[00:00:10.910] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.910] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.390] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:13.460] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:15.560] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And it's been one of those weeks hasn't it? The weather has been really nice. And then we had, a couple of nights ago, we had a storm and a bit of rain on, yesterday and it's sort of a bit all over the place. And it's a worry for me because I get hay fever. And so I've been sneezing quite a bit, haven't I?
[00:00:46.670] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:46.670] - Gordon
Which is not good. My eyes are already itchy and, you know, it's, you know, still got the rest of the day to go yet. So hopefully I'll be OK. Hopefully you are not suffering from hay fever and having a lovely time in the in the sun when it's out, wherever you may be. So Taylor any news before we get on to our topics?
[00:01:07.520] - Taylor
Just to say congratulations again to our winners. We did contact you and yeah, you seemed very excited and happy and also surprised that you won. But yeah, well down to Emma, Caroline and Hayley, well done.
[00:01:23.150] - Gordon
Thank you for joining in and playing along. And you don't need to stop now. There's no giveaway presently. But if you do want to share or send this to someone that you think would be interested, then please do so. We'd be very grateful. And we're on episode 56 now.
[00:01:41.150] - Taylor
Wow!
[00:01:41.150] - Gordon
And it's about time we, we got a bigger following I think, so we haven't pushed it at all, but we are now. We're thinking now's the time for us to get it out there. We've got quite a bit of content. We've got a nice website. The search facility is awesome. So if you haven't checked that out, go and check that out: thisweekwith.co.uk. So, Taylor, what would you like to talk about today?
[00:02:04.370] - Taylor
This week I want to talk about 'cross browser device compatibility testing.' So a bit of a mouthful.
[00:02:10.590] - Gordon
It is.
[00:02:11.150] - Taylor
Basically just being able to basically test your website across all the different platforms and browsers that exist. So the popular browsers that exist would be Safari, Firefox and Chrome. There also are ones like Brave, which is kind of a chromium base, but more privacy, basically like Chrome. And then you've also got different platforms. So that would be an iPhone, it would be a Samsung phone, it would be a Windows computer, a Lenovo laptop, a MacBook, anything that you can...
[00:02:43.400] - Gordon
Apple TV.
[00:02:44.150] - Taylor
Yeah, anything you can look at a browser with or search the Internet with. And it can you know, it can have its challenges because for me, I use a Mac exclusively and I use iOS devices exclusively, so if there's an issue with a Windows computer I can't test that because I don't have one. So I you know, need to be told by the client if there's an issue with it, because I can't obviously test for that. And so if I do have that issue, I try and make the changes, but also use my friends that I have online who do have Windows and ask them, you know, can you debug for me or can you just have a look and see if it's fixed, and things like that and that's my kind of way of being able to test and make changes and fix stuff for devices I don't have.
[00:03:32.390] - Gordon
And that's quite a good idea actually. If you get sort of an agreement in place with someone who uses Windows and a Samsung, that's the idea, isn't it? One person who uses Windows and an Android, and then ask them when you've sort of got to a site that's ready to launch and say, could you just give this the once over on both your devices? And they do the same for you because obviously you've got Mac and iOS.
[00:03:58.850] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:59.810] - Gordon
Then just before you launch, you can very quickly, with someone who knows what they're doing, check that the site has no visual problems, which is normally the problem, it's not normally a functional problem, it's normally a visual problem, which can normally be fixed quite quickly.
[00:04:19.280] - Taylor
Yeah. And it's different because even if you had the same browser, they behave differently on different devices. A good example is, I had a client who had a visual discrepancy between the, on Chrome for Windows and Mac, and the Windows one wasn't showing correctly. I had no idea of this because I don't use Windows and it was only brought to my attention when they mentioned it. But, you know, I have chrome on my computer, but it looks completely different because there are different rules, different ways that it's been built for the device that I was running it on. And so yeah, it's interesting because I don't think they were there before. So something's changed, something's come up and something's caused that, so.
