The Web Kind of Happens to You
John:
john how's the renovation going oh it's going uh a bunch of stuff is done a bunch of stuff still needs to be done sometimes it rains this is like a description of life yeah basically now i'm just trying to now like make my peace with the with the fact that things are not done to my standards and it's like just you know just let it go it's fine
John:
have you met a human being much less a contractor that can complete anything to your standards like how does that how does that go for you at work i allowed myself to do some amount of nagging and some amount of asking for things to be redone in a better way but at a certain point you have to be like look just it is what it is just go forward friday they're doing the front door i think so that'll that'll be uh that that involves a lot of potential detail work and a lot of potential for me to be disappointed in what ends up happening but
John:
that's the way you look at this is there not a lot of potential for you to be delighted it's a lot of potential for you to be disappointed oh yeah no forget about delight and then and then finally like painting at the end and i'm hoping even the painting i'm like boy like you know will the prep work be done to my satisfaction almost certainly not the
John:
prep work you don't even surface prep surface prep like because because they're not stripping all the paint off it they're just gonna they just want to paint the trim and get out of there but i wanted you know anyway i have demands it's really i had no idea i mean this in the nicest way like i i just i can't imagine being you yeah
John:
now you would have complaints about some of these things too because something is like sometimes you know sometimes you make a cut in the wrong spot sometimes something isn't square when it should be sometimes corners don't meet up the way they're supposed to anybody can look at them can see if that's not right this is a question of does it bother you and sometimes you just gotta just you know just let it go and just be like all right whatever well anyway i'm i'm very particular
Casey:
How does this work out for you at work?
Casey:
Given that you're so particular, how do you continue to have co-workers?
Casey:
Or do you just do everything single-handed?
John:
That was great for programming.
John:
The computer's really particular, too.
John:
You tell it to do the wrong thing.
John:
It just does whatever, you know.
John:
You have to really get it exactly right.
John:
Because if you don't, it don't work.
Marco:
So, you want to talk about Safari being the new IE some more?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
There were actually a couple things about that I wanted to get to this week.
Marco:
Well, you should have put it in the follow-up, then.
John:
Uh, hold on.
Casey:
see see how easy it is for those who are listening marco is marco just typed into the show notes in the very first entry of the follow-up section safari is the new ie fu yes so you don't you don't need the fu because it's in that section that's redundant
Casey:
John has deleted the letters F you.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
And then added a sub bullet Marco talks.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So since I will blindly read the document, it appears Marco that we have some follow up with regard to Safari is new IE.
Casey:
Would you like to tell us about that?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
First of all, we did get a good email, actually just like an hour ago, from somebody named Lauren, who says, don't be so dismissive of web applications.
Marco:
I work in Ocean Freight.
Marco:
My job involves using a wide variety of web apps almost exclusively.
Marco:
He or she goes on to list a whole bunch of different things that are all like, I believe these would be called line of business applications.
Marco:
Is that a fair judgment of all this stuff?
Marco:
talking about how they're all on Windows machines, they use this internal tracking app to do all this other stuff, and then also talking about things like the general public, accessing government websites and everything.
Marco:
So improvements to web functionality are very much appreciated by all this stuff, and also I should not be dismissive of web apps.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I think this is the perfect example of where cross-platform, write-once, run-anywhere, universal accessibility kind of applications make perfect sense.
Marco:
Like any kind of line-of-business thing where you are a bank and your employees have to use a management system from all the different branches to conduct business and enter information from customers and check on systems...
Marco:
Make that a web app.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
The web is very good at that kind of thing.
Marco:
And I'm not arguing in whatever I've been arguing about this, I'm not arguing that the web is useless today or that it has no place in the market.
Marco:
Only that native apps have replaced quite a lot of it and are probably the new hotness.
Marco:
In the same way, Visual Basic apps for a long time were a line of business apps.
Marco:
Before, web apps were really a big thing.
Marco:
And it was never like a huge, you know, massive amount of the software business in like the parts that anyone knew about.
Marco:
But it was still like there was big business to be had there, but it wasn't, you know, Adobe wasn't running Photoshop in Visual Basic.
Marco:
You know, web apps serve a lot of that same role where...
Marco:
there is a lot of usefulness to them.
Marco:
There's tons of applications for which that is the right choice.
Marco:
But most of those are going to be boring types of things that are internal to companies or government websites and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's this kind of stuff that
Marco:
There's not a lot of action happening there.
Marco:
It doesn't get a lot of consumer attention.
Marco:
And if you're launching a new consumer-focused service or consumer-focused application, that probably isn't the right choice today.
Marco:
So that's mostly the angle I was coming from on that.
John:
I think the difference is not so much that they're boring or anything.
John:
It's the difference of the customers.
John:
Individual persons, like consumers, they have...
John:
different value system than governments really big corporations or whatever because those large those large entities made up of lots of people there's institutional knowledge there of you know it's no no one person has to be smart or wise or have forethought there's a lot of institutional knowledge and there's a lot of
John:
experience with this type of thing.
John:
If you are a very large company that's been around for any amount of time, you've been burned by a vendor, whether it's like having based your entire company on Visual Basic and having Microsoft like change things around or having their priorities change or doing everything in Java and then having Sun get bought by Oracle or like
John:
every big company has been burned by lotus notes yeah by some proprietary system owned and controlled by a single company and so they kind of they they act with different set of criteria they're like the most important thing to us is not to get tied down to a single venture to sort of be masters of our own destiny to not let this thing which is supposed to be like a supporting thing that helps us run our business uh
John:
Do we really want to be super tied, like you said, Lotus Notes, to IBM?
John:
Are they a trustworthy partner?
John:
Are their priorities aligned with our priorities?
John:
Or are they just trying to sell us something?
John:
Like getting entangled with other big companies and making your company's fate rely on some other companies' fate is something they want to avoid.
John:
So big companies are very incentivized to find a solution that they...
John:
that gives them options so if you do it like you do it on the web doesn't mean you're not you're still gonna have to develop you're gonna have to like migrate all your users from one browser to another and things are gonna break and maybe if you did everything on ie6 with active x controls you realize you were actually kind of tying yourself to microsoft anyway or whatever but that is a very different value system than consumers individual consumers are not making these judgments like i don't want most of them i mean we know the people who are like i don't want to tie myself to one company or you know but the vast majority of individual consumers just don't think that way they're just like
John:
Is it easy to use?
John:
Can I understand it?
John:
Is it nice?
John:
Is it convenient?
John:
Is it popular?
John:
Have I heard about it?
John:
So on and so forth.
John:
So that I think is the biggest difference.
John:
And it's not so much the things they're using are more or less boring than consumer applications, because sometimes they're really interesting and sophisticated depending on like, you know,
John:
the business they're in um and and even things like government like government stuff i guess it's kind of boring by definition but that stuff can be super important so much government stuff has moved to the web uh as opposed to moving to uh you know visual basic applications or whatever and i'm sure every parts of the government probably went through that phase where microsoft did convince them that like oh yeah no if you do this everyone has a windows pc and it will be fine and the government learns like that's not a great plan either right so i think that that heavily influences
John:
uh the value of a solution based on like what your criteria are and i think marco is right that like you know all the people who complained about marco i don't think anyone denied the overall trend of like you know and you said in the last show we had the sort of web 2.0 phase where the consumer facing sort of interesting things that got written about they're interesting to individuals was all a new website a new fancy website and now we're in sort of the app era all the things we write about our apps and maybe 10 years from now it'll be something else but like
John:
That is definitely something that's going through a transition and a cycle and a trend.
John:
But the web stuff, the value it has to large entities and to anyone who doesn't want to hitch their star to some other company whose interest may or may not be aligned with them, continues to be a viable thing.
John:
And like I said in the last show, I don't think anyone's saying the web is going to go away.
John:
The web...
John:
the web will probably be around as long as email.
John:
Because once something goes out there that's as widespread as the web and that is as decentralized as the web, lots of people are incentivized to keep that being a thing.
John:
If suddenly the web was dwindling because all consumers were using
John:
uh apps or whatever many large entities and companies and governments and and everything are highly incentivized to make the web still be a thing because they don't want to uh be you know can you imagine especially if apple's the only game in town apple is does not want to do what the enterprise wants to do enterprise needs its own thing
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, Apple getting that role would be the worst for everybody, including Apple.
John:
Yeah, Apple just wouldn't take it.
John:
They'd be like, whatever, if you can figure out how to use it.
John:
Like, I mean, they do, you know, they have the corporate thing where you can push this application to all your employees and IBM wants to make iPad apps for everybody, right?
John:
Like, they're moving in that direction.
John:
But I have to think that...
John:
It's the same thing all over.
John:
As good as IBM's iPad apps may be, I'm not saying it's a bad solution for everybody.
John:
If you have some factory and they can give all your employees iPads and use this application to run your business, that's probably good.
John:
But boy, it's a ticking time bomb.
John:
There's a time limit on that.
John:
At some point,
John:
either ipads aren't going to be a thing apple's not going to be a thing that os is not going to be a thing your apps won't run on the new version of the os like it's just a matter of time whereas the web you know there's no one can no one's uh decisions can make your crap stop working immediately you just know that i'm signing up to keep my web apps working year after year after year but hopefully that will not be as
John:
as drastic as if IBM totally changes strategy or the Apple-IBM partnership goes away or Apple decides that they're not making iPads anymore because they can't sell them and they're doing everything with VR goggles or whatever.
Marco:
And most of these web standards that are pushing the envelope now are things that this massive class of applications generally doesn't really need.
Marco:
And that isn't to say they can't be made better by them, but much of the time they actually can't.
John:
Well, it's a leading indicator.
John:
Like these tech, these technologies are not going to be relevant to the enterprise for many, many years.
John:
But the only way anything ever becomes relevant to the enterprise is it's been around for many, many years and everyone's implemented.
John:
And this is the third implementation in every web browser.
John:
And it's like, OK, now finally enterprise.
John:
I mean, it took so long just to get off IE6, like for the longest time.
John:
It doesn't work on IE6.
John:
I don't care.
John:
And while that was going on, every other browser was getting better and better and better.
John:
So when IE6 finally went away, mostly because Microsoft, you know, sort of killed it itself when it realized it has to start moving again.
