Join Dan Ward and Tobi Abedisi for Labs Live! In this first episode we invited two of our iOS developers, Chelsey Baker and Jeff Kelley on to talk about WWDC. Due to some technical difficulties, it’s a two-parter.
Dan: Welcome to Labs Live, it’s kind of like Saturday Night Live but it’s Wednesday and probably won’t be funny. I’m your host, Dan Ward and in with my cohost, Tobi Adebisi got it-
Tobi: Good try, good try.
Dan: We’ve been working on that a while. Before we get into the show, I should probably introduce Detroit Labs, most of you probably know who we are because you’re family and friends that we’ve coaxed into watching this. But for those who don’t know who we are, we’re a software development company in Downtown Detroit, that’s where we’re coming to you from. We develop really great apps, web apps, hardware for really wonderful clients. Pretty much anything you can dream up, we can build.
Tobi: Yeah, if you can think it, yeah pretty much.
Dan: Okay. This show, it is our first, it is live, we will mess up. Tobi and I will learn how to work with each other in this.
Tobi: We’re going to be best friends, Dan.
Dan: Yeah, you’re going to have to speak up, Tobi, no one can hear you.
Tobi: Producer, can you hear me?
Dan: No, see? no one can hear you so please speak up. The show format is we’re going to do a little intro, we’re going to jump into news. Tobi and I are going to talk about current events, everything based around tech, around things that we do here at Detroit Labs and then we’re going to jump into our main topic of the show. Every single episode’s going to have a few guests and today’s topic is going to be WWDC.
Tobi: Exciting, yeah.
Dan: It is very exciting, so once we move on from the news, we’re going to get into that. Now, this is a livestream, so I do have the chat up here. So far, the audio is great based on what the chat says. I’m going to do my best to figure out how we integrate some of those questions into what we’re doing.
Tobi: Yeah, we’ll just try to make it organic and you know, answer questions that come up.
Dan: Yeah, that’s exactly how we scripted it, thanks. Also, if you don’t already subscribe to our channel, please do so, it’s that little red button. And you should turn on the bell icon because when we do another one of these shows … Again, we’re hoping to do these probably about every two weeks.
Tobi: Every two … Yeah, yeah.
Dan: Assuming we’re around and you’re going to want to have that bell icon clicked so you’re notified when we do it. Let’s jump into the news. Tobi, Women’s World Cup.
Tobi: Football, had me at football.
Dan: I didn’t see … Is it soccer or football?
Tobi: I just … Now I have a platform where I can say football not soccer, so I’m going to use it that way.
Dan: Oh, please do.
Tobi: It’s football and now we’re really good so we can call it football now. It was such a great entire tournament. Probably one of the most enjoyable tournament, not even just men’s or women’s, just in general it was just really good. From a streaming point of view, this world cup, although the numbers were lower in terms of traditional TV when you compare to the one we had in Canada last year … Last World Cup four years ago. It was 400% higher streaming-wise than the previous World Cup.
Dan: Do you think the dip in TV versus streaming is because of the time difference?
Tobi: There was time difference, there was also-
Dan: Because I assume there were a lot of people at work at that point in time, so streaming might be-
Tobi: It was on Sunday, so …
Dan: Oh, fair point.
Tobi: … a lot of people watch it at brunch which I did.
Dan: Oh, brunch, fancy.
Tobi: But the last one was in prime time, prime time and it was in Canada and I think that’s the main difference.
Dan: All right. Autonomous plane, did you hear about this one?
Tobi: You were telling me about it.
Dan: Yeah, it landed itself. I’m not really sure what that means for the human race in general and the-
Tobi: Was it like a test flight or like a real flight?
Dan: What’s a test flight versus the real flight?
Tobi: People in it?
Dan: Oh, fair. Well, it was autonomous, so I don’t think there was people on it. But it took off and landed by itself which is amazing. I don’t know if you know but the landing is the hardest part of a plane and it did that. That’s really all we’re going to talk about, it’s kind of interesting all this antonymous technology. I don’t know if you’ve been in a self-driving car.
Tobi: No.
Dan: No?
