Hello and welcome to episode 21 of the Brew and Byte Show, sponsored by the London Mac User Group.
Tonight, let’s first say hello to Tina. How are you?
I’m well, thank you, but still slightly disappointed with WWDC.
I’m trying to get over it, but I’m finding it hard.
I don’t think you’re the only one out there at the moment thinking that too.
And we’ll also say hello to Martin. How are you?
Hello. Good evening, guys. Good evening, folks.
Yes, I’m very good. And pre-show, I pressed the button on buying my Mac Mini earlier on this evening.
So I’m now looking forward to that arriving on Tuesday.
So he’s officially in the M Club now.
Yes. Yes.
Hey, this leads nicely onto what was our first thoughts of WWDC.
Does Tina want to go first for the sounds of that?
This is my own fault. Okay, I’m going to own up to that straight away.
I read too many articles predicting what was coming and there was a lot of good stuff that I liked,
but because they didn’t announce a new MacBook Pro, I’m still in a bit of a salt because I wanted it.
I’ve read people who’d actually sold their MacBook Pros in the anticipation that this was going to
definitely come out and I’m not in that position but I so wanted it. I so wanted to see what was
coming, you know, and even if they’d said it’s coming out in November, I could have lived with
that because I’d have known what was coming. Is there going to be MagSafe back? Is there going to
be an HDMI input? An SD card input? All those questions unanswered. That said, there are some
things that were really clever. So if I think about it, what do I remember? The laptop next to
the iPad and the finger and a cross and coming back. So that looked exciting. But like I said,
I’m still in a salt even though it’s ridiculous. I think Apple is the only people that could
actually make the dragon drop the most exciting moment of an event. It’s hard because there’s some
years when you have to explain to people what’s special about WWDC. One of my friends is really
into Android, he’s really, you know, he’s a PC user, but he likes tech. So we would talk about
what’s happened. And I think a couple of years ago, he said, “What happened?” I said, “It’s hard to
describe what happened, but actually the closer integration is what’s exciting.” And I think
that’s one of the things that excited me about WDC this year was you could see things linking.
So they’re still distinct systems, but there’s more links between iPads and the laptop. And
And there are some things that like I’ve got an iPad, I’ve got an iPhone.
So when they brought all the whole widgets thing in and they’ve been able
to rearrange your home screen so it’s got more on it.
I naively thought, well, you could do it on an iPhone.
Well, you can do it on an iPad.
Well, at the time you couldn’t.
Well, now you can. So that would be nice.
So there are lots of little things that are really good.
But like I said, I’m still sulking over the laptop.
Oh, what was Martin’s thoughts?
Well, a little bit similar to Tina, I was kind of smirking
that the so-called experts and the so-called professional leakers who always get it right
were so wrong. And I mean, 100% wrong. And I get a kind of feeling that maybe Apple
were being a little bit naughty here and leaking some possible details about all this new hardware
we were going to get, knowing full well they had no intention of releasing any hardware.
WWDC is after all a developers conference and that’s where it lies. I know in the past they’ve
given maybe some clues or some brief announcements to new bits of kit. But primarily this is a
developer’s show. They had quite a bit to show on all their operating systems to cover. At the end
of the day, the show was nearly two hours long anyway, let alone chucking some hardware.
Apple has started to move into where they’ll do almost what, bimonthly shows, announcements to
bring all this stuff out. So don’t be surprised if we don’t have a special event in July
or I think maybe July, August is a bit late, and they’re going to announce a new hardware kit at that point.
Other than that, yes, I found the show interesting. There were some good features in there which will help
tidy up a few of the bad stuff and get rid of that. So I thought, yeah, for what it was meant to be, it was exactly what it is.
I agree with you on that because for me, I wasn’t really gearing up for excitement around hardware releases.
if there was a guess that I would have had for it, it would have probably been an update to
AirPods because it’s something quite minor. But of course, I got really excited when someone
announced shortcuts are coming to the Mac. Yes. Yeah, you’re a shortcut man, aren’t you?
So that’s going to be exciting. But the one other little feature that I quite liked was
the quick note. I don’t know if you had any thoughts on this from that it actually works
on the Mac as well as the iPad. It literally is like a little pop up notes window. And in being
able to play with the beaters recently. That’s probably the most useful thing that I’ve used.
I think if that ties up with Hey Apple Lady, then yes, that could be very useful because you can be
in any type of app doing anything and all of a sudden a thought will come to mind or a link or
something you want to follow up. If you can do just a quick note like that to put it away for later,
then yes, I think that will be very useful. You like yourself with the podcast, you know I do
quizzes and stuff like that and yeah, stuff like that will pop into your mind when you’re working
on a big spreadsheet and I suddenly think of a question about Henry the 8th. So that could be
very useful that I could make a quick note, put it far away and then come back to it later.
Brilliant. The one thing that was the huge announcement was obviously the new name for
Mac OS and we did do quite well on our last guesses. Well done. Yes. But is this the first
time that Apple have announced an OS and not all the features will work on its current lineup? Did
this happen once before? Did we see this with Intel and PowerPC? I don’t remember.
