Every Building Has Bugs
Marco:
I kind of feel like I should have just left Tiff here and left the show because we got so much awesome feedback about not only how great she was, but how much better she was than me.
Marco:
But unfortunately, you guys are stuck with me this week.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
And Bradley Davis writes in, with regard to hard-to-hit up-down arrow keys on the new MacBook Pros, the bottom key row of the new MacBooks is shorter than the previous generation.
Casey:
The bottom row used to be taller than all the other rows.
Casey:
Now it's the same height.
Casey:
Huge loss, in my opinion, especially as a programmer who uses modifier keys more than your average person.
John:
I didn't even believe this, so I measured it at work, and he is totally right.
John:
Did you guys both realize that right up until the 2016-2017s on the MacBook Pros, the space bar in that whole row was taller than all the other rows of keys?
John:
Nope.
John:
Now I'm curious.
John:
Hold on.
John:
I thought it's plausible, but it can't be that much bigger, so I measured it.
John:
It's appreciably bigger.
John:
I was using the side of a credit card or whatever, but you can get a ruler and see how much bigger.
John:
It's at least 5% bigger.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I don't know if I believe this at all.
Casey:
Let me get out my behemoth of a work laptop.
John:
So while you guys get out things to measure, the reason this is relevant is not so much that it's hard.
John:
We're actually both doing this right.
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
What are we getting out to measure?
Marco:
I'm getting out a digital caliber.
Marco:
What are you getting out to measure?
Casey:
Never mind.
Casey:
Wow, this does look a little bit taller.
John:
Oh, it is.
John:
So as I was saying, the reason it makes a difference is not because it's easier to hit the space bar or the command key or anything, but because the arrow keys... Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's a huge difference.
John:
The up and down arrow keys are jammed into a single key space, and I was complaining.
John:
I felt it was a little bit harder to figure out the up and down arrow keys on the new MacBook Pros, even though it's like the same layout.
John:
It is the same layout, but with the taller keys, each half, the top half and the bottom half, are bigger, so it makes a difference, particularly for the arrow keys.
Marco:
Yeah, so the height of the command key on my 2015 is 17.8 millimeters, and then the height of the keys in the row above it are only 15.2.
Casey:
That's surprising.
Casey:
By the way, only tangentially related.
Casey:
If you ever have a longing for the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which I always thought was just hilariously stupid, but I know that there are people that love it.
Casey:
I do not need to hear from you.
Casey:
I'm just saying it's not for me.
Casey:
Anyway, if you ever want to make your 15-inch feel like a 17-inch from the days of the past...
Casey:
Spend a couple of months using exclusively either a 27-inch iMac or, more importantly, a 12-inch MacBook Adorable, and then bust out your work 15-inch MacBook Pro for the first time in two months.
Casey:
Holy monkey, that thing is enormous.
Casey:
It is just gigantic compared to the little MacBook Adorable that I'm used to.
Marco:
Well, I'll tell you what.
Marco:
Even during my great laptop shuffle of 2016 to 2017, when I, for a while there, owned the 13-inch MacBook Escape, that to me is such a great size, and I do intend to go back to that probably in the next generation, whenever it comes out.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
When I was using that, even after years of using 15 inches a lot of the time, I would occasionally see a 15 inch out in the world and it would look crazy to me.
Marco:
Even the brand new, like the current generation ones that are a little more compact than the old ones, once you're used to whatever size you're used to, anything above it looks like a monster by comparison.
Casey:
Yeah, it's striking, the difference.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
But today I did a half day at work for the first time since January.
John:
Aw.
John:
I know.
John:
Half congratulations.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Speaking of work and giant laptops, I had my 15-inch 2017 MacBook Pro at about 85% charge.
John:
and i did a one hour meeting where i projected during the meeting drained my whole battery the machine shut down really wow i watched it go down the whole meeting it's webex the magic of webex fan spinning just like a single one hour meeting from 85 percent to basically you can no longer on your computer sorry off
Marco:
Yeah, because WebEx is... I've never used WebEx, but I assume it's pretty inefficient on the CPU, right?
Marco:
We need to have a special episode where we just make Marco use all corporate enterprise software.
Marco:
And I would imagine, too, that you were plugged in, you said, to your projecting via cable?
Marco:
Yes, I was.
Marco:
So that means the discrete GPU was forced on the whole time.
Marco:
And so it was basically as if you were playing a game.
Marco:
And like playing a game, so your GPU is on, your CPU is probably being maxed out because it sounds like the software is terrible.
Marco:
So yeah, that's going to be about one hour battery life.
Marco:
It was bad.
Casey:
You know, I think the most popular advertisements that we've ever run on this show were the ones that Cards Against Humanity did, where John was forced to try a new usually garbage toaster each week.
Casey:
I think it is possible, if the Cards Against Humanity folks are listening, that making Marco use some piece of enterprise-grade software once per ad, that might be an even more popular, even better segment.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
It would be magical.
Casey:
You would probably quit the show just from being near enterprise-y sort of things that John and I have to deal with every day.
Marco:
Yeah, I would make a switch to Patreon.
John:
The trick is, though, that you have to be forced to use them, like that they're mandated by the company or because you have to like teleconference, so you need to use the only approved teleconference software that you know everybody has, right?
John:
That's the part of it.
John:
It's not just...
John:
using the software it's that you have to the toasters kind of work because like maybe i'll be making toast anyway but there's no way marco is going to even be doing the things that these programs you know are made to do let alone being forced to do them
Casey:
Barnaby Kendall writes in, if you think the MacBook's arrow key setup is bad, check Dell's recipe for annoyance.
Casey:
And there's a link included.
Casey:
So imagine the same arrow key setup that we have in brand new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
But just for funsies, let's put page up and page down in the dead space between.
Casey:
So I'm sorry, I guess it's not like the new MacBook Pros, like the previous MacBook Pros.
Casey:
And we'll put a page up and page down in the dead space to the left and right of the up arrow key.
John:
so if you're looking at it it's page up and then below that is left up and down page down and below that is right it looks terrible i'm sure if you get used to it it's convenient but oh man it does not look good at a glance it's not convenient because like if you accidentally hit like see it's above the arrow keys right so if you accidentally hit the wrong key trying to go for left you don't go more left you go page up which is totally unrelated to left
John:
but that's the key that's near there so i would never want to like fumble to hit that and what if you didn't notice you fumbled it and then you like didn't think you actually hit it so you hit left arrow you've gone left one character or whatever but you don't realize you're a page up from where you were and it's just well it's really terrible and they also overloaded brightness in the up and down arrow keys but i'm assuming that's a modifier thing but
John:
It'd be kind of funny if it wasn't.
John:
Like, every time you want to move the cursor up, you get a little bit brighter.
John:
The screen gets brighter.
John:
You can keep moving down the document, but eventually you can't see it anymore.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
No, I mean, this, like... I feel like... And part of the reason... And I swear I'm not going to make this all about Apple's dumb laptop keyboards, but part of the reason why Apple's keyboard design offenses bother me so much is because we have it so good in Apple Land that usually their keyboards don't have horrendous flaws.
Marco:
And if you look over in the PC Land, like...
Marco:
I mean, you can get a ton of really nice PC desktop keyboards.
Marco:
But once you get into laptops, especially mass-market laptops, especially small laptops, you can get the big gamer ones that have the built-in mechanical key switches.
Marco:
But once you get down to mass-market small laptops, PC designs are all over the place and have horrendous bad design choices about as often as the worst of Apple.
Marco:
We normally are not seeing this from Apple land because we don't buy these things.
Marco:
And so we're kind of spoiled that when Apple does have a generation where they release a really terrible keyboard, our heads explode because we can't take it.
Marco:
Whereas on the PC side, this is a commonplace occurrence.
Casey:
It's sad times.
Casey:
Now, I have a question.
Casey:
Are there, and Marco, you wouldn't know this, but maybe John would, are there like rabid Dell fanboys in the way there were like five, 10 years ago?
Casey:
Because you know how like there were the Apple fanboys, like, well, us, and then there were all the people on the PC side.
Casey:
They were all like devout Dell people.
Casey:
And I feel like I haven't run into any of them in years.
Casey:
Do they still exist?
Yeah.
John:
I've never met someone who is super into Dell.
John:
We all know that there are people who love ThinkPads.
John:
I mean, Casey, you're one of them.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And let me think.
John:
I mean, obviously, there's enthusiasm for the specialty brands like Alienware or Asus even for, you know, gaming-focused stuff.
Yeah.
John:
Dell or HP?
John:
I mean, the closest I can get to that is I think there was a lot of brand loyalty behind Gateway 2000 back when they had the cow boxes and before it was 2000.
John:
That was my first computer.
John:
Same.
John:
But that was more of like a mainstream thing and not like a computer enthusiast thing.
John:
But if they're a Dell enthusiast, I have not run across their path.
Casey:
Well, like my brother-in-law, for example, was a huge Dell enthusiast as much as one can be up until a few years ago.
Casey:
And then he started buying Surfaces, Surfi, Surface things.
Casey:
I don't know, whatever.
Casey:
And he's been really enthusiastic about those ever since.
Casey:
But and maybe that's what they did is all the Dell people went and bought Surfaces.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I just it occurred to me that I haven't seen anyone that's like really amped for Dell in a long time.
Casey:
Anyway, in our final bit of follow-up, just a small anecdote from the kitchen in the List household earlier tonight.
Casey:
Aaron was making dinner, and I was doing something with Declan.
Casey:
Oh, I was walking around carrying Michaela in a little carrier on my chest.
Casey:
and multitasking and playing Breath of the Wild at the same time because I've started to pick that up again.
Casey:
And then Declan caught wind of what I was doing, and he was like, oh, I want to watch.
Casey:
And we don't really like giving Declan a whole ton of screen time if we can avoid it.
Casey:
So what I decided to do was set a timer for myself and remind me not to play Zelda for more than like five or ten minutes while Declan was watching, and then I was just going to put it away.
Marco:
This is a hell of a multitask.
Casey:
Yeah, well, you know, I do what I can.
Casey:
So I asked the lady in a tube to remind me to stop playing Zelda in five minutes or something like that.
Casey:
And I think the key is that I phrased it with remind, which I'm not sure why I did that, but that's what I did.
Casey:
And she got really, really confused.
Casey:
And apparently there's like a whole different reminders versus timers set up, which makes sense.
Casey:
But I'd never experienced this in my week in a day with a lady in a tube in the house.
Casey:
So anyway, so I'm like going back and forth with with the echo trying to get it to just set what amounts to like a five minute timer.
Casey:
And, you know, this was my fault.
Casey:
I phrased it poorly.
Casey:
No big deal.
Casey:
But what was funny was from the kitchen, I hear Aaron say something along the lines of, oh, come on, Siri, get your act together.
Casey:
Knowing full well, I was talking to the echo.
Casey:
So here it was that she was using like she was she was calling the echo Siri as a not derogatory.
Casey:
That's not the word I'm looking for, but like as a like a put down, you know, like she was saying, oh, this is reminding me of how terrible Siri is in so many words.
Casey:
And.
Casey:
I thought that was kind of interesting because Erin is the most normal person in the List household by a far margin.
Casey:
And so it was interesting to me to see her kind of associate and equate a crummy voice experience with Siri.
Casey:
Because early on, I thought that—and I was reflecting on this briefly on Twitter earlier—
Casey:
Early on, I actually thought Siri was extremely impressive.
Casey:
Like the first year or two, I thought Siri was really good.
Casey:
And then it seemed like everyone else started to either create their own voice assistants or make their own voice assistants really a whole lot better.
Casey:
And ever since the first year or two when Siri was brand new,
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I asked the lady in a tube something along the lines of, how much older is Paul McCartney than Michael Jackson?
Casey:
And she knew exactly what I was talking about and gave me the answer.
