UI Responsiveness and CarPlay Notifications

Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Claude from Anthropic and SteamClock I'm John Vorortz, and I've got Federico to teach you with me. Hey, Federico. Hello John. How are you? Very well, thank you. How about yourself? What's going on? I'm good, I'm good Just busy finishing a couple projects before WWDC. Yeah. Usually I do this in the month of May, obviously. It always happens then I want to clear the deck for before all the new OSs and beta season in the summer And the new the new cycle that begins anew every June and lasts really until September, October So yeah, I have a couple of things that I want to finally And up post on Max serories and it's going to be fun. But otherwise, my mind and I think yours as well, we've been thinking about WWC. And we've been thinking about US and iPadOS twenty seven And like we do every year we thought we would put together a series of wishes for the new operating systems There's going to be a few episodes like this one. We're gonna to be talking about the other Apple operating systems. Today we're just going to focus on I US and IP US And I want you to go first, John. If you don't mind. No, I don't mind at all. And I think It's worth saying up frront that these are not really predictions. These are just things we want. I think our expectation for WWDC this year is probably based on you know, the rumors that we've seen It going to largely be about the rollout of AI Oh yeah, very different from last year for sure.. Yeah. So I mean, we're going to wish for some things that I fully expect we will not get. but I think it's important to kind of keep these wishes out there because hopefully Apple will hear them and at some point in the future they will be addressed at some point. And I'm I'm not going to go in any kind of priority order, but I did have something come up the other day that I wanted to raise about continuity camera I was sitting out on my balcony and I was using my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode with an external display. And the display didn't have a microphone in it or anything. and I wanted to use a dictation app. and I realized, I didn't have an available microphone, but then I thought, well, I've got my phone in my pocket. So I took my phone out cononnected it to the MacBook Pro with continontuity camera, which works in clamshell mode And I let it sit on the table and used it as a microphone, which I was like very proud of myself. I was like, o, this is a clever solution. And it was good However I in that situation Contuity camera is kind of a drain on your battery because it's using the video camera, sending a live feed to your Mac. I didn't need to live feed to video. All I needed was the microphone I would love it if Apple would have a mode in continuity camera that just let you use it as a microphone. because you know, the mics are actually pretty good. They may not be like podcast quality for recording, know a YouTube video or a podcast or whatever, but they are good for dictation. And I think that that would be a really nice way to extend the kind of dictation you can already do on an iPhone directly to the Mac when you're in a situation where you're using something like a Mac mini or a laptop that's closed or that kind of thing. I think it'd be it'd be a nice nice plus I have never used continuity camera. John and I have very different setups for some things I am using continuity camera right now. That's the camera I'm using. And I have used and now that I have an ASS display on my desk that doesn't have a microphone on it, I have used the iPhone sixteen E as my microphone. with my Mac studio to do dictation apps Imagine the difference I am using during the day when I don't do podcasts, I use a dedicated microphone for dictation. just I've got those. I clip on mic that I can just clip ono my shirt like this and. And it's got a tiny USBC receiver. And that's what I use for dictation. I actually think I have all the continuity stuff disabled at a system S level said Why because it was just I hate the suggestions Oh, when it tells you, do you want to use the video? But I hate when the computer bothers me and have forever. like don't ever prompt me for something that I don't request, especially like if I dismiss that thing like, I don't know, ten times Lets continontue. St. Yeah, no, and I in the initial setup. When I set up this iPhone sixty E, I did have to change some settings because it would for my phone in my pocket and my phone that I use as the video and I had. let me guess, John, let me guess. You are the type of person that has od set to automatically switch between devices? Of course I do. Of course you do. And it's of course It's a constant frustration. I need to turn it off in some context. It's a particularly bad when I'm using my laptop. Why do you put yourself through this Be you gott to understand the out of the box experience to be able to write about it Yeah. is how that is how it comes. Well, you know change a setting and have a happier life. I know. I just like to struggle. I love the struggle. You love the struggle, you do, you do. Okay. All right. All'm going I'm going to state to the obvious. I really think that Apple gets their AI act together in IS and IPOS twenty seven in general, but especially in these two. I would love to see the rumored seri chat bot a new large language model experience According to the latest Germn report, there's going to be a major seri overhaul both Obviously from a functional standpoint, it's going to be based on the pre announced Apple and Google Gemini deal So Apple is going to be using a white labeled version of Google Gemini for Apple intelligence. I cannot wait for that. Especially if it's a version of Gemini that's been fine tuned. think so for Apple platforms