[00:05:05.840] - Gordon
And there are actually services online that allow you to test your sites on different devices. Some are free, most are paid, the reason for that is that they have to have these physical devices attached to a network and they send the website to that device and they take a screenshot effectively and then send it back again. But they actually have to keep, up-keep these machines so that it goes back to sort of Windows XP and things, just in case people have that still, which, you know, they shouldn't. But some people do. And so it's normally a paid for service because of the fact they have to, you know they've got all that expense. And there's services that do that for browsers and devices. There's also servers that do that for emails. We'll talk about that another time, I think.
[00:05:59.670] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:06:00.120] - Gordon
But yeah, just getting somebody who has different devices from you to go and check it, is normally good enough, although you may then have to badger them if there is a problem because you fix something and you can't check to see if it's fixed or not.
[00:06:13.170] - Taylor
Just make sure you know them well enough.
[00:06:15.240] - Gordon
Yeah exactly. Unless they go and check it again.
[00:06:17.340] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. So yeah that was kind of what I wanted to talk about.
[00:06:20.760] - Gordon
It's annoying isn't it? 'Cos...
[00:06:21.990] - Taylor
It is.
[00:06:22.560] - Gordon
'Cos to actually have a P.C. just for the testing of sites like that is not really cost effective, but it is something that's quite important to do.
[00:06:36.630] - Taylor
I think it depends on the level or the complexity of the issue. For my one, it was just a small character issue where there was a small character showing when it shouldn't. Whereas, you know, I know a dev actually, who has had an issue with this plugin where some of the keyboard commands and shortcuts for a Mac weren't working properly as they should do. And the dev had to buy a MacBook to be able to debug the issue because no one else could debug it for him, because he was one that knew the code; he was the one that was basically developing it and he had to buy a Mac. And because of where he lived, it took a while to get to him. And so that issue has been ongoing for a while. And because emulators and stuff that don't do a good job sometimes where they can't fully replicate issues, that was kind of one of the things that...
[00:07:30.180] - Gordon
But I bet now he's got a Mac he's using it a lot more, isn't he?
[00:07:33.240] - Taylor
It depends. Some people just prefer the platform to a Windows.
[00:07:36.750] - Gordon
It's true.
[00:07:37.200] - Taylor
I think it doesn't really matter what you use, whatever you feel comfortable with and whatever you're used to really.
[00:07:43.680] - Gordon
Very good. So test on all devices, that's the message there.
[00:07:46.290] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:47.560] - Gordon
So news today, well, not really today, just recently is that Microsoft, talking of Windows machines, Microsoft announced a long time ago that Windows 10 was going to be the last ever Windows with a number. So that either meant that they were going to start naming them like Apple do.
[00:08:07.270] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:07.890] - Gordon
They've just announced the new one, which is 'Monterey.'
[00:08:11.110] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:11.700] - Gordon
Which is going to be coming out in the autumn.
[00:08:15.780] - Gordon
But they've announced that a new Windows version is on its way and everyone's sort of very interested about that. Just for those who aren't aware, Apple bring out a new version of their operating system every year and it's completely free. So there's no charge whatsoever. The purchase price of your machine includes the operating system and the updates to it. Whereas with Windows, you have to buy Windows and they've got lots of different versions depending on what you want to do with it. So there's an 'enterprise' version, there's a student version, etc etc.
[00:08:55.770] - Taylor
It wasn't always the way though for Mac you used to, it wasn't always free.
[00:08:58.690] - Gordon
No, that is true. But for the last I think it's 15 years now, it's been free.
[00:09:04.410] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:09:04.710] - Gordon
Something like that. But yes, there's a new windows coming and that's all we know at the moment but...
[00:09:11.510] - Taylor
I did see some stuff in the news that apparently leaked, that it kind of looks similar to Apple in the way that the design is.
[00:09:19.200] - Gordon
It's funny because because Apple and Microsoft have sort of leapfrogged each other over the years with features. They've sort of taken some of the best bits from Windows and put it in the Mac OS, and then Microsoft have taken the best bits from Mac OS and put it into Windows. But they are still very different.
