Best Worst Influence
Casey:
sorry i bored you john i had such great hopes who he's gonna summarize but no so let's start with some follow-up steven fry was the narrator for the migration video one of us had said it was um oh god what was his name david attenborough thank you it was not david attenborough it was steven fry steven fry doing david attenborough impression basically oh yeah definitely
Casey:
So Jen Simmons, who is a designer advocate at Mozilla, had contrary thoughts about the migration video.
Casey:
So this is the video, the same one we were just speaking of at the very beginning, which I loved.
Casey:
I thought it was hilarious about how, you know, developers basically never come out to the sunshine and they never travel.
Casey:
They never talk to people, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So Jen said, I can't get past the opening video with the long quote unquote joke about how developers are not regular people.
Casey:
They're a special kind of nerd.
Casey:
Only certain human qualify as special enough.
Casey:
I simply am so utterly done with this myth that only people who act male, act white, act nerdy, dress badly, eat junk food, have poor social skills, are qualified to be developers.
Casey:
There's a special insiders club which most people can't join.
Casey:
Or that there's a special insider's club that most people can't join.
Casey:
I'm utterly sick of that idea.
Casey:
Simply saying, quote, oh, girls can join now.
Casey:
People of color can join now.
Casey:
You just have to act like this, dress like this, eat like this, talk like this, think like this.
Casey:
Here's your hoodie.
Casey:
Join the cult slash club, quote.
Casey:
That's not being inclusive.
Casey:
That's enforcing monoculture.
Casey:
i can't disagree with this that is not the read i got from it but hey i'm a white nerdy guy so what do you expect um but i i thought the video was funny and i think it's because i am i don't know if we've met i kind of like to make fun of myself that's kind of just one of my quirks and so i i yeah i know exactly uh i thought it was very funny but i think this is a very good point and i'm glad uh one of you i'm guessing john put this in the show notes i brought up a similar point on our live episode
John:
uh the some aspects of the video rubbed me the wrong way and i put it in here again to talk about it uh just to get a perspective from someone who doesn't fit exactly into the the stereotype that they were giving there uh but also because it's it's a challenge right so uh on the last show i talked about how if you want to get the audience on your side and you know reflect them back in the video and say this is a this is a thing about you down to literally putting you know developer friends of ours in the video
John:
So you want to foster the idea that the people who are at WWDC, that there is something that unites them and their common interest in Apple and developing for the Apple platform.
John:
That is the thing that should unite them.
John:
So you'd want to have kind of...
John:
the most uh sort of benign version of the in-group out-group right the in-group are people who attend wwdc do you want to go to a conference about developing for apple platforms you are in the in-group and then the out-group not in a mean way but just trying to say you have this shared interest right and so you are different than people who don't have this interest let us all feel good about our shared interest right so i understand the aim of the of the migration video um
John:
But whenever you have and I'm sure that was part of the motivation of making this video, whenever you do something, though, you have to be very careful that you're the sort of the outline of the in group and out group is what you think it is.
John:
Right.
John:
Because there are there is the thing that unites people that we receive, I think, is just what I described.
John:
Right.
John:
and pretty much nothing else.
John:
What unites the people at WWDC is not that they're all dudes, is not that they're all white, is not that they're all rich, is not that they're all from the US, is not, you know... Any other thing that is unrelated to developing for Apple platforms is really outside the realm of the things that should be uniting the people who are there.
John:
But it's very easy to... The stereotypes include much more stuff.
John:
So you get the people dressing, you know...
John:
dressing in the hoodies or excluding the guy in the suit or the plain fact that like the vast majority of people shown in the video were men it's very easy to fall into those because you think your motivations are pure i want people to feel like they belong and they belong to this this tribe of wwdc this tribe of apple developers and that is a good instinct and that's what they're going for and that's what everyone is responding to right we want to feel like we are part of that group we have this esoteric interest but now suddenly we're in a group with all those people with similar interests but the other stuff that comes along with it
John:
can make certain people feel like oh this what this video is telling me is that i'm not actually a member of the tribe because i don't see myself reflected up there or because what some of the aspects of the stuff they're putting up there don't apply to me so for example when they're talking about like source code as a strange language i would give a thumbs up on that because if you're a developer to people who aren't developers writing computer code looks strange to them and that is the thing that everybody knows and has learned and can unite them
John:
but anything having to do with how you dress or or how socially awkward you may be or just representation thing of like who you see up on that screen is you know is a thing that could potentially make other people exclude so um i think i've said this on past shows or whatever but it's just general rule for life that uh
John:
we judge ourselves by our motivations but other people by their actions right and in some respects that's a good way to think about that to help you deal with other people uh but in this case like i think we can all agree that apple's motivations are pure but as a large corporation with a with a you know a big voice up on a stage and you know in front of thousands of people and thousands more remote
John:
we have to at some point also judge them by their actions so although we may recognize the problem the great motivations and though we may think this video was you know made us feel good and uh you know like we appreciate the motivation we appreciate some of the feelings that engendered there are still aspects of it that were not ideal and you know well i need a sarkeesian's refrain at the beginning of every one of her videos that
John:
uh people conveniently ignore is that it's oh i'm paraphrasing it's okay to criticize things that you like like it doesn't mean you hate them forever it doesn't mean it's the worst thing in the world it just means that everything you know things that you like i think had a podcast about this there's usually something that that's uh worth criticizing about them and you don't have to go from i hate every aspect of this and i need to boycott apple or say i love every aspect of it and it's perfect
John:
got it i should have looked up her quote because it's a little you know stick that she does at the beginning and it's very apt so anyway all this is to say that uh nothing is so perfect all right can you tell me what it's road trip me oh that's right it's road trip i right as i was reading that it occurred to me what that was did we not tell
John:
about this on the show we didn't i think we missed it it was in the notes and i you know the specifics aren't probably not that interesting although just to refresh everyone's memory there was a past keynote where uh some apple folks were giving a demo i forget of what application and they were trying to write utah road trip and autocorrect changed utah into its
John:
right and the guy giving the giving the demo hit return or whatever or like you know accepted the text before he had realized the autocorrect is snuck behind his back and changed it's utah to it's and he has this great expression on the video where he's like oh like you see his face drop and his eyes roll on his head you know and and so they had this project that was running they fixed it i think they fixed it in post like in the non-live version they changed it to utah right so it looks okay um
John:
But we were all making that joke about its road trip after that keynote.
John:
So in this keynote, there was where the heck was it?
John:
Maybe in like, oh, it's one of the labels in the finder, I think.
John:
Okay.
John:
Like, you know, they showed a finder window with a bunch of labels.
John:
And one of the labels was its road trip.
John:
and i thought that was neat because whatever they're making a joke but the thing is it was apple making the joke that apple was this is sort of like it's a low it's a low bar but it's one of the things that i've seen apple do recently it makes you know it's an admission of engagement with the community because apple didn't intentionally make its road trip a thing it was an accident and the community latched onto it and by doing this apple is acknowledging hey community we see you
John:
We know you're out there.
John:
We know we made a goof and we know it was funny and we know you made it funny.
John:
And we are reflecting that back to you, which is a rare thing for them because normal Apple would be like, all right, have your fun, but we're never going to reference our mistake again.
John:
Why would we reference our own mistake?
John:
Why would we acknowledge that it's a meme that was invented in the outside community?
John:
We'll just move on and pretend it never happened just like we did in the video where we corrected it.
John:
So I thought that was a nice glimmer of hope that Apple sees and recognizes the community and is willing to do frivolous things to reflect ourselves back.
Casey:
uh my buddy sam gross tweeted sometime in the last week hey messages in mac os mojave mojave mojave mojave i always second guess it mojave long a okay uh messages mac os mojave supports i message and nothing else rest in peace yahoo messenger aim google chat via jabber icq etc now most of these are actually dead anyway yeah exactly did messenger is dying soon like they announced that it's dying right
John:
yeah icq i think died like 50 years ago i think aim shut down last year i thought icq was still a thing seriously i think aim is uh i think yeah i think icq is gone and so is aim you can download it right now new icq for mac os 10 i could swear it's still a thing i could swear it's still a thing google chat is definitely still a thing is it though
John:
Yeah, it's in the lower left corner of my stupid Gmail window all the time, and I have to learn how to hide it in every new version they release.
John:
I mean, Google Plus was there for a while, too, and that wasn't really ever a thing.
John:
They got rid of, yeah, Google Buzz, yeah.
Casey:
I assure you, for the parts of my company that are not on Slack, which is basically everything that's not engineering, Google Chat is still a thing.
Marco:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
So anyway, one nice heuristic to help you remember how to say Mojave correctly is that Mojave sounds fancy.
Marco:
Mojave sounds like casual, and it's California.
Marco:
So it's always going to be casual.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I dig it.
John:
Mojave.
John:
Yeah, so them eliminating all the third-party things makes sense.
John:
I mean, iMessage is ascendant.
John:
Many people have talked frequently about how iMessage is the one vaguely social thing Apple has ever done right.
John:
uh and it's very popular and it's a very commonly used application and it's better than sms and we're all happy we have it so on and so forth and the other ones are all dying and it's just like apple to say why are we even supporting these anymore everyone wants everyone has an iphone wants to use
Marco:
iMessage anyway just ditch them it'll make the app simpler and i'm pretty much on board with that even though i have accounts on all these services it also just might be like you know from a basic software development standpoint one of the big issues that apple had between ios and the mac is that the mac version of messages supports a very small subset of what the ios version supports so if they were going to do something like
Marco:
try to improve that it would probably be a lot easier in a messages app that only supported iMessage instead of having a special case the entire UI for all these other services while they are also working heavily on it we'll talk about that topic either later in this show or in the next show because I have more to say on that specific topic
Casey:
Dun, dun, dun.
Casey:
Sent with lasers.
Casey:
I always forget that's a thing, and then somebody will send me something.
Casey:
I'm like, oh, yeah.
Casey:
Renaud Leinart writes, I just realized that Xcode 10's device simulator clones, which make parallel testing possible, probably rely on APFS fast snapshotting capabilities in order to instantly copy the master simulator's quote-unquote template.
Casey:
Thus, the APFS transition is starting to bear its fruits.
Casey:
I know someone who's probably excited about that.
Casey:
Tell me about it, Marco.
Yeah.
John:
john tell me more i want this to be true because here we go yeah so i i've saw the demo of like look we can run a bunch of simulators in parallel and run multiple test suites and like it's all cool and everything and it makes sense to me that this would be an efficient way to implement that but i have no idea if that's how they actually put it
John:
I hope it is because I agree that APFS has many abilities.
John:
They can lead to advances like this, things that you couldn't even conceive of doing.
John:
Let's say these templates are like 300 megabytes and you want to make 12 copies.
John:
Making 12 copies of a 300 megabyte file in HFS Plus would take you forever.
John:
And in APFS, you can do it instantly, and they can slowly diverge from each other with copy and write semantics.
John:
And so that would be super cool, and I really hope that's how they're doing it.
John:
If they're actually copying 300 megabyte files 12 times, or if the file is only 4 megabytes, then it just copies real fast because SSDs.
John:
I'll be sad.
Casey:
iOS 12 pre-release reports.
Casey:
Okay, so I need an intervention.
Casey:
I'm traveling sometime soon, and I really don't want to be traveling on beta software.
Casey:
It just seems like a poor choice.
Marco:
Okay, so don't do it.
Casey:
But I want Memoji, Memoji, Memoji, whatever they're called.
Casey:
I want Memoji so bad.
Casey:
So do it.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
But you're supposed to be.
Casey:
You see, this is why I can't go to you, Marco, because you are the best, worst influence I've ever met in my entire life.
Casey:
What I really want to do is install iOS 12 on my carry phone.
Casey:
My brain is saying no, but my future Memoji is saying, oh, hells yes.
Casey:
So I don't know what to do.
Casey:
And the reason this is an issue, this is a real issue, is because everything I've heard is that iOS 12 is, without comparison, far and away, the first beta is far and away the best first beta ever ever.
John:
uh the customer sat on the beta is blow away thank god i hate myself for saying that but i couldn't know someone said blow away in this in this uh it was in the talk show no no it was in the talk show live someone said blow away i felt like throwing something yeah i felt like i'm like oh i see i kind of find charming i'm like oh i miss scott forestall like because like we we haven't heard apple say blow away since scott was fired is that true i don't think i don't know about that like i think it's kind of creepy though it's like it's like when
John:
When the ET, as they call themselves, executive team, like talk amongst themselves and a word like that spreads like just like in a single group of friends.
John:
Right.
John:
Like and then like years later, they're still saying blow away.
John:
But I'm assuming no one else in the world is except for like a senior leadership at Apple.
John:
I mean, it's natural.
John:
It happens all the time.
John:
I see it happen at work, but it's a little bit weird to see that one come slingshotting about and go, whoa, blow away.
John:
Blow away is an adjective.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
It was always such a clumsy, awkward thing to say that way anyway.
John:
Someone needs to track that down.
John:
We need an etymologist to find the origin, the cultural origin of blow away as an adjective at Apple.
John:
Maybe it's all Silicon Valley.
John:
I don't know where it came from.
John:
oh man that's tremendous anyway what was i trying to say i don't even know anymore you were saying beta one stability is blow away oh yes that's right i was 12 uh the the not even like the first public beta but like what they release at wwc like hey get out of your seats go down to the labs download from little uh you know epoxy on ethernet connectors and get ios 12 for wc developers everybody says not only does it not crash and mostly functions but that like they said in the keynote it's fast it's fast on your old phone it's fast on your new phone
John:
everybody's raving about it and i'm in a similar situation to casey i'm never i'm not considering putting it on my phone because i'm not you know that deluded but i have strongly considered putting it on my ipad and i'm holding out and saying just wait for the first public beta because everyone says it's great and i don't think i've ever heard this about an ios beta before
Marco:
I mean, you have to put it on your main phone so you could do Memoji if you have an iPhone 10.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
I don't care about Memoji.