in a way that it has knowledge. about anything on your device, your apps, homeomekit, health maps, music, all kinds of stuff that make Apoll OSes feel so integrated with one another And I really hope that this rumor of Siri being integrated with the dynamic Island is true The idea being that when you long press the side button to invoke Siries, Siri will appear as this new gling element in the dynamic island. or It sounds like you will be able to swipe down anytime from the dynamic Island to open this ask and search ser interface. effectively, it sounds like Apple is going to enable It's gonna fuse Spotlight and Siri together And it's going to enable system wide search and seri integration without having to press a button or without having to speak an implication phrase So I really hope that's the case. I really hope that you can take those Ephemeral questions and turn them into persistent chats in a dedicated Si app which is also sounds like it's in the cards. I hope you can organize those chats in the SIirI application. whether it's via folders or tags or Some way to manage those get them get the data out if you want, which, you know, with a share sheet or whatever. They're never gonna to do that. I'm sorry. know. I know. I'm just putting it out there It's not gonna happen. Uh We'll be lucky if we can copy responses Oh I'll give you I'll give you print to PDF Oh no. Okay I wish PDFs would just go away forever. Nothing more than that. Nothing more than that. Copy and PDF I hope that obviously we get and appap intense slash MCP story Whatever foundoundation Apple decided to settle on if they managed to make those app intents from a couple of years ago work Otherwise, maybe they will announce a new MCP bridge for connecting apps to Syria and Gemini whatever, whatever works for me. I was also hoping that I was thinking about this new This new series integration with the dynamic island It would be nice to be able to drop stuff into the dynamic island and ask seri questions. I canine doing en Saring they're not doing that. No, but imagine you take a screenshot, right And and you grab the little thumbnail and you drop it into the dynamic Island and then you can ask Siri question about the image immediately. Yeah, That'd beful. Yeah, we use the sh sheet too U But yeah, so my first wish would be my first wish would be proper AI story that maybe is not as cutting edge as the latest cld or ChBT Yeah. I would settle for something that feels like Apple is just a year behind instead of three, four years behind. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I hope that it's part of this too, this stuff doesn't I think they need that Apple needs to move beyond the annual update schedule. I feel like Things are moving so quickly in this realm that not only do the models need to be, periodically, which To some extent, that can probably be done server side But I think that the app itself needs like constant improvement over the course of a year. because year is like an eternity. in the AI world But For my second pick, I'm going to say screen sharing on the iPad. So screen sharing so that you can screens share to a Mac which You know, there are apps that let you do this jump desktop and screens and some other ones, AstroPad workkbench But I'd like it built in the system because I' tell you having used a lot of these different apps, The Mac screen sharared app is the most reliable and best quality out there. And it's partly because it's built in. so you don't have to like Be sure that that you've started an app on your Mac at home and make sure that it's running before you try to connect to it remotely. You know sccreen sharing is just always built into the OS, so you don't have to think about it That's the kind of thing that I want to see with the iPad the iPad. I'd like to be able it to be bidirectional too, obviously, so it's not just the iPad accessing a Mac, but a Mac accessing an iPad mean I think Accessing a Mac is probably more important to me overall personally, just because I use screen sharing a lot more now that I'm actively running a headless Mac mini server, but it's it's time for this built out because I think it really complements some of what Apple is planning with the AI stuff for Siri is that they have to understand that people are doing more advanced AI type work and automation workflows on the Mac. and there need to be more ways to get into that. at a system level and not just rely on third parties for that type of thing. That was also one of my wishes. I really hope that they have such an incredible on the Mac with screen sharing. Yeah I think if the I'm gonna see something I don't think it's controversial. I don't think we're going to get that many iPadOS updates this year I don't either, but I do feel like there's just one thing and it's screen sharing, I would be happy. Yeah, I was thinking about this because I know we have wishes about other things that we'll get to for the iPad and they're probably unlikely for that very reason. But I feel like if you can dedicate a couple of people to work on an app that sometimes in these quiet years for a platform Yeah you get you do get apps, new apps because they're more self contained than working on, you know, like the foundations of the OS itself. Like like the year before IPO S twenty six that they did calculator Right, Right in weather and weather like it was just, yeah, now we're bringing calculator and. And you know there was just like a designer and a developer. Yeah one of each probably on those deals. but that's pretty even quite Good. like it sure. The the calculator integration in notes that the did what it's called like Math notes. Remember math notes? Yeah, everybody should go watch Chris Li's video. His very special video where he got Got to demo that. Yeah, I think that that's great. Yeah