode when the photo was taken. That's cool but when we looked at the photos we realized that the depth of field was too shallow and some of us including Pat and me were way out of focus. Now understandably Pat didn't want to be responsible for choosing the right photo from all the ones that we took to adjust the depth of field so she said I'm just going to give them all to you and you find the best one and then I could fix them. It turns out to be much trickier to transfer editable depth photos than I ever would have imagined and this is where the real madness began. Now in our family we normally just create a shared album in Apple Photos for family events but when Pat added these portrait photos to our shared album we could not edit the depth of field. Now I knew shared albums weren't full resolution but I didn't realize they would lose some of the editing functionality. It was time to go on a quest to find a way to move these photos from her library to mine and let me do the depth of field editing. Now it's very mean to me to do it this way but I'm going to start by telling you all the methods that failed first and then I'll tell you what does work. The next most likely way to succeed at sharing a photo with an Apple-centric person is to send the image via iMessage. If you drag an image from photos into messages or use the share icon at the top of the photos app and share the messages the image loses the depth data when it arrives at the other end. That really surprised me because iMessage it's usually my go-to when other methods fail. I tried iCloud sharing next but it also failed me. You have to log into iCloud.com to share files you can't right click to share a photo and then when you choose to share a photo gives you the option to copy a link and send it to someone. But when you send that link to someone you can clearly see it's a photo with depth information because it has our little F symbol but the edit button is grayed out when they receive it. I think it makes sense though because iCloud sharing is kind of just letting someone look at your photos it's not a collaboration method. Then I got to thinking maybe we need to export the image first. If you do a simple export from photos in macOS using file export export one photo or shift command E you can set the export to be HEIC JPEG PNG or TIFF but this is not the full original photo format even if you export to HEIC. To export the original in all its glory with its precious depth information you need to select file export export unmodified original option shift E. Okay if you're on iOS you can do it too select the share sheet icon in the bottom left you know the little box with the up arrow in it then you'll choose unmodified original. We're going to have to circle back to where to export the file to in a bit because that gets confusing too but that unmodified original part is what you need to remember. The exported original is going to break into two files. If the photo was taken as a live photo you're going to get the original photo either JPEG or an HEIC depending on how you took it and an MOV file and that's that little two or three second video taken for the live photo. Now if it wasn't a live photo you'll still get two files but it'll either be a JPEG or HEIC and the second file is an AAE file. I had to look this one up. The AAE file contains any adjustments you may have made to the original photo so those changes could be reapplied if you ever wanted the back. All right. So now we know how to export unmodified originals. Great. I exported an unmodified original and I dragged it into iMessage and sadly bringing that image into photos on another user account did not allow me to edit the depth of field. Okay so iMessage is definitely out as a transfer mechanism if you want the recipient to be able to edit the depth of field but this unmodified original method is still crucial for what will work. I did finally find a couple of ways you can transfer the file but the format in which you took the original photo matters I think. I'm not entirely sure though. I'm an engineer by training and it's in my DNA. I know how to do controlled experiments where you change just one thing at a time. That's the only way to know for sure what affects the outcome of an experiment but in all of my testing with Pat some with Jill and later extensively with Sandy even while I was watching her screen I've seen some methods not work and then start working for no apparent reason. Sandy is my witness on this. Now I'm going to have to give you the best advice I can but don't be surprised if at some point you get inconsistent results. One of the things Pat and I discovered that we think caused janky results was that the format in which he took our family photo was a JPEG not HEIC. The HE and HEIC stands for high efficiency but it's also a newer format that allows more options. To increase your chance of success in transferring photos so they can have their depth edited I suggest you ensure you're using an HEIC for your photos. On the iPhone in system settings scroll down and open camera select formats and under camera capture ensure that high efficiency is selected. The other option is called most compatible and that's the option that creates a JPEG. Pat had set her camera back while back to take JPEGs because she had had trouble sending photos to some Android friends. Keep that in mind if you choose to make the change to HEIC. Now I know this feels like we're fixing to make a plan to maybe start transferring some photos someday but there's one more thing that matters the person receiving the image must be on iOS 17 or macOS Sonoma. That little fact reared its head when Steve was unable to edit the depth on a photo I'd sent to him and yet