Big Plastic Finger
I have too many freaking t-shirts.
Like I made the mistake of, of using my, the system I have for storing t-shirts is like my nerd t-shirts go on hangers instead of being folded up.
And I figured that's fine when I had like two nerd t-shirts and I have a thousand nerd t-shirts and half my closet is nerd t-shirts and hangers.
I just really need more closet space.
That's the main problem.
Yeah.
We should probably actually start the show.
So we have some follow-up from all the way across the planet in Australia.
John, would you like to tell us about what Wade from Australia said?
This is the best theory I've heard so far, although it's still kind of vague and shaky, because based on fake products and rumors of why a...
12-inch MacBook Air might only have one USB port on it instead of two.
Oh, jeez.
I cannot wait for this thing to come out so we can stop talking about it.
Yeah, no, but that's the worst part of the room where it's like, yeah, retina's green, really thin, blah, blah, blah.
Like the one they throw, it's like, one port?
Why would you do that on purpose?
And then you're like, you know, I just need to have a reason because...
It just doesn't make any sense otherwise.
So this is about the PCI Express lanes.
How many PCI Express lanes are supported by the Core M chipset that we assume this fake product will use?
And according to Wade from Australia, it supports 12 lanes of PCI Express, 4 gigabits per lane.
So it means you need more than two lanes per USB 3.1 port if you want the full speed, which I would assume they do.
So if you start adding up the ports, you end up like with one lane for the PCI Express SSD and one for like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and stuff like that.
And you can get the chipset with different combinations of lanes.
And Wade's speculation is that if you can fit everything in four lanes, then you don't have to.
You can get a chipset that just has those four lanes.
You don't need to spend power like pulling the other lanes for devices.
Like in other words, you could shut down some of the lanes.
Yeah.
So you're going to need more than four single lanes just for USB 3.1.
You need three lanes for that and two more for the radios and the SSD.
So you're already at five.
If you want to add another port, you have to bump it up at least from five to eight.
And I guess all this depends on do you really get a big power savings from keeping it at or under four, at or under five?
Like, is there a point at which you have to spend... Like, the power budget takes a leap.
You know, does it not scale linearly?
So...
uh pci express lanes are a sort of the the uh currency of the internals of modern macs in terms of how many do you have and then what can you spend them on and stuff like that because you know once you're out of them you're you're out of them and uh oh the other thing is that uh usb 3.1 is not built into the chipsets that's why you need to use pci express lanes like it's not it's not uh integrated into the chipsets so um
I buy more of these theories because it plays into hardware constraints that Apple doesn't have control over and also power saving.
But, you know, it's a speculated machine from a mock-up and we don't know exactly what kind of trade-offs they have.
And you never know what kind of crazy stuff that Apple...
I don't I don't think we've ever actually seen correct me if I'm wrong but it's off the top of my head here.
I don't think we've ever actually seen Intel give Apple access to a chipset or even a chip itself that wasn't available on the market with the one exception of the original MacBook Air.
But that was like a physical repackaging to make the pins smaller.
But the chip, the die was still the same as what everyone else was getting.
Yeah.
Who is making that controller chip for them?
They could probably get that company to make a special chip just for them.
And I don't know.
I'm not willing to rule out almost anything because Apple has such incredible volumes and such leverage with chip makers.
that yeah they more or less can't make intel do special things for them but at this point like if you look at the iris pro graphics and everything who has been leaning on intel so hard for the many many years to improve their gpus i i would attribute a lot of intel's recent gpu focus on the things that apple said that it needs from them and has influenced their multi-year roadmap they don't get it exclusively everybody gets it but that kind of focus and the fact that you know these chips show up in apple's machines i would assume there's a
there in terms of uh what intel decides to make so we also had some feedback about from tom holiday um he had said that the rumored 12 inch lack of thunderbolt sorrows me the macbook air plus 27 inch thunderbolt display configuration allows sessile components i've never heard that word before look it up that's a i've thought it was like a typo for several i don't know nope it's not it's a word sessile sat word
Of an organism, for example, a barnacle fixed in one place or immobile.
Ah, gotcha.
I learned that word as a description of my friend's cat when I was in high school.
That was the SAT word association.
Oh, wow.
Dan's cat is sessile, and it was true.
Okay, so the MacBook Air plus 27-inch Thunderbolt display configuration allows sessile components like external hard drives, scanners, and printers, and a 27-inch display to be set up for the desktop while the MacBook retains portability.
Yeah, I put this in the notes because we talked about this in the past shows, but that all these things that you get out of Thunderbolt in terms of having multiple devices going through one particular chain...
You could approximate them.
You get the display.
You get the USB.
You could have a USB-type hub thing.
You could connect hard drives through USB.
And it wouldn't be maybe as nice or as fancy as Thunderbolt is.
But the question that I had that this brought to mind is...
Does this mean, you know, if Apple comes out with this thing and Thunderbolt is off most of their machines and everything is USB 3, assuming they ever revise their stupid monitors, does the next equivalent of the Thunderbolt display try to replace the Thunderbolt display with one that connects just through USB?
Or is that not something they're interested in anymore?
Because I use the same arrangement.
Like you have a portable machine, you plug one cable into it, and then you have all the other ports that don't fit on the laptop.
And it's a really nice arrangement.
That will go away with this unless Apple comes out with a new display that's like their USB hub display where, you know, the external monitor is one cable.
You plug it in and you get a USB hub where you can hook up all your hard drives and everything.
And you also get the display all through a single cable.
I mean, I would certainly hope that they would because I have lusted after the Thunderbolt display since it was a thing.
And it's been like two or three years now, right?
But anyway, I've wanted one so badly, but I'm way too cheap to buy one.
And I would hope that they would still do this kind of a setup, but I am extremely skeptical that they would do this kind of a setup because...
Apple just, I mean, when has Apple ever really believed in a docking station?
There was that one where like the whole entire folded up laptop slid into it.
Stephen Hackett is furious right now.
I don't remember the name of it.
The Duo Dock.
Thank you.
But I mean, other than that, like docking stations is not really a thing, which is actually kind of frustrating to me because I work in an office full of Dells where they all have these docking stations, which are aesthetically hideous, but functionally awesome.
And I kind of wish that my Mac would do something similar to
But, yeah, I don't know.
I don't see them really putting too much effort into that.
Well, I mean, the answer to that is those, like, Belkin, Thunderbolt dock things.
But nobody really buys those, as far as I can tell.
Well, they're so expensive.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, now I think they're, like, $200 down from $300.
But still, that's still a lot.
But still, like, I don't know.
See, I think...
If this is the direction Apple is going with all of their laptops, they might be concerned with things like this.
But for this one model, I don't think we need to read too much into... Again, and again, this is assuming it's all correct with these rumors, but I don't think we have to read too much into it because you guys are all talking about from the perspective of people who use laptops much of the time or most of the time as desktops with a bunch of stuff plugged into them and have these heavy external needs...
I think it's a good idea for most of Apple's laptops to cater to that because that is probably how most laptops that are sold are actually used, especially with power users where you're plugging a bunch of stuff in and it might have an external monitor and stuff.
But I think there is nothing wrong with Apple having a model in the lineup that does not cater to being plugged into stuff all the time that won't be good at that.
I mean, the original MacBook Air was awful about that.
The newer ones only got better because of Thunderbolt.
I think there's nothing saying that Apple needs to solve the problem of lots of good external bandwidth or external ports or anything like that with this model of MacBook.
I think they could be just fine with this one, mostly made to be portable, to not be used while plugged into a bunch of stuff most of the time.
Yeah, you know, I think you might be onto something there because now that I'm thinking about my own example of work in docking stations, I think a lot of the reason that we have the docking stations everywhere and dual monitors everywhere is just because it's nice to have it.
But for non-developers, you know, my company that I work for is probably half business consultants and half technical consultants like myself.
For the business folks,
I think they like having a second monitor, but I would guess that most of them would tell you, well, you know, if it went away, whatever.
And so if I think about it, typically they're not plugging in an external hard drive.
Typically they're not plugging in Ethernet.
Typically they're not plugging in an external monitor unless it just happens to be sitting there.
So generally speaking, a lot of these folks, all they plug in is power to your point, Marco, and that's it.
And so would it really matter if this hyper portable computer only can take power in one other thing?
Maybe not.
You know, this MacBook Air, two things about it, like, potentially, like, can't they just have one model on the line?
One, I think the rumor, maybe not this specific rumor we're talking about, the 9-to-5 Mac one, but for the past few years, it was like, oh, the 11 and the 13 are going late.
It will just be replaced by a single 12.
If that ends up being the case...
It's fine for them to have one model that would be like this.
But if you're replacing two models with it, it seems weird that, you know, for the people who wanted something ultra portable and you don't care about the ports, the 11 inch makes sense.
And for the people who want a bigger sort of more full size laptop and the 13 inch.
But if you replace them both with the 12, it's kind of weird for it to.
say that oh you know you can't use this one like you so that was like to revert to the original macbook air but there is an advantage to not using thunderbolt and it mostly has to do with the annoying nature of thunderbolt so as we have a thunderbolt display here and a macbook air um and it's got the little little squid type cable coming out the end of it where it's got the magsafe power thing to power your laptop from the monitor and then it also has the thunderbolt cable and
And part of it is that they made the little squid tentacles too short so that because they're on opposite sides of the MacBook Air, you have to put the Thunderbolt on the left side facing you and the power on the or whatever is the opposite.