John:
You do.
John:
Oh, come on, man.
John:
You should.
John:
I think they're creepy.
Casey:
I have it.
Casey:
I'm using my iPhone 7 right now, and it is already installed on there.
Casey:
But I don't even know why I did this in retrospect, because the one thing I actually really want to try is the stupid Memoji that I know I'm going to be obsessed with.
Casey:
And so I don't know what to do.
Casey:
I really want to put it on my carry phone.
John:
It sounds like you're drunkenly saying emoji when you say Memoji.
John:
I love those Memoji.
John:
But it's supposed to be Memoji, because it's like, just imagine a Nintendo, M-I-I, Memoji.
Casey:
Yeah, sorry.
Casey:
Well, anyway, the point I'm driving at, though, is I need someone whose name is not Mark Ormond, because you're the best, worst influence ever, to tell me that this is a terrible idea, and Beta 2 might be just a dumpster fire and not to do it, even though I really want to.
Casey:
wait for the first public bid at least for your phone please the other thing the other thing that's easy to so marco is sending me a message of his memoji smiling at me right now real-time follow-up see you could do this too just think you could respond with your own little cute casey i know stop it well but then the thing you got your tall hair but you all have the same nose and your face will be round
John:
no they have different there's different face shapes and different nose shapes i haven't seen much variation i haven't tried it myself obviously but uh and the ones that people have posted i haven't seen much variation maybe everyone just always picks the ideal not the ideal but the the most emoji looking face well it's it's hard it's also like it's hard to judge if you're if you're making it for yourself it's hard to even know like what shape is my face exactly
Marco:
I can tell you what shape your face is.
Marco:
Yeah, because you're not me.
John:
No, I know what shape my face is.
John:
It's not round.
John:
Round is not the shape of my head.
John:
Long, tall, big nose.
John:
I know what shape my face is.
Casey:
Now Jelly is sending me Memoji stickers and IMSs.
John:
It's not Memoji.
John:
Stop saying that.
John:
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
John:
I love Memoji.
John:
My emoji's great.
John:
Think you're better than me?
Casey:
Let me tell you all about my emojis.
Casey:
My emojis are fancy.
Casey:
Anyway, so the point is I want me emojis in my life.
Casey:
God, I'm going to get made fun of so badly.
Casey:
I want me emojis in my life, and I can't have them, and I want them.
Marco:
Everybody out there who has Casey on iMessage, please send him an emoji.
Casey:
Please, no.
John:
You should all build, everyone build an emoji that you think looks like Casey.
John:
There's plenty of art on the internet for you to find.
Casey:
That I am on board with.
Casey:
You can tweet at me or the show.
Casey:
I am on board with this because if we've learned anything from my me on the Nintendo Wii and or Switch, I have learned that John Syracuse is quite the me critic and he will not fancy my emoji.
Casey:
So I need some help on this one.
John:
oh man of course there's no way to share it right if someone builds a cool looking casey one they can't like literally no there isn't you have to like take note of uh take note of all the settings yeah i guess you could just like you know use it as a reference when building your own but they should be shareable just like me's are if nintendo makes something shareable and apple doesn't that's bad
Marco:
now federico's sending me messages stop everybody oh god you're all terrible influences what shape is federico's face it's beard shaped which one of these hairs is the casey hair i didn't find a good casey hair in the 10 seconds i played it might have been your phone it might have been there's one that's kind of backward it's like the inverse of your hair direction can you can you flip your hair direction either way so we can start looking more like an emoji it'll just use the selfie camera that reverses everything right
Casey:
Fair point.
Marco:
Yeah, there isn't a good one.
Marco:
There's some kind of close ones.
Casey:
This is going to be my Bazel moment, isn't it?
Casey:
Oh, totally, yeah.
Casey:
This is not good.
Casey:
Can we move on?
John:
That's because Memoji is a made-up word, so you're fine.
John:
We're just going to nip it in the bud before you start saying Memoji for the rest of your life.
Casey:
i'm working on the golf r i'm making slow progress on it slow slow slow there you go that's another real word that you should work on i'm working on it all right so so marco all kidding aside you're running the beta and you're sending me the memojis uh you're sending me emojis and every time you say it it's wrong in a different way
Casey:
Well, he was intentionally saying it wrong.
John:
That one was delivered.
Casey:
The earlier ones were not delivered.
Casey:
That one was delivered.
Casey:
Anyways, you're sending me your Memojis.
Casey:
How is the stability, though?
Casey:
Because you're living with it.
Casey:
You've experienced this.
Casey:
So how are we doing?
Marco:
Everyone is a unique snowflake.
Marco:
Everyone's phone is uniquely different and everything.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I will say that it's been totally fine for me.
Marco:
That being said, though, a beta is hard because it's unpredictable.
Marco:
At least at least like the GM versions, you can be sure that like they've been pretty extensively tested on a lot of people's devices and the standards are pretty high for them usually unless they're high Sierra.
Yeah.
Marco:
so you could but like with the beta like this beta might be fine today and yesterday and the day before that and then tomorrow it might just break all of a sudden and you don't really know that it's and then also like you know this is beta one when beta when it gets updated to beta two beta two might be a lot worse like that's just part of the beta cycle is like every version of it is uh is a new gamble and you don't you don't know what you're getting until it's too late really so um
Marco:
In the last couple of years, the betas have actually been pretty reasonable to run on your main phone.
Marco:
We all say you shouldn't do it, because ideally, you shouldn't.
Marco:
If you don't need to be running the beta for any reason, yeah, you probably shouldn't be running it.
Marco:
But we want to run it anyway, and I can say from that point of view, it's been fine.
Marco:
The only bug I've noticed is that the group notifications in Notification Center sometimes will show, they'll sometimes duplicate
Marco:
notification like in two different stacks instead of showing what should have been on the second stack so so i'm actually not seeing certain notifications as they come in so that it just so happens i don't care about notifications so it doesn't matter but uh but if you are a notification user which is almost everybody uh you might care about that but otherwise you know install it if you feel like being a little bit reckless if you don't need memoji right now don't bother
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks.
Marco:
You know, it was a really hot day today, and I wanted to go for a big dog walk.
Marco:
And because I knew it was going to be hot, and because I wanted to hear the world around me, the headphones I picked to listen to podcasts on while I was going for my big walk today, of course I went with the Aftershocks Trexair.
Marco:
The Trexair are bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
And what this means is nothing sits inside your ear and there's no big pad that goes on top of or around your ear.
Marco:
Instead, there are these little tiny transducers that rest next to your ear and they send tiny little vibrations through your cheekbones so that your inner ear picks them up.
Marco:
but without having the whole world hear them as well.
Marco:
But the great thing about this is because nothing is blocking your ear, not only is it great in hot weather because it makes you less sweaty, but you can still hear the sounds of the world around you.
Marco:
They just get added to whatever you're listening to.
Marco:
So I'm able to listen to a podcast on my dog walks,
Marco:
And also still hear, say, if a car is coming.
Marco:
There's lots of different scenarios where this is great.
Marco:
You know, walking, running, biking even.
Marco:
A lot of things outside.
Marco:
Also, just doing things around the house.
Marco:
It's really nice because say you want to listen to podcasts while you're getting chores done around the house.
Marco:
And you want to also hear, like, if someone knocks on your door or if your dog barks or something like that.
Marco:
You can do all that with Aftershocks bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
And on top of that, the Aftershocks Trex Air are also just really good Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
They're wireless.
Marco:
They have great range.
Marco:
They have great reception, great battery life.
Marco:
They're waterproof.
Marco:
It's just wonderful.
Marco:
They're a wonderful product.
Marco:
I highly suggest you check out the Aftershocks Trex Air wireless bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
I use them almost every day in the summertime and even a lot in the fall and winter too.
Marco:
They're just wonderful headphones, especially for hearing the world around you in addition to your podcasts.
Marco:
Check it out today at atp.aftershocks.com and use code ATP30 to get $30 off the weightless wireless Trex Air.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for once again sponsoring our show and for keeping my ears nice and cool and open while I listen to podcasts on the go.
Marco:
So I believe I mentioned two weeks ago that I had acquired with the release of iOS 11.4 and AirPlay 2 and stereo pairing, I had acquired two HomePods after resisting the HomePod from its release until now because I now have to do a lot of HomePod testing because of AirPlay 2 with Overcast.
Marco:
And the reason I got two is because I'm going to be very heavily doing it this summer.
Marco:
So I needed one for basically my desk here and one for my desk at the vacation house.
Marco:
However, I haven't been there yet to drop it off.
Marco:
So I have two HomePods sitting here.
Marco:
So I decided, you know what, while they're here,
Marco:
Let me try stereo pairing.
Marco:
Plus, a few people had said that they've had weird, like, out-of-sync sounding bugs with stereo pairs, with Overcast in particular.
Marco:
So I thought, okay, let me test this.
Marco:
I gotta, you know, actually see if this is the case or not, and if I can do anything about it.
Marco:
The answer's probably not, but anyway...
Marco:
So I had the chance to finally test not only one HomePod, but two HomePods, and to see how they sound in stereo.
Marco:
Now, having just the one before, and I had it in the kitchen first, and then I brought it to the office, I was pretty impressed with the sound quality.
Marco:
It wasn't life-changing or anything, but it was very impressive.
Marco:
It also isn't a very good value necessarily.
Marco:
Like $350 can get a lot of good speakers.
Marco:
But it was a very good sounding speaker.
Marco:
But it still ultimately sounded like a fancy version of an Echo.
Marco:
It still was trying to fill a room with one point, and that's hard to do.
Marco:
So the stereo pair takes what was a... You know, it sounds good in a mono non-pair, I guess.
Marco:
A mono unity.
Marco:
A stereo pair sounds great.
Marco:
Really great.
Marco:
It's not just because of certain instruments coming from one side or the other.
Marco:
It's because it fills a space better.
Marco:
We are accustomed to hear... If we have a room that's bigger than a bathroom that you want to fill with sound, you do it with two speakers usually, at least.
Marco:
So we are accustomed to how that's supposed to sound.
Marco:
And when you have multiple points broadcasting, it just sounds better.
Marco:
Even if they were playing the exact same signal, like if they were just both playing a mono signal, it would still sound better because it would fill the room better.
Marco:
And it would come from multiple points.
Marco:
It would have wider soundstage and everything else.
Marco:
But because they're also doing a stereo signal now, it basically lets them shine as not having to rely so much on...
Marco:
trying to like reflect sound across walls and everything to try to fake a wider you know sound projection but to actually just have one in the first place to have a wide projection of sound that way they can it seems like they may be turning down the weird processing when they're in stereo mode and just playing really good sound things sound the way they're supposed to like you know it isn't doing some weird blend it you know things that are supposed to come from the left do come from the left etc so it's great sounding
Marco:
And I have it on my desk now.
Marco:
I have them like Jeff Fox really style.
Marco:
They are on top of my other speakers.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Which actually is really nice because it puts them right at ear level, which is exactly where you want them.
Marco:
But these make incredible computer speakers.
Marco:
These would be the best computer speakers in the world.
Marco:
Except for one small flaw, besides that they're $700 for the pair.
Marco:
That's a bigger flaw, but there's one flaw even bigger that money can't solve, and that is that you currently can't use them as computer speakers, or many kinds of speakers, really, because not only is there no input on them, and not only are they not Bluetooth, but also iTunes can't send to stereo pairs.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
seriously yes itunes sees them both as individual speakers so and so you try to send to either one it just does just that one so even though like so you can send from your iphone you can have iphone you know as your as your sound source but not itunes and if you want to like say watch a video on your computer and have that come through it
Marco:
I think maybe you could trick AirPlay into helping you out there, but it would be awfully clunky.
Marco:
Basically, the Mac doesn't seem to have AirPlay 2 support in any apps that I know of.
Marco:
So that's really unfortunate because if there were a way to conveniently make these my computer speakers, they would be the best computer speakers I've ever heard at any price.
Marco:
unfortunately they're they're limited by their lack of input uh variety and lack of input options really and it's really a shame because like compared to anything else where they really excel like you know i have i have my little paradigm adam speakers which are i think it was about 300 for the pair plus i had to get like a little tiny amp to like power them on my desk that was another 200 maybe that was a little i don't know a long time ago
Marco:
and the paradigm atoms sound excellent i've never found a pair of regular bookshelf speakers it sounds better for the price than paradigm atoms but because they are traditional speakers not only do you need an amp and they have a powered version it sucks don't get it it's not the same thing anyway so
Marco:
They sound great, but they also have a clear sweet spot because they're just regular speaker drivers.
Marco:
So then there's regular ones facing forward.
Marco:
So actually using them on a desk is a little too short distance for them, unless you really angle them towards you and tilt them up and everything.
Marco:
And there's a pretty small sweet spot.
Marco:
The HomePod doesn't have...
Marco:
clear sweet spot because it broadcasts from a bunch of different tweeters and the subs just fire I think up or down it kind of fills a bigger area so that's great with the HomePod also my regular speakers really don't have strong bass they really need a subwoofer I don't have one but they could benefit from one
Marco:
The HomePod has not only strong bass, but almost too strong bass.
Marco:
It's pretty thumpy.
Marco:
Although, honestly, it's a pleasing and fun tuning.
Marco:
It's not accurate.
Marco:
It's not neutral.
Marco:
It's nothing like that.
Marco:
But it is fun.
Marco:
It's what Beats headphones wish they sounded like, but they don't.
