mergeconflict384 === [00:00:00] James: Frank, I'm super excited because I just upgraded my Mac device after watching that fantastic, super scary, fast, after dark of Apple event that I was like, you know what, I'm feeling behind Frank. My M1 is not on Mac OS 28 or whatever it is. So it was at 14 now. I, and I decided I was going to sit there, watch House Hunters and upgrade my Mac and I did [00:00:23] Frank: it. Could you, could you just download this upgrade? What are you talking about? Did you buy Macintosh hardware from the Apple? American company of computer manufacturers? [00:00:34] James: No, no, no. I have my M1 MacBook Air, Frank. It's just sitting around. I was just, I was just envious of all the new hardware. And I was like, if I can't upgrade my hardware, I'll upgrade the software. Oh, [00:00:44] Frank: it's about time. I, you know, I, I've been writing the, uh, the beta wave and that led into, I've just kept the operating system up to date, which is so unlike me. I never normally do this. So I, I don't normally feel the FOMO. I'm feeling the FOMO on my Intel machine is where I'm feeling it. That's why I went to hardware in my mind when you said upgrade, but, uh, yeah, it's good. Get the, get the new software, man. Jeez. Of course you should get the new software. [00:01:14] James: Well, as you know, I run, I run the beta train on my iPhone production, iPhone beta beta dev builds all the time and my windows machine. I'm also, I'm not quite there. There's this, there's this really funky setting in windows 11, which is my favorite feature. We go into updates. There's like the windows insider preview, right? That you can get become a windows insider and inside a windows insider. There are four that's right, Frank, four different insider settings. There's. Uh, Canary Channel, that seems scary. Dev Channel also seems scary. Uh, Beta Channel, yeah. Dev, I used to be on Dev. It's just like, [00:02:01] Frank: I'm painting a lot. Do they rank them by scariness? Can you, is there a sort column that you can do? Because I am curious. Um, I would say, like, Dev should be the worst, but Canary does sound scary. [00:02:15] James: Yeah, I mean, Canary, it says, it can be unstable. Dev says. Rough edges and low stability and then beta beta is like early adopters. These will be more reliable than dev and they're VAT. And these updates are validated by Microsoft dev channel. No, those aren't validated. I'll just go, go for it. I want a number, [00:02:39] Frank: you know, they used to fake numbers all the time. Remember when windows 95 came out and you could get a number that said how good your computer was. And we all competed on what number about the police box said about it. Those were the good old times. Just give it, give us the, those numbers back. I want a number. [00:02:59] James: I want a number. Well, I'm on the fourth note, I'm on the fourth number, which is a new setting because when you go into windows updates, there's actually, you can do the check for updates still. But then there's a thing, which is get the latest updates as soon as they're available. And it says, be among the first to get latest non security update fixes. Uh, as they roll out now, you might be thinking, isn't that the windows insider program? Yay. And nay Frank at the same time, because if you go into the windows insider program, there's a fourth option that you can't select because on the first screen, that's a toggle and it's called release preview. That's what it is. So I don't know, four, five settings, five settings in windows. That's pretty great. [00:03:41] Frank: And how long do they take? Can you speed run them? Can you, can you do five in one hour? Or is it like five and five hours? Well, [00:03:48] James: the cool part about this one is that this is a preview channel for consumers and you don't need to like enroll in the windows insider program or do anything like that. When you do the other thing, you got to like do a whole shebang in there. But anyways, I was sitting there and on my Mac, there's that little like red dot that's like, update me, update me, update me, update me. And I was like. All right, let's do this. And I was surprised it, it only took maybe 20, 25 minutes or so. It did sit at the, um, downloading only five minutes remaining for about 15 minutes. Very Apple esque, you know, in the Sonoma tab. [00:04:29] Frank: It's so dramatic, right? Because like, um, it'll go through, even if the download succeeds, which is just a big maybe, and we all talk about Xcode. Like, I feel like the operating systems are actually more reliable than Xcode or anything. But then you get into those reboot cycles, at least on the intels, where it's just Progress Bar, Black Screen, Apple Logo, Apple Logo, Progress Bar, Black Screen, Apple Logo, Progress Bar. You're like, Oh boy, I know you're against this. Like, I like the progress bar, but it would be too Linuxy. I know you can't tell me what you're actually doing, but sometimes I wish it told me what the heck it was doing. [00:05:10] James: I do want to know too. I think that it would be super cute. Like when windows comes up, it's like, we're almost there. We're almost there. We're totally there. I'm like, aren't