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We're missing John.
That's unusual.
You think his Mac Pro finally died after being celebrated for 10 years?
I don't want to say that that would be the best, but that would kind of be the best.
See, if it made it 10 years, which it did, that's what we were waiting for, right?
We were waiting for it to make 10 years.
and so if now it did so anytime it dies after now would not be tragic like it would be really tragic if it made it like nine and a half years right or like if it made it like one week less than but no it made it 10 years so now it can die anytime and it's not a big tragedy so now it actually becomes funnier the sooner it dies oh man that would be kind of amazing like does it make me a bad person if a little part of me maybe a lot of me wants to see that this thing has just died
I don't think I want that yet, but I can see why it would be funny if it happened, especially like right after last week's show.
Hi, John.
We're live.
Wait, John, I have to know.
What computer are you using?
uh what do you mean what computer am i using same one i always use oh what are you hoping you're trying to you're wishing for the death of my computer no neither of us would do that why would you say it's just a terrible thing ben baharin writes uh he got some clarity on the apple watch background uh afib detection watch had the watch has to detect afib six times before it will notify the user this is to help minimize false positives
yeah we've been seeing a lot of articles and and quick hot takes come out from various people in the medical field uh and people who make medical devices basically saying that the apple watch series 4 sensors are horrible because they're going to result in lots of false positives and false positives are indeed a problem like you know if something does result in a bunch of people thinking they have heart conditions uh that is bad for lots of reasons you know you have people who get a lot of who stress out about that who might get
tests done and might even have procedures or surgeries done to correct problems they may not have or may not have badly enough to get them to ask for the treatment that they ask for.
They might take away treatment for people who need it, whatever else.
So it is a problem if there's a lot of false positives.
But so far, we don't really have any evidence that the Apple Watch Series 4 sensors do generate this level of false positives.
you know i'm sure this is something that apple thought about when they designed it they're probably really careful and conservative about that kind of thing so i i would err on the side of assuming it's probably okay that they've probably done their diligence and it's probably implemented reasonably conservatively yeah that's what this item was about that it has to detect it six times which if you just think about it's like
Well, geez, wouldn't I want to know after the first one?
But it's like, no, you probably wouldn't like that.
Six times is the extra insurance to say this is not a fluke.
This is not a sensing error.
This is not your watch was shaky on your wrist and there was some salt water underneath it for a couple seconds and like six times presumably spread out over time, not just six times in a row, but like six times with.
a gap between them saying that this is a real thing this is not just a a fluke or a sensing error i thought about that a lot with the fall detection we didn't talk a little bit about in the last show where when they were describing fall detection i thought to myself uh because of the difficulty of figuring out have i fallen or have i just waved vigorously or have i just jumped or you know whatever uh
That surely either it would be off by default or it would not operate like a dead man's switch.
But then they got to that part of the presentation and said, no, if you fall, if it thinks you fell and you don't move for a minute, it will call your emergency contact or whatever.
You don't have to do anything.
And I think...
Not that calling your emergency contact or emergency number or maybe emergency number.
I don't know if it calls just your emergency contact or an emergency number or both or either or whatever.
But you could flop onto a bed and just lay there for a minute thinking and then have your watch call you or whatever.
But the fact that they made it auto call, like, I guess they have to do that because if they don't, it's like, well, if you really do have a problem, you're not going to be awake enough or at all to press a button on your watch or something.
Right.
So they have to.
have the confidence that they can actually detect a fall and distinguish it from flopping on your bed or all sorts of other things, uh, to be able to confidently follow through on their promise to say, well, we're going to make the call now.
Like we are a heuristic said, we think you fell and then you didn't move.
Therefore we're going to send, um, the six times on a fib is, you know, a similar attitude.
So as for the, the medical, uh, the medical world's reaction to this, uh,
I assume unless it is really bad, unless like there's, it requires a software update and there's like tons and tons of false positives or whatever, that the medical world will account for this eventually.
Like in the beginning, it'll be a weird novel thing or whatever, but eventually doctors will all know about it because they'll have their hypochondriac patients saying, my watch said I'm dying, right?
They'll, they'll know about it.
Doctors will understand the technology involved because they, they know the different kinds of EKGs and they understand the limitations of, you know, just having two sensing points, one on your wrist and one on your, like, I feel like it will mostly work itself out.
So, I mean, we'll see.
We'll circle back next year and see if those same doctors say this is, you know, this is a net negative for patient health.
The problem is that Apple is only going to ever tell us about, like, the 1 or 2 or 10, you know,
amazing stories where the watch saved somebody's life which will surely exist but apple is not going to probably come out and say and here are all the false positives let's weigh them against each other they're just going to show us the inspirational story so i think like it's kind of on the medical establishment and everyday citizens to to figure out what the net health effect of a bunch of nerds wearing these kind of watches is that's the saving grace is that it's you know how many people will have these watch in the grand scheme of things
Not that many as compared to how many people, you know, actually have heart conditions or own cell phones or anything else that has larger penetration than a specific kind of very new Apple Watch.
Yeah, it was interesting seeing a lot of feedback from physicians, both on Twitter and a couple via email.
And to grossly oversimplify their complaints, it seemed like they thought, A, it would create too much influx of people with not actual problems, which certainly could be.
But I don't know, I find that hard to believe because of all the reasons you just enumerated, John.
And either way,
I'd rather, like, get checked out and have a false positive than never know that I have a heart issue.
And then the other complaint that they seem to have was that this isn't a real EKG.
This is, you know, a fake EKG.
It doesn't really count, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, I'm not an MD.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't really know what it's like to be a doctor, but it seems to me like this is, you know, this is unnecessary, that this is a positive step and the medical community should embrace it.
And now I'm going to get a whole bunch of email and tweets and I apologize.
But I just think that like this is a good thing.
Giving us more awareness of what's happening in our own bodies is a good thing and should be applauded by everyone, most especially the medical community.
Yeah.
All right.
So tell me, Marco, about the camera in the iPhone XS and Tenor.
So I said I think I actually said last episode that the sensor was not larger or I said that it didn't maybe have to be larger because they said the pixels were larger.
That doesn't mean the sensor is larger.
It turns out the sensor is larger.
It's about 32 percent bigger sensor in the iPhone XS and XR and XS Max.
I don't really know... This was confirmed to John Gruber through Apple, so we know it's real.
33% larger sensor, and that's great.
For anyone not familiar, larger sensors basically means that you can get a higher ratio of detail to noise because each pixel is picking up more light, and so it has to do less...
artificial amplification of the signal to to basically see what is being shot in a scene bigger pixels slash bigger sensors mean more light gathering ability which means better pictures because you get less of the grainy noisy crap and therefore the softening algorithms need to do less work and so you can get more detail as well especially in lower light
So anyway, I don't really know why Apple didn't make a bigger deal.
