Larger, Less Portable Pastures
Casey:
Oh, you're about to get a bunch of snow?
Casey:
You know, we're due for like 30 inches.
Casey:
Consider that this entire area shuts down over about six.
Casey:
As we record this Wednesday evening, the snow isn't supposed to start until Friday.
Casey:
And on Facebook, I saw four or five different people show images of the grocery store bread aisle, which is eviscerated.
Casey:
The bacon aisle, because hashtag the South, is gutted.
Casey:
It's just apparently a disaster out there.
Casey:
And there's not been a flake on the ground, as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, we're supposed to get the tail end of what's hitting you, so we're supposed to get about a foot, maybe, about a day later.
Casey:
Which, for you guys, is like a dusting.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's heavy snowfall, but it's not unusual.
Marco:
That happens at least once or twice every winter, and it's fine.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
I tried to buy rock salt today.
Marco:
And there was one kind left.
Marco:
It was the most expensive kind, of course.
Marco:
And it was like the heavy commercial pro blend or whatever.
John:
Was it like sea salt?
John:
Well, if you don't use it all, you can sprinkle it all over your seared salmon or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, the entire region up here is panicking for snow that we get every year.
Marco:
So I can't even imagine what you guys are going through.
John:
I think people underestimate the amount of food in their house.
John:
Like the idea is that, you know, the roads will be impassable, which, you know, does that really ever happen?
John:
And maybe by Casey it will.
John:
And then we will starve to death in our home because we will not have enough food.
John:
Never mind that it would take a really long time for most people to starve to death without any food.
John:
And you don't have to worry about water because you can always melt snow.
John:
So many things we learned from the long dark.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so like they run to the store and we got to buy all the food because what if we can't get to the grocery store for like two days?
John:
People don't know how long you can you live just off the food in your house?
Casey:
Well, see, but that's you guys.
Casey:
You guys are prepared for snow.
Casey:
Whereas for us, I guarantee if we get you could live off the food in your house for like six months.
John:
No way.
John:
Yes.
John:
I mean, if you planned well, probably.
John:
If I planned well.
John:
No, but you don't realize how many calories are in things.
John:
Like, just a box of granola bars.
John:
Like, add it up.
John:
Like, 100 calories per bar.
John:
Like, how many calories do you think you need per day?
John:
I'm not saying it would be pleasant.
John:
I'm just saying, like, people are not in imminent danger.
John:
Never mind that, like, the house next to you has people with food, and the house next to them has people with food.
John:
Like, we're in civilization here, people.
John:
You're not going to starve to death in your home.
John:
You'll be fine.
John:
But, yeah, everyone does go to the stores.
John:
I mean, a lot of it is just...
John:
not so much that i think you're going to starve to death but let me just get in that one last grocery run before it is annoying to drive to the grocery store not that the roads will be impassable but it will be more annoying and you know there will be problems getting out of the driveway and maybe it'll take a while to shovel you know and so it's like oh let me just do my grocery run now and everybody it's like uh what do you call it a barrier um fence uh you're gonna help me out here marco
John:
what offense is a kind of barrier that is true yeah the mutex thing where everyone stacks oh yeah yeah anyway memory barrier yeah yeah it just causes all it just causes everyone to end up going at the same time that looks like people are panicking really it is just taking the normally more random distribution of their their supermarket trips and putting them all in the same day so that makes me feel better about humanity i think about it that way
Marco:
The reason I was preparing for this today and not like three days from now when this stuff is actually about to hit us is because I feel like I'm about to get really sick because everything's going around.
Marco:
My whole family's sick.
Marco:
I'm starting to feel it.
Marco:
So I'm thinking I need to stock up on food to get me through being sick.
Marco:
At the same time, everyone else is thinking to stock up on food to get them through the apocalypse.
John:
Just stay at home and eat saltine crackers.
John:
You can live for weeks on that.
John:
But everybody's saltines are always stale.
John:
Doesn't matter.
John:
They still are life-giving.
Marco:
But nobody ever needs saltines enough for their saltines to be fresh.
Marco:
Everybody needs saltines like twice a year.
Marco:
So everyone's saltines at any given time are stale.
John:
I used to be quite a saltine fiend, but I'm now convinced that when you...
John:
when you buy them from the store i'm now convinced that they're stale like in the store because a few times i bought like a brand new package of them intending to use them for soup like as you do and open them up and i'm like these are already stale how is that even possible i feel like just you know being one of those old people and returning to the supermarket i pick these saltines off your shelf and they're already stale
Marco:
I would love to just go shopping with you sometime.
Marco:
Amen.
Marco:
It would be amazing.
Marco:
Well, I mean, there are so many better crackers.
Marco:
Wheat thins are way better.
Marco:
No.
John:
Saltines were the only cracker in my house when I was a kid.
John:
So that's what I had, but I could, you know, I don't eat them anymore, but I did back in the day.
Marco:
Slim salty pickings.
Casey:
Rob wrote in to tell us, and I feel like I've seen some conflicting information about this, but the general theme seems to be true, that at the very least, the iMac trapezoidal boxes are in fact shipped, I'm sorry, are stored upside down and then right side up, upside down, right side up.
Casey:
And so Rob wrote in and said, as a former Apple Store employee, I can tell you that iMacs are stacked on the shelves in the right side up, upside down fashion.
Casey:
They are not, however, shipped this way.
Casey:
When the computers are shipped, each one is in a standard cardboard box like every other product for secrecy.
Casey:
I got to tell you, mine was shipped to me, which may be different than the stores.
Casey:
It was a standard cardboard box in that it was unmarked on the outside, but it was the same basic shape.
John:
anyway rob continues they don't care how many computers can fit in the truck they however they do care about how many computers can be stacked on the shelves in the back where there's already not a lot of room yeah some people sent pictures as well like a palette of imax showing them alternating even the palette was weird like the one photo we had it did show them saving space by alternating they weren't upside down right side up they were like laying laying flat you know pointing left and right but then sometimes on some layers of the palette
John:
there would be like these filler blocks feel like because i guess it didn't work out to be completely flat so there were these these trying these triangular filler regions it's very strange anyway it was like all that's like where like you put all like the uk keyboards yeah like you said throwing throwing the mighty mice in there or the well they come with the mice so you don't need that but it's like where you need like the the the things that that not everyone needs so you put like the uk keyboard maybe the trackpad yeah
John:
Stop it with iPod socks.
John:
Anyway, it seemed clear that at the very least in the back of the Apple stores where there's not a lot of room because they have tons of stuff back there, I'm sure they definitely pack them in like that.
John:
And I imagine a lot of them are shipped like that, but apparently not all.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Joe Masolati, I hope I pronounced that right, wrote in and he said, Casey discussed how mocks and Swift can only be created if the language allows them.
Casey:
I disagree that mocks can only be created by subclassing.
Casey:
Actually, I think that is an anti-pattern.
Casey:
He continued, mocks may be created by having the class conform to a protocol, or if you're a C-sharp guy like me, an interface.
Casey:
This can be done inside your own framework and for Apple's as well.
Casey:
For example, you can mock NSURL session by adding a new protocol URL session.
Casey:
Then via protocol extensions, you can have NSURL session conform to your framework.
Casey:
As long as you keep the method signatures the same, Swift will compile without issue.
Casey:
I wrote about this extensively on my blog, and we will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't think that's entirely accurate, what I said.
Casey:
What I said was that it's really a lot easier if you program to interfaces or protocols, because then mocking becomes a lot easier.
Casey:
And I said that to Joe privately in an email, and he actually just wrote back and said, in so many words, yeah, we're on the same page.
Casey:
Actually, let me read from his email.
Casey:
Design to an interface is great until you end up with interfaces or protocols with a single implementation of your production code.
Casey:
The Swift solution I proposed almost forces this.
Casey:
Not sure if this is tangential to the initial argument, but it's something I'm struggling with, which is a very fair point.
Casey:
There's a lot of times that I've written to interfaces specifically to enable really easy mocking for my unit tests, but...
Casey:
But in my actual code, there's only one implementation of that interface, and that's the one I use.
Casey:
So it's a little bit weird and dodgy, but you can check out his blog post and kind of see for yourself.
John:
yeah i always forget about protocol extensions like it's just clear that i'm not actually using swift but i'm just reading about it on mailing lists like oh yeah protocol extensions they're neat they're useful even though there's whole sessions at wwc about them they're already like it just if you're not used to working that way or thinking in that way you just you know uh not didn't occur to me but yep that's that's totally possible that's the way to do it and i i wouldn't bother me if i had a thing with only one implementation it wouldn't bother me at all
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, in my extensive experience with both Swift and Mox and general testing, I agree.
Casey:
Thanks, Marco.
Casey:
Go team.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have a lot of follow-up about Blue Light.
Casey:
A lot of people have written in about this.
Casey:
I don't think I am the best of the three of us to summarize this, so I don't know if one of you wants to handle this for us.
Marco:
Well, I'll take it, because it was what I said that was partially, if not entirely, wrong.
Marco:
So basically, last week, talking about the flux slash night shift claims of blue light at night being bad for your sleep quality, I had said that I was not able to find, in my research before the show, I was not able to find connections that said...
Marco:
blue light specifically was bad, what I was finding was saying that just like bright light was bad, and that could negatively affect sleep quality, but the blue light didn't seem to be anything special.
Marco:
Turns out that's totally wrong, that there's actually quite a bit of evidence to suggest that all brightness of light
Marco:
does negatively affect your sleep quality by basically tricking your body into not producing melatonin, I believe.
Marco:
I think that's just part of the sleep cycle and everything.
Marco:
It doesn't produce enough of it or it doesn't produce it correctly or it tricks the circadian rhythms or some stuff that's way above our pay grade here.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Looking at any kind of bright light before bed will cause this problem, but there's a point in the blue spectrum.
Marco:
In fact, we got an email from Dr. Todd Stintzik, who very specifically identified it, because there are three different kinds of things.
Marco:
We think of the rods and cones in the eye.
Marco:
There's also a third kind of light-sensitive cell thing back there,
Marco:
That is specifically not for vision, but it's to regulate this melatonin type thing for the sleep cycle and for the circadian rhythms and all this stuff.
Marco:
Please forgive me for butchering this.
Marco:
But anyway, this third kind of light receptor back in your NRIs.
Marco:
It has a peak sensitivity at 479 nanometers, which is, so it's basically the shade of blue.
Marco:
And that is like the peak sensitivity so that if you get a lot of light on that, it activates these cells the most.
Marco:
And that inhibits the melatonin and everything else into like telling your body, hey, it's time for sleep.
Marco:
But it isn't this narrow window where if you just don't see that shade, you're fine.
Marco:
That shade is just the peak of sensitivity, and as you get further away from that wavelength in either direction, sensitivity drops, but it still works.
Marco:
So if you reduce the blue range of the spectrum...
Marco:
you can see more brightness without it being a problem.
Marco:
So if you see, like, if brightness is fixed, seeing blue is worse than seeing other colors, you know, for they're far away from that.
Marco:
But you still ideally should be lowering the entire light level.