I? Are we totally there? Cause we're still not up. And then, I don't know, you're saying there. [00:05:23] Frank: Do it. Sorry, I'm in a flashback mood for some reason tonight. Back to Windows 95, the old setup programs that would have like the blue gradient background. But specifically there was one installer that everyone seemed to use and it was like driving in a car. And the, it just did driving in a car animation, like a first person view of that the entire time it installed. And I used to love those apps that had the driving in the car installation screen, you know, entertain me. Even if it's non formative, be like, Oh, the road's getting windy. Got to get on that [00:05:57] James: road. Oh, got to get, we're getting this. This update's getting a little off track. I don't know. Uh, uh, Running out of, running out of road. Like your heart, it's like how much road is like how much hard drive space you have left, like we're running out of road. I don't know. I used to like the little copying file animation. Where's like a little piece of paper. Would travel across, across the screen. I don't know why they don't put those back in operating systems. They're fun little things. I would just have like generic bars and graphs. I mean, the graphs one got removed. [00:06:30] Frank: no, I think that's why we liked mobile at first too. I'm saying at first, because like back in the skeuomorphic days we were having fun. you like, it wasn't just good enough to write an app. You had to write an app and make the UI fun. Those were two things. Nowadays, you can just write an app. [00:06:47] James: You've lost the fun. No fun anymore. That's why you got to get the headset and then you can have fun again. [00:06:55] Frank: Oh gosh. Can we not talk about it this week? Cause I still don't know if I'm going to get it. I keep going back and forth, but. Let's get [00:07:01] James: back to the Mac. Actually, you know what? I should probably pay you out from our Patreon supporters over at patreon. com forward slash MergeConflict. And that's where you can go to support the show, get bonus episodes and support Frank in his quest to get an Apple Vision Pro. That is. Patreon. com, 4slashmergeconflict. com. All right, back to Mac OS. Um, I'll write to Jack, I swear. Um, back to Mac OS. Do you have Sonoma machines? Oh, yes. [00:07:27] Frank: Yes. So I've been staying very up to date and everything. Um, mostly because like new X codes and all that kind of stuff. So in order to get new X codes and everything, plus I've been, I've been changing my mind a little bit. You know how we talk about app version support, OS version support in our apps all the time? Well, I have to bring up the topic one more time. Because, um, I'm getting to the point where I, I am with new updates and everything, doing the minimum version that Apple recommends as a minimum version, which is a lot more of an accelerated schedule than I used to do. I mean, I used to support iOS 9 up to, like, Three or six months ago. And it's just ridiculous. It was just too much work and there was no way, like, testing on those things. It's just ridiculous. So, um, I've bumped up all my version, minimum versions for my apps. And I felt like my penance for that, that the price I have to personally pay is I have to run all the modern operating systems and everything like that to make sure that. I am doing what I hope my users are doing and staying up to date. [00:08:35] James: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I'm, I was sort of in that mindset where I was like, Oh, wow. Like, you know, I do ship a Mac app. I should probably actually test it on Sonoma because that's what these new Macs, like, I think that's what kind of kicked me into gear is like, okay, there's new Macs, I'm pre installed with Sonoma, like, you know, obviously every other Mac that they buy now is going to have Sonoma on it anyways. I should probably get on it, double check it, make sure everything's good. Of course it is, cause it's awesome. But it did let me unravel a mysterious feature that is mind boggling in all regards, which is widgets on the desktop, Frank, widgets on the desktop. Yeah, I haven't [00:09:17] Frank: played with it enough. I keep my widgets off into the widget corner. They're, they're often widget click land. You got to click on the thing to get the widgets. And I, I never click on the thing. Um, are you living the widget lifestyle? I remember, sorry, I'm going back. Flashback one more time. Windows Vista. All the original, like, uh, artistic design always had this giant sidebar. Computers were meant to have giant sidebars, and like, every graphic designer's idea of an OS. So are you living that sidebar lifestyle, or are you just plopping them over [00:09:50] James: your desktop somehow? You, you know, you gotta have it, like, you know, Windows 11 has the widget screen, I got the, the weather, I got my CPU usage, I got some. Uh, dev home stuff in here. I got pull requests. I got a whole bunch of generic news that I don't want to put on here. I think you can turn it off now, but yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. Like the dev home stuff has great widgets. I got the, you know, I got the