Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From Relay, this is Connected, episode 547. Today's show is brought to you by Netsuit, ZocDoc, and Ecamm. I'm your annual chairman, Federico Vittici, and it's my pleasure to be joined, as always, by Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hello, Federico. How are you? I'm good. It's you and me again. It is. You know? Yeah. Mike will be back soon. Eh. Maybe. And next week, you have a special guest.
Yes, I do. It's going to be good. Because you will be doing something else. And so I will have a special guest on the show. Yeah. Me and a bunch of Relay people and a bunch of other people are attending a conference at St. Jude next week. Very fancy. Very fancy. Yeah. Stephen, do we have follow-up? Do we ever, Federico. Okay. Okay.
We're going to start with Mesa's. I know. Oh, God. This is the last time, okay? I'm putting a cap on the Mesa turret plateau conversation after this. Seppe wrote in when we were talking about the MacBook Pro and how HDMI is important, but it's also one of the thickest things on the side of the laptop. They recommended an HDMI Mesa. You just have a little...
That makes me think of like the PC laptops that have like the camera. It's like an opposite notch. Like it's like a tab at the top of the lid. You know what I'm talking about? You've seen these. These are terrible. It's a bad idea. Bad idea. Andy wrote in. Okay. That's all. Andy said hi. No, Andy said...
Continuing the saga on the camera Mesa Plateau turret, I want to chime in that the turret terminology discussed in last week's episode is inspired by a contraption known as the lens turret. Oh, no. It is an attachment that allows the operator to quickly rotate between different lenses without having to go through the typical process of removing and inserting lenses. I looked this up.
This is horrific, right? It's pretty upsetting. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like the eyes of a spider to me. Yeah. It's a spider-ish contraption going on. It is. I don't like it. There'll be a link to an article about it. If you have the thing, what is it called? Where the eyeballs freak you out?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about the eyeballs. I know about the holes. That's what I'm thinking of. I think it's kind of the same thing. Is it tryptophobia? Tryptophobia, that's the holes though. Tryptophobia is what Zoe says. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what are lenses except holes for light?
We don't need to get into this again. Remember when we were talking about like the eyeballs are actually holes in your eyes? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Thank you, Andy, for the useful, slightly terrifying feedback. Yeah. Andrew wrote in, Federico mentioned the idea of a UI that sort of looks at your surroundings and integrates it into what's on screen.
This made me think about how true tone will change the white balance on your screen depending on the warmth of your ambient lighting. Perhaps new iPhones will have truer tone, which gathers the other colors of your surroundings somehow. The one true tone, they should call it.
Or they could, you know, if it's multiple colors, they could just call it True Tones. See? Plural. True Tones. Fixed, like problem solved. I love it. I like the idea. I like the idea. Like, it would be so Apple to come up with like some weird technology, like some, I don't know, probably making this word up, like some spectrometer thing that like can gather the colors of your surroundings without actually being a camera. You know, like how...
a spectrometer. Isn't that what is actually used? Steven, you're a man of, you're a handy person. Sure. You know, you can work with things with your hands. Have you ever needed like a custom calculator
color of paint done. Yeah. Just a couple of weeks ago, actually. Okay. So isn't a spectrometer like the thing, like it's a piece of equipment that sort of can scan a color and reproduce it in paint? Yep. I think that's what it is. Like it would be so Apple to take a technology that is totally unrelated to smartphones and use it for UI design.
It would be cool. There's different types of spectrometers. One of them. Spectrometers. Yes. Yes. I had this recently. I needed to match paint on something. So I took a little piece of wood up to the hardware store and I said, I need paint that looks like this. Yeah. They stuck it in a machine. They mixed me some paint and it looked pretty good.
Honestly, I think I've designed a better iPhone 17 Pro than Apple. You know, just in talking about these rumors on Connected. Yeah. I now think this is the phone I want and it's not going to be the phone I'm going to get. So that makes me a little sad.
Anyway, thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. And lastly, we have feedback from Alex Rodin. Enjoyed the special April 1st episode. Do you know what that refers to? We didn't do anything weird last week. I have no idea, Alex. Maybe got us confused with another show.
Yeah. Surely if the MacBook Pro becomes thinner, the logical way to retain the HDMI port is via a special door like the original MacBook Air ports. Wait, what's a special door? Do you remember this? On the original MacBook Air back in 2008, they had a little flip down door on the right hand side. And in that flip down door was a headphone jack, a USB port and your display out. Huh. Little door on the right.
MacBook Air. What's it called? Flip Out Door? Yeah. I think Door is fine. Let's see. Oh, I see. It's like a little flap. Like a little... Okay. That's cool. They should bring it back. Let me ask you, did you like it when you had it? Did it work? I did have an original MacBook Air for just a little while. The job I was working at the time was when I was consulting and...
