Sonos Arc Ultra, Car Key Expands, & Shortcut Automations with Clicks Keyboard
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Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara. I almost messed this up. We're 30 seconds into this. But joining this week, I have another guest with me. I teased it an episode or two back, but I have Jeff Gadway, the CMO and one of the founders of the Clix Creator or Clix Keyboard Case Foundation.

for iPhone. I'm very excited about it. We're going to talk about the new model, but we're specifically going to also talk about shortcuts and automation when used with this accessory. So we have some crazy topics to talk about. Thank you, Jeff, for joining me this week. Hey, thanks for having me on. Love the show and excited to get into this week's news and talk a little bit of clicks.

I know. We have a lot of new stuff to get into this week because it's always interesting. You never know what you're going to have, and you're never going to know what your co-host that week is going to be really interested in. And then right off the gate, we got two big ones. We briefly talked before we started recording, and we had to just cut ourselves off because the first thing is –

Apple's CarKey, you know, what you can use to unlock your car and everything else, is arriving to three more brands based on some backend code found in the Wallet app. So Audi, Volvo, and Polestar are all going to be soon adding support on select models of their vehicles for Apple CarKey. And you might have some experience with this very recently, right? Yeah.

So recently, I mean, I got to thank this show for even making it known to me that I could get my car key for my BMW in Apple Wallet. I didn't know that was even an option. And so when you sent me the rundown for the episode and I went and started looking into the Apple car thing, I was like,

I was like, oh, I can do this. And I got in the car and it was super easy. It took me probably less than five minutes. It took me more time to find both of my keys because you have to have both the keys in the car to pair it. And once I had that sorted out, it was easy. Now I'm so stoked to be able to go out, you know, go for runs and stuff with just my phone and not have to worry about bringing a fob around. I know. It's so crazy because it works on, I don't know if you wear an Apple Watch, but it works on Apple Watch 2, I believe. Yeah.

That is crazy to me. I didn't know that. That's super cool. And what I want to try, and not to go too far ahead to talking about click stuff, but I want to try to see if you can build a shortcut to be able to share your Apple key with somebody else.

Okay. I like that. I feel like that could be really useful. I mean, we're waiting for a house sharing of keys. I'm not even sure where we are with the car sharing of keys, but it has to be a thing. Um, my wife has her key fob recently has not been working and it's been driving me insane. Like she'll get in the car and then like, won't start, won't start. And then it will start just like for no reason. And then she was, she ran out and she texted me, my car won't lock. Like I literally am pressing the button on the fob and it won't lock. I'm like,

If this was just on the phone, on your watch, none of this would be a problem.

And we're finally getting there. I mean, you're already there. You're whatever model you have that already has a support for car key. And anyone who's got these three models hopefully will be added soon. But at least it's expanding. I didn't have it in our show notes here, but I believe they actually heard that there was, I think Apple did a little interview or something where they said they're expanding this to several more vehicles, so they didn't name anyone else. So hopefully we're going to see more coming. It's just been a very slow rollout so far.

Okay, next big topic that we have teased on this show for so long, and I'm finally excited to be able to have something that's official to talk about. I didn't know anything about this until this week, but Sonos has actually launched their new products. We have the Sonos Arc Ultra, as well as the Sub 4. So two new products. On top of that, they have made more improvements to their app, sticking with that bi-weekly cadence, so there's more updates there.

Before we get into the specs, how excited are you about these new Sonos products? I'm over the moon. I've been a big Sonos user for a long time. I have a Play 5. I've got a Sonos One, some of the old S1 stuff. I even have some of the architectural stuff in the house and out on the patio with Sonos amps. Oh, nice.

The only thing I don't have yet, Andrew, is home theater Sonos. Like I don't have a soundbar and I don't have a sub. And I think it's the Arc Ultra that's going to be the thing that gets me over the goal line and gets me buying an Arc. And what it is for me, it's the slimmer profile thing.

I don't have a ton of room and there's not a whole lot of clearance between my TV and my fireplace. So having something that's a little bit lower profile, smaller form factor, it's going to fit in a lot better. And then just the improvements that they're talking about with what is it? Sound motion. It just it seems like it's going to be incredible. So I'm super stoked to try it out.

