I Never Cancel a Drag
John:
why is chrome using 100 of my cpu because chrome oh i know why i have an apple tab open that's why you know when they added that thing where they put like a little speaker icon which by the way this is kind of like a telephone icon it's one of those things that i wonder about uh people how people recognize it except just by like pattern matching like you know the you know the speaker icon looks like a a paper cone with a little magnet coil like but in profile to show you like which tab is making sound
John:
Yeah, with the sound wave coming out of it, do people even know that that's supposed to be a speaker or do they just think that's the sound symbol?
John:
Anyway, they do that to me.
John:
Because who the hell knows what a speaker looks like these days, right?
John:
Certainly the speakers in our phones and iPads don't look like that.
John:
I mean, they have the same parts.
John:
Maybe they have similar parts fulfilling similar functions, but they don't look like that.
John:
Anyway, they have that thing where you can find, oh, what tab is making the noise?
John:
Like Safari has it and Chrome has it.
John:
They have some way for you to find the tab that's making the noise.
John:
which is like, oh, that's great.
John:
This is a good feature.
John:
They recognize this need.
John:
It's annoying when you can't find the tab that's making noise and you find it and, you know, kill it or close it.
John:
But then when you relaunch the browser and it, like, restores the state of your previous session, all of the tabs that could possibly make noise, like, everything just starts autoplaying.
John:
you have seven seven youtube videos and they all start playing it's like well you're so close you're like you give me the information to stop one when they start spontaneously or i lose track and you don't autoplay when tabs load in the background but when i relaunch from you know and restore a state it says you know what i bet this person wants seven youtube videos to all play at the same time let me do that and then yes i can find them and stop them all one by one
John:
you know what a solution to this problem is john having fewer tabs a couple of tabs open that is a completely reasonable solution doesn't say it doesn't take many like i think i only had four tabs playing but you know because i had a bunch of youtube videos up you know i was doing youtube research right and you have a bunch of videos open in tabs which is fine you watch them one at a time you leave them open some of them are like paused in the middle but then you relaunch your browser for whatever reason and they all start playing
Casey:
All right, so I have some follow-up about my MacBook slash MacBook One slash MacBook Adorable.
John:
You hate it already?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
There are people that are very perturbed about the MacBook Adorable nickname, and I think you're monsters.
Casey:
Not really, but I don't understand why people are so upset by this.
Casey:
A lot of people wrote in to recommend a particular kind of port replicator that apparently will solve all of my problems because it has...
Casey:
power in it has ethernet it has usb ports it has an sd card reader and on the surface they are correct but the reason i didn't buy this was a couple um one it was very expensive although the sum total of the other dongles i got was probably at least as much if not more than this is and we'll put an example in the show notes but there appear to be like seven different manufacturers that all white label or excuse me several different companies that all white label the same thing that's manufactured by gosh knows who yeah
Casey:
But anyway, the main reason I was not terribly interested in this is from what I had seen when I did a little bit of research, in order to get the Ethernet port to work, you have to install a kernel extension or like a specific driver or whatever.
Casey:
And I was like, nope, I'm out.
Casey:
And that was problem number one.
Casey:
And problem number two is it looks very small.
Casey:
And it appears on the surface to be very small.
Casey:
But in actuality, it is quite large or larger than I would want.
Casey:
And like when I went to Chicago last week with the adorable, I didn't bring the Ethernet slash USB.
Casey:
I almost said hub.
Casey:
I guess it is kind of a hub.
Casey:
But anyway, I didn't bring that dongle.
Casey:
I only brought...
Casey:
The HDMI dongle, which we actually used more than a couple of times, and it worked out very nicely.
Casey:
But my point is that I do like the flexibility of only bringing the one or ones that I absolutely need and not bringing the one or ones that I don't need.
Casey:
So I thought I would just mention that.
Casey:
But I do appreciate the feedback.
Casey:
I honestly do, because sometimes I don't see everything.
Casey:
And then finally, I just wanted to point out that I also wrote a blog post, a review of my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
So if you want many more words, then we've already spoken on this podcast about the MacBook.
Casey:
Feel free to check that out.
Marco:
That was good, by the way.
Casey:
I enjoyed that review.
Marco:
Thanks.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
It was actually a lot longer than I intended.
Casey:
And for a while, I thought maybe I'll go through and try to cut what I can.
Casey:
And then I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I'm just going to leave it because I have a lot to say because I really like this thing.
Casey:
So anyway, we will put links in the show notes.
Casey:
But yeah, I really like this adorable.
Casey:
It is not the fastest thing in the world, but it is quick enough for me.
Casey:
And that's all that matters.
Casey:
Speaking of these sorts of things, Connor Brooks writes in and says, here's some comparison pictures of the 2016 versus 2017 keycaps.
Casey:
There's been a small revision.
Casey:
Connor says, I've heard that the retrofit is known internally as a shim kit.
Casey:
And to be honest with you, I can't really see the difference, which probably means I'm completely missing it.
Casey:
I'm sure this picture is completely fine.
John:
I couldn't see it either.
Casey:
Okay, good.
Casey:
That makes me feel a little better.
John:
Yeah, I wish there was like red arrows or circle like, look here.
John:
Here's the difference.
Marco:
I went back and forth and I'm like, I could not figure it out.
John:
Am I looking at the underside of the keycaps?
Marco:
I will say, though, I have had a chance to try typing on a 2017 MacBook Pro in a store, and it really is actually a different feeling.
Marco:
It is not a dramatic difference.
Marco:
It doesn't feel like a whole different type of keyboard, but it does feel a little softer, almost as if they put a rubber mat under all the keys.
Marco:
When you bottom out the key, it feels like you're bottoming out on something rubbery instead of something flat.
Marco:
And it sounds different as well.
Marco:
So I think that actually is a nice improvement.
Marco:
Is it quieter?
Marco:
Slightly, yeah.
Marco:
It's a little more dull sounding and a little more dull feeling.
Marco:
It really does feel like they just added some rubber somewhere, which I think is actually what they did.
Marco:
But it seems like it's better...
Marco:
I still would not describe this as a good keyboard, but they are incrementally making it more tolerable.
Marco:
And if they also took this opportunity to fix whatever was causing the keys to stick and fail, then I hope they did.
Casey:
Let's not get too aggressive.
Casey:
I hope so, but I'm skeptical.
Marco:
And maybe this is it.
Marco:
Maybe it needed some kind of rubber O-ring around a certain part or something.
Marco:
I don't know the details, but the 2017s do definitely feel slightly but noticeably different.
Casey:
Yeah, I got to tell you, and I talk about this in my review, so I'm not going to belabor it.
Casey:
But when I first got the keyboard, I was like, ugh.
Casey:
I mean, I knew what I was getting into, but at the same time, ugh.
Casey:
And then I kind of got into like the, eh, it'll work.
Casey:
And I actually kind of like it now.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
I don't know if I like that I like it, though, because I love my Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
I would still take my Magic Keyboard.
Marco:
You've crossed over to the side now.
Marco:
You can never come back.
Casey:
Ah.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
So I do prefer the Magic Keyboard, and I think in no small part because I prefer a deeper throw.
Casey:
Is that the right term for it?
Casey:
Basically, I want more travel when I push the key.
Casey:
I want the key to depress whatever amount.
Casey:
I don't know what the amount is on the Magic Keyboard, but I find that to be perfect.
Casey:
And on the MacBook, it does not travel into the MacBook as much as I would like, and that still frustrates me a little bit.
Casey:
But in a way, and I couldn't figure out how to describe it.
Casey:
And only you guys and a handful of people that read the review will truly understand what I meant.
Casey:
But the only way I can describe it is the difference between a proper shifter on a rear-wheel drive car, where the shifter is sitting directly over the transmission.
Casey:
So there's rods that are connecting the shifter that you hold in your hand to the transmission itself.
Casey:
Like that feeling of sturdiness and notchiness and just good feeling.
Casey:
That's what the adorable keyboard feels like.
Casey:
Whereas especially the onboard keyboard on my older MacBook Pro.
Casey:
So before they went to these new style keyboards.
Casey:
That feels like, and I've actually understood Hondas to have very good shift linkages, but like my Saturn, which admittedly, yes, it's a Saturn.
Casey:
Haha, I get it.
Casey:
But the Saturn had the sloppiest, worst, most disgusting shift linkage in the world where you could shimmy the stick left and right like an inch either direction while the thing is in gear.
Casey:
It was terrible.
Casey:
And that's what like the old MacBook Pro feels like.
Casey:
And the Magic Keyboard is closer to the Adorables Keyboard better.
Casey:
but not quite as sturdy.
Casey:
And that sturdiness is actually really, really, really nice.
Casey:
And I really enjoy it.
Casey:
And it seems so silly.
Casey:
And if I was listening to this, not having really had this for a while, I would think you are bananas.
Casey:
That sturdy keyboard, what?
Casey:
But that's the best way I can think of to describe it.
Casey:
And I don't know if your MacBook, what are we calling yours?
Casey:
The MacBook Escape?
Casey:
That has the same keyboard that this does, doesn't it?
Marco:
uh well probably not because you probably have the new 2017 keys on that oh right right yeah yeah right okay but it's very similar do you find it to be more sturdy is that a decent adjective for it can you figure out a better way to describe it i know what you mean it's it's basically like what johnny ivan his white world video described as precise or stable um and so i know the feeling unfortunately i hesitate to use the word sturdy because it's unreliable in the
Marco:
2016 which is unfortunate um and i haven't gotten it replaced by the apple care bar yet because i just don't i haven't had the time um and i need to use this computer um but yeah so i assuming that i can get this fixed it'll it'll then be probably the same keyboard and then it will be precise and stable and sturdy and everything else but until then i can't agree with the specific word sturdy because mine keeps failing fair enough
Casey:
So coming back to the actual point we're trying to make, none of the three of us can see the difference in these two pictures?
John:
No, but there is a difference.
John:
I want Connor to write back in and mark up these diagrams or tell us what we're supposed to be seeing because I've looked at them for a long time and I'm not getting it.
Casey:
I don't doubt that this is accurate.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that this is fake news.
Casey:
It's just that for my eyes, I cannot tell the difference.
Casey:
I'm sure there's a difference, but darned if I can see where it is.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Joseph writes a very, very fascinating email about USB-C.
Marco:
Yeah, this was awesome.
Marco:
Because last episode, I had complained that one of the problems with the USB-C lifestyle is that you kind of can't go all in on it yet.
Marco:
Because, to me, one thing I just didn't really ever come around to saying, but I should have said, is my goal here is, okay, if I have a laptop that has all USB-C ports on it,
Marco:
Let me go to Amazon and just buy all new cables for everything that end in USB-C.
Marco:
And then I can totally avoid having to use weird adapters all over the place for almost anything.
Marco:
I'll just get USB-C cables for all my stuff.
Marco:
And I can get a couple of new things, like a USB-C card reader, a couple of things, and then I'm converted.
Marco:
And then I can just bring USB-C cables with me on trips.
Marco:
That is the dream.
Marco:
And that is pretty much impossible to do in practice, or it's hard to do in practice, because...
Marco:
My complaint last time was basically there are no USB-C hubs that multiply USB-C ports to more USB-C ports.
Marco:
The only one I knew of was the one that's inside the LG 5K display, which converts one to three.
Marco:
And those are just USB-C 3.1, not Thunderbolt or DisplayPort, which we'll get to in a second.
Marco:
All week, people have been sending me hubs.
Marco:
And they say, oh, I think this does it.
Marco:
Almost none of them actually do.
Marco:
almost every other hub that people sent me this past week, the only thing it did was it had USB-C in port and a single USB-C out port.
Marco:
So the best it could do is not lose you the port, but it still would not create more.
Marco:
The only product I found that actually created more, there's a Belkin hub for like 30 bucks.
Marco:
It has one-star reviews everywhere.
Marco:
Because it's totally passive and unpowered.
Marco:
It converts one USB-C port to two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports.