We had one come in. I was like, oh, I'm going to use this because it's like thin and light, like the new hotness. And then I realized that in my job at the time, I really needed FireWire. So I turned it back in and went back to a MacBook Pro. The door was, it was a clever way to solve the problem that this laptop was like too curvy for ports. But it didn't last very long, right? Because when they redesigned it to the good one, a couple of years later, they just had
regular ports on it and i don't know how fragile it was the original macbook air its problem other than overheating was that the hinges were kind of weak and so you could break the hinges on a macbook air pretty easily as they aged i think the door was relatively resilient but i don't think this is the solution apple's gonna go with yeah i don't think so it'll be cool though like a little flip out door little flip out door i got a merch update
Okay. Two, two actually, uh, connected merch. If you ordered it is, is mailing out. I got mine yesterday. It all looks really good. Super exciting. Thank you to everyone who bought a connected shirt or six of them when we had them on sale recently. Uh, and then due to, uh, I don't want to say overwhelming demand due to some demand, uh, relay has a new hat with a new logo on it.
So, and you can get it, you can get it in, in camo because Mike's gone. He can't tell me what to do. No. I like the, the model names like dad hat, trucker hat. Yeah. Are, are dad hats and trucker hats different? Trucker hats are like mesh on the back. Dad hat is like cloth all the way around. Got it. Got it. Nice. Okay. And a snapback trucker hat with braid and then baseball cap, which I'm, I'm not really sure the difference between a baseball cap and a dad hat, but.
They look slightly different and are available in slightly different colors. Speaking of colors, Stephen, can we talk about 512 pixels? Yeah, each one individually? Well, yes. Let's start and we can get through probably 32 of them today.
Yeah, what do you want to know? So I redesigned 512? You have a new design. It looks great. Thank you. Very retro. I don't know, very sort of 90s Apple vibes. Maybe it's the font. I think it's the serif font that you're now using. How did this come together?
So, yes. So I will say I was aiming for like 90s kind of look, both with the color and the typeface, which is a version of Garamond. It's not exactly the Garamond Apple used, but it's as close as I could get on Google Fonts.
And yeah, so the structure of the site's the same, like the navigation's still the same. The typeface for the body is actually the same, but new colors, the new use of Garamond and a new logo by our friend Jelly, who does all the St. Jude artwork for our campaign. Jelly did that Mac for me. And yeah, I'm super happy with it.
It was a big change. This is the first design of five pixels in like well over a decade that doesn't have orange in the design. Actually, going back, I was looking back through screenshots. The site has always had orange. Initially, it was just for links. And then it kind of became the predominant color, especially in the navigation on the most previous design to this.
But this is now sort of a new era of this kind of blue cooler scheme with serif fonts. And there was a version that was all serifs and it was too much. Like it was too much. And so stuck with sans serif for the body copy. And I think it's a nice mix. And yeah, I feel like it does kind of feels like the 90s in here. And that's what I wanted this time around. Yeah.
Yeah, it looks great. Well done. Thank you. I did it all myself for the first time in a long time. I think we've talked about this in the past. Finding folks to work on bespoke WordPress sites can be tricky. But this time, because this is basically just a reskinning, the structure of the theme is the same, I was able to do all of this. And that was fun too, really kind of getting...
Getting my hands dirty in WordPress for the first time in a while was a lot of fun. A lot of GitHub commits, you know, just like change a few little things and commit it so I could roll it back because I'm always a little unsure when I'm working on things like this. But I am very happy with it. And the feedback has been great, which is awesome. Nice. Yeah. This episode of Connected is brought to you by NetSuite. Nobody knows for sure what the future holds for businesses.
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Yes. Yes. CalDigit announced the TS5 and TS5 Plus, their new Thunderbolt 5 docks. I currently use the CalDigit TS4. So up until this announcement, the most recent CalDigit dock. And it allows me to have my MacBook Pro
And everything on my desk is powered through that dock. So the display, the stream deck, my audio gear, everything passes through the CalDigit. And I got to say, it has been a rock solid. It has never let me down. Never. Same, same. I'm even using it with like a...
power adapter plug because I bought it from the US so it doesn't have an Italian plug and I'm using a thing from Amazon and I was concerned oh is this going to do something to the current no it's been absolutely rock solid I've been using this thing for like four years or something at this point
going through multiple iterations of all the computers that I've used, you know, a Mac and then an iPad and then a Microsoft Surface, like it always worked. It's incredible. It's sort of the promise of Thunderbolt, right? That this one connection can carry...
so many things and there are other and honestly less expensive versions of this out there of like thunderbolt docks but it is definitely one of those things that you get what you pay for and like i said the cal digit like i don't even think about it federico it just like i can't see it it's like on the corner of my desk behind my laptop and yeah it just does its thing it's like a piece of furniture which is exactly what i want
Yeah. So these new ones, they come in two versions. And I kind of want to talk about these we use to sort of understand which one do we need. Because I do think I'm going to upgrade because, you know, I want to take advantage of Thunderbolt 5. And realistically, I think I'm going to get a Thunderbolt 5 compatible monitor at some point later this year. So we have the TS5 and TS5+. Obviously, the TS5+, we'll get to in a minute, it costs more.
