Touchy Grass

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, but this week we're joined by a third. As always, I'm joined by Matt and Nelian. How are you guys doing? Hello. We're doing well. I'm starting first now, for the first time. Dang it. I always go in an order because I'm very particular about how I do my introductions, but we're also joined by Mr. MacStories himself, our boss, Federico Vettici. Hello.

How are you going, Federico? Thank you for having me. Yes. Well, thank you for being with us. You and I are here in Cupertino, sitting inside Apple Park. Yes. I mean, as far as we know, this could be Johnny Cerugi's lab and they just put up some fake walls. I don't think it is, but it looks like a patio studio. Yeah. So Federico and I were here at WWDC. The keynote was yesterday. Neelyan are calling in from their respective locations and we're gonna do things a little different with this episode So instead of us, you know doing topics in a challenge We decided each one of us is gonna bring one thing that we were excited about

for this that was a part of this keynote and We're gonna go through it and Federico since you're the guest you're first in our show doc you so there's no challenge There's no challenge this week. We just that we knew we weren't gonna have time We do I thought I was gonna win something I mean, we can have you back on in the future and we could do a proper challenge I actually have a really good idea for a challenge related to the stuff that came out today that's right up your alley. Can I just pretend that I'm going to win something? Yeah, I mean, Numeon does it all the time. I'm not okay with that. I'm winning.

You do have a particular flavor of democracy that you apply to this podcast. Yeah, it's perfect. Okay, so I got to bring something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was something in the keynote that you're just really excited about? like one particular thing and we can discuss it and kind of go into some detail. So I want to talk about the Apple Intelligence actions in shortcuts. Okay. That's what I want to talk about. Yes. I am very excited about those. So I've been covering this idea for a while of using shortcuts and using automations, which is the kind of like deterministic automation, right?

So you have actions, they run from top to bottom and they run in a certain way. It's basically traditional programming, traditional computing. You have an input and you're expecting an output. But what happens if you mix in large language models and AI, right? Those are non-deterministic things. So you're ending up with this kind of hybrid automation setup where you're combining traditional automation with the sometimes unexpected output of AI. And Apple is now joining this space, right, themselves with these new actions that they have in shortcuts for, what's it called, use model?

Yeah, yeah, the use model, yeah. The use model actions. And so you can choose to use the local model on device model, which is a small 3 billion parameter model, or you can use the private cloud compute model. So you're going off to Apple's private cloud, and you can even use charge apt, which is baked in. You can use it for free. You can log in with your account. You can do all that. Now, I was playing with it this morning with the developer beta. And something really interesting that I wanted to bring to the show is, I mean, beyond the action.

And I showed you this when we were having coffee and pastries. For the record, I was not having coffee. I was drinking a Dr. Pepper. Yeah, he's doing the Dr. Pepper thing in the morning, guys. I just wanted to say that it's concerning how much Dr. Pepper this guy drinks. Yeah. We only get to see him for like an hour a week doing it, but he's constantly drinking it. I can only assume that's... No, he's doing it all the time. I can tell you in person, like, it's got the can and everything. Anyway. They wouldn't let me bring it in here. It's slightly concerning, but, I mean, he's alive still, so whatever.

I showed you this morning. It seems to me like those actions in shortcuts were, like, the model was trained to actually understand native shortcuts variables. So, here's what I mean. I put together a simple proof of concept where I'm using the find notes action to just give me all the notes in a folder in the Apple Notes app. Right. And so I have like two notes in that folder.

And I'm asking the model, hey, can you tell me which ones of these notes are about Chris, for example? And typically when you do this sort of thing with ChajPT or Claude or these other models, they just give you a text response. They say, oh, I see that you have two notes and the one called Chris is about Chris. Here, the model is actually giving you as the output, the actual native shortcuts variable, the shortcuts object for that note.

And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Like, how can you do that sort of thing? and then I looked into the action, I read the documentation and I played around with it some more and it's actually been trained on a whole bunch of shortcuts variables so it can give you proper variables for reminders for your calendar events it knows how to structure a response if you're using a loop, like repeat with each so I wanted to bring this to the show because I think it's interesting that it's not just okay, fine, you have a model that gives you a text response You have a model that gives you a response, but it also can give you structured native output in shortcuts.

That's cool. Lots of ideas, lots of possibilities. I can imagine, like, my first reaction was like, okay, that is sort of the key advantage that Apple has here. Because, like, once again, if you use Cloud, if you use ChagipD, if you use Gemini, you just get text, right? Yeah, it can't hook into shortcuts. No, no. Here, you're actually getting a native variable. So it's actually connected to whatever app you're using in shortcuts. So it's in a very indirect way, it's yet another instance of Apple

sort of creating this lock-in where you're like, well, if I want to use AI, do I want to use like some third-party web service or do I want to use something that has an action in shortcuts? Because and I can get like a much better output that is directly connected to the app that I use. That's so cool. When we were looking at it this morning, my brain was just kind of hurting through like ideas and stuff like that. And I even spoke to somebody yesterday that they gave me an example of how they were using this, is that they were using this action to look at their calendar and basically pull like appointments and meetings and stuff like that.