The power on the left side and Thunderbolt on the right.
And the Thunderbolt connector, because it has a chip in the connector itself.
It sticks out like an inch from the computer with this big, you know, inflexible, you know, the hard plastic part of the connector.
And it's just not it's not great.
Like the cables have are sharp angles and it makes the thing wider.
And it's not nice looking with the USB thing, even though it can't do all the things that Thunderbolt can do.
one the cable won't have a giant inch long hard plastic connector sticking out of it it can be a much you know smaller more flexible thing and two if they combine the power with it you also won't need to have the split squid thing where you have the mag save on one side and you know you you will literally be able to plug in just one cable instead of right now oh it's one cable but it splits in two at the end and that splitting is kind of annoying every time you take it apart you got to take it you know
pull the things out from each other and then it slides behind the thing you just have one little cable that was a usb cable i would it would be easier to sort of plug and unplug and i'm generally anti-dock because of the whole docking procedure being awkward i'd much rather just put down on the desk and plug in one small cable
Yeah, I agree with you.
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One more thing I'll add to this follow-up item of the power.
We briefly mentioned it before, but it's worth mentioning again.
the the idea we talked about oh get rid of magsafe can you power through usb yes you can well despite that uh that you could either use magsafe or usb people also are interested in the idea of powering it the way the watch is powered uh with a thing that doesn't plug into it but a thing that sort of attaches to the outside oh please don't please and that's such a bad idea and i don't think that makes any sense because like usb will work we know that like it'll be fine uh
I'm not sure what the advantage would be to having a big, warty sort of metal thing that you place on top of it.
Space is already at a premium, and I'm not sure where you would put that.
And then who wants to have a bunch of connectors with a big circle metal thing?
I'm not even sure how that'll work with the watch.
Uh, another thing is having a, some kind of pad or something to use inductive charging where you put it on the pad and it charges.
That is a little bit better appeal because then you're not plugging stuff in.
You're just chucking it down and you, you know, you put stuff on the pad.
I'm not sure how fast those chargers are, but like it could be done.
But the problem pads have is, uh, I think you still need something that you plug in because yeah, you've got a pad in the place where you put it in your home.
But like when you travel, do you want to travel with a big pad or a little adapter?
Uh,
Having something to plug, the smallest possible thing that you can plug in would be nice.
Someone in the chat room asked, why would the pad have to be big?
Well, if it's small, then again, then you're worrying about like alignment issues or something.
Like the whole idea is you just want to put the thing down somewhere and not align it and not stick a little warty thing on it.
Plugging a little tiny thing into a little tiny port is actually very straightforward and fast compared to, at least in the past, the type of things that they've had where you put your phone down on a certain pad or whatever.
That's why you want it to be kind of like a big thing where it doesn't matter where you put it.
Just put it anywhere.
It'll charge.
It'll be fine.
So that's possible, but Apple really hasn't gone there.
And I think it mostly has to do with just the space that type of solution would take up and the fact that plugging in seems to work.
And the final one, which I think is the most fun one, it was brought to my attention by someone whose name is now lost to the mists of time.
Someone sent me a link to a YouTube video called Ytricity for wirelessly sending power.
We'll put links to it in the show notes.
The website is ytricity.com.
You can take a look at it.
And it made me recall our past conversations about the Artemis P-Cell stuff for sort of doing targeted wireless to avoid interference and everything where you pre-calculate the sort of interference map of all the different sources of wireless and you focus the signal destined for your laptop right on your laptop.
Yeah.
and one of the vague rumory kind of hinty things was like oh and we might be able to use this for something more than just sending data and
i think that that was a hint at like we could do wireless power because once we have the ability to focus a particular signal on a particular location we can power things that way as well uh both of those seem crazy to me but crazy in a fun way uh i guess you could like you know accidentally slowly bake the inside of your hand if it's aiming the wireless power at the wrong spot and it's sort of microwaving your hand that would be bad uh
But I don't know, like all of these, all these things that are possible, you know, because every time powering stuff comes up, people like this is not new technology.
Inductive stuff is not new.
Wireless power is not new.
This is the things that work.
You know, someone will bring up Nikola Tesla and say that we had this hundreds of years ago and just, you know, whatever the, the physics and the technology behind it all seems to be there.
But the products, like the products that people buy,
uh it hasn't caught on to the degree that other technology has where usually you know when if something is going to gain traction like really high-res screens like well do people really want that yeah they they more or less do even though they can't really tell it just catches on it goes through everything and pretty soon the giant chunky pixels will be gone from handheld devices just because it's better it's unequivocally better everybody likes it better you can do more things with it look sharper even if most people can't tell it's good inductive charging wireless power all those things have not
made that breakthrough is it because they just haven't been done right or is it because the thing they're trying to replace is
not as annoying as people think it is and people don't mind just plugging something in and it's more straightforward or I don't know.
Um, but I, I would love to see one of these things.
I've never used any of these for any appreciable period of time, but I'd love to see one of them actually end up being like the new thing because all of them have that sci-fi kind of feel where it's like plugging things in.
It's like, you know, back to the future, which we should celebrate back to the future part two, which is celebrate because we are now in the year of back to the future part two.
Um,
Where he sees the, what was it, the name of the video game in the future diner?
What the hell was that?
I haven't seen Back to the Future 2 in years.
Anyway, Marty McFly goes over to it, and he picks up the little plastic gun thing at the screen.
Like, use your hands?
It's like a baby's toy.
You plug it in?
How barbaric.
We're not there yet, but it would be cool.
John, I love that Marco and I have beaten you down to the point that you have to go on a preamble to make your pop culture reference make sense.
I just couldn't remember what the name of the thing was.
No one in the chat room has it yet?
Faith was here.
She would know.
It's like a Western shoot-em-up game.
Wild Gunman.
Someone in the chat room thinks I can't tell if that's right.
Anyway, I'm old.
Oh, goodness.
No, I mean, I think everyone who's searching for all these crazy complex systems of charging this theoretical rumored laptop.
I think, you know, John, what you said a minute ago, like almost all of these, even if they worked, would probably be more annoying or have other big downsides in practice.
The fact is, if it still has any ports at all, then it's worth just charging it with a cable because that's going to be better.
No matter what kind of cable that is, that's going to be better than any other kind of weird induction or wireless or, you know, mat induction or clip-on induction kind of schemes.
Like, it's just...
None of those things, if you actually think about what it would be like to use them in practice in real life, I just don't think any of those things would be overall less annoying and better than just a decent cable.
And they already have decent cables.
MagSafe is pretty good.
Like there's...
There's nothing wrong with MagSafe.
And if they end up using the USB power thing to do that, that's probably going to be perfectly fine, too.
It's probably not a big deal.
The only reason the watch has to do it, really, is because the watch is water-sealed.
So the watch has no openings.
So they had to do some kind of other system besides a cable that just plugs in.
And it clips onto this giant...
Is the backplate sapphire or is it ceramic or something?
It's something that's not metal because if you would clip with MagSafe this giant metal disc onto a metal laptop, it would scratch the hell out of it.
Just like the iPad 3 smart cover or the iPad 2 smart cover, the metal one.
So all of these things are like they're searching for solutions to what really isn't that big of a problem, which is a laptop that has any ports at all can still have a power plug and that'll be fine.
Fair enough.
You don't think there's anything wrong with MagSafe?
I will admit I liked MagSafe 1 better than MagSafe 2.
MagSafe 2 comes out accidentally more easily in the vertical direction when pressed.
But it's not that bad.
Other than that, that's my only problem with it.
I'm a little bit... I think the weakness of MagSafe, both versions, is the tiny little contacts.
I've seen a lot of, you know, pictures of and stories about MagSafe things that somehow either got misaligned or something wedged in there or something caused a short inside that little tiny area.
Because it is... Everything is so fine and, like...
You just need one little iron filing from a silly kid's toy to float in over there, and you plug it in, and it fries the thing.
It would be nice if it was more resistant to stuff.
I'm not sure what you would replace it with, though, because I think the tiny USB connectors probably have the same problem, maybe.
But yeah, I agree that MagSafe 2 is worse than 1, but I'm not sure.
With the shrinking sizes, I'm not sure how...
what you can do to mag safe to make it better while also making it smaller whereas something that plugs in you know again it comes out of the question we talked before does if the usb uh three connector the tiny little one does that come out just as easily as mag safe when you trip over the cable or does it not like what size does it start becoming like this is just as good as mag safe in terms of trip resistance and i don't know until someone buys one of these things or buys some other usb3 device and starts tripping over it
all right can we move on to any other topic yes we have uh corrections for you and john with regard to reliability probability oh my god i don't think they're really corrections because both here we go yeah because both of us tried so hard to stay away from the math part like we didn't want to talk about the math we just hand waved it and yet the hand waving because we use mathematical words about like addition additive and multiplicative
You know, then that was enough to trigger the math people to come tell us how wrong we were.
Like, I think we all knew we were going to be wrong.
We didn't know the math.
But there's two posts about this.
Actually, there was a good email about it, too, which unfortunately we can't link the email, but it was too long and complicated to explain.
But Dr. Drang has one explaining the actual math of the probability stuff.
Kieran Healy has one explaining what he thinks we probably meant, and I think he's closer.
If I had to resummarize this discussion, I would say there are two points, both not involving math.