Casey:
And I think it was like 16 years.
Casey:
And I think I had even asked, if I recall correctly, I'd asked, if Michael Jackson were alive today, how old would he be?
Casey:
And I thought that was stretching a bit.
Casey:
Like, I was not going to be surprised if the lady in the tube would not know what the crap I was asking was.
Casey:
And sure enough, she gave me an answer.
Casey:
Couldn't tell you what it was offhand, but she gave me an answer.
Casey:
And that like if I haven't tried it, but if I asked Siri, how old would Michael Jackson be today?
Casey:
I would be very surprised if Siri had any darn idea what I was talking about.
Casey:
And the fact that I don't even think it's worth trying is itself an indication of my lack of confidence in Siri.
Marco:
Well, I mean, next time you ask one of those questions and you're impressed or not impressed by how the Echo does, take out your phone and I see you're the same thing.
Marco:
It is kind of useful as commentators and enthusiasts in this field to do that and compare, like, you know, how are these things doing with the things that I think I should ask them?
Marco:
Because I found whenever I do that, I do find the Echo devices to have better answers, faster, more of the time.
Marco:
But they don't always get them, and Siri doesn't always not get them.
Marco:
Siri's average is worse for me.
Marco:
But the Alexa devices are actually not perfect either.
Marco:
They just have better averages.
Marco:
I do think, though, going back to the beginning of the story, though...
Marco:
I wish that these devices handled the basic PDA functions.
Marco:
The things that all computing hardware and stuff have tried to do since the beginning of time that almost everyone needs.
Marco:
Reminders, alarms, timers, calendar.
Marco:
These are very basic things that...
Marco:
everything should be able to do these days.
Marco:
And the fact that... And the Echo devices, I think, do a pretty good job on the timer front.
Marco:
I think their timer support is excellent.
Marco:
Their alarms are basically just like timers.
Marco:
They're excellent as well.
Marco:
iPhones and iStuff, as we've talked about with the HomePod launch, not having multiple timers or name timers or things like that, that's still so far behind.
Marco:
And it just seems like that stuff is not that hard from a programming perspective.
Marco:
That isn't that hard.
Marco:
It just seems baffling to me that anything, any of these voice assistant services or devices launch these days without totally nailing reminders, timers, alarms, and what was the other one?
Marco:
Calendar.
Marco:
Those should be easy.
Marco:
And at least...
Marco:
Calendar, I can kind of understand if any of them don't because you have to connect two different services and maybe they don't support the one you use or you haven't set it up or whatever.
Marco:
But reminders should be local on device if they don't have any kind of sync thing set up.
Marco:
That's easy.
Marco:
Remind me at this time to do this.
Marco:
They should just treat that as a timer.
Marco:
And so the fact that anything that is that simple to do doesn't work properly on any of these things, it should be kind of embarrassing.
John:
I think we discussed in the past on this topic.
John:
I'm still waiting for, like, forget about how far behind Siri may be and so on and so forth.
John:
I'm still waiting for the next logical step in this.
John:
Well, actually, this is too.
John:
One is the advancement of the vocabulary surrounding the things Marco just said.
John:
uh echo and google home are pretty good and as you know as casey found you just phrase it the way you think and it'll mostly figure it out but the next logical step is some and i think that maybe the reason this is so difficult is it'll require more hardware locally is uh some some context awareness to allow the beginnings of a conversation about things because
John:
Although these devices are flexible about how we request the things, you can phrase it a different way, so on and so forth, it ends up being single command, single response.
John:
There is no semblance of a conversation for the most part, except for very rudimentary things that are asked for confirmation or something.
John:
Or sometimes serial asks for basic clarification.
John:
But I would rather be able to speak in an even more offhand manner, clarifying with a series of grunts as necessary, right?
John:
Like you interact with people.
John:
Like there is context.
John:
Like the thing doesn't entirely forget about the interaction you had three seconds ago when you make some other request.
John:
That it can figure out what you mean.
John:
Oh, yeah, and I forgot also blah, blah, blah.
John:
That it hasn't forgotten the previous context.
John:
Just basic questions.
John:
conversation thing i'm not saying is you know it's going to have deep conversations with me i'm not even saying it has to be like eliza right but uh i feel like that's the next logical step and at this rate if apple still can't even do multiple timers by the time the competitors get to the beginnings of a conversation phase we'll be lucky if apple is being able to do the basics of all the things marco listed in a flexible way
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, I did ask Siri, you know, how old would Michael Jackson be today?
Casey:
And I got a web search.
Casey:
So, no surprise there.
John:
The trick for, by the way, the trick for doing comparisons, you got to make sure you word them exactly the same way, to be fair.
John:
Because I think that's the whole thing.
John:
Like, I try to, when I speak to the various cylinders, I try to just...
John:
not think about syntax and just say whatever occurs to me because that's the test like phrase it however i want to phrase it but then you have to remember how you phrased it which is convenient because it's recording your voice you can go play it back casey so i hear remember how you phrased it and then do it word for word to siri just to be fair because you you may say it a different way to siri because now you're thinking about it and everything and if siri gets wrong on one phrasing it's very sensitive to the exact position of you know all the things in the sentences or whatever
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So apparently there's going to be an onboarding screen for every single damn app on future versions of iOS.
Casey:
We've seen a little of this trickle out over the last few months.
Casey:
And how do you pronounce this?
Casey:
Is it Guillerme Rambo?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Mr. Rambo, Mr. Rambo, who is underscore inside on Twitter.
Casey:
He first jumped into my radar screen by being one of the people that was tag teaming with Steve Trout and Smith during the HomePod firmware.
Casey:
I don't know, picking about or, you know, the hyenas went and and picked at the HomePod firmware.
Casey:
But anyways.
Casey:
He had tweeted earlier, Apple is busy adding onboarding screens to every single iOS feature.
Casey:
And here's a screenshot of welcome to videos, browse your library, watch anytime, anywhere, enjoy extras, et cetera.
Casey:
And Mr. Rambo, if you please, has been going through other iOS features and finding similar things.
Casey:
So I don't get this.
Casey:
I don't think it's necessarily bad, even though in any time I get asked to make an onboarding screen, I always fight tooth and nail to avoid it.
Casey:
But I mean, for for novice users and new users, I don't think that's necessarily bad.
Casey:
But what do you guys think about this?
Casey:
And let's start with Marco.
Marco:
As a user, when I just install an iOS update and I get these screens in every app I try to use, I'm annoyed by them.
Marco:
I don't like them as a user.
Marco:
From Apple's point of view, though, from the developer point of view, I see that side as well because I'm a developer.
Marco:
And I've never had one of these screens in any of my apps, but I kind of need them sometimes.
Marco:
Because when you're updating your software...
Marco:
It's really hard to communicate to people when things have changed in a way that is helpful and not annoying.
Marco:
And they will actually see or read or remember.
Marco:
This is a very hard problem.
Marco:
And
Marco:
so there have been lots of times where i will make a change and i'll you know mention it on the twitter account or i'll write a blog post about it or something but the fact is like some tiny percentage of my audience actually looks at those things like most of the users of the app don't know when i've changed anything i can put things in the app store update notes which i do but no one sees those either for the most part because everyone auto updates and no one ever looks at the at the notes and
Marco:
So it's really hard to communicate feature changes and improvements and UI changes that aren't immediately obvious.
Marco:
It's very hard to communicate that to an existing user base.
Marco:
New users, it isn't a problem as much because new users, A, they don't care how things were before they got there, so you don't have to tell them what things have changed, and B...
Marco:
New users tend to be more exploratory.
Marco:
They'll poke through settings screens to see what the app can do.
Marco:
So if you just added some settings or added some new features, they'll find them as they poke around the whole rest of the app.
Marco:
But how you communicate this to existing users is always a challenge.
Marco:
So Apple faces the same problems that any other developer does, which is some small percentage of users of Apple devices pay attention when they announce a new feature in a keynote or on Apple.com or whatever else.
Marco:
But most of their customers don't see that.
Marco:
And even the ones that do don't all remember it by the time they're actually using these things.
Marco:
So Apple has the same problem that every other app developer has, which is how do they communicate changes to their app?
Marco:
Or even do they communicate changes to their app, which is a valid question to ask?
Marco:
Or do they just kind of let the app stand on its own and let people figure it out?
Marco:
So this is Apple, I think, trying, you know, trying a new way of doing this.
Marco:
So far, they've really not communicated changes to the apps in the apps themselves.
Marco:
They've usually just made the changes, mentioned it in, you know, press events and stuff, and that's it.
Marco:
And people just kind of find them when they update.
Marco:
this is a different approach.
Marco:
This is them saying, you know what, let's put up these little helpful sheets the first time you launch some of these apps saying, hey, here's what's new in this app, in this version of iOS.
Marco:
Again, I don't love these as a user, but I see why they do it.
Marco:
It solves a problem and it's not a great problem, but it's a real problem nonetheless.
Marco:
And it solves it in not a great way, but it might be like the least crappy way we've thought of so far.
Marco:
So I don't object very strongly.
Marco:
I see what they're trying to do.
Marco:
It's annoying when I go to do something and I have to go dismiss a screen instead of like doing the thing I actually went to the app to do.
Marco:
But that's a one time annoyance.
Marco:
And so if overall it helps people find stuff, I guess I'm OK with that.
John:
I feel like this is part of, I mean, the screenshots here are from a phone, right?
John:
But I mean, they might do some other things in the iPad.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But part of the problem they're solving here is caused by the fact that the screens are just so darn small compared to a computer screen.
John:
Like in the personal computer world, we've.
John:
Always had, I mean, there's a long history in the personal computer world of splash screens.
John:
Remember those where they would just put up a big box that puts the name of the application and maybe some credits and like some loading stuff for you to watch while your application takes a year and a day to launch, right?
Right.
John:
Um, that transition on the desk desktop to general move away from loading screens.
John:
If you see a loading screen, you know, you're either using like Microsoft for an Adobe product or you're like back in time somewhere.
John:
Most desktop applications on the Mac anyway, have moved far, far away from any kind of splash screen.
John:
Right.
John:
But there is a trend that started, you know, maybe a decade ago, probably led by office or similar things to give you that screen.
John:
I don't know what you call it.
John:
There's probably a name for it.
John:
where it shows a bunch of templates or like the first run experience, like tutorial click through next, next, next thing to show you screenshots of the app.
John:
It's called Ubi, the out of box experience.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
It's not kind of out of a box.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh,
John:
But yeah, so that kind of thing.
John:
And sometimes that doesn't even go away.
John:
Sometimes like in Office, it's a preference.
John:
You have to say every time I launch, you know, Excel, don't show me the thing with a bunch of Excel templates.
John:
Right.
John:
Just don't show me that.
John:
Just open it and like, you know, I can handle it myself.
John:
But in all cases, in a desktop application, on the Mac, especially on most desktop platforms,
John:
there's a place that you can go to learn more about what this application can do whether it's the help menu or like apple guide in the old days like there's some standard way to say what can i do in this application i know i see a bunch of menus up there but you know help me out and help varies from application application sometimes it's just a a limited thing that you can search but some applications have really comprehensive help or even if they just chuck you to a website i think the
John:
The main thing that these screens are answering for new users, who, again, they don't have to be told about changes or anything, is what can I do in this application?
John:
So if you look at the welcome to videos thing in this tweet here, it's not really telling you what changed this last version.
John:
It's like, what does the video app do?
John:
Because if you just launch it, forget the screen.
John:
What is the first screen that you see when you launch videos, especially if you actually have no videos?
John:
That's always the problem on iOS.
John:
Like, what do you show when there's no stuff?
John:
It's not really clear what you would use this application for.
John:
So this is here's what you do for, you know, browse your library, find purchases and rentals, you know, watch anytime, anywhere, play videos over Wi-Fi or cellular, download to watch offline and enjoy extras, right?
