The Todoyist Problem
John:
But eventually, the test writing becomes exactly as much coding as the coding does.
John:
That doesn't sound right.
John:
I know it sounds weird.
John:
I'm not trying to convert you.
John:
I'm just saying, like, this is the... That sounds like it's not math.
John:
Anyway, this is not the show where we convince you.
John:
It's not the show where we convince Casey to drink coffee.
Casey:
It's not the show where we convince you to start testing.
Casey:
When Marco starts writing tests, I'll start drinking coffee.
Casey:
Let's make that agreement.
John:
Oh, there you go.
John:
Now you're going to make him do it.
Casey:
We should start with some follow-up.
Casey:
And Ravi Sar writes in,
Casey:
But it takes ages for the camera to launch, and you've missed your shot.
Casey:
The list goes on and on.
Casey:
This is a serious usability issue for people with older iPhones, and they suffer from it daily during the whole day.
Casey:
Now, this is a completely fair point, and Ravi is right that I haven't really experienced this lately because I've always been on the latest and greatest phone.
Casey:
That being said, I believe it was either my 6 or my 6S, and we did talk about this on the show at some point or another, I want to say it was my 6S, would occasionally just shut itself down.
Casey:
And whether or not it was the same problem, because it was a relatively new phone at the time.
Casey:
And I think it was during a generation of phones where they did have battery problems, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
The specifics of why it happened don't really matter.
Casey:
But the fact of the matter is, I had a phone where this sort of shutdown was happening.
Casey:
And I remember vividly that there were at least two or three times that I was trying to capture something that Declan was doing with the phone's camera.
Casey:
And it decided to shut itself down.
Yeah.
Casey:
What Ravi seems to forget is that booting a phone, even a brand new iPhone 10, is like 15, 20, 30 seconds or something like that.
Casey:
That is way worse than waiting 5 to 10 seconds for the camera to come up, which is also terrible.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
I am not arguing that that is garbage.
Casey:
I can't imagine how tough it would be to have every app open after 10 seconds.
Casey:
And unequivocally, that is trash.
Casey:
But I would still take that trash over having the phone completely shut down when I'm trying to capture a picture of Declan or now Michaela.
Casey:
Like, no question, I am still convinced that I would rather have throttling than not.
John:
Well, the slow app launch could happen every single time, whereas the shutdown only happens once in a while.
John:
But the reason I put this thing in follow-up is not to debate whether shutdowns are worse than slow performance, but to reiterate again what I think I said on a past show, which is...
John:
If your phone is doing stuff like really, really slow, like this kind of slow, like I literally, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's exaggerating, but it was literally like 10 seconds to launch an app and you know, just a routine regular app.
John:
Like if it's doing things massively slow, that's not throttling.
John:
That is something else.
John:
That is the mysterious ailment that no one has been able to identify that is sometimes, but not always cured by either wiping and restoring from backup or wiping and starting as a new phone.
John:
Why does that cure it?
John:
What does it do?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
But the throttling is not... It's going to make it feel slower, you know, for sure.
John:
But it's not going to make it do this type... Like, even if you cut the clock speed in a quarter...
John:
it wouldn't take 10 or 20 seconds to launch an app, right?
John:
That's too much, right?
John:
It would take a quarter of the time to launch the app or whatever.
John:
So phones that have these massive slowdowns or freezes and stuff, I don't think those are explicable by the throttling.
John:
The throttling feels different.
John:
The throttling feels like your whole phone is kind of going through molasses, but not these huge things.
John:
So all I'm going to say is that if you're encountering one of these problems,
John:
Don't merely assume that you're being throttled.
John:
You may have something much, much worse than throttling.
John:
And what can you do about it?
John:
The only thing I've heard is something, like I said, wipe and restore from backup or wipe and start as a new phone.
John:
And that may or may not fix it, which is terrible advice.
John:
I don't have anything better.
John:
I just want people to be aware that every problem is not throttling.
Marco:
People often complain about how I bother Apple about their software quality.
Marco:
Well, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
They're very successful.
Marco:
They're moving fast.
Marco:
They're competitive.
Marco:
They don't need to make everything perfect.
Marco:
But part of the reason why this battery thing became such a big deal and part of the reason why so many people jumped on sometimes even wrong information about it but definitely sensationalized the motivations and what was actually happening is because
Marco:
Apple's had problems for years where iOS has weird bugs, is not tested well enough on old phones, weird cruft accumulates with older phones, older installations that get upgraded.
Marco:
Sometimes you have things like this where you just have to restore your phone and that might fix it.
Marco:
This is all just problems that arise from having a massive amount of technical debt and bad software quality that never gets a chance to get fixed.
Marco:
If Apple had better software quality and better testing and better support on these old devices, the battery gate thing would have been a way less severe problem.
Marco:
One of the biggest reasons why it blew up the way it did is because there are so many quality problems with software on old phones.
Marco:
And Apple basically handed them on a platter a very good explanation for why their phones are this slow.
Marco:
That isn't their fault.
Marco:
That's Apple being evil.
Marco:
it probably isn't the right explanation, as John said.
Marco:
I think if most people's phones are this slow, it's probably not because the CPU speed has been cut down by 50% or 60% or whatever it is.
Marco:
This seems like a more severe software issue, but...
Marco:
Apple, for years, they've been ignoring this kind of software quality, and it bit them really hard.
Marco:
And there's lots of areas, things like security, where technical debt can really come back and bite you hard.
Marco:
Maybe they need to really reconsider their priorities and how much they value and devote resources to quality of their software and running on old devices, especially, as opposed to just...
Casey:
plowing ahead and giving engineers no time to fix bugs all right andras uh puise writes does anyone other than tech blocker bloggers give a darn about smart speakers uh isn't there a gigantic market of dumb bluetooth speakers it seems that way all over europe where electronic shops seem to be taken over by an unreasonably huge selection of these devices uh blah blah blah i'll get a home pod as soon as i can i doubt i'll ever say a single word to it
John:
You can't blah, blah, blah the middle part.
John:
You're skipping over the important parts.
John:
I didn't put the whole text there just for the hell of it.
Casey:
For the love of all that's good and holy.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
From the middle part, don't normal people just want a fantastic sounding speaker, even if it's not at the cutting edge of solving their lazy old white men problems of switching off the mood lights or turning on their smart kettles?
John:
I know I want a great speaker that connects seamlessly to my Apple devices, so I'll get a HomePod as soon as I can, but I doubt I'll ever say a single word to it.
John:
The reason I put this in here is like – so if I had to summarize this in a slightly less snarky way, it's like Bluetooth speakers.
John:
We all – I have a Bluetooth speaker.
John:
A lot of people do.
John:
They're everywhere.
John:
It's kind of – it becomes sort of the baseline for so you want a little speaker that's better than your phone speakers that you can play stuff from your phone or whatever on, right?
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, and he's right.
John:
There's lots of Bluetooth speakers around.
John:
So why do you even need all like, what's the deal with the home pot?
John:
If it was just a Bluetooth speaker, wouldn't that be fine?
John:
Who cares about things you can talk to except for as he, you know, puts it like turning on your mood lighting or your smart tea kettles or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And he even says, I'll get one because he wants something connected to his Apple devices, but I doubt I'll ever say single word to it.
John:
I think this falls into the same category, albeit much more angry, as Casey, where, and I think we've talked about this before, and I want to reiterate to it.
John:
If it seems silly that you're talking to your speaker, you're like, I don't want a speaker.
John:
Who cares about the talking?
John:
If that seems silly, people who say that probably have not tried one of these things.
John:
And I know if you haven't done it, it sounds like a froofy thing, but...
John:
As the technology required to make something that works like this goes down, and I argue it's pretty low already considering you can get a little Amazon dot that does a pretty good job of understanding what you're saying, the utility of it will be apparent.
John:
These things are not popular for no reason.
John:
So I would once again urge everybody...
John:
If you've never had a thing like this that you talked to, don't immediately dismiss the idea of talking to it as something that is a passing fad or a thing that only rich, lazy people do or whatever.
John:
It is a technology that has utility.
John:
Talking to things is a useful interface in many situations.
John:
And that's why I think, as time markers on, Bluetooth speakers that you can't talk to
John:
will become less popular in the same way that like smartphones that were not iPhones became less popular because you could do some of the same stuff but once you've spoken to something to tell you to play music having to go to your device and flick around in an interface and
John:
send the audio to the Bluetooth thing.
John:
It doesn't just seem slower.
John:
It is slower.
John:
It is less convenient.
John:
It's a different way of interacting with things.
John:
So I would once again say do not dismiss talking to cylinders.
John:
They're good to talk to.
Casey:
I understand why you brought me up earlier.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
have mixed feelings about this, but I think even despite having never had an echo or any, I stumbled because I couldn't remember if that was going to trigger them or not.
Casey:
Despite having never had an echo in my house, I think to some degree, I understand the draw.
Casey:
It's not something I feel like I need, but I do think I understand it.
Casey:
The reason I'm so grumpy about the HomePod is because I want to be able to shout at my HomePod
Casey:
Hey, you know, cylinder play such and such by such and such artist.
Casey:
And, and the fact that I can't do that unless I have either that in my library or an Apple music subscription is what bums me out.
Casey:
Because as I talked about for a very long time previously, I would like to use Spotify to do that.
Casey:
And yes, I am aware that you can do basic controls like, you know,
Casey:
hey cylinder skip to the next track and it will work even if you're air playing spotify like i get that but the whole point is i want to be able to say hey cylinder play placed on hold by mute math and i want it to just work without having to pay apple for an apple music subscription um and that's the thing i understand the limitations of the homebot specifically this was a more general this person's more general anger is like don't normal people want just want a speaker even if it's not on the cutting edge of solving your like it's not your lazy old men problems right
John:
and mood lighting and stuff like that it's not that you're lazy it's like saying don't normal people just want a command line so the solving your lazy problems of oh no you can just point to the thing on the screen with the mouse and click on it like it's just this sort of backwards macho thinking that
John:
You don't need any fancy thing to do that.
John:
It should be fine to do it the way it currently works.
John:
We just want a Bluetooth speaker that sounds good.
John:
You don't need to talk to things.
John:
And it's like, no, like people have tried it and it's convenient to talk to things sometimes.
John:
Not all the time.
John:
It's not the best thing in the world, but it is an interface that has proven its utility.
John:
And just because you don't find utility in it or you have never tried it, so you have no idea what it would be like, doesn't mean it doesn't have utility and doesn't mean everyone who's talking to their cylinders or their phones or their watches or talking to their cars to tell them to call so they don't have to take their hands off the wheel.
John:
to, you know, call home while they're driving.
John:
Those are good user interfaces.
John:
They do not reflect badly on the people who use them and people who think that way should reconsider.
Marco:
Some brief follow-up on my Raspberry Pi music player that I discussed last week.
Marco:
Lots of people wrote in to suggest that I try something that reads RFID or NFC tags.
Marco:
And there's been a number of projects that do this.
Marco:
One of the best ones I've seen is called Plastic Player.
Marco:
And there's a few other projects that were similar where basically you have Raspberry Pi with an NFC reading board.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
intro them into an old mini NES had like the power and reset buttons all wired up to actually do correct things and it was but in reality it wasn't playing the games off of the cartridges it was playing them off of internal memory and the cartridges were simply telling it what to play and that's how all these RFID based music players work too some of them play them off of Spotify or something some of them play them off of internal storage so I started playing with this
Marco:
I actually I got a NFC board.
Marco:
I was a little hesitant at first because there there there don't seem to be any kind of like quick little plug and play boards like the like the sound cards.
Marco:
You can get some that fit the Raspberry Pi hat specification, which is like it's just like a board that like sticks on top of the Raspberry Pi with like a predefined connector on the on the main IO connector.
Marco:
And you just kind of stick it on and it stacks on top nicely and it's like plug and play and it just works pretty easily.
Marco:
There's none of those for NFC reading that I could find, at least none that were maintained.
Marco:
So I had to get like a different board that required me to actually wire it.
Marco:
And then later on I soldered some stuff and it was kind of fun.
Marco:
And I'm terrible at soldering.
Marco:
This is the first time I've done it in years and still terrible at it, but slowly getting less terrible.
Marco:
Anyway,
Marco:
So now I have one that plays via NFC, just using internal storage, and the NFC cards that I'm sticking on the reader just play the album.
Marco:
And it's really nice.
Marco:
It's still a little bit in progress, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
Marco:
I'm really enjoying this crazy little world of making fun crap as procrastination when I'm waiting for Overcast to get through test flight beta review or something like that.
