Full Transcription
Serena:
I have an iPhone 10, which happens to be the phone where a lot of these cool features stop working…
Jeff and Raqi:
[sad trombone noises]
Jeff Thompson:
It’s demo time—voiceover recognition, iOS 14.
Raqi:
-really customize it now. It was like having augmented hearing, that supersonic hearing everybody tells me I have, well, tonight I felt like I had it, it was fabulous.
Jeff:
It makes us blind people feel like real blind people!
Raqi:
Like real blind people!
Raqi:
-stream now and it went [makes two-tone beeping noise]
Serena Gilbert:
-and Raqi’s like “I’m begging them to let me spend money, like, this is ridiculous-”
Raqi:
Take my money, Apple, I’m ready, take my money.
Jeff:
Welcome to Tech Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. In the studio with me is Serena Gilbert—how’re you doing, Serena?
Serena:
I’m doing wonderful, and Raqi, how are you?
Raqi:
I’m great, Serena, pretty good.
Jeff:
Pretty good, that’s pretty good.
Raqi:
Pretty good-
Jeff:
Pretty good’s pretty good!
Serena:
Pretty, pretty good?
Jeff:
Purty, purty good.
Raqi:
Purty good!
Serena:
Raqi might have recognized that, we’ve been rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he says “Pretty, pretty good” all the time. My husband will appreciate that, because he does it to annoy me. It’s super annoying.
Raqi:
Pretty good!
Jeff:
Hey, did you guys watch the App Way event, Time Flies?
Raqi:
Absolutely.
Jeff:
I didn’t think time flew very well. It was one of those lackluster ones, and we’ll talk about it a bit later, but something else dropped, and, you know, it’s kind of new, some of us haven’t been able to kick it around the block but everyone’s talking about it and everyone’s enquiring about it—so iOS 14 just hit, and Raqi, you updated, didn’t you?
Raqi:
I did, I did, and I’m still just barely, barely stepping into the new landscape, I don’t consider myself to be an expert by any means, but this is a big update. Lot of features packed into this update, and I think most people will be happy—of course, we were just talking about some areas where we’re dissatisfied, but I think most people overall will like this update, there’s a lot of good stuff in here.
Jeff:
A lot of accessibility stuff came out with this update, and not just for the blind, but for the hearing impaired, people with hearing—what do you call them, hearing aids, that’s it! It’s kind of like if you have the Airpod Pros, or a couple other beats, a couple other Airpod devices, you can enhance your hearing, that’s really cool, and if you’re into audio—Raqi, you probably went right there first.
Raqi:
Oh my gosh, there’s a reason I haven’t played with any other features. As soon as I started customizing the Airpods Pro I just stood there with my mouth open like a fish in the middle of my kitchen going “Oh my god, oh my god,” it was amazing, I could hear the clock ticking up on the—we do have an old school clock, I’m not quite sure why, but it’s still up there on the wall in the room next to me above where the mantle would be, the fake mantle’s there, and there’s a little clock, and it doesn’t tick that loudly, but these headphones just, they amplify so well and you can do so much customizing, and you can bring up frequencies across the board, you can boost the highs, you can amplify, you can do it subtly, or make it really gradual, or you can just crank it up there, it was amazing. I felt like I had supersonic hearing again, I felt like I was 20 years younger, with this. I had all my highs back for a half an hour, it was really interesting being able to hear all the crazy things.
Jeff:
That’s great. Serena, not all of the phones upgraded immensely—I mean, iOS 14, they do have a variety of phones out there, but I think we’re finally getting caught up with the slew of phones out there, but not everyone can get all the benefits, and where did that stop, what phone was it, Serena?
Serena:
Yeah, thanks a lot, Jeff. Yeah, I am in the minority, and I’m not super satisfied with iOS 14, because I have an iPhone 10, which happens to be the phone where a lot of these cool features stop working.
Jeff and Raqi:
[sad trombone noises]
Serena:
iOS 14 works on iPhone 6S or later, but a lot of the accessibility features in particular are not available until you hit the iPhone 10R and 10S or higher, so I have a slightly different opinion on things, because you guys have newer phones than I do, and we’ll talk about this a lot more as we go through some of the new features, but I think that the way that this is implemented in the phones that don’t support all the features could really force some people to update their hardware, because it is very obnoxious, unless they fix some things.
Jeff:
Come on October! I heard the iPhone 12s will be coming out, Serena, I think you got your eyes on those—you even mentioned you were thinking about it.
Serena:
Oh, it’s not thinking about it, it’s a for sure-
Raqi:
No, she’ll do it.
Serena:
Now I’m doubtful, though, because the event was September 15, if they were really delayed until October, I feel like they would have just had a really big event in September, I’m actually thinking they might not come out until November, honestly, but we’ll see.
Raqi:
I kind of agree with you there. They’ve announced before—remember in years past, when they announced, and they said, you know “This is the new iPhone and it will ship on September 30th or October 30th,” they’ll give a date that’s several weeks out, and you know it’s coming but you’ve still got a few weeks left to wait. They’ve done that before, and it was interesting that they didn’t do that this time, it must not be three weeks away.
Serena:
Yeah, I agree, because normally we’re used to getting two events, one in September and one in October. This isn’t unique—normally it’s iPhones in September and then iPhones and Macs and all that stuff in October. Maybe people are thinking maybe they just flip flopped them, but I don’t know, it’s 2020, so I’m not holding my breath.
Serena:
Yeah, apparently.
Jeff:
One of the big features in the accessibility is the recognition, it seems like everything has recognition right after it. The text recognition, the screen recognition, image recognition.
Serena:
Well, there’s image recognition, and then there’s the recognition of text within images, and those are two separate settings from what I understand inside the voiceover screen recognition features.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s demo time. Voiceover recognition, iOS 14.
Siri:
Settings.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Accessibility button. Accessibility features help you customize your iPhone for your individual needs. Voiceover on button
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Voiceover on.
Jeff:
Single fingers swipe left to right.
Siri:
Voiceover recognition button. Using on device intelligence, your iPhone will automatically improve the accessibility of apps, images and text. Voiceover recognition should not be relied upon in circumstances where you could be harmed or injured, in high risk situations, for navigation, or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition.
Jeff:
Single finger swipe left to right.
Siri:
Image descriptions: OFF button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Image descriptions off.
Jeff:
Single fingers swipe left to right.
Siri:
132.7 MB required, your iPhone will speak descriptions of images and apps and on the web, sensitive content output heading. Selected, speak. Play sound. Do nothing. Indicate if an image may contain sensitive content. Apply to apps button.
Jeff:
Let’s go back, upper left hand corner.
Siri:
Back button.
Jeff:
Let’s swipe on down to screen recognition.
Siri:
Screen recognition OFF button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Screen recognition off. 12.8 MB required.
Jeff:
On the first time activating this that download will proceed.
Siri:
Your iPhone will automatically improve the accessibility of apps that have no accessibility information, such as identifying the state of buttons or toggles, and by grouping related items together in other apps screen recognition can be accessed through the rotor.
Jeff:
Single fingers swipe left to right.
Siri:
Apply to apps button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Apply to heading. 60 minutes button, optive button, ACB Link button access button, Acrobat button, Adobe Scan button, Aira button.
Jeff:
All your apps are here for you to make the choice of toggling them on or off. Thus, you could leave this feature on or just shut it off totally. Now let’s go back, upper left hand corner.
Siri:
Back button.
Jeff:
Let’s swipe on down to text recognition.
Siri:
Text recognition on. Your iPhone will speak descriptions of text found in images.
Jeff:
Let’s swipe back once, single finger right to left.
Siri:
Text recognition on.
Jeff:
And with text recognition, you could just toggle this on or toggle it off with a single finger double tap.
Siri:
Off. On.
Jeff:
Single finger swipe left to right.
Siri:
Feedback style, play sound button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Speak selected. Play sound. Do nothing. Determines the feedback provided by voiceover recognition when active.
Jeff:
So with these settings, if you’re hearing an annoying sound periodically, this could be the case. You can come here and turn it to do nothing, if you so choose. I highly suggest experimenting with these, turn them on, turn them off, and see what suits you. And remember, options are good. Serena, if it helps, I only have text recognition on, I have the others turned off because it seems too robust, it’s like all of a sudden you gained all your eyesight back all at once, it’d be too much information. Like if you go to a menu—taco on wood table, knife, fork, plate. Okay, I just want to order. So, sometimes having too much information it’s just too much going on. I have those turned off, they’re a good feature though, if you don’t have accessibility to an app it can turn it on, I haven’t found where I need it yet so it’s nice, you can turn it on, the robustness on per app, so that’s nice. Raqi, you were talking earlier about where you can use it, so i think it’s a good feature that you can turn it on and off, so that’s what I think about that.
Raqi:
I think every screen reader has been guilty at one time or another of having a problem with verbosity, and we can’t just, you know, ping Apple and voiceover for this. We had it with JAWS and others too, where they want to offer things—tutor messages and hints and help messages and it’s every screen readers way of trying to let the user have as much information as they can, but as we get more proficient, of course, that’s where it pays to start customizing or all that verbosity—after a while it’s like “Wait wait wait—what did it say? It just gave me a whole bunch of information and I didn’t—” I think especially for new users too much verbosity can be too much, but it’s great to have the option and the more customizability—is that a word? The more customizable I think the software is the more Apple is really opened up some of these things, and the more we see as developers start to put apps out there, it’ll be really interesting to see how much of this we can take advantage of and how much we can tailor to our own individual need case.