Plus' the standalone epis so. Yeah. yeah. I mean I was gonna I was going to mention it would also be nice to have the new spotlight from Macwash last year on the iPad And I still I still kind of For that I think the biggest wrinkle in that plan now is What if There's no new spotlight in the sense that the new search UI is going to be serary Yeah, I do wonder about. Maybe that spotlight on the maclas was like a bully But actually the new search UI is going to be Siri with Apple intntelligence Yeah, I do wonder about that. and I do wonder about how they mold those two things together because that's one of the problems that a lot of the voice assistants have had, you know, whether it's Alexa or Google Home asssistant is that know going from sort of a more deterministic model of of interpreting spoken commands that are formatted a particular way to plain English natural language queries, It's been very hard for some of those companies to merge those two things in a way that keeps the things that were reliable reliable and then adds the new I think Sir's advantage here is that most of it's unreliable There's nowhere to go but up except if they get the weather wrong and things like that. I am so so curious to see how the new series with Gemini integration works with external apps. becausecause if there's anything that we've learned from Gemini models over the past six months, is that Gemini kind of sucks a tool calling, right? Yeah. It really not their thing. And And that was especially apparent The Gemini three and three point one releases like they really didn't go over well developers and And if anything, over the past six months, we've seen A pretty equal split between either codeax or cloud code. in the developer community because of the tool calling. And Gemini, I mean, who's using Gemini for tool calling and programming? I really only use it to get transcripts out of YouTube videos So yeah, I mean, a lot of people do that. Me too actually. And I think there's a lot, there's a lot wrgging on Google for the upcoming Google IO U the the rumors are saying that they're going to show off Gamini three point five that supposedly almost matches GPT five point five in the flash model, which will be incredibly nice to see. We've seen with these models from openp AI and anthropic, that something that they're really good at is integrating with external tools Whether you're using the chatbots or the coding agents, they're really good at integrating with external tools and apps. Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but Google has already kind of pre announced that they have something very similar to A intents in the world. Google always announces So I know et whether it becomes a real product and sticks around is another case altogether. Exactly. But it's like what version of Gemini hasas Apple been given access to? That is also my question. becausecause we're now at three point one Google is going to show off three point five Yeah and this week by the time this episode comes out. R Is Apple fine tuning three point zero we don't know. like what checkpoint of Gemini of the Gemini three family is app all going to use I would hope I would hope it's three five because three five obviously has been in the works for a while, undoubtedly, right? I hope you're right I hope you're right I don't know. We'll see. We'll see Yeah Yeah. let me see. what else should we wish for Oh, you know what? I have a really small one on the iPhone. I want to be able to favorite songs from Standby mode. I know that we just recently talked on App Stories pllus. They haven't seen standby mode in like a couple of years. I know. And you know, after we talked about it on App Stories pllus last week, that it was something that you don't use and I have used on and off but have fallen by the wayside again myself I set it up the other day with a battery pack Chat two charger that has a kickstand and I set up on my desk and it was actually kind of nice to have like a battery widget and the weather and have, you know be able to listen to music But you know what you can't do, you can't favorite your songs. And one of the things I like to do when I'm listening to music while I work is have a very quick way to favorite something now and then so I can go back to those songs and maybe explore those artists you know, more in more depth and not having an ability to do that just by just tapping on that screen is kind of a bummer. Yeah I mean, I agree. I don't use it, but I agree This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Claude from Anthropic. One of the coolest things I did recently with Claud Code is I used it to set up an Android handheld gaming device. I used it in developer mode, connected to my Mac, gave Claud Code the instructions of what exactly I wanted, and had it figure out where to go grab the emulators online on GitHub and make sure that all of my files are in the proper place and properly named. Then it cleaned up a bunch of extra craft that was sitting around in my downloads folder And then I got another handheld compared to the first handheld with Claogged Code and got them to be mirror images of each other simply by instructing Claogg Code to take care of the busywork. Claod is the AI for minds that don't stop. good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks like you do whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Plaud extends your thinking. tackle the problems that matter If you're a developer spending half your day on tasks you wish you could hand off, Clog code runs in your terminal read your code base and can take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you having to handhold it through all the steps Plus, you can forget about basic web searches with Cloud Claude is excellent at deep research That means you can dig deeper with