60% Satisfied
Marco:
see all is right in the world ladies and gentlemen none of that can make the show because it's heinously boring and annoying because it's a shame because there were some good titles but it's not going to happen all right let's let's start the show now that we're all friends again we should make the title fish stick and just not include that in the show and have nobody know like what that would be kind of funny actually
Casey:
All right, so we have to start the show with Casey Schills for ATP Merchandise.
Casey:
We have realized that MKBHD, the popular tech YouTuber, was selling a shirt on Cotton Bureau at around the same time that we are, because I think his shirts have just ended recently.
Casey:
And we have come to the opinion or conclusion or have been told, I don't remember exactly where this came from, that MKBHD sold around 4,000 shirts over the lifetime of his time at Cotton Bureau.
John:
No, this is inaccurate.
John:
You already gone off.
John:
I should have put more notes in the notes.
Casey:
Well, how is this inaccurate?
Casey:
It's 100% accurate.
John:
No, I'll tell you how.
John:
I'll tell you how it's inaccurate.
John:
The people at Conbure were trying to make us feel better, but here's the sad facts.
John:
Last show, I said, oh, look at that MKBHD shirt.
John:
It's only sold like 500 and something, and there's one day left.
John:
We can beat that.
John:
Let's go beat that, guys.
John:
And we did, thanks to everyone who bought a shirt or anything else.
John:
I think we were around like 700 or something.
John:
Yay, 700.
John:
and mqbhd had 500 we win right well that particular shirt had sold around 500 with one day left in the campaign uh but he has sold many more than just that shirt one other shirt of his sold 4 000 across two campaigns so now we're up to 4 500 across two campaigns he's sold many many shirts many of them had sold in the high hundreds or the thousands so
John:
If you just look at that one shirt we were looking at, yes, he sold 4,000 of that single shirt over two campaigns.
John:
But if you look across all of his shirts, the numbers are grim.
John:
So we have no hope of beating MKBHD in terms of shirt sales, which is fine.
John:
He's got like millions and millions of viewers.
John:
We do not have millions and millions of listeners.
John:
We are the elite, right, Marco?
John:
Are we coastal elites?
John:
yeah yeah so the uh but but thanks to everyone who bought something uh the the store is doing well people are enjoying the pins they've gotten no one has gotten any other merchandise yet but the pins are shipping now and people are getting them and people are liking them i'm still waiting for my pin but looking forward to it
Marco:
I actually received my pins, and boy, are they nice.
Marco:
I got to say, I know this is shameless shilling, but I'm really happy.
Marco:
I already put one on my 60% satisfied backpack, and it's really nice.
John:
You should get that on a hat now that you can't have a computer's hat.
John:
Just put your hat that says 60% satisfied.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
So yeah, so the campaign is going on for another week or so, I believe.
Casey:
If you would like something, get something, please.
Casey:
Do not wait.
Casey:
Do not hesitate.
Casey:
Every time, I know I made the same speech last week, but every time we get so many people who write in and say, oh, I really wanted a shirt, but I told myself I'd do it later and I forgot.
Casey:
Can you get me a shirt just for me?
Casey:
And the answer is no, we cannot do that.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
Don't wait.
Casey:
just order a shirt.
Casey:
It'll be great.
Casey:
The hoodies particularly are wonderful.
Casey:
The polo shirts, if that's your thing, they are also wonderful.
Casey:
We've sold over a hundred of them last I looked, which is magnificent because that makes me think that Marco will let me do this in the future.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
Because like I said, I had to fight him a little bit on that issue.
Casey:
So buy a shirt or a pin, anything.
Casey:
It's great.
Casey:
They're great.
Casey:
I would appreciate if you would do that.
Casey:
All right, some follow-up.
Casey:
We had a little bit of information on 32-bit deprecation.
Casey:
Somebody wrote in and said that 32-bit macOS frameworks still target the old Objective-C runtime, which is different than 64-bit macOS or iOS that's always used the modern runtime.
Casey:
So this means that frameworks need to worry about the fragile base class problem, which we can explain maybe later if you want.
Casey:
They have to worry about exposing all the space that's required for each class and other limitations unless extra tricks are done manually by the implementer.
Casey:
The end result is that almost all new development is done for iOS first, and Mac frameworks are either stuck in the past or evolved much slower.
Casey:
Removing the support for 32-bit frameworks means the same framework code is much easier to ship on both Mac and iOS, which is good, which we want.
John:
The Objective-C runtime thing is a big factor in this, but I think it's a little bit optimistic.
John:
I think that if this is removed, suddenly frameworks will be released for both simultaneously.
John:
It'll help, of course, but there are many other reasons why new development is done for iOS first and the Mac later.
John:
This is but one of the many reasons.
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Was raised to listen the problem?
Casey:
On the last episode, Marco and I were lamenting the fact that oftentimes we were getting like these misfired audio messages that were queued up and ready to send in the messages app.
Casey:
And we had a case of simultaneous invention when both of us realized, wait a second, what about raised to wake or raised to record or whatever it's called and raised to listen?
Casey:
And this is if you're sending a message, you can raise the phone up to your ear and it will let you dictate like an audio message.
Casey:
I shouldn't say dictate, but it will let you record an audio message and then that can get sent.
Casey:
We thought maybe that would be it.
Casey:
So both of us turned that off, turned off that feature in messages.
Casey:
And I am happy to report I have not had one of those misfires yet, but that doesn't necessarily unequivocally confirm that that was the problem.
Casey:
But certainly so far, so good.
Casey:
Marco, how about you?
Marco:
Yeah, I have not had the problem recur, but it's only been a few days because of our weird schedule this week.
Marco:
And so I can't fully say that I fixed that problem.
Marco:
The other thing is, so we got a lot of feedback from people on this.
Marco:
Lots of iPhone X owners who are tired of accidentally causing things to happen, especially audio messages and messages when putting their phones in their pockets.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Learn some interesting things.
Marco:
One of them, I think, is actually, in my opinion, this is a bug that Apple should fix.
Marco:
I know why I can see why it does this way, but I think this is a bug.
Marco:
If you hit the sleep wake button, iOS will continue to accept touch input for like a half second or so after that.
Marco:
And the reason why seems to be that it is giving a small delay to try to tell whether you are double tapping the button or holding the button down to activate Apple Pay or Siri, respectively.
Marco:
Or if you have a triple tap accessibility shortcut enabled, it's waiting to see if you're triple tapping the button.
Marco:
The only way to distinguish whether you're single tap or double tap or triple tap or tap and hold is to just wait a second before it executes the single tap action.
Marco:
So, the problem... And all that is, I think, unavoidable.
Marco:
There has to be some delay for it to know, like, did you just double tap this or not?
Marco:
The problem, in my opinion, is that when you single tap it, touch input should be suspended.
Marco:
I think when you tap that sleep-wake button...
Marco:
the entire screen should disable input for that half second until it knows whether it is going to sleep or not.
Marco:
Because I can't think of any of those situations where you're holding it down or double tapping it or triple tapping it where you need to have screen input during that half second.
Marco:
So I think that needs to be disabled because right now, and you can test this out for yourself, open up your phone, open up Mail, or any app that has a table view.
Marco:
Hit the sleep-wake button, and then in the next half second, tap a message.
Marco:
And you will see it start to animate in before it goes to sleep.
Marco:
And then when you wake the phone back up, that message will be open.
Marco:
So it is definitely still accepting touch input after you hit the sleep-wake button for a brief period.
Marco:
So that's the actual cause of this problem.
Marco:
That needs to be fixed by iOS, in my opinion.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I agree.
Marco:
And somebody on Twitter suggested that if you disable all of those things, that can wait for more clicks.
Marco:
So basically, if you turn off Siri, Apple Pay, and the accessibility shortcut on the iPhone X, somebody on Twitter was saying that that actually makes the sleep skip all those delays and be instant.
Marco:
I didn't actually try that, though, because I don't want to turn all that stuff off.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Hover, a great domain name registrar.
Marco:
Visit hover.com slash ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Whenever I need a domain, I go to Hover.
Marco:
They have the best website, the best search, the best tools.
Marco:
And you get tons of stuff built into the cost.
Marco:
Things like free who is privacy, free forwarding, all sorts of great stuff.
Marco:
And there's no tricks.
Marco:
There's no shady upsells.
Marco:
There's no scammy add-ons.
Marco:
It's just great and easy.
Marco:
And so I'll tell you how easy it is.
Marco:
This past week, I was making a Slack group for a private community.
Marco:
And I wanted a .com that would just redirect to the Slack invite URL, which is this big, ugly, long thing.
Marco:
I just wanted a simple .com.
Marco:
Somebody could type in.
Marco:
I could tell them.
Marco:
I could maybe print it on posters and hang it up in the community, whatever else.
Marco:
And I went to Hover, and I had a .com.
Marco:
That was a great name.
Marco:
It was easy to search for.
Marco:
I had it registered, bought, redirected to this URL with DNS propagation and everything in less than 15 minutes.
Marco:
Because Hover is that good and that easy to use.
Marco:
I was able to go from the idea to having a fully functioning domain with a redirect in less than 15 minutes.
Marco:
I was blown away by how easy it was.
Marco:
And that's just how good Hover is.
Marco:
Their website is easy to use.
Marco:
Everything is intuitive.
Marco:
It's well designed.
Marco:
It's respectful of you.
Marco:
It makes good choices for you.
Marco:
So for instance, it turned on who is privacy for me.
Marco:
Because why would you ever not want that?
Marco:
They are sensible people and they give you wonderful deals, wonderful domains, and a wonderful website.
Marco:
So I strongly recommend you check out Hover.
Marco:
They have all the domain extensions you might need.
Marco:
They have all the features you need.
Marco:
They have a feature called Hover Connect that lets you automatically and very quickly connect to popular web hosts.
Marco:
And they also offer full DNS control if you don't want that.
Marco:
And their customer support is top-notch if you ever need any help with anything.
Marco:
So check out Hover today at hover.com slash ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, hover.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Hover, get a domain name for whatever you're passionate about.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Late breaking news.
Casey:
I have not yet had a chance to read this, so I am falling down on my chief summarizer and chief duties.
Casey:
There is an article on Daring Fireball entitled Scuttlebutt regarding Apple's cross-platform UI project.
Casey:
And this, I guess, is with regard to what people are calling marzipan, but I haven't had a chance to read this, and I'm not going to try to read this while we're recording.
Casey:
So I'm assuming one of you has at least the short, short version they can share with us.
John:
I read it when you were talking about jam bands.
John:
No wonder you were so quiet.
John:
It was just published, like, as we started recording, it appeared on the site.
John:
So it was nice timing.
John:
So kudos to Gruber for making it in time for our show.
Casey:
And you're welcome for getting into an argument with Marco that hopefully never made the show.
Casey:
So most people are scratching their heads right now.
Casey:
There you go.
John:
uh so marzipan we talked about this a couple shows back when uh many shows back when the rumor first broke the the idea is that a cross-platform uh gui project to make it easier to write applications that work on both the mac and ios marzipan was supposedly the coding wow it was december 2017 that's a pretty old article actually seems like only yesterday that we were talking about this and
John:
you know the the possibilities for such a thing the dangers uh you know all that stuff uh see whatever episode number we talked about that but we haven't heard much about it since except for us vaguely referring to it whenever we mentioned things that might appear wwdc so gruber has some info uh about that most of it's secondhand but uh here's the the gist of it
John:
uh the main thing i'm going to skip to the end go to the very bottom of the article and say the main the main piece of information he has here is a suggestion that despite all the discussions and despite the fact that this marzipan rumor is from december that it seems like maybe it might not make wwc 2018 and that this is more of a 2019 project kind of like the mac pro and that it would be scheduled for mac os 10.15 and ios 13 so not for this year um
John:
There's some discussion of what it might actually be, other than being a cross-platform framework.
John:
Gruber has heard that it might be like a declarative UI, and he likens it to both HTML and React.
John:
Whereas instead of procedurally constructing a button and setting the button up and telling it where to display or whatever, you would have a declarative thing where you just sort of describe the button and its surroundings.
John:
I'm not sure how that...
John:
you know how that relates to react i know it react is like plain old web react but of course html i guess it's redundant with html but like i wanted to ask casey about this how does this uh when you hear declarative ui on on apple platforms like on ios on the mac does that relate in any way to rx swift like how how would you would you characterize rx swift as as declarative ui in any way
Casey:
No, RxSwift really has nothing to do with creating user interfaces.