I think there have been cases where the hardware can’t cope with certain things,
so if you had an older machine it wouldn’t do all of it because it just didn’t have the
processing power. I think this is new because obviously this is almost like PowerPC to Intel,
isn’t it? So they’re moving to a new system. I just think it has happened before, but this time
it’s a bit more stock. I’m not going to keep going on about this but obviously I have a very old
MacBook Pro and it’s interesting because this is the first time it won’t be able to update the
latest operating system. Which actually, fair do’s, I think this is like a 2000, you know I’m using
it now, it’s a 2014, 2015. Actually that, you know, it’s at least six, seven years old so…
I can remember there was a certain software we used, an architectural design software,
which I was running successfully on a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro for years. And each progressive
upgrade, the software was taking advantage of the new power and you could do more and more,
especially with the 3D and the renders and stuff like that. And it got to a point in 2000 and,
what was it, 2018, the latest update, it then turned around and said, “You have to have a
multi-core chip to now run this application. So because the MacBook at that time was only a dual
core chip, it wouldn’t run it. I couldn’t upgrade to the next software, which I think at that time
was Catalina. So at that point, I had to then upgrade my MacBook Pro because now the operating
system was exceeding or surpassing what the apps and the hardware actually needed. So this, I think,
is the same. There’s new features in OS 15 which are not going to be available to non-M1 users.
I think specifically maps I was looking at that’s got an awful lot of new technology in it a lot of
new 3d rendering in it and you’ll only be able to although your machine may upgrade to Monterey
which is what it needs if it’s not an m1 chip you won’t get those enhanced features in maps
and I’m sure some of the other updates I was looking earlier on tonight Final Cut Pro they’ve
just released an upgrade to that in the last few last day there’s going to be issues there about
whether or not you can run Final Cut Pro on earlier versions and I would imagine the next
iteration of Final Cut Pro, may even move on to M1 chips only. I don’t think you can keep legacy
programs for too long. Technology is moving on in leaps and bounds these days. Because as it stands
at the moment, you could go out tomorrow and buy a 16-inch MacBook Pro and spec it out. But when it
comes to Monterey being released, there are so many things that are not going to be able to run.
Example being the portrait mode within FaceTime, so you can’t have the blurred background,
or the unlimited keyboard dictation. To be honest, I think that’s a really good feature
and I wish that had come to the Intel Macs. Text-to-speech live in other languages doesn’t
work and as you mentioned, Martin, the Maps is also not going to be as heavily detailed
in that regard. I just feel sorry for people that have got a Mac Pro. They’ve spent a lot of money
on this and these features are not going to be able to run.
But ultimately with all tech, there does come a time when things are obsolete. I use virtual
machines and I use VM Fusion and I keep looking to see what’s going to happen with M1 and
they’ve done a blog post and they effectively said, “We’ve been asked if we’re going to
do something that can run Windows 7, something that can run Sierra or Leopard.” And the answer
is no, because the amount of work it would require financially isn’t worth our while.
We’re going to concentrate on that. They’re going to concentrate on trying to run Windows
10 or 11, and that’s it. Ultimately, Apple aren’t a charity. They’re pretty good. Like
I said, this machine is seven years old and it’s still running reasonably well. It’s still
running most of the apps. It’s only going to become September, October time that it
it won’t be able to run the latest software.
Well, that’s amazing for a seven-year-old machine.
You know, if I had a PC, it wouldn’t be doing that well.
- I think you’ve also got to consider,
if we want this newfangled technology,
if we want these new apps to do stuff
that we’ve not seen, AI, for example,
virtual reality, all that sort of stuff,
you can’t be hamstrung by the technology
being too far back or saying,
“Right, we’ve got to support machines from 15 years ago,
or 10 years ago, or five years ago.”
There has to be a cutoff point.
And I think the whole idea of Apple bringing out the M1 chip is a clearly defined step in the road.
Okay.
We want you to upgrade now to new M1 machine.
And in that way, we can move on to newer technologies, newer items, new features that we can’t produce in the older chip.
And it was the same when we jumped from PC to Intel.
Everyone went out and if you wanted it, if you wanted the top features and the best performance, you had to invest in new kit.
I was going to say in regards to new bits of software or things that people can try,
there is one thing that people can test out at the moment, which is Safari. Did anybody
have any thoughts on the new versions of Safari? What did you first think of it? Does it look
better or does it look worse?
I did like the idea of having groups of tabs. So for instance, if I was planning a trip
trip somewhere. Sometimes you do lots of research and you might have four or five websites that
normally you wouldn’t use, but actually for this trip you want to keep going back to these
same four or five websites. So having a tab and going, “Okay, this is holiday tabs,”
and then you can click on it and then they’re all there so you can swap between them. It
just struck me as very convenient.
Because one thing that they announced this week was that people can now start to install
the new version of Safari, even if you don’t have the beta in that you can download the
Safari technology preview. So you can actually currently run it on your machine to have a
play with it. It is worth a go. I’ve been enjoying it more on iPad OS beta. And to be
honest, I do prefer it. And I’m not one of these people that has mountains of tabs. I’ve
not really used that side of it. But from a touchscreen point of view, it is much quicker
to go back and forth between websites or to actually physically get to the menu bar and
type it in, it seems more natural to do it rather than reach the top of the screen every
time. I like it a lot. I’m pleased that they did that. I didn’t see that coming either.
