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Coming up, Apple canan't shake its love of titanium, Big upgrades in store for the Apple Watch Ultra four. The first IOS twenty seven features officially announced A lightweight alternative to spotlight and our favorite web browsers Good evening, and welcome to the Cult Make podcast. I'm your host today, Dee. Griffin Jones. Leander is out this week and next, I think like several of his like eight children are graduating some level of school. I'm not entirely sure which. I'm joined today by Louis Wallace, coming from where. I' from Ohio. Ohio. sameame with you Griffin, veryy exciting D in Southern Ohio, Pike County. We almost could have recorded in the same room, but Also joining us, she's a contributor to Mac Stories, co host of the Comfort Zone podcast, independent developer, president of Tot DeFem Yeah Neelon Welcome. Yes. Hello. Thank you. Thank you for having me I don't know how it works. Sh there be like some jokes in here, like some bana? Yeah, I'm not used to it being my responsibility to talkify the pre show V. You have some modern computers Oh yah sure. YouTube viewers will know I rotate between some old computers on the desk behind me. I've got a Macintosh Classic, a power Macintosh G three, and also an Apple EMac, which is the most recent addedition to my collection. so it's got a spot of honor right there for a while. I've got those particular old Macs behind me because I also just recently got my first bllue Sczzy which lets you plug an SD card into the scuzzy port of an old Macintosh. As an old computer enthusiast, this is very exciting because this is the first time I can move more than one point four megabytes of data onto and from an old computer at a time before I decide to use a floppy disk drive, which is not a fantastic medium for storage. So you know, I've been messing around with those. What's the oldest thing you have in your regular use neelon? In regular use O for funzies I don't know. I I have an iPod, Nano, but it's on a shelf right now. I'm not using it. I tried to use it a few months ago I guess my Thunderbolt dog is getting old It's a Thunderbt three dog. I don't know importantpant question, what color is the iPod nano so it's the squareish one and it's a light blue, the light blue one. Well a short and wide one Yes, the short and white one. That's a good one Yeah, it looks cute Let's jump right into it. Today's episode is brought to you by Our first story on cult of Mac. Lewis, why don't you tell us about it? Oh crap. I was excited for a minute there. I thought we had a sponsor. On this show So what you're saying is sponsorships are available Yeah, today's episode is brought to you by our listeners. if you want have a message that you'd like to put in front of our audience, write us in Okay, that's our ad break. Tell us about the Titanium iPhone U yeah, Apple's Titanium iPhone experiment may not be over just yet. A few months after switching iPhone seventeen Pro away from Titanium, Apple might be having second thoughts about aluminum Interesting might remember all the scratch gate crap that was going on right after it came out. scratched up like completely marred in stores within days of unveiling. You know, aluminums light, cheap, plentiful Also scratches Titanium strong But expensive, also heavier Um Not as effective at aluminum as aluminum at dissipating heat. I can barely see the show notes being so blind and staring at a MacBook for the first time in years. I'm so used to having a gigantic screen. Now I'm staring at this little thirteen inch MacBook air. Anyway,, Apple used Titanium for the iPhone fifteen sixteen Pro But switch to aluminum with the iPhone seventeen U now I never know how to pronounce this either Weibo. Yibo, it's probably Yibo Hipster, it's the digital. It iss the digital I can read. and pr outs U It's digital claims that Apple was working on a new titanium alloy that might help address the heat problem. while keeping the iPhone light ish. Apple currently uses titanium in the iPhone air great material makes that super th in Chassis Durable Iupposly Apple might use one the folding iPhone we've been hearing about, which supposedly coming later this year, possibly called the iPhone Ultra Nobody's actually sureet Maybe I wonder if Tim Cook is even sure yet. He has mentioned, you know, using if they can get this ally ally alloy together, And u bring it back to the pro, which you know, kind of does seem cool. I mean, I remember those things. They were heavy, but they Nice solid feel to him you know, if they get it together, that would be able to stop the scratching problem You remember that stuff? That was maybe overblown, but Pictures don't lie, I mean Th things were getting scratched up. and Apple actually blamed it on used chargers in the stores, right? And didn't they remove or replace them all.? I can't remember if they officially did that or if that's just what happened But suddenly every iPhone station had its little in store demo unit charger things replaced. So The scratch is stopped It's true that some of those things did look pretty sharp and S the scratching was pretty bad, but I mean, mine's fine and case, no problems really died down. that one that gate died down faster than most of the gates. So Anyway, as as always with these, you know, big rumors and stuff like this, who knows Will it actually happen? Supposedly it's an early stage research. I don't think this is happening this year mayaybe in a year or two We'll see. I mean, as someone who still uses an iPhone, sixteen Pro regularly Yeah, it gets hot. It gets very hot all the time. like for a while, I thought, oh, it's just because I'm running the IiOS twenty six beta, you know, it's buggy and process is going in the background wrong and it gets heated up, especially in the camera app. but no, it still gets hot. So that's it's just how it is. And if I'm going to a If I'm tentatively planning on going into a folding phone, I guess titanium will still have a way in my life. I think it's not just the switch from titanium to aluminum that helped with heat, but also the iPhone seventeen Pros added the vapor chamber cooling system, that helps a lot as well. And if you think about it, like a big part of that on the back transfers the heat away from the processor, which is under the aluminum onto like the glass section, the glass panel on the back, glass conducts heat pretty well. So supposedly I mean I bet even if they switch the you know, iPhone twenty proro or whatever metallurgy aside with this hypothetical new titanium ele that they have, like they still have the vapor chamber cooling system. they could still disipate heat through the glass panel on the back, I think it would be a lot better. I think titanium round two It would be more successful on the iPhone And the whole design is just different too, right? I mean I mean, obviously it's different, but isn't like all the bottom part, the battery? or am I getting confused with the iPhone air? I remember they're both like that actually. like the processor' all just in the top part where the camera stuff is. And everything else is battery. You know, they made a big fuss about switching to titanium and then they go back to aluminum again. Do you think they would they would make it like a big ad campaign if they were to go back again to titanium? Yeah It's funny. I mean, when they talked about this the latest ones being aluminum, I was like, God, you know, I mean, two years ago, every Apple store had the word titanium in giant letters, you know, it