Sandy could see the depth slider on the same photo. We'd gone back and forth we couldn't figure out what was going on. Now I had done tons of experiments using Steve's MacBook Pro to test whether photos were editable and they were working but when I sent him this one photo he happened to be on his Mac Studio and it didn't work because it was still on macOS Ventura and his laptop had already been on macOS Sonoma. So the recipient has to be on iOS 17 or macOS Sonoma. Okay I think we finally have enough caveats here to get to be able to finally transfer the photo. The first way I found that allows you to successfully send a portrait photo to someone and have them be able to edit the depth information was to use Apple Mail. Dragging right from photos into Mail had the same problem as iMessage. So the way you do it is first export an unmodified original as I described earlier and then drag it from the fighter into Mail. It works but there's one more thing you have to do. I told you this is madness right? All right you've probably noticed that in Apple Mail when you attach an image there's a little drop down in the upper right that lets you change the size of the image you're sending. You get to choose between small, medium, large and actual size. However, if you've dragged in an unmodified original you get one more option. It says choose original image. You must select this for the photo to be transported to its recipient without any of the data being stripped away. Remember that recipient's got to be on Sonoma iOS 17 in order to make the edits to the portrait photo that you've taken them. Now Sandy and I tested the idea of putting the unmodified originals into Dropbox and then I would just send links to them. She had total success if I sent a link to a single image or if I compressed a group of them into a zip file. In all cases she was able to modify the depth data. Now Dropbox with unmodified originals for the win. Earlier I said that sharing via iCloud.com didn't work because it is not a collaboration tool. It's all about just showing them a photo. But what about sharing from iCloud Drive? I exported an unmodified original to my iCloud Drive in the Finder so that it was a file, not part of photos. I right clicked on the file and I chose share and I selected iMessage. I sent a photo of our cat Grace to Sandy. I sent the same image in the same way to another phone that I have and I was able to open it and while it looked like it worked because the upper left clearly said portrait and had the little F I didn't get the depth slider when I went to edit. I backed out of edit and I tapped on the word portrait with the little F and I saw something very curious. Under portrait it had two options. Portrait with the little F next to it and portrait off with the F having a line through it. Look at this, the portrait off option was selected. Why would the photo say it was portrait but have portrait off? But it gets even weirder. You cannot change the selection so I'm unable to change it to a portrait photo. Sandy and I are in agreement that this must be a bug because she saw that on her version as well. Why would they let you send a portrait photo tell you it's portrait, give you a drop down to enable the portrait photo but disable the option. Undaunted, I went back into the share sheet on iOS and there's a button for options before you export. You can set the format from automatic to current or most compatible. We would want current to ensure we still had the HEIC on export. At the bottom there's a toggle that says all photos data and this is off by default every time you go to export a photo from the iPhone. Below the toggle Apple explain original quality files will include edit history and metadata like location, depth information and captions. The recipient can view the current version and modify any edits. Well that sounds like exactly what we want. Above the title the heading says that this toggle affects airdrop and iCloud links only. All right so I set the photo to current format. I chose send as iCloud link. I turned on all photos data and I texted the iCloud link to the image to Steve and believe it or not it worked on his iPhone running iOS 17. Okay we have a success there. Next I found another method on iOS that worked with iCloud. If you export as original from photos using the share sheet you can email it as an attachment. When you start the email tap in the blank area of the screen so you haven't typed anything yet. You'll first see paste select and all when you do that tap but there's a chevron to the right. If you tap that you'll see add link, auto fill and format. Tap the chevron to the right again. Now you'll see quote level and insert photo or video. Do not select photo or video because it won't work. Instead tap that darn right chevron a fourth time or it's a third time. Anyway tap it again and now you'll see attach file. Select that option and it'll let you navigate to where you save the file. When you select send in the email you'd be asked whether you want to send as full size and you need to say yes. Now this one sounds a lot harder than it is except for the option that you might fat finger the chevron button which I did the first few times but it does get the job done. So remember you want to attach a file not add a photo or video because that's going to ask you to get it out of photos and then it won't do the right image it won't be the unmodified original. You need to attach a file and find it out in the Finder. Alright to be complete I wanted to try another cloud file sharing option so I abused my friendship with Sandy one last time by sending her a link to an unmodified original in Google Drive. I created the link by opening my Google Drive in Finder and right