Marco:
And so it's
John:
it's nice and uh yeah i'm really enjoying this world that's about all i don't have anything to show for it yet but uh it's coming along well and it's getting pretty cool and uh so once it's done i'll take pictures and make a blog post maybe i don't know you should you should get tiff to help you design the case for it she can do you know she can uh make a nice case or do something like painting on the outside you got to involve her in this project she'll allow you to put this thing in a prominent place in the home
Marco:
So I actually already have version one of it in a case in a prominent place in the home that she has approved.
Marco:
I'm not going to spoil what the case is yet.
Marco:
I will tell you that it was manufactured by Apple.
Marco:
Oh my goodness.
Marco:
Anyway, once it's done, I'll take pictures.
Marco:
I actually ordered a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is much smaller than the Fulces Raspberry Pi, to help it fit better into this case.
Marco:
But we will see how that goes when it arrives.
John:
You should have saved your trash can so you could chuck these little NFC cards into the trash can, just chuck them in the hole, and then they rattle down to the bottom and it plays the song.
John:
And eventually you have to turn the thing upside down and empty them all out.
John:
Empty the trash.
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:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I actually like plans like this because it lets me, like normally I'm a meat eater, but I like eating less meat over time.
Marco:
And so things like this are a wonderful way with their veggie plan at HelloFresh to eat less meat if you want to do that or if you want to try it, try that out.
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:
Thank you so much to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Apparently in the last week or so, there have been some rejections of iPhone apps or iOS apps, I guess I should say, that use emoji as part of the user interface.
Casey:
The rejections have said something along the lines of, listen, that's Apple copyrighted material, which really is true.
Casey:
You can't use that and it can't be in screenshots.
Casey:
You really got to change your app.
Casey:
Let me start by saying that I am quite confident by the letter of the law, Apple is 100% right, and there's nothing we can really do about it.
Casey:
But it seems short-sighted and stupid that Apple provides all these beautiful emojis,
Casey:
And as most of you probably know, I do love me some emoji that Apple provides all these beautiful emoji.
Casey:
And then if you use them as part of your user interface, they stomp on you and say, no, that's not allowed.
Casey:
Now, shortly before we went to record tonight, I had seen some rumblings about this maybe being walked back.
Casey:
So instead of spending the entire rest of this episode on it, I guess we can just kind of talk about it and then move along and hope that it's getting resolved.
Casey:
But man, that just seems dumb.
Casey:
Like, I understand that, yes, it is their right to do this, but it's just dumb.
Casey:
I don't get it.
Casey:
And I like using emoji.
Casey:
Like, I can't say that I've done this at work, but if I was writing my own iOS app, I would absolutely use emoji in my user interface from time to time because I just think it's cute and fun.
Casey:
But gosh, I don't dig it.
Casey:
And I haven't had the chance to listen to the most recent Connected, which we'll link in the show notes, where Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia is on.
Casey:
And I guess that interview is probably pretty good because Jeremy's pretty damn awesome.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
You're missing a lot.
Marco:
You really should have listened to it.
Marco:
It's really your loss.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Well, I will listen to it.
Casey:
I just haven't yet.
Casey:
I'm sorry, you guys.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I mean, it came out like, what, six hours ago?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
How can I listen to it already?
Casey:
I've been a little busy.
Casey:
But no, the connected guys, of course, are dear friends of ours.
Casey:
And Jeremy, even though we've never met, he's a dear friend of mine.
Casey:
He just doesn't know it.
Marco:
I've been in a hot tub with him.
Marco:
Does that count?
Casey:
That is super hot.
Casey:
And yes, that counts.
Marco:
In any case, the point of driving... Oh, wait.
Marco:
It was a giant hot pool.
Marco:
It wasn't a hot tub.
Casey:
Well, in that case, not so hot.
Casey:
Anyway, you should listen to that.
Casey:
And certainly one of you guys, I guess, Marco, if you'd like to jump in, kind of fill in the gaps here.
Casey:
But I just I don't care for it.
Casey:
I understand it's within Apple's right, but I don't care for it.
Casey:
And I think it's a it's just a poor decision.
Casey:
So, Marco, since you seem to be more read up on this than I, anything you can add or fill in or kind of clarify for me?
Marco:
I mean, once again, the specific day that we're recording is kind of inconvenient for the story because it does seem to be kind of in progress and still in motion.
Marco:
So this may be out of date by the time that I'm able to release this tomorrow morning or whatever.
Marco:
But I think Apple clearly...
Marco:
needs to define a line of what is okay and what is not.
Marco:
Because certain things with their emoji are obvious.
Marco:
You know, the emoji is Apple's copyrighted work.
Marco:
Not that different from, you know, the San Francisco font is Apple's font.
Marco:
They own it.
Marco:
They can dictate the terms of use.
Marco:
One of the things that you can't do with the San Francisco font is you can't embed the San Francisco font in an Android app or on a website.
Marco:
You can call for it in your CSS, but you can't actually embed the files that would then show the San Francisco font to people on Windows or people on Android because that's ripping off their copyrighted stuff and putting it on your server and redistributing it.
Marco:
That's obviously over the line.
Marco:
So similar things with emoji.
Marco:
There are apps, sometimes really big apps.
Marco:
I'm not too familiar with the specifics, but I think people were saying WhatsApp just copied all of Apple's emoji and was putting it on all their platforms, like on Android and stuff.
Marco:
Obviously, taking Apple's emoji images and embedding them in your app on Android is obviously over the line, and that should be enforced by Apple's copyright department.
Marco:
That makes total sense.
Marco:
So obviously, there is a line of what is too far.
Marco:
The question is, where is that line being drawn?
Marco:
And it seems like that might still be in flux, or maybe there was some interpretation by AppReview that is still in flux.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Obviously, I think anything that involves you taking the images off the system and manipulating the images themselves is probably not right and not cool with Apple.
Marco:
But I don't think it's right for Apple to say that a text label in your app can't include characters in this range being rendered by the system fonts.
Marco:
That, I think, is too restrictive.
Marco:
And so from a technical perspective, I think it's easy to define that line.
Marco:
You're allowed to use emoji in your app if it's being rendered as text, like by the text system being rendered as text.
Marco:
That makes total sense.
Marco:
That seems reasonable because then Apple can change the images whenever they want.
Marco:
It can only ever render that way on Apple's platforms because you're not embedding the images.
Marco:
You're just calling for the text characters.
Marco:
So if you do the same thing on Android or somewhere else, it's going to render the Android emoji set, which is what you should be doing.
Marco:
That, I think, is a very good line to draw.
Marco:
It's unclear whether they are drawing that line or not.
Marco:
I think the big app that kind of kicked all this off is an app by Sam Eckert called BitTracker.
Marco:
So BitTracker has basically emoji all over the UI.
Marco:
Like in text labels, there's like a little emoji at the end of text labeling everything.
Marco:
But that looks okay to me.
Marco:
And so this is mostly coming out on his Twitter account over the last few days.
Marco:
And originally he got rejected.
Marco:
Then he got a phone call from AppReview.
Marco:
And in the phone call, AppReview apparently told him that you cannot use emoji anywhere in your app UI except the user being able to enter text.
Marco:
So if there's a text field and the user can type emoji into that text field, that's okay.
Marco:
And if you're doing things with that text, like displaying a message that someone else sent that person that happens to include emoji, that's okay.
Marco:
What he was told on the phone is apparently that you cannot use emoji in the UI in other ways.
Marco:
But then AppReview decided to retroactively go back and approve his app after all and to let him use the emoji that way.
Marco:
But we haven't yet received clarification on the policy.
Marco:
So whether the policy is actually different, we have no idea.
Marco:
And this is a little bit, you know, I have a little bit of skin in this game because Overcast has a couple of small uses of emoji in the interface.
Marco:
If you star an episode, a little emoji star will show up.
Marco:
If you have not downloaded it, but it's simply being streamed, a little cloud will show up.
Marco:
Both these things appear in the detail label, like the date shows on the episode.
Marco:
Oh, and I use the emoji heart.
Marco:
Also in tiny little form in the text label for becoming a premium subscriber.
Marco:
So obviously I have some skin in this game because if this policy is super restrictive in the way that he was told on the phone, that you can't use emoji at all unless the user is typing it in, then everything I just said about Overcast would be prohibited.
Marco:
And that would be unfortunate.
Marco:
But
Marco:
The unfortunate reality is that we don't know.
Marco:
This is one of those vague app store times where either somebody made a big mistake by telling Sam Eckert this policy over the phone, which I think is unlikely, or the policy is shifting, which is probably the more likely answer, that they're considering feedback and maybe considering they went too far.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Again, some policing of their emoji is necessary.
Marco:
There's a very clear line where if you're pulling the images out and putting them on other platforms or playing with them as images, that's probably not cool.
Marco:
But if you are just calling for emoji as characters in text labels in your app being rendered by the text system in the system...
Marco:
I don't think that should be prohibited.
Marco:
Casey, what you said up front, they can legally, it's totally within their rights to prohibit that.
Marco:
I just don't think they should.
Marco:
The language of emoji has become such a...
Marco:
critical part of what's currently in fashion in app design and how people are communicating and what people expect to see and what they expect to be able to use, that I think restricting it from being used in the kind of innocent way I was saying earlier of being used in text labels, restricting that I think would be a big mistake for just...
Marco:
kind of the design landscape of iOS apps.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple has to worry about dilution of their brand or losing control of their copyright with these images as long as it's being rendered by the tech system on their device and not in other places.
Marco:
that actually, in my opinion, reinforces their brand.
Marco:
Because then, all these apps that have these unique looks that include Apple's emoji in their text fields can't look the same way on other platforms.
Marco:
That actually, I think, reinforces the design walls around Apple.
Marco:
Look, if you want your app to look this cool, to have this kind of cool mood, it has to be on iOS.
Marco:
It can't be anywhere else.
Marco:
i i think any any effort to restrict apps from using emoji in the ui in this kind of you know relatively innocent way with the tech system i think is not a good decision and and is likely to do more harm than good not you know not to mention it's going to really annoy and anger a lot of developers so the last point you brought up about uh emoji being a differentiating factor for apple's platform is i think starting to get at the angle that i'm taking on this um
John:
as uh jeremy pointed out in an emojipedia article google has an emoji font too but theirs has different licensing terms he describes as an open source license that allows other projects to use it within the term set out blah blah blah but like but it's a different license right so it's still google still owns it but it's easier to use elsewhere so jason snell had an article recently on six colors talking about uh slack used to let you pick which emoji you want do you want to see apple's emoji do you want to see google's emoji what are the other choices uh
John:
it was a bunch of other twitter style emoji emoji one style like it had a bunch of emojis clearly like embedded in the app somehow because i think it was like this on all platforms right um even if you were on windows or whatever you could get the apple emoji and then obviously it's no no and because they were using you know the using a different platform so apple uh must have gone to them because now you don't have that option anymore you get you can get the apple emoji on apple platforms but not on windows or whatever
John:
But if you're on Windows, you can get the Google emoji because Google's license is more permissive.
John:
When it comes to what Apple should or shouldn't do with its emoji rights, yes, there is the angle that's saying, look, if you're on Apple platforms, you get a nice emoji.
John:
We think our emoji are good.
John:
uh they make our platform nicer to use because we think they're better than other people's emoji and people can use them in their interface like marker or whatever um and that's a differentiating factor the other angle is if apple decided to have a much more permissive license for its emoji
John:
what could happen and what i think is already kind of sort of happening without apple's permission is they could attain visual uh not dominance but like they could become the face of emoji to the world the like the the what they decide the representation of each one of these fairly vaguely specified emoji symbols is
John:
what they the artwork they choose and their art style and their all their artistic choices could come to define emoji across the entire industry including when they decide to change an emoji or make a new emoji or whatever like that they could become the de facto leaders of emoji merely by having the most widely used set uh and you know google's is very widely used as well i don't think google is winning that battle uh judged based on like
John:
how often Apple's emoji are copied without permission rather than using Google's with permission.
John:
It's like given the choice between Google lets me use it in my app or whatever platform it's on and Apple doesn't, but I kind of like the Apple ones better, right?
John:
So that position, being the sort of visual leader of emoji for the entire world also has value.
John:
And I'm not sure the value of saying if you want Apple's nice emoji, come to the Apple platform is worth the sacrifice because this happens all the time for me.
John:
Like when you're communicating with emoji,
John:
If you're just communicating with all your Apple-using friends, you're all on the same page about what the emoji looks like, right?
John:
But if you're communicating across platforms, it's harder to know if they're seeing the little face with the teary eyes or the whatever, like, or the thing that looks like a grimace that's supposed to be a grin.
John:
Like, there can be miscommunication because of differences in art style.
John:
And people on Apple platforms experience that.