Casey:
So RxSwift is a mechanism by which you can react to things that have happened in the user interface.
Casey:
But it's unfortunate because React became a buzzword that like three or four wildly different projects all started using all at the same time.
Casey:
So RxSwift is ReactiveX, which was actually a .NET thing.
Casey:
And so in any case, RxSwift is about reacting to a button tap on a plain vanilla UI button, for example.
Casey:
It has nothing to do with the creation of a button or anything like that.
Casey:
Now, this is in contrast with React Native, which is a Facebook project.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Which is about...
John:
making user interfaces in a semi but not really cross-platform way which in in putting a kind of is that the one that has like kind of a fake dom in front of everything is that right i thought react native i have this is the blind lady blind here i've only used actual real react right so these react adjacent projects i have limited familiarity with but my but my tiny limited familiarity with react native was that it's actually uh the reverse that the ui elements were still done with the native ui toolkit and it was merely the
John:
It's kind of like RxSwift.
John:
The cross-platform part would be the handling of events in terms of when this happens, do that, and the state management stuff.
John:
But the actual UI would be defined and rendered by the native platform.
John:
But that comes from zero experience with React Native.
John:
But plain old React...
John:
It uses JSX, which is basically like HTML plus JavaScript combined.
John:
And HTML, I think, is the better example here.
John:
It's declarative in that you just write tags.
John:
You just write tags for your buttons and for your input elements and for your paragraphs and so on and so forth.
John:
You don't write procedural code that says, please draw a paragraph here.
John:
And then inside the paragraph, please draw this.
John:
There are no commands that you're telling them to do.
John:
You just type angle brackets and letters and stuff like that.
John:
That's what they mean by declarative.
John:
And you can make declarative UIs in all sorts of languages.
John:
You can write it in XML.
John:
There was a whole bunch of sort of XML...
John:
ui definition toolkits that have come and gone at various things you could define it in json you could define it in a plis or in a zip file or a nib file or a zip file or whatever the hell apple's using these days like interface builder files are an example well they're more like freeze dried objects but um declarative versus procedural is a general split and usually people want to do things declaratively uh if they don't want to deal with the details like i don't care
John:
rather than it telling me rather than me writing a recipe for how to build this ui why don't i just essentially draw this ui uh with uh with data instead of code you know data driven stuff so i don't want to have to write the code to glue all this together let me just write a bunch of configuration information and then something else comes and look at this oh i see how you're describing your ui apple has done this in a strange way before with uh
John:
Maybe Markham will know.
John:
Is it auto layout that lets you draw the little ASCII art diagrams of what like buttons should be and stuff?
John:
Yeah, that's one of the features of auto layout.
John:
I use it all the time.
John:
Some people hate that UI.
John:
What we're describing is like when we say ASCII art, like you can draw like square brackets and equal signs and greater than signs and stuff to sort of draw a little visual format language.
John:
yeah like a little ascii diagram of like i want a button and then and then a space and then another button and then i you know it's it's very strange some people find great it's like oh this is great i can just sort of draw out my ui and pass it as a string to this api and other people find it terrible oh i can't believe i'm passing this opaque string to an api and expecting it to do something why don't you just let me make a bunch of calls i mean to be fair everything about auto layout is weird
Marco:
And a little and a little obtuse and a little unintuitive.
Marco:
It is one of the least weird, least obtuse, least unintuitive parts of auto layout.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But so this this project for this cross platform UI, the rumor here is that it is aside from the cross platform parts.
John:
the the other twist on it is that is a more declarative way to define user interfaces rather than being more procedural um and if true it would mean that we were talking before about like with the cross-platform thing if apple's going to make a unified ui for both the mac and ios presumably they would use their current best idea of how to make a ui like app kit was their best was the best idea in the 90s and then ui kit was a chance to think what's our best thinking now you know for in the iphone era
John:
And if they're going to do one that's crossed both of them, they can take all the best ideas that come from the new one.
John:
And it's a little bit surprising to me that they would go in such a new direction that
John:
as with a declarative ui because there are there are limitations there are things you want to do procedurally even something as simple as like pulling information dynamically to fill something like a scrolling table view it's a little bit tricky to do that uh declaratively because you don't you kind of have to do it on the fly like in response to incoming data you can't really declare the entire ui because you don't know it ahead of time so sometimes it's tricky to do you know like i don't know like there there's a place for procedural code in any sort of
John:
a religiously declarative way to do uis can run up against strange limitations whereas if you have something that works procedurally you can build a declarative language on top of it but underneath it is still the the uh the procedural way to do everything so you can hook into that i don't know we'll see anyway that's the rumor um about what it may be and the idea that it being crossed cross-platform of course that uh you'd be able to make one ui using one framework and it would work
John:
in both places not that you would have the exact same controls in every place but that it wouldn't be completely different like app kit versus ui kit or ui color versus ns color and all that stuff that there would be a single shared set of classes for different widgets you'd use the appropriate widgets in the appropriate places but in general the ui code would be the same and the final bit is that the code final bit of rumor and this is that the the code name marzipan is
John:
Uh, may have been the name of this thing at one point, but apparently it's not called that anymore.
John:
Not that we would ever know this because Apple doesn't usually tell us the codenames of things, but, uh,
John:
apparently marzipan is an outdated thing and who knows how outdated because the story was from many months ago but uh whatever it is uh if apple tells us the code name chances are good that they're not going to say it's marzipan according to this article so i mean the amazing reason i wanted to put this in here aside from us fumbling in the last minute to try to characterize what a uh what a declarative ui is um is what's
John:
Not what's left for WWDC, but no Mac Pro, no artist formerly named as Marzipan.
John:
What do they show us at WWDC?
John:
What's left?
John:
What are we looking forward to now, now that all our Mac Pro hopes and dreams have been shattered?
John:
And now that it seems like, if you believe this article, perhaps no cross-platform UI either.
Marco:
Maybe WatchOS will finally give me background audio.
Marco:
Maybe SiriKit will finally give me an audio intent.
John:
That's all Marco cares about.
John:
Marco cares about one word that's going to be floating in the background of a slide that will say, new WatchKit audio.
Marco:
That's basically been my entire developer life.
Marco:
With Instapaper, I was always hoping for any new API on UI WebView because it was almost never any, and I had so many hacks.
Marco:
I was like, please make this easier.
Marco:
Now I'm just kind of hoping...
Marco:
Yeah, you know what?
Marco:
Please just make me a Siri intent for audio or make watchOS not suck as much as it does suck for me right now.
Marco:
Give me a volume control on watchOS.
Marco:
By far, my number one feature request from customers is to be able to control volume from the crown from my watch app, which they can't do.
Marco:
The reason they can't do it is not within my control to fix.
Marco:
That's what I'm hoping for here.
Marco:
Every WWDC, developers get fun new APIs, fun new abilities.
Marco:
Even the quieter OS releases usually have that kind of thing.
Marco:
Even, infamously, Snow Leopard added Grand Central Dispatch.
Marco:
Like, you know, the no new features release had this massive new API.
Marco:
So, you know, Apple's API and frameworks teams are pretty good at getting interesting, useful stuff out there pretty much every year.
Marco:
So, you know, even if there's not like a major headlining difference for like consumers of the Apple products and even if there is no like massive paradigm shift for developers like a marzipan kind of thing might be,
Marco:
That's still... There's still going to be stuff for us there.
Marco:
It just might not be mind-blowing or sensational.
Marco:
I'm sure they're going to heavily push AR and VR even further, especially AR, because the iPhone can't really do VR.
Marco:
I'm sure they're going to very heavily push AR stuff even more.
Marco:
I honestly don't give two craps about AR, and I don't see any...
Marco:
killer app on the horizon for it so so i i don't really get excited about that but i do get excited about just like a bunch of little stuff and maybe one or two big things might become easier or possible now that weren't before so that that's that's what i like and i think most developers if you're if you're you know getting real like you know about what actually matters day to day to a developer's life that's the kind of stuff that matters more
John:
I want to talk about the AR and VR stuff in a little bit, but I'm trying to think of still what they could show WWDC because they do want to have some kind of headlining thing, even if it's mostly independent of the week's worth of sessions.
John:
Something as the, you know, what's the headline feature for the tech news sites?
John:
FWDC keynote could be a hardware keynote where the headline thing is that they have newly revised laptops, and that's the number one story because there's a lot of
John:
That would make for a compelling headline, given all of the press surrounding the laptops in recent months.
John:
But that's not particularly developer-focused.
John:
And then just have the sessions be like, oh, and we have new versions of Xcode, and everything's better, and Swift has ABI stability, and
John:
AR and VR is still cool, and the new OSes and stuff like that.
Marco:
Well, and also, you said it isn't exactly developer-focused, but first of all, releasing new MacBook Pros is very developer-focused, because almost every developer in that room will be using a MacBook Pro during that keynote, and afterwards, and the MacBook Pro is...
Marco:
if I had to guess, by far the most common machine used by Apple developers.
Marco:
But also keep in mind that the keynote is a public Apple event.
Marco:
It's an Apple keynote.
Marco:
It's not that different from the fall keynote in terms of how Apple needs to frame it, what kind of products might be announced there.
Marco:
It's just kind of convention that hardware doesn't always get announced there.
Marco:
But that is a public event, and that is really aimed at consumers.
Marco:
Developers happen to be sitting in the room while Apple talks to the world.
Marco:
The actual developer keynote is the State of the Union two hours later that's in the afternoon.
Marco:
That's when we actually get all like, oh, here's this brand new big API or here's major changes to Xcode.
Marco:
That's when the developer quality of life stuff actually gets introduced.
Marco:
The keynote, the official keynote that's live streamed to the world is really a consumer-focused statement that is couched in developer context.
Marco:
But it's really talking to consumers.
John:
So as we get closer, maybe we'll know better.
John:
But for now, like I was disappointed when it seemed like the Mac Pro is not going to, well, Apple announced that the Mac Pro is not going to make it.
John:
And now it seems like they're not even going to tease it because why would they?
John:
The whole point of them telling us that it's only coming in 2019 was to make it so we don't hope for anything.
John:
I still would love a tease, but this just doesn't seem like something they're going to do.
John:
And now this is just a rumor, but still a rumor with, uh, you know, a fairly reliable source group usually gets this stuff, right?
John:
Uh, that whatever Marzipan is or was, don't be looking for a new declarative cross-platform framework to be announced WWC.
John:
So that takes away the other, uh,
John:
you know the big hardware story as far as i was concerned was the mac pro and the big software story was this marzipan rumor both gone if you believe everything and then all you've got left is all like last year there's gonna be a new version of ios there's gonna be a new version of mac os maybe there'll be some new hardware there's a new version of xcode there's a new version of swift like just a typical wwdc i mean i suppose as we get closer you know that the rumors will get more accurate rumors but right now
John:
not feeling bummed about it but i'm when the mac pro was taken away i was like oh well at least maybe they'll show that cross-platform framework the only thing i have hold on to is my like dark horse ridiculous probably not going to happen but if you want something to hope about is if apple is changing cpu architectures in any way one potential strategy is to super duper pre-announce it so that developers have plenty of time to adjust
John:
they pre-announced the intel transition but not by that much but there was a period of time when developers were shipped like uh power mac g5s with pentium 4s in them and stuff and uh ported their software and stuff like that so if apple really wants to get ahead of the game and say we're pre-announcing this by two and a half years but just so you know we're gonna change architectures and here's a bunch of things on it that would be cool and super exciting but it doesn't sound like a thing they're doing so
Marco:
Oh, well, I think one more thing to be optimistic about for this, you know, for like what's left for WBDC.
Marco:
WBDC keynotes have been pretty poorly predicted in recent years.
Marco:
Like there's always been a lot of stuff that gets announced that we had no clue that we had no expectation of beforehand.
Marco:
There were no rumors about it.
Marco:
Apple is getting a lot better at secrecy recently.
Marco:
And when it comes to things that aren't hardware, that don't have things like supply chain leaks and everything, like a lot of the stuff that gets announced at WBDC, like APIs, Swift, stuff like that.
Marco:
There have been a lot of major WBDC announcements in recent years that...
Marco:
Nobody expected and nobody predicted.
Marco:
So I wouldn't say like, oh, what's left?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It could just be a boring one.
Marco:
There's really not a strong correlation between what we know and can think to expect now versus what actually comes in a month.