was like the big thing. Oh, it's so awesome. It's a high end Pmium material, not that. Crappy aluminum stuff we use in our low end phones And then u Yeah, then just two two years later like ye Yeah I have to admit I don't even know more which one mine is, like my phone Oh, that's a That's either a fifteen or a sixteen That's the sixteen pro That's the sixteen Pro, I don't know if that's titanium. Yeah, the sixteen proro and it's titanium I had no idea. Oh where go. The more you know Yeah I remember I had a Fortteen pro before this one and I remember it getting extremely hot But I don't know why Maybe it's because I switched back to a leather case but I don't feel that anymore not as often. insulates it Yeah Do you think they would ever switch the MacBook ro back to back to Titanium. there was the Titanium powerbook G four. back in like two thousand one. thousand two Was that actually made of titanium or did they just call it that? No, It was one, yeah. It wasn't a unibody, so it wasn't like entirely titanium all the way around, but it had large amounts of it that were titanium It was also really fragile and broke very easily. Like a problem is that they hadn't figured out like the modern hinge mechanism yet. So the hinge sort of like stuck off the back of the laptop and the screens would snap off on them all the time That's premium. Yeah. But they could go maybe that'll be like another change they make with like the MacBook ultraate. because supposedly that's gonna to be like thinner.be mayaybe it'll be thinner because it'll switch to titanium and it'll be, you know, have more strength. Was that the era where the MacBooks they The battery you could swap out. Oh yeah at the bottom. Yeah. Yeah. That was nice. ye ood. I mean, I don't know, I was a baby, but sounds nice. I mean now if they had use a swppable batteries, mean, you'd just be taking the whole bottom of the MacBid Pro off. Yeah, true Let's move right along. Appleunch Ultra four might add better hypertension alerts with the WOS twenty six update Apple brought hypertension notifications to the Apple Watch Series nine, Ultra two, and newer models. but a digit times report suggests Apple's new High blood pressure notification system uses the optical heart rate sensor to analyze how blood vessels respond to each heartbeat in real time That sounds kind of similar to how U they announced it working already, but we'll see. Very similar Publication adds that it is currently being reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, so Apple will have to wait until it's cleared. You know this could help flag or identify abnormal patterns associated with hypertension. That should mean there's a clinical distinction in how the new blood pressure feature notifications will work. so they could be seeking additional clearance because this will be better And you know maybe they'll be able to say more than, oh, over the past few weeks, we think you've had higher blood pressure. Maybe you should get this looked at. You know mayaybe it'll be more prescriptive. thanks to that. Apple has long been working to bring non invasive blood glucose monitoring to the Apple Watch. whileile that feature remains subject to regulatory approval, the framing in the Digit Times report hints that it is no longer a distant dream, and we could see it in a near future Apple Watch. So that might be on the horizon at least they could be working on that inching closer. I think there was another article this week that was mostly about how the, um Johnny Surgi is reorganizing the hardware. Teams within Apple and apparently Kevin Lynch is now working on that project. so he could be getting them into order there, trying to get it into a shippable product. Digit Times also says a significant redesign is on the table for Apple Watch Ultra four, citing supply chain sources. The report hints at eight sensors arranged in a circle on the rear side of the Apple Watch That could allow the watchatch to take more direct physical measurements, which could translate into better health tracking accuracy across the board. I think the question now that Apple has so many different models of Apple Watch is how many of these are actually revised annually every year I've long argued that Apple doesn't need to put out a new series model of the Apple Watch every single year when they're barely different, but They seem keyen on doing it anyways. the Apple Watch Ultra like skipped a year or two We weren't sure if we were getting a series for this year or not but it seems like it's on the cards and it'll be a big upgrade. What are we thinking about that? Well, it also says significant redesign. so hm interesting. I remember when the first ultra came out. I was not such a big fan of it, but A large part of that is interested huge fan of the raaw titanium look. But I do love it. I mean, now I wear it every day and I wish I had one of those black ones because I think those look even better But I mean, they really gonna change up the design and make it completely different? I don't know. Maybe so It sounds more like they're changing up the design of you know, the glass panel on the bottom It may be more of an internal design. Although also Now that the I mean, what number are we on? Series eleven, Now that the series eleven, larger size, technically has a display that's the same size as the Apple Watch Ultra, I wouldon't be surprised if it gets a new display on top as well. It's a little bit bigger to justify the size of the rest of the watch Big enough. Yeah. Doesn't it have kind of like, you know thick bezels around the display on the top? It's hard to tell. I got a black watch face. Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, the one thing that's kind of weird about is the lip on the top of it is kind of strange. Yeah. If you've never worn one, don't own one, whatever. You know, I mean, if they make the sensors in the next version better, you know, especially if everything is just better veryery tempting. And if the blood pressure stuff is actually, I mean, I've never received any sort of blood pressure notification or hyperensionial alert, whatever they call it Of course last week we were talking about the sleep apnea stuff. and I was saying, o, like it doesn't work. Well I mean, one of our carefully listening listeners gotot in touch others and said, Hey, it's actually in there. It's you know, it is it's true. I went in and I dug in. I did find sleep apnea or what don't they call it sleep disturbance or something like that. And you know, it says No, I don't have sleep disturbance, which is Interesting because I have been diagnosed with sleep apne and I typically don't use the stupid ClePp because I hate it Yeah. Like everybody else on the planet who's ever strapped one of those things on their face. I think all these things, I mean, we talk about this all the time. I love this background monitoring of your health. It's fantastic that all this data is getting accumulated and trying to figure out if you've got a problem you don't know about And You mentioned the blood glucose stuff. I mean, if they could get that, that would be amazing I still don't think that's anywhere near coming to fruition, but You know, man, if they could, if they could get if they could, I mean, I would buy that instantly. Oh yeah. that would take it to the next level. That would I mean, at that point it's a completely different product. That would be incredible. I world like everybody it' it's a useful companion device and it can tell you if you have like, you know, one of these