Marco:
And I actually bought one.
Marco:
I have one right here.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It is unpowered, so it can't really charge anything meaningfully.
Marco:
And you can't plug in Hydra current things to it.
Marco:
And the reason it has one-star reviews everywhere is that...
Marco:
Nobody expected that when they bought it.
Marco:
And it also does not do power pass-through.
Marco:
So, Casey, it wouldn't help you at all because you couldn't charge your MacBook Adorable while this was plugged in.
Marco:
But if you have anything but a MacBook 1, so if you have any more than one USB port, you can plug this into one of the second ones that's not being used for power and you can turn one port into two.
Marco:
So this is the only thing out there.
Marco:
And everything else does not do this.
Marco:
And so Joseph's email, which is full of wonderful information about USB-C spec that he's very familiar with, basically tells us why it's so... Basically, why aren't there hubs out there that multiply USB-C ports into more USB-C ports with the same capabilities as the ones built into the laptop?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so I'm going to read most of this email.
Casey:
It's a little bit on the long side, especially for feedback email, but it's fascinating and I think it's worth it.
Casey:
So go on, go on this journey with me, kids.
Casey:
The problem, this is Joseph now, the problem with doing USB-C hubs is the spec.
Casey:
USB-C has alternate modes.
Casey:
There's Thunderbolt and DisplayPort.
Casey:
When you go into Thunderbolt mode, the wires are completely disconnected from the USB controller, handed over to the Thunderbolt controller.
Casey:
When you go into the DisplayPort mode, the wires are completely disconnected from the USB controller and handed over to the display controller.
Casey:
The key here is that this is all done at connection time, so I think you can see the problems with hubs.
Casey:
If you plug in a hub and nothing's plugged into it from below, then what is it?
Casey:
Well, it's a USB hub, right?
Casey:
So now the upstream lanes from that hub are USB, and this is connected inside the PC or Mac as USB.
Casey:
But those ports below the hub haven't changed.
Casey:
They're still the same USB-C connector, which can have Thunderbolt or DisplayPort devices plugged in.
Casey:
So now you go to plug in a display to the downstream hub's ports.
Casey:
Well, it can't be a display because that would mean you need the upstream port to be renegotiated as a display.
Casey:
You can force a renegotiation, but if you did that, then none of the other ports downstream from the hub can now be USB ports because the upstream port is no longer USB.
Casey:
It's DisplayPort.
Casey:
And you can see a similar issue for Thunderbolt.
Casey:
Now, there's an interesting thing here, and I'm sure somebody at Apple has thought of it.
Casey:
Thunderbolt itself can carry DisplayPort.
Casey:
It's a time multiplex bus.
Casey:
And since Thunderbolt is really just PCI Express over a cable with the same multiplexing ability of a display, you can build a Thunderbolt hub or dock that has a USB-C capable host controller in it.
Casey:
And thus the upstream is Thunderbolt, but the downstream ports can still be USB-C because those ports are now quote-unquote root ports.
Casey:
I think Thunderbolt adopting the USB-C connector here is like a Trojan horse, call it USB-C, but instead it's really Thunderbolt, and Thunderbolt takes over the world from within the USB-C spec by making the default behavior of USB-C to be the Thunderbolt alternate mode.
Casey:
That is fascinating.
Casey:
I read this email and was like, wow, this is a lot of text.
Casey:
This is the sort of email I would normally be like, okay, whatever.
Casey:
I am so glad I actually spent the time because we actually did cut some of it.
Casey:
This was one of my favorite feedback emails ever.
Casey:
And it tells you basically everything you need to know.
Casey:
I have a feeling, however, that you guys have some thoughts on this.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, basically, to summarize, because of the way it works, you basically can't make a hub that is reasonably good, that multiplies the ports that are on the laptop that have all the same capabilities.
Marco:
So you're basically never going to get one that can multiply to more displays or more very high-speed Thunderbolt peripherals.
Marco:
The problem is that...
Marco:
You know, you buy USB-C stuff, you don't really, unless you're paying really close attention and you're a huge nerd, you don't really know which alternate mode, if any, it needs to work.
Marco:
Like, I have this card reader, I have some Ethernet adapters, and it's like, well, are any of these Thunderbolt devices or are they all USB-C devices?
Marco:
I don't actually know.
Marco:
And as a nerd, I can figure out, well, they're probably not Thunderbolt devices because that would be, you know, overkill.
Marco:
but like how are regular people supposed to navigate this weird world?
Marco:
Like they tried to make this connector, this one unified thing, and this will solve all of our problems.
Marco:
But in reality, this is a world of hurt.
Marco:
And it's, it's complicated by things like, you know, by these alternate modes where, yeah, it's nice that you can put displays and Thunderbolt over, uh, you know, over the same connector and stuff.
Marco:
But like Casey's MacBook one,
Marco:
doesn't have Thunderbolt.
Marco:
It only has USB-C.
Casey:
Bingo.
Casey:
I was just about to interrupt you and say exactly that, because that reminded me, one of the common themes amongst what people suggested for alternate dongles for me is, oh, use this thing that has everything you want.
Casey:
And a lot of the times, it did, but it was Thunderbolt and not USB-C.
Casey:
And it wasn't until I got the Adorable that it was really made clear to me that, just like you said, Marco, this
Casey:
This machine does have USB-C, but it does not support Thunderbolt via that connector.
Casey:
So I have a very small subset of things that I can use that are all on the same physical connector, but internally are very, very different.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so these connectors are kind of a mess.
Marco:
The whole spec, the way the standard works, it's kind of like if you just look at USB-C as USB 3.1 as the protocol.
Marco:
and you only connect USB 3.1 or 3 devices to it, that's great.
Marco:
Then it's just a smaller connector for the standard we already had before with USB 3, and it's great because there's lots of USB devices out there, and USB 3 is a great standard, relatively speaking, and we can connect everything, and it's fine.
Marco:
The problem comes that there's all these little asterisks on it, and those asterisks apply to devices, computers, cables, and hubs.
Marco:
All four of those things can screw this up in some way and make something that you bought just not work for a reason that to most people would be a mystery.
Marco:
And even though the computer can put up some kind of weird dialogue if it's smart, that's still not really helping the problem.
Marco:
So it's nice that they unified this all into one connector, but the implementation details make it kind of a mess.
John:
So the idea of Thunderbolt being like, you know, the catch-all or the Trojan horse, like, ha-ha, everyone's going to put these ports in their machines, but they'll eventually learn that, you know, it's neat that you can connect a display and also a USB device to that thing, but really the only protocol that can tunnel everything over it and multiply stuff out is Thunderbolt.
John:
So Thunderbolt will take over the world because it's the superset of everything.
John:
Like, won't everybody just make everything Thunderbolt?
John:
Because once they learn, oh, you know, like this email says, if you plug in a hub...
John:
if the thing has to decide whether it is you know sending through display port or usb or thunderbolt then why wouldn't everybody just do thunderbolt and the reason everyone won't do thunderbolt is because it's more expensive it's more expensive everywhere it's more expensive in the cables in the in the hardware that's in the hubs uh in the peripherals like at usb is just cheaper to implement so it's going to be very difficult for thunderbolt to take over everywhere now maybe intel opening up a thunderbolt spec will help with this because people can make like knockoff controllers legally that are knockoffs but like
John:
legally they can implement their own spec order but i think it's just more expensive to implement even if you don't have to do the active cables with the chips in them because you have a low speed device or whatever um i'm not entirely sure that you were going to get the thunderbolt everywhere now i think it will help for the high-end devices where people are spending gobs of money on the you know the upcoming mac pro and there's a bunch of thunderbolt peripherals that you can attach to it and there's tons of you know pci express lanes inside the box and you know that i
John:
I think it will probably live on the high end, but for the medium to low end, like people just using their laptops around, it's almost like this is yet another problem that more ports solve in theory.
John:
Again, I'm not sure how many lanes there are, but if you've got this port like, oh, this one is connected to a display, so it has to be a display, and this one is USB, so it's connected to my USB hub.
John:
If you can have more ports and have each individual port decide what it wants to be independently, but you probably can't do completely independently once you reach a certain number of ports because there's just not enough ports.
John:
you know controllers on the inside but uh surely you know in casey's case if you had one more port that one port could decide well he's going to burn one on power so one is power and then one is usb and then one is display so say you had a three-port computer those three ports and those three ports could decide individually what they wanted to be if there was sufficient you know controller hardware and independence inside the box maybe maybe forget about casey's thing sorry adorable you're you're stuck go to marco's computer surely marco's computer
John:
You could put four ports in that thing, one of the power and three other ones.
John:
And then those three ports can decide what they want to be.
John:
And then you get the advantage of having a bunch of uniform ports in your computer that are all the same shape and size.
John:
And you just put display in this one and put your hub in this one and put your power in that one.
John:
And they all just work.
John:
But once it daisy chains out, it's like, well, what are you even daisy chaining?
John:
Like you can't, you can't sweep that under the carpet because it's not like there's one magic protocol that does everything.
John:
Well, there kind of is, it's Thunderbolt, but it's the most expensive one.
John:
And that isn't on all your peripherals.
John:
So every time you plug something in, you're sort of deciding what this port is going to be and plugging in a box that has a bunch of other ports on it.
John:
You've basically just decided that the thing has to be Thunderbolt and now everything is expensive.
Casey:
Yeah, so anyway, definitely on the Hall of Fame for me for great feedback emails.
Casey:
Really love that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Marco, you have some HomePod follow-up, according to the show notes?
Marco:
I do.
Casey:
Tell me more.
Marco:
Okay, so this is probably my second favorite follow-up in the history of follow-up.
Marco:
My favorite follow-up in the history of follow-up is there was an old episode of... It was either Connected or Connected's predecessor show, The Prompt.
Marco:
One of those shows...
Marco:
Mike had misstated his own age.
Marco:
He was off by one.
Marco:
And a listener wrote in the next episode to correct him on his own age.
Marco:
That's my favorite follow up ever.
Marco:
This is my second favorite follow up ever.
Marco:
We spent about a half hour a couple episodes ago speculating about whether the HomePod had a screen or not.
Marco:
And one guy even wrote in to say, like, it was somebody basically like a tipster about it saying, here's how it's actually implemented.
Marco:
There's this diffuser and there's these LEDs below it and it's not really a screen, but it might be a screen later on.
Marco:
And we talked about this for like a half hour.
Marco:
It turns out none of us thought to check Apple's site.
Marco:
But Rob Buckhouse did.
Marco:
And Rob Buckhouse writes in to say, Apple's site clears us up pretty well.
Marco:
There's a section on the HomePod page that says, tap the top of HomePod to play, pause, or adjust the volume.
Marco:
It also shows you when Siri is listening with an LED waveform that animates with your every word.
John:
Yeah, I had read that when we did the show.
John:
That's why we talked about the idea of it being like, okay, well, maybe this is just a temporary one and they'll put the real screen on it later.
John:
So who knows?
John:
I thought we had all read the website at the time we were discussing it.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think if Apple is putting this on their product page saying this is what HomePod does and this is the thing it has, that's it.
Marco:
That's final.
John:
That's what they're doing.
John:
If you read the text, you could describe something as an LED waveform even if it's a screen.
John:
Because you know how they have LED TVs?
John:
They wouldn't say LED.
John:
i know led tvs aren't aren't really led tvs and if it was oled it would say oled like it's not and it's if it was a if it was an lcd screen it would say lcd or it wouldn't say anything at all but i said it could it fits within if they wanted to change this to a screen they wouldn't have to change that copy uh but but either way as i said on the show this is not the type of thing that you would do as a stop gap
John:
Right?
John:
Because it's just too complicated.
John:
It's too complicated and too polished to have in there as a stopgap.
John:
If they were going to make it a bitmap display, they would already have done that and they wouldn't have spent all this time on this weird thing.
John:
iFixit will show us exactly how many colored LEDs are inside there.
John:
But it's probably fewer than are in the Google Home.