I think it’s going to be interesting though, isn’t it, with some of it, because there are
things like passwords. Is it the virtual relay? I think they’re going to be stepping on a
few toes because I sort of use the password manager. I did use one password. I’ve not
bit the bullet and I’ve not done a subscription for it because I don’t like subscriptions
hugely and actually I’m waiting to see if I need to now. That would be interesting.
I do like the fact that the whole privacy thing is at the base of everything they do.
On my phone I was asked by Facebook recently did I want them to track me so they could
me adverts that were personalized. I had great fun and going, “No.” Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not
going to see adverts. It just means I’m just going to see rubbish ones, as opposed to the ones that
they think I want to see, which were pretty rubbish anyway. But at least they’re not going to track
me and I’m not going to suddenly look at, say, tents, for instance, then spend the next 10 years
looking at adverts for tents. I think we’re at the beginning of something that could be quite interesting.
As a, what should we say, should I say a professional tab user or just a lazy so and so?
My screen is, I can’t even see the end of the tab bar. It goes off the end of the screen somewhere.
I get the little double arrow saying, you’ve got to push this to see even more. And then a huge,
great long list opens up. So Groups for me is almost perfect. It’s something I’ve written in
about because when you’re doing certain things, Craig, you’re doing a podcast, there’s certain
sites you want to be able to go to quickly. If I’m doing a costing for a job, there’s certain sites,
again, I need to be able to get to without scrolling down this huge long tab bar because
I don’t close them on the lazy side. So don’t close off all the tabs. So again, grouping will be
actually perfect for me because I can put them into specific groups and then just open them up.
And there’s the four or five tabs that I need instantly. So I think that’s a great feature.
I like it looks a nice and clean face to it. Again, they’re tidied up a bit. So that looks
interesting. What you’re saying about privacy, Tina, yeah, I fully agree with you. I don’t want
everyone to know everywhere I’m going and what I’m doing, what I’m looking at. So the fact that
this is a war that Apple have got into with the likes of Facebook and people like that,
because they’re affecting their money. And no one wants to lose money, certainly not Zuckerberg.
It annoys me, like you say, a year ago, I looked for a left-hand or sprangle washer,
and I constantly get adverts for left-handed or right-hand or sprangle washers. Well,
Once I’ve bought one, I don’t intend to buy another one, so I don’t need to see the 16 or so
different manufacturers of left-handed or sprangle wash constantly updating me with adverts.
What did we think of the iCloud Plus? So it will actually generate a temporary email address.
In using the beta, that works really well and it notifies you if you’ve not been on this website
or signed up for it before. So you could go to Deliveroo.com and a pop-up will come up suggesting
that you use a temporary email, that’s quite useful and you can literally pull the plug
on that as and when you want to. It’s handy as well. I went away at the weekend and the
scenario would be perfect in that sense in that when you go to a hotel and it wants you
to sign up for the Wi-Fi, you don’t want to give your personal details across. So that
literally is a throwaway email address for a weekend, which was perfect.
And does it connect across your devices? So say you had a temporary email that you used
for Deliveroo. If you did Deliveroo on a website on your Mac and then did Deliveroo on your phone, does it know?
So as long as you’re signed in with the same iCloud account on the device and it’s got the most up-to-date operating system on it,
it does remember it. So it is stored in the keychain. So it will literally generate you a temporary email address in that sense.
The other clever thing is that you can kind of like flick through the temporary email addresses.
You can’t necessarily create one of your own, so you can’t put mickeymouse@apple.com,
but it will give you another suggestion so you don’t have to continuously use this temporarily
throw away email address. So yeah, I used to use the alias ability in mail in my account. So under
my normal Apple ID, I’ve got my normal email address and you can create aliases. So I had one
there that I did use for sites that I wasn’t totally happy with giving out all my personal
details or want to be inundated with sales literature from them. So again, I used to
use that but even that could be a problem because that was then forwarded to my own
email address. So although they didn’t know what my personal email address was, I was still getting
all the junk mail and everything else for them. So you’d have to go through that process. So a
temporary email address that would be used and then forgotten and you wouldn’t have to come back to it
at all would be, I think, useful for a lot of people. I think the other clever thing that I
discovered with relay is if you’re using it just for browsing the internet and you’ve
connected to a public Wi-Fi and it disconnects for some reason or another, a pop-up comes
up on the screen to say you’re currently out of relay and it tries to reload. So it is
like a VPN kind of, “Oh, I’ve lost my connection. Do you want to wait?” And it does try to re-automatically
connect. Being in beta, I don’t think it’s foolproof just yet.
And that’s going to have a big effect on a lot of VPN companies, being able to do that
automatically inside the system without having a third party
requirement for a VPN connection. That could be useful.
You say that my one frustration is that I’ve wished for years is
in shortcuts, why on earth is there not an option to turn on
and off the VPN, there is for Wi Fi there is for Bluetooth, but
that’s just never been a function that’s been on the
wishlist for many, many years, I think I RS 13, the first time we
started to see the turn on and off button. Still not there.
Maybe relay is the way forward that they’re trying to push.