silent killer things. Back to your point. I mean, every year they release a new watch Every year lately, it's kind of the same watch you know, different colors, maybe a slightly larger screen that you'd never be able to tell if you if it was it side by side with another, you know, the most recent watch I bought one of the Apple Watch Ultra three'es, you know, a black one, and it was hard to turn it back just because I liked the black. But to be honest, I couldn't tell a nickel's worth of difference in the two things So it's like, okay, I'll just take my eight hundred dollars back. Thanks Apple. Sorry for the free rental. but Blood glucose, that's a whole different That' a whole different thing. I mean, I got diagnosed with TiPes and I have a thing stuck into my arm right now that's constantly checking my glucose levels. And it's been fascinating watching that. I mean, That doesn't really that's similar to how the Apple Watching would work, I suspect is that it would track things over time. And this gives you real time realal time results, you know, what's going on, you every fifty well, not real time, every fifteen minutes with the know non prescription version of it. And u Being able to see how a particular meal O activity affects your blood sugar level is kind of mind blowing And Having to like stick your finger to check your blood sugar level. I mean you know It's slightly painful, not a big deal. doesn't it's more about the Frequency of checking, you know? I mean, when I was before I started using these continuous ones, I would just I would check my blood sugar in the morning Maybe I'd check it in the afternoon if I was feeling weird, Which by the way, I never did feel weird ever Uh, like, I mean That's what's so weird about it. Like my blood sugar was super high, D didn't know it. No idea The great thing about this is, and I figured this out looking, you know, doing the blood, you know, the fingerprick method It was like I checked it before I went for a walk And I checked it after I got back And it had dropped like forty points, just a twenty minute walk Holy crap, that's amazing took it from you know, too high to sort of It's still a little too high, but not like crazy high And uh, I thought, man, is that even true? But the thing is, like you can't you can't just rick your finger every twenty minutes. I mean, you could, I suppose. You'd run out of those things and it'd be a ridiculous mess. Um Being able to just see, oh, I did this and this happened. I drank two IPAs and my blood sugar went to the roof I ate peanut butter and my blood sugar dropped. You know, it's great information to have. and especially I mean, it's not just if you diabetes. I mean, this probably would be not It would be helpful for people who have diabetes, but it probably wouldn't be as helpful as's like one of these continuous things. It'd be helpful for everybody to just understand how these things work because I had I mean, before a few years ago, I had no idea like how the mechanism of that worked. Like o, why is it that after I eat half a large pizza, I feel insatiably thirsty for the rest of the day? because it's like, you know fifteen hundred calories of like, you know, bread Also salt. probably. But u Yeah You know, I think this is this would probably be more helpful for people. I mean, who are undiagnosed or who are pre diabetic or just, you know, young and none of you know these bad sort of lifestyle choices, notot that diabetes is all lifestyle choices, but you know, eating poorly is not good for you and seeing the actual effects of certain foods on you is It iss pretty eye opening. I did heinous things diet wise in college. What I would do is when I when I was still in the dining halls, in college, my freshmore, what would do is I would go to one of the lines where I have, you know, like burgers fries, hot dogs stuff like that and I would just get a full plate of fries. Then I would take that over to the Mexican food line. and have them tristlet in nacho cheese then I would just I add on top of that, ketchup and barbecue sauce and I would just eat that. Wow. In addition to other stuff. It's like all carbs fat and sugar. Yep, yeep, wow. If I ate that, my head would probably explode. This is the most American thing I've ever heard. I think. You're goddamn right What model Apple watchatch are you on Nelian? or do you go Sam's watch? Not wearing one. My last one was an Sessie and I wore it for a year and a half I don't like wearing things. like I don't have jewelry either. This is something with him me until they wearing those things. I think When like significant redesign, I think I would be interested in that if it finally means round bezel, like round display That's never happening, is it? I mean, eachach time they redesign it it gets rounder Yeah, Iess At some point it will be round, maybe. Not quite full circle yet. But you know just Infinite time scale. it's going to be a circle eventually I remember my first smartw was the Moto roller something and it had like flat a flat edge at the bottom. so it was round. Oh yeah. but it had a flat edge at the btom. People called it the flat tire or something. Yeah. That rings bell now. That was really weird. I suppose because they had to fit the controller somehow and they had not figured out how to put it underneath or something Did you did you like it No, that was huge I have tiny wrists and it was huge and heavy and it ran the earliest of Android versions of watch stuff and That was not Amazing I also have small wrists. Every time I go to an Apple store, I put on an Apple Watch Ultra and just laugh at it for a few seconds and then I take it off. And then my arm is sore because it's so heavy.' day. peopleople like that I remember like it was a few days before the Appleatch Ultra was unveiled, like the CAD files for it leaked online And I was just like looking at, why is it shaped like that? And then my brainwave was, oh, that's the shape of like the aluminum part. And then obviously they'll fill like the weird gaps and corners and stuff with with a rubber piece that'll fit around it and make it like normal Apple watchatch shaped. I was thought, yeah, because you know that's like what sport watches are like, you know they're metal, but then they have that really dense rubber around them, like the casio G shog watches And then they unveiled it and it just no, it just looks like that. It is true. I remember when those first came out, I thought the same thing. It looks like the bones of a watch And u I think Graham, one of our Apple Watch experts here at Con Mac, I think he that was his prediction before it launched. likeike, oh, that's what they're going to do And and I mean, admittedly, I mean, I've gotten used to it. it does look kind of strange with that big they probably would call it a u Plateau, right? Yeah ye where the digital crown the side button sit. I mean, it's it is peculiar. That's I've come to you know appreciate it though. It looks less like a kind of star Trek smooth. sci fi looking thing more like a actual You knowre like you're like you're doing plumbing when you spin the digital economy. mean it's so big and chuny's like're spinning a big wheel. Yeah. And I mean, the battery life is maybe the main thing that I like about it. I mean Aside, I mean, I think I do like the look better than the Pain Apple watchatch Let's carry on. Apple, I mean, they do this every year. They drop in advance a few features of the next big software update to celebrate World Accessibility Day So we've got details on the accessibility