John:
Because I think Google Home, like I said, Google Home has like a ring of them.
John:
So it's got a lot.
John:
This probably just has, I don't know, maybe 20.
John:
Who knows?
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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Marco:
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Marco:
They are their own thing already.
Marco:
So you hang it up, it's ready to go, and it looks great.
Marco:
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Marco:
If you want to get them for the special people in your life, maybe you take a photo of your kid or your dog and give it to their grandparents.
Marco:
They really appreciate that.
Marco:
These make wonderful gifts.
Marco:
We've given lots of them over time.
Marco:
Our house is filled with fractures.
Marco:
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Marco:
They look great.
Marco:
We get compliments on them all the time.
Marco:
Tiff actually recently ordered a giant one.
Marco:
It's something like two feet wide, and it looks fantastic.
Marco:
It comes in a massive box.
Marco:
It's pretty great.
Marco:
They scale up from the size of a CD cover all the way up to that, and it looks great.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Speaking of new family members, Marco, you have welcomed a new family member to your house.
Casey:
Can you tell us about this?
Marco:
Well, there's some asterisks on that.
John:
Did you already return it?
John:
Is that the asterisk?
Marco:
Today I received my pre-order of the Echo Show, the new Amazon Echo device with the screen.
Marco:
And the reviews had come out yesterday or the day before, and the reviews showed it in different angles and in real life.
Marco:
Before this, when we pre-ordered, we were only shown the product shots, which were taken at a very careful angle.
Marco:
And even at that very ideal, flattering angle, this looked like a pretty ugly product.
Marco:
But I thought, okay, but, you know...
Marco:
I love the echo cylinder.
Marco:
It's really useful.
Marco:
We use it all the time.
Marco:
And there are contexts in which it would be nice to have a screen.
Marco:
Timers are the big one.
Marco:
You can watch a timer countdown.
Marco:
Or Tiff will ask about the weather in the morning.
Marco:
It would be nice to see that as opposed to just having to sit through this four-sentence-long description of the weather.
Marco:
So a screen would be helpful, we thought.
Marco:
and i convinced tiff despite the way it looked to to let me pre-order one and try it so we we get it here set it up plug it in and boy the thing is hideous in person i mean it is really ugly in person and and if you look at all the reviews and we got the white one too i figured that would be a little bit less hideous no it's just as hideous uh so is it is it uglier than the original kindle
John:
no but it is larger all right yeah so i was gonna say like i think it is it can't be uglier but it does it does impose the ugliest that it has it does impose that more in your face than the original kindle that is it right there and so let me expand on that so
Marco:
So basically, it would plug it in.
Marco:
And now, because I hadn't opened up the Alexa app in a long time, I had not yet connected it to try to do its FaceTime or calling thing.
Marco:
So I open it up.
Marco:
In order to set this up, I'm required to give the Alexa app my real name and confirm it.
Marco:
And then it really tries hard to get me to give it a phone number and access to my contact list so we can periodically sync it with the Amazon service.
Marco:
And I say, no, no, no.
Marco:
And you can skip that part.
Marco:
You can skip the contact and phone number part.
Marco:
But you can't skip the name part.
Marco:
I don't see any way to opt out of calling completely.
Marco:
I don't want people calling me on my Echo.
Marco:
I know Amazon just launched a service where they have their own FaceTime network.
Marco:
I could not possibly care less or be less interested in using it.
Marco:
We have a million other ways to do that now that are all better and not run by creepy companies like Amazon.
Marco:
So the whole idea of being forced to set this up and not having a clear opt-out really put me off.
Marco:
So I was already kind of unhappy.
Marco:
And maybe that colored my later reaction.
Marco:
So we set the thing up.
Marco:
First thing I have to do is a software update.
Marco:
Okay, fine.
Marco:
And software update takes forever.
Marco:
So I can't walk away.
Marco:
Obviously, they couldn't update the software before they shipped it to me two days ago.
Marco:
But okay.
Marco:
And then the thing finally boots up.
Marco:
And the screen is super bright.
Marco:
And I know we can probably change that.
Marco:
But the screen is super bright.
Marco:
And it's just blaring news headlines at you.
Marco:
It's like some celebrity baby thing.
Marco:
I don't care at all.
Marco:
The last thing I want is for this screen to be blaring, visually, blaring news headlines at me.
Marco:
And we tried a couple things.
Marco:
Okay, I guess we'll set this up.
Marco:
We don't have calendars paired yet, so the calendar screen isn't that useful yet.
Marco:
But do I really want to give Amazon access to my calendar?
Marco:
Well, maybe not.
Marco:
Okay, I won't judge it on that.
Marco:
Let's try playing some music.
Marco:
So the first thing is it completely fails to recognize my Amazon Music, whatever the subscription is that is on the Echo, the premium thing for the Echo that's like $4 a month.
Marco:
We have that.
Marco:
And it totally failed to recognize it.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
It eventually started working.
Marco:
The sound quality on it is really poor.
Marco:
It is only a very small improvement over the Echo cylinder.
Marco:
And I don't care for that.
Marco:
Like, they had all this time.
Marco:
This device costs $230.
Marco:
And granted, yes, it has a screen and everything, so that's a pretty good price for what it is.
Marco:
But they couldn't improve the sound quality?
Marco:
That's like the one major problem with the echo cylinder, the sound quality.
Marco:
And they really, I would say they almost didn't improve it at all.
Marco:
It's very, very close to the old one.
Marco:
And as we're using it, it just keeps blaring this screen at us.
Marco:
And Tip was very quickly out of love, and I very quickly followed.
Marco:
Because what I realized was, regardless of what anyone else thinks of this product, I had made a mistake in thinking it was right for us.
Marco:
Because one thing that I now realize in retrospect that we like about the Echo Cylinder...
Marco:
is that it does not take visual attention away from anything.
Marco:
It is this... It's not pretty, but it's discreet.
Marco:
It's this black cylinder you put somewhere.
Marco:
It comes in white too now.
Marco:
It's the cylinder you put somewhere.
Marco:
And you don't really ever have to look at it.
Marco:
It doesn't draw attention to itself.
Marco:
So the echo cylinder fits into your life in a more discreet way.
Marco:
The echo show with the screen draws attention in.
Marco:
It...
Marco:
draws your eyes in.
Marco:
It takes attention out of the room.
Marco:
And it does it for something that really doesn't deserve that kind of attention.
Marco:
It is just this screen in your kitchen that's telling you about Kanye's baby or whatever.
Marco:
And I could not possibly... I'm sure I could probably configure those things in some different way.
Marco:
But this thing draws your eye.
Marco:
And it's designed to do that.
Marco:
Amazon stuff is not good enough to make it worth using their GUIs.
Marco:
And I kind of knew that already, and I don't know why I thought this would be any different.
Marco:
But for some reason, I thought this would be different, and that was a mistake.
Marco:
So this thing is not for us at all.
Marco:
So I'm returning it.
Casey:
Oh, that's disappointing.
John:
Maybe you got the Amazon Echo show with special offers.
John:
You paid 50 bucks more.
John:
Get the one without special offers.
Marco:
Yeah, and one of the things that makes me sad about this is I realized, like...
Marco:
What if there is a future where they make their app even worse and they require my calling information or whatever else or they require more stuff I don't want to give them?
Marco:
Or if there's a future in which all Echoes have screens and there is no more option to get one without it or that the ones without screens start sucking because the service assumes you always have one or something like that.
Marco:
It made me realize quite how fragile this ecosystem is because this was depending on Amazon doing this one cool thing.
Marco:
Just keep doing it.
Marco:
This one thing they made is great.
Marco:
The cylinders, they're great.
Marco:
Just keep doing that.
Marco:
But instead, they're broadening out into these weird, creepy things like the look and the show that are going in a direction that I really don't like.
Marco:
And again, if you listeners like this stuff, that's fine.
Marco:
All I'm saying is this was dramatically not for us and not the kind of thing we were looking for, even though I probably should have known that going in.
Marco:
But I didn't.
Marco:
Oh, well, sometimes that happens.
Marco:
But it made me think for a second, like, I'm actually going to be really sad if this ecosystem goes south in a way that ruins the cylinder for us.
Marco:
because i really like the cylinder the way it has been and if that goes away like i mean i guess we could try the google air freshener but i'm not a big fan of that the home pod might be great but we don't really know yet and honestly the more i keep trying siri i keep giving it the benefit of the doubt and it keeps making me not want to try it anymore um i don't have good luck with siri so so i'm not incredibly optimistic about that um
Marco:
And the HomePod is also larger and much more expensive, so it would be hard to justify buying more than one of them.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
HomePod is a big question mark.
Marco:
I hope Amazon does not screw up what they have that's really great with the echo cylinders with the new weird, creepy stuff they're trying to do now.
Casey:
So what did you think you were going to get from from the Echo Show when you bought it?
Casey:
Like, and I don't mean that in a nasty way.
Casey:
I'm genuinely asking, like, did you think, oh, it'll be really nice to have, I don't know, a visible view of your grocery list or you made mention of your calendar?
Casey:
Like what sorts of things did you think this was going to help out with that?
Casey:
It seems to either not or do a crummy job of it.
Marco:
The only reasons I really wanted the screen were to show me timers and weather.
Marco:
That's about it.
Marco:
I didn't need the screen.
Marco:
We get along just fine with the cylinder, but it would just be nicer to be able to just glance at timer statuses and just see the weather presented without having to listen to the full three-sentence description with all the words in it.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
And this is, again, everyone out there is yelling at me to just wear an Apple Watch because that really does solve many of these problems.
Marco:
And Siri even occasionally works on that.
Marco:
So that could be nice, but it's just not the way I want to do things.
Marco:
So this is all really nitpicky stuff, and this technology is all really amazing.
Marco:
So it feels weird to complain about any of it, really, because in absolute terms, this is all amazing, and we should be thankful we have any of it.
Marco:
But in relative terms,
Marco:
I never want to use an Amazon GUI if I can help it.
Marco:
And I think what I was hoping for is...
Marco:
More like what we thought the HomePod might be before we read Apple's site, which was just a very small, discreet screen output for small amounts of information to be presented subtly.
Marco:
That, I think, would be nice.
Marco:
It could even still be an echo cylinder, just with a little...
Marco:
like an OLED strip around the top to do like a Times Square kind of like, you know, scrolling marquee kind of something like something small and discreet that does not draw your eye that that like if there's no timers and if there's nothing that you've asked for recently, it would just be blank.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
But that isn't what this is.
Marco:
That strip idea is terrible, by the way.
Marco:
Nobody... I know.
Marco:
That actually is bad.
Marco:
But like, okay, a small screen, like a watch size screen, right?
Marco:
You could have like two timers stacked there counting down and it would be fine.
Marco:
You know, like something small and discreet is what I wanted.
Marco:
And this is not that.
Marco:
This becomes the center of attention in your kitchen, or wherever you put it.
Marco:
It's like having a TV on.
Marco:
And I'm the kind of person that, if I'm in a restaurant that has TVs, and there's one in my field of view, I'm constantly distracted by it.
Marco:
And I don't want to be, but my eye is just drawn to it.
Marco:
That's how this is.
Marco:
Even though it's not always moving and stuff, although it sometimes is, but like...
Marco:
It just constantly drew my eye to it, and I couldn't ignore it, and it really deserves to be ignored most of the time.
Marco:
So if what you want is more TV-like screens that are always on in your life, this might be for you, but that's not what I want.
John:
It feels like you could have gotten this thing quieted down, so to speak.
John:
Get it to the point where, I mean, I don't even know if it displays the timer and the weather stuff.
John:
But in theory, one of the things that Amazon might have a leg up over Apple on is just saying, oh, we'll just make everything configurable.
John:
Like you'll just be, you know, turn things on, turn things off, whatever.
John:
And then you can get it to the point where all it ever displays is your three timers and the weather.
John:
And you start looking at it more like a like an old style clock radio where, yeah, it's a light that's constantly on, but doesn't change much.