They actually did, in one or two spots on the website, they did mention the sensor was larger.
But it was really downplayed, I thought.
And they never said how much larger, except for this clarification to Gruber that they gave.
That's a really good thing.
You know, I think one of the themes that I keep seeing in the reviews of the XS and the Apple Watch Series 4, because as we record this, all the press reviews for both of those devices, the embargo is lifted like today and yesterday.
And so while no customers have them yet, we now have a bunch of fairly similar reviews of them from various sites.
I really got to give a special shout out to John Gruber's reviews of both the Apple Watch Series 4 and the iPhone's XS because they were excellent reviews.
I feel like I haven't gotten a lot of great quality from other people's reviews of these phones that I've seen yet.
But Gruber's were excellent for both.
And
at the event i feel like apple didn't do a very good job of selling the benefit especially for the phones like the watch i think they did a pretty okay job although it does seem like there were a lot of benefits according to the reviews especially group review like it sounds like you know not only is the screen really nice uh you know the edge edge is nice uh but also apparently the taptic engine got way better especially in the steel model which it desperately needed uh the crown was
does feel noticeably different so you know the crown is better and and you know so like there's clearly like there's stuff going on there that they just didn't even talk about but with the phones I feel like they really didn't give a great presentation about why these phones are better than last year's phones and
they talked about how great they are in absolute terms, but not relative terms to last year's.
I know that most people don't upgrade their phones every year, but if you can't say that your phone this year is a lot better than their phone last year, it still impacts the press reaction and the news reaction and the enthusiast reaction of like...
is this upgrade worth it or not?
So I think it is important for Apple to actually say how much better it is than last year's.
And they really didn't do that in the presentation.
The good thing is the reviews seem to be clarifying that it actually is a significant upgrade in a few areas, not in all areas.
And it is possibly the S-iest year of all S-years.
But I think it is clearly like there have been noticeable upgrades in a few areas.
Again, I think Apple kind of failed to communicate that well enough.
But fortunately, the reviews are coming in and they're pretty positive.
The only negative point of many of the reviews seems to be the camera, while it is way better than the iPhone X, is not as good as some Google Pixel whatever, whatever.
And to me, that's like, wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
It's way better than the X?
That's what I wanted to know.
Okay.
And that's like the beginning of a sentence that says, but Google's phone beats it in these few areas.
And it's like, no, no, no, that's fine.
That's fine.
I don't want Google's phone.
I really, really don't want Google's phone.
I want the iPhone.
Thank you.
And so I really want to know, is this iPhone better than last year's iPhone?
So thank you for providing that, all those weird negative reviews.
Apple's done some weird stuff over the years with how willing it is to trash its previous products, right?
Sometimes Apple goes out of its way to tell you, look at this product we sold last year.
It was garbage.
Can you believe we even sold that thing?
Buy the new one.
It's so much better.
Jobs did that himself several times.
It's happened in the post-jobs era.
Not saying it's garbage, but really being willing to show the failings of what was previously their best product, right?
but this year for the for the 10s they definitely didn't do that they didn't and here's here's where i think we could have been shown about the camera they showed the smart hdr and they showed uh you know the pictures that you can take with it and you know the demonstrations dynamic range i think they even did some comparisons but like they didn't do what most of the reviews do which is i'm going to take the same exact picture with the 10 and it's going to look bad on the 10
It's going to look blown out and gross and like a bad picture.
Because I don't think Apple's ready to say, you know what?
In some situations, the 10 will take a bad sort of, as Gruber said, unusable.
And I said it last show, your garbage photos.
This is just a garbage photo.
And the 10S will rescue it and make it not garbage.
Maybe it still won't be a great photo, but you'll be able to see the person's face.
Like the sky won't be blown out.
It won't look ridiculous.
You won't be embarrassed by it.
And they didn't go that extra step to really emphasize.
It doesn't just take good pictures.
So they always show you good pictures.
Of course, it's like professional photographers and models and everything is gorgeous, right?
They have to show.
And by the way, this picture here, here's how it would look on the 10.
And you go, ugh, because I just don't think they wanted to do that this time.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they decide, but this time, for whatever reason, they didn't.
Honestly, I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal because...
you know like for the people who want to know how much better it is than a 10 whatever like but for most other people upgrading it's just a fantastic phone and everybody's going to love it and what's much more important about it are probably like the colors the finishes the prices than than like oh let me tell you how much better it is than the than the the 10 which you can't buy anymore it's like i don't care i'm upgrading from a six or a seven like so it's you know it's miles better so
Yeah, it's an S year, and maybe Apple could have trashed its previous products a little bit more.
But I think they mostly hit the highlights, just maybe in a milder form.
Unlike the watch thing, where if the Taptic Engine really is better, that could have been a thing worth mentioning.
I think they mentioned everything that's better about the S. They just maybe didn't emphasize a few things as much as they could have.
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All right, John, there is a reference in this next piece of follow up, and I am confident that I will not do it the appropriate justice if I have anything to do with this piece of follow up.
So can you just take this away for me?
Last show, I mentioned that on the GPU slide for the GPU and the iPhone XS, Apple had seemed like they had cherry picked a thing that their GPU does faster.
50% faster tessellation.
And I said, when you're citing something like that, like a specific thing that your GPU does, maybe it's not overall as fast as you would like it to be.
And you have to pick one particular operation that does much faster than its predecessor.
But apparently that's not what the slide actually said.
And I was reminded of the Simpsons episode where...
uh i think homer or somebody goes to a lawyer and he's got a business card and the lawyer asks him for money and he says but your business card says you work on contingency no money down and he says oh i see your problem and takes the the business card it says works on contingency no money down he adds a question mark after contingency and a comma after no and an exclamation point after down it says works on contingency no money down so what the slide actually said was 50 faster
tessellation it's not 50 faster is its own thing and then tessellation because it has a capital t and it's its own bullet point is telling you it does tessellation and also overall it is 50 faster so it's my bad for not catching the capital t um so it has tessellation and multi-layered rendering which is the thing that apparently the previous tv didn't have at all and in general it is 50 faster so
I apologize for missing the capitalization and sliding the GPU in the iPhone XS, which is apparently 50% faster.
Up to 50% faster.
Yeah.
Apple specs are always up to.
Whenever they're talking about relative performance, like the CPU is up to 50% faster, right?
But then it's like actually it's like 15.
You can't just say 50% faster because it's always not going to be 50% faster on some things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Steve Troutensmith has discovered that neither the Tennis or the Tenor have a landscape home screen, despite both being Plus layout models.
So let's unpack that just slightly.
Thank God.
That's how I unpack that.
Thank God.
Yeah, all the Plus phones before have had this wonderful feature where, like an iPad, if you rotated the phone to landscape, the home screen would rotate.
Well, sort of.
Basically, it was terrible.