Marco:
If you put too much bass in headphones, what you tend to get is boominess.
Marco:
And when you have good bass from a subwoofer, you get thumpiness.
Marco:
What you want is the thump, not the boom, you know, because that sounds better.
Marco:
And the HomePod provides that.
Marco:
For its size, it gives a remarkable amount of clean, thumpy bass.
Marco:
I've never heard anything like that from something this size that sits on top of a desk.
Marco:
It's just a shame that they would make such amazing desktop speakers.
Marco:
if my mac i'm not even asking for like a game console or a blu-ray player here like if my mac could output sound to them that's all i would need but it can't and that's unfortunate um there's also a few other minor niggles about stereo pairing mode if anybody was curious about trying it it's it seems to be working kind of like airpods where
Marco:
it most of the time it gives the illusion that it is a stereo pair acting as one but there are a few holes in the abstraction so for instance when they've been off for a while and you tell it to play first of all siri only responds from one of them and okay fine that's weird but fine uh when they've been off for a while and and it starts to play that one that that responds to siri like the primary one which in my case the left one
Marco:
that will start playing for like a half second first before the right one wakes up and realizes, oh, oh, you wanted me?
Marco:
Okay, please.
Marco:
I will turn on now.
Marco:
Here we go.
Marco:
So like you hear the sound first out of one channel and then the second channel like warms up and gets there after a second or so.
Marco:
And there's... I have had...
Marco:
occasional like once or twice split second moments where it did seem like they were out of sync also so very much like the air pods in that way they just seem like they're working with the same technology of like these are two separate devices that are most of the time working together as a perfect stereo pair but sometimes you see a little bit of a seam somewhere other than that though they are really great and i and i just i hope
Marco:
that Apple broadens this product's versatility to the point where I can use it for more.
Marco:
Because Siri is fine.
Marco:
It's still not where the Amazon Echo was three years ago.
Marco:
But if you are primarily using it for music, this could be a really great product if it was easier to get your music into it.
Casey:
So real-time follow-up from Zach Hall.
Casey:
In iTunes, it is possible to do stereo pairing.
Casey:
How?
Casey:
So he has tweeted at us.
Casey:
I will put a link to this in the show notes.
Casey:
But the little, like, AirPlay icon, just like you would see on iOS, if you click that, apparently, and you look down in the Switch 2 section, and in this particular screenshot, it says Office HomePod, but there's a picture of two of them.
Casey:
So even though it says singular Office HomePod,
Casey:
There's a picture of two HomePods there, and that would apparently do the trick.
Marco:
Hang on, I'm going to test this out right now.
Marco:
Loading?
Marco:
What is it loading?
Marco:
Not playing.
Marco:
This is like when you plug it in and it says not charging.
Marco:
This is like... That's not helpful.
Marco:
I asked you to charge.
Casey:
Thank you for that.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Okay, thanks, Zach Hall.
Casey:
That is deeply unobvious to me, having only seen the picture.
Casey:
Because he said to me, you know, you just have to use this Switch 2 menu, and you just need to click that.
Casey:
I'm looking at this menu, and I'm like, I have no freaking clue where on this menu I need to click.
Marco:
And it wasn't until he said... And it still doesn't solve the problem of, you know, that it's only iTunes.
Marco:
It still has, like, a little bit of a delay still.
Marco:
Like, if the Mac could just output your system audio as an audio output device...
Marco:
to a pair of home pods yes they're expensive now but first of all the computer is expensive too a lot of apple customers don't care and will buy it anyway second of all a lot of other desktop systems that are high-end are similarly expensive like from all like the the you know b&w stuff like that and third of all they're not going to be expensive forever
Marco:
Like there's going to be more models.
Marco:
And so I got I hope I hope they add this with with future versions of Mac named after various casually pronounced places in California because they do sound great and they would be the best desktop speakers.
Marco:
If only I could make my desktop output sound to them.
John:
Do you remember the rumor somewhere online that was saying that the HomePod, which we had heard had been in development for a long time and just now emerged, was originally not designed to be like a, you know, person in a tube cylinder thing, but was designed as the sound system for the supposed Apple television set?
Casey:
I did hear that rumor, but I don't remember where I saw it.
John:
And I think about that one and, like, you know, we all know the Apple television set rumors from ages ago and never produced a television.
John:
And I suppose it's conceivable, but kind of to Marco's point about the stereo pair, having one of them for your TV, like, where would you put it?
John:
Like...
John:
if it was off to the side it would you know it would always kind of sound like the sound is coming from the side it would just be weird if you put it in the middle it would have to like it would block the tv unless you put it under and you can't really put it over it and then if they're gonna have two of them are they gonna add you know seven hundred dollars msrp to the television set and why would they be separate so i'm not sure i buy that theory but who knows what goes on inside apple i mean maybe that's the reason they didn't make it because they realized this is a dumb idea for a tv uh speaker but
Marco:
apparently uh if you get two of them for the low low price of 700 you get some good stereo speakers no i mean ultimately like if you're setting these up to fill a moderately sized room with sound like pretty much everybody's like living room would qualify for this i would i would plan to get two because it really does sound that much better and it really does fill the room that much better
Marco:
If you want it to be what most of us have used Amazon Echoes for, which is like a thing in the kitchen, you know, or like in like the middle section of a house to be like kind of a personal assistant to answer voice requests and not so much music, or if there's not room for two of them, yeah, then you can just get one.
Marco:
But it sounds so vastly better with two that for anybody out there who doesn't have one yet might be thinking about it, really plan to get two if you want to fill a room with music.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It actually, honestly, like they say, it's like the apple of air purifiers.
Marco:
I got to say that's actually pretty correct.
Marco:
It looks almost like the cylinder version of the cheese grater Mac Pro case.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Let's talk about WBDC.
Casey:
This is kind of like a smorgasbord of random quick hits.
Casey:
So let's start with AR.
Casey:
They Sherlocked, what is it, MeasureKit, which I always thought was an odd name for an app, but it's a great app.
Casey:
They Sherlocked MeasureKit, which is an app wherein you can use AR today to measure things.
John:
They didn't Sherlock MeasureKit.
John:
They Sherlocked all the other AR-based measurement apps that are out there in the store.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
But MeasureKit was the only one that I'd ever heard of, really.
Casey:
I'm sure there are others, but that's the only one that I knew of that people used.
John:
Yeah, I want to talk about this just because, you know, I think it's interesting which applications Apple decides to make, like what they decide to Sherlock.
John:
Obviously, it makes sense for them to make an app with AR, another app with AR to, you know, to highlight their work on AR and measurement apps are a pretty simple one.
John:
And it got me thinking about people don't get.
John:
as worked up as they used to about Sherlocking.
John:
Certainly the original Sherlocking was much more egregious than this.
John:
People can look that up.
John:
I don't want to delve into it now, but there was a program called Watson and then there was a program called Sherlock and it was pretty obvious and pretty rude.
John:
Anyway, um, there are, there are upsides and downsides to Sherlocking, right?
John:
So the downsides are obvious before I was selling a measurement app and now everyone can get one free with their phone.
John:
I'm assuming this thing is free.
John:
It doesn't come with the phone or is it just in the app store?
Um,
John:
i honestly don't know anyway the point is apple can afford to make this for free and maybe you can't if it was the app that you were selling and it was super popular so that's bad but the upside is that apple tends not to like they tend to make applications like this and uh sort of you know call it good after it has basic functionality like they're not relentlessly year after year improving the measurement application that they offer for free right and so
John:
by offering this application it could be that apple makes a larger portion of the population aware that measurement apps are a thing and that uh it leads more people to your application which is like the pro version of a measurement app that does more fancy things that apple's never going to implement and all of a sudden you have a bunch of new customers who previously didn't even know you or measurement apps existed at all but find themselves hungry for a better one once they reach the limits of the apple one
John:
I don't know which one of those is the case for measurement applications, but I thought it was interesting that I didn't hear pretty much any outcry from Apple deciding to offer a free application that does things that a bunch of store apps already do.
John:
And I think it may be because people recognize the potential upside more than they used to now.
John:
We'll wait two years and see if those measurement applications that were previously selling for 99 cents are all dead or have gone to free with
Marco:
in-app gambling or something but uh measure is included on the phone i'm using my iphone 7 right now and uh and i don't know how well this is really working but that's okay it's a dark room i've tried it a couple times and it has failed pretty significantly like they they said last year when they introduced ar kit they said that measurements would be roughly within five percent accuracy
Marco:
The ones I've taken so far with the Measure app have been like 30% off.
Marco:
So maybe I'm doing it wrong or something.
Marco:
But I would take any measurement with it as a novelty and not as an actual useful bit of information.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
So I'm measuring my Magic Keyboard, and it snaps with haptics when you're hitting what it thinks is a corner.
Casey:
That's very neat.
Marco:
I love that everybody on Twitter is sending you memojis of you.
Casey:
Including you via iMessage.
Marco:
Of course.
Casey:
Jelly has been sending me some.
Marco:
I'm kind of happy that we all picked the same hair.
Marco:
That is true, yeah.
Marco:
Even though it isn't the perfect Casey hair, but I think it's the closest of what we have.
Casey:
Yeah, Jelly's critique of yours, which he probably didn't want me to share with you, but hey, whatever, is that my hair is too light and my eyes are too round, according to Jelly.
Marco:
I did lighten your hair from the default, because I'm basing it mostly on your avatar picture, because that's what I'm staring at right now, and it's easier to look at that than to remember what you look like.
Casey:
You know, we have a solution for this problem.
Casey:
We could do this crazy thing.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
Whoa!
Casey:
Skype has video?
Casey:
Skype has video.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
Oh, damn.
Casey:
oh do not want you know what's funny in the in the what have we been doing this like five years of this show i don't think i've ever turned on my camera while recording we've never done this until now now we see how that you're sitting in darkness wearing your best undershirt yeah i am wearing my best white t-shirt as as you said look at us we're looking at each other it's a whole new world oh yeah this is enough i can't handle it i can't handle it
Casey:
It's too weird.
Casey:
Anyway, this show is a total train wreck, but that's okay.
Casey:
So what else is going on with Sherlocking and AR stuff?
Casey:
Do we care?
John:
We're done with that topic.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
I was distracted by my emojis.
Casey:
Multiple faces for iOS 12.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
Now I'm amused by it.
Casey:
My own customer sat on my own mispronunciation is blow away.
Casey:
I got to tell you.
Casey:
Now beating that joke to death.
Casey:
Anyway, multiple faces in iOS 12 face ID.
Casey:
There is a alternative appearance option for face ID and iOS 12.
Casey:
I have not yet tried this myself.
Casey:
I have heard reports that other people have been able to set this up for like a spouse or something like that.
Casey:
I think this is actually supposed to be used for... Oh, man, I don't want to get this wrong.
Casey:
And I don't recall the head covering.
Casey:
What's the name of the head covering?
Casey:
I really don't want to use the wrong word here.
Casey:
Hijab?
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Casey:
It's for people that have... Well, I shouldn't say have to.
Casey:
That choose to use hijabs.
Casey:
I hope I pronounced that right.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
And so you could have one face ID like...
Casey:
orientation or set up, if you will, with and one without.
Casey:
And I think that that seems to me to be the truest intention of this particular ability.
Casey:
But you bet that as soon as I get this, I'm going to try to set this up for Aaron and vice versa.
Casey:
I have no particular reason why I wouldn't want her to be able to unlock my phone.
Casey:
I know not everyone is like that, and that's fine.
Casey:
But for me, I don't think she even really cares.
Casey:
It's just for me, it's easier if I'm driving or something.
Casey:
I can just hand her my phone and say, hey, can you send a text to Marco or John about blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And so I would like to have that ability.
Casey:
And I am curious to see if this works.
Casey:
Again, I have heard rumblings that it does work, but I have not tried it for myself.
John:
So I've got a report for you on this.
John:
Oh, excellent.
John:
Okay.
John:
First of all, I'm...
John:
It's interesting to me that the option in the settings says, set up an alternative appearance.
John:
And as you said, it's a reasonable feature to add.
John:
Yeah, sometimes I have an alternative appearance.
John:
As far as face ID is concerned, I look different enough that it's confused, and I want to set up an alternative appearance for myself.
John:
But when they phrased it that way, I was like, are they trying to discourage the idea of letting your spouse open it?
John:
They don't say set up an alternative appearance or a second person, right?
John:
So...
John:
i bet a lot of people will see that option and dismiss it as not what they want they're like oh i want my spouse to be able to do it i don't want to set up an alternative appearance for myself so i was curious as to whether it would work or not and i tried it at wwc uh and i can now unlock matt panzerino's phone with my face it works just fine now here's the thing about it uh once you set it up
John:
The only way that we were able to determine in the brief two seconds that we were looking at this to like, all right, we should delete my face off your phone so I can open up your phone and steal all TechCrunch's secrets or whatever, is to reset face ID.
John:
It's not like touch ID where you see like the individual fingers and you can delete the individual fingers.
John:
The option after that is reset face ID.
John:
And I was wondering when the iPhone X first came out, can they not support more than one face?
John:
Is it a performance issue?
John:
Is it a storage issue?
John:
Obviously, it wasn't a storage issue because they didn't add more storage to the phone by putting iOS 12 on it.
John:
But it could have been a performance issue, and now they've dealt with it.
John:
But it does feel kind of limiting that if you add that second face and want to ditch it, you've got to start completely over with face ID, especially since that might...
John:
like remove all its learning that it's done about your various appearances right you have to reset it and start over from scratch but anyway i'm excited to be able to unlock my wife's phone with my face because typing in her very long passcode is tiresome yep that's the problem i have is aaron knows my passcode but it's something like 10 15 20 characters i don't remember exactly how many
Casey:
It's long enough that it's a pain in the butt, even for me.