Tobi: No. Oh, I’ve been in a Tesla when it was self-driving itself, it was-
Dan: So, you’re been in a self-driving car.
Tobi: If we call that
Dan: What’s the difference in … Okay, oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah.
Tobi: Technically.
Dan: Okay, I get it.
Tobi: Technically.
Dan: Yeah, I mean, they’re okay. They’re not great, I think Tesla does a far better …
Tobi: They’re exciting now.
Dan: .Yeah, sure.
Tobi: It just gives you this feeling of you’re in the future.
Dan: I think that’s called fear.
Tobi: Fear and excitement, both.
Dan: Yeah, they scare the hell out of me.
Tobi: Sometimes you can’t tell the difference.
Dan: All right, Jony Ive left Apple.
Tobi: I didn’t see that coming, no.
Dan: No?
Tobi: No, no.
Dan: Well, from what I understand, he’s kind of been phasing himself out over time and he’s already had a team that’s around there. So, of course, everyone got very concerned right away. He’s the head of design, so when Steve left … Steve was that visionary person. So, Jony kind of took the torch of visionary because Tim Cook’s not.
Tobi: Yup.
Dan: So, I don’t know who designed the new Mac Pro
Tobi: Have you-
Dan: … cheese grater but I did see that it does not grate cheese though.
Tobi: It doesn’t grate it, I think someone did a YouTube experiment with it, tried to grate cheese with it and didn’t work out.
Dan: No.
Tobi: But from a design point of view, how do you feel about that? In terms of Jony Ive leaving Apple?
Dan: Well, Jony Ive leaving Apple or the Mac Pro?
Tobi: The entire Apple business without Jony Ive. Do you think it’s something they can just … Business as usual?
Dan: Well, it’s interesting because there’s a lot rumors that over the past three years he was already phasing himself out, so I don’t know what has been designed by Jony and what hasn’t. From a design perspective, any time someone leaves that’s like that heart and soul always concerns you. But we’ll see, there was a lot of talk that he’s going to continue to work with Apple, so this whole leaving thing could be PR for his new thing that he’s doing but which ultimately he’ll be a contractor for Apple.
Tobi: Extended vacation, that’s nice.
Dan: On to another topic about Apple, keyboards.
Tobi: Oh, okay, this is a big one. The switch from the butterfly switch …
Dan: Yeah, currently they’re using butterfly …
Tobi: … to the scissors?
Dan: … that would all stand because they don’t have a lot of travel.
Tobi: Where you can eat anything on your computer.
Dan: Right, you shouldn’t eat anything on your computer to begin with.
Tobi: Well …
Dan: Usually you have over and crumbs in.
Tobi: You know, sometimes you have your computer right in front of you and you’re eating a granola bar, that is a perfect use case for the computer. I just did that this morning-
Dan: Should [crosstalk 00:06:44] Cheese-Its.
Tobi: Cheese-Its, Cheese-Its …
Dan: Do you know Cheese-Its?
Tobi: I know that from the commercial, they look interesting. I think I’ve had it once.
Dan: You’ve had Cheese-Its once?
Tobi: Probably, I’m a very picky eater.
Dan: I don’t even know the commercial. Oh, the cheese growing, …
Tobi: The Cheese-Its.
Dan: … maturing. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re saying.
Tobi: Yeah, weird commercial.
Dan: Yeah, it’s not great.
Tobi: But it works because I remember it.
Dan: Fair point. Now with the new keyboard you can eat your granola over top of your laptop …
Tobi: Yeah, and Honey Crunch.
Dan: … because you don’t have to … Are they going back to … Was it scissor or butterfly?
Tobi: Scissor switch, butterfly to scissor-switch.
Dan: Got it and scissor is what they used before, right?
Tobi: Correct.
Dan: And that worked well, we love that, it was nice and cushiony and worked great. Okay, fantastic.
Tobi: Yeah.
Dan: So, you’re happy about that.
Tobi: I am ecstatic.
Dan: And your granola bars are thrilled.
Tobi: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: All right, Movie Pass.
Tobi: Oh, this is a good one.