clicking on the file and choosing copy link to clipboard. Easy peasy. But when she opened the link she didn't have permissions. So she had to request permission. This triggered an email to me that I had to open. Then in the email I had to click a link to log into Google Drive on the web and give her editor permissions. As soon as I granted her permission she was then able to import the image into photos and she was able to change the depth of field. So while it was incredibly annoying compared to just using a Dropbox link technically you can use Google Drive to share an unmodified original portrait photo that the other person can edit. At this point I told her I refused to install OneDrive to test that option because even I'm wary of this entire investigation. All right let's go to bottom line here. I explained at the beginning that I descended into madness and drag Sandy with me and now you understand what I meant. At least I warned you. All right let's see if I can summarize my findings. To take a live portrait photo you have to have one of the iPhones 15 running iOS 17. I recommend sending your image format to high efficiency but I'll confess that I did find scenarios where JPEGs actually worked so your mileage may vary. For the person receiving your image to be able to change the depth of field they must be on macOS Sonoma or on iOS 17 but they do not need to own an iPhone 15. To transfer the photos successfully so they can edit the depth of field your choices are from macOS export an unmodified original and then you can save locally and attach to an email in Apple Mail but be sure to change the size to original image or you can save it to Dropbox if you want to make it harder save it to Google Drive and send them the link. This may work in other non-iCloud services but I haven't tested elsewhere. If you're on iOS you can use the share sheet and use options to set the format to current send as iCloud link and turn on all photos data. Then you can send the iCloud link through any service you like. You can text it you can email it whatever you want. On iOS you can also airdrop the photo if you toggle on all photos data in options first. Finally in iOS you can export unmodified original using the share sheet from photos save to iCloud or another cloud service then you create an email and add the image as an attachment. Now I have a suspicion that much of what I've explained would work with regular portrait photos but early on in the process I got overwhelmed with all of the options and I focused my efforts on just the new live portrait photos. I welcome you to try any or all of these methods and find out if they work for your regular portrait photos. As you can imagine this has consumed my daily life for several days taken up paths time Jill's time and especially Sandy's time to do all of these experiments. I thank them for all of their efforts and I'm just gonna go take a nap now. Do you wish that right now the show would be interrupted by an ad? No? Well then how about becoming one of the fine folks who support the show financially by going to podfee.com slash PayPal and making a one-time donation so we never go to ads. You could be cool like John Murray and put a reminder in your calendar to make a donation once a quarter. I hope you'll consider helping keep the show going. Well hey Bart, last time we talked we chatted about you going with a bigger watch. You went from the 44 or 45 millimeter Apple Watch up to the Ultra 2 but you embiggened something else in your digital life right? I did. I've had a year of tech inflation where it wasn't about the price. All of my tech just got bigger. So I... But it also was about the price. Actually technically speaking the price stayed the same, didn't it? Well no, of course I paid more because I got a bigger model. Yeah, okay. Right. So far, yeah. I am famously anti-big phone but I now own a 15 Pro Max iPhone. Ah, the giant. Which the gigantic phone because now you get to have an I told you so moment here to start us off because when the iPhone 10 came out I was very very very worried that it was way too big and I wouldn't be able to use it and it would be terrible and awful but I bought it anyway because gosh darn it, was it ever cool? Which it was. And you told me not to be so silly it's absolutely not too big it'll be just fine and you were completely correct. The iPhone 10 was absolutely fine so I got over myself very quickly because I could still use it one handed and it still fit in all of my pockets. So this time around I don't think I've been quite as lucky and I knew I wouldn't be so this is only the second time that Apple have made us have this difficult choice because in recent years it's been the same camera in the big and the not so big Pro and there's only one other time in history they made us choose which was all the way back in the iPhone 6 Plus. And that's when I bought an iPhone 6 Plus because I wanted the new cameras. What was it? Was it just having two cameras I think back then? Was the big and? It was no it was motion it was it had the image stabilization so the video was way better and I remember you liking that. Okay I'm going to bring it up in Mac Tracker and look at that because I thought it was also it had the it had two lenses or something because I don't do video much. Back then I thought you did because I was also one of the first waterproof ones you could have fun in the pool with it. It's a long time ago. iPhone 6 is so many so so many years ago. Anyway I didn't go big and then for obvious reasons because I disagree with big phones but you didn't stay big which is interesting. Right after a while I did really like it. I liked the phone and I actually came to the conclusion that big phones are for