extensive sources, proper citations, and do it all in a fraction of the time that Android handheld project that I just mentioned, I used deep research to start it off just to see if it was even possible to do. And Claude went out found all the tools I needed and investigated all the software I wanted to install to make sure that it was all possible before it got to work For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at claud. Ai slash app Stories. that CLAu dE. Ai slash app stories and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode Cud d. AI slash app stories Our thanks to Claude for their support of the show You mentioned Clam Chalmode on the iPad? I did Well, actually, no, I was talking about clamshell mode on the Mac And and I will mention climeshall M on the iPad. I don't think they're going to do it this here because I means that the focus is obviously elsewhere And rightfully so, I will say, I mean whether you We We have a lot of MacSories readers and app stories listeners I still think that U these AI feds will be going away and I don't use steel in a pejorative or derogatory way. I think if you are a tech company like Apple right now, you almost tab. an AI story. Oh yeah. it just Al see it's not going away just away and I mean, I mean you just the fact that moreore than a billion people at this point in between Claud, ChPT and Germini use these products on a daily basis. It's like saying, no what if search engines went away? And we went back to, I don't know. chat boards and I don't know, blog ros instead of using search engines's like, it's not going to happen Um, U in any case I hope that Apple eventually has a clamshell mode feature on the iPad. I would love to be able to just Dock, my Ipit Pro at my desk and have all the features of the iPado SUI on the external display, like a control center, like security, permission dialoguess, those kinds of things that right now, if you connect an iPad to an external display, all those things like the face ID prompts, for example, come up on the iPad internal display because the iPad doesn't have any sort of idea of what it means to not show a UI on its own display, but only on the external monitor, like the Mac does. then I will mention more widget sizes I want to see some widget improvements Uh, again, I don't think it's going to happen this year. I think it's more likely that Apple is gonna to copy U what Google did? Um have you seen the Android show, John Have you watched the Android show? No So Google announced this feature that lets you create your own widgets with Mmini And basically you use generative model in Gemini to design. to design your own widget And the idea being that you prompt Gemini. And you say, Ohh I want to make a widget that shows me these and that And you wait a couple of minutes and you have a widget created by Gamin ID you can add to the home screen So I think if anything Apple is going probably copy that but I would rather see the ability to have new widget sizes like extra small, for example, that Like a widget that onlyn takes up like two icons horizontally, for example. That would be extra nice U, Vvertical would be good too if you could do like a column. column Yeah. like like a one, one icon wide Oh Widget maybe. Yeah All right. I have a couple of small ones I want to share with you. The first one is about reminders. And I think that We're at a point now. and I know you've been working on a CLI for reminders And that's great. But I think that some of the stuff that sits on top of a Vt kit needs to be opened up more efficiently to developers because I feel like task managers There are a lot of them out there, but it's kind of plateaued because it's hard for developers to do the kinds of things that are available in reminders that aren't part of EventCit. thingsings like urgent notifications or flagging, sections in a list to create. Th are things that are layered on top of Event kit, which is an API that's been around for a long time and hasn't really changed a lot. And I'd like to see some of that migrated into the official SDK, whether it's part of event Kit or it's, you know, something that is off to the side, but it's more it's opened up more fully to developers that they can use that. So that's one And the second one is related to AirPods, but it's AirPods as they work with an iPhone, which is going back again. to the idea of dictation. And I think that voice has become a really good way to interact with devices both to control them, but also just to do the kind of dictation stuff that we've talked about in the past What I'd like to see is the AirPods tuned specifically for like a whisper mode because there are times when Maybe you're in kind of a loud coffee shop and you don't want to just be the guy sitting in the corner talking to himself. But if you could do it quietly, it might be more okay. I'm just thinking about circumstances where you don't want to be disruptive by speaking at your normal out loud voice, but you could maybe whisper some notes to yourself and have them dictated into your phone that way. would be. I think that there given the quality of the microphones and AirPods proro now, that that would be a a nice additional feature for them Whisper mode Whisper mode. I think I think some of the dictation apps already have a whisper mode, but that's usually's it's it tends to be I think if it were built into and tuned for the specifically for the microphones of the AirPods, it could potentially work better This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Steam Clock. A lot of mobile apps are mediocre, notot exactly broken, but just okay The thing is though, you notice the difference the moment you use something good Steam Clock software builds mobile apps for companies that care about taste They're a design and development studio based