Casey:
And that's why it's so nice to have, you know, Face or Touch ID.
Casey:
And that's why it's such a pain with Face ID that she can't unlock my phone without typing this obnoxiously long password.
Casey:
Tell me about Mojave Dark Mode.
Casey:
What's going on with that?
John:
there's another thing that i think we didn't talk about at all on uh our live show uh but it was a major selling feature i guess we didn't talk about it because we weren't really surprised by it and didn't feel like there was much to say but after that live show i went to the mojave dark mode wwc sessions and i just went to them because i just want to see cool screenshots and stuff and i thought well whatever this will be a fluff session uh but as usual apple surprised me with the
John:
the depth of the thought behind dark mode which i and i love these sessions that they're rare but there are wdc sessions where they're not just like here's the apis here's how you use them but it's where apple explains their thinking why did we do it the way we did it right and that really doesn't have in most cases much of a developer impact but it's just it's like explaining our thinking like
John:
This doesn't influence how you do things, developers, but we want you to understand why we did our things the way we did them.
John:
And sometimes it's a lesson, like, use this lesson in your application, but sometimes it's just, like, we want to explain ourselves.
John:
Like, the people behind it want to explain themselves.
John:
They want to show how thoughtful they were.
John:
And dark mode, the dark mode sessions are a good example of that, at least the first one.
John:
Maybe the second one is more about how to change your app.
John:
So what did they do that, you know, that you might not have thought of if you just saw the keynote presentation?
John:
Well, I think as we discussed a couple of times previously, a naive implementation of dark mode is a problem because the way the Mac distinguishes windows from each other is with a drop shadow.
John:
And if all your windows are black, for instance...
John:
how do you do the drop shadow does the shadow become light like it's like a you know outer glow instead of an outer shadow um how do you deal with having sufficient contrast or showing colors against black versus white having text you just make the text white light and the background uh dark but what about colors uh how well do they show up on black what about transparency colors with transparency how do you make that work
John:
uh how do you distinguish the edges of windows even if you figure out the shadow thing um and so uh you know we'll put the link to the session the show notes i encourage everyone to watch it it's not that long and it's definitely not particularly technical uh but there is a surprising amount of detail that they go into and exactly how they made this work one aspect of it uh made me think about and we didn't talk about this much either but i've heard it mentioned at the uh at wwc
John:
why no dark mode for ios and we were talking about in terms of oled like oh if you have black on all that looks great because it turns off the pixels and it's true black right but dark mode does not on the mac does not use true black almost anywhere so that advantage of wouldn't dark mode look great on ios on an oled uh phone because we get true blacks is not really an advantage because almost nothing in dark mode at least on the mac is true black for the reasons i stated before like that you lose the ability to do any kind of contrast now there's not overlapping windows
John:
So maybe it's less of a problem there.
John:
Maybe they'll still do it.
John:
But certainly on the Mac, you know, although until we get our 8K OLED screen with our Mac Pro next year, the OLED thing is not an issue.
John:
The things that tickled me about how they dealt with this is, as they took pains to point out, although I think it's a little bit ridiculous for people to think this, it's not just an inversion of light mode.
John:
I mean, if anyone has ever used the accessibility feature to literally invert the colors on the Mac screen, they realize it doesn't look
John:
particularly attractive it's an accessibility feature but it's not really like let's make it look cool like it looks like a film negative for people who are old enough to remember what that is um but they made things dark and everything is kind of a shade of gray and to make the windows distinguishable they made the shadows much darker than they are before and the dark shadows have a fighting chance to show up against the not so dark dark windows and
John:
But they also had to add a little like single hairline pixel glow around the perimeter of all the dark mode windows.
John:
So you could pick out the edges of the windows against the shadow, not just that shadow against the windows behind it.
John:
There's a bunch of new dynamic colors that you have to set in your application.
John:
If you want your application to be dark mode savvy, there is a surprising amount of stuff that you have to do to it.
John:
It's not just flipping a flag and making sure your colors are right.
John:
You have to change a lot of things about your app if you really want to make it right.
John:
They even go so far as to say, say you've got a black and white icon in a toolbar.
John:
And in dark mode, I'll just, instead of drawing black text, I'll, you know, instead of drawing a black outline of a house, I'll draw a white outline of the house.
John:
And they were like, but you just changed your house that used to be a white house into a black house.
John:
It should still be a white house.
John:
So don't just invert it, fill in the field with white in the inverted version.
John:
So it's still a white house on a black background.
John:
You know, it's, you can go pretty far down the rabbit hole trying to make your applications look good in dark mode.
John:
Same thing with vibrancy, with the transparency and stuff.
John:
They've pulled off a pretty amazing feat, which,
John:
uh you know i'm not sure that most app developers would be able to pull off of trying to make something look like it's colored but transparent but on top of black and we've seen it in the screenshots but really look at it like say you had to do that on your own like with a color picker you would never pick this color it's like being a painter like you don't you look at some people uh you know are doing a painting or whatever and they think
John:
well the mountains are gray and the sky is blue and the trees are green so i'm gonna make the trees i'm gonna mix up some green paint for the trees and i'll mix up some gray paint for the mountains and mix up some blue for the sky and you just paint everything as like it's intrinsic color but that's not what the world looks like the trees are actually mostly gray in the distance
John:
you they're slightly green but they're mostly gray and the ones in the foreground are a little bit more green and the mountain isn't actually gray it's actually blue on one side and really dark gray on the other and like you know so that's what they do with with uh with dark mode they don't paint things the color is supposed to be oh i have i have a black quote unquote black window i'm going to take red and put it over there that looks like nothing how do i make the red transparent so the the black shows through the red do i just make the red darker and
John:
it's actually a very tricky problem so like take the take the eyedropper take like a digital color meter and put it over like a highlighted region and see what color that actually is and just marvel at how it looks like a piece of transparent red plastic from a transformers box in the 80s laid over a black window when it is neither of those things
Marco:
Yeah, I can just say from my experience developing the overcast black theme on iOS, it's really hard to design UIs where a prominent background color that's used often is pure 100% black.
Marco:
It is pretty much impossible to do a lot of good, clear, complex work that way.
Marco:
And that's why if you look at iOS apps that succeed with their true black designs on the iPhone X...
Marco:
it's typically apps that don't have a lot of depth to their uis don't have a lot of layering where it's like you know single flat screens that can work it's still hard but it can work you but you know you don't get shadows even like and you don't realize how common of design element of really small shadow is like you know you think of today's app aesthetic as being still very flat and everything but it's not
Marco:
And as we get further from iOS 7, it's actually getting less flat over time.
Marco:
And so shadows are very commonly used to denote layering.
Marco:
Even if it's just as simple as a slide-over sheet or a pop-over or a dialog box.
Marco:
There's shadows everywhere.
Marco:
Even to do things like to help separate artwork from its background.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
There's little shadows and little dark borders all around lots of things in UIs.
Marco:
And when your background is pure black...
Marco:
It's really hard to make those conventions – they won't work.
Marco:
So it's really hard to find alternatives to those conventions that are understandable and that look good.
Marco:
It's a surprisingly hard problem.
John:
Oh, I also forgot to mention accent color, which is one of the most fun things that Apple has added since the classic macOS days, really, like the ability to change the character of your UI independent of light and dark mode, right?
John:
Because accent colors apply in both.
John:
So if you never want to use dark mode, you still get to use accent colors.
John:
And it basically changes like the...
John:
the solid colored space it's solid blue in in high sierra and many versions for like what color is the okay button like the cancel buttons is gray and the okay button is blue right you can change that blue to a bunch of different color choices purple pink orange uh even gray and that influences everything the color radio buttons check boxes the little arrow thingy that's on the side of pop-up menus and you know
John:
whole nine yards.
John:
Uh, and that it's fun, like to, to be able to customize, uh, the appearance of, of your operating system, you know, no, no reason other than just aesthetics.
John:
What, what do you like?
John:
What mood, what mood are you in?
John:
What best matches your desktop background?
John:
Um,
John:
uh steven hackett has a nice article about uh dark mode showing some showing off some of the features i would still suggest watching the sessions because they go into even more detail um and uh you know i was this is one of the few sessions where i was watching it i got that sort of pang of like man if i was doing uh mac os reviews i would spend i would it would be difficult to constrain myself to one quote unquote page one section for this because i would be doing screenshot after screenshot zoomed in at like the pixel level and every minute detail of how they do it um
John:
So Stephen's got screenshots in his thing as well, but I wish I could click on them and zoom in because I don't see the details of these tiny sizes, Stephen.
John:
I need to zoom in.
John:
I need to have lossless pings at, you know, native resolution.
John:
Anyway.
Marco:
I mean, you know, it would be theoretically possible to write a mini review like post just on this one topic.
Marco:
I mean, maybe you could write it on some kind of, I don't know, what would you call something like that?
Marco:
Maybe like a web blog or something like that?
John:
no no it doesn't sound right if only there was some place some way that you could publish text and images to the world but without having to write a 25 000 word review that's not what i want to do are you sure steven already wrote a blog post about it yes i would have done it slightly differently but he covered the basis plus this is the wwc session plus i have this big ramble so i figure like i've gotten out of my system but it would have been fun although like i also did think about how would you write a full review of mojave because
John:
Yes, dark mode is fun, and you'd have a big section about it, and I'd spend a lot of time talking about, you know, Mars Pan stuff eventually, but there's not much there.
John:
But is there enough?
John:
You know, my full-fledged OS reviews kind of had a certain number of sections that you expected them to have, and recent macOS releases have been...
John:
Not as evenly distributed across the feature surface of the OS, let's say.
Marco:
Yeah, but you know, that's just self-imposed.
Marco:
If you wanted to write a blog post about just one thing, you could.
Marco:
You're allowed to.
Marco:
You're right, I could, but I don't want to.
John:
it sounds like you gotta do though it sounds like i had i said had a pang of regret but one pang does not make a blog post are you sure have you ever really written a blog post about mac os i wrote a blog post about articles that i've written about mac os that counts right
John:
no no i think it does that's about mac os indirectly it seems like you're capable of of writing you know quote only a blog post if it's about something you consider trivial like bagels or pasta well i i had i had a blog at ars technica and i ported all those blog things with permission to my hypercritical like website so if you look there's a fat bit section you can see many blog posts about mac os okay i guess that's before my time knowing you
Casey:
yeah that's right probably was you should go read them some of them are good i used to do i used to do wwc bingo back when i was marlin man oh my word all right tell me about notarized apps what i mean the name makes sense but i don't know it seems like a very peculiar name to me but uh i guess that there's a different stage of security and and secureness to apps in mac os mojave so tell me about this john
John:
so you've got uh what is it gatekeeper it's been in the os for a while and developer id yeah well gatekeeper is the feature and you have you have uh three modes uh one mode is anything goes whoopee old mac os style that is not the default uh the next mode is i gotta open up this preference so i don't blow this um security and privacy it's called developer id all right um
John:
you know so the next mode is mac store and identified developers so mac app store is like you all run applications for the mac app store we know what those are and then the the and identified developers so marco's talking about which is developer id which is you register with apple and you get an identity and you sign your application but your application is not in the mac app store and the final setting is mac app store only the only things that this mac will run are things from the mac app store
John:
The default setting is the middle one, and there's always a bypass where you can right-click and do open and click through a dialog and get it to open up.
John:
So people have been scared about this for years because they're worried that Apple would make a Mac that can only run software that Apple approves.
John:
I mean, nobody wants that because we all want to be able to run whatever the heck software we want on our Macs, but we also appreciate the additional safety of these settings, right?
John:
um in particular i never change it to the like the old style anything goes thing because it's so easy to bypass on a case-by-case basis if you leave it in the middle setting the middle setting gives you advantages which is that if there is a malicious developer out there apple can revoke that developer's identity and your mac will refuse to launch their application so if there's some you know malware that goes out there and apple detects it they can revoke this developer's identity and then everyone else who has that software is protected after that
John:
So notarized applications is not really a change to this model.
John:
It's just an enhancement.
John:
And the enhancement is to allow Apple to revoke the ability to launch a specific app.
John:
If they revoke the developer's ID, every application that belongs to that developer is nuke.
John:
So say like some hacker got into a third party developer's thing and poisoned one of their applications, but all of their applications were fine.
John:
with developer id or they would have to kill all that developer's applications but with notarized apps they can kill the one specific application that has uh you know that has the malware inserted into it and the way it does this is by communicating with apple's notary service on launch and saying hey i'm application xyz am i allowed to launch rather than saying hey
John:
i am an application signed by developer xyz is developer xyz in good standing and i'm allowed to launch their applications so this seems like a you know a good change a good enhancement i can imagine eventually notarized applications replacing developer id applications like it's basically just an enhancement of developer id in both situations you need to register with apple and both situations
John:
Apple servers are involved in it somehow, if only, you know, sending definitions to your computer about what it isn't allowed to run.
John:
Notarized, I think, checks on demand every single time with the service.
Marco:
Well, there's a pretty major difference in how the app gets signed, though.
John:
uh well are you saying like uh you have to contact apple service to do the signing too like is there the notary on it whereas developer id you can just sign it locally without a network connection is that a difference yes but it's it's it's it's a little bit more complex than that so if i'm understanding this correctly um so developer id you it happens entirely locally once you get
Marco:
your certificate from Apple that you register with, the entire signing process from your version of Xcode to your customer's Macs can happen on your computer.
Marco:
You can generate the final build and put it on your server or send it to people and it works and it's verified as you because it's just a signature and a certificate.