One is the idea that if you have something with a certain reliability and you add a second thing, even if the reliability is just as good as the first thing,
If for your entire system to be successful, they both have to work, you've decreased the reliability of your system, even though the thing you added is just as reliable as the other thing.
So that was one counterintuitive thing that people might not think of.
It was like, oh, well, if I add the second thing and it's just as reliable as the first thing, the total reliability is the same.
No, it's worse.
So that's one.
And the second thing is the sort of, I don't want to use this phrase because it's probably wrong, but I'll say it anyway, network effect.
uh of when you add more and more devices you had three devices and when you had one before you don't get three times the number of things you can do because if they all interact with each other the number of possible connections and interactions between them goes up much faster than linearly and that's the sort of multiplicative effect that i think marco was first one to mention yeah the handshake problem right
Right.
Yeah, that that by adding you may add one device and another one and you don't just get three times the number of things that you can do.
You get much, much more than that if they all interact with each other.
And so the first point combined with the second means that the sort of intuitive sense that when I have a computer, there's one thing and I have a computer and a phone.
That's two things.
And it should be roughly like, you know.
It should first people would think if the phone is just as reliable as the computer, my total system reliability has not gone down.
But it totally has, because if they both don't for features that cross between them or for syncing issues or whatever, it's much worse than just having a phone or just having a computer.
And the second thing is, as you get even more devices, the number of connections between them, possible interaction goes way up, goes up faster than linearly.
uh especially if they all interact with each other especially if some features on one aren't even unlocked until you get the second one like continuity is not even in your world unless you have two devices so there's a whole new feature set that wasn't even there before that blooms on both of them and then you have the interaction between them and then three of them and then the cloud and everything like that that's more or less what we were getting at if you want to get into the nitty-gritty details of the math dr drang has a good coverage there
And the person who sent us an email said that even though things do get worse and you add something to a system, if most things are generally reliable, like if the reliability is, you know, 99% or whatever, it doesn't get that bad.
So the effect is maybe we're exaggerating the effect because it's not like, we use an example like 50% reliability.
Yes, that you'd really feel.
If most things are very, very reliable, adding another one to the system of the same reliability is not going to pull down your overall reliability that much.
So that's why I think Kieran's post about
The number of possible interactions between the different devices going up is the real thrust of what we were getting at.
You with us, Marco?
And we still don't know the math.
We stubbornly refuse to address or learn any of the math.
This will not be on the test.
People believe John.
Yeah, no, but that's what I said.
I wasn't strongly advocating for any specific thing.
We were both saying, stay away from the math.
We both don't know it.
Look it up if you care.
The look it up if you care should be the motto of our feedback.
Well, no, it's like, you know, we are neither one of us off the top of our head was going to say this is definitively how you calculate this or whatever.
We both just hand waved it and ran away from it and we still got yelled at.
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There's been a rumor that the iPad Pro, which we don't even know exists, might come with a stylus, which is something different.
So what are we going to do?
Oh, a stylus, right?
We're going to use a stylus.
No.
Who wants a stylus?
You have to get them and put them away and you lose them.
Yuck.
Nobody wants a stylus.
So let's not use a stylus.
Yeah.
If you see a stylus, then what is it?
They've already failed.
If you need a stylus, you've already failed.
The point is one of the more reliable supply chain, I guess, analysts, I say, because I don't know.
I hate that term.
But anyway,
And has said that the next iPad or the 13-inch iPad will have an optional stylus.
And I don't think that most of us would have paid too much attention to this, or certainly I wouldn't have, except that this particular individual has an unbelievably good track record, which makes me think, okay, maybe this is real.
So I can't, I don't own any styluses for my iPad.
I've never gotten any.
I've never really had a particular need for them.
I've tried the, what is it, the paper pencil?
Yep, I got one of those too.
It sits in a drawer.
It seemed cool, I guess, but I'm just not one that needs a stylus.
So I don't think I can really comment intelligently on this.
It sounds like, Marco, you have a bunch, because you've spoken fondly of the Cosmonaut in the past, right?
yeah and of all the ones i have that's my favorite one for general usage uh the if you if you use paper a lot like the app paper by 53 if you use that app a lot for like artistic purposes and sketching purposes their stylus offers some features in that app that that other ones won't have uh the paper pencil for general use around the rest of the ipad i don't think the pencil is better than the cosmon i think it's about the same uh if not a little bit worse because it has a little bit of a weird shape and
The thing is, the reason why it's a big deal if Apple makes one of these is because if Apple makes a stylus, it's not going to be a $25 capacitive foam tip stick the way all the other ones are.
It's going to be integrated with the OS and with the hardware.
So right now, the reason why the styli on the market generally all suck or that they've basically hit a wall that they can't get any better than this is because to get better than that, you need system-wide recognition of Bluetooth and more precision on the tip.
And so certainly, like the Paper by 53 stylus, I think that is, I'm pretty sure it is Bluetooth.
It's some kind of, yeah, it must be.
So that is Bluetooth, but it only works in their app.
And it's still not as good as it can be because the app has to try to do things like reject the side of your palm touching the screen and not count that as a touch and things like that.
And the low-level OS frameworks for touch recognition have way more recognition and way more
data to work with than what's exposed to apps in the public APIs.
And so if Apple did this at the system level, they could not only use Bluetooth or some other kind of short-range RF thing, probably be Bluetooth, but they could not only use Bluetooth, but they could do it system-wide so it would work in every app with all the sensitivity and precision.
and it would be able to tie in with the touch recognition and do better touch rejection and things like that, none of which third-party styluses can do really very well or everywhere right now.
So that's why it's a big deal if Apple makes one.
They might even, if this is going to be a big deal, they might even switch to the different kind of touchscreen.
I believe it's a resistive touchscreen, or at least be able to put in a layer like that, like what the Wacom Cintiqs use.
which is what the Microsoft Surface Pro, at least the two and the three, I don't know if the original one did, I think it did, but the Surface Pro uses this too, where it's basically, it's like a pen tablet integrated into the screen.
And artists love these things.
They are, you know, if you're a sketch artist or an illustration artist that would use a pen for your art form, these things are very, very widely recognized, very, very widely appreciated.
And the iPad really doesn't do a very good job at that because of the imprecisions and limitations of the styluses that are available now.
So I think if they did this, and I think they probably should do this, I think there's a market for it.
It would make sense to limit it to only one model and to make it like a high-end thing.
That would make sense, just like Microsoft has done, really.
And just like Wacom has done.
um i don't know by the way i know i'm pronouncing that wrong i don't know what the i usually even say whack them because it's more fun to me um just like the effing key but so anyway i i think it's a very good idea well i don't know if they'll actually do it but i think it's a very good idea i think it's inevitable because i mean for the same reason i think the bigger ipad is inevitable and multitasking multi-windowing on the ipad is inevitable like that that this platform has to expand to do more things because it's because people like it better than the old platform and uh
You have to make it expand slowly and make it not lose much of the advantages and diversify the line so a particular product does it.
But it has to happen because the amazing number of artificial fingers for sale for iOS devices just goes to show that there is a market demand for this in the same way that people wanted bigger phones, right?
uh and that's why you know you said like but that's why all the the existing ones stink because all they are is artificial fingers like all you are is simulating a finger and the os is made for fingers and simulated fingers or real fingers or whatever it's just a bunch of fingers and they're big squishy things they're imprecise or whatever uh if apple comes out with a stylus not only does it have to deal with bluetooth but i think they have to do something different with the screen like you said and if you look at
the you know huge number of patents that come out of apple apple patents million things doesn't mean they're going to make anything but i think in the case of the stylus even if we didn't see any patents i would think that a stylus is going to eventually come when we get to that point and apple has tons of patents related to styluses or styli or whatever i wish we knew what the plural that was because this is going to be awkward for the whole time we talk about this we should put that in for next week please if you took latin in high school don't write in yeah i don't we don't care mouses mice anyway i also took latin in high school
why would they have all those patents usually their patents are about like well user interface stuff like maybe they tried this user interface and it wasn't great so they didn't ship it but they're going to patent everything you patent anything you do but the number of stylus related patents that have come out of Apple over the years shows that
They've had people doing stuff related to styluses or styli or whatever for so long that, like, why are those guys still doing that?
It's not like they just try this experiment once.
Like, just year after year after year, people are in the lab with these little sticks doing stuff.
And maybe they hate all those.
Maybe everything they patented is something they're not going to make.
But someone is being employed at Apple to do stuff that produces things that are patentable related to drawing with a stick on a screen.
So it seems to me that that is definitely something that they're working on, not just once, but over the years.
And they're eventually going to get something they like.
Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I think it's inevitable.
And if they don't, if they don't hurry up, like the Surface getting the cache with the artist, because finally it was a portable tablet type thing that had the hardware support for a decent stylus interface.
If Apple doesn't do it soon enough, eventually it's going to be like, well...
every artist knows that if you if you want to do art on the road you have to get a microsoft surface because you're not going to use a big plastic finger to scribble on an ipad right uh so i would say now is the correct time for them to do something i hope they do something that is at least as good as what the surface does um and i'm really hoping that at least one or two of those weird patents or something we haven't seen before because patents take a long time to come out something we haven't even seen that's patent pending uh
will provide an interface that's even better now the kind of the scary ghost floating around this has nothing to do with drawing pretty pictures on your ipad and has everything to do with the other thing that you might do with a pen or pencil or writing implement on a flat surface which is write letters and that's you know as in characters as an ab and apple and
has big scary egg freckles all over this topic uh but see the thing is once you once you ship uh once you make a stylus and you're able to you know do fine art with it or whatever are you gonna say no you can't write notes that will translate into text i mean that's one way to get out of it just to avoid it entirely say it's just for drawing no you you can write words but it'll just state like we won't translate it into text but
Boy, I think there's no way for them to avoid having to resurrect and finally defeat the ghosts of the Newton by doing handwriting recognition that is not embarrassing.