John:
It just shows the time.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's probably wise to wait for a second generation device instead of this hideous thing.
John:
But on the other hand, look at your cylinder.
John:
Yeah.
John:
they haven't made great strides with that cylinder they did i wouldn't worry too much about the ecosystem going all screen because they've still got the the dot and then they got the cylinder and then they got this and now they've got like a three-part family uh not even counting all the weird buttons that you press to get paper towels and stuff um so i think amazon will keep making one of everything but i also think if they actually iterate on this which remains to be seen that they will but
John:
If they do iterate on it, I think this, this approach is better than the, Hey, just give me a cylinder with a tiny screen because cylinder with a tiny screen is just has more limited use cases.
John:
What you really want is instead of this, this thing looks like a, like a speaker grill housing, apparently some crappy speakers.
John:
and then a screen on top of it.
John:
What you really want is for it to be, and what people are going to suggest is, oh, why don't you just have an iPad in your kitchen?
John:
Because then you can run whatever app you want, configure it however you want, use Hey Siri to do everything you want, and won't that solve all your problems?
John:
And you already discussed, no, it won't be a Siri.
John:
doesn't listen to me and does dumb things um but having a big giant screen that can do anything is much more flexible than having a small screen that can do the three things that you want to do with it um provided you can make the big screen
John:
you know quiet down not show you special offers by the way if people don't know what that's a reference to the kindles for many years perhaps they still do this you get a kindle cheaper if you're willing to have ads displayed on it when you're not using it and amazon had a euphemism for this they called it kindle with special offers as a way of saying buy this kindle for less money
John:
And we'll constantly show you ads.
John:
And if you want the ads to go away, give us a little bit of more money.
John:
And let me tell you, that's the best money you'll ever spend in your life because nobody wants their book to show them special offers.
Marco:
Yeah, it was only 25 bucks.
Marco:
It wasn't a massive amount of money.
John:
yeah like get the one by all means get the one with special offers and then just say every quarter that you find like in the laundry just keep saving that until you get 25 bucks and then spend it it's a great uh use of your money but anyway i'm i'm still a believer in a big screen thing that is stationary and plugged in and has cameras and microphones and good speakers in it but apparently this is not yet it but i also think that marco didn't quite give this a long enough chance to know exactly how much he would hate or like it because i feel like if you had kept it
John:
for a couple weeks you could probably come to some uneasy truce with this super bright screen and get it settled down and then then you really know whether like it's untenable and this needs to go or whatever but it's probably easier for all involved if you don't add more of these devices to your house so maybe just start buying cylinders and stockpiling them now
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It'll be Marco with the cylinders, Gruber with his keyboards, John and Stephen Hackett with everything.
John:
Well, see, the thing with the keyboards is you can probably keep getting those to work, but the cylinders, like if Amazon gives up on the cylinders, that cylinder is useless without the backend services that feed it.
John:
So you'll just have a bunch of useless.
John:
And Marco, you would know, have they ever revised the cylinder?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
so that's that's not a good sign they've already they revised the dot already there's been two dots and there's been the other ones that no one buys that the the tap and um oh god what's the other one called there's two other ones that nobody buys but the tap and the spud and the dot yeah right but but yeah like there's been two dots but there's only ever been one full-size cylinder all right anything else on the echo show
Marco:
Hopefully not.
Marco:
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Casey:
Okay, moving on.
Casey:
We wanted to talk a little bit about iOS drag and drop.
Casey:
And I have not really experienced this yet.
Casey:
I don't have a new iPad.
Casey:
I haven't put the bait on my iPad mini.
Casey:
But there was a little bit of discussion that I think all of us had overheard when we were in San Jose for WWDC.
Casey:
And
Casey:
It was a really fascinating conversation that I'm going to try my best to summarize.
Casey:
So Dr. Wave Michael Johnson of Pixar had an interesting use case that he didn't feel like the existing drag and drop API would work with.
Casey:
And his specific example is slightly different than this, but I heard him talk about this a couple of times with a couple of people.
Casey:
And I'm going to use his example that is not really for Pixar, but just a general example.
Casey:
So let's say you had a photograph that you were dragging from, say, photos into Pages, you know, the Apple word processor app.
Casey:
What Dr. Wave was saying was,
Casey:
In general, like say on a Mac, you would expect that as you're dragging this photo over the text that's in pages, say you're dragging it into the middle of like an essay or something, you would expect that the text would flow around the image.
Casey:
such that it's hugging the borders of this image presumably this image is some sort of rectangle and you know it's it's trying to hug the four edges of that image as best as possible so as you drag it up all the text moves down as you drag it down all the text moves up etc i'm trying my best to paint a word picture here
Casey:
So what he was saying was that's not really allowed the way things work today.
Casey:
And now I'm talking a little outside my comfort zone, so feel free to interrupt me.
Casey:
But basically, you're given a bare minimum of, I guess, metadata.
Casey:
about what's getting dragged, if any.
Casey:
And it's not until the user releases the drag and thus commits, yes, this is the app I would like to receive this thing I'm holding onto.
Casey:
That's the moment at which the destination app gets all kinds of information, including the actual object that's being dragged.
Casey:
But the theory from Apple was...
Casey:
Until you have released your finger and taken it off the screen and thus dropped what you have, quote unquote, in your hand, what if you drag across some other app that you don't want to see anything about that information?
Casey:
So let's say you have one of those situations where you have three apps open, you're going from photos, and you're going across Twitter.
Casey:
And because you're a maniac, you don't use TweetBot, you use the official Twitter app.
Casey:
Don't at me.
Casey:
So you drag across Twitter dot app, but you don't want Twitter to see that photograph.
Casey:
And then you go into pages and that's when you release.
Casey:
So that's why they don't want to give a not final destination any sort of real information about what's being dragged.
Casey:
But that's a real bummer for cases where you want to do things like reflow text around an image.
Casey:
So it was a very, very interesting use case.
Casey:
And I actually witnessed a couple of conversations between Dr. Wave and a couple of people, including some Apple employees, one of which was extremely fascinating.
Casey:
about what are the pros and cons of Apple's approach and what could or should they do about it.
Casey:
And there's a lot of gray area here that I'm kind of fluffing over.
Casey:
As an example, if the source and destination apps are from the same developer, say com.pixar.whatever, then there's, I believe, more information available to you than there would be otherwise.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I don't recall if that's enough to get through this particular problem or not, but it was just a really, really fascinating use case.
Casey:
And I don't know if I should go so far as to say edge case, but it's certainly, it's not one of those things where I heard this and was like, wow, this API sucks.
Casey:
It's actually, wow, they really, really thought about this API.
Casey:
They made a decision that may or may not have been the best.
Casey:
But I think that makes sense, and I understand why they did it.
Casey:
So I have not experienced this myself.
Casey:
I've kind of summarized as best I can.
Casey:
Marco, you have a new iPad, and you do have the beta on it, right?
Casey:
So anything to add on this?
Marco:
I thought you're wrong, but now I'm questioning it.
Marco:
I thought that there was a whole thing in WWDC sessions, which I haven't finished watching the drag and drop ones yet.
Marco:
Yeah, see, I haven't seen them either.
Marco:
But I thought that they actually did provide, for photos, they provided dimensions.
Marco:
There was even some way to tell the drag agent how to render a preview to say, like, show a thumbnail of the image here.
Marco:
And didn't Federighi talk about that on the talk show?
Marco:
For some reason, I think you might be wrong about this entire concept.
Marco:
You are right that the apps don't receive the data that's being dragged unless it's dropped.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
for security concern reasons, but I think there's this whole API in place for previewing that allows the Windows server to, basically the app can tell the Windows server, well, if you happen to have an image, let me know its dimensions and render it at this kind of alpha level at this scale here.
Marco:
I think there actually is a way to do that.
John:
So maybe the... Let me clear this up for you.
John:
You're both right.
John:
Marco, you were recalling this, and actually there's even more than that.
John:
There's other places where you can stash a limited amount of actual data, like an 8K buffer or something, and Casey's right about the, not friend apps, but like app groups and stuff.
John:
All those things are true, but the specific use case and the case that Apple has specifically...
John:
protected against is getting at the actual data that is behind that dragged item they have all these things surrounding it to give you some way to let the destination know stuff about your thing without getting at the actual data and there's a couple reasons that one is the thing that case you talked about which is privacy and it kind of makes sense and in in the
John:
In the iOS ecosystem, in the modern computing ecosystem, the idea of dragging an image across the Facebook app and the Facebook app extracting all the image data and, like, analyzing it and uploading it or whatever.
John:
Like, that sounds crazy.
John:
You're just paranoid.
John:
No, we've seen worse.
John:
It's not crazy at all.
John:
We've seen worse from other applications on iOS.
John:
This is why Apple did this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And a lot of times that can be enough.
John:
For example, if the thing that you're dragging is representable by URL, for example, and you can jam that URL into that, you know, eight kilobyte field, then your destination application is like, oh, you're dragging this thing, but I can't get the real data.
John:
It's like, yeah, but my data is just a URL and I'll put it in a little area and then you can read the URL and then you can hit the URL and pull down the data and get it.
John:
But in other cases, when you're dragging something very large, like a large data file or something like that,
John:
They don't want the application to get at that actual data.
John:
And all the preview stuff you can do is never going to represent the thing.
John:
I don't want to get into... I know some more specific details about the use cases of the Pixar thing, but I don't want to talk about them.
John:
But there are situations where a preview is not sufficient.
John:
A thumbnail preview dimensions, all of which are not sufficient.
John:
You can imagine things that Pixar does that may not be adequately representable or nicely representable.
John:
as merely some dimensions in the thumbnail, right?
John:
Because Pixar does stuff in 3D, so just feel free to extrapolate from there.
John:
And that's that's a user experience thing where you would just expect on on the Mac or on a PC type operating system that the destination has access to the full set of data and can do whatever it wants with it and not just say, give me a little placeholder, because sometimes a placeholder, especially if the placeholder is a thumbnail or something or eight kilobits is not adequate.
John:
And so I think Apple made the right decision for the environment, because and especially since it's so hard to
John:
to ensure that you don't drag across something you know that did you like because everything is you know it's a tiling window manager essentially there is no dead zone there's no demilitarized zone between the quote-unquote windows right so i guess if you invoke the multitasking switcher you've got you're sort of out of dragging across things until you pull it back but maybe when you pull it to the front maybe you're not hovering over the right side of the pane as it zooms in like it's
John:
It's difficult not to accidentally hover over something.
John:
And I don't know if it's just iOS or just modern computing in general, but iOS grew up in an environment where it is not overly paranoid to think that applications will try to extract any piece of information they can because they can do stuff with it.
John:
They can upload to a server.
John:
They can analyze it.
John:
They can figure out how to sell ads against your thing.
John:
That is real stuff that happens, so they have to predict against it.
John:
Um, and, uh, but after hearing these specific use cases, I think there is, there is a situation that Apple needs to address.
John:
And I think the best way to address it is probably by, you know, the same thing with the app group stuff of like opening the floodgates between applications that, that know each other.
John:
Right.
John:
And I'm sure there's a use case beyond that was like, all right, well, what about,
John:
you know third-party company that wants to sell an application into a professional environment and they're not the same company and they want to share things so there needs to be some sort of secure way for applications even across companies to agree that it's okay that we show that we share each other's full data instead of doing a lot of this stuff but i mean this this is what software design is about that you know you make the best decision for everybody and then everybody who's who doesn't fall into that you know the 80 percent the fat part of the bell curve
John:
sends you bug reports and you try to find some way to accommodate them.
John:
So I don't know what the outcome of this conversation is other than I was fairly convinced that this is a legit use case.
John:
And I think Apple was as well.
John:
And hopefully they'll do stuff to address it.
John:
But I still think they made the right decision for the majority of users.
John:
You know, it's sort of safety first, security first, privacy first approach with many allowances to let, you know, your average application do something reasonable.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then the more demanding applications have to find another solution.