Marco:
The Apple, the new one, the notarized thing, requires the app binaries to be uploaded to Apple servers and requires them to go through something that sounds a lot like the processing step with iTunes Connect, now App Store Connect.
Marco:
And as iOS developers know, that is not just a simple reading of the file.
Marco:
It's also not very fast.
Marco:
So there's a couple of problems with this.
Marco:
Number one is that processing step on the iOS iTunes Connect infrastructure, at least, can take half hour maybe on a good day, sometimes longer, sometimes a little bit shorter, but minimum usually 20 minutes.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
you know you seem it seems to be like you that you're stuck behind a big queue so that that just slows down development and complicates things it becomes an asynchronous thing that you have to submit to apple and then wait and then download the file from them and you know it's like you can't just have like a script that like signs a build publishes it and you're done right so like it adds complexity because you have to wait until this processing step is done that happens sometime uh and occasionally gets stuck it's just for release builds though right
Marco:
Yes, it is for release builds.
Marco:
But still, that's still an extra step and it makes something less automatable.
Marco:
It makes it more complicated and it increases the chances that your release that you want to do might have to be delayed by a couple hours if it gets stuck and you have to make a support ticket because that actually does happen with the iTunes Connect stuff.
Marco:
And so that's one problem.
Marco:
The other problem is
Marco:
Apple hasn't, I don't think, been incredibly clear on what kind of verification they're going to do.
Marco:
So, for instance, on the iOS one, during that processing step, they're doing all sorts of automated checks on that app binary.
Marco:
Now, we know the whole purpose of this is to scan for malware.
Marco:
That makes sense.
Marco:
Sure, I'm sure they're going to do that.
Marco:
But one thing the iOS one does is also scans for things like private API usage and will automatically, with no human decision involved...
Marco:
will automatically, every time, reject an app that uses any private API symbols.
Marco:
Are they going to do that on the Mac, too?
Marco:
For this non-App Store distribution method that will soon probably be the only distribution method that works without changing massive defaults?
Marco:
Will they, at some point in the future, require all apps to do this, unless you do something crazy like disable SIP?
Marco:
If you look at...
Marco:
How this is today, right now today as we know it, which I don't think the system is actually running yet, but as you know it today, we know the iOS version just adds delays and makes things asynchronous and makes things occasionally just stop for hours at a time for no reason.
Marco:
But in the future, this could be used badly.
Marco:
It could be used to...
Marco:
actually prevent mac apps that exist today from being able to use the system at all which could in the future prevent them from being run either easily or at all so for instance if your app uses a private api is this system going to automatically reject it and therefore in a future version of gatekeeper your app will just be unsignable
Marco:
That's kind of crappy, and that's not good for the platform, I would argue.
Marco:
So there are some red flags here for that, that I hope they don't do it badly like that.
Marco:
But this kind of system now gives them the ability to, and not only as some kind of crazy theoretical thing, but just if it works the way the iOS processing step always has, then it will do this.
Marco:
And I don't love that.
John:
So, I mean, that's the slippery slope argument that everyone was worried about when Gatekeeper came out.
John:
It could just be that the slope is slippery, but everything about macOS development is slow, and it's taking a long time to slip down the slope.
John:
So this is like a decade-long locking down of the Mac.
John:
But...
John:
Thus far, they haven't made any moves in that direction.
John:
And I think the one that people are really wary of is not so much about how annoying it is to have a signed application, but the ability to run on sign once period by making that either extremely difficult or impossible for regular people.
John:
That would really change the character of the Mac.
John:
Things like SIP for third-party applications make me think that they don't have a change in philosophy.
John:
Well, first of all, they took great pains to say there are no new guidelines for app review, which is kind of a non-secret, because we're not talking about app review or talking about developer ID.
John:
The rules for the Mac App Store do not change, but this is kind of outside of that.
John:
And second, SIP for third-party applications is the reverse.
John:
It lets third-party applications...
John:
use the tools of the os to lock themselves down in a way that was previously only open to the os so it's it's third-party applications keeping users out of their business right uh and i know it's mostly an unrelated feature to this but it makes me think that they realize that on the mac the you know like that it would be a bad idea to reject my application mac applications that use private apis like that it's been part of the culture forever unlike on ios um
John:
And that the whole point of this is to be not, they already have something that rejects you for using private API.
John:
It's called the Mac App Store, right?
John:
This is not that, right?
John:
I can imagine them changing the default to Mac App Store only if and when they're able to make the Mac App Store, you know, get up to snuff again and getting like Office and Adobe in there is a step in that direction.
John:
So maybe their goal could be, you know, in three years, let's change the default.
John:
But I really hope they never do get rid of the ability to run apps from anywhere.
John:
and i really hope they don't take any of the mac app store guidelines and port them down to notarize because then what's the point then instead of having three options you really just have two right and the only difference is in one case apple takes 30 of your money and hosts your file for you oh and to clarify uh before we leave this topic apple did actually say explicitly a future version of mac os will require developer id apps to be notarized so
John:
notarized apps will replace dev id in in the future which future os next year's the year after who knows they didn't say but we'll see oh it's next year for sure like it's let's be realistic here we're just lucky they didn't do it this year moving on safari got some cool stuff uh it got tracking prevention and so tell me about this facebook example dialogue
John:
I just thought it was funny, like when they're talking about Safari, all these sorts of security features to show how they prevent websites from tracking.
John:
They use Facebook as the example of the thing they're stopping from tracking you, which is a little on the nose.
John:
But it's good that they're not pulling punches, especially considering how Apple used to in the past.
John:
I think it's all gone now.
John:
Have direct integration with Facebook for things like contacts.
John:
um and have like i think they still like they still let you have a facebook account and you're like accounts thing no they pulled that all out last year yeah so anyway apple apple has uh spent a few years with sort of uh most favored nation status given to like facebook and twitter and a bunch of services that we're not familiar with because they exist in china and they seem to be moving away from that and saying you know what get out of our messages service yahoo aim icq and
John:
get out of our system dialogue box facebook uh you're not allowed to use our contact data just you know going back on all that stuff and now really taking a very aggressive stance with safari at doing whatever they possibly can to thwart uh websites tracking you all right so uh one one avenue of doing this they already uh did this in uh what the
John:
and high sierra's uh version of safari where they try to detect when a cookie is being used to track you across websites and periodically delete it to try to prevent you from being tracked across websites like they basically make their web browser broken it's supposed to say hey store this cookie in honor my expiration time and safari tries to say
John:
that cookie doesn't look legit like it's not a cookie the domain for that cookie seems too broad or i see it being read by webs by multiple websites or it's being read by a little bug on a page and i don't like that so i let you have the cookie and i let you set it but every once in a while i'm going to delete it just just to fuzz things up to make it harder to attract these people
John:
Now they're taking it even farther and looking at all the things that the websites do that don't use, you know, the most obvious thing, which is just cookies or other local storage to track you.
John:
And lots of websites do stuff where even if you run kind of in an incognito mode or constantly clear your cookies or whatever –
John:
they use javascript to access attributes of of you of your web browser uh things like what fonts do you have installed what configuration do you have installed what's the resolution of your screen you know all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't think has anything to do with you but just like but if they combine seven or eight of those things they can come up with what they call fingerprinting like a fingerprint of you you know how many people have this exact combination of attributes you
John:
uh at this time with this user agent on this device with this thing and they can use that fingerprint to track you across websites and so now safari is going to lie to websites about exactly all that stuff it's going to lie about what fonts you have installed it's going to lie about what plugins you have installed it's going to lie about your configuration it's going to make you seem generic and make all safaris look users look like they have the same fonts installed the same plugins the same configuration the same screen size stuff like that
John:
uh which is you know if you got back in time 20 years and said uh you know soon web browsers will have the ability to tell what you know all these attributes of your system like wow i could do such interesting things with that and say yeah but browsers are going to lie and tell you fake information because if they don't people will track you and show you the same ad across a million different websites um they're also getting rid of all the legacy plugins that could do all sorts of nasty things to your browser they've you know they've been deprecating those for years now finally they're going to go away
John:
unfortunately they also got rid of their own legacy plugins safari extensions they introduced many years ago
John:
uh they're not going away entirely but the only way the only ones you're allowed to be used are the ones from apple's app store which means that my beloved reload button the most sophisticated safari extension ever created which reloads your web page um is breaking in uh mojave uh because i can't put it on the apple's app store for extensions i used to be on their little app store for extensions like when the extensions first came out and
John:
And then later they changed it around and you had to sign it with a certificate, which I did.
John:
And then later they had like a separate store for it.
John:
And they said, if you want your extension to keep showing up, submit it.
John:
And I submitted it to them.
John:
And they said, this extension has insufficient functionality, which I can't really blame them because it's kind of true.
John:
So my reload button is dead, which is sad.
John:
But more importantly, a bunch of other extensions that I used to use are also dead.
John:
And I'm kind of annoyed by that.
John:
So I'm trying to encourage those developers to get into the Safari extension app store thingy so I can continue to use our extensions.
John:
If you want to work around this, by the way, I discovered this on Twitter today.
John:
You can use Safari extension builder to load the extensions and run them.
John:
And you just have to type in your admin password, which is kind of scary, but you have to type in your admin password and that and that will get them to run.
John:
The problem is every time you quit Safari and relaunch it, all your extensions are gone again.
John:
so not great uh but there's a workaround um and my final point on this topic is apple went through all this stuff and it's crowd-pleasing people like i don't want to be tracked by facebook i i love how you're doing these clever things to thwart people trying to fingerprint me and i don't like flash i guess so yay legacy plugins going away um
John:
but in the end as people are applauding i was thinking as a you know long-time web developer apple somehow got an entire audience full of technical people to applaud for potentially breaking websites and not that i'm saying apple shouldn't do this stuff but every time apple does stuff like this some website somewhere that you're going to use is going to break in some weird way and you're not going to understand and it's going to be because either safari's
John:
quote-unquote intelligent tracking prevention and fingerprinting are going awry or because they're working exactly the way they're supposed to and this website literally stops functioning when they can't track you both of those things
John:
are prone to happen.
John:
It's one of the, you know, one of the downsides of running a content blocker or an ad blocker or any of those things that I think we all run in some form or another is that you have to be careful because we all don't want to be tracked, but we're also super annoyed if some website we're using doesn't work, especially if it doesn't work in subtle ways that you think might just be a bug with the website.
John:
And then it takes you like 20 minutes to an hour to realize, oh, it's my content blockers.
John:
And if I reload this page without content blockers, suddenly it works, which by the way, you can do on iOS by holding the reload button.
John:
down and i think you can do a macOS with a similar thing so it's not that hard to do but it's for me at least it's hard to remember that be that may be what's going wrong here and it might not just be that like my my cell connection is bad and that's why i'm tapping this button nothing's happening it might not be happening because
John:
This website is being broken by some security thing.
John:
So anyway, good moves by Apple, but I'll miss my reload button, and I'm a little bit wary about websites breaking.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm not that concerned about that.
Marco:
With the intelligent tracking prevention that they did last year, the first version of the system, as you described...
Marco:
As far as I could tell, nothing seemed to break from that.
Marco:
There was never a time in this whole year so far where I've thought, well, better disable that or better switch to Chrome because that must be breaking what I'm doing right now.
Marco:
So that was a pretty conservative approach, I think.
Marco:
Obviously, this year, what they're doing with this is a little more aggressive.
Marco:
And honestly, I think that's a good thing.
Marco:
Ultimately, if you look at the browser landscape,
Marco:
Google, the advertising company that does a lot of this tracking stuff themselves and has zero respect for people's desires not to be tracked, they're not going to do crap for Chrome.
Marco:
Chrome is not going to lead the way on this.
Marco:
And the only two browsers that have enough market share to do things like this without having a lot of people just get mad and switch away are probably Safari and Chrome.
Marco:
And so, you know, Apple, I think, is the only major browser vendor that both has the market position to do things like this without, you know, without the whole web just saying, well, F off, you know, fine, our site will break in your browser and it'll work on everyone else's.
Marco:
Like, Apple has the clout to try this.
Marco:
And they actually have the motivation to do things like this.
John:
Google has motivation to do this as well.
John:
Oh, no way.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Listen, I think they've probably already done stuff like this.
John:
I just haven't been keeping up with it.
John:
Google's motivation is to kill everybody's tracking except their own.
John:
So because they build the web browser, they can literally build in any Google-specific tracking they want into the web browser.
John:
That's true.
John:
And block everything from everybody else.
John:
Now, they're not going to do that, but by owning the web browser and because they are an advertising company, they can do exactly what Apple's doing and become super aggressive about blocking stuff, but instead switch all of Google's tracking entirely, literally within the browser's code itself.
John:
You just have some tag on the page that says, Google Chrome, do your thing.
John:
And Google Chrome totally internally, based on the do your things tag, will have its own internal tracking that they can update with their auto update mechanism or whatever.
John:
So I kind of think Google is motivated to block every other tracking system except for theirs because they make money in advertising.
John:
And the degree to which other people's advertising systems are crappier than theirs is good for them.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And honestly, you know, you say they wouldn't do that.
Marco:
I think they totally would do that.
Marco:
The only reason they probably haven't done that yet is maybe antitrust concerns.
Marco:
Although, honestly, in this day and age, no one's enforcing that.
John:
And it would break the web.
John:
Like if they were super aggressive and it totally broke everybody else's stuff, it would break more than just like it's.
John:
Because they're all using the same tools to do it.
John:
They're using cookies, so you can't totally break cookies.
John:
They're using JavaScript.
John:
You can't turn off JavaScript.
John:
So it's actually very tricky to do, which is why it's hard work.
John:
That's why Apple, again, they did the cautious thing with the tracking prevention.