girls because we have purses and by and large obviously not all women carry purses. Pat Dengler is famous for not carrying a purse but we tend to carry purses more often than not and being thin and but longer is I mean an iPhone 6 plus would have fit in the the fanciest little clutch kind of a purse but if you got pockets and or you know a jacket pocket or something maybe it maybe it would be harder. So I started came to the conclusion it was good for girls but when I downsized to the next year I was so happy I was so happy to go back down. I didn't realize how much it was bothering me until I went smaller. Yeah and I know Adam Christensen also went big once and swears he'll never do it again. So it was my turn to to have it go. And I mean this year the reason I like I wasn't into iPhone photography with the iPhone 6 plus so it didn't really that wasn't my thing but now I'm all in like my DSLR literally I checked the timestamp on the last image on the memory card it's before COVID. Oh my gosh 2019 you haven't taken a picture since COVID on the DSLR it has not taken a shot since everything's been iPhone every single shot. So when Apple made me choose between the big phone with the 5x tetraprism or the not as big phone without the 5x tetraprism I kind of knew where I was going. So I went but I knew it was going to be a trade-off and it is it is an absolutely amazing device and I feel like I've made trade-offs and I haven't felt like that in a very very long time. So I want to end on good stuff because trade-offs have pros and cons right that's that's always the thing with the trade-off. So I'm going to start being mildly cranky and then I get happier and happier as you go through and because I know you prefer it that way right. So I literally actually pulled a muscle trying to use the phone one-handed I had to get the Arnica gel out and it was I didn't know there was a muscle between your thumb and the other finger sort of in the V of your hand but you do have a muscle there and it can really bloody well hurt. Oh that's terrible. Yeah so I've given up on using it one-handed sort of I've discovered the accessibility features and figured out how they work and they work well. So I had slightly scuppered myself because a long long time ago and I remember doing it now with hindsight so we used to have to triple tap the home button to get reachability and there was a reason that annoyed me and I would be darned if I remember what it was but I remember being delighted at discovering I could turn it off. So I did so long ago I had a home button so years ago and now I was like where the hell has reachability gone I haven't accidentally triggered that thing in years but I know it exists So reachability again is the thing that pulls the the whole screen kind of slides down so you can reach the top of the screen right? Yeah and on these big phones it pulls down a lot and the smaller phones it pulled down like three quarters of the way but now it pulls down halfway down the screen so it really comes down into reach of your thumb like all the way down which is cool because my thumb isn't very long and that's literally where I pulled the muscle so yeah good. So it's in accessibility settings along with half the planet So I turned it back on and you know the gesture on the post home button phones is the reverse of the show me the home screen so it's basically pulled down at the bottom of the screen instead of pulling it up which is intuitive yeah which is intuitive when you think about it I haven't forgotten it which is helpful and the other accessibility thing I've gotten very fond of is this what I call it the scoochie keyboard so if you use Apple's official keyboard it can exist in three modes like normal where it's the full width of the phone which on the wide phones means the letters are very far apart so you make less typos actually but you can't reach all the way across with your thumb because the phone is too big but it exists as a scooched left for left-handed people and a scooched right for right-handed people and I discovered that I usually actually hold my phone left-handed even though I am right-handed because usually my right hand has an umbrella in it and in Ireland it's often windy so you actually need your good hand to keep the umbrella steered at the wind so because you can't have it go under the umbrella because then you're in Mary Poppins land I can't fly so I just break umbrellas so the right hand has to keep control of the umbrella and the left hand has the phone which means that if you put your thumb and press and hold on the globe icon you can then slide up and to the left to get the scoochie left keyboard and it's like one nice easy little fluid motion so and then I can reach everything with the thumb even though it looks like the scoochie keyboard looks terrible but it works really well so I don't care what it looks like it works so I was explaining this to Steve that you wanted to be able to type left hand or one-handed because you had to hold the umbrella with the other hand and he immediately said why doesn't Bart just use dictation Allison? Oh because it's usually windy as well and it's just not a good mix I don't know I know that I've badgered you about this before and I promised myself I wouldn't yet again tilt at this particular windmill but it's getting better and better Bart and separately I told the story to Helma and she said the same thing why doesn't he just use dictation? I will give it a go when it is sometimes if I'm out in the crowd of people I probably won't because that's just weird but yeah when I'm out along the canal by myself yeah I'll give it a go I'll give it a go what's the worst it can do make a mess of it right do you find that the the