Neither of these are cheap. Like you're looking at the TS5, $369 or €349. And the Plus is $499 or €460. So there is a bit of a price difference for a reason. So the standard TS5,
We're looking at vanilla Thunderbolt 5 compatibility, 140-watt charging. So that allows you to charge at the maximum allowed speed a 16-inch MacBook Pro, like high-end, the one that supports 140 watts, you can charge it. It's got pass-through charging up to 140 watts.
It takes advantage of the full Thunderbolt 5 bandwidth. So the 80 gigabit per second boosting up to 120 gigabit per second, which is wild. Yeah, so fast. It's obviously compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt as well as USB 4.0 V2, which we don't need to get into the weird naming schemes of USB again. We don't have time for that. We don't have time for that. You're looking at support for...
two 8k displays at 60 hertz or i believe it's three 4k 120 i think my math right yeah um
It's got three USB ports, USB-C ports at 10 gigabit per second, and one USB-C port that can charge downstream at 20 watts. And that's without the computer present. So what's cool about this...
this 20 watt port and then on the the nicer one it's uh 36 watts is that those work as long as the dock is powered so if you use this to like charge your phone or your ipad and you get up and like take your laptop with you the thing will keep charging which is pretty cool yeah the ts5 has 2.5 gigabit ethernet yep same as the ts4 i've got 2.5 and it's great yeah
It comes with its own compact power supply, 240 watts. What else? Supports the SD cards with the UHS-II standard, microSD. Yeah, that's pretty much about it. You can also plug in an SSD in it and it supports...
6.2 gigabit second uh transfer speed so that's you know pretty nice update if you're using thunderbolt 5 and i think for most people the standard ts5 is plenty what sets the more expensive one apart is uh like we said the 36 watt usbc charging at the front it has 10 gigabit ethernet networking so if you have a really fast network you can do that yeah
And it brings back DisplayPort 2.1. Yeah, which is a big deal because it allows you to connect a whole bunch of like different peripherals, right? Yeah. And a whole bunch of different displays. I saw in the promo video that this fancier one, you can do like things like you can plug in monitors that support refresh rates like 544 hertz, like something like that, which is
Like, I don't like, I'm not sure. Like, like you gotta be, you gotta be to have that kind of display. You gotta be a professional gamer, I'm guessing. And you gotta have a modern Windows PC that has the complete Thunderbolt 5 spec. And so in that case, like you can imagine like a Razer laptop or something, you could, you could plug it into the TS5+.
and do your gaming, you know, do your Call of Duty or Fortnite on a 540 hertz refresh rate monitor, which sounds wild, and it is. I think obviously most, you know, Apple users will just have, like,
I think most people will just buy like a 240 Hertz or even like 120 Hertz refresh rate display and it'll look great. But in this case, with this version of the TS5, you can go nuts basically. Yeah. The Plus also has this cool trick where it actually has two USB controllers inside. So it's got a total of 20 ports. It's got more USB ports than it has the display port, which we just talked about.
but it means that all those ports can run at full speed and that there's not contention in there in terms of, I've got everything plugged in, how do I negotiate the speeds? Like I said, I think for most people, the TS5 at $369, if you need something like this, is the way to go. But
The TS5 Plus is serious. Like, it really kind of ups the game of what's doable. And having 10 gig networking is really nice. Like, currently, if you want that, CalDigit sells a standalone...
like 10 gigabit to Thunderbolt adapter. Ubiquiti also has one, uh, as do other brands, but to have 10 gig built into the dock you're already using that list is really short. And yeah, most people can't take advantage of 10, 10 gig networking at their desk, but having 2.5 at my desk has been really sweet. Uh, I've got that, uh, through my, just through my single Thunderbolt cable and, and,
These things look great. Now, they are expensive, and the big one, the word compact is suspiciously missing from the power supply. It's 330 watts. It's going to be a big, chunky thing. I know the one for the TS4 is huge, but pushing out 140 watts of power to your laptop, 36 watts out the front, all these other Thunderbolt ports and stuff, they have power going out. It really is...
doing a lot of things and these sorts of products, like it is the dream to like take your laptop and turn it into a desktop with one cable, which I feel like from the very beginning Thunderbolt promised. And I feel like with maybe Thunderbolt three for the first time was actually doable, but now it's like, it's what I want to do. Like I want to have just one cable going to my Mac book and, and that power everything else. Hmm.
I don't know. I think I'm leaning TS5+. Yeah. I can see the display port, I think, matters more to you. I'm using a studio display that just has a Thunderbolt cable going to the dock. So for me, I don't think the plus is worth it, but you dabble in more deeper waters when it comes to your displays. I do dabble. Yeah, I do. Yeah. You're a display dabbler. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, yeah, I think it's because of the display port for sure. Yeah. And the TS4 has a display port, I think.
Yeah, but not like this. It's not 2.1. Not 2.1. 2.1 is some serious bandwidth. And like you said, you can run multiple displays at a slower refresh rate or like one at the 540 or whatever. And that's because like DisplayPort gives you a set amount of data and that data can be allotted in different ways. Is it resolution or is it speed? And you can basically have different kind of presets along that spectrum.