John:
me as an apple user i wish that apple would widely license its emoji to whoever the heck wanted it so i could be sure that other people would see the same things i did because i have the expectation that if given the choice they'll choose apple's emoji over google's because google's is weird and ugly or whatever like i don't know if that's entirely true but i would prefer that world and i think being the de facto visual leader emoji has more value to apple as a company than retaining its fancy stuff to only be on its platform
Marco:
I think there's also the issue of app design quality.
Marco:
This is not quite the same, but honestly, it's not that different.
Marco:
Imagine if we were not allowed to use the San Francisco font in our apps.
Marco:
That Apple had this wonderful system font that all their apps used, but the third-party developers could not use the San Francisco font in their apps, period.
Marco:
What that would mean would be that every app would have to figure out some fonts that it could use, probably make its own or buy its own or license its own.
Marco:
So what that would do is not only would all apps look different, like way more than they do now and sometimes in bad ways, but that also would draw some lines between apps that had money behind them and apps that didn't so much.
Marco:
It would make that more apparent and you'd have a bigger visual quality difference, making quality app design less accessible to people.
Marco:
There would be somebody out there like, you know, we would all just go use the Google open source fonts or whatever, like there would be some small collection of free or low cost fonts for developers to just go get instead.
Marco:
And so you would have iOS apps where the design, as you were saying, like the design would basically be dictated by third parties like Google who were offering some kind of permissive font that we could use instead.
Marco:
The emoji situation, if we can't use them in text labels and stuff, isn't that different.
Marco:
Because the fact is, app design is including emoji now.
Marco:
That is happening.
Marco:
It's been happening.
Marco:
It's going to happen more.
Marco:
Emoji is becoming an increasing part of how people...
Marco:
Use computers, how people expect to be able to use apps, how things should look, how people expect things to look.
Marco:
So a lot of apps want or need to use emoji in their UI.
Marco:
And if we can't use Apple's emoji there, we're going to have to go get our own made, which almost no one can afford to do except the biggest companies.
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
Go use some open source one like Google's.
Marco:
I don't even know if we're allowed to with their license, but I know it's pretty permissive, so maybe.
Marco:
In which case, what you said is right, John.
Marco:
In which case, then all third-party apps on iOS look like these weird other emoji, and then Apple's look weird by comparison.
Marco:
That's not a good situation to be in, which is why I think...
Marco:
For the same reason that we are allowed to use the San Francisco font in our apps on iOS, as long as we don't rip out that font and bring it to Android, for that same reason, we should also be able to use the Apple emoji set in our UIs, as long as that emoji set does not leave iOS.
John:
I want it to be used on Android, too, because I want the uniformity.
John:
But as for using it just in iOS, Apple does have a point which I can imagine being made in some future WWDC session if it hasn't already.
John:
They're not going to say this, but it would almost be better if you ripped off the image as a ping.
John:
and put it in your app than if you did it as a character because if you do it as a character apple changes its emoji font from time to time and your ui like if they change that star to be something totally different and it clashes with your ui all of a sudden because it's not yellow anymore and you expected it to be yellow or the cloud that used to look a certain way looks a totally different way and you know or sometimes they change the the emoji so much that semantically it doesn't even you know convey the same message and
John:
it's probably not a good idea to use a little graphic that you don't control as part of your user interface unless you're willing to chase that around.
John:
But of course, once you start ripping off the image of it, that's even worse in terms of Apple getting all uppity about its copyright and everything.
John:
So again, if they gave a permissive license and just consider these like, these are free glyphs that you can use in your thing.
John:
If you want to, you know, that's the case where I would say if you want to use it as your user interface, you can only do it on Apple platform, so not on any other ones.
John:
And then the license would say, if you want to use it as text, like if someone types text and they want to see it in the Slack application on Windows, that would be the case where you say, fine, you can use our emoji.
John:
Just don't use them in your user interface on Windows, but you can use them for typing on Windows.
John:
Anyway, I think there's definitely a way for Apple to...
John:
sort of have their cake and eat it too and i don't think the the way that is the most benefit to apple setting aside developers the most benefit to apple is keeping it so tight that you know that that people can't use it even on apple's platform and i don't even think it's going to be just to confine it to apple's platform because i don't think there's any advantage
John:
or i don't think the advantage is worth being that restrictive and saying come to apple for our cool emoji because people won't and some other uglier form of emoji will spread everywhere and then apple people will feel weird because they'll send you the grimacing face and other people will see something different and not understand what you're saying and that will
John:
make apple people feel marginalized rather than uh the other way around i just want us to be able to use emoji on apple platforms just like marco said is that so much to ask yeah i mean i don't i haven't been following the drama but i'm sure i'm assuming that that there'll be some nuances there because i think apple's goal is to make sure emoji and stuff looks nice on their own platform
John:
I don't think they're going to be so restrictive as they did let the guys app through, but that's just me thinking that the App Store has been more reasonable than usual in the past year or so.
Marco:
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Marco:
I started using a to-do app this past winter.
Marco:
Which one?
Marco:
Well, I'll get there.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I had always kind of used Reminders, the built-in Apple Reminders app, very lightly.
Marco:
Like I'd have it remind me of maybe one thing a week.
Marco:
And, you know, simple stuff like take out the garbage, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
I very lightly used it, and it was never really a habit.
Marco:
For overcast planning, I kept a task paper document.
Marco:
since the beginning of Overcast and even before that for a lot of Instapaper.
Marco:
And I still find the task paper format really nice for planning a software release for an indie developer like me.
Marco:
But this past holiday season, I was just super busy.
Marco:
And everything in my life was half-done projects and things I had to worry about and check in on and try to complete all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
And I finally started using Reminders very heavily.
Marco:
And what really got me into it was Siri Capture.
Marco:
Siri freshers me a lot, but it's pretty good at reminders.
Marco:
Like, it's, you know, it's not perfect, but it's close enough that it's, like, it's useful.
Marco:
And I found that to be a very nice way to capture, like, as I'm out, as I'm thinking about something, oh, remind me to blah, blah, blah, you know, okay.
Marco:
The problem with Apple Reminders is that while the Siri Capture on Apple Reminders is great,
Marco:
Pretty much everything else about it is terrible.
Marco:
The only reason why I ever used Reminders to enter tasks is because I never had to actually use the Reminders app to enter a task.
Marco:
Creating a task on the Reminders app is awful.
Marco:
The UI is incredibly clunky.
Marco:
It's ugly.
Marco:
It's hideous.
Marco:
It still has a lot of weird pre-iOS 7 kind of behaviors and looks and everything.
Marco:
And it's especially horrible on the Mac.
Marco:
It's way worse on the Mac than it is on iOS.
Marco:
The Apple Reminders app on the Mac is honestly embarrassing.
Marco:
And maybe at some point they're going to do what they did with Notes, where they totally redid the Notes app a few years back and made it awesome.
Marco:
Maybe that's coming to Reminders.
Marco:
I hope it's coming to Reminders, but we don't know whether that will happen yet.
Marco:
So I started seeking out third-party apps to help me finally.
Marco:
Do either of you use Reminders or to-do apps?
Casey:
Um, because of hearing a friend of the show, Mike Hurley, talk about it constantly.
Casey:
I think it was Mike.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure it was Mike.
Casey:
Now I'm having second thoughts.
Casey:
But anyway, somebody in my life had talked about the app DUE do.
Casey:
Um, and because I decided that I wanted to have occasional periodic reminders that were repeating, um,
Casey:
And all I wanted was reminders.
Casey:
I didn't want to go all the way into like OmniFocus or anything like that.
Casey:
I just wanted to have reminders that are repeated.
Casey:
I've started using DUE Do.
Casey:
And if I'm honest, I kind of really love it because it does exactly what I want, which is reminders oftentimes, but not always periodic.
Casey:
And most importantly, that will nag you to death, which is exactly what I need because I
Casey:
I'm the kind of person that will be like, oh, yeah, take out the trash.
Casey:
Yeah, sure, I'll do that in 10 minutes.
Casey:
You know, like clear, you know, clear the notification or whatever.
John:
Oh, no, you can't clear the notification until you did it.
John:
There's your mistake.
John:
You can never clear.
John:
Never complete unless it's complete.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's not a Casey problem, but I know myself.
Casey:
One has to know oneself and I know myself and myself is the kind of person that would say, oh, yeah, sure, I'll get that in a minute.
Casey:
And so I have been using Do for, I want to say, three to six months and I kind of love it.
John:
I just use the default reminders one, mostly because it was the one that had Siri support for so long when no other ones did, right?
John:
So remind me to whatever.
John:
That's one of the few times I use Siri to do that.
John:
Occasionally, I will type them in, and you can actually type, like, remind me to do whatever at 7 p.m.
John:
tomorrow, and that will save you from having to look at the UI that lets you pick dates and times, which is not fun to use.
John:
But that's it.
John:
I've never used any third-party apps.
John:
I use it very rarely.
John:
It's usually like
John:
And like, like Marco said, usually for capture, like I'm in a situation where however I would normally make sure I remember to do this is not available.
John:
I can't put it on my calendar or that would be too cumbersome, but my phone is there.
John:
So you just pick it up, blah, blah, blah, remind me to do the blah, blah, blah, right.
John:
You know, remind me to go pick up my daughter in 15 minutes, remind me to, I'm, you know, I use it occasionally for, you know, remind me to stir the sauce in 10 minutes or whatever.
John:
That's why I get annoyed that it won't do a repeating reminder for 10 minutes because that's
John:
I don't know why, because it won't.
John:
But yeah, not very frequently, but when I do use it, it's Siri and it's on my phone and it's plain old reminders.
Casey:
Quick addendum.
Casey:
I should mention that for shopping lists and only shopping lists, I also use the app AnyList, which I love.
Casey:
It's really, really great at doing shared shopping lists.
Casey:
Before everyone writes me email, yes, I am aware that reminders can do shared reminders lists.
Casey:
I am aware that that's a thing.
Casey:
I don't care for it.
Casey:
I much prefer any list for reasons that are not interesting for right now.
Casey:
But anyway, I use any list.
Casey:
And I don't remember if I stumbled upon that myself or if that's because Jason Snell, who is also an any list person, had told me about it.
Casey:
It could have been either.
Casey:
But one way or another, if you're the kind of person that wants to have a grocery list that's shared between you and your partner, which is me, I'm sorry, your partner isn't me.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Point I'm driving at is that if you want to have a shared shopping list, I cannot recommend any list enough.
John:
the notes will do that now too the fancy version of notes has oh that's true that's true you can you can make a shared note and you can put those little radio buttons on it's not as nice as any list um but it you know if you're if you're it's a good way to try out like to see if this is a thing that you'll want to use and you don't want to bother downloading another app just try it in notes and if it seems nice get a better app like any list
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I keep meaning to try any list because of your recommendations, Casey, mostly.
Marco:
I've heard you mention it a few times.
Marco:
Because I would like to... Right now, I just have a shopping list.
Marco:
And the way we share it is Tiff tells me, hey, add this to your shopping list.
Casey:
Oh, that's barbaric.
Casey:
That's barbaric.
John:
That's a good system that I bet she likes.
John:
So I have a worse problem.
John:
I've been trying to get my wife to use any kind of shared grocery list.
John:
I've bought and subscribed to any list.
John:
I've tried using Notes.
John:
I've tried using other third-party apps whose names I've forgotten.
John:
It's just going on my purchases and just...
John:
The problem is she just wants to use paper.
John:
She just wants to use paper that's like in her purse or in her wallet.
John:
And she wants to use the whiteboard that's on the fridge and like three pieces of paper in the whiteboard.
John:
I'm like, but those aren't electronically shared.
John:
And if I write it on the whiteboard, you're like, oh, I didn't see it on the whiteboard.
John:
I had a separate list I wrote down on this piece of paper.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
i'm stuck outside the digital realm there's no real computer solution to that just like i bet tiff enjoys a system where she just yells things to you and you do it it's like paper doesn't work for me because so right now i use the app clear and i know i've heard they have like a new beta going on that's supposed to be a lot better but i'm not on that beta i'm just using the old one which is like not even updated for the iphone 10 and everything
Marco:
But what I like about Clear is that it's very simple and it lets me manually reorder things really easily.
Marco:
You just drag the row.
Marco:
Because what I do with my shopping list, the reason I don't use paper, is I'll enter things however they come to me.
Marco:
But then before I go shopping, I'm the shopper, and before I go shopping, I reorder them to be in the order that I know they're in in the store.
Marco:
Because I know the stores really well.
Marco:
So I know where things are.
Marco:
And so I'll arrange them.
Marco:
Like, okay, walk into the produce first, put all the produce stuff on top.
Marco:
And so as I'm going through the store, I can very quickly check them off.
Casey:
Oh, Marco, why do you do this to yourself?
Casey:
Any list will do this for you.
Casey:
Doesn't know my stores?