During the admittedly brief times that I used the Plus phones in the past, I would always enable the system on rotation lock for many reasons, but this was one of them that I thought this was actually worse than... It was better for me to have rotation lock on and always have to manually unlock it whenever I wanted to watch a video or something than to constantly have my home screen automatically rotating, which I really, really never wanted it to do.
So the fact that these phones are in many ways adopting the Plus layout and doing things like multi-column and messages in mail and stuff like that, which I also hated, by the way.
But, you know, they're adopting a lot of that, but they didn't adopt the rotating home screen.
That is a very good thing.
And I hope that is not an oversight.
I hope that is actually a decision.
This reminds me of the accelerated timeline in which you came to the decision that I thought it was always the right one for Overcast 5, which we'll talk about later, which is when there's a system-wide feature for something like rotation lock or whatever, but users want to override an individual applications.
I remember when system-wide rotation lock came to what was then, I think it was still iPhone OS, and
One of my favorite applications, Twitterific, said, oh, system wide rotation lock.
We can finally take that feature out of our Twitter client.
And it has annoyed me ever since because the one application that I tend to read laying on my side in the bed is Twitter and using Twitterific.
I would love it if like Twitterific version two, I had a rotation lock in the Twitterific app because I almost never want to run Twitterific anymore.
and allow rotation but i do want to allow rotation when i watch videos on my phone or whatever like so every night i turn on rotation rock lock read some tweets laying down put my phone away wake up in the morning do something with my phone eventually in the morning or afternoon and realize rotation lock is still on turn it off blah blah so i think there is an advantage to having
a per application setting for a feature and also a system-wide one that said you go crazy if every single setting has the system-wide one and the per application one and it's a redundant it can be confusing and yada yada so you got to use it judiciously what they've done with the the 10 max is or 10s max is
not have a setting for it but just say there's no more landscape like if you liked it sorry because it's just not there anymore but it is effectively a per application override of a system setting um which again i think makes sense because i hated the rotating home screen and my wife had a plus phone as well so anyway i totally endorse the idea of selectively judiciously allowing per application overrides of system-wide settings because sometimes that's what people want
I would also say I would very much support the idea that people have floated, I think Gruber did too, of having a setting where nothing in the system rotates except video and photos.
That would be awesome.
Right now, I don't think there's any standard API to identify a view controller in your app as, this is displaying a photo.
They'd have to add some API to make this work with apps, but boy, would that be nice.
Because I think so many people, that's what they want.
I think when the phones first came out and as the world got used to multi-touch interfaces and everything else, the idea of rotation was a fun novelty.
And in some cases, when viewing visual media, maybe when reading certain things, but even that I think is rare, usually it's like when viewing photos or video or using the camera.
You want rotation for that.
in almost nothing else do people actually want rotation anymore so like my solution with overcast i i had that problem john of like you know first i like i and i had i even had the same problem with instapaper because that instapaper was i was referring to the over overcast thing we'll talk about later but yeah
Yeah, but supporting rotation in apps has always been difficult and a little bit buggy here and there.
It's easy to support it on one screen, but it becomes really tricky when open a web browser, let it rotate.
Okay, then the web browser closes.
The user goes back to a controller that can't rotate.
Does it appear sideways?
What happens if they turn the phone, you know, or if they hold the phone the same way there for a while?
Does it stay kind of in this half-rotated state?
It's very, very strange.
And the iOS handling of rotation has changed a lot over the years for developers, and it's never made it easier.
It's always made it more complicated and more buggy.
They just move the bugs around.
So my position is not only should Apple offer a system-wide toggle for this rotation lock except video and photos, but also I don't think almost any app should support rotation at all.
I think the only apps that need to support rotation are the ones that display things like that.
Most apps don't need support.
Like, I dropped rotation support from Overcast in just, like, a point release in the 4.x series, I don't know, maybe six months ago.
And almost no one complained.
And it saved me so much work when I was doing this redesign for five, which I'll talk about.
it was so much less work and so much less buggy to make screens that didn't have to rotate than it would have been with that.
So huge wins for the developer, huge wins for the stability of the app and the UI by just dropping rotations altogether.
And, you know, when I think about phone rotation, usually to do it successfully, you have to... Certainly you have to change your grip.
Most of the time, I imagine, people have to bring up their second hand.
If you're going to switch from I'm reading something in portrait to I'm watching something in landscape, very often the other hand appears to hold the phone a different way or to reach it or whatever.
So...
So maybe this is too complicated a gesture and I have to try it to see if it's a good idea.
But sometimes I think about like the two finger twist motion that you can do.
You can do it on the Mac.
I think you can do it on some phone apps too for rotation.
You know, if I could just put my two fingers on whatever it is on the screen and literally rotate it.
it's not like a per app setting it's like i'm looking you know let me give you the stupid example when people post incredibly blurry 10 times recompressed images of text on twitter i can't read them when my phone is in portrait because the text is microscopic but if i go to landscape it's you know wide enough that i can maybe read the text you actually read those yeah well sometimes i would love to be able to just grab that image and rotate it with my two fingers
It's not a gesture that's used for anything else.
It doesn't do anything now.
Some applications do do it as rotation, so it's not unprecedented.
It may just be awkward to do because I think you probably would need the second hand.
But that would get around the like, oh, like it's certainly easier than swipe up from the bottom, turn off rotation lock, rotate the phone, wait for the accelerometers to catch that I'm rotating.
Oh, they didn't catch it.
Put it back straight again.
Put it sideways.
You know, that dance.
Just let me twist the image.
But it may be awkward.
I'll have to try it.
But I would love for some app makers to try that out.
We're going to take a quick break that's not a sponsor break, but a break for something that is near and dear to all of our hearts.
Our very, very, very close and dear friend Stephen Hackett and his family have had the unfortunate situation of having dealt with childhood cancer.
And September, at least in America, is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
And as he does every year, Stephen Hackett tries to raise money for St.
Jude Children's Research Hospital and
Which is an absolutely incredible and tremendous place that happens to be in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, where families that are affected by childhood cancer can get treatment and get that treatment for free.
And the reason that works is because of donations from people like you.
Yes, you, the person listening to me right now.
I'm talking to you.
I know we've all spent a lot of money on things.
Maybe we actually should talk about that.
Maybe there is more follow-up as it turns out.
But anyway, we've all potentially spent a lot of money on things that make our lives better, but that's just for us.
And it would be cool if we could make other people's lives better.
So if you, dear listener, the person that is listening to me right now, have even a dollar that you could spare, think about that coffee or that Diet Coke or that hot cocoa that you drank today.
Could you have maybe spent that couple of bucks and helped childhood cancer?
You want to be cool, right?
Help kids get over cancer.
So give some money to St.
Jude, if at all possible.
As we record, it is Wednesday evening, the 19th.
There has been $16,652 funds raised.
By the Hackett family and everyone else for St.