It’s interesting though, I sometimes think with keychain
that it would be nice for you to, you can certainly, I know you can lock it so
that you can’t look at the passwords, but it would be quite
nice if you could lock keychain and say I don’t want you to
automatically fill in things for me until I unlock it. Because
for instance, you might have a machine that you use most of the
time but then you lend it to, you know, I haven’t got children, but if you lend it to your child,
well certain sites if that was the case you could sign in and buy things.
I would prefer to have a guest account set up on my laptop if I was doing that. I wouldn’t want to
give them my account and open up my home ID with that. It’s like a common laptop used around an
office. Most of them will have individual identities on them so you don’t have that problem but
yeah I wouldn’t be keen on giving out keychain to anyone other than myself so yeah maybe
just think about setting up a guest account. Does any of us use Pixelmator? I’ve got it on my system
but I’ve never used it. I downloaded it when it very first came out but I rarely use it but they
are one of the first companies to announce that they are going to be introducing shortcuts that
are readily available with their operating system or their app so I’m sure there’s lots more to come
with that. My wish list is still our wonderful favourite that we mentioned last time. Why does
audio hijack not have any automation functionality. Martin, did you say you’d had a play with the
Final Cut updates? I downloaded the new update to Final Cut Pro and Motion. To me personally,
there’s not a lot in the new features that’s going to really enhance it other than this new
column mode where you can keep all your media sorted out to column rows and then save that
column layout as a layout that you can then move from machine to machine or over on place to place.
that would be useful because as I said I like to know certain aspects of all the media I have that
I’m about to use. So that might be useful to me. I think it’s more that they’ve brought it into
line so that it works on the M1 chips natively. Don’t need to go through the Rosetta which didn’t
seem to be a problem from what I’ve heard. I haven’t used it myself because I haven’t had an
M1 chip machine yet but I will have. So yeah the changes are I think more in the mechanics of
Final Cut Pro working this way forward. A couple of new minor features but nothing personally that I
would be using. No I noticed iMovie do its download to say there was an update and it was huge it was
like two and a half gig. Shall we look at the Apple Watch? Now this is an intriguing one.
This is kind of the most difficult thing as a beta user to actually test because you can’t choose
to run the beta without having the beta on your phone and if you use the watch primarily as your
main device and not just for testing it means you’ve got to sacrifice your main machine or
your main phone to have an update so I’ve kind of avoided this one. I do have a spare Apple watch
to hand somewhere but I’ve not yet or been intrigued to do it but let’s look at some of
of the past history of when the Apple Watch was released.
So the very first Apple Watch was released in April 2015,
which that seems to have flown by personally, I think.
And it quickly became the world’s first fastest selling
watch with 2 and 1/2 million sold in the first quarter
of 2015.
And now it’s believed that more than 100 million people now
use an Apple Watch as of up to the end of last year.
The question is, how do we use our Apple Watches?
Would you say you use it in the same way that you do with your phone or as much of or less of?
I use the phone extensively.
It’s a great device.
I’ve got a Series 3 bought for me by my wife for Christmas present.
Smashing piece of kit.
It tells the time, which is a good start, but it does so much more.
You know, the phone goes off, the phone’s buried in my pocket somewhere or a jacket
or it’s on the desk somewhere else.
Immediately I can see who’s calling me.
What if do I need to take it?
I can answer the call on the phone saying, look, hang on a second, let me go and get
my phone or whatever. I use the fitness tracker to keep an eye on what I’m trying to do. I’ve
been trying to get a little bit fitter with my medical history. There’s also the function
that you get. You can see notes that come in. You can see announcements. I get an announcement
about the slack room that I’m in. I get people calling me that. I can see an email that comes
in or just glancing down at the watch. So I find it incredibly useful. It adds functions
to the that you may not may not have just having a phone alone. The thing I’d like to do now is
not wishing to upset my wife but I think I will be upgrading because of the health tracking features
that are now available. I’ve become very much more conscious of that kind of need over the last
last year or so. So yeah I’d be keen to look at the heart monitoring systems and items like that
which is not quite there on this current version of the watch.
I find it really convenient, but there’s also bits that are a little bit irritating.
So you do need to be careful.
So for instance, I have WhatsApp and I’m notorious for a WhatsApp message comes up on my phone.
I inadvertently touch it and I send a reply.
I mean, I suppose I could unlink WhatsApp.
I could do that, but I’m too lazy.
So every now and then people in one of my chats will go, “Question mark, what have you just done?”
I did this a couple of days ago in my old workplace when I said, “How’s it going?”
Out of nowhere, which confused people, no end.
And then they laughed at me when I said, “Oh yeah, just touch me, watch,” when I shouldn’t
have done.
The walking, because of my knee, I’ve done a lot of walking.
It gives you instant feedback on how fast you’re walking.
You do see messages, you do see emails.
When I first got it, I was childishly excited about talking into my phone like I was on
Star Trek.
I discovered it wasn’t actually that convenient.
You know, holding your phone to your mouth
and speaking into it isn’t a natural thing to do,
unless you’re gonna say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” obviously.
I upgraded, I think I had a three,
and I think I’m now on a five,
and the reason I liked it is the always-on,
so that was a big deal for me, the always-on.