Casey:
Anything else on drag and drop?
John:
So there's a subsection here about drag and drop on the phone.
John:
This is all older notes, but it was like right after the keynote.
John:
I was like, wait, does drag and drop work on the phone?
John:
Or does it work in the beta?
John:
Or is it supposed to work?
John:
Or no, they're going to intentionally make it not work because they don't want drag and drop to be on the phone.
John:
I don't have iOS 11 on a phone, so I don't know the current status of this.
John:
Marco, do you have it?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
can you drag between anything on the phone can you drag between apps no you can drag within your own app though i'm not entirely sure why they impose this limitation like i can see why somebody might have argued for this uh but you know on the ipad you can drag and drop within an app and also between apps on the iphone you can only drag and drop within an app however
Marco:
If the argument is the screen is too small and so you can't expect people to cram their fingers on or whatever, that doesn't work because there's this awesome system that they built where you can pick up some items in a drag and then with another finger, maybe from your other hand, with another finger, you can navigate the interface to a different screen.
Marco:
And then drop the dragged items somewhere else.
Marco:
Like not just within the same list or within the same screen.
Marco:
But you can actually go to a different level in the navigation hierarchy and drop them there.
Marco:
Or you can drive them to a whole different app entirely.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
That's an incredibly powerful system.
Marco:
But if you're going to allow navigation within an app to happen while you're in mid-drag on the phone, why not also allow you to kick out to a different app and launch something else?
Marco:
The only thing I can think of is, on the iPad, you have the screen space to have two apps side-by-side.
Marco:
More than one app side-by-side.
Marco:
You have that ability on the iPad, and you don't have that on the iPhone.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
I think that makes sense, given the screen sizes and the app environment.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't see why there's this limitation that you, that you can't do it between apps by like holding down your dragged items on the phone and then hitting the home button and go into a different app and opening up a different app.
Marco:
It's like you already enabled it within the app.
Marco:
So why not that?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Steve Trout and Smith, uh, responding to some people, uh, offering that maybe it's because, uh, they, you know, that the phone's not powerful enough or they want to save as an upsell feature for the next iPhone or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
uh and from what he heard at wwc is they just wanted this to be an ipad only feature for now maybe it will come to the phone eventually a lot of by the way related to this both on the phone and on the ipad um one of the things that kept coming up during the keynote and afterwards is the idea of a shelf which is a concept that i'm pretty sure existed in next step but certainly there were there were like
John:
copycat products on the mac they probably still are on on the mac these days it's just uh i think even quicksilver has something like that um it's a region of the screen like a shelf like a little rectangular area that comes out and it's like hey put stuff here and when you put things there it doesn't actually move them to there they're just proxies like oh it's like if you start dragging something
John:
Just put it on the shelf here, and it's as if you continued the drag, but you don't have to.
John:
You just drop it on the shelf.
John:
Then you can go do whatever it is you want to do.
John:
Go find where you were going to originally drop that drag thing.
John:
Then you open up the shelf again, and you're like, all right, take the thing back off the shelf and put it in.
John:
So it's a multi-part drag operation with a rest stop in between.
John:
You can have multiple things on the shelf.
John:
Imagine it's multiple clipboards.
John:
It's lots of...
John:
things in the current interface that are equivalent to that the tricky bit in ios and maybe the reason apple hasn't committed to anything like a shelf yet is where do you put the shelf how do you activate it do you want to hog a whole screen edge with it uh how do you get it to appear and disappear do you feel like you're burning uh
John:
Are you burning parts of the interface?
John:
Now, you can use entire applications as a shelf, you can make a shelf application and dock it on the right side of your thing.
John:
And like, there's, there's lots of ways you can work around this, but all the demos in the keynotes, and a lot of the stuff that I've seen online is people showing what
John:
multi-finger drags with the thing i think i refer to with the on the live show is the holding your breath operation where you begin doing a bunch of stuff and now you got stuff in flight like fingers are on the screen and maybe and basically you can't let go like you're dragging stuff and you can't let go you haven't gotten to your destination yet you're getting there your other hand is navigating somehow you're you're doing this with one hand wrapped around your little phone or you have two hands on the phone it's resting whatever um
John:
Those type of operations, that's kind of the same reason that you guys don't remember this, but on the Mac, originally the menu bar worked like the thing at the top of the screen.
John:
You'd have to hold down the mouse button.
John:
So you go up to the file menu, you'd click and hold down the mouse button and you'd have to keep holding down the mouse button until you moused over the menu item you wanted and then you would release.
John:
And that is like the smallest version of a breath holding maneuver because you did mouse down
John:
And you had to keep holding it down while you looked around the menus.
John:
You can go to the next menu, go down, go into a sub menu, try to find the thing you want, but you're holding the mouse button down this entire time, which is a more difficult operation, especially back when the Mac was new and no one knew how to use a mouse.
John:
It's a more difficult operation than you might think.
John:
hold down the mouse button but keep moving the mouse you know what but i have to i have to keep pressing the button so do i just rest my finger on it and press it into the table or do i push upward on the mouse and these things we take for granted now that it sounds crazy that i'm even suggesting this but believe me this was a maneuver that was difficult for people to do much more difficult for people to do than the equivalent which is what windows did which is go to the file menu and click mouse down mouse up
John:
no you know you don't have to hold anything down anymore the file menu will fall down and now you're free to navigate and the flip side of that and and the windows world is okay well i did this click on the file menu and i decided i don't want anything in the file menu but now the file menu is stuck down like how do how do i get rid of it and then you move your cursor around the other menus come down and you try to move your cursor off the end and it's like
John:
I just want to get rid of these menus.
John:
How do I make them go away?
John:
You can do it on your Mac now.
John:
Click the file menu and then just move your mouse around it and pretend you're a novice user.
John:
It's like, the file menu is down.
John:
I don't want it to go.
John:
And then you hit the edit menu.
John:
Now the edit menu is down.
John:
You have to find a safe place to click to deactivate it.
John:
Whereas if...
John:
With the old Mac style one, when you hold down, you just release the mouse button anywhere that's not on a menu item, and you have canceled the operation.
John:
Eventually, Apple came around to the Windows way of doing things because it's less of a breath-holding maneuver.
John:
You get to click, and now you get to think.
John:
Find the menu item, scroll around, whatever, and eventually people learn the safe areas to click to deactivate the thing or whatever.
John:
So on iOS, all these drag operations, you're just holding your breath that whole time until you can find a place to put these, and worse,
John:
this is my question after the keynote and i still kind of have this question even though i do have ios 11 on my ipad now is how do you safely cancel a complex drag operation you've got seven things in flight you're swiping around and you're like you change your mind you're like no never mind if i was on the mac i would hit the escape key which nobody knows because uh people aren't old school mac users and it would cancel the drag operation yeah um
John:
but on on uh in ios i'm like well what do i do with all this crap that i've got in my hand i'm holding my breath i i gotta get rid of this like a hanger in it i gotta get rid of this stuff safely i don't want to accidentally drag all this stuff into so like you go off the screen edge maybe
John:
i mean there's a million places we know is you probably go to springboard and it's probably safe unless you're dragging applications in which case maybe you'll move them to there you can go to a thing they have different cursors of like uh can this drag potentially happen in this location at all one of them is like the forbidden cursor which they tell you you're not supposed to use but at least tells you like look you can't drag this here ever it's never gonna work don't bother like oh now it's safe to drop i can drop it there like
John:
They don't show demos like that, but having a safe way to change your mind mid-flight and also having a way to...
John:
To think about what you're doing mid-flight without the pressure, without the literal pressure of having to hold your fingers down on the screen or the mental pressure of knowing that you have this thing in flight, those are problems that can potentially be solved by a shelf because then you have a two-part maneuver.
John:
I'm going to do something with this thing and this other thing.
John:
Chuck them on the shelf.
John:
and now i'm free i'm not holding my breath anymore i'm not holding my fingers on the screen i'm free to figure out what i'm going to do with that stuff if i decide i'm not going to do anything with it it's over like i can just leave it on the shelf or i could delete it from the shelf or just let it age out of the shelf or whatever but eventually to do find the thing i want to do i can bring the shelf back onto the screen take the thing off the shelf put it where i was going to put it so i think there's room for that type of interface element uh in ios and i think a lot of these multi-finger drag things are
John:
cool to look at and impressive but are way above the uh the the physical mental dexterity of most people most of the time and even for people who can pull them off i think they are they're less comfortable than a more relaxed multi-part operation in the same way that holding down the mouse cursor on a menu was less comfortable for people
John:
uh on the original mac and why we're all used to just single clicking if you want to get a feeling of this by the way just fire up an old mac emulator everybody even old school mac users like me you fire up one of those old mac emulators and you go to go to go to a menu and you click on it and the menu briefly flickers on the screen and you go oh yeah yeah i remember this or if you're not an old school mac user you're like this thing is broken and you just quit
Casey:
So there was an app that I loved that is not being made anymore.
Casey:
And I think there was like an API change or they got booted from the Mac App Store.
Casey:
I don't remember what it was.
Casey:
But it was called Dragon Drop.
Casey:
That's dragon as in the animal drop.
Casey:
And it was a play, obviously, on the phrase drag and drop.
Casey:
Yeah, funny, huh?
Casey:
Anyway, what it did was, on the Mac, if you start a drag and then wiggle your mouse, the same way you wiggle your mouse to get the huge cursor in Sierra, what it would do is it would pop up, I'm sure there's a term for this kind of pain, but whatever the term is, it would bring up one of those, like...
Casey:
I don't know how to describe it, but it's like a little temporary window, basically.
Casey:
And you could drag or you could drop, I should say, whatever you have in your drag onto this drag and drop pane and it would stay there.
Casey:
Then you could mouse around and do whatever you needed, maybe get to a different path on your drag.
Casey:
desktop, you know, or, you know, in your hard drive, whatever.
Casey:
And then you could go back to drag and drop and drag out of that.
Casey:
So it was basically a shelf, like you were saying, and drag out of that and onto finder or what have you.
Casey:
And it was amazing.
Casey:
And it made the computer so much better and easier to use.
Casey:
And maybe there's another equivalent of that.
Casey:
And if there is, I'd actually kind of like to know it.
John:
But like 20 of those apps for the Mac, the drag and drops innovation was the wiggly cursor.
John:
I think that was the first app that did that one.
John:
Most of them use screen edges.
John:
Like I said, Quicksilver has one.
Casey:
I'm sure I want the wiggly cursor.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, you want the weekly cursor?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe someone copied drag and drop.
John:
But yeah, I'm trying to think if the next shelf was the original one of these, but I'm mostly coming from Mac world.
John:
And even in classic Mac OS, there was a ton of these things.
John:
Some of them are really good.
Casey:
So anyway, I love this thing.
Casey:
And I also did know you could hit escape to cancel drag, by the way.
John:
I don't know how you live this long not knowing this, Mark.
John:
What do you do when you have to cancel a drag?
John:
I never cancel a drag.
John:
I never cancel.
John:
I've committed to this drag.
John:
I'm seeing it through to the end.
John:
I've got to find some place to drop this thing, damn it.
John:
I know what I'm doing.
Casey:
Oh, sick burn.
Yeah.
John:
let's go to the mac you can only grab well you can only grab either one thing at once or multiple things all at once it is more difficult than most mac programs do not allow you to do this to add to your drag well as an ios that's all the demos like like i've gone into another app and you know what i'm gonna add more crap to this drag add add add i'm running out of fingers but it's okay and you know you keep going
John:
Oh, one more thing on this, since we got to have an APFS section in every show now, as per my legal agreement with Apple.
John:
Another one of the things, you know, I keep bringing up like, why do I care about APFS?
John:
And I brought up snapshots and everything last time.