Jude, I would love if we could push that over his $20,000 goal as quickly as possible.
So I think all three of us have donated.
If not, we will get on that immediately.
I actually had to donate via PayPal.
That's how serious this was, because for some reason it wouldn't accept my credit card.
But I did not want to go without donating.
And so I used PayPal, that disgusting, awful service, in order to give money to St.
Jude.
That's how serious I am.
So if possible, please go to the link in the show notes and give even but a dollar to St.
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
You could spend your money in much, much, much worse ways.
Please, it would mean a lot to all of us and especially to Stephen Hackett and his family.
So if you have a minute and if you can, please send your money that way.
And if you don't know about St.
Jude's, the thing that always strikes me about it is like, you know, if you're a family dealing with childhood cancer, it is a terrible situation to be in.
And St.
Jude's will treat your child and you never see a bill.
Like, so it's one less thing you have to worry about.
Like, you don't have to worry about...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
question of how are we going to pay for the cancer treatment for my child your money helps families not have to worry about that yeah it's it's really hard to come up with better causes than this like yeah i'm sure they exist but boy are they hard to think about like it's like this is this is kind of a no-brainer like if you if you can spare anything this is a really really great cause and is a way better idea than yet another iphone case you know or yet another iphone
indeed so yeah please send your money that way we will have a link in the show notes and it will be very hard to miss so please even just a dollar don't think that's not enough that's enough a dollar just do that or even more would be better but a dollar is great so please send some money that way now to continue the follow-up i thought we missed or i thought we were done with i should say what did we order i feel like we should uh quickly take care of that
I will start.
This is a terrible thing to do right after that.
We all gave money to St.
Jude's, and after we gave money to St.
Jude's, we gave money to Apple.
That's true.
That's right.
That is our priority system.
This is a terrible segue, but I'm committed now.
Please don't buy a new iPhone, but I bought a new iPhone.
Well, let's see.
I can tell you with an honest heart, I can tell you that I have donated a pile of money to St.
Jude's, and I have pre-ordered precisely nothing.
I almost achieved the greatness that would be only John buying the year's new iPhone.
You ruined it.
Almost, but not quite.
As foretold in Slack when you said, you know, I'm really thinking about not getting the new phone.
And I said, narrator, Colin, you got it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I got it.
I mean, because...
Two things changed between when I last week was saying, you know, I'm not that excited about it, and this week when I have ordered it.
One was, which John kind of quickly mentioned during the show that I hadn't thought of, was trade-in value.
So it isn't a question of spending zero or $1,200 or whatever it is.
It was a question of spending like $600, which admittedly is still a ton of money for what is...
a fairly minor update to the phone.
Um, so I had to, you know, really, I, I'm still not excited to have spent this money on this, but the other thing that, that convinced me was seeing all the stuff about the camera, especially seeing Gruber's review and seeing some of the sample pictures and what it can do.
Um,
I did quickly breeze by last week, like, smart HDR, if that's a real thing, could be really useful to me.
And it does seem, from the sample pictures that all the reviews have, it seems like smart HDR is a real thing.
And the sensor being larger is a pretty big deal.
You know, this isn't going to replace a full-frame camera.
It can't, with physics and cost.
But...
it does seem like the camera is noticeably better in both software and in hardware.
And that gives it enough value to me.
And honestly, the better speakers and stereo and video, once I started thinking about all this stuff, I'm like, you know, actually, I would actually really like that stuff because I'm really into sound.
And so it all added up to be like, okay, I wouldn't be happy to spend $1,200 on a...
minor speed bump but to spend 600 on a significantly better camera that actually is worth it to me
and you get a fresh battery too and also the the smart hdr stuff also happens when you do panoramas it also happens when you take a still photo during video and the video has that thing where it'll drop the frame rate down to 2040 get extra light on each frame if you take it from bright in the middle of a video if you take it from a bright into a dim scene so all sorts of stuff to help in challenging situations where previously again the previous phone would have
Taking a movie that looked okay until you turn towards the interior and everything's all shady and it couldn't see anything.
And now maybe it'll salvage something.
You'd be able to see people's faces.
Right.
And yeah, the smart HDR sort of being thread throughout the entire system, not just like for one particular still image in a particular mode.
Also, a lot of people have pointed out also that there's noticeably less shutter lag.
And that's also very important.
I miss a lot of shots because of shutter lag.
And so to have that be reduced in a noticeable way is pretty impressive and pretty important to me.
Oh, and also my screen is probably going to be a lot less scratched.
so uh most most durable screen ever they say we'll see what that means yeah well somebody i think i think it was gruber somebody got clarification that that that clarification quote unquote that it's durable because like you know durability like they said the same thing about the 10 screen but it was the most easily scratched iphone screen i think in the history of iphones because what they meant with durable was it wouldn't shatter as easily yeah the clarification was by the way it was about is it scratch resistance or durability and apple said it's both which gives you no information
like okay okay it's both it's the most durable screen ever in both it is the is it the most scratch resistant screen ever and is it also the most shadow resistant it's both uh i don't know what that means so what specifically did you order what color what what size etc 256 white uh 10s
and tiff got a tennis max is that correct same thing but max and gold so not even not the same thing at all except the 256 part i was with you for the record if you would just let that go i wouldn't have thought twice about it all right and so i i have not gotten any cheats like i said however my intention is i am going to try to go to the local apple store friday morning not necessarily to pick anything up although if it happens to work out sweet and
But I would really like to try on new watches.
My intention is to buy a new watch eventually.
But as of this time, I have not ordered anything and I'd really prefer to see it on my wrist before I do so.
So I'm going to probably try on Friday morning, laugh as it's a complete disaster of a zoo, and then try again in like a week or two and see what happens.
That is very, very wise because on the watch front, again, the sizes are so different, and they will look so different because of the screen size difference inside the case body.
There's a few different ways you can go in this.
In this week's excellent episode of Cortex, CGP Grey, our friend who's not going to hear this, was talking about...
uh how he went for the bigger watch because he always likes big watches he wants like the biggest watch he can get even before the apple watches he liked big watches and he wants the biggest screen he can possibly get on his wrist because he uses a watch that way and then conversely the kind of the flip side is like in john gruber's review he mentioned how like you know his review unit was the big one but he said he's kind of thinking maybe the small one because while the big one can fit he might be able to get away with merely the small one
And that's kind of how I think about it.
I'm not a huge watch person.
There's a certain amount of kind of just delight in having a watch that's very, very small but still looks good on you.
One of my favorite watches is my Nomos Minimatic.
It is 35 millimeters.
It is the smallest watch I own.
It weighs nothing.
It is incredibly thin.
It sits small on the wrist, but it has a super thin bezel.
And as I was mentioning last week regarding how watch size looks with bezel thickness, having a super thin bezel so the dial kind of goes edge to edge
makes it look like a bigger watch than the 35 millimeters that it is.