John:
Everybody else had, you know, technologies that had been worked out in the market for so many years that by the time the enterprise woke up and installed like IE7 and IE8 or maybe gave people Chrome or Firefox or something like, wow, look at all this great new web.
John:
Where did this come from?
John:
Well, it had been developing the whole time when you were stuck in IE6.
John:
So I think all this this this web tech, you think, oh, it's not relevant to current enterprise apps.
John:
It's going to be relevant to enterprise apps in five years if any of these things actually gain widespread adoption.
Casey:
That's sort of true.
Casey:
So I'm glad you brought up IA6 because as someone who writes websites for other companies for a living, I don't know if Marco's characterization of line of business apps on the web earlier was 100% the way I see it.
Casey:
The reason I see companies deploying line of business apps to the web is because of easy deployment, not necessarily because the technology of the web in and of itself is superior.
Casey:
And so I cannot tell you the amount of times that up until very recently, like you were saying, John.
Casey:
We would be asked to do a website, either an internal, like intranet, or sometimes a public website.
Casey:
And we would ask, okay, well, what are the browser requirements?
Casey:
Well, the most modern version of Firefox plus one back, the most modern version of Chrome plus one back, and the most modern version of Safari plus one back.
Casey:
Oh, and all the way back to IE6.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Well, you don't understand.
Casey:
All of our computers, our standard build for all of our computers is still rocking IE6 because our security department has an approved IE7 through 14 or whatever they're on now.
Casey:
So yeah, you have to make this work on IE6 too.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
So I think the reason they do this is because...
Casey:
They want to have a way, businesses want to have a way to very easily deploy software to their users, particularly line of business software.
Casey:
And so the easiest way to deploy that software is to not really deploy it at all and just put it on a web server and tell people go to this URL.
Casey:
And thus, that's why we were always targeting IE6 for the longest time is because all of these standard builds on all these computers were on ancient versions of IE and typically Windows XP, sometimes even today.
Casey:
And so because of that, we would have to support these old versions of IE.
Casey:
And all of that was about deployment.
Casey:
It's not about being available everywhere in the sense that the web is available everywhere.
Casey:
That probably didn't make sense.
Casey:
What I'm saying is it was just about getting this software onto their users' machines.
Casey:
And the easiest way to do that is to put it on the web and target whatever browser they're using.
Casey:
That's why all these old government websites, like you were saying, John, all target IE6 is because that's what the government was using.
Casey:
And why all of these old websites were using ActiveX controls.
Casey:
And again, you referred to that briefly, John.
Casey:
All of this stuff was because the only thing that these companies cared about was the stuff that they themselves were using.
Casey:
And so there was no incentive to make it better for anyone else, except very recently when they started to realize, well, having a really crappy website, that's kind of a detriment.
Casey:
We should really pay attention to this stuff.
John:
Yeah, they move slower, but, like, I mean, I'm assuming right now you see far fewer instances of IE6 just because Microsoft is moving on.
John:
Like, they're killing it as best they can.
John:
They're force-installing newer versions of IE.
John:
They're stopping support of OSs that could run IE.
John:
Hell, they're trying to kill 7 and 8 and 9 as fast as they can as well.
John:
So Microsoft is moving again, and people are going to have to catch up.
John:
But, yeah, like, it's the same reason we do all the Igloo ads.
John:
Like, internet software, frequently companies are not incentivized to make their internet good.
John:
so it just moves slower it doesn't mean that it's never going to get better it doesn't mean that like you know it just means that for a really long time everyone else's web apps are going to be way better than yours because no one cares about the intranet but at a certain point it just becomes embarrassing and ridiculous and it's some some executive somewhere is going to realize they can get a lot of points by making everyone in the company better by bringing their their intranet site or their line of business web application up to the standards of five years ago or ten years ago and everyone's like wow this is so much better because it will be because
John:
They'll stop using, you know, ActiveX controls and frames and whatever the hell they're using to do their intranet site.
John:
So that's that's a slow motion type of thing.
John:
But I mean, they could just as easily be using be deploying everything as Java applets or because it's because they do control both ends of it.
John:
They can do all sorts of crazy things like.
John:
They could do a Citrix thing and run Windows apps that you can access from everywhere.
John:
Enterprises have been known to do because they control both ends.
John:
It's not like they have to say, we just need this to be available everywhere and easy to deploy.
John:
There's lots of things that companies will sell you that are digitalized.
John:
have to install any software people just click this icon on their desktop and they can get your app and it's automatically up to date it doesn't have to be the web but i i like to think that enough companies have been burned by the proprietary solutions now that the web has a certain appeal that the other solutions don't and even going as far as say the web and also nothing like active x in the web like we're not going to do everything in flash we're not going to do everything in adobe air we're not going to do it in active x because we've learned that that is a mistake we're just going to stick to
John:
the plain old web uh it's good enough for you know everything else we do on the web as consumers our site will be crappier it will be older it will be uglier but it won't have be won't be based on anything that we have to pay like an annual fee to some other enterprise company for unless you're running everything off ias then i'm sorry that's my everyday john um ask me what our intranet is at our company that among other things does intranets for other companies it's got to be sharepoint right what version john
John:
Oh, I have no idea.
John:
I don't try not to go to our SharePoints.
John:
I didn't even know there were versions.
John:
Like, is it the years for SharePoint, like 2013?
Casey:
Oh, keep going.
John:
I don't know how old it goes back.
Casey:
Well, it goes back to 2007, but we are mostly on 2010.
Casey:
This is in the year 2015.
Marco:
That's pretty good, I think.
Marco:
Is it usually, by Microsoft standards, was the version 2010 actually introduced in 2009?
Marco:
Like car model years, yeah.
Casey:
I think that's true.
Casey:
I don't remember off the top of my head.
Casey:
I totally understand what you're asking.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
I do believe 2013 was introduced in 2013, and...
Casey:
And as with all things, you know, so SharePoint 2007 was, I think that having my nails ripped out would have been a more pleasurable experience than coding for SharePoint 2007.
Casey:
SharePoint 2010, in three years, made it change.
Casey:
Just barely livable enough that I didn't immediately quit my job when they said, oh, you have a SharePoint 2010 project to do.
Casey:
And supposedly 2013 is decent.
Casey:
So I hear from the people that do SharePoint all the time.
Marco:
Well, it's like desktop Linux.
Marco:
It's always getting better.
Casey:
It's always getting better.
Marco:
Now, our first sponsor this week, I am actually serious.
Marco:
This is not a joke.
Marco:
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Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And that place is not SharePoint.
Marco:
igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
You are probably at your job, you, the public.
Marco:
I know, Casey and John, this is true for you.
Marco:
Your intranet is probably something terrible.
Marco:
It's probably built on SharePoint or something like that.
Marco:
The world of intranets out there is pretty rough, except for Igloo.
Marco:
Igloo really takes the best of the modern consumer web technologies and brings them into a corporate, safe intranet private environment.
Marco:
And so you can have things like Twitter-like microblogging and annotations on coordinated document editing and stuff like that.
Marco:
You can do all this stuff right inside of your intranet in your company privately for you.
Marco:
They have a huge upgrade recently that revolves around document tracking, how you interact with documents, how you gather feedback.
Marco:
You can track changes, comment on people's stuff.
Marco:
Now, somebody wrote in, last time I talked about read receipts for documents, and somebody said it's supposed to be read receipts?
Marco:
Which one am I supposed to be saying here?
Casey:
I think I would have said read, but I flip-flopped back and forth.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Okay, well, whether it's read receipts or read receipts, Igloo offers read read receipts on documents so that you can do things like you can make sure that certain recipients have read and acknowledged new policies or disclosures, any kind of handbook kind of thing.
Marco:
This is often useful for HR purposes, regulatory purposes, stuff like that.
Marco:
All these things that companies that are real companies, unlike what I do, have to actually deal with.
Marco:
And you can also just, you can do an amazing amount of functionality with Igloo.
Marco:
Things like, you know, as I said, viewing, annotating documents.
Marco:
All of that is built on HTML5.
Marco:
There is no Flash.
Marco:
It's not Java.
Marco:
There's no plugins.
Marco:
It is all HTML5.
Marco:
And so this allows you to work...
Marco:
With all that functionality of viewing, editing office documents, stuff like that, all the tracking, all the microblogging, all of that works on mobile devices, on every device.
Marco:
So they even make it work on BlackBerrys.
Marco:
It works on everything.
Marco:
And everything is fully responsive.
Marco:
So all the layouts work on any screen size.
Marco:
New screens come out, it already works.
Marco:
And they also, you know, you can customize your Igloo intranet to, you know, give it whatever design you want.
Marco:
If the marketing department wants their own color scheme, they can have it.
Marco:
It does all that for you.
Marco:
Sign up for a free trial today at igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And if you have a group that is 10 or fewer people
Marco:
It's actually free, like indefinitely, forever.
Marco:
Give it a try.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
No reason not to.
Marco:
If your company has a legacy intranet that looks like it was built in the 90s or in, quote, 2010, you should definitely give Igloo a try.
Marco:
igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo for sponsoring once again.
John:
And for all the people who think this was planned, like we led into this with the internet talk, you do not understand how the show works.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
We are not that deliberate.
John:
You vastly overestimate our organization.
Marco:
So speaking of organization, one more thing I wanted to talk about.
Marco:
Websites, I don't think, deserve all of the abilities of native apps.
Marco:
for one key reason.
Marco:
There is no app review for websites, and you frequently visit websites accidentally or without opting into certain behavior.
Marco:
The web kind of happens to you as you're browsing around.
Marco:
You click a link, you don't know where it's going.
Marco:
And so this link opens up, and whatever page you open is now executing code on your computer, hopefully not native code.
Marco:
But whatever websites can do,
Marco:
they can do to people who didn't opt in, who didn't even choose.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
I want to go to this website because they could just be following a link or it could even be a script running on somebody else's page or an iframe embedded on someone else's page.
Marco:
So there's all these considerations.
Marco:
You have to have way tighter security for web stuff and you have to have much stronger restrictions.
Marco:
And in an environment like we have an iOS where apps go through this review process, which...
Marco:
I know it's controversial, but I think even though it is imperfect, I think it is definitely a net win.