features coming in IOS twenty seven, MacOS twenty seven, etcetera, etcetera. Apple Intelligence powers a lot of them. Apple previewed a sweeping set of accessibility upgrades Tuesday that weave Apple Intelligence into some of its most relied upon features, the sort of Headline one are improvements to voiceover and magnifier, you know the vision stuff. A new image explorer in Voiceover delivers richer, more detailed descriptions of images across the entire system. Photographs, scanned bills, personal documents, and more This feels like something that you know they've been building the bones of in other features. like when somebody texts you a picture in iMessage and you know you're wearing the AirPods and it has to like describe the photo to you. Mbe this is some of the technology that's borrowed there. So it'll be able to describe things that you're looking at more accurately, that voiceover feature currently doesn't work that great. like it'll tell you, you know, Neillyen sent a photo with some text It doesn't do that much to try and describe the contents of it, but you know it's a step in that direction. L looks like they might be doing more there. An update to live recognition lets users press the action button on iPhone to ask a question about what the camera is pointed at and receive a spoken response. and follow up questions get support in natural language So it'll be more descriptive. As well, Magnifier gets similar treatment. ussers will be able to control the app by voice, saying things like zoom in or turn on flashlight, and can also use the Aiumon to ask questions about what they're looking at This also feels very Apple intelligency with the app intense framework in the background. know a lot of the if you go back to WWDC twenty four and watch that really hilarious demo, like a lot of what they're talking about, you know what the future versions of Syria and Apple intelligence will be able to do is like doing things inside apps like the examples they gave are When you're looking at a photo, make this photo pop or you send this webpage that I'm looking at as a text to my friend or send it in slack. basasic stuff like that. that's like all gonna be voice controlled. And you know if you think about it, those would be excellent accessibility features if you can't see the buttons that you're tapping on because they were designed by Alan Dye and they' two transparent or hard to see or invisible, then you can just, tell it to turn on the flashlight. Excellent stuff. But first ruin the UI and then build some features to work around and then innovate their way out of it again. Yeah. Voice control is another popular feature And it'll undergo a natural language overhaul. Instead of needing to recall exact button labels or grid numbers, users will be able to describe what they see on screen and speak commands accordingly. For example, a user could say tap the guide about best restestaurants in maps, or tap the purple folder in files. Accessibility Reader, which reformats text for users with dyslexia th vision and related needs. It's kind of like, you know, reader mode and saafari except across a few different apps like prereview. willll be a little smarter. It'll now work with multi column layouts, tables and images found in scientific papers and other similar documents. Every Not every year. It's been two years now that When they do the accessibility announcements, before WWC I expect one thing, accessibility wise, is that they fix the balance slider, the audio balance slider in MacOS, which gets restored randomly every day depending on whichever output device you're using This is such a basic accessibility thing for people who have since recently, I've been having hearing issues like depending on left and right and I need to adjust that every device that I use. And on the Mac, this is the only device On the mac, it's impossible to keep that slider in its place. It will just move around randomly. And ye that's very frustrating. So I guess I'm happy for them that they're using AI for accessibility features. It's a good thing in general that it can be used for that. I suppose that's one of the only ethical things that can be doubted about AI and that's good, well done But I wonder can they leverage AI to fix the balance ler? Maybe the problem is that it's already powered by Apple intnt. and that's why it break maybe. It's just like serious It's already thinking too much If you look for this issue, like when you have this sort of issues with MacroS, you type on Google, right? If peopleople have been fixing this And this volume slide, this balance slid issue comes up so often and dates back to like Reddit threads in twenty eleven or earlier, like Apple discussion forums from earlier even. This is extremely old and it's not fixed. I've heard it described on another podcast A big problem with Apple's feedback system is that As soon as a bug becomes too old then nobody bothers fixing it Uh it's just like it's established like, you know, we'll fix the incoming bugs coming in Like the window of that you have, if you really want a bug to be fixed is like ideally right after the Developer beta of that software release comes out. oldld bugs. If they're more than like three years old, there's no chance they're just there forever now. That's just how it works. So maybe this summer I need to manipulate somehow the feedback system and make them think that it was introduced by the OS twenty seven Yeah I will try. I will try. That's an article that I republish every every summer as soon as like the betas are out. How to get your feedback system, how to work and game the system of feedback and get your bugs actually fixed and listened to. June is really the best time to file bugs. Apple will also add on device generated Subtitles for video content that doesn't already include captions. That includes personal clips, videos shared by friends and family and streamed content. becausecause the speech recognition runs on device, Apple says the process is private. This is also like a feature that they're building out like on device subtitles and captions. like they've added this to notes. They've had it in final cut for like, I think a a year or so now Final Cut Pro, like how you can transcribe things to captions. It was really rough when it was first introduced, but it's been getting better. Now I use it when' when I'm publishing like short video clips for how tos for Cult to Mac that'll go on socials. I used to like do an extra step where I put them in Mac Whisper because I really just had to. The app like the Final Cup Ps subtitle system was just so bad. It didn't recognize any proper nouns whatsoever. But it's getting better and you know, this is one of those features that once it's good enough, you can really roll out everywhere once it's like, you know, just barely reliable enough. you know, they have the transcribing and podcasts now So yeah, I guess they can transcribe videos that people sent to you. That's awesome. I suppose this is like an iteration on live captions. It shows that these kind of features, that these are touted presented as accessibility features They went done well, they benefit everyone The live captions is one I've been using a lot in situations like you would't expect it to be useful, but for example, your in the train and you're not rude. so And you're not rude and you have forgotten your headphones, you don't have airPods on you and you want there's like an Instagram real or whatever that you want to watch quickly. You turn on live captions and you can