And I've been wearing that watch most of this past week because, I mean, it's one of my favorites, and I get a certain amount of pleasure out of, like, this thing is so small and lightweight, it feels like I'm not wearing anything at all, but I'm getting all the utility of it.
And there's a certain amount of pleasure in that, especially when it's hot or whatever else.
And so even if you could get the big Apple Watch, you may want the small one because it may be big enough that it's functional to you,
But maybe you can get away with the smaller size than you had before because of the new screen dimensions and everything.
So this is, again, strong recommendation to go to a store and try them first.
Yep.
And that is my intention.
John, however, it is your year, my friend.
It is your year for an upgrade.
So have you already ordered?
And if so, what did you get?
apparently i got an iphone 10s leather case because it's sitting in front of me right now that's the the joy of uh when it's your year to get the iphone you get to experience uh your case being delivered before your phone because for the past several years that's been true you make your order you buy your phone you buy your case the case comes first you get to sit and stare at it for a day or two or a week or whatever and then eventually your phone comes to put it on it
yeah like in the old days where like apple care would come a week before your mac would oh yeah yeah a little box and a piece of paper yeah i got what did i get i got the the space gray 256 10s i didn't want the dishwater white one um and also i when i found out that uh the bottom of them uh you know they're not symmetrical they have the extra antenna line and the different holes i figure black will hide that sin a little bit better than the shiny silver
So, yeah, that's true.
That's what I got.
And I have a black leather case for it.
It's supposed to arrive tomorrow.
No, Friday.
It's supposed to arrive Friday.
And then I'll be off to the races.
Oh, I upgraded my wife's phone to iOS 12 finally.
Now that the official one is out and I put my face on it.
And it's so much nicer.
So much nicer than entering in her password to unlock that thing.
Oh, yeah, because now iOS 12, you could have a second face.
That's right.
Oh, that's right.
I got to do that on Aaron's phone and on my phone.
Oh, I completely forgot about that.
Good call.
Oh, man, I want to set a reminder to do that tomorrow.
Wait, before we move on, did Marco get a watch?
Don't tell me about that, Marco.
I don't want to know anything.
Did you get a watch?
Of course I did.
Yeah, so you tried to let him get by without mentioning that he got the watch, too.
Casey, of all people, will understand my reasoning here.
Oh, here we go.
This is going to be good.
It was better than the Watch DTI?
It was $10,000 better?
All right.
So, owners of the 12-inch MacBook frequently will upgrade that thing as soon as there's a new version out because it is so freaking slow.
Any upgrade is actually a meaningful difference to how usable it is to them.
Like, I have never seen people...
with as much of a love-hate relationship as people have with the 12-inch MacBook because everyone loves how small it is and it's cute and that's great.
I see the appeal.
But it is just so slow.
And so when a new one comes out, that's like 20% faster or something and something like that.
You jump on it.
You buy it because even though it's so slow, you're like, this will actually be a meaningful difference because I'm so often limited by the slowness of this thing, right?
That's how I am with the Apple Watch with developing an app for the Apple Watch.
App development on the Apple Watch is infuriating.
It is incredibly frustrating and just grueling.
Anytime you have to do a build and run, which is where you're editing your code in Xcode, you can run your code in the simulator that they give you that runs on your Mac.
It's a separate app called the simulator.
And that's the fastest way to see your code, to build your code and see it running is in the simulator.
But if you want to run it on the real device, you got to plug the device in if it's a phone and hit build and run with the phone as the target.
And it takes a little bit longer and then it pops up on the phone.
On the watch, the difference between... I mean, even the simulator is slow for the watch, which is hilarious.
I don't know why it's slow, but it is.
And then maybe it's accurately simulating the watch.
And then when you do a build and run with the watch itself as the hardware target, which really is like you plug your phone in and you say, run on Marco's phone plus Marco's watch.
And then it says not available for development half the time, even though it's available for development.
And then you've got to reboot the watch and reboot the phone and close Xcode.
Maybe reboot your Mac.
Maybe someday it'll actually work.
Anyway, when you eventually get it to work and build on the watch, it takes like 45 seconds.
And that's if it works.
Much of the time, I would even say the majority of the time, it takes that long.
And then it says...
timeout didn't work i don't know or the my favorite thing is it says running on marco's watch and it's not running at all you're like great thanks you have no idea what's going on and neither do i and there's no rhyme or reason to it anyway even in the best case scenario where it actually does work that build and run cycle can take like 45 seconds or something like it's it's a long cycle and
The reason I upgraded to the Series 3 when it came out, because I was already kind of not wearing it much, but I upgraded to the Series 3 because I was doing a lot of watch work, and Underscore told me that one of his tests that he ran, the difference between Series 2 and Series 3 deployment time for that build and run thing, it would save him 10 or 15 seconds each time.
And I'm like, done.
I will spend $1,000 to do that.
That's how infuriating this delay is.
Because...
unlike the phone a lot of stuff works differently between the simulator and the hardware with the watch on the phone heart the phone simulator you can you can develop entirely in the simulator of the phone for lots of different types of apps and different capabilities and it works pretty well you don't really need the hardware for much with the phone with the watch especially when you're doing audio stuff you need the hardware a lot to see like
how does this actually behave with the integration with the now playing screen?
How does this actually behave with background audio?
How does this actually behave with air pod controls or the connection and disconnection and presence of air pods or other Bluetooth headphones?
How does it integrate with the watch faces?
Stuff like that.
Like,
It's so hard to do Apple Watch development without deploying frequently onto the watch hardware itself.
So this is a very common thing I have to do where I have to build and run on the watch and sit there and wait and wait and wait.
And that kind of waiting destroys not only developer morale, but productivity.
Because what you do while you're waiting is, well, I'm not going to stare at the screen for 45 seconds for it to maybe work.
I'm going to go read my RSS reader or check my email or check a social thing or browse the web.
And so you just get derailed because you're just stuck waiting so much.
And that's no good.
That's one of the reasons why developers can justify, and totally reasonably, things like iMac Pros.
Computers that make their job faster, that make this build cycle faster.
Because if you don't have this fast feedback loop from, okay, made a change.
Let me see it running.
Let me see if it works.
If you don't have that...
It really can crush your productivity and your morale.
It's very frustrating and it really does have an impact.
So anything I can do to get the watch build cycle to be faster, I will do.
Then I had the question, do I get the aluminum or the steel?
Before Series 3, I only got steel.
The other day, I was cleaning out a desk drawer full of like old tech gadgets and cables and crap like that.
And I pulled out my old Series 0 Apple Watch.
And I haven't plugged it in in probably two years because the Series 0 is miserable.
So I haven't pulled it in two years.
It was the steel one.
And I didn't even have it on a strap.
I had long since removed the strap from it so I could, you know, move it on to better, newer watches.