Marco:
Apps go through this review process, and that's great for consumers because so much crap we are protected from.
John:
Don't you think the iOS philosophy is the reverse of that?
John:
It's the idea that apps should have the same restrictions as websites, not that websites should be more restricted than apps.
John:
Because it used to be apps can do anything and their websites are held in their little box.
John:
And the iOS innovation is let's put a box around apps to their sandbox.
John:
They can't see the things.
John:
They can't get your location data unless they ask.
John:
They have to have entitlements and the review process is part of that or whatever.
John:
It seems almost like they're taking apps and putting them in a box and websites were always in a box.
John:
Now, the websites are trying to get out of their box and the apps.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Are they happy in their little box?
John:
It seems like they're trying to make their box bigger, too.
John:
But they might meet in the middle where.
John:
Uh, you can imagine them having a similar set of capabilities with a similar set of restrictions in it.
John:
Like an app can't get, I mean, right now, for example, a website can't get your location data without asking because that's the thing they built into Safari.
John:
If they ever did enable any of these, like, oh, you can spawn background jobs or, you know, local storage, it pops up a dialogue.
John:
This is not a perfect system.
John:
It's not as fancy as apps, but it took a long time for us to even get like the whole, uh,
John:
managing app notifications and app storage and which apps can use my location when I'm in the app, when I'm not in the app.
John:
It seems like the controls for both of these things, for both the web and the apps, are evolving.
John:
The apps are way ahead with the sophistication of the controls on stuff, and that's what you brought up in the last show.
John:
You can't just let a web app do this because the controls aren't in place to...
John:
There's no place you can go in settings to decide which website can do what and whatever, but already the websites are pretty well confined.
John:
And that was one of the complaints like, Oh, I don't want to pop up a dialogue.
John:
Well, apps don't want to pop up dialogues when they ask for a location too, but guess what?
John:
They have to like, so I think, I think we're figuring out, uh, you know, even though you opt into downloading apps, they're figuring out how to contain software.
John:
That's actually a topic we ever get to in the, uh, El Capitan rootless stuff, how to contain software in a safe way.
John:
And, uh,
John:
The web started out much more contained than native apps.
John:
And at this point, the sophistication of how to contain apps on iOS is well ahead of where it is for web apps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Also, one issue that we heard from a few people on, which is worth discussing, is browser choice on iOS.
Marco:
And so this is a bit of a multifaceted issue.
Marco:
There's two main problems that people have.
Marco:
On the desktop, you can write a browser using any rendering engine you want, and you can ship it to people, and that's it.
Marco:
On iOS, that is actually forbidden.
Marco:
On iOS, you are not allowed to render web content with anything other than the built-in web kit.
Marco:
And so like Chrome, for instance, I mean, let's be honest, when everybody says we want browser trash on iOS, what they're really saying is we want Chrome to be better on iOS.
Marco:
And there are a lot of things like if Safari drags its feet on implementing some new standard, chances are Chrome and iOS also won't have it because it's that part of the rendering engine that it's sharing from the system.
Marco:
So that's one problem.
Marco:
The other problem is that on the desktop, you can set your default browser.
Marco:
or your default mail client, or your default calendar app.
Marco:
iOS does not have the concept of default apps for these types of things.
Marco:
So in iOS, the default app is always the built-in system app for those kind of roles.
Marco:
And so you can't say, if I click a link in an email message, open it up in Chrome automatically.
Marco:
You can't do that.
Marco:
It'll always open up in the system default browser of Safari first.
Marco:
And anything that just calls open URL on a random web URL, same thing.
Marco:
It'll just open it up in Safari, even if you use Chrome.
John:
That's one of the things that we didn't get in iOS 8 that we're still waiting for, by the way.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so I'm curious, like, you know, on the desktop, we have that system, and it pretty much works fine.
Marco:
I'm curious, though, what would be the reasons on iOS to never bring that over?
Marco:
Like, at this point, it seems like that might be a conscious decision that they're just not doing.
Marco:
uh and i can think of a few reasons from ample point of view why not uh one of the biggest to me i mean you know you can you can argue things like security and everything those those are weaker arguments once we have proper technological sandboxing in place as we just discussed but what about for the web uh rendering like javascript i think it's security is still a valid reason for javascript because of the incredible contortions they go through to get plain old javascript to run quickly with the whole just-in-time compilers and like they basically are turning it into native code
John:
And if you can exploit that that engine, you know, that's because, like you said, people can be redirected to websites.
John:
And once if someone finds an exploit where they can somehow send a payload in a Web page that confuses the the JavaScript engine in some third party browser and causes, you know.
John:
uh, code execution, or they basically just have to say third, like they do now, uh, third party web browser.
John:
And you can make your own web browser fine, but you can't, you can't do what we do with our JavaScript engine.
John:
So basically you're dooming every job convention to be slow, except for ours.
John:
We get to do the fancy, you know, insecure, potentially insecure thing, but there's just one of that.
John:
And we fixed the bugs and no one else can make one.
John:
In fact, you can't even, they don't even let you do interpreters, right?
John:
Except for like Lua or whatever for games, you know?
John:
So I think security is still potentially an issue for, uh,
John:
stupid slow javascript that they try to make fast so your choice is all right like i said i don't think you're even allowed to have an interpreter i don't remember the exact rules but i think security is still a reasonable answer for the web browser but i would set aside the web browser and pick my pet peeve it's like why can't i pick a different default email application i don't want to use apple mail i don't want to enter any accounts there and get every single application when it wants to send mail sends me to that account
John:
Email does not seem like something that needs a just-in-time compiler or some native.
John:
It's just an app.
John:
Just define a protocol, let people have a third-party mail application.
Marco:
Well, for the email side, you lose the security reasons.
Marco:
And I think your security reason there is very good.
Marco:
And by the way, there's this huge misconception that Chrome is not allowed to be as fast as Safari.
Marco:
That used to be the case.
Marco:
That stopped being the case a year ago, at least.
Marco:
Whenever WKWebView was, I think a year ago.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Yeah, but it has to use Apple's.
Marco:
At that point, it's just using Apple's engine straight up.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, it always was.
Marco:
Just before, there was only UI WebView, which wouldn't do the JavaScript thing because it was in process.
Marco:
WK WebView is way more restricted from what the app can access.
Marco:
Like, if you have a font loaded in your app, UI WebView will show it.
Marco:
WK WebView won't because it doesn't have access because it's running out of process.
Marco:
That's why it's allowing you to have that native JavaScript compilation because all the stuff that's happening in that WebView is not happening in your app's process.
John:
And because parsing fonts that have illegal values in them is apparently a terrible security hole.
John:
I'm going to find a good... Did you see that article today?
Marco:
I just saw the headline.
John:
Oh, that's so bad.
Marco:
But for mail clients, they don't have that kind of thing.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
There is a cost with mail clients of integration.
Marco:
So one of the iOS APIs is to show a mail composed sheet in an app.
Marco:
So to put up a sheet, when somebody says share, share to mail, whatever, put up a sheet that you can pre-populate the subject.
Marco:
You can add attachments.
Marco:
You can do all this stuff that, you know, you can do some of that with a mail to like the subject, but you can't do much with the attachments and body and stuff like that very easily with mail to URLs.
Marco:
So like some of that, they actually wouldn't be able to do if there was a choice.
Marco:
So you can see areas like that where there is, like, some reason where you can say, well, for integration reasons, it would kind of suck if the system API would only work if their default mail client was mail app.
John:
Well, they would have to define, like, you know, to be conformant...
John:
you know, suitable, like they're not good at this.
John:
It's just like the same pipe dream is saying, I would like to replace the finder.
John:
I just tell me what sort of Apple events I have to respond to, to be a conformant finder replacement, you know, and like with an email app, maybe it's much more limited, like, but just you could, you could dictate, you could pretty well dictate, uh,
John:
please you know respond to these messages support this api support these url like whatever that apple wants to do to be a full-fledged mail app replacement you know mail apps applications would conform to it because it shouldn't be too onerous uh but yeah you gotta like leave something for ios 15 or whatever they did they did a lot of stuff in ios 8 that we thought they wouldn't do
John:
And I think, like, they were so dazzled that no one really cared that they didn't do the, like, you pick your default app.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And they might do that in the future.
Marco:
I mean, you said, like, you know, they certainly could.
Marco:
But the more I look at this, like, there's also, there's issues of, first of all, there's competitive issues.
Marco:
You know, obviously, when people say, I want to choose my own email app, they're not looking to choose Eudora.
Marco:
They're looking to choose Gmail.
Marco:
Like, and when they say, my own browser, they're looking at Chrome.
Marco:
Like, this is all Google stuff they want to switch to.
Marco:
Then that is not, I'm sure that is not lost on Apple.
John:
it could be outlook like microsoft bought outlook oh that's true yeah whatever the app used to be and like or i just reading interview they were saying you know outlook for ios is the best gmail client and it may very well be because google's gmail client for ios is not that great but like because again because email is more or less an open protocol and because so far gmail supports imap and pop uh there is some pot and so does apple for that matter that's why you can have a different email client because email is an open protocol and you don't need to it's not like exchange where well even exchange apple has exchange support
Marco:
sort of um it was like we're almost there with the mail apps i don't have to use apple's applications just that every time i tap a link i go to apple's well and and now you know the great thing is like you know before when apps were all writing their own share sheets and we got this mail compose view controller and i don't know ios 5 maybe
Marco:
So, you know, the app had to write, okay, here's a shared email option, use the built-in system thing that has all these features, all this functionality.
Marco:
Now, everyone's just switching to the default share sheet, which includes mail and can also include any other mail app that you have installed if they have an extension.
Marco:
So now the need for choosing your own mail app is going down as more apps implement these share sheets, the system share sheet.
Marco:
Because now, you know, you can just plug into that from any app.
John:
Yeah, you still have like mail to links.
John:
I don't know, do mail to links even work on web pages?
John:
But anyway, like, yeah, the share sheet does help.
John:
It definitely does.
John:
But there's still many things in the system, including parts of Apple's thing that will chuck you into the mail app because it's like, oh, you want to send an email and, you know.