Because I’m clumsy, I wear my watch on my left-hand side,
and it’s on the inside of my wrist,
and I could never work out a way to flip my wrist up
so it came on.
now it’s always on. This is the one place that I’d wish that Apple was working on thinness because
it is still, it’s not bad, but it’s still quite a chunky bit of kit on your wrist as a dress watch
certainly. See now for me I use, well I can’t go without a day without wearing the watch,
so I am somebody that likes closing activity rings a lot. I use it more as a reminder type device,
like you said with the WhatsApp, so I’ll have OmniFocus reminders set that trigger it, or
I use it a lot more in terms of being a remote so I can fire things off such as using it with a camera
so use it as the trigger. I’ll use it to send automated messages off so in terms of like
pre-written emails or reading probably reading replies more than using it as an input device.
So if someone sends a direct message on Twitter I’ll probably read it on the phone more than I
would on the watch. I very much like the watch straps, I’m the other way. So I probably got
a different color watch strap for every day of the month over the numerous years that I’ve owned an
Apple watch. Yes, that’s very sad, Craig. I admire your ability to keep the profit levels at Apple
up. But yeah, that’s maybe one step beyond. The only thing that I was looking at maybe upgrading
the watch, apparently you can’t just buy the watch body on its own. So if I want to buy the new watch
Series 7 when it comes out. I have to buy it with a strap. So, okay, so I’ll buy the cheapest one
possible and then say like Tina, I’ve got a Melanie’s black strap, I’ll have to sock it over.
But I would like to see them just, you know, you can buy the body only for those of us who’ve got
30 odd straps in our collection. I’m glad that you can actually now choose, you’ve got more freedom
over which strap you want. Before, in the early days, it had to come with a particular strap.
You were limited to like rubber white strap. So if you’d bought an upgraded one, I think between
series two and three, you ended up with two or three of the same strap, which was a bit
of a nuisance. I think they learnt from that. Yeah, because they’ve got the watch. I love
the phrase. They’ve got the watch studio. So when you’re on the website, you go, “Oh,
what watch do you want?” And then you slide it across on the different straps. So that
made me laugh a lot. The idea was the studio. But you’re right. When I bought my first one,
you had to buy a certain one to unlock certain straps. So you had a bit of a choice. But
if you went for the base model, well, it was like, well, if you go for the base model,
can’t have the Milanese look. Whereas now it appears that they’ve got this really
clever packaging thing where you pick the watch and you pick the strap and
they come in separate boxes but then they have an outer box that puts them
together so that when they come out in the store to give it you, it’s
all in one box. I think there is more choice. It was a big deal though for me,
you’re always on. What’s interesting is sometimes it’s really difficult to switch
Siri off. So if you’ve got a watch or a phone and you’re in a job where you’re talking and posing
rhetorical questions, because I was a teacher, and so you’d say, “So what do you think about this?”
and I’d be in front of a class and suddenly Siri would go, “Hang on, I found a website for that.”
And you think, “Oh Siri, go away!” and other such things were occasionally said but only in the
hearing of six woman. So there are one or two little operating difficulties that are interesting.
I don’t wear my watch at night. I charge this overnight. Ever since when I’m on my first watch
at quarter to three, Minnie Mouse fans, “It’s quarter to three. Good morning.” And for some
reason, my husband didn’t think it was a good time for Minnie Mouse to be telling people the time.
So we’ve agreed now that I don’t wear my watch at night just to stop that.
I’m the complete opposite of that Tina, I wear the watch at night. If you put your phone into
quiet mode, the watch won’t go off, it will keep quiet. But then I get up first thing in the morning,
I then throw the watch on the stand, charge it down while I have a shower and everything else,
and then come back. And normally that short period, half an hour, three quarters of an hour of
charge is enough to keep the watch going for another 24 hours. It’s quite impressive. So
It also, because of the, if it’s on my wrist, the sleep pattern recognition is much better as well.
So it’s telling me that I’m getting four hours sleep out of a good five hours in bed. So yeah,
it’s, I find that feature useful. One of my friends that I used to work with, he does the same
and he was quite ill and actually his watch gave the doctor some clues to do with, you know,
the biometric data that he downloaded and it actually contributed towards his diagnosis.
Yeah, I had a friend in Birmingham here, he’s almost the exact same. The watch flagged up
an unusual heart rhythm. We suggest you see your doctor and lo and behold it turned out in the end
the guy needed a pacemaker fitted, his heart was beating irregular. So the watch was the first
indication of that illness he was suffering from. So yeah.
With watches, there’s going to be more and more things that they’re going to be able to,
you know, the idea that they’ll be able to save your blood sugar level.
They’re talking about, you know, it’s going to be interesting.
Got full technology on it, hasn’t it? As long as that can distinguish between a fall from a
heart attack or a fall from six points of Guinness, I’d be quite happy with that. I could,
you know, safely use it, not worry.
Is there any particular apps that you use the most or that you just only use on the watch?
I don’t think the app store on the watch has been anywhere near successful as the app stores on all
the other things. I’m getting of the age when there’s only so much detail you can see on the
watch screen. So there are some things like I use the fitness thing and just going for a walk because
it gives you an idea of how fast you’re walking. But there are other things where I don’t quite
trust it. I still use an Oyster card in London and I know I could use my watch but I have visions of
getting to my tube station to leave and going, “Oh, my watch has run out. What am I going to do?”