And I think the technology is there to do it.
And I think they more or less have to support it system wide in a nice way.
And I think very few people will use it because who likes writing with a pen and a pencil?
Everyone who likes writing will.
send us email, which is fine, but I really feel like... I mean, I don't like it that much either, but that's a pretty big group that does.
Here's the thing.
In what context are you going to use it?
I can imagine using it for things like...
checking things off or scribbling a quick little note without bringing up the keyboard to tap things out.
But I can't imagine someone using it to do text messages or write a long email or something.
And maybe that's just me.
Maybe I just don't see that anymore.
But like...
If you're going to write a long... Unless it does cursive.
Because people are really fast with cursive.
Because those are the type of people who like to write handwriting.
Unless they tackle cursive, which I think... Those people are jerks.
To just do a long handwritten letter in cursive and have it translate that into text for you.
But having really good stylus support...
in this day and age you can let them write it in cursive and just send it as a giant image like you can do that now you could that wasn't an option before you had to translate it to text i think now this beautiful handwriting you know that people have or you know they want to convey their that you want to see someone's handwriting why not just transfer it as you know a vector or a bitmap or something like that why do you have to turn it into text i guess you have to turn it to text to make it searchable and so on and so forth and
i don't know uh there's lots of different ways where they can go with this but i think the the art angle is a slam dunk they're gonna do it it's gonna be good i hope uh if it doesn't happen this year they better hurry up because everyone else is doing it and then the handwriting thing i have no idea what they're gonna do and i see all sorts of crazy pitfalls there
I think the opportunity is big.
I would be surprised if anybody at Apple with the ability to make such a decision would restrict or stay away from these areas because of the Newton.
I think they just don't care anymore.
That was ancient history, and most of the public doesn't even remember the Newton and doesn't even care about it.
Not stay away from it because of the Newton, but because it's still a hard problem.
The Surface does it now.
Microsoft does it, and they do it obviously better than the Newton.
You've got way more computing power.
and they've been doing it for like a decade Microsoft's been doing it for a long time and they've and it's and their version is pretty good it's good but it's like here's the thing with it's not so people don't need to remember where the newton is it's just like it's a hard enough problem kind of like a lot of the stuff and unfortunately we're not going to talk about this this week because I don't think any of us had time to watch it but you know the windows 10 announcement and the holographic stuff or in the past the connect or whatever things that are that was real things that are really hard problems and
that make a really awesome tech demo that make you feel like you're living in the future but if they don't deliver on it like if they if they don't cross the threshold like kind of like how siri didn't cross the threshold in the beginning of like well a demo is well but if it doesn't quite work for you enough of the time you just kind of give up on it and that that came up again because uh
daniel jacob was talking about how siri has gotten much better and that went around the sort of uh apple nerd uh sites uh this past week or so oh by the way about that so i'm sorry to interrupt for a second so i i have not used siri in a long time because it just never works for me like the reliability was so bad for so long i just stopped trying because i would say i would say a complete command it would sit there and spin for 20 seconds and then say i'm sorry i can't help you right now there's been an error you know like so i stopped trying
After seeing all these things about Siri, I'm like, all right, maybe I'll give it another shot.
First thing I try yesterday, Siri, start the stopwatch.
Sorry, Marco, I can't help you with the stopwatch.
It can do everything else in the clock app.
It can't start the stopwatch.
Yep.
Really?
Come on.
That's this is easy stuff.
Why?
Why?
Oh, but at least it worked.
You know, it understood what you said and gave you a reasonable answer.
But it's similar in that like Siri is kind of bad or any kind of voice recognition thing.
you just let a kid use it and you'll see it.
Because like, as soon as you start talking to it and it talks back to you, people are like, oh, well, I guess this is a complete human.
And if it doesn't do exactly what I say, I consider it stupid.
Right.
And handwriting recognition is similar.
As soon as it changes anything you write into text, you're like, oh, it understands handwriting.
And then you write something else and it doesn't.
You're like,
This thing is stupid because your only analog for something that understands spoken text and can read handler writing is other humans.
And it's like, well, if you can read this word on the shopping list, why couldn't you read this one?
To a human being, if you can read one of those words, you can read both.
One is not incredibly sloppier than the other.
But to a computer, which is not like a human and not even close, it's not even at the level of a kindergarten student in terms of recognizing letters,
it just has a bunch of heuristics and sometimes they get tripped up by things that make no sense to you because you have no idea how it's recognizing things you also have no idea how your own brain is recognizing things but it just works in us right our brains just where that's the real it just works right we can't be taught to read and write it just works right for for the most part in most people i still can't read all these cursive cards i get from old people you got dyslexia and you've got people who are out of practice and you've got people with terrible handwriting but
Handwriting recognition is a promise that if you don't pass a certain bar, it's like... That's why I think the bitmap thing is a way out, because...
Maybe you try to do handwriting.
Even if you do it better than Microsoft, I still think that's below the minimum that will be acceptable by the general public where people will say, oh, it understands your handwriting.
What they'll say instead is sometimes it kind of understands your handwriting, which is not a ringing endorsement.
But if you can use it to send bitmaps of your writing, then your only problem is the person at the other end can read your writing.
And we've all had that where, you know, a spouse writes a shopping list for you and you can't make out whatever the last word is.
And you're not sure if it's like,
carrots or cucumbers or something with a C and then a bunch of squiggles.
So if humans can't do it sometimes, you know, I don't know.
I think that is a difficult thing.
And really...
We're mostly talking about tablets here.
I can't imagine someone doing it on the phone.
But once you have it working on the tablet, do you put it in the 6 Plus?
So a little place to put a stylus or something?
Would you see?
I mean, I know people see this now.
Someone with, you know, the Galaxy Note or whatever, holding a big giant phone and stabbing at it with a little pencil thing.
My own mother uses a little fake finger thing to stab at her iPod Touch.
Some people just want to poke something with a stick.
Have you seen that?
Have you seen people using a phone with a stylus?
Obviously not an Apple phone.
Not a phone.
My father-in-law uses his iPad very often with the Cosmonaut.
He just prefers to interact with it that way.
He's tapping UI buttons and everything.
I totally get that.
I think the era of Apple sticking with a very small product line, I don't think they're really holding dearly to that.
I mean, just look at the iPad lineup.
You mentioned earlier about the new 12-inch MacBook Air thing, possibly needing to replace the 11 and 13 Air.
Yeah.
even that like you know not anytime soon maybe not ever because they are fine having a bigger lineup i i think the tim cook era and this didn't start with tim it started with steve but but certainly i think the tim cook era has expanded this of like apple is fine keeping old products around and having more versions of new products now to address markets that they weren't serving before that were possibly a threat to them
Yeah.
They have tablets, they have phones, they have laptops in a couple of varieties, they have desktop in a couple of varieties.
What they're doing is within those sort of nameplates and brands diversifying like how many different iPads are there.
But the simplification thing is like it's just an iPad.
You don't have to know like do I want an iPad or another tablet product.
They're all iPads like perception wise and all it is is just like buying different sides of closing or you know whatever.
It's like
it's it's as if a car manufacturer had one kind of car and you could get that car in suv wagon uh you know tricycle motorcycle but they called it all the same you know line of things you know what i mean maybe it's not quite that bit but like actually that's not that far from what bmw actually does
it's true but like so but in the in apple's world the three and the five series would not be different cars right and maybe you'd have like the electric one would be a different line like i think the ipad is the best example because these are all ipads and it's like well they're all rectangles of screen but like huge diversity of different guts different x outsides different form factors and the phone has slowly been diverse they're all iphones it's just what variety of iphones and there's there's a range there as well
The iPod Touch is off in the corner or whatever.
So with the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, maybe there's still a little division there, but they're kind of unified in a MacBook.
So I think Apple's appetite for taking existing product lines and just making more varieties is...
uh is demonstrated but their their uh appetite for splitting say the macbook line further splitting and it's a macbook macbook pro macbook air macbook whatever i think they instead they're going the other direction you know making everything getting rid of the plastic models making it all aluminum getting rid of the non-pro macbooks and you know who knows how long the air if this new one is called like macbook stealth and the errors go away or something i don't know uh that kind of diversification is like having your cake and eating it too because
You address more of the customer base while still making it seem like you only need to have, you know, two or three tables in an Apple store and you can put all your products on them.
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So CES has already ended by like a week or two.
Is that right?
It's always hard to tell with CES, like if it's a real thing, if anything matters.
I wonder if we can if we can just paste in the Verge's summary of CES from last year and just paste it in this year.
Would anybody notice?
Uh, anyone who isn't John would have no idea that it was the same thing regurgitated, but John would notice.
And John has noticed.
Well, the first thing I have it here related to this is the wire cutter did what they do, which is like, they distill it down to the things they thought were actually interesting and important out of CES and CES.
It actually is an important show.