Casey:
I think that's true.
Casey:
I don't think this is an appropriate time to do our official WWDC pontificating episode.
Casey:
But that being said, since we've kind of...
Casey:
opened up this whole conversation a couple things that jumped to mind that would be really cool especially for developers anyway is having more ui kit on the watch rather than watch kit so having any ui kit for us on the watch would be cool um a potential for custom watch faces in any capacity i don't think either of these things is particularly likely but both of them would make a pretty big splash amongst the people who care about the apple watch
Casey:
We could see like Xcode or an Xcode equivalent for iPad, which I still am hyper skeptical that that is going to be a thing anytime soon.
Casey:
But there seems to be enough smoke there that I'm starting to think that I'm the one that's wrong and maybe it is coming soon.
Casey:
And this is not Apple style at all.
Casey:
But what if the headlining feature of iOS 12 is that there's no headlining feature?
Casey:
That's what I was going to get at.
John:
We had that story about downscaling.
John:
What was it like Apple?
John:
I think it was just a rumor like that there was a bunch of things planned for iOS 12.
John:
And now they've been pushed aside because Apple's worried about stability and ditto for the Mac thing.
John:
That was what's making me think that there'll be even less here than we expect.
John:
And yeah, they could spin it like you were saying, Casey, like, oh, the feature is no new features, even though they already did that once.
John:
That would get a lot of applause, but it doesn't really make for a lot of really interesting sessions, right?
John:
Guess what?
John:
Things are more stable and we fix a lot of bugs.
John:
That's exactly what we want, but you can't really do a one hour WWDC session about how a bunch of bugs are fixed.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll presumably talk about this again in a few weeks.
Casey:
But it is an interesting predicament because any of the thing, any of the places where we all were looking for smoke, it seems that those those fires have been extinguished.
Casey:
So I'm not sure what's left to your point.
John:
Well, so the like to what Margo was talking about before, the thing about WWC things being surprises is.
John:
uh software doesn't have uh supply chain uh leaks right for the most part it's not like people all over the world have to build millions of these things and it's inevitable to leak out it all happens in california for the most part and those people are really good at keeping secrets so we don't have any visibility into them and the the process is from what i can tell from the outside of how things appear at wwec is
John:
They're worked on for years and years and years inside Apple.
John:
And the most large, important projects have at least one, sometimes two years where they think they're going to be shown at WWDC.
John:
And they say, actually, let's wait until next year.
John:
So if you're outside Apple, it's like, wow, look at this amazing thing.
John:
When do they do that?
John:
And if you're inside Apple, it's like...
John:
What year did we release that?
John:
Because I know we were going to release it this year, but then we didn't.
John:
And then the next year, oh yeah, that's the year we actually released it.
John:
But we've been working on it for five and a half years, so it's hard to keep track of when we actually released it.
John:
The rumors are that the HomePod was like that.
John:
Swift was certainly in development for years and years inside Apple before it was shown to the world.
John:
god knows apfs and every file system project inside apple spent a long time not being released until it finally was released every year we thought it was going to be the year of the file system until it finally was um so that's kind of why they catch you by surprise because when apfs comes out although i think i did predict that one correctly but it was the prediction was was factoring into the formula that they had been working on this for years and even though it seems like this is the year it should come out it won't it will be next year uh swift was
John:
mostly out of nowhere like no one knew it was a real thing uh but again worked on for years and so anything that we're hearing rumors about now like a project that started recently like this you know this don't call it marzipan thing
John:
That probably has to incubate inside Apple for many years and miss a bunch of WWDCs because it's not ready yet before it actually appears.
John:
So having it miss this year actually isn't that surprising.
John:
With the file system stuff, they missed so many years that we eventually stopped talking about it until we could start talking about it again.
John:
They went down the realm of ZFS and then almost got out.
John:
It even got onto an Apple web page.
John:
And ditto for all sorts of Objective-C changes and things that are in Xcode.
John:
It seems to me that things like any big company, Apple usually is cautious and not in a hurry to put out features like that, especially if they have large developer impact.
John:
They want to be sure that they work.
John:
Sometimes they want to dog food themselves for a while.
John:
um so that's why i think it's so surprising when it comes out it's a project that was hot inside apple five years ago when it was really getting going and by the time it comes out you know you didn't know about it five years ago and it's like wow where did this come from yeah it's like yeah we've been working on this for five years like this entire teams of people been doing this and it was practically ready last year and the reason it's so good this year is because it was practically ready right last year so i'm hoping any sort of
John:
cross-platform declarative ui follows that path where by the time we see it apple is super sure that it's great they've dog fooded internally it's really polished it's good uh and that's when it comes out and not like oh it's in a somewhat releasable state and we could show people now let's just do that because that's not a great way to go
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
Start building your website today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace sites look incredible with almost no time investment from you.
Marco:
So if you need to make a website for pretty much any new project you want to do, whether you're creating a new blog or a new business or you want to show things off in a portfolio or even more complicated things like you want to launch an online store,
Marco:
or you want to put an online podcast up and you want to host a podcast, Squarespace can do all these things for you, and all built into all of their plans.
Marco:
And they have tons of intuitive, easy-to-use tools.
Marco:
And you can make these sites, no matter what your skill level, whether you are a novice or whether you're an advanced computer nerd, you can make a Squarespace site in pretty much no time with pretty much no effort.
Marco:
They make it super easy to do a lot of complex things, so you don't have to worry about it.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about hosting and upgrades and patches and...
Marco:
uptime for your site and everything they take care of all of that on rock solid networks rock solid infrastructure and if you need any help whatsoever they have award-winning customer support too and it's great even if you're making a site for somebody else and they've come to you the computer nerd in their life to make a site for them you can make it on squarespace and then it's out of your hands then when they need support they don't have to go to you they go to squarespace
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
John:
Oh, and I guess this is still on WDC topics, why I moved it up briefly.
John:
Marco talked about how he doesn't care about AR or VR, and there's no killer app for it.
John:
And I mostly agree with that, although I still think placing furniture is a, it's not a killer app, but it's a good application.
John:
I was doing some
Marco:
ar stuff on my phone that i actually found somewhat useful or at least fun oh yeah i think placing furniture if you're like trying to ballpark a measurement on something like there are there are interesting and useful uses for it but what i'm saying is like i don't think we've seen a killer app yet and and usually i mentioned a little bit a little bit of this on under the radar this week or last week i forget which one but uh but usually it's if if a new technology comes around
Marco:
and nobody can figure out the killer app for it almost right away, there generally doesn't come one.
Marco:
It doesn't usually happen later.
Marco:
Usually, the killer app for something, if there's going to be one, is pretty obvious right from the start.
Marco:
So we've had AR now for a while, and we've had a few cool uses for it.
Marco:
Pokemon Go is by far the biggest use, I think, for the world.
Marco:
There's always going to be fun little game integrations and stuff.
Marco:
There's going to be occasional utility functions like measuring or like placing furniture.
Marco:
But I just don't see the killer app that's going to make something like AR goggles, which is what there's rumors about.
Marco:
I don't imagine that's going to be worthwhile.
Marco:
Nothing about AR has motivated me that like, oh, wow, now I can look at something on a table.
John:
cool i can also look at something not on the table and it's easier that's why i brought up this this article here about the rumor about apple ar vr glasses first of all this is like the second or third iteration of a years old rumor about apple supposedly working on things that you put over your eyeballs that have screens incorporated with them i think the most recent one was that apple several years ago that apple had canned their internal glasses project because uh
John:
The tech wasn't ready or they didn't like it or they spent some time looking into it and they figured, let's put this on the shelf.
John:
Here comes the rumor back again, this time with a wireless angle of like, oh, but it's different than other headsets because you don't have to have it connected with wires, which is a big hassle for AR and VR goggles from some other companies.
John:
But I think for AR to, you know, we call it killer app because it's done in terms of like the software being the reason you buy the hardware.
John:
But in this case, kind of like the iPhone,
John:
The hardware is what enables the software.
John:
If you couldn't make a flat, small, all-screen phone, it doesn't matter how good your iPhone software is.
John:
No one's going to want to use that.
John:
The killer app is the phone hardware itself.
John:
Once you have a big touchscreen, the software can finally run on it.
John:
You can hold it in your pocket, and the battery can last the amount of time, and the screen is responsive, and so on and so forth.
John:
That enables you...
John:
to have all these applications so i think one of the reasons ar is less compelling and more of a specialized technology at this point is because you have to kind of hold your phone up and you can put it in front of signs and have it translate them or put things on tables and stuff like that but it's not particularly comfortable or common activity unlike the plain old
John:
non-augmented reality of looking at your phone and also known as reality well you know looking at your phone and flicking around with your thumb that interface to your phone right well if there ever is and i don't entirely buy this rumor because it seems it doesn't have enough substance there but this rumor is about 8k displays in front of each eye ar glasses wireless ar glasses with 8k displays in front of each eye which is far beyond what most expensive huge vr sets use these days
John:
But if you could have something that you could put on your face, they will let you see, normally, see the rest of the world, but also see 8K display overlaid on it, controlled wirelessly by some powerful device.
John:
And this rumor has it being some box, but that just... Whatever.
John:
Okay.
John:
I'm sure that's what it is inside Apple, but I'm not sure that's what they would ship.
John:
I think that...
John:
that changes the ar game because i don't want to hold something up in front of my face i don't want to look through a phone size portal into a uh a augmented reality world but if i can wear perhaps not this product but in the somewhat distant future if i can wear something in my head that is not too much different than the glasses i'm wearing right now and can have a powerful computing device overlay useful information onto that world
John:
I'm much more likely to find that useful and it's much more likely to find the actual killer app when the hardware is able to support that.
John:
Because I don't think anyone wants to launch an app and hold the phone up at something.
John:
But I think if people could walk around all day and see information readily available, even if even it's just driving directions, I know they have heads up displays that do that in cars.
John:
Now, if you could get turn by turn driving directions overlaid.
John:
with ar in your car that would be a killer app because glancing at the nap screen is dangerous and much more difficult and most cars don't have huds and i wouldn't trust that to automakers anyway but if it could be displayed inside my glasses my eyes on the road the whole time i wouldn't miss the turn because i can't tell if it was telling me in 500 feet or in 300 feet i can't correctly estimate what 500 and 300 feet is and i can't tell the thing is lagging so i missed my turn
John:
If it's a big green line on the ground, I can figure it out.
John:
So I think there's not going to be a really big AR killer app until we get hardware like this, which is why I'm interested in rumors like this.
John:
Not that I think anything is coming anytime soon, but I am happy when I see rumors like this because I want to believe them.
John:
And I want to believe that Apple does continue to investigate both AR and VR, the release of AR kit and
John:
makes it uh even more plausible yes apple actually is doing this internally what do they have so far they got a bunch of frameworks that they're working on improving and the frameworks are really good and they they improved last year and i hope they improve more this year
John:
killer app we don't see it yet hardware glasses like that we don't see it yet but if and when it does come i think it will it will be the game changer for ar and until that happens it will you know i'm glad that apple is not like holding this stuff back and say oh we shouldn't even bother releasing ar kit until we have glasses they should and they are um but i'm i'm hopeful this is for like i guess wwc 2021
John:
when the glasses come out i don't know maybe they come free with your mac pro oh yeah yeah right apple would ship anything for free remember how the glasses used to come with like uh the three crappy 3d tvs and you'd get like one pair of glasses with it but if your family wants to watch each new pair of glasses was like 100 bucks
John:
I never had one of those.
John:
I got a free pair with my TV.
Marco:
I totally missed the 3D era when I was buying TVs.
John:
Thank God.
John:
Be glad.
John:
I used it.
John:
I used it exactly twice, I think, both doing the same thing.
John:
I was playing the PlayStation 3 remaster of Shadow of the Colossus, which had a 3D mode, and I used the glasses to game with my TV.
John:
It's kind of interesting.
Marco:
I don't recommend it.
Marco:
The funny thing is we can kind of predict if Apple does release this.
Marco:
We kind of know how it will go at this point based on previous releases.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect another iPhone.
Marco:
I would expect it to be announced way too early, to ship late, to ship with incomplete buggy software, and to be really slow and generally weird for about two years before they finally get something that's pretty good.
John:
possibly but like every time i look at these rumors even you know the oh 8k display in front of each eye i'm like how good how far advanced would technology have to be before it's a product that people would actually want to use uh because i even apple in the state of this today i don't see them releasing something like the oculus or the the hgc vever vive
John:
where it's like a giant shoebox in your head, Apple just won't do that.