Casey:
Well, no, it doesn't know your stores, but if you enter, I don't know, like banana, it will be smart enough to put that in the produce section.
Casey:
So a single list will be sectioned, and it defaults to groceries, but you can set up other things.
Casey:
But if you enter banana, it is smart enough to put that in the produce section.
Casey:
If you enter milk, it's smart enough to put that in the dairy section.
Casey:
You are begging for any list.
Casey:
You just don't know it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I will definitely give it a shot.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to my to-do item, which I've been trying to talk about for like two weeks.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
I'm going to make this happen, damn it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So what I really came to want, like I wanted basically something that was fairly simple, like reminders that had great Siri integration.
Marco:
I basically wanted like Reminders Pro, like what reminders would be if Apple did it from scratch today and actually put resources on it instead of just whatever the heck is working on it now, which is probably nobody.
Marco:
What I want is Reminders Pro, basically.
Marco:
I don't want to practice getting things done or any kind of GTD-like system.
Marco:
I'm not that kind of person.
Marco:
I respect people who do that.
Marco:
That's great for you.
Marco:
That's not for me at all.
Marco:
I want basically a flat, simple, single-screen home view of what's going on.
Marco:
When I complete that, I want it to disappear.
Marco:
I don't want to see future items at all until their date comes up.
Marco:
I have the concept of separate projects or lists, but I only need one level of that.
Marco:
I don't need things like contacts and tags to also be here.
Marco:
I really just need a very simple hierarchy, very simple flat structure.
Marco:
And I really dislike the concept that most of these other apps have where they have an inbox between Capture and when it's in its home.
Marco:
I don't want that extra step.
Marco:
I don't want to have to review my inbox.
Marco:
I want to just say in my Siri command when I'm recording the to-do item, I want to just say where it goes right then and not have anything in the inbox.
Marco:
If I don't specify a project, I want like a default list that just all the two items just arrive in that list.
Marco:
This is basically how Reminders works.
Marco:
Just Reminders is terrible in all other ways.
Marco:
I want something better.
Marco:
So the Mac is my primary platform for viewing, editing, and completing tasks.
Marco:
So it must have a good Mac app.
Marco:
My primary capture platform is Siri on the phone.
Marco:
So it must have an iOS app with Siri integration.
Marco:
It should be able to handle recurring tasks pretty well because I have a lot of those.
Marco:
And I want whatever app I use to be an active development on all three major Apple platforms, Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Marco:
So some nice to haves.
Marco:
I would like maybe to have shared lists or shared projects.
Marco:
I think I might someday want a web service for some kind of API integration, but I haven't in practice actually needed that for anything yet.
Marco:
So maybe I won't actually need that after all.
Marco:
And just kind of a nice to have like the apps should be pretty because I'm an Apple person, damn it.
Marco:
And I like things to be pretty.
Marco:
So like I want like an attractive app that is, you know, simple and has a lot of stuff.
Marco:
Okay, so.
Marco:
Apple Reminders was not doing it for me.
Marco:
In many ways, I like it.
Marco:
I like the integration.
Marco:
Apple Reminders is the only one that works with Siri on the Mac because there is no Siri kit on the Mac.
Marco:
So any of the third-party apps, no matter how good their Mac apps are, they cannot take a to-do item from Siri on the Mac.
Marco:
That's annoying, but that's an Apple problem, really.
Marco:
That's not the app's fault.
Marco:
The Apple Reminders app will always get system integration abilities and stuff like that first before there's a third-party way to do it if it doesn't arrive at the same time.
Marco:
So there's a big advantage to Apple Reminders there, just keeping it simple, keeping it in the system and everything.
Marco:
But again, it's such a clunky app.
Marco:
I really didn't like it very much.
Marco:
I tried Todoist.
Marco:
Todoist has tons of features.
Marco:
It's very much web service oriented.
Marco:
So it has really good collaboration features, shared projects, shared lists, API integration, stuff like that.
Marco:
They have apps on every platform.
Marco:
But the Todoist Mac app is horrendous.
Marco:
It is basically a very poorly wrapped web app.
Marco:
Like Slack.
Marco:
It makes Slack look native.
Casey:
Oh, I cannot believe that.
Marco:
Oh, it's bad.
Marco:
Every interaction with the Todoist Mac app feels just wrong and limited and nothing works the way you think.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's kind of embarrassing.
Marco:
um if if ios is your primary platform like i understand like why federico likes to do this because ios is the primary platform and he needs collaboration features with some of his employees and stuff so that makes total sense but for me as somebody who works alone on a mac i cannot recommend to do this at all it's it's rough i also i couldn't get over like hearing hearing the way that people like federico and mike talk about to do this one of the problems is that siri
Marco:
doesn't really recognize the pronunciation to do list you have to pronounce it wrong like to doist or other like and like i couldn't get over that like i i know that's that's kind of a stupid reason to not pick an app but like even if everything else was great about it the fact that every time i added a reminder i have to tell my phone to add something to to doist i i didn't know if i couldn't get past that so
Marco:
I also tried OmniFocus.
Marco:
This OmniFocus seems to be kind of like the good default for if you want a powerful task management system, you should probably just use OmniFocus.
Marco:
The OmniGroup makes amazing software.
Marco:
They have an amazing, long-standing reputation for...
Marco:
very high-quality Mac and iOS software.
Marco:
And OmniFocus has been around for a long time.
Marco:
It's very mature.
Marco:
There's tons of guides on how to use it and everything.
Marco:
It has first-class Siri integration.
Marco:
It's frequently updated, very well-supported, very powerful, very customizable, but it's ultimately very complex.
Marco:
It's far too complex for me.
Marco:
Maybe someday I will graduate to OmniFocus, but I'm not ready for that right now, and I might never be.
Marco:
It has a lot of roots in getting things done, and the kind of people who practice that kind of more structured system than what I'm looking for, maybe it would be possible to heavily customize it to be what I want, but I honestly don't have the time or will to do that.
Marco:
And again, maybe someday I will, but for now, OmniFocus is just way too complex for me.
Marco:
So then I tried Things.
Marco:
Things has, frankly, the best Mac app I've seen.
Marco:
Like, not among all Mac apps, but among to-do apps.
Marco:
It's a really good Mac app.
Marco:
I think the Mac app is actually better than their iOS apps.
Marco:
Again, first-class Siri integration.
Marco:
One thing I like about Things is that it's one syllable.
Marco:
And it's a regular word that Siri can always recognize properly.
Marco:
And it also doesn't sound too nerdy if I'm saying it when other people are around.
Marco:
Like, if I have to say to Doist to Siri, that's rough.
Marco:
OmniFocus sounds okay, but a little nerdy.
Marco:
Things, you breeze right by, you don't even hear it, right?
John:
On this topic of the names of the app, by the way, this is another place where I feel like I've been waiting too long for what seems like a pretty obvious advancement.
John:
I understand why Siri works the way it does with the name of the app as part of the sentence that you say it, but that's not how people want to talk to their phones.
John:
Even if it's a nice one-syllable normal word, that's not how people want to talk to things, right?
John:
If someone decides that they're going to use things as their reminder app, there should be a way in iOS...
John:
to tell it when i say remind me to blah blah blah i mean to do it in things because i use things like it's not i don't think it's asking for the moon and it makes the experience so much better because your interface is talking and once i feel like i have to talk in a particular syntax i'm playing a text adventure game with my phone i don't want to do that i want to speak i want to speak in a natural way that's one of the beautiful things that i love about a lot of the cylinders and like my google home
John:
For my Google Home, I just say things however the hell it occurs to me to say it, and it amazes me that it figures out what I meant.
John:
In a very narrow problem domain, like remind me to, or there's already a million ways to say set a reminder, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I shouldn't have to insert the name of the app I want to use, especially if it's the same app every time.
John:
That would avoid the doused problem, and it would just make it better.
John:
This gets back to the default apps things or whatever.
John:
Anyway, if Apple's looking for something for iOS 13, not iOS 12,
John:
Make that experience better because we do like talking to our phones, but we don't like to, say, to douse or things or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, and there was actually, Federico brought this up on Connected this week, the episode that you all should have already been listening to for the Jeremy Burge emoji interview.
Marco:
But anyway, that was also in this episode.
Marco:
And Federico mentioned, like, you know, people have for years wanted Apple to have default apps choice for things like the browser and the mail client.
Marco:
And I understand why they don't do that.
Marco:
And that's, you know, that's been argued to death.
Marco:
But this does seem like an area where that's very easy to say yes to.
Marco:
SiriKit has a limited number of intents.
Marco:
There doesn't seem to be any downside to enabling a default option for somebody to say, okay, Things is my Reminders app.
Marco:
Always put Reminders and Things.
Marco:
X or Y is my Notes app.
Marco:
That should be...
Marco:
that should be supported.
Marco:
There should be a system-wide preference to just default that.
Marco:
And if Apple, you know, really wants to make Siri awesome, I hope they consider that.
Marco:
But anyway, so just finishing up with things, there's no shared functionality, like no kind of like shared groups or lists or projects or anything like that.
Marco:
There is no API or public web service, but they did recently add an email-in feature, so you can kind of simulate parts of it.
Marco:
You can get like the...
Marco:
add this to things working by basically using emails the gateway one of the annoying things about things is that uh i can't figure out how to make a new task from siri go directly to no project anytime you can sit you can say like remind me today to do this thing and things and then it gets no project and but it gets today i can't figure out how to make it go no project if you say anytime it goes to the inbox
Marco:
I don't want anything to ever go to the inbox, ever.
Marco:
On the Mac, you can configure it to basically skip that with quick entry, but you can't do that with SiriKit on iOS yet, and it annoys me.
Marco:
But for the most part, I have found things pretty good.
Marco:
There's a couple of other small weirdnesses.
Marco:
So, for instance...
Marco:
the repeating UI is really weird.
Marco:
Once you get it set up, it's fine, but creating recurring events is very unintuitive.
Marco:
I mentioned earlier that I don't want things that are in the future to show up until it's their time to show up.
Marco:
That is only done on the granularity of the day level.
Marco:
So you can't say...
Marco:
Don't show up until Wednesday at 9 p.m.
Marco:
that I have to put out the cardboard recycling.
Marco:
All day today, I've had put out the cardboard recycling on my to-do list, even though I really shouldn't do it till 9 p.m.
Marco:
You can set a reminder to alert you of that at 9 p.m., but it's going to show up on your list all day.
Marco:
I don't love that.
Marco:
And finally, whether it is an active development or not is kind of a big question mark with things.
Marco:
Because the developer of it, Culture Code, went for a very long span between previous versions.
Marco:
And it seemed at many times as though the app was abandoned.
Marco:
And it turned out it wasn't, but there were such long delays...
Marco:
that it's a little hard to shake the fear that it might get abandoned again or go for long spans without updates again.
Marco:
And so finally, after trying all these apps, I finally understand why so many of our podcaster friends are always talking about their frustrations with their to-do apps and why they're always switching between them and saying, oh, now I'm switching to this because this thing annoyed me about this other app.
Marco:
I finally get it because this is such... It's a hard problem.
Marco:
This is a very personal app.
Marco:
You're trying to codify people's internal mental systems in an app, and that's really hard to do in a way that pleases many people.
Marco:
None of these apps are perfect for almost anybody.
Marco:
Everyone is kind of 70% satisfied with any given one at most.
Marco:
One thing I thought of, though, is that...
Marco:
There's really nothing saying that you have to only use one to-do app for everything.
Marco:
Like, Casey, you mentioned earlier that you use AnyList for groceries and you use Do for some other stuff.
Marco:
That is totally a solution.
Marco:
If you don't like the way Things does recurring reminders...
Marco:
I could just have some other app remind me to take out the trash.
Marco:
I don't need things to be the app that does all that stuff.
Marco:
There's nothing saying that you only have to use one app for everything.
Marco:
You can have different to-do apps for different needs depending on what they're good at.
Marco:
Your grocery store shopping list does not need to necessarily be in the same app as your next version of your iOS app and what you're doing for it.
Marco:
It would be nice if one app could do multiple things like that in a way that didn't step on each other, but
Marco:
It doesn't have to be.
Marco:
I've settled on things for the time being.
Marco:
And I think I'm going to be here for a while because the Mac app is just so much nicer than the other Mac apps.
Marco:
And so I like things a lot.
Marco:
It does fit what I want in some ways.
Marco:
There's some things about it that are just friction to me.
Marco:
But for the most part, it's the closest I've found to good for me.
Marco:
But I'm also probably going to check out any list for grocery stuff.
Marco:
And I'm really curious to know whatever the heck Clear is working on for their next version for, you know, other like really casual stuff like groceries.
Marco:
But ultimately, I'm now using it to do app and it's things.
Marco:
And it's pretty nice.