And so it's just like the watch body itself, a little, you know, round, erect blob of steel and stuff.
And I was, I picked up this thing in this drawer as I was cleaning out.
I kind of twirled around on my hands and,
It's beautiful.
Like, I love the way the steel Apple Watch looks.
It's a really nice-looking smartwatch and a decent-looking watch.
It's really, really nice.
The aluminum ones, more power to you if you like them.
I do not think the aluminum ones are attractive at all.
And again, if you like it, I'm not saying this to crap on everyone out there, to crap on your watch preferences.
If you like it, that's great.
Everyone's fashion preference is different.
I really don't like them.
And so when I had the steel watches, I would find more excuses to wear them, even though it wasn't very frequent, admittedly.
But I would wear them more
When I had the aluminum with the Series 3 this past year, I figured now I'm wearing it less than ever.
I'll get the aluminum because it's a waste to get the steel.
I had the aluminum Series 3, and I think this is one of the ugliest products Apple has ever made.
And part of that's the giant red dot.
Part of it's the thickness of the Series 3 being so ridiculously thick.
And part of it is just like, I don't let this finish.
And so now my usage of the Apple Watch has gone from occasional to only when testing Overcast and wanting to take it off as soon as possible when I get back from a walk or whatever.
And that's not good for my app.
Because increasingly, like when the Apple Watch first came out, like, you know, I was seeing something like, I don't know, 5% of people using it in the app, something like that, right?
Now it's like 15, 20%.
It keeps going up.
For me to not use the watch like ever is not good for my app.
So I rationalized myself getting the steel this time, even though I know I'm not going to wear it a ton because when I have the steel, I feel good about it.
Like I look at it and I think that's a nice looking watch.
Like I actually feel like it looks good to the point where maybe I won't take it off right when I get home.
Maybe I'll wear it for a whole day at a time or for a whole week at a time instead of just treating it like some kind of medical device that I want to get off me as soon as possible.
So that's how I rationalize it.
Not only do I want the Series 4 in general for the development speed-up, but I also went for Steel, even though it seems a little ridiculous, because I honestly think it will make me wear it more, which will be better for my app.
I honestly can't see the difference between steel and aluminum.
And maybe you had them next to each other.
I agree.
You can see the difference.
You're just saying like a normal distance is on your wrist.
It isn't, it's not a thing that stands out to you.
Well, that's the thing.
Like I cannot remember a time I've looked at somebody's wrist and been like, Oh, that's a steel.
I've only ever looked at them and said, Oh, like once or twice I saw the original edition and thought, Oh my God, are you kidding me with that?
But the point I'm driving at is I can't sitting here now.
I,
I don't recall a time I've looked at a watch and been like, oh, that's a steel watch.
Now, I completely agree.
I'm sure if you set them side by side, I would think, oh, well, that's obviously steel and that's obviously aluminum.
But I mean, just sitting here, I don't see them as that different.
And I'm surprised that you have such a...
strong reaction to the aluminum versus the steel it just seems so illogical to me and i'm not actually trying to say you're wrong is to my eyes it just seems so weird that you would have such a strong reaction but hey man you do you i mean and you said the same thing like this is taste it's it's fashion it's it's visual it's fashion it's totally irrational but it's that's it's fashion it's real it's just irrational and if you don't see this the same way
that's a really good thing because you can save a lot of money.
Exactly.
Uh, so John, you didn't order any watches for either you or Tina.
Is that correct?
No, I mean, I'm still not sure I'm going to, for all of Marco's extensive rationalizations of why he's going to do the thing we all knew he was going to do anyway.
Mine will be even worse.
If I buy this watch, mine will be even worse because I wear my watch like way less than even Marco does.
So it'll be really ridiculous for me to buy one.
But then again, like what, how long is the series zero four years, five years old?
but you get a lot of mileage out of it so i could that's probably my rationalization to be like look you wear it two times a year but if you keep it for five years it's not that bad anyway i gotta see what they look like in person see if i think it will actually motivate me to wear it three times a year instead of two or whatever um but yeah i'm not doing anything involving the watch until i see them in real life which i haven't yet oh we did get a phone for my daughter though so we got that solved what'd you get her
she got after after much hemming and hoeing she got an eight with a supposed promise that she has to use it for the next three years oh that's bold yeah we'll see if it survives we got i i opted for the theft and loss protection because i know my daughter in addition to like the drop and whatever so it's a giant case and we'll see how this goes
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i was so excited to test out the new feature of the home pod multiple named timers this is i said like i said multiple episodes in the past like this is like the one big feature it needed to make it more useful in my kitchen they finally added that and it almost works almost almost so i've been testing it for the last couple of days since i installed the update and
Oh, Siri.
It works in the most Siri way possible.
The basic functionality of it does indeed work most of the time in the sense that you can say, so like earlier today, I was making two cups of tea.
I was making a cup of green tea and a cup of black tea.
green tea you got to brew for a short time otherwise it gets really bitter so i said start a green timer for two minutes and then a couple minutes later once the water got hotter and i poured it into the black tea i said start a black timer for five minutes and it properly knows it then it'll say okay green timer set when whatever whatever and you can ask it how much time is left on the green timer and it'll say your green timer has two minutes left
When the timer goes off, it'll make this little chime and it'll say green timer is done or something like that.
It'll announce which timer is done.
So these are the basics.
Good.
The inconsistency I'm seeing, first of all, is Siri tries to be smart with what you tell it.
So I've talked in the past about the Amazon family of cylinders that one of the things I like is that you can be, you can kind of speak like a programmer.
And it'll take what you say pretty literally.
So if you want to start the sauce in five minutes, you can, with an Amazon Echo device, say, start a start the sauce timer for five minutes.
And it'll say, okay, start the sauce timer five minutes.
And in five minutes, it'll say your start the sauce timer is done.
So you can actually include like a bit of phrasing in the name of the timer and it doesn't get tripped up by that.
Siri has has this problem with everything I do with it, including with reminders, you know, with other types of intents like using creating things and things.
siri will kind of jumble what you say to it that sounds like part of the command even if it's part of what you think of as a parameter that you're passing to the request you're making so it's really hard to like create a reminder that's called something like you know remind me in five minutes to remember the milk
Because then it'll create a reminder that says something like the milk.
Because it'll see, remember, as part of the phrase of creating a reminder.
Even though you already said different words for that, it'll assume you just said it twice or something.
Siri's not good at parsing those commands like that.
Whereas the Amazon Assistant is super literal, which is both good and bad in certain cases.
But it was super literal in the sense that you can be...
you can talk like a programmer to the Amazon one and it gets it right.
Whereas Siri doesn't.
So like one of the things you can do is you can say like, you know, start a rotate chicken nuggets timer and Siri got that right for me.
But when it came time to like, you know, start a start the oven timer for 15 minutes from now, it doesn't get that right.