read what's being said in that video instead of putting it on speaker. I mean, I would say one of one of the few positive impacts TikTok has had on the world is that it established Videos on the internet should have live captions that are animated that are high quality TikTok has damaged the world in a lot of. we don't have to get into that. But that's one of the great things that it put out into the world. And you know, I'm in Ohio, so I don't experience public transit ever. You know, just in a group setting, like somebody text to a video and you know, in the middle of like a party, yeah, some people looking at their phones but you don't want to like get out headphones and put them on just to listen to a thing. You just want to see what it's all about really quick. Yeah, live captions. mean It's an accessibility feature, but everybody can will use those at some point or another 's next? One of the more striking announcements is a wheelchair control feature for Vision Pro. Lveraging the headset's precision eye tracking system, users will be able to operate compatible alternative drive systems to power wheelchairs entirely with their eyes The option matters greatly for people with conditions like ALS for whom joystick controls viable I think VisionOS is also getting dwell controlled to where You can just like look at things and stare at them for a few seconds And that'll do a simulate a tap gesture The iPhone has that and it doesn't work very well because eye control on the iPhone is very unpredictable and that great. but on the vision on the Vision Pro, I mean, that's That's brilli Brilliant idea and yeah, controlling a wheelchair with a Vision Pro? I mean, hell yeah, go for it I'm sure dozens of people will be very thankful for that future. Hopefully that will become more useful when there's something like not as heavy to wear. Yeah. ye. ye. If you have ALS, Maybe the weight of the Vision Pro would be a problem, but you know solving other problems, you know, controlling electric wheelchair. That's cool. This is a good addition for the OS. I'd say, not so much for this iteration of the hardware. We've got sort of a grab egg here at the bottom, madeade for iPhone, hearing aids will pair and hand off between devices more reliably, you know, kind of seamlessly like like AirPods, TVOS gains large text support for low vision users. That's excellent. The Sony acccess controller will work as a game controller with iOS, iPadOS and MacOS, you, just like any other game controller. A lot of people don't know this, but you know all of Apple devices have really versatile game controller input support. if you have a PS four controller laying around, you can connect it to your iPhone and you can even like navigate the games app entirely with it. You can launch games, you can play a lot of games. Basically every game on Apple arrcade has controller support, Xbox controller, Nintendo Switch controller, like both the Pro contontroller and like the individual Jooyons, you can connect the Hikawa grip and stand for iPhone, which is an accessory I hadn't heard about until now, comes in several colors and it's now available worldwide. Have you not seen the videos I've not seen the videos. it looks funky. I like it It does. it It's like a big handle. It doesn't look terribly comfortable. In Apple's marketing pictures, they show, you know, three different people holding it in three different ways So it's like this big pyramid shape Yeah on the back that attaches the back of your iPhone with a big hole in the side. that runs across I guess you can like slide a finger into But the example pictures show like people's hands and then fingers like going at like a ninety degree angle in order to slide in it because of course the hole in the side is like completely Orthogonal to the direction of the phone. Yeah I think the video like they put out on YouTube a kind of video slash ad for this and It's more convincing in there because you see people with disabilities with their hands or arms using it at holding the phone using this accessory. And it looks like this is like actually really fitting for those use cases. for these people That's fair. I believe that. Yeah Maybe it's not for us if you have. It doesn't help that one of the textures looks like it's like made of marble, so I guess I was my first impression is like, is that like a solid block I think you're sticking. I wonder what's the texture? Is it squishy? I'm not sure. looks like You know, they they they bend a little bit. so they're probably rubber and not that Yeah, not that bad.ust I mean, good stuff. you know, our first taste of IOS twenty seven features. I think the The expectation is that these are going to be smaller feature software updates as they're mostly just IOS twenty six year two they're going to be squashing a lot of bugs, going for performance and reliability Um, But I mean, if this is a hint to go by, we'll have a lot of new features as well because I mean, this is just as big a year for the new accessibility features as any. Although maybe that's a different team and that wouldn't really affect the number of broader software features. But WWDC is scarily only a few weeks away. What's our feeling going into that? I don't know. I'm still trying to Wake up from last year's nightmare with Makel Staho and All right we all. I just hope the next macowS just has a ton of refinements It's we are just like you said, we are just a few weeks away from the next OS being announced and last year is still extremely bugy. It's like it's in its Tenty of beta or something Well we'll get to this shortly, but now you've got an app to develop. So do you have a do have a game plan for that Testing testing different hions No You me be installing the first developer beta and, you know I'm not doing that No Unless like the first developer beta is orally like stability wise and Like refinements wise, an improvement over the current version of Tau. I mean God, I can't get may then Yes it can. I don't know Yeah right. I don't know. I will see I see So this is the main thing. I'm just this year I'm just hoping for like refinements across the line Lewis, your Tahe was forced upon you. what are your feelings? Yeah, I'm still not digging it too much. There's a lot of things that I donon't find that pleasing. I got a new one this morning. I woke up, signed into my mac and for some reason, the accent color was purple So I had to change that back to blue. And then I opened system settings, went to the appearance settings. It hadn't changed to purple. It was still set to the regular like default Bue But I switched it and then switched it back again And then it was blue again. That was a new one haven't experienced that yet I don't know. a lot of crap like that that you know, feel like a broken record, but that just doesn't work the same way every time you turn on your computer And I don't even mean just every time you reboot it. I just mean every time that Comes awake. It's like Why did something change in the background? It's crazy. L just dis Sometimes my display just doesn't go off. It just stays on After I lock it, just stays awake. I mean, sometimes I use the app in Fendm to intentionally keep it awake. I double check every time now it's not running. I don't know why it just won't go to sleep It's an insomniac, I guess I hope that they do fix a bunch of things that are you know sort of just a little sloppy in the current operating systems, but it just seems really otherwise it's just going to be all AI, all AI And I mean, they did it two years