John:
dragging a large thing whether it be a photo or a giant audio file or a video file or you know a 3d model or whatever from some ios application to another one when you drop it and you've committed to have all the data appear over there sandboxing is still a thing in ios and despite app groups and all the things with data sharing or whatever especially if it's across applications from different vendors it has to get you all that data if this is a three gigabyte video file
John:
it can't just say oh you can just read that three gigabyte video file out of that other application sandbox because you can't that's the whole point of sandbox and you can't get to that other application stuff but you also don't want to wait and like throw up a progress bar of like now copying three gigabytes of data from application a to application b which is what would happen on the mac if you drag this huge thing someplace in the mac progress bars are everywhere you know everyone gets a progress bar that's that's part of the mac experience progress bars are
John:
less a part of the ios experience massively less a part of the ios experience the best we get are stupid little spinners in the app store app store that never actually terminate but anyway those are circular those aren't those aren't progress bars those are progress rings um so uh the solution to this uh good old apfs to the rescue uh because drag and drop is only available in ios 11 in in the way that we're talking about and because ios 11 comes with apfs for everybody um
John:
when you drag that three gigabyte video file from one application to another you get an instant clone of it in the other application sandbox it doesn't actually actually copy any data doesn't matter how big it is the clone takes the exact same amount of time doesn't take any more space on disk it's copy and write so if that application starts modifying it it will start to become unshared uh
John:
I'm not going to say that APFS makes drag and drop possible, but it almost makes drag.
John:
Because if you didn't, think of what you would have to do.
John:
Like where would the progress bar even appear?
John:
Would it be app modal?
John:
Would it be like a progress bar just underneath the little thumbnail icon of the thing as it slowly copies three gigabytes?
John:
It would be terrible.
John:
APFS is saving the universe once again.
John:
wow oh john although i kind of think it's enabling like it's enabling them not to think about sandboxing like hey sandboxing but then how are we gonna have drag and drop between applications oh don't worry you don't have to rethink your sandboxing model it'll just be an instant clone i kind of wish they had to rethink their sandboxing model or have come up with some other sharing scenario instead of saying it's all right everyone will have their own copy of this data in their own sandbox and we can make as many clones as we want instantly so it's no problem right and i still think it actually is a problem
Thank you.
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Casey:
John, tell me about DILD 3.
John:
That's another one of those sneaky things that Apple does every once in a while.
John:
Maybe it's not sneaky.
John:
Maybe it's people who don't care about it.
John:
I used to write about them in my OS X reviews.
John:
The canonical example is Launch D, where...
John:
Actually, more recently, we've had Discovery D, lots of things that end in D, and so does DYLD, where they're core parts of the Mac operating system, sometimes core parts of the underlying base operating system.
John:
Darwin is underneath iOS and Mac OS, although you never hear that name anymore these days.
John:
um and apple will decide they need to rewrite it and that can be exciting but also scary uh discovery d last time that happened was a little bit scary because they what was the thing that was replacing i forget uh mdns responder
John:
yeah and so that was a problem because like mdns responder was a mess and had tons of bugs but the thing that replaced it had more bugs and it was even a bigger mess and so they roll back that change um but things like launch d where they replace the uh the process that spawns off all the other processes and does a million other things rewrite that from scratch and replace the old init uh process uh
Marco:
um that worked out pretty well um did we ever find out whether it was bono that rescued us from uh rescued us from discovery d remember there was like a like when that when that change happened there was some kind of like some celebrity complained to tim cook and i think it was bono like you know of all the things of all this but it doesn't know
Marco:
to use computers remember there was it was some big celebrity and like imagine like you know of all the like the world peace things that bono has done but like also rescuing us from discovery d that would that would rank pretty high up on that list was john mayer i'm trying to think maybe yeah it was something it was some some celebrity that that allegedly complained to tim cook about this thing and got it fixed like the next week yeah well fix as in roll rolling it back to mdns responder whatever it was it was fixed
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, for some people.
John:
So in the upcoming operating systems in High Sierra and iOS 11, Apple's CoreOS group, I'm assuming, or some other people who work down in the guts of stuff, have decided there's another part.
John:
that needs to be replaced and that's the dynamic linker which is a thing you probably don't know about if you're not a programmer but uh it's the thing that figures out where all the other code that you're going to be calling into is and so you can call it from your application you compile your application saying how to call this method in this framework here and this function in this library there uh and when you launch your application the operating system needs to connect all those dots
John:
because you know maybe that library has changed and these libraries aren't part of your application they're somewhere else in the system directory and the address of all the functions in them might be different from when you compile your application so this is dynamic linking it's not static linking where at the time they can build your application it knows where everything is and writes all that information it's dynamic linking it says i'm going to call this function in this framework
John:
And you're going to tell me where it is because it's going to move around.
John:
And there's also address-based randomization and a bunch of other stuff for security reasons, which means that dynamic linking really has to figure out where everything is.
John:
The title of the relevant WWDC session is App Startup Time, Past, Present, and Future, which seems like it's very innocuous.
John:
Like, oh, I'm going to learn how to make...
John:
My apps start up faster.
John:
But surprise, session 413.
John:
We will put the link in the show notes.
John:
This session is really about how Apple's rewriting the dynamic linker again for the third time.
John:
and as you might imagine the dynamic linker is a really really really important part of the system because if it's broken like nothing works because everything is dynamic linked to everything and it's super important it's kind of like when they change the compiler but worse because the compiler like they left the old compiler around and the new dynamic linker
John:
is going to be used to link like everything in the operating system itself and probably eventually all your third-party applications um so here's the the skinning on this uh the old version dyld2 will be completely replaced by the new dyld3 stop me if you heard this one before hopefully this will go well and not uh not be a repeat of discovery situation um
John:
It will be the default for all system apps, and this is their phrasing, for 2017 Apple OS platforms.
John:
So I guess that means...
John:
The watch, the HomePod, the Apple TV, the Mac, and all iOS devices for system apps, which means Apple's own applications.
John:
I mean, I guess third-party applications will still be using DYLD 2.0.
John:
Anyway, the reason this session is called App Startup Time Past, Present, and Future is because what they're pitching developers on is this will let your application launch faster.
John:
And there's been a lot of WWC sessions about that, and you might think this is like, oh, great, my app is slow on startup.
John:
This DYLD3 will make my app launch faster.
John:
Well, maybe, but probably not, because as the session says in the beginning to try to level set,
John:
What they're talking about making startup time faster is everything that happens before they call main.
John:
You're like, well, wait a second.
John:
My code doesn't even start until they call main.
John:
If your application is slow on startup because you're doing a bunch of stuff in your code, this will not help you because all the time they're trying to remove is before main is called.
John:
right you're like oh well nothing happens before you call main right isn't that like the first thing that happens and from the dynamic language perspective it's like no no no you think your program starts at main really we have to do a bunch of crap to find all your stuff before we can even call main and so this team is like we are everything that happens before developers think there is zero time before main is called but that is not true at all and so they're working at a much smaller level obviously in most non-trivial applications i would imagine the time required you know
John:
after main is called and before like your application are usable dwarfs all this time but for very small simple applications or system demons or other stuff like that maybe not um sorry i'm not gonna i'm not gonna repeat everything that's in the presentation but uh the summary is that
John:
they're taking the dynamic linker and moving it out into a demon process which might be terrifying to people like what how can how can the dynamic linker be a demon process and i don't like demon processes and dyld already ends in d which is convenient for them um is it called the dyldd i don't know um they tried to it's a simple caching mechanism there's a bunch of stuff that has to happen
John:
Before you call main of like figuring out where all your stuff is and the addresses of everything and finding all the dependencies and stuff like that and doing symbol lookups.
John:
That doesn't change unless the libraries change.
John:
And so they're going to do all that in an external process and cache the results of it.
John:
So on subsequent launches, they don't have to redo that.
John:
They can say, oh, I've launched you before.
John:
I know where all your crap is.
John:
And so we can skip right to the part where we start.
John:
doing stuff and executing.
John:
And having it in a separate process, even though it sounds terrifying from a security perspective, like, oh, if you can hack that process, you own the system.
John:
It's actually better than having it in the process because if you're going to try to mess with a dynamic linker and a dynamic linker is running in the same process as you, if you can corrupt that process, you have access to all the stuff that the dynamic linker is doing because you are in the same process.
John:
Whereas if it's in an external process and a program is corrupted, it's going to have a harder time
John:
leaping across the barrier to a whole separate process that it hasn't yet corrupted i don't know we'll see how this works out security wise i can see the argument for it that it is harder to hack with things in a separate process than in your own process but on the other hand this is now a very attractive target for all sorts of hacks so i'm sure they're doing a good job with it and they made a pitch from a development perspective of like developing this as a separate process uh makes it easier for them to test
John:
Like it's not a bunch of code running inside a bunch of other people's applications, right?
John:
Inside other people's memory spaces where who knows what the heck is going on.
John:
It is a separate process in its own memory space that other processes aren't messing with because of memory protection.
John:
And that makes it more reproducible and reliable and everything like that.
John:
um so i think this is a fascinating presentation it's one most people probably haven't watched session 413 i encourage everyone to watch it wdc videos are free for everybody you don't have to have developer account you can just click on the link in our show notes and watch it right away i think this stuff is super cool i love it when apple replaces the guts of operating systems i hope they don't screw it up because this is super important and terrifying but i really like that they're doing it um
Marco:
yeah one of my favorite sessions this year so there are a few people in my life who are not programmers but listen to the show anyway and there are a number of people who write in and and comment to that effect sometimes they are going to love this chapter of the show i didn't go into that much detail you can watch the session to go into detail but let's put it this way here for regular people like again with apfs like why do i care this happening
John:
In theory, things could launch faster on your Apple platforms.
John:
In theory.
John:
Will that be perceptible to you?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe not.
John:
But anyway, the potential downside is everything is broken and nothing works.
John:
So if that doesn't happen, consider it a victory.
Casey:
So you got a little bonus surprise at WWDC.
Casey:
Marco, you also got a little bonus surprise at WWDC, did you not?
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
Last summer...
Marco:
As I was writing my MP3 encoder, I ran into an issue.
Marco:
MP3 has had, for a very, very long time, has had the option to have VBR, or variable bitrate files.
Marco:
The idea being that different parts of a file, of an audio track, have different complexity levels.
Marco:
In a podcast, all of the gaps that are between all the words that we're speaking...
Marco:
You don't need that many bits to encode what's mostly silence to a level that most people would not even notice, right?
Marco:
And then you can use more bits to encode complex passages like music.
Marco:
And a variable bitrate file allows the encoder to just decide, like, you know, for these few milliseconds, I'm going to use this bitrate, and then for the next few milliseconds, I'm going to use a different bitrate, and so on.
Marco:
And it's a much more efficient way to encode audio.
Marco:
the mp3 format does not have great ways at least it did not start out having great ways to know ahead of time before you've read the entire file if you want to say jump to an hour and 10 seconds in what byte position is that if it's a constant bitrate file you can just calculate well each second is this many bytes so therefore just jump to you know offset times bytes per second and that's where you go
Marco:
If it's a VBR file, you can't guarantee that because you don't know what the average bit rate is across the whole file.
Marco:
And so in order to jump to a precise point, you have to have some kind of lookup table or something to say, you know, for every second or for every half second or for every tenth of a second, this is its byte position.
Marco:
And maybe you put that at the beginning of the file in the metadata section or something, and then you can jump to it.
Marco:
And there were a few standards on how to do this, but Apple supported none of them.
Marco:
So if you would load a very long file, like a podcast, in something that was using an Apple decoder, which is every podcast player on iOS or Safari or pretty much anywhere on Apple platforms that could play an MP3 would have this problem.
Marco:
you would jump ahead, like if you were trying to seek within that file, you'd jump ahead and you would actually not be at the right point because it was not having any kind of intelligence about VBR files and how to seek within them.
Marco:
So it would just try to estimate based on file size, and it would say, well, this file is 100 megabytes, and I can read from the duration header up front that it's two hours long, and you told me to jump to one hour, so I'm going to jump to the 50 megabyte mark and just assume that's correct.