Yeah, so the highlights on the upgrade here, it's basically $100 more, I think, from $899 to $999, from the Arc to Alc Ultra. Both are still available, but it's a 9.1.4 surround, like virtual surround, which is up from, I think, a 5.1.2. So now, I mean, talk about Dolby Atmos coming out of a soundbar. I am so excited to see how 9.1.4 sounds now.

out of this thing. And yeah, they made it smaller, but it's not only supposed to sound better, but fuller and more precise. So yeah,

What they called that sound motion tech, I believe this is what they brought over from... I don't know how to pronounce it. Like M-A-Y-H-T, mate, mat, something like that. Sounds about right. Well, they bought that... Yeah, close enough. Well, they bought that tech, and it was essentially minimizing sound components. So they were able to produce...

better quality sound out of smaller pieces, smaller diaphragms. And they kind of took off. Sonos bought them, haven't heard anything for a couple years. Well, now we have our first product using that tech, which they are now billing as Sound Motion. So that allows them to make this thing smaller, but also more able to be more precisely able to put that audio in 3D space. So I'm super curious how that's going to actually sound. Got Bluetooth input,

The new sub four, not much of a change there. They say it has an upgraded wifi chip makes it more stable. There's also a faster processor and more memory for future proofing. And they have a matte finish on the outside of that sub four. So some big upgrades here. Okay. Here's my question to you. Are you getting a sub to go with it?

I think I have to. I think I need to buy... I was checking it out before we recorded, and they have, like, a, you know, shop the set. So get the Arc Ultra, the sub, because I don't have a sub now today. And maybe even the ERA 300s for the, you know, the rear channels. And get the full Atmos experience, because I feel like that's missing in my life. For the amount of, like, TV and movies that we watch here, I feel like I'm coming up short, man.

I know, and I'm excited, to be honest, to try, because I have not tried a full-size Sono sub before. I have the sub mini, mainly because it's more affordable, but I think it does, you know, just a good enough job. And especially when the kid is sleeping, I don't want to have it, you know, thumping too loudly. But even with the sub mini...

It's got some really good bass to it. So I'm pretty excited to try out the Sub 4 because I think that's going to be awesome. But yeah, this is all pretty lust-worthy if you're looking for a soundbar, I think.

Yeah, I'm excited about that. I was talking to somebody last week who was in a similar situation to you are, and they said that there's even like some kind of a night mode with the Eero 300s where it can channel the sound instead of playing off of your soundbar and filling up the whole room. You can put it just a little bit closer to your ears so you're not keeping up the other people that are in your house. So, you know, as somebody who is up until the wee hours as a night owl, like that would be perfect for me too. So I'm keen to check it out.

That's what I ran into all the time, which was I would still be awake and my wife was like, could you just turn down the volume? I'm like, but if I turn down the volume, then I can't hear the dialogue because the bass is like...

They get too much. By the time you get the bass to a suitable level, you can't hear the dialogue. So to have that night mode. There's something about enhanced dialogue support with the Arc Ultra 2, which maybe I'm just getting older, but I'm finding myself picking up my Apple remote and rewinding 15, 30 seconds to catch a lot more of that dialogue. So maybe this would help me out.

They do have that new dialogue board. I was about to mention that. So thank you for reminding me because I didn't even have it in the notes. But yeah, there's like, I think it's like three or four levels of dialogue boosting, similar to what Apple has built into the Apple TV, but now it's being done on like the actual audio level, which I think is really handy because then it works from, because like Apple's,

Like Apple's design that they did only works through the Apple if you're using the native player. But as soon as you jump into a custom player like Peacock or Max or whatever, like you're not necessarily going to get Apple's audio benefits there. So this gives you that across the board, no matter which streaming app or which video source you're using, it's going to boost that dialogue. So I do think that's a huge thing. And if there's multiple levels of it, it's so cool. Like they did such a cool job with us. Love it.

Okay, well, those are all out. You guys can order them. Links are in the show notes per usual. Next up on the list, in the news, another thing that I'm jealous about. I'm going to be jealous about Carkey for a little bit, and now I'm going to be jealous that on Android 15, if you have a Pixel phone or a Pixel tablet, there is a new interactive wallpaper that you can use for your smart home. Basically, something that...

turns your tablet into a interactive display for all of your controls in your house. You know, Apple's got standby mode, which is one only available on iPhone, not available on tablets. And then two, you're limited to like what four little widgets or eight if you put them, you know, side by side. So it's not nearly enough to be able to control everything from that single spot.