new predictive text in Iowa 17 is helping you too? Yes and I often see it be very clever like jump back to two words yeah exactly it's like a whole sentence and then suddenly it realizes oh you didn't mean you know umbrella whatever it is like bloop thank you that's just what I was going to do I don't mean uh fixing previous stuff I'm talking about where it shows you in gray the words it thinks you're gonna type well that's true it's like an autocomplete but it's it's no longer you have to look down and tap it it's just right in line and if you just hit a space it accepts it yeah so that's good it's also very good at correcting the word you just mistyped and I've noticed it correct a word or two back and that works really well with dictation surprisingly enough if you if you watch every word it says in dictation and you pedantically say each word it'll be a disaster if you stop every time you see anything wrong just talk just talk to it and let it figure it out and you'll see words be wrong and then most of the time you'll see it go back and fix it every once while it was right it changes it to the wrong word but most of the time I see it changing it the right way I've been surprised with how much better it is each time yeah definitely I mean I know they're using a large language model which seems like a good thing for autocorrect right that's the language model auto yeah that's kind of what they're for right using a large language model to try tell you truth terrible using a large language model to type language that's a good use for a large language model yeah yeah that's the perfect reason for it that I mean it's literally predictive text okay let me use it for predictive text yeah exactly the other thing that slightly made me a little bit cranky is too strong a word mildly disappointed I sort of thought that a bonus for getting a much bigger phone would be an extra row or column of icons I figured there's so much more screen here surely they'll give me bigger widgets or something extra on my home screen on my lock screen nope oh they're just bigger yeah everything's just a little bigger and or further apart depending on what it is so on the keyboard the keys are the same size but the gap is bigger which I guess does aid accuracy if there's a bit more of a gap so when you're using two thumbs it's actually quite nice because it's a there's a little bit more room between the you know the q and the w and the e and all that you know so it's a little nicer that way it gives you more room for the scooshy keyboard that's probably as big as my keyboard right well no the scooshy one is very scooshy but no but I'm saying if you scoosh yours it's probably the size of mine on the 15 pro I think it's even more scooshed I think it's actually even smaller I like this name we're going to keep this scooshy scooshy yeah so that's so that's me done to be honest being cranky because other than that it's kind of all the trade-offs are all on the other side so if you want to watch a video or something it's so much nicer to watch a youtube video on this iPhone than any other iPhone I've ever owned if you want to enjoy flicking through flicker it's so much nicer looking at people's photos on this iPhone than any phone I've ever owned and the added bonus of course is that if I want to edit my photos in the camera app all of the controls are a little bit easier to use and the view I get of my photo is that little bit better because it's all a bit bigger and as well as being my primary camera it's also my primary editing suite so it's really nice to be easier you know for it to be just better editing photos and of course yeah and the other thing of course is that the 5x telephoto is yeah okay that was why I went big and I'm really glad I did because it is without a shadow of a doubt it is at least as good I can say with a hundred percent confidence it is at least as good as a 3x telephoto there is no loss in quality and I'm convinced it's slightly better but I will say for sure it's the same but I think it's a little bit better which for going from three to five is impressive and in particular it doesn't get noisy even in low light because I was doing things like moonrise and stuff at 5x because I figured let's stress this thing right dusk 5x telephoto sure yeah that's as cranky as you're going to make it there was no noise like I had a sky without noise I had a very plain landscape with very little detail so the noise should have jumped out nothing going trees where the edges should have got all crunchy with noise reduction they were fine it wasn't all crunchy so this thing holds up the 5x holds up really well so I'm glad you were you say it's at least as good as the three I was hoping it would be a lot better than the three because the three is kind of muddy to me on the 14 pro and the 15 pro but that's why I think it's better I think the reason I say I think it's better is because I haven't noticed it'd be muddy so with the 3x telephoto sometimes it would be amazing and sometimes it would be awful and seems to be light based yeah and so I don't know if I've had this phone long enough to be sure it's never awful but so far it feels better okay now I did one experiment Helma was here this week and she has an iPhone 15 pro max and I did a test that I wanted to do that I've been wanting to do for a while I took the 15 pro max and used the the little rotating dial thing and dialed it down to 3x which my understanding is that's now a digital zoom it's not the optical zoom it's now a composite image where it's taking some information from two lenses and mushing it together and it's digital photography thing so yeah right and I compared that and I took this a 3x shot of the exact same thing with my 14 