Marco:
And that could be off by two minutes or more.
Marco:
That could be off by a lot depending on the content of the file and how the variable bitrate stuff was allocated between different parts of it.
Marco:
And so that sucked.
Marco:
So it basically meant that it was impractical for podcasts or any kind of long-form audio content to really ever use VBR encoding.
Marco:
And I filed a bug report.
Marco:
It's the best I could.
Marco:
And I wrote a blog post to draw attention to it and heard nothing for a very long time.
Marco:
Well, for a year.
Marco:
And then in iOS 11 and in High Sierra, that's fixed.
Marco:
iOS 11 and High Sierra now properly seek VBR MP3s that have the seek tables at the beginning of them.
Marco:
There are three different formats of those that I know that exist.
Marco:
They support all three of them.
Marco:
They prioritize the highest precision one first, which is the MLLT ID3 tag.
Marco:
They prioritize that first.
Marco:
Forecast, my encoder, now writes those tags.
Marco:
So now we will soon... There's always going to be issues with VBR files on random car head units and stuff.
Marco:
Things that aren't advanced computer platforms.
Marco:
But it will soon become more reasonable.
Marco:
Once iOS 11 and High Sierra are widespread...
Marco:
It will become more reasonable for podcasters to potentially use VBR encoding on their MP3s.
Marco:
And what this means for you, the listeners, is better sound quality for things like dropped-in music.
Marco:
Like if we drop in a clip for music or if we play our theme song or whatever, you will hear better quality on that.
Marco:
And also, you can maintain the same level of quality for the whole file for just basic speech like what we're doing now and have it take up like 25% to 50% less space and therefore also download faster, use less battery while downloading, you know, less space burned on your phone, etc.
Marco:
So it's a pretty nice gain.
Marco:
It's like a 25% to 50% gain depending on content.
Marco:
It's a pretty nice gain and you can get better quality for dropped in clips and stuff.
Marco:
all because now Apple will seek this properly.
Marco:
Now, again, there are going to be non-Apple platforms.
Marco:
There's going to be ways in which... Android listeners, for instance, are kind of a problem for this.
Marco:
So podcasters like us will have to decide what percentage of our audience is on platforms that don't support proper VBR seeking.
Marco:
And are we willing to let them live with miscalculated durations or miscalculated seek points as they seek throughout the file?
Marco:
And so, you know, that's going to be a trade-off for, you know, any podcaster trying to decide what format to encode their audio in.
Marco:
But having it in the Apple platforms is by far the biggest gain.
Marco:
Like, that's the big one we needed.
Marco:
Like, Overcast already supports it because I use Apple's decoder.
Marco:
So, like, Overcast already supports all this stuff on iOS 11 and High Sierra.
Marco:
Well, I don't have a Mac app.
Marco:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
But if I made one, it would support on High Sierra.
Marco:
And every other app that uses Apple's decoders, which is, as far as I know, all of them, I don't think any podcast apps have bundled their own MP3 decoders.
Marco:
So, you know, this basically makes all iOS apps suddenly support this without any changes whatsoever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that's really great.
Marco:
I'm incredibly happy about this.
Marco:
It might be a while, you know, it might be another year or two before we should practically use that.
Marco:
But this is the start of it.
Marco:
Like, this is the first step.
Marco:
And that's really great.
John:
Spoiler alert, audience.
John:
Marco will make a VBR episode of ATP way before you think he's going to.
John:
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
John:
he's dying to do it the episode you're listening to right now might be vbr that's what i'm saying i wouldn't do it during the the beta of i was sure you would you wouldn't tell anybody either it'll just be like you know what that last episode that was vbr you didn't even know it yeah yeah notice how good the theme song sounded yeah that's all we got is that we'll have to add more music clips like yeah inexplicably
John:
Lots of symbols and syncopated rhythms that trip up compression algorithms.
Marco:
The funny thing is, too, Apple also added in very few places, but they did add rudimentary support for the Opus audio codec also.
Marco:
which is very interesting.
Marco:
The Opus Audio Codec is kind of the successor to AugVorbis.
Marco:
It's by the same people, and it's open source, and as far as anybody knows, patent-free, although that's always open to whether it's really been challenged or not, but it's a very good codec, very advanced, very modern.
Marco:
In a very small number of places, iOS 11 and High Sierra support that now.
Marco:
So there might be a future in which MP3 might not be the most practical solution anymore.
Marco:
It might become... If everywhere starts supporting Opus, this is step one towards that possibility.
Marco:
That's probably not going to happen in reality.
Marco:
It's probably always going to be more practical to just ship MP3s because everything supports them.
Marco:
But maybe in the future...
Marco:
I get together with some other podcast app makers and we figure out how to advertise multiple formats of the same show.
Marco:
And if you're using a compatible client, maybe it sends an accept header that lets it say to the downloading server, you know what, you can send me Opus if you have it.
Marco:
And maybe publishers then can publish files that are automatically transcoded to multiple formats.
Marco:
This would take a lot on the tooling side to make anybody actually do this.
John:
but this is this is the the start of making better quality podcasts that take up less space and i love that i remember having to make multiple video tags because with the whole uh was it a vc1 or vp9 i forget the webm thing yeah webm and all that other stuff because they wouldn't do h.264 and so now all my os 10 reviews i had to have
John:
multiple versions of every video so all devices could see them but but anyway that's from a from a production perspective it's annoying but it is nice to be able to do a cascade and say here's seven versions of this thing and just you know browsers and between the browser and the server you figure out which one you want i but i rank them like kind of like apple did with the algorithms for the vbr thing rank them in order from best to worst and you just go down the scale until you find the one that you can read
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Fracture, and Harry's.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Casey:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So I was not entirely clear about why I had experience with a 2017 laptop keyboard earlier.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I lied.
Marco:
I said I used it in a store.
Marco:
I didn't use it in a store.
Marco:
I used it in my house.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So here's the situation.
Marco:
Oh, and it begins.
John:
Your parents went away on a week's vacation, I know.
Yeah.
John:
Is that a reference?
John:
Come on, I'm trying to do the 90s references for you guys.
John:
It's your generation.
Casey:
So you know how I'm the chief summarizer-in-chief?
Casey:
Marco is the chief justifier-in-chief.
Marco:
Yes, that is true.
Casey:
So what did you buy and how did you justify it?
Marco:
My MacBook Escape, as I mentioned, I need to send it in and get the keyboard repaired.
Marco:
So that started me thinking like, all right, when's it going to come to do this and everything else?
Marco:
I'm going away for a week.
Marco:
We also will be at the beach for a month later this summer.
Marco:
I have placed an LG 5K display at the beach house so I can work for a month.
Marco:
I work a lot in the summer because as an iOS developer, you do major upgrades using the new beta OS and new capabilities and everything.
Marco:
Of course, I'm still going to be recording with you guys.
Marco:
I'm going to be podcasting while there.
Marco:
It's going to be, you know, a work month for the most part.
John:
But I work a lot during the summer would be a great title for this episode if we want to meet to Marco.
Marco:
So my plan was to bring the MacBook Escape and connect it to the LG 5K and work on that all summer long.
John:
Wait, on your LG 5K before you go on, did you get it replaced with the one that doesn't flicker off when Wi-Fi is nearby?
John:
Because then they fixed that?
Marco:
Yeah, as far as I know.
Marco:
Because I bought it on the very last day of the discount.
Marco:
Because we were starting to plan our summer.
Marco:
We were thinking we would probably do a whole month out there.
Marco:
And I was like, you know, I should have some big monitor to plug into.
Marco:
And on the very last day of the discount, before I even had the MacBook Escape, I decided, you know what, I'm probably going to do this.
Marco:
And this was after they had paused selling them to fix the problem.
Marco:
So as far as I know, mine does not have the problem.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So anyway.
Marco:
So this was my plan.
Marco:
Bring the escape up there and and just, you know, work that work on that all summer long.
Marco:
And I knew it would be slower than my iMac.
Marco:
But fine.
Marco:
You know, it's it's still, you know, it's a compromise situation.
Marco:
But, you know, I would deal with it because I love the escape in so many other ways.
Marco:
Then the escape keyboard started having problems.
Marco:
Then I went on to WVDC and hated having only two USB ports, as we discussed last episode.
Marco:
That got in the way a lot.
Marco:
And even now that the keyboard is fixed on the new ones, probably...
Marco:
That is still the one thing that I can say I didn't like about the MacBook Escape overall in my use of it so far.
Marco:
I really don't like having only those two ports, which if your power is really only one port.
Marco:
But that's not a big enough problem to make me dump it.
Marco:
But I have this other problem now.
Marco:
My iMac keeps having problems.
Marco:
And these are problems that I don't think we're going to get easily fixed.
Marco:
My iMac is, not only does it have the image retention that I complained about months ago, and that's still getting worse and worse and worse.
Marco:
I'm also getting what appear to be I.O.
Marco:
stalls on a pretty regular basis.
Marco:
My performance is actually getting noticeably worse.
Marco:
I'm having weird pauses.
Marco:
Logic has given me that wonderful disk too slow or system overload dialogue.
Marco:
Have you ever seen that?
Marco:
I love it so much.
Marco:
I've never seen that dialogue before two months ago.
Marco:
And I'm having problems with my iMac is what I'm saying.
Marco:
Now, I really want either an iMac Pro or probably a Mac Pro.
Marco:
My plan has always been, you know, let me ride this iMac out.
Marco:
The AppleCare on my iMac is up in a few months in October, I think, whatever three years after the 5K came out is, which I think is October.
Marco:
Let me just last till then.
Marco:
And then I can like sell it and get the iMac Pro.
John:
You should make a run at getting the screen fixed.
John:
Like before your thing runs out, just bring it in.
John:
Just be like, look, IO stalls and the screen has image transitions, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Do something.
John:
And who knows?
John:
I'm going to.
Marco:
But the thing is, there's never a good time to do that.
Marco:
Like there is.
Marco:
There's never.
Marco:
You're at the beach for a month.
Marco:
But you can't have Apple send it back to you and have it sit in a store for a month.
Marco:
I think that would be a problem.
Marco:
Or sit on my porch for a month.
Marco:
That would be a problem, too.
Marco:
So basically, I'm having problems with my iMac.
Marco:
But this is a terrible time for me to want to replace my desktop.
Marco:
Because I want to wait.
Marco:
Even if the iMac Pro ends up being for me, what I should really do is wait for the Mac Pro to come out before I decide that.
Marco:
Just so I can see what the Mac Pro is.
Marco:
And I can weigh those decisions equally.
Marco:
And whatever their Pro display is, etc.
Marco:
I already have this LG display.
Marco:
So my new plan is...
Marco:
Let me use a laptop full time with the LG display after vacation month this summer.
Marco:
I'll bring the display home.
Marco:
I will use it on my desk full time.
Marco:
I will send in my iMac to get serviced.
Marco:
The new laptop plus display will become my iMac.
Marco:
You know, it'll become like my desktop, my main computer.
Marco:
And that can bridge me over until the Mac Pro comes out, presumably like probably about a year from now.
Marco:
And then I can buy a new desktop with all the options available to me and decide that.
John:
TTE Pass A in the chat room has a good suggestion for you.
John:
It sounds like what you need is a Mac subscription service where you just pay a flat fee every month and Apple just sends you every computer it makes.
John:
all the all of them whenever they have a new computer you they just send them to you and you just you just keep paying the subscription and the ones you don't like you return and it's like blue apron if you want to cancel a mac you don't want the mac to come this month that's fine uh and if you don't like one of the macs you have you just send it back to them they send you a different one
Marco:
They actually have leasing for business customers.
Marco:
And I'm a business customer at my local store.
Marco:
So they actually started offering me the leasing option, which is not that different from that.
Marco:
The only reason I didn't take it was that it's not that great of a deal.
Marco:
It's either two or three years fixed, of course, because it's a lease.
Marco:
It's like a fixed timescale.