I think this is super cool. I mean, I don't have a lot of Android tech in my life. I'm pretty much Apple exclusive at this point. But this could be something that would pique my interest because with all of the smart tech and connected home stuff I've got in my house, I would love to have something that's effectively like a stream deck for my house. And, you know, I could even see if you had like a...

just a dedicated device that sits there on a stand to serve as like a remote control for all the things in your home, that'd be pretty sick. I agree. And you know, that kind of leads us,

Real quick on that. So two things is not only is this very easy to implement, but it also works for not just the Google Home app. So if you do have a Pixel tablet, you can use this for your Matter accessories. You can use this for your Home Assistant, anything like that too. So it's pretty easy to implement that and use it for other smart home platforms all from like your Pixel tablet. So like I don't have any Pixel tablets, but I want Apple to make something like this.

And based on our next news item, it sounds like that might be a thing sooner rather than later. But before we talk about it, let's take our first break to thank our sponsor. We've got Shopify. There's so many brands these days that are launching and being successful online.

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Mark Gurman came out with another one of his big reports that essentially is rounding up a lot of the news, but it starts to paint a picture that we've talked about on the show, which is Apple's smart home platform coming into focus for 2025. And the big things that I think we can expect to see next year that has a lot of us excited is a actual dedicated home OS that

a new, new devices such as that smart home display thing that we had just talked about. Um, and more devices support it, which will be coming through matter. So whether Apple is maybe like holding off on some of these matter updates to push it all out at the same time, be like, Hey, look,

We're really committed to the smart home. Here's a new device to control your smart home. We control 50 more devices and we support matter up to 1.4 or something like there's all these different things. But I think this overall picture is something that we should all really be excited about, at least in that smart home space. I mean, this is exactly what we were just talking about, right? Like having some sort of Apple smart display there and some OS to go with it.

It feels to me like a lot of the plumbing is in place, right? Between how powerful Apple Shortcuts is on iOS to a lot of the enhancements that it feels like iOS is making with Control Center. It feels like the groundwork could be coming together to enable this more robust infrastructure and ecosystem around the home. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there like me who...

a plethora of Apple products that already work together in some capacity. I have Apple TVs, I have Macs and iPads and iPhones, and a lot of those things are already connected to other smart devices in my house, like my Nest Cam and my Sonos. It feels like a no-brainer to bring those things together in some

in an even more cohesive way. And let's be honest, that's what Apple does probably better than anybody else is that hardware software integration and make everything work really seamlessly together. I totally agree. I think 2025 is going to be the year of Apple Home. Like that's going to be it forever.

It's going to explode. Apple's going to have these dedicated devices, device support. All this stuff's going to take off. I'm promising. 2025 is the year. We've been waiting for so long. I feel like it's going to come together next year. So close.

Well, not everyone, I guess, makes it, which is, I'm kind of bummed by this. These people did not have any Apple Home-enabled product, but I have used these for years, and I was pretty bummed to see the news that they were being shut down. So, AeroGarden is ceasing sales.

So air garden was a standalone business for a long time. It was bought by Scott's miracle grow, um, which is, they have like a whole factory thing very close to here. And, uh, they, I thought they were doing so well. They were like a hit always around the holidays and everything. Um,

And now, now they're kind of going belly up. They, they didn't really say why they just said they made the difficult decision to see sales. There may be third party pods out there that you can continue to use with your arrow gardens, but they were kind of like the big one in terms of like smart home hydroponic gardens. They were the one like everyone had. I had one of these like right after college, I took it from my parents and I used it in our house to grow fresh herbs to cook with. And, uh, I'm,

Have you ever tried any of these, like, smart gardening things? No. I mean, I couldn't keep...

a fake plant alive, Andrew, let alone, you know, anything. They handle all this for you. See, yeah, it's not a product I'm familiar with. Man, now I feel bad. Like I should have, I should have bought it and supported it. Well, now you're never going to try it. All I know is that hardware is hard, right? Take it from, you know, the, the consumer, consumer tech startup that, you know, launched less than a year ago. Hardware is hard and like much respect to anybody who ventures into the space. And, you know, it's really too bad that, uh,

you know, they're not going to be moving forward because it sounds like it's pretty cool. They've done a lot of neat things. But, I mean, it was so simple of just taking a little plastic pod with some foam, sticking it into the bed. It told it what you had planted in there, and it would adjust the light, the water, everything as you would go. It would send you a text or an alert on your phone whenever you had to, like, add nutrients. But, honestly, if you didn't have the nutrients, you were probably still fine. So, like, it just grew your plants for you. Like, I had to...

basil and stuff that was going crazy. So we'd make fresh pizza and put basil on it. You could also do flowers and fun things like that. But I actually knew many people that had these. We talk about a lot of products on this show that a lot of people don't have and had never heard of. And this is something that a lot of people had heard of, and yet they're still not going to be able to continue on. So that's a bummer. Bummer. They are still selling through stock.

including like on Amazon and stuff, you can still buy these things. They just say they won't have a full warranty after November 1st, I think was the deadline. So if you want to still buy one, buy it before November 1st and you get a whole year warranty on your hardware. So you can still use them. Just use your own pods and everything. Maybe you'll find a discount because I've been seeing them still cut pretty steep.