But, you know, Mac users, we don't get to play in DisplayPort land very much. It doesn't look like there's an OLED monitor at 540 hertz that you can purchase. Yeah, that's pretty fast for OLED, isn't it? You can purchase, it seems, an OLED 360 hertz from Asus. Okay. How much does that thing run? Where is it? Uh...
800 euros? That's not too bad. No, I thought it would start... I thought it'd be four figures. I found an Alienware, so that's a Dell, right? Yes, it's a Dell. Dude, it's a Dell. QD OLED, 360 hertz, 27 inches, 800 euros. Wow. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah, I'll get the one with DisplayPort for sure.
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doing screenshots and renders and all sorts of stuff about this, about this, um, this redesign. What is a leak anymore? Right. That's a whole separate conversation. And I see this like renders being passed around as leaks. Like that's not a leak. That's a reconstruction of something that you've seen. Uh, anyway, we don't need to get into the semantics of it all. No, no, but we're going to turn this into a game. So, uh,
Julie Clover over at MacRumors had this blog post up on Tuesday outlining half a dozen or so things that are believed to come with iOS 19. So I'm just going to read this list to you and then I'll explain the game that I've thought of. Okay. So point one, VisionOS-like design with translucency. Number two, a glassier look.
with quote menu elements that can reflect light based on iPhone tilt. Number three, subtle lighting effects. Number four, more rounded expanding buttons. So you could have a button that you then you touch or haptic touch and it expands and it's all nice and round looking. The next one, pill shaped tab bars. So, and it's pointed out in this story that the app store and Apple Music and Apple TV are
have all been described using like pill-shaped tab bars at the bottom. Round app icons, which feels like a really big change. Simplified navigation and controls. And then lastly, cross-platform cohesiveness so that these design changes aren't just in iOS, but iPadOS and macOS will get the same overhauled look.
So what I want to do, Federico, is I want to rank these items based on the order of most likely to least likely. I just want to tell you that some people in Discord are already referring to this game as the leakies. So...
I'm just saying. Well, that's the name of the title now. The Leakeys. So we're ranking these in order of how likely they're going to be. Yeah. And I guess...
So is this going to be like a proper game where there's going to be a winner? Like you and I are going to rank differently or is this going to be like a joint ranking? And somehow, I'm not sure how, but somehow our adversary is Mike when he comes back. Yeah, that one, I think. Okay. I think it's joint. And then if this sticks and the leakies become a thing, then maybe we can like do some real rules around it once he's back.
Okay. So this is a, this is a, like, like an open draft for the leakies. Okay. Okay. We're brainstorming the leakies. All right. Um, okay. So what do you think is the most likely out of all of these things? I think the most likely is the, the shape of the app icons. And let me explain why. Um,
Let me make my case for it, I guess. And then I want to hear what you think of your most likely and we can come to a decision. So John Prosser in the FrontPageTech video mentioned that they saw whatever the verb to see is doing a lot of work in this context. They saw this animation of
When the person that was operating, supposedly, a device running iOS 19 long pressed on an icon on the home screen, Prosser said...
the round icon was hiding behind the regular shape of the icon. It's scared. Translated in simple terms and less YouTuber-y terms, I think that means it was an animation bug where they long pressed on an icon and the shape of the icon glitched out.
And they saw a round shape. I may be wrong. Maybe it was not a glitch. It was actually a security measure to hide the shape of the icons unless you long press. That's what I read. That it was a, you know, don't get sniped over your shoulder kind of thing. Right. Unless you long press in public. In the case, you know, no long pressing in public for Apple engineers. Only on Zoom calls or whatever. But let me say this.
Actually, MKBHD tweeted this today and just as I was thinking about this, so I added it to our notes. I think I agree with Marques. I think it's kind of hilarious that we're making such a big deal of Apple doing custom shapes, like new shapes for icons on iOS when it's been totally the norm on Android for like a decade.
Not just to have round icons, but to be able to customize the shapes of the icons. The multiple different forks and versions of Android, like Samsung's one, the OnePlus one, the Lenovo one, like each of these companies, they have their own take on letting you customize the shapes of the icons.
And it's no big deal. You can choose to have a squircle. You can choose to have a proper like round rack. You can choose to have a circle. You can choose to have something that they call cookie shape. And it's been totally the norm. And interestingly enough, just a couple of weeks ago, we saw this rumor that Google is also supposedly bringing back with Android 16, which is currently in beta and launching at some point in June, I think.
then bringing back this old Android 11 feature that was later removed, they're bringing it back for 16, and it's a feature that lets you go in settings and customize the shapes of the icons on your Android home screen, choosing from a few presets, like iOS-style, round-racked, circle, what's it called, like...
Cookie style with four, cookie style with six. Like you got a bunch of different options basically. And here's why I think this is likely, not just because Google is doing it and not just because it's popular on Android.
Apple already has that kind of customization menu right there on the home screen. They already have a UI element that lets you long press on the home screen. Right now, you just get the menu to choose whether you want to use the small icons, the big icons, or the, what's it called? Like the dark, automatic, and tinted icons. Yeah.