I still have some trust issues and it hasn’t died for ages, probably for a year. The battery life is
amazing but I had one and it did not always last the evening or last the day. So because of that,
I’m cautious. So I use the fitness thing and the music.
Which one have you got Tina? Which series?
I’ve got the five now and I had the two or the three.
Well that’s strange. I’ve got a three and this now will last a day and a half at least.
Topping it up each morning for about three watts per hour.
Keeps it running all the way through to the following day.
So that’s not been an issue for me.
I sometimes find that if you are walking around and you’re not with your phone,
the battery goes down quicker. And I’ve got no proof of that.
that’s just anecdotal, but it’s like it’s looking for the phone and because it isn’t nearby it uses
more energy. Yours is always on as well. Yeah, but this to be fair, my series five is being judged
harshly because it does last, you know, it’ll last all day and it’ll generally last longer, but if
it’s not near my phone and sometimes it gets a bit funny when I’m out, it doesn’t always connect over
network data, sometimes it gets a bit funny, it prefers wi-fi. Well like you, I use the fitness
tracker an awful lot when I’m doing programs. Even if I know I’m walking around on site,
it’s useful to know how far you’ve actually covered in a day to make sure your clients
are well informed as to what you’re doing for them. I use the timer app an awful lot
on the phone to just do a quick five minute time or something like that, not to worry
about. And as you say, Tina, being able to change or move on track on or something like
that. Like Craig, I’ve used it for the camera sometimes, being able to set a camera up in
an inaccessible position to get the best shot and then being able to press the button and
take the picture on the phone. Again, that sort of thing, you don’t really think about
them until you’re actually doing and using it. And like you, you get a quick message
coming in, there’s certain inbuilt replies you can just hit and say, “I’ll call you later,
thanks for that,” or whatever. So it all just helps with your day-to-day concentration.
And I’m sitting with a Series 4 and to be honest, I’ve not seen the need to upgrade
yet, but it’s getting to the point where maybe the battery isn’t as good as it was when it
first came out of the box.
The other thing as well is I think you have to consider when you slightly get slightly
more mature like myself, those health issues start to become you.
You do think about them to make sure that your heart is working okay.
If they could put a diabetes, if they could put a blood glucose level detector on it,
that would be absolutely mind blowing for me.
That would be a straight down the shop by the day it came out type of sort of decision.
Are there any third party things that you use a lot with your watch?
So that could vary from being a dock that charges your AirPods, your phone and your
watch or along the lines of an app that’s built for a third party device.
So I know Pennet on the exercise bike, they have an app that’s designed for that.
What I have got is I’ve got a power bank that I use for my phone when I go away.
I spent ages looking for a power bank that would have a place for the cable for my phone,
but also it’s got an Apple Watch charger on it. I would really miss my phone.
Well, I can help with that, Tina. You can buy from, I think it’s Belkin, a three-in-one
charger cable, which has three different ends, a USB, a lightning port, and a magnetic charger
for your phone, all running off of one lead. So you plug that into a USB port or into an
adapter and it will power all three, charge all three at once. So that’s in the bottom
of my travel bag every week I’m afraid.
I think the most used accessory of all things to be honest that I’ve bought is the actual
Apple official watch charger, the USB-C connector one that’s different to the one that comes
in the box. That has made such a difference. It literally takes about 40 minutes to go
from flat to fully charged and that gives me so much more freedom. I can literally plug
it into an external battery or I can put it in the MacBook Pro as most things are now
going USB-C however much people may or may not like the confusion about it. It does make
a massive difference and that was probably the most 25, 30 quid I think they are at the
most but the only the only criticism I have of it is why on earth is the cable the length
of your iPhone and that’s it it’s not even a meter you cannot get a long charging cable
that’s USB-C. The one thing I’d like to see added in the new, I don’t know whether it’s in
OSA 8 or not, is that the ‘find my’ would be extended to the watch. So like ‘find my’
air tag and stuff like that. At the moment you’ve only got ‘find my people’ on it, but that might be
useful to be able to see where you’ve left your keys when you’re hunting around after half an
hour of fruitless search where have my keys gone. So that would be useful. Again, it’s on the phone,
I know, but if the phone’s not with you, having the watch to be able to point you in the right
direction would be would be helpful. One nice thing I don’t know if it actually
works with the watch I’ve not tested this yet but is the proximity update
that they bought to the AirPods so if you’ve got a set of AirPods and you
leave them behind you can actually set a distance of how far you walk away and
then your phone will remind you that they’ve been left behind that’s a new
feature that they’ve added in iOS 15 but I don’t know if it works with the watch
I’ve not seen that that’s a really good question I have to play with that to find
The other thing that’s slightly bizarre about the watch is when I’m in the car and I’ve got Apple CarPlay on and you give me directions, the watch will still buzz once for left, twice for right.
It’s a bit strange when you’re driving along and suddenly your wrist starts tapping and you say turn left, turn left, turn left.
Is there anything from WWDC’s watch OS 8 update that you were really intrigued by or that you think, oh yes, I’m definitely going to be using that?