John:
it just it's share sheet is is a more democratic uh process that's true if only it would remember where the hell i dragged the icons in it did they fix that in nine or you're not running the beta you're too responsible it's that here's the thing about that that the whole like it doesn't take much to make people give up trying to arrange crap
John:
like you know the whole spatial thing like if springboard didn't remember where you put your icons no one would arrange their home screens but it does so you do share sheet was supposed to remember where you put things and everyone dragged them around when they first got the ability to do it and then realized it doesn't keep track of what you do and then everyone just gave up and i haven't tried it again either like i've just given up right and so maybe when nine comes out i'll give it one more try but it's very easy to be discouraged like i spent time thinking about what should be the first second and third one in the share sheet and
John:
And then I realized the next time it comes up, it's scrambled again.
John:
I'm never going to try again.
John:
It's like, well, that was a waste of my time.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell us about trim.
John:
Finally.
John:
Our first real follow-up topic.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Why does follow-up take so long?
John:
Let Marco put things in follow-up.
John:
That's what happens.
John:
Eric wrote in to tell us about, we're talking about trim on SSDs.
John:
So there's another way that SSDs can deal with,
John:
with uh not knowing which space has been freed up uh and you know knowing which things can be erased and that's over prison over provisioning over provisioning is something i think all ssds do to some degree when you buy an ssd that's like 500 gigs you don't get a bunch of chips in there that are 500 gigs you get more than that
John:
And that's for a variety of reasons.
John:
One, the cells wear out if you use them a lot, so you have to have some extras left over because when you wear out a section of them, it's like, all right, well, those are worn out, but I have these new ones here that are fresh.
John:
And part of what the farmer is supposed to be doing is wear leveling to try to wear them out evenly or whatever.
John:
But the other thing you can do with overprovisioning, especially if it's massively overprovisioned, like 20% or 30% overprovisioned, like the...
John:
quote unquote enterprise class ssds are is that you can use that empty space and then when the drive is idle it can just sort of shift things around and compact them and as it shifts things around compact so it makes larger regions where the where it knows that there's nothing because it has moved everything from that space into another space like even when the drive is quote unquote full there's still this empty block where you can move things around and that empty block
John:
You can erase because, you know, you just moved everything out of it.
John:
And then that's the whole point of trim.
John:
Like we didn't get into this.
John:
We got into this in the first time we talked about trim, but I realized we talked about trim like two times and haven't gone over this.
John:
Like it is slower to write to an area of an SSD that has that has to be erased first that you don't know.
John:
It's not already cleared.
John:
right so it's much faster to say oh this is already cleared i can write to it directly instead of having to copy everything out clear it write everything back plus the little part that you added or whatever so if you have this big empty region and if during idle time your ssd can shift crap around to make sure that big empty region is always there and it can clear that empty region so it knows if some new data comes in it can write it directly to that empty region without reading it in and writing it back out or anything
John:
Uh, that is a win.
John:
So that is a potential other way to get, uh, to deal with not having trim is just, just have way more, uh, uh, flash memory than you need.
John:
And then hope you have enough idle time for the firmware to shift stuff around to, to keep a large section of ready to go area where you can write too quickly.
Casey:
And tell us about your egregious error about Half-Life.
John:
Yeah, if I had thought about it for a few more seconds, I would have remembered it.
John:
They ported it to the Source engine a while back.
John:
In my mind, it's like, well, that's not the real Half-Life.
John:
That's just when they ported it to the Source engine.
John:
The real one was, you don't want the original game.
John:
It looks worse.
John:
Anyway, Half-Life is available for the Mac on the Source engine.
John:
You can buy it on Steam.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
Go ahead and play it now, 15 years after we wanted to play it.
Casey:
I played Counter-Strike, the original Counter-Strike, briefly.
Casey:
And I remember thinking it was really hard.
Casey:
And I know the whole of the internet is now judging me and my inability to play games.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
But I played an inordinate amount of Counter-Strike when I was in college.
Casey:
I played a crap load of Counter-Strike.
Casey:
I loved that game.
John:
It's a good game.
John:
You can play Team Fortress 2.
John:
Now it's the... Well, is it the spiritual successor?
John:
It's a successor, kind of, sort of.
Marco:
Even that, I would do the weird way to play Counter-Strike.
Marco:
I would just buy the one really weird gun, like the scout sniper rifle that was terrible, and just try to get a kill with it because that was harder and more interesting to me than just mowing everybody down.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm a terrible gamer.
Casey:
Not as bad as I am, but that's okay.
Marco:
mark will be rocking the no land beyond in destiny i don't you keep tweeting these destiny things and it sounds like it's all made up doesn't it's like those bands from canada that mark that uh merlin talks about yeah like it it looks like like a markov generator makes these tweets like i have no idea what you're talking about yep all these words it's like i think that's a sentence and i think it's english it's great for it's great for twitter because like bungie
John:
makes up all these basically proper nouns, makes a ton of proper nouns that are very compact, that everyone knows what you're talking about and that abbreviations of them are also clear.
John:
But to other people, those proper nouns mean nothing because they're just made up words.
John:
So it is a high percentage of made up words per sentence.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
When you tweet about these things, I wonder if like my brain is blue screen of death or something because I cannot compute what you've talked about.
Casey:
And then I'm like, what thing has happened on the Internet that I'm not privy to?
Casey:
And then I get all concerned that there's something important that I'm missing.
Casey:
And oh, no, it's not important.
Casey:
It's just destiny.
John:
Yeah, there is a potential that Tiff could get into Destiny.
John:
I know it didn't take when I showed it to her when she was over here, but at some point she could wander over into it on her own, like with no one, you know, putting it in her face and just try it.
John:
Like, it has the capacity to suck you in.
John:
I don't know if she is susceptible to it, but it could happen.
Marco:
Well, we don't even have a PS4.
John:
Well, that can happen in two seconds.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
PS4 could be on its way to your house right now.
John:
You could do Amazon same-day delivery.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
So anyway, our second sponsor this week is MailRoute.
Marco:
So MailRoute, what they are is they are basically a mail proxy service.
Marco:
So you point your MX record of your domain, you point that at MailRoute servers.
Marco:
They filter out spam and viruses, and then they deliver to your real mail server the filtered out mail.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I have, oh man, I have used email services for so long.
Marco:
I've tried my own spam filtering solutions.
Marco:
I've tried using FastMail's built-in ones.
Marco:
I use FastMail as my host.
Marco:
I once set up my own server with SpamAssassin and stuff like that.
Marco:
Not only were none of those as easy as MailRoute, none of them were as effective as MailRoute.
Marco:
So to give you some idea of how effective this is,
Marco:
Last week, I got a spam message.
Marco:
And I noticed.
Marco:
Because it was so unusual to get any spam.
Marco:
It's not like you still get three or four a day.
Marco:
I get zero a day.
Marco:
It was surprising and noticeable that I got one spam message that got through.
Marco:
That's how good MailRoute is.
Marco:
And by the way, I haven't seen one since.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I really am incredibly impressed at how good MailRoute is.
Marco:
I've always heard from Gmail people.
Marco:
I'm looking at you two.
Marco:
I've always heard from Gmail people that they have the best spam filtering.
Casey:
Oh, no, you never heard that from me.
Casey:
It's good, but it ain't the best.
Marco:
Honestly, I can say this is the best.
Marco:
I mean, granted, I haven't seen Gmail, but how do you beat zero?
Marco:
That's really hard to beat.
Marco:
Well, excuse me, now it's one.
Marco:
One spam message in months.
Marco:
So really, I can't say enough good things about MailRoute.
Marco:
If you are like me and don't want to give Google all of your mail and information and kind of buy into that whole ecosystem, if you prefer to be non-Google for that like I do, like I use FastMail, if you can use any IMAP post you want,
Marco:
The great thing is with MailRoute, you can bring world-class spam filtering service to any email host.
Marco:
Any domain you control, any domain you own that you get email on, you can put MailRoute in front of it and really eliminate spam.
Marco:
It's incredible how well it works.
Marco:
It's very customizable, too.
Marco:
If you want to be less aggressive with your filtering... And so they have a thing where they will email you this digest every couple of days or whatever you set it to.
Marco:
of messages they think are probably spam that they have withheld from you, but that they're not quite sure about.
Marco:
And there's just little links you can click to say, all right, this is fine.
Marco:
This is fine.
Marco:
If they catch anything in there, almost nothing legitimate ever gets caught in there for me.
Marco:
And it's great to have it all summarized in one email that just gets sent out once every couple of days.
Marco:
So that way I know I'm really not missing anything that's even close to legitimate if it is important, but I don't have to go through those constantly every day.
Marco:
And if it does catch something, you just click the little whitelist link and it's never a problem again.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
I am very impressed with MailRoute.
Marco:
It is easy to set up, reliable and trusted by the largest universities and corporations, as well as a bunch of individuals like me.
Marco:
They support LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, mailbagging, outbound relay, everything you'd want from anybody handling your email.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so now that John has moved away from his beloved iPod Touch because he thought that Apple had abandoned him in the same way they have abandoned him with his god-awful file system, ding, it turns out that things have changed.
Casey:
John, what happened today?
John:
they did abandon me they abandoned me for years they released new ipods but you know too little too late apple well i wouldn't say too i mean for you oh for me we're just talking about me but anyway yeah they released new ones and uh what is this uh steve trout and smith uh said i don't know i haven't confirmed this that the new ipods are ipod 7 comma 1 like the model number and the last one was ipod 5 comma 1
Marco:
what happened to ipod 6 comma 1 where did that one go that was the secret one they withheld to make me buy an iphone that was entirely it was actually a big plan at apple just to get you because you were like this thorn on their side this guy would not buy an iphone yep yeah
Marco:
They really cared about that.
John:
I'm thinking about why they can that.
John:
Like, I think I have a reason that they skipped, you know, if this is true, that, you know, or basically, why did they not release an iPod touch for such a long time?
John:
Why was this big, long gap?
John:
Why was it the fifth generation iPod touch and it just lingered on and on?
John:
Well, the lingering is like we know that Apple would just keep selling a thing, even if not a lot of people buy it, because it's like, well, we're good at making it.
John:
We know how to make it.
John:
It doesn't change.
John:
The cost of parts presumably goes down up to a certain point.
John:
Why not keep selling them?