Just make that pop-up a little bit taller and add a shape option. Wow. That's it. So really, you're not saying round-up icons, maybe. You're saying... Customizable icon shapes. Customizable icon shapes. Which is not like...
This is my flavor of it, but I'm happy to go with whatever is in the Leaky's document, like round up icons maybe. Yeah, I mean, the way that it's phrased, round up icons maybe, it's perfect. But this is why I think it's likely, because that UI is already there and it's kind of empty right now.
I could see Apple sort of fill out that menu with a new option in 19, which is now you can choose to make your icons even more your own, choosing the shape you want or something like that. Yeah. You know, your passion has won me over. So I'm okay with it being at the top. Okay. So, okay. Why not? Why not? After this, it's a bit of a grab bag of a bunch of things that like, so we're looking at,
Yeah. So for me, I pull, I think, glassier look, you know, just some sheen, you know, some translucency. I think that the the flat design that we've had, which has evolved. I mean, you look at iOS 7 and iOS 18, they are radically different.
But I think a little depth, a little texture, a little sort of material is due. And I think it's going to look pretty nice. Yeah. I think it's likely we've had this conversation about Apple doing all that work on Vision OS. And it would be a shame if that work just stayed and that style just stayed within the constraints of Vision OS. Yeah.
if we are pulling that forward, I think it also, like it goes in tandem with the visualized like design with the translucency. I think so too. Like, I think these two things are related, right? Uh, whether Apple decides to be fancy about it with my theoretical sensor for understanding the context of your surroundings or not. Truer tone. Truer tone or true tones, like depending on what you want to call them. Yeah. Uh,
I think they go together. Like the glassier look and the Vision OS-like design, those two things are related. And because of this, I think there would be an argument to also pull forward the cross-platform cohesiveness. That's kind of in the definition, right? I think the big question there is, what about the Mac? Like iPadOS and iPhoneOS, they're going to look the same, right? They're basically the same operating system.
But the Mac, I think, is sort of the wild card. And what comes to mind for me is the iOS 7 change. iOS 7 came out and Mac OS X that year, I think, was Mavericks. It changed.
It had the lion... What was after lion? Gosh. Sea lion? Mountain lion. Wasn't it mountain lion? The sea lion was the joke in the keynote, so that's where my brain always goes. It took a year, and then Mac OS got flat, and they used Helvetica's system font for one year, and then San Francisco was ready. I could see the Mac lagging behind again, but
Just but you know, that's a single point. That's not a trend necessarily. But I think in general, like the end of this iPhone, iPad, vision and probably TV OS really all look much more closely related. I mean, that's the whole goal. Like anytime anyone reports on this, like Apple's goal is to make them more cohesive, like cohesive.
If you're doing this stuff, that is what's going to happen. So yeah, that glassier look, vision OS design with translucency, cross-platform cohesiveness, those are all kind of like three sides of a...
Are you getting it? These are not three separate things. These are not three separate design briefs. It's one design brief. Call it Vision OS. Yeah. Yeah. So these last four. Yeah. I want to pull up pill-shaped tab bars.
And I would agree with that. I would agree with that. That is present on Vision OS. It's also present now on iPad OS. You know, iPad OS 18 brought the thing where like the sidebar can become tabs across the top. And those things are pill shaped. And honestly, I think they look really good. And having them sort of populate around more places, the OS, I think that's going to be pretty nice. And so, yeah.
I do, you know, the part of me that's like a little unsure what happens of like right now, like if you go in, like if you go into an app like pedometer plus plus, for instance, right. You know, we've got five kind of sections are all across the bottom. Like,
Do those become sort of floating at the bottom with the background color extending past them? Probably. I think that's what the design language will call for. So I think there will be a sort of natural flow to this for developers who are using kind of the traditional tab bar control now to move to this. And I think it's going to look really nice, especially with the use of color or translucency to have that behind those controls.
It's a small thing, but tab bars, like once you start paying attention, tab bars are all over the place in iOS. And I think changing that is going to really make things feel fresh. Let me tell you about something wild that I've noticed over the last week on social media. I have seen from some people nostalgia for Get Ready. Do you remember the beta version of Safari in iOS 15?
with the floating address bar at the bottom. I do. I have seen nostalgia for that after these leaks came out. I've seen people be like, ah, finally Apple is bringing back that floating top bar design that they had to scrap for Safari because people complained. Now they're bringing it back for top bars in iOS 19 and it looks great. I don't know what these people have been saying
But could you bring some over after work? Please. I think the reason that didn't work, so I'm looking at a MacRumors article that has an example of this. This didn't work because there's like no depth to it. Like it was just a white round rect with some text in it, literally just floating over the webpage. And it had a little bit of shadow to it, but it wasn't enough to set it apart.
And it was the biggest problem with it. Maybe these people, maybe this new generation of these new leakers and designers, maybe they don't remember that that beta version of Safari and iOS 15, that address bar that you so much love was messing with the viewport of mobile websites. And it was making very basic actions impossible. Like I remember struggling with like the add to cart button on Amazon because that...