And then it would have it open the relevant note to that, to whatever your appointment is. like if you had a biology class and it was just biology on your calendar would pull up your biology note. But the cool thing is they were triggering it with the squeeze gesture on the Apple Pencil Pro. So like, like, so like they would sit down to take handwritten notes and they would just do it. And it would just look at their calendar and be like, okay, this is the thing that they're at. And it would just open the relevant note for them. Huh? Yeah. And like, technically you could do that with a big built out shortcut, but that would be a lot of actions that you would have to do.

And then on top of that, if you didn't have a note already, you would need an if action. If you don't have that note, then you would need to create a new note and stuff like that. But with this, they were doing it in very few actions and using that use model. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I'm bringing. I think that's pretty cool. I'm really curious. So Apple released all of their developer videos on Monday this week instead of pacing them out through the week. So I've been mainlining them this morning. and I watched the video about how developers can use Apple Intelligence in their apps.

And they talked quite a bit about how you can structure the responses that it gives you specifically so it'll work in your app. And I wonder if Shortcuts is doing something like that and if it's just something that all developers can do or if it is Apple privileging themselves a little bit in this case. It feels to me like what we're looking at here is a model that's been probably fine-tuned to understand how to return shortcuts variables in the output.

And if I were to sort of extrapolate from that and speculate a little bit more, that would be the first step that you would take if you wanted to let people build shortcuts with natural language down the road, which is a much, much bigger effort, right? to say, I want to build a shortcut that does this and this. That would actually require a model to understand how is a shortcut put together. But if you start by letting the model know what a variable looks like, that's your first step toward that goal,

maybe a year from now, two years from now. So yeah, it's interesting. I'm sure Chris will have lots of fun with shortcuts. We got to talk about like, this is outside of what we're bringing to the show, Like, this is a kind of a comeback moment for us. We're so back. Oh, yeah, we're back. Oh, my gosh. So for the listeners that didn't see the photo, Federico and I sat next to each other at the keynote, and we were giddy when the iPadOS section came up.

I mean, this whole keynote, I was a little biased. It was basically, it started with a Formula One video. There was a Mustang in it, and then iPadOS 26. I mean, come on, this keynote was targeted at me. But yeah, we're back. We're so back. Shortcuts, iPadOS. I'm so excited. All right. All right. Anything more on that? Or do we want to move on to Neelian's topic? I'm ready to move on. I want to know what this is. I'm looking at Neelian's topic in the notes. I have no idea what it is.

I don't know either. This happens all the time. Yeah, I was going to say, this happens every week. I never know what it is. I think she has her own code when it comes to the doc, just so we can't figure things out. Okay. It's pretty simple. What are we looking at? Okay. So what I wrote in the document, because we're talking about the document apparently, what I wrote in the document is Spotcast. Spotcast. Spotcast. Yes. Exclamation mark. Okay. What I'm bringing to the show is Spotlight, the new Spotlight, which is, it reminds me a lot of Raycast,

which I'm a big fan of, and we're all big fans of it on the show. And yeah, I'm really, really excited about the new Spotlight. It's interesting to see how it has brought together into the native experience some types of workflows that are usually reserved for the alternatives to Spotlight. And now we have it directly into macOS. That's really nice. especially clipboard history.

That seems pretty huge. It's huge. Yeah, because this is the first time Apple has ever done a clipboard manager or a clipboard history, right? I mean, I guess you have to doubt. Yeah, officially, not a third-party app, like officially a first-party feature. Yep. Yeah. And the fact that you can insert multiple parameters into a single query, that's pretty huge. Even if you look at the UI of that, how you can invoke a command and insert multiple arguments into a single command,

like sending a message or performing any type of action in an app, that UI looks a lot like Raycast when you just invoke a command and you can have multiple arguments inside. It looks also a lot like shortcut actions, the way it's laid out. Yeah. And it makes sense because my understanding is that it's powered by App Intense.

So that's pretty cool. I'm really excited about that. I wonder how customizable this all is. Maybe I should not expect much. For example, I'm wondering, can you assign keyboard shortcuts to these actions? I think you can. I think you can. The quick keys. The quick keys. So it's not a keyboard shortcut, but it's a toggle spotlight and type like in R for new reminder or something. Yeah. And I think it actually defaults to creating an acronym for your shortcut.

Yeah. Like, so by default, if you have a shortcut that is called, I don't know, Apple Frames, and it's going to default to AF as the acronym, but you can also change the acronym later if you want to. So, yeah, I do think that this is an excellent pick. And especially like the similarities, Niléane, with Raycast are fascinating because you literally have the same sort of UI and the same behavior. Like when you're triggering the command and also when you're tabbing through the parameters, right?

You're filling in the missing spots in the shortcut. And obviously, I mean, this is another case of like the Apple advantage, right? The Apple lock-in. Obviously, sort of like big picture, the person or the team who came up with App Intense years ago, like that has to be one of the most prolific APIs in recent Apple history. They're using it for like everything. Like you take a look at the new feature, there's App Intense somewhere.