John:
They're ramping it up.
John:
It's very easy to accidentally break the web by doing this stuff.
John:
So you actually have to, when they say intelligent tracking prevention, there actually is not a machine learning, but an intelligence aspect to this where you have to do it very carefully and test a lot, and you can't just blanket block anything because you will break the web.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, I wonder, is, quote, breaking the web that bad of a thing these days?
Marco:
We've had a lot.
Marco:
We've had years and years and years, over a decade, of browser extensions being commonplace that can do things like block JavaScript on certain pages or block all JavaScript or things like that.
Marco:
We've had people routinely, quote, breaking the web for themselves voluntarily for a long time now.
Marco:
I would also argue that today there's more reason than ever to break your web.
Marco:
The web tracking and web ads are so abusive and so just immoral and creepy and sleazy and just bargain basement garbage, shameless.
Marco:
They're so bad.
Marco:
That as time goes on, I feel like the reason to break your web voluntarily for yourself with things like this, not only does the reason go up, but also I think the downside gets reduced.
Marco:
Because over time, the web has less usage and more alternatives.
Marco:
You know what happens?
Marco:
I run a content blocker in Safari.
Marco:
You know what happens if I go to a site that breaks it?
Marco:
I close the tab and I go do something else.
Marco:
I go read someone else's site that it doesn't break in.
Marco:
Or I go do something else that isn't browsing the web.
Marco:
We have so many options and things to do.
Marco:
This is why the web is struggling in a lot of ways.
Marco:
But there's so much competition for everything on the web these days that if the way I like to run things for my own safety, security, and speed breaks your site, my reaction isn't, I'm going to disable my blocker.
Marco:
My reaction is, screw your site.
Marco:
I'll go somewhere else.
John:
I think that's the reaction of us on this program and most people listening to it.
John:
But people who are not into technology just want their websites to work.
John:
And if you install a blocker on their thing and it breaks Facebook in even the most minor way, they will immediately uninstall the blocker.
John:
They won't even, oh, you can whitelist Facebook.
John:
Nope, nope, just uninstall.
John:
You broke the web for me.
John:
People just want their stories.
John:
They just want the two websites they ever go to, Facebook and probably something else,
John:
to work all the time 100 of the time and if this thing causes any sort of problem they will immediately delete it so i think it's important for us tech nerds to be on the forefront of this because we are the ones who you know are trying to push this forward we're the ones who are willing to not go to a website to break stuff to deal with the brokenness and that i think is pushing the web and pushing you know apple apple's part of that pushing everything in the right direction most normal people they are not an agent of change they are merely victims of these things so
John:
building it into safari i think it's a big step because it's not a thing that people can turn off as far as i know so apple has to be really careful with it uh but it does it like raises the bar for everybody and and to a degree it's a cat and mouse game apple does this the advertisers do that and so on and so forth uh same thing with google someone said in the chat that google chrome actually does have like some blocking already built in for for the most annoying kinds of ads and you know for years they've all had pop-up blocking you know you guys remember the web when pop-ups were not blocked by web browsers and
John:
You have pop-unders and all that other stuff, right?
John:
So every time browser vendors have taken that next step, that has really pushed the web forward.
John:
And we have influence by, you know, recommending to everybody know that you shouldn't use IE6, you should use Chrome, right?
John:
Like what made Chrome become as popular as it is on Windows?
John:
Part of it.
John:
is tech nerds who had heard of chrome and no one else had forcibly installing it on all their friends computers and saying use this don't use ie it's better right uh and i think you know we can't forcibly install safari people's windows machines anymore uh but i think being enthusiastic about browsers and blockers and stuff like that and uh evangelizing them to regular people who otherwise wouldn't look at them
John:
is help moving this forward as well.
John:
Um, not sure if we're winning this war, but I'm glad that there are at least combatants on both sides instead of like so many other situations in the tech and especially government worlds having combatants only on one side and just victims on the other.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you to Rover for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
It starts with Rodrigo Palau, who writes, I love hearing you guys talk about the cutting edge stuff.
Casey:
What do you think are the essential Mac apps for the super novice user?
Casey:
I'm not sure how to answer this.
Casey:
Like, I have a lot of things that I consider important for me.
Casey:
But I wouldn't necessarily say that any of them is important for your novice user.
Casey:
The only thing that can come to mind is Alfred, which is my particular launcher of choice.
Casey:
I think one or both of you guys use Quicksilver.
Casey:
LaunchBar is another popular one.
Casey:
That's on the Mac, right?
Casey:
Or am I making that up?
Marco:
Yeah, LaunchBar.
Marco:
That's the one I use.
Casey:
Other than a launcher, Alfred just does the same stuff that Spotlight does, but in a way that agrees with my head a little better.
Casey:
Other than that, I can't really think of anything.
Casey:
Let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Do you have any apps that you would recommend?
Marco:
I would honestly say that I don't think a launcher is necessary for most people.
Marco:
I would just use Spotlight because by default, I think it even has the command space key that kind of is like the standard launcher key.
Marco:
For me, the best thing for most novices to do on a Mac is to use as many of the built-in apps as possible because Apple's pretty good at making novice apps for common tasks.
Marco:
You know, like the built-in calendar is fine.
Marco:
It's not great, but it's fine.
Marco:
Built-in Apple Notes is really good, actually.
Marco:
You know, there's a couple rough edges here and there, but for the most part, it's really good.
Marco:
The, you know, built-in Reminders is okay.
Marco:
I would say Things is significantly better to be your to-do app if you want a to-do app.
Marco:
But Reminders is okay in the meantime.
Marco:
And just, you know, like all the built-ins, you know, Mail is good.
Marco:
Safari is good, as we were just saying.
Marco:
Like, just use a bunch of the built-in stuff, I would say.
Marco:
Maybe add things to it.
Marco:
Although I think it's...
Marco:
Probably a little bit expensive for most novices, if I had to guess.
Marco:
But otherwise, yeah, just use Apple stuff.
Marco:
Use photos.
Marco:
Use notes.
Marco:
It's all really good.
Marco:
Use iCloud to sync and back up your contacts and everything like that.
Marco:
I use most of the stuff myself.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
There's a good suggestion from Espressly in the chat to use 1Password.
Marco:
I really like 1Password a lot, and I was kind of late to that game, but I'm very glad I joined that game.
Marco:
But that being said, I think it's still a little clunky and complicated for novices.
Marco:
I don't know that I would recommend it for novices.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with everything you just said about 1Password.
Casey:
I'll also put in the show notes, I have a link to an article I wrote probably two or three years ago now, 2016, there you go, where I put in basically, it was for myself more than anyone else, but I put in a checklist of all the things that I tend to install.
Casey:
To be clear, most of this is super nerdy, super duper nerdy, but there may be something on here that you might think is useful.
Casey:
So as a silly example, like trip mode, which I'd learned about from Jason Snell, if you're on a laptop where you can restrict what has access to the Internet connection, say, if you're tethering or something like that.
Casey:
Also fiddly, but also something that may have appeal beyond just the super nerds.
Casey:
So, again, you can take a look through that.
Marco:
I got to say the trip mode like that, like a lot of weird stuff breaks with trip mode in non-obvious ways, because like if an app uses like some kind of like command line thing behind the scenes and that thing isn't whitelisted, then it'll get blocked and random things just won't work.
Marco:
It's kind of weird for a novice.
Marco:
I'm not sure I would recommend that.
Casey:
It's just something to look at, if nothing else.
Casey:
And you can see a lot of these on this on this post.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
So this is asking for not just novice users, but super novice users.
John:
And I think my advice to them would be, like, there's probably one sort of main thing you're doing with your Mac, especially if it's a work-related thing.
John:
As far as my work is mostly writing.
John:
But it's writing or drawing or, like, you know, what are you doing in a Mac?
John:
Spreadsheets, whatever.
John:
I would say that if you are a super novice user, like Marco said, just stick with the stuff that's built in there.
John:
There's a lot of stuff built in that covers most of the bases.
John:
But whatever it is that you're doing,
John:
There is probably one or two or three popular, powerful Mac applications for doing whatever it is you're doing better than whatever is built in.
John:
So if you're a writer, you could probably use text edit and get by with the fine.
John:
But depending on the kind of writer you are, if you're like a fiction writer, maybe look at Scrivener or Ulysses.
John:
Or if you're a coder, you know, look at BBEdit or some other kind of it, right?
John:
There's some application, if you're an artist, there's some built-in applications for doing some kinds of art, but obviously you look at Photoshop or Acorn or whatever.
John:
In every one of those realms, especially the realms that the Macs are popular in,
John:
You have to do a little bit of research.
John:
And if you're a super novice user, maybe you've never even heard of Acorn.
John:
Or maybe you've never heard of Scrivener, right?
John:
You've heard of Microsoft Word.
John:
It's like, is that what I can get?
John:
Oh, Word.
John:
Word is for the Mac.
John:
I should just get that.
John:
Word may not be the best application for you.
John:
What makes the Mac great is there are applications like Ulysses and Scrivener that are not Microsoft Word and are...
John:
you know i would say simpler and more elegant and dedicated to specific use cases you should find those applications for the one important thing you're doing with your mac and everything else uh use the standard tools and then i would say i was going to offer a launcher as like and finally
John:
If you ever graduate out of super novice user, maybe the first sort of quote unquote power user thing you might want to look into is find a launcher.
John:
And there's lots of cool ones to choose from.
John:
And there are very simple application that does a few simple things a little bit better than Spotlight.
John:
And it's a good sort of entree into the world of Mac customization and more sophisticated use.
Casey:
Moving on, Jack Johnson writes, do you think Apple could make an Android version of iMessage for cross-platform compatibility?
Casey:
Set aside the question of whether or not they would make it, even if they could, for reasons like platform tie-in and et cetera.
Casey:
There were rumors a while back that this was already in progress.
Casey:
And I would be surprised if they hadn't at least, you know, kicked the can on this or kicked the tires, I guess I should say, on this one.
Casey:
I don't think they're interested in it, because I do think there is tremendous lock-in, but I don't personally see any reason why they wouldn't be able to.
Marco:
I mean, you could look at the way they treat iMessage on the Mac, and you can kind of be like, well, they can even maintain this on, like, two OSs.
Yeah.
Marco:
Let alone adding another one.
Marco:
I mean, that being said, obviously, Android, I think, would have probably more of an upside for them if they wanted the most people possible using iMessage.
Marco:
But I think the lock-in thing is really the key here.
Marco:
iMessage is a great lock-in for iPhones.
Marco:
I think surveys and business research and things have actually shown this to be the case.
Marco:
one of the major reasons people stick with iPhones who, who might otherwise be a little curious to try Android or something is because they know they'd become a green bubble friend and they don't want to be a green bubble friend.
Marco:
That's a real thing.
Marco:
That's a real major effect.
Marco:
So I can't see Apple being willing to give that up for what benefit, like, like what basically like I think the answer shouldn't be like if they could do an Android version and
Marco:
I think the answer is why, what would they gain from doing Android version?
Marco:
Like they're not making money on iMessage directly.
Marco:
Like what, what would they gain from that?
Marco:
And I just, I don't see any answer to that question that would make it worth giving up the massive amount of lock in that it gives them.
John:
This ties into something I mentioned earlier about, uh, messages being Apple's most successful quote unquote social network, uh, which is again, not a high bar because they're not particularly good at this.
John:
Um,
John:
and you know the question is could they yes absolutely they could they've made windows versions of all sorts of stuff they have android version of uh apple music in fact when i read this question i was like wait do they have an android version of i message and i realized i was thinking of apple music i think right they have apple music yeah because there was a beats music like when they bought it and and unlike many other products where apple usually cans the windows versions they didn't for that so there is apple music uh for android um
John:
but anyway if there ever comes a time where it is in apple strategic interest to have a foothold in the social networking space like say say facebook is on the wane and it is slowly destroyed by our by our cumulative hatred for it right our meaning on this podcast three people we're going to take down facebook with our mind um and there's like a power vacuum there's a power vacuum right apple is like well you know there's whatsapp and line and all those other things and apple would be like
John:
are we we're a player there right like maybe we're not as big as whatsapp our line but why aren't we as big like we're you know it's been historically as marco said a a uh lock-in is such a harsh word a differentiating factor for the iphone that you know a network effect kind of thing right but at some point the uh the math could switch and say actually we have a shot at the brass ring here is a gold i don't know if it's brass
John:
we have a shot at the brass ring the space gray ring yeah if we just open this up we can take i message you know we can triple the size of it overnight maybe because you know like carry the wave of that network effect and saying now suddenly why would android people sign up for this oh because they want to be blue bubble friends too like the last gasp of that but the exclusivity even though you've just eliminated exclusivity there are still the people who wish they had blue bubbles briefly and then you know
John:
to overwhelm the competitors and become the most important text messaging subsystem remember it's not just text messaging and then yeah they don't make money off of it right but apple pay is an app in there and apple pay is the thing they do make money off of presumably um and it like it is kind of an app platform so there may come a time in the future where apple is in apple strategic interest to try to
John:
to try to like put strap rockets to their one successful social network and see if that can take them to the next level to make them a player in a space where historically they have not been a player.
John:
But I don't think that's going to happen today.
Casey:
Finally, Mustafa Hemwe writes, this one is for Syracuse.
Casey:
It seems that everyone is suddenly talking about streaming console quality games to thin clients.
Casey:
Are the days of gaming consoles numbered?
Casey:
So what they're saying is do all the like graphics processing in the cloud and
Casey:
And you're basically doing like a glorified VNC or something like that, where it's just beaming the fully rendered display to your console or your computer or what have you.
Casey:
And you're interacting with something that is very, very stupid and not very powerful, but it has a very, very good connection to the Internet.