Tab Bar was constantly getting in the way. TechCrunch has an article about this, and they have that tweet from you is in the TechCrunch article. This is you. Just another day being unable to order takeout because iOS 15 Safari bottom bar makes this checkout button untappable. Thanks, Safari, for not letting me have that bruschetta.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is hysterical. So I think it was the wrong design in a browser because like in a browser, you're dealing with web pages and it's not an ecosystem that you control. It's like, it may, here's what I'm going to say. There may be something, and I've always said this, that you can salvage from that design. By the way, parentheses, I think Apple has landed on a really, really good design for Safari after that beta release.
So much so that other browsers have copied the design of Safari for iOS with the bottom address bar. I think they've done an excellent job. But that floating design...
There may be something that you can salvage that maybe makes more sense as a top bar in native apps because that's the kind of environment where developers can have more controls. Like you're not dealing with the viewport of Amazon.com, you're dealing with your own UI. And I'm sure like I could see, I guess what I'm saying is that I could see the potential for a top bar that...
can be minimized and expanded on demand so that maybe you can have icons in a compact mode and icons plus text labels in a full mode or that maybe it's a top bar that also lets you see some of the content underneath but let me tell you like if it's a straight up copy of that safari design
things are going to get weird because you're going to be unable to like you're going to have shadows you're going to have animations constantly getting the way you're going to accidentally swipe that thing with your finger with your thumb at the bottom of the screen all the time and i just wish that some of these you know new leakers had a slightly better memory for what that beta of safari was actually like yeah it was only four years ago it wasn't that far yeah
Well, yeah. But I do think that the pill-shaped top bars rightfully should be there in the leakiest list. Now I have a problem because we have subtle lighting effects, more rounded expanding buttons, and simplified navigation and controls. And I'll just say that all these three, I could see the simplified navigation going after the top bars.
But the other two, I absolutely have no idea. Yeah, I could put simplified navigation. I don't really know what that means, but sure. Like sure, exactly. Like sure, yeah, sure. Yeah, maybe buttons will look like buttons. So more rounded expanding buttons makes me think of path, right? Like you tap a button and things fly out of it, which is very exciting. I don't know if that's actually what's here for this, but you know, the...
in this Mac rumors article that we're kind of basing this on the photos app is brought up. Photos could be full screen with controls and a slim drop down menu bar at the bottom rather than a full navigation strip, like different possible ways to interpret this. I think lighting effects where the glass would like shimmer or like would look different with the phone, uh,
moving like that's big ios 7 energy remember like the icons would parallax over the wallpaper yeah i just don't know about that i think that could be overdone and be kind of tacky kind of gaudy so i'm gonna put i want to put subtle lighting effects last and put more rounded expanding buttons next to last
I agree. I think that the lighting effects... I mean, happy to be proven wrong. But if you want to make iOS all shimmery, I mean, be my guest. But yeah.
So this list we're looking at from the top. Round app icons, maybe. A glassier look. Visualized light design with translucency. Cross-platform cohesiveness. Pill-shaped top bars. Simplified navigation and controls. More rounded, expanding buttons. And subtle lighting effects. That's not too bad. It's a pretty good list. No, no.
I continue to be excited about this, though. Like, I really want to see what Apple's been cooking here. I actually just used my Vision Pro for the first time in forever the other day. And in preparation for this, like, okay, let me, like,
relive Vision OS for a little while. So I spent maybe half an hour just kind of noodling around on it. I was like, there's a lot of really good looking stuff in Vision OS. Let me tell you about a recent Vision OS experience of mine. I've been trying to use the Vision Pro as my night computer. I think I mentioned this before. Yeah, did you slide away again with the screensaver? No, no. Here's what happened. So I put on the Vision Pro
And I hadn't used it in a few days. And so you know what happens when you don't use the Vision Pro in a few days, like you got to charge it and then, you know, or maybe the battery is somewhat dead. And in this case, it was like 10% battery. I was like, okay, I guess I'll charge it.
I start using it and at some point it just freezes. Like it just stops recognizing my gestures. I cannot go back home. I cannot pinch anymore. Like my hands just don't get recognized anymore. I was like, okay, I need to shut this down. Somehow the shutdown menu works. So I shut it down. Now,
And this is probably my fault. I never really understood how you're supposed to power on a Vision Pro. I guess I should have Googled it. I didn't. So I start long pressing the top button, which is not the digital crown, it's the other one. And I guess I long pressed too long and maybe too many times. But long story short...
I end up with this Vision Pro showing on the outer facing eyesight display, the icon of a cable connected to a Mac. I was like, did I accidentally enter recovery mode? Sounds like it. It was late at night and I was supposed to go to sleep. I was like, I'll worry about this the next morning. Like, I guess I'm not going to use it.