It's the new NS user activity. It used to be NS user activity, now it's up in 10s. But like, I don't know, if I were Raycast, I would be slightly concerned at the moment. Because like, if you have an app, and now this is Mac only, I mean, hopefully we'll get this sort of stuff on the iPad. Yeah, yeah, you and I were both like, please come to the iPad, please come to the iPad. Because the Mac OS section was first, and then... They gotta leave us something to wish for. You always got to leave people wanting something more.

You know, I mean, we're used to this. Yeah, that's true. So true. Look, we can't go years without features and we survive. But like, if you're a third party developer and you're building an app on the Mac, would you prioritize App Intense or making a Raycast extension? And I think the answer is pretty clear what you're going to do. Yeah, no, absolutely. And especially with app intents being able to be like, it's clearly the future.

So it's not going to just be spotlight activities. App intents are going to be more. So while Raycast extensions are great, they are limited to us just being in that Raycast sandbox, if you will. But app intents are very clearly the future. And they will, you know, just because you're making an app intent for spotlight doesn't mean it's going to be limited to spotlight. Yeah, here's a hot take, and I mean it in the best possible way. Yes. Just, I mean it in the little sense, not in the sort of pejorative sense.

App Intense is the electron of native features. Ooh. Where by that, I mean, not that it's bad. By that, I mean that it's like the kind of thing where you build once and you ship everywhere. It's flexible. You build App Intense and suddenly you have shortcuts, spotlight, control center, widgets, Siri. Like you have all these things. And so it's like, I think it's funny that a lot of people in the Apple community are so like that set against Electron as a technology. It's like, no, you're supposed to build like custom tailored experiences for it.

And yet we all appreciate App Intense. Like the idea of like build something once and it takes on to multiple forms and shapes. It's a pretty good one. I mean, I think we discussed this on the last episode. We're a fan of the Electron apps here at Comfort Zone. This is a friendly space for, mostly friendly space for Electron apps. Mostly. As long as they're a good one. Yeah. I was going to say, the one thing I think that Raycast has over, still has going for it, is I think a lot of people on the Mac use web apps for a ton of things.

And so if you're doing, like, things in your project manager or Notion or whatever, like, these don't have app intents. and like you may not even have the app on your computer so in those cases raycast definitely still has a place and it's like talks with the web more closely than so or not safari uh spotlight would so i think they'll still exist but yeah this is every year they'll do like some sort of spotlight updates and i'm just like whatever i'll never use those but this one this one's intriguing i would be testing this out right now but uh chris chris banned me from using my beta os during this Yeah, he banned us.

So, I, I, I, look, I've been, I've been very nervous about this whole recording thing ever since they told us we were going to get to record in here. And I was like, no, you guys cannot use your device, Mac devices that are running the betas to record this. I need, I need some stability because I've been very nervous about like something going wrong. So yes, I did ban them. I'm not the boss of them, but I, I kind of, I kind of acted like the boss of them. Yeah. Chris, Chris, how many hit record? Should I hit record now?

Matt. For the viewers, Matt is off to my eye line right here. So I'm looking that way because I'm staring daggers. But no, literally, I really hope these spotlight improvements come to the iPad because this is killer. I've always wanted some kind of like flexible spotlight or more flexible Spotlight for the iPad. And, you know, technically third parties can have actions in Spotlight.

Like I know Drafts does this. Like Drafts is like my golden child for like demoing features and stuff like that because Greg always puts everything in there. And like you can do, you know, basic stuff, but like the ability to send an email right from Spotlight and fill in the sender, I'm sorry, the receiver, the subject and the message and just type that all right out from spotlight. I'm like, that's killer for just sending off a quick thing. And we talk all the time about having ADHD and stuff like that. And Neil and I both do. And like, whenever I have to switch context, that has a very strong chance of me breaking my focus. So tools like that

are really helpful. I use Raycast all the time to do these kinds of quick actions so that I am not breaking my focus. That was a good pick. All right. You guys ready for my pick? No. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm ready to talk about tvOS. Cool. Cool. No. iPad PR is about ready to tackle me. No. iPadOS. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. I'm literally making it up. I'm totally making that up. No. I can talk about whatever I want. I'm just, I'm totally kidding, by the way. I'm totally kidding. No. Let's talk about iPadOS and the new window management system.

There's no way we could get into everything about iPadOS, but the window management system, I have Federico here. We kind of have to talk about that, right? You and I weren't exactly the biggest fans of stage manager. I think that's fair to say. I think that's fair to say. I'm kind of curious, just your hot take. What do you think of the new window management system? You and I are both running the betas. We've played around with it. We've seen demos. They literally gave us our iPadOS briefing right before this on purpose.

And I'm kind of curious, just like your initial take on what you think about the window management system. I think what I keep thinking about is realizing that it seems to me that internally within Apple, they almost developed this acceptance for the fact that sometimes old ideas can still be good ideas and you don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time.