stuff I want. However, the thing with the widgets that is different is they're not. Mac widgets, Frank. Oh, no, no, no. They're widgets from your iPhone, which makes it amazing in every regard, humanly possible, because where do I have all of my apps for all my smart devices, Frank? On my iPhone. But now I also have them on my Mac. And that is a hot diggity dog am I amazing. [00:10:39] Frank: Okay, see, that's where our disconnect might be. Because I think it is that like an Apple M1 required thing? Like, does that require that the apps also, um, uh, have the, you know, the little checkbox saying that they can run on M1 Macs for those to work? Or am I just terrible and I don't have any good apps with any good things? Because I do have a few widgets on my iPhone, but they haven't shown up on my Mac. So now I'm feeling a little [00:11:08] James: bit silly. When you go to a, I'm not sure. It doesn't actually say, Mm-Hmm, . It's, it's a continu. Continu. Continuity. Continuity. Cont that's too big of a word. Apple . Um, that's a good question. 'cause you only have an intel Mac. [00:11:28] Frank: Well, no, that's not true. I have my M1. I just don't use it very much because I'm always sitting my butt down at a desk working on my iMac. So, I mean, that's the real groan when you say, Frank, are you going to get that Vision Pro thing still? Because, actually, I need to buy a new Mac to go with the Vision Pro. So, it's like a two for one deal. It's going to be very painful. [00:11:51] James: iPhone widgets on Mac to use iPhone widgets on your Mac. Your iPhone needs to be iOS 17 or later, and your Mac needs to be Mac OS Sonoma or later. It says it works on works on, uh, that's it. That's all it says. This is nothing else. I mean, are you on it right now? [00:12:08] Frank: Uh, I'll, I'll keep clicking around. Maybe I have it turned off. I have to keep clicking around, but, um, I, I definitely have widgets on my phone, like right on my home screen of my [00:12:18] James: phone. They should, they should, they should, you should be able to go into your widget dialogue box. They add a new widget. Edit, edit [00:12:25] Frank: my widgets, editing widgets. Add a new widget. There are things listed here. Yeah. Are [00:12:33] James: there things from your phone? They kind of are [00:12:36] Frank: things from my phone now that you mentioned it. Yeah, that's right. They [00:12:38] James: are things from your phone. That's right, Frank. And they've been there all along. Because here's the thing. [00:12:45] Frank: Oh, I love this, [00:12:45] James: James. Yeah, you're welcome. It's the, it's the best feature. It's the best feature to feature since there's been a feature. Cause here's the thing is I have all these like smart home device, like switchbots. What if I edit it from my phone? Sorry. Well, here's the cool part, Frank. Is that. They're not the actual widgets on your iPhone. They are widgets that are available from the apps on your iPhone. They are different widgets, Frank. Well, [00:13:13] Frank: James, I just, I just happened to have developed a widget app. So I'm testing out my own widget app because I know for a fact, the developer of this widget app did not put any time into supporting this feature. So I wanted to see how well does it work? And you know what? It should just work. It's working perfectly right now. [00:13:34] James: Oh my God. And yeah, there's a bunch of widgets that I use on my Mac that I don't use on my iPhone and my iPhone. I only use minimal widgets. I got like just a few, I got some photo stuff. I don't need all the stuff, but on my, but on my Mac, I opened up. It was like mission control. I got all the home kit stuff. I got all the switch bot stuff. I got all the stuff just like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, right. I'm turning stuff on, I'm turning stuff off, I'm getting humidity and temperatures inside the house and over here. I'm doing all the fancy schmancy stuff, Frank, and it's boggling my mind. [00:14:09] Frank: I like that you can just paste it onto the desktop. I will admit that that's kind of nice. [00:14:15] James: That's the winner because your people are used to the sidecar over there, sidebars over there, and now there's this whole thing. It's like, hey, did you just drag and drop? And guess what? You just drag and drop that puppy and you can have different sizes. And you're like, Oh my gosh. And it's really interesting too, because you obviously have to configure your widget as well, because like in my switch bot, it's like, which switch bot device do you want to see? Do you want to see the upstairs, the downstairs, this house, that house, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can right click on it and kind of go into the edit widget mode. And then it'll give you options for that specific widget. Now it does seem. From what I can tell, maybe not every single widget is supported for some reason. I'm not positive. What I'm seeing is quite a lot of widgets and it's really, really kind of cool. Now, my assumption here is that my Mac and my iPhone and my watch or whatever continuity is, it needs to be. All in the same network, right? Cause I'm, I'm assuming things we talked about this