Marco:
That's basically the gist of it.
Marco:
So that overall brightness is a problem, but you're extra sensitive to the blue region at night.
John:
There was another doctor, professor of neurology.
John:
He was more kind to you.
John:
He said that you basically got it exactly right.
John:
But the same thing, you know, that light can adjust the circadian rhythms, but there's a particular sensitivity to the blue light.
John:
Lots of people sent us the study showing the particular sensitivity to the blue light, but that all light counts for that.
John:
This had one extra little nugget saying that another benefit of reducing the amount of blue light at nighttime is it helps the rods in your eyes stay adapted to the dark.
Marco:
uh that way when you look up from the screen you won't like trip over something in your dark house yeah and he he likened it to like like why you why like the military stuff is all like red light allegedly was is that true or is that a myth i always thought that might have been a myth i don't know we have a a professor of neurology says it's true so it's probably true though no i can tell you i have been on a military vessel when it was out at night and i can absolutely tell you with for a fact that that is true
John:
so was everyone just falling asleep all the time or or what no what i mean is that there's red everywhere it is keeping your eyes it's the same as the pirate eye patch all over again you know the what pirate eye patch come on people is that like when you close one eye when you get to go to the bathroom at night so then you can open it when you turn the light off and see your way back
John:
Yes, that's why the pirates are the eye patch.
John:
So when they go below decks where there's no lights because they didn't have electricity on their pirate ships, they could flip up the eye patch and that eye is adjusted to the dark and they could see better.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
Casey:
That's crazy.
Casey:
You thought they all had one eye?
Casey:
Well, I didn't.
Casey:
I had no idea.
Casey:
I never thought about a pirate needing an eye patch before.
Casey:
The pirates are there to eat the saltines.
Casey:
There's a lot of pirate lore you guys don't know about.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
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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Marco:
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Casey:
So we should probably do a little bit of follow-up about my iMac.
Casey:
So where we last left our hero, he had a completely dead iMac that he could not resuscitate in a Genius Bar appointment for, I think, the following day.
Marco:
On that bombshell.
Casey:
On that bombshell, right.
Casey:
In talking with another friend of mine, he had pointed out to me, you know, you could just return this.
Casey:
And I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I think we talked about it on the show, actually.
Casey:
And I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I am going to return it because this thing is going to be forever tainted in my mind if I try to get it repaired and they have to crack it open.
Casey:
So the following day, I canceled my Genius Bar appointment.
Casey:
I went in and returned it.
Casey:
And I had boxed it up all nicely in the retail box, the trapezoidal retail box.
Casey:
I'd done what I could to get it all back together as cleanly as I possibly could.
Casey:
I brought it into the store, and the gentleman on the store floor, who I happened to walk up to, said, okay, I can handle that return for you.
Casey:
You know, while you're returning it, oh, it's basically DOA.
Casey:
Oh, that sucks.
Casey:
Okay, no worries.
Casey:
All right, I just got to open it up and confirm the serial number to make sure, you know, now I'm kind of filling in the lengths, but to make sure that you're not doing a bait and switch or anything like that.
Casey:
So he says, oh, I'm going to open it up.
Casey:
I'm going to take it out.
Casey:
I'm going to turn it on.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Because he wanted to go into like about my Mac and see the serial number and realized, hmm, that's not going to work now, is it?
Casey:
He starts looking and I start looking on the back of the Mac trying to find a printed serial number.
Casey:
And me having never owned an iMac before, I had assumed that's where it would be.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
He goes and takes this thing to the back to where, like, I guess the off-duty geniuses are, maybe some of the on-duty geniuses, to try to get them to help him figure out where the crap serial number is.
Casey:
Do either of you guys know where the serial number on the IMAX are?
John:
It's on a little metal plate on the dashboard.
Yeah.
John:
We know where to find the tire pressure and we know where to find the VIN number.
John:
There's VIN numbers in all sorts of weird places.
John:
There are.
John:
I would imagine my, I mean, like where could it possibly be, right?
John:
The only place it could possibly be is what opens up on the iMac.
John:
It's the memory door opens up, right?
John:
That's the only thing that opens.
John:
And other than that, I'm sure it's printed somewhere like on the motherboard or whatever, but you got to take the whole thing apart to see that.
Marco:
And I wouldn't think it'd be on the memory door, because that's something that you can take off.
Marco:
So that's no good.
Marco:
I would guess it's printed somewhere on the metal, but God knows where.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
So I didn't know any better, having never had an iMac.
Casey:
It turns out it's on the bottom of the foot.
John:
Huh?
John:
Oh, sneaky.
John:
Was it a sticker on the bottom of the foot or was it etched into the metal?
Casey:
I believe it was printed on the metal, although I don't recall off the top of my head.
Casey:
And what just occurred to me just this moment, how does that work for like Snell's iMac that had the Visa mount?
Marco:
Good question.
Marco:
Maybe it's on the mount itself because like there is like a little thing back there that would have to mount to it.
Marco:
It's got to be in more than one place.
Casey:
But either way, so that took a few minutes to get through, which was not a big deal.
Casey:
I mean, I was just as confused as the dude was.
Casey:
And, you know, perhaps the guy should have known it.
Casey:
But I mean, I didn't.
Casey:
So I can't really blame him.
Casey:
So anyway, so it ended up that they returned it.
Casey:
No questions asked.
Casey:
And once they had somehow, someway confirmed the serial number.
Casey:
And then I had already at that point ordered a new one.
Casey:
And the other thing that I wanted to tell you guys about, which was a new discovery for me, did you know about expedited shipping on the Apple store?
Marco:
Is this when we were yelling at you last week?
Marco:
Typically expensive shipping?
Marco:
If I'm buying something that costs multiple thousands of dollars and I can get it next day for an extra $40, even though it makes no sense, I don't do that in normal stuff.
Marco:
If it was $40 to get a shirt the next day, I wouldn't do it.
Marco:
But for some reason, the psychology of the relative pricing works out.
John:
Pricing psychology, that's how they charge you $150 for floor mats or your car, and you're like, whatever.
John:
Exactly, yeah.
Marco:
If it's like 40 bucks to get my awesome new computer a day earlier, I'll usually do it.
Marco:
That's like the cherry on top, you know?
Casey:
So I didn't know that this I knew that I could do faster shipping, but I didn't look into how much it was.
Casey:
Well, now I'm seriously impatient because I've just returned the beautiful 5K iMac that I was waiting for for a week as I watched it march across the country on FedEx ground.
Casey:
And this time I was like, you know what?
Casey:
I'm going to do expedited shipping.
Casey:
Darn it.
Casey:
Expecting that this like 20 pound box would be 50 or 100 bucks.
Casey:
It was $42 to your point, Marco.
Casey:
$42.
Casey:
And the best part was it arrived at 8.30 in the morning at my doorstep.
Casey:
Pro tip, if you're going to buy a Mac from Apple and you're not going to get it retail, like a bill to order, for example, definitely, definitely, definitely do the expedited shipping.
John:
Is that really a pro tip?
John:
Because I think what Marco just outlined is the illogical pricing psychology that makes you think that's a good deal when in reality you could take those $42 and spend it on lots of other things.
John:
It's the same size as if you paid $42 to ship a pen to your house, which you would never do because the pen costs $2.
John:
But when you're shipping the expensive computer, somehow that $42 for shipping is totally worth it.
John:
So I would say get some books on Zen Buddhism from the library or something and learn some patience and then...
John:
pay for the cheap shipping because 42 is the same size no matter what it's attached to who in their right mind would pay 42 of shipping to get a package of saltines delivered from amazon nobody would but and i'm sure 42 and you waited four days for it anyway because you had to spend the weekend terrible
Marco:
nobody likes saltines enough to ever do that and also if you ever want saltines you're probably within 50 feet of a store that has some 12 month old saltines on the shelf i'm just saying 42 does not change size when you put it next to the price of an expensive computer all i'm saying is for me and i think for marco too damn if it wasn't worth it because oh my god i was so glad i did that it just it it's it's like a little like a little touch of luxury you know like yeah it's like getting the extra leg room seat on the plane
Casey:
Yeah, the 27 inches of luxury don't count, but that $42 quick shipping.
John:
You spend a lot of time convincing yourself to do nice things for yourself by buying yourself fancy things.
John:
It seems like a skill we all have.
John:
We're all really good at.
John:
I can teach you the skill.
John:
You have seminars.
Casey:
Marco, as I've said to you in the past, you are the best worst influence.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
My seminars would totally have extra legroom seats at the front for an extra 20 bucks.
Casey:
So I am talking to you right now from a 5K Retina iMac.
Casey:
This thing is magnificent.
Casey:
To recap, I had bought the mid-range one because it was the crummiest one that could support the one terabyte SSD, which is what I got.
Casey:
I got it with eight gigs of RAM and then immediately for this one had put in 32 gigs of other world computing, Mac sales, whatever they call themselves, RAM.
Casey:
So it's a one terabyte drive, 32 gigs RAM, the four gigahertz processor, and I am in love.
Casey:
A couple of quick immediate thoughts for those who may be like me and leaving a laptop behind or considering leaving a laptop behind.
Casey:
Oh, my God, 27 inches is magnificent.
Casey:
And I have never looked at my 15 inch MacBook Pro and thought, oh, my God, the screen is so tiny until now.
Casey:
It is insane.
Casey:
And one of the things that I've noticed is I've gotten really, really into using spaces on my MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And I don't use them nearly as heavily here because I have so much frigging real estate.
Casey:
I can put a million windows on the screen.
Casey:
By a million, I mean like five, John.
Casey:
But I could put a million windows on the same screen and have them tiled and not feel overwhelmed.
Casey:
It's magnificent.
Marco:
Welcome, Casey.
Casey:
I know.
Marco:
Welcome.
Marco:
I've been trying to get you to walk through this door for so long.
Casey:
You can only bring the horse to water, as they say.
Marco:
Believe me, you don't need help with that.
Casey:
So anyway, so the only complaints I have so far, first of all, I have no good solution for this really.
Casey:
But having the ports on the back of a curved surface, I'm not really into that.
Casey:
It's kind of wonky to plug in like a USB key or USB devices.
Casey:
I mean, not a big deal, but it's a little wonkier than I'm used to on my laptop.
Casey:
Yes, I know, first world problems.
Casey:
However, the SD card slot does not trip my SD card's write protect switch like both of my MacBook Pros did every single time.
Casey:
So that's a big win.
Casey:
The new Magic Keyboard or whatever they're calling this thing, very thin.
Casey:
I like it a lot.
Casey:
Charges via lightning.
Casey:
I like that a lot.
Casey:
That being said, this arrow key situation that I thought John was completely overblowing, oh God, it's the worst.
Casey:
It's the worst.
Casey:
Having the full height left and right just totally throws off my arrow key game.
Casey:
And I know I'm going to get used to it over time, but right now it's driving me up a wall.
John:
You don't have to get used to it.
John:
You can buy an Apple keyboard with an inverted T that you can feel with your fingers and you never miss it.