Serena:
Well, and I think it’s important to point out this snafu— Raqi, do you know what snafu stands for? We’ll make Jeff edit something later. We’ll have the listeners look up what snafu stands for.
Raqi:
Do they win a prize?
Serena:
I don’t remember but there is definitely a bleepable word in there.
Raqi:
Somebody will have Lady A spitting out the definition by the time you utter your next sentence.
Serena:
They can call us.
Jeff:
If you know what snafu means, give us a call at 612-367-6093. You can also leave us a message, give us some feedback and let us know if we can use your voice on the next podcast, we’d love to hear from you. And what does snafu stand for?
Raqi:
There you go.
Jeff:
I’ll fix that, I’ll fix that in editing.
Serena:
You’ll fix that in post-production. But since I have—this is where my, Jeff, you can just insert the soapbox here again.
[sound of person going up lots of steps]
Raqi:
Psst, there’s only three steps.
Jeff:
She’s really short.
Serena:
This is where I’m a little frustrated, and it’s very possible that I’m just missing something, but I’ve been all throughout these voiceover settings. Since I have the iPhone 10, it’s been very clear on different articles that I’ve been reading that the screen recognition feature is not intended for the phones prior to the 10S and the 10R. So, that’s all well and dandy but what’s happening to me, and you guys can Tweet us or let us know if this is happening to you too, is that it is automatically still recognizing images everywhere. Like, I’m talking even in the music app, the podcast app, it’s reading the artwork as you’re scrolling through along with the titles, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make it just not do it since I don’t have the voiceover recognition menu item, since I don’t have the newer phone, so that’s where it’s slowing me down pretty much everywhere in my phone.
Jeff:
Gotta watch what you asked for there, Serena.
Serena:
Well, it would be fine if—I guess I’m confused why that’s turned on by default without an option to turn it off, if it really wasn’t intended to work on the phone prior to 10S and 10R, that’s where I’m confused.
Jeff:
It is interesting that you have no tweakability on that I mean because we used to—I remember with 13, way long ago, on iOS 13, where it would say “Maybe button” or “Maybe back button.” Are you still getting that type of stuff on your 10?
Serena:
No, so you know how Facebook has that glitch where there’s a post there but it’s not really there? It’s no longer saying “Possibly,” it’s just reading what it thinks is there, and sometimes even when the post is visible with voiceover it’s even going to try to describe the picture, and I’m not talking about the Facebook automatic alt text, I’m talking it’s clear that iOS is putting its own recognition in there, and it’s sometimes—and this could be something that Facebook needs to update, but it’s reading it in just a very odd way and it’s even trying—as you scroll through you’ll catch snippets of the image that it’s trying to recognize from the post either before or after where you’re at, and then in the native apps, it’s reading it in a way that makes sense, it’s just so verbose—like if you’re scrolling through your albums it’s going to read you the artist, the name of the album, and then describe the picture of the album cover all in one sentence.
Jeff:
What you’re saying is that the Facebook accessibility team is sitting back going “Wow, we did a good job.”
Serena:
Well, and it’s so hard to demonstrate, maybe I’ll play it for you after we’re done here, it’s just different and it’s—especially since Facebook alt text is decent, especially when there’s text in the image. It’s almost like you’re getting it twice sometimes.
Jeff:
Oh I get it, yeah, because it’s reading it and then it’s going into the description and everything.
Serena:
Yeah, the iOS one is second, like it’s coming last—it’s the final thing that you hear so it’s just a lot.
Jeff:
And in your settings, you don’t have the ability to turn that off.
Serena:
I do not.
Raqi:
There’s no way to turn that off, that is so weird.
Serena:
I know, it’s super frustrating.
Raqi:
I just think that’s bizarre that you can’t—you know, you can turn recognize images off or whatever but you can’t…
Serena:
I can’t even turn that off, there’s a spot that it has navigate images but that doesn’t—toggling that on and off doesn’t change the behavior.
Jeff:
Who would think we would want a blinder screen reader?
Raqi:
A screen reader that talks less or gives less information about what’s on the screen—actually I think it’s not so much the information, I think it has more to do with the customizability and I have a feeling, and I could be completely wrong about this, I’m just speculating that, Serena, if it’s driving you crazy it’s gonna drive others crazy too. And of course that’s not good for business so I have a feeling that if it’s something that is correctable, easily correctable, that there’ll be a fix for it soon enough because it sounds like it’s really a showstopper, and I don’t know that the fix for everybody is going to be oh just upgrade your phone! Just go buy a new phone tomorrow-
Serena:
Exactly.
Raqi:
-it’s great for some people-
Serena:
-but it’s not realistic.
Raqi:
Exactly.
Jeff:
Yeah, I hate to think this way, but it seems like the screen recognition, the voiceover recognition, image recognition, it seems like, yeah, this is for the blind, for the visually impaired and all that but I have a hunch that if you can’t control the developers to make their apps accessible, let’s put this in there too. Which came first here, the horse or the cart, you know what I mean?
Raqi:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Is this really here for us or is it for developers to actually say “Hey, they’re doing it for us.” I hope that developers—you know, I’ve talked to the guy from Downcast, and he says you can go through there, and it’s really easy to set it up for accessibility, but I wonder if this is a crutch that they’ll just “Eh, we got it.”
Raqi:
Well, I mean, it’s a start, and if people complain and enough people complain, or the opposite, say that they like it, you know they’re going to get feedback, so I think we have to start somewhere and I hear exactly what you’re saying, this is that same argument about do we want people to know we’re running accessibility tools or not. I think it’s incredibly creepy to spy, but you know, to what extent is it helpful? So Apple’s put some tools in here and given the developer some guidelines, some of them will pay attention, some of them won’t, but I hope that some of them when they get good feedback will learn from the community and say “Hey, you know, I never really knew how this worked until I started getting reports from people,” and it’s an easy enough thing to customize, hopefully. Maybe having it there, as opposed to having them be something they have to write or create themselves or figure out how to implement.
Jeff:
Yeah, like squint mode or something, you know? Just tweak it back a little bit.
Raqi:
I’d rather have Apple say, “Here’s a slider, haven’t worked across the board, we’ll hold your hand it just works,” even if you’re a developer. Granted, it doesn’t teach the developer what’s needed necessarily but it’s a tool for them, just like any other tool that they’re—I don’t know what tools Swift implements, I’m just speculating kind of globally here, but I think whatever it takes to get them to implement, and be aware of the community.
Serena:
But wouldn’t it be nice if the tools that Apple gave the developers in the first place were universally designed-
Raqi:
Absolutely.
Serena:
-so that it didn’t even have to be a piece, you know? I mean Apple’s like “We need to find a way to make apps more accessible,” well, then make the things that they’re developing the apps on naturally accessible.
Raqi:
But then we get back down to sandboxing and why they do it and you know their whole model is…
Jeff:
It’s kind of like when you have kids, you know, you’ve got to stay between the lines—rainbows are red and flowers are blue, where developers are creating stuff from a bubble in their head and they’re using the code to do it, now all of a sudden someone says accessibility, then brakes go on and it’s like they had no idea. But it’s a start, I’m glad they’re doing it. Raqi, you’re talking about the—we were talking about the AirPod Pros on the headphone accommodations. There’s another thing that’s in there that has built in sound recognition-
Raqi:
Oh, sound recognition.
Jeff:
-so listening for these sounds like an alarm, a doorbell.
Raqi:
You can enable those or not.
Jeff:
Yeah, toggle them one on, a dog bark, a cat meow-
Raqi:
Smoke detector, siren, yeah.
Jeff:
Lori calling me for dinner.
Serena:
Oh, you’re gonna edit that out, aren’t you.
Raqi:
The madder she gets, the louder it gets, “Jeff!”
Jeff:
Yeah, lights flat. Well that doesn’t help me at all. But it’s kind of neat that they’re putting this stuff in there, because you know I’ve seen where they have particular dogs that come up and start licking someone or start barking at something if there certain indicators tell them to do it for someone with epilepsy or something, so it’s neat that they’re building some of this stuff in, especially the headphone accommodations like you were talking about to bring up those certain sounds that you may be missing— you don’t even know you’re missing them until you turn it on and you go through the steps. I think it’s really cool.
Raqi:
Yeah, it was a neat experience to walk outside with headphones on that let me—I mean I could hear the cars that were parked across the street, I could tell where they were parked. It was really fascinating. I don’t think I’ve heard like that since I was a little kid, you know?
Jeff:
Oh yeah.
Raqi:
It was like having a headphone amplifier only it was my typical little Apple AirPod Pros, it was like this wireless thing that I had been wearing, it was pretty—it was okay, it was fine, it was good, but holy smokes that turned it into something stellar just with the click of a couple of buttons, you know?