John:
I mean, even I would, if I had to describe what you do in the videos app, I wouldn't have put that enjoy extras thing, but that's an important piece of information people might not know.
John:
Oh, there might be special features associated with something I purchased and I can watch them here too.
John:
And then and so it's important to just convey that basic information.
John:
But unfortunately, unlike the desktop, say you're like most people and like, yeah, like Marco said, this is generally an annoyance.
John:
And if you look in the Apple's old human interface guidelines, they'd be like, don't stop.
John:
your user from doing what they set out to do by interrupting them with a thing that that you know i just before you do what you want to do i want to tell you something about the videos app it's like no no yeah yeah i'm not whatever you're trying to tell me i don't care just let me get to the thing i want to do and you reflexively hit the continue button before you even register any words on the page right which i expect that to happen a lot but unlike in a desktop app you know how do you get the screen back if later you're wondering okay is this a thing i can do in the videos app or what is this video app even for
John:
You can't go to the help menu and say, show me that first run experience thing again.
John:
Like, I don't even know if there is a way to get this back once you've dismissed it, other than waiting for the next OS update or something or resetting your thing.
John:
And it's because there's just no standardized place in iOS applications, probably because the screen is so small to say, where do I go to get help about this application?
John:
Or will there ever even be help within this application?
John:
Is it always something I have to do elsewhere?
John:
And then, but not a thing that happens in the app.
John:
And the final bit that I think Apple is leaning on here is the Wish You Were Here people down at the bottom of this.
John:
Apple's new little logo for privacy that shows two people shaking hands with each other.
John:
So part of that is marketing and that Apple wants to emphasize as one of its competitive advantages, which is for every application that you launch as an Apple application, we care about your privacy and we'll tell you exactly how we're not using your information in a creepy way.
John:
And implicitly, how everyone else is who doesn't have the similar disclosure is using your information in a creepy way.
John:
So you should use Apple stuff.
John:
That little logo, I think Apple is trying to associate with the good information that you will find link from it is like when you see that logo, that's Apple reminding you that they're the privacy company that doesn't do creepy things.
John:
And tap here on the small text to find out exactly how non creepy we are.
John:
And the only way you get that in people's faces is if you put that in people's faces.
John:
Otherwise, you know, in the past, Apple has not been doing creepy things with your data.
John:
But there is no way as a user of these applications that you know that because you launch them and they just show whatever their initial screen is.
John:
And there's no indication in the application of exactly how creepy it is or isn't.
John:
And so Apple is relying on the fact that you trust them enough to believe them when they tell you that, by the way, we're not doing creepy stuff, and they want to remind you of that.
John:
So I have similar mixed feelings to Marco about the screen in that I understand the reasoning behind it, but I think...
John:
It is difficult for it to fulfill its purpose because it's probably so easy to dismiss quickly because there's no way to get it back after you've done that.
John:
And because it interrupts the user from doing what they wanted to do.
John:
And yet I think most new users especially would benefit from not reflexively dismissing the screen and from actually reading the three little bullet points so they know why you would ever want to launch the videos app or whatever.
John:
um now it can be taken to extremes here we have this uh follow-up tweet from micah sergeant that shows what's new in clock uh where the only item is this splash screen literally just this splash screen what do you want from us but it's still got the privacy thing at the bottom it was that real i assume that was a photoshop
John:
yeah it's fake but it's funny but like where does it where does this end so similar to the trend of desktop applications all opening up with like a template library create a new document pick for one of these 17 templates like just no just get out of my face right this type of thing can be annoying and if apple does it it may encourage other people to do it and if every new ios application you launched
John:
put one of these screens up, it really amplifies the you are stopping me from doing what I'm trying to do factor.
John:
And it makes people even more quick on the draw to reflexively dismiss these things.
John:
And it further emphasizes the fact that if you do reflexively dismiss it, there's probably no standard way to get it back.
John:
So I think this is a difficult problem that Apple is solving in a not so great way, but I do understand why they're doing it.
Marco:
As I said, it's really hard to figure out how to communicate changes like this in your app, but I think what I mentioned initially and what you just kind of confirmed and clarified for me is I think the biggest reason why I don't like these things is that
Marco:
it is almost never a good time.
Marco:
When I see them, it's like, no, I didn't come here to read what's new.
Marco:
I came here to write something down really fast or do something.
Marco:
I came here doing a task that I don't have time right now to explore all the new features that you did for me and get through your marketing language.
Marco:
The problem is what percentage of the time when people are first seeing this is going to be that kind of context where they're just going to breeze right by it.
Marco:
Even if people have time, we are so conditioned to dismiss those screens that we're not going to remember things that are on it.
Marco:
One of the most sad realities of interface design, but this has been true forever and will always be true, is that nobody reads anything.
Marco:
Anything you're explaining by just a couple of bullet points of text, nobody will read it.
Marco:
The very small handful of the two won't remember it.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
explaining things with text is just not very effective you should never rely on that ultimately the best way to solve the problem of how do you communicate changes in your app is with the design of the app itself this isn't always possible this isn't always practical but
Marco:
Ideally, the changes should either be like not worth mentioning because the user doesn't care if it's like, oh, we under the hood changes like, well, the user doesn't care.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Do do the changes makes you happy, makes your users happy that like things are faster or don't crash or whatever else.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Don't need to mention that.
Marco:
Or it's like new features, in which case like those will make themselves apparent in the interface as the user is using them.
Marco:
It's hard these days, not only is it hard on touchscreens because, as you mentioned, they're so small, that makes it hard for a lot of features to be visible because you don't have space on the screen to have a toolbar button for everything the app can do.
Marco:
But also, modern design trends...
Marco:
are such that you try to hide as much as possible in the main interface.
Marco:
You try to make the main interface as empty as possible.
Marco:
Everything looks super sparse and open.
John:
The way Apple would phrase that is maximize your content.
John:
They wouldn't say you are hiding things.
John:
They would say you are allowing the content.
John:
They've said there's so many WDC sessions.
John:
The content, maximizing the content, not minimizing UI, but in effect, you are hiding everything else if you're putting the content...
John:
in front.
John:
And that, that I think gets to what you were saying with the, the, you know, this is not a good time application to be telling me about your features, right?
John:
That's the beauty of the help menu.
John:
When the user seeks out an item in the help menu, that is their task at that point.
John:
They're trying to learn more about the application.
John:
That is exactly the time you should tell them more, but there is no standardized interface element in iOS for almost anything.
John:
Like it's part of the beauty of iOS that each application gets the entire screen back from the single testing model.
John:
and maximizing the content.
John:
All those are good trends, but the lack of really any standardized interface element aside from the status bar, which at least we know you can use to scroll to the top most of the time, really does hurt discoverability.
John:
If there was some kind of standard help widget that was the same across all apps,
John:
That would be the perfect place to stash this, because when people tapped it, they would be seeking out information about your application at that moment.
John:
But in the absence of that, even if even if you have a great help widget in your app, no one knows what it means or where it is or what it does, because it's not standardized.
John:
Right.
John:
And so we're forced to throw this in people's faces.
John:
Otherwise, they will literally never see it.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And part of that, a lot of people who haven't been around this stuff that long, the kids these days or whatever, a lot of assumptions are made about current design trends that people project as universal design rules that have always and will always be the best.
Marco:
And the fact is right now we are in, you know, I'd say probably the three quarters point of a trend of ultra minimalism everywhere.
Marco:
And the fact is that's just a style that's been in style for a little while.
Marco:
We have a little more of it to go probably.
Marco:
That isn't necessarily the only or best way to design apps.
Marco:
A lot of the minimalism of iOS apps and interfaces and getting out of the way for the content was born of limitations of the original iPhone hardware being a really small screen.
Marco:
But as phones have gotten significantly bigger, as also we've added things like iPads and possibly Mac through bridge layers this fall, we hope, as we've added larger screens and more capability and everything, the ultra-minimalist thing doesn't necessarily work or doesn't carry over as well.
Marco:
Also, the software.
Marco:
iOS started from zero with software.
Marco:
It started with every software is going to be 1.0 here.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
There weren't a lot of features in most apps for a long time, and there still aren't on iOS apps, but many apps now are pushing those boundaries and have developed over the last decade into very feature-rich, very capable apps.
Marco:
And the conventions of...
Marco:
ultra minimalist, you know, hide everything design while they still look very nice.
Marco:
They suffer greatly from discoverability and, and affordances of like, you know, showing people what is possible or how to, how to use things.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Again, this is just a design trend of hide everything that won't last forever.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's almost over because I think it's many usability flaws are really piling up.
Marco:
And it's resulting in people having to do bad hacks like those splash screens.
Marco:
Those are terrible hacks.
Marco:
I frequently tell the story about when I first made the magazine app, I thought it would be a good design principle to not need a settings screen.
Marco:
And so I didn't have one in 1.0.
Marco:
And I tried to get it.
Marco:
It was just, okay, there's no settings anywhere.
Marco:
Or there's no setting screen right there anywhere.
Marco:
Let me design the app to not need a setting screen.
Marco:
Wouldn't that be great?
Marco:
Wouldn't that be clean and modern and everything?
Marco:
And the fact is, to not have a setting screen, I had to jump through hoops.
Marco:
And the hoops I jumped through were worse than just having a setting screen.
Marco:
And this is a very important lesson that I learned at that time and a metaphor that I think is widely applicable.
Marco:
By the way, I still haven't learned this lesson every time.
Marco:
I mean, I have a significant design problem in Overcast right now that I need to revert on the now playing screen.
Marco:
Just guess how many emails I get per day from people asking how to change the speed.
Marco:
I have a significant problem that I need to redesign there.
Marco:
But in our efforts to make things clean and simple and minimal, usability suffers big time.
Marco:
And I think we're finally starting to realize that.
Marco:
But it's still an open question of how we are going to solve that going forward.
John:
I think it's not just a design problem.
John:
There's the obvious design thing.
John:
And again, Apple's been emphasizing that, you know, make your content, give it focus, make it the primary thing.
John:
You know, it's the thing that people care about.
John:
Most people don't use all the features, yada, yada, mostly good.
John:
But especially on larger iOS devices, which may include phones, now that they're getting bigger, they still sell the SE, but especially on iPads, potentially even larger things.
John:
Part of it is up to the OS to provide standardized elements for things.
John:
And the set of standardized elements you need for a 3.5 inch phone screen is not the same for the set of standardized elements that you need to make a really great application on a 12.9 inch iPad.
John:
And getting back to the help menu, not that I'm saying that they should add a menu bar, but...
John:
If you leave it up to, even if this trend, the design trend ends and everybody stops making everything minimal and they start adding just toolbars and pallets everywhere.
John:
if there is no standardization for that the toolbars and palettes in every application will be wildly different and users still won't know where to go for common functions like finding the help or any kind of guide or you know any trend towards that or whatever it may be i think one of the poster children for this was i forget what version it was but a couple of releases ago apple's photos application that would launch and it would show like uh
John:
highlighter markup with things circled in yellow pen all over the screen with one of those overlays.
Marco:
Oh, those are the worst.
Marco:
Was it photos?
Marco:
I know iMovie did that, but it's... It might have been iMovie.
John:
It was some Apple application.
Marco:
Lots of applications do this.
John:
Yeah, don't do this.
John:
They're not going super minimal because a lot of those applications, particularly the Apple one that I'm thinking of that I can't remember, the chat room will tell me in a second, they have tons of controls on the screen.
John:
There are a lot of buttons.
John:
Maybe the minimalism is like, oh, why aren't the buttons labeled?
John:
They're all icons, which is why they're so damn inscrutable.
John:
but they were everywhere.
John:
There was like 50 of them on the screen.
John:
And then they would circle them all with pen and say, use this for this, use this for this, use this for this, use this for this.