John:
Every single key is full size.
John:
It's great.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or you can also get the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard that I recommend so much for like 60 bucks and solve this problem really quickly.
Casey:
But I blew that on the shipping.
Casey:
I couldn't even get that out of the straight face.
Casey:
I tried so hard to sell that.
Casey:
I lost it.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So anyway, so I have just this very moment.
Casey:
I am tweeting a picture of my setup that I had queued up because I didn't want to spoil the fun for those who listen live.
Casey:
And I am really digging this.
Casey:
I think I had mentioned last episode that I have cleaned up my office quite a bit.
Casey:
My desk used to be a total disaster.
Casey:
And now it actually looks nice and clean.
Casey:
The floor you can actually see now, which is really exciting.
Casey:
So I'm feeling good.
Casey:
I'm feeling like this is a fresh start.
Marco:
i i just i'm so happy i'm just so happy you finally are on something real what come on no i mean like look i did the the you know 15 inch laptop with the second monitor on a desk thing for years and it's fine and but but if you can do this instead this is better and it's not a little bit better it's a lot better
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
It's so far so good.
Casey:
I really like it.
Casey:
And I haven't yet missed having a laptop.
Casey:
Give me time.
Casey:
I might.
Casey:
But I mean, we have enough other laptops that aren't quite as new, but we have enough other laptops floating around between my work laptop, which actually is fairly new.
Casey:
My personal laptop, which I'm thinking about putting a really tiny SSD in, even though it's from 2011.
Marco:
You know, you could probably get an SSD for 40 minutes.
Casey:
yeah i'm thinking like a hundred like 64 128 gig ssd would be more than enough for an occasional computer but yeah it's so far i'm really enjoying it so far i'm really really really happy and we'll see what happens and i know for some people this is like completely old and boring news but there's a lot of people in fact most people that i know are full-time laptop users and so if you're one of those people like i was until just this past monday um you know i mean it doesn't have to be that way there there are
Casey:
I wouldn't say there are greener pastures, but there are... There are larger, less portable pastures.
Casey:
Yes, there are larger and less portable pastures around.
Casey:
So, yeah, that's my follow-up about that.
Marco:
Well, and also, I mean, like, if anybody is thinking, like, oh, why are they talking about one person's computer choice, you would be amazed how much email we get and how many tweets we get from people asking what computers we use or what they should buy or asking us to talk more about this kind of stuff.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that a lot of people...
John:
care about this and i do too and i'm one of those people that's why i love talking about this stuff yep completely agree we got one of those emails earlier today in fact so that's the deal but uh so far so good so far two thumbs up on the iMac john any thoughts i think your keyboard's too high i'm concerned about you because like so this is one of the things when you're switching from laptop to uh i mean i guess it depends on what you do if you literally put your laptop on your lap
John:
then you can pretty easily have your arms at a right angle while you're typing but if you're sitting at a desk the way most people sit at a desk like with a chair and desk height like a typical chair and desk height the keyboard is way too high so you either need to raise your chair oh in which case the monitor is probably too low and then you need to raise your monitor
John:
Or you need to lower your keyboard by using a keyboard tray or something like that.
John:
So I'm concerned that if you're going to use the computer for a long time, you may be in a different position than you were with your laptop.
John:
Now, if you're using your laptop on top of the same desk in the same position, then you already have that problem.
John:
I'm just saying I think your keyboard is too high.
John:
I'm also concerned about you hanging your headphones on the boom arm for the mic.
John:
That seems like putting on due stress on the arm.
John:
And you are revealing yourself as a left side dock user, which is... Hey, I'm a left side dock user.
John:
Oh, please.
Marco:
That looks like the Rode boom arm.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
And the Rode Podcaster is way heavier than the combination of those headphones and that microphone.
John:
now what's wrong with are you a doc on the bottom kind of guy are you a right side doc i'm i wish the doc didn't exist kind of guy well right given that's old school given that's the case where do you keep your doc john like on laptops i keep it on the right because the screen's too damn small and you can't do it and on desktops with big screens i keep it on the bottom and i grumble about it but the left the left is madness
Casey:
Okay, so the reason I have it on the left is a holdover for my laptop days.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I would have in any of my working environments, be it work or home or what have you, I always had the laptop directly in front of me.
Casey:
And then I would have an external monitor to the right of the laptop.
Casey:
And thus, the dock was on the leftmost edge of my two-screen setup.
Casey:
I guess alternatively, I could have done the exact same thing and had it on the far right side of the external monitor, but I've just always liked it on the left.
Casey:
And it seems insane to me, to your point, more so on laptops than desktops.
Casey:
But on these widescreen displays, why in God's green earth would you keep the dock on the bottom?
Casey:
And I should also note that mine auto hides, which will probably drive you crazy as well.
John:
yeah i'm not a fan of auto hide now you keep it on the bottom because once the screen is humongous it's not like it's really eating into your screen like oh yeah it is wider than it is tall but this thing is so freaking big like it's not like you're you're eating up the space so it's fine and uh the bottom is wider because if you have lots of stuff in your dock whether it's lots of docked items or lots of applications it's more room for them to line up before they start shrinking right so
John:
yeah i guess so i don't know i'm a left doc kind of guy i'm with you on that casey solidarity in the left i so wish we didn't have to run the doc like this is the one like one of the few handful of remaining persistent os 10 things that annoy me like because i run drag thing and i would only run drag if i could but notifications still can only be received by the doc and notifications are important enough to see the little badge on an icon or see a little bounce and
John:
And drag thing can't get them.
John:
And only the dock can.
John:
So I'm forced to run the dock and I could hide the dock.
John:
But I don't like having to go down there when the little thing pops up.
John:
And if you hide the dock, you can't see badges like slack, just badges.
John:
It doesn't bounce.
John:
And I don't like bouncing.
John:
It's just it's an uncomfortable situation with the dock where I wish I didn't have to run it.
John:
But I do, and it seems like that's never going to change.
John:
Anyway, the dock, I think, is the right, as I've written many times, I think the dock is at this point the right choice for most people.
John:
But for me specifically, I really wish there was some way I didn't have to run it.
Casey:
Oh, I should also note, just to really drive you up a wall, that I also use magnification, and I like it.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Whatever, whatever.
Marco:
I don't go that far, but I respect you for being that guy.
Marco:
That's me.
Casey:
I am that guy.
John:
A left-side auto-hide magnifying dog.
John:
I was going to say it's like you're a new Mac user, but you are.
John:
You actually are.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
There's an infinite timescale joke here somewhere.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else is awesome these days, Marco?
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So there's been some news from IAD, which is something I didn't think I'd ever really care enough to say on this show.
Casey:
But there's been some things going on.
Casey:
And there was an announcement this week.
Casey:
So tell me about that one of you.
John:
It was confusing because I originally had this in the notes.
John:
I read their like, again, I don't care about iAd.
John:
It doesn't really affect my life at all.
John:
I don't really have apps that use it.
John:
I'm not a developer.
John:
But like, oh, yeah, iAd is still a thing.
John:
And there's this little tiny announcement.
John:
And like, I guess everyone just read it quickly and was confused.
John:
It's like a paragraph long.
John:
iad app network will be discontinued is the headline iad app network will be discontinued as of june 30th 2016 blah blah blah blah it's like a paragraph of text saying oh i guess they're are they not doing iad anymore well whatever they were never good at it didn't seem like ads didn't seem like apple's heart where it wasn't ads or whatever but
John:
uh i and many other people missed that second word in there i add app network not i add itself as a concept but the i add app network which is a way that you can advertise apps in the app store through i ads so they're not doing that anymore but i add is still going to be a thing and i guess we can continue to go back you know we can go back to ignoring it like we always did
John:
um i was actually kind of hoping i was kind of disappointed when i learned that they're only talking about the thing that lets you advertise apps that are in the app store through iad i wish the whole thing would go away because as far as i'm concerned it's not like a value add like to me as a user i don't care that apple has an advertising thing that people sell ads on like you may say oh it enables people to have free apps in the app store but i don't really don't think people need more ways to have free apps in the app store um
John:
I don't think that iAds are particularly better than other kinds of ads.
John:
Maybe they are.
John:
Maybe I don't buy enough apps with ads.
John:
Maybe Apple's ads really are as fancy as they say and, you know, so much better.
John:
But just it just doesn't appeal to me.
John:
It doesn't make me feel better about Apple as a company.
John:
And I would be glad if they said, you know what, that iAd thing we were doing, forget it.
John:
We're just not doing it all anymore.
John:
We're going to phase it up.
John:
Instead, they're just phasing out this small component of it.
John:
So I'm actually kind of disappointed that my misreading of this announcement is not what's actually going on.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, iAd is a weird beast, and obviously it has not gone the way Apple hoped it would.
Marco:
I mean, keep in mind, when they first made this, they were showing off those fancy Nissan Leaf, one of the first ads for it, that was all interactive, and you tap it, and you spin the car around, all this crap.
Marco:
And they were envisioning this very, very expensive and clean ad format that...
John:
almost immediately flopped i mean like i don't think they got past i i honestly don't think they got past their launch partners on it like i don't think they ever had any other ads that were that fancy like super interactive kind after the launch partners it's like the pipe dream of advertisers thinking that you're going to be spending time like like like using their like you'll you will sit there and willingly interact with an ad like oh i can spend the nice like that is a fantasy isn't this fun i'm engaging all over your brand
John:
right like i mean there are ways to get people to do things but it has to be like you have to have like a you know a funny viral video or a game or whatever but the idea that someone's going to be so interested in the nissan leaf that that an ad that pops up in an ios app an ad in an ios app you went to the app to do something and nissan leaf pops up on your screen you'll be like you know what i was going to do something but let me spend 10 minutes tapping around inside this interactive ad that is that is a fantasy of an advertising person who just just has convinced themselves to
John:
that people are going to i mean unless you're giving them free money or you're you know like there's a limited number of ways to actually get that interaction interaction and all of them are pretty terrible and so trying to make a classy nice one like if someone's really interested in the nissan leaf they're going to like go to the nissan website or maybe they'll download the nissan app or something but they're sure as hell not going to take a break from going to play a game they were going to play or whatever application they were using and derail themselves and interact with your ad so
John:
that just seemed doomed from the start.
Marco:
Well, and not only was it the advertiser pipe dream, I think moreover it was Apple's pipe dream that this is the kind of thing advertisers would actually do and would want in a way that would be compatible with what Apple wanted.
Marco:
What Apple wanted, from what we all heard from the stories at the time, basically Apple wanted tons of control, way huge buy-ins up front from big brand companies, brand advertising like Coke and Nissan, not like...
Marco:
Not like small stuff that would advertise on podcasts.
Marco:
Big stuff that would advertise on TV.
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
And imagine working with Apple as an advertiser.
Marco:
That's just not compatible.
Marco:
Apple wants a certain degree of control and everything.
Marco:
And the fact is, in order for ads to work...
Marco:
they have to do things that conflict with what Apple does most of the time.