So that's one thing against it.
The main problem I have with it, though, so far, and hopefully this gets resolved over time, although honestly, knowing Siri, I'm not sure it will, is... So, one time, when I wanted to create a second timer, I was told today, when the feature came out and I patched my HomePod like three days ago, I was told one time today, in the middle of a sequence of doing these things...
sorry you can only create one timer at once nice i was like oh yeah really i asked the exact same thing with the exact same phrasing again and it said okay black timer created you know five minutes it knew in the business we call that green blue deployment mark
The version 1 servers are still floating around out there that hadn't actually killed them all off.
It's not a botched screen loop.
Yes.
And this happens with Siri all the time.
This is one of the biggest failure modes of Siri.
You issue a command, it just fails for some dumb reason that it shouldn't have failed for.
You say the exact same thing again and it works.
This happens all the time with Siri.
So it's really disheartening to see that this still happens even with a brand new fairly simple seeming feature.
And also...
I've now set multiple timers, I think, five or six times with it.
Three of those times, if you ask it for the status of all of the timers that are running, it has gotten it wrong, and it has reported only one of them.
And there's lots of different ways you can ask.
On the Amazon things, you can say timer check, timer status.
On Siri, I tried...
How much time is left on all of my timers?
You can try the big verbose ones.
If it works properly, you can just say, hey Siri timers, which is really nice.
It's like a nice short thing.
You can say timer check, timer status, timer, you know.
So whatever phrase I tried for three of the timer sets, and it didn't matter how often I asked after this point, for three of the sets of timers,
When I asked what's the statuses of all the timers, it gave me just one of them, usually the last one that was created.
But the first one wasn't canceled.
You could still ask for the, like, whichever one it wasn't reporting, I could still ask for it by name, and it still went off on time.
So, like, it's still there, which is comforting, I guess.
It would be worse if they just disappeared.
But the fact that it's still inconsistent, and they still, like, such a simple thing,
And this was one of the only new features of the HomePod since April or something.
And they didn't even get this right on the server side.
It's still intermittently failing for dumb reasons.
I mean, for God's sakes, what is going on at Siri?
This is such an almost great product.
I like the HomePod in so many ways.
And as Amazon moves forward with their stuff...
I generally trust them less because it seems like they're doing weird things sometimes with their setups and they're pushing it in weird directions.
And I generally don't trust Amazon to be a good steward of their platform long term.
I think they're going to start doing weirder and weirder stuff with it, like with their weird voice chat stuff and building in more things.
They just want more of your info and they want to dominate more of your life.
And I know Amazon's going to ruin what they have because they always do with this kind of stuff.
See also Kindles.
So I know they're going to ruin this.
And so I want so badly to switch to the HomePod.
But if it can't do basic stuff reliably, come on.
That's the basic requirement.
I'm okay paying their crazy prices.
I'm okay not having all the skills that the Amazon series has.
I love that it is a nicer looking thing.
I love that it sounds way, way better.
I love all the privacy stuff that Apple does.
It just has to work.
And Siri still doesn't do basic things reliably.
What year is this?
Why hasn't somebody changed this?
They have all the resources.
Other companies have demonstrated for years that it is possible to do this with way more reliable results than what Apple does.
What they're doing with Maps, the big article that came out a few months back where they're doing this big reset on Maps, if they aren't doing that with Siri, I have serious concerns.
And I hope so badly they're doing that because something is deeply dysfunctional and rotten about Siri that they can't get basic stuff to work reliably.
Even something as simple as this, this is a critical part of infrastructure for the company and its products.
They have to make a change.
i was joking before about blue green deployment which by the way please don't send me your emails and tweets about because i said green blue i meant blue green it's fine anyway um but uh it is the case that this feature just came out and you just updated your home pod so it could be just one of those transitional hiccups and if you try again like today for instance now that they transition all the way or wait a week or whatever that all of the old servers that think they can only do one time or time at a time or
No, this was right before the show.
This was the tea I just finished drinking.
This is like... Oh, well.
Honestly, I don't even know how much of that is server-side anyway, so it is pretty baffling.
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Congratulations, my friend, because you have shipped Overcast 5.
And from my experience and from the experience of everyone I've seen comment on it, things are going pretty well.
Yeah, thank you.
You are right.
I mean, it has really been very well received.
I'm very, very happy with it.
So Overcast 5 is a pretty substantial redesign to the now playing screen.
And I did this for a lot of reasons.
We can get into it if you want.
But basically, it's a pretty big redesign.
So there was a lot of potential for people to dislike the change because nobody likes when you change anything.
Then they'll email you asking you to change things.
So it's a very, very hard line to walk when you want to make a change to an app and please the old customers or at least not anger the old customers while making your app better for new customers.
That's a very, very hard thing to do.
and I have not always been very good at that.
But in this case, this worked out well, and the new now playing screen is way more discoverable and usable, and I think looks nicer than the old one.
And so it has worked.
There's a lot of other things about the update too, but that's the big thing.
That was the thing that I was most proud of and was most scared of the reaction.
I don't remember during the beta process if you had tried this or if it maybe was before the beta, but did you ever try going with three dots under the thing instead of the things poking in from the sides I'm now playing?
That's what Overcast 4 was.
So there were a couple of issues with that.
So number one was there was really no good place to put the chapter title when you had the three dots interface.
And this is a common iPhone interface thing, the three page dots that you get under anything that's multiple pages.
And that indicates you can swipe this and there are multiple pages to this thing.
So I thought the previous design just had the artwork, edge-to-edge, big square, and it was scrollable, and on a page to the left was the speed and settings and stuff, and on the page to the right was show notes.
I was getting emails every day from people saying, I would love your app if it had speed controls.
or i changed the speed i don't know how to change it back everyone's talking too fast help oh no it was very clear to me from in you know from all sorts of feedback that the previous design just was not discoverable enough that those three dots there were two problems number one the three dots weren't very discoverable even when they were shown number two they were hidden and
and replaced with the chapter bar when podcasts had chapters.
And that's how I added this feature.
When I was designing that screen, very few podcasts had chapters.
So it wasn't that big of a problem.
Then I released an app that made it really easy to make chapters.
And this was probably poor timing.
So then a lot more podcasts, especially those popular in Overcast, started adding chapters.
And so the percentage of time these dots would display was going down.
But even when they were displayed, you know, most of, like, most, like, novice users were listening to podcasts from, like, you know, big producers.
They never use chapters because they use low production value on the files despite all the money they spend on the production itself.
So, you know, most people weren't seeing or weren't having the dots hidden from them by the chapter bar.
Most people were seeing the dots, but they just weren't noticing or knowing what it meant, right?
And this has been a problem that I faced with Overcast since 1.0 of...
Anything that is hidden behind a swipe or a gesture, anything that is not really visually obvious, that visually is on screen, people won't find and they won't use.