John:
It's just too much.
John:
Or even like the HoloLens, right?
John:
But we are so far from technology that lets it be glasses like the ones I have on my face.
John:
So far, there's a long gap.
John:
On the other hand, as I've said about phone thinness many times, you don't just immediately release the thing that looks like a regular pair of glasses.
John:
You have to do all the things in between and work your way up to it slowly.
John:
Is that what Apple's doing internally?
John:
Or are they going to actually release
John:
the big thicker thing and then like you said marco go through two or three years of it being thick and ridiculous and geeky and unwieldy until they finally get down to the nice one uh it's rare that you can jump immediately to the iphone which was already pretty thin pretty light and did all the things we wanted it to do that's why it's so amazing
John:
but an 8k display in front of each eye how wirelessly communicating the batteries the batteries alone to power this would be substantial this this by the way ties into i can't believe this article didn't tie it in but it ties into the micro led thing right if you're gonna if apple's doing micro led displays uh as far as i understand about that technology as with any new screen technology initially it's
John:
it's really expensive and really hard to make so if you're gonna start it on a product start it on the one with the small screen the obvious answer is to watch like the whole reason apple will be doing this micro led stuff is because they want a micro led display on a watch in the future because the screens are small but you know what else has a small screen potential glasses right so don't expect micro led displays on your giant 27 inch display first expect them on your watch and maybe on your glasses in 2021
Casey:
I thought this rumor was hilarious because two AK screens wirelessly?
Casey:
No, not today.
Casey:
Now, that doesn't mean in the future it can't happen by any means.
Casey:
And if there's anything I've learned as I've gotten older is that the future is far closer to today than I ever think it is.
Casey:
But I don't know, man.
Casey:
That's a whole lot of data to be pushed over.
Casey:
over no wires at all really really fast i mean remember how much time the three of us spent pontificating about you know external retina displays and that still is it's i guess it's i guess you can say it's here now but it took a long time from when we first started talking about it and arguing about whether or not you know thunderbolt had the bandwidth to do it it's just i don't see how this can happen even close to the way they want it to in 2018 but who knows maybe in 2020 it is possible
John:
They can use lots of compression.
John:
The things that the glasses have going for it, the watch has going for it, obviously, its size.
John:
It's a really small screen, all things considered.
John:
So if you're going to debut a new display technology that you're working on, make it the size of a postage stamp.
John:
Great.
John:
The thing glasses have going for it,
John:
is that depending on how they handle the lensing and all that stuff like that, you can make the actual screen very, very small because it's right next to your eyeball.
John:
And it doesn't have to be that bright because it's right next to your eyeball.
John:
And you have the possibility of using lenses and stuff, which you don't have the possibility.
John:
And it's in a fixed position very close to your eyeball.
John:
So there's lots of things you can do that let you...
John:
Make the screen, I'm thinking mostly of battery, make it so this thing can take way less battery power than an 8K desktop display, which has to spray light all over the room hoping that it will find its way into your eyeballs.
John:
This thing knows where your eyeballs are.
John:
It doesn't have to be as bright.
John:
It can be very, very tiny.
John:
You can use lenses to magnify things.
John:
So I don't think it's... In labs, I can imagine somewhere in some university right now there's some...
John:
AR pair of glasses that has AK displays in front of each eyes that cost, you know, $200,000 to make.
John:
And I'm probably, that's what's inside Apple as well.
John:
How do you turn that into a product?
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's, that's Apple's job to figure out.
Marco:
What do you think, like, if you think about, like, the logistics of if Apple releases AR glasses and if they become as popular as, say, the Apple Watch?
Marco:
Like, I think that's a good comparison, like, of what they might expect, like, or, like, you know, what might be a realistic outcome is that they become as popular as the watch.
Marco:
Do you guys get kind of... First of all, like, there's the logistical questions of, like, well...
Marco:
What about people who wear prescription glasses?
Marco:
What about sunglasses?
Marco:
Does Apple sell lots of different glass that can go into these?
Marco:
Do they become a prescription company and you tell them your prescription and they have a bunch that they can make or they can custom make for you?
Marco:
What if the future, you know, the quote, the future involves wearing a certain kind of glasses that people with certain weird eyesight problems like Casey, what if they just never make one for you?
Marco:
And then you can't participate in the future of computing.
Marco:
What if they make one, but in Apple style, they basically only make one style and then all of society...
Marco:
He's walking around with the same pair of glasses.
Marco:
That's a little creepy.
Marco:
The Apple Watch creeps me out enough that I kind of feel like everyone's part of the Borg, which I don't even understand that reference.
Marco:
I never even saw that show.
Marco:
But I kind of feel like when I see a pretty large number of people out in public all wearing the exact same watch...
Marco:
as as a watcher i find that kind of creepy and corporate takeover overlord kind of and then if everybody was also wearing the same kind of glasses with the same frames and everything like i don't know i just don't a i don't want that world because i would feel like everyone is just kind of you know corporate a little too far like a little too too much like you know we love apple for for even my taste
Marco:
And I'm a pretty big fan of Apple, but even that's, I think, too far.
Marco:
And also, there are all these logistical and practical challenges of... Glasses are, first of all, pretty diverse.
Marco:
Second of all, not everybody even can wear glasses.
Marco:
Third of all, people who can wear glasses don't always want to.
Marco:
Fourth, people who can and want to wear glasses need different kinds of glasses, different types of lenses, different types of optics, different shading and tint for those lenses.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
And there's so many logistical challenges with this kind of product.
Marco:
And even if it succeeds, it's kind of creepy and weird in a lot of different ways and makes a bunch of aspects of society creepy and weird, as we kind of got previewed from, you know, glassholes.
Marco:
How do we, how does this work?
Marco:
Like, how do they get past all that stuff?
John:
Well, that's why I think you're thinking that it might be as successful as the watch is very optimistic because the watch is a known quantity, and the only real hurdles you have to overcome are, like you said, fashion.
John:
But for the most part, you don't have all those concerns about, like, you know, people don't have prescription wrist watches, right?
John:
Like, if it fits around your wrist with an adjustable strap, you're pretty much good to go.
John:
If you can wear a regular watch, which is already a thing in a known quantity, you can wear one of these.
John:
and it doesn't have to be that different from them.
John:
The adoption for glasses has to be slower.
John:
First of all, it's on your face, which is the thing you didn't mention.
John:
Yes, watches are on your wrist, and it's the most personal product Apple has made, but it's not on your face.
John:
On your face is a whole other realm.
John:
Just ask anyone who gets tattoos.
John:
Yes, people have tattoos.
John:
Do you have a tattoo on your face?
John:
No.
John:
Why not?
John:
It's a little bit different.
John:
Your face is your face to the world, as they say.
John:
So...
John:
Anything that goes on your face, there is a lot of problems in terms of how weird and embarrassing this is, how comfortable it is, even before you get into vision, before you get into anything like that.
John:
So I think the uptake is definitely going to be slow.
John:
But long term with any of these things, it's the whole semiconductor industry mantra from two years ago or whatever.
John:
As the price of compute drops to zero, many new applications become possible.
John:
Right now, the price of compute and the size of compute and the power constraints of compute is not zero, but it's going down all the time.
John:
But imagine if you could get the computing power of the iPhone X into something that sips power and is the size of a grain of rice.
John:
Obviously, this is, you know, far future or whatever.
John:
Then a lot of your concerns about how do you do this with the glasses?
John:
Well, it's like it's the size of a grain of rice.
John:
Just get whatever glasses you want and stick the grain of rice in it.
John:
Right.
John:
Like that it is such a small thing that it doesn't come to dominate.
John:
Not only is it not a product in its own right, but it doesn't even come to dominate the products that it's part of.
John:
The watch is not quite there yet, but it's closer than we might think in that the computing power of the Apple Watch does not dominate the band.
John:
The band doesn't care about the computing aspect of the watch.
John:
The entirety of the computing part of the watch is in the little watch thing.
John:
It's still thicker than we would like.
John:
It's still bigger.
John:
But imagine if that computing part and the screen part, again, the computing part is the size of a grain of rice and the screen is a flappy piece of paper that sips power.
John:
Suddenly, your possibilities for what that watch could look like are no longer led by the technology.
John:
So with glasses, I have to think that the endgame is you get whatever glasses you want, and you apply to them some very small thing that projects something into your eyeball that lets you see stuff that communicates wirelessly with something else that drives them, right?
John:
That's the endgame.
John:
In between there are all the phases where it looks large and clunky, where you either have to wear your prescription glasses inside it, or they're incorporated with it, or it attaches awkwardly to your existing glasses, you know, like...
John:
I think you could even start it as an accessory to regular glasses as long as you can find a way to aim into someone's eyeball.
John:
But all the initial products are not like that.
John:
All the initial products are it's a thing right next to your eye that incorporates glasses.
John:
And either you can wear glasses with it or you can't.
John:
And that means it will necessarily be much more constrained than the watch.
John:
Lots of people won't even be able to use it.
John:
It will be for early adopters only.
John:
But you're hoping that the people who can use it.
John:
recognize the value in it and rant and rave about it and can't wait for it to be more widely available and obviously apple's not dumb like they they know all these things about but i bet there are some people who work at apple who wear glasses i'm just you know guessing it's not as if this is an unknown thing this is this is again one of the things that they have to tackle in terms of making this a product that they can sell in any form what is their answer to that um
John:
There are lots of possible answers, but the most recent rumor about this project being put on the shelf at Apple could have been, we just can't make anything of this yet.
John:
The technology's not there.
John:
There is no combination of things that makes a product that is remotely viable.
John:
So let's revisit this in a few years.
John:
And this rumor could be, hey, guess what?
John:
Apple's revisiting it.
John:
So I'm mostly content with that.
John:
I just want to make sure that they're pursuing it because it seems like the potential upside is very big.
John:
And you'd rather see Apple doing this research, building ARKit into a powerful, robust, stable, feature-rich framework, you know, building devices with powerful GPUs to do AR and VR.
John:
And keep doing that so that if and when the hardware comes out of your labs and you get something that's even remotely viable for some subset of the population, all the software pieces are in place.
John:
Because I think, and this is the reason this is in a lot of science fiction movies or whatever, the potential upsides are really big.
John:
Being able to just look around and have information...
John:
in your field of vision when you need it uh overlaid onto the real world is potentially incredibly powerful yes it can be dystopian and stupid and you know also just sci-fi movies take advantage of that but there are plenty of completely benign really awesome applications that are just waiting for the hardware essentially even if it's something to put someone's name next to their face if you work in a big office like i do and you travel with names like me
John:
That's a killer feature right there.
John:
When I look at somebody, it does face recognition and puts their name underneath it because I always forget people's names.
John:
That's not an exciting feature.
John:
It does not require massive computing hardware.
John:
The application itself that does it involves technology that existed for many, many years in a very reliable form.
John:
Why don't we have it now?
John:
Because there's no way to get...
John:
information in your eyeballs when you look at somebody that's that's the limiting factor not not the reading of faces not the looking up of names not the constructing a raster image to overlay on something it's uh if i hold my phone to people i look like i'm crazy but if i just look at them with my glasses everything's fine so i hope i live long after season like this because i can't remember your name i'm very sorry it's casey we've been doing the show for almost five years i know i know almost three casey's
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Rover, the nation's largest network of five-star pet sitters and dog walkers.
Marco:
For $25 off your first booking, visit rover.com slash accidental tech and use promo code accidental tech during checkout.
Marco:
Rover is the dog people.
Marco:
They are the nation's largest network of five-star dog sitters and dog walkers.
Marco:
They are here for you with access to reviewed, trusted sitters and walkers for every dog owner and lifestyle.
Marco:
Your dog deserves the best.
Marco:
So they only accept 20% of sitters who begin their profiles.
Marco:
And Rover offers all this in an easy-to-use iOS and Android app.
Marco:
You can search, book, fave, pay all through their app.
Marco:
And then you can even receive adorable photos.
Marco:
You can get maps of where your dog walker walked their dog.
Marco:
You can even know where they did their business.
Marco:
If you want to know that for some reason, you can get custom updates.
Marco:
And you can even meet your dog walker before you trust your dog with them.
Marco:
They have free in-person interviews and home environment visits so that you can find the perfect match between sitters, owners, and pets.