when they announced Mac, MacOS Sonoma, we haven't talked about it since I'm assuming that it's communicating through the internet somehow my wifi network. I don't know how it works. Frank, how does it work? [00:15:29] Frank: Well, it could, it could be a million things. Um, Apple very smartly and very early iOS and Mac added multi peer connectivity. And so like at the operating system. It'll just route you through whatever the heck it can find, so Bluetooth, Wi Fi, whatever, it'll try all the things. Um, I can say right now, I don't have Wi Fi enabled and it's still working fine. I don't know if it's going over Bluetooth, I don't know if it's going over the internet, Could go, could be any of those things. Um, it is funny, um, it makes sense now that I think it through a little bit because, um, The Widget API, although they've expanded it, and I haven't looked at the expanded one where you have interactive widgets and all that kind of stuff, it is fundamentally a pretty darn simple API. There's like four rough widget layouts that you can have, three sizes a piece kind of thing. You're allowed to put text in them, an image. That's about it. Text and images. Um, nowadays I think you can put buttons and a few other little things in them. Um, so it actually kind of reminds me a lot of, uh, the early days of the watch where you had very limited UI system and you just sent over these minimal things. So I wonder if they're using similar [00:16:51] James: technology. And it's a good question because if I remember how this was working with Swift UI, it was kind of like a snapshot in time, right? So it's kind of, now there are more interactive. That was one of the newer features. You can like check stuff off and do stuff. So there's things that are happening, but I think it's all, there's a widget kit. Is that correct? Is that what you had to build it in? [00:17:12] Frank: Yeah. So you build a, an extension. Uh, as, as in everything in Apple nowadays, you build an extension. It's a widget extension and it honestly doesn't have too much code in it. Um, if you've ever written a watch complication. It's a lot like them. Uh, your extension is loaded up at very random times. Who knows? Sometimes, if you're, when you're running the app, if the person has a widget on their home screen, depending on how often that's updated, they'll load up your extension. Your extension can do whatever data stuff it needs to do. Talk to servers, open databases, whatever. It tries to predict a timeline of what to show to the user. So, like a slideshow. It can set up a slideshow, and it returns that to the OS, the OS plays the slideshow, and then whenever the OS feels like it, it repeats that whole cycle over again. It's a weird development experience, I'll say that much, because you're always like, is it? Is it like in that? There's always like, it's like those early watch days. Like sometimes it just doesn't transfer the updates correctly. And you're like, is it a bug in my code? Or is it a bug in the like, uh, widget update stuff? But, um, it's, it's only during development that things are crazy. Once you stop development, it all stabilizes [00:18:35] James: nicely. Yeah. It's interesting. I've Oh, I've done some widgets in the past for Android way back in the day, and it was complicated and weird, and it's sounding like it's also maybe not overly complicated, but also just kind of weird. Cause it's not what we're used to. Um, and I think that is good and bad, right? Because obviously these things are having to. Do work and use battery, use things, and you want those to be super efficient. So, you know, when I'm running all the time, I think that was some of the early problems with Android is just how widgets work. They're kind of always on and doing the stuff and they locked it down. I don't know if they ever redid it, but I do feel like the, I feel like the control y ness of widgets feels very early iPhone and I'm not necessarily. Mad at it, I guess, [00:19:28] Frank: in a way. It's funny you say that, because what I was really thinking while you were talking was like, they did have a choice. They could have made widgets like little iPhone apps, and just write a little app, and it just runs in a little window, and bingo bango, done. I mean, especially on the Mac, who cares? We have 8 million cores sitting there doing absolutely nothing the majority of the time. On an iPhone, yes, there's an argument not to do it that way, but a Mac could probably run 10. iPhone apps without you even noticing in the beginning. Um, but yeah, uh, that's not what we got. Instead we got the, yeah, crazy overcomplicated system of, um, it's, it's, it's not bad. It's, it's not bad from a development point of view. It's just weird. It reminds me of QT, It's almost like you're like rendering out some HTML and then sending it down to the client and then 10 minutes later, the client will do a request to the server again, feels a lot like that. [00:20:30] James: Well, that's funny. Yeah. I, funnily enough, even talking about that, like running a mini app concept is that I actually get quite a few requests from. Users of like my cadence for the number is that they're like, Oh, like, you know, it sure