Maybe the photo portrait mode thing might be interesting.
I can change what I’m looking at instead of just a watch face all the time.
That might be worth playing around.
But I think often a lot of these things is you play around with them.
You have the Mickey Mouse front, you have all the bit and pieces.
And then you end up going back to making the watch look like something
you’d bought from Rolex or something like that.
That would be funny actually if you could start emulating old-fashioned watches.
So the most popular watch is a Casio.
You could have a Casio watch face.
What the old red LED remember the old red diode? Yeah that’s cool.
Dear, show your age there I’m afraid. That was actually one of the most requested things that’s
yet to happen wasn’t it? Customizable watch faces or third party watch faces so they’re not
necessarily just from Apple so other third party developers could make their own. I don’t see them
ever adding that because I don’t know if any of you remember, do you remember when they got into
hot water with one of their watch faces that resembled a Swiss.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, more than hot water, they had to pay money.
Yeah, they lost a quarter battle over it, I think, didn’t they?
I think it was the Austrian station clock case that they used with the red hand and the large
dot at the end of it. Yeah, they had to very quickly backtrack on that and pay quite a lot
of money. The other thing I like about the watch is you mentioned it, Tina, about logging in and
out of tube stations and been able to use it for Apple pay. That is useful. The only
problem is it doesn’t help if you wear your watch on your left hand because nearly all
the readers at London Underground stations are on the right. So you’re trying to reach
across.
You don’t think about it because if someone said to me, “How much do you use your watch?”
I’d probably go, “Oh, not that much.” Every time I open my laptop, I get this funny little
mark, you feel some sort of tactic thing on your wrist, you go, “Oh, I don’t log in.” Not that it’s
like a major trauma, logging in, but the watch just unlocks it. Yeah, you don’t think about it.
I come in, turn the laptop on, move the mouse, and all of a sudden the whole thing is open.
Everything’s there, and the watch is logged in. It’s interesting because every now and then,
I think more with my new one because of the way I’ve set it up, it asks me for my login,
which I know it’s not a problem but I can feel myself huffing and puffing and oh my god I’ve
got to put my login in. Trauma. And I think it’s a security thing because they want you to do it
every now and then just to make sure it’s still you but it reminds you that you don’t normally do it.
I’m kind of in a bit of a quandary. The one I wanted to talk about was a thing called Sidecar.
I don’t know whether people are aware of this but it’s a facility to be able to link your iPad
screen to a MacBook Pro or a MacBook or even your iMac, giving you two screens for the
price of one. And it’s a simple little application inside that you turn on and there you’re able
to then use one keyboard, one mouse for both sides of screens. Now, it means also that
with a pencil, you can always use your iPad or your phone as a writing tablet. If you’re
trying to draw something on your main big screen, your iMac, it can then act similar
to like a Wacom tablet. And I find that very useful when I’m doing a lot of my design work
and drawing work where I’m trying to knock up a quick sketch, being able to rough it
out in a pencil first and then follow up is useful. So that’s something I said, I’m not
sure how many people use it, but have a look at Sidecar and you’ll be surprised how easy
it is to work with a second screen using your iPad.
Well, I use Notes. So one of the things I like about Notes is if I’m going somewhere,
I plan out my route and then I turn it into a PDF and then I drop it into notes so I’ve
got it with me on my phone.
That’s about, I mean that’s not a high level thing but I find that quite convenient on
web pages and stuff.
Okay, this is the part of the show where we discuss our tips and tricks that we may have
discovered this week or that have been sent in to us in our Did You Know section.
All I was going to suggest was this brought me back to something that Alistair was saying
about the other week where he gets frustrated where it’s an old website and it doesn’t
work properly on the iPhone or the iPad. It doesn’t display properly. So my suggestion
was going into Safari and that you can actually hold down the top right hand corner and request
a desktop site so it will appear as if it’s on a desktop machine. But the other clever
bit about that is if you actually go into the Safari settings and scroll right to the
bottom there is actually a function that keeps a record of all these. So every time you press that
request a desktop site you can keep it that way or you can manually switch it on and off. And I know
Martin’s not going to like this because he mentioned lots of tabs but there is an option now in Safari
to close tabs automatically after one week, two weeks or a month. You can actually set when you
want them to disappear, which to be honest for me would probably be a good idea. Did we want to
touch on some features of iOS 15? Because I’ve had a play with some, some work, some don’t.
To be honest, I wouldn’t install the Mac OS beta on anything at the moment. Safari’s got lots of
criticism as well. I don’t know if you’ve seen that with the tabs, that when you open up a tab
at the top and say you’ve got 10 others, they don’t stay in order. They shuffle around on their
own, which is a bit of a frustration for people. I think I’ve got OCD. So I don’t even like it when
my husband uses my laptop and closes a tab. I have certain tabs that are open all the time
and they have to be in a certain order. So the idea that they would move around when I wasn’t
looking would be deeply distressing. This is one of the reasons I don’t do booters though,
because I’ve got things working in the way that I like and I’m open to change, but I like to take
the time over it. I admire anyone that’s brave enough to load the operating system. I suppose if
I had a really old machine that could do it, possibly, but if I’m using it all the time,
I don’t think I’d want the risk that it doesn’t work. That would be distressing.
