In this week's podcast, Chet and Gary talk about April and May's meetings, the new software update, and some random thoughts.
Let's go!
Good morning, Chet. Good morning, Gary. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good today. Okay, well, what are we going to talk about today?
Well, I figured that seeing as how we got our regular meeting coming up on Wednesday that maybe we want to let people know what we're planning on doing in that meeting.
And also, let you know what I'm thinking about from the May meeting. Oh, great! Great! We might get some feedback from people on it. Good deal.
I know that coming May, that's going to be our last meeting until the fall. That's right. So we've got April and May meeting, and then we'll break till September.
And so, tell me a little bit about this meeting we're having. This Wednesday matter of fact.
This Wednesday, that's right. Yeah, coming up here in a couple of days.
Excuse me. What we've been doing over the last couple of meetings is kind of talking about the user interface and trying to get people to recognize how they can access information.
You know, use the search to do searches in support.apple.com and things like that.
So I do want to follow on along with that. I've got a couple of exercises that we're going to do as a group.
And one of them, I'm going to kind of lead it in. I'm going to show them a web page and ask them what they see.
Oh, okay. I hope I see something.
And also, we're going to use the email app as the thing that we talk about here. So we're going to take a look at the email app and talk about a few things such as,
what do you do if you get an email that has a document as a PDF attached to it and you want to save the document?
Oh, yeah.
We talked about mail in the past or photographs in the past and how you can save a photo.
Well, what do you do if you get a PDF document and you want to save it?
So we're going to talk about things like that and then have some table exercises where they kind of go through and do a few exercises like,
how do you create a mailbox?
Yeah.
You know, things like that.
And then looking forward a little bit, for May, I was thinking we'll kind of follow along the same theme of getting to more familiar with the user interface and the aspects of the user interface,
but we'll use the calendar app as the thing that we're exploring and looking at the user interface on the calendar app because calendar events are another thing that can be very beneficial to people.
And talking about things like what's the difference between a calendar event and a reminder.
All right.
Yeah, that sounds great.
And getting into mailboxes and stuff.
At some point in time, maybe we can even learn how to set up rules for mailboxes.
Well, that's good.
That's a little bit tricky.
We'll take it a step at a time.
It's a challenge.
It can be a challenge.
Yeah, one of the biggest problems I keep running into is people not even realizing it's possible to do something like that.
And I think that's one of the biggest problems that we've got looking into the kind of systems we're looking at in the future,
especially when we start talking about artificial intelligence and applying the artificial intelligence to these systems.
All of it's a lot of things that you can't even imagine are possible can be done.
It's amazing what can be done.
I would think that we probably use probably about 10% of what's really available.
Just in normal day activities, texting, taking pictures, calling.
But there's so many things like I mentioned, set up rules for your mailbox.
That's right.
And then you have to have it if something comes from a certain individual to put in a certain mailbox.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is that when I was writing software for a living, we always used to talk about the 80-20 rule.
That 20% is important and the other 80% isn't.
It's fluff.
Or it's stuff that doesn't apply to you.
The problem is that if you had 10 people in the room, the 80-20 would apply differently to everyone of the 10 people.
If you had a room of developers.
No, if you had a room of users.
I mean, it would switch between a room of developers and a room of users.
Yeah, that's part of the problem.
But it really is interesting that different people have different sets of requirements and so forth.
And when you get up into a retiree situation like we are, that also changes the complexion.
Some people have a lot of doctor's appointments they have to worry about.
So the calendar is very important to them.
Some people are living on email with their family and friends as their primary means of keeping in touch.
So email is very important to them.
And the fact that we are getting so much spam that we just almost can't control that situation anymore.
Well, in your opinion, this would be our third, I think our third meeting that we have gone to.
Table of exercises.
And how do you feel like it's going? Do you think it's going well? Do you think it's something we need to expand on?
Something we need to keep?
I'd like to get some feedback from the group.
And so, I don't know, you did the survey before we started all this.
Maybe it's time to send out another survey.
And I would wait maybe until after the meeting on Wednesday because this will be the third meeting where we've actually done this kind of thing.
And see whether or not it's go to bed.
Some people I've talked to and they say it's great. We really like this.
It gives us an opportunity to try things that we would not go home and try because we don't remember all the details.
But at the same time, I've talked to other people who said this stuff is still so far over my head.
I have no idea what the words that you're saying even mean.
And I sit there at the table and listen to these other people talk and I have no idea what's going on.
And so, I don't know exactly what the issue is and how we can best handle it, especially in a large group situation like we had with our monthly meetings.
If we had small classrooms and we could do hour long small classes or something that kind of like a kid in school that you went every week for a couple times a week for a semester.
That would be a very different.
Start out at the basic?
Yeah, start out at the basic and kind of grow it up.
We're not quite in that environment.
We have too much trouble with people being able to attend regular scheduled meetings and even setting them up and just finding resources to do that kind of teaching.
So I'm not sure what the right answer is.
I think to continue, if we really want to be successful and continue in this format, we've got to have capable table leaders at each table.
Yes, we need to find some people that are a little bit more skilled, that are able to understand some of that and explain it.
And again, it's kind of like, you know, in other conversations I've had that people are saying, well, why are you even bothering to tell me this?
I don't want to do anything except make phone calls.
You know, they just don't understand why it's important to do that at all.
I still see people, they have all of these note capabilities and reminders and other things that are free form now in their devices.
And they're still using paper and pencil all the time.
Yeah, it's hard to break.
It's hard to break. It's a different mindset.
And so a lot of times you say to somebody, okay, why aren't you using notes?
I never put notes on there. I keep them on paper and pencil. I'm too old to change.
I've already deleted that app.
I don't use it.
I don't use it. Yeah, it's gone.
But when I say that when I say capable table leaders, it's not like it's a hard thing to be a table. No, we're going to guide you through each.
You know, we'd love to have meetings before our regular meeting just with the table leaders.
But we know a lot of times that's not possible because of the other people, you know, people have other schedules that they have.
And it's hard to get everybody together at the same time.
So that's something we're going to have to work on though, if we want to continue, I think, is to make these table leaders aware of it's not that hard.
We have to have a good number of them that we would have wanted each table.
I think it's our last meeting. We had several that several table leaders were at one table and, you know, I had to kind of spread them out some.
So I think that's the big key and we'll have to work on that if we want to keep it.
So, you know, we're still very new at this.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Our last meeting was the second time.
Right.
And I got to be careful not to myself get tied up talking to one person like I did in the last meeting.
Yeah, well, you know, you always want to help people. That's what we're here for, right?
That's right, yes.
Yeah, so, yeah, it can be a challenge.
I get waylaid myself when I'm back there and, hey, can you look at this for me?
I already start the meeting, but let me look real quick and see if I can figure it out.
But, yeah, I like the format.
I hope that we get to the point where people feel like they're learning something each month.
Right.
And we do have, after the, we'll have that break, the three months that we can kind of go over some stuff and maybe make it more beneficial to our members are the presentation format and so forth.
Yeah, so we'll just have to see where it goes from there.
Right.
Any other news?
Well, let's see, other than the fact that Apple just came out with a 16.4.1 update.
They're pushing on the iPhone and the iPad.
This is apparently due to some security problems they found and they felt it was important enough to send out an immediate update to fix these.
So you should consider very seriously putting that update in right away if you have not already put this in.
There's no visible change to anything you're doing.
This is all internal stuff, but it is a major security fix.
Yeah, I was just reading an article just a few minutes ago before we started the podcast that evidently an issue was discovered out in a while.
Somebody was able to get into an iPhone.
Yeah, if you've got that notification, go ahead and download that update because it's got a security fix.
Do that update, yes.
Yeah.
It's important.
Even if it does mess up your Siri, remember.
Well, yeah, that's one thing that I've noticed that Siri used to be able to ask Siri to remind you of this when you were looking at a web page or an email and Siri would create a reminder with a link back to that email or a web page.
And that does not appear to be working at the moment under it.
I'm still trying to get more information.
And if this is something that there's a workaround for, or if this is just broken, it might have been that whatever they did in the security area blocked something that Siri needed.
So do you get out your paper and pencil now and write the address down to remember it or are you kidding me?
You use notes for that, right?
I'll find another way.
So one of the things that I have found, though, that, again, it's something that is quiet and kind of in the background and people don't think about it, but I'm finding it to be extremely valuable.
And that is the fact that if you have several devices, for example, when I'm working on presentations, I have my MacBook.
I'm using my MacBook and I've got my iPad and my iPhone to do examples and take screenshots and things like that.
Well, it turns out that copy and paste works across devices.
And most people don't even realize that that happens.
You can copy things on your iPhone like a photo of the screen and then you can go into your MacBook and paste and you paste the photograph you took on your phone.
Wow.
Yeah.
That is, is that a handoff issue that has to be turned on?
That's part of the handoff.
If you have to have a handoff turned on, but it creates a global copy and paste environment where if you copy something on one device, the other devices know you copied it.
So if you just go into them and say paste, you can actually see it.
It comes up a little dial on your screen and says copying from and the name of the device is copying from and then paste that on your screen and you're done.
That's awesome.
All the little things we learn every day.
Yeah.
And a lot of these things, I'm surprised that even knowing that they're there and understanding how all of this works, you still have to get your brain in the right mode to think about that.
Right.
It's enough of a change that it isn't something that is intuitive.
Right.
Yeah.
Something you really gotta think about.
Right.
Well, I think that about does it for this week.
We have had a couple of weeks off.
Apologize for that.
One, I had a surgery one week and last week we just really didn't have a whole lot to talk about.
So this is our 44th podcast.
Okay.
And, you know, when we hit that 50, I don't know, maybe we might move from this penthouse to another penthouse.
There you go.
All right, well, we'll see you all at the meeting Wednesday, hopefully.
And with that, I think we'll just call it a day.
All right, sounds good to me, Gary.
Goodbye.
Goodbye, Gary.
Bye.