Marco:
When you're shopping or after you've done them, you can have verified reviews.
Marco:
You can write reviews.
Marco:
You can read reviews.
Marco:
All through their app, you can browse photos of the sitter's home, browse their previous pets, previous stays.
Marco:
All the bookings from Rover are backed by insurance, a reservation guarantee, and 24-7 access to pet care professionals.
Marco:
So see for yourself.
Marco:
For $25 off your first booking, visit rover.com slash accidental tech.
Marco:
and use promo code ACCIDENTALTECH during checkout.
Marco:
That's rover.com slash ACCIDENTALTECH with promo code ACCIDENTALTECH for $25 off your first booking.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Rover for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Marco, you just released a couple of updates for Overcast, particularly your GDPR update and had a post about that.
Casey:
Would you like to summarize anything about this update before I ask you a couple questions about it?
Marco:
Yeah, basically this was my privacy update for Overcast.
Marco:
It bundled in a few bug fixes, like one or two very minor enhancements, and the most visible change for it
Marco:
is that on first launch, you are now asked if you have an email address as your login to Overcast.
Marco:
You're asked if you want to convert it to anonymous, and with that option being pretty well promoted in that screen.
Marco:
And also, new registrations, when you start the app like Clean, you are prompted to create an anonymous account as the primary encouraged action platform.
Marco:
And kind of buried at the bottom is you can log in with email if you want to.
Marco:
And there is no longer even a way to create an email-based account from scratch in the app anymore.
Marco:
You have to create an anonymous account first and add an email later if that's what you want.
John:
Can you describe what an anonymous account is?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this has been very hard to properly communicate to people in the interface and on Twitter and everything.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So basically, all Overcast users have a sync account on the server.
Marco:
Overcast is server-based.
Marco:
It uses the servers to crawl the feeds, to sync things, for the app to know whether you have new episodes and everything.
Marco:
So all Overcast usage is being based on having some kind of account on the server.
Marco:
Basically, I have two different types.
Marco:
You can have an email and a password, so you can just log into a regular login form.
Marco:
Type in your email, type in your password.
Marco:
You can have a forgot password.
Marco:
You can change your email, you can change your password.
Marco:
All the regular user stuff.
Marco:
That's one way you can do it.
Marco:
The other option is...
Marco:
The server just generates a random number for you and gives it to your app as the login token.
Marco:
And there's no email and no password.
Marco:
Those are anonymous accounts.
Marco:
So basically, those columns in the database are null, which makes MySQL keying easy.
Marco:
So you have a null email, null password.
Marco:
You can't log into the website because that token is not available to the website right now.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The devices can maintain your account through multiple device logins or through a restore or an upgrade of your main device because it stores that login token in iCloud.
Marco:
So it totally bypasses the need for an email and password.
Marco:
It's still using an account, and you still get a login token.
Marco:
And if you lose that login token, you have no way to access the account.
Marco:
But in actual real-world usage, most people use that type of account just fine.
Marco:
Even before I did this update, about a third of Overcast accounts were this anonymous kind, and...
Marco:
I'd never hear from people saying, I lost my account.
Marco:
It locked me out.
Marco:
I'd never hear from that.
Marco:
So this seems to be just fine for pretty much everybody who uses it.
Marco:
So now that is the default and that is the encouraged and official way to do things.
Marco:
And this is all in the service of getting me out of the business of having this many email addresses.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
I posted... When I made this big blog post, I mentioned how... I think it was 68% starting.
Marco:
About 68% of Overcast accounts so far were email accounts.
Marco:
And I would like to drop that as far as possible.
Marco:
Now, I don't know what's realistic to expect here.
Marco:
I have a few options if I want to boost things, but none of them are very pleasant.
Marco:
What I want is for at least new accounts to drop down to very few of them being email-based...
Marco:
uh and and i i did that prompting screen in part for gdpr compliance which i actually it's the problem one of the problems gdpr is that it's a little bit vague on certain points um and it's mostly a feature not a bug because then people should interpret it pretty conservatively and and be extra cautious about dealing with your private data um and
Marco:
There is some question about whether I even have qualifying private data and whether I even have the kind of usage of that data for marketing reasons that would even require consent or explicit consent in this way.
Marco:
But I'm assuming that I do.
Marco:
I'm assuming that email addresses count as personal data, and I'm assuming that just having your email address requires some kind of consent.
Marco:
And so therefore, I am making people opt in to accept the privacy policy to even keep using their email address in the app.
Marco:
So I think I'm covered there.
Marco:
But this is partly about GDPR.
Marco:
That's kind of what motivated it.
Marco:
But it's much more about
Marco:
I just don't want to have people's emails.
Marco:
To me, that's a liability.
Marco:
I talked a few months back, at least under the radar, and I think I did here too, about how I was trying to come up with a plan to... Similar to how any right-thinking service doesn't store your password, they store a hash of your password in a way that is... Hopefully, if they use a secure hash, in a way that makes it...
Marco:
impossible or impractical at least to get your password if somebody steals your database and gets the hash I was investigating for a while can I do that with emails too
Marco:
and and hash the email so i don't even have a copy of your email and there there's a bunch of challenges to doing that like just practical challenges of things like how do you look up an email with a database index if it's a hash that doesn't have a fixed uh uh key or salt to it rather um like the key would have to be fixed but the salt would have would presumably change with every iteration with any any secure hash and
Marco:
If you have problems with that.
Marco:
So there's lots of different challenges of hashing emails.
Marco:
And I might tackle them in the future.
Marco:
But for now, I realized, why don't I just try to store way fewer emails?
Marco:
Step one is let me store a lot less personal data to begin with.
Marco:
And then I'll start looking at ways to maybe erase it completely.
Casey:
It makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
I will probably forever hold on to my email-based account because I occasionally upload things.
Casey:
And I don't use the website near as much as I used to since getting AirPods because it's so easy to flip back and forth between my computer and my phone for what's being piped into my AirPods.
Casey:
But I will probably still hold on to email addresses and make your life miserable for as long as I can.
Marco:
Well, and so there's a couple other things here.
Marco:
So you mentioned you want to still upload files.
Marco:
So right now, the only way to upload files is on the website, and the only way to log into the website is with an email address and password.
Marco:
And I should clarify, too, for anybody who wants to, who's thinking about going and deleting your email from Overcast, you can always switch both ways.
Marco:
You can add an email to an account, and you can remove an email from an account at any time right from the app in the settings screen.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If you want to try anonymous for a while and see if you ever actually need to log in with email, you can do that.
Marco:
It's no problem.
Marco:
And then you can always change your mind later.
Marco:
So please, I don't want your email.
Marco:
Please lose it.
Marco:
So the other thing is, right now, you can't log into the website through any other method besides email and password.
Marco:
But I can change that.
Marco:
And the reason why I'm able to encourage people to use all these anonymous accounts at all
Marco:
is because almost nobody uses the website it's it's very infrequently used it's used by a very small percentage of logged in users you can use the website without being logged in for things like looking up a share link looking up a podcast viewing share link stuff like that you don't have to be logged in for that you only have to be logged in to basically have like synced playback from your from your account and the website is terrible and has been terrible since day one
Marco:
And one of the reasons it's terrible and that I haven't really fixed it up or added features to it is that almost nobody uses it.
Marco:
And there's a small chicken and egg problem there.
Marco:
But for the most part, there just isn't that much demand for people to listen to podcasts in their web browsers.
Marco:
By far, the most listening happens on iPhones.
John:
The most important feature of the website is so you can give someone a URL to listen to a timestamp in a podcast and they don't need to have the application.
John:
They can just go to the web and it plays.
John:
That, I feel like, is the main reason the website needs to exist.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
And you don't need a login for that.
Marco:
You can generate those links on the phone and then anybody can view them without logging in.
Marco:
The only reason to log in is if you want to play stuff from your Mac or Windows PC or something like that in the browser that also syncs to the same account you use for the iPhone.
Marco:
And while there are people who do that, there's not that many of them, you know, relative to the user base.
Marco:
It's a very, very small percentage that does that.
Marco:
So like, for instance, like I think CarPlay is more popular than that, like by a lot, actually, possibly by like 10 times.
Marco:
So it's it's a very small number of people use the website.
Marco:
So and file uploads are also, you know, that's.
Marco:
That's a big feature for some people.
Marco:
It's not a big feature for a lot of people.
Marco:
It's only available to paying subscribers, which is already a fairly small percentage of the active user base.
Marco:
And even among them, not all paying subscribers upload files.
Marco:
Many of them just subscribe because they want to support the app or because they don't want to see the ads.
Marco:
So the number of people who are actually needing to upload files is fairly small.
Marco:
And
Marco:
there are also ways like i can work on ways to allow that either through the ios app or through other means or i can make you know different various ways to log into the website without using an email like if i can like link your account from your phone to the website like there are ways to do it basically so i'm not totally out of luck that's going to be my next question lots of people suggested using cloud kit apis to let you use basically let you pull that token off of icloud for the people
John:
uh by using a javascript api that you can run on your website that has access to the same information that your ios application has access to and you don't have to handle any of the authentication stuff they just have to be logged into their icloud account but as far as your website is uh concerned it just gets the token from there and goes through the whole shebang but that i mean that would allow casey to go email us i suppose but if so few people use the website i don't see why you wouldn't just keep it so that if you want to use the website you need an email address
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, you're right, that would do it.
Marco:
And I haven't looked at the CloudKit JS stuff before.
Marco:
I know it exists.
Marco:
I know a few people have used it probably, but I don't know anything about it.
Marco:
I don't know if it's good.
Marco:
I don't know if it's reliable.
Marco:
I don't know what it requires from the websites.
Marco:
But I would like to investigate that.
Marco:
There's also various things you can do.
Marco:
I can have the phone send a one-time link to...
Marco:
that you know to your email that you can open up in a browser and have that log you in like there's stuff like that you can do that you know it's not that big of a deal so i'm going to be investigating that kind of thing in in the near future probably but it isn't a burning problem right now so i have a question one of the things you talked about in your post is blocking tracking pixels
Casey:
And a tracking pixel basically is an image that is effectively invisible.
Casey:
But when Overcast or some other client goes to get that image to display in like show notes, for example, that inherently passes some information about that user to the server that's serving that image.
Casey:
So it's kind of a backdoor into getting a little bit information about users without their consent.
Casey:
I have heard of tracking pixels, you know, and I've seen it used plenty of times on the web.
Casey:
I had no idea that this was a thing in the show notes for podcasts.
Casey:
I mean, it makes sense.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's unreasonable from a technological perspective, but I had no idea that that was a thing.
Casey:
How did you even find out about this?
Marco:
Well, you know, I follow the podcast industry news.
Marco:
And tracking pixels have been a thing in RSS feeds for a long time.
Marco:
I think FeedBurner even offered them to the masses.
Marco:
But there's been various feed hosting and analytics platforms and packages that have offered tracking pixels for a while.
Marco:
The podcast industry... I wrote a bit about this in the post.
Marco:
The fundamental behavior of a podcast player that...
Marco:
no publisher can break without cutting off large portions of their audience is that they publish an rss feed in that rss feed are urls of audio files and the podcast player at some point if for for you know if you are subscribed in your podcast app at some point the podcast app downloads that audio file that's listed in the rss feed for the episode that you are going to listen to
Marco:
And then after that, the publisher hears nothing from the player.
Marco:
So the kind of information void here is the publisher of that podcast...
Marco:
All they know is that they served a copy of this audio file to a person at this IP address at this time.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
They don't know if you listened to it at all.
Marco:
If you do, they don't know when you listened to it.
Marco:
It could have downloaded it onto your phone and you listened six months later.
Marco:
They don't know if you listened to the first five seconds and then deleted it or never went back to it.
Marco:
They don't know if you skipped the ads, which a lot of them want to know.
Marco:
They don't know how far you got.
Marco:
They don't know if certain segments of the show are boring to people and they always skip over them, although really what they want to know is ads.
Marco:
But there's also they want to know content decisions.
Marco:
As podcasting becomes a bigger and bigger business, the big players in the business are people coming from
Marco:
the big content world from the web, from TV, from radio, etc.
Marco:
And they're used to the kinds of things they can do on web pages.
Marco:
If you're running a web publication, you can track everything about what people are doing while they read.
Marco:
You can track...
Marco:
how long they spend on the page, how far they scroll down the page, how quickly they scroll, whether they're the kind of person who highlights text as they read or not and what parts they highlight and whether they click around the page.