Dan: Yeah, Movie Pass just announced that they’re shutting down for maintenance. So, as both an app and a service, they’re shutting down to do maintenance on their app which I personally have never heard of this before where the app needed to be shut down just purely for maintenance. You are I were talking about this earlier, you apparently are kind of fan of Movie Pass, you’ve attempted to sign up?
Tobi: Well, they sell a service that sounds too good to be true when it came out and it was too good to be true. They’ve shut down a couple of times, they’ve had their competitor Sinemia, I think it’s called Sinemia, also start-up and shut down. But when a company is offering you 10 bucks a month to watch as many movies as you want-
Dan: Does that seem a little too good to be true?
Tobi: That is cheaper than seeing one movie, the last … I just saw Toy Story four, great movie.
Dan: Did you like it?
Tobi: That was not 10 bucks. It is my favorite movie of all time.
Dan: Favorite … Have you seen any other Toy Stories?
Tobi: I’ve seen all of them multiple times.
Dan: Its better than the other ones.
Tobi: I will say so right now.
Dan: Well, you said favorite of all times.
Tobi: Yeah, I’ll say so right now because I just saw it.
Dan: Because it’s new?
Tobi: I have a recency bias.
Dan: Toy Story three, did you end up crying over that? Because I bawled a good chunk of it.
Tobi: Probably the first immediately but thereafter, business as usual. It is Toy Story then Dark Knight for me and then every other movie.
Dan: Toy Story is better than Dark Knight?
Tobi: For me, for me.
Dan: Toy Story four … Oh, fair, okay. No, that’s fine.
Tobi: Strange but true.
Dan: No, that’s fine. From an app shut down, what do you possibly think maintenance could be on an app that needs to be completely shut down?
Tobi: Yeah, I was chatting just before this as well, one of our developers, he was mentioning that maybe switching back ends or something like that. That could be possible but to shut down for several weeks? It’s hard to tell if it’s actually an app issue or they’re shutting down because of … More like a business strategy thing. So, it could be that they truly have crashes or back end issues they want to fix or they just use this the over-arching detour to say, “Oh, we have so much other things to fix as a business, so let’s say we’re shutting down our app, not shutting down the business.” So, it could be that too.
Dan: As negative as this is, do you see that it could ultimately be … You know how we say no publicity is bad publicity? Do you see that this is ultimately a good thing? That when they bring this back up, they can have a full announcement and have an excuse to get back in the news? Hey, we’re back it’s great, we’ve raised our prices to $11.00 from $10.00 or something along those lines?
Tobi: Yeah, it worked for them last year and I think it will work again. The press is just … Unless they come back and tell you it’s 25 bucks a month, I feel like just having it 9.99 is just too enticing to turn away, so good publicity.
Dan: All right, our last thing we’re going to talk about today comes from Japan. 7-11, they have an app there where they launched a brand new mobile pay service, you already know this? You’re laughing at our audience because I wasn’t being funny at that point.
Tobi: I’m laughing at our producer.
Dan: Oh, okay, I understand. The issue is they launched this pay service and I don’t know, within a very short amount of time they had already lost $500,000.00 of their consumer’s money. It’s a big deal. The reason-
Tobi: It’s half a million, could change my life.
Dan: That is exactly the amount. The reason is because the password reset feature clearly was an afterthought. I could fill out some information for you, I can find out your birthday which was just the other day, happy birthday.
Tobi: Thank you
Dan: And I can find out your email address and I can get your password sent to my email. So, immediately I can go in and take your money.
Tobi: So, it doesn’t use the email you registered with?
Dan: It does not, it does not seem to care about that.
Tobi: Oh, wow.
Dan: That seems to be a little bit of a flaw.
Tobi: In 2019.
Dan: Right, right. Well, it’s just interesting because we know when we build our apps, that passwords are an important thing, security is an important thing and password reset is often something that is … I don’t know.
Tobi: It’s common use case.
Dan: It’s shuffled off, it’s not something that is kind of prioritized. It’s interesting to see that kind of bite 7-11 in the butt. I promised I wouldn’t swear, so butt.
