[00:00:09.350] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.800] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.800] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.930] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.300] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have been happening for our businesses over the last seven days, and about things that have been happening in general, that are sort of technology related.
[00:00:30.980] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:31.670] - Gordon
So first thing I need to do is apologise for last week's video quality. So, the device that we're using to stream on, is an iPhone. And last week was the first week that we used an iPhone 12 pro, which is one of the new devices, and it has Dolby vision in it, which is a sort of HDR type affair with 10 bit video recording, which gives you a much higher number of colours that it can capture and a better quality. The problem is that not all of the software has caught up yet. So when we put it on Facebook, it obviously looked horrible. And when we put it on YouTube, it's horrible because they don't understand this format just yet. So we've gone back to taking that off. We're still using the same camera. But this time, hopefully it looks fine. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think. But we do apologise for last week. It was...
[00:01:48.350] - Taylor
It wasn't great.
[00:01:49.010] - Gordon
It wasn't great. At least the audio was good.
[00:01:51.230] - Taylor
Yes. The audio was good.
[00:01:51.870] - Gordon
Yeah. Which is which is good. We have a separate microphone for that. So that's why.
[00:01:56.450] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:57.830] - Gordon
So it's been a busy week. Taylor, what have you been up to?
[00:02:02.450] - Taylor
So this week I have been kind of doing designs for clients and sending them off for approval and comments and things like that. And I used a, I used to export all of my designs as just PDFs and send them over in a big zip file. However, I found that it wasn't very good for getting feedback, nor was it good for clients being able to actually visualise how the website would look, and also it just took forever to send because they were just big files.
[00:02:34.700] - Gordon
And they were very thin and long as well so...
[00:02:37.130] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:02:37.670] - Gordon
Unless you go into them, it looks really weird.
[00:02:40.340] - Taylor
Yeah. So because of the way that you kind of, you design the whole page, it's a very long, so if you were to export one page, for example, like the Apple website, you would see that it would be very, very, very long. And that's because, you know, that's the whole page. But then when you zoom in, you make it fit the width, it's actually not that much until you just keep on scrolling.
[00:03:00.770] - Gordon
And then you get an idea of what the site actually looks like without any of the animation or interaction.
[00:03:05.640] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:05.920] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:03:06.740] - Taylor
And I kind of found that clients didn't understand how to get it into a format that you could kind of preview it in before the website had actually been built. And I came across an app called "markup.io"
[00:03:21.221] - Gordon
Ok.
[00:03:21.920] - Taylor
And what it allows you to do, it allows you to upload any sort of image or you can put a URL in and it will screenshot the page and clients can then look at the website and they can select view, 'fit horizontally.' And what that would do is that will take the width of the PDF and pull it all the way out to the width of your browser and what that means is, you now get like a scroll-y, scrollable effect where as you scroll down the page, you get to see what you would see when the website was actually built. And it gives the client a much better understanding and visualisation of what their website's going to look like.
[00:03:59.930] - Gordon
May I ask a question?
[00:04:00.860] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:01.190] - Gordon
Does it take PDFs because you mentioned PDFs?
[00:04:04.460] - Taylor
It may do. I normally export them as JPEGs, but I believe they do take PDFs.
[00:04:11.270] - Gordon
And is this a free or a paid service?
[00:04:14.420] - Taylor
They have a paid service. However, I am the only person, I think it's if you want team members that you have to pay.
[00:04:21.260] - Gordon
Ok.
[00:04:21.650] - Taylor
So it's completely free.
[00:04:23.660] - Gordon
For very small single person businesses.
[00:04:27.410] - Taylor
And clients can then click on top of it and make comments. So it means that they can say, "oh, I don't like this, can we change the colour? Can we increase the spacing?" Or whatever. And then I get a notification saying, you know, so-and-so has made a comment, the name of the person who made it and what the comment was. I can then go away and make all those changes and I just re-upload a new version and call it 'V2' and they can then do the exact same thing until we get to a point where they're happy.
[00:04:53.510] - Gordon
So I have something similar called "wpfeedback," which works on the actual website once it's been deployed, if you like, once, it's already been built. So this service looks, sounds like it's very similar. So people can click on a particular area and make a comment about that particular thing.