pro I have 15 pro and the 3x on the 15 pro was better than this modified mutated 3x on the 15 pro so if you want to take a photo that's 3x take it at 2x and zoom in and crop in on it I would suggest don't take it don't try to make it 3x take it at 2x and crop yeah and that was something I was a little bit worried about so would I miss so I shoot an awful I still shoot most of my photos at 0.5 that is my look I don't know that's just whether it's that the Irish landscape likes it or whether it's me who likes it I don't know but I the two of us together that that 0.5 works well you seem to be very very close on flowers and bugs and such or your 0.5 exactly and I was a little bit on one but when I want to zoom I generally speaking want more and so I have not found myself wanting anything less than the full 5x it's like yeah give it to me give it to me this is but this is better that I'm cropping less I'm cropping less yay so I was afraid that's a good point when you want to zoom you want to zoom yeah exactly and so I thought kind of between one and five that's a big leap no it's fine it's absolutely fine so few so again not being cranky the other thing I got very lucky on right so the time I go big is the time Apple changed the material from heavy stainless steel to light titanium so my phone is physically much bigger it feels no heavier in fact I think it feels a little bit lighter but it may just be because the edges are so much nicer it may just be nicer rather than lighter but there is no way that this phone feels heavier than my old phone even though it is bigger which again there's a lot of discussion about why it feels that way and things about moments of inertia and where the you know where the weight is around the edge versus the frame and all that I don't know it does feel lighter just going from 14 pro to 15 pro I'm trying to remember if we just looked at the 15 pro versus say a 14 pro I wonder if you're doing statzy work would I be very curious on the difference in real grams between the 15 pro max and the 14 pro not max right I'm just checking just 15 pro to 14 pro first and it's wait a minute 206 was the 14 pro and 187 is the 15 pro and that's in grams okay yeah grams okay so your phone is your 15 pro max is 221 the 14 pro was 206 so it's only is that 15 grams more which is spectacularly little right right right and if it's better distributed and all that yeah yeah and definitely because the stainless steel was the heaviest part of the old photo and it was around the edge and now we have the lightest material around the edge of this one so my physics brain does tell me that should make it feel lighter because it as you move it around it doesn't feel as heavy so either way it feels nice in the hand apart from the fact that there's too much of it like but imagine if I'd gone with the stainless steel really big one I think I'd be cranky about the weight as well as everything else so I think I'd feel more traded off so I just I think I got very lucky that I went big when they went light and it's such a nice material I really really can't say how much I enjoy the titanium like it's it's a gorgeous gorgeous material no you're you're right I am caseless yeah always will be the other thing is that this thing continues to surprise me with this battery life like I haven't changed what I do and every time I look at the phone to see should I pop it on a charge pad I go oh 80 percent why you how it's like almost all the way through today how are you still oh yeah you're a new phone you're bigger it just it always always surprises me that it has way more juice than it should and I used to pop this thing on a little charge stand three or four times a day basically whenever I would be at my desk it'd get popped on the stand I've never been the kitchen I'd pop it on the stand that had the the belkin ones everywhere and I just don't need to it's just like I said it's constantly surprising me that it still has like not just enough charge but like way enough hope to be enough don't worry your little head about it enough and that's funny I didn't have it never it with the exception of certain software updates that seem to cause things to go poorly like towards the end of iOS 16 I was losing battery right and left I don't tend to charge mine midday with the with the smaller phone but I was looking at the specs and you should be getting 25 percent more battery so that is certainly noticeable that is noticeable and the other thing of course is my phone was a year old and so its battery wouldn't have been at full oomph so I'm probably getting more than 25 percent yeah yeah and maybe that was part of what was going on with me too well that's good and the other thing that I thought was hilarious so I was talking to dad the weekend a week ago basically over the weekend and he was saying I'm thinking again a new phone don't quite know what to do I think he's on a he's on an 11 so he's an 11 pro mind you so he's a fair bit back wow and he was like you know so what this very latest one I hear titanium here it's very nice you know I'm thinking of going to the really big one and I was like as it happens I bought it it really is very big and he only had one question battery life I was only cared about it's like battery life how big is battery life and I said well look at I honestly it is very big but I'll show you when I come home on Wednesday and you can have a look at it and I came home he picked the phone up he did that thing you do you juggle it in your hand he stuck it in the shirt pocket anyway so you said the battery life was longer and I said yes he went great that's my next phone that was it does it fit in my breast pocket and does it feel okay in the hand yeah fine yeah that's it that's