Marco:
It only takes... If an advertiser is looking at a bunch of possible platforms they can advertise on, and they're like, well, we can work with Apple and spend a ton of money for an ad that gets X click-through rate, or we can make our own and put it on these many other mobile ad networks that is...
John:
maybe a little bit more annoying or a little bit more flashy or a little bit less user polite um but that'll get twice the click-through rate and twice the conversion rate because it because it turns out being annoying works and not just a little not just a little bit but a lot like yeah the the race to the bottom of advertising like you know i mean there's a reason you know the one weird trick things are everywhere like you just go right to the bottom like what are the base brainstem like reaction thing is just you put up
John:
a picture of a pretty lady you put up a gross thing you put out a tease about celebrities you put you know so stupid boxes that are at the bottom of every website i'm so depressed when i see them now like i like punch the monkey better than this like when you go at the bottom of every website all of a sudden there's these you know nine squares attempting to tap into the nine most primal uh instincts of human beings to get you to click on something and
John:
like I scroll down, like I'll be reading a website that I think is a good website.
John:
I'd be like, Oh, not you too.
John:
Really?
John:
Everybody?
John:
Like, it's just, you know, it's just terrible.
John:
And, and those, and they do that for a reason because they're effective.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's totally, like you said, Marco, that's totally against what Apple wants.
John:
Apple wishes people were different than they are, but they are not.
John:
What people actually click on are one weird trick ads.
John:
And Apple does not want one weird trick or didn't originally.
John:
So this utopian vision of I had, I still think I had is better probably about keeping out the worst of the worst of
Marco:
scammy ads but you know that it's it's across purposes uh the advertisers want effectiveness and apple wants to not annoy people and those don't really go together right and apple also has you know strict privacy controls and and advertisers you know for advertisers invading your privacy is very profitable it helps them better target their ads and you know and they even tell themselves it's better for you whether you agree is up to you
Marco:
But the whole idea of don't annoy our customers and respect their privacy, and we're only going to give you access to this little sandbox of information, and you're only allowed to do these things, that goes against what every advertiser wants and what many other ad networks would demand.
Marco:
So the only ways to make this work would really be if they banned any other kind of ad network from running on iOS, which they could do.
John:
I'm surprised they didn't do that.
Marco:
honestly i am too um but they they could do that no question but uh and maybe they will in the future i i doubt it but they could it would be a little hard to enforce could you start getting into getting into questions of like maybe like what is an ad but app review has never shied away from vagaries and difficult distinctions all that would make is all that mean is all the advertisements would be coming as push notifications instead of only 15 of them
Marco:
So iAd, it started out this way with this fancy Nissan Leaf stuff.
Marco:
It very, very quickly did not fill up with those things and instead started filling up with crappier ads.
Marco:
Your earlier point is, I think, fair of like, why did they even run this at all?
Marco:
And I've also heard from developers complaints that the fill rate was never very good on iAd.
Marco:
And so the fill rate for people who aren't in this business...
Marco:
It's literally just like, you know, if you have an app and you have an iAd banner in the app, what percentage of the time does iAd actually have an ad to serve in there?
Marco:
And if they don't have an ad to serve in there, it's just like blank, you know?
Marco:
So what percentage of the time do they actually have something?
Marco:
And you as the app publisher want that to be 100% or at least as close as you can get to 100%.
Marco:
The iAd people basically have never had that kind of fill rate as far as what I've understood.
Marco:
And so what usually happens if you're implementing iAd, usually you have like a fallback network where you can supply to the iAd thing.
Marco:
You can say, if you don't have an ad, show this.
Marco:
And then there, you put in another ad network that will presumably have something to show there for you.
Marco:
So on one hand, you can say, if you can think about why Apple might want to keep iAd, to me, the biggest argument is they think it's the lesser of the two evils.
Marco:
We're like, well, if you're going to have ad-supported apps, which seem to be a common enough thing now, that's a given now.
Marco:
There are going to be ad-supported apps.
Marco:
So if there's going to be ad-supported apps, might as well be our nice, respectful of your privacy ad network rather than someone else's.
Marco:
That is the best argument for iAd still existing.
Marco:
But in practice, because everyone's using these backfilled networks in addition to iAd, we're not even achieving that goal.
Marco:
We're not getting the nice privacy and everything else.
Marco:
We're not getting that because if you're running ad-supported apps...
Marco:
You're running arbitrary code from God knows who from these other ad networks that's doing God knows what on your phone.
Marco:
And at least iOS has things nicely sandboxed and everything to make it a little bit harder to be creepy.
Marco:
But there is still creepiness to be had.
Marco:
And so I think the theoretical goal of iAd being like, well, better us than them, I don't think works in practice.
Marco:
So I think I'm with you, John.
Marco:
I don't really see why they keep running it.
John:
also seems like a previous generation ad network because these days the thing to do is not you know i mean we all know about native advertising but like the in between where it's not completely native advertising but it's like in the flow of what you're normally doing it's not a banner on the top or bottom of the page while the rest of your app continues its business if you're if your app has any kind of timeline for example
John:
the ads would be put in the timeline like instagram ads they just appear to be another picture but oh wow my friends suddenly became better photographers oh it's an ad um it's not a banner that appears coming down from the top of the instagram app while you're using it that's the old model like you want it to be integrated so not everyone has an app that's like that obviously they can't work for games and stuff like that although actually it can because you put billboards inside the games and do all this stuff like that but flappy bird made all of its money via ads
John:
Yeah, that that one did have just a little banner, but like advertising that's better integrated into the application is certainly the trend.
John:
And I doesn't give you any help there.
John:
I agree that it's mostly it seems like it's mostly there just because like, hey, we want to make it easy as possible for developers to write apps for iOS.
John:
And since some developers want to be free with ads, we provide a way to make ads.
John:
uh and if you don't like it do your own way but when you're starting out as a developer in the same way that you may not have credit card processing set up and be able to deal with customers and be able to do all this other things hey the app store will do that for you and you want to put ads don't worry about negotiating a deal with an added network if i will do all that for you like it seems like a sort of starter kit training wheels type thing that also happens to give apple
John:
a little bit of control but the fact that it's not super popular means that i don't see it evolving into a more sophisticated framework for for you know like say you have a timeline app here's a new wwc session how you use the iad network to uh have native advertising filling in your application instead of just having banners above and below and stuff and i don't know i just it just seems like one of those products that
John:
Apple doesn't really seem to care about, that's not important to the company, that's probably not going to get a lot of attention.
John:
The only announcement out of it is a paragraph little thing saying you can't advertise your apps in it anymore.
John:
It just doesn't seem like a winner.
Marco:
If they're going to keep doing iAd, they should go all the way.
Marco:
They should ban other ad networks and make iAd so good that that actually works.
Marco:
But now they have this weird half-butted way of doing it with...
Marco:
it's just kind of like well we have this thing it mostly sucks you can also do these other things and everyone who ever tries both will end up doing this other thing because it's going to be way better than us i think that the they can't uh go back and close the door on third-party ads now because i think that would put them at an even bigger competitive disadvantage against android
John:
you're probably right you know you know like it's maybe when when android was really weak and they were the big game in town they could have set a precedent like they did with so many of their strong arm app store things right but at this point like it's too late the the the horse is out i can't close the barn door whatever you know half half butted is right
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Casey:
iTunes Radio.
Casey:
Apparently that's going away-ish.
Casey:
The free stuff is going away.
Casey:
As a listener of ad-supported radio and Apple Music, we want you to know that it is being discontinued starting January 28th, which is probably about a week after this episode is released.
Casey:
Additionally, with an Apple Music membership, you can access dozens of radio stations handcrafted by our team of music experts, commercial-free with unlimited skips.
Casey:
So they're kind of pulling in the reins on iTunes Radio, too.
John:
yeah you still have beats one beats one is still free um but i guess the other ad supported i mean maybe people aren't listening to them maybe it's just a reacting to the market or whatever but it's just an excuse to you know another opportunity to say you know if you pay for apple music you get lots of cool stuff uh but you're not getting these ad supported radio stations anymore you just get beats one
John:
beats one is free even if you're not an apple music subscriber i totally forgot that itunes radio was a thing i this this news made no sense to me until just now when i finally remembered oh yeah it's like i had and this are also like services that you forgot existed that are now being changed or canceled and you're like uh well all right i guess
Marco:
I mean, a lot of people were upset about this part of it.
Marco:
I saw a lot of people talking about it, but I thought there was some kind of Apple Music indefinite trial mode.
Marco:
But I guess that was just iTunes Radio, which they launched a year or two earlier.
Marco:
And that was basically their Pandora clone.
Marco:
So that one had a free ad mode and a paid mode.
Marco:
Was there a paid mode?
Marco:
I don't even remember.
Marco:
It was such a weird kind of half-baked service for all that time.
Marco:
But Beats 1, so Apple Music has always been paid only, but was Beats 1 allowed to be available for free?
Marco:
The chat room says Beats 1 has always been free.
Casey:
Oh, I did not realize.
Casey:
Never knew that.
Casey:
Yeah, me neither.
Casey:
No, we should do some homework once every one now and again.
Marco:
All right, your homework is to listen to Beats 1 for a week.
Marco:
Good luck.
Marco:
No, none of us were into that part of Apple Music.
Casey:
So speaking about things that we know nothing about, let's talk about the new Apple Music apps.
John:
A little bit about them.
John:
I downloaded it.
John:
I tried to do things with it.
John:
So they announced a new version of GarageBand for iOS, which is great.
John:
You know, it looks cool.
John:
It looks interesting for people who use GarageBand on iOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and they have one a new app called what the heck is it called music memos i believe that's right and this app probably makes a lot of sense if you are the type of person who had previously been using the bundled voice memos app to record little snippets when you get ideas for songs like if you're a musician and you're on the go and you're like a little tune is stuck in my head and you want to like make a note of it for later rather than calling yourself and leaving it on your voicemail which is also a thing that i've heard musicians do
John:
um you can use the voice memos app to just hum a little tune into it whatever music memos is an app that says it's as far as i can tell stop doing that use this app instead because that's what it's made for uh and you do something into it with either your voice guitar piano
John:
and then it will like auto put auto accompaniments accompaniments with it with like their little you know sort of ai tempo matching thing with different kind of music lines and then you can export it into garage band and go on with it now i really have no idea how i would ever use this app i probably wouldn't at all but serenity caldwell wrote up uh wrote about it on i more uh so you should read this article the headline is very straight to the point i wrote and published a song in 30 minutes with apple's music memos
John:
So this is clearly an app with a definite audience that is not me, but it seems neat in the same way GarageBand seems neat.
John:
And it got me thinking about iOS.
John:
I mean, this starts to get into our area and Marco's area specifically iOS devices.
John:
as uh platforms for doing audio stuff they seem so perfect because they're small battery powered they have more than enough cpu power to do most of the things you want to do with audio because audio is wimpier like i mean these days you can do amazing video things with them but audio is wimpy enough that the cpus in the modern ios devices absolutely crush it they're like yeah no we can do all sorts of amazing things it's just a question of screen size and inputs and outputs
John:
So every time I see Apple trying to make iOS devices more viable hardware accompaniments to audio things, whether it be music or podcasting or whatever, I think that's a great move because it just seems like such a natural fit.