But there's a place for an old pre-existing idea to be available on modern hardware with optimizations for the iPad in this case. And it's okay to just keep an old feature without saying, oh, you know, we're doing this crazy, fancy new thing. It's just, it's windowing. And I mean, it was like the joke that Craig also did in the keynote, like, you know, who knew that people wanted classic window.

But like, and I think it's actually, here's the thing. I don't think it's too obvious to say, well, I mean, duh, it's obviously an old idea if it works, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Exactly. But no, because if you're a creative person, in any kind of creative field, I think it's easy to fall in the trap of thinking, I must think of something new every single time. Don't think about hardware or Apple as a company, like any kind of creative.

You think, oh, I must have the hot take, the thing that makes it completely different, completely unique. I got to think of something new. And I think in this case, we're looking at windowing. That lets you move windows, lets you resize windows, lets you move them off screen. It's an old feature, still a pretty good one. And then you have the modern layer on top of that with like tiling, which I'm absolutely loving the tiling. Not only can you move windows to the side and it'll like snap to 50% to the side, but there's keyboard shortcuts for that.

There's the quarter view. You can there's the red, yellow, green stoplight buttons that you can close, minimize and make a window full screen. But if you long press on that, you get tiling options in there as well. The menu bar, there is options to do the tiling and move windows and center windows. And it even tells you all the keyboard shortcuts. Like now there's a keyboard shortcut that is globe control C that will just center your window. Globe control left arrow right arrow remove your your windows to the left of the right side like there are

Modern touches on top of that and and yeah, I know Mac OS got tiling last year But like it's not just like okay fine. We'll give you Mac OS. This is very much still iPad OS It's very much native iPad, but it's not It's it's not emulating. It's not running an emulation layer of Mac OS or anything like that that it's it's iPad OS it's the way the iPad works and one of my favorite touches is when you tap an app it still goes full screen when you launch it out so if I'm sitting here in tablet mode I can still have my full screen app you know and do what I need to do but then I can just push it you know there's there's

a little corner handle and I can just push it to the side and I can get windowing and the fact that you know window it's not limited to four windows anymore it's based on how much RAM and power your iPad has so it's gonna be scaling so I'm gonna have to do a bunch of testing on review units and other iPads and stuff I have at home to kind of see what that scale is but yeah I I'm the the windowing alone is a big feature and makes the iPad feel more powerful and less less handcuffed like I don't feel handcuffed and and the

interesting thing is stage manager is still here there there is an option you can still turn on stage manager and it's another on top of this windowing mode, but they even went in and they took away the four app window limit. Windows scale, fluidly, like they do on the Mac in Stage Manager, you don't have the snapping grid and all that stuff, you just have basically the window management tools. I don't think I'll necessarily use that, I think I'll probably just stick to the traditional window mode, but I'll play around with it over the summer, I'm not gonna write it off, but yeah. Matt, have you guys played with iPadOS yet?

- Oh, I have, it was the first beta I installed. And, uh, yeah, it is, it's definitely liberating the first time. Well, cause you, after you do the update, they like say, do you want to, are you going to use your apps all in full screen or do you want to use this new thing? So I chose the new thing and yeah, there's just that little grabber now and it's super, it's so great to just like set it to a size and have it to respect that choice and not resize to like whatever the closest approximation is not to like drag a window slightly off screen and then have it kind of pull it back for you. Like it's great.

It's nice. The one thing I don't love about it, and I hope they do fix before launch, is if you're doing it with touch, it's pretty finicky because the keyboard shortcuts don't work. You can use the, like, you can press and hold on the traffic lights, like you said, but they also have, like, this gesture to, like, toss it to the left or right, and it will fill, and, like, figuring out the velocity it wants is tricky. I found myself, like, intuitively doing the thing they added to the Mac last year. I'll just drag the window to the side, and then it will do it in half screen or quarter screen, whatever.

So I hope they add that eventually, but it's certainly better than Stage Manager. I got up to 10 windows before I just got bored of testing on M4. I got 12, by the way. Okay. He likes to brag about this number this morning. He mentioned it to at least three people already. He keeps saying that he was using 12 windows. It's like an accomplishment. I was using 12 windows at once. Please congratulate Chris on the 12 windows. I love you iPad people. It's great. Yeah. So I think it's pretty rad. The mouse cursor is actually the big thing for me that resonated.

I really like the mouse. I mean, it's more like a Mac, I guess. It's pointy. It's a pointy cursor. It's precise. Especially with a mouse. When I'm using it at my computer, I'm using a physical mouse. The other one felt weird because it would pull. It would gravitate towards items. your like physical mouse isn't doing and so i like that it's just a normal mouse and it's still kind of like has the large touch targets and everything so you kind of get that same effect but yeah it's a it's a it's a very nice update i'm happy with it yeah and one thing i forgot to mention that that's really nice is if you close an app and then go to and reopen it the scaling and position they

they remember that and it it persists if you turn off your ipad if you reboot your ipad that's scaling and position remembers it stays the same. So you're not like if you close everything, you're not having to go back and rebuild everything. You just open those apps back up and everything goes back into that position. And it's kind of cool. So like you mentioned the snap to the side, you can also drag to the top and make something full screen. But then if you drag it back down, it goes back to that same size that it was. So that's pretty cool. And then I think,

didn't they mention something about like if you drag it to the bottom, it minimizes it? Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of cool. Neil, I'm going to take it you haven't had a chance to play with it because I think you sold your iPad, right? Yes. I was about to say Apple waited until I sold my last iPad. No. To bring this update. But it's okay. It's okay. So because I can't test it and I will not test it, I have questions for you. Ooh. Okay. And the first question is, does stage manager have the sacred checkbox that I've mentioned before on comfort zone?