John:
It's like, no one's ever going to remember that.
John:
No one's ever going to read that.
John:
No one's ever going to be able to figure out how to bring it back.
John:
And the reason you need it is because without that overlay, nobody knows what any of those icons do because there is no standardization for, you know, toolbars for common functionality.
John:
And,
John:
It's somewhat like the Mac had the luxury of not having the sort of Cambrian explosion of applications that iOS did because a lot of the conventions, let's say in graphics applications on the Mac, it was like seeded by a Mac paint and evolved slowly through like super paint and the Adobe applications and,
John:
to establish over the course of several important formative years the standard language for tools and design applications if you see a little mickey mouse glove everyone knows that's like the grabber thing if you see a paint bucket with paint pouring out of it everyone knows what that does like i'm i'm so glad that
John:
you know, that those, those widgets have, you know, whoever owned the copyright on the first ones, those didn't aggressively pursue it and say, you can't use a paint bucket in your application because it wasn't Adobe who did it first.
John:
It was Apple.
John:
And, you know, so anyway, there is a design language within graphics applications that,
John:
that even if you use a new graphics app, you know where to find things.
John:
But that's application level.
John:
Beyond that, the help menu is a thing that Apple defines as the OS vendor.
John:
To say, there is a menu bar, the menus are in this order, the help system in this era of the Mac is this shape and in this position, and here's what you can expect to find on it.
John:
Or the menu bar itself, the fact that a menu bar exists.
John:
Applications didn't decide that, the OS decided that.
John:
Again, not saying that iOS needs a menu bar, but...
John:
The combination of the OS and the applications develop an interface language that means when you go from one really complicated application to another really complicated application, you have a hope in hell of...
John:
knowing how the second application works because hopefully it works in some way similar to the first one and the the model of ios where the application owns the entire screen makes it very difficult to have any kind of consistency yeah maybe the buttons look the same and yeah maybe the little pop-up dialogue things look the same and stuff but the application itself is almost like games where they can design their own interface entirely and that leads us down the path of apple to
John:
being forced to put a hilarious uh you know football style telestrator markup illustration covering its interface that no one's ever going to remember and then having a thing go away and having you look at a bunch of hieroglyphics and go so i guess i'll just tap things randomly and see is this is this the crop tool is this the crop tool is this i mean
John:
any crop tool they could just steal the icon from from the desktop applications but even that varies a lot so i think ios has a long way to go even once we get over the design trend of minimalism to have to realize the dream of the mac that the interface consistency allows you to understand how a new application would work by reusing knowledge about a previous application
Marco:
I'm not even sure that we're ever going to have that again because the companies and platforms these days are just so much bigger than they used to be.
Marco:
Apple is a huge company now, way bigger than even five, ten years ago when they were doing a lot of these initial iPhone designs and everything.
Marco:
They're way bigger now.
Marco:
There are way more apps.
Marco:
There's way more departments and divisions and services and apps and platforms and everything else.
Marco:
The Apple Watch looks nothing like the rest of iOS.
Marco:
Apple TV is a whole different ballgame as well.
Marco:
Even on iOS, there's tons of different design languages.
Marco:
You have Apple Music.
Marco:
You have Maps.
Marco:
You have some of the older stuff that's still kind of very iOS 7-y.
Marco:
like there's there's all these different designs being followed now i'm not sure that modern apple that it's realistic to expect design coherency from them they're just too big there's too many things and and i think if there was any chance of design coherency it would happen now when design at apple runs apple
Marco:
There is no more powerful department in Apple right now than the design department.
Marco:
And they're a company that heavily prioritizes design, heavily funds it with allocations of time and resources and everything else.
Marco:
If anybody could have a coherent design right now, it's Apple.
Marco:
And they don't.
Marco:
I think the problem set is just too big now.
Marco:
I don't think we're ever going to see that kind of coherence like what we used to have again.
Marco:
Instead...
Marco:
It's going to be mostly left up to, I think, third parties to slowly evolve standards over time that just kind of become de facto standards.
Marco:
And that's a much messier and slower process.
Marco:
But I think that's kind of what's going to happen in reality.
John:
i feel like the design department lately has not added any of new sort of standardized controls or standard you know standard interface elements they've mostly just been dressing up the ones that are there it's not as if ios doesn't have these elements um it doesn't again doesn't have the same ones doesn't have a menu bar but just to give an example i don't marco will tell me what the class name is there's a ui navigation controller the thing the the right left thing with the back and done button yeah like
John:
That's been around since iPhone OS 1.0, iPhone OS firmware 1.0.
John:
Like the fact that you have at the top of the screen, you have left to right sliding transition interface.
John:
They used to have the little arrow shape on it or whatever.
John:
That was a standard interface element that...
John:
you know it was the same way any standard interface element works hey you don't have to write this gui widget we've actually written it for you and it provides some important functionality so now you don't have to worry about that part of your application if you decide you want your application to be like master detail view and you and you go into the right and out to the left
John:
And you want to have cancel and done buttons or like we've provided that control for you.
John:
So don't bother writing it.
John:
And by providing it for you, we standardize the interface.
John:
So think of all the applications from the day one of the iPhone that work that way, where the top part of the screen was for you to go back and forth and it was done and cancel buttons and arrows and stuff like that.
John:
that's a standard element that interface element is still with us despite the fact the top of our phone is like a mile and a half away now and and uh in the ios 7 days they've jammed other crap up there like the little arrow thing which has always looked super weird from a aesthetic point of view that little tiny you know go back to safari which is super convenient functionality wise but it shows they didn't rethink anything but still that one interface element
John:
does provide an important degree of consistency across all applications not just apples because it generally does look the same and it generally does kind of work the same and people know to to look and look up there for stuff but again if if there had really been design innovation design being how it works and not just how it looks at some point you have to rethink the fact that the top of the phone is really far away and at some point you have to think about
John:
Are there other standard interface elements that are appropriate in the age of 12.9 inch iPads that we should introduce?
John:
Standard movable palettes or tab interfaces like in Safari on the iPad or anything like that.
John:
Just any kind of standard interface element that other applications can use that is appropriate for the modern iOS usage.
John:
The more of those they can produce, including perhaps standard icons or widgets for things like help or, you know,
John:
a quick way to get to settings for an application from within an application if they don't want to give up on the whole idea of settings being a separate app which i think is also a dinosaur of a bygone era of uh much less ram usage and also the whole you know we don't want anything in our application so hide all the complexity into another application that never worked by the way yeah a lot of stuff needs to be rethought about the design of ios and almost none of it has to do with what applications look like i feel like we need
John:
We need more help from the OS and the foundational classes to get to the next level of functionality on iOS applications.
Casey:
I think that's mostly true.
Casey:
I think to go back a step, though, part of the reason that I think we haven't standardized on any one design or any one set of iconography is because it didn't take long, in my recollection, starting with iPhone OS 2.
Casey:
It wasn't too long after that that it became kind of blasé, or maybe that's not the word I'm looking for, but kind of gross to use vanilla UI kit for most of your app.
Casey:
And I think that there's plenty of vanilla UI kit controls in any app.
Casey:
But I mean, looking at Overcast is a great example.
Casey:
There's plenty of vanilla UI kit there, but so much of it is hidden in so many different custom controls.
Casey:
I mean, look at the card interface, Marco, that you were rolling for a long time.
Casey:
Like that was completely and utterly custom.
Casey:
And from what you've said on the show and from what I've heard elsewhere, you know, you bent over backwards to do it.
Casey:
And we can have a different discussion another time as to whether or not that was wise.
Casey:
But the fact of the matter that I'm driving toward is that for better or worse, one way or another, in order to stand out on this ever more crowded app store, you need to have a more and more custom UI, or at least in most cases, that's the case.
Casey:
I'm sure you could well actually meet a death on this one, but it seems to me that
Casey:
That your average consumer, be it design-minded or otherwise, tends to like things that are very opinionated and somewhat different.
Casey:
I mean, look at TweetBot as a great example of that.
Casey:
I wouldn't say that I see a whole lot of vanilla UI kit in TweetBot, but I would say that it looks like it belongs on the platform and it looks like it has its own personality.
Casey:
And I would say the same of Overcast, actually.
Casey:
And so I think because everyone was branching out in their own direction, everyone was creating their own personal or perhaps company-wide conventions and things, I think that may be why we've splintered in so many different directions.
Casey:
And that kind of bums me out, partially because I'm really bad at customizing UI kit to do weird things like Marco does.
Casey:
But it's understandable, nevertheless, because in this ever more crowded space, you need to do something to stand out.
John:
You do need to be differentiated, but that's separate from do you need to do super custom controls?
John:
I think that's part of the skill of making an application on any platform is use standard controls, but add some kind of branding and flair to them.
John:
And I think every application also needs at least one or two unique interface elements.
John:
Because historically...
John:
advances in the sort of quote-unquote standard ui have very often come from third parties like the first you know just look pull the refresh for crying out loud on ios but i was going to do a bunch of old mac examples um granted mac paint seeded a lot of the uh
John:
the DNA of graphic applications across all GUI platforms, but subsequent applications like, you know, Illustrator and Super Paint and Photoshop especially had their own innovations in UI that informed the whole rest of the genre.
John:
And in the best case, new interface elements, whether they be tabs or whatever, you know, should eventually be co-opted
John:
by the os and become standard controls i'm not saying apple has to do it all but i think you can get away with having an application that is 100 standard controls with a little bit of flair plus one or two things that totally don't look like standard controls even if they are under the covers that they give you want your app to have personality
John:
Right.
John:
Like tweet bot has a personality and you wanted to have some some kind of differentiating thing like, oh, this is this feature that only this application has or this UI element is fun to use flicking the thing away or whatever.
John:
And if that's really a great idea, a couple of years down the line.
John:
Apple should adapt the iOS interface and say, oh, here's a way you can pop up sort of a thing on the screen and people can flick it away in a physics-based, fun kind of way.
John:
Because so many applications do that.
John:
That should be a standard type thing.
John:
And that should be the feedback cycle.
John:
I don't think you need to go, even on iOS, I don't think you need to go whole hog and say, everything I do is custom.
John:
It's basically a game.
John:
Every one of my controls are awesome because that's...
John:
i'm gonna say it's too much differentiation because maybe like people still do like that but you're in for a world of heart and i think it's not necessary you do want people to notice you but you don't need to like reinvent everything especially with the flexibility apple gives you in most modern ui kit controls you can really customize them to look almost nothing like what they what you would think they look like generic things like the collection of views and stuff where you have a lot of control over exactly what is drawn on the screen like
John:
you can make a collection view into something that no longer resembles a collection view at all with some cleverness, right?
John:
So I think, I think, uh, app developers have the freedom to be differentiated by staying on standard controls, but I still think it's on Apple to see what's out there, see what's popular, see what's works and come up with some of their own innovations to give a better palette of tools in the, in the interface builder sense, even if nobody uses that in iOS.
John:
Um,
John:
to uh i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say that well i don't know what's popular these days with the kids but to to be able to say i'm gonna make the next great uh ipad graphics application of which there are many and but i you know i don't want to have to invent everything from whole cloth i want to you know i want apple to help me here by saying oh
John:
Are you going to have floating pallets in your graphics application?
John:
Well, we have a standard control for that because everyone seems to be making their own.
John:
All the way down to all the little experiments, speaking of Steve Trout and Smith earlier, of like floating quote unquote windows or whatever.
John:
Stuff like that.
John:
If it comes from a third party application first and it's popular, fine.
John:
But that's exactly the type of stuff that Apple should be looking into.
John:
Trying to figure out a more sophisticated bucket of parts for people to build their fancy iOS applications out of.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it's also worth pointing out, like, the timing of talking about this now I think is interesting because the iPhone X, I think, really changes a lot of how things in iOS should be designed.