Jeff:
Yeah, if you could only have that control with the image recognition now. It’s like you’re saying, put some sliders in there.
Raqi:
Yeah.
Serena:
Stop it, Jeff.
Raqi:
Well, you just need to buy her a new phone, and keeping—you know, and hosting so she can be current and talk about trends, and in keeping with technology you just need to send her a Tech Abilities iPhone 10S.
Serena:
Thank you, Raqi, and then you need to send Raqi the newest braille displays.
Jeff:
You know what, I’ll just virtually send them both out right now, I just did.
Raqi:
They’re right here! Look how quickly they got here.
Serena:
We’re still waiting on those lattes.
Jeff:
Serena, I’m sorry to do this to you, but there’s one other feature that I set up long ago during the beta, it’s called Back Tap and you know, I like it, I like it because if I want to check on my control panel, I just double tap twice on the back of my phone, and it’s subtle, and it works. The triple tap I noticed—when I set my phone down awkwardly sometimes the triple tap lights up, but also my calendar is going off and I wonder what’s that up for? But it is kind of cool to have it because the control panel I think right now is, anyone who’s using iOS 14, the control panel, it’s a little tougher to find if you really want to do it, you know, the gesture is a little goofy right now but—so I set it up on there and I don’t know what I want to switch number three, the triple tap to but it’s kind of neat to have these options.
Serena:
What’s goofy about the control panel gesture? I haven’t even tried to go in because I so rarely need the control panel, but what’s goofy about the gesture now?
Jeff:
Well, it’s not really that difficult, after you practice a little bit, but basically you’ve got to be on the right side of your screen, go up and touch near the top, and then slide your finger down and bang, there’s the panel of the control center, but I don’t use it that often either, and I was thinking for the back tap double tap, what I wanted to use it for but I had to do something because I just want to try it and that’s what I set it up for, and some people set them up for shortcuts and everything that they have. I’m not a shortcut guy, I don’t go in and build too many shortcuts, I might change the gesture but I probably forgot about it already. I’m basically your basic kind of guy that likes things the way they are, but I do like the app library set-up a little bit right now I’m exploring it, especially bringing the widgets into it. And that’s kind of neat, but as soon as they screw up your homepage a little bit it’s like, okay, wait, muscle memory’s pissed off right now.
Raqi:
I was wondering how that would be.
Serena:
They’re a little different, for sure. I was playing with it a little bit, and I was able to do the stacked widgets, which is where you have two widgets, literally stacked on top of each other and you can do an action to cycle between them, and I had a little trouble with the actions because I think there’s a little bit of a glitch, where voiceover’s reading “New line” after just random texts in random places, so I had the music widget, and was trying to switch to I think the podcast widget, and it was not doing the action because it thought it was in a text field where it was reading the album title of a recently played album, so I’m sure that’ll get fixed soon but I struggled a little bit with that.
Jeff:
It is kind of neat though, to have these options to play with, because everyone likes to do everything—I knew someone that kept all their apps alphabetical throughout their whole entire phone. I tried that one time, and I was so-
Raqi:
Oh, you’re going to make me crazy, oh my god, just thinking about it, augh.
Jeff:
Every folder’s gone-
Raqi:
Just thinking about it hurts my soul.
Serena:
There’s no undo if you do that, too.
Jeff:
You can’t go back.
Serena:
And it takes so long to get your stuff back the way you want—it’s tedious.
Raqi:
Can you imagine—you ever do the old iTunes backups, back in the day and it would just—so, I’m one of those people that keeps everything in folders and it’s this old school mentality of directories, right, so I have just 16 folders on this page and 16—hundreds of apps and they’re all sorted into folders so it’s gonna be really hard for my brain to make this conversion, but, you know, back in the day you go searching, you do a backup and it might trash the folder setup and all of a sudden you disconnect from doing what you thought was a nice clean sync and you take the phone off and there’s, you know, 16 pages of apps, it still wasn’t able to redownload everything because it emptied 400 apps out of the folders and just threw them on there in random places, it used to be such a nightmare. I’m so glad not to have to go through all that sorting, just the thought makes me, oh man.
Jeff:
Well, the Apple library, which is at the back, so if you have five pages it’ll be on page six, and it’ll put it into these categories and the categories are like a four on a die—there’s four, and you can open that up and then they’re alphabetized so if you have 30 apps that are in productivity, there’ll be alphabeticalized and you can find them that way, or you can just go to your social, you know, mail is in productivity and I’m thinking, hm, really? It’s okay, I explored with it for a while, it’s there, it’s an option. I’m glad it’s an option, not forced upon me, and then I put a couple widgets in the front and it screwed up my front page, so I went smaller with it and you can put two smalls and it takes up two rows, or you can do a medium, and it will take up two rows all the way across, but if you do a large, depending on the widget, it could take up more than that but it kicks it to the next page. But it kicks two rows to the next page, it won’t kick like six apps icons to the next page, and then it will move that page that it kicked it to further down so they don’t scramble them together. I like that part of it.
Raqi:
That’s kind of nice, it keeps it linear.
Jeff:
Yeah, it does. And then if you pull them out and say, “Forget that, I don’t need that widget,” you know, widget like it’s a-
Serena:
You just made that sound like a bad word!
Raqi:
Son of a widget!
Jeff:
Widget!
Raqi:
That’s funny.
Serena:
I’m still trying to find the use case for him, because—Jeff and I were talking about this a little bit in pre-show and we were like “Yeah, we can put all these widgets here but why can’t I just swipe once and go to my today view and have the widgets there?”
Raqi:
That was my first thought when they said widgets I went “Oh like in the today view!” which I have all customized and widget-y and it’s got the things that I want to see in the order I want to see them and I thought, well that’s kind of cool except I think if you’re sighted it probably looks really fancy and I do like that no two home screens are gonna look the same. Same with watch faces, you know, we’re going to have so much customizing just because we do have so much individuality, that you can turn it into whatever you want it to be and I do think that’s kind of a nice thing, but I have yet to see the merit of most widgets, I think there’ll be a couple that really display enough information to make them really cool but I’m still searching.
Jeff:
Like I put the calendar widget on there, and then I started realizing if I touch the calendar icon and I do have an appointment that day it’ll say “One appointment,” I mean why would I have to put the widget out there, you know? Sometimes I wonder. So what I was thinking of doing is going to about page three or four and just start lining up the widgets how I want them but when I go-
Raqi:
Just tap the back of your phone instead.
Jeff:
Yeah, there you go.
Raqi:
Didn’t you set that to your calendar? Just double tap your phone.
Jeff:
Well, I’m just trying different things and it’s like you want to do it, but I find myself going back to what I was doing five weeks ago, four weeks ago or whatever, you know, when I started the beta and stuff, so, I like the good old muscle memory and just doing what I do every day. Productivity and this changing it up, I don’t know, I don’t know, I might not be a widget guy. How are you, Serena?
Serena:
Well, if you keep saying widget like that of course you’re not going to be a widget guy. Oh, my goodness.
Raqi:
You’re just a widget guy.
Serena:
Nobody wants to be that kind of a widget!
Jeff:
Jeez, was I that bad?
Raqi:
Stop being a widget!
Serena:
You definitely had a negative connotation with that word
Jeff:
Widget anonymous club. But, see, they did other things in accessibility, for sign language, [unintelligible].
Serena:
That’s very cool.
Raqi:
That’s cool. Yeah. That’s neat.
Jeff:
Yeah, I’ve been in groups where we were filming stuff for speaking in sign language, the interpreters were there, deaf-blind, hard of hearing, and I was the odd person out, and I never felt so lost in a room full of people, communicating fully, and I could not-
Raqi:
Have no idea how to follow it.
Jeff:
Yeah, so I’m sure they’ve run into situations too so this is really cool, how they’re doing that. I’m always waiting for some day where gizmos and gadgets and stuff, if they’re—do you remember Thing from The Addams Family. The hand?
Raqi:
I forgot about the Thing!
Jeff:
Yeah, just think if you had two Things, they came out of a box and they could sign to you.
Raqi:
So you could always have signing hands with you.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Raqi:
Oh my gosh.
Jeff:
Like instead of hiring an interpreter you can set that in front of the—yeah, I don’t know.
Raqi:
[starts singing the Addams Family theme]
Serena:
It’s funny that you say that, but I think the next step—with the fact that on FaceTime it’s smart enough to recognize when somebody is using sign language, it’s not just—because some people gesture a lot when they talk but for it to recognize, oh, this is sign language, I don’t think we’re too far from that being another translation piece of the iOS, I really don’t. Could you imagine that? I mean, I think that the communication barrier between an individual that’s visually impaired and an individual that speaks ASL is massive, and it gets really difficult unless there is an interpreter and you can type back and forth, but it’s not the same. Imagine if there was an automatic translation of sign language and things like that.
Raqi:
That would be fabulous.
Serena:
Amazing.
Raqi:
Yeah, yeah. It’d be great.
Jeff:
Yeah, that would be.
Raqi:
At least in a lot of instances it would bridge the gap, you know, and we have—already we can interpret spoken language so it’s not a much greater leap, really, in that direction to think about being able to interpret ASL.