Marco:
And I don't love having my computer purchases be tied to a fixed timescale.
Marco:
I care less about a car because that's a big deal to change and
Marco:
When new minor revisions come out, I don't really care.
Marco:
But to tie a laptop to a two-year schedule that can't be slower or faster than that, that I don't like that much.
Marco:
And also, the way it was priced is you get a pretty nice discount for doing the lease.
Marco:
If you add up all the payments, you end up paying something like 20% less than the retail price.
Marco:
But then at the end, you have nothing on that.
Marco:
You're not paying it off.
Marco:
At the end, you can buy it out for fair market value at the time, but you're basically paying 80% of the retail price over two years to at the end have nothing.
Marco:
Whereas if you just buy it and then sell it later, you might only lose 20% to 50% instead of 80%.
Marco:
And you can sell it whenever you want to.
John:
So you've got these sticky keys and you have your image retention.
John:
You have your I.O.
John:
stalls.
John:
You seem to be having a lot of problems with computer reliability.
John:
If you're interested, in a couple of years, I may have a very reliable computer on the market for sale.
John:
If you're interested, this is a proven track record.
John:
I can give you all the repair history.
John:
Totally solid.
John:
Everything works.
John:
One owner only drove it to church on Sundays.
John:
It's great.
John:
Never been in an accident.
Marco:
But it's been full of browser tabs the whole time.
Marco:
It loves them.
Marco:
It eats them up.
John:
Beats them for breakfast.
Marco:
So basically, I did have a chance to use the LG display.
Marco:
We went to the beach a couple of weeks ago or days ago, whenever it was.
Marco:
And I tried to do some stuff on it with the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
And the GPU in the Escape is really not great at...
Marco:
fairly basic operations on a 5k display and in all fairness that's not what it's made to do that like that's a hefty gpu load to put on an intel integrated gpu there's a reason why like apple does not really advertise much with like the 13 inch class of laptops uh
Marco:
...on the big 5K display.
Marco:
They always show it with the 15-inch... ...because the 15-inch has a discrete GPU... ...which is way more powerful than the Intel one.
Marco:
And when you plug a 15-inch into a display... ...the discrete GPU locks itself on.
Marco:
It always uses that.
Marco:
It forces it on... ...if it's ever connected to an external display... ...because it knows you kind of need that.
Marco:
So... ...the MacBook Escape... ...while awesome for everything I needed before...
Marco:
Now with this summer need that I need to have a nice big monitor and do big development over the summertime, I now have a need that it does not cover very well.
Marco:
It really is quite poor at it, actually.
Marco:
Things like resizing windows is sluggish.
Marco:
Because it isn't made to be doing that.
Marco:
I decided now that my needs, now that my iMac has caused me to have different needs and I now need a desktop replacement to last me a year until the Mac Pro comes out, presumably, I need something more powerful.
Marco:
So I got a 15-inch again.
Marco:
I got a 2017, almost maxed out, 15-inch.
Marco:
I'm going to see how this goes.
Marco:
I'm still in the return period.
Marco:
Business rep said I can return whenever I want.
Marco:
We'll see.
John:
I wonder if he has a big pile in his office that just says Marco over it.
John:
Put it in the Marco pile.
John:
Well, technically, I feel like this is... Oh, I have a 15-inch again.
John:
But you don't.
John:
You have the 2017 keyboard.
John:
That will make all the difference, I'm sure.
Marco:
Honestly, it does feel dramatically better.
Marco:
But I don't know yet how reliable it is.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I got fairly accustomed to the MacBook Escape keyboard.
Marco:
I still don't love the butterfly keys, but I got used to it enough that I could operate.
Marco:
But I can't operate when the keys fail.
Marco:
So I hope they have fixed that.
Marco:
I'll tell you because I'll know in a few weeks.
Marco:
Luckily, there's not a lot of grit in the beach house, so you'll be fine.
Marco:
nice i mean i don't use it in the sand but yeah there's uh you know what they say about sand
Marco:
what neither one no correction you two don't know what they say about that it's fine there's one time i'm glad you didn't get a reference oh my word anyway so yes i know this is totally ridiculous yes i know this is completely wasteful but uh you know my requirements changed
John:
Well, it's not wasteful.
John:
It's not like you're throwing these computers in the garbage.
John:
You're returning or selling them, so other people are getting use of them.
Marco:
Yeah, and when they're this new, the resale is not too bad.
Marco:
It's a shame, because I really do love everything else about the Escape, and in the future, once my desktop situation settles back down again, once I get a Mac Pro, probably, or an iMac Pro next year...
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if whatever laptop I buy next after that, I might then go back to the escape form factor because I really do like it as a travel laptop.
Marco:
But it is not what I want for a desktop replacement.
Marco:
I want more power for that.
John:
You're going to get an adorable.
John:
You're going to get a two-port adorable.
John:
You'll see.
Marco:
If that exists, maybe.
Marco:
But I really do like the Escape over the Adorable, honestly.
Marco:
The Adorable I find a little bit too small to comfortably use in my lap.
Marco:
The way it sits on my legs, I need a little bit more width.
Marco:
And the 13-inch line offers that.
Marco:
So I'm a big fan of the 13-inch size overall.
Marco:
I think it really is.
Marco:
I think for almost everybody, the 13-inch is the right choice.
Marco:
It is really great, and it is a wonderful balance.
Marco:
I will say, though, now that I've used the Escape for three months or whatever it's been, the 15-inch looks like an aircraft carrier by comparison.
Marco:
It seems so big now.
Marco:
I mean, Casey, it's probably even worse for you, right?
Marco:
Because you're bouncing between the adorable and the old 15-inch.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
So I've got the adorable that I used from Wednesday through Sunday when I was in Chicago.
Casey:
Then I came home to the 27 inch iMac and then I needed to do something specific for work.
Casey:
So I got out the 15 and the iMac is a little different because it's kind of an it's like an external display, so to speak, in that it's it's it just occupies a different part of my brain.
Casey:
You know, it's like, oh, that's a that's a desktop.
Casey:
But holy smokes, when I grabbed that 15-inch, it looked enormous.
Casey:
An aircraft carrier is a perfect description.
Casey:
And I vaguely remember having handled 17-inch computers back when they were a thing.
Casey:
Yeah, those were great.
Casey:
I kind of want to just use the adorable for a while and then have somebody hand me a 17-inch.
Casey:
And I can't imagine what it would be like because the 15 just looked enormous.
Casey:
It's obscenely large, and I'd had 15s for years before the Adorable, probably six or so years by now, and golly, it just looked massive.
John:
I've got a Mac portable if you're interested.
John:
How do you feel about a 16-pound portable Macintosh with a lead-asset battery?
Marco:
Somehow I think that's going to have trouble driving the 5K display.
John:
Active Matrix LCD display.
John:
That's the thing I can't communicate to you youngsters adequately.
John:
The idea that back in the day, every Mac had something amazing about it.
John:
Even this giant, disgusting, portable computer had an Active Matrix LCD display.
John:
And all of the like the typical PC laptops had passive matrix screens.
John:
And I don't know if you remember what those were like.
John:
Awful.
John:
You know, ghosting like you would you would move the cursor and move windows and you would see like 17 ghost images of the things was terrible.
John:
Active matrix.
John:
yeah yeah transistor behind every pixel and you can move your cursor and the cursor would actually move and it was like it was like a portable a flat screen can't do that because everyone knows what a flat screen looks like it's this ghosty mess and yes it was monochrome i think uh yeah i think the first back portal is monochrome but active matrix it was like well it's like it was it was the promotion of its day it was the 120 hertz of its day it's like well once you see active matrix you can't go back
Casey:
My dad had a ThinkPad, and I don't remember the model number, but it was black and white.
Casey:
Well, I should say it was grayscale.
Casey:
And I remember running Wolfenstein 3D on it, and it was unplayable because of all the ghosting.
Casey:
It was ridiculous.
Casey:
However, I believe at dad's house right now is an IBM PC convertible.
Casey:
And John, you don't know anything about these because you didn't believe in PCs.
Casey:
So let me tell you about old hardware, John.
Casey:
The PC Convertible came out in the early 90s, and it had two low-density 3.5-inch drives.
Casey:
As a matter of fact, according to Wikipedia, it was the first IBM computer to use the 3.5-inch floppy disk format, which went on to become the industry standard.
Casey:
You're welcome, John.
Casey:
Anyway, it was a complete piece of garbage.
John:
It wasn't IBM that made it the industry standard.
John:
It was Apple.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
it weighed 13 pounds according to wikipedia and uh it was an amazing machine and i loved it and uh it's a total piece of garbage if i'm really honest with you but it's worse than the mac portable which is saying something yeah so the if you look at the image in wikipedia and you close so imagine you close the lid if you look at the the very front of the keyboard you see how there's like a gray bar going across the front and the sides of the computer
Casey:
It's a handle.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Was it John that just said that?
John:
Yep.
John:
It's a handle.
John:
So it slides out.
John:
I remember these computers because I was alive when these were too.
John:
You know, that's what being old means.
Casey:
So yeah, the thing would slide out as you grabbed it and you can carry the 13.
Casey:
I mean, granted, I am not the strongest man in the world, but I actually saw this thing within the last year at Dad's and I picked it up and was like, oh God, this thing is heavy.
Casey:
Like it is uncomfortably heavy at apparently 13 pounds, which for those of you who believe in units that make sense, that's almost six kilograms.
John:
It's lighter than the Mac portable by almost an entire 15-inch laptop.
Marco:
I will say, though, the current 15-inch is very light.
Marco:
It's only four pounds.
Marco:
It's about the weight of the previous 13-inch models of the old Retina generation.
Marco:
and and so it really is very light it's just large it has a big footprint so it feels like you're waving around a lunch tray you know but um you know i do like a lot of that like if if you're if you want a really powerful laptop that's a great one to have and that's probably the best one to have and
Marco:
It really, you know, all my complaints about battery life aside, and I haven't had time to test this one really yet.
Marco:
I haven't really used it on battery yet because it's only a few days old.
Marco:
But the form factor of this current 15-inch is really remarkable because if you put it in a bag, you know, it's like all the previous 13s.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't feel any heavier than that.
Marco:
But you have the power and massive screen size, relatively, of the 15-inch.
Marco:
So it's a great computer.
Marco:
And it wasn't for me before, but my requirements changed dramatically so.
Marco:
And that's why I have it now.
John:
Okay, so you have something that your convertible PC can't do and didn't do, which is auto-eject a floppy disk in space.
John:
In space?
John:
In space!
John:
Like in no gravity, you mean?
John:
Well, there's gravity, but you're falling around the Earth.
John:
It's called orbit.
Marco:
Anyway, I put a terrible quality video.
Marco:
If you bring one to a geostationary orbit satellite, can you eject it?
John:
Auto inject and eject drives on the Macs were great.
John:
But anyway, this is a famous video.
John:
That's the word for that.
John:
Auto inject is the feature.
John:
Yet another feature that made Apple computers superior to PCs for all those years.
Casey:
I love you, John.
Casey:
But you being smug about old Apple hardware.
John:
Auto inject and eject will never die.
John:
Will never get old.
John:
They will live forever.
John:
They did, though.
John:
They will live forever.
John:
No, because the floppy just went away.
Marco:
I mean, on the other hand, like, you know, you look at this IBM monstrosity and like, you think like, you know, what's better than a laptop with a floppy drive?
Marco:
A laptop with two floppy drives.
Casey:
Well, there was no hard drive.
Casey:
What are you going to do?
Casey:
You had, you know, one floppy for like DOS or whatever, and then the other floppy for actually doing it.
John:
There wasn't enough room in a 13 pound package for them to fit the hard drive.
Casey:
No, there wasn't.
Casey:
I mean, I know you're snarking, but there wasn't.
John:
Well, Mac Portable had a 40 megabyte hard drive, so there you go.
John:
40 megabytes!
John:
It was also $14,000 in 2016 money, by the way.