John:
And I mean, Marco can probably speak to this better than anyone, but like the frustrations with...
Marco:
knowing that the power is in there that you could do really awesome audio things with iOS except for and I would imagine it's usually input output but maybe you know and and software and the market for that software or whatever so yeah basically I mean I this is I had the same opinion as you of this app of like I'm I'm really happy to see Apple's doing stuff like this it looks like a great app that I will never use because I don't have that kind of creative talent and I wish I did but I don't
Marco:
In general, I think it was on Connected where our friend Mike Hurley mentioned that iOS is the happening place to be in software right now.
Marco:
All the exciting software is happening on iOS.
Marco:
All the innovation, for the most part, is happening on iOS.
Marco:
If you want an app to do something cool on iOS, you probably have at least five or ten different choices for what that app might be.
Marco:
Whereas if you're looking for a similar kind of Mac app, you might have one or two.
Marco:
iOS is just where the action is right now.
Marco:
And it is unfortunate that there is so much about iOS that limits or makes it difficult to do certain kinds of work or certain kinds of multitasking or activities that
Marco:
And, you know, over time, they keep trying to lift those with varying degrees of success.
Marco:
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Marco:
But iOS is where this kind of stuff happens these days.
John:
I was thinking about what is the new Rogamiba app?
John:
Loopback.
John:
Loopback, yeah.
John:
So imagine, I mean, again, it's not a hardware issue.
John:
Imagine if you could have an iPad.
John:
that had the power of audio hijack and loopback like you like we're always thinking of going to something that we know something about podcasting can we have like a little portable podcasting studio where you can record multiple people uh you know some of them local some of them remote uh
John:
right uh do do like uh the equivalent of skype calls or facetime or whatever and record them in their locations and record locally with people and then do all the editing for like can you produce a podcast with just an ios device and hardware wise you totally can there's plenty of storage space for a podcast the the screens are big enough to do editing like jason snell recently edited one of the incomparable episodes on audio editor on the podcast like this is all possible it's just a question of
John:
i o uh getting the software out there that can do this and then having some hopefully nice os supportive facility for doing all the sort of system level things we just described that the rogue amoeba apps do on on the mac uh where you do have access like a loopback lets you make
John:
uh artificial virtual audio devices essentially so you say i want the audio from these three microphones to be presented to skype as a single input because skype is dumb and just wants a single input really i have three people talking here um and uh audio hijack lets you set up audio pipelines from this app to that app to this app like say you want to have like a soundboard app where you can insert
John:
Sounds into the podcast in real time and have the other people who are on the call here.
John:
Like, these are all things we all do today on a Mac.
John:
You know, it's why Macs are powerful and we love them.
John:
But hardware-wise, there's no reason an iPad can't do all of that.
John:
It's just software barriers.
John:
And then I guess hardware barriers for...
John:
connectivity like how the hell are you gonna hook up all these mics to your thing do they all have lightning connectors hanging out the end is there some kind of hub or whatever so we seem so close to i mean i know there's tons of things like you know for for music i think it's much better like musical instrument apps for uh sequencing things and for uh performing music on them and for composing songs and garage band on it like the music industry seems better served by it than like the the podcasting industry but
John:
It frustrates me because I still see reasons why video, you might need a beefier rig to do it.
John:
Like video, the storage requirements are much bigger.
John:
The IO requirements are bigger.
John:
You probably want more space to do stuff.
John:
So we're still not quite there.
John:
But audio, we just seem like eternally on the cusp.
John:
So I'm really happy that Apple also sees this.
John:
Because if someone had said, hey, what do you think the first new app for iOS that Apple is going to announce in 2016?
John:
I doubt many people would have thought of something like music memos.
John:
But I'm glad that Apple did because it shows that they understand audio.
John:
like the strengths of the platform they have and we just this has got to keep going and it's got to it's got to get down to the os level and the multitasking level and the you know the access to audio on the device and then eventually the io and i think we will maybe five years from now be able to do full podcast uh recording and production on the go with an ipad but we'll see
Casey:
Is that what Fraser Spears is doing with Canvas, with Federico Vatici?
Casey:
Is he recording on the iPad as well?
Marco:
I believe he does.
Casey:
See, I thought so too.
Casey:
It says in this blog post, which we'll link, that we are walking the walk too.
Casey:
The show itself is edited and published entirely on iOS using Ferrite, which is what Jason Snell has been talking about.
Casey:
I thought that they had said that they were also recording it on iOS, but I'm not 100% sure.
Marco:
I know Fraser does.
Marco:
I'm not sure if Federico does.
Casey:
Maybe that's what it is, is that only Fraser does, and that's why I didn't say it in his blog post.
Marco:
I think Apple has this view of how the world should be, how modern computing should be, and what they mean by that is iOS, and how things should be isolated from each other, how things should be safe and should be secure and locked down.
Marco:
And
Marco:
If you look at what kind of innovation happens on the Mac and historically on desktop computing, it tends to very frequently involve some kind of hack that is just not possible on iOS devices.
Marco:
For instance, what you're talking about, if you want to record something for podcasting, there are special tools that basically try to do voice over IP and also record it so that you can use it for podcasting.
Marco:
they tend to not be as good as just using Skype.
Marco:
So what everyone does is we just use Skype.
Marco:
And then we use apps on the Mac to record our Skype calls that mostly are hacks.
Marco:
Sometimes PSO is a pretty straightforward recorder because it can share the input.
Marco:
But what a lot of people do to record Skype is just use Skype call recorder from Ecamm, which is a complete hack that is impossible on iOS because it basically injects itself into Skype and records that way.
Marco:
and on ios there is a skype app for ios but you can't record out of it in software the only way to do that would be to have two devices and like to run the audio out from one into some kind of lightning connected usb audio interface which believe me that's a whole world of pain if i've done that it's not great um you know to have like these these weird like
Marco:
cheaply made, unreliable $70 audio interfaces for iOS devices, some of which might be able to keep a charge, some of which won't.
Marco:
They all have these big plastic garbage knobs on them.
Marco:
It's like trying to buy a high-quality USB hub.
Marco:
It's very, very difficult.
John:
What you're doing there is you're doing the hardware version.
John:
You're doing like a reverse skewer morphic hardware version of Audio Hijack.
John:
Like you are literally connecting boxes with actual wires in the real world instead of dragging and dropping the little boxes.
John:
And even things like Audio Hijack, I think Loopback must be using supported facilities for creating virtual devices or something.
John:
Even on OS X, like you said, a lot of these things that we're using right now, I'm using Call of Recorder right now, are kind of hacks that
John:
uh but every time i see hacks on any system whether it's os 10 or you know ios where we can't really have them or whatever it's like the fact that so many people like the fact that people are building businesses selling these hacks which is very difficult to do because you have to be really careful and you can't screw up stuff and like it shows there's such an incredible market need that software developers are willing to fill that need that it is lucrative for them to fill that need even though it is super hard work and they're the stuff breaks when you know apple changes things out from underneath them
John:
um it shows that like they're crying out for your os to have supported facilities for this functionality and so tons of things on ios that aren't even possible i always wonder like if we can't have the hacks is that removing a signal from apple but then i look at the mac and i'm like they're not getting that signal either it's so clear that we want to do more sophisticated things with audio that like you know that we just named ecamm and rogamiba two businesses basically built i know ecamm sells a lot of things but rogamiba built around selling audio stuff to do things with
John:
your mac that people clearly want to do that they're willing to pay good money for that they have to do as hacks because apple doesn't have a good supported way to do it and it's just the signal's just not getting through like they'll pass in the grass hacksies thing like this is where people are walking apple like make pave pave their paths like it's it's such a it's such a clear signal and it's frustrating to not see them take advantage of anyway sorry i derailed your connecting of boxes with crappy uh plastic things
Marco:
No, but like it's what you're saying like this.
Marco:
It's exactly it ties in earlier with what you were saying with IAD where like with IAD it's like Apple had this view of how they thought the world was or maybe it was wishful thinking how they thought the world would become if they would build these, you know, beautiful, you know.
Marco:
clean, concrete rooms for people to fill with all this respect for your privacy in an industry that just doesn't do that.
Marco:
Apple thought that the world would adapt to their vision for iAd, and it just didn't.
Marco:
And that was kind of a foolish thing to even think would be possible.
Marco:
And I think you can look at the bigger picture of how they lock down iOS and to an increasing degree the Mac, but the Mac is still nowhere near the level of lockdown that iOS is.
Marco:
You can look at that versus the pressures of...
Marco:
us needing some of these hacks to get our work done or to innovate.
Marco:
So much innovation has happened through hacks like this.
Marco:
A few months ago, we mentioned things like Dropbox, find integration, all this crazy stuff that now is either not possible anymore or harder or more limited as the OS keeps getting more and more locked down.
Marco:
enabling these hacks to some degree is very productive and and to some degree necessary for us to get our work done and and to push things forward and like like earlier today i was maybe i'll do the after show on on how i jailbroke two iphones today for the first time in like six years something um but you know and it's for the same reason of like apple has this vision of how things should be and everything is locked down and isolated and it will allegedly work perfectly and it's the future of computing because they're the ones saying it's the future of computing because
Marco:
Certainly, if you're the one talking and you're making computing devices, you want to say yours is the future of computing.
Marco:
You can say it as much as you want.
Marco:
It doesn't make it true.
Marco:
It might become true, but there's no guarantee of that.
Marco:
But they're saying this is the future of computing, but they have this very highly opinionated view of them being in extreme control of quite a bit more than what their users can do and what, of course, developers can do as well.
Marco:
And the reality of that is you have people saying, I can't get work done on iOS devices because of reasons X, Y, or Z. And Apple's trying to knock those reasons down.
Marco:
They're trying to solve it.
Marco:
They want people to be able to get their work done on iOS devices.
Marco:
But there are these major barriers that Apple won't budge on that are just fatal barriers to a lot of these uses.
Marco:
Podcast recording with Skype is, yes, it's a narrow thing that only podcasters care about, but it is a very good representative of the problem as a whole of so much of what we do today is like these big, private, centralized power holders that we have to deal with.
Marco:
So in this case, Skype.
Marco:
Turns out Skype is the best VoIP thing for podcasters to use to communicate with each other while they're recording.
Marco:
And if you want to record a Skype call, you can't sit around and wait for Skype to release an iOS app update that will enable recording in their iOS app.
Marco:
Because they probably will never do it.
Marco:
You have no input on that.
Marco:
That's out of your control as a user or developer.
Marco:
What you can do on the Mac is you can kind of hack around and you can make this work.
Marco:
On iOS, you can't do that.
Marco:
That's a big problem.
Marco:
And so you can...
Marco:
Extend this to so many problems that chances are, if you look around at what any given person does on their Mac, I bet almost everyone who uses a Mac depends on at least one weird hack that is not possible on iOS.
Marco:
They depend on that on the Macs to do what they need to do.