So I googled it and I landed on a Reddit thread, of course, of people complaining about the same problem that they accidentally long pressed, well, too long. But it was just a matter of unplugging the battery, plugging it back in, and it's not really recovery mode. And a tip that I've read in that Reddit section was that when you power on a Vision Pro, count to five when
when you press the top button, and that's a pretty good system for not accidentally doing what I did. So whenever you need to power on the Vision Pro by pressing the button, count to five, and not any longer than that. And it doesn't have to be a slow five, like one, two, like a normal person five, you know? Yeah. The Vision Pro is the slowest computer I use. Like, one of the things I did was like, oh, I should update to Vision OS 2.4.
And they prepared that update forever. Like boot up takes forever. I just, I don't, I don't get it. It's got an M2 in there. Should be plenty fast. Yeah. Well, thank you for joining me on the leakies. We'll see if we ever do this again. Time will tell. This episode of connected is brought to you by Ecamm. Ecamm live is the leading video production and live streaming studio built for the Mac.
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Let me tell you about some of the automations that I've built lately before we go. Okay. I think I have entered one of the more creative phases of my life in terms of automation. I've had some of these phases in my professional life.
When I started with URL Scheme, that was a whole thing back in the days of Launch Center Pro, drafts. Then there was the phase of Pythonista. Yeah. Then there was the phase of Pythonista and editorial, my beloved editorial, of course. Then came workflow. And that sort of began the modern age of automation that I do. That later became shortcuts.
And I think I've entered this new, slightly different and similar at the same time, phase of the automations that I've built, which is...
automations plus some more scripting involved again plus some sort of AI sprinkled on top that's like this hybrid automation so to speak that I've been playing around with lately and I've built a lot of things this past couple of weeks both for personal use and Mac stories use
The first one I want to share, this is a simple one. I realized that I needed to... This is a regular shortcut, by the way. I realized that I needed to have a system to make sure that I create documents in Obsidian that don't have illegal characters in their file names.
that work both on iOS and Android. Turns out that iOS, macOS, and Android, they have different characters that are considered illegal characters. Like if you have a document that has one of those characters in the file name, it's not going to sync with Obsidian. And it's going to tell you, you cannot use this file name. And there's different characters across platforms. So I created a simple shortcut
that runs as a function of all my other shortcuts. It's called sanitize titles. Okay. And it uses, it uses a single regular expression that contains a whole bunch of these illegal characters, um, separated by, are you even slightly familiar with, uh, regular expressions? Just enough to be really, really dangerous.
Okay, so you know in regular expressions you can do like if this or this or this, and the or is done by a vertical pipe character. So this is basically what the regex looks like. It's a bunch of characters separated by the vertical pipe. And so this shortcut is just one action. It's that regular expression. And it runs as a function of my other shortcuts. So for example...
I have a shortcut that saves a web page in Obsidian. Before saving the file, it says, "Okay, I have this title. Run the sanitize titles shortcut and then give me back an actual title that I can use that doesn't have any legal characters." And this completely fixed the issues that I was having with some file names that work fine on iOS and macOS and others that do not work fine on Android.
So that's nice. And it's especially nice how you can use the run shortcut action to basically treat this like instead of duplicating the same code over and over in all of my shortcuts, I can just invoke this one and it just runs externally. You give it permission once and then it always runs in the background. It's cool. Yeah. When did they add that? That was just...
a couple years ago a few a few years ago a few years ago yeah yeah because it used to be like in the old system and you did after you repeat that code as like a block and a bunch of shortcuts then what happens if you you know you find a character that you missed and you're like you're going and adding it to five different shortcuts like it's not exactly not exactly yeah um
Man, I got to say, like that team, those few years ago, that workflow team and then shortcuts team, those folks were cooking, man. They were doing thing after thing after thing. And now we're just getting a bunch of settings, actions.
But anyway, then I want to tell you, I wanted to give you an update. I wanted to give you an update about the transcription workflow that I told you about. So I was talking by myself like a crazy person while driving my car. That's right. Yeah. I finalized this thing and I think it's ready to be written up for club members. I think that's what I'm going to do. I realized...
Something funny, that I did not need to do the audio cleanup at all. So out of curiosity, so if you recall, I had this shortcut that it was this Hazel automation that was monitoring a folder
where I was uploading audio recordings, right, of me talking in my car. And before processing those audio recordings, I was encoding them to a different MP4 format because the default one was not supported by shortcuts. And I was also cleaning up the audio using an FFmpeg, like, silence removal script.
Out of curiosity, a few days ago, I thought, well, what happens if I take the raw, unedited file with the weird audio encoding and I just pass this along to Gemini 2.5 Pro?