Okay, last piece of news here. Before we get into talking about clicks and shortcut automations, so Hue has updated their app again. Version 5.28 has added four new effects. These were already announced before, but they've just been added in. So Cosmos, Enchant, Sunbeam, and Underwater. So new effects have been added. These, like, motion effects that move. They also have this update for their Scattered effect. This would...

basically be used for any of the gradient lights. Could be the sign light that's behind me. Could be like the gradient light strips. But Scattered would put five different lights across the various areas and move them around. It was nice. Now it works with all of them. This originally came out with like their twinkle lights, their Christmas tree lights. But now it works on any of the gradient or segmented lights that they produce. Then finally they've made it official that

that they support dark mode. They previously had like their icon and widgets, but it's like official. Now they're putting it in there. I almost said show notes, but their app store notes that this has been updated there. So that's very handy. Um, but yeah, so you guys can go download that, update it. If you got the huge stuff, it adds to that AR feature we talked about last week.

Okay. Very excited. We made it through the news. I want to take one more break and then we're talking automations, shortcuts, and the click keyboard case for your iPhone. Big updates there that we're going to be pretty excited to talk about. So second sponsor of this episode is ExpressVPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom.

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So let's talk clicks. Before we get into the automation part of this, give me your background, how you ended up here, how you started this journey of clicks, and what brings us to talk about the new model and the shortcut automations today.

Oh, man. I mean, Clix is a breakout success that's 15 years in the making. The team behind Clix is really the dream team. You've got Mr. Mobile, a.k.a. Michael Fisher, who is a lover of buttons. You've got Crackberry Kevin, who started Crackberry.com and was one of the biggest proponents of BlackBerry smartphones.

teaming up with the industrial designer that worked on some of the most beloved BlackBerrys of all time, like the Bold 9000 and the Bold 9900, and folks from FXTech who've made some incredible keyboard devices like the Pro 1X. And this really started for me probably in the spring of 2023, I think.

uh when kevin called me up and he said i've got something really cool to share with you but if you tell anyone i'm gonna kill you which i know means that it's like a hit from kevin and he shared with me uh some of the thinking around around clicks and showed a prototype to me um and then you know kind of went silent for a bit and i was coming back from new york city actually uh i was in the airport and he's like can you get to new york in three days i'm like i'm going home um

but I can go home, drop my wife off, turn around, come back. And we got together, Kevin, Mr. Mobile and I, uh, gave feedback on one of the first prototypes. And then from there, you know, it was game on, you know, hundreds of changes over the course of four or five months to get ready to launch at CES in Vegas. Uh, and you know, we broke the internet, you know, the product went viral. Um,

It held its own with some of the bigger hits of CES that year, the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin, both of which, funny enough,

You don't hear about them much anymore, but clicks is still clicking. We're still kicking along. Not in a good way. And anyways, I mean, like the whole idea was to bring the benefit of buttons, the best parts of buttons to the modern smartphones that we all love, right? We weren't trying to build a time machine and go relive our 20s, but bring something that was lost in the move to smartphones and touchscreens, you know, to modern devices. And I

I think we nailed it, right? The feedback we get from customers is that it allows them to use their iPhone in all new ways. It takes everything they love about their iPhone, the big beautiful screen, all the apps, all the shortcuts, and allows them to do even more of it, right? You know, you get 50% of your screen back when you move the virtual keyboard off the screen.

And, you know, it's one of those things that starts a lot of conversations, whether you're going through airport security or holding your phone up to scan the QR code in a drive-thru. Everybody's asking you, what phone is that? And then when you tell them it's an iPhone, their mind is really blown. So, I mean, there's so many stories about...

building a consumer hardware product that sits on top of the most popular smartphone in the world. We could have an entire episode on that, but that's kind of the short version of how we got from idea to project to product.

Yeah, so this is – when this was announced, it was so serendipitous for me because I – so I was at CES and we had really started pushing into short form content a lot here at Apple Insider. So I was like doing reels in the TikToks and YouTube shorts and all of these things and especially –

It's a whole separate tangent. But you have to do it basically on mobile. Like, sure, the videos are consumed there. Does the entire creation process have to be there? You wouldn't think so, but that's basically how it is and how it was. There's other solutions, but...