Marco:
You can measure so much.
Marco:
And then you can embed tracking codes with cookies and things like that that
Marco:
follow those those people around the web so you can say not only does this person click around when they read but this is a person that a little while ago went to amazon and looked up you know patio chairs and now they're over on my site reading about sunglasses and it sounds like they might be going to the beach like you can you can make those kind of correlations and then later on the things that your website tells facebook about them can then be used to advertise to them on instagram about the article they wrote on your site three hours ago and
Marco:
So it's this whole crazy web of data.
Marco:
And also this allows for things like they can algorithmically generate articles.
Marco:
Bots can generate articles that they know people will like based on previous data.
Marco:
They can analyze how those articles perform in real time.
Marco:
They can A-B test different arrangements of sentences and paragraphs, different types of construction, different topics.
Marco:
And they can A-B test that to generate even more articles that are even more effective later and
Marco:
And podcast publishers want to bring that kind of world to podcasts.
Marco:
Now, I should clarify, not all podcast publishers, not even most podcast publishers, a few of the biggest ones, like the biggest ones that have massive companies, massive budgets, massive listener counts...
Marco:
big podcasting basically they want more data so they can sell more accurate ads more targeted ads for higher rates to big brand advertisers like coca-cola who want that kind of data that's that's what they want nobody like us wants this and oh and also they those you know the people want to be able to
Marco:
make content decisions based on that kind of data so they want to know like oh if we structure the intro this way and if we if we do this segment before this segment or then listenership drops four percent but if we rearrange them then the data shows that this is better this way because people will hang on you know two percent longer time or something like that and what that leads to is in my opinion what the web has now which is
Marco:
A lot of spam, a lot of garbage content, a lot of micromanaging of creative content and creative people and consumption of that content by data people.
Marco:
A huge amount of privacy invasion and tracking that is creepy and that people don't want or like or even know about.
Marco:
And just kind of a general kind of cutthroat...
Marco:
bargain basement, penny-scraping ad market.
Marco:
Right now, podcasting has none of these things, and podcasting is awesome right now.
Marco:
And we've gone like a decade without having any of these things.
Marco:
So I don't know why anybody wants this.
Marco:
Well, I know why they want it, but I think they're misguided and wrong.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Because the big publishers want this and because podcasting is hot and there's a lot of money being made here, both the big publishers want it and also there's tons of ad tech companies trying to break into podcasting.
Marco:
see basically they smell money and they're like oh you know we'll use the tools we have to expand into this market so the tools that ad tech has are tracking a b testing stuff like that um this is why a lot of podcasts now serve you local ads it's you know just another part of this movement where they they literally inject ads into the podcast at the moment you download it that are tailored to your ip address and anything else they know about you from that
Marco:
And ad tech companies are selling all sorts of wonderful solutions to podcast publishers saying, we can solve your data problem.
Marco:
We can track people past the download with our proprietary technology.
Marco:
And most of it is total BS.
Marco:
Most of it is just totally like they are not really knowing anything here.
Marco:
They're not really getting any data or they're getting data from very few people.
Marco:
So I'm always on the lookout for whenever any ad tech company says, we've solved podcast data.
Marco:
We can tell you more about where your customers are coming from, how far they're listening and everything.
Marco:
It all boils down to a few very small things they can do.
Marco:
Number one, they can embed images in the feed, they can embed tracking pixels, and they can assume that if somebody downloads the podcast and then the tracking pixel shows that they got, they can assume that person is playing the episode and has viewed the show notes.
Marco:
And then they can maybe extrapolate from that what percentage people are viewing that or whatever, and it's fine.
Marco:
And number two, they can try to slow stream the file to you, basically.
Marco:
So to try to measure how far you listen, instead of sending you the file as fast as you can download it, if they can tell that you're streaming it, whether you're in a web browser or an app they control, or if they can just kind of figure through heuristics that you might be streaming instead of downloading for some other reason, then they will serve it to you just a little bit ahead of the playhead.
Marco:
So that if you cut off the stream after listening for five seconds, it hasn't served you much more than that.
Marco:
So they know how much they served you so they can tell how far you listened.
Marco:
That's basically every podcast ad tech thing.
Marco:
It's like dynamic ad insertion, tracking pixels in the body, and slow streaming files.
Marco:
That's about the extent of it.
Marco:
And again, there's lots of efforts to change this.
Marco:
I don't know how that's going to ever get off the ground, but it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
apple actually gave people data they didn't give like personal data but now as a podcaster ever since i think about november or so you can log into to the apple podcast back end and you can see like what percentage of people listen how far into your show and you can see what segments they skip like it's funny you know you can look at the graph of an episode and you can see the ad breaks because you can see there's like a small drop off for the ad breaks and
Marco:
And there's like a slow curve or a slow slope down as you get to the end of the episode where you can tell people are like, you know, not everybody finishes the episode, of course, right?
Marco:
But the funny thing is we've had this since like October, November, December, something like that.
Marco:
And that basically told us everything that podcasters say they want to know.
Marco:
It didn't give any personal info, which is what they really want.
Marco:
But it did say...
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
It turns out most people who download it listen to it.
Marco:
Most people who listen to it listen to the end and don't skip the ads.
Marco:
That's about all we needed to know.
Marco:
Which, guess what?
Marco:
We already kind of knew that.
Marco:
We already kind of thought that.
Marco:
Because our advertisers use things like special URLs and coupon codes and everything.
Marco:
And that's how they can gauge roughly how many people are hearing their ads and responding to them.
Marco:
That's why podcasts have repeat advertisers.
Marco:
Because they can measure these things in the old-fashioned way.
Marco:
And they don't need all this tracking data.
Marco:
No one needs all that.
Marco:
Anyway, all this is a long-winded way of saying, which I'm very good at, a long-winded way of saying that the podcast industry is trying very hard to get more data about people.
Marco:
And I am interested in supporting none of that.
Marco:
I would like to keep giving them the exact data they have gotten forever, which is when you download the MP3 of the episode, they, by the nature of a download, get your IP address, and they get a user agent string that says they're using Overcast.
Marco:
And that's all I want to tell them.
Marco:
That is the minimum.
Marco:
I mean, technically, I could remove the user agent string, but they're not really using that for analytics purposes anyway.
Marco:
They're using your IP address.
Marco:
I think that's fine.
Marco:
I don't think I'm hurting anybody by doing that.
Marco:
That's how the industry has always worked, and I'm just trying to prevent new things from invading our privacy in weird ways that we didn't consider.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
In Overcast 4.2, I block tracking pixels.
Marco:
And the way I do that is by blocking image loads from the UI web view and replacing them with placeholder rectangles that if you want to see the image, you can tap the placeholder rectangle and it will load.
Marco:
Most people don't look at the show notes to begin with, and most people who do look at the show notes, most show notes don't even have images in them that are of legitimate content use.
Marco:
So it isn't that big of a problem for the consumer.
Marco:
And for the ad tech people, they have two tools at their disposal, and I just disabled one of them for Overcast users.
Casey:
So is there an API within like WK WebView or whatever that calls you specifically for images?
Casey:
Or are you doing some sort of more advanced technique to intercept these things?
Marco:
I'm doing an advanced technique.
Marco:
So I'm using UI WebView, not WK WebView.
Marco:
And this is partly for historical reasons.
Marco:
It's mostly because when WK WebView came out, I couldn't find a way to nicely make it use my custom fonts for my app bundle.
Marco:
And there probably are ways to do that now that I just didn't find at the time.
Marco:
But it was more like, you know, I'd already written all this code with WebView, and this was not performance-sensitive code, so it was totally fine.
Marco:
The other thing is I'm pretty sure the way I'm doing this actually wouldn't work in WKWebView.
Marco:
So the way I'm doing it now is...
Marco:
So on the server side, ever since Overcast 1.0, I have run an HTML filter on the body HTML of podcast episodes called HTMLOD, L-A-W-E-D.
Marco:
It's been this PHP HTML filtering library that's been around for a long time.
Marco:
And it was pretty well regarded forever ago when I last researched these things.
Marco:
I'm running that on the HTML.
Marco:
And there have been a few problems with that.
Marco:
One of them is that it broke under image source set tags.
Marco:
Because the version I'm using predates that.
Marco:
And I can try to update that or I can try to swap out another library for server-side filtering, but server-side filtering is expensive.
Marco:
You know, computationally, it's expensive.
Marco:
And I don't, like, just filtering the strings that are HTML strings, I think is kind of a, it's just a cat and mouse game.
Marco:
Like, there's always going to be, like, new security vulnerabilities that can come up for, you know, oh, we found a way to execute arbitrary JavaScript if you put a line break here and move this byte over here and use this weird Unicode character sequence here and everything.
Marco:
So, like,
Marco:
And libraries like HTMLOD are supposed to be really good about that, but you're always playing catch-up.
Marco:
And it's kind of hard to really guarantee that just by parsing the strings from some library in PHP that you're accurately filtering the HTML in a safe way that doesn't allow arbitrary code to execute or things like that.
Yeah.
Marco:
Fortunately, also around the time I developed Overcast 1.0, there was this wonderful new browser ability called Content Security Policy, or CSP.
Marco:
And Content Security Policy is a header you can use on webpages that you guys are probably aware of that basically lets the server-side software say in the HTTP header, so before there's even any content in the page, although you can use a meta tag too if you want, but it lets people say right in the header...
Marco:
what domains to accept things like JavaScript and images and other embeds from.
Marco:
And you can lock it down so that even if somebody gives you a cross-site scripting vulnerability on some kind of content showing on your web page...
Marco:
you can block that in all modern browsers by having a strict enough content security policy in your headers.
Marco:
And there's not much reason not to do it.
Marco:
The only downsides to it are that you need to be a little more structured and, and, um,
Marco:
controlled about like where you put JavaScript and styles and stuff like that so like you can't just throw inline JavaScript and inline CSS styles all over your pages like you have to actually put them in you know templates files or external files that you're declaring correctly and the or things like that so like you have to be a little more you know structured about how you write your code but you should probably doing that anyway so ever since overcast 1.0 I've been using content security policy on overcast website so that even if I would display unfiltered body text from
Marco:
from people's podcast feeds on overcast.fm it shouldn't actually be dangerous now i don't do that just as a feature i just don't display body text on the page but i figured like in case i ever want to or just as a safety measure like i have no reason not to support this so i do
John:
Although unlike the iOS app situation on the web, it's less of a secure thing because you're relying on the browser to honor that thing.
John:
But on the iPhone app, you know what the browser is going to be.
John:
You know, it actually will honor your content security policy.
Marco:
that's true and also you know content security policy is not new anymore you know it was new in 2014 when i was writing all this stuff it's not new in 2018 so now like i think with a web browser you should still be very secure in things like you know xss prevention and escaping html stuff and stuff like that but but i think now csp will cover you pretty effectively in the vast majority of modern web browsing usage if you screw up but you still what about users with web tv 1.0
Marco:
they can't see anything on my side anyway so in fact doesn't doesn't modern https stuff not even work well at all yeah i was i was running uh like netscape 3 the other day in emulation and uh yeah ssl is a problem
Marco:
yeah anyway so um so what i'm doing on the ios app is i'm actually using content security policy in the app uh by by using ns url protocol to serve the the show notes it's it's almost like running a local web server but without the overhead of like you know opening a port and having it to go to localhost colon 80 75 or whatever um so it's
Marco:
It is using the part of the Cocoa URL loading system that is kind of designed for you to hook in and make custom URL schemes.
Marco:
So I define a custom overcast local URL that's responded to by this app library that's there.
Marco:
That serves the show notes, and with it, it serves the CSP header.
Marco:
And the CSV header restricts images and everything, JavaScript, everything, to only its known resources.
Marco:
And then, you know, even when you proxy, even when you tap the image to load it, it is still one of those URLs.
Marco:
It doesn't modify the CSV.
Marco:
It just loads the image in the back end of the code from the server and then shoves it in there and displays it.
Marco:
So it's basically using web browser security technology, which is pretty well tested and pretty well supported, to restrict what can be done in my show notes.
Marco:
And my plan is, once this version has large, widespread support, my plan is to disable HTML-LOD, HTML-LOD, however that's pronounced, disable that on the server side, because it's breaking all the Germans' podcast CMSs that use source sets.
Marco:
And it's been breaking it for a long time, and they're very upset with me over that.