Marco:
Not perfect, but definitely the nicest for me.
Marco:
Once I kind of got a feel for it, it just felt really right for the way I like to use things and the way I like things to look and work and behave.
Marco:
And yeah, there is some friction, but ultimately I like it.
Marco:
So thanks, things.
Marco:
What do you use for your calendar?
Marco:
Calendar.
John:
And so how do you decide whether something goes on your calendar or in one of those to-do app things?
Marco:
Oh, that's easy.
Marco:
A to-do app is a list of things I need to get done.
Marco:
A calendar is a list of time slots that are booked.
Marco:
Great apologies to people like Merlin who have talked about this at great length forever.
Marco:
A calendar entry is a thing that I have to do at that time.
Marco:
If I have to have a meeting with somebody or recording a podcast, that has to happen at a certain time.
Marco:
That is not a to-do entry.
Marco:
A to-do entry is things like, you know, follow up about this thing I had this email about.
Marco:
Or like, you know, take out the trash sometime today or stuff like that.
Marco:
You said you wanted to be told to take out the trash precisely at 9.
Marco:
Yes, but I don't have to do it at 9.
Marco:
I have to do it sometime between 9 and tomorrow morning.
Marco:
So where would you put the fact that a plumber is coming?
John:
that's a calendar entry because that is that is like a thing that is happening at a certain time it's not a to-do item it's it's an event like that's that's a very different you know semantic thing i think that the line is fuzzier than you're making it sound because anything that i feel like has a date and a time associated with it is a potential candidate for a calendar but it's also a potential candidate for a reminder but it's also a potential candidate for a to-do item because you want to do it at a particular time depending on how you view things how many you just use one calendar casey what do you use
Casey:
I use a shared Google calendar that is off of my Gmail account that Aaron and I share, and that is the canonical family calendar.
Casey:
That being said, anything that happens during the workday or anything that for some reason I don't want Aaron to see, like maybe I've booked a time to go buy her a gift or something like that.
Casey:
That's the only thing I can think of that happens.
Casey:
I wouldn't want her to see or maybe something that's irrelevant to her.
Casey:
That goes on my work calendar just because… Going to the Tesla dealership.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
How did you know?
Casey:
But yeah, so basically the Google calendar that's associated with my Gmail account, well, strictly speaking, my Google Apps for My Domain account…
Casey:
that is a shared calendar that that she has on her phone that she has on her computer that's everywhere that is the canonical list family calendar and then anything that is basic basically anything that happens during the work day or for some reason i don't want her to be burdened with that is on my work calendar what is your work calendar it's google apps for oh but it's all google yeah it's google everywhere
John:
So I also have a separate work calendar.
John:
It's not Google because my work doesn't use Google at work.
John:
It's Outlook, whatever, Exchange.
John:
And I think that's split.
John:
I like that split.
John:
I like not having my work calendar mess with my family calendar.
John:
Most of the time, my work calendar is totally bonkers.
John:
Like, it is just massively booked and oversubscribed, and I would never want that noise in my life, right?
John:
And then the life calendar is less...
John:
um and there's the split the market but it's pretty much the same split that i use like on on the family calendar it's you know podcast recording uh i would put plumber on the calendar it would be an all-day item um
John:
And then reminders are if I'm doing something off the normal schedule.
John:
I do put what time I have to leave work on my work calendar.
John:
I do put what time I have to leave home on my home calendar.
John:
Four days where that is different than normal.
John:
So if I have a very early meeting and I want to remind myself...
John:
Don't forget today you have an early meeting.
John:
You actually have to be at work earlier than you normally are.
John:
I put that on my home calendar early in the morning.
John:
And if I have to leave work early to like a parent teacher conference, I put that in my work calendar, which is weird.
John:
Like I was thinking of that for the to do apps as well.
John:
And when I use reminders, I'm a lot of the time I'm choosing a system based on where I think I'll be when I'll need this information and what I think I'll be doing.
John:
If I think my phone will be with me, reminders is a candidate because that's where I'm going to see it.
John:
But if I think I won't have my phone, if I put it in a reminder, it's not going to do me any good.
John:
if I'm someplace where I don't have that.
John:
And that's the homework calendar split.
John:
I don't want to look at my work calendar at home, and I do look at my home calendar at work, which requires some combining of stuff.
John:
But for the to-do stuff, like Marco said, with the multiple applications that are task-specific, I just got done asking for the ability to say, like, oh, remind me of whatever and have you use a single app.
John:
The next logical step in that is,
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it should eventually like learn or ask you when your actual trash day is.
John:
And you should be able to say increasingly offhand and casual things, which result in the correct being reminded at the correct time, because it has some context and history about what you've done in the past.
John:
We're not asking for how 9,000 here.
John:
I think all this is within the grasp, but it's the stuff that probably Google probably already knows about us from like monitoring all our activities through its various applications and stuff.
John:
I would love for those systems to get just a little tiny bit smarter.
Casey:
So, Marco, how long until you write your own is really what we all want to know.
Marco:
That is not an unreasonable question.
Marco:
It would be totally my style to get upset with all the options and just write my own.
Marco:
But honestly, I don't think that's going to happen.
Marco:
First of all, there's limited time in the day.
Marco:
It's a little bit of a crowded market, perhaps.
Marco:
Honestly, well, it isn't, because there's only so many that are actually decent.
Marco:
But the problem is that for a... This is kind of a similar problem that John Gruber and Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus had with Vesper, is that to enter this market in a competitive way that's useful to a lot of people, you really need to be on all of the Apple platforms at once at launch.
Marco:
That's really hard for any indie to do these days.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I'm not going to use a to-do app that is not on my Mac and my iPhone and my iPad.
Marco:
And a lot of people are also going to need a watch app.
Marco:
The barrier is just so high that it is certainly possible for people to do it.
Marco:
And there's going to be certainly some people who are totally fine to have it, say, only on their phone.
Marco:
But that's not me.
Marco:
And that's not many people, unfortunately.
Marco:
And so in order to make a good to-do app that's actually competitive, you really need to launch on all those platforms at once.
Marco:
And that's just really a massive amount of work that I don't think I'm ever going to have not only the bandwidth to do, but also like...
Marco:
I don't have the passion for this market at all.
Marco:
I'm happy to use these apps and talk about them once on a podcast for 30 minutes, but I really don't think I'm going to fall in love with to-do app systems and suddenly want to make my own enough to actually be willing to devote the massive amount of time it would take to make apps for all of these platforms to make it actually useful.
John:
So not that this actually reduces the amount of work, but it is a novel approach to reducing the apparent footprint on all the different platforms is the approach that I think Google's taking this approach.
John:
I'm sure other apps have done it as well, where you decide that the problem you're solving, whatever it is, to-do apps or whatever, you're going to implement that entirely server-side with some smart somewhere, right?
John:
And that the interface to those smarts will be something that is not directly connected with a task.
John:
So in Google's case, like, I forget, what was it?
John:
Was it Allo or something?
John:
Like, they basically had a chat app.
John:
It's bubbles of text.
John:
It's you versus the thing you're communicating with.
John:
And that chat app can be used to chat with any person or thing.
John:
There's nothing in the chat app.
John:
that is specific to the problem.
John:
So if you have the chat app on all the different platforms, the chat app is on your watch, it's on your phone, it's on your Mac or whatever, you just write that chat app once.
John:
And then what you're conversing with is a series of intelligent agents that know how to do certain kinds of things.
John:
And so then you implement your to-do app entirely server-side
John:
And then when you want to do your next app, which is like, you know, a shopping list, it's the same sort of interface with the chat type thing or speaking or whatever, like getting closer to the idea of not looking at pictures and screens and poking at them, but having sort of an assistant who helps you with things.
John:
Obviously, writing the assistant is much harder, even harder than writing an application for all the different platforms.
John:
But that is it's an interesting approach to these kinds of problems where
John:
You're never going to make one user interface or one way of organizing that works best.
John:
But if you can make one kind of reasonably fake intelligent agent that learns based on your habits in some reasonable way, it could be, you know, it could be a better, actually a better experience to be able to go back and forth with the thing with over text and voice.
John:
Uh, and eventually it's sort of like having your own very primitive personal assistant who in the beginning doesn't really know how you like things done, but eventually learns.
John:
And that could be better than any really nice interface that you make on all the different platforms and potentially easier to maintain because once you've mastered that interface, whether it's faceless talking or just like a chat type interface, you don't need to revisit that that much.
Marco:
Another angle I considered when I was thinking, like, should I make my own one of these or not?
Marco:
Is that the reminders... Like, we've seen a lot of apps over the last couple years that are basically, like, better interfaces to the built-in Apple Calendar.
Marco:
Fantastical is number one.
Marco:
And I use Fantastical for all of my event entry on the Mac.
Marco:
But I still use Calendar for the browsing of it.
Marco:
But I use Fantastical for entry.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
iCal, or rather Calendar, does have a somewhat fantastic Cal-like natural language entry field in recent versions of OS X. Sorry, macOS.
Marco:
But it's not nearly as good, so I don't use it.
Marco:
But the same API exists for the Reminders database.
Marco:
So one way someone could tackle this market, I don't know if anybody has really in a serious way, but you could just make a nicer interface to the built-in Reminders database.
Marco:
I don't know what the limitations of that would be.
Marco:
I'm sure it's not going to be nearly as full-featured as if you make your own database and run your own service.
Marco:
But that is one way you could do this where if you first just tackle just the Mac first or just iOS first with a really nice interface to the Reminders database, maybe that's a way you could do it more incrementally.
Marco:
But again, this is not a market that I feel passionate enough about to spend my time on it, unfortunately.
John:
if you wanted to be differentiated in this market which i i still think is crowded yes there are the good ones but there is such a long tail of of mediocre to bad ones that someone somewhere loves right uh i'm sure because the tail is so long that someone has already done this but when you were talking about and when other people talk about these million to do apps and how they do one thing you like but not some other thing or whatever i'm always reminded of the calculator construction set like that old story about steve jobs where the calculator app wasn't quite to his liking and the developer was tired of of
John:
hearing him say no this should be like that and he just basically made a way here steve you can arrange the buttons and size them and like you build the calculator that you want so instead of a to-do app maker saying well this person says they want this but that person said they always want that and they want there's too many demands here you make the to-do app you want so if you can make a to-do app construction kit where it was an app
John:
that gave you the tools to build the app that you wanted uh i mean that maybe that's what omni focus is and that's what marco was recoiling from because it was just too darn complicated but i think army focus does have at least some point of view about what you're supposed to do but if you really made a construction kit for to-do apps where and again i start thinking of agents like i don't want to you get into programming really quick and that just narrows your market to nothing because no one wants to even do some kind of simple programming but if i could converse with the application and negotiate how things are going to work
John:
You know, do you want me to remind you once or do you always want me to keep reminding you like the nagging thing that Casey was talking about?
John:
You know, most of the time, what do you want?
John:
OK, do you want to see all the things that are coming up in today or just the things that are due in the next time window or like just sort of.
John:
go through the process of building the app that's viewed again that would be astronomically hard to make but i think it would be i'm assuming it would be relatively novel in the market because having heard many many dozens of hours of people talking about to do apps on podcasts i have yet to hear someone say i tried this construction kit and it was terrible so uh if it does exist maybe it's so far in the long tail that no one's even seen it
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you to Betterment for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Time for some Ask ATP?
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Roar Locker.
Casey:
What a great name, Roar.
Casey:
That's amazing.
Casey:
What parent decides to name their child Roar?
Casey:
And why didn't I think of that?
Casey:
Anyway, he or she writes, Casey, do you miss the C Sharp and .NET development stack?
Casey:
I'm taking my computer engineer bachelor degree, and I must say that I enjoy it very much.
Casey:
I also like C Sharp much better than Swift.
Casey:
Although I've spent more time coding in Swift, maybe I'm just feeling an Xcode versus Visual Studio effect.
Casey:
I miss C-sharp, and that's about it.
Casey:
.NET is fine, whatever.
Casey:
It's good, I guess, but to me, it's just a vehicle to give me C-sharp.
Casey:
I do miss C-sharp.
Casey:
I love Swift.
Casey:
I really honestly do love Swift.
Casey:
I like Swift quite a lot, but C-sharp...
Casey:
It does.
Casey:
And I've probably said this before on the show.
Casey:
C-Sharp does a stunningly good job of being all things to all people.
Casey:
If you want to write sort of kind of functional programming, and yes, I'm aware that there's F-Sharp, but like if you want to get halfway to functional programming, you can do that with C-Sharp.
Casey:
Kind of basic, boring procedural stuff, you can do that with C Sharp.
Casey:
If you want to write super object-oriented stuff, you can do that with C Sharp.
Casey:
And I know that C Sharp is not the only language that all this applies to.