John:
But every time we saw sales numbers that were in any way possible to slice and dice so that you could isolate the iPod Touch numbers, they were low.
John:
They were super duper low.
John:
You know, we know the iPod numbers were going down and the iPod Touch was part of that.
John:
And it's like, you know, we're not selling a lot of iPod Touchers.
John:
So I can understand them saying, is this a thing we're going to do?
John:
Should we bother making a new iPod Touch?
John:
Like maybe they were making one and said, should we even bother updating this or should we just keep selling the current one?
John:
Do we think this new one will bump our numbers enough to be worth the cost of, you know, changing our manufacturing and making a more expensive product?
John:
Or we just want this product where the margins just keep going up and up, again, up to a point.
John:
But, you know, they make most of the insides, but they can probably get all the parts for that cheaply.
John:
So the 5th Gen iPod Touch, by the time they were done selling it, like, they had dropped the price a little, I think.
John:
But, boy, that must have had...
John:
some great margins in low volume and i guess they did the math and said there's no point in releasing and releasing an ipod 6 comma one because it's not going to increase our sales enough to offset the uh the you know the the difference in cost of parts and everything um but i guess they came around and said they finally decided look we're either we're not going to have the ipod touch anymore and everyone's got to get phones or it's important for us to have a product in this in this range even if it doesn't sell a lot of it because it's kind of like an entry you know
John:
an entryway product for young people or you know give it to your kids but you don't want to buy them a phone or something like that and i think that was the wise choice and so here we have it ipod 7 comma 1 with an a8 processor uh in the same form factor as it was before no more little lanyard strap new colors uh this is sort of the apple coming out kind of like with the mac pro and saying no we still are going to make a mac pro and no we still are going to make the ipod touch
John:
And this seems like a pretty good iPod Touch, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, what's interesting is they shipped it with the A8.
Marco:
And I think this might be a little hint as to why they shipped it anyway.
Marco:
But going back a sec, they shipped it with the A8.
Marco:
And historically, with the exception of the very first iPod Touch, all the other ones have kind of been a generation behind in their CPU core experience.
Marco:
And in this, they shipped the same core, just clopped a little bit lower, but the same CPU as the current iPhone.
Marco:
Now, granted, the current iPhone is not going to be the current iPhone in a few months, but this is still significant that everyone expected if they were going to do an iPod update anytime soon, it would go to maybe the A7 chip.
Marco:
And it went to the A8 instead.
Marco:
And so that is significant, even though it is clocked a little bit lower than the iPhones.
Marco:
Matthew Panzarino ran some tests.
Marco:
He said it's 1.1 gigahertz.
Marco:
The iPhone 6 is 1.4.
Marco:
So close.
Marco:
Granted, it's not going to be as fast, but still, for $200, that's really cool.
John:
I think it makes sense because my prediction is there will be another fairly long gap before this is updated again.
John:
So it's like, this is a product line we're going to have.
John:
We think it's important to have this product line.
John:
Let's give it the most longevity possible by sticking essentially last generation chip.
John:
I know it's the current one now, but like you said, Marco, the new phones are coming with the A9 and everything.
John:
So this is kind of like, okay, we've ramped up on the A8 enough that we're not supply constrained for our products that we really care about.
John:
There's enough A8s left over for the amount of iPod touches we're going to sell.
John:
And pretty soon our flagships are going to be A9 anyway.
John:
So let's give us an A8.
John:
That will give it the most possible longevity so we don't have to revise it next year.
John:
Because if they put an A7 in it, it would be aging much more rapidly.
John:
The A8 is a big bump up and maybe gives it an extra year, an extra year or two that they can let it sit there.
John:
Because I don't think it's as important for the iPod touch to be updated every single year given its sales volume and its kind of place in the lineup.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so I think if you think back to why does this product still exist but wasn't updated for three years?
Marco:
And I think there's a couple of potential reasons for this.
Marco:
Number one, what you said, it really does not sell very well.
Marco:
I mean, it's a decent business.
Marco:
It's like the same thing where people say, well, if you look at the iPad by itself, it's bigger than McDonald's or whatever.
Marco:
It's a good business in isolation, but compared to Apple's overall business, it's a very tiny part of it.
Marco:
And even compared to iOS usage numbers, I know with my app, the usage numbers of iPod Touches are just vanishingly small compared to all the iPhones.
Marco:
Almost no one uses an iPod Touch for my app.
Marco:
And I think most developers I've talked to, I think you could say very similar things.
Marco:
Now, of course, it does tend to skew younger because a lot of kids get them.
Marco:
So maybe if you have like a game that appeals to kids, maybe your numbers would be different.
Marco:
But for the most part, it does not sell in large volumes relative to iPhones and iPads.
Marco:
And I think another part of maybe why they were kind of letting it languish for a while and maybe why the 6 was canceled, the iPod 6.1, maybe that may be the reason that was canceled, assuming it existed.
Marco:
I think maybe they were trying to see if they could move this demand or this role in the lineup to the iPad Mini.
Marco:
Because if you think about what the iPod Touch is for, an iOS device for people who don't have or can't have or just for whatever reason are not going to get an iPhone.
Marco:
And when it was long, there was no iPad.
Marco:
Now, or once the iPad came out, it was very clear that
Marco:
A lot of the people who would buy an iPod Touch, especially people buying them for kids, a lot of that usage was moving towards iPads, especially for things like games.
Marco:
And I think what we've seen over the last few years is the iPad kind of petering out, or at least leveling off to some degree there.
Marco:
And the iPod Touch is still very hot for that use of kids' games and developers' test devices and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's very useful for that.
Marco:
And I think maybe they were trying to see if the iPad could take that over and it just didn't pan out that way.
Casey:
You know, I was thinking as you were talking, especially when you said that none of your users are on iPod Touches, I thought to myself, well, that seems crazy because of kids, like you were saying.
Casey:
And I was just thinking about it.
Casey:
And I haven't been like chronicling this in my head because I hadn't really been thinking about it until today.
Casey:
But as I reflect on, you know, going out to eat at a regular restaurant, you know, like a Panera Bread, let's say, or...
Casey:
Just going about my day outside of work, you know, on the weekends or whatever, I'm thinking back to, well, what are kids using when their parents just want them to shut up and let mom and dad eat?
Casey:
And to my recollection, they're either using their parents' phones or they're using iPads that seem to be dedicated for kid use.
Casey:
And so I think you're onto something.
Casey:
And that maybe answers the question, why did Apple not really care for, what was it, two years, three years?
Casey:
How long was it?
Casey:
Three years.
Casey:
Why did Apple not care for three years?
Casey:
Which, by the way, is insane.
Casey:
But anyway, you know, maybe that's because, to your point, Marco, nobody's really buying these.
Casey:
If they want something that's a portable kid device, just like you said, they're getting an iPad mini.
Casey:
And certainly my reflection on what I see day to day is that they're buying iPad minis.
Marco:
That's one reason why they might have done this now as opposed to any other time.
Marco:
Another, I think, big reason, they also recently quietly killed the original iPad Mini that used the A5 CPU.
Marco:
So the iPod Touch was the last A5 iOS device, and not counting Apple TVs, that's kind of a different story, but this was the last A5-based iOS device that was for sale.
Marco:
And now they have no more A5s left.
Marco:
They are also now all 64-bit once the 5C falls off the lineup, right?
Marco:
Is the 5C still even sold?
Marco:
Is it the free one right now?
Casey:
I thought so.
John:
Well, that's the other thing I was saying about this.
John:
They probably had to make this hardware anyway if they're going to make a 6C in the same form factor as a 5C.
John:
This is basically a 6C with no phone.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so they're going to have some economies of scale here, even though this is a way smaller scale than the 6C will likely sell.
Marco:
But assuming they have a 6C, it'll have basically this... I bet it'll have these same guts, just with the phone hardware added to it.
Marco:
And if they've managed to squeeze that into a $200 product here, getting a little bit more hardware for the phone features and maybe a slightly better camera into the 6C,
Marco:
which might even have this size screen we don't even know that uh that would be a nice high margin product to keep their margins up while still being able to be the cheap phone in the lineup and they would have you know they'd have fewer parts that are being manufactured together
Marco:
So it would be a net win operationally and profit-wise almost certainly as well.
Marco:
But also software-wise, they want to go all 64-bit.
Marco:
I am guessing that iOS 10 does not support 32-bit operating systems or 35-bit CPUs.
John:
Isn't it already a requirement for like you have to upload a 64-bit app for something?
John:
What is the carrot they were dangling for there or the stick?
Marco:
You have to have a 64-bit binary for any submission after like this past January or something.
Marco:
It was a while ago now.
Marco:
But you can still have a 32-bit thing as well.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But also this year, you can now, if you want to, you can now ship only 64-bit for the first time.
Marco:
I think with iOS 9, I believe it's the first time you can do that where now you can say, you know what?
Marco:
Now my app only runs on 64-bit devices before you could not do that.
Marco:
And so now they're going to have...
Marco:
they're going to have the whole lineup as far as I know, except maybe, definitely not the 5C, but once the 5C is gone, they'll have the whole lineup now running 64-bit chips that also can run Metal.
Marco:
So this is all, like, you know, what they did to the Mac, moving a bunch of stuff to Metal for El Capitan,
Marco:
They can now do that to iOS next year with iOS 10 and move a whole bunch of stuff to requiring metal.
Marco:
And if they then just don't have any devices that can't run metal, they can do that.
Marco:
So that can be power savings next year.
Marco:
That can be performance increases.
Marco:
So there's a whole bunch of reasons to do this.
Marco:
And all of this is predicated on the entire currently active for sale lineup having 64-bit chips that can run metal.
Casey:
Did they say at this year's WWDC that in either OS X or iOS that core animation is now running on metal?
John:
Yeah, I think they're already doing the thing where if Metal is available, they have a dual code path for a lot of the stuff, even in iOS 9, where if Metal is available, they will use it, and if not, they'll fall back to the other way.
John:
I don't know if it's pervasive, and like Marco said, there's a big win to be had of not even supporting the other code path.
John:
If you could just say, okay, well, iOS 10 is Metal everywhere, it doesn't support OpenGL, it doesn't run on devices that couldn't run Metal.