Marco:
You know, again, this isn't news, I'll be quick, but, like,
Marco:
We have now culminated this trend that we've been going on for a little while now with the Plus phones, where now a lot of iOS interfaces have critical functions and buttons and things on the top area of the screen, which is now very hard to reach for a lot of people a lot of the time on a lot of devices.
Marco:
And so this is like a fundamental thing that...
Marco:
So much of iOS design has been based on putting important controls in those top corners.
Marco:
And now that should be rethought.
Marco:
I'm sure Apple is feeling this too.
Marco:
I'm sure they are thinking about this and are hopefully working on this.
Marco:
But this is also a time where they have a lot of software quality problems that they have to slow down on the move forward aggressively side of things to let the quality catch up, really.
Marco:
We've heard rumblings here and there that maybe there was some kind of iOS 12 redesign plan, but that maybe that's been pushed to next year and next version of iOS because of the quality push.
Marco:
That seems reasonable to me.
Marco:
So assuming that either it's coming this year or next year, I do expect Apple is probably working on a big iOS redesign to...
Marco:
better accommodate the iPhone 10.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that they just need to update the look and feel of it to just be fresh and new and no longer iOS 7 stale.
Marco:
But I do expect that to happen soon.
Marco:
I hope it does.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
even if even if it's next year for quality reasons that's fine with me i really would love to see what apple has in mind for a coherent direction to bring ios in now um i hope we get that i don't think it's a sure thing that we will ever get that because of what i said earlier but i hope we get that whether it's this year or next and i really look forward to seeing what they think the direction is and i hope it's not just for the iphone 10 because i think as much as the iphone 10 needs it
John:
because things really are farther away from your thumb than they ever have been.
John:
It's not like the plus phones haven't been around for a while, but I feel like the iPad needs it more because I do see a lot of people.
John:
I mean, a lot of his graphics applications use with the pencil, but I see a lot of increasingly sophisticated applications on the iPad and they all still look like games to me in terms of the interface.
John:
I see.
John:
very little consistency among them everybody having to roll their own controls for everything which increases the barrier to entry for good graphics applications like i just think of something like acorn which i'm sure has some custom interface elements but in general it's using app kit to its fullest effect taking advantage of all the controls apple gives to design an interface doesn't look like other graphics application interfaces but it looks mac like you know how it's going to work and the fact that i mean
John:
both on the front and on the back end, that Acorn is able to leverage the frameworks that Apple provides for UI and for image processing itself, allows a one-person software shop to make a graphics application that is basically like a mini Photoshop.
John:
That's the platform advantage that Apple should be selling.
John:
Come develop on our platform.
John:
Look what a single person can do.
John:
It's unbelievable.
John:
On the iPad, I feel like maybe it's only three people teams, but I feel like it just looks like a hell of a lot of work to make a top tier iPad graphics application.
John:
And that when you're done, you have, unless you exactly ape your competitor's interface, you have little chance of being familiar to the users of your competitor's product.
John:
So your pitch is now use my application, which has fewer features.
John:
And by the way, the interface looks nothing like your interface and it works totally differently.
John:
So come learn it from scratch.
John:
It's a tough sell.
Marco:
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Oh.
Casey:
There's been some interesting news coming out of Apple Park, previously known as Apple Campus 2.
Casey:
It seems that it's a hazardous place to work, and it seems that people are running into glass walls.
Casey:
I don't even know where the genesis of this story was, but apparently somebody has amassed, I've seen a link at some point, somebody has amassed 911 calls that relate to people walking into the glass walls at Apple Park or something like that.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Marco:
I mean, this is a problem that almost every office building that does a glass design or a glass redesign has at some point.
Marco:
I mean, I remember when I interviewed, as I was job seeking for the job that eventually ended up being Tumblr back in 2006, I had an interview at Bloomberg here in New York, and they had all glass everywhere.
Marco:
And it was very, very hard for me to navigate that office.
Marco:
I couldn't look around the room and find, where's the door out of the room I am in?
Marco:
You had to really look hard to see which of these walls is a door, actually.
Marco:
It was very, very strange.
Marco:
That was part of the interview process.
Marco:
It was part of the test.
Marco:
Oh, God, I failed so many tests in that interview.
Marco:
I failed every test, including try to escape the room.
Marco:
But anyway, and I remember it was a fairly moderate, like the building was fairly young at that point.
Marco:
And I remember a few of the employees telling me that they had to install rows of logo stickers at eye level on all the glass because people kept running into it.
Marco:
Now, as this story has played out today with Apple Park, we've heard so many Twitter responses and people in the chat talking about it, about how this happens in every office building that goes with all glass for all the walls inside.
Marco:
People always run into them all the time, and they always have to end up installing some kind of sticker or something to make the glass not transparent in a really obvious eye-level place.
Marco:
So the fact that people are running into glass with apparently no decoration or insufficient decoration on it is not surprising at all.
Marco:
That is – I think it's a well-proven thing that that happens.
Marco:
So that isn't surprising at all.
Marco:
The only surprising part of this to me and the kind of sad part is like –
Marco:
Did they not know this would happen?
Marco:
This is not a new thing that happens in glass buildings.
Marco:
Like, surely someone had to have told Johnny Ives somewhere along the design of this.
Marco:
Like, someone had to have mentioned this.
Marco:
Like, so how did this, how does this, how does the building get designed with this ignored?
Marco:
That's what I want to know.
Marco:
Like, again, it's like, it's almost like the HomePod ring thing.
Marco:
It's like, did they not know?
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Marco:
It's concerning either way.
Marco:
Like, they should have known.
Marco:
And this is, again, this is a small thing.
Marco:
This is not... I mean, the only reason we're talking about this is because we spent too long on the last topic and it's too late to start a new big topic right now.
Marco:
So, you know, this is not a huge topic.
Marco:
This is not a huge deal.
Marco:
Just like the HomePod ring.
Marco:
Not a huge deal.
Marco:
But just kind of an embarrassing story that, like, the interesting and worrisome part about it is not the actual thing that is happening, but that it seems to indicate a pretty substantial failure in process along the way.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Why didn't they foresee this?
Marco:
This is not a new problem.
Marco:
Everyone who's ever designed or worked in glass office buildings probably knows about this problem.
Marco:
So why didn't they accommodate for it here?
John:
But it looks so nice.
John:
I mean, that's really part of it.
John:
So every building has bugs.
John:
It's not like a software thing.
John:
But every building, especially new buildings, large complexes, they have bugs.
John:
uh whether it's like a particular uh way that it was constructed that wears out sooner than you thought or people walk in a path that you didn't expect and so you got to move some things around or sight lines that you didn't expect to be a problem when the sun is at a particular angle and reflects off this particular thing goes into this person's eyes or whatever like but buildings have bugs and so you work you expect there's going to be stuff like that in every building but
John:
uh as you said marco like for the glass stuff it's not an unforeseen thing and it's not an emergent property of a complex system it's they very deliberately picked materials and they didn't just use them a little bit like this is a glass heavy building tremendously glass heavy like it sounds like the bloomberg thing was it's not like you're just using it as an interface element along with everything else it's very heavily used like the largest pieces of glass in the world are here um
John:
And it does look really good.
John:
And, like, I was tempted to say this is another example of, like, you know, form over function where if – I think when we talked about this building before, I said I didn't have confidence that Johnny Ive really understood what it took to make a functional building, although I knew he would make a beautiful one, and this might fall into that category.
John:
But I think there is actually a functional aspect to all this class, which is part of the utility of the building is not just –
John:
You know, can you find all the places you want to go very well?
John:
Is there room for everything?
John:
Does the air circulate well?
John:
All those sort of like what makes good use here in a design of building.
John:
But aesthetics actually are part of it, like any product, but perhaps even more so for a building, allowing natural light in, being inspired by the views, feeling like you're, you know, indoors, outdoors with like a complete glass thing from floor to ceiling gives a different feeling than it would if it was just a window in a wall, right?
John:
So there is, I think, a functional aspect to all this glass.
John:
And unfortunately, a lot of the solutions
John:
that fix this problem, like the stickers at eye level or whatever, fly in the face of all the advantages that you're getting.
John:
You don't feel like you're outdoors, indoors type of thing when your beautiful wall of glass is marred by a bunch of Apple stickers.
John:
Johnny, I would have a heart attack if you just put a bunch of Apple stickers all over these things.
John:
That's what they're doing in some cases, like putting tape or anything else.
John:
It's gaudy.
John:
It breaks up the appearance that you want.
John:
It kills the illusion of transparency of the glass.
John:
it makes everything uglier and worse like i was thinking they do like they do in the uh the diving pool in the olympics where they have a constant spray of water agitating the surface so you can see where the surface of the water is you know for the diver as they come down they just should have constant sprays of water onto the onto the walls and do so one of those uh glass waterfall effects but that would kind of ruin the aesthetic as well so i don't know what the solution this is because i kind of understand that
John:
The glass stuff is not just an aesthetic.
John:
So the building looks pretty.
John:
I really do believe it probably enhances the experience of being in the building in an important way, right?
John:
For the people in the building, not the people outside looking at it.
John:
But, uh, I mean, maybe there was a little bit of wishful thinking in terms of, all right, so we know this is a problem.
John:
We know people run into glass a lot, but after a breaking in period, uh,
John:
eventually people will develop flinch reflexes or something like people people will will adjust their daily paths to not do this so they'll become more aware or this door that people keep running into will make sure we keep it open 24 hours a day to make sure it's not a factor anymore i think they might have been optimistic about how much people will eventually adjust to it and we'll see maybe maybe oh no you know what they should do
Marco:
When you first walk into the building, just slide up a little splash screen that tells people, hey, just so you know, there's glass everywhere.
Marco:
Watch out.
John:
Walk with your hands straight out in front of you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And for all we know, maybe they will get used to it.
John:
This is the growing pains of this building.
John:
It's early days.
John:
Maybe people will eventually get used to it.
John:
But if they don't, the solution, I think, if you want to keep the glasses, I think what you have to do is...
John:
change the non-glass parts of the building to essentially herd people to the openings right so you want you want the building to guide you like it should be less work to just go where the building wants you to go and you should find yourself coming to the place where the door is and the door hopefully will have a handle in it so you see that yes this is the place where the door is right you want like
John:
The idea of just having a giant expanse of glass that sometimes is open and sometimes is closed that's like three football fields wide, like the cafeteria doors, strikes me as a bad idea because there's no hurting of anybody.
John:
And when the door is closed, it looks just like it's open.
John:
So I think if you want to keep the glass, you have to make the building accommodate the glass.
John:
And maybe that's exactly what they've been trying to do everywhere and they just missed a couple spots.
John:
And in that case, they just need to rearrange the furniture and put a different pattern on the floor and do all those other tricks that sort of subtly guide you to...
John:
where the building wants you to go and flow with the traffic, especially with large groups of people.
John:
It's easy for one or two people in a house to guide people around.
John:
But in a giant campus, you have to have large apertures to accommodate hundreds or thousands of people going to and from lunch or whatever.
John:
And that's the challenge they face.
John:
I really, really hope the eventual solution is not to put a bunch of Bloomberg stickers at eye level, especially since it would be weird to have Bloomberg stickers on Apple's campus, because that is just...
John:
That's just design failure on all levels.
John:
It's aesthetically gross, and it ruins all the benefits that you're supposedly getting from the glass.
Marco:
So here's how you do this.
Marco:
Hold the glass at exactly a 78-degree angle.
Marco:
Get a can of compressed air.
Casey:
Turn the can upside down.
John:
It's like the constant spray of water, just a constant spray of compressed air going on the glass that fogs it up and lets you see it all the time.
John:
Or they could do what they do on the ski jumps where they put pine bows and everything.
John:
You ever see them where they go, they do the backflips off the ski jump at the Olympics.