Yeah, you had to do a lot of it from your phone. And I'm trying to run, and I'm trying to type on my phone, and I was getting so frustrated having to type out these long paragraphs and so many hashtags. The virtual keyboard was driving me crazy in these apps. And I'm like, I want a freaking keyboard to do this. And I swear, I pulled down Twitter and saw that clicks had launched. I don't even think I had gotten PR for it. I'm like, I need to find...

this and you guys were at one of like the three you know unveiled showstoppers pepcom one of those you guys were at and uh i i sat down i got to play with one of the very first ones and i liked it on the show floor and i finally got a retail unit and i was uh disappointed very disappointed for a couple reasons one there was no magsafe in those original ones

And two, I had the 15 Pro Max. And when you add it on that keyboard, it was a monster of a phone. And I couldn't do it because I would put it in my back pocket. And I'm like, I feel like I've got a ruler sticking out of my pocket. It was just so, so monstrous for me.

Well, you guys managed to get me one here just that we can play around with for the episode. But this is one of the new ones for the 16. I hope I'm supposed to be able to show this, right? You're the first person to have this in the spice color. So, you know, this is a moment. But, yeah, this is clicks for iPhone 16.

Yeah. So a couple of things here is one, I switched to the 16 pro instead of the pro max. So now this size is so much more manageable. This is a great size because like you said, when that keyboard goes off of your screen, you still get their screen real estate. So I feel like I'm still essentially using a pro max keyboard.

With having a smaller device so that was already great and if you can see on the video it has that wonderful MagSafe logo right in the middle which means any of your MagSafe stuff is gonna work so you can stick this thing on your MagSafe charger and You're gonna be able to use it like right there. It's gonna work. So I'm so excited about

for those changes that you guys made. There's also improvements to the keyboard itself. Tell me about... You changed the angle of these keys a little bit to make it easier to type on? All right, buckle up. We're going to go to Nerd Town here for a second on keys. This is what I love, though. Let's hear it. This is what we do here. So, I mean...

this team knows more about building buttons than anybody else on the planet. And with click sprite one 16, we really set out to build the best typing experience, uh, on buttons ever period. And so what we looked at was the shape of the buttons themselves. So the original product that we launched earlier this year, the keys were all flat, right? Like each key cap is flat. And, uh,

what we move to with 16 are keys that are contoured. So there's a high point on each key and then a low point on each key. And what that does is it creates more ergonomic separation between the buttons so that when your fingers are moving from key to key, it just feels much bigger. Uh,

As a result, we were able to make the actual keys themselves about 10% bigger. But through that contouring, there's 35% more key surface area, which ultimately means bigger touch targets for when you're typing. And that combined with some really thoughtful design

angling and shaping on things like the space bar just makes for like a really, really premium typing experience that you can type on for long periods of time with very limited typos and a high degree of speed and accuracy. So it really is the most elevated physical input on a smartphone period. It's a really nice way of putting of what I could just describe as it's easier to type on. Like...

Looking even just looking at them, they don't look that different, but I'm like, well, I can type better on this and I'm not exactly sure why, but yeah, combination of all of those very specific metrics. Well, that's, that's why I unpack it here, but it works. That's why I unpack it that way. Because, you know, at first glance, if you're just looking at clicks for iPhone 15 versus 16, you might not think there's as much going on, but there's been just a ton of, uh,

research, we studied all sorts of different key shapes, different key heights, different key travels, different actuation pressures, which is just to say how much force you need to engage the buttons. And we were aiming to optimize all of that just to make it a more enjoyable, easier, more comfortable typing experience.

Absolutely. And another change, I don't know if this was actually with the original one or not when I tried it, but one of the things that kind of made this happen was you guys have added now an app, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so the app we've had out for a number of months now, but we've been continuing to add new functionality through the app and firmware updates to Clix itself. And the whole idea with the app is to give you more personalization and customization around your keyboard from things like the backlight brightness and backlight timeout period to even how some of the keys function. And this is kind of an interesting observation that we had when we initially launched the product.

What we found is that there are two camps of people when it comes to say how they expect a return key to function.