would be great if I could get that number just as a little pop over, you know, like on top of like a picture on picture and I could. Stream it as I could stream that number as a video. And if I, you know what I mean, but then you can only have one video playing at a time. So if you were watching Netflix, you can't have a picture and picture of a video and another video running. Right. So on Android, there is a concept of like. App Bubbles and. I think, I mean, I haven't used them ever, but I remember Facebook used them a long, a long time ago and probably WhatsApp and all this stuff. But basically when you'd get like a message, like a circle of like your face would come up or you could pin like a mini app. And it was like a little app, it was like, cause you can resize Android apps to anything and they can hover over, you know, it's. It's a proper operating system window, you know, just by default, it limits the windowing, but there's a way to break out of it. So some phones, they could do this and they built into the operating system. And I think you, your little app is just basically running all the time. And it's just like in a pop over mode. So you could open it and you could respond to it kind of like a notification. Uh, I don't know if that's still available or what they did, but I remember that there was a time that that happened, but yeah, it would be very fascinating to have a proper, like picture in picture mode that could run my mini app besides on the iPad, where you can obviously pin and run multiple apps side by side, but like, yeah, run my little tiny app right over here. My iPad is going to be okay. Well, that'd be pretty [00:22:15] Frank: neat. A little bit of a side tangent, but you're just making me think of it, um, with these like picture and picture things. Okay, a lot of things to say there. I think they actually did open up the API a little bit, where you don't necessarily have to be a video anymore. I think you could just be a rendering. But either way, you still have the same problem of what you said, then the person can't watch a video or YouTube background because stupid iOS. But that brings up this, this is the side tangent now. A big glaring missing feature of the OS that I've been feeling recently is apps cannot become middleware to Videos. We can do it for audio, in fact. So many years ago, audio extensions were added, where you could set multiple apps, like a mixing system almost, where app comes out of whatever app you listen to your music from, and then maybe you run some effects through another app, or it does a recording or something like that. So, they added that. Um, at first people were just cheating. They would put up little servers and run servers in the background and the other apps knew to look for ports and things like that. And that's how they would transmit audio between themselves. But Apple finally said, Oh, we'll do it officially. And we'll provide this audio extension API, this middleware that you can establish. However, they still have not done that for video. You see, there's still no way for apps to interoperate nicely with video. Every time. It seems like Apple just talks about AirPlay and all those other things, but there's no way for just two apps to just exchange video data. It's really sad and [00:24:03] James: of tangent. Well, well, and I think the other part too is maybe they're like, Oh, the dynamic Island's going to be the thing that is allowing you to kind of run apps on top of applications. You know, when you think about it, like, you know, if you're Uber or whatever, you can put like a little notification there. I'm not sure how long it stays up. And, but again, you can only have one of those active, like, is it active? Is it this, is it that? I mean, ideally the scenario is like, I'm doing my, my cadence and I'm doing whatever, but then you're probably going to put your device in full screen and watch Netflix or whatever. Right. And what you really want is like, or YouTube. And then you want this little thing, then your dynamic island goes away. So again, there's not like a. A winning solution here, because it's not a windowed device. iPad is, [00:24:49] Frank: if you have the bigger screen iPad, you can actually put windows side by side and all that stuff. But yeah, [00:24:54] James: phone, no. Unless, Frank, the parent application doesn't allow side by side applications. It's the worst. Example. Example, because then it doesn't pop over is Apple fitness plus. So Apple fitness, which is really, which is like one of the things I built my app for, this is really funny. I built my app for doesn't allowed side by side apps and that's problematic. But what I tell my customers of my cadence is you can, you can still drag it up. And when you go to pin it on the right hand side. It's like, no. And it's just the whole, the whole app just hovers on top of the app, which is funny because I then know Apple has the capability of running an app on top of another app and they both work great because that's how I'll do it is like literally on my screen is, you know, 70 percent the Apple fitness plus like person showing me how to do stuff. And then. The 30 percent overlapping on the other 