John:
So they don't want the slope that they land on to be completely white because then they can't, again, they can't do depth perception to see where it is when they're flipping through the air.
John:
So they put like dirt and other dark colored junk all over it.
John:
At least that would be natural.
John:
Just a bunch of pine needles stuck to the windows.
Marco:
What if they use fiber optic style light guide lighting in the glass panes so that all the panes of glass, each department can pick a different neon color that all their glass will be lit with?
John:
Alright, I've got it.
John:
This is perfectly, not that we're going to transition to accidental neutral quite at this point, but they need driver aids, right?
John:
So if you are approaching a glass wall at a speed that they feel a collision is imminent, the glass wall should change to one of those transparent LCD screens and say, warning, stop, wall is in front of you.
Casey:
goodness so there's some transcripts on the san francisco chronicle website dispatcher tell me exactly what happened patient um i walked into a glass door on the first floor of apple park when i was trying to go outside which was very silly dispatcher you keep breaking up you walk through a glass door patient i didn't walk through a glass door i walked into a glass door yeah the
John:
door one speaking of those big glass doors like uh the i think it's the cafeteria doors wherever like the the eating place i'm sure they don't call it cafeteria because that's not fancy enough but like has like what four story or three story high glass doors that weigh some astronomical amount right and they they slide open like barn doors um and they're just huge expanses of glass and i was thinking about this about a month ago looking at the pictures of you know the final building being constructed
John:
Now, I'm sure this building, having been constructed in California, has all sorts of earthquake readiness stuff built into it, because surely the codes require that, and surely Apple would do that, right?
John:
Have they considered the possibility that these doors cause earthquakes when they open?
Casey:
They're very smooth.
John:
It's a very well-lubricated mechanism.
John:
It's almost noiseless.
John:
It's beautiful.
John:
But, and I know glass bends, right?
John:
But these are very large, very heavy pieces of glass.
John:
And probably the last place I would want to be during an earthquake is near one of these giant sheets of glass.
John:
Because I don't want a chunk of glass falling from four stories up onto my head.
John:
No matter how much it's like safety grass and breaks into small pieces or whatever, just from the sheer weight.
John:
Like, forget about sharpness.
John:
Pretend it is completely dull because it's safety glass and breaks into small pieces.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's like a clear rock landing on your head from four stories up, which I think is a, you know, maybe also a problem in skyscrapers when you're on the outside of them, like the glass shatters or whatever, and it falls down onto the street and kills people.
John:
But it just I would love to know.
John:
exactly what the earthquake mitigation techniques were to make it safe to have four stories of of like inch and a half thick glass like 17 tons of it just sitting where people could be right next to it people could literally be touching it or in the process of walking into it at the time it starts to wobble and parts of it crack off and fall down onto the ground so it seems a little bit scary to me
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Thank you to Betterment for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
VAMC writes, they would apparently like to know all sorts of rules, protocol, and strategies with regard to windowing in our cars.
Casey:
So first, how do you use the windows in your car?
Casey:
Always closed?
Casey:
Always open?
Casey:
I will start and we'll do a round robin.
Casey:
I tend to leave the windows and the doors closed almost always unless it is a particularly nice day, in which case they will usually be opened later.
Casey:
all the way it is very rare that i have anything but a binary treatment of my windows one example of when they are cracked however which is very rare is if i have any sort of food in the car um in which case i will try to ventilate the outside air by uh cracking the windows uh and we will get to sunroofs in a sun in a moment so john how do you use the windows in your car does your car have a sunroof i don't recall
John:
No, can't because I've had to remember.
Casey:
I knew you preferred not.
Casey:
I couldn't remember if it did or not.
John:
Nope.
Casey:
Okay, so with your windows.
John:
Windows, I'm almost always an always closed person, mostly for two reasons.
John:
One, yes, the hair mussing because it is a real thing.
John:
Like if I have my windows open and I show up at work, my hair will be crazy.
John:
Yep, did it.
John:
And two...
John:
Most of the cars that I've owned have required a complex series of baffles to not have weird thrumming noises.
John:
You got to have alternate windows open one on one side, one on the other, the front and back, stuff like that.
John:
It doesn't make for a pleasing auditory environment, even if I don't care about my hair.
John:
So I am an all closed person most of the time.
Casey:
All right, Marco?
Marco:
Most of the time they're closed because most of the time the temperature outside is not pleasant in one direction or the other.
Marco:
But when the temperature outside is pleasant, and if I'm at low speeds, like around town, like not on the highway, I'll open a window here and there.
Marco:
Sometimes I will just crack the window to feel the cool air, cleanse my every pore as I pour my pore heart out.
Marco:
But usually I will just open one either all the way or not at all.
Marco:
I don't know that song.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Did you get that reference, Casey?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
I could tell it was a reference.
Casey:
I had no idea what it was.
Casey:
Was it fish?
John:
Is it fish?
John:
Can't be fish.
John:
There's too many words.
John:
No.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And the follow-up, of course, is how to use the sunroof.
Casey:
And then VAMC adds, this I really don't get.
Casey:
Just got a car with one.
Casey:
Australian summer is boiling, so I haven't had a chance to open it.
Casey:
Again, I will start and we will do another round robin.
Casey:
I love my sunroof.
Casey:
I will open it in truly absurd – well, maybe not absurd, but in temperatures where I probably shouldn't have a sunroof open.
Casey:
So as soon as it hits about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and I don't care what that is in Celsius because Celsius is stupid for ambient air temperature.
Casey:
Don't at me.
Casey:
So whatever 50 degrees is in stupid units, I will start opening my sunroof from time to time, and it will be open pretty much until it hits about 80 degrees, and that's about when I decide that air conditioning is absolutely required and there's no other way about it.
Casey:
Marco, let's start with you this time.
Marco:
um i use the sunroof during the winter a lot during spring and fall sometimes and during summer not at all because as i believe i previously mentioned i don't have that much hair and i get a headburn really easily if it gets a lot of sun i keep a hat in my car for mainly for the purpose of being able to use my sunroof um but in the summertime sometimes i just don't want to have the liability of the hat blowing off
Marco:
And so I get a lot of sunroof use in the cooler temperatures when sunburn is less likely or less of a concern.
Marco:
One of my favorite things to do with a sunroof is to open it during the winter because you can have the heat on in the car but have the sunroof partially or totally open.
Marco:
So much for saving the environment, am I right?
Yeah.
Marco:
Compared to what your car is burning, compared to what my car is burning, I think so.
Marco:
I'm turning on the heat and then opening the sunroof.
Marco:
Well, and you can also do things like just use the heated seat, but not use the air heating.
Marco:
So then you are kept warm, but you have fresh air.
Marco:
So there's lots of options of combining the sunroof with heat or air.
Marco:
the lack of heat in the car.
Marco:
But it's a very pleasant thing to have fresh air coming in, but to not be freezing your butt off in the winter.
Marco:
That, to me, is the best reason to have a sunroof, is the use of it in the wintertime.
Casey:
I will say that a good solid floor heat with a ventilated roof is a nice thing.
Casey:
I don't usually do that.
Casey:
It's not something I enjoy often, but...
Casey:
You know, having the heat coming up from the floor, rising up, and then escaping out the sunroof is actually quite pleasant.
Casey:
John, if you had a sunroof, hypothetically, do you ever fancy a time that you would use it?
John:
I think—didn't we have one on one of my old Civics?
John:
My parents' cars have had them, so I've had them enough to know whether I use them or not.
John:
And basically, I treat it like a window.
John:
In general, no, I don't want it open for the same reasons hair-mussing and thrumming noises.
Casey:
uh i don't and now that my hair is thinning on top i'd probably have the same problem with uh with uh headburn so i think i would probably not use it even if i had it headburn is not fun as someone who is far and away the fussiest about his hair uh i can tell you that i can rock the sunroof reasonably frequently without worrying about my hair getting too messed up whereas that is not typically true with the side windows if i open them more than just a crack you got more product in your hair than i do though
Casey:
Oh, it's pretty much welded at this point.
Casey:
There's so much junk in there.
Marco:
You know, if anybody out there feels bad for me that I don't have good hair, just know that I don't have to worry about any of that BS.
Marco:
My hair cannot be messed up.
Marco:
It's glorious.
Marco:
I can leave all the windows down and the sunroof open and drive on the highway and get just tons of wind to the point where like...
Marco:
If I have a loose tissue in the back of my car, it might blow out the window.
Marco:
So I have to make sure everything is anchored down in the vehicle.
Marco:
But I can drive in pure wind like that, which is awesome in the summertime when you're driving next to the beach, by the way.
Marco:
And it's wonderful.
Marco:
And I get to where I'm going, and my hair isn't messed up because it can't be.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
I go to the shower, and it's dry.
Marco:
It's done.
Marco:
I just walk out of the bathroom.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
So yeah, don't feel bad for me as these two were talking about comparing the amount of product in their hair and how they can't enjoy wind movement because it might mess up their hair.
Marco:
That's only for going to work.
John:
I'm glad you brought up the beach.
John:
Beach is the one time where I do open windows and I probably would open a sunroof just to smell the beach air and because no one should ever care what their hair looks like when they're going to or from the beach and I don't.
John:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And finally, when do you turn your recirculation on or recirculating the air conditioning?
Casey:
I don't typically mess with this unless there is an odor or I'm in a hurry to get the car either colder or warmer.
Casey:
My car does have an automatic recirculation feature.
Casey:
I have no idea if that's like a complete placebo or if it actually does flip recirculation on and off.
Casey:
And so typically I just leave that on.
Casey:
But in prior cars, I would only ever really turn recirculation on if I was in a real big hurry to reach the temperature I wanted.
Casey:
John, I think it's your turn now.
John:
I am a manual control, even though now my car has automatic climate control.
John:
I am a manual controller, a micromanager of climate control and recirculation is no different.
John:
I preemptively turn it on when I know I'm going to be coming to a stop behind a smoker because smokers are disgusting and flick their stupid ashes out their window, which they leave cracked open so the entire world can enjoy their stupid smoke.
John:
And then they flick the cigarette that they're half done without the window, too.
John:
I put Reserk on, again, preemptively when I'm going to be stopped behind a big truck that's spewing its stinky exhaust.
John:
Basically, now I know there's going to be an odor from the outside.
John:
I turn it on.
John:
And the final time that I do it is...
John:
Yeah, in the summer when I want to get the car cooler faster, but only after I allow enough fresh air in so the inside and outside temperatures are equalized.
John:
And in the winter when my car's poor heating system can't keep up, like literally can't make the car warm enough because it is so freaking cold that the air coming out of the vents gets appreciably warmer when I put a recirc on.
John:
Like in the really cold spell that we have where it's like below zero for several days in a row,
John:
The car will eventually warm up and be comfortable enough, but if you're on a shortest drive where you don't have time to do that, you just got to put on recirc just for me not to be freezing my bottle.
John:
I don't have heated seats.
John:
I think that would really help me get around with that, but that's when I do it.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
I used to manually manage recirculation.
Marco:
I don't anymore because...
Marco:
modern nice cars not only do it for you and and their defaults of when to use it versus when not to seem pretty good um but also like the smoker issue i i too like one way to really make me very angry is to make me smell cigarette smoke for some reason and but the good thing is about like and i don't know if it's a tesla and bmw thing or whatever but like
Marco:
Usually, the intake air filters seem to be so good on some of these cars now that I don't usually smell outside smells if my windows are up and my sunroof is closed.
Marco:
Now, occasionally, I will still smell a cigarette because my window's cracked or something, but that's coming in through the window, not the ventilation system.
Marco:
So I almost never have any reason to manually adjust whether recirculation is on or off.
Marco:
I just let the system handle it, and it's fine.
Casey:
Peter Gosling writes in, there seems to be a lot of disappointment with the Slack Mac client, justifiably so.