And that is an option to open apps in the current group instead? Chris, I already know the answer. I asked this question. It does not. So the way Apple sees Stage Manager is a way to organize Windows. So you can, if you are going to, and I don't know about Mac OS. This is just iPad OS. But if you are going to add apps to the same stage, you still need to like drag and drop it or shift click. Or if you're doing it from Spotlight, you can do shift enter. So they don't have that checkbox.

But if you use the traditional windowing mode and you just tap an app, it opens up on top of your other windows. Okay, so no secret checkbox? Okay. Not for stage manager, no. The other question I have is, considering how many apps you can have on screen, how are you expecting Federico and Chris to use this? How are you expecting to overflow your screen with apps?

Yeah. Yes. Let's just say I'm really glad that the sale of my 13-inch iPad Pro fell through before WWDC, and it's still sitting at home. Am I going to have to make one of those YouTuber videos of, "I was wrong!" Yes. Yeah, I probably will have to. Please do. Yeah, I think I'm...I haven't seen a demo this morning, I think I'm really going to use the tiling a lot. Same. I wanted to have this kind of layout with like the three columns for a long time, and especially on a 13-inch iPad Pro that looks really good, like how you can have these kind

of wide columns, but all displayed at the same time. I think I'm going to do that a lot. I think I'm going to do external display integration a lot. And sort of like big pictures speculating about the future. I think this kind of feature opens up the possibility of like even bigger iPads. Oh, yeah. Foldable iPads at some point. Like, you know, being able to carry around something about this size, but then when you sit down, you actually fold it open and it's like, I don't know, 20 something inches.

That sounds suddenly very compelling when you can do that kind of multitasking. And something we should mention too is this new windowing system is not just for iPads that have ran stage manager. Any iPad that runs iPadOS 26, I think that's all the way back to the A16 iPads. Don't quote me on that, but that's kind of what I think. Even the iPad mini can do it. That's what I was getting to. Even the iPad mini can do this windowing thing. So and like I mentioned, it scales. How many windows you can have open scale depends on what iPad you have.

So if you have an M4 iPad Pro with 16 gigs of RAM, you're going to have all the windows. But yeah, and the thing that I forgot to ask is, does that is there a hard limit? And I don't think they have an idea on this kind of kind of just talking to what I've heard. They don't have a hard limit coded. It's kind of based on the RAM, and it may or may not fluctuate, but we'll see during the beta. I'm going to be doing a lot of testing on that. But, yeah, I'm just like, you know, a check-in because I refuse to say that other word, you know, the V word.

I'm feeling pretty good, Federico. I'm feeling pretty happy. Like, I know you and I have both done some Mac stuff lately, but it's that meme of the guy who's holding his girlfriend's hand, and the girlfriend is the Mac, and then we're just waiting, hey, the iPad, it's back. It's back, baby. Yeah, I am very happy, and I think there's obviously, like, still differences, you know, between working on the Mac, working on the iPad. I mean, obviously on the Mac, you still get greater flexibility in terms, like, you have a terminal, for example.

Menu bar apps. Menu bar apps. You have more RAM, so if you want to do, like, really intensive workflows. Like, there's still a place for, especially if you are a tinkerer, you know, with this kind of stuff, shell scripts, all that kind of stuff, you can still can only do that on a Mac. But I think there's now this much better balance between, you know, having something that can cost a lot of money, you know, purchasing this kind of iPad Pro. Oh, yeah. A 13-inch with lots of storage and nano-texture. Magic keyboard. It's a big purchase.

And now you have that balance of like, sure, you can use it as a tablet, but you can also finally use it as a proper laptop. And even beyond, we're obviously focusing on the multitasking. But even if you consider the big picture iPadOS 26 update, so the features for podcasters, the improvements in files, journal, there's a lot more in iPadOS 26, but obviously you and I, sort of right now we are fixated.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. - But there's a lot. - Yeah, there's, I was kind of putting together the structure of my iPadOS 26, that's gonna take some getting used to, walk through this morning, and I was just kind of listing out all the sections I wanna hit, and I was like, there is a lot here. 'Cause obviously, like you said, it gets all the iOS stuff too, but yeah, this is probably the, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think this is the biggest iPadOS update ever. Yeah, I mean, it's about, like, same sort of, like, defining moment as iOS 9 probably was with Split View and Slide Over.