Casey:
I'm waiting for John to jump in and talk about Perl.
Casey:
But C Sharp does a really good job of being just about anything to anyone.
Casey:
And I do miss C Sharp a lot.
Casey:
I don't really mind Xcode, which means one of a couple things.
Casey:
It means either I'm still a noob, which is possible.
Casey:
It means either I just haven't been burned by it, which is semi-true.
Casey:
Or it means I'm an idiot, which is possible as well.
Casey:
But in the same way that everyone else seems to complain and moan about Xcode, I don't really mind it.
Casey:
And maybe it's because...
Casey:
Visual Studio, while great in many ways, is aesthetically an assault on my eyes.
Casey:
And Xcode, for all of its faults, Xcode does one thing very well, and that's be very, very pretty.
Casey:
Marco, you said something earlier about, you know, hey, I'm a Mac user, or I'm an Apple person, so I like things to be pretty or well-designed.
Casey:
I forget how you phrased it earlier.
Casey:
But yeah, it's that, right?
Casey:
Like, Xcode is painful in some ways.
Casey:
But A, it is and forever will be better than Eclipse.
Casey:
Don't email me.
Casey:
And B, it is not that bad in my personal opinion.
Casey:
Now, if you want to talk about Swift code completion, what is it, SourceKit?
Casey:
Is that what I'm thinking of?
Casey:
SourceKit is an utter disaster.
Casey:
But Xcode itself...
Casey:
It's not bad, and I like it.
Casey:
And do I miss Visual Studio?
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
And holy hell do I not miss anything related to Windows.
Casey:
Nothing about Windows is something I miss or long for.
Casey:
I am so unbelievably thankful to be off Windows.
Casey:
I cannot even verbalize it.
Casey:
I am so thankful to be away from that.
Casey:
So, I miss C-sharp, .NET, whatever, it's something that gives me C-sharp.
Casey:
Visual Studio, meh.
Casey:
Windows, hell no, I don't miss it.
Casey:
All right, David Steer asks, the next time you discuss single versus multi-thread processing, would it be possible to give a couple of real-world examples of tasks or applications that perform better on each process?
Casey:
I love the show, but I'm not that technical, and sometimes I struggle to give context to your discussions.
John:
Trying to figure out exactly what is being asked here.
John:
Cause, uh,
John:
one way to read it is like what types of things benefit from multiple threads and that's getting into the marco zone of like look if you're doing this type of task and you got a 10 core mac pro you'll see a big benefit or imac pro but if you're doing this kind of task you're not going to see a benefit because it's not uh you know it doesn't use multiple cores and the and which tasks those are really depends on a lot of factors including just like what the application is like i think final cut pro 10 wasn't particularly strong at multi-threading until recently
John:
so but that doesn't mean video processing does or doesn't benefit from multi-thread the other way to think about this question is uh they're asking like what makes something a problem to which you can apply uh some uh parallelism beyond like you know any kind of parallelism or like degrees of parallelism and i think that's
John:
I think that's probably closer to the answer, so I'm going to try to give a non-technical explanation as best I can to this.
John:
So doing stuff in parallel requires a problem where you can break it up into pieces and that the pieces don't have dependencies between them or don't have a lot of dependencies between them.
John:
The obvious example that comes up a lot is almost anything having to do with graphics processing.
John:
where you've got a lot of dots on your screen and for the most part dots may depend on their neighboring dots but they don't depend on the dots way over at the other side so if you're taking an entire image and blurring it you can break that image up into a bunch of smaller pieces dole out those pieces to a bunch of things that are going to work on them all at the same time and then put the pieces back together at the end lots of graphics cards do exactly that for you know tiling processing but in general just the giant array of pixels
John:
They are worked on as much as possible in parallel by your graphics card.
John:
There's probably a Wikipedia page on this expression, but there is a term of art in the computer science world called embarrassingly parallel problems where it is so easy to parallelize because you can break it up into as many chunks as you want.
John:
And there are a lot of chunks.
John:
And so it's like, look, if you gave me a million processors, this problem is embarrassingly powerful.
John:
I could break it up into a million pieces and do them all at once.
John:
And it would be a million times faster than doing them one at a time.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, assuming the thing is processed at the same time.
John:
So.
John:
Whether something performs in parallels is based on sort of the nature of the problem.
John:
There are problems that you can't do in parallel because to do step two, you need the answer from step one.
John:
To do step three, you need the answer from step two.
John:
So you can't do steps one, two, and three all at the same time.
John:
And so that's the high-level computer science explanation.
John:
You can apply your basic reasoning about things to try to discover whether...
John:
particular problem you're having uh is parallelizable in any way is it embarrassingly parallelizable or is it generally serial by nature but that's when we get into the complexity of like well this problem is parallelizable say mp3 encoding but it turns out the mp3 encoder i have
John:
It doesn't do anything in parallel.
John:
It just does it from the beginning to the end.
John:
And that's where Marco said, well, it's not embarrassingly parallelizable, but I can break this audio track up into five pieces and encode all five at the same time and then put the five pieces back together.
John:
And now I've done it five times faster.
John:
right you can't break it up into a billion pieces because at a certain point you're doing i don't know what the size is marco would know like a single frame or whatever it's about 1200 samples yeah like there there is some you know some unit size beyond which you don't get any benefit um but that's an example where the problem itself is parallelizable but the but you can say if i buy a faster computer my mp3 encoding will be faster not if you're using a non-parallelized mp3 encoder it won't so it gets a little bit complicated casey you want to try a different angle
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what I've been working on lately is this thing where I have a folder full of photographs, right?
Casey:
Or maybe live photos.
Casey:
So it's a photograph in a movie.
Casey:
And I want to file them away in a particular way.
Casey:
And what I've run into is some of this is paralyzable and some of it is not.
Casey:
So if you think about it,
Casey:
Any time that I have any photo that doesn't share a date, so if, for example, on today, which is the 7th of February, I take only one photograph with my iPhone, I can, without worrying about a conflict, I can just copy that to where I want it to go, right?
Casey:
Without worrying about a conflict with any other photos taken from my iPhone, I can copy it to where I want it to go.
Casey:
But if I took 15 photos yesterday, it's possible that maybe some of those were taken at the same hour, minute, and second.
Casey:
Maybe I did a burst or something like that.
Casey:
And so some of this is parallelizable and some of it is not.
John:
When I was re-listening to last week's episode, I meant to talk to you more about how you're going to resolve your race condition and how you said, my thing is bug-free except for the massive race condition that I didn't consider.
John:
That's not bug-free.
Marco:
I mean, you could parallelize by day.
Casey:
But what I was trying to explain, and I think I've done a poor job of it, and that's why I want it to be cut, is that if in the batch of photos that I have, I have no conflicts in terms of date.
Casey:
So the hour, minute, and second is unique.
Casey:
All of the photos or movies or whatever, all of the media that has a unique hour, minute, and second can be processed in parallel.
Casey:
So that is to say it may have a conflict in the destination, but it doesn't have a conflict amongst its peers that are being imported.
Casey:
Does that make any sense at all?
Marco:
It does, yeah.
Marco:
But honestly, I'm kind of wondering, does this problem benefit from parallelization?
Marco:
It seems like it's pretty fast to just dump the files serially.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
The reason I think it may benefit from parallelization is that there's two different things at play.
Casey:
Number one, let's say that I took a photo at exactly noon today, just for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
I took a photo at exactly noon today.
Casey:
And it turns out that the destination, so my photo repository that has every photograph I've ever taken, also already has, by some mechanism, don't worry about why, but let's just say it already has a photo that was taken at exactly noon today, at 12 o'clock, at zero minutes and zero seconds.
Casey:
one of the things that my app is going to do is it's going to say, hey, let me take an MD5 of the source that I'm trying to import and of the thing that's already at the target.
Casey:
And if the MD5 is the same, then I need to take evasive action, so to speak.
Casey:
So I need to increment the file, or I need to add a suffix to the imported file name.
Casey:
So instead of being...
Casey:
2018-02-07-12-00-00, the imported file will be all of that with an A at the end, the letter A at the end, because they're two different files.
Casey:
Well, if you're doing that across a whole bunch of files at once, which presumably I am, that may be well served to be parallelized, because on an average modern processor, you have at least two, if not four or six or eight or 10 or 12 or 18 cores that
Casey:
which are all working simultaneously to solve problems.
Casey:
And so it makes sense to split this same kind of operation across all or at least some of these cores.
Casey:
Where it doesn't make sense to split it is if I have multiple pictures that were taken at 12 o'clock in zero seconds, because then I can get into this race condition that I found earlier, which is to say...
Casey:
So the first photo that I'm processing looks at the target and says, oh, there's nothing there and starts the copy.
Casey:
The second photo that I'm processing looks at the target and says, oh, there's nothing there and tries to start the copy, but then they collide with each other.
Casey:
And that's the problem that I was running into before.
Casey:
And I'm solving it now by parallelizing anything that doesn't have an internal conflict.
Casey:
Because even if it has a conflict at the target, that's fine.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
I can still parallelize it.
Casey:
But if it has an internal conflict, then I have a problem.
Casey:
And so anything that doesn't have an internal conflict can be parallelized.
Casey:
Anything that has an internal conflict will be serialized.
Marco:
So what if you, in parallel, read the input files, get whatever date and timestamp buckets they belong to, and stuff all that into an array, then serially just have a thing run through that array, look for the conflicts, resolve them, and do all the renaming serially?
Marco:
Because that's going to be so fast anyway.
Marco:
You're really just relying on the file system speed at that point.
Casey:
Yes, but no.
Casey:
But the thing that I haven't mentioned, and I alluded to this earlier and then never actually put a period on the sentence.
Casey:
The thing that I haven't mentioned is that my target for all of these images and also movie files, my target is actually my synology.
Casey:
So it's not the local file system.
Casey:
I have to crawl across the network to do all of these checksums and to figure out if these files are identical or not.
Casey:
And some of these videos that I'm taking, I mean, like five or 10 minutes of 4K video off the iPhone is multiple gigabytes.
Marco:
Yeah, but a rename should be quick, right?
Marco:
Well, you could import it somewhere first, then do a rename later really fast.
Casey:
Yes, but again, my process is that I'm saying, hey, I found an identically named file at the destination, which in my case happens to be a Synology.
Casey:
So I need to MD5 both the local file that is on my local file system or at worst on an SD card attached to my physical computer.
Casey:
But I also need to do an MD5 on the remote file that's on the Synology.
Casey:
And that can take forever.
Casey:
And that's why I want to parallelize it.
Casey:
So anything that has a conflict...
Casey:
I want to parallelize anything that – I'm sorry – anything that doesn't have a conflict internally, anything that I know will not collide with any of the other files I'm importing, that can be parallelized.
Casey:
What I worry about is if I have 15 files on my SD card that were all taken at 12 o'clock in zero seconds –
Casey:
that's when I need to do it serially because otherwise I run into a situation where I say, oh, does the target... That makes sense.
Marco:
But when something is slow in this case, it's probably being limited by the transfer bandwidth of the SD card or the network protocol for renaming or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I does paralyzing those actually get you anything or is it just clog it up and make everything run, you know, like where you can run 10 things at one 10th of speed each.
Marco:
He's already spent more time writing this program than he's going to say.
John:
But that's fine.
John:
I would just point out that your race condition is like the canonical race condition, which is check if something's OK and then go do the thing.
John:
And while you're going to do the thing, something that you check was OK is right.
John:
So my suggestion for a strategy for dealing with this that doesn't involve serializing any portion of it.
John:
is to use what other past technologies have used, including Unix, and in the specific case, Ethernet.
John:
You want carrier sense multiple access collision detection.
John:
It's kind of getting at what Marco was saying.
John:
don't do everything in parallel uh you just need some kind of remotely atomic operation and even with a nas if you can get the stuff onto the nas and do a rename local to the nas hopefully you can get uh atomic renames and then you just try to do your rename and if your name fails because the file exists you increment it and then you try to do the rename again and you do a binary exponential back off and you just let all the parallel things fight it out
John:
and because there is no inherent order to things that are literally, you don't have any increased resolution.
John:
If you did, you'd put it in the file name, right?
John:
There's no inherent order to the new in pictures, right?
John:
They're all just new in pictures.
John:
So let them duke it out.
John:
There's no locks, no shared state, no waiting, no serialization, and you'd be surprised at how nicely things terminate because this is how Ethernet works.
John:
It tries, and if the line is busy, it waits a little bit and tries again.
John:
If it's still busy, it waits a little bit longer and tries again, and everything works.
Casey:
Yeah, but there is a bit of an inherent order, right?
Casey:
Because the source file name is like IMG underscore 1111.
Casey:
IMG underscore 1112.
John:
Oh, you didn't tell me about that.