[00:05:12.110] - Taylor
Yes, it does also work with websites. So, instead of uploading files from your computer, you can put a URL in.
[00:05:20.330] - Gordon
And it will grab a screenshot.
[00:05:21.500] - Taylor
Of the entire website and act the same, similar to wpfeedback, but rather you have to do it from the "markup" interface, rather than from the actual website.
[00:05:31.820] - Gordon
Well, that's a really useful tool, because if you, if you've ever been in the situation where a customer is telling you what they want to be changed or tweaked, then normally they'll come back and they go, "yeah, the third paragraph on the second line down says this when it shouldn't do." And because you don't know what device they're on, if they're looking at the real website as opposed to a picture.
[00:05:58.610] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:59.060] - Gordon
The second line down could be the fourth line down on a mobile.
[00:06:01.820] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:06:02.600] - Gordon
And so you're looking going, "I can't see what it is you mean." So by having them being able to click and put a little pin in as you, you know, like you would do for Google Maps, for example, it identifies the exact point that they're talking about, which must speed up.
[00:06:20.540] - Taylor
It does. And it also is a lot easier to collate feedback rather than having endless number of emails.
[00:06:27.320] - Gordon
And I'm guessing if you've got other people coming in to look at it as well.
[00:06:31.070] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:06:31.550] - Gordon
They don't then repeat things that people have already said.
[00:06:34.640] - Taylor
Yeah. And you can also, it's also a lot easier to share with friends, family, colleagues. And people can just say, here's a link, go and have a look and make your own comments.
[00:06:44.060] - Gordon
People you respect their opinion of. Yeah, fantastic. That's really good. Is there anything else you want to say about this service?
[00:06:51.050] - Taylor
I think that's everything, it's been really good for me. I found it on I think it was "Product Hunt."
[00:06:56.240] - Gordon
OK, that's another website we should talk about in the future.
[00:06:59.930] - Taylor
But yeah, it's been great.
[00:07:00.740] - Gordon
So if you're interested in that, we'll put the link in the show notes. Just to remind you, if you're watching live, the show notes go up after the the live because then we know what we've actually spoken about and what we've, what we need to put links up for. So they go up after. So it's normally on the same day. It's normally within an hour or so if I get time to do it quickly. So have a look in the show notes for a link for that.
[00:07:27.650] - Taylor
How about you this week?
[00:07:29.270] - Gordon
So something that, so well this week has been taken up a lot with learning from from you, in fact. So I mentioned last week that I was redesigning "Pip Kennedy" and the website, as it is at the moment, is in dire need of being updated. And I'm doing so and Taylor convinced me to not go my normal route of finding Divi; and installing that as a theme; and then working on that. Which is what I've done for probably the last ten years or so.
[00:08:04.190] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:04.730] - Gordon
He convinced me to start with a brand new builder I've never used before, which he is loving, which is "Oxygen," and learn it from scratch on a project of my own. Which sort of makes sense, because I'm not then keeping a customer waiting while I'm learning. Oh my goodness, is it a big learning curve, though!
[00:08:27.680] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:08:28.190] - Gordon
Oh, jeez.
[00:08:29.110] - Taylor
The reason for it, is because it's an entirely different way of working.
[00:08:33.860] - Gordon
It is.
[00:08:34.370] - Taylor
The way that you're used to, is completely different to the way that Oxygen works.
[00:08:40.580] - Gordon
Now, to give it it's due, Oxygen is very powerful.
[00:08:44.180] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:08:44.720] - Gordon
You can, if you understand how it works, which I don't yet.
[00:08:50.650] - Taylor
You're getting there.
[00:08:51.260] - Gordon
Errr. Getting there. But if you understand how it works, you can do pretty much anything. But you have to have, I mean, it is very nerdy. I can understand why people say it's the builder for the nerds, because you do have to understand CSS, you do have to understand Flexbox. You have to understand an awful lot of other technologies to be able to get the most out of it.