Tobi: Good job.
Dan: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Tobi: Good job., good job.
Dan: All right-
Tobi: Doesn’t that count as swearing though?
Dan: Butt? No, how? Where from?
Tobi: Maybe in America it doesn’t.
Dan: Does it count as swearing in Nigeria?
Tobi: No, no, I’m just … No.
Dan: Oh, all right, okay. That’s fine. All right, let’s move along after the swearing controversy. We’re going to talk about today’s topic which is WWDC. It was just recently, June 3rd through the 7th, about a month ago.
Tobi: A lot of time flies.
Dan: It does, it does. At the show they announced iOS 13 as they tend do every single year. Mac OS Catalina, that’s the new Mac OS version. Brand a new opportunity system specifically for iPad, so instead of iPad running iOS 13, it runs iPad OS. And the new cheese grater Mac Pro which I think a lot of people were excited about and then upset about and then excited and then upset when they saw the price of the display.
Tobi: You got to be … If you see the benchmarks, the presentation was amazing.
Dan: It was, yeah.
Tobi: Yeah, it’s great. Expensive though.
Dan: Yeah, the display itself was like two grand, right?
Tobi: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, okay. All right, let’s welcome our very first guest to talk about WWDC, you can move over to that side.
Tobi: Excuse me.
Dan: Chelsey Baker, she is an iOS and Android developer. Chelsey, welcome.
Tobi: Welcome, Chelsey.
Chelsey: Hello, thank you.
Dan: I’ll let you kind of get comfortable there for a minute after Toby moves over. Now, Chelsey’s going to talk about a couple different topics, the first one being dark mode and why you should care about it.
Chelsey: Yes, yes. We’ve heard about dark mode … I don’t know, I feel we’ve been hearing about it for a long time, up to WDCC but why you should actually care about it especially if you’re a product owner. Sorry, this is just right in the way.
Dan: No, no, no. It’s okay, just talk to the mic.
Chelsey: Okay.
Dan: It just won’t talk back to you.
Chelsey: Gotcha, great. So, why should you care as a product owner? You’re going to definitely have just, in general, some brand positivity I would think there, I … When you open an app like that that … When you upgrade to iOS 13, you open it, it’s already respecting your dark mode setting. You’re going to be like, “This is awesome.” You might even get some free publicity out of that, a couple of blog posts or whatever coming in like, “Oh, hey, here’s some apps to check out that are doing dark more really well.” The most important thing though I would think is you don’t want your content to not be able to be consumed because of a dark mode setting. Your app should, for the most part, look the same if you don’t do anything as far as I understand. But if you’re using any iOS specific components that when switched to dark mode when the rest of your app doesn’t, you might have some issues there.
Dan: Dark mode in general, that’s just … Anything that would be essentially white or light gray on the screen turns dark?
Chelsey: Yup, pretty much. Your … The iOS, in general, will be not so much swapping colors but making it a lot darker so it’s not as intense in your face when you’re at night or something like that.
Dan: So, it’s not a full invert of colors because they had that in accessibility for a while right?
Chelsey: Yeah, it’s definitely not. If you watch the WWDC video, they specifically say this is not just literally taking your whites and turning them into blacks there’s … Even the guy doing the presentation was like, “Your blues are going to be slightly different to fit better with your dark colors and stuff.” So it’s not just necessarily a one to one flip, it’s a little more than that which is why you should care about it.
Dan: Well, yeah in … This is an operating system-level change, right?
Chelsey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dan: You go into your settings and that’s where you’re changing this at?
Chelsey: Yup.
Dan: Okay, so it is …You expect your apps then to respect the operating system, right?
Chelsey: You would hope … Yeah, that’s definitely what you want because that’s another thing too, you don’t want your users using your app less because when they are using it in dark mode they’re laying in bed or something, chilling out for the night. They open it and it’s very bright compared to what they were using, you have a better chance of losing users that way I would think.
Dan: Yeah.
Chelsey: What does that mean for you and your developers? It could be anything from going in and just updating your backgrounds to something like just swapping light colored backgrounds for dark ones but you also have but you also have the opportunity to have a whole different vibe with your app depending on what your content is. Their WWDC video had a really awesome, just very basic example but showed maybe in your daytime you have all these brighter colors and you have a beach or something and then they swap to … Oh, in dark mode maybe you have a sunset. So, it really opens the opportunity for designers and stuff to have just a whole different vibe for your app.
Chelsey: That could again be anything from, oh, ten minutes of updating your backgrounds and stuff to a whole redesign, so it’s kind of like what you want to do will be a little bit of work to respect that especially if your app is larger and you have to switch over all your settings and your colors and stuff to the system ones. But to just do basic stuff it’s not a big deal at all.
Dan: So, it sounds like it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing type thing, there’s different levels of things that you can adapt …
Chelsey: Yes, definitely.
Dan: … whether you want that dynamic content or if you want it to just respect the darkness, if you will, of the operating system.
Chelsey: Yup, that should be pretty cool, so that’s something I’m pretty excited about and I hope that the product owners of the apps that I use are also paying attention to that. Because when I upgrade to iOS 13, I hope to be seeing that right off the bat, it’d be sweet.
Dan: That one’s interesting because that’s not something that is a big feature that immediately would bring in a ton of revenue but it kind of reminds me of iOS 7 when they switched from skeuomorphic to flat, is that an accurate assessment?
Chelsey: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that’s exactly a great point. It wasn’t something you had to do but it’d be a lot color, your app was a lot cooler.
Dan: Yeah, Apple loves you when you do exactly what they want you to do, right?
Chelsey: Exactly, for sure.
Dan: And adopting any type of new design thing for them even though you don’t have that immediate ROI, you at least get featured or whatever they might do.
Tobi: It could also make the argument that you won’t lose money because, as she said, if other apps have that mode and yours doesn’t have, you go from using this app two minutes a day to one minute a day to 30 seconds a day. That is losing users.
Chelsey: For sure. Yeah, tr are some apps who have been doing light and dark settings for a while before that where you just set them in-app. Reddit’s one of those and I love that, every time I get a new phone or something I’m always like … That’s something I want to change right away.
Dan: Twitter did the same thing too and they ended up getting a lot of press for doing that.
Chelsey: Right, exactly.
Dan: I mean, granted they got a lot of press on their own platform, so maybe it wasn’t, maybe it just was amplified because it was on their own platform. But I remember when it came out, everybody was tweeting about it like crazy.
Chelsey: Yup, yeah.
Dan: That’s cool.
Chelsey: For sure.
Dan: Fantastic. Now, anything else about dark mode before we move on to a very passionate topic that you have?
Chelsey: I do, it’s a very passionate topic. Dark mode? Not so much, excited about it but yeah, about CarPlay.
Dan: Yeah, the next one is CarPlay, there are some major, major enhancements in iOS 13. Chelsey.
Chelsey: Yeah, I went ahead and put iOS 13 on one of my older devices because I never put betas on my actual, personal, real devices. So, I went ahead and tried it out in my car, I have a RAV4 that has CarPlay that I actually disabled on my last road trip because I was the passenger in the car and we were coordinating with a bunch of people and we had group chants and stuff going. CarPlay would just interrupt our music to read every single person on this group chat and read off these messages and it’s not a problem of the other person’s hearing it. But it’s just really annoying.
Dan: It’s intrusive.
Chelsey: Yeah, it’s super intrusive and there’s no way to turn that off and then-
Dan: And you bought that car specifically because of CarPlay, right or one of …
Chelsey: It was a feature, yeah.
Dan: The features.
Chelsey: Yeah, totally, CarPlay was a huge thing about me wanting to get a car because I was like … I don’t always like the UI in cars for their entertainment systems is not always the greatest and I was like, “This will be sweet, I really want to use this.” So that I always have a cool version running in my car. Then yeah, the other big thing was I’m trying to coordinate with people via text and Facebook messenger and stuff and every time I would close out of that, our directions would close as well. I’d be like, “Oh, well this is kind of … ”
Dan: Defeats the entire purpose.