Split View. Which are gone. Yes. So, rest in peace. All right, you do the real ones. Pour one out for the homies. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I'm sad about is Slide Over. There was something about Slide Over. It was really convenient for like music and like those just like messages and like something like ivory. Like it was really convenient for that. And I like that idea. But like you can kind of recreate it with the new windowing system. And the nice thing about the new windowing system where is something like Blue Sky that doesn't have an iPad app, but it has an iPhone app.

So you can use that iPhone app in that windowing mode. And it does scale sort of. It's not as nice. But, yeah, it's it's I kind of miss it. I'm kind of surprised that one, because you can turn off the windowing mode altogether and just use single apps full screen. I'm kind of surprised they didn't just leave split view for that. But at the same time, that would have been three multitasking systems on the iPad, and that's too much. So, yeah. Any other thoughts on iPadOS, or should we move on to Matt's topic?

I just want to say congrats on winning WWDC. Thank you. The competitive side of me, I appreciate you saying that. There you go. You did win something on Comfort Zone. Okay. We can wrap up the show here if we want to. Here's your trophy. It is a water bottle that Apple gave me. Thank you. I already drank out of it, so you may not want to have. I would like to thank my agent, my mom, and my family. Thank you. Thank you for this award. Thank you to the Academy.

Awesome. Episode without a challenge, and I still managed to lose. This is fantastic. oh that was fantastic all right matt i i didn't even need to look at the document to know what you wanted to talk about in fact i'm pretty sure i told federico what you would talk about before you even put it in the document so safari it's got to be a browser nope there's one other thing above that above web browsers for you yep yep uh i wanted to bring liquid glass which is as far

as I can tell the most controversial thing about this entire WWDC I have uh Neilian you said a message yesterday where you were like I think it was something to the effect of I like it on iOS I hate it on macOS and in another chat I'm in this morning someone said I think they nailed it on macOS and iOS sucks and like completely opposite opinions uh which is yeah a surprise but yeah I wanted to bring liquid glass as the new design language uh across all their platforms uh explicitly

inspired by vision os they said i know that was part of the rumors and uh i think there was some question over whether apple actually saw it as inspired by that but i think they said it like literally in the keynote like inspired by our work in vision os and i live for this sort of update this is so so fun um i was here for for ios 7 for developer beta 1 which was an absolute disaster in many ways uh and this is giving me very similar vibes sorry chris uh the triggered it is it is a big swing for them i think that's what i'm most excited about is uh i actually i wrote a blog

post this morning about this where i think it was called everyone says they want opinionated design until they get it uh i think this is more opinionated than we would expect from a company with a billion users across their devices around the whole world like they could just iterate iterate iterate and let like whatever happens happen but like this is a big change um it changes the style of like just the ui but it also changes fundamental ways you interact with it too so i am excited to be mad at it for the next few months as we push apple to fix it and make things better uh contrast is a

massive issue right now for example lots of text is illegible i've noticed control center on the ipad is is particularly it's not great it's rough on the iphone too like yeah like it's it's very strange there's some there's some weird stuff here but like i'm so happy after three years of arguing about large language models and from three years of that before arguing about crypto i'm so happy to have just a ui where we can it's so much simpler it feels closer to the old days of uh covering tech

so i'm excited about it i think that it is a very cool direction but they cannot ship this in september they have a lot of fixes to do but i'm really happy they went with something and they went with something totally different than what google did with their new material um i forgot what their new uh material expressive expressive yes yes so and i think they're both cool like they both look really really nice but they're very different this isn't just like them following the same trend so So, yeah, I'm excited. I don't know what you guys think about it, but I, yeah, I'm excited.

I think what's interesting is, I mean, looking at a redesign now on the products that we have versus trying to think, okay, but why do you want to do a redesign now? If you're the kind of company who obviously knows what's on the roadmap, right? And I keep coming back to this thought of, Why prioritize glass as a metaphor? You could have said, oh, we're calling the new design, I don't know, touchy paper.

Or we're calling it, I don't know, liquid, let the green fell back. You could have chosen any material. You could have chosen any metaphor. And I think they chose glass because if you were to think about the future, like in a potential future where, you know, these devices that we have, they lose their bezels. And so you're left with literally holding a piece of glass in your hands with no cutouts, with no bezels, or you're actually wearing the glasses, right? You're wearing glass in front of your eyes. And I think that

visual metaphor of like, okay, we're embracing the glass because the one thing that's for certain in the next, I don't know, five years, is that we will be using in the physical world the glass material. Like you will be holding a screen made of glass. You will be potentially wearing a display made of glass. So the glass is here to stay unless, you know, a new element is discovered on planet Earth in the next... Doesn't seem like it's going to happen. Probably not. So we're going to be using glass in our product. Yeah. Therefore, in terms of the visual language of the design, let's also embrace glass as a metaphor.

And I think it's blending the software and the hardware. Yes. Yes. And I think that's sort of the quintessential Apple, right? Actually blending what's left of the hardware, which at this point, I mean, it's already not much. Not much. But what if they actually were blending together also in the UI design? And I think there's something to that idea. Yeah. I obviously been extremely busy in the last 24 hours. And Federico and I have been both running around briefings and stuff.