And they'll think the app just doesn't have that feature or they'll email me asking about that feature or they'll get really mad because it doesn't have the feature.
And all this time, it does have the feature, but it just wasn't in an obvious enough place in the design.
My entire design arc of Overcast for the last couple of years has been slowly surfacing features visually instead of making things just behind swipes or just behind menus or whatever else, or just behind the edit state of a controller or anything else like that.
Because those things, people don't find them.
And so the now playing screen, the big swipey area on top, that was just always a big problem with it that just nobody would ever find the two other pages.
So that's the main thing I wanted to solve for this.
And if you look around, Apple's podcast app and the music app both have similar issues.
Remember when the music app, I think it was iOS 10 or 11, when it first put the repeat and shuffle buttons where you have to scroll the now playing screen to see them below everything else?
Remember that?
Yeah.
Yeah, but there's no affordance for that, though, unless you have some content cut off.
When there was no content cut off, at least the dots give you something.
What I was thinking with the dots with the Overcast 5 is I always felt the Overcast 4, because it was edge-to-edge, right-to-left, it didn't look like there was anything to the right or left.
And then with the new design, just by shrinking the art to have margins around it, maybe even without the things peeking out of the side, this design with the dots...
would be more discoverable than the four design with a dot obviously i think it's even more discoverable with the lines but i wonder if people are going to figure out what it means that there's these little gray lines on the side like i mean you'll find out i guess from the feedback but i was thinking like why not belt and suspenders why not have things poking out from the side little grip handles and three dots
The main thing is, I mean, first of all, I would have the same problem with chapter stuff where the best place to put chapters in this UI is right where the dots would go.
And so do you do the same thing where the dots are hidden when the chapters are shown?
And then even then, I've also moved the main time slider down below the art.
Before it was always above the art.
Now it's below the art, so it's more easily reachable on super tall phones.
I think it would look really crowded there with the three dots...
and then a small gap and then this time slider right there yeah you made the time slider so skinny that's one of the things i miss is being able to glance at it and see how much of orange is filled up is it a halfway orange or three quarters orange now it's like this really skinny line with a little tiny dot it's much harder to read at a distance it looks more elegant but not sure it is uh it is as fisher price friendly as the old one was
Part of this is also just fashion.
It's app design fashion.
App designs have... Fashions come and go.
Trends come and go.
The previous design was incredibly iOS 70.
And it was really looking dated to me.
Very, very, very dated.
And if you look around at where design trends are going now...
it really is away from a lot of like straight thin edge to edge lines and towards a lot more like, you know, rounded shapes, uh, line widths of maybe like three pixels or, you know, 1.5 stroke kind of things like, you know, and, and like, like one little detail I have like on the scrubber, the, um,
the actual scrubber head of that timeline, there's a background color stroke around it.
So what you see is a circle, a small one-pixel gap, and then the bar behind it.
That's a trend recently.
There's stuff like that, that if you want your app to look modern all the time, you have to evolve the design over time.
If you don't, your app looks old and stale and geeky and boring.
And this is a lesson I have slowly learned.
I'm not all the way there yet.
I'm not saying I am.
But I have slowly learned I have to keep the design up to date.
I have to keep evolving it.
I have to keep looking around and noticing what's going on in the world of popular apps because...
I'm not making this app just for nerds like us.
I'm making this app for the mass market.
That is my goal.
It has always been my goal.
And that is the audience that it thankfully has.
And so I'm really having to pay attention to things like trends and to things like keeping it updated and fresh.
So anyway, that's where that came from.
But anyway, so what I was saying earlier with the music thing, like...
laying out a now playing screen in a way that looks nice is modern but also has a lot of functionality and also has a functionality be discoverable is incredibly hard and i'm not the only person struggling with this like if you look around and
music apps, and especially podcast apps, because podcasts have more features they have to cram into that screen.
It's a really big challenge of how the heck do you have a lot of accessible features there that are also discoverable and also look nice.
This is a challenge I have been struggling with for all over Cat's history.
And again, look at every other app, including Apple's.
They have the same struggle.
When Apple put the shuffle and repeat below the scroll thing on the music screen, no one found it.
And then in the next version of iOS, Apple added like a little like help tip the first time you launched it saying, did you know these were down here?
Which is like the worst way to solve that kind of problem.
Even Apple gets this wrong sometimes because that's how big of a design challenge it is.
And again, I say design here not in the sense of making it look pretty because that isn't what this kind of design is.
This is like deciding what should be on the screen and how it should be presented and how it should work.
That's the kind of design I'm talking about.
And it's just a really hard problem.
And if you look around at different podcast apps...
We've all struggled with this exact same problem.
And we've all come up with different solutions to different degrees of success.
But it's a really hard problem.
So that's one of the reasons I was so excited about this design that I think I actually have a pretty good solution this time.
I think I finally got it right.
For the first time in Overcast history, I finally got a modern-looking design that is also highly functional and also highly discoverable.
And the rest of the app, I still have a lot of work to do.
But the now playing screen, I think I'm proud of that.
I think it turned out well.
I definitely like it.
I never really had an issue with the side-to-side swipe, but I can see how it would not be discoverable to a lot of people.
And this looks good.
I also like the haptics that you've done with it.
And I saw a tweet, I think, earlier today about how that's been controversial, but I thought you did it very well.
I didn't think it was too aggressive.
I thought it was good.
That's what I was referring to before, where he's turning it into a setting because he started off saying, I don't need this as a setting.
It's a system-wide setting.
But now some people want it system-wide but not an overcast.
So it's going to be an app setting.
Yeah, exactly.
And actually, I did the haptics pretty late in the beta.
I've only been using them myself for a few weeks.
But there is a system-wide setting in iOS preferences to turn off haptics.
And so I assumed that people who didn't like haptics would just use that setting.
But once again, just like rotation, there's a lot of demand for people who want to leave that setting on for other ways the system uses haptics, like maybe live photo previewing or peak and pop previewing, stuff like that.
There's lots of other ways the system uses haptics, notifications.
So they want that to be on, but they don't want it in certain apps.
And
at first i thought that would be almost nobody who would want that turns out it's a decent number of people so i'm gonna add a preference and you went pretty haptic crazy like when you when you do the side to side swipe on the huge region at the top you get a haptic just in case you can't tell that something changed when you swipe like literally the whole top half of the screen to the right or left like the button press is where it makes more sense because you're like did i hit the button is my finger too dry did i just brush it that happened because oh yes it registered it registered my thing but i feel like we're doing it the swipe at the top is a little overboard
Well, but see, this is like – everyone has a different opinion of what is overboard.
Like if the reaction to the haptics was simply this is too much, I would just like remove some of them or tune them down or whatever.
And by the way, I don't actually have a whole lot of control over like the strength of them or the style of them.
Like the system provides a very small number of preset haptