Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:07] Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 776 for November 2nd, 2023, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. Back after a long hiatus that I can't even explain why it happened, this week our guest is one of my favorite recurring guests, Adam Anks, publisher of the long-running internet-based email newsletter Tidbits. You might have heard of it. It's great to have you back on the show, Adam.
Thank you. And I have to say, I am sitting here, you actually are across a pond because there's a pond in my front yard facing west, and I'm in New York. So by definition, you are across my pond.
Perfect. We've also been known to accept alcoholic drinks as ponds. The definition is fairly liberal.
[0:48] Well, a few weeks ago, you published an article in Tidbits entitled, iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens. Now, my audience knows I'm an advocate for accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren't good at technology.
If you throw in gender along with that, such as a phrase I hear all too often, it's so, easy your mother could do it, the top of my head pretty much blows off.
So I got ready to read your article with a desire to learn any tips you could provide to making the iPhone more accessible to seniors, and ready to jump down your throat if you replied that elderly people cannot be technically competent.
I have to say, I was delighted to find that you pushed none of my hot buttons, and you gave terrific advice.
So can we start with how you explained this wasn't downplaying the competence of folks over a certain age, like maybe me. I'm on Medicare now, for crying out loud.
Yeah, yeah. So it's terrible because...
[1:44] You're absolutely right that there's there's no requirement that people over some age somehow like, Cease to be able to like know how to use a mouse or whatnot. Um.
[1:55] But simultaneously we have to acknowledge that there are physical and cognitive declines that come with age, For well pretty much everyone sooner or later, um and so it's it really comes down to individual situations. And so one of the things I was, I tried really, really hard to do because even in the discussions that had sort of triggered this article, people were doing that, you know, well, I'm 75 and I have no trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And like, of course not, you know, but that doesn't mean, you know, someone who's in their 60s couldn't be suffering early onset Alzheimer's or something like that, you know, like some sort of tremors or or tremors, right? I mean, like arthritis in the hands, um, make can make using mice and keyboards and stuff difficult. Um, uh, eyesight can be a problem, um, that you're starting to like bump up the font on your iPhone. Well, yeah, you can do that, but you may need to do it a little bit more. And again, not to say that someone who's young might not need to do that too, but it does happen. And so it really just came down to be sensitive about the fact that there's no guarantees, nothing that's going to be true of everybody, but it is worth...
[3:11] Talking to the person and seeing what they're having trouble with and honestly comparing it with what you know about them I mean like I mean, this was really aimed at people who are helping friends or family and, And so because I mean, let's face it probably the people who are reading tidbits fall into that category Well, frankly, they're referring tidbits. They're on the the the older end of the spectrum because they've been doing it for 33 years, just like us but But when you're helping someone, you tend to know what their strengths and weaknesses are.
I've been helping my parents and my in-laws for years now with various tech things, and for the most part, they're just fine.
But on the other hand, there's a few things I know, yeah, I don't expect them to be able to do X, Y, or Z because it's just not something they're going to be good at.
One of the things that I was thinking about when you were saying these are probabilities that these declines will happen to you if you're lucky enough to live long enough.
And one of my blind friends says, he says, think of yourself as currently abled.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, actually, my wife works as an editor in the, oh my god, I can't get the whole name, the Yang Tan Institute on Disability in the Workplace.
[4:30] At Cornell. And so, basically, it's a group of researchers and outreach people. And they, You know, they do tons and tons of stuff about disability in the workplace.
And that's one of the things that they're very big on, that the disability is really, really widespread. And there's only one really interesting disability that isn't considered one, which is vision.
So, you can wear glasses and you get perfect vision, that's not considered a disability.
So, but you know, you know, you know, it's, it's, you know, basically, that's the one we've really, really solved.
Oh, okay. So, you're saying, realistically, if you can get perfect vision with, with glasses, then it's not a disability. Precisely. That's right. One of the things that bothers me is that if you get glasses, nobody looks at you as less.
Right. But we still look at people with a hearing aid as, oh, you're old.
You're falling apart and we need to get past that or my father-in-law was very resistant to even using a cane and eventually he wouldn't use a walker but my mother was like wait a minute if i get a walker i can walk faster and more securely and not fall down why wouldn't i do that and if we can get into that mindset then it's like maybe she's not disabled because now for the walker she can walk perfectly.
[5:48] Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, so in any event, it's, it is absolutely the case and, you know, and, and I said the, the simple fact of the matter is that some people will be, you know, lucky enough that they don't suffer from arthritis or hearing loss or, you know, tremors of any sort of that kind of thing.
That's absolutely fabulous, but a lot of people do.
And so, and if we can learn about how to solve those things and if it ever does happen to us, we're ready to go, but we can help other people.
So you had early experience in this area with your grandmother and grandfather?
Grandpa Bernie and Grandma Estelle.
Yeah, yeah, they're my grandparents in New York, in New York City.
And yeah, long, long ago, we gave them an SC-30 and they had a modem and, and, uh...
Oh, actually, do they have a modem? Yeah, they must have had a modem. Boy, this is going back a long ways. And the SC-30 was not new. Let me tell you, this was probably back in, I don't know, the Performa days or something like that. But yeah, they were never significant computing people.
[6:54] But they could do a little, they could do email and things like that. That was about it.
It. Um, and, uh, and, and then we switched them to one of the gumdrop IMAX when those came out. And that was about the time we got an IMAX, my other grandmother, um, who lives live much more close, live much closer and then sort of watched them honestly be able to do less and less. And, you know, my, my grandma is still, you know, she was sharp as a tack the entire time. I mean, she, she did not have mental mental issues in the slightest terms of declines. On the other hand, she was physically a disaster. I mean, she couldn't turn on light switches. So, you know, typing completely was right out. You know, she could use the phone if she had memory buttons to push. She could push one button on a phone.
So, yeah. So, like, you know, that was a situation where, you know, as long as Grandpa Bernie was.
[7:48] Okay and he was fairly physically fine that, you know, she would literally tell him everything to do and what to type and all that. But that's how they'd been driving for years. That was their relationship. I mean, I don't know that everyone could do that, but she'd been telling him how to drive and how to navigate for decades. So, you know, this is how they worked. They were a team.
And eventually when he died, there was obviously no way that she could use the computer ever again.
So, you know, she didn't. And then my other grandmother, she started to have dementia.
And, you know, it turns out computer use is pretty early on the things to go.
[8:35] You know, that was like, she just couldn't figure out how to use it, couldn't remember how to use the computer. This is back in early days of Mac OS X. So, she could still damage it in ways by moving things around accidentally. And so, eventually, we just sort of, you know, took it away. Yeah. So, again, very sad. But, you know, nowadays, in some ways, it's easier because I think iPhones and iPads are more obvious to people who maybe, you know, don't have either the history of just like technology being built into their bones, or they, you know, it's more obvious because you're that direct manipulation. I have always said that there's something about the iOS interface that is tapping into our DNA, not learned stuff. And the two examples I'd like to give is a hand of a very, very small child.
[9:33] Two years old, an iPhone, and they'll eventually figure out how to get to photos and start looking at pictures. Likewise, a friend of mine's mother had dementia, and they got, they brought, they would bring an iPad to her and open up photos, and she would look at the photos and zoom in and zoom out and smile and laugh, and it was intuitive to her. She didn't learn it, because she couldn't learn anything at that point, but she was very happy with that. And so it's tapped that, you're probably right, it's that direct interface, not the indirect connection that really makes a difference. And I do think, you know, you know, anyway, we have to be careful, though, not to go too far also, which is so I just did a did some did something about, you know, talking about the difference between touch ID and face ID. Because Apple moved all this stuff, you know, like in one you swipe up from the bottom to get control. So then you swipe down from the top right to get control. So how do you get to the home screen? And right? And like, like, these are not intuitive in any way shape or form. They're completely arbitrary, completely non-discoverable, there's no way you'd guess, and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, some aspects of the touch interface are great. Others are truly maddening. And, you know, I mean, this is, I mean, actually one of the things that comes up, in fact, is the difference between touch ID and face ID. So, you know, someone who's had a touch ID phone for some years, well, the question becomes What happens when they need a new one? What do you get them? Yeah, no, you know, I went back and forth on on this.
[10:59] Yep in particular. We're kind of jumping in the middle of our agenda, but that's okay. We're fine. We're fine.
[11:05] So there's pros and cons to this so you've got somebody who's um used to touch id and.
[11:13] I'm gonna Do what I said. I hate i'm gonna Generalize and say that as we get older we become less plastic in our willingness to accept change.
[11:24] I think there's something to that, but I would also suggest that I think society in general is becoming more resistant to change.
I've been seeing this in younger people as well, just like, don't want to do it.
You know, too much, there's too much going on. So, yes, I think that's not an unfair characterization of older people, but I think it's also hitting people at a younger age too, yeah.
Well, the example I was going to give was, my brother had a Touch ID phone and he needed a new phone.
It was very, very old. And he was trying to, I was talking to his wife and his daughter and they were saying, no, we've got to get him a Touch ID phone because that's the only thing he's going to be able to use because he's not very technically savvy.
A brilliant guy, no mental difficulties at all, but just set in his ways, man.
Doesn't like tech, doesn't want new tech. And I said, the problem is, look at his age.
[12:18] He's too young. He's going to outlive touch ID phones and he's going to have to learn someday.
Will he be better at learning that later or today? Maybe he's resistant today, but that is not a curve that's going to get better over time.
Precisely. And you know, right. I mean, I have people, you know, uh, some of the folks on tidbits talk, you know, people saying, you know, I'm 96 really not getting another Mac, you know, this one's good for me. Yeah. Yeah.
And you're like, yep, that's fair. if you're, you know, 72 or something like that, probably going to be multiple iPhones in your future. You hope you're going to outlive that. Yeah, precisely. You started this out by talking about the approach you do when, or you would suggest that we do, when talking to somebody about a new phone. What is your approach on that? Well, I mean, certainly familiarity is a big one, and there's nothing wrong with familiarity. Obviously, given your caveat of the, well, it's going to happen sooner or later, and it's going to be harder in the future. But the other thing that is worth thinking about is that, I mean, right now, a Touch ID phone means an iPhone SE. And that's basically Apple's smallest phone now. And so one of the other trade-offs that you get that becomes possible when you buy a new phone is you can get a bigger screen. And so.
[13:46] Simply, one of the big advantages is, well, if the screen size or what you can read on the screen is also being an issue, switching to touch ID or face ID might be required learning some new stuff. But here's the benefit. Big advantage of that. Yeah. Here's the big advantage of that in terms of... I know two women who bought Apple Watch Ultras because they refused to wear bifocals.
[14:11] They're like in their late forties early fifties and they don't want to wear bifocals and they can't see the screen on the on the smaller watches and they love it they're like look i don't need glasses it's like the font on your screen but they're perfectly happy so i should leave alone.
Yeah and people do that usually have these tiny tiny wrists and the whole things like sticking out on the side radio tape to the.
Yeah, whatever works, whatever works So yeah, no, I think that's I think that's that's sort of what's important. That's kind of why you know, I was emphasizing that Oh, wow It's really important to like talk to the person and see think about their strengths and weaknesses in terms of like You know that they're having trouble seeing stuff Then here's one of the reasons why you could encourage them to move up to even one of the big phones You know the pluses or the pro maxes You know, that that might be when you, because one of the things Apple does a pretty good job with in accessibility is making, you can make stuff big.
Big, and you know, you talk in your article about how to turn on bold text too.
Yeah.
[15:16] Yeah, that was a big one. For me, honestly, you know, for a long time I was using, wearing contacts and then having to go with reading glasses or computer glasses and distance glasses and sunglasses.
That's why I gave up the contacts, because I had to have so many glasses involved.
I could just wear a pair of glasses. I did the same thing.
I did the same thing. I was wearing glasses and contacts, and I was like, wait a minute, why am I doing both again? I did it for years before I made that connection.
It took me a long time too, and now I have these, you know, progressive lenses and you know, blah, blah, blah. It all just works much more easily.
But before then, I was really getting into that, you know, I can't read stuff.
I was bumping, I was going to the bold text, I was going to bumping up some of the sizes and things like that.
And so I, I get it, like I know how frustrating it can be when you just can't quite read the damn thing.
I have one suggestion I didn't see in your, um, in your article.
When I started to lose my close vision, I noticed it at work.
Before I noticed it at home and I realized what was going on. I was using this horrible PC laptop.
[16:25] Horrible being redundant, but it was a terrible HP display and it was super dim.
When I came home, I was using an Apple display and at full brightness, the brightness of the screen contracts your pupils. And if you know anything about photography, you know that a smaller aperture gives you a longer depth of field, so more is in focus.
So, the brighter you set your screen on your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac, the smaller your pupils are going to be and the better you're going to be able to focus.
Jim Collins Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense. The one thing that I have also run into, which I find fascinating, is, and as this happens in middle age for a lot of people, is sensitivity to light either high or low.
Maggie Simkins Right. It can go the other way. That can be a terrible thing. Jim Collins So, I like things to be bright. I do not like dimness, whereas my wife's the exact opposite, where she does not want stuff super bright. And I'm often coming into the kitchen and turning on a second set of lights because I can't quite see, but she's obviously comfortable that way.
And so, we're often different in that regard. Josh Senner, who I used to work with on tidbits, same thing. He really did not like things being super bright.
So, I do find it interesting. Yeah, so I guess that's in the list of questions, right, is to say, let me turn the brightness up for you and see whether that helps you see better or does it bother you.
[17:49] That would be an approach to take. I do find it interesting because Apple keeps pushing how like, we're making this brighter every time.
I'm like, well, I'm sure some people appreciate that, but really that's not my issue.
What about other things? You talked about arthritis, motion problems.
So well, before that, the funniest one, actually, that a woman said that her parents had run into as they got fairly significantly older was their skin stopped working with touch interfaces.
Yeah. So it's a capacitive touch interface, and I can't even quite envision what's involved with that. Maybe sort of a dry, certain kind of dryness? I actually lick my finger before I touch Touch ID on my Apple keyboards, Adam.
Okay. So yeah, I guess... Yeah, I guess Apple pay without licking my finger.
So face ID for the win there.
Right precisely just gets you one less thing. You have to touch unless looking at my screen and stuff.
Do not be licking the screen. It's not sanitary. I'm sure.
I wash my hands a lot. Well, what was it that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
I think one of the one of the books they had the they'd sent off the telephone sanitizers.
[19:04] It was a whole class of people job. a job they had. So, yeah, so, so I think the, um, Uh, yeah, for arthritis, you know, that's an interesting one, because the, again, you never quite know what's involved.
Um, and, um, and so that's one where I think you not just have to ask someone, but you'd have to like watch them and see, you know, what, what they have trouble with.
Are they moving? Yeah, so they precisely, I could see different kinds of keyboards and pointing devices being better or worse, but I can't predict what they'd be, you know, like.
Steve's dad has neuropathy, so he can't, he doesn't have a sensation in his fingertips.
And so he won't even try an iPhone, so that's out of the picture.
But when he's on his Mac, it's really tedious to watch him type.
And he's a dedicated, dedicated one password user.
Just like he's done testimonials for the show. He's 86 now and he's just as happy as he was at 80 with it.
But we were watching him, we were replacing his Mac and Steve said, you know what, I'm gonna buy you, I'm gonna pay for it, I'm gonna buy you a new keyboard.
And he bought him a Touch ID keyboard and it took him quite a while to understand how to do it.
He has to hold one hand with the other hand and lay it down.
He is in love with Touch ID, because now he doesn't have, we gave him a 75 character password with a goat in the middle of it to make sure it's secure.
And now he doesn't have to type it and he's so happy.
[20:34] So that's where maybe somebody with arthritis would actually be better off with Touch ID as long as they know how to lick their finger first.
Well, and also, I would say it is actually worth investigating other keyboards.
So, you know, I'm a big clicky keyboard kind of guy. You know, I like my DOS keyboard.
I mean, I get, and I'm old school. Like, I don't, I get the impression that like, man, keyboards have gone seriously niche.
You know, you can get them with, you know, 17 different switch types and LEDs under them.
And, you know, they can pulse and all that kind of stuff.
I don't do any of that stuff. But just like that big, old Apple extended keyboard feel might be better for some people than the really low, low travel keys that are on all of Apple's keyboards now.
I did something funny. I installed a menu bar app called Clack.
[21:30] With a K, it gives you clicky keyboard sounds on a regular keyboard, and I swear it makes a difference. I use it on my MacBook Air because the keys are a little too mushy for me.
I want it to be more clicky, and now I can make it sound clicky.
I swear it's easier to type on now.
You know, it may be one of those things. It'd be interesting to do some true human factors research on that sort of stuff, but it's entirely possible that there's just a little bit of an auditory pathway that...
Hey, give somebody two different MacBooks, one with this clack thing installed, one without same identical keyboard, saying, we're testing these two different kinds of keyboards, which one are you more comfortable typing on?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I find tricky with like...
[22:09] Anything speed is like Typing speed is all one of those like oh type this passage I don't know how to do that like that's something from high school You know where you would actually type a piece, you know type something from the one piece of paper and do it to a paper So like I compose like I can never tell you how fast I type because it's how fast I'm thinking about what I want to say at that particular moment.
[22:31] So like I'm a fast typist I think but I don't really know, you know So, so yeah, but again, all the variables, so, you know, mice versus track pads, there's some funky, funky stuff still out there.
Track balls are still available, not very many, but they still exist.
I use a thing called a Contour Designs Roller Mouse, which is a bar that goes slides back and forth and rolls. I saw that ages ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's been around forever. I mean, it goes back to one of the early, was it the outbound laptop?
One of the super early Mac portable laptops back in the day, used that for the first time.
[23:12] But it works fine, but it puts the pointing device right in front of the space bar.
So you're not going off to the side to use something else. That's my thing, I actually like laptops better, because again, trackpad's right in front of the keyboard rather than off to the side.
I hate the trackpad on laptops being right in front of me.
I'm a huge trackpad fan, but it's because I have an external one, so it's more comfortable out and then kind of trying to bring my fingers in front, but let's go back to focusing on the, pun intended, on the iPhone.
So you give specific instructions on how I like to increase the text size and bold text, and you've got great screenshots.
Of course, this whole article is linked in the show notes.
[23:51] You got into one for, you talked about reduced transparency and increased contrast. Talk a little bit about what those do and why those are important.
So increased contrast is, it's again, one of those things you just sort of have to see to believe. I mean, like, it's just, it makes every like, you look at it like, oh, wow, everything pops a little better.
And this is actually important, that this guy used to write for us a while back, Charles Moorer, he and his wife are vision specialists. He was a photographer.
She's actually a researcher in vision stuff.
And so one of the things that he pointed out in some stuff was that the human eye is designed to see contrast.
And we actually care about contrast more than detail. So, you know, if you, I mean, There's an old tidbits article I could find probably and send you where he illustrates this.
You know, you look at two photos, one with more detail and one with more contrast and you're drawn to the one with more contrast.
So, or any kind of scenarios where your vision is just not as sharp as it should be.
[24:57] Bumping up that contrast, the increased contrast switch can make the whole thing a lot easier to see because Apple likes to feather stuff, right?
They like these smooth transitions between objects and stuff like that.
I just turned it on and I like it.
See? Yeah, so just anybody who's playing along and not looking at the show notes right this minute, it's settings, accessibility, display and text size, and then there's a bunch of options, one of which is reduce transparency.
[25:23] Increase contrast. I'm sorry, increase contrast, yeah. And it basically just makes the light gray a little darker gray and the dark gray a little darker gray and the text a little darker.
I might leave that on for a little while and see what I think about that.
Yeah. So what does reduced transparency do, then? So reduced transparency is another one of these things that Apple likes doing.
Where like, oh, we want to pretend that all these things are like sort of translucent pieces of plastic.
And so that when you have one thing over another thing, you can kind of see through it.
And that can be a problem again. Just it just kind of muddy stuff for some people, And it doesn't really in my mind. It doesn't really ever improve anything that.
[26:10] That I don't believe in the iPhone interface It's actually helpful to believe that you're on top of something from a functional standpoint I don't think it's helpful on the Mac either when it comes to no, I don't think so And I turn it off. I actually turn it off all the time because I take screenshots, right? So it's screws with your screenshots Because I never thought about that. That's exactly what I need to do, Yeah, because I want my screenshots to be gray in the background or you know, whitish lightest color Anyway, whereas who knows what the my what it's on top of the screenshot is on top of it could be half yellow and half Blue right, you know because that's the window that's behind it. So so yeah reduce transparency I actually encourage people to turn off, certainly for documentation purposes, but just see what you think because I think the whole thing just looks a little crisper in terms of not having, whatever, you know, bleeding through. I'm looking for it on the Mac now. I'm not paying any attention to you because I'm going to turn this off. Turn it off right now. Reduce transparency.
Boom. Let me increase contrast while I'm at it. Oh, that's a little... And you'll notice...
On the Mac, it's a little OS 7-ish.
Yeah, yeah. It's a little excessive.
[27:29] The one thing you'll notice immediately with reduced transparency is the menu bar stops, you know, being... it just gets a gray background.
Oh, you know what? I'm not going to do it, because that's going to ruin all the cool new features in Bartender 5 that let you have these different colored tints of your menu bars. At least until I'm done doing my screencast about Bartender 5.
Yeah, so in any event, so those are two that I actually, you know, increased contrast depends.
Reduced transparency, honestly, I think is worthwhile shutting off for most people. I I don't think it adds anything.
And it just makes the whole interface a little bit, I don't know, coherent in some ways, you know?
And predictable.
Like, you know that this is always gonna be this color rather than, well, whatever's behind it's now changing the color.
It's not bad enough that they made every window look identical, but then they make it look different just based on what's behind it.
So you really can't recognize it. One of my favorite things- Oh, go ahead.
I was just gonna say that I noticed, I'm always amused when I'm seeing someone writing something that has screenshots, And the screenshots are like bright pink, because I think they just don't know.
Like they don't really see it. But I'm not like going, wow, you had a hell of a background on there, dude.
You had your Barbie background up. That's right. Now I'm wondering if you've been mocking my screenshots all these years. Well, anyway, moving on.
[28:53] In this category, I've talked about this on the show before, but one of my very few changes I make on an Apple TV is in accessibility, display, focus style.
You can turn on high contrast and that puts a white box around whatever's been selected.
You ever look at the Apple TV and you're like, I don't know which thing I've got selected.
Oh, I'm glad you told me about that because I don't know what it is.
Some of these apps, right?
Like some of them, like they make it enough bigger, but the Apple TV app in particular is terrible.
I'm like, I have no way. I mean, I'll actually literally move so I can see something change.
Absolutely, it puts a white box around it. So accessibility display, focus style, high contrast.
Yeah, and I think one of the lessons of this is that...
[29:40] You should go everyone should go into accessibility settings and just play, Turn them on see what happens because oh man, are they some of these are just better?
Like this is we are not recommending this focus style thing on the apple tv because oh, we're old Or we have bad vision or anything like that. It's because it's a bad interface. Yes I mean, it's as simple as that.
They did a bad interface and it is not clear enough to people who are highly technical and completely aware of what's going on. That's a hint. That's a hint that you did it wrong.
That's a good idea to do that. On the other hand, make sure you tell them to leave, I don't know, four to five weeks open in your schedule to work your way through all of the accessibility settings.
Yeah, right. I know you remember when I did my iOS 11 settings mind map.
[30:41] That was like 80% of my graph was accessibility.
It is insane. Yeah.
I thought about doing it again, but I don't have that much time left. I'm 65.
I'm not sure I can get it done in time. You certainly wouldn't finish it before iOS 19, you know, 18, whatever the next one. Exactly. And on my post, I promised I would never update this.
So I gotta stick to that.
[31:04] So let's see. Oh, one of the other things that intrigued me that you talked about in the article was rearranging the home screen and making that more simplified. And I had never thought of doing this for somebody. Yeah. So this is, again, I think a little bit more of, frankly, a help for someone who is having some cognitive declines, but maybe not necessarily. So one of the problems running to an iPhone is that there's just too much. There's a lot of stuff there, even if you if you don't have a ton of apps.
And let's face it, anyone who's been using the iPhone for a while probably has a fair number of apps, even if they didn't really want to. And I do, I'm seeing pushback.
People don't want to get another app.
You know? I mean, I've kind of, I'm kind of done. I'm like, yeah, I've got so many apps.
What's another one? I don't care, you know? I did a keen install on my iPhone this time.
Oh. And I've been downloading them when I need them. And I can't really tell the difference.
[32:01] Yeah. The app library was brilliant for just like, yeah, fine.
They're over there, whatever.
I searched for everything anyway. So yeah. So think of it as that.
Think the home screens as dashboards, right? I mean, they are.
But there's some things that you use all the time. The top four should be on your dock.
IPhone, I guess you can obviously get more on the iPad. But that's the point of it.
It's always there. are the most popular, you know, the most common things to use and you want to make sure...
So figure out what the person uses the most.
Right. Precisely. If they don't ever use it as a phone because they have a landline...
[32:41] Take the phone out. Take the phone off, precisely. And, you know, but maybe photos or messages, you know, whatever it is they use, totally fine.
And then sort of the next level down is the first home screen.
Because those are the things that you see every time you unlock the phone.
And so that's a fair amount of space. You know, you can definitely put, you know, the things the person probably uses. And that for many people, that may be all that you really need.
You may not need to get into a second screen, but if there's those secondary apps that, yeah, oh, yeah, I need this every now and then because it's how I access my bank, or I have to use customer support to get to the cable company or something like that, those kinds of weird little apps that you need every now and then, those are the kinds you could put somewhere else.
And it's probably still good having them visible. They don't have to go search for them.
I think search is generally not a good thing to rely on when you're helping someone else and you say, oh, you could just search for it. Yeah, because that requires learning that gesture and figuring out where to type and typing and knowing the name.
[33:52] Right, right. And sometimes they change the names too, you know, like every now and then apps.
Yes, the one you downloaded is named something else on the app.
Right, right, precisely. So so so I really like the idea of doing that.
And then within those spaces, thinking about what organization makes the most sense.
And it could be by location, it could be by name, or, you know, this is one that I, it's a little funny, but my wife thinks this way completely, which is by color.
You know, my blue apps are over there. It's a blue app.
You know? I'd love to tell the story. My friend Niraj and I were working on some web development together, and we were in different offices, and we were constantly on the screen sharing calls. No, we weren't screen sharing, we were just on the phone. And we realized after like a year of working together that he and I think completely differently about finding something on screen.
[34:52] He said to me, he was telling a story about his father, and he said, I told him to click on Eagle Mail.
And I said, eagle mail? What are you talking about? What's eagle mail?
Look at the... It's not true now, but the mail icon had an eagle on it for many, many years.
I literally never noticed it. And the way I think is in Cartesian coordinates. So when I was talking to him, I would say, look in the upper left-hand corner. And when he was talking to me, he'd say, look for the blue icon. Neither of us were communicating at all. So we had to go, okay, I need to talk in color. You need to talk in Cartesian coordinates.
Yeah, and you know, I mean this is I mean this goes way back to when word started to do like icons on toolbars without names and you know, and they're like, I'm just like, I don't see them. I literally don't even see them. I could not tell you what they look like without the yeah, like I only need the words. I don't I don't think in pictures at all. And so, you know, so like, again, everyone's different.
Don't assume the person's like you.
Right. Don't assume the person's like you. And, and, you know, and, but you can, you can usually meet them somewhere, um, you know, with helping them.
Which one of these is male? And they say the blue one, then you know they're Tanya.
[36:06] And if they say the one that says male under it, then they know it's you.
Precisely. Precisely. And, you know, I mean, and that's partly like why I do actually search for some things because I'm enough of a word person that I think in words and it's not really a big deal for me to type a couple of characters and get the word to come out. Do you ever have that brain fart moment though where you go to do the and you're just complete blank? You have no idea what the app is called? Like it's just gone today? Not with apps or things that I'm doing like that.
Where I have that, and I'm actually quite put out about this, is playing music on a HomePod.
[36:39] I cannot think of artist names, album names, song names, basically at all.
Like I don't, I can't, there's so many of them that I can't pull them out.
And like, I don't even know like what I want to listen to necessarily.
So you have to go with a genre like 80s rock or something instead?
Sometimes that, what I'll more do is like, there'll be an artist, I'll be playing a certain set of artists regularly and I'll default to one of those are the only ones I can remember. Um I mean I'm I'm you know again I'm of the age where you used to like flip through the albums or if you know or look at all you know look at your rack of CDs and I needed those kind of memory aids to say oh yeah I do want to listen to such and such that who I didn't because like I didn't think I knew wanted to listen to it but I once I see it I know yeah oh yeah Peter Gabriel would be perfect right now but like you know like I couldn't Tomorrow, Peter Yangrel's name won't come to you.
Not in the slightest.
Not in the slightest. So yeah, so it's really kind of a problem.
And of course, the problem is that the more that I can only think of a certain set that I'm listening to, like, oh man, I'm really bored with these ones.
They're the only ones I listen to. My solution is I put on a podcast, so.
So yeah, so it's a perfect example, though, of how different people's brains work or don't work with retrieving data.
[38:02] Yeah. Yeah. You did some other things on simplifying the home screen.
I was really intrigued with being able to create buttons for who somebody wants to call or text.
[38:13] How did you do that? Well, so yeah, this is another one where, this goes back to the whole visual interface, right?
That knowing kind of where to find something when it's moved around.
So think about messages, you know, if your message is anything like mine, I don't know how many hundreds of conversations are in that list, right?
So you only really notice the ones at the top. And if I have to go down more than a scroll or two, like I'm just gonna start typing and like try to find it again.
So that's, you know, that works for me, but for someone who has just ended up with these things organically, but they don't really have that spatial sense of how to search this list visually, you in messages, you can pin certain people or groups.
And that's a really nice thing to do. so that, you know, I have Tanya pinned, so she's always in the upper left corner.
The only problem with that is that you have to make sure you then know to look at your people, because they're not in the list.
Where's Tom Merritt? Oh yeah, I pinned him, now I can't, there he is.
Precisely, so it can be good and bad. And then people change their profile photo, and then you can't find them again.
That could be an issue too. I'm I'm yeah, I'm yeah, precisely.
[39:33] You never know like who? Oh, that's right.
But so so I think that, you know, again, trying to keep things in predictable places is a big help to some kinds of people.
And so pinning stuff in messages. So I thought, well, that's kind of cool.
You can pin stuff in messages. Maybe you can pin stuff in mail too.
No, you can't or in contacts or in anything else. Like your favorites, but that's emails from those favorites. Not right. It's not it's not. Yeah precisely, so I Am completely I'm actually not even a big fan of shortcuts. I don't really like shortcuts But this was clearly we're gonna do a whole episode on everything you hate about short.
[40:18] But I was like this has got to be something shortcuts can do and and so, you know So like yeah, it turns out it is actually really easy to make a home screen icon.
[40:30] That could be just you could just do one per person if you wanted to get you know If you only had three people total or you could do just one for you know Like make create mail and then it pops up a list of the people and you tap the name And then it creates a message to them the people being the people you write to the most often, Right because the kinds of in the situations i'm thinking about, you know know, again, you know, like the grandparents I've worked with, you know, when they did do email, they were probably writing to six people, you know, like there was just, this was not, they weren't doing email per se. This was, you know, writing to this person, to that person and, you know, and that was it, you know, these relatives. So, and you know, they might conceivably receive mail from someone in reply, but that was, they weren't ever going to initiate more mail to that person or that address. So this was just trying to make it very easy to get back to the 3, 5, 8 people that they would ever want to actually initiate mail to.
And that shortcuts thing is in the tidbits article and it's super simple and easily modified by literally you really can't figure it out. I don't know. Even if you hate shortcuts.
It's not on the Mac, right? This is on the phone?
This is on the phone. I might have a chance on the phone.
I've never gotten a shortcut to work on the Mac, not yet.
I will admit, not me either.
[41:51] We will not go into the particular problems we had, but yeah, you're telling me all this, you can't get this shortcut. I'm like, oh, well, don't use it on the Mac.
That never works. Yeah, he was like, I don't understand.
I've got this thing working. Then I said, it was a Mac. He goes, oh, never mind.
So now we do highly recommend downloading executable code from the internet, from any source you find, and installing it on your devices.
But we know Adam, and we know it's going to be great.
I'm definitely going to try that.
Yeah, it's worthwhile, and again, very specific use for specific people, but something could be, and the idea behind it, again, is a simple one, but it's the provide me a menu of actions.
[42:35] And that might actually be not a terrible thing to do in certain other cases, too.
So I could imagine that someone just not like getting the concept of like finding apps or whatever, you could actually give them a menu.
They could tap one thing and it would just list out the names in a text menu of the apps.
Maybe I need that for those days I can't remember the name of an app when it disappears on me.
Well, that's because you don't see by color. You know, if you just looked at the blue apps, you'd be fine. I'd be fine, but Adam, be fair, all apps are blue.
So, you know. But it is true. I have looked at that and man, there should be some more variability in app icons colors because they all look... You get a green one, you're like, oh, I can see it.
[43:24] You also, you also, another suggestion I liked was editing their address book to simplify it.
Yeah, so this is something that I mean is again probably increasingly a problem honestly because you know people were professionals they retire they take their their address book which includes every person they ever communicated with during their busy professional life and suddenly they you know are now only talking to friends and family and you know 10 or 15 years later they still got this address book with you know 500 people in it.
[43:59] In it, all of whose addresses and phone numbers have changed anyway, and they were work colleagues or contacts.
I'm positive that I don't know 1,263 people today, but I have that many contacts.
Precisely. So, it's a little bit like going through, I don't know, I've had this a number of times where my family would tell me they need to clear up space on their computer.
And so we'll go through their files or we'll go through their photos or things like that because people often end up with like mega duplicates of photos.
And so this is a little bit like that. You can think of it as content gardening, you know, so you're just going through and it's like, Oh yeah, I am never, I don't even know who that is.
I am never going to talk to so and so again, you know, so and so passed away.
You're like all of those kinds of things, get them out of there because it's not going help you and all it's going to do is confuse you later on when a search, right, a search brings up five Peters, you know, like, ah, which one was it, you know, suddenly, whereas, you know, and again, it's a little bit, it's a little bit like you were saying with, um, you know, with a touch ID.
[45:08] Switch is, you know, like, if, is it going to be easier in 10 years to do this? No, probably not.
So, you know, like, take the time and clean up your, clean up your, your, your contact list now and then you'll have be able to work with it more fluidly and the also change people's names like change it to son or.
[45:29] I Don't usually recommend that Abigail van Buren. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I mean I would actually always recommend, making things familiar, But but probably you know, but usually in such a way that you're not gonna lose the search, So you could actually mess around a little bit with like the I think there's the nickname field, Or, you know, or ways like that, you know, like, Abby versus Abigail, that's not gonna be a problem, but you know, when a person's name is Francis, but everyone calls him Buddy, you know, like, yeah, you probably should leave the Francis in there, you know, but put Buddy in as well, you know, that's enough of a change where someone else would have no chance of ever figuring out what you meant.
Right, right. Now, let's talk about text input. You talked a little bit about dictation.
[46:23] I'm a big fan of dictation. I mean, it's one of those things, the only problem I have with dictation is that as a writer, I want it to be perfect. And it just, it just does things I'm like, no, I would never say that. You know, and I would punctuate correctly, I have to turn off the punctuation because it does the punctuation just wrong.
So the latest version on I dictate on 15 pro, and on my Apple Watch Series nine, and that's where it's supposed to be doing it on device now and everything. And the punctuation is It's just bizarre.
I mean, it's, auto-punctuation, I don't think it works at all.
I mean, it'll just like put a full stop in the middle of a sentence.
[47:02] That now it makes no sense. Right, right, you know, like I don't get it.
One of the things that is absolutely the case, you don't see this so much when you're dictating in messages because you tend to do short things and then just send them.
I dictate sometimes in an app where it's just like free-form text and it's more like I'm dictating for three or four minutes, kind of a journaling kind of app.
And I will see it go back and fix stuff.
And that's pretty fun. I mean, I really, and it bugs me too, because like, oh, you got that word wrong. And I'm like, but I'm gonna wait, because you'll get it right.
You know? And then you have Steve with that is, if you give it a minute, a lot of times it'll go back and it's like it picked up the context and went back and fixed it.
That does work really well. A lot of people are really resistant to doing dictation, and other.
[47:56] People aren't. Yeah, and I don't, I mean, I don't know why they're resistant to it. I mean, some of, it is that it just never is, it's never exactly what you want, right? It's always going to make some level of mistake, or like I was.
[48:14] Communicating with someone in messages using dictation last night, and it used the word gonna. G-O-N-N-A.
Oh, it did? Oh, gosh, I would never type gonna. Like, it pained me that it used the word gonna. I didn't quite notice earlier. And I'm, you know, I mean, like, yes, I probably said gonna, but I meant going to, you know, so...
If you go to hell, it's going to be having dictation do that to you for the rest of your life for an editor like you that's so precise in your use of language, that's just the worst thing ever.
Yes. So in any event, so yeah, so I think there are people who like that, but I really do encourage the use of it, because even for someone who's a fairly good typist on an iPhone or an iPad, the dictation is just going to be a lot faster.
And the one problem I'd worry about with recommending it for someone with any kind of motor control problems is that if it does make a mistake getting the cursor back to the right point, even by pressing and holding on the spacebar and using it as a trackpad, it's still dicey.
[49:19] Yeah. Yeah. It's not easy. Yeah.
Editing is editing is tough, but is it any, but the problem is, is you're going to end up doing that anyway, because if you've got motor control issues, you're going to be making a ton of mistakes.
Yeah. You might make them and then back up and fix them right away instead of having to move the cursor.
And then you've got to remember, now that the dictation stays on, you have to remember to put the cursor back at the end of the sentence in order to keep going.
The other thing that I see people struggle with is knowing which of the microphones to use. So like if you're in messages, there's a microphone right next to where the text field is, but there's another one in the bottom right of the screen.
The one in the bottom right of the screen is dictation, the other one is record audio.
[49:59] So I see people make that mistake. Is that audio one still there in iOS 17?
I sort of want to... I'm looking at it.
You're looking at okay. I'm using my iphone as a camera. So I can't look at it. Um, the uh, Yeah, the audio messages and messages have always bugged me, Um, you know like that just strikes me as sort of you know, that's wrong. Don't do that. Hang on. Hang on this just in, Sorry, i'm dictating. Um If you tap the microphone in the text field now, it enables dictation, Oh, okay. Okay. Good good hold it to record. Let me see, I don't think so, I think it's just a tab.
Okay. So that's the thing, it's like... So now they kept it there, so you get two of them, but they do the same thing.
Right. That might help.
And the other place you get two is in Safari, because you can do the voice search in the search field, or you can do dictation, which inserts into the search field.
The difference is the voice search automatically enters your search as well.
So you're saying if, oh yeah, because you have a microphone in the search field, right in the, I'm sorry, in the search slash URL field, and then and then the one in the bottom right, you're saying the one that's in the search field, it'll, it'll hit enter when you stop.
Now.
[51:17] Yeah, it's basically do the search, whereas the one in the keyboard just types what you say. So yeah, so I'm glad you said that because like I, I thought the audio messages thing was always problematic, you know, like in the sense of like, well, But you don't know what the person said, you don't know if it's an appropriate time to listen to it, you know, it's just like, no, don't do that.
It's sometimes the story's so long, you know? It's better in voice, I do like to do that.
I have a friend who, I don't know what it is she's doing, but we use Telegram for communication mostly, and you'll see so-and-so recording dot dot dot, and you know she's like, bump that button.
And it happens all the time. And nothing ever comes out, so she eventually notices, but it might be like an hour later.
Yeah, who knows what's going to happen if she actually ever sends.
I find people resistant to dictation saying, I don't want to look like an idiot.
I don't look like a crazy person.
[52:13] You look like a crazy person if you dictate to your phone. It only happens if you talk like a crazy person.
So it is true that you have to think a little bit about what you're saying.
And oh, the worst part is when you're like, I'm driving and Tanya's dictating messages to her phone, but I want to edit them.
And I'm like, don't say it that way. You know, like it triggers all the editor editor instincts in me.