So all I have had it on is the iPad. And what I've seen is exactly kind of like what Matt said. It needs some tweaking. Like this absolutely couldn't ship in September. But they will be tweaking over the beta period. And that's totally, you know, expected. Like I'm not stressing about, oh, my gosh, you know, is like when Safari got the big redesign a couple of years ago and it was like oof um but no i'm actually really excited about this i'm really excited about the new

design if you know ipad os wasn't what it was i would still be really excited because of this new design but i i feel like a kid at christmas where like i have too many toy new toys to play with i can't decide what to play with right now because i'm just so excited about all of this stuff um i love the idea of like pulling elements from vision os and pulling that that because the software side of vision pro like the os side vision os is beautifully designed it is incredibly well thought out and i just absolutely love that and the fact that it's coming to these other products

and everything is kind of getting this design language when we did our uh yearly picks episode that Matt came up with that game for, and I kind of went off and did the whole Apple OS thing. This is kind of what I was thinking along that line. Yes, it's not one unifying OS, but it's one OS that has the same design elements spread across the platforms. Yeah. What Matt said, like, it's nice to be arguing about...

I also resonate with that a lot. Like, it's been a tough couple of years. if you are not just an Apple user, but somebody who reports on Apple. And it's been tough, you know, to talk about politics and regulation and AI. And here we're just, we're so bad to just arguing with each other. Oh, that's bad design. No, it's good design. Like, I miss having those fights. I got so giddy when I opened up Mastodon this morning and I saw people were like, no, this is ugly. No, this is great. Yeah, those are like Mastodon users in their natural element.

Right, it's like a safari. You're seeing like the elephants like in the wild. It's great. Like I'm loving it. I'm loving that we are so back to this. And I am very much looking forward to the summer. As soon as I get home, I'm going to load up the betas on every device except my main production machine, Matt and Neilion, because we record a podcast and we need to make sure it's stable. But yeah, no, I'm so I'm so happy about all this. Neilion, do you have thoughts on the new OS? Yeah. Or design? I have.

like Matt said when I look at it on iOS and iPadOS it looks really exciting and like the visual effects, the refractions this looks amazing and I can't wait to play around with it as soon as I'm not banned by Chris to start using it but the more I look at it on macOS the more I'm worried I'm cautiously worried macOS is at a state

currently in Sequoia it's at a state where it has a mature UI, mature design and it's very structured the sidebars are cleanly separated from the content the toolbars as well this is why we have frames lines that divide things on screen this all seems to be gone in a way that's extremely radical. It needs a lot of refinement on WordPress, I think.

Yeah. Looking at just the finder window, so all the buttons are floating. I saw that. Everything's floating now. Everything's floating. Everything's floating. And I don't really understand why some things are floating. Why are they not just on the background, plainly on the background? And perhaps this will get some use too. And perhaps in usage, it feels better in the long run. Still, I'm worried.

And I'm thinking here, this is going to take years to come back to a place where it's mature and it feels great visually. And maybe we'll get there soon enough. I don't know. I'm excited to try it out. And I'm cautiously worried. I think it's also interesting that they gave it a name. Yeah. Like a proper brand. They didn't do that with iOS 7.

It was just flat. It was just, yeah. Minimal. Yeah, and obviously you can see a lot of the same aesthetic of the dynamic island, for example. how fluid and organic almost it is. Like, with all the animations, like, everything's floating, and, you know, it does feel like a proper material. And it's funny because, like, you don't think of glass. Like, glass in the physical world, you don't think of glass as something soft or liquid or...

I mean, the only instance where I can think of liquid glass is when you, as a kid, I went to... we were with my mom in Venice in Italy, and they have these artisanal glass makers. Oh, yeah. They blow into the glass when the glass is still like hot and molten, right? And they give it a shape. And that's the only instance where glass is actually liquid, because otherwise glass is not liquid. Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. And so I think it's interesting that you have this metaphor of like, it's liquid glass, almost like something that shouldn't exist in the physical world.

because if you try to touch liquid glass in the real world don't do that that's the last thing you ever touch interesting yeah it's funny you bring that up because Danielle my girlfriend she has actually some of those like vases and those liquid glass vases and I'm I have to go home and like look at those and just like really kind of like because it's it's so wild because like like there's a moment in the keynote where they talked about like bringing physical items into the os and they

had like that um it's like that glass magnifying stone whatever that is i i don't know what that's called but they had that and then now if you you know in ios or ipad os you take your finger and you hover over text you get one of those and it's really smooth um have you guys seen the new animation for like when a notification comes in and like your computer like ios or ipad os I don't know how it works on macOS but on iOS or iPadOS when a new notification comes in and your device is unlocked and you're looking at the screen it's really smooth and it kind of comes out and grows almost slightly, it's really nice

I love it it's very nice by the way, the WWDC logo was spot on with the glass we don't think about this after WWDC, it's funny because before the event we're all speculating Did you see the logo? Did you see like... Because we got nothing else to do. Because looking back at it, yeah, it was glass after all. Yeah, it was glass. Yeah. You know, sometimes those invites do have hints in them. Yeah. I think my favorite one, just a quick tangent, my favorite one was the iPhone 7 and you guessed the Boca.