Chelsey: Yeah, this is not very useful so we ended up disabling it and just using the in-car app nav and I was like, “Well, this is pointless.”
Dan: Apple clearly heard there was complaints from somebody.
Chelsey: From someone, not me, I only started using it. But yeah, I heard that there was a split-screen version of CarPlay now which I thought was really cool and so I wanted to try that out. So, I downloaded the new version, put it on my phone, got in my car and it is a, I would say, pretty major upgrade. The split-screen, it does look like, for at least right now, you’re locked to … Your split-screen has your maps on the left side and then there’s other little widgets going on there. I didn’t find a way to customize any of that yet, so I don’t know if that’s still coming and it just wasn’t available in my beta or there’s no apps that really support it so those were these only ones. But it seems to be also locked to Apple Maps but that could also be because … I normally use Google Maps or Waze, those apps just aren’t updated yet, obviously because they’re still in development. So, maybe, possibly …
Tobi: That makes sense.
Chelsey: … they could be updated to do that. Either way, even if it doesn’t CarPlay no longer is one to one with your phone. So, if I have Google Maps up on CarPlay and I close out of it on my phone to open my text messages or something, Google Maps stays up which is major.
Dan: So, it’s not just a mirroring anymore, right?
Chelsey: Right.
Dan: It’s actually almost like its own thing that takes place on the car.
Chelsey: Yeah, because before it was very … It was mirrored. If I had this app open on my phone, it was open on CarPlay and if I open an app on CarPlay, it was open on my phone. There was no way to disconnect that but now they’re disconnected which is really awesome as a passenger, as a driver obviously I’m not going to be doing both but as a passenger that is super helpful.
Tobi: How do you switch apps?
Chelsey: You do it right through the regular CarPlay dash so that it’ll show up on the left side and you can hit the different buttons and stuff which is what it was before but then it would change it on your phone which is, I thought, really lame. What’s going on over there, Dan?
Dan: We’re learning how to use microphones, that’s what’s going on.
Chelsey: Great.
Dan: Bring that in a little. All right, I thought I was loud enough to keep it further enough away but we’re getting there.
Chelsey: All right, that’s good, yeah learning, we’re all learning together.
Dan: Yes, of course.
Chelsey: Yeah, so that is something I’m really excited about and then because I was on an older device, I wasn’t hooked up to my sim card or anything, so I want getting any texts but I am praying that it doesn’t just … Or at least I can disable automatically reading them out because that was … It was just nuts.
Dan: In my experience, even if … If you were in the CarPlay experience and you went to use the in-dash experience, if you had a text come in, it would kick you back to the CarPlay experience. I don’t know if … I don’t know, it could have just been my car but that was a very frustrating thing.
Chelsey: Yeah. I don’t remember if that happened specifically but when I did tap a new message, there was just literally no way to disable it reading to the whole car which I just thought was ridiculous.
Tobi: Did it read your emojis too?
Chelsey: Yeah, it reads everything, it reads everyone on the group chat and everything and then even … There’s even a setting that says disable something in CarPlay and apparently didn’t disable reading them. So, I always thought that was ridiculous but I’m excited, I’m really excited.
Dan: Wonderful.
Chelsey: CarPlay is one thing I’m excited about.
Dan: So, in order to test this right now you have to have the beta.
Chelsey: You do, you have to put a beta on some … An iOS device that can support CarPlay. I put it on my iPhone 6s and it was crashing, not a little bit so I don’t recommend doing … Well, I would never recommend putting your betas on your personal devices. But if you do have a device that can support iOS 13 and you have your car, you can just go ahead and plug it in and it won’t affect your other devices that use CarPlay.
Dan: Yeah, I believe that public beta just came out this week? Last week? Something along those lines? So, if you don’t like your battery and you would like it to burn up, you can go out and install that on your main device, I would not recommend you install that on your main device.
Chelsey: Never recommend.
Dan: But you know.
Tobi: Have you done that before?
Dan: Install it in my main device?
Tobi: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chelsey: Oh, yeah.
Dan: Oh, countless, Tobi. I can’t even tell you how many times it’s happened and I complain like crazy and I say it’s Apple’s fault. Even though they say don’t do it, I still do it.