Marco:
And sometimes these are Apple doing these hacks because they can hack as much as they want.
Marco:
Sometimes it's other companies.
Marco:
And on the Mac, we can still do that.
Marco:
And on iOS, we've never been able to.
Marco:
And that does limit things in the same way that Apple's insistence on the app being the strictly walled container for your data has been so limiting so far with iOS.
Marco:
And they're starting to break down some of those walls with iCloud Drive and stuff, but with mixed degrees of success and mixed degrees of confusion.
John:
Yeah, that's the big paradigm switch that's the difficulty of, like, the monolithic app.
John:
Because, like you're saying, you're waiting for Skype to add that feature.
John:
Or those people, like, the apps that you have to say, oh, this app will let you record multiple people and it'll do voice over IP.
John:
Like, you have to have one app to do it all because it's not... Even on the Mac, it's still somewhat difficult.
John:
But at least on the Mac, historically, we've had the ability to mix and match.
John:
Here's the best app for talking to someone over the internet.
John:
Here's the best app for recording.
John:
Here's the best app for editing my podcast.
John:
Here's, you know, like, that we could...
John:
that we had job-specific apps that you could use to work together to perform a single job.
John:
Or in iOS, it's like, well, it's kind of easy if you just have one app that's, like, called Podcast Recording Studio, whatever, you know, that does everything.
John:
You know, it has to have its own voice over IP client to talk to people remotely.
John:
It has to have its own microphone interfacing thing.
John:
It has to have its own editor.
John:
It has to have its own denoising filter.
John:
It's like, because if you didn't, it's like, oh, some might have to export this audio to this other app.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Talking to Jason Snell about podcast production, he's using some super fancy audio processing program on his Mac that he's really impressed with that does an amazing job of like intelligently removing noise even better than the ones he was using before.
John:
He can mix that into his workflow to say, oh, I was using this.
John:
You know, I think he's used like three different apps for it.
John:
Every time he finds a better one, he just swaps it out.
John:
um and maybe it would be better if there was one big integrated app that did everything but then he couldn't like upgrade it piecemeal to say this part of my workflow i have just made a lot better um and it is kind of frustrating to have to incorporate all those apps together and deal with it you know but like there's advantages and disadvantages and ios is totally on the you launch one app your device becomes that app and that app does everything for you and if it doesn't like no one's leaving garage band to go out to some other thing constantly back and forth right it's more of like a more of the waterfall model right but if you're doing the uh
John:
For podcast production, it's a great example where you'd want to at the very least separate the thing that like remotely talks to people, whether it's FaceTime audio or Skype or whatever, like whatever is best for that.
John:
That is a complicated application in its own right.
John:
And you're like, let that app do what it wants to do.
John:
I just need to, in audio hijack parlance, connect the little tube that has the audio coming out of it from whatever app I'm using for that into this app that's also recording from my local microphones and then I can see the waveforms or whatever.
John:
Anyway, we're not there yet.
Marco:
And the kind of power that enables is that, like, Loopback, the new algorithm we're talking about, and before that, Audio Hijack, these are apps that, like, this can not only make things possible that weren't possible before, but this can, like, eliminate the need for hardware.
Marco:
Like, that's very powerful, especially for things like affordability or just, like, just speed of deployment and experimentation of things.
Marco:
Like, I mean, there are so many.
Marco:
I've hacked with audio so much.
Marco:
And I have a closet full of dumb wires and dumb little boxes that do one stupid thing because there's no software thing to do it.
Marco:
Everyone who's ever had to do anything with audio has probably had this experience where, oh, well, I could do this because I need this one weird cable to go between these two ports to loop this thing into this thing first, and then I can do this.
Marco:
Audio is a huge pile of hacks, most of which have been, in the past, hardware things that you needed to buy and manage and have on hand.
Marco:
And connect up in certain weird ways and hope nothing breaks.
Marco:
And once you get it working, never touch anything.
Marco:
And then when you get the software side of this, you can move this stuff around.
Marco:
You can play with it.
Marco:
You can do things for free with no hardware in seconds that you could never do before.
Marco:
That's very powerful.
Marco:
That's the kind of innovation that computers are all about.
Marco:
This is what computers have always been about is...
Marco:
Breaking down barriers of what can you not do in the physical world or in the previous world before your computer came around?
Marco:
What were you either not able to do because it was too complicated or out of reach or what was too expensive for you to do before with dedicated hardware or special needs or anything?
Marco:
And the computer knocks down those walls and says, now you can do it.
Marco:
It is very kind of democratized.
Marco:
If you move towards this world of the monolithic app, like you're saying, John, the monolithic app is not only more restrictive than that, and it eliminates a lot of those gains or significantly reduces them, but also it is kind of less democratic in a way because like...
Marco:
The number of people who can make a really great noise removal tool for audio is way bigger than the number of people who can make a complete audio production studio app and backend service.
Marco:
The monolithic app requires that each app be way more advanced than the kind of Unix philosophy of a tool does one thing and does that one thing well and you have multiple tools involved in a workflow.
John:
and we're not even we're not even close to that like if you think about photoshop that is a massive application it does tons and tons of things but there's still illustrator like there's still room for like it doesn't matter how big you make the pieces they're still msp right well you know i'm just saying like that that photoshop despite all the vector tools that they keep adding to photoshop illustrator still has a role those are two massive applications
John:
we're not saying like every tool is like oh this is a tool for making circles this is a tool for making squares like it can it can be ridiculous because whenever you say unix pipeline they're like oh one tool and does one thing well like no matter how big you make it there's always a certain point where you're making photoshop and it's like well uh if we're doing page layout should we add that to photoshop no like keep it in indesign or what like
John:
there's always something else so like we're saying for podcast production there are so many aspects of it no matter how big you make any aspect of that like you can imagine an amazing like skype equivalent for ios that is really reliable like it's an incredibly hard app to make that's it just do that even that alone is basically you know maybe not as big as photoshop but it's a big problem fine take that and move it off and then if you want to go down to all i do is reduce noise like that can be a very small app but there's so many things in between that
John:
Trying to do podcast studio editor production suite, that's too much for, like, anybody to bite off, especially since you can only charge 99 cents for it or have I ads in the bottom.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
You know, I wanted to come back to something John was saying earlier about paving over where people were making the paths in the grass.
Casey:
and that's a reference it is um among other things to this very program anyway um whatever i think we should be considering that apple has done that in many occasions but also with audio bus because audio bus if memory serves was an ios app that would let you kind of route audio between apps and didn't apple start supporting that in garage band like a year or two ago
Marco:
Yeah, it was basically a third-party protocol that people had just kind of made to kind of hack local networking into sending audio between apps so that you could actually have like an audio effects app that was just like a certain effect that would be in a chain that would be supported by other apps that supported Audiobus.
Marco:
And so the big deal there was that not only did Apple not ban that from the App Store, but they built in support to GarageBand on iOS to work with Audiobus apps.
Marco:
So that was very powerful.
Marco:
And so audio is a slight exception to this rule in iOS in that they did support Audiobus.
Marco:
However, only apps that work with Audiobus work in this system, and Skype doesn't.
John:
I was thinking of, like, Audiobus, like, using the local network to hack around.
John:
Like, it's good that they didn't, like, for example, reject it and say you can't do that.
John:
But using loopback network interfaces as your IPC mechanism?
John:
Like, surely there is a better way to get it.
John:
Like, it's iOS, John.
John:
This is all we have.
John:
I seem to recall, have vague memories of us seeing a demo showing drag and drop between two side-by-side iPad applications that also use loopback.
John:
You can do a lot of stuff with loopback network interfaces.
John:
It doesn't mean it's the right solution.
John:
So again, the signal that should have been to Apple is like...
John:
I guess it's good that they had a positive reaction to it, but what they should have done is like, man, there is a clear market need for audio applications to be able to work together and generally to have better audio routing within the system that is a real supported API for shuttling audio buffers around.
John:
And maybe it's difficult because it's kernel-level stuff or whatever.
John:
Whatever they have to do, like...
John:
i guess supporting uh using local network interfaces for it is better than nothing but that's not that's not the answer that's the final answer they can go well we solved that problem now let's move on to the next one you haven't solved it and people there is a need for it and letting a third party you know dictate the uh the protocol is just so unapple like so i would i would just love for them to uh keep advancing in this realm and to address the clear market needs
Marco:
And to kind of break some rules here and there, you know, like Audiobus was, first of all, as you said, I think that was an exception.
Marco:
You know, that was a fluke.
Marco:
That was not like the common pattern that Apple's doing here.
Marco:
But, you know, you look at something like, well, you know, only apps that opt into it are compatible with this system and Skype doesn't support it.
Marco:
Well, in the world of desktop computing, which is still wonderful, by the way.
Marco:
Still, hey, by the way.
Marco:
Hey, guys, still here.
Marco:
Still wonderful.
Marco:
In the world of desktop computing, we can break those rules.
Marco:
We can say, you know what?
Marco:
Skype doesn't support this.
Marco:
Well, we're going to be clever as Ecamm or users of Ecamm software or other people like this.
Marco:
We can be clever.
Marco:
We're going to need this stuff.
Marco:
we can say, you know what, even if your app doesn't support this, we can work around that in this technical, semi-hacky way, and we're going to say, we're going to enable this.
Marco:
And that is so powerful for just enabling people to do things.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Marco:
On iOS, that category of value and that category of innovation is almost impossible.
Marco:
There are some areas for it, but it's very, very limited compared to what you can do on Mac OS X or on Windows or anything like that.
Marco:
And so I feel like we're missing out.
Marco:
We're making computing almost like the same way that the hardware that Apple's selling is so not hackable anymore.
Marco:
You can buy what Apple offers, and everything's soldered to the motherboard now, and you can't replace anything.
Marco:
There was a time back in the day... I made my big post about the MBE whatever 101 non-random MacBook Pro, where at a time when Apple didn't sell...
Marco:
120 gig hard drives you could buy one off newegg for like 200 bucks and put it in and you could have a configuration that apple didn't sell whoa and it was super powerful and you could replace the dvd drive with another hard drive if you wanted a laptop with two hard drives or tons of capacity or one small ssd and one big hard drive
Marco:
You could do stuff like that, and now you can't.
Marco:
Everything's locked down.
Marco:
You can only buy what Apple sells in support configurations for most of their hardware, and that's that.
Marco:
And in iOS, it's the same kind of thing.
Marco:
In the software, it's becoming the same kind of thing, where it's like, you can only do what is prescribed to you by Apple and each app in its own monolithic silo, and that is it.
Marco:
And that is very limiting, and I really am concerned long-term for, like...
Marco:
This kind of dumbing down of computing, there is value in making things more approachable, but I don't think you have to eliminate ways people can innovate in order to do that necessarily.
Marco:
I think there's other solutions to that problem and that these things are being conflated when that isn't necessarily valid.
Casey:
Well, I tend to agree with what you just said, but I think it's worth noting that we're really tainted as desktop users, as people who really love desktops.