Casey:
So is that the way things are going from here?
John:
So we've gone from plastic disks in cardboard boxes and trucks that you would drive your car or whatever to the store and get and bring back home and load.
John:
And we've gone to, okay, we don't need the plastic disks.
John:
We can download the bits onto your computer.
John:
Actually, before that, we went to plastic disks that you buy and bring home and stick in your console.
John:
And then it copies every single bit of data off of the plastic disk onto your hard drive.
John:
And then it plays off the hard drive, but you have to have the disk in for stupid copy protection reasons.
John:
Then it's like no disk at all.
John:
Download directly to your computer or to your console and...
John:
you know it's like a one-time bit download with frequent updates and content additions uh then we had don't download all the bits because it's really big just download enough bits for you to start playing in the game like the playstation 4 fast start thing i think xbox has a similar thing now uh so it's still not streaming the game it's still running locally but it's sending you just enough bits to start the game and then it runs it locally and then in the background downloads more bits and
John:
And then the final stage of that, which we've had with OnLive and the various, that company that Sony bought that emulates PS3 games or runs PS3 games remotely.
John:
And what is the other one?
John:
NVIDIA Now.
John:
A whole bunch of these services that literally do not run the game locally.
John:
Run it in a data center somewhere on a much more powerful device and beam it over to you.
John:
And so it seems like a trend of, like, we're obviously going in that direction.
John:
Everything's going to go there.
John:
But...
John:
Uh, physics is a harsh mistress here for certain categories of games, not all, but certain categories of games, the latency imposed by the physical distance and the speed of light.
John:
Uh, and you know, in the U S the crappiness of our internet, of our internet connections means that certain genre runners or games are not going to, um, become streaming anytime soon.
John:
Like you would need direct fiber optic connections to a very fairly close data center, uh,
John:
for for it to make sense for those genres but for every other genre of game and there are many of them that don't require those those kind of you know reflexes it's just an economic question um yeah it's great to be able to sell someone a cheap box that doesn't have a lot of electronics in it uh but you still need to pay for the electronics that are not in that box you need to pay for the ones in the data center and you're hoping to get sharing out of it like well people aren't all playing games at the same time so i don't have to buy one
John:
giant gaming pc for my data center for every customer i have to buy you know 0.3 gaming pc 0.1 and depending on how that math works out and how much data center power costs and all that other stuff it could make sense to do that um but
John:
it's a thing that everybody is trying right now so everyone's seeing how that works out you know does it just make sense for old games does it make sense for uh people who can't afford big gaming pcs and we can get them to rent games and like i don't think anyone has shown that model to be particularly lucrative um so i think in the next one or two or three generations we are still going to be downloading bits and running things locally
John:
but five generations from now, it seems conceivable to me, especially for like TV connected pucks or TVs themselves.
John:
And they've done this as well.
John:
There's like a PlayStation now TV puck thing.
John:
And I think they built it into some of the TVs for games that don't require latency.
John:
That could be insane by the phone games.
John:
That could be, you know, a, the dominant form of cheap gaming for the rest of us.
John:
But I think for the rest of all of our lives, listening to this,
John:
Running games on a local device will still be a thing at the high end anyway.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks, Rover, and Molecule.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Well, what else is going on?
Marco:
Your job.
Marco:
You quit your job.
Marco:
You had a job, and now you don't.
Casey:
Well, I still do for now.
Casey:
Soon you won't.
Casey:
But soon I won't.
Casey:
So that's the thing.
Marco:
Yeah, so we couldn't talk about it last week because it was kind of a big event, but now we can because it's just us here.
Casey:
Nobody cares.
Marco:
Yeah, but I very much care, and I think our listeners do too, as much as we joke about it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You had this big, long analog episode about it, which was excellent.
Marco:
So obviously anybody who really wants a lot more about this, you should also listen to analog.
Marco:
But I figure we can cover it here too.
Marco:
So you decided to quit your job after months of us badgering you about it.
Marco:
What made you decide...
Marco:
It seemed like in the early part of this year, right before Michaelia was born, it seemed like you were kind of on the fence and then you were kind of into it during your leave of absence.
Marco:
And then at the end of the leave of absence, you seemed like you decided, you know what, actually, I don't want to go independent.
Marco:
I want to go back to work.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization.
Marco:
Right, and so obviously sometime between that, which was what, like late March or something like that?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Sometime between then and June, you change your mind.
Marco:
What happened?
Casey:
Yeah, and I mean, I'm perfectly happy to give the abridged version of Analog.
Casey:
I think the canonical version of this conversation, just like you said, is on Analog episode 134, Running Toward a Better Future.
Casey:
And I put a blog post up about this, which is kind of the super succinct version of it.
Casey:
But to answer your question more directly...
Casey:
A few different things happened kind of all around the same time.
Casey:
You broke a shoelace, right?
Casey:
I broke a shoelace.
Casey:
That's a deep cut.
Casey:
I'm proud of you, John.
Casey:
I broke a shoelace, and that's where it all happened.
Casey:
Now, what actually happened was I started arguing with my insurance, and that was kind of sort of my broken shoelace moment because –
Casey:
It occurred to me – well, it was two things.
Casey:
I argued with my insurance, and I actually looked at how much we pay for the insurance that our employer provides.
Casey:
So if you're not from the U.S., generally but not always, your employer will effectively subsidize your health insurance.
Casey:
So they'll pay –
Casey:
A large portion of the cost.
Casey:
And so at around the time that I started thinking, how much am I really paying in insurance was when we were starting to really get the bills from Michaela's birth.
Casey:
And the insurance is not very good.
Casey:
In fact, it's pretty bad.
Casey:
And it's fairly expensive.
Casey:
What occurred to me was I've got garbage insurance that I'm paying a not insignificant amount of money for.
Casey:
What am I doing?
Casey:
Because in so many ways, the thing that I was hanging my hat on for going back to work was I need insurance.
Casey:
I don't want to pay for my own insurance.
Casey:
I don't know if I can pay for my own insurance.
Casey:
I need insurance, which means I need a job.
Casey:
Well, then when you realize that a few things all at once, you realize A, your insurance sucks.
Casey:
B, it's expensive.
Casey:
See, even though I've been told this a thousand times, it wasn't until I went on that trip with you, Marco, in May for Mike's bachelor party when I really got away from everything.
Casey:
And you guys badgered me a smidge when we were out there, but it really wasn't that much.
Casey:
But I was able to kind of separate myself from family, from work, from everything and just kind of think differently.
Casey:
It occurred to me like, you know that thing that Marco and Aaron and Mike and everyone has been saying, you know, you could always get another job.
Casey:
You know what?
Casey:
Son of a gun.
Casey:
I could always get another job.
Casey:
That's a thing I could do.
Casey:
And I make fun of myself.
Casey:
But it really is.
Casey:
It took that separation for me to really evaluate it less emotionally and more quantitatively.
Casey:
And another thing that occurred to me was, you know, if I look at the money that I'm lucky enough to earn from this podcast and my other, you know, kind of side hustles, if I look at that as just a number and don't think about where that money comes from, it occurred to me, well, crap, I would have quit my job like two years ago.
Casey:
But
Casey:
But I think of the money that is earned from podcasting as not real, which is unfair of me.
Casey:
And it's wrong of me.
Casey:
But it feels not real because it doesn't feel like podcasting can be a real job.
Casey:
And I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am, well, all three of us, but me especially, I am deeply, deeply, deeply lucky and unbelievably privileged to be in the position where the three of us earn enough money from this podcast and with our extracurriculars that me leaving a full-time job is something that's even possible now.
Casey:
let alone you know that i could even consider it let alone actually do it but it occurred to me like if and i know this is a hilarious uh thought exercise but this is this is the thought technologies i needed if if fast text had earned the exact dollar amount that this and my other extracurriculars have earned over the last couple of years i would have quit a long time ago because fast text again for example but fast text is a real job that's
Casey:
But podcasting, man, that doesn't count.
Casey:
That's not real.
Casey:
But when I realized, OK, I can always get another job.
Casey:
My insurance today sucks.
Casey:
This is enough money that I should be able to survive.
Casey:
And then I started doing like the world's biggest number.
Casey:
That's not really true.
Casey:
But figuratively speaking, the world's biggest number spreadsheet to try to figure out, OK, no, really, you're looking at, you know, the money that we've earned.
Casey:
Is this is this really something that that's possible?
Casey:
It occurred to me, like, this is a thing that I should be able to do.
Casey:
And we might have to make some lifestyle changes.
Casey:
You know, I think I talked on analog.
Casey:
You know, we tend to go out to eat a lot.
Casey:
Now, not to expensive places, to, like, places that most of you would be disgusted by.
Casey:
But there are places that we enjoy.
Casey:
Like, say, Wendy's, as an example.
Casey:
You know, we might go out to Wendy's once for lunch on the weekends.
Casey:
And that adds up over time, man.
Casey:
You know, like $10, $20 worth of food, you know, every – not that we go to Wendy's every Saturday, but for the sake of conversation, you know, $20 for lunch every Saturday.
Casey:
That adds up real quick.
Casey:
So silly things like that.
Casey:
Actually, Mean Mean is mentioning Cookout in the chat.
Casey:
That's only like $8, but I'm with you in principle.
Marco:
Wait, it's cheaper than Wendy's?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
Oh, it's so good, too.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
I'm telling you.
Casey:
It's not a front for organized crime.
John:
I'm getting suspicious of this cookout place.
Casey:
It is very possible that that's the case.
Casey:
But anyway, but you take my point, I hope, is that there may have to be some lifestyle changes.
Casey:
And I'm not talking dramatic lifestyle changes, but some lifestyle changes.
Casey:
Because we've been lucky enough that we haven't had to nickel and dime ourselves.
Casey:
And to be fair, we don't spend money.
Casey:
particularly often like you know we we buy cars once every five to ten years you know i don't have a home pod i would love i would love two home pods i don't really need it so i don't have one our tv or the biggest tv in our house is 40 inches 1080p and i have no desire to upgrade it well that's not like in a okay infinite money sure i'd upgrade it but sitting here now it's fine i'm okay with it
Casey:
I'm only potentially buying a car because my car is frigging broke, and I'm tired of it being frigging broke.
Casey:
So you put all this together, and we've been treating the extracurricular money as money that's been mostly funneled directly into savings.
Casey:
So we have enough in the bank that we can survive for a while if everything just disappeared tomorrow.
Casey:
So all of that put together says that the numbers check out.
Casey:
so is this what i really want in talking with aaron especially about it it it occurred to me and again like i had known this but i really needed to like own it as well and it wasn't until i was away from the kids in in austin for mike's bachelor party it occurred to me that you know declan is three and a half and because of when his birthday is he's probably going to go to kindergarten when he's six not five
Casey:
and that means I have two and a half years left of being with him all the time.
Casey:
And Michaela, she's only five months old at this point, but that means I only have four and a half to five and a half years with her.
Casey:
In a lot of ways, you could make a very good argument, especially John, I suspect, because you have the oldest kids of all of us, but you could make an argument that being there when they're super young is not that useful because they may not remember it well.
Casey:
They're barely humans for a long time.
Casey:
I wouldn't make that argument.
Casey:
OK, fair.
Casey:
But, you know, I'm saying, you know, you could make it you could you one could make an argument that this is a silly time to be home.
Casey:
But the way I look at it is, you know, from starting from five or six years old until they're gone, they're going to be in school all day.
Casey:
You know, it's at Summerside, you know, just in general, they'll be in school all day.
Casey:
So now seems to be the time.
Casey:
It seems to be the time financially.
Casey:
It seems to be the time familially to.
Casey:
why wouldn't i try this and more than anything else if i don't try this i'm never gonna know and if i never know i will regret it i might regret this later maybe i doubt it but maybe but at least i'll know that i tried at least i i'll know that i did the thing that i didn't think i was capable of and
Casey:
And I effectively took a bag of money and lit it on fire and said, you know what?
Casey:
I'm good.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
But I did it because I wanted to be with my family.
Casey:
And I didn't know that I had the gumption, for lack of a better word, to do that.
Casey:
But the Monday before it was, I'm sorry, the Tuesday before WWDC, because what was the holiday that Monday?
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
There was a holiday that Monday.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you.
Casey:
Memorial Day.
Casey:
So I didn't do it Monday.
Casey:
I did it Tuesday.
Casey:
But I said to my boss, look, I want to be home with the family.
Casey:
I want to work on other side projects.
Casey:
So the first Monday in July, which is the second...
Casey:
is going to be my last day.
Casey:
So after that, I'm going to be done.
Casey:
He took that as well as can reasonably be hoped, but he was not particularly overjoyed by this, and I don't blame him.
Casey:
And that's the plan.
Casey:
And so sitting here now, it's the 13th of June, which means in one, two and a half, just shy of three weeks, I will be an independent worker.
Casey:
For hopefully as hopefully as little as two and a half, three, I guess, two and a half years until Declan's in kindergarten.
Casey:
That's like my goal.
Casey:
The six or so years or five and a half years or whatever until Michael's in kindergarten.
Casey:
That's my stretch goal.
Casey:
And my holy cow, I've won the lottery goal is just I never have a boss again.
John:
Well, that's awesome.
John:
Even Bono has a boss, Casey.
Casey:
Well, I know.
Casey:
Everyone has a boss.
Casey:
I know, I know.
Casey:
But let me tell you about some sponsors.
Casey:
How many houses do you have, or how many bedrooms do you have in your house?
Casey:
Did Casper sponsor this episode?
Casey:
No, they didn't.
Casey:
But if you have any extra bedrooms in your house, how many ears do you have in your family?