Chelsey: Yeah, I was surprised to hear you didn’t do that this time.
Dan: No, I stopped, yeah. Some folks got really mad at me when I kept complaining about it and it was my own fault.
Tobi: But you give good feedback to Apple though.
Dan: No, I don’t, I give feedback to our team members and then it’s just me complaining pretty much the entire time. I don’t think I filed a bug with Apple ever because my bug would just say my battery is draining and you’re a jerk and you should fix that and then they would just say it’s a beta, don’t do that.
Tobi: Yeah, that’s right.
Dan: All right. Well, Chelsey, thank you for joining us on our first episode. It will go down in history as being something. So, I appreciate you …
Chelsey: Awesome.
Dan: … coming on.
Tobi: Thanks, Chelsey.
Chelsey: Thanks.
Dan: Thank you.
Tobi: Thank you.
Dan: All right.
Tobi: See you.
Dan: Toby, did you learn about dark mode and CarPlay?
Tobi: I did.
Dan: Fantastic.
Tobi: Both. As a former CarPlay user and developer, it’s refreshing to know that there’s more new stuff.
Dan: Awesome, all right, we have no cards behind us that tell us things. All right, we’re on to our next guest, Jeff Kelley who is an iOS developer here at Detroit Labs. Jeff is going to have a couple of his own topics, we’re going to let him get situated and make sure the mics are working well for him. The applause in the background was roaring which was fantastic. Are we good on, mics, Dave?
Tobi: Are we good?
Jeff: Do I sound good?
Dan: Dave’s our producer and so we’re learning. All right, Jeff, first topic you are covering is Swift UI which I understand will make developing apps easy for even myself to do. Is that accurate?
Jeff: Absolutely, it’s just drag and drop to make an app now, it’s brilliant.
Dan: So, we don’t have to code anymore.
Jeff: Nope, nope.
Dan: Are you serious? We have a business and if we don’t … If we can’t code anymore, we’re kind of in trouble.
Jeff: I wouldn’t go that far.
Dan: Okay, tell me about it then.
Jeff: Okay, SwiftUI is a new cross-platform declarative UI framework from Apple.
Dan: What does cross-platform mean?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s a lot of words, right?
Dan: Yeah, please, break it down for me.
Jeff: I’ll start with cross-platform, this SwiftUI code, you write it for iOS, you write it for iPadOS, you write it for MacOS, you write it for TvOS, you write it for WatchOS.
Dan: So, cross-platform is really just across Apple’s platforms.
Jeff: At first, yes but people in the open-source community have already written things that take SwiftUI and make a webpage out of it. So, even though Apple is only offering it for their platforms, there’s no reason it can’t be used on other things. I mean, someday we could see SwiftUI for Android. But it’s not write once, run anywhere, that was the big problem with other cross-platform UI frameworks.
Tobi: That’s right, React Native?
Jeff: Yeah, what Apple … How they refer to is it’s learn once, apply anywhere, so it’s not the same code running on a Watch app as it is in the big cheese grater Mac Pro. Because that doesn’t make sense, they’re completely different devices with different capabilities.
Dan: Right.
Jeff: But what it is, is that when you create a button in your app, you just write button and then inside of that button you give it some text for what the button says.
Dan: The stream cut out, I don’t know where it cut out but I think we were wrapping up SwiftUI. Now, I mentioned this during the intro of the topic, WWDC as something new announced. This one I think is really exciting and interesting, admittedly I’m a little confused by it but iPadOS.
Jeff: Yes. Over the years, iPads and iPhones have kind of started to diverge in what you can do with them. The iPad supports lots of multitasking, it has hardware keyboards that don’t use Bluetooth and the use cases for the iPad and the iPhone really have become their own things. So much so that now Apple is actually splitting the iPad into its own operating system. Really iPadOS right now is a lot like iOS, there are very few features that you can get on the iPad that can’t get in the iPhone but the ones that are there are the more power user features that make the iPad more like a computer. For instance, there’s the new Side Car feature where if you have a Mac or a MacOS Catalina and you have an iPad that’s running iPadOS 13, you can put an app from your Mac onto your iPad screen.