And I'm going to figure out which one you're in in a second, Andrew. Some people, like me, expect the return key to serve as a send button. So if I'm typing an iMessage, I hit return, I expect it to actually send the message. That makes sense to me. Other people expect the return key to serve as a carriage return, essentially dropping a line.

and people wanted the flexibility to be able to customize how clicks worked to suit their typing preferences. So we added it through the app, and now there's a soft return key option where you can toggle between whether it functions as a hard return, aka send button, or soft return for a carriage return. Okay, which camp am I in? I'm going to say you're a carriage return kind of guy.

Nope. Ah! I want to descend. Because the carriage return is shift enter. That's what it's always been. Agreed. Sorry, I got excited there. You're doing, you know...

Yeah, you're in Slack or something, you hit enter on your keyboard, it sends. If I want to go to another line, it's shift enter. That's how it should be, and that's how I would set mine up on the Clix keyboard too. I fought so hard for that. That's why we launched it that way. I pitched a fit. I dug in my heels. I'm like, there is no other way. Yeah.

And apparently there is because a lot of people want it to serve as a carriage return. Yeah. But the good news is if you do put it into like soft return mode, shift return then serves as your enter. So it's just sort of like swapping the expected functionality. But then there's other features in there for people who type in different languages. If you have your iOS keyboard input language set to say, you know,

UK English, you can customize the keyboard layout to like the UK Apple keyboard layout, which just sort of moves some of the symbols around and things like that. So, you know, we'll continue to try to bring additional functionality to clicks through the app and the firmware updates that we're able to deliver.

So one of the things that we talked about before we hopped on the podcast, this was like last week, I think. So I hope again, this is something that I was allowed to talk about, but you're adding like shortcuts to the app, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we really see clicks as a keyboard for more than just typing. It's really a form of input for your smartphone and essentially a remote control for all the things in your ecosystem. And, you know, the way I think about it is Apple added the action button back in iPhone 15 days.

when it was launched and you can customize it to do all sorts of things, right? You can leave it as the mute or, you know, volume switch, or you can program it to launch shortcuts. And what we're doing with clicks is giving you essentially 37 more programmable action buttons that you can use to place phone calls or invoke shortcuts to control your home or even control some of the settings on your iPhone itself.

And what we're doing in an upcoming release of the app is including a gallery of shortcuts that you can click to install in the Apple Shortcuts app, making it easier to configure some of those shortcuts that then you can map to the Clix keyboard as a remote control.

that's what I loved. Like when we talked about that, I'm like, that is such a cool idea. And especially when you describe it as like, okay, it's a, it's a keyboard. Yeah. But being able to make it like a remote for your life, like that's a whole different level. And yeah, it requires more customization to get to that point, but there's so much stuff that you can do with it. And I definitely went down some rabbit holes of trying to find some things to do. And there's, there's one limitation that,

that I would have loved to see, which is not on your keyboard, but more on iOS. So I'm going to put a bunch of resources to shortcuts in this episode in the show notes. I've got some GitHub repos. Matthew Cassinelli, who is...

you know, Godfather of all these shortcut things. There are, you know, the Mac story shortcuts, which are a great spot to go off of. Um, I found a couple that I wanted. So one of them is, is have you seen this? Um, there was one called I utilities. That was a shortcut that came out a couple of years ago. And there's a new version now just called utilities. It's essentially like a hundred plus utilities that you can run just from a shortcut. So like I put that on, on here. So you can just hit like a button to,

to run this shortcut and it'll take over your screen with like a directory or, or a desktop little, not take over your screen. It's just a little pop-up, uh, but a pop-up window with all these different options. So you can control many of your stock apps. You can like launch a search in Safari. You could, uh, scan for a song that is currently playing. You could, uh, trying to figure out all these things that they have, uh, searching web, uh,

playing a playlist, checking weather right now. They have over 100 of these different utilities that can all do. Scan a QR code from a photo, download a YouTube video if you've got a URL on the clipboard.

All this stuff with just a single shortcut that you can run. So it's really making that powerful. And I just love the idea of being able to run it from the keyboard without having to, there's no icon to tap on the screen. There's no, you know, you don't have to press the action button on the side to run it. Like it's such a quick way to do that.