30 percent that I can't see behind it is my app basically running, which is really, really funny just in, in general. [00:26:01] Frank: Yeah, I still don't, it, it is a weird, I think leftover limitation of the OS. Um, the single video per app thing, because in your own app, You can spin up 10 videos and play 10 videos simultaneously. You can go to a website that has 10 video tags in it and all those videos will play simultaneously. It is not a hardware limitation. It is a weird OS limitation. Just keep dealing with, I don't know, I, I, I wonder like in a widget. And so going back to widgets, like they allow images in widgets. Could I generate an MP4 file and throw that into the image and see if it'll play that video? I don't think, uh, videos work in widgets, but who knows? Might be worth having a little [00:26:53] James: fun with. Yeah. And then it's like my app probably at that point could just run. On Mac for my cadence. And then, then that would work out better because as long as all the blue to stuff still connects and does all this stuff, then you would just have my app on there and working. But, you know, in general, I think what's neat is that there's a lot of applications that aren't on a Mac. And additionally, you don't. I actually want to open the app. Like I think that's the thing is like when I think of like my SwitchBot app or I think of even my, um, my HomeKit app, I could open it up, but it would be, it's really nice to be like, Oh, I'm going to pin my huge lights here or whatever, right? Just these ones that I know that I'm going to be using on my home screen. XYZ. I do think it's a killer feature, but it's funny because you are right. It's like widgets aren't new widgets on the desktop aren't new, which is in the sidebar on new and yet. It feels astonishing because it is the apps that I have in my hand, um, in my, on my iPhone, 24 hours a day. Right. And like that sort of synergy is like really impressive. And in a way, I think I was like, that's, that's really smart, uh, of how they did that. [00:28:07] Frank: Yeah, and I'm just noticing with my app, um, I, I don't have an interactive app and every time you click it, click on the widget, I was like, Oh, what happens if I click on it? It says, go get your iPhone, buddy, icon. It's actually kind of sad. They hide my entire UI and just say, go get your iPhone. Um, so I think there's still a little bit of room for improvement there. Um, but maybe if I add interactivity, maybe it could do a little bit better [00:28:34] James: there. Yeah, it, it kind of gets you thinking a little bit more. It's like, oh, what can I do now? Besides that, um, you know, there's new screensavers, so that's cool. Uh, you know, do, do you have the, do you have the thumbs up thing? Does your, does that work on [00:28:48] Frank: your thing? You do that? Oh, what's the thumbs up thing? I don't do thumb, I don't do thumbs up thing. Do [00:28:52] James: it, do the thumb. Do it. What, what should it be happening? Didn't do it. All right. So, okay. Ideally, if , ideally, this is the three D, augmented reality effects. On your camera. Are you using your, are you using your camera on your thing or an extra? I am using [00:29:08] Frank: my camera on my thing, but I guess I don't have augmented reality effects. [00:29:12] James: Darn. Two available and using built in camera with Apple Silicon. [00:29:18] Frank: See, I am being left out of so many things. Time to upgrade [00:29:23] James: the hardware or any Mac when using continuity at camera with iPhone 12 or later. So you could just use your iPhone and then it would work. So that is, that is fascinating. I was on a call with some of my reports that upgraded to Sonoma and. We're just having a conversation and all of a sudden there's like fireworks behind her and like balloons and like other stuff. And like, there's all these effects just built into the camera. You have to turn it off, which I'm imagining most people have turned it off because you can't really, if you just are having a conversation on like a, a team scholar or a zoom scholar, like you're probably actually going to accidentally trip it. And, um, it's quite fun. Yeah, it's on by default. [00:30:04] Frank: Good. Yeah. No, the, the world needs fun. We, we were just talking about it. We need more fun in this kind of stuff. So if you, if you create confetti, you create confetti. I know when I like, uh, chit chat with my friends, kids, they always like, they know how to use like little. Message stickers and effects and all this stuff. And I'm like, no, I just talked to the FaceTime camera. Cause when I was a kid, I thought that was good enough. These kids are adding effects and everything to their FaceTime chats. It's good to know that you can do that just from Sonoma. Are you using the, uh, predictive text at all? Have you noticed [00:30:42] James: it? I don't think so. Yeah. It's only been like a day. I haven't, I haven't really noticed it. Is it, is it good? Is it bad? Is it just like the iPhone or? [00:30:50] Frank: So any native app, their text box will now have predictive text. And when you start typing now, it doesn't go too far. It only goes about one word ahead and it takes it absolutely for forever. So I think it's a feature that needs to be improved, but it's kind of neat to see that they did it OS wide. I say OS wide because it turns out it's not supported in a lot of places. Cause people are bad programmers. [00:31:20] James: I think that, um, I've been using this week specifically a lot more. Voice Dictation. This is like my new, I use it on my iPhone all the time too, but in windows, you can do windows H and that brings up windows dictation, any, any entry field, anything like that kind of something like we were saying here, and I've been writing whole papers with it, doing the whole thing. It's not perfect, right? It's not, you know, just not a hundred percent, but it gets me like 80 percent the way there, and then I can just speak it out. I'm doing our connects at work. I've worked for like 360 reviews, you know, base camps, whatever you want to call. That's open a word doc. Boom! Then I can clean it up and that's what I've been using, which is very good. Now I do wish that between the voice dictation and the, you know, predictive cleanup, punctuation, that's always the hardest thing I think is like predictive text is good with punctuation, but dictation, voice dictation, not so great with, uh, with that. And in fact, so much that. Like we call these things connects and it's always a connect period. So it's like six months time. So I'm always like during this connect period, then I say something, but then it definitely always adds the period. I was like, no, how do I say the word period without it actually writing, making a period punctuation? Um, [00:32:34] Frank: it's so funny. I I've really been trained on period. Semi colon. I, I say these things and I like, I switch my tone of voice to robot voice whenever I say them. So hopefully it knows that I'm talking about punctuation, but, um, I've been using like the voice mode of chat GPT on my phone and it uses whisper sync, a different, um, Speech to text. Yeah. I got that direction, right? Yeah. And it breaks all those rules. It does automatic punctuation. If you say period, semicolon, em dash, any of those things, it just writes that word. And so half of the time I'm talking to chat GPT, I just can't stop it. It's like a dialect I've learned. I've learned to just say period when I'm talking to a computer thing. And it's going to take a while for me to learn to stop [00:33:27] James: saying that. That's funny. There is actually. Inside of windows, there's a, uh, automatic punctuation toggle and. It kind of does a blend of it that sometimes it'll just put a period if you say period, but then other times it's just like, it's a little aggressive with the punctuation. So I kind of turned it off, I think. Uh, but that's funny that it kind of, uh, ignores it. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't know what this is. This is using speech. It provides. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It says it's using Microsoft Speech Services, which is Microsoft Online Speech Tech. [00:34:09] Frank: Microsoft's always had really good, I think they've always had good handwriting recognition and really good speech recognition. I don't know where it came from, but [00:34:20] James: it's good though. I'm impressed. [00:34:21] Frank: Yeah. And it's been commoditized a bit. It's kind of baked into the OS's nowadays. It's kind of our solved problem, except for punctuation, it seems. [00:34:31] James: Yeah. Punctuation or, uh, anything else in Sonoma before we get out of this Sonoma episode? I mostly just want to talk about widgets. Cause it blew my mind. I've only played with it for five minutes, but [00:34:40] Frank: I will say, I think I've, I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but the biggest reason I upgraded to Sonoma is that they. Changed how, uh, views are rendered, custom drawn views are rendered on Mac when you build with a new SDK. So if you're a developer with a native Mac app out there and you do custom drawing like I do, you're gonna have to go review all your code and fix a bunch of bugs. Um, so that's the other reason to upgrade to Sonoma, to get ahead of those bugs. [00:35:14] James: Yeah, because it's never, they're not like, they're going to revert that in the next, in the next release. It's always, will continue to be broken. So, yeah. Uh, well, yeah, go upgrade. Let us know what you think. If you have a favorite feature in Sonoma or Windows 11, let us know, test it out. We'll check it out. We like it. And there's a bunch of stuff that I'm sure we didn't even find yet. Um. Yeah. Feel free to read it right into the show, MergeConflict. fm. Uh, let me know what you think about this new, uh, microphone setup that I have here. It's the exact same microphone, but before it used to come from the right side. Now it's coming from the left side of me in my arm. You can't see it on the video. It still looks like it's in the same place, but my hope is that it is more in line My mouth, so it sounds better and buttery smooth like Frank Krueger, but I was going to do it for this week's Merge Conflict. So until next time, I am James Montemagno. [00:36:11] Frank: And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. [00:36:15] James: Peace.