Dan: Have you used this yet because … I’ve had … Was it Duet?
Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dan: And there’s a couple of other ones that can do that and all of a sudden my computer and my iPad are getting ready to melt down.
Jeff: Right.
Dan: Does this not do that? I would like to know that, that’d be great.
Jeff: Like you mentioned earlier, you should never run a beta on your primary OS.
Dan: Fair enough, yeah, that’s a good one.
Jeff: So, I haven’t actually run it myself, I would expect though because it’s Apple, because it’s a first-party solution that they are going to have a better solution in terms of performance. But also, I’ve used things like Duet display and I think it’s another that I had and they’re okay but I’m hoping for the Side Car features latency to be low enough to actually use it for real-time applications.
Dan: Sure. Hit me with some other top iPadOS, what are the couple big things that make it just way different than iOS for iPhone?
Jeff: Sure, ever since the first iPhone, the paradigm for using an app on your phone has been you have one app open and then when the iPad multitasking showed up with split-screen you could have two apps, you could have three apps open at the same time.
Dan: Sure.
Jeff: But one of the limitations has always been that each app has its own space, its own window and now with iPadOS, you can have multiple instances of the same application in different parts of the OS. So, you can have side by side two Microsoft Word documents, you can have a note and then another note next to it. And you can have this up almost like spaces on the Mac where you can a Word document and a website and Safari open next to each other and then use a multitasking to get over to a different Word document and a different website.
Tobi: Wow.
Dan: Yeah, I like that.
Jeff: Yeah.
Dan: It does bring it closer to the desktop experience that we’ve all been accustomed to. When I’m on Safari … Sorry, I don’t actually use Safari, I use Chrome. But when I’m on Chrome, I’ve got a crazy amount of tabs, same thing if … Any other tool that I’m using.
Tobi: Even students writing a paper, you have two Word documents sometimes because you’re reading a paper and then you’re writing your paper.
Dan: That’s a good student.
Tobi: Yeah.
Dan: That’s not me.
Tobi: Honor student.
Jeff: Yeah, you can have an outline over here and your main document over here.
Tobi: Yeah, oh, yeah that’s a good excuse.
Dan: One of the things I saw in tactics was the widgets that I think are terrible. They seem to be on the main screen now? Does that mean they actually have data?
Jeff: It should. One of the big problems with the home screen widgets of iOS in the past has been that they don’t actually start loading until you swipe over to get to that screen.
Dan: Yes, that’s worse than ever.
Jeff: Being able to pin them on your first home screen and have them always open, ideally, they should always be reloading so, they should always have data and actually be more useful.
Dan: That will be fantastic and a welcomed addition because Android seems to get that right and I’m not sure how iOS does not.
Jeff: Yes.
Tobi: From a development point of view, are there … If you have an app, an iPad app, are there things you have to do right now to get ready for iPad OS in terms of widgets and all that stuff?
Jeff: Not in terms of widgets, widgets that been optional the whole time they’ve existed, they still are. But you do now have to support more of the multitasking. If you don’t support edge to edge displays on the iPad Pro, if you don’t support some of the multitasking features, then you’ll get rejected.
Dan: Anything else on iPad OS?
Jeff: I think that’s it.
Dan: That’s it, all right. Well, Jeff, thank you for coming on to our very first show, as I mentioned to Chelsey, you are now part of history.
Jeff: Thanks for having me.
Dan: Good or bad. All right, thank you. Now, we are going to wrap the show up for a number of reasons. It ended up being 38 minutes, probably really 32 minutes with all the technical difficulties with the stream stopping and I’m sure … I’m not even certain if we’re still live right now. But-
Dave: Yeah, we’re live.
Dan: Okay, Dave says we are, thanks.
Tobi: Hi, everyone.
Dan: Thank you for everyone who tuned in and watched us today, it was fun learning how to do this. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be back with another episode hopefully as long as we remember how to set all this stuff up again. We’ll get better on things like echo, things like microphones working and things like streams cutting out after 30 minutes, we will get there.