Casey:
I mean, I love desktops so much that I literally went from a laptop to a desktop just recently.
Casey:
But what you perceive as handcuffs, I think other people perceive as wings in that it's less...
Casey:
complex in a good way it's less intimidating it's less daunting you know complexity is scary for a lot of users and i'd say even for each of us there are things that we don't know how to do with our computers where that sort of complexity is scary and frustrating and prohibitive and i feel like
Casey:
there's the right tool for the job and i think that a lot of jobs in my opinion recording podcasts being one of them as we've used as an example i think the full bore computer be it a laptop or desktop is the right tool for that job but you can make a really good argument that there are a lot of other jobs where an ios device is if not the rightest tool it is a perfectly acceptable tool and i don't think anything any one thing needs to be all things to all people and
Casey:
It's kind of unfortunate that none of us is a really, really devout iOS user for productivity-related things, because I really think that Federico, for example, would have some strong counterpoints here.
Casey:
And because I'm cut from the same mold that you guys are, I'm having a hard time arguing, playing devil's advocate in their favor.
Marco:
Again, I really do think it's worth clarifying here that you can have complexity and you can have the ability to do complex things without making something harder to use necessarily.
Marco:
You don't need to lock it down to make it easier to use.
John:
Well, I think it's like there's an accident of history here.
John:
Like a lot of the locking down things they're doing is because a lot of the things we just described on the Mac are unsafe.
John:
And we know what happens if you allow them to run rampant.
John:
You get it.
John:
It's not a stable system.
John:
Like what we really want is and what I hope we're all working towards is.
John:
the ability for people to have new ideas and do interesting things without compromising stability safety predictability like essentially wandering into another app's memory space and screwing with it is like the worst possible thing you can do it's terrible right and but on the other hand if you have to wait for apple to provide you supported apis like maybe that's not a great solution what we're looking for is i mean you know this is still you know distant future stuff or whatever like we would like to be able to
John:
um do interesting uh innovative things in safe ways and because we can't do them in safe ways because like the alternatives are basically if that app developer didn't think of it um you can either you know parachute into their memory space and cross your fingers and be really smart which is terrible or you can't do a damn thing about it and what we're looking for is they may not have thought of it and hey here's a way you can do something and you can't screw it up like
John:
that i think we want we want both we want and we're getting it you know in bits and pieces here like it's like that's why the solution isn't hey apple you should allow memory injection on ios like that's not the solution right that doesn't help anybody but because of the state of our languages and the way we do you know everything having to do with computers we're trying to move away from the bad old days where it was the wild west but we haven't quite gotten to the new golden age which is
John:
Now, finally, we have the freedom to do what we want without the things that we know are downsides from past technology.
John:
So it is it's a it's an uncomfortable transitional phase where we don't have the safety we want.
John:
And we're trying to like, I guess the transition is step one, make everything safe.
John:
Step two, find the ways to do all the things we used to do in unsafe ways.
John:
And I just want to hurry up with the step two.
John:
And that's why I think.
John:
like marco said it doesn't have to increase complexity or be scary or whatever we just don't have the new ways to do it yet so apple is more or less doing the right things of like look we know these things are bad we just stop them and you say yeah but i can't do x i can't do y and then it's like all right well you know we're on board with you apple we agree it's not good you know whether it's final default or sandboxing or any other things but like but at some point
John:
you got to give us the new safer supported better like you have to give us the better way to do these things because we want to do these things and if you don't give us away we're gonna do them the old bad way or you know like it's not you can't just pretend this is getting to the core of what marco's point is very often is you can't just pretend that those things were unsafe and bad and we'll never need to do them again so just throw them in the dustbin like what
John:
the the task that people were trying to accomplish is still a task they want to accomplish it if you give them a different better way to do it they will take it if you give them no way to do it then they will just find some other way to accomplish that task probably going back to the old bad way so i definitely feel like we're in a transitional period with all this ios stuff with the ipad pro and everything like that and it's just like it's an exercise in figuring out how we can
John:
evolve this new clearly safer clearly easier to use you know less less stuff that you shouldn't have to be concerned about that's what it boils down to things on ios that you you know that are on the mac you have to be worried about x y and z and on ios you don't worry about them at all that's good thumbs up now let me also use those ios devices or whatever to do the things i could do with my mac but in this new safer way
John:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Fracture, Squarespace, and MailRoute.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
John:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
John:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
What on God's green earth possessed you to jailbreak a device?
Casey:
Two devices.
Casey:
Two devices in 2016.
John:
He didn't want to pay for a game.
John:
He didn't want to pay 99 cents for a game.
John:
Yeah, that was it.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So here's the deal here, which fits in perfectly with what we were just talking about.
Marco:
In developing the next version of Overcast, I'm trying, you know, people have been complaining about battery usage.
Marco:
So I'm trying to reduce its power consumption.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why I've actually replaced the visualizer, the little animated bars.
Marco:
I've replaced that with a different one for the next version that is way, way lower power.
Marco:
And because that was a big power suck.
Marco:
um but i also you know i want to test like the core audio engine and i made i made some improvements there but i want to be able to test this like i can do things that reduce like the percentage of cpu usage while i'm running it from xcode like i can do that but that doesn't tell me how much power it's using and xcode has and there is an instruments like power instrument but it really just tells you like you know you're using the radio right now oh you use the cpu at this much at this point
Marco:
It doesn't tell you, you know, the change you just made just reduced battery life when running on an iPhone 5S from two hours to one hour.
Marco:
Like it doesn't tell you that.
Marco:
It doesn't tell you how it will actually behave on devices.
Marco:
So it's very hard to know.
Marco:
If you're actually making progress with making things more battery efficient in the real world on real devices when you're dealing with relatively small changes, like if you're using 100% CPU and you go to 20, that's probably going to be a pretty clear win.
Marco:
You don't really need to test on a device to know that that's a better idea or to do a full battery test.
Marco:
So, if you're trying to test whether something is better on the battery, one way to do it is to run it on a phone, like fully charge up the phone, try to control everything as much as you can, run it when the phone is 100% charged, and see how long it takes for the phone's battery to die completely.
Marco:
That is probably the best way to do it.
Marco:
That is also very hard to control in all ways and is extremely time consuming.
Marco:
Because I found out I took my closest spare device to something that was relevant.
Marco:
So I got my 6 Plus and I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
This will be good because it turns out the battery in the 6 Plus is quite large.
Marco:
I ran this test last night where I was playing it into... And trying to measure when does a device turn off.
Marco:
That's hard to measure accurately if you're not staring at it constantly.
Marco:
So I had this big setup where I'm like, alright.
Marco:
I had the 6 Plus...
Marco:
playing through the headphone jack into a USB sound card that was recording onto my laptop.
Marco:
And the laptop was just kind of like in the corner, like, you know, just recording, just like record as long as possible.
Marco:
And then in the morning, I'll get up and I'll see like, you know, where it stopped.
Marco:
And I'll see like, you know, how long of playback did I have playing files continuously off this thing.
Marco:
And then I can compare it to like the built-in podcast app to see like, what's my target?
Marco:
Like, what should I be trying for?
Marco:
What can a podcast app do if it's like totally integrated using all the official APIs versus what can mine do?
Marco:
And I'll try to make those comparable.
Marco:
So I wake up in the morning and the phone has gone from 100% to 92%.
Marco:
And I realize, oh no, this is not good.
John:
So you just need like another week of testing and you'll get down to zero.
Marco:
I was expecting, you know, because, you know, it has Wi-Fi on.
Marco:
So, like, you know, I want any kind of sync activity.
Marco:
I want that to be counted.
Marco:
So, Wi-Fi is on.
Marco:
It's logged into iCloud, to an iCloud account, you know, but there's no other ads.
Marco:
You know, it's a restored phone.
Marco:
Everything else is off.
Marco:
And airplane mode is on, but Wi-Fi is on.
Marco:
So, like, so it's not using the cell radio because I don't have an extra same anyway.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Like, you know, that would kind of be unfair because conditions can change and everything.
Marco:
So, I'm like, all right, let's use Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Turns out a 6 Plus in airplane mode, just using Wi-Fi with the screen off, only playing audio out of its headphone jack, is insanely power efficient.
Marco:
And if you actually want to use Overcast to do that, you can expect something like 100 hours of playback time.
Marco:
But that makes it difficult to actually develop and notice any big changes because if it takes you 100 hours to run a full test to see, did what I just do make a difference?
Marco:
Did the change I made today, did that meaningfully change battery life?
Marco:
That's kind of a crappy cycle to be on.
Marco:
And I could use a 5S, which has way less battery life, or a regular 6S.
Marco:
But those mostly have the same problem.
Marco:
The 5S would be the smallest battery in the group.
Marco:
But my 5S is also from when 5Ss were new.
Marco:
So it's a very old battery.
Marco:
And the 5S hardware is very different from the 6 and 6S hardware.
Marco:
The CPUs have gotten better.
Marco:
The hardware is different.
Marco:
The screens are different.
Marco:
So the power profile might not be the same.
Marco:
Something that is way more efficient on a 5S, some change I make that's way more efficient, might be less efficient on a 6 or a 6S.
Marco:
Most of my users are on 6s and 6s, so that's what I should be testing on.
Marco:
But still, how do you do this without it taking 100 hours or 80 hours or these massive time spans?
Marco:
So the other way to do it would be run it for a while, run it overnight, look at the battery percentage when you start, and then in the morning, look at the battery percentage when it's ending, and then just extrapolate.
Marco:
You can be like, well, if it took eight hours to go from 80% to 60%, then battery life would be X if it had a whole charge.
Marco:
that's an okay way to do it it isn't the best because the percentage meter isn't always exactly accurate battery life is not linear exactly so it isn't the best way to do it but it can at least give you a reasonable approximation in a short amount of time one of the problems with that is that it's just imprecise you're using this two-digit percentage there's nothing you can do with that that's that precise like it took it took my this the six plus it took it an hour
Marco:
to move one percentage point when i was watching it earlier today and like and by the way if you want to actually look at the screen you're turning the screen on to check the battery level so that's kind of messing with the data you're tarnishing the data because you're turning the screen on and then all the things that ios does when the screen turns on running background refreshes doing system checks whatever that's all happening every time you have to even check the level so you don't want to be checking it very often but if it takes like an hour to move one percentage point uh then that's very imprecise
Marco:
So my idea was, let me dive into the APIs and try to get a more precise, try to get like the milliamp hour rating for the battery.
Marco:
Like what is a more precise charge level?
Marco:
There is an API on UI device called battery level or something like that.
Marco:
But it only updates in 5% increments.
Marco:
So that's even less precise than looking at the screen and just checking that.
Marco:
So I'm like, let me just find something.
Marco:
Is there anything else that can read this?
Marco:
Even I'll use a private API because I don't... I'll just make a little quick test app to show me the charge level on the phone.
Marco:
I don't need to submit it to the store.
Marco:
I can use a private API.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Well, it turns out the private API requires you to have the IOKITDILIB file, the framework dynamic library file.
Marco:
You need to have the binary from a device...