Does it care? And the answer is, it doesn't care. It doesn't care about the background noise. It doesn't care about the weird encoding. It just takes that raw file from my earbuds and it just transcribes the audio. So I vastly simplified the approach by just using Hazel to monitor the folder. When it sees the new audio file, it gives the file to Gemini. Later,
I run a shortcut that does a bunch of things. The shortcut takes the transcript and gives it to Claude. I'm using Claude in this case because I prefer the style. I think, you know, we all have our little quirks and preferences for these models. Some people prefer the way that Chagipiti talks. Some people prefer the more terse way that Gemini talks.
produces text. I prefer the way Claude writes, so I'm just using Claude to process the text. I do use, in the shortcut, FFmpeg to re-encode the audio, because at the end, I finalize my template for these voice notes. I save a markdown document in Obsidian that has the summary of whatever I was talking about, the actionable items, and then
a player, an audio player, to listen back to the recording, and a link to the full transcript. So,
I finalized the whole thing and I think it's ready to be shared with people. So that was very fun to put together, actually, to play around with like audio stuff. And like, I think it's a perfect example of this new kind of like hybrid automation where it used to be impossible for shortcuts power users or, you know, even Apple script power users back in the day to do any kind of like
natural language processing because like automation is always I guess what I'm trying to say is that automation has always been deterministic right it's always worked with a precise set of rules and here with this new flavor of automation you can sort of have this hybrid world where the input or the output are non-deterministic but you can still use your regular actions like the terminal finder you know doing these things and it's
It's very fun. It's actually very fun to do. I wanted to mention something that you put in the notes. A listener, Steve, recommended this beautiful piece of hardware by the folks at Teenage Engineering. The TP7. It's a field recorder. It's beautiful. I love this. I love the look of this thing.
I would feel bad for just using it. It's so pretty. Oh, I'm looking at the price now. Oh, God. It's 1,500 euros. Yeah, same in dollars. 1,500 dollars. Okay. All right. Yeah. Keep using your Huawei earbuds, I guess. Yeah. And yes, then I guess I will hint that
It's something that I also mentioned in the pro show for Connected Pro members that I think I should be able to finalize for this week's issue of the newsletter, which is a new flavor of something that I was doing three years ago in Obsidian. In Obsidian in 2022, I had this system to have a little watch later queue for YouTube videos in Obsidian.
And I was doing this data view presentation to have like this little grid with thumbnails and basically saving videos as notes. And that system didn't stick because like I was doing nothing with those notes. Like there were just markdown documents with a URL inside. I'm putting a different spin on it. I'm now saving again those videos in Obsidian, but alongside the video,
like the link to the video, I figured out how to embed the video itself with an embeddable YouTube player. And I'm also saving a summarization of the video, thanks to, once again, AI. So it's sort of, I'm saving those videos as a way to
not just like see them in Obsidian and click play, but also have some future searchable knowledge. And again, that goes back to what we were talking about in the pro show. So the idea being that in the future, at some point, I will be able to ask Obsidian, hey, did I ever watch a video about
And, you know, this idea of making the things that I read or making the things that I watch or making the things that I write searchable down the road is something that I've always, that it's always been missing from whatever system I was using before. And I'm slowly working my way toward building that. So these are some of the things, actually, let me look in shortcuts if I have some more. Oh, I should mention, I have also been using the, I don't know if like,
There's a beta version of this. Do you know Pushcut? I do. Yeah. So they have a beta version of Pushcut on the Mac that lets you run the automation server on the Mac. The idea being that you run this little server. I do it on the Mac mini server that I'm renting.
And it's basically a utility that allows you to run shortcuts on that computer remotely. So they give you like a password and a private URL, and you can make an authenticated request to that URL to have Pushcut execute a shortcut for you on that computer. Wow.
Yeah, so I've been using this extensively to send links from my Android device, from my iPhone, from my computer, to the Mac Mini,
basically using it as a shortcut traffic controller, so to speak. PushCut is running and it's executing these multiple branches depending on what I remotely execute. And that's especially useful
for these long running shortcuts that take like several minutes to complete. Like I wouldn't want to run those on my iPhone and just stare at the shortcut running, you know? Also because I cannot run the shell script action in shortcuts for iOS. So it's ideal if you have a Mac server that is always on, if you can join that push cut beta, it's very useful. Yeah.
Yeah, we've talked about Hazel in that regard before too, right? Like this thing that's like running on a Mac all the time can be very useful. Yeah, yeah. So that's all. You're busy over there.
I've been very busy and I'm not making the mistake that I made in the past. Now, every time I build one of these things, I document it. So both for me and like if it's something that I'm building for John, like I create a little document for John. So everything is always documented. And that also helps if like I need to talk about it on Connected or App Stories or if I want to turn it into an article, I already have the documentation for it. That's awesome. I think that does it, Federico. Yeah.
I think so. I think we're done. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you want to find more of us, you can find Federico. He's the editor-in-chief of MacStories.net and Vatici across several social media websites.
You can find me at 512pixels.net and I co-host Mac Power Users here on Relay each and every Sunday. Links for this week's show are available in your podcast player or on the web at relay.fm slash connected slash 547. There's a link to leave feedback or you can go to connectedfeedback.com and leave us thoughts about the episode.
If you want to join and get Connected Pro, which is the longer ad-free version of the show each and every week, there's also a link to do that. This week, we spoke about some of the new features in Dev & Think 4 and continued our sort of ongoing conversation about AI assistance in Obsidian. So go check that out. I'd like to thank our sponsors this week. They were NetSuite, ZocDoc, and Ecamm. And until next week, Federico, say goodbye.
Arrivederci. Bye, y'all.