[00:09:17.900] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:09:19.190] - Gordon
And you know, as is the way with everything, I guess in this world, if you understand what you're doing, it's easy.
[00:09:28.790] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:09:29.210] - Gordon
But it's also very powerful. But you do need to learn it.
[00:09:35.180] - Taylor
I remember when I, so I moved over probably about the beginning of lockdown. And it was it was a big step...
[00:09:42.150] - Gordon
Lockdown 1.
[00:09:42.710]
Yeah. Lockdown 1. It was a big step because I mean I was you know, I was probably half a year into starting my business, I'd already done numerous projects with other clients. And I came across this and I thought this solves pretty much every single problem that I faced using Divi.
[00:10:02.240] - Gordon
And gave you a whole load of new problems.
[00:10:04.850] - Taylor
Yes and no. I had to spend more time to learn it, and some things take longer to implement, however, in my opinion, they're implemented the right way. Because obviously there's millions of ways you can do something, the way you can get something to appear, you can do in so many different ways.
[00:10:24.920] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:10:25.140] - Taylor
But there's always going to be a better way, or your preferred way. Sometimes they don't make a difference on, kind of speed optimisation and things like that. And this kind of solved all of all of those problems that I was facing and kind of pulling my hair out because, you know, Divi just didn't have that complexity that I wanted to be able to do and have the control and anything I wanted to add, it was just, "here's a plug-in to do," which, you know, isn't needed for every single thing.
[00:10:52.830] - Gordon
No, this is true. The other thing is you are, because Divi, which is a theme builder and a theme, is packaged up, you can only use the features they've given you.
[00:11:06.420] - Taylor
Yes, and... You can extend it.
[00:11:08.580] - Gordon
You can extend it with plug-ins, but as it is, you can only use the features that they've given you. So, for example, if you have an animation you want to do, which is a CSS animation and they haven't actually put it into Divi yet, well, it's possible, but it's a pain in the backside to do. Whereas with Oxygen, you can just add a code block and bring in some JavaScript and you know, you can get it done. And... See how I understand a little bit.
[00:11:40.530] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:40.530] - Gordon
It is, it's a long journey to learn and it's taking many, many, many hours and days to learn. And I'm...
[00:11:49.170] - Taylor
This was all off the back of your comment last week though.
[00:11:52.980] - Gordon
Which was?
[00:11:54.750] - Taylor
You should always, if you can, evolve and try and find the best solution and technology.
[00:11:58.540] - Gordon
I totally agree.
[00:11:59.760] - Taylor
And I was pestering you for probably the last couple months to try it, and you said, "nope, I'm happy with what I want.
[00:12:06.060] - Gordon
It's true.
[00:12:06.060] - Taylor
And then you said that comment and you kind of didn't really have a choice at that point.
[00:12:09.440] - Gordon
Well, yeah, I sort of, I did because of your performance speeds. The performance is a lot quicker and a lot better, and the sites load a lot faster.
[00:12:20.370] - Taylor
Out of the box. So you can get really good speeds using Divi.
[00:12:23.280] - Gordon
Yeah, agreed.
[00:12:24.300] - Taylor
But out of the box without having to do very minimal optimisation. It's a lot better.
[00:12:28.980] - Gordon
It's not quite what I want to talk about though. Because one of the things that a lot of us face, is being able to access content from certain places. So, for example, here in the UK, we have BBC iPlayer and that is something you can access if you are on a UK broadband provider's UK IP.
[00:12:59.160] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:13:00.340] - Gordon
And if you go on holiday to Spain or on a business trip to America, which I did just this, a couple of years ago, and you no longer have access to it, because BBC iPlayer locks in content access just to those people who are in the UK, which makes sense.
[00:13:20.070] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:13:21.060] - Gordon
And there's a lot of sites around the world that do the same thing. Now, this doesn't seem like a big problem. You know, you wait 'til you get back, then you can watch iPlayer. It doesn't seem like a big problem. However, consider the fact that all over the world you are being charged different prices for the same exact service or product depending on where you are.
[00:13:45.180] - Taylor
If you're in a different service as well, depending on where you are.
[00:13:47.730] - Gordon
Yes indeed.