I know you have a great one that sends like an ETA you've programmed on there, right? I've got so many, right? And the way that I'm thinking about it, Andrew, is there's kind of like three types of shortcuts that I use. The first are like,

around my contacts, right? The people I talk to the most often. And so what I've done is I've set them up off of the globe key on the keyboard because that's kind of like the people in my world. So if I press globe and then double tap the K, it's going to call, it's going to FaceTime Kevin. I mean, it better...

and that, so I don't bother him. But I have all sorts of different contacts set up within the app that's contextual to them. So Kevin, it's FaceTime. My wife, it's a call. Adrian, who's in the UK, it's a WhatsApp call. So the globe key is for my people. The command key is for my iPhone. So that's where I'm able to show and hide the notification tray or control things like notifications

control center. I can bring that up and down. Um, so that's kind of my iPhone. And then the clicks key, that's where like the real powerful stuff happens. So I set up shortcuts like, um, controlling my, uh,

my lights in my house, for example, or the one that I like to use often is this one here. I'll try to show it to you. It goes to my calendar, figures out where my next meeting is, and just brings up the directions and ETA to that meeting based on the current traffic conditions. And I can do all that just from the home screen or from the lock screen. I don't actually have to go into any of these apps. So I've got a bunch of really interesting

interesting stuff set up. And I think the one you were referring to is, um,

I like to try to be a good husband as much as I can. And so I have a shortcut built that figures out my drive time from whatever my location is to my house and then packages it up into a text message that gets sent to my wife's contact that's like, hey babe, on my way, be home in. And then it puts in the number of minutes that it expects me to take to get home just based on the current driving conditions and traffic and everything else. And that one just makes me look like a hero. Yeah.

I like another one that I found that I started to really like is...

setting one up for my TV. So I set one up for watching like TV time. So it could TV scene that I would normally run. Right. But it'll, it's so easy just to hit it from a shortcut. Like I'm walking through and boom, just hit it. It'll like dim the lights by 50%, close the shades to make sure they're at least 50% close so that the sun doesn't come in and glare on the TV wakes up my TV, which is also a home kit and then turns on my Apple TV and brings up the remote control on my iPhone. It's like one button press can like,

all that stuff and it's so easy to do. Yeah. No, it's amazing. It's powerful. I, I, I,

I remember that I put that on O for office. So yeah, I mean, if you hold the quick key... Jose, I just laughed because you're the light in the background. It's just flickering on and off. So yeah, I mean, it's a pretty simple one, but you could go to town with what you're saying with not just having a particular device that's controlled, but using it to invoke a series of things. Maybe it's

turning off all the lights in your house and setting your thermostat when you're going to bed or something like that. The possibilities are endless. And the great thing is that all of this is already available today within the Shortcuts app and through Shortcuts and automations. And all we're doing is giving you the ability to invoke those things through physical buttons that are omnipresent on your phone without having to unlock your phone or go to a widget or go to a shortcut or something like that.

It's just right at your fingertips and you can just take action at the push of a button, essentially.

100%. I mentioned there was like one limitation, which is in iOS. And we had again talked about this before the podcast, which is I wanted to be able to, you know, hit a button for like lights. I would do like, you know, globe lights or something and would pull up my lighting list by rooms. And then I could tap into the room and then do that all without having to like move my fingers up to the screen. And I actually reached out to Matthew Riesel.

sorry, Cassinelli about this to see if it was possible to navigate a shortcut window with keyboard strokes. And apparently not like you can use the keyboard shortcut to invoke a shortcut, but not to navigate those modal lists that you can pull up. So yes, you can still like hit a button to invoke those types of things. So like you can create one, like, you know, command L or whatever, but,

globe l pull up your light shortcut it'll show you like five rooms in your house tap a room on the screen it'll bring up all the lights in that room and then tap the one to turn off like you can create all of that which is still possible i just wish i could do it all from the keyboard without having to lift my fingers i was hopeful that i could like you know assign them like numbers or something and just hit again another button to it and it would it would happen but

Still, it's still good. It's still easy to do that. It's still easy to pull up a command like that with a physical button. Plus, I don't have to clutter up my home screen anymore. Now that you can really add these widgets and move your icons places, I like to keep mine so simple. I keep the whole top of mine just empty. I'm not really quite sure why I want it to be empty, but it's kind of nice not to have...

Well, I used to have like a clock up there that I really liked like through like, you know, one of the customization ones. But to create it, you had to like screenshot it and then apply like a dark and light background to the widget because you can't have transparent third-party widgets. Yeah.

And the clock looked great, but to do that was such a hassle every time I would swap wallpapers. And I switch my wallpapers pretty frequently. So I'm like, this is too much work just to keep my widget matching my background. So I kind of just gave up. And now I'm like, I just kind of like the simplicity. Like I don't have to stare at a thousand icons when I return on my phone.

I have like the couple that I use and then spotlight search is just key, which by the way, you can invoke with command plus space bar, just like you would on your Mac. So like from the clicks keyboard, I can just hit command space bar, type the app that I'm looking for and it'll pull up without having to reach up, poke the screen or anything like that. So it's super quick.