Marco:
It'll be interesting, though, also to see if they go this way and if iOS 10 is 64-bit only, is there still the ability to run applications that haven't been updated since this requirement that are only 32-bit?
Marco:
Because right now, the way the phone works now is if you run an app that does not have a 64-bit version of its binary, which basically means it hasn't been updated since this past January or earlier, and the developer was really irresponsible for the year before that...
Marco:
If you have an app that's only 32-bit binary, the system has to load a whole bunch of 32-bit frameworks into memory just for that app.
Marco:
Having one 32-bit app running has an abnormally large cost associated with it for resource usage on your phone.
Marco:
Whereas if all your apps are 64-bit and there are no 32-bit apps loaded, you then save that giant chunk of memory and whatever performance and battery cost comes with that.
Marco:
yeah you know apple could do to help that is maybe put more ram in its devices over time over like a multi-year period that that number could change anyway over an infinite time scale so i'm saying like a couple years yeah right anyway so uh so now like you know if they go 64 bit only with ios 10
Marco:
Would this be the first time that they would actually cut off compatibility with running old apps?
Marco:
Because with iOS, they've never done that.
Marco:
You can have an app that hasn't been updated since 2008.
Marco:
You can still run that on an iPhone 6 Plus today.
Marco:
It won't look very good, but it will run.
Marco:
And part of the App Store's appeal, on paper at least, is that it has this giant library of apps.
Marco:
And I'm sure lots of people, myself included, I still very occasionally need to use some kind of obscure ancient app that is giant on the current phones and has the iOS 6 keyboard and everything that hasn't been updated in forever.
Marco:
If you lose the ability to run all those, it'll kind of hurt.
Marco:
Do you think they do that?
John:
They're going to, like, maybe not next year, but, like, if only to not have to support, like, the old ARM 7 instruction set and to be able to be, like, you know, all 7S and 7Q or whatever the hell they come up with next.
John:
Like, to be able to, you know, like, they're still supporting thumb, right?
John:
The little ARM 4, like, the little tiny one.
John:
Like, wasn't there, like, two, on the original iPhone, wasn't there two instruction sets that you could use?
John:
Like, they would just love to ditch that silicon.
John:
Like, you know, it was just a,
John:
they'll do it eventually ios 10 might be like a nice round number turning point i feel like it'll be two more years before they pull the trigger on that but who knows apple you know one or two years i think is a reasonable time frame for them deciding to can all those ancient apps that haven't updated because really like they've had time it's like it's kind of like the whole 30 pin connector thing like where anyone anyone complaining about that it's like you know they kept that connector for almost a decade i think yeah that is a reasonable amount of time like
John:
I know it might seem like, well, it may have been a decade, but I just got an iPad last year and I bought all these cables.
John:
Yeah, you're right.
John:
Sometimes someone buys it just the year before the transition.
John:
That's a bummer for you.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, if your same binary has been running since day one of the App Store on iOS 2.0...
John:
i think it's okay now for us to say okay well you didn't update it in how many years it's been uh six years since the app store seven yeah yeah i mean that that's fine that is that is it that is a reasonable window so i could say this year or next year i would not be surprised to see them doing that and they'll do it basically in line with like when when do we have the system on the chip design that reaps the benefits from dropping all these instruction sets that's the time it'll happen
Casey:
Well, any other thoughts on the Touch?
John:
Yeah, unlike the poor stockers who get phones, if you get an iPod Touch, you can pick from $16, $32, $64, and $128.
John:
Still the same crazy price range between them, but whatever.
Marco:
Well, no, $32 is only $50 more.
Marco:
So they actually inserted $32 where it would go in the phone pricing if it was there.
Marco:
So you have $16 as the base, $64 for $100 more.
Marco:
In the middle, you have $32 for $50 more.
John:
I know, but it's like if you do the actual curves of like how much does this much flash memory actually cost?
John:
Like it just it doesn't make anyway.
John:
It's nice.
John:
There's a 32 in there.
John:
It would be nicer if they drop the 16.
John:
But if any product can justify the 16, it's this.
John:
It's the cheapest, you know, like the one ninety nine.
John:
You're going to give it to your kid like whatever.
John:
Like this is the only product they should still be selling with 16 gigs of memory in it.
Marco:
um but it's nice that they have a 32 in there just just in time for 32 to become like actually a little bit too small as well right well and keep in mind there there's been a lot of changes recently that are really um making it easier to have smaller capacity devices so iphone i thought photo library is a huge one because then your photos don't have to live on your phone anymore on your on your ipod
John:
and uh and you know with all the ios 9 stuff with app thinning and you know all this stuff like that that's all designed for minimizing disk space usage of your apps yeah although there's going to be a huge lag time on that because how long is it going to take for people to pick that up they have the download on demand for downloading you know game levels on demand and the app slicing and app thinning like all that stuff should just massively reduce things if developers actually use them and like i don't know what the lag time is going to be on using them
John:
i hope game developers are incentivized to do it because a lot of time no one's going to buy like you know infinity blade version 17 if it's like three gigs and you know everyone with a 16 gig every kid with a 16 gig device is just not going to have room for a three gig game but if you can download it in 200 megs and just download levels on demand i mean i i worry about like you know when i watched that session wwc they kept showing like oh you can look how small your app is and then we'll download this thing on demand it's
John:
you know it didn't seem like there was a progress api it didn't seem like there was a callback where you could show a progress bar it didn't seem like there was anything it just seemed like what your game would have to say is put up a static screen that says loading level please wait and if it's a 500 meg level and they're you know they're on cellular forget it right but if they're on wi-fi and the wi-fi is slow or the server like i worry about the viability but anyway
John:
and also lots of kids go long spans during the day where they are not connected to any network with an ipod touch right yeah they'll be disappointed when they advance to the next level and realize they can't play the next level right until they get home that night yeah that that api looks like one of those that whole api for on-demand downloading looks like one of those apis that will be better next year after everyone tries it and realizes there's insufficient amount of uh you know sort of uh resolution so to speak of like
John:
How can I get hooks into this API to provide a good user experience to let people know what's going on and, you know, and to do reasonable things and not make it look like my game is broken when in reality it's just either in the process of downloading a giant level or failed to download a giant level, you know.
Marco:
Well, or if you look at it from the perspective of the game publishers, there's very little reason for them to adopt it.
Marco:
It solves a problem that Apple has, but it doesn't really solve a problem developers have unless you really are trying to ship a 5-gig game.
John:
Well, these games are big.
John:
Like I said, Infinity Blades are already like 1 or 2 gigs, and it's just not going to fit on a 16-gig device because the kids will film them.
John:
And so they can't buy your game, or they'll buy it and regret it and be angry that they can't use it.
John:
People want...
John:
they want you to tap their link and get their game on your device and play your game, especially if it's a free to play, like they get no money.
John:
Then it was just, yeah, I got to launch it.
John:
Right.
John:
So I think game developers are, are incentivized to do some stuff, but even just plain old app developers, I really hope that people do the app thinning and slicing stuff because it seems like from Apple's perspective, like, look how easy we made it for you.
John:
Just tag things and do this.
John:
And we'll, we'll automatically put the version and we'll have the different binary.
John:
Like,
John:
that should be a win it just all it takes is for people to rebuild their apps for ios 9 and upload new versions of them and i hope that will happen for all the apps that i care about because they're all like sort of actively maintained by people that are just going to do this anyway as a matter of course i'm just so happy that i don't have to do any of those apis because overcast is like four megs you should do them anyway you could be like two megs do them we'll do them for for what assets yeah yeah yeah
Marco:
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Casey:
Oh, I didn't notice that.
John:
Honestly, I think the colors look pretty good.
John:
I do like them.
John:
I like these colors.
John:
This lineup of colors is more appealing to me than the past lineup of colors.
John:
I don't like anything with the white front.
John:
I like how it looks as a product, but I don't like looking at it.
John:
So it's kind of disappointing me that now there's only one with a black front.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
Marco:
And I wish there were more color options, but the ones they have, I think, look good.
Marco:
Black and gold, at least.
Marco:
Come on, guys.
John:
Well, they're not going to do black and space gray.
John:
Space gray is the new black, John.
John:
No, I mean like a gold back and then black on the front.
John:
oh that's all i'm talking about is the front all the fronts are white except for the model that is space gray on the back on the back is that how the iphone is is does the gold iphone have a black front maybe it is like i saw obviously they don't have 17 colors for the iphone so you maybe you don't notice and maybe this has been this way with the ipod touch in the past as well which is why i keep buying the space gray ones but it's still i worry with the black one being the sole one there that
John:
It's only a matter of time before they, not that I'm buying these things to myself anyway, but anyway, both of my kids have, they have ones that are different colors on the back, but both of them are black on the front because both, well, one was originally bought for me and then one was bought for my kids directly.
John:
And when I bought it, I remember thinking, I can't believe I'm buying this iPod touch.
John:
That's like two and a half years old.
Marco:
Real-time follow-up, the gold iPhone has the white front.
Marco:
However, the gold MacBook One has the black bezel.
Marco:
Well, you know, that's... I know.
John:
I wonder if they did that, like if they made a MacBook with white around the screen.
No, I don't...
John:
I don't like white around the screen.
John:
I do like how it looks.
John:
That blue one with the white looks great.
John:
The red one with the white looks great.
John:
It looks great in product shots.
John:
I just don't want to look at it as a screen.
John:
But other people like it, so there you go.
John:
But anyway, cool colors.
John:
No lanyard, which I think they discovered that nobody wants to put a strap around their wrists ever.
John:
I wonder what percentage of kids use the little wrist strap on the Wii when they're using those Wii remotes.
John:
Parents probably make them destroy their TVs by chucking their remote at it or whatever, but...
John:
I can honestly say that I never saw anyone in real life with the wrist strap connected to their iPod Touch.
John:
And though I had an iPod Touch with the wrist strap, I never put it on my wrist.
John:
I think it's still in the box.
John:
Did you ever fling it at your TV?
John:
No, I did not.
John:
Okay.
John:
Yeah, that's a cost savings.
John:
It's a space savings.
John:
You don't have that little moving part, which is kind of fun to play with the little clicky, you know, lanyard thing in and out and in and out.
John:
But yeah, that's an interesting experiment that apparently didn't pan out because if it had panned out, you'd be seeing those little things on all their products instead of just being on one for this weird three year period and then going away.