Well, I think what would be interesting is once I get my new machine, that will become my main
machine. So the MacBook Pro I have here, that very well could be a beta tester. I wouldn’t mind
trying that because I’ve never had another piece of kit because I keep them too long.
That’s really up to date that you could do. This is only a, this is a 2018 MacBook Pro. So it’s
pretty, pretty up to date. So I could start running Monterey and done some testing on this to see how
it works. But yeah, no, we always say the word of war in turn and don’t put this kind of beta on your
primary machine because it will let you down. Unfortunately, it will let you down until you’re
almost at the gold disc level. Yeah, you’re taking a big risk. But that’s what it’s a beta, isn’t it?
If you buy a beware or beta test a beware. I’ll be honest, the text recognition on the phone is
unbelievable. When you first do it, it’s shocking at how it picks up exact text. That has obviously
been something they’ve been working on for a very, very long time, but you can literally go outside,
take a picture of the road sign and it will convert it into text. Or I don’t know if you saw there
was this joke thing going around that someone held it up to the blackboard on the beginning of The
Simpsons and it literally took all of the text off of the screen from the TV on the blackboard
and put it into a Word document. I’ve not had it foul yet.
This is why as a teacher lines would have to be handwritten. I think that text thing is going to
to be one of those things that once it’s there and you start using it, you won’t think about
it, but you’ll be using it all the time.
It’s only, it’s just kind of, I use, I don’t know, I use the scan technology in the camera
app all the time to scan documents, anything I need to copy from clients or stuff like
that. I need to take a copy of a document. Scan technology is so good that I can take
that document and produce the PDF and use it. So being able to turn that into a document
that you could actually edit or highlight or change would be even better.
So, yeah, I think that’s an important bit.
And are they going to tie?
They’re also going to tie that with a translator, aren’t they?
You’ll be able to take a picture of a sign in French
and it will convert it to English.
I’ve been testing it with Italian and it’s about 85, 90 percent there.
It’s kind of got in line with Google Translate.
So they’ve come a long way considering how bad it was previously.
OK. Yeah.
Well, it’s still 75 to 80% better than my translation of Italian.
So I’d be I’d be quitting.
What’s interesting for me, though, with Apple is trying to buy stuff
outside of your store is really difficult.
For instance, if I’m going to France, I like to have the charger that works in France,
the USB that plugs in. Same for America.
So if you try to buy that in the UK, you can’t.
You have to buy it in France.
That’s a really good point.
I came up against that when I lived in Spain and I had that exact problem.
I got fed up with using the travel adapter plugs and I wanted to buy the plug.
And exactly, they wanted to sell me the travel kit.
I think I landed, went to the nearest Apple store and bought three plugs just to get
the two pin adapter.
But yeah, that is a really silly suggestion.
I don’t know why they don’t do that.
Couldn’t have anything to do with money, surely?
I don’t know though, because not really, because I’ve got an American one, I’ve got Australian,
I’ve got Europe. So I’ve probably spent more money buying that and you buy two or three
because obviously you’re going to charge two or three things. So you want two or three
of them. So they’re probably better off selling me the individual things.
I wonder if it’s down to the voltage. They don’t like selling something where someone
could make a mistake with the voltage. I’m intrigued. I’d like to know what the thought
process is behind that. It’s interesting though, because if you look
at the power brick to do with the laptops. I often wondered why they were the shape they were,
but if you’re in America, it’s actually a cube. The thing that plugs in just squares it off.
It’s really neat. On the other hand, given they’re due, the UK three-pin plug that folds is amazing
because you can stand on it without actually swearing too much. Ah, one thing for the wallet,
which is clever that wasn’t announced, was do you have lots of digital wallet tickets from events
or you’ve bought a theatre ticket and it’s digital? Yes, I’ve had a couple, yeah. They now get
automatically archived or you can have them to automatically delete. But I do like the fact of
archiving them because now so many digital tickets have replaced paper and they are kind of a digital
memory as such. I think that was the only thing I could think of which is an important digital
memory other than a photograph. I’ve got tickets for like a band launch or the premiere of
a film that was a digital ticket and I’ve always kept them. Yeah, that’s one other feature.
They’re supposed to be, I think it’s 400 new features in iPad OS. Yeah, the battery percentage
has come back at the top. So you can now display the battery percentage back in the toolbar
instead of it being in the menu, all these little tiny niggles.
I think we’ve come to the end of yet another episode of The Bruin Bike Show.
And firstly, we’ll say thank you to Tina.
Not all. I hope you’re having fun with whatever Apple kit you’ve got
and that you too were not that disappointed that there wasn’t any hardware.
Not that I’m going to keep going on about that.
Thank you. And we’ll say thank you to Martin.
Now he’s waiting anxiously for the delivery man of his new M-Kit Mac Mini.
Yes, now that yeah and I’ve got a great deal on the I bought it from the Apple refurbished site
and saved over 150 quid on the the cost of the Mac Mini which I thought was quite quite good.
So if you’re looking for some kit look at the Apple refurbished site.
Perfect and as always it’s thank you for listening from me until next time thank you very much.
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