Casey:
Why not stick with IRC like the live show?
Casey:
The native Mac IRC clients are a joy to use and aren't half-baked like Slack is.
Casey:
So a little bit of background.
Casey:
Slack is written using Electron, which does not by necessity mean that it's a pile of garbage, but it turns out it is in fact a pile of garbage.
Casey:
But a little-known fact about Slack, which I probably will not remember to put in the show notes, is that you can actually access Slack chat rooms, Teams, whatever the terminology is, via IRC.
Casey:
There's an IRC front end to Slack.
Casey:
So you could use any IRC client and connect to Slack.
Casey:
And that's what Peter's talking about.
Casey:
Where this falls down is a couple of things.
Casey:
One, Peter said the native Mac IRC clients are a joy to use in Slack.
Casey:
I must not be using the ones that he's using.
Casey:
I use colloquy, which is okay.
Casey:
Whatever Peter's using must be much better than that.
Marco:
Yeah, I got to agree with you on that, by the way.
Marco:
I use colloquy.
Marco:
I've also used textual.
Marco:
And there's one more I've used before.
Marco:
I forget what it is.
Marco:
And I can only describe any of them as okay.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But anyway, so you can use IRC to get to Slack.
Casey:
And the reason that I don't do this, well, there's a couple of reasons, but mostly the reason, the biggest reason I don't do this is because one of the better things about Slack and one of the reasons why I do understand if I don't love the fact that they use Electron is that so much of their, so much of the things you put into a Slack chat will like auto expand.
Casey:
So think about what's going on with iMessage when you put a tweet in or a link to a website and
Casey:
It will try to grab like a hero image or if there's a tweet with an image, it'll grab the image and it will put it right in line in that iMessage conversation.
Casey:
Well, Slack does the same thing, but it does it for all sorts of different data.
Casey:
And it's really, really nice.
Casey:
I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
And that I think I would really miss if I didn't have that.
Casey:
And so like another example of that is, say, if somebody pastes in an animated GIF or a URL to an animated GIF,
Casey:
I would want to see that in line.
Casey:
Like part of what makes Slack fun is that kind of shucking and jiving back and forth with GIFs and things like that.
Casey:
And I think I would miss out on that if it was just in a traditional IRC client.
Casey:
But it is a fair point, and maybe I should try it just to see, but I don't know.
Casey:
That's my two cents.
Casey:
Do you guys have anything to add about that?
John:
So I think in this...
John:
uh, contest between, uh, various applications that lets you type words to other people, even if they're various friends to Slack in the case of the IRC gateway to Slack or whatever.
John:
I think the Slack application on the Mac is,
John:
one fair and square based on its features and ease of use that's what it comes down to like yes irc has existed forever and yes lots of irc clients are good but slack offered a combination of functionality and application that gives you a front end for that functionality that is simply more attractive to most people than all of the alternatives like it's not like slack won accidentally or because it was bundled as part of some monopolistic thing and you couldn't help but have slack forced down our throats
John:
Slack has lots of warts, but it has the right balance of stuff.
John:
It is a fun, interesting, easy to use application that provides, I think, more fun and more features focused on exactly what it does than an IRC client.
John:
And enough speed and functionality that we all, you know, grit our teeth and deal with the electron weirdness and everything like that.
John:
Because on balance, it is better than all those things.
John:
Otherwise, we would still all be using those things.
John:
I was in tons of IRC channels before Slack came along.
John:
And most of them have been replaced by Slack because that's what more people want to use.
John:
I can understand being in a situation where it's like, yeah, but I like the IRC better.
John:
Sure.
John:
But I think most people did not like IRC better or didn't like IRC at all, which is why Slack is as successful as it is.
John:
So I think the reason we don't use it is because Slack is better in general.
Casey:
Juan Pablo Rodriguez writes in, John, I saw your tweet about the halting problem.
Casey:
I would like to hear how you would explain it.
Casey:
So the context, this was just a couple of days ago.
Casey:
And John, jump in and cut me off whenever you're ready.
Casey:
Quote, why is this program taking so long to run?
Casey:
End quote.
Casey:
Big milestone today.
Casey:
My son's first infinite loop.
Casey:
Then he asked why the programming courseware website he's using can't just tell him there's an infinite loop instead of trying to run the program as written.
Casey:
I introduced him to the halting problem, but he wasn't impressed.
Casey:
So do you want to fill in any other context or just jump into the what is the halting problem?
John:
So the context here is that I tried to show my kids, both of my kids, programming at various early ages.
John:
So if you're interested, this is the thing I can show you how to do.
John:
But of course, me being their father, they don't want to have anything to do with anything that I know how to do.
John:
So fine, whatever.
John:
So I just laid off like they're into whatever they're into.
John:
um but uh my son is in eighth grade now and he's looking to take he wants to take a computer science course in ninth grade which is awesome that it's even offered i didn't have any computer science courses in my high school yes they had computers but they were apple twos but anyway um he's interested in taking that maybe just because his friends are interested in it i can't tell if he's really interested in it but uh
John:
he's trying to get into an advanced level computer science course and he wants to have some experience so he's going through this online course or a thing with his friends right this is all this is all him right but i'm offering to help him with it um so that's why he's doing any kind of programming stuff at all and it's pretty late in the game in the grand scheme of things because he's got like five-year-olds who are writing ios apps and going up on stage at apple things and stuff like that and he's you know he's not a precocious programmer but he's getting into it and so i
John:
i'm trying to help them you know as laid back way as possible because you don't want to help too much you know because like becomes uncool if dad's into it whatever uh and he did write an infinite loop and he did ask me like the courseware is like running his program for it and like it just shows like a spinner on the web page and he's like why is it taking so long
John:
he did write an infinite loop which i feel like it really is a milestone like the first time you do that and then don't understand what the hell's going on in your program uh specifically he was uh he was iterating over uh an array and in inside the loop he was adding an item to the end of the array which is a pretty fun way to do your first infinite loop as opposed to just like forgetting to check for a termination condition he was iterating over a list that he kept growing at the same pace he was iterating over it so that was fun uh apologies to the courseware website for the uh for the infinite loop bomb my son
John:
invoked on you as he opened up tab after tab and tried to run the same program over and over again and i didn't understand why it wasn't he didn't do a fork bomb but he's not he's not up at that process level yet so i did try to say actually there's a general problem about this the halting problem and to finally get to answer this specific question how would you go about explaining it part of the the the uh the knowledge and wisdom i'm trying to impart on him as part of this is not the specifics of whatever he's doing about programming which i feel like will come on his own but
John:
Uh, how do you, how do you, how do programmers do this?
John:
How do you figure stuff out?
John:
Uh, and early on, I wanted to show him if you have a question about how something works, the magic of the internet, you know, after me saying, you know, uphill both ways, how I had to do it in my day, so on and so forth, you can just type your question into Google and there'd be like a stack overflow answer of like, you know, how to concatenate strings, you know, in Python or whatever.
John:
Like, uh,
John:
The answer is right there.
John:
You don't have to ask me.
John:
You don't have to wonder.
John:
Just type it into Google search box.
John:
So for the halting problem, rather than me trying to explain this is what the halting problem is based on like my memory of it from school, you know, or just like even just in broad strokes.
John:
just go to the wikipedia page for the halting problem and there's like a paragraph at the top that does a pretty good job of explaining more or less what the halting problem is and links to examples and so on and so forth but the idea is that you shouldn't ask your dad or ask someone next to you to explain what the halting problem is you are empowered because you have the whole internet at your fingertips to find out the answer to this question quickly and in a much more authoritative way than me trying to
John:
you know recite it from memory because if i was going to recite it from memory if i was going to talk about the halting problem on this show i almost did it when i saw this question i was like oh i should go to the wikipedia page and and paste the first part but no like the lesson is you this is one of those things that you don't have to memorize and even if you know it backwards and forwards it's difficult sometimes to explain something that you know if you haven't like taught a course in it five or six times so use the internet use the tools that are available to you don't rely on other people to explain things
John:
I haven't yet explained to him about Wikipedia being a tertiary source and all that crap, but one step at a time.
John:
There's only so much dad that kids can take in one dose.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Linode, and HelloFresh, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So last week we – what was the genesis of the question?
Casey:
I should have left in the show notes.
Casey:
But we were talking about like cars and things.
Casey:
And Roland 00 in the chat suggested something that hopefully you guys have at least put two minutes of thought into, which I know Marco hasn't and John maybe has.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I put exactly two minutes of thought into it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, that works for me.
Casey:
What car would you pick for your other hosts?
Casey:
Now, I didn't ask Roland00, nor did I clarify.
Casey:
What do you mean by that?
Casey:
Is it the car you think they would enjoy the most?
Casey:
Is it the car you would most like to see them in?
Casey:
Is it the car that you would get to just troll them?
Casey:
And I didn't want to give you guys any sort of direction about any of this.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I have answered the question in my own way, but I don't have to go first this time since I was very aggressively first during Ask ATP.
Casey:
So which one of you would like to volunteer to tell each of us what cars we should be driving?
Marco:
I'll do it if you want.
Casey:
All right, Marco, feel free.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
This is fairly easy for Casey.
Marco:
You would have the new M3, period.
Casey:
Well, so your criteria is what car would I most like to drive, I guess?
Marco:
Yeah, my criteria basically, I mean, if we're assuming that I don't have to worry about how much these cars cost, that they're just being paid for somehow, and that I just get to decide which car you have, then my rationale here is which car would you be most happy with?
Marco:
What is the car that you should have?
Marco:
And so I think it's the M3.
Marco:
Done.
Marco:
A little bit harder.
Marco:
I was kind of thinking maybe the M5, or if he doesn't want to go necessarily that large, because I know your parking situation is a little bit tight over there.
Marco:
So I figured maybe you might also go with something in the...
Marco:
three series range maybe your dad's old three series that you liked but like a faster one so like like it may be like the 335 of that generation maybe something like that but probably just I think John I think my answer is actually going to be just the new M5 so new M3 for Casey new M5 for John
John:
Why?
John:
I understand your reasoning for Casey.
John:
What's your reasoning for me?
John:
Why are you even picking for BMWs for me?
Marco:
Well, I know you wouldn't actually enjoy owning a Ferrari.
Marco:
I know that you like Mercedes, but I'm too young to know how to select one.
Marco:
And so I went with the brand that I know how to use and how to pick from that gives you what you want, which is similar to what I want, which is a nice big fast sedan.
Marco:
Like, you like those, and I know you're not going to get... See, here's the problem, though.
Marco:
I know you like stick a lot, and you can't have that in stick.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Maybe I try to find you an F10 generation in a stick, which they probably made like three of those total.
Marco:
But maybe that's the right answer.
John:
People didn't like those stick shifts.
John:
They said that the manual was not very good in that car.
Marco:
Yeah, see, picking for you is very challenging.
Marco:
Picking for case is easy because I know what he wants, so it's easy.
Marco:
Picking for you is harder.
Marco:
But, you know, I don't think Mercedes makes any sticks either that you would want.
Marco:
But I don't know.
John:
No, they don't.
Marco:
yeah I don't know but I think so I'm going to stand by my answer of the new M5 but with some reservations
John:
I was proud of Casey for recognizing what a terrible question this is, but then I was unproud of him by saying, but I don't care and I'm not going to clarify, so let's just all interpret the question however the heck we want.
John:
This question is terrible because it just has no parameters whatsoever.
Casey:
Oh, just have a little fun, John.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
It's not useful.
John:
Anyway, so if I had to pick, first I would have to pick how to interpret this question.
Casey:
So how did you interpret the question?
Okay.