Wasn't it you that guessed the Boca? The whole iPhone 7, dual lens, portrait mode there? How do you remember this and I don't? I have the weirdest memory. I remember the weirdest things, but then I can't remember my girlfriend's birthday. It's because of the Dr. Pepper, isn't it? It is, probably. It's eaten away my brain. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, anything else on those, or should we get to the end? The very last thing I wanted to mention is it is insane that we can do all this processing on device in real time at 120 frames per second.

I took a slow-mo video as I scrolled the photos app on the iPad and like watched the background go behind the bubbles and kind of like just refract in real, like it was, and it's, it's a full 120 FPS. Like it's, it's insane. Like I'm, I'm, I'm old enough to, Neil and you won't remember this, but like when Vista came out, there were all these, like, everyone was like, you got to turn off transparencies because it's going to slow it down. I was waiting for the Vista name drop. Okay. Yeah. But now it's like I'm on developer beta 1.

I'm on the latest iPhone, I guess. So that's one thing. But it runs great. It has no issue doing all this incredible calculations in real time just as you use your phone. And it's like nothing. So it's amazing what we can do. It's got to be GPU accelerated. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's probably a big reason why a lot of Intel Macs fell off the cycle. and next year is the last year for Intel Mac OS updates. They'll get like three years of security updates after that.

But next year, the next update will be the last one for Intel Macs, which is interesting they announced that ahead of time. Okay, really quick because we're running short on time, but I want to ask you guys, what do you think of the new Photos app and the fact that they added buttons or jumped back between the two? Because you and I are on the same mind. I loved iOS 18's Photos app. And I loved it in the beta when they had the carousel at the top, which they took out. And I was so bummed about that.

I guess enough people complained about it. And they're going back to... They were wrong. ...grid. I know. I know. Well, like Neilian, I'm a man of the people. And I agree with the popular sentiment that it was not a great upgrade. Yes, the people. I like that. Why do you do a podcast with people? I don't know. but we're the ones here and they're not so it's it's impossible to ignore that's true um i love the photos app please apple bring me next year um no i i like that all that stuff is still there it's just cordoned off into its own space for when you want it it's not just there every single time you open the app so that's it all right oh nimeon did you uh you have any thoughts on that yeah i just

want to say um my first computer was running vista so i'm not that old oh my gosh fellow dinosaur My first computer was running Windows 95. Anyways, thank you for making me feel old again. On every episode we do, I walk away feeling like an old man. Thank you. All right. Well, we've come to the end of the show. And as always, I have an end of the show question for you. But since we're not doing a challenge this episode, I have two end of the show questions for you. And I'm going to ask them both and we can just go around and you can jump on there.

First, I want to know what your favorite moment of the keynote was. Not necessarily favorite announcement, but favorite moment. And what devices are you running the beta on already? Federico, you want to go first? My favorite moment when Craig was driving the golf cart, thinking that it was like a high-speed thing. That was good. And I'm running the beta on my iPad Pro 13-inch. Nice. Neil, what about you? I'm not running the beta on anything yet. I will be waiting, and I have posted on Mastodon Slab Me in the Face if I do before beta 3.

So try to hold me to that. Otherwise, my favorite moment was the moment where Federico Vettici was called out. Not by name, but almost to all the podcasters out there. I'm pretty sure that was you. Matt, what about you? My favorite moment was when they showed the traffic lights on the iPad because they look exactly like a mock-up I made last year for how they would touch on the Mac.

I was very happy about that. and then I hope they'll let you stay a few minutes longer for betas. I have the beta installed on my personal phone, my development phone. Oh, boy. Matt, what are you doing? My iPad. Oh, no. Oh, my God. He's moving around. My Mac. Matt, stop. My Vision Pro. Oh, and the watch. Oh, my God. The Vision Pro? Yeah. You got it on the Vision Pro? Yeah, there's no downgrade. I know. I'm locked in. Can you tell me real quick if there's any new native Vision OS app that is no longer in compatibility mode?

i have installed the beta i have not used the product since then i didn't because this is this is him winning connected my connected victory hinges on this okay i'll try it afterwards i did create a new special persona it looks a lot better i will say they do look a lot better now anyway that's i think that's all my device literally everything has it nice uh so my favorite moment of the keynote was when the mustang gt pulled up in the keynote i literally yelled out mustang in the press section and people turned around and looked at me not great but it was awesome I loved it and then my favorite our devices I'm running the beta on just 11 inch iPad Pro right now but I'll install it on

everything when I get home that just about does it thank you all so much for listening thank you Federico for joining us pleasure thank you be sure everyone check out app stories you you have that you have a bunch of stuff on Mac story so everyone be sure to go check that out we'll have links in the description thank you all so much for listening have a great day bye