An interview podcast about what's unusual in tech by Timothy Buck
Benjamin Mayo, writer for 9to5Mac, sat down with me and chatted about Apple’s “iPhone” keynote, their services strategy, Apple Watch Series 5, and of course the new iPhones.
Guilherme Rambo from 9to5Mac joined me again as part The Future of Apple series. We nerded out about what we expect Apple to announce next week—iPhones, watches, and one (or two) more thing(s).
Brian Roemmele, a speaker, writer, and inventor who has been working on voice technology since the 80’s. He and I had a longer than usual and fascinating conversation about the history of voice first, human-machine interfaces, the dialog that goes on in our heads, and where he believes this voice-first technology is going.
Adva Levin, founder of Pretzel Labs and Alexa Champion, sat down with me to discuss her dive into the voice first world, characters in voice first applications, making skills for children, monetization and more.
Vlad from The Verge and I spoke about the strategic, economic, cultural and legal environments we find ourselves in and how they impact voice first technology.
Cathy Pearl, Google’s Head of Conversation Design Outreach, joins me to chat about how voice assistants can help with accessibility, multimodal devices, solving for discoverability and context, designing for Voice First and more.
The Future of Voice First is a 4-part interview series with Cathy Pearl, Head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google, Vlad Savov, co-founding editor of The Verge, Adva Levin, the founder of Pretzel Labs, and Brian Roemmele, a speaker, writer, and inventor who has been working on voice technology since the 80’s.
Ryan Jones, founder of Weatherline and Flighty, joined me again this year to break down Apple's announcements at WWDC.
Guilherme Rambo, the prolific software spelunker and writer for 9to5Mac, was my guest this week. This is the first in a new ongoing series of interviews about Apple, before and after major events, that I’m calling The Future of Apple. He joined me to discuss what he expects at WWDC for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and even hardware.
In episode 3 of The Future of Podcasts, Carolina Milanesi and I chatted about her history with podcasting, its unique relationship building aspects, how podcasting competes with video, attention spans, and more.
In episode 2 of The Future of Podcasts, Zach Kahn and I spoke about how he landed in podcast marketing at Vox, our common joy in discovering new shows, falling down the McElroy hole, changes in podcast advertising, and where podcasting is going.
In episode 1 of The Future of Podcasts, I sat down with Stephen Hackett to talk about his history with podcasting, the founding of Relay.fm, building a relationship of trust with listeners, and the future he’d like to see.
The Future of Podcasts is a 3-part mini series. First, I interview Stephen Hackett, co-founder of Relay FM. Next, I speak with Zach Kahn, who heads up podcast marketing for Vox and their long list of popular shows. And finally, I have a lovely conversation with industry analyst, Carolina Milanesi.Get new episodes before anyone else and help support the show by becoming a patron.
In the final episode of UNCO Season One, Peter Cao, writer for 9to5Mac, returns to chat about his transition to the iPad-only lifestyle, Apple Music moving to the Echo, Tumblr banning adult content, the slow-moving connector situation, and more.
Cap Watkins, the former VP of Design at Buzzfeed and the founder of Practical Works, spoke with me about the future of work, learning to be a good manager, the story behind Practical Works, ethics (or the lack of them) in tech, tech leaders taking responsibility for collateral damage, and more.
Ryan McLeod is the creator of the brilliant, infuriating, Apple Design Award winning puzzle game, Blackbox. I chat with Ryan about his move to Amsterdam, the ideas behind Blackbox, turning a portfolio piece into a full-time job, designing context-aware personalized fluid interfaces without compromising privacy, and more.
Larie is pregnant and the mother of 5 children. She joined me to talk about the Apple Watch, and how it has surprisingly become an important part of her daily life as a mom.
Up-and-coming tech YouTuber, writer and podcaster Matthew Cassinelli was an early member at Workflow, the Apple-acquired company behind Shortcuts in iOS 12. Matthew offered his unique perspective on Shortcuts. We shared our thoughts on the new Apple devices we just got in the mail, talked about taking control over our technology instead of letting it control us and more.
For this Apple Day episode, I interviewed friend of the show and former guest, Carolina Milanesi. Carolina is an industry analyst at Creative Strategies and regular columnist for Techpinions, TIME, TechCrunch and PC Magazine. She joined me to discuss this week’s event, what was and wasn’t announced, the Apple Watch Series 4, the reasoning behind Apple’s 3-new iPhone lineup and more.
Guilherme Rambo is a software spelunker and writer for 9to5Mac and an iOS developer in Brazil. He joined me for a special Apple Event predictions episode to chat about how he found rare leaked marketing images for both iPhone and Apple Watch, his expectations for Apple announcements this fall, which devices he plans to buy and more.
Cate Huston runs Jetpack engineering for Automattic and is an international speaker. In this early-morning recording, we chatted about the strange fad of “reinventing” food poorly, why she works in Ireland, the positive influence of internet raccoons, ending things well, and more.
Jason Yuan is a design intern at Apple. We discussed his journey from theatre school to working in Cupertino, difficulties of breaking into the tech world, design celebrity culture, creating a Kanye book with depth, and more.
The founder of Charged, Owen Williams, joined me this week to discuss his experience building a newsletter business, emerging internet business models, working in tech from Amsterdam and New Zealand, whether it’s time to end the yearly smartphone launch events, smartphone innovation in coming years, the unusual state of the smart assistant market and more.
Jean MacDonald is the founder of App Camp for Girls, a community manager at Micro.blog, and was an early employee at Smile Software, the company behind gems like TexExpander and PDFpen. She shared what it was like to start a non-profit from scratch, how she decided to buy podcast ads in the early days of the medium, the story behind how the founders of Smile met, and more.
Christy Laurence is the CEO of Plann. She and I chatted about bootstrapping a high-growth startup, building a software business as a non-technical founder, and marketing tactics for organically building a global brand.
Blair Reeves is the author of Building Products for the Enterprise and a principal product manager at SAS, the largest privately owned tech company in the world. We had a fascinating conversation about the major differences between the tech scenes in Silicon Valley and the Southeastern parts of the US, as well as what makes enterprise product management unique.
Louie Mantia is the founder of Parakeet and a former designer for Apple and the prestigious Iconfactory. He and I chatted about iconography, his wonderful obsession with Memoji, the delightful addition of new colors in macOS Mojave, the sad lack of personality in modern app design, and a few uniquely opinionated and fun-filled apps.
Eric Young works in research and strategy for NBCUniversal. His understanding of Hollywood and the media landscape along with his strongly-held views on Apple made for a great conversation about Apple’s media strategy across music, video, news, podcasts and more.
Cassidy Williams, head of developer voice programs working on Alexa for Amazon. We talked about voice-first user experience, designing voice-first with a screen, building feedback loops into voice-first tools, the future of voice-first computing and more.
May-Li Khoe is the VP of Design at Khan Academy and long-time Apple designer who worked on software for the first iPhone and early stage human interface design research for Force Touch, iPad Mini, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, HomePod and more. We had a wonderful discussion about her time at Apple, the intersection of design, technology and culture, dark patterns, design with a capital D, and more.
Kelly Guimont is my special guest this week. We discuss iOS apps on the Mac, Breaking up iTunes, Siri Shortcuts, building tools that can be used for evil and more.
Ryan Jones, founder of Weather Line and Flighty, joined me after the Keynote to discuss Apple’s announcements and what they say about their strategy.
This week I sat down with Carolina Milanesi, an industry analyst at Creative Strategies and regular columnist for Techpinions, TIME, TechCrunch and PC Magazine. We had a lot of fun talking about both what we want and what we expect from Apple at WWDC next week—including Siri as a platform, hardware improvements, Apple in the home, and The Information’s scoop that Apple may be expanding NFC to more than payments.
Mark and Paul Johnson are friends of mine and the founders of an education platform company called Pathwright. They joined me to talk about how we see technology impacting education over the next 50 years, how Google Duplex could replace the need for tools like Zapier, the downstream effects of self-driving cars, what we want to see from Apple at WWDC and more.
The founder of UserLeap and my friend, Ryan Glasgow came on the show this week. We dove deep into how product managers distill user feedback into actionable insights, and we also talked about Twitter upping the character limit, Facebook's mistakes, antitrust, blockchain and more.
This week I’m excited to have chatted with Matt Birchler of Birchtree. We discussed how we get our tech news, building a brand on the internet, and what we’ve learned over our many years trying to do just that. Then we closed out the show focusing on shifts in the culture of privacy.
Georgia Dow brought her unique perspective as both a psychotherapist and a tech writer for iMore to the show. We discussed the intersection of social media and mental health, privacy, the robotpocolypse and more.
Josh Centers joined me to discuss Apple’s path under Tim Cook, the power of consistently creating and sharing what you create, the impact of technology on politics and more. Josh is a writer over at Tidbits and an author of several books on technology that you can find at Takecontrolbooks.com.
This week I sat down with Bradley Chambers to discuss Apple and eduction. Bradley brings a unique perspective on this topic as both the Director of IT at a school in Tennessee and a regular technology writer for 9to5Mac and The Sweet Setup.
My special guest this week is Ben Bajarin, the founder of Techpinions and principal analyst at Creative Strategies where he leads primary research into consumer technology. We discussed Apple’s strategy to position the iPad for education (not necessarily the education market), the possibility of talent drain from Facebook, positive movement toward diversity in tech and more.
This week’s guest was Sonya Mann, staff reporter for Inc. and an all around interesting person. We talked personalized products powered by machine-learning, living in San Francisco, the fintech company she finds most interesting at the moment, and more.
Small features certainly have the power to delight, and sadly, those types of features can also be described as something unusual in tech right now. In episode 008, I talk about 3 little things that have brought delight to me in recent weeks.
In this week’s show I sat down with Marco Suarez, Design Systems head at InVision and former designer for Etsy and MailChimp. We discussed his decision to be a remote worker, and we dove into the topic of Design Systems—what they are, how they work and the many benefits they provide to each team involved in making products.
Does the launch of the HomePod show that Apple has learned from their mistakes with the original Apple Watch? In this week's show I take a look at this question and compare the launches of these 2 high-profile Apple products.
Peter Cao, editor from 9to5Mac and 9to5Google, joined me for this week's show. He shared his perspective of the HomePod, as a self-proclaimed 'recovering audiophile', and we discussed Apple’s declining software quality, the delay of AirPlay 2 and one thing Peter finds unusual in tech right now.
Benjamin Schipper joins Timothy to discuss his unique perspective of technology as a comic writer and artist. We discuss the tools he uses to run his business, the powerful pros and cons of social media and more.
In this week's episode I talk about my new HomePod, Echos and the smart home setup in our San Francisco apartment.
Steven Aquino joins Timothy to discuss accessibility—what it is, and why accessibility is a hugely important for the future of voice-first tech.
In this short inaugural episode, Timothy talks about his goals for UNCO, the different formats the show will take, and one thing that is unusual in tech.