John:
i'm i'm mostly interpreting as a car i think uh that you would enjoy that you wouldn't buy for yourself so like the gifts giving type thing sure okay i like that interpretation um for casey i think i would go with a cayman slash boxster whichever one comes with a sunroof or and or convertible 718 whatever the hell it's called now
John:
um or i would actually maybe go with it with uh the previous generation naturally naturally aspirated because i think you would really enjoy a stick shift cayman because you'd get that open air driving experience i think it would be a more fun dynamic driving experience than all of your like regular car cars and it's just an all-around great car like not super too super fast not too super loud not as small and wimpy as a miata which i think you would also enjoy by the way oh i bet i would
John:
It's like the big boy Miata.
John:
So I would go with a Cayman.
Casey:
I like that choice.
Casey:
I drove... I probably told the story maybe on neutral.
Casey:
I drove a Boxster S early on in the lifetime of the Boxster.
Casey:
So this was circa 2005, maybe 2006.
Casey:
And I think the Boxster had only been out for a couple of years at that point.
Casey:
I might have these dates wrong, but you get the idea.
Casey:
And I got in that car expecting to hate it.
Casey:
Oh, it's a poor man's 911.
Casey:
It's just garbage.
Casey:
This is going to be crap.
John:
and i loved it i couldn't believe how much i loved it and that was you know 10 plus years ago so i can only imagine a cayman or you know whatever the new boxers yeah like the cayman like the yeah the cayman s the the naturally aspirated one right before they changed to 718 it's just an amazing all-around balanced fun and not too ridiculous car and you wouldn't buy it for yourself because you're like oh i gotta have a car that i can put car seat in and all that yeah but it's i feel like with the giant
John:
shoebox thing that you've got going on for the whole family that you that you should have a boxer for yourself and it would be it would be a nice compromise of like a small small ish fun interesting fast enough to be cool open air kind of car nice and for marco for marco
John:
a little bit torn on this my my go-to would say and especially if i'm not allowed to pick from like future models because a lot of people coming out with cars that i think he would enjoy more than most of my picks because like everyone all the other tesla competitors are coming but they're not here yet so i can't pick them agreed um so i would go uh i would probably shop in the mercedes range because i truly continue to think that marco would actually really enjoy a mercedes perhaps more than he enjoyed his m5 um
John:
And so I'd probably go kind of like what I picked myself in that previous show, like an AMG E-Class, if I could find the right balance of options and features to satisfy.
John:
And if not, believe it or not, I would probably look at Audi.
John:
There's another brand that Marco seems to have not wanted to really consider for himself, but I think there are models in that range that he would really enjoy.
John:
So those would be my picks, like midsize Mercedes.
John:
And if I can't find the right set of options in car and model year, I would go Audi.
Casey:
I think those are good choices.
Casey:
Marco, thoughts?
Casey:
It's reasonable.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I haven't driven a Mercedes or an Audi in a long time.
Marco:
When I have driven those cars, I have been incredibly unimpressed with their media and navigation systems.
Marco:
But, you know, I would give it a shot.
John:
And the thing is, it wouldn't buy for yourself because you're all electric.
John:
So basically all gas cars are now cars that Marco wouldn't buy for himself.
John:
So you have a lot of choices there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And he had the 1M, right?
John:
So I feel like if that was a thing that he still wanted, he would have gone back to that well, but he hasn't.
John:
So that's why I'm picking like regular normal size, you know, mid-sized cars.
Casey:
I think those are good choices.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I interpreted this as what do I think would be the best fit for my co-hosts?
Casey:
They may or may not buy this, but my rule was I couldn't just say, like, oh, well, Marco just wants another Tesla.
Casey:
So I actually thought it was a little easier to pick for John because the options I came up with were a new Mazda 6, which I think you would quite like, and is basically what you already have, just a different manufacturer.
Casey:
And I've always thought the Mazda 6s, there was one really crummy generation, which was the generation after Aaron.
Casey:
So this was like late 2000s, early 2010s, which was not attractive at all.
Casey:
But every other Mazda 6 has always been pretty attractive in my eyes.
Casey:
And we loved Aaron's Mazda 6.
Casey:
It treated us so really, really well.
Casey:
And I think, John, you would like that.
Casey:
But the other thing I was thinking about, even though...
Casey:
I really think hatchbacks are dumb.
Casey:
Sorry, Europeans.
Casey:
I think you would love a GTI.
Casey:
I really think you would love a GTI, John.
John:
I think that's definitely a car I would not buy for myself, but that was the criteria.
Casey:
But leaving aside the fact that hatchbacks are stupid, do you have any interest in a GTI whatsoever?
Casey:
I mean, you can get it with a stick.
John:
I think the main thing I would enjoy about a GTI is the small-ish size, both in length and width.
John:
But they're not as small as they used to be, and they're definitely not as light as they used to be.
John:
So I'm not sure I would get that much enjoyment out of it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Well, those were my picks for for John.
Casey:
And obviously, you know, the clear answer was a Ferrari, which is like Marco said, like that would be that would actually probably make John more unhappy than happy.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
If you again, this is the question is so vague, you could say a Ferrari and a mansion with a heated garage to start and then suddenly I'd be happy.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Marco I actually found harder because I really do think that the Tesla, in the current iteration of Marco, in Marco version 2018, I think the Model S is probably the perfect car for you, Marco.
Casey:
However, if I couldn't choose that, what would I choose?
Casey:
And the obvious answer is a brand new M5.
Casey:
I think you would quite like that.
Casey:
It gives you the all-wheel drive that you didn't have for the last iteration.
Casey:
It's just as quick as your Tesla or Nears makes no difference, if not quicker.
Casey:
But then I thought, okay, what are some more interesting choices?
Casey:
And I thought to myself, well, what about a Prius Prime?
Casey:
Which is somewhat insulting, and I don't mean it to be.
Casey:
But my parents have a Prius Prime, which is the plug-in Prius.
Casey:
And it is for what it is.
Casey:
It's a nice car.
Casey:
Is your criteria suddenly switched to punishment?
Casey:
No, not deliberately.
Marco:
What would I do to deserve this, Casey?
Casey:
But I'm thinking, if you're so bent on electric, then I guess a Chevy Volt, maybe?
Casey:
But that seems like an even poorer answer.
John:
You're going to get him a much worse electric-slash-hybrid car than what he has now?
John:
That's a bad idea.
John:
And the Prius Prime is perhaps the ugliest car on the road today, now that the Aztec is out of production.
Casey:
That's possible.
Casey:
That wasn't designed to be a punishment.
Casey:
It was taking your insistence on having an electric car in mind.
Casey:
But I don't think that's a terribly good answer either.
Casey:
I was just throwing it out there as a point of conversation.
I agree.
Casey:
And then I thought to myself, well, let me think about Marco less as a driver, but more as just like, let me think about Marco's personality and disposition.
Casey:
Marco tends to obsess over things.
Casey:
And I have this quality in me as well, so I can recognize it in others.
Casey:
You know, tends to obsess over things and get just like really, really deep into something and just...
Casey:
I'm going to explore it to the most extreme depths, and I will explore every avenue of it.
Casey:
I will know something front to back, in and out, left and right.
Casey:
What kind of car would Marco be able to do that sort of thing with?
Casey:
You would need a car that's like, I don't know, like an erector set or like a Lego set.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Marco should have a Wrangler because you could have 17 different tops.
Casey:
You could have 17 different doors.
Casey:
You can have a six-speed if you want it.
Casey:
And you could go rock crawling in the little hills and mountains of New York.
Casey:
And you could go driving off-road up in Tiff's parents' house.
Casey:
You could do all those things.
Casey:
You could have different winches.
Casey:
Imagine the fun you would have, Marco, figuring out the exact right winch you should put on the front of that car and getting the extraordinarily expensive winch that weighs just five pounds less than the one that's half the cost.
Casey:
But you know you're saving that weight and you know it's better off that way.
Casey:
Imagine deciding exactly how big a gas can you want to put on the rear bumper for when you're going off road.
Casey:
Do you want five gallons?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
No, I think I want six.
Casey:
This is like your perfect car.
Casey:
It is nothing but useless decisions that you can throw oodles of money at.
Casey:
This car is made for you.
John:
You're thinking of Porsche with the oodles of money and useless decisions.
John:
That's true.
John:
The Wrangler is like, didn't you hear the discussion of headburn?
John:
This is not a good car for him.
Casey:
You can get it with a hard top, but I know you're not going to agree with this, but I stand by this decision.
Marco:
This is what I get for all the Mac Pro talk.
Marco:
I get it.
Marco:
I totally...
Casey:
well done sir i have i am speechless you have done it i commend you excellent job i could not top this like i know you don't have any interest in a wrangler like i get that but if you just put aside the fact you have no interest in the thing i want you to have interest in like
Casey:
There's so many ways you can customize this.
Casey:
You could have a soft top.
Casey:
You could have a soft top that makes it look kind of like a pickup.
Casey:
You could have a hard top.
Casey:
You could have a hard top with a little convertible section.
Casey:
You could have a winch.
Casey:
You could have an onboard air inflation system.
Casey:
You can have different spare tires set up.
Casey:
I mean, all the different things you could do to this car.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
I think it's perfect for you.
Casey:
But anyway, the actual answer I have is either an M5 or an E63 AMG.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I'm just thinking, like, is it possible to make a custom configuration of the Jeep Wrangler that I would tolerate?
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
Marco:
I don't think you could do it.
Marco:
I challenge you to try.
Marco:
I don't think it's possible.
Casey:
I think the problem is what I really want is like a Wrangler equivalent.
Casey:
That's a sedan.
Casey:
That's like a go fast sedan.
Casey:
You know, something where you can mess with the tops and you could have, I mean, you can put different wheels on any car, but like, I really stand by that you would just get wrapped around the axle, but I'm like,
Casey:
wrapped around the axle with all these different decisions you can make and all the different tweaks you can make like this is why i think and i feel i get i would guess that you and i would enjoy camping an equivalent amount in the differences you've actually gone camping and i have not but that's a similar thing where i could see really either of us all these things i'm really just projecting onto you i could see either of us obsessing over well the the aluminum spoon and fork and knife set weighs one ounce
Casey:
But the titanium spoon, fork, and knife set weighs a half an ounce.
Casey:
And even though it's literally 10 times the cost, that half an ounce in aggregate adds up.
Casey:
It's the same sort of thing, right?
Casey:
Like I could see you going, or me, going ridiculous about camping equipment in the same way I could see you or me going ridiculous with your Tinker Toys Wrangler.
John:
So you've got to expand our silly, unconfined question to say, OK, Marco, all of a sudden you live in the middle of nowhere.
John:
There are no paved roads to your house.
John:
And you have like hundreds of acres that you have to patrol to hunt for your own food.
John:
Then all of a sudden Marco's interested in a Jeep Wrangler because he has a reason to have, you know, a pretty good off road, easy to get into and out of four wheel drive vehicle to wander around his property with.
John:
And so he can, you know.
John:
get out when he needs to get to the hospital 50 miles away you can construct a scenario in which marco would want a jeep wrangler but the scenario of where he lives now is not it no not even close so you're not you're not you're not picking up what i'm putting down on this one
Marco:
Are you surprised by that?
Casey:
No, I'm not.
Casey:
Can we at least concede, though?
Casey:
Can you at least concede that you can see that the tweakiness of it, that you can just dial it in just right?
Marco:
No, I concede nothing.
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
I completely disagree because it's tweaking a bunch of things that I don't care about.
Marco:
No matter what you tweak about that build,
Marco:
I still don't want it and never will.
Marco:
It's like asking me, how do I want to set the EQ for my Dave Matthews band?
Marco:
I can tweak a lot of things.
Marco:
Look, I can tweak a lot of the EQ.
Casey:
Silent.
Marco:
Every band, minus 90 decibels.
Marco:
That's how I would set it.
Casey:
I was proud of my response, dammit.
Casey:
I stand by it, but that's okay.
Casey:
Stick with the M5.
Casey:
That was a good response.