[00:09:38.170] - Taylor
They are.
[00:09:38.910] - Gordon
And the very fact that Windows doesn't get many updates very often.
[00:09:44.520] - Taylor
It supports...
[00:09:45.330] - Gordon
Is a problem I think.
[00:09:46.350] - Taylor
It supports older computers and things like that and it has, I think has bigger backwards compatibility than Mac.
[00:09:53.400] - Gordon
Well it has to because with Microsoft Windows, Microsoft have no idea what hardware the software is running on. So they have to make it as compatible as possible because someone might be using a machine from, you know, 2010, that has a certain graphics card in it that's no longer produced and, you know, if someone was to buy Windows, they would want it to work, so it needs to be compatible. But that's the problem. You've got all of the manufacturers of the devices, the graphics cards and so on that have to make drivers for Windows for it to work. And if they give up and say, you know, that's been, we haven't made that for five years, then they're not going to then create drivers for it ongoing because it's of no interest to them. It's just work that they're having to pay for that isn't going to bring in any further income. So having a big choice of what graphics card and what memory and what, you know, CPU you want in your in your PC is advantageous in some respects, but it's also disadvantageous. That's not the right word. Disadvant... It's not great, if you want backwards compatibility when a new version of software comes out, because you're relying on the developer of the hardware to update their software, which doesn't always happen. So, yes, we will look and see what the new version of Windows is going to look like and how it's going to manifest itself. Is it going to be something they're going to upgrade every year like Apple do? Is it something they're going to charge for? Probably, is the answer to that, but we will see.
[00:11:40.830] - Taylor
Yeah, it'll be interesting.
[00:11:41.400] - Gordon
Yeah. So my topic is not going to be very long, but it's something I touched on last week. Our YouTube videos have started to see the fruits of the labour that is transcription and subtitling. So we mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we were using a service called "Happy Scribe," which will take the videos, once we've finished recording them, they've gone live. We can then take the recorded video, bring it into Happy Scribe and Happy Scribe will do an 80%, they reckon, accurate transcription of the video. We then have to go in and edit it just to make sure that what we're saying is actually what the words are saying, what the text is saying. There was a funny one the other day. You don't know about this where it says, it was our intro it's you know "Hello and welcome to This Week with Taylor and Gordon, a weekly podcast." And it said, "a podcast from the White House," which is not true at all. We've never done an episode from the White House for those who were wondering.
[00:12:54.800] - Taylor
I mean, if you look at, back when we did our Zoom version, I was in a white room.
[00:13:00.040] - Gordon
OK.
[00:13:00.690] - Taylor
So it's close to a white house?
[00:13:04.740] - Gordon
A white roomed house.
[00:13:04.740] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:13:04.980] - Gordon
Yeah, ok, alright, maybe. But every now and then it gets it slightly wrong. So we have to go in and fix it up and it all takes a lot of time. And, you know, luckily we're not the only ones doing it. So thank you to the other person who's doing it. I won't mention your name, but you know that we thank you very much for that. It's very kind of you to do this. However, once the transcript is done, we can then take that transcript and put it into the website, which is fine.
[00:13:35.850] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:13:36.660] - Gordon
We can also export that transcript from Happy Scribe as a subtitle file. Now, what this is, is a file with all the text and timecode, and you can uploaded to YouTube and it will replace the automated transcript or subtitles that it, oh pardon me, that it creates and it will put these ones on in its place. And because you've got timecode on, it will show the subtitles at the right time of the video, which is the important bit. Not much point having subtitles if you've got them coming up at the wrong time. What Happy Scribe also allows you to do, is to translate and export your subtitles into different languages. So I am pleased to say that going back to I think it's episode 40 now. I think that's right.
[00:14:33.700] - Taylor
We're international.