the phone I want he could have also gotten a 14 plus or a 14 and got better battery life than his 11 his 11's probably pretty bad battery life these days it is at this stage yeah but yeah so like he's a bit like sort of I would be if I wasn't quite so too nerd he tends to buy nice and then keep for a long time yeah okay okay so yeah I just thought it was hilarious he didn't care about the camera he didn't care about the the screen he didn't care about anything he said does it have a longer battery life and does it still fit on my shirt pocket you know Helma loves hers too and she could care less about the camera we're standing on the edge of a cliff with the sun setting over lanada bay which is this beautiful we're on the cliffs and and you know the waves are coming in and this is gorgeous view and I was like Helma take a picture here stand there I'll take a picture of you and I kept saying send this to your husband send this to your husband I kept making her take pictures and it was like I had to force her to do it it was pretty funny oh dear yeah it's of course the show right because I'm only going with this phone because of the camera I don't know people couldn't care less about the camera at the screen like the screen is gorgeous of course being an always on screen I think it probably has more knits as well it just it's just a very very pleasing screen of course the bezels have shrunk as well which definitely helps that's a good question does it have more knits I thought Apple were throwing knits at everything this year I kept on hearing them say that on the keynote nope it's the same as the 14 pro and the 15 pro thousand knits 1600 HDR okay so just more of the there's just more pixels yeah more of them glaring blurring at you yeah and you had always on before with the 14 pro right I did yes now that my phone has been handed down my darling beloved has always on for the first time and he's now going through that phase of why is my phone not oh no it's supposed to do that one thing I heard about that you can do is you can get the benefit of always on which is you look down and you can see the time but you have the option of actually turning off your your wallpaper so what you have is a black screen with just the time so it's very very low battery drain so if it bothers you that you're getting a battery drain with it you can you can turn that off so I like my pictures so I keep mine yeah so do I picture pictures and actually to be honest the widgets although if you go with a black screen you still get your widgets hmm I don't know I don't use any widgets that would cover up the picture of my grandson looking at me with a big grin on his face he can move the widgets around so that's and covers it no you can't no they're up at the top right underneath the the time and they obliterate the subject of the of the image if I could move them I would I thought there were a couple of different maybe I'm misremembering either way if you stack enough of them they go down but I could be wrong I only gave them one try and went nope you're obviously not as obsessed with knowing the probability of rain and actually yeah I almost hate to say but my watch has done it again I've lost all weather again and I'm just I'm done so now I'm using complications on my lock screen on my phone to take over from my watch come on it's sad oh that's terrible well you know while you've been going bigger I've been on a going smaller thing you know I went I had a 15 inch MacBook Pro then I went up to the 16 inch MacBook Pro then I went down to a 14 and oh boy Howdy was I happy I was so delighted that I got to have a smaller laptop couldn't believe how light that was and I don't know if it's I've mentioned this but I've had this little tiny problem with battery life on my MacBook Pro so I bought a a MacBook Air just to be able to have a machine to use when I was running all these tests and I love it I love the form factor I love how light it is excuse me and I've always had a 12.9 inch iPad Pro and I'm considering going down to the 11 I think I might go down huh that's that's interesting because I have to say actually no maybe I've always I'm the old guy with the 17 inch MacBook Pro years ago so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask but I adore because I use it as my kitchen utensil I like my giant big iPad I don't think you could pry it out of my cold dead hands my gigantic iPad that's what I always used to say because I use it as a TV I watch video podcast on it and the occasional TV show but I don't know I'm not that far away from it so I don't have it across the room in the kitchen like you do where you you sit at the kitchen table and watch it as a TV right well no so I'm using it while I'm cooking as my recipe thing so I'm basically glancing over at it while I'm trying to stir the whatever and do the whatever 20 million things at once so I use the split screen thing so I have two thirds the screen on the paprika app you put me onto all those years ago which is the best cooking app ever and one third with my multi timer app which has lots and lots of kitchen timers oh did you know that paprika can do the timers for you if it says yeah but it's not near as good as multi timer if you if it says simmer for 15 minutes if you tap it it'll start the timer and it'll be that that one thing we'll have the timer and then you can set it you can send as many as you want and it's directly related into the recipe yeah but the thing is I usually have about six recipes going so oh okay whereas the multi timer app lets me have a grid of timers the multi timer app's amazing for timers but those things like interval timers Thanksgiving we've got that where we're going okay we got the turkey to go in we