Jeff:
You know, another area that I think they really did a lot of good work in that I haven’t totally explored but I’m starting to wrap myself around it is in the Messages app, you know, right away I pinned nine people, right away, I have nine friends so it was easy to do.
Serena:
Is our Tech Abilities conversation pinned? Because it’s pinned on my device.
Jeff:
Well, there you go.
Serena:
You didn’t answer the question.
Raqi:
Notice that he avoided the question.
Serena:
Mm-hm.
Raqi:
You see that?
Serena:
So we’re not important enough to him, Raqi. We didn’t even make the top nine.
Raqi:
He’s quickly going and pinning, he’ll say “We have 10 friends!”
Jeff:
No, no, no, no, I just wanted to explain—Serena, you are pinned. Raqi, um, you didn’t make it yet.
[sad violin music plays]
Raqi:
Oh, oh!
Serena:
You’re such a jerk, you’re such a jerk!
Jeff:
I’m sorry.
Raqi:
How many years have I known you? I’m devastated now. I’m crushed. I’m sad.
Jeff:
But with all the conversation—the group that we had was really neat-
Serena:
You should probably pin that one.
Jeff:
I was able to make a group and make a name with it and put a logo on there, T-A, Tech Abilities, right there. Now we’re somebody, folks, we’re somebody in our group, and the things we can do in the group—like Serena, you came back to something that I sent earlier and sent me a message responding to that even though we had went further down, and it came up on me as a subcategory conversation going on, and I don’t think Raqi would have even gotten that one.
Serena:
I am curious, Raqi—so, it’s-
Raqi:
I did have a mix-up in my messages. I was trying to figure it out, what the deal was, because you responded to something of hers, and yet it showed up in our Tech Abilities thread.
Serena:
Because Jeff didn’t reply to my reply, is what happened. So I had replied to something where he was like “Hey go check your AirPods firmware” and do this and that, and I replied to that and he replied a couple times but then-
Raqi:
Yeah, yeah.
Serena:
Towards the end of him texting he must have exited the reply thread, and then it replied to the whole group, so I am curious, though, if the first initial replies, if it only went to Jeff, or if you got a notification too, because it’s not like it’s a secret, it’s all—so it only went to him.
Raqi:
I only saw his comment about—there were some comments about AirPods, there were like six comments back and forth.
Serena:
Those were the replies, so you were seeing them.
Raqi:
All of a sudden he segwayed to saying something else, they were like two messages at the bottom of the thread, and he was saying something totally unrelated to you about, I don’t know what he said even, it’s the last couple lines of the message, I thought “What is he talking about?”
Serena:
It was about the widgets
Raqi:
Yeah and I went looking like, where did this start?
Serena:
Because he didn’t reply. Yeah, because he sent it to the whole group.
Jeff:
Oh yeah, well it’s new-
Raqi:
And then I got lost in there, I’m like, oh, I hate this, he’s replying to something but I cannot see what she said to him, to make—why is his reply showing up? It’s got to be in the thread, maybe I don’t have focus on the whole thread.
Serena:
It was Jeff’s fault.
Jeff:
You know why that is, Raqi, when you’re in a group, don’t whisper, and she was whispering in my ear so you couldn’t hear it.
Raqi:
That’s because you ostracize me to the bottom. I’m not even in the top nine, that’s what it is. I’m just devastated.
Jeff:
I’m going to unpin that Serena there, Raqi, I’m going to have to learn how to unpin now.
Serena:
Well, and it only lets you pin nine people.
Raqi:
Oh it does, there’s a limit.
Serena:
It’s a limit.
Raqi:
Interesting.
Jeff:
Okay, but here’s the catch. When you go into your messages your latest one is near the top, right?
Serena:
It is but there’s been times—like, I don’t text my husband a whole lot, especially since we’re, I’m working from home a lot and he’s home a lot, like we’re not texting each other. But when I want to text him I don’t want to have to be able to scroll through 29 other messages to get to him because-
Jeff:
Okay, that works, that works.
Serena:
-that’s an important person in my life, you know?
Jeff:
Fair.
Raqi:
It’s like favorites in the phone app, that’s really what it does, only yours has a limit but all it is is a quick way to hit without, you know, your boss and your notifications and your, you know, other messages showing up and making it so you have to scroll down 20 messages to get to the people you want to see.
Jeff:
Yeah, but here’s the thing. I got nine pinnies up there, what should I call them? Pinnies?
Serena:
That’s a whole different thing.
Jeff:
I got nine pinned people up there, so when I go into messages, I have to go down to the list if one of those aren’t the ones that sent it. so I’d have to go through the nine pinned people to get to the—so, I, see, I just did the nine to see how far I could go and what message I would get when I tried to do the 10th one. So now I’ll unpin and just go—probably go back to three, just like in WhatsApp, that’s all you can put is three people up there and I think I’ll go back to that, because it does get cumbersome because you’re always jumping down because, you know, I don’t know, it’s—you’ll always be skipping your husband there, Serena, because you don’t text him much, but you always have to go through that one now.
Raqi:
All nine to get to him.
Serena:
I only have two pinned. I have our Tech Abilities group one and I pinned that today because I knew it would be very active and I have a feeling it’ll continue to be active, because Raqi, as you probably noticed, I just send the stream of consciousness. Like, I will just text whatever I’m thinking-
Raqi:
Well, I felt bad, I sent this paragraph and it’s just because I had a keyboard in front of me, and after I sent it I thought, boy, that’s really evil to do to people that are sending on their-
Serena:
No, it’s fine!
Raqi:
-mobile phones, I just had a keyboard so she got a novel.
Jeff:
You mean-
Serena:
No, that doesn’t bother me at all.
Jeff:
-a true, complete full thought instead of a soundbite? Come on.
Raqi:
Right? Braille screen input, you know.
Serena:
You mean an accidental soundbite when you thought you were dictating?
Jeff:
Oh yeah.
Serena:
Jeff?
Raqi:
That too.
Jeff:
Well, that’s the other feature, that you can use Siri to send an audio message, and then it will say, “Recording,” so I sent it, and I was doing it for effect, like I was dictating like we’re doing back and forth, but then it’s audio, so that was really cool. I kind of like that, it’s kind of like a WhatsApp, in a sense, I mean-
Serena:
A lot easier to do
Jeff:
-I sent it to the group, so there you go.
Serena:
Yeah, how did you—what was the—did you just say since you had named the group Tech Abilities, did you, is that what you used? Very cool, I wondered.
Jeff:
“Hey S-lady, audio message Tech Abilities.”
Serena:
Now you make that sound negative.
Raqi:
I’ve think you’ve been able to do that for a while though.
Serena:
Not with an audio message, though.
Raqi:
Are you sure?
Serena:
Yeah, it’s brand new this time. You could always text the group, like dictating, but you could never use-
Raqi:
Are you sure you couldn’t just say “Hey-”
Jeff:
Do you think we would be talking about new releases-
Raqi:
“Text Jeff Thompson?” No, I think you’ve been able to do that-
Jeff:
Oh, no, you can text, yeah.
Serena:
You can text, but not the—like, he recorded an audio clip.
Jeff:
Audio message.
Raqi:
Oh, audio, audio, I—never mind. Okay, I’m stupid, it’s been a long day, I’m sorry, audio, oh my god where’s my latte?
Serena:
It’s still virtually on its way.
Raqi:
You’re right. Jeff, man, you don’t pin me, you take forever getting my latte, it’s going to be an iced latte. Well, maybe not out here, I don’t think anything stays cold out here.
Serena:
It’s gonna be spoiled.
Jeff:
Hey, it’s 2020, come on, give me a break.
Raqi:
We’ll give you a pass. You’re right, audio, that’s interesting.
Serena:
I thought that was—I mean it sounded pretty clear too. Yeah, I think it was really cool that you’re able to do that, because I don’t, I don’t use the audio feature a lot, even—remember when you converted me to WhatsApp and I would send Jeff like audio messages where I’d be like “Hey Jeff, period.”
Raqi:
“How are you, question mark.” Oh my god.
Serena:
And I was like wait, this is an audio message. It’s just so weird because you’re just so used to doing things a certain way, it’s that muscle memory.
Jeff:
Period, question mark. That’s always funny when you hear those. I think they really did a great job, you know, that there’s something else in there, where you can actually put a person’s name like you’re in a huge group. I don’t see myself using it that much but you can put your name in there and it’ll look for a mention of your name, it’ll highlight that for you. I don’t know if you can have a sound for the highlight or anything, I doubt it, it might be in green or something, but I don’t know how big they think these group messages are going to be. I mean I don’t see a group message with 30 people, texting back and forth like this.
Serena:
Well, I think it’s designed because sometimes people mute group messages, especially large ones where there’s a lot of things where you just read it but don’t want to get alerted 29 times, because it’s an active group, and I think—like, Jeff if you were to have muted our Tech Abilities one, but then I tagged you in it, it would make the alert push through. I believe that that’s what it-
Raqi:
It gives you a notification.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Raqi:
But does it come up and say, “Jeff Thompson has just mentioned you in a conversation,” or does it just give you a little green squiggly line or something? So does it—is it an actual notification that you get? I haven’t played with this either so I guess I should.