That's one of the things that we love about just the way that iOS supports external keyboard support. All of those things were there and waiting to be tapped into.

I'm guessing that it probably came over from iPadOS when those code bases were brought together because as soon as you put clicks on, those shortcuts just work out of the box. Whether it's Command-H to go home, Command-Space to bring up Spotlight, or if you're in something like Safari, just tapping Spacebar to page down one page at a time.

All those things, like if you're used to using those keyboard shortcuts and compound key presses on your Mac or your Magic Keyboard on your iPad, they just work right out of the box with clicks, which is just a great starting point to then build around with more of these like custom keyboard configurations and shortcuts as well. Yeah, I love it.

Okay, anything else that you want to add about all this? We've talked about shortcuts. We've talked about the redesign. We've talked about these automations. Anything else that you want to add before we wrap the episode?

I mean, I guess the only other thing that's worth mentioning is we've been continuing to build on the actual ID itself. So with the iPhone 16 model, we've changed the materiality. We've added brushed metal side keys. You know, we've done a really thoughtful implementation of the cutout for camera control.

So there's a lot of refinements to the overall kind of identity or ID and hardware design. And on the app side, we've already talked a little bit about it, but we're starting to build more into some of the features that are available developers like, um,

Dynamic Island. So we're incorporating Dynamic Island notifications to let you know kind of what mode your clicks keyboard is in, as well as tapping into some of the control center options too. So you can build things like your backlight into control center shortcuts just to make it even more integrated from a hardware and software perspective. So, you know,

We're in year one. We're pushing hard. We have got a great V2 for Clicks for iPhone 16, and we're just getting started, man. So much more to come from us.

I'm so excited because something like this can just – you really can do so much on the software side once you have, like, the solid product. I really like this more than I liked that original one. Like, this is very solid. I like the little, like, you know, leather, faux leather palm rest. Not really palm rest, but finger rest on the back. There's a lot to like about this. And even with iOS 18 and all these upcoming updates with Apple Intelligence –

The app intents are like shortcuts was already underutilized, but these new app intents that developers are able to add are crazy. Like you're going to be able to do so much with shortcuts with Apple's assistant and Apple intelligence and all that. Being able to tie those into physical keys is going to be crazy.

Oh, man. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'm so excited to see what else comes in iOS 18 as they roll out the Apple intelligence features and how a keyboard could promote

provide input to Apple intelligence beyond voice. I mean, that's one of the things I'm excited for. But since you mentioned iOS 18, and I know this is like a little thing, but it's, I think, a huge improvement in the way that clicks can be used. I don't know if you noticed this, but the way that they implemented the emoji picker in iOS 18 just makes it so much easier. Like if you click on the globe key, it brings up a really slick emoji picker

now as opposed to actually pulling up the emoji keyboard in the keyboard tray. So for people who use a lot of emoji like I do, this just is a total game changer for being able to choose the emoji you want, use the keyboard to search for the emoji you want and add them without even moving off of the hardware keyboard itself. It's super cool.

Nice. That is awesome. Well, if anyone else wants to learn more about clicks, the keyboard, I'm going to pick one up for yourself. I'll put a link for it in the show notes. You can also, it's also going to be in my massive, I have over a hundred iPhone cases in my iPhone 16 pro case roundup. This will be one of them alongside many other fan favorites. So if you guys want to

check that out. That'll be linked in the show notes that I'll be dropping over the weekend before this episode comes out. So you can see it there and obviously follow Apple Insider for more. You want to give a shout out to like ClickSocials or website, anything like that specifically outside of what we're going to put in the show notes? Yeah, sure. I mean, if you're interested in learning more about clicks, we're at clicks.tech. You can also find clicks at Best Buy. We've got

Clicks in like over 230 Best Buy stores, so you can go and check it out and type on it or bestbuy.com. And on social, we're on Instagram at ClicksKeys, so you can check us out there too. Awesome. Cool.

And Jeff, thank you for joining me for this episode. Everybody, all this stuff's going to show notes. I'm going to put a bunch of shortcuts, utilities there that you guys can check all of those out. If you want to expand your shortcuts usage with or without a clicks keyboard case, if you guys can check those out, please, please, please leave this podcast a five, 10, 100 star rating on whatever podcast player you are using. Apple podcast, YouTube podcast, whatever it is, please go ahead and do that. Otherwise, thank you again, Jeff, for joining and we'll see everybody next time.

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