And of course she's going to just send because that's the whole point of it, is to do it quickly. when you're driving and whatnot, um, you know, the car's moving.
So she can't type as easily as she would otherwise.
But, uh, but yeah, so it is to be clear, you're driving when this is happening.
I'm driving, I'm driving and she's, she's texting and yeah. And so that's the thing is like, like, I can't, I know I can't even say anything right, cause I'll interrupt what she's saying or my words might even get into it.
So like, I'm just sitting there going.
[53:12] My biggest problem is my son is thirty three years old and he still thinks it's hilarious to yell diarrhea in the middle of whenever i'm texting when i'm dictating.
Every single time how.
Thirty three someone some people never grow up it's still funny it's still funny to do it to other people cuz it is pretty funny when you do it.
I think the big picture of what you've been talking about here is.
Kind of a rule of thumb I use with people is look at someone you're communicating with as your customer.
You want them to be able to communicate with you.
[53:52] You need something from them. And so if you figure out how they wanna communicate, that's gonna be better than trying to tell them they should communicate the way you wanna communicate.
So you talked about a grandparent to a grandchild learning that they don't use the telephone anymore, Step one. Number two is email.
Maybe, maybe not. Texting, one of my favorite things is as an elderly person, we have a tendency to say goodbye, like to sign off on a text message.
But anybody under 30, 40 years old would never do that, right, that would never happen.
You just stop talking.
Right, right. Yeah, I think it's very important to meet people meet people where they are because it takes two to tango, you know, it's as simple as that and.
[54:43] You know, it's it's what's funny is is that I think we usually think we're usually thinking about all these other things It's like oh, how would the older person who might have these issues what we do to meet them?
But but realistically it goes both ways like again if they want to talk to a teenager, You phone isn't gonna work email really isn't gonna work either there. And there's, I mean, but simultaneously, they're probably not going to do Snapchat, you know, the grandchild probably, or the grandparent probably won't do Snapchat, or TikTok.
So that halfway might be right here in iMessage. Yeah, right. Yeah, so right. So that's, so I think that's, you know, and again, that's a little bit of that conversation. And, you know, in the case of the grandchild, you know, talking to the, talking to the parents and saying, so what, how am I actually going to be able to get to this kid?
I also think about time of day too.
Steve's mom is in her early 80s and very tech savvy and she has started to use messages more because she knows she gets a more immediate response.
But I also know that if I email her first thing in the morning, sometime before nine o'clock, I'll get a response.
If I email her in the afternoon, it might not be till later that day and then she feels all apologetic because she made me wait an hour for a response to something that didn't matter.
But if I can do it in the morning, that's when she checks her email.
So I get a sense of that.
[56:02] One of the most interesting things I read about this cross-generational communication was an article talking about words we use.
Notice what a younger person says if you say, thank you. They will never say you're welcome.
[56:16] They'll say no problem. And even if you complain, they say no problem. It's like, no, it really was a problem.
And so this, what is this phrase, no problem? But what young kids hear, uh, this article claimed this, that what young people hear when they hear you're welcome is they hear you're welcome. They hear sarcasm. Oh really? So we could be miscommunicating when we're both being completely polite on either end of the age spectrum. Yeah. I did see something, I think it was maybe Seth Godin talking about this where he's like, he actually recommended, um, uh, it's my pleasure or something like that. Um, that that was sort of a, you a way to get around like the no problem or you're welcome being weirdly.
That's very nice.
Yeah. Another one I've heard lately is, I appreciate you.
And it seems out of context, but it always makes me feel really good.
I think that, I don't know if it started there or it was just popularized there, I believe that's a Ted Lasso.
Is it?
Yeah. Yeah. Because the Ted Lasso character says, I appreciate you a lot.
Interesting. So that's my, that's my guess. I really like that.
That's gonna make people feel good.
Yeah. And the other one that actually I know about, but I refuse to cave to.
[57:38] Apparently young people are perturbed by punctuation at the end of texts.
Oh dear. Like, like if you put a period at the end of your sentence in a text, that's like, you know, you're, you're, you're mad or your clipped speech, you know, that kind of thing.
It'd be as bad as a period at the end of a bullet in a list of bullet points when you were near me.
How do they feel about exclamation points? I hope that's okay, because I'm a big fan.
I think exclamation points are pretty heavily used now, but again, in the right place.
But yeah, apparently periods are like complied disapproval, et cetera, et cetera.
And again, I'm like, no, it's punctuation. Get over yourself.
We could do a whole episode on language and punctuation, but we better cut this off.
This has been fantastic. I highly recommend people sign up for the Tidbits newsletter, if nothing else, because It's a great resource.
I always find something interesting to read in it. And this article is linked in the show notes with lots of screenshots where the background is not pink.
[58:48] Done by Adam to explain the different things that he does and get that shortcut from you.
And so if people want to find it, it's at tidbits.com. And it looks like you're pretty not on Meta products, but can be found on Mastodon.
I see tidbits at mastodon.social adamangst at mastodon.social. Are those good spots?
Yeah. Yeah, that's totally fine. I'll see everything that's posted there. Yeah, I've pretty much decided that I don't do big company social media. I mean, meta is problematic in so many ways and Twitter, well, I don't even want to start.
I'm looking at meta now going, hey, it's not as bad as Twitter.
[59:29] You know, I actually had that issue too. For a long time, I was like, well, Twitter's kind of a cesspool and you know, I don't approve, etc, etc. But at least it's not, at least it's not Facebook. And at least not Instagram. And now I'm like, oh man, when, yeah, like, I still haven't brought, I haven't still have not come to the point where I can use the letter X without, well, I can't, I haven't used it yet. I've actually mostly just done the service formerly known as.
No, refer to it as ex-Twitter.
Because then it's insulting. I like it. All right, we should probably cut this off.
As always, a super good time, Adam. Thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me.
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[1:01:13] Music.