Serena:
And I don’t know because I tagged Jeff a few times, just to try it out, and I don’t know if it did anything different or said anything different.
Raqi:
It’s in his notifications.
Jeff:
I wanted to have my Apple Watch squirt at me or something, because-
Serena:
Oh my goodness.
Jeff:
-if I’m in those big groups like that I’m not really paying attention to them. I never liked when they say all those phone numbers, you know, “You got a message from [makes phone number noise].”
Raqi:
Oh, I hate that, because you know then yours is probably showing up for them too.
Jeff:
Yeah. So, if anybody’s out there thinking about sending a group text to 700 people, don’t do it.
Raqi:
Hide the phone number.
Serena:
The one thing I did not like about messages is I can—this is Serena complaining about it being too verbose—is it changed it where it’s—everyone’s name is a heading. So—and maybe I can change it where it doesn’t read any heading, I don’t know, I’ll have to go look in the verbosity settings but as you’re scrolling through the messages it’ll be like “Jeff Thompson, heading level three. Raquel Gomez, heading level three.” Like it’s added more and I get that because it was saying it can make it easier for you to quickly jump to where you’re at. I didn’t notice it being any quicker than just scrolling up a page or two, but I’m not sure if you noticed that Raqi, when you’re going through and there’s a lot of headings in the Messages app now.
Raqi:
Scrolling. Yeah, I found it incredibly convoluted and I think it’s probably just user error and I need to go play with it a little bit, but it was our conversation that I started with so I had a group there. With one person it’s fine, the conversation goes back and forth and you can jump around, but as soon as we get three people it’s like, there are replies that are truncated, that I just can’t see where they started. I can tell I hadn’t spent a lot of time with it, so actually I like the ability to jump by heading, if it’s gonna mix up replies. It looks like it’s time to thread replies, but if somebody replies in the wrong place or something you have to be a little more vigilant, so I’m just not sure that I know what I’m doing yet. And I think some of it’s operator error, but it seemed kind of messy to me, so ask me next week and I’m sure I’ll think it’s great but I’m just not there yet with messages.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s just some changes to something that we use quite a bit. So, how we employ it in the future we don’t know yet, really. It’s brand new, and so is password monitoring, and this was really cool—I went into my passwords, you know, and you got to do the facial recognition and all that but then there’s a new section at the top—password monitoring. So, if you have a password that is overused on various sites and stuff, it’ll go through this list of passwords that could be compromised easily, and for some reason, or it’s been in some database that this password has been compromised somewhere, and it just makes you wonder when you see that, the word “Compromised.” I mean, oh, you know, it got me going, so I started a little process and I’ve always wanted to do this, is update my passwords and everything so it got me going on, and it’s really easy to use. Once you go into your password you can find it and tap on it and take note of what they’re saying about it and realize that certain password, you know, 123456 is not a good one to use because it’s sequential or something. So they might point that out to you so you can go through it and it’s kind of neat to just bring it to your attention in a new way and I kind of liked it, I used it.
Serena:
You mean that using password 123456 is no longer secure for you, Jeff?
Jeff:
Yeah, you better change that, too.
Raqi:
Did you get pawned, Jeff?
Jeff:
That is kind of neat that, you know, you might have used something back in the day, and some of these websites are—like Audioboom, that popped up like oh, wow, I haven’t been there for a long, long time.
Raqi:
That’s funny. And you just don’t know, you know, maybe a password was used multiple times but you forgot, maybe you used it five years ago and, you know, so it is—it’s a good thing to kind of keep those clean, I love the password manager and the whole concept of auto generating, you know, complex passwords and stuff like that. I think it’s fantastic.
Jeff:
If one of those companies, way back, someone compromised their stuff, and they found that sequence, they could start running in-
Raqi:
It’s out there your password’s out there.
Jeff:
-they’ll start putting in a, there’ll be an algorithm and they’ll start feeding all this stuff and that’s how they get you because you signed up for some gift card making software, long ago-
Raqi:
And put a password in.
Jeff:
-and here you are using it today on something else, so you’ve got to update these things and I’m going through that process myself. It’s long, painful, strenuous and this is secret stuff, we got a two factor authorization and then you got to do this. I’m getting good at remembering six digits quick though, you know.
Raqi:
That’s good. That’s good.
Serena:
Well you know, if you’re doing it on your phone, though, it’ll autofill it on the—right above the keyboard. It’ll have it where all you have to do is tap it and it’ll insert the digits, especially if it texted it to you.
Jeff:
Yeah, if got it from messages, yeah.
Raqi:
By the prediction boxes, yeah, I also-
Serena:
I love that.
Raqi:
-password for Jeff Thompson at blah di blah, and you just have it on and it’ll autofill, I love that whole password manager in Safari. Whether you use an external one or not I think everybody should use password protection, because it is so easy.
Jeff:
The other thing that came up was sign in with Apple, I used it for the first time, and it was just a cheesy little app that I had on here that I had to update and, wow. I did sign in with Apple and it gave me this weird email address and-
Raqi:
But it worked
Jeff:
-but it doesn’t know me, and they don’t know me or anything like that but it works, so I like that, where you can use that full email or whatever and it works pretty slick. At first I was wondering.
Serena:
That was supposed to come out in ‘13, right?
Jeff:
Yeah, with a bunch of other things. What happened to the air tags, people?
Raqi:
Where are the air tags? They’re with the air power. I know they are.
Serena:
They’re never making it, they will never see the light of day.
Raqi:
They’re in the air house, waiting to be shipped—where are the air tags? I even saw some leaks and rumors and, oh gosh, you know the rumors, everybody’s just making them up like crazy before the event, and I saw one the night before the event “Air tags are coming but they don’t come with key chains,” people were all over and wildly speculating but so far…
Serena:
And no HomePod Mini.
Raqi:
No HomePod Mini, no air power.
Serena:
No Mac-
Raqi:
No new Mac, where’s my Mac, I’m waiting for my Mac, where’s my Mac?
Jeff:
Air tags, when they do come out, I hope they don’t come out with approximate location.
Serena:
That would be obnoxious.
Jeff:
I like that setting, because you know, you got your weather apps and stuff like that, they don’t need to know your doorstep. All they have to know is your zip code basically, so having your weather app have access to your approximate location is much better than having them know where your backdoor key is hidden, exact location.
Serena:
So what I’m hearing is that Jeff hides his door key somewhere.
Jeff:
Well no, I’m just saying, some of these apps, like why do you need to know where I am, you know? Like Home Depot.
Raqi:
Especially apps that don’t have anything to do with assisting you from getting from one point to the other right, maybe they sell you things and they don’t need to know where you are! Here’s my credit card, just sell me my stuff, send it where I tell you, you don’t need to know where I’m tagging in from or located.
Jeff:
It’s demo time, let’s go in and check out how precise location, or approximate location, can be determined by the choice you make, and you can find this in location services. So let’s start out by going to settings.
Siri:
Settings.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Settings.
Jeff:
Then we’ll swipe down to privacy.
Siri:
Privacy button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Privacy.
Jeff:
And now we’ll go to location services.
Siri:
Location services on button.
Jeff:
We’ll single finger double tap.
Siri:
Location alerts button.
Jeff:
When we swipe down we’ll find out a little information about what Location Services is all about.
Siri:
Location services uses GPS, Bluetooth, and crowdsourced WiFi hotspot and cell tower locations to determine your approximate location, location services settings also applied to your Apple Watch.
Jeff:
And these settings can be set for each particular app. So let’s swipe down.
Siri:
Aira.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Aira requested your location in the past, while using button.
Jeff:
Single finger double tap.
Siri:
Allow location access heading.
Jeff:
Now, Aira is a great example here of why you may want precise location, and while you’re using the app. So let’s swipe down to these options, single finger swiping left to right.
Siri:
Never. Ask next time. Selected, while using the app. Always. App explanation, Aira needs your location to help you find nearby places that sponsor Aira minutes.
Jeff:
And with one more swipe we’ll determine whether they’ll have approximate, or precise location.
Siri:
Precise location on allows apps to use your specific location with the setting off. Apps can only determine your approximate location.
Jeff:
Once in a while, go through this list of apps, and see who’s locating you when and where. You may be surprised.
Jeff:
And I have to wonder about this, with Apple putting all this, like, squashed down, kind of hiding, putting up a facade between us and the third party people, but Apple still knows all this stuff, it’s like fear the big brother for us.
Serena:
But their vault—Apple’s evolved, like they have fought the police to not unlock criminal’s iPhones. I trust them more than I trust, say, Google with my data, you know?
Raqi:
Oh yeah, I think this is branding, it’s really just a word and it’s just a company, and we want to feel like, you know, they produce this great wonderful hardware, and they’re taking our security so seriously and they’ve got our back, but we spend a lot of money with them, so, you know, if I see a familiar brand I think, ooh, I want that one, so I don’t know. Is Apple really better than Google? I mean, I’m all in on it so I don’t know, thousands and thousands of dollars later and I’m pretty ensconced in the ecosystem, but is one really better I don’t know, I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder.
Jeff:
Do they have a sky blue tablet?
Raqi:
Or a green one.
Jeff:
Rose gold-
Raqi:
And a blue one.