[00:14:34.870] - Gordon
We are international. Yeah. If you look on YouTube, you will find, not the latest two versions because, I'll explain in a minute, but sort of 53, 54, I think it is, 54 going back to 40, we have now got English, we've got Spanish, we've got French and we've got German subtitles. So if you speak one of those languages or read one of those languages, you can now turn those on, but only for the YouTube videos, not the Facebook videos. Facebook videos are causing me a bit of a problem. Plus the reason we can't do the the most recent videos so quickly is because YouTube has to process the videos, and it has to make sure that they are in HD and showing properly for people who want to watch it when it's not live. And that takes time. And it's normally a few hours or so, and only when it's done that, can I then go in and trim off our header. Now, the reason we have the header is so that people can join us, they've got 30 seconds to join in the live stream before it actually goes live so that we can make sure nobody misses anything. But for our transcripts and our subtitles, we don't need that header, that 30 second header. So I go in and I manually trim the video to get rid of it, so that when you watch it on the website or you go back and watch it on YouTube, you don't have to sit there for 30 seconds to watch the countdown, you just go straight into the episode. And once you've trimmed it, you then have to wait a few hours. So I normally have to do that on a Saturday, a Sunday or a Monday. And once it's then done that, only then can I bring it into Happy Scribe to have it transcribed and translated. And the reason is that we don't want to transcribe it with the time codes with that header on, because then when we trim it, all of the transcriptions are going to be out by however long, you know 30 seconds, which is the length of the header. So I have to wait until all that's done before I can bring it into Happy Scribe, which is why the transcripts are not normally there until about halfway through the following week, because that's how long it takes, not for us, but for YouTube to sort its video out. But it's really quite exciting.
[00:17:05.990] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:06.340] - Gordon
And we have the option to add in further languages and it's not a big deal. Actually adding a new language is quite a quick thing to do. So if you are watching this in another country and you can't understand us, then what I'm about to say will make no sense.
[00:17:26.250] - Taylor
Well yeah, well done for getting this far.
[00:17:27.700] - Gordon
Then leave comments below if English is not your first language, and let us know what language is your first language and if it's possible to do so, because we have a set, a number of languages, we can translate into. But if possible, we will, just for you, start creating a subtitled translated version of our episode that you can then watch and join in after it's gone live and sort of half a week later effectively.
[00:18:01.690] - Taylor
Great.
[00:18:01.870] - Gordon
But it's great. It's a really good system. And I have mentioned Happy Scribe before, but I'm going to mention it again because it's a very good service. And if you do have a reason to have subtitles for videos like we do here, then I highly recommend them.
[00:18:17.920] - Taylor
It's good for any video content, really, because you can put them into your website and it can then become searchable, and SEO-able. So if people were searching for it and it comes up in Google, um, Google search, then we're going to you know rank for that, whereas you don't rank for captions normally on YouTube. And so it's very hard to be able to, you know, rank for stuff because we're only doing audio.
[00:18:43.870] - Gordon
And the other thing is, it will bake the subtitles into the video. So it'll actually allow you to export the video with the subtitles sort of 'hard coded' onto the video so it's part of the picture. And that's, pardon me! I've got hiccups today. That's great if you are doing social media videos on Facebook, for example, where you might want to have people turn on their speaker, because normally social videos go through and you can't actually hear, because it doesn't want to disturb what you're doing, but it wants to play it. And if you have subtitles, you might have something at the beginning of your video that might grab somebody's attention and make them want to turn the sound on so they can hear your video. So that's another thing that you can use it for, which is really good. That's it from me.
[00:19:39.000] - Taylor
Same from me.
[00:19:39.970] - Gordon
So thank you very much for watching. As always, please like, share and subscribe on YouTube and on Facebook.
[00:19:47.200] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk where you can find all of our past episodes and you can search for all of the different topics that we've spoken about. And as we add more transcriptions, the search will become better and better because you'll be able to not only search for titles and our show notes, but you'll also be able to search for the transcriptions, which sometimes we mention something, but they're not actually in the show notes. So hopefully, yeah, that will help more.
[00:20:14.620] - Gordon
Good. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:20:21.280] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:20:23.740] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:20:24.250] - Taylor
Bye.