in Vancouver, Canada, and they've been shipping iOS and Android apps for over fifteen years. Their clients are growing tech companies that care about mobile, but don't have the in house team to build something great. Steam Clock works with companies to level up their apps so they can go from this is holding us back This is pulling its weight someome of their clients have discovered the hard way that vibe coding your way to the app store isn't a product strategy SteamClock has deep experience shipping apps on both iOS and Android, so they're good at helping companies figure out the right technical approach for their situation Their client apps have been downloaded over ten million times and they've helped five of their clients go through acquisitions If you're building something and need a mobile team who cares as much as you do, Steam clock is where to start Visit steamclock d. com slash app stories to get in touch that steamclock d. com slash A Stories Our thanks to Steam Clock for their support of the show I don't think I have anything else. Not because I mean There are things that I wish happened. I just don't think they're gonna happen No Like for example, I could mention I would love to see Apple make the entire iPad OS UI be faster and Yeah. more responsive like the MacUI. I don't know what it is, but like If you compare working on Late Pro, and a Macbook pro And just don't think about how more flexible macasses We just look at the UI Yeah, moving around to different Moving around, opening windows like Everything feels like a second sllower on the iPad. It does. Ething kind of moves around more, animates more. There's always like this big spectacle of UI animations on the iPad where the mac is just more functional, a little bit more primitive, maybe you just click window appears You know? likeike I would love to see those just like heavy handed transitions to be gone from IPadOS. Because like we get it, I think at this point there's an entire generation of kids Right that has grown up with iPads. I think they know how windows operate And I think MacOS is perfectly usable in terms of like understanding how windows move and resize and where you're supposed to click. I think it's I think it's a relic of when touch touch was new and people had to be taught what touch interfaces were. I don't think we need to be taught anymore And and this is also partially a problem on IOS. On IOS, you notice less because You only see one window at a time There's going to be a problem on the fold. By the way where you's gonna be you're not gonna to be seeing one window at a time. but it's especially true on the iPad where this needing to be taught like, oh, yes, this is where the window comes from. So we're gonna show you that it comes from this side That's not needed anymore Yeah. just And I'm not saying that you should not have any animations or transitions whatsoever, but the contrast that you get when you work on an iPad and when you work on a Mac is so apparent at this point evenven with all the issues of Tahoe Even with the same appaps, working on the iPad feels slower most of the time. It does. You know another thing that would be really good on the fold is screen sharing. Just putting that out there too This is like you wishing for export features in the Siri Chatbot app. I don't know what's less I think it's no, I think exporting data is the least likely Okay, well here I've got one more for you to judge. Okaykay? You can judge me on this one, Federico. I want I want CarPay to be updated so that I can tell texted me if I miss that little pop up that comes up that says who's texting you? So the here's the problem I have. I have like some group chats. that's the most likely so far. I know Okay, good. because here's the thing is like if I'm on a long car trip And I may need I mean I may want to see a text message from you about something happening on Mac stories, but I have a bunch of group text messages that I don't really care whether I see them now or three hours from now I want to either be able to prevent those that I don't care about from showing up in carpl while I'm driving or to have some kind of special way to distinguish between one and the other so that instead of just having a red circle that has no indication of whether I have one message or twenty I can figure out whether it's an important message that I need that I want to see. becausecause right now there's absolutely no way to do that and it drives me a little bit nuts when I'm on a long trip. And I have a long trip coming up but I want to know you know, what messages or what? I don't need to, you know, have Oh stuff coming in So there you go All right All right, I think I think that's a more I think it's our list of wishes. I think it's maybe a little more understated than previous years, I think I noticed something about our lists. What? Unlike previous years, we don't have a single shortcuts wish This is true And maybe that's something wor. Rking about Something worth thinking about for sure. Well if I did have to wish, I would just wish for one thing, which is for reliability is N not features just Make it work consistently What are we going to talk about in Aai Spllast J? Oh, we're going to talk about visual intelligence. Oh yes. And the rumors of the AirPods Pro getting cameras in them because I think I want to buck the conventional wisdom on this one and imagine ways that maybe this isn't uch a crazy feature after all All right R. Allright. All right, everybody. Thankks for joining us today for A Stories. You can find us over on maxstories. net. I want to thank our sponsors too Claude Bianthropic and Steam Clock. Again, Federico and I are also on social media. So look for Federico. he's atvatici. That's VI TI CCI And I'm at John Vores. JOH N, VWR HWS. atch you next week Federico Charge on