ago, all AI, and none of it works yet or almost none of it. So I mean, I'm not the only person who's saying this. I mean, they got to do it this time. They don't do it They're going to look like morons. They're going be the laughing stock of the tech world. so You know, it's super high stakes. I hope that the stuff works. I hope that the Si actually works I mean, honestly, if Siri just worked the way you expect it to now properly, that would be almost like a headline. But if it can do all this other stuff that they've been talking about, well, that they talked about two years ago that the rumor mill keeps saying that they're getting closer to providing, that'll be great. It's kind of weird. I mean so many people are down on AI. I'm not down on AI, but I'm down on things that don't work right. and if this thing If all this stuff works seventy five percent of the time and then the other twenty five percent of the time doesn't work, That's worse than not working seventy five percent of the time in my opinion. I'd rather have things that I can rely on to work properly every single time that I go to use them. So I recently had reason to rewatch, I think it must have been WWDC twenty fourteen when they first brought Siri to the MC. And it feels like three quarters of the things that they showed off. It's like, it even does it still do that? Is it Wow. They showed off all these demos where like you they're asking Siri, Ohh yeah, find all of these files that this person sent me about this topic. And it's like They just showed that off in WWC twenty twenty four and it didn't and they couldn't ship it. Like what? didid these features go away? Did they forget how it works? It That's weird. It I don't know if I remember watching that. When was that twenty? I want to say twenty fourteen, but twelve years. it might be twenty fifteen or so. It was after it was definitely after the Yosemite redesign. So it was either twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, I think. That sounds like an interesting post, man. writing about how the original pitch for Siri We either we never got there or we got there and left there and now are not there An idea for how I want to test the Apple Intelligence Sory when it comes out is I want to go back to the WWDC twenty twenty four demo and make an itemized list of everything they said it would be able to do and just like test those one by one, see how well it holds up. Anyways. If you'd like to make your Mac work better today Neilian. I a solution for that. Transition music Tell us about this after the year that you've been working on My my app. Yes, I made an app. This is the first one that I'm like shipping to people in real life. It's called Tiny Start and it's an alternative to spotlight U The idea being that it's supposed to be hence the name is supposed to be simpler It's also tiny on screen, but you can as well Medium start is not a separate product. You can just make a mediumage Okay. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, and the idea is it just focuses on the essentials, launch apps, open URLs You can do web searches and run your shortcuts as well And that's pretty much it. You can also like I We went with the idea that it should not be indexing everything on your mac because I feel like that might be a performance struggle, especially since beginner in terms of making myus and I don't feel like I can take on optimizing such a machine something that would index everything. There are alternative launchers that will just use the spotlight indexing on your Mac. But yeah, I decided not to do that either since my idea is to do something that's completely separate from spotlight So yeah, it's just a tiny launcher and it's supposed to be fast. and I feel like it's fast. I feel like I've done it. It's pretty fast at opening apps and opening your links and the folders that you save since since it's not indexing everything, you can just save shortcuts to your folders And that's it. Excellent. I mean I runed this all the time, like sppotlight. Older versions of Spotlight were very quick and fast Miraculously, which they ran on older computers. I don't know how that happens. but They were so much more information dense. you know, withith the new spotlight, everything is so big and the screen, although it's large on your screen, the text size is also really big. So like trying to find anything, you have to scroll through and it searches through so many different things that like the scope is just huge. and you've got like you know, if I'm just searching for a file and I even know the exact name, like I type it in And it's not anywhere in the first page of results. I've got to scroll through it. I mean, also if you have like an external hard drive like I do That's still on spinning disks because SSD storage is just still insane Sometimes I'll type something into spotlight and It'll take a moment, it'll pause. and then I have to listen to each one of my drives spin up. and it can be like thirty seconds before I even get any results when I know exactly what I'm looking for. Tiny Start, it skips through that. It's super fast. I still need to like retrain myself to use it because I think by default, you leave spotlight in place so you can still hit command space, but Tiny Start takes Optional space If you'd like to use that instead Yeah, because it's not really in terms like UXYise, it's hard to override like the default command space shortcut for people when they install the app I'd rather have a different keyboard shkit and let people change it. command space if they want to And yeah, to man to bounce back on what you just said, I' like I'm trying to make a very small app that's very explicit that what you look what you can search for with it So you're saying, if you have apps that are stalled on an external drive or something In Tiny Start, can you can add that directory explicitly in the settings. You can add specific directories where Your apps are stored. And yeah, I'm trying to do that too It's also like it's just for me as well. It's just so I don't have to deevelop something that will look for the things on your computer. you just tellail the Hub where it is and And that's it. And to for a bit of context and history like This is when I started working on this earlier this year, like January soon after Christmas This is I was not intending on making something that was finished. was kind it started as a rabbit hole kind of Um because First, I was exploring things on GitHub. I was looking for some little things in Swift andt with Swift UI as well that people have made. and I all up on something that one guy made and it's a very small emoji picker that they made And just swift, swif UI, very very simple, straightforward, an emojy picker that just appears on screen and When I started looking at that because Even though I'm a beginner, like making a macup I've been I was a web developer before and So I have some experience there and I'm curious in general. So I started looking into this tiny project. And I started thinking this This is actually very simple. like I can actually tackle this. I could turnurn this into something. So at first I started forking this random emoy picker that I found on Gitub that was like had one star, so probably the developer itself, noody installed this thing. I tried to like tweak it and play with it and try to iterate on it And then I started from scratch, I was thinking, hey, like I understand this thing enough. I can probably make a tiny launch that works similarly to this emoy picker