Marco:
And it's going to save me a lot of computation time on the servers, too.
Casey:
So NSURL protocol, I'm just curious about this because I've not used it.
Casey:
So you're not intercepting the call as much as you are responding to it.
Casey:
Can you tell me a little bit more and summarize what this is doing?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
So basically, the way NSURL protocol works is you can define a class that is a subclass of NSURL protocol, and you can say, you know, my URL scheme is, say, you know, kcliss colon.
Marco:
And so then you can have your WebView load kcliss colon slash slash whatever, and...
Marco:
And then instead of it trying to load that off the internet or the system, it will first check your registered entity URL protocol to say, hey, we have a URL that begins with a casey list colon.
Marco:
Can you handle this?
Marco:
And you can say, yes, I can.
Marco:
And then it'll come back to you later and say, all right, we've got a request for this URL.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So it's a wonderful system.
Marco:
I use it with Instapaper for a few different things, too, back when I was doing a lot more web view hacking.
Marco:
It's a wonderful system.
Marco:
And so it lets you basically do all the benefits of having a local web server in an app without actually running one.
Casey:
So then when you get one of these calls for show notes, what is actually happening under the hood?
Casey:
You're making a call to your servers to get the slightly sanitized version or no?
Marco:
The app already has the body text downloaded from the server.
Marco:
It's part of the sync payload.
Marco:
So when you display the web view, I'm literally loading a URL that's like OC info colon slash slash bunch of stuff to...
Marco:
And then that library in the app is saying, oh, you want the show notes for episode ID, whatever.
Marco:
And here's that HTML.
Marco:
And here's also a CSP header to make sure it doesn't do anything crazy.
Marco:
So in theory, I don't have to be filtering the HTML at all.
Casey:
That's fascinating because I had no idea how you were doing this.
Casey:
And I thought you were doing some sort of like ridiculous parsing of the HTML, trying to figure out what is a tracking pixel or what is an image even and what's not.
Casey:
So this, this, I had a feeling that was not the approach you took, but I didn't know what, what the approach was.
Casey:
That was very interesting for me if, if nobody else.
Casey:
So thank you.
Marco:
I'm also doing... There's one other aspect of it that I think is also useful.
Marco:
I am doing a very small amount of filtering, but I'm doing it client-side in JavaScript.
Marco:
I'm having the JavaScript... There's, I guess, I mean, recently in absolute terms, but in relative terms, it's probably been five years old or something, but...
Marco:
In the recent era, JavaScript got the ability, without using third-party libraries, to import a DOM from an HTML string and let you work on it as a DOM node or as a DOM document.
Marco:
And so what I'm doing now also is there's a few things that I want to filter out.
Marco:
I didn't want people to do meta refreshes that could somehow get past me and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I passed as part of the...
Marco:
show notes HTML page that I'm showing I don't just I don't just like insert the you know hostile body HTML from the publisher into the template and serve it I pass it to the JavaScript as a string that the that it it then interprets that as a DOM and
Marco:
And filters it using JavaScript for the handful of things that I was a little bit afraid of.
Marco:
So things like meta tags.
Marco:
And that also does that.
Marco:
It also uses that DOM for image replacements.
Marco:
Rather than just showing a broken image, which would happen if I pasted in the full image and the CSP blocked it, it replaces it with the placeholder and lets me do that.
Marco:
And I do all that in JavaScript because that way I don't have to worry what if my string parsing library doesn't parse HTML in quite the same way as WebKit.
Marco:
I don't have to worry.
Marco:
When you're using JavaScript, it is parsing it the same way.
Marco:
So it's, again, just kind of like shifting the security onto the, you know, well-tested, built-in functionality of WebKit that, like, if there's ever some kind of weird variant, some kind of weird security hole, that's going to get fixed before I even know about it.
Marco:
And it isn't my problem that I have to go update some HTML parsing library.
Casey:
that's super clever i dig it all righty let's do some ask atp and alex faber writes you've talked about worky work in the past and using max at work i'm wondering how you guys handle private apple ids and work apple ids how do you guys looking particularly at casey and john here uh deal with this do you guys keep working private strictly split or do you have a work private watch for example or do you just not care john would you like to start
John:
I'd like to start by saying that Worky Work is not a valid companion to Jobby Job.
John:
I know it seems like it should by parallel construction, but no.
Casey:
I agree.
John:
Jobby Job, yes.
John:
Worky Work, no.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Jobby Job or not.
John:
There we go.
John:
So as we all know, if we use Macs or other Apple devices, they're not really great at letting you juggle multiple Apple IDs on the same computer.
John:
iOS and to some degree the Mac let you pick different Apple IDs for different specific things.
John:
you're not going to be swapping between your personal and work apple ids on the fly uh to do certain things and you can't really assign on a per application basis all right messages i want you to use this apple id but photos i want you to use this apple id but notes i want you to use this apple id not going to happen apple doesn't have that feature they could have it but they don't um so given that i have never done the thing where you have a work apple id and a home apple id
John:
I have a bunch of Apple IDs, most of the one, I have my real Apple ID and then I have tons of other Apple IDs that mostly I use for like,
John:
mac os reviews back in the day but at work i use my real apple id and i just disable most of the things that i don't need to have at work mainly what i want at work is messages if i get a message i like to be able to see it on my mac and not just on my phone so i'm signed into iMessage with that apple id but of course i'm not signed into iMessage with that apple id i'm signed in to that apple id in the iCloud preference pane and then i just have different things toggled on and off
John:
That situation is not ideal, especially if you actually need to have a work Apple ID.
John:
I don't do development in Xcode, so I'm not uploading things to Apple servers, and I don't need an Apple ID for my work at all.
John:
So that's a luxury I have doing server-side stuff.
John:
But if I had to have...
Casey:
work apple id i would probably be signed into my work apple id on my mac if i needed to i really don't think i would switch back and forth but i'm interested to hear what casey does because i'm assuming he does need to have a work apple id i do so my work apple id is what i use to publish work apps to the store and things of that nature um but i am not logged in in any capacity in any operating system level capacity to my work apple id and
Casey:
The only thing I have logged in in iCloud is my personal Apple ID, the same one I use on all my personal devices for much of the same reasons that you were talking about.
Casey:
And so the only time I ever really use my work Apple ID is when I need to sign in to iTunes Connect or Equivalent, and that's about it.
Casey:
And so when you're in Xcode, it's actually pretty good about allowing you to have – recently, this is very recently – pretty good about having multiple Apple IDs associated with Xcode.
Casey:
And it, generally speaking, does a reasonably decent job of picking the right one for the particular moment.
Casey:
So I have the same Apple ID I use everywhere.
Casey:
I do that mostly for messages and for apps because there are some Mac App Store apps that I bought.
Casey:
Yes, Mac App Store is still a thing.
Casey:
It is still a product in their lineup.
Casey:
And so I want to use the same apps I've already paid for at home at work.
Casey:
And I also want to have messages among many other things and notes.
Casey:
Actually, I've been using notes a lot more recently because it's gotten really good.
Casey:
So it's basically the same story for the both of us.
Casey:
Marco, your boss is a real turd.
Casey:
So how does this work for you?
Marco:
Funnily, you know, I know that, you know, lol, I don't have a job, but I have the exact same setup that you'd have, which is like I have Apple IDs for apps and then I have a personal Apple ID that I have logged into things like the store.
Marco:
And, you know, obviously this question is harder if you have to log into the app store or to iCloud for work.
Marco:
We don't have that issue.
Marco:
You know, like, you and I, like, we use our personal Apple IDs for the actual, like, login on the phone, and we use our work Apple IDs for iTunes Connect and submitting apps.
Casey:
Yep, exactly.
Casey:
Ryan Taylor asks, do you cover the camera on your laptop with posted or other material?
Casey:
Do you advise your non-tech friends to do so?
Casey:
Is it possible to design a webcam that always indicates when it's recording, perhaps something mechanical instead of light?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Why are people paranoid about laptop cameras but not microphones?
Casey:
Does the designer of the MacBook find it offensive when people put Post-its on their cameras?
Casey:
Is that a design failure or a user failure?
Casey:
I don't get why people do this personally.
Casey:
I do trust the little green light on my Apple devices, and I do not put Post-its on any of my cameras or anything like that.
Casey:
If I had a PC, I would consider it.
Casey:
I especially am confident in the lack of ability for the camera to turn on without proper user authorization on the new MacBook Pros, where they use... What is that?
Casey:
That's not the T1.
Marco:
The secure enclave.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Well, the T1 is a touch bar.
Marco:
You know, actually, I don't know...
Marco:
If the MacBook Escape and 12-inch MacBook have this protection, I'm guessing they don't.
Marco:
I don't think they do.
Marco:
Because they don't have a secure enclave anywhere because that requires, you know, that specific implementation of this kind of thing requires an ARM chip that they don't have.
Marco:
So I think you're talking only about Touch Bar models and the iMac Pro.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
So those that have the secure enclave and all that, I am 100% confident that they cannot turn on without, you know, a user intervention or, you know, unless there was some sort of really terrible bug.
Casey:
But I've never covered any of my devices, cameras ever.
Casey:
I just, I mean, if you really want to watch me picking my nose or whatever, you go to town, man, because I just, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I don't even lead an interesting life.
Casey:
I don't think it's a big deal.
Casey:
John?
John:
I don't cover any of my cameras either, although I totally believe that every camera attached to any computer can be hacked.
John:
But, you know, it's like you said, the microphone and all that stuff like it's there are too many things in this world that are potentially watching and listening to us and all of them are hackable and.
John:
you're not actually getting much additional protection by putting a piece of paper over something.
John:
Your net vulnerability to hacking is about the same as it was before.
John:
We're all mostly relying on the fact that we are not interesting targets.
John:
That's what's protecting us, honestly, not anything else that we do in our lives.
John:
If you were a really interesting target, putting a piece of paper or a piece of tape over your thing is not...
John:
gonna stop people because you know the the hackers don't go through the door with a lock on it right they go through the open ones or they don't go through the door at all they get you to come out of the house or they social engineer you're like
John:
yeah so if it makes you feel more comfortable to do it feel free i would not recommend uh my non-tech friend do it i've never advised a non-tech person or anybody for that matter that this is a thing that they should do because it's just i don't think it is a uh uh useful i i think obviously the drawbacks are obvious that you have to keep adding and removing that thing and remembering to put it on and off and worrying about it and all the other stuff it makes using your devices less convenient um
John:
For example, say you did it on your phone and had to keep peeling this piece of tape off every time you did a FaceTime call or something or had some kind of muffler over the microphone that every time you had a phone call you had to remove.
John:
That inconvenience is not worth the additional security if anything you're getting.
John:
So no, I would not recommend someone else do it.
John:
But if you want to do it and it makes you feel better, feel free.
John:
But just perhaps think about what you're doing with your life.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm with you.
Marco:
I think this is... It's the kind of thing where it looks like you're doing something to increase your security.
Marco:
It probably feels good.
Marco:
You're like, oh, yeah, I'm really blocking out those hackers with this circular sticker that I'm putting over... Or this piece of tape that I'm putting over my camera here.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
That doesn't... As John said, it doesn't really make you that much more secure.
Marco:
And I think Ryan Taylor, the listener who asked this question, brings up a very good point of what about microphones?
Marco:
I think most sensitive information from companies...
Marco:
That could be gleaned from a webcam would be via audio, not video.
Marco:
I don't think anybody's worried about watching you pick your nose while you work.
Marco:
But if you're having a conversation about something confidential, that's probably the more damaging thing.
Marco:
Although, if somebody is to the level of hacking your camera...
Marco:
like, hacking the hardware that your computer is using, I imagine the contents of your data on your computer are probably way more, you know, questionable and vulnerable and valuable to people.
Marco:
So, it's... But at the same time, like...
Marco:
I don't know if there's any reliable way to block the microphone input from the built-in microphones on a modern Mac.
Marco:
What do you do?
Marco:
Shove sticky putty into the holes?
Marco:
Are you sure you even have the right holes or all of the holes?
Marco:
There's multiple microphones on all these machines now.
Marco:
Some of them are going to be behind speaker grills that you can't really actually plug up.
Marco:
There's really no good way to block off microphones so nobody does it.
Marco:
I think the reason why people do it to the camera is because it's easy and there's no real downsides unless you are somebody who uses video chatting a lot on your laptop.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's something that IT departments can mandate and look like they're doing their job and say, look, we're covering our butts.