Jeff:
Space gray.
Raqi:
Aluminum.
Jeff:
Silver.
Raqi:
Gold
Serena:
There’s a red one.
Raqi:
Red one!
Serena:
I think they said that they would have a product red one.
Raqi:
A product red one, interesting.
Jeff:
Another thing for developers in iOS 14, there’s a lot of stuff in here that we are using, and developers are working on, that will be coming out later, is their augmented reality, and what I was getting from this is they’ll be able to pinpoint certain things like in a museum, a location, which sounds like GPS, but from an exact location on earth for a sculpture. So then you can identify it and label it and add to all that stuff that Serena’s getting for her recognition right now.
Raqi:
All that verbose detail that you need to have with exhibits and stuff.
Serena:
Jeff, that’s number three, that’s number three.
Jeff:
And that’s why when the 12 has come out of the top dog, the big 12 is going to have the LIDAR I believe, and that’s, you know, just like having the 10 right now—you’re missing out on a couple things but if you don’t have the top dog 12 when more developers come out with augmented reality are you going to be going “Aww.”
Raqi:
Or is it going to take a year, that’s the thing, is it going to be something where you think oh, I wish I got that one and just broke down and done it or is it gonna take them a while to get on board?
Jeff:
iPhone 13. Will there be a 13?
Serena:
But the 13 wouldn’t be until like 2024 or something, at this rate.
Raqi:
2023 before the next one.
Jeff:
Oh man, where’s the optimism? We already got the—well, we don’t have the 12.
Raqi:
We don’t have the 12, we should have had it, but we don’t have it. They don’t even have a date.
Serena:
Isn’t the augmented reality also something they introduced in iOS 13, I mean it just feels like they were like “Oh, look at all these cool things,” but some of these things, I remember them talking about it last year.
Raqi:
And the new iPads got a lot of, you know-
Serena:
-that I’ve had does look really cool.
Raqi:
It does and I don’t even necessarily want an iPad. I thought ooh, I’d like to play with that for an afternoon just to see, and I like that they’re moving toward USBC. I think they have to. So hot mess or not, it looks like they’re gonna go that way, so there are good things about it, but-
Jeff:
Yeah, I was just thinking about—you’re talking about different devices now, like the AirPod Pros are supposed to hand off to each other now. Serena, you do that with your HomePod, in a sense that you’re listening to something but I’ve never seen it do it with AirPod Pros that you could switch devices, that’d be kind of cool.
Serena:
I’m definitely going to test it tonight, to see what that looks like and because it’s paired to both my iPad and my phone and it’s always been—I’m not sure how you guys have it it’s always a pain in the butt, I normally listen to this on my iPhone but today I want to listen to my—so I’ve had to go into Bluetooth settings and all these acrobats to get in there and so I’m curious to see what it does if I start using my iPad, if it’ll automatically connect it to it or if it’ll still try to go to my iPhone.
Jeff:
With AirPods too you can hook up two sets to your Apple TV 4 now. So that’s—but you have to be running the TV-14 so update to that and you can connect up to-
Raqi:
Wait, two sets? Oh, so people can watch—oh, nice.
Jeff:
Serena, does your husband have a set of AirPods?
Serena:
You know he does, because I’ve told you the stories, but I’m trying to figure out the use case for it, because if you’re both sitting there watching TV-
Jeff:
Oh, he has your old pair, okay.
Serena:
-but if you’re both sitting there watching TV and you’re watching the same thing, what’s the purpose, unless—I mean I could see if you, with hearing accommodations and things like that, that totally makes sense but, I don’t see myself putting-
Raqi:
Most other people that don’t want to watch
Serena:
Yeah, but I don’t know, like, it’s a TV-
Jeff:
Unless you’re enjoying the spatial audio.
Serena:
That could be a part of it, maybe, but I’m just trying to figure out the use case.
Jeff:
Maybe Trey doesn’t want to hear the audio description.
Serena:
But we wouldn’t be having the same stream, it would be the same sound going to both I’m going to both-
Raqi:
-two earbuds, unless two people want to listen and someone else is doing something else, but it’s a really far-fetched-
Serena:
The other person can go do something else, you know?
Raqi:
Yeah. We’re watching TV, get out of here, majority rules, we’ve got the TV.
Jeff:
It would be cool if you could send out two signals, one to the amphitheater you know, your house, you know, your surround or whatever-
Raqi:
And one to the phone-
Jeff:
And watch what we wish for, right?
Raqi:
See, I can see a use case for this. I’m thinking of my friend who, he and his wife are both blind and they raised six sighted kids, and I know they were in kind of a small space when they did it and I know he and his wife used to have headphones all over the house, and kids would use them because they would watch TV and be all over the living room, and the parents would be—it’s blind people, right, so they had a lot of audio and stuff. I could see where two people might want to share an audio source but not necessarily play it with the rest of the room, but it’s not a typical use case. I don’t see, usually it’s, you know, let the whole party tap in and connect their devices if they want to. It’s not usually a headphone thing where two people are gonna want to connect to the same source, but who knows? Maybe there’s a use case we’re just not thinking of, so I don’t want to speculate too much because I know there are some really unique scenarios out there, where it might be helpful.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Raqi:
Is that just media, right? What is it, like you could do it for two people or I could say to Aira, so if you go somewhere with another blind person you could-
Serena:
Well that-
Jeff:
-just talking about the Apple TV.
Raqi:
Oh, Apple TV, I’m sorry-
Serena:
But the feature that you’re talking about, I believe iOS 13 did allow that, where you could, I’m pretty sure, I have to double check, I feel like you could always connect two different AirPods to an iPhone or an iPod or something, like share your audio, if that makes sense.
Raqi:
I know couples that would split them, they would take—one would take the right one and one would take the left one.
Serena:
I think you can actually have two distinctive sets share the audio.
Raqi:
Interesting.
Serena:
And I see plenty of use cases for that, like on a laptop or iPad or a mobile device because you could be out in public doing whatever, you don’t—you want to share that, maybe you’re in a waiting room or whatever, but where I’m stuck is when you’re just watching TV.
Raqi:
TV, yeah, TV is a little bit, I don’t know, it’s got to be-
Jeff:
We’ll see.
Raqi:
Somebody’ll write in right now with the best use case for that scenario.
Jeff:
612-367-6093, you can also leave us a message, give us some feedback and let us know if we can use your voice on the next podcast, we’d love to hear from you.
Raqi:
There you go. Send a message.
Jeff:
We’ll send you a virtual latte.
Raqi:
You might get it by next year.
Serena:
He’s just giving virtual lattes out right and left.
Jeff:
Hey, they’re virtually free so why not.
Serena:
Can you see them? Can you even see them, Jeff?
Jeff:
No, but you can’t see the photos either, but you can capture them now and that’s a neat feature.
Raqi:
I love this. I love this, I love this!
Jeff:
It’s a little more cumbersome than I wanted it to be, but you go into your photos, you tap on one, you open it up and then you go to the photo where it automatically starts describing camper, trees, car, or whatever it says-
Serena:
Which is what all of Jeff’s photos say.
Raqi:
A camper, a lake, lake shore.
Jeff:
You can flick into more details and then swipe and add captions so you can start labeling these. What I like about it is, if you start labeling them, the captions on them, you can get rid of all those other photos
Raqi:
Your screenshot—I went in there the other day and I had 30 Amtrak tickets in my screenshot that I accidentally took as a screenshot when I was buying the tickets or accidentally hitting the button by accident, you know, you go to hit the volume button and you hit the power by mistake and I forget to go clean them up, 30 screenshots and they’re all Amtrak.
Jeff:
Is there pocket lint in there too?
Raqi:
It’s crazy. It’s crazy, crazy. I love this because typically the captions, they haven’t been—you couldn’t preserve your tags, you could label them of course, but that metadata wasn’t preserved across the board, so the minute you upgraded or moved them to a different platform and moved them back you’d lose your tagging and this is so wonderful because of course, you know, blind people love to keep photos too, but it’s really hard to show them to a sighted person if you can’t remember what’s in the picture. So, I love this. I think this is really cool.
Jeff:
The other thing is voice memos had a big update and I really like this one. Not only can you now put your files in folders, create folders in there, but you can also—if you go find a file that you’ve recorded something and you play it, and you hear there’s a big background floor noise coming on, like a big hiss or a fan going, you can now hit Edit, hit play and then press enhanced and it knocks out the whole floor noise. So it does a sampling of it and it just knocks it out and then you can save that version of it, so-
Raqi:
That’s pretty cool.
Jeff:
What’s really cool is you can take—say I have someone wanting to put something onto a podcast, and they send me a voice memo. I bet you I could open it in voice memos, enhance it and take out the background noise.
Serena:
Now that’s a really cool use case for that. I was just thinking when I was—back in the day when I was in college and I just had that, I think it was the Olympia recorder that was not even really accessible, you just kind of guessed which folder your stuff was in. I’m surprised it took them this long to add folders to voice memos but it’s huge, because it’s going to help a lot of students, I think too.