John:
Oh, and the final thing on the iPod Touch.
John:
No, I'm not getting an iPod Touch.
John:
The main reason is, of course, I have the phone now.
John:
We've already got the family plan.
John:
They pay for it.
John:
People are asking if I'm going to go back to a flip phone.
John:
I'm not.
John:
But I think the biggest thing keeping me on my iPhone is that I'm now used to the bigger screen.
John:
When I pick up my kids' devices, I can't imagine using that tiny little thing.
John:
I'm now used to it.
John:
My hand is used to it.
John:
I'm used to the extra space.
John:
I'm used to the extra pixels.
John:
I can't go back again.
John:
So...
Marco:
congratulations apple thanks obama right so are you gonna get one of the brand new ipod nanos or ipod shuffles new question mark right yeah i think it's actually not even a question anymore i think it's just not new i'm pretty sure that's confirmed is it a soft is there different software on them maybe no there's different colors i believe that is literally the only change
John:
Yeah, I was trying to look into this, but, like, honestly, I had no record.
John:
I was looking at the tech specs, and, like, I don't remember what the old ones were.
John:
It's kind of disappointing to me that, like, there are many areas both of these products could be improved in both hardware and software.
John:
Just through, like, experience of, like, having this been in the market for a long time, people using them, knowing which buttons are hard to press, how is it weird to hold, what materials you could do better, what seam tends to open up over time.
John:
which parts of the os are slow or don't support a thing but it's like just the product is not selling enough for them to to make those changes i guess so it's just more of the same in different colors i think it's still a good idea to sell these products um new colors is a way to get more people to buy them
John:
it's another sort of starter product for like a little kid who wants to listen to music and you're not going to buy them a sony walkman right you're going to go buy them a little ipod a little cheap ipod you don't care too much if they send it through the laundry or destroy especially like a shuffle they're like 50 bucks or whatever uh it's good that these products in the lineup i think of all of the ipod nanos and shuffles they've ever made these are not the best versions
Marco:
Yeah, I think I agree.
Marco:
What's interesting, though, is that these are officially updated in quotes, but they can't use Apple Music tracks.
Marco:
If you download something from Apple Music, so anything downloaded from Apple Music is DRM'd, and it's kind of time-bombed so that you are not supposed to be able to play Apple Music tracks if you end your subscription to Apple Music.
Marco:
iPods, I guess they decided through the DRM they can't really...
Marco:
They can't really guarantee that an iPod will have its clock set properly or that it'll really ever check in once it's synced or anything like that.
John:
Do they even have clocks?
John:
They don't have wireless.
John:
They have FM radios or whatever, but it's basically because they can't validate that the files are... If you got your Apple Music files onto your iPod Nano, they would either never play, which is the current option, or...
John:
uh play forever because as long as you just don't plug your ipod now into anything those are basically the only choices so yeah i'll put a link in the show notes serenity wrote about this whole thing like it's not surprising that if you're you know streaming files that rely on you having a subscription cannot go on devices that can't confirm that you have a subscription these things have no way to tell if you have a subscription and they could have updated them to know they could have updated them but that would have been i guess more time and effort and technology and software that they're willing to invest in this product line
Marco:
And if Gruber's right, that the reason the Nano still has the iOS 6 look to its fake iOS UI, Gruber's sources say that there's literally nobody left in the team.
Marco:
Apparently the team that did that was poached for the Watch team, and so there's basically just nobody who can work on it right now.
Marco:
and that sounds plausible and because you know imagine if you're if you work at apple like you do you really want the job of updating the ipod nano software every three years to look more like fake ios like that's probably not a great thing to be working on if you can help it yeah the adp tipster wants us to know that if you have trusted time on the device that you can still use that and there'd be you know if you tried to reset the time it would invalidate things and so on and so forth but all of that i would assume would require investment and and
John:
software at the very least and possibly also hardware that doesn't exist and so they're not going to do that investment that you know they're not going to add a way for these devices to know maybe the maybe he's saying they already have this feature uh it just seems like any kind of investment in changing the feature set of these products was just not in the cards for this revision changing the colors is something they could just do in manufacturing done and done
Marco:
So the iPod Nano is $150, 16 gigs.
Marco:
For $50 more, you get the iPod Touch.
Marco:
Now, granted, it is a larger device.
Marco:
But otherwise, why does the Nano still exist?
Marco:
Why would anybody get the Nano for $150 if for $50 more, you could get the same capacity in a full-blown, pretty good iOS device?
John:
Smaller, lighter, simpler, has an FM radio.
John:
I mean, you know, like for...
John:
it's not a big area it's not a growth market but i mean the shuffle i'm assuming you're excluding that one because you're like oh well the shuffle is so damn small that if you want something that's like microscopic and weighs nothing this is your only option the shuffle sucks but the shuffle has always sucked i've i've owned multiple shuffles in my life they've all sucked they it's it's a terrible device it is awful i like that remember the stick of gum one the original one it's two gigs still
John:
Yeah, they're all the same size.
John:
Yes, I had the stick of gum one.
John:
That was one of them.
John:
I'm sad that one broke because I loved that one.
John:
I thought that was a very clever design.
John:
I mean, obviously, it's way too big by modern standards.
John:
But back then, I really like that design.
John:
I like the fact that it had a little thing around your neck.
John:
I like the little stick of gum thing.
John:
um and it was nice and lightweight i like the shuffle before they pulled in the margins and sort of wrap the shuffle more tightly around that circular control because that one had a place for you to put your fingers to open the little chomper like the little clamp on the back without accidentally hitting the the previous track button button you know
John:
This one is just too small to do anything with.
John:
That circular button on the shuffle has never really been great, but it does have the advantage that it's super microscopic.
John:
Remember the one that was like the Trident gum that had no buttons on it?
John:
Yeah, that was short-lived for good reason.
John:
Those were the days.
John:
There's a lot of interesting innovation in how small we can make this.
John:
It's just kind of sad to see it not...
John:
You know, like this is it, this little square that you clip onto things.
John:
Anyway, it's not that bad.
John:
So why does the Nano exist?
John:
I think it is different enough.
John:
You know, I think it's differentiated.
John:
It's differentiated from the Shuffle by having a screen and a place where you can do stuff.
John:
And it's differentiated from the iPod by being, I think, from the perspective of people who want to jog with it or something.
John:
The Nano is the size that you could...
John:
like then you wouldn't notice it it's still i think below the threshold of of you know even if not so much from weight but just from like having a big playing card side stiff thing like strapped to your body somewhere whereas the nano i think is down in the range of uh you know more towards the shuffle end of things where you can find someplace inobtrusive to shove it you wouldn't even have to buy like a dedicated case for it i would imagine but maybe you'd want to anyway
Casey:
The shuffle to me is the, I'm going to do some sort of aggressive working out with this, and I don't want to break any other device.
Casey:
And if I do break this, it's not the end of the earth.
Casey:
The Nano, though, I agree with you guys.
Casey:
It's kind of a weird gray area.
Casey:
And the only thing I can think of is, what if it's for a kid who isn't necessarily old enough to be able to handle, or maybe you don't want them to handle, a full-on iOS device?
Casey:
but you know like the ipod touch but maybe this is sort of a halfway that's more interesting and allows you affords you some amount of control yet is still not a full-on ipod touch it keeps the kid off the internet basically they want to listen to music this keeps them off it allows parents to delay facing the inevitable which is how do i handle my child who has access to the internet let's them push it off for a couple more years
John:
Right.
John:
Although they still have to deal with, Mom, can you put this music on my iPod, please?
John:
Because they have no way to get music on it without, you know, connecting to iTunes for crying out loud.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
I'm asking this honestly.
Marco:
Do kids still care about music?
Marco:
Yeah, they do.
Marco:
I honestly didn't know because...
Marco:
it seems like music is very generational, but also that in recent generations, we were actually like moving more away from it.
Marco:
If that makes sense.
Marco:
Like we're like music is becoming less important as the generational cultural entertainment, uh, media, I guess.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Does that make sense?
John:
Seems about the same.
John:
Like my, you know, they, they, your kids one day will come home and they will know a pop song that you have never played or heard of.
John:
And they know all the words to it.
John:
Like, how did this happen?
John:
You know, that's, they have peers, they have,
Marco:
uh you know they find out about music they get interested in music they eventually have demands for songs that they want on their ipods and yeah it's still a thing all right fair enough thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week squarespace igloo and mail route and we will see you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
What's going on in Overcast these days?
Casey:
You haven't heard much about it.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
I mean, I'm working my butt off on it, basically.
Casey:
So, like, a couple hours a day?
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
Marco:
Maybe a half hour, 45 minutes.
Marco:
I'm working on a big 2.0, and I'm still, like... I mean, I've said this on Twitter a couple times.
Marco:
It's not news that I'm working on 2.0.
Marco:
For me, 2.0 will have a few big new features, but it's mostly about kind of nailing down all the different parts.
Marco:
Like, this week I was working on, drumroll please, the downloader, as usual.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Uh-huh.
Marco:
So I finally figured out there's one of the problems that people keep reporting to me is that storage usage just seems to just keep growing over time for any given installation.
Marco:
It's temp files that are created by the background download system, the background download process in iOS, which I hate with a passion.
Marco:
There are temp files that that generates.
Marco:
And then if a download is interrupted for any reason, like if you force quit the app or if the app crashes or sometimes even just if the download fails and then it retries again, it's creating a new file and starting over again.
Marco:
And the old file just gets abandoned.
Marco:
So the old temp file where it was partially downloaded to is never deleted.
Marco:
And I actually discovered this behavior months ago.
Marco:
And I issued a fix back then to basically scan for these temp files and any temp file that was above a certain age that hadn't been touched for a couple of days or something, I would delete.
Marco:
That caused lots of problems because the download system does not expect its files to be deleted from under itself.
Marco:
And they're also downloaded through this undocumented location that you're not really supposed to know about inside your app sandbox.
Marco:
They also recently moved that location to a different location.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
So now, all of a sudden, I thought I had this problem under control.
Marco:
And now people are saying, oh, it's all the space usage.
Marco:
It's mostly because of that.
Marco:
It's mostly because they moved the location of these files.