Marco:
So why aren't you using that as your tiebreaker?
Marco:
Yeah, wait, you have sequential names in the source?
Marco:
Doesn't that totally solve your problem?
Casey:
Well, that's why I'm running the potential collision stuff serially.
Casey:
That's exactly why I'm running it serially.
John:
So I'm guaranteed that it will... But you've already got a uniqueifier that you'll never have a collision because you've got the date you're doing the import and you've got a sequence number.
John:
Yeah, what's the problem?
John:
He doesn't want to put two dates in the file and that's his problem.
John:
It's too much of an aesthetic is happening in these file names there.
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
Because I want it to be, you know, 2018-02-07...
John:
I keep using A and B. Do you go to AA and then AB and then AC?
John:
Do you then go AAA, AAA, B?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I've never run into a situation when that's a problem, but I understand your point.
John:
This is another bug-free program that there'll never be more than 26 conflicts.
John:
A through Z is fine.
Casey:
See, you, sir, you are why I will never open source this.
Marco:
When the iPhone 15 shoots like 30 frame per second burst photos, you're going to have a problem.
John:
I think the problem is that you're not an old and crusty enough programmer.
John:
If you're thinking...
John:
A through Z is always fine, and I'm like, do we need to use an unsigned 256-bit integer for this number?
John:
That's what cracks me up, by the way.
John:
I was looking at something that briefly touched on, like source code to one of those Bitcoin or some other...
John:
cryptocurrency and they were literally using like the i'd never seen it and like see like the the u256 type for like for one of their values because they're like 64 bits is not enough we need 256 bits of unsigned precision for this value like yep you are really future-proofing this thing that will be gone in two years not not bitcoin just some other random ico
Casey:
So moving on.
Casey:
So where do we leave this?
Casey:
Because, John, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, which is give it over to me, and then I completely ruined it.
John:
I tried, but I think that question has been addressed to the best that we can do in an Ask ATP style segment.
John:
Really, you'll be able to talk about it with Mike when you do like your computer science-y learning stuff.
Casey:
If that even keeps on.
Casey:
And wait a second.
Casey:
Since when did you ever listen to analog?
Casey:
I know you do from time to time.
John:
I am vaguely aware of many podcasts.
Casey:
I feel like you're my dad.
John:
This is not the best way to characterize my current podcast listening, which is very spotty and diffuse.
Casey:
It's like, dad, how did you know I was doing that?
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Thomas Nosiewicz or something like that writes, have any of you ever tried meditation?
Casey:
Please discuss.
Casey:
No, I have never tried meditation.
Casey:
John.
John:
I'm pretty sure I've never tried meditation.
John:
You don't know?
John:
I might have done something that qualifies at some point, but I'm going to say no.
Marco:
Then no, you haven't.
John:
I'm going to say no.
John:
There's lots of things qualify as meditation, and I'm sure as a teenager I probably did one of those things.
John:
That was called sleeping.
John:
Maybe it was even a church thing.
John:
They're always having you do stuff like that.
John:
That was called zoning out.
John:
No, no.
John:
Anyway, I'm going to say no.
John:
The no is the quick answer.
Marco:
I, too, have not tried anything.
Marco:
I have a vague concept of the kinds of things you're supposed to do.
Marco:
I kind of want to try it someday, but it's never been more than like a passing notion like that for me.
John:
I was hoping one of us had done it.
John:
That's why I put this question in there.
John:
It's like, surely one of us has tried meditation.
John:
But nope, we've just heard podcasts about it.
Casey:
You know what I really want to do?
Casey:
I really want to get hypnotized sometime because I think that's bogus.
Casey:
I think it's a bunch of malarkey and I don't think it's real.
John:
Maybe you should start smoking so then you can try to get hypnotized to stop.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Now we're going to hear from so many people about everything that just happened.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and HelloFresh.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
We're going to hear from listening.
John:
We just haven't tried meditation.
John:
We just tell the truth.
John:
We didn't say anything bad about meditation.
John:
Casey said bad things about hypnotism.
Marco:
Now we're going to hear from the meditation people, the smoking people, the hypnotists, the people who have been hypnotized, allegedly.
Marco:
We're going to hear from all of those people now.
John:
I think you might hear from the hypnotized people, but you won't hear from smokers.
John:
Who's going to object to the joke about smoking and hypnotism?
John:
You'd be surprised.
John:
Hypnotists?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It helps some people quit smoking.
John:
If that's the goal, who cares?
John:
Does it work?
John:
Did it help you quit smoking?
John:
Sure.
Marco:
Yeah, I suppose it doesn't really matter.
John:
Yeah, if you believe it works and it actually helps you quit smoking, great.
John:
Like, stand on your head, whatever works.
John:
Don't smoke, kids.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
Baby update.
Casey:
So I love Michaela to death.
Casey:
She is adorable and she is my precious little angel.
Casey:
Yet if she doesn't learn how to sleep, I'm going to go insane.
Casey:
I mean, she's brand new.
Casey:
This takes a while usually.
Casey:
I am extremely lucky to have had one child, let alone two.
Casey:
I cannot believe my good fortune that I have had two so far healthy children.
Casey:
Either one of them could have been unhealthy or had some sort of physical ailment.
Casey:
That would have been really unfortunate.
Casey:
Like in so many ways, I am extremely lucky.
Casey:
But in the heat of the moment, it's funny how you kind of forget that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm so miserable.
John:
So how long are the usual sleep stretches?
Casey:
At night, between two and a half and three and a half hours.
Casey:
That's not bad.
Casey:
Which is not terrible, but is not great.
Casey:
And to be fair, the funniest part of this is that Aaron hasn't really woken me up deliberately to help with the nighttime stuff in like a week.
Casey:
So I am being this much of a baby and all I'm doing is getting woken up when I hear the cry and then going right back to sleep.
Marco:
You just grumble and roll over.
Casey:
No, this is true.
Casey:
This is how ridiculous men are.
Marco:
You're really not having a good showing right now.
Casey:
No, I know.
Casey:
I'm fully aware of this.
Casey:
No, 100%.
Casey:
And maybe I should not all men myself.
Casey:
I mean, all men.
Casey:
I cannot feed Michaela.
Casey:
I don't have the equipment to feed Michaela, right?
Casey:
But the fact that I'm this much of a baby after being woken up, like John said, by a bunch of like, oh, she's awake.
John:
You've got to wake up early to go to work in the morning, right?
John:
Oh, wait.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
Every part of this is me being... I'm the biggest baby in the house, if I'm really honest with myself.
Marco:
I can help you with two liquids.
Marco:
Vodka and coffee.
Marco:
I will let you decide when to apply each one.
Marco:
Don't give them to the baby.
Casey:
These both go into you.
Marco:
These both go into you, but at different times.
Marco:
Don't do it at the same time.
Marco:
It's a bad idea.
Marco:
Erin may not appreciate you doing things that she can't.
Marco:
Yeah, that's also part of it.
Marco:
But if you being a little bit happier and a little bit more functional turns into you being a little more helpful and less of a baby, she might appreciate that.
Marco:
Obviously, this is a hard time for anybody.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
It could be so much worse.
Casey:
I don't think that Michaela is to the point of being, having colic.
Casey:
I don't know what the right phrasing is, but
Casey:
She is very fussy for a lot of the day, but I would not go to go so far as to say that she is like, you know, Alex was or anything like that.
Casey:
Like she is she is manageable, but horrible.
Casey:
Alex, by comparison, John's eldest was from everything I've been told indescribably bad in a way that you'll know you're reached Alex level when you find yourself bringing your baby to a chiropractor.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Not even in the ballpark.
John:
What's wrong with my baby?
John:
Is it in constant pain?
John:
Is it filled with spikes?
John:
I'm willing to go to a quack non-doctor.
John:
Acupuncture?
John:
Anything?
John:
Scan my baby?
John:
Is it filled with bees?
Casey:
Is it filled with bees?
John:
That's the level we were at.
John:
The desperation is like, we will try anything.
John:
Is there a spell on my baby?
John:
Did we get an exorcist in there?
John:
But, yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
Colic is one of those words that means nothing, too.
John:
It's like, what does that mean?
John:
It means you're busy crying all the time.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's the thing.
Casey:
I recognize that I'm being the biggest baby in the world.
Casey:
I fully understand that.
Marco:
You're doing something hard, right?
Marco:
For anybody, even for the weak baby men, having a new infant in the house that you're caring for is a lot of work.
Marco:
And it's hard on everybody.
Marco:
So you don't need to belittle yourself over that.
Marco:
It's hard for everybody.
Marco:
It's not...
Marco:
constructive or useful to get into like trying to outdo each other of like oh well this is hard for me well it's hard for me too like don't worry about that like that's not constructive it's hard for everybody it's hard for you it's hard for Aaron it's hard for Michaela it's probably hard for Declan too like it's hard for everybody Declan's sleeping like a baby so to speak has she woken Declan up because that's the most fun no thankfully no the chain of misery laughing laughing
John:
It feels like unfair.
John:
It's like, oh, come on.
John:
You can't wake the other one up.
John:
We did all the work into the other one.
John:
He sleeps now.
John:
You can't wake him up.
Marco:
It's a hard time for everyone.
Marco:
So the best thing you can do is just try to be as functional and useful as you can and try to add as little drama and problems as possible to the situation that is already very hard on everybody.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
whatever you need to do to do that do that so if that's coffee sometimes and vodka some other times fine keep it under control but if otherwise fine like you know if it just like because like that's the most helpful thing you can do right now for everyone including yourself is to try to make yourself useful and to try to not get bogged down by the hardships and drama of this
John:
Although, you were trying to remind yourself how lucky you are, which is a place that parents often go to try to train themselves in.
John:
But I found a perhaps more successful method is to remind yourself, and you should have an easy time for this, to remind yourself this will pass.
John:
Like, they don't stay babies forever.
John:
Like, you can do it, you have done it, and this will pass.
John:
And I personally find it much more comforting than trying to remind myself how lucky I am.
John:
Because that's like, okay...
John:
Another night off the chalkboard, like the kid is getting older.
John:
He or she is not going to be three months old forever.
Casey:
So literally earlier tonight, as we were recording, I sent the following text to Erin.
Casey:
But in the same way nobody goes to college in diapers, she will eventually learn to sleep.
John:
Literally what I said to her.
John:
That's a big one.
John:
Potty training is the other time you remind yourself.
John:
Most kids are not 30 and still going in their diaper.
John:
It's going to happen.
John:
I remember reminding Marco of that when he was going through it.
Marco:
And it seemed like forever, but now it's done.
Marco:
It's totally done.
Marco:
It's kind of surprising.
Marco:
It seems like you're doing it forever, and then one day you're past it.
Marco:
It just happens.
Marco:
He's probably not going to go off to college with diapers.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And it seems like when you're in it, it seems like it's never going to end.
Marco:
And you're like, oh my God, do I have a problem here?
Marco:
Yeah, take him to the chiropractor.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the reality is like, yeah, it'll end.
Marco:
And so just, you know, get through it.
Marco:
Keep yourself and your family healthy and as happy as possible given the challenge and
John:
And do, like, I'm not saying you have to go to the extreme of going to, like, your local neighborhood, like, psychic or exorcist, but, you know, do bring up all the issues with the doctor, because some babies have reflux, and there's all sorts of legitimate reasons they can't actually be treated that can help, and so you should...
Marco:
exhaust those right just maybe don't go the step further and start you know being totally desperate you know from having a kid before you know that things are hard for a while and then they end and there's you know there's new challenges that arise but like whatever you know whatever challenge you're in it eventually ends
Marco:
and then you know so you get to move on and that's just a thing that becomes automatic now it's nice so like eventually she will sleep and it won't be that big of a problem and it's it might happen next week or it might take two years or more likely somewhere in between and it you know you know it's coming it's gonna be hard until it gets here but you did it once before you can do it again and
Marco:
You are a human, you are an adult, you can do hard things.
Marco:
Also, you don't have a choice, so you're going to do it anyway.
Marco:
I am very happy, and I'm sure underscore will be too, to teach you how to use coffee.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
It fixes so many, or at least it improves so much of this.
Marco:
There's a reason why coffee is so popular.
Marco:
This is a thing.
Marco:
I don't know if you've heard about it in the world, but it really does help.
Marco:
Don't use drugs, kids.
Marco:
You don't need to have coffee to raise children.
Marco:
But it's nice.
Marco:
It helps.
Casey:
Syracuse let me down.
Casey:
If his beloved accord could be had with a stick with anything other than cloth and basically no other options, I would have one.
John:
Cloth seats are great.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
People love to get really fancy, expensive luxury cars with cloth seats because they're so much better than leather.
Marco:
You know what's awesome?
Marco:
Static in the winter when you rub against them and you get static from your car.
John:
There's no static in my cloth seats.
John:
I don't know how long ago you had cloth seats.
John:
There's no static in my cloth seats.
John:
I live in the winter place.
John:
I don't have static in cloth seats.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Anyway, no, but that is a thing of people wanting cloth seats in their luxury sporty cars because they grip you better, right?
Casey:
How could they grip you better?
Casey:
That makes no sense.
Casey:
Leather is not literally sticky, but kind of, sort of sticky.
Marco:
Well, you do kind of slide on leather when it's cold, but it grips you better in the summer.
Marco:
No, the cloth seats are grippier.
Casey:
No, it's funny because I've been talking to a couple other friends of mine.
Casey:
This is the one that had the R32 and previously before that, the M3, the 96 M3.
Casey:
And he's the one that suggested both the Legacy and the 335.
Casey:
So I really should never trust him about any car ever.
Casey:
And he's also suggested the Golf R, by the way.
Casey:
But anyway, I was talking to him and another friend of ours about how, you know, I really want a Golf R, but I really want a sunroof.
Casey:
Like, I really, really, really don't like...
Casey:
not having a sunroof.
Casey:
And they go, you wouldn't even miss it.
Casey:
You wouldn't even know.
Casey:
And I feel like that's sort of kind of the conversation we're having now.
Casey:
You don't even know.
Casey:
You haven't had cloth seats in forever.
Casey:
Cloth seats are better.
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Well, as it turns out.
John:
I don't say you wouldn't miss cloth seats.
John:
I'm just saying the static is not as big a problem as he thinks it is, especially now.
Marco:
I would take cloth seats before I'd lose my sunroof.
Casey:
That's an interesting question, actually.
Casey:
I think I agree.
Casey:
I think I agree.
John:
Leather is just making you feel luxurious and having a nice smell, right?
John:
But leather, in terms of just what it feels like to sit in it, is not... The Holy Grail is cloth seats with seat heaters, which almost nobody makes.
John:
Because then you're like, well, if I want to get seat heaters, I have to get leather.
Marco:
I had them in my Accord.
Marco:
My Super 5 or 6.
John:
Nobody makes that these days.
John:
Because basically, once you go to seed heaters, you also get the leather package.
John:
Because it seems luxurious.
John:
Or fake leather.
John:
Leather or fake leather.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't draw a line between those two.
Marco:
Fake leather is so good these days that it doesn't really matter which one I have.
Marco:
I don't even notice, really.
Casey:
All I know is, to go back a half step, my friends were saying, oh, you don't even know.
Casey:
You wouldn't even miss the sunroof in the Gulf R. It'd be fine.
Casey:
It'd be fine.
Casey:
Well, as it turns out, my Legacy GT that I had before the 335, it was something to the order of $3,000 to get basically two options.
Casey:
And that was leather and a sunroof.
Casey:
And I bought the Legacy because my then car, a 300ZX, wouldn't stay on the road.
Casey:
Sound familiar at all?
Casey:
And it couldn't stay on the road because it was always in the shop.
Casey:
And so I bought the Legacy GT after having been employed as a real adult for like literally a month or two months or something like that, which is to say I was frigging broke.
Casey:
And $3,000 would have destroyed me financially, like truly, even like over the course of, you know, the four or five or I might have even had a six year car loan.
Casey:
I was so broke at the time, but whatever it was like that $3,000.
Casey:
Yes, I understand it was only like 10 or 20 or $30 a month, but that would have ruined me truly.
Casey:
It really would have ruined me.
Casey:
So I didn't get it.
Casey:
And I had that car for like eight years.
Casey:
I had it from 04 to 2012.
Casey:
Yeah, it was eight years.
Casey:
And every single day in the spring, summer and fall where it wasn't actively precipitating, I hated not having a sunroof.
Casey:
I hated to Marco's point, not having leather less, but I hated that too.
Casey:
And so I can tell both of you, not that you're really arguing with me, but I can tell both of you and my two other friends with, uh, with confidence that yes, I have lived the non sunroof life and I have lived the not leather life and it sucks.
Casey:
And I don't want to go back.
John:
What did you miss about leather?
John:
i just i don't i don't like cloth and that's like such a thing to say it just it feels so not nice i don't know maybe i'm just because there's a wide variability in cloths just basically means not leather not pretending to be leather there's very wide variability and whether it's fuzzy or like stitched or you know all sorts of different textures and and patterns and all that other stuff i'm wondering what you missed other than the that it feels more luxurious because we've been trained to think leather is fancier
Casey:
I think it was just that.
Casey:
I mean, even the Saturn that I had, the infamous Saturn where the wheel fell off, even that had leather.
Casey:
I'm serious.
John:
You had leather in a Saturn?
Casey:
I swear to God.
Casey:
Why?
John:
I swear to you.
John:
I'm surprised that you were like the only person who was like, this guy's getting leather in a Saturn.
John:
Do you know what kind of car you're getting?
John:
Like, it's Saturn.
Casey:
A lot of people have been saying, in fact, even in the chat room just moments ago, Tim underscore underscore was saying the same thing.
Casey:
A lot of people have been saying, why are you even considering a Golf R?
Casey:
Why not get a GTI?
Casey:
You can get a GTI with sunroof.
Casey:
It is not that much slower.
Casey:
What is wrong with you?
Casey:
Why wouldn't you do that?
Casey:
My answer has always been twofold.
Casey:
One, I would want the best of what I was getting, if at all possible, because that's kind of who I've become.
Casey:
I'll blame that on Marco, but it's kind of always been a bit of me anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, come on.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
That's like saying, oh, I drink and I become a jerk.
Marco:
No, you're just a jerk.
Casey:
It comes out more when you drink.
Marco:
This has always been inside of you.
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
Where was I going with this?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I would want the fastest one and I would want the quote-unquote best one.
Casey:
That's why I think I would prefer the R. Plus, in my experience, which admittedly I have not driven a front-wheel drive car in, I don't know, 15 years or something like that, but
Casey:
I, in the past, have never particularly enjoyed driving front-wheel drive cars.
Casey:
Well, actually, that's not true.
Casey:
Aaron's Mazda was front-wheel drive.
Casey:
And although I didn't drive it regularly, I definitely did not like the feeling when I drove it.
Casey:
It just felt like the front wheels were doing too much.
Casey:
I didn't care for it.
Casey:
And the GTI is front-wheel drive.
Casey:
Now, with that said, my understanding of the GTI is that it actually has a limited-slip differential up front, which is weird and kind of like the Dodge SRT4 from back in the day.
Casey:
But anyway, all of this is to ask the question, do you think you guys would, if I told you you had to buy a Golf R or a GTI, which I know, John, you're going to blow this predicament out of the water some way, somehow.
Casey:
But if you had to choose between one of those two cars, do you think you would entertain the front wheel drive GTI that has a sunroof?
Casey:
Or do you think you would have to go all in on the Golf R?
John:
I would get to GTI because you keep saying like, oh, the R is the best quote unquote best, but it's clear that you really want a sunroof.
John:
So it's not the best for you.
John:
Like the amount of time I would imagine you would enjoy a sunroof is greater than the amount of time you would enjoy it being rear wheel drive or whatever.
Casey:
All-wheel drive.
Casey:
Yes, I'm with you in principle.
Casey:
Why do you have to use your logic on me?
John:
Because you're just cruising down the road at 15, 30 miles an hour.
John:
You're enjoying the sunroof on a sunny day, and you're only enjoying the slightly different driving dynamics when you're driving hard, which is way less of the time.
Casey:
You haven't been in the car with me in a long time, have you?
Casey:
But anyway, I understand your point.
Marco:
You should drive more safely.
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, look, you're talking to people who have Volkswagen things and they're going to want to sell you Volkswagen things because everybody always wants to convince other people to buy what they bought.
Marco:
So keep in mind, though, that that is their perspective.
Marco:
Like, you know, I'm telling you first, I told you you should buy a BMW because I bought one.
Marco:
Now I'm telling you you should buy a Tesla because I bought one.
Marco:
John's telling you to buy an Accord because he bought one.
Marco:
Part of this is to validate our own purchases.
Marco:
Part of it is because whatever thought process led us to make the choices for ourselves, it's natural to apply the same processes to you.
Marco:
The reality is, though, that when you're bending over backwards trying to get some GTI-like vehicle to fit what you actually want, but it sounds like they just don't make one that is what you actually want.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
and that's a totally fine answer like the answer i think just is they don't make what you want so therefore this is not the right car family for you and you should look at other things that might be so in conclusion i need to buy a wrangler that wasn't one of the two choices you were like you gotta pick a gti or r i picked one mark was like no you should get something totally that wasn't the question the question was gti or r i have a specific point of that question was seeing if you should value all-wheel drive over the sunroof
Marco:
uh i'm with john i think you would probably enjoy the sunroof more but i think ultimately none of these volkswagen small you know hatchback things are actually what you want so you shouldn't really like this is kind of a pointless exercise because you shouldn't really be considering any of them unless what you want completely doesn't exist by anybody but that's not true there's lots of lots of cars that well not lots but there are some cars that you would enjoy more that are from other brands and
Marco:
And that maybe you're not, you know, considering because you don't think you should, like in the case of your SUV envy.
Marco:
But, you know, we're your friends.
Marco:
We'll accept you for whoever you are.
Marco:
But, like, you know, maybe it's because you don't want to pay the price or you're mad at BMW, like with the M3 or Tesla with the price.
Marco:
But, like...
Marco:
these cars like the cars you're looking at are not for you because every choice you have in that lineup has some kind of severe downside that you really don't like i know there's achilles it's achilles heels all the way down right so therefore none of them are the right car for you and that's okay i know i know you should be test driving these cars though like you always like talk about them in him and hot just go test drive them just like it doesn't cost you anything to test drive them
Casey:
And coincidentally, I might have a little bit of time outside the house just by myself tomorrow, maybe.
Casey:
And I've been debating – I probably won't because I'm going to want to come back and save Aaron.
Casey:
But I've been debating going to the Volkswagen dealer and – oh, that's right.
Casey:
That's why I wasn't going to do it because I've looked at their inventory and it's garbage.
Casey:
But I was kicking around the idea of going to the Volkswagen dealer and driving a GTI just to try it.
Casey:
And if there's any part of this segment that, Marco, you leave in the show, would you please leave the following –
Casey:
I am aware of the Kia Stinger.
Casey:
It looks very nice.
Casey:
Well, not aesthetically.
Casey:
Aesthetically, whatever.
Casey:
It looks like garbage.
Casey:
Go ahead.
Marco:
You're really winning over the fans here.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
Aesthetically, it's... I'm aware of this car you keep telling me about.
Marco:
It's ugly.
Casey:
It's not beautiful.
Casey:
But I understand it ticks a lot of the checkboxes that I'm interested in.
Casey:
Except everyone seems to be forgetting that it's two-pedal only.
Casey:
And if I'm going to go for a two-pedal car...
Casey:
I'm going to go all in and do something like Tesla or really make my life miserable and get the Giulia Quadrifoglio or something along those lines.
Casey:
I'm not going to get a Kia and get a two-pedal Kia.
Casey:
It's not happening.
Marco:
You're giving up so much by dropping the clutch that you better be getting something amazing in return.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
No, truly.
Casey:
I completely and utterly agree with you.
Casey:
I could not have said it better myself.
Casey:
And that's the thing.
John:
And the latest car and driver of the Kia Stinger tied with the BMW 430i xDrive.
John:
grand sport grand coupe it's a giant long name it was like fastbacks but it's basically it tied it tied with the kia stinger uh for second place in a three car race so they were so they were both massively behind the winner which was the audi a5 so but what i'm saying is how far bmw has fallen because i used to routinely win these matchups by a wide margin now it's way behind by not just like you know a couple of points it's not just a couple points yeah and it got tied with the kia so what i'm saying is bmw has lost their way
Marco:
Yeah, like any comparison to the F30 and beyond generation of BMW 3 and 4 series has to have the disclaimer that like, yeah, but these are way worse than BMW used to be.
Marco:
So like, yeah, Kia has reached the level of BMW in BMW's degraded state.
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
So I started going to an exercise thing with Tip, and the trainer used some amazing euphemism to describe my physical state.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
You're like a Kia Stinger, Marco.
Marco:
I think it was... Oh, it was my deconditioned state.
LAUGHTER
John:
Like a battery you've been deconditioned?
Marco:
Yeah, which is hilarious because that implies that I was at one time conditioned, which was never the case.
John:
Did you show them your mouse and trackpad hands?
John:
Look at these hands.
John:
I'm a mouse and trackpad all day with these.
Casey:
I've worked hard for these hands.
John:
Look at how precisely I can double click.
John:
I'm a computer athlete.