got the ham we got the green beans we got the mashed potatoes all the the timing of all the things that have to go on yeah you can give them icons so you not just can you give them a name you can give them an icon so if you have a turkey icon and a potato icon like that is when you're frantically trying to make it all work just having a grid with like giant big countdown sort of pie charty style big countdowns telling you what's going on it's very powerful and you can also put intermediates so if you have to stir something every 10 minutes you can have it make a different bong on the intermediate then on the final so I have like you got to stir this as a gentle little beep and it's done as a beep beep beep beep beep so you know that's it all has meaning it's very very powerful and if you're into these weird things like pomodoro and all these kind of things it does it has all of those built in as well so it can do almost anything and you could basically assemble your grid of timers and then it's just one giant big tap at the start to tap it again to pause it very powerful app oh that sounds good well I learned something on that if not everything I learned about the the phone I'm kind of glad I was really tempted to go with that big phone Bart for the same reason for the 5x because I I spend most of my time zoomed in I like to use it to zoom in on flowers to get that get a little more real bokeh if I can but I've been I've been pretty disappointed with the 3x camera so I was thinking oh maybe the 5x would be this much better but I am really glad I didn't get a bigger phone and I can wait another year till they bring it down to my size phone but I want I want 10x I want a lot yeah yeah how many more besides can you put on this tetraprism like can you make it an octoprism yeah why not it looks like I'm still going to be carrying my micro four thirds camera when we go to Africa next year because that's the time I use it is when we go on these big trips so to take pictures of the penguins in Antarctica and the puffin up in Iceland having that camera with me was really good but other than that everything else is the iPhone that's for sure yeah so actually just to go back to your iPad question does anyone else in the house have that smaller size iPad even if it isn't a pro no no but I have played with other people's I've played with helmets for a while and I was really excited because she's got the smart keyboard on it the whatever it's called the magic keyboard and I thought okay great I can get a chance to type on it and see what it feels like but the her keyboard was different than a us version of it it wasn't super weird oh of course but just enough move that like the size of the return key and the location of the tab key were just enough move that I kept making typos so I couldn't quite tell but it seemed like it would probably be fine because typing on it is really important to me right and that's one of the things I adore is that Apple keyboard with the built-in trackpad is such a nice experience yeah yeah interestingly enough Helma has that she never uses the trackpad she uses her finger all the time and I thought that was fascinating I just immediately took to the trackpad yeah so if I have it sitting on the kitchen table when I'm you know reading catching up my RSS after dinner or whatever or triaging email it's either the trackpad or the stylus but I would never put my big grubby finger blocking my entire view it's either scroll at a distance with the apple pencil or use the trackpad with the two-finger swipe gesture which is very very much a thing in the mac right I would only use the pencil to scroll if I had it in my hand because I was doing something else now I still would use my fingers I would fold that up and use two fingers to scroll that's funny yeah elbow on the table like a slob and just gently scroll with the pencil it works I like it I like it well this was fun this has been interesting here in your perspective and we'll be curious to see what more you learn about the camera and what you what you like and see what it does over time yeah exactly I'm waiting to do a let's talk photography on it which I will when when the time comes oh but you're not supposed to talk gear and let's talk photography but let's give a plug for that if you go to let's-talk.ie or look in your pod catcher of choice for let's talk photography it's a fantastic podcast I love that you're doing so many solar shows I really like learning directly from you I'm just selfish I only want to hear from you I'm actually finding them fun to do so I was feeling I was always apologizing for them but I've stopped apologizing because actually I just kind of like them so there we are okay I can't remember how I'm supposed to end this one but how's about some happy computing that sounds good talk to you later Mark bye well that's going to wind us up for this week did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeet.com anytime you like if you have a question or suggestion just send it on over you can follow me on mastedon at pod feet at chaos.social remember everything good starts with pod feet.com if you want to join the conversation you can join our slack community at pod feet.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely nocella castaways you can support the show at pod feet.com slash patreon or the one type donation at pod feet.com slash paypal like John Murray and if you want to join in the fun of the live show come on over to pod feet.com starts live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time even this weekend on Thanksgiving weekend and join the friendly and enthusiastic nocella castaways thanks for listening 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