And by the way, I forgot to mention but Tenny Start has an emoji pico as well. And also like it also has a bunch of characters as well. Like I in my articles I need to inssert like the command symbol option symbol, control symbol like a bunch of different keyboard symbols. You've got all those in there as well U P partly thanks to me as a beta tester, was like, can you add all these in? Yeah, you suggested that I remember But you know it's also use f for me. When you're typing in French, for example, there there's some weird pctuation that we use in French that you This is an easy way to insert those caracs. Oh ye, that's Andy. I mean, I use it to insert special characters all the time because Again, the MacOS character symbol viewer is like something that hasn't been changed probably since like next step. nineteen eighty nine. it's weirdly slow. Sometimes I have to hit the command contontrol space shortcut several times in a row to get it to show up at all. but I mean, now when I hit that same exact keyboard shortcut, it just brings up tiny Start instead and I can type in I can type in the names for them, like the name of an emoji. You map a few different versions of it, like there's both the official unicode name, but you can also just type in smile and it'll bring up all of the different smiling emojis. That's pretty clever as well and you just you know type in and paste it's super fast. Again, like the scope of it is so much smaller than sppotlight or the other system features that it can be like super fast at whatever what you're trying to do. So I heartily recommend it. Is it all in Swift UY Who knew this was be to be that fast. L and it's a struggle because so Half of it is like it's a blessing because It's very easy to get and started with. But also like some things I wanted to some behaviorss that I wanted to get right with the settings window, for example This is very hard, somehow, very hard to get right with Sift UI U so I did have to make some app kits views, but anyway, mix in some stuff to make it work right So yeah I I have a few like hobby apps that I've I've not gotten to the stage where anybody else can use them yet. They're just for myself. likeike a few tools I've built And Swift UI is actually on the Mac has come a long way. It used to be you couldn't have any like settings style windows or like accessory style windows that aren't the main windows. So like any window that you made it would have the full screen button and like no, I don't want to make the settings window full screen. Nobody wants to do that. Why can't I disable that?. But so if you guys come a long way there. U Y still have like a bunch of planned features. I mean, it seems like the kind of app that you could get to a point and then just, you know, stop and let it sit So the idea it's also like a strategy for me because I don't want to tackle something I cannot do. and the reason the scope for the app is still very small is because of that. I'm specifically refusing feature requests left and right from people peopleople want to like currency conversions that may add because you could fetch something from online APIs or on sources for that But some things people are more complex and the one in this app the most requested one is the cryboard management feature that Spotlad has now, but also Raycast and all the others I'm not going to add that into Tiny star that feel have deccided, it's out of scope. I'm not adding this But otherwise launchers can do all of those advanced things. Exactly. The alternate is the they are real Swiss arrmy knives and this is not the point of Tinistat And so but what I'm planning to add is small small things like small refinements on an existing feature set. For example, one ten I've added now and m going to ship in a few Days, maybe I don't want to anyway. You must be this to use timeint It is an alias, the ability to add aliases to specific emojis as well as apps If you want for somebody emailed me to tell me they want to type LL to launch Safari. and I don't know. peopleeople have weird habits and I guess, Aliases can address that But also I've added shortcuts support. so It's very simple, by the way. on the backend, what the app does to run shortcuts It's just using the shortcuts, CLI, the command line to list all the shortcuts and just show you that list and put it in the indexing of the app and that's it. so you can search for your short ks. I need to start using that because Literally just before we started the podcast, I have a I have a shortcut that I run that you know, hides all the open apps except for the ones I need opens like logic and Chrome and all the other things that I t want to do manually every time. switches my Mac to Dark mode. and I have a spotlight shortcut for that. know, that's just like SP for a start podcast. And Apple explicitly added this in Taho, like, oh you know you can add these shortcuts for sppotlight and it'll just be two characters and you can quickly launch something. But for some reason, when I type in SP, that's the second result. The first result is the game sppace crab two that also starts with those letters. So it's SP Down arrow enter. So Hopefully tiny that sound like something else that tiny startart can fix for me So ye, I guess right now in Tiny Start you would need the shortcut to be named SP or something like that. Yeah, when I add the alias could I can just rename the shortcut to SP Start podcast Yeah, yeah, you could do that. There we go. But yeah, the idea behind adding shortcuts is I can answer easily to people requesting more advanced features. with just try setting up a shortcut for this. So like for example, people have been requesting a way to fix your grammar and spelling from Tiny Start because I suppose Rayast does this And they want Tiny St to do this. And I was like, maybe try and figure this out with shortcuts because Yeah, so it's an easy escape hatch that I can rely on to tell people, ye, you can probably make it work with a shortcut that you launch from Tiny dot as well as like switching to Dark mode and things like that. At Apple sccript support I mean that's another aw. Well, sure, but you can run Apple sccriript from shortcuts. so there. Well there you go. Yeah Let's talk about another one of your favorite topics, browsers Louis, we have a relevant question sentent from one of our listeners. Looks like this comes from a listener named Phelipe Rostin I think that's right Philipe Philip Parston. Philip Parostin that's probably. You want the French approach Oh this name Yeah, Philip Hostal Okay, that's great Maybe that's notine. I can't tell it's all jammed together there. Anyway, the question is, it's a good one. I am pretty new to Mac. in five book, twenty four gigabyte one terabyte. and I have a question. I am trying to use Safari, but I still use a lot of Google apps on the web Do I benefit also from the integration of Savari Or do Google Web apps use as much resources as the programs themselves There's the Long held belief that I mean, it was actually true that Google Chrome takes up more resources than Safari. Drains your battery faster And I think Google's been actually making a number of improvements to the performance of Chrome. It no longer drains the battery. I think it's like on par slightly better than Safari now. I don't know if they've improved the memory as much, but it's no longer the resource hog that it once was. However There are still other benefits to using Safari as well, you know it' syns across all of your other Apple devices in a way that Google Chrome