Casey:
Let me tell you about Aftershocks, because they all need a pair of Aftershocks.
Casey:
You should check them out.
Casey:
But no, the plan is to...
Casey:
to work about half time on casey stuff so casey on cars on this app that um that i'm semi-quietly trying to work on uh to work on uh maybe uh some stuff about rx swift and and teaching rx swift and and you know if 1099 work that i find is interesting and is not 40 hours a week comes my way 1099 being independent consulting if you're not american
Casey:
So if 1099 work comes my way that I find interesting and does not take up an entire week, then sweet.
Casey:
But Aaron and I have talked a lot about it.
Casey:
And the whole point of this is to not be elsewhere, be that in my in-home office or Starbucks or something, is to not be elsewhere for 40 hours a week.
Casey:
Because if I'm going to be elsewhere for 40 hours a week, I might as well just keep a regular job and get the free – well, not free, but you know what I mean, free health care.
Casey:
And so the idea is to be around the family at least roughly half of the work week and then spend the other half of the work week trying to pull the thread on all these things that I've been kind of playing with but haven't been able to really achieve.
Casey:
I've done a couple of Casey on Cars videos.
Casey:
I haven't, I've been, and I've been very proud of them, but I haven't been able to work on them as much as I want or as quickly as I want or with the dedication that I want because I have a job and I have a family.
Casey:
And now Aaron and I, and I keep saying the word negotiated, which I think has a negative connotation, but we've negotiated that I'll work, you
Casey:
And presumably in the house, doing these things, doing KC on cars.
Casey:
There's a few things for ATP I'd like to do, which I haven't talked to you guys about, which I should have last week.
Casey:
Nothing bad.
Casey:
Some helpful things for ATP I'd like to do.
Casey:
I can start to put more energy into these things that I haven't put as much energy as I've wanted to into.
Marco:
So one thing I want to place in your head, because occasionally that works, is...
Casey:
i don't mean that to be insulting i like i'm not saying you're dumb i'm saying like this is an idea that most people don't yeah he's incepting you is what he's saying exactly right that's exactly the first thing i thought i didn't see the movie so i can't say that oh it's so good the problem with inception is the sidebar the problem with inception is everyone tells you it's amazing and i didn't watch inception until like a year or two after it came out and i was like oh god this is gonna be such a chore because everyone it's like an avatar everyone said avatar was amazing it was garbage don't say avatar was amazing
John:
I agree with you about people overhyping Inception.
John:
I don't think Avatar was overhyped.
John:
I think everyone kind of sneered at Avatar because it was Dances with Wolves with blue people.
Casey:
I'm glad I saw neither of them.
Casey:
I heard nonstop that Avatar was amazing.
Casey:
I did not think it was that great.
Casey:
Inception, however, and this is where John's going to disagree with me.
Casey:
Inception was worth all the damn hype.
Casey:
I loved that movie.
Casey:
I freaking love that movie.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
I do disagree with you.
Casey:
But anyway, so you're trying to incept me.
Marco:
So what I'm going to incept you with, I think, if I understand the reference correctly, which I don't, is one thing that is hard to fight against in American culture especially.
Marco:
And I can't speak for the country, but in American culture especially, we have a few –
Marco:
cultural things that make it hard to do what you've done, that are probably going to be weighing on your mind.
Marco:
So you mentioned a few minutes ago that leaving your job unnecessarily feels like setting a bag of future money on fire.
Marco:
Like, I'm just going to give this money.
Marco:
And I had the same thought.
Marco:
When I was thinking about leaving Tumblr, even though my side hustle was doing well enough that I could leave –
Marco:
I thought, why would I give up a job?
Marco:
That's just giving up money.
Marco:
And part of that is because many of us, myself included, come from modest backgrounds where why the heck would you give up money?
Marco:
We didn't come from a place that was privileged enough that giving up money would be something that a normal thinking person would do.
Marco:
And so there's – and that's a pretty prevalent part of American culture too of like why would you turn down money?
Marco:
Another big part of it is this kind of guilt of like you have to have a job.
Marco:
You have to be working as hard as you can.
Marco:
Why would you ever not work a full work week?
Marco:
That is slacking off or something or makes you less of a person.
Marco:
And instead of thinking of those in those American culture ways, I think it's valuable to look at a different concept or a different mindset on this, which is, do you have enough?
Marco:
And Americans are not good at thinking about this.
Casey:
Oh, no, we are not.
Marco:
You know, this is real hard for us.
Marco:
A lot of other cultures have a much more healthy relationship with the idea of having enough.
Marco:
We are all in an amazing position that this show makes enough money that it provides all of us with enough.
Marco:
We could just do this show.
Marco:
We could work like three hours a week and or, well, you know, maybe a little more than that with the overhead of other stuff.
Marco:
But like, you know, this show takes up at most, including the recording time, probably between the three of us and Average are about five hours a week.
Marco:
This could be all you do.
Marco:
This could be enough.
Marco:
you are feeling a lot of pressure right now to try to fill your time with more stuff.
Marco:
But like, for instance, I honestly don't think you would really enjoy consulting work very much.
Marco:
I don't think you would enjoy hourly, you know, 10 to 9 based.
Marco:
And the way you're talking about it, it sounds like you want to jump into that because you think you should, not because you actually want to, but you totally don't need to.
Marco:
And I would actually say, honestly, if you don't need to, which I know you don't,
Marco:
Don't.
Marco:
Why would you do it if you didn't need to?
Marco:
The only reason to do that I think would be if you, as a programmer, had the itch to program a lot and didn't have your own projects to invest that itch into and to satisfy that itch with.
Marco:
But you do.
Marco:
You do have your own projects that you want to do, that you are doing.
Marco:
So I don't think you need to do that.
Marco:
uh you know we are in incredibly fortunate positions here by having this income from this show with relatively low hourly weekly loads you know workloads for it that you should just like enjoy this because like you don't need to do anything else you don't need to fill your week with 20 hours of consulting work just because you feel obligated to fill that time like
Marco:
You have enough with this right here.
Marco:
Literally everything else you do could just be a fun hobby or like a future, like kind of betting on a possible future, but that has no direct income right now.
Marco:
Everything else you do could be that kind of thing.
Marco:
Could be like, let me place a bunch of bets and see what pays off down the road, but it's all bets that I like.
Marco:
It's all like fun projects like Casey on cars that like in the future, this might become a thing that makes money, but it isn't now, you know, and that's fine.
Marco:
Literally everything else you do could be that and you'd still be fine because you'd have enough.
Casey:
Yeah, we're actually saying the same thing.
Casey:
I brought up the consulting earlier.
Casey:
I feel like you're mostly right.
Casey:
I don't think that I would take consulting work if it was offered, unless it was something that I genuinely thought was interesting and novel.
Casey:
And even if I took it, it would only be for a day or two a week.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, I want to spend about 20 hours working on things for me.
Casey:
And one day is eight hours.
Casey:
Two days is 16 hours.
Casey:
Suddenly I have four hours.
Casey:
I mean, not to say this is not fungible, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like if I stick with my quote unquote budget, if I do two days of consulting a week, I've already blown through my budget of hours that Aaron and I have agreed upon.
Casey:
And so what you said is exactly right.
Casey:
Well, everything you said is exactly right with regard to, like, what am I going to do?
Casey:
A, I could just do ATP and nothing else.
Casey:
B, I don't think I have the disposition to do it, though.
Casey:
And C, I really, even though sitting here today, knock on my glass desk because I have no wood nearby, I see no particular end point for the three of us and for this show.
Casey:
But you never know what will happen, and everything does have to end eventually, just like you said.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
What I'm what this this out these hours that I want to spend doing other things it's I want to start throwing some crap against the wall and see if any of it sticks so that if if one of us decides tomorrow you know what I'm done then I have something else to keep me going so I don't have to go crawling back to a regular jobby job.
Casey:
And I don't know if any of these things will stick.
Casey:
Like you look at YouTube today and to make money on YouTube is damn near impossible.
Casey:
So is Casey on cars going to stick?
Casey:
Yeah, probably not.
Casey:
But does it make me happy?
Casey:
And do I find it fun?
Casey:
Abso-frickin-lutely.
Casey:
So I'm going to work on it.
Marco:
Well, and also like even if a particular project doesn't end up making money long term or you don't want to stick with it long term.
Marco:
it also leads to other like everything you do leads to more things that you do yeah so like even if case if case young cars doesn't stick it might lead you into something that does so it's still worth placing these bets all over the place seeing seeing where you end up
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
And we're saying the same thing.
Casey:
I can continue on even if this went away or analog went away.
Casey:
What if advertising just dries up in the podcast world tomorrow?
Casey:
Is that likely?
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
But what if?
Casey:
Then I'm screwed.
Casey:
I need to have some other plan.
Marco:
The other plan would be we would ask everybody to give us $10 a month or $5 a month.
Casey:
Sure, but you know what I'm driving at, right?
Casey:
I want to diversify, basically, and I don't want to have all my chips in this basket.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
that's the plan.
Casey:
And candidly, the ideas I have, the Casey on cars is almost assuredly not going to work.
Casey:
This app I'm writing is probably not monetizable.
Casey:
And if I do, it'll be like a tip jar or something.
Casey:
And the only thing that might have legs is doing something with regard to RX Swift.
Casey:
And that's
Casey:
a stretch like it's possible i think i can see a future in which that makes money but it's a stretch and so i figure i'll try all three of these and if i come up with a different idea i'll try that idea and we'll just see where it goes but i don't want to as much as i i can just sit here and you'll be retired basically like i don't want to do that because i'd like you know my my win the lottery goal is i never have a in the sense that i mean you know i will never i don't ever want to have a boss again
Casey:
And if I can make that happen by using this time wisely, then that's what I want to do.
Casey:
Now, John, you've been quiet.
Casey:
Tell me now that it's over.
Casey:
Well, now that I've committed.
John:
This is the short version of the analog.
Casey:
That was like an hour, hour and a half.
Casey:
So we're less than that so far.
John:
Yeah, no, I'm all on the same page with everything you said.
John:
I think you did a good repeat of analog, not such a good summary of analog.
Casey:
Sorry.
John:
Sorry, Dad.
John:
Chief repeater and chief repeater and chief.
Casey:
Well, in my defense, I recorded that before WWDC.
Casey:
Like, a lot has happened since then.
Casey:
I couldn't remember what I did or did not talk about, but that's okay.
Casey:
So, yeah, that's the plan, and we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
So a couple of people have been kind enough to ask, and I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
It's very, very kind of them to ask.
Casey:
Are you going to do a Patreon?
Casey:
Are you going to do some sort of membership to your website?
Casey:
Sitting here now, no, I don't plan on that.
Casey:
I'm not saying that is my forever answer, but sitting here now, no.
Casey:
How can you throw money my way if you're so kind as to do so?
Casey:
Which I have been asked, which is so unbelievably nice of people to say that.
Casey:
For now, just put it aside for me, I guess.
Casey:
Buy yourself some aftershocks.
John:
Start a savings account.
John:
Special Casey savings account.
John:
Your bank knows about them.
Casey:
Just ask.
Casey:
I've set it up with every major bank across the world.
Casey:
No, I mean, obviously I'm kidding.
Casey:
you know it's to keep keep that money you know in your head if if i ever do come up with like a patreon or a member full or something like that but for now just if we say something's really good on the podcast you know sponsors really good you know just make sure you use our coupon code and if you want to be a uh if you want to be a relay fm member and you want to choose analog as the show you like the most i'm okay with that too so uh but other than that we'll see
Marco:
yeah because that's nice too like yeah like all like relay has a membership program we don't so and all of us have shows on relay so if you want to give us more money individually or as a whole you can just go subscribe and become a relay member and that helps us too why are you telling people to do relay stuff go to our sponsors website the sponsor on this podcast that you're listening to now and buy things from them with our code that's how you support all of us
Marco:
that's what i said no and ultimately you know if the time comes when sponsorship no longer makes financial sense for whatever market forces or whatever reasons and if the time comes that we ask you the listeners to pay us some amount of money per month i forget what our calculation was like to to match you know enough to to make casey you know not go out of business as himself um
Marco:
I think we'd have to have like, was it 5% of people paying $5 a month?
Marco:
Was that it or was that half?
Marco:
It was worse than that.
Marco:
You've done the math wrong and it was even more grim.
Marco:
Yeah, it was like 10 or 15% would have to pay $5 a month.
Marco:
So it's enough that it's like, ooh, that's rougher and less likely.
Marco:
But if the time comes that we would need to do something like that,
Marco:
Apply the money then, if you haven't given it to all of our sponsors yet.
Casey:
Exactly, exactly.
Casey:
But yeah, and I said this on Analog, and I will briefly repeat myself, sorry, John, and say it here.
Casey:
It is an unbelievable privilege to record this show with you guys and to record Analog with Mike, but...
Casey:
But even more so, it's a tremendous and unbelievable privilege that I am able to make a tremendous difference on my children's lives, hopefully for the best, by being home with them for this window of time.
Casey:
And it would not be possible.
Casey:
It literally would not be possible were it not for the ears that are hearing the words I'm saying right now.
Casey:
So to every listener that has ever bought a T-shirt, that has ever bought anything that the sponsors have ever sold and used our code, to any of you that have ever given us your attention for any amount of time,
Casey:
Thank you so very, very much.
Casey:
And from the bottom of my heart, and I think I speak for the other guys, but from the bottom of my heart, I deeply, deeply appreciate it because it literally is paying for my entire existence.
Casey:
And it's because of you guys.
Casey:
So tell your friends about the show.
Casey:
Buy some Casper, some Aftershocks, some Rovers, some Molecules.
Casey:
Buy all the things, and I appreciate it.