[00:13:48.710] - Taylor
So a good example would be Netflix. There are numerous TV shows I think, there's a popular one called "Grey's Anatomy." That is an American Netflix TV show, which doesn't appear on the UK.
[00:14:00.650] - Gordon
Yeah, I'm not sure how that would work though, because I think that is based on the account you have.
[00:14:06.540] - Taylor
Yes, but I'm more just...
[00:14:07.650] - Gordon
Rather than the location that you're viewing it from. For, my example, is more like if you've got, I mean, the dollar to the pound at the moment is pretty much in the UK, dollar for pound. So if something is ten dollars, it's ten pounds, which is not the same as the exchange rate, it's very different to the exchange rate in fact. Um, I don't know what it is currently, but it's probably going to be something like ten pounds is eight dollars. Ok, something like that. So we are being given that extra cost because we happen to be in the UK. Now, a VPN, which is what I want to talk about, allows you to view a website and access a website as if you were in a different country. So just to explain that just a little bit further, I could, to a particular website, appear as if I am in the US or I'm in Africa or I am in New Zealand. I get to pick basically and I, and because that website is just checking where you're coming from, it goes, "oh ok, you're coming from that country, so this is the information I'm going to give you." And a VPN will allow you, to a point, not always, there are ways to stop it, but most of the time a VPN will do the job and will let you appear to be from another place. Which can give you an awful lot of benefit. So VPNs, the way they work is they have servers in all these different countries, and they allow you to access the website that you're looking to access, or the service, through their server in that country. And that is a really expensive thing to do, to have, first of all, to have all these servers in different countries. But then you've got bandwidth that you're paying for to go through to these different sites. So most VPNs are paid for. So depending on what you want to do and what you what you want to achieve, a VPN might be something that will help you achieve that. There are some free VPNs. Don't expect great things from them. Some of them do a good job. Some of them are terrible. It's an expensive business to have a VPN service. However, one that I've been using successfully recently is called "Urban VPN." I'll put a link into the show now just in case I haven't got it quite right as the name of it. But this is a chrome extension and allows you to basically view sites as if you were in another country. So if that's something you need to do, the technology is out there, you can do it.
[00:17:11.060] - Taylor
Wonderful.
[00:17:11.750] - Gordon
Yeah. So, news item this week. This is something that happened last week and it's something that we decided that we would wait to hear about because it's a new announcement and it's going to affect pretty much all the people who use Apple products, which both of us do. And we wanted to see what the feedback from other people was going to be before we mentioned it on This Week With. Taylor do you want to tell everyone what it is?
[00:17:46.100] - Taylor
So they are bringing out a new or their own chip.
[00:17:50.840] - Gordon
It's out already now.
[00:17:52.040] - Taylor
Yes. So it's called the M1 chip. And the best way to explain it is, you've probably heard of people going, "I've got an Intel i5, Intel i7, Intel i9" chip in their computer.
[00:18:06.290] - Gordon
It's the processor.
[00:18:07.170] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:07.550] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:18:08.560] - Taylor
And that's what Apple have used pretty much from the beginning, really. They've used Intel. However, they're now moving over.
[00:18:15.350] - Gordon
Not quite the beginning.
[00:18:16.400] - Taylor
Well, since I've used...
[00:18:18.500] - Gordon
Yes. So 2002 I think it is, they moved from "PowerPC," which was an IBM chip, and they moved over to Intel. And the reason they did that is because PowerPC wasn't giving them the performance and the updates and the mainly the 'power per watt' that they wanted because they wanted to produce laptops that were much more powerful, and the chips just weren't being, coming out with the power to performance ratio that they wanted. So they did a big changeover, which was a major changeover, because it meant that all of the applications at the time that were written for PowerPC had to be rewritten for Intel. So there was a transition period where people created universal binaries and there was "Rosetta," which allowed, software which allowed the old version of the software to work on the new version using emulation. And this is effectively what they're going through all over again.
[00:19:23.990] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:19:24.950] - Gordon
So why is the M1 chip important?