Raqi:
Did they enable stereo recording finally, finally, a rumor has been there that iOS 14 was going to enable it on Apple and native apps, and you wouldn’t have to go and create a video and then save the audio and go through all these antics, just—I know it’s fake stereo and I know it’s not genuine stereo for all the people who want to say it’s not xy and it’s not true stereo and this and that, but there are all these mics in the iPhone, and it would be really nice if we could have what Android has and at least be able to open up an app and begin to record with that without having to go through all these antics and conversions just to get a stereo audio file. Is it still mono? My fingers are crossed, both hands my fingers are crossed.
Jeff:
I would have to verify, I didn’t see anything that said it was stereo, mostly the microphones I see that you hook up to them, other than the binaural where the Olympus would come in handy-
Raqi:
Oh yeah, they can connect binaurals too but I’m frustrated that the iPhone has, you know, multiple mics, and still we can’t just flip it sideways and make a decent stereo recording on the fly without connecting external hardware, it’s been a pet peeve of mine for years now. I keep waiting for them to fix it.
Jeff:
I’m a lover of post-production, but if they would turn that enhance on so when you’re recording, no matter where you are, that would be kind of cool—at least have the option to turn it on during your recording if you know it’s going to be there, instead of having to go to and go through the hoops and make a new recording with the enhanced feature turned on so that’s something. But then, you know, you might want to hear that clock ticking, just like, some people have been missing out on.
Raqi:
I was just intrigued by how seriously loud it was, I thought oh my god, it’s going through two walls and a door and I can hear the thing, it was kind of creepy really.
[creepy music and clock ticking sounds]
Jeff:
So that’s a neat thing for a recorder, and you’re right, Apple really hasn’t done much with that for a long time, so it’s well overdue to improve upon the recording ability, especially with so many people out there during this pandemic that are sending in recordings from home, you know, and iPhone, I think the iPhone has one of the best microphones for a handheld device. It’s pretty good. Back to the Apple event, Time Flies.
Serena:
But it really doesn’t.
Jeff:
No, we dragged on to this point, and I tell you I’m never gonna get that hour back. I was excited to see the blood monitoring, blood monitor.
Serena:
Blood alcohol.
Jeff:
Blood oxygen monitoring.
Serena
Oxygen! This whole time I interpreted it as blood alcohol. I was like “That doesn’t even make sense, how is that possible?” I’m so dumb.
Raqi:
That’s funny, that’s funny.
Serena:
Now it’s way more intriguing, especially during cold and flu season. That’s actually a really big deal.
Jeff:
Yeah, I don’t know if 95 is a good rating but it seems like everybody on the show had a reading of 95 oxygen.
Serena:
That is good. Yeah, anything like 92 and above is what most people are.
Jeff:
So, you know, people are monitoring this health stuff and I use it for the health thing but sometimes, honestly, I have the iPhone 5, I notice it, not on me but sometimes I’m halfway through my day, and then it says “Your rings are usually further along, Jeff.”
Serena:
Did you say you have the iPhone 5? Did you mean the Apple Watch Series 5?
Jeff:
Apple Watch Series 5.
Serena:
Like if you’re still rocking an iPhone 5, my god. It doesn’t even work.
Jeff:
It doesn’t even have walkie talkie. Do I recommend anybody getting the Apple Watch Series 6 or the SE for 299, 399 starting at, for the series 6? I don’t know, I have to say my personal experience with having a watch is you personalize it yourself, you grow into it, I think we’ve mentioned that before, it’s nothing that I can say yeah, you’re gonna love it. It’s an experience, and after you have one for I would say four, five, six months, you start to use it in a certain way that you get used to. It’s nothing that you take out of the box and ask someone “How do I set this up?” Well, it’s a long process really, of how you incorporate the companion.
Serena:
Speaking of taking it out of the box, they removed the bricks out of all of the boxes for the Apple Watches, did you catch that? They were like “We figure everyone already has one so we’re going to charge you the same amount but not give you this piece of it too.”
Jeff:
So, how does it hook up, are they hooking it up with a magnetic circle?
Raqi:
They give you the USB cable, with the…
Serena:
Yeah, you still get the magnetic circle, but just not the brick because they said they figure everyone has enough.
Jeff:
There’s enough bricks in the world for everybody.
Raqi:
Even the landfill.
Serena:
They better not do that with the iPhone.
Raqi:
I think that’s the plan actually, to do it with the iPhone.
Serena:
Oh, that’s frustrating.
Raqi:
Originally that was what I heard they were going to do with it, and they did it with the watch. I hope not, eventually we’re migrating toward USBC for everything. And so I think there’ll come a time when they just will stop bundling the charger there too and allowing people to—we won’t know till we get it but I think the rationale is that everybody has a couple, and I kind of cringed when I first heard this I thought oh gosh, I’m going to go pay all this money for this thing, but then I realized, you know, I think I leave every Apple Watch and iPhone charger in the box, so that when the day comes that I go to flip it and sell it and do my upgrading—the last two or three iterations of the iPhone I don’t think I’ve even taken that little brick out of the box, I just left it in there with the cable wrapped up because I have so many of them that it just makes it that much cleaner when I go to box it up again and sell it to have the original accessory. I know it’s probably been since maybe the first iPhone SE that I’ve even taken that charger out of the box so I really—to be fair, as much as I kind of want to nitpick it’s a really inexpensive part, if I need one I’ll probably go buy something that’s a little bit larger, a little bit faster and maybe can charge multiple devices anyway, so I guess I’m not as upset about it when I realized that mine tend to stay in their boxes too.
Serena:
And I’m weird, I do unbox them, because I’ve had them fail, because they don’t last forever. So we’ve had some that are like, we’re like “Why is this not charging?” and then we’ve narrowed it down to the fact that it’s the brick so we’ve had to throw some of them away. And I think the brick that came with the iPhone 11 Pro, I believe that one has a faster charging capacity than the normal bricks do, and then obviously the ones that come with the iPads are totally different than the regular bricks. So-
Jeff:
I love those, I use them for my iPhones all the time-
Raqi:
Me too, iPhone chargers, I do too.
Serena:
Yeah, because they fold up.
Raqi:
And they’re faster, you know, you’re gonna get a faster charge out of them. I always carry one.
Jeff:
I’ve got this image of Johnny Appleseed walking across America, reaching into his bag and throwing out bricks-
Raqi:
He’s distributing chargers! May I give you a charger today?
Jeff:
Planting the seed, the Apple seed. Did you guys like Apple One, Apple One , the subscription thing? I don’t know, I wasn’t ready to-
Serena:
I don’t know what to think of that.
Jeff:
I keep on thinking I want to downsize subscriptions and all sudden this comes on, it’s like, no, bundle, when they say bundle your subscriptions it’s like wait, and Serena you mentioned something—is a fitness app going to be accessible though, with the workouts.
Serena:
Well, before we go on to the fitness thing, like the one thing that makes it hard for me to even really seriously consider the Apple One thing, and I know it’s unique and I—Jeff, I think you have the same exact setup as me, I have Verizon and Apple Music’s free for us right now, so I don’t—how are they going to overcome that, because there’s a lot of places that are bundling, like the cellphone providers are bundling things, you know, to keep you on their plans and it’s like there’s no reason for me to pay for anything in that Apple One plan when we have a family plan for free, right now.
Raqi:
Plus, not everything is included. I think news is not included, and something else isn’t included.
Serena:
No, and neither’s the fitness one.
Raqi:
Is it the fitness?
Serena:
Yeah.
Raqi:
So it’s purely what, Arcade, Music, Cloud?
Serena:
And I will say that it’s a significant bump in the iCloud storage, I believe the individual plan was only going to be like $14.99 a month and you got Apple Music, Arcade and then I think it was like, maybe 10 gigs, or something like that of iCloud storage so I mean, it makes sense if you don’t already have some things bundled already, or if you do use iCloud Drive a lot, which I personally don’t, I tend to use Google Drive and Dropbox more.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s interesting, you start to think about what you’re already paying in some of the plans that you have, like the news, there’s $9.99, or $4.99 depending on when you got it, how you got it, or where are you getting it from. Yeah, it’s gonna be, I think they’re gonna be in for either a rude awakening or making a lot of money within a year because the campaigns are going to be over, people are going to say I have to make a choice, you know, do they want to go with Disney, do they want to go with Apple TV and then a lot of these subscriptions happened right with the pandemic so they’re not making new movies so it’s like, wow. It’s had quite a test, with all these subscriptions, you know, with the pandemic happened we don’t have a lot of new material, so Apple TV really put themselves in a corner where they aren’t creating too much new stuff right now, so this bundle might be able to help them out, but first the campaigns will have to wear off before we can really see how many people are really subscribing, or how many people are just taking it for a free ride.
Serena:
Well, and all the free Apple TV plus year subscriptions are starting—they’re going to start expiring, gosh, this month, because remember last year for—it seemed like for every new device you got, you got a year of free Apple TV plus, but I know that-
Raqi:
That’s me
Serena:
Yeah, ours is expiring, mine goes November.
Raqi:
Yeah, next month. Yeah, I saw that and I thought ooh, I don’t want to give it up, at first I was like I’m never gonna use that. But no-
Serena:
It’s good quality stuff, and their production quality, especially for the audio mixing is impeccable. It’s the best.