Marco:
We're saying we need to make our computers more secure and we'll give you this $0.08 sticker to put over the camera and your laptop will look secure and we can make sure you have that on there because we can see it.
Marco:
And we can look like we're doing our job and we can feel secure.
Marco:
And the reality is it's mostly security theater.
John:
And by the way, if you're trying to come up with like part was part of this question.
John:
Is there any way to make a light that any way to make a camera that you can be sure that the green light is, you know, is real and it can't be hacked?
John:
Like perhaps something mechanical.
John:
Yeah, mechanical is the way you do it.
John:
You'd have an actual opaque piece of metal.
John:
uh that when it it slides in front of the camera and the only way for the camera to get a picture is for it to slide out and if you want to tell whether the camera is on just assume every single time that metal door is open the camera is on um that would do it and and i think the we're thinking of this mostly from our perspectives or from the perspective of like we're a giant corporation what might we want to protect but
John:
uh the reason people hack webcams obviously is to get pictures of people like uh in their bedrooms or whatever and then either blackmail them or sell that footage or whatever it's a vulnerability that we don't think about because no one wants to see us naked but it is a vulnerability that half the population has to worry about uh so
John:
if you find yourself in that situation again i would recommend don't you know put stickers over your thing uh close the lid on your laptop turn it off like you know like don't don't have your your computer running all the time and pointing at your bedroom and i know that's you know perhaps even more inconvenient than just putting a sticker over it and again if you want to put a sticker over it go for it but uh
John:
I think a better idea would be to buy a computer where you have slightly more faith that it's harder to hack the camera.
John:
I don't know if I'm just shilling for Apple there.
John:
But like I said, Apple's not going to protect you.
John:
There have been proven hacks to get around that little light.
John:
So maybe the best choice is to get one of the PC laptops I've seen.
John:
that you don't have to buy something that covers the camera that it comes with a little mechanical door over the camera you have to use your hand to move it but uh but that's you know that's uh that's the only way to be sure um and you're not they you're not safe for microphones as as marco pointed out so they might not be able to hear your bedroom see your bedroom but they can hear it and can they produce some kind of blackmail out of that too who knows uh
Marco:
yeah technology in the bedroom it's a problem yeah and also just like there's also there's a lot more cameras and microphones in most people's houses than just the one on your laptop now with a lot with a lot more lax security than hopefully than your laptop yeah yeah and and it's just yeah and and and to to finish the like 19 questions that ryan taylor asked uh does the designer of the macbook funds offensive when people put post-its on their cameras uh
Marco:
uh i i assuming that you're talking about johnny ive because i don't know which of his staff designed it um i would say probably they find everything offensive because they design these things to look good in pictures with nothing that they actually use they should find the dongle hell offensive that we have to do in practice they should find the terrible cable management on the current power brick offensive but ultimately i don't think johnny ive spends two seconds thinking about max anymore
John:
I think the design of the camera on Apple laptops reflects the Apple design philosophy of like, say this was even part of the design brief, which is...
John:
One problem is that people want to know when the camera is recording them, right?
John:
And they want to feel secure that they can tell if it looks like the camera is not recording, then it really isn't.
John:
So their solution, their elegant solution is rather than having a clunky mechanical door, let's have a light next to the camera that's on when it's recording, and let's use some very clever technology to make it so that light actually is representative.
John:
And they did a pretty good job of making the light hard to hack,
John:
But it was indeed hacked at one point on one of the older things showing that no matter how hard you try, you're never sure if you really got it 100% hack-proof.
John:
You look at the circuit diagram and you're like, oh, there's just no way that camera could be on with that light being on.
John:
But they did something very clever.
John:
There was a good article about it a while back to get around it.
John:
I don't know if the modern ones have now worked around that, if a secure enclave is better, so on and so forth.
John:
But you can never be sure.
John:
But that's their solution, is...
John:
It's clunky to have a door.
John:
It's fidgety to have a door.
John:
It would be fidgety to have a computer-controlled door.
John:
It's kind of silly to have a manual door.
John:
So let's not have a door at all.
John:
Let's just simply have a camera and solve the harder problem, which is how can we have a light that is always representative, that is always true?
John:
If I look at that light, it really tells me other things on.
John:
That was their attempt.
John:
unfortunately it is less reliable than the clunky solutions, but, uh, maybe with a secure, secure on flight, maybe it's, it hasn't been hacked and maybe it is really reliable.
John:
And I think that would be the Apple philosophy is let's not resort to the easy solution of a door.
John:
Let's instead keep, keep trying to harder and harder to make a very secure piece of hardware where we actually do have control over the light because we make the whole widget.
John:
We make the Silicon, we make the, uh, the hardware, we make the OS, we should be able to make this work.
John:
Um,
John:
And they have a pretty good shot at making it not 100% hack-proof, because nothing is, especially if you have physical access to it, but very, very robust to the point of very diminishing returns.
John:
They may already be at that point with the secure enclave.
John:
So I don't entirely fault them for this approach.
John:
But it's certainly not the simplest solution, which is a door.
John:
And then the microphone solution, well, you got nothing there.
John:
You're screwed.
John:
Well, there's an even simpler solution.
John:
Make the camera optional.
Marco:
oh yeah everything make it a preference good old make it a preference marco they call him every time he says let's add a preference that's what i remember from him i mean look at how many like how many apple fans have given us crap especially giving me crap because i complained they removed something i use
Marco:
And they're like, well, you know, it's the future, and almost nobody used that.
Marco:
Well, how many people use the camera, really?
Marco:
Like, I know people use it for Skype and stuff, and occasionally FaceTime, but you can also use your phone for that now, and I think most people probably do that more often.
Marco:
Does it really need to be on every single laptop they sell anymore?
Yeah.
John:
or yes it does really does it why i mean it's it's uh like obviously nobody uses every feature 100 of the time right uh not even the keyboard i bet some people only ever use a clamshell but i think the camera is well past the threshold of commonly used enough that it should be on everyone now if they wanted to make an option like i wouldn't object to a big option who can object to options you know like sure let me configure my laptop with exactly what i need but in the grand scheme of things that might be options
John:
this would be pretty low down on the list because so many people need occasional use of the camera.
John:
It's really difficult to add after the fact.
John:
Um, maybe again, maybe not workplace stuff.
John:
You underestimate exactly how much video conferencing goes on in the modern workplace.
John:
Just because it's the default of a lot of telecommunication applications for work, it's nice to see other people's faces.
John:
I mean, I've had video conferences with people in the same building.
John:
I had like three video conferences today.
John:
It's just a thing that happens today.
John:
Sometimes I think about it, and if I had told myself as a kid that when you're an adult in the workplace, you'll have video conferences.
John:
It would sound also cool and futuristic, and now it's just like, ugh, meetings.
John:
But I think it's used a lot.
John:
all right well follow-up question then if it's that important and use that often why are these cameras still so terrible it does because it doesn't matter for video conferencing the compression is brutal like the reason is you know there's like six people and these little postage stamps and this terribly over compressed stuff the quality is far below what the camera is even capable of but i agree the camera should be better just because we pay so much money for these computers put better cameras in
Casey:
I remember when I was a kid, I used to watch Double Dare on Nickelodeon.
Casey:
And the grand prize was not irregularly a video phone from some manufacturer, like AT&T or something like that, where I think you got like two video phones, one to put in your house, one to put in the one other person you can talk to's house.
Casey:
So like, you know, if I'm a kid, maybe our house and my grandparents' house.
Casey:
And those are the only two people we can talk to with video phones.
Casey:
And it was like a refresh rate measured in seconds.
Casey:
You know, like there's one new image every four seconds.
Casey:
And it was a postage stamp and it was terrible.
Casey:
But I thought it was amazing.
Casey:
One of the many reasons why I wanted to go on Double Dare.
Casey:
Anyway, John, not the one in the room right now, asks, do any of you have CarPlay?
Casey:
If so, do you use it?
Casey:
How does it work for you?
Casey:
CarPlay crashes about once every 30 or 40 minutes for me, often when we aren't asking it to do anything.
Casey:
iPhone 10, genuine Apple cable, etc.
Casey:
For me, we recently got Erin a new car.
Casey:
We got her a Volvo XC90 that does have CarPlay.
Casey:
It is wired only.
Casey:
And I really, really like it a lot more than I expected.
Casey:
It is not perfect.
Casey:
It is by no means perfect.
Casey:
But what I like about it is I don't have my phone paired with her car.
Casey:
And if I ever drive her car somewhere and she's not with me, then all I have to do to have my phone kind of take over her car is plug it in.
Casey:
and start CarPlay, and then I can listen to Overcast, I can listen to Spotify, I can do just about anything.
Casey:
And I have been surprisingly efficient at maintaining a text message conversation by way of just conversing with Siri.
Casey:
You know, I'm not looking at the screen at all.
Casey:
I don't think it's possible to see a text message on screen.
Casey:
At most, you can see who it's from.
Casey:
And I've had entire conversations via text message, or via iMessages, really, via Siri, via CarPlay.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
It's actually worked out pretty well.
Casey:
Maybe if I lived with it every day, I would find it frustrating.
Casey:
It certainly infuriates me, as we talked about not too long ago, that you can't use Waze or Google Maps with CarPlay.
Casey:
That is very annoying.
Casey:
But since I'm only ever in the car for like 15, 20 minutes at a time...
Casey:
I don't mind any of the limitations, and it's actually worked pretty consistently for me.
Casey:
Now, I know, Marco, that you don't have it in the Tesla, but I believe Tiff's car does, right?
Marco:
That is correct.
Marco:
However, I almost never drive Tiff's car.
Marco:
So basically, I almost never use CarPlay.
Marco:
I hear from people who have it, who love it, so it seems very popular.
Marco:
I will say as an audio app developer, there's often weird CarPlay bugs I hear about that are just very hard to debug or ever fix, really.
Marco:
CarPlay is subtly different depending on implementations.
Marco:
From what I can gather, it seems to be mostly an iOS thing.
Marco:
I think the car manufacturers themselves or the head unit manufacturers are not doing much logic on their side.
Marco:
It seems to be an interface that's entirely rendered by the iPhone and just kind of sent it as a video signal to the head unit.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
But the problem is there are small differences in how cars will do things like send the Bluetooth commands or send playback commands and things like that.
Marco:
So there is some car-to-car variation or head unit-to-head unit variation.
Marco:
So it's a little hard to generalize and say it's always this or always that or always stable or always unstable.
Marco:
But most of the logic is happening on the phones as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think it is fair to characterize, you know, your experience with one is going to be pretty similar to your experience within a different car.
Marco:
So all that said, I've had very little experience with it.
Marco:
And so it does look nice.
Marco:
And my usage stats show that a heck of a lot of people use it.
Marco:
But I can't use it because it isn't available in my car.
Marco:
If it was available, I would get it.
Marco:
Although I would probably still map my phone in little docs so I could run Waze.
Casey:
John, neither of your cars support it.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
That's right.
John:
I have never used it.
Casey:
Oh, that's too bad.
Casey:
It's good stuff.
Casey:
I mean, it's, again, nowhere near perfect, but it's pretty good.
Casey:
As usual, I'd say the biggest problem with it is Siri.
Casey:
Although, again, for the purposes of text messaging only, Siri does work pretty well for me.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Squarespace, and Rover.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
Yeah, after show stuff, any exciting baby stuff going on?
John:
Yeah, how's your whole family life going?
Casey:
Things are generally okay.
Casey:
Michaela is a much happier baby now that her insides aren't on fire, which is great.
Casey:
If you recall...
Casey:
She has either a milk and or soy.
Casey:
It's not an allergy.
Casey:
What do they call it?
Casey:
Intolerance.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, you know, she was an extremely fussy baby, at least by List family standards.
Casey:
And so we went to the doc, figured out, oh, it's this intolerance, you know, put her on this really crazy formula.
Casey:
It seems to be making her a much happier baby, which is great.
Casey:
That being said, I think we are hitting the three and a half to four months sleep regression.
Casey:
That seems to be a normal thing, which from what we remember from Declan was terrible and seems like it's probably going to be the same for Michaela.
Casey:
And I'm going out of town for a few days starting tomorrow.
John:
You should have added some sleep unit tests.
Casey:
I should have.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
I absolutely should.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
That's a good regression joke.
Casey:
I'm proud of you, John.
Marco:
Oh, my God.