Marco:
So now I'm scanning the old directory, not the new one.
Marco:
And so I have to go...
Marco:
look at that again and, you know, obviously change where it's deleting, but also then now test to make sure it's not messing them up too badly when it does delete them, you know, make sure that the downloader doesn't then have weird behavior or crash when it finds that its files are gone.
Marco:
It's a whole ordeal.
Marco:
The background download system is just incredibly unreliable for me.
Marco:
I know some developers seem to have good luck with it.
Marco:
It has been insanely unreliable for me in all of my usage of it so far.
John:
You download more things than I think probably for more creaky servers.
John:
Because, you know...
John:
Tons of things you're downloading all the time.
John:
It's practically the whole point of your application.
John:
And I've seen lots of really slow downloads from wherever people are hosting their podcasts.
John:
So it's a formula to exercise a downloader.
John:
But if everything is in the caches folder, there are jobs, I assume, that are wandering through iOS, like purging the caches folder when you're under disk pressure.
John:
There's nothing that you can do as an app developer to try to say, hey, system, if you would like to come by and reclaim space from my caches folder, please do that now.
Marco:
I don't think you can trigger it.
Marco:
It automatically triggers when disk space is actually filling up.
Marco:
And then that's when if you've ever spotted an app that says that where the icon is dimmed out for a minute and under it, it replaces the title with the word cleaning dot dot dot.
Marco:
That's what it's doing is it's it's deleting all the cache and temporary files from the app sandbox in order to reclaim disk space.
Marco:
So I'm working on stuff like that.
Marco:
Also, I overhauled the artwork system because it was not only buggy, but it was causing bad scrolling performance on the main list of episodes that everybody was complaining about and they were right.
Marco:
So I fixed that.
Marco:
There's a couple of sources of common crashes that I fixed.
Marco:
And most importantly, there's been a bug for months, literally, like since I think February, there's been a bug for months.
Marco:
where you would occasionally, if you manually reordered a playlist, sometimes that ordering would be reset back to the default ordering of whatever that playlist is, whatever the sort method is for it.
Marco:
So your custom ordering would be lost.
Marco:
And this drives people crazy, understandably.
Marco:
It drives me crazy.
Marco:
It happened to me, too.
Marco:
It drives me crazy.
Marco:
Because it is kind of a form of data loss.
Marco:
It's really annoying.
Marco:
It's like, you know, I organized this a certain way, and now it just undid it.
Marco:
And this took me months to find this bug.
Marco:
And it turns out to be a concurrency bug in the way... So basically, getting into the weeds for a brief minute here, Overcast Data Storage Layer is built on a library that I wrote that's open source called FC Model.
Marco:
And it's basically a little model layer between SQLite and you.
Marco:
And so it does not use core data.
Marco:
It uses FCModel, which kind of replaces core data in the role here.
Marco:
And in the initial design of FCModel, instances of your models in memory were unique.
Marco:
So that if you requested post ID 1 from one thread, and then some other thread also requested post ID 1, if the first one was still in memory, the second one would just get another pointer to the same object.
Marco:
So that there was only one post with ID 1 in memory at any given time.
Marco:
So if you modified that, it would be the same between all the places it was being accessed.
Marco:
If you modified a value on it and didn't save it yet, you would get that from everywhere.
Marco:
In practice, that caused a bunch of weird concurrency issues and weird potential bugs, weird actual bugs.
Marco:
So this past February, I switched it so that if you requested ID 1 from one thread and then requested ID 1 from somewhere else, those got separate copies.
Marco:
And so all writes were being done separately.
Marco:
And there were some things in place to make sure it wouldn't get stale data here and there and everything.
Marco:
But basically, I changed the way that worked.
Marco:
And that has... For the most part, it didn't cause any problems.
Marco:
And it solved a few other problems.
Marco:
Unfortunately, the playlist reordering bug is caused by this.
Marco:
And I haven't quite nailed down the details yet.
Marco:
Because it has taken me months to have this happen in a debugger once.
Marco:
that is the worst yeah because you know it's this weird like concurrency related bug and it's very hard to reproduce uh and i've i've asked people for months like if you find a way to reliably reproduce this please tell me you just throw in some sleep calls now that you know that you're pretty sure that you know where it is you can confirm it by throwing in some sleep calls to to induce the race
Marco:
Well, the one time I caught it in the debugger, I got a pretty good idea that it was due to this model being unique in memory kind of thing.
Marco:
Pretty sure it was from that.
Marco:
Anyway, so now I have a different branch of my FC model now called Unique 2 that goes back to the unique in memory model system.
John:
Why don't you just use optimistic locking with the one where they're not unique?
John:
I don't think I know what optimistic locking is.
John:
It's like you version everything, and then when you go to do the update, you say, do this update, but only do the update if the version is the version that it was when I read it.
John:
And if it's not, then you know you have a conflict.
John:
You know you lost a race, and then you have to resolve it in some way.
John:
But basically, like...
John:
instead of checking every single time because you get two guys got a thing one guy's going to write first and if you're not the guy who got to write first when you write your thing you could be overwriting the other guy's changes so you do the i mean it's the sequel thing like update blah blah where blah blah blah and id equals blah blah blah and you see if you see zero rows update you're like oh actually i thought i read and then wrote it back but really someone else wrote back so i have to reread incorporate those changes before i can write back it's just you know like or you got to go the brent simmons route and only do updates to your model from a single thread
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, so database access has always been serialized onto one thread.
Marco:
You could read them from anywhere, but it was all being serialized behind the scenes on a serial queue.
Marco:
So you couldn't actually be doing simultaneous reads and writes, but you could hold out to things that weren't quite saved and have it be changed under you and everything.
Marco:
And then I did, a few months back, I did change it so that
Marco:
writes were all being done inside serial blocks too so that rather than saying you know model dot name equals bob model save instead of that you would say model reload and save in this block and then in the block you would say name equals bob or whatever and so those were all serialized as well so that way and and it was literally a reload and save like you would first do a select
Marco:
then do your changes, then save them back all atomically on a serial thread.
Marco:
So it should have solved that problem.
Marco:
And I think it solved it in lots of places, but I guess something was still happening that it wasn't quite getting it everywhere.
Marco:
So the new system, the Unique 2, also does the Brent Simmons thing, where...
Marco:
now it's all just happening on the main thread and for a while i thought there is no way i should have you know database stuff on the main thread that will cause ui performance problems and everything and i have such big databases for some of these some users there's no way i can afford that so i just never tried it and then last week i tried it and it turns out it's fine and there are so many problems it solves like
Marco:
having all the database stuff on the main thread first of all it's fast enough doesn't matter at all second of all lots of places where there was ui lag before from blocking on a database on like a massive database operation like the like the initial sync a lot of times you know you think you're offloading it to this background thread then the background thread triggers an update that posts notification and the ui says oh the data changed i have to reload the data to show my ui
Marco:
So then it's blocking the UI anyway while it's waiting for that reload to come through.
Marco:
So it turns out the whole idea of getting these operations off the main thread in practice usually didn't solve the problem because usually the UI was still blocked waiting for the database thread to finish what it was doing.
Marco:
Anyway, so once you move things to the main thread, all the database stuff, then it becomes so much simpler.
Marco:
Once again, Brent Simmons is right.
Marco:
Brent Simmons is usually right.
Marco:
And when it comes to stuff like this, he's really usually right.
Marco:
And so with this, if you make a change on the main thread, what happens with so many changes, as I said, is the UI responds to the notification and does something, updates something.
Marco:
When all that's happening on the main thread, it removes so many dispatch async calls and so many potential deadlocks of, well, the database did this.
Marco:
Now update the UI to reflect this.
Marco:
Then the UI calls into the database again.
Marco:
It just solves so many problems.
Marco:
Anyway, this is very long and boring.
Marco:
But that is why the playlist reordering bug happened.
Marco:
I made that change a week ago in development.
Marco:
And this used to hit me every few days.
Marco:
It hasn't hit me once since.
Marco:
So I'm pretty sure I got it.
Marco:
And it sure looks like the rest of the app still works fine.
Marco:
I'm reserving saying that definitively.
Marco:
But it sure looks like I'm not having any other problems.
John:
i think i asked you about this before but now it's even more relevant if you're doing your database access on the main thread do you uh use any of the sqlite pragmas to fiddle with the defaults to make it faster i do yeah that i i started doing that about six months ago do you turn do you turn off the synchronous thing let me see the thing that makes it like the thing that says like really seriously flush it to disk before you're done turning it off says like it'll say yep no i'm totally done when really it isn't but like
John:
Because we're using flash, like, I mean, that's the risky one.
John:
That's like the dangerous one.
John:
And then I guess temp store memory instead of temp store disk or whatever.
John:
But some of those make a big difference or used to make a big difference back when I was screwing with SQLite.
John:
And so once you're doing it on the main thread, it's probably worthwhile to...
John:
revisit the pragma page and see if there's anything else you could tweak i would probably not recommend the synchronous one because you don't want to corrupt your database because then you're sol but i am doing synchronous off and journal mode journal mode memory there you go well you're living living the dangerous life i mean i guess a power failure is like it's just yeah that's it's a battery-powered device it can't get unplugged i guess but you know
Marco:
Well, and also, this is just data that this is basically an offline cache of something that's synced to the web.
Marco:
So, you know, if local database gets corrupted somehow, which is very unlikely, as you said, but if it gets corrupted, and it can't be opened, then it just redownloads from the web.
Marco:
So it's like, it's not like I'm not losing meaningful user data here.
Casey:
John, what was the occasion that you had for fiddling with SQLite out of curiosity?
John:
Web applications, database-backed web applications.
John:
And the database that backs them has been all sorts of things at various times SQLite.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And, you know, if you're just doing something that you want to do database stuff with, especially in languages that have sort of a uniform interface to any database, it's just a question of picking the driver like Perl does and like many other languages do.
John:
You're just like, well, I'll prototype this with SQLite because then you don't have to worry about starting a server and doing all that crap.
John:
You're just, you know.
John:
uh it's just convenient i mean hell even if you just do sqlite you know in memory database like it's a great way to just prototype something it doesn't even litter your file with this you just tell it uh database name and don't give it don't give it a file name and it will just do everything in memory it's neat