Jeff:
It is.
Raqi:
Yeah, yeah. They’ve done a really nice job.
Serena:
But you had asked about the fitness service, and I had texted you in our Tech Abilities group discussion, I wonder if the fitness videos that they talked about will have audio description because they showed that you know there’s a subscription, you get to pick the music you go to and then they have, you know, there’s instructors that are teaching you a workout or walking you through that, and it’s like, how descriptive are they going to make it, have they thought about keeping that accessible. It’ll be interesting to see what that’s gonna look like and, I don’t know. Unless one of us buys a new Apple Watch, which, I just got one for Mother’s Day so I won’t be buying one, I don’t know that we’re going to get to test that because there’s a free trial with lots of different things but it’s bundled with the Apple Watch, the purchase of a new one.
Jeff:
You know, what surprised me is the price of the new Apple Watch really hasn’t budged.
Serena:
Not ever.
Jeff:
Yeah, it hasn’t really moved, like when all of a sudden we came out with these 10s, and then the 11s. I mean, that was a huge jump there, they had to make up from not making any money off the iPhone 9 I suppose, you know. That’s a joke, folks.
Serena:
They don’t know how to count, they just skip right over 9,
Raqi:
Just skip the number, right.
Jeff:
It’s 13 you’re supposed to skip, have you ever been to a hotel?
Serena:
Exactly. They did not do that though.
Jeff:
Next year. Next, well, that’s-
Serena:
That’s 15, that should be a massive release, at 15, like that should—for iOS 15, that should be huge.
Jeff:
iOS 15. Wow.
Serena:
Doesn’t that sound weird?
Jeff:
Here we are, day one, we just passed out cigars, iOS 14!
Raqi:
Right? It’s not even midnight, it hasn’t even been out 12 hours yet, iOS 14 and she’s going iOS 15, it’ll be out next year!
Jeff:
And to think I pinned her, I pinned her in my messaging thing. Remember when we used to say “Are you in my Fast Five or are you in my…”
Serena:
T-Mobile space!
Raqi:
Oh, I forgot about T-Mobile!
Serena:
Where you could do unlimited calling to them. I forgot about that!
Raqi:
Like people want to talk on the phone anymore. Oh my goodness.
Serena:
You’re dating us all now. We all feel old.
Jeff:
Well, time flies when you’re talking Apple.
Serena:
Oh, goodness. Okay Mr. Cook.
Jeff:
We’ve got to come up with a new, what are they going to call the next one? We know it’s going to have to do with the phones, right?
Serena:
Well, and they’re supposed to have a flatter design, it’s probably going to be like “We Weren’t Done.”
“But Wait, There’s More.”
Raqi:
“Wait, There’s More. Just One More Thing.”
Serena:
They always do that.
Jeff:
They should have ended it with to be continued.
Raqi:
I was waiting honestly for the surprise. I thought, okay, all the rumors of this is gonna be boring, they’re gonna drop something that we don’t expect to see-
Serena:
No, and it came to this abrupt end-
Raqi:
-and one more thing, and they’re like “Okay, thanks for coming. We’ll see you later!” I’m like whoa whoa, where’s the rest-
Serena:
-and it was only an hour, it was literally only an hour.
Raqi:
-and then I hit play, I thought maybe something happened and my stream started over.
Serena:
Maybe there’s a bonus scene.
Raqi:
Like wait a second, is it done? That’s it? 11 o’clock and it’s done?
Jeff:
It’s like you get that Christmas present, when you open it up and you go, um…
Serena:
There’s something missing.
Raqi:
Where’s the rest of it?
Jeff:
And you start shaking it, nothing comes out. And it wasn’t even really live, if you know what I mean? Like it was clearly all pre-recorded and produced, you know, I thought that they were still going to have a-
Jeff:
Yeah, the audio description-
Raqi:
I’m kind of okay with that, I kind of—honestly I like this format, people are gonna hate that about me but I think I enjoy this format much more, it seems a lot more focused, but it was so quick and because I think there just wasn’t anything that really was enticing for me so I felt like okay, you just brushed over it and had an event to have an event, and that’s the end of it. But I feel like compared to the days of—I was telling Jeff the other day how we used to have to fight to get a stream even, you know, for an Apple event, it’s like you’d hover and hover and try to figure out who’s going to stream it, where could you get a clear enough stream to, you know, that wouldn’t get cut off in midstream and you’d finally get one and you’d pray that you wouldn’t get disconnected because you need probably never get reconnected again and compared to this where I think I opened up Apple tv and clicked Stream Now and it went [makes two-toned beeping noise], and the audio description was playing, and the event—and it took all of 10 seconds to get connected to this thing, so we’ve come a long way. It’s really a lot more polished, they definitely didn’t have the interactive audience-y feel.
Jeff:
No, it was smooth, really smooth. I watched it on my Mac and boom. It just came up, you know, so yeah. I remember those days where it was guesswork, you know, where were you watching it, what time was it on. Back then we had to convert, like, Pacific time. Why do they do it out there? Because that’s where Apple is, you idiot. Someone told me that the developers were upset because they didn’t have enough time to get ready for it, and I’m thinking, geez. If you’re a developer, what else are you doing?
Raqi:
I was wondering that same thing. I heard that same thing, that developers were mad that they only had a day and I thought well, you had three months. They even gave you a computer to get it going on, like they talk about—but I guess if you’re one of those 11th hour people maybe you’re waiting till the very last moment to put those finishing touches, but I thought, whoa, really?
Jeff:
11th hour people are the loudest aren’t they?
Raqi:
Right?
Jeff:
Serena, are you there?
Serena:
I am here.
Jeff:
Oh, good.
Serena:
Why do I feel like you’re setting up for something here?
Jeff:
I don’t know.
Serena:
You just sound super suspicious.
Raqi:
There’s a smile on his face, like, yeah!
Serena:
There’s that word again suspicious. Marlin, I noticed that you made fun of me.
Jeff:
Oh yes, yes, Marlin came in. Marlin, I know you’re listening, and I know you listen to this anyways. It’s great that Marlin—Marlin always comes back and he was asking about, you know, some devices and stuff like that, always ask questions, he’s a big, big Braille user, he talks about it all the time. And so I’m glad that we’re gonna be talking about Braille coming up here. And, yeah, so I want to thank all of you for listening. If you want to follow us you can find us on Blind Abilities, at BlindAbilities.com, and Serena, any last words?
Serena:
I’m ready for October or November, I want my new iPhone. I’m so ready.
Jeff:
I should write a story about that.
Serena:
Can you write a strongly worded letter to Apple on my behalf?
Raqi:
Please hurry and release, Serena would like to purchase immediately. Which one are you going to get, Serena? Are you going to get the small one?
Serena:
I don’t even know-
Raqi:
-are you going to get the great big one?
Serena:
I would never get whatever—not the max or whatever that is, I don’t like that.
Jeff:
The huge, gigantic, mammoth-
Serena:
No, I would get whatever the pro version is, but the smaller of it. I don’t need a tablet to my head, that’s ridiculous.
Raqi:
Right? Goodness.
Serena:
It’s just so-
Jeff:
Not yet.
Serena:
Oh no, I won’t. And it was just so funny when, when we were chatting and Raqi’s like “I’m begging them to let me spend money, like this is ridiculous.”
Raqi:
Take my money, Apple, I’m ready, take my money.
Serena:
Like I don’t get it-
Raqi:
Put something out that I want to buy.
Jeff:
Subscriptions aren’t going to do it.
Raqi:
No. I’m going to subscription myself to death.
Serena:
We need something tangible.
Raqi:
You know I’m like you, I saw the subscriptions and I said “I’m trying to go the other direction” and it does look impressive for the iCloud that you get in there, but I—just like you, I don’t know that it’s feasible for me.
Jeff:
They did the perfect math, I added it up, I come around that 24 to 27 dollar range, you know, and it’s like okay, they want 30 for everything, it’s like, well, I don’t know, I just don’t know. So, it’s Apple. I always say no for about five seconds and there I am, slamming down the credit card.
Serena:
Because it just works, right?
Raqi:
You could still try it out, you could tell us how you like it.
Jeff:
Yeah, that’s what sucks, is that’s what you want to do. You really want to get it in your hands and we can’t even do it at the stores. And I was thinking like the Bose that came out, they got the two new glasses that came out? You can’t even go try them. They say that it’s an enhanced-
Raqi:
Three! They’ve got three new glasses, the Tenor and the Soprano and then there’s another one called Tempo, and Tempo is a sport version that lasts—has seven hours of battery life, but you know, who can go to the Bose store? But it’s down for the pandemic.
Jeff:
But now with the AirPods with it being on a, you know, equalize your sound a little bit, dial it in. Yeah, I don’t think the Bose have a chance. I’ve got a pair, my wife has a pair. And I’m like, ah, AirPods rule. Alright folks, thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye. And for more podcasts with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @blindabilities, and give us a call at 612-367-6093. Leave us a message and let us know we can put your voice on the next podcast. Drop us an email at info@blindabilities.com and download the free Blind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store, that’s two words, blind abilities, and from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities. Download our app from the app store Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
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