Marco:
How do I get an IOKIT dilib from a modern device?
Marco:
And there are a few online that are all 32-bit.
Marco:
You can't build 32-bit apps with any recent version of Xcode.
Marco:
And I'm like, well, I'm not going to install Snow Leopard or whatever.
Marco:
Try to do the old version route there.
Marco:
That's too much work.
Marco:
I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So what else can I do?
Marco:
What's faster?
Marco:
And it turns out you can browse the file system on an iOS device if you have a jailbroken phone.
Marco:
You can browse the file system and pull arbitrary stuff off of it.
Marco:
PhoneView works for a lot of stuff without jailbreaking, but it couldn't get to the system directory that would have these frameworks in it.
Marco:
So like, okay, I guess I need to jailbreak something.
Marco:
I'll take one of my iPhone 6s from last year that's been sitting in the drawer discharged, charge it up, jailbreak it, and get this file off of it so I can make an app that would do this that would actually run in 64-bit mode.
Marco:
The process of jailbreaking today, so I should point out, the only time I've ever jailbroken before was the iPhone 1.
Marco:
Shortly after it came out, there was a site called, I think it was jailbreakme.com or something like that, where it was literally a Safari exploit.
Marco:
You'd visit a website and tap a button, and it would jailbreak your phone for you.
Marco:
Total security hole.
Marco:
It's terrible that was possible, and it's terrible whenever that is possible, again, if that ever happens again.
Marco:
That is a terrible thing that Apple should definitely always close up because that's a horrible hole.
Marco:
uh but i did it for like you know i ran it for like a day and i loaded my phone's garbage and i'm like you know what this is stupid my phone works worse now everything's garbagey like there's nothing in here that i actually need so i restored my phone like like two days later it was so quick i'm like you know this is this is stupid and never joke since then but the fact is it's very very popular to
Marco:
tons of like literally like probably tens of millions of people jailbreak it is a it is a significant slice of the ios user base that it's jailbroken it is not a small percentage it is not a fringe thing it is a very very common thing i figure you know the tools must be you know let me see what it's like today so the procedure of jailbreaking today is you have to find a device that doesn't have anything newer than ios 902 on it so i had like you know oh this this one in my drawer happened to be 901 okay i'll use that one
Marco:
boot that up, and try to search for how to jailbreak a phone.
Marco:
This is basically saying, how do I download Photoshop?
Marco:
You know everything you get is going to be a scam of some kind.
Marco:
It's going to be malware.
Marco:
It's going to be ads.
Marco:
It's going to be garbage.
Marco:
You're going to find all this garbage stuff.
Marco:
Searching for how to jailbreak it actually was very easy.
Marco:
There's this thing called the Pangu jailbreak.
Marco:
My impression of this, as somebody who doesn't know anything about this,
Marco:
is that the way you jailbreak is that you basically download a closed source application from a Chinese hacking group that's unsigned binary, and you force your Mac to run it.
Marco:
That's how you jailbreak.
Marco:
You plug your phone in, you run this arbitrary code from a Chinese hacking group on your Mac.
Marco:
That sounds safe.
John:
I did this on my laptop I don't care about, because there's no way I'm running that on my real computer.
John:
Now it's infected your entire network.
John:
But on the bright side, your Apple TV won't have a number after its name anymore.
Casey:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
because they're gonna while this malware wanders through your network you'll fix that just on you know drive by it's a common courtesy yes so anyway so here i am like i'm like you know gritting gritting my teeth like should i really need to be doing this feeling okay you know i'll run it on the same laptop or like if i if i buy any hardware that requires some kind of java installer i run that on this laptop as well
Marco:
It's like my garbage.
Marco:
Anything that requires software that I don't want anywhere near my real computer, I run on this thing.
John:
So the homepage for your web browser on that computer is now Yahoo, right?
John:
Because you installed Java.
John:
Yeah, and there's a toolbar.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, I ran it, and it turns out it's stupid easy.
Marco:
So anyway, to make a long story short, jailbreak this phone.
Marco:
It boots up.
Marco:
I go to Cydia, which is...
Marco:
The UI for Cydia, it's like when the App Store first launched.
Marco:
People just put random parameters into UIKit widgets and just spewed them all over the screen.
Marco:
That's Cydia.
Marco:
Still, today.
Marco:
I posted a screenshot and I'm like, I can't believe this is even real.
Marco:
This is how this app actually looks today.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, sorry, jailbreakers.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
You have some improvement opportunities in corporate speak, maybe a coaching opportunity.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
We'll put it in the parking lot for now.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
But long story short, the file's not there.
Marco:
And it's all these stupid apps to tell me.
Marco:
And the dial-up is just not there.
Marco:
and so i and i'm like well maybe like people say oh things change in ios 9 maybe things will be better on an older version but i still need 64 bits i'm like all right let me pull out tiff's old 5s which has been powered off in the closet for like two years pull that out it's still running ios 7 great i jailbreak that with another app from the pangu hackers that runs that
Marco:
So I've never run two of their apps on this laptop because it's a different app to jailbreak iOS 7.
Marco:
Run that.
Marco:
Turns out not there either.
Marco:
And it turns out that like apparently dilibs have not existed on iOS for quite some time because they lump them all into one giant blob.
Marco:
and they load they kind of load out of that and there's like this cache you can try to hack but it doesn't really work so i'm like this whole thing failed i'm just like forget it i found one jailbreak app after much searching i found one jailbreak app in in the interesting city uh app quote store where uh it would display the milliamp hours of the battery for me i'm like all right good enough i'm
Marco:
I'll just run that and I'll put that on the iPhone 6.
Marco:
Now I have an iPhone 6 that has this interesting app from this interesting app store on it that will show me the milliamp hour rating.
Marco:
So now I can at least launch the app at start, run my testing, 12 hours later, open the app again and see what the milliamp hour level is of the battery and do basically a better, more precise version of the percentage interpolation and have faster turnaround time.
Marco:
That's my incredibly long, boring story about jailbreaking today.
Marco:
And I would not recommend this to anybody.
Marco:
If anybody knows an easier way, just using private APIs that I could just do in development that wouldn't involve jailbreaking, please let me know.
Marco:
But yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't jailbroken since I think my 3GS.
Casey:
And I did it at the time for SP settings, which basically was control center long before a control center existed.
Casey:
And it was pretty magical.
Casey:
But even then, I think I only had my phone jailbroken for like a couple of months or something like that because it just felt gross to me.
Casey:
And I wasn't really gaining anything that justified all the icky feelings I had by going through that whole process.
Casey:
So I can understand both why you did it and why you hated every moment of it.
Casey:
But it's an interesting story, to say the least.
Casey:
The lengths that we go to just to, I mean, I think so.
Casey:
It's the lengths that a good developer will go to to try to figure something out.
Marco:
again it's just like one more thing it's like if they were just an official api even or a developer tool that could that you could enable on the phone because the problem is like even if they put it into xcode you can't run it while connecting because it'll charge so and there's no wi-fi debugging yet and i know there's kind of like some support for that to make the watch work but it's not for phones yet so like
Marco:
There are so many failures here that led me to do this.
Marco:
And maybe the answer is I should just not care this much, which is a terrible answer.
Marco:
Because it's like, how does Apple manage their battery usage?
Marco:
They probably have tools to tell them this kind of stuff while they're developing core iOS functionality and iOS apps.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I assume people inside Apple have a way to know, am I making battery life better or worse with this change I'm making to this app?
Marco:
That is probably easier than jailbreaking their phones and running the Cydia app quote store.
Marco:
In summary, please Apple, break down some of these walls where it makes sense.
Marco:
All right, titles.
Marco:
I think Saltine Fiend has to win.
John:
Nothing in the show was about that.
Marco:
The whole first four minutes of the show were about that.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, totally.
Casey:
I really need to put some sort of Syracuse County prevention on here.
John:
They'll just use Unicode.
John:
You can't stop them because JavaScript doesn't understand text.
John:
It doesn't understand numbers either.
John:
Try going above 53 bits.
Casey:
Moving on.
John:
Moving on.
John:
Your wonderful language.
John:
Did you see the Trump programming language?
John:
No.
John:
No.
John:
It was like, only uses integers because Trump doesn't do anything halfway.
John:
All right.
John:
I put Trump script.
John:
I think Trump script is the one I saw.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All numbers are strictly greater than one million.
Yeah.
John:
there are no import statements allowed all code has to be homegrown making making python great again oh god this is magnificent what about i like to punch the monkey better than this telling you saltine fiend it's short it's cool it's funny no you said it no i i think i've discussed the saltine thing on this show haven't i in the past i didn't think so i don't think so no
John:
I think, remember when we were talking about Super Taster stuff?
John:
I know we've talked about Super Taster stuff.
John:
Super Taster, like, that's why I'm able to enjoy a good saltine, because I can get the, everyone else tastes like a piece of salty cardboard, especially if they're stale.
John:
But there are subtle nuances to the flavor of saltine that can be enjoyed by people with very sensitive taste buds.
Marco:
The Wheat Thin is far superior.
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
Larger, less portable pastures.
Marco:
Casey, you're like the master of, like, junk food.
Marco:
Like, how do you not love Wheat Thins?
Marco:
Wheat Thins are not great.
Marco:
They're not terrible, but they're not great.
Marco:
They're cardboardy.
Marco:
Stale ones.
Marco:
Stale versions of any cracker or chip are cardboardy.
John:
But Wheat Thins are, man.
John:
Wheat Thins are like, they are the Pringles of the cracker world in that they are just compressed sawdust.
Casey:
Oh, Pringles are magnificent, though.
Casey:
No.
John:
Pringles are compressed sawdust, and so are Wheatlands.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
So, I mean, like, formulation-wise, you are right that Pringles are not, like, slices of potatoes.
Marco:
They are, like, you know, they're compressed, powdered versions, basically.
Marco:
But, I mean, that's, like, that's how flour works in every wheat-based cracker.
John:
No, no.
John:
You don't, like, here's the difference.
John:
You don't just take, like, the idea with Pringles is that there is, like, dehydrated potatoes that is in powder form that is merely...
John:
pressed to make it into chip shape it's not as if you take flour and water and mix them to make a dough and like you know because that's what a cracker is saltines are legit dough that is cooked right right they're a cracker right i'm pretty sure wheat thins are dehydrated powdery crap that is compressed into cracker shape and then covered with salt and grease
John:
I don't think it's true because they are not of uniform shape.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe they do cook them.
Marco:
There is an edge, and some of them will have a slight curl down on one side, and the part that curls down is slightly burnt compared to the rest of the cracker, and some of them occasionally will have a ripple also.
Marco:
So I do think they're actually baking these in big sheets and then cutting them.
John:
As with any industrial food, we probably don't want to know how these things are actually made.
Casey:
You're probably right.
Probably not.
Yeah.
Marco:
I love that you think that your saltines are somehow made in a better way than Wheat Thins.
Marco:
I do think that.
Marco:
I really do believe that.
Marco:
I really doubt it.
John:
The bubbles on top.
John:
Can't fake that.