[00:19:28.520] - Taylor
Because it means Apple have control over every single part of their laptops and iMacs and stuff like that now. So they no longer have to worry and rely on a third party chip. Every single part that is within Apple, is made and is accessible by Apple, meaning they now know what is capable, what isn't capable. They have access to change things as they wish, and it also is just a lot faster for a lot smaller package, really.
[00:20:04.790] - Gordon
So they're using five nanometre technology, which is sort of in layman's terms, the thickness of the chip or the silicon that they're using. And obviously the smaller the chip size, the more powerful it's going to be. More you can pack into it. Didn't say that very well. The smaller the silicon that you're using is, the quicker electricity will pass through it. That's a much better way of doing it. So, yeah, this is a major, major update for Apple. And over the next year or two, they are going to be updating their entire line to use Apple silicon, which is the same technology and chips that they're using in their iPhones and their iPads, exactly the same technology, same team behind it. And as Taylor said, the advantage is that they can plan for the future. So if in six years time they want to bring a particular feature to a particular device, they can start working on the processor to allow that to happen, now, rather than waiting for another company to make sure that they put in the technology that's needed to allow this feature to happen. So they've got complete control over the vertical integration of all of their devices from the software, the hardware and the processors now. Which is just amazing. And one upside to this is that on all these Apple silicon desktop devices and laptops, you are going to be able to run natively, iPad and iOS applications.
[00:21:58.740] - Taylor
It's going to be good.
[00:21:59.550] - Gordon
Which is amazing. I mean, this is actually a feature, I believe, that's coming into 'Big Sur,' which is out, I haven't upgraded yet. Came out last Thursday. But I'm waiting to check, which I recommend you all do as well. If you haven't already upgraded. Just wait a little bit. Just make sure all the applications that you rely on are working perfectly fine in Big Sur before you upgrade. This is what I always do. Let those people who want to be on the bleeding edge of technology upgrade; find the things that don't work; report to everyone else; and let us benefit from that. But being able to use iOS, iPad and phone applications on your desktop and laptops, I mean, that's huge. It's going to mean that you can have you know, you've got so many more applications that are already coded, that you can use on your devices, everything from games... I mean, there's tons of games. It's going to make the Mac a big gaming platform. Without, I heard someone saying that they could run, um, what's the game that...?
[00:23:15.940] - Taylor
"Among Us."
[00:23:16.560] - Gordon
"Among Us," thank you. Play "Among Us" on their Mac, without having to pay stream, or "steam" sorry, "steam" to buy it so that they can...
[00:23:28.740] - Taylor
You can't buy it though, it's a PC only game.
[00:23:31.670] - Gordon
Right. So in which case you'd have had to emulate it through "steam."
[00:23:35.390] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:23:35.780] - Gordon
Emulate it on your Mac, to be able to play it on your Mac.
[00:23:39.580] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:23:40.370] - Gordon
Whereas now just run the iOS version. Yeah. Much, oh it's just, it's going to bring so many changes to the platform. Plus of course it is, according to Apple, the fastest desktop processor in the world. And I mean the reports are still coming in, but I have no reason to doubt that that's not true.
[00:24:04.310] - Taylor
Yeah, it's gonna be good.
[00:24:06.440] - Gordon
There you go. Full, um, fun fact packed episode today. What are we? Episode 29, I think this is.
[00:24:17.360] - Taylor
Yes something like that.
[00:24:18.190] - Gordon
Yeah, it's amazing. Please tell your friends about us, because we do these every week and it would be nice to have more viewers. I think that's everything that we want to say.
[00:24:29.220] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:24:29.690] - Gordon
So as always, please like, share, subscribe. Share importantly. We are on Facebook and YouTube. You can catch us at one o'clock on a Friday every day, every week sorry.
[00:24:42.920] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk, where you can find all past episodes, show notes, video and audio, and you can find it on there.
[00:24:53.600] - Gordon
Thank you very much for joining us. My name is Gordon, and you can find me at draysondesign.com.
[00:24:59.660] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:25:02.930] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week.
[00:25:05.690] - Taylor
Bye.
[00:25:06.110] - Gordon
Goodbye.