can't really do as well And as Apple introduces new system features in MacOS, you know that Safari is going to take advantage of them immediately and first like from the first developer beta. if there are new features in Safari, you know it's got a pretty active team there. But I'll admit my understanding of Chrome is a bit limited as I I've always been a Safari boy. Andew Lewis, you only use Chrome, so you're not too familiar with Safari. Nilian, you've used every web browser. What that's your opinion So on comfort zone, we have a running running gag, I guess, where we have a sub show on the show called the brrowser podcast because we talk so much about browsers U Right now, I'm using Vivaldia. I've been using it for mononths now Um as my main browser and By the way, Matt, my cohost, Matt Birchlo. me, he like he actually went on like a huge rabbit hole to test this theory, that this myth Chromium browsers use more battery than Safari on MacOS on MacBooks and Yeah, he's adamant. it does not. It's quite quite equivalent to Safari. It's not myth busted by by Matt. U Yeah, I don't know, in terms of like Sfari Sfari, I really don't like it. The design has gotten way worse with Taho Um And in terms of performance as well, it's not that great. And I'm not sure who's to blame here, Google or Apple, but Google Google the apps like Google Docs, sheets YouTube Google's main things They run worse for me on all my devices in Safari than on a Chromeome browser This is like a constant that I'm noticing and people are also noticing I don't know who's to blame. I think like there's a thing where Safari in terms of JavaScript performance and all of that is not as well optimized as Promise, but yeah. I mean, honestly, if you spend a lot of time in Google apps, They're integrated better in Chrome because Google makes both the browser and the web apps. So they they tie together in a lot of ways that Safari can't because you can't like, you know Signing into Google account in Safari isn't is just like any other web browser whereas you know Google Chrome integrates with all of those web apps a little more deeply So I mean, if that's like a primary use case, As much as I love Safaria, it's a creom probably is a better choice in that case. I mean, what I do is I have a separate profile in Safari that I only use signed into Google accounts. and then I also have like that I have signed in Googleount as well that I sort of switch to just for a few things. but I don't want to be signed into Google and have them check me all over the internet in my regular saafari profile. So I keep that into a separate profile But then again, I also don't use a lot of Google services, like my job only requires Google Docs for, you know, show notes I use YouTube signed out. I subscribe to channels like via RSS feeeds in a different app So'm not I don't use a lot of Google Svices. W. but okay the thing about Safari performance, it's kind of surprising toar that You know, Chrome is so much more performant because I know that Apple like even designs the silicon itself around like JavaScript performance, which Safari takes full advantage of, but you know, I guess that's something Chrome can do as well. Like it's hard to describe because it's mostly feeling, I guess, but I don't know how measured it is from performance faster in general on the web I mean the other integration thing that used to be the case was know, Chrome won't have any of your saved passwords if you're all in an iCloud keychain, but you, Apple put out the Chrome extension. so I mean, that's better now as well. And they made it system wide where you can just right click on any text field and insert a saved password. They have the passwords app on the Mac, if you need another escape hatch, like that's not as big of a problem as it used to be either. You can even get your iCloud passwords on Windows sign into a, you know, Chrome extension there so that they still sync everywhere. So you know, of a lot of the things that used to be true about browsers are, you know, no longer I think we should mention and I will always mention as long as it's true that Apple's passwords extensions on from browsers and Firefox are terrible right now. Okay So if you're happy using Apple passwords, in my opinion with Safari and then all is well, but If you try to keep that going, Apple passwords, you get that going and use another browser with it, I think you will suffer. Like those extensions, they are not as refined as as something you would expect from Apple. Maybe it's not solved problem, I take that p I'm just like I like to mention it because I think like it And What's it like in other browsers like Vivaldi? The passwords extension? I think like it's just as bad. The one main issue that people have in general I think it's still an issue because Mat to us about it last week on the show and Chris as well, the It will constantly log out itself and constantly reas like that you two FA with your Apple account. So you know when there's a big popup that shows up on all your Apple devices at once with six numbers that you have to type in, the passwords extension will always do this. like I don't know, every hour or For no obvious reason. Because you've not walked away, you've just moved like you've just moved websites maybe and the extension will not be happy. We willll ask you this every time. It's extremely frustrating. Okay, so I guess our answer is it's complicated, and we don't really have it U, sorry Phiip I think that's a repp You can find Neelianne's writing at maxstories dot net. Her podcast is called Comfort Zone, and she is on Mastodon and Blue skky at NIL EAN E as well as her cat Zelda, veryery good follow there. Love seeing those pictures.. Give us a five star ring or review in Apple podcast, or share with someone you think would like to listen. Oh she also mentioned you can find a tiny start link to that in the episode description If you'd like to give that a try. I mean, it's a one purchase, get updates forever. you know, no subscription ifes you're not that tighty person, you know, Put your money where your mouth is. buuy an app. Text us on iMessage at cult ofbac podcast at iCloudot com to send in questions, comments, and feedback for the show. You can send an audio message or a short video for us to play too I will say, I know we haven't done that on the show yet. It's not because we're getting so many and we're throwing them all away. We just haven't received any yet. So You could be the first. Yeah, you can be the first. The bar is low. If you send in an audio message or video message, I mean, we'll probably play it. Give it a shot. You know showow us your cat Oh video feedback is such a nice idea. I'm going to steal this. Oh yeah. And you know, you can just set up a free Apple account and then you can like text your listeners We used to have this system like called Broadprout where people could text us, but then we couldn't text back and they didn't know that we couldn't text back. so they wouldd ask us questions and like, o, it's not the sort of question we can do on the show, but like I can't respond to you. I just set it up on a fare iPhone. it's a lot of fun. You know I text our listeners, they email us sometimes as well with longer stuff. It's great. So thank you all for listening, for watching. We will see you all next time. I mean, we won't all be here back next time, Lilon. Thank you for joining us temporarily. If you have any feedback for her, foollow a messageon, send it in that way. Okay. Have a great weekend. See ya Bye everybody Be