If you care about consumer electronics, uh,
But there is so much there that it's like, what is the important thing this year?
And so for me, I'm interested in televisions every year at CES.
It's like, what did the new crop of televisions look like?
Because, you know, people tend to announce their upcoming things that are –
they have new technologies is this the first year you know the first year an lcd tv is available the first year an hd tv is available you know and those are the exciting years where there's some kind of technological advance and then they're all the in-between years where you're like okay what is this current year's crop of plasma tvs like are they better than last year's problem you know so and so forth those are more boring that's just picking television as one category but for every category there's something like that and then there's just tons and tons of noise um
so the wire cutter thing gives a good summary out of the wire cutter uh summary of uh interesting gadgets and stuff from ces i'm really really interested in the tv part so that's the only part i've highlighted here but we'll put the link in the show notes and you can check it out because you can't if you try to follow like ces coverage you can't it's just there's too much stuff and a lot of the times the things that are covered by sort of live from ces stuff are the things that demo well but you're never going to see them again it's not a real product it's not a real thing but
the booth and the demo is impressive.
And then just forget that it exists because you'll never see anything about it again.
But yeah,
The technology stuff, which is like more of the boring written stories, it does not have anything fun to look at.
It's just announcements of products.
This is just, I mean, we talked about it last year on the television front.
4K television and technologies related to that are slowly, steadily marching forward.
4K, we don't probably care too much about because of the size of the televisions we have and the distance we sit from them.
It's probably not a factor, but as we discussed last year,
4k comes with more than just higher resolution it also comes for a larger color gamut different frame rates uh and all sorts of stuff like that that people will notice and then the one i was really interested in last year was this crazy this is not really a product tech demo type thing from dolby which was like high dynamic range to be able to have darker darks and brighter brights in your television and that is something much more so than 4k that you would notice if you put a regular tv next to one with this uh this high dynamic range thing
You would be able to tell the difference immediately in the same way that most people could with high definition television versus standard def.
And the exciting but boring announcement related to that is this UHD Alliance, which is a consortium of a bunch of people who make hardware and a bunch of people who make content to try to get together on these standards because...
You don't want this to turn into a weird format war or whatever.
If any of these things, if any of this sort of enhanced 4K with high dynamic range, if that's ever going to become a thing, it can't be confined to one vendor.
It can't be confined to one distributor.
And I think now it's good to see that the companies at least understand this a little bit.
Various times they've been good and bad about this, like getting together on, you know,
making a decision on blu-ray finally after having the hdvd thing or you know i think cds they kind of came together a little bit it's always an argument over who owns the patents and who's going to get the money and all that crap but no but nobody benefits if it's like if it's competing standards or if it's just available because if just sony had like this high dynamic range thing right if it was exclusively licensed through them and just sony movies were out like that nobody cares like who would ever get that tv you're like well that's great but you only watch sony movies no one knows what a sony movie is it has to be an industry standard so i'm
Glad to see them doing this because I'm much more excited about
the high dynamic range stuff and the color enhanced and frame rate enhancements of 4K TV than I am about the 4K resolution itself.
So I'm hoping good things will come from the UHD Alliance and then it won't splinter apart into a bunch of petty squabbling and other crap.
And then the final thing is like, speaking of things that are sort of evergreen about CES, like you mentioned, just if we just repost the Verge story, every time I think about actually writing something about CES, which I actually do think about, I don't actually write anything, but I think about it.
And then I think back to the post I wrote in 2013 on hypercritical.co, which is CES colon worst products through software.
And I don't want this to be an evergreen article.
I want it to be.
Remember that moment in time when consumer electronics companies realized that they needed software in their products and they were super bad at it.
And every time they added software, it made their products worse.
And I'm hoping this will be.
Yeah.
google apple microsoft maybe kind of even amazon those are pretty much the only companies like companies that that maintain that that have a software platform and that they maintain and advance it they're the only companies that can do software worth a damn every other company that tries to add software to their product it just makes the product worse because the software is awful and it replaces something that wasn't quite as awful and the new capabilities never make up for the difficulty of dealing with
it like if your refrigerator comes with software it's going to be worse than your refrigerator without software like guaranteed because you know refrigerator makers have no idea what they're doing when it comes to software thus far neither do tv makers they're terrible about updates they're terrible at bug fixes and the product itself it doesn't start off very good and doesn't get any better so
I'm not writing anything new about that.
It's still true.
I wish it wasn't.
That's CES, worst products through software.
Yeah, I'm not in the TV world, but I totally agree with that statement in other areas.
I mean, things I've gotten off of Kickstarter that have like, oh, this is an oven thermometer that has an app on your phone to see the results.
Yeah.
and I threw it away and bought a real thermometer with an actual display and this stupid thing.
You know, like, the microphone interface I got for a week and then returned because it was broken anyway, but, like, this thing that has this screen with just one button on it and everything else is controlled by software, and then, of course, the software is terrible, so I replaced it with this box that is covered in knobs and buttons, and it's way better, and it will last way longer.
I mean, just...
I hate software so much, and I'm a software developer, and I hate software.
Use software intelligently.
Use software when it really does benefit things, but that is not everywhere, and that is not always necessary, and it is often better without it.
And the worst part is even in the places where you could totally see the benefit, or things that have had...
sort of you know visual interfaces for a long time like for example thermostats or something like that's a perfect place for software because having a bunch of little buttons under a panel that you open up on this little dinky screen you're like boy if i could have real software to do this that would be better and the nest approach is kind of tied up with also don't make it programmable or whatever but so many opportunities exist for something that where software really is appropriate and
But awful software is worse than just give me a bunch of freaking buttons and a dial, right?
And what you were talking about, like on the thermometer type thing is like, this is actually not an appropriate place for software at this point.
Just give me a mechanical device that works.
And the cars are the best example because like there are ample opportunities for good software to improve the experience inside a car.
But they take the software and put it where it's not needed.
And then the software that is there is usually pretty terrible.
And, you know, we all use cars.
And so we're all just kind of suffering as...
companies that do not know how to make software i guess hopefully slowly learn to make software better i don't know if they're even learning uh i mean like you just talked about the bm the last show the bmw key fob with a screen on it like that is not an appropriate place for software uh something that's in your pocket that you want to feel to be able to feel the buttons or maybe you don't want to touch it at all like oh yeah
All right.
And speaking of software, our friends at Rogue Amoeba released something new this week.
Audio Hijack 3.
Indeed.
It's not pro, though, so forget it.
That just means it doesn't have Thunderbolt ports on it anymore.
Yeah, exactly.
People don't get the joke.
It used to be called auto hijack pro.
And with the version three, they removed pro from the name because it was just like, you know, it's like Netscape Navigator gold pro gold.
Yeah, we don't need the we don't need the suffixes and the modifiers.
We can just say audio hijacked and it's version three.
Yep.
And I have been fiddling with it.
I have not used it to record a podcast yet.
I didn't have enough time today to get my, I don't know, I guess workflow almost a session, I think is what they, the term they use.
I didn't have enough time to get my session squared away before we recorded tonight, but I'm hoping to in the next week.
be able to set it up so that it records not only a copy of just my mic, but also a copy of you guys as well.
And this will be super helpful for analog.
But it's really, really slick the way they've done the kind of workflow-y interface where you're dragging boxes around.
And it's, again, a very gentle way of trying to do very powerful things, much like the workflow app that I've talked about quite a few times, both on my website and here on the show.
It's a very cool idea, very well done.
And the thought of writing that UI scares the crap out of me because I'm a terrible UI developer as it is.
And writing something that complex with like that kind of a dynamic layout just scares the bejesus out of me.
But it's cool.
I wouldn't just describe it as gentle.
And by the way, this is not a paid sponsorship.
We're saying this because we think this app is neat.
And the reason I'm excited about this app is because it takes an idea that like concepts that are, you know,
been that have been related to audio for a long time and it's like these capabilities a lot of these capabilities more or less existed already in the previous versions of audio hijack or you could have done yourselves with different audio things the major innovation of this is kind of like uh people are familiar with quartz composer is it lets you
visually design the flow of audio.
Like if you were to die, you know, if you were to try to explain to somebody, what I need is I need to have the audio from this source going into over here and I need to record into a file over there, but then be mixed with this one over here and have a volume adjustment and go through this output device and you would draw it on an app and you're like, boy, how the hell am I going to configure that in an app?
you you just take that diagram and you make it in in this thing they have these little blocks you can pull out for for sources of audio they have a little meter block which i think is genius and shows the the greatness of this approach is like what does the meter block do doesn't do anything lets you know if you're clipping and that and that source right and then you have adjusters for different channels and volume things and you have a recorder where you can put the track down you can put multiple tracks down into one recording split them all into separate ones it
the interface is the entire thing of this application.
The capabilities were there and that you could have used it with an old version of audio hijack or other applications.
But take a look at the screenshots of this.
If you do anything related to audio and maybe you don't, maybe it's just a bunch of podcasters who care about this stuff.
But if you do anything related to audio or recording audio,
this one interface this one window like just drag a bunch of things and connect them with lines lets anybody do things that previously almost nobody could do because you'd have to understand like some crazy arcane interface and a bunch of weird uh vocabulary it's like this is all visual vocabulary very simple very straightforward i was super impressed by this
Yeah, it's a very neat app, and I'm hoping to get everything squared away so I can use it to record this next week.
We should have held out because they probably would have sponsored, and I could have done a good sponsor read for them, but too late.
You just did.
Yeah.
And Marco, you were on the beta for this, weren't you?
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, I like it a lot.
What I like about it, I said this in a blog post too, like, in audio is a pretty, like, dealing with audio and like, oh, I just need to record this and then run it through this mixer and combine it with this and then be able to mix this in and record over here and split this off and apply an EQ and a compressor over here, like...
Doing stuff like that can very quickly lead you into hardware complexity and just a hell of wires and cheap or expensive little boxes all over the place and lots of boxes all over your desk and complexity and not knowing where things are and costs.
and this app is able to replace so much complexity so much hardware some and even like if you try to do a lot of these these things in software there are like free open source things out there that will uh that you can do some of these things with or that you can combine in certain ways to do some of these things and they're usually way harder to set up and you got to install these three different packages and
One of them is really made for Linux and all this stuff.
You hit all these little bottlenecks and frustrations and limitations and just challenges and setting it all up.
So to have it all in one app is pretty amazing.
This kind of makes me sad because this is the kind of awesome utility that we will never see on iOS and that can never be in the Mac App Store.
And those things make me very sad.
A second point I was going to bring up is the innovation of this app.
This is exactly like the original GUI.
It's like...
previously i could not do this with a computer because it was too complicated but now when you make all my files little pictures now i can actually arrange them i don't know i don't know how to type commands to move files i can't keep you know like simple things like file management once you made the files little pictures that people could drag around with the mouse suddenly they were able to do it and you know the professionals who are going to have actual audio hardware with the xlr interfaces or all that stuff like this is not replacing a giant recording studio for them but it's saying like you have a mac
that is capable of doing a lot of stuff in software that you can also do a better job of a more fancy job of with hardware but maybe you don't want to buy thousands of dollars worth of audio hardware and that like marco said that is a whole other world of complexity what if you just want to do something like i have a mac everything here is happening on the back i've got a skype call i've got you know a google hangout i've got some music playing i've got like
why can't i i know my mac is capable of this it hears all the audio i can route it in a simple way using the input and output control panels why can't i just do this one thing they want to do it's not that much more complicated so i would say this is like when i tweeted about this i was like if you don't have a big budget for hardware but you want to do something like what marco does with like playing some music and mixing it to a live stream and stuff like that like
or you know on the incomparable where we just want to play clips from on our clip show play clips from past episodes or drop in sound effects in like a game show type thing you're not asking for much it's pretty simple but it's like oh i can add stuff in but it won't record my sound effects you'll just hear them over the skype chat or the only place i can get my sound effects is out of the the completely mixed skype chat or i'll play this clip and the other people in the show won't hear it but eventually it'll be in the final recording silly things like that are limitations of the simplicity of the way we can mix audio here
and providing an application that does that it's just such an incredible shame like this is this is like the kind of innovative application that you'd expect from a great mac developer right can't be on the mac app store can't be on ios because of the way it works because it you know hijacks the audio from other applications and stuff like that and i understand like it doesn't have any kernel extensions or anything but it's using you know it's getting into other processes and like you know grabbing audio from them and i feel like
it's my computer i there should be security restrictions about that like oh do you want to hijack audio from this application you know confirm that it's done have some sort of system level thing that prevents like i feel like this application could be on the mac app store if apple cared enough about the functionality it provides to you know to provide sort of the gateways of like oh do you want to give this app access to contacts the person says yes that app has access to contacts that's the only kind of barrier i think you need uh
It's kind of sad that you cannot buy this on the Mac App Store.
You have to buy it direct.
All right.
I think we're good.
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harvest, Backblaze, and lynda.com, and we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did it.
And find out how much money Marco is saving from Go.
It isn't that impressive.
It's like a few hundred dollars a month.
I mean, it's... That's what we want to know.
It's a few hundred dollars a month.
There you go.
It's not like... We're not talking thousands.
Because hosting overcast was already inexpensive compared to Instapaper or Tumblr or something like that.
Yeah.
You say it like it's nothing.
A few hundred dollars a month is not nothing.
I mean, that's a car payment.
Well, but in my last business, I was spending like five to seven thousand dollars a month.
So like for this one, like this is a lot smaller because it's like, you know, five to seven hundred dollars a month as opposed to a thousand.
It's a pretty good bang for the buck, though.
Like how how long do you spend rewriting it and go?
And then the savings will be realized, you know, going forward.
You know, so you it's it's a pretty you got a pretty good return on the investment in the time you spent to learn, go and rewrite this thing.
Yeah, I mean, and ultimately, I'm going to spend a little more time on it because the current model I have has a couple of little problems.
But overall, it's been a huge win.
And I learned a new language, and that is valuable too.
And now I have a very, very good tool for certain types of problems in my tool belt, I guess.
I learned something new.
It gave us something to talk about on the show here and there.
And let's be seeing some money.
I mean, like John said, a few hundred dollars a month, that's significant.
That's impressive.
And that's really awesome.
And it's kind of crazy that you just choosing to attack this problem a little bit differently has had what I think to be a pretty big, tangible impact on your financial situation for Overcast.
That's awesome.
And
Who would have thought that ditching PHP would save you hundreds on server costs?
And just not even ditching all of it, just ditching it for this one hotspot, this one major bottleneck that was a huge resource hog.
And that's why I like that I now have this in my tool belt, because...
Now I know problems like this, I have another way to attack them.
I have something else that I know well enough and that I trust enough to do this kind of thing that's now available to me.
And that will enable certain new things.
I didn't want to learn certain things like Python or Ruby that much because...
They didn't seem to provide enough of an advantage to make it worth me adding that complexity and having that burden of having to learn that over a few weeks and dumping all that time into it.
Go is different enough and good enough at certain things that it was worth it to me, and I'm glad I did it.
Yeah, the bad old Marco would have spent many more months arguing with everyone else about why he didn't need to rewrite it.
So true.
The amount of time and energy you would have spent defending your decision not to rewrite it and go would dwarf, very quickly dwarf the amount of time it actually took you to rewrite it and go.
Oh yeah, no, this is what happens when there's a lot of money to be made on one side of an argument.
yeah well it's all speculative like i don't think it'll be that much faster maybe i can reduce the number of machines from one to two even now you're saying it's not that much money although i think it totally is uh and then you know the whole the arguments you just made about having this in your tool bit and so on and so forth you know we could have made those arguments you'd be like meh you know you hem and y'all it doesn't seem like a big deal it's not a whatever so i hope you you've learned from this that like uh trying new things is awesome and saves you money and
uh it's it's the lesson i usually take from that is like i get this work all the time i have to do the calculation of like how much energy will it be for me to argue against this versus how much energy will it take for me to just do it and surprising amount of time it's like it's more exhausting for me to think about arguing against it than just do it like it's actually less work because then you're like
Whatever.
It's done.
When it's done, the argument is over.
There's no argument to be had.
And it was less mentally exhausting than having to try to, you know, argue about this.
Well, I mean, you know, in my case, it was really just about like, you know, I'm not I'm not going to take like a sideways step and learn a language that is generally similar to PHP and what it does well and what it doesn't do well, because there's not a whole lot of upside for that.
We'll work on that one next.
I know that's what you think.
But with Go, the reason I went to it was because I had this problem that I was doing that PHP is especially bad at.
If it was just something that PHP is kind of inconvenient for or not that well designed for, that's less of a game.
That's more like, well, in an ideal world, on an infinite timescale thing, maybe I would do something else.
But...
In most cases, most of the problems I have to solve with web apps, the other languages don't solve it better than PHP enough to make it worth the jump and the hassle of having to rewrite things.
This is going to cost me probably two months of web programming time because I not only had to rewrite the crawlers and debug all the problems that came with them
But I also have to rewrite a lot of these supporting tools, things like the logging infrastructure and the things that allow me to check and see when feeds were last crawled, how often, monitoring if there's delays, if there's queue congestion, being able to force one to crawl immediately.
There's all sorts of little infrastructure supporting pieces that tie into the crawling system that I now have to modify or rewrite because it's a different system.
So it is a pretty expensive change up front.
It will pay off over time, but it's certainly taking a lot of time.
And so that's why I'm not going to rewrite the whole rest of the app in Python or something, because there doesn't seem to be enough benefit to doing that for the amount of time and work it would take.
um if i'm faced with a problem that php does really badly like lots of parallel network requests uh now i'm not gonna i'm not gonna use it for that you know so that's so that's where the benefit is when you sell overcast your next product you won't the parts that are appropriate for go you won't write in php to begin with and it'll be go from the beginning and the same thing with your queue management stuff like if you ever if we ever across the next hurdle which is like third-party products for dealing with queues of things and managing the queues and and uh
dealing with failures and reporting and logging.
There, there are lots of infrastructure type tools that deal with that.
I know you probably don't like anything.
I would rather just write the thing, straightforward thing yourself, but in the similar way that if you were to try to use one of those, you'd be like, Oh, I have this infrastructure that already works.
Now I have to do this thing.
And now I have this weird system where some of them use this system.
Some of them use that.
It's like, again, the next time you do a project, if you have that tool in your tool belt,
then you will say okay this part of the system i'm going to write in php this part i'm going to write and go this thing i'm going to use you know this q system and this whatever like we'll work on the third party stuff next but like i feel like having having it this is one of the things that having a crappy job forces you to deal with because if you have either one crappy job or uh even better multiple crappy jobs crappy meaning just like regular job jobs where you work for somebody else you don't get to pick half the time what you're working with
what database you're working with what what uh logging infrastructure you're working with what operating system what you know just you don't get to pick right and a lot of times you work with crappy things and but eventually you work with a whole bunch of different things so that when you come to a new situation you're like look i've tried these five things and these seven things in this realm or whatever and you have you're forced to have experience with lots of different things and so you have a deeper tool chest to pull from whereas if you're not forced by some pointy-haired boss
to use a particular technology you're oh it's always up to you to do like the cost benefit and like
I'm the only person here.
Is it really worth me learning to do this on my own?
So on and so forth is much harder to, you don't have the time to just screw around with stuff and try everything out and survey the landscape.
You really just have to go with what you know.
And so now you overcoming that hurdle to say, I am going to screw around for a little while just because I think there'll be a benefit from it.
It's a sort of a slow motion version of having a series of crappy job jobs where you're forced to use 50 different technologies.
Yeah.
It's so true.
I also think it's kind of funny for you to just kind of wave your hand at, oh, it won't be any better than PHP.
Well, that's not what I said.
I said it won't be better enough to make it worth the transition costs.
Okay, even then, I think that's a very bold claim for – not for Go necessarily because you know Go, but to just kind of wave off, I don't know, Python as an example –
And just assume that it's not going to be that beneficial.
I think that's pretty bold.
Now, it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong.
It just means that's pretty bold.
And I am proud of you and remain proud of you for having explored Go.
And I echo what John is saying that I think this is a baby step in the right direction for you understanding that you don't necessarily need to personally solve every problem under the sun.
And there are more than one ways.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
And that's OK.
The part where Marco's right about this thing, though, is like it's not even, you know, Python versus PHP.
It's that he found the hotspot, right?
Like you reduced your number of servers by like half, didn't you?
So it doesn't matter how much better something is than PHP.
This was clearly the hotspot.
Like he's not going to have it again.
Right.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like so that's the you know, again, that's just true of anything, not just working yourself, but especially when you're working yourself.
put your effort towards the thing that's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and so if you have the number of servers it's it's silly to expect that the next change will also have the number of servers because eventually it'll have you know one one thousandth of a server and you know that's not gonna happen right so it like decide where the bottleneck is and address that and then you know if if the current state of things is fine then your work is done you don't need to work further like it
I don't think, like, for example, if he decided the hotspot is PHP, I need to replace PHP with Python, he would not have had the number of servers.
Like, that's the type of thing, even without using language, you can kind of ballpark and say, are these at the same level of abstraction?
Go is clearly lower level, and it's clearly giving him something that PHP wasn't that he knew would be a big bang for the buck.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I've been doing WatchKit a lot.
Lots of WatchKit this week.
I'm liking it a lot.
Yeah?
Because it's so limited that there's not a lot of pressure on me to make something amazing.
There's not a lot of pressure on me to cram the entire app into this because I just can't.
It is not possible to.
uh so the limit limits i have are very um challenging and and in that way kind of uh interesting to me can you do a thing with like uh do you have accelerometer access on the watch like if i if i shake my wrist nope no sensors no that would be like i could a lot of the time when i'm listening to a podcast or something i hate i've talked to you about this before i hate the stupid little clicker like going forward and back of doing two clicks and three clicks which when you have cold fingers and like
I don't know if I accidentally hold too long and it ends up being the click and the hold.
Like I know all the patterns, but I just can't make my fingers do it with the stupid Apple clicker.
But you just you run out of gestures like you can't you don't have enough.
There's not enough input.
You don't have enough buttons.
So a lot of time it's like, you know, I just missed the last few seconds of what was said on a podcast.
I would shake my wrist for it to go back seven seconds and just have that be the one unambiguous, vigorous wrist shaking.
Like, you know, I feel like you can make it vigorous enough so you didn't have to.
So you wouldn't accidentally do it or whatever.
And that is much easier than me trying to triple click the stupid headset thing to go back and hear what somebody said.
Actually, I have a prototype class that's a pocket tap recognizer that will try to recognize if you tap the phone while it's in your pocket, like if you just hit it with your finger from the outside of your jeans or whatever.
And I got that working decently, but I could never get it working reliably enough to actually ship it.
It's just not good enough.
There's too many false responses in either direction, like falsely detecting if you just step really hard as a tap.
uh and missing real taps like i just could not get it to work properly yeah and it's kind of small for gestures that's why i was thinking like the one input you have is the shake and like the shake to undo is silly you know in ios uh but i'm pretty sure i've never actually done accidentally done it and i very frequently have a done it on purpose and be shaking an app in the in the dim hope that this app will actually support undo through shake and i'm really excited when it does and when it doesn't i just i'm just sad
You've never kicked that off accidentally?
Never.
Oh, I do it all the time because I'll be holding my iPad.
I'll be in bed on my back holding my iPad up with both hands using it.
And then I'll kind of like drop it intentionally to let it land on my chest so I can like type or something like that and not support the weight of the iPad with my hands anymore.
I have an iPad three.
If I did that, it would break my ribs.
That's true.
That is, that is an excellent point, sir.
But, uh, but yeah, every time I do that deliberate drop onto my, onto my chest in order to make it so that I don't have to support it anymore.
Um, then, then it kicks the, uh, undo, you know, do you want to undo the typing you just did?
And it drives me nuts every time, but as a developer, I know that it's, it makes perfect sense why that's happening.
And it's,
it's not my fault but it's kind of my fault yeah for all i know i am accidentally triggering it i'm just doing it in apps that don't support undo but i've never i've never seen stuff go away on my screen and realize it's because i jostled the thing too much and like i said i very frequently after accidentally performing some action just futilely shake the device even if it doesn't undo it lets me get revenge i guess on the device you stupid phone didn't mean to tap that you know i didn't mean to tap that
I've been doing a lot of WatchKit stuff.
I'm just going to talk about it now.
Screw it.
So I like it a lot.
I think it's important for people's expectations of what WatchKit apps will actually be to actually know how it works a little bit.
So basically, when Apple Watch launches in a few months or whenever, it doesn't matter, developers can only... Apple can do whatever they want with their apps, but third-party developers can only make Watch apps with WatchKit.
So what this is is...
WatchKit is actually an extension that runs on the phone from the main parent app.
And it runs in the background.
Whenever you select the app's icon on the watch, it launches the WatchKit extension on the phone to boot up, give it data, and control it.
And then the third party developers code never actually runs on the watch.
All the third party code is running on the phone.
And it's literally just like it's reading data from the parent app on the phone.
If you make a network calls, it's also happening on the phone.
And then you send commands to the watch to just update the screen.
The watch is playing through a static storyboard where you've defined your controllers and everything and the elements they have.
Those are all static.
You can't generate elements dynamically at runtime.
You can hide and show them, but you can't generate new ones.
And the phone is basically commanding the watch over Bluetooth how to update your interface in it.
So it's sending over commands like, set this label's text to this string.
And all the commands, it's hilarious, all the commands, they're write-only.
You can't read from them.
So you can you can set the color of the text, but you can't read it back because it's literally just like this thin layer on top of this commensure.
They're just like telling the watch how to update its interface.
So there's a number of challenges with this.
And the biggest one is the latency because Bluetooth has some latency.
It's in modern Bluetooth.
It's pretty small.
But there is some latency and there's also just a lot of there's pretty limited bandwidth there.
And the watch, as far as we can tell from from hints and things here and there, the watch is not going to keep your app running for very long.
Like as soon as you stop looking at it, it closes, the extension closes and everything's cut off.
So there's going to be major challenges in just getting these watch apps to to be dynamic and to be to be useful and to be rich, because like if you're like sending over images, you know, even like, you know, like I'm having this problem with the album art.
of like how do you how do you send over album art in a way that is efficient and you can have it cash up to 20 megs of album art for you and but not a lot and like all these like little limitations little problems but overall the biggest thing about it is just this this lack of dynamic interface and the latency involved in updating things and
everything is based around trying to minimize it.
Also, if you're really chatty over that protocol, over the Bluetooth, you're going to keep the radios on, and you're going to burn a bunch of battery life on both sides.
So there's a lot of challenges, a lot of limitations here.
I would say for the first wave of third-party apps, which I think is going to be a year roughly,
um i would say don't expect a lot of dynamic interaction it is like a static menu that you're dealing with or like static interface elements there's there's almost nothing dynamic that you can do um i would not expect a whole lot from games i i think some games will work on it things where you can have very simple controls like which of these five actions do you want to do next touch this button like that's it like there's not a lot of interaction that's going to be reasonably possible with the system um
on the plus side it's really quick to develop for and it's really easy to get something going and it's uh i i think i think it's a smart move overall from apple and the tools are pretty good there's a couple of bugs here and there but overall for this limited set of things that it's doing it's pretty well suited for that so
I'm actually really happy about it.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, I'm happy that I don't have to kind of be forced to cram the whole app into it because I just can't.
So instead, I can do this limited subset that I can do in a month or two and have a really great app out there and be done with it.
So overall, I like it.
Again, set expectations low if you're going to be buying one of these things.
Don't expect a whole lot from third-party apps.
But what you have...
i think will be interesting and certainly will be enough for the first year that's good for apple because what they want to say is boy the the apple watch is out and already there are insert very large number of third-party applications for it because if it's really easy for you to add like you know why don't you just add trivial apple watch support well all apple watch support at this point is trivial without native apps and stuff like that and the incredible limitations so if you make it easy for people to go
that's a nice bullet point we could add to our iphone app i could say we have watch support and then everyone is thinking of is there anything sensible i can show on the watch and if there's anything remotely sensible no matter how simple it is you don't feel too bad because look everyone has to be simple so i think this will help apple have a lot of you know a lot of
quote-unquote phone apps you know i ios apps that support the phone watch apps ios apps that support the watch out of the gate because that's what they want to say they want to say our platform is exciting it's popular uh and if it was possible to make full-fledged applications then if you just made some silly thing that was barely interactive you would look bad but now everyone will look bad together and you know comparatively you'll look good
Yeah, I mean, it really does serve their interests very well.
And again, I think it helps us too.
I mean, I know a lot of developers are probably very frustrated with the limitations of the very long list of things you can't do, things you don't have access to.
Like, for instance, if your phone moves out of range of the watch, from what we've been told, we don't know that we don't have hardware yet, but from what we've been told...
If your phone loses that Bluetooth connection to the watch, so if you go running with it or whatever, your app just terminates.
It just ends because it can't keep the UI updated anymore.
It's like the head gets cut off.
It just ends.
So nothing can run detached from a phone that's third-party.
And again, there's so many limitations on the things...
The kinds of things you can't do with the interface is very long.
And we still... In the simulator, they have attempted to simulate latency with some of these commands.
But it's just artificial insertion of a sleep command in the UI.
So we don't really know what the latency will be like on a real device.
If I'm showing a list of podcast episodes like I do in the playlist screen...
I want to have artwork on each one showing you what show they're from.
And I'm compressing the images down so they're really tiny.
They're like a couple of kilobytes each maybe.
But in the simulator, it takes a long time to load that.
And I don't know if that's a bug.
I don't know if that's because it's simulating latency per request instead of by byte size.
Or I don't know if that's really how latent it's going to be, in which case I'm going to have to change that design entirely.
You've got to think like Yosemite and iTunes 7 and just...
average the color of the album art pick one color out of it and then just set a square to that one color so i have a an honest question and you may choose not to answer it but you've talked several times about how limited watch kit is which makes sense can you give a couple of examples of things you really wish you could do or have tried to do but couldn't make work with the current set of watch kit limitations
Oh, sure.
I mean, one of the biggest ones is I can't do my play animation at all.
I mean, I could render it to a bunch of images and try to send the commands over to be like, all right, set this bar of the EQ to be this height.
No, no, no, no.
Put them all on the storyboard and you just cycle between those four frames in the storyboard.
right yeah remember the old like i think the old you know a lot of uis do this where they want it to look like level meters but they just have like four images so they just cycle between randomly oh yeah on the storyboard it's all static marco you're overthinking it no one will know no one knows what the waveform is supposed to look like that's how apple does it when in in ios 7 and on the watch when they have their music app and they have the little now playing animation bars those are fake yeah i think the one in the quick time seven player is real isn't it
i don't know i think so but but yeah the ones the ones in ios 7 like the little three bar animation when you on the now playing item that's totally fake and that and like seeing that and being annoyed that it was fake is what made me try to do my own that was real and see that it worked but but the fake ones do serve a purpose like i'm joking about you know doing a fake one with storyboards but like something to let people know that audio is playing uh it's probably a good idea and if you do i guess it's probably much better to do it with a static thing like a red you know light on the camera that shows you know camera is on or whatever but
uh people are if you show anyone that looks anything like a level meter people know oh that means something is playing now and if i can't hear it something is screwed up because my headphones don't work is the music playing like you would think most people would just look at it and see the pause symbol and say of course it's playing otherwise there wouldn't be a pause symbol but i found my experience that people do not recognize that that reality that's staring them in the face but if you show a level meter anywhere they know something should be playing it i'm not hearing it something's broken
Right.
I mean, so, Casey, I mean, to answer your question, like, you know, limitations I've hit directly.
I mean, you know, again, one of the biggest ones is just, you know, not not knowing how much latency I can actually expect in real life when sending images over and stuff like that.
But, you know, some of the actual like hard limits are things like I can't even show efficiently the seconds remaining indicator because.
there is there's like a built-in widget that that you don't have to keep updating for counting up or down to a certain time or certain time interval or showing the current time so i can't like the only way for me to have it count down with like second with the actual seconds remaining is to update it every time that number changes so at least once per second which i probably can't and probably shouldn't be doing so instead i have i have it actually update a minutes remaining counter
And whenever the number of minutes remaining changes, I send an update over the Bluetooth and have it update the label to show that.
And I have a progress bar in the current mock-up that only it's images.
And it only has, you know, like I think 150 increments across the screen.
And so whenever like the progress through the episode changes by enough to matter to be worth a couple of pixels, I update that image to be the new value.
You're still doing better than Windows 95.
that's true yes that that was just pallet cycling right no the one is 95 of the segmented progress bars oh yeah yeah and you have more than 100 it didn't have 150 segments right so there's like there's there's limitations like that that i just i just can't get around um
The biggest limitation is the width of the screen is just really narrow.
You just can't fit a lot on the screen.
I've managed to make it work, I think.
I won't know until I actually get one of these watches and start using it, but I think I've managed to make it work acceptably.
but that is i mean the hardest challenge is just a design challenge right there but then there's also like there's other like little details like so if you have a navigation stack uh so you have like your your root controller and then it pushes on when you select an element on the table view it pushes the new one uh and then you know you select again it pushes another one any of the ones that are below the current item in the stack that you that you push something on top of
Those stop receiving UI updates and those can no longer send UI updates for themselves.
So let's say you have at the base of the navigation hierarchy a list of the podcasts you subscribe to.
Then you push on top of that the playlist view and the now playing view.
So you're in the middle of a podcast.
the list of podcasts you subscribe to changes for some reason.
Something new comes into the download, you delete one, whatever the case, the list changes.
So now the root controller, which is not currently shown on screen because it's buried below the now playing, the root controller needs to update itself.
If you, it's still memory, it will recognize if you, if your data layer set up, it'll recognize that there's, that there's been a change, but you have to check to see if it's active.
And if it's not active,
you have to just enqueue that and just set like a boolean flag somewhere saying this is invalid data that i have now and i need to reload it next time i'm shown and the next time it's shown you have to check for that flag and say oh if i'm invalid reload the data like all this stuff like this doesn't really exist in ui kit on the on the phone like these aren't these problems don't really exist you can just kind of do things anytime you want it's fine
um the watch is really like the watch kit communication is really basic as i said like it's it's write only it's very limited it's all like just like sending like remote desktop commands over the wire basically and uh so there's there's really there's a lot of stuff you have to do very manually a lot of stuff you just have to just choose not to do or choose to do in very minimal or clever ways and that's kind of why i like it because i enjoy challenges like that
Then you're going to get like screen flicker, though, when you go back to the podcast list, you know, only once that thing is active, will it even have a chance to update its UI.
So as soon as you go back to that screen, if that boolean is set, you're just now within a couple, you know, fractions of a second, it's going to update everything.
Whereas before it could have been updated behind the scenes sort of.
So now now you're you're putting that UI flicker in people's faces, which is kind of crappy.
yeah and again and it sucks and i don't think there's anything i can do about it but you know again there's just yeah there's nothing you can do someone needs to discover the hack of like if you just make the currently active view larger than the actual screen and like you know like sort of like css sprites css sprites for ui yeah right like it's not i'm not really pushing a view i'm just shifting the viewport and so i really this view is always active so i can update the podcast list whatever's an update
yep nope can't even do that yeah i'm sure they would reject your app if you try to anyway i would also i would love to do like like the the force press gesture on the watch which is it functionally it's kind of like a right click it shows that menu of like of overlaid icons when you use the force to press your watch yeah you just concentrate really hard and this menu comes up
and uh that you can only do it per screen like you can't force press on say a table a table list item and get options for that item you just have to do it for like the whole screen like this screen has the force press yes the force press is on the screen but then it ignores where what part of the screen your finger is touching and i can kind of see that because what what if that gesture becomes part of the vocabulary of using the watch
it's kind of weird to make people care about where their finger is on the screen.
You know what I mean?
Like that's, that's two different things because then you'd have to be thinking, is this one of those forest presses where in this app where it doesn't matter where my finger is, or is this one of those forest presses in this app where it does whatever my finger is.
Now you can just shove your meaty paw into the watch and just press it and it'll do something.
yeah exactly but i mean really like i was not really that excited about the watch until i started playing with watch kit now i'm very excited like now that i see what i can do with not that much effort and how useful that would probably actually be in practice which i think is pretty useful like there's a lot of situations where i were like well i'm like i'm walking my dog i'll bundle up in the cold and i'm like man i would really like to have a basic little watch control right now a lot of situations where this is coming up where i'm like you know this would actually be nice to have
So I'm looking forward to it.
Got to wait five years before we can live in the real future where we can have a great view of your nose hair when you're out on your walk because you'll have a live video on your watch just like Dick Tracy and we'll all be able to see up each other's noses.
That sounds awesome.
The future.
I can't wait.
Yeah, because it's the whole thing.
You just look at your watch, and your wrist vibrates a little bit, and you pick up your wrist, and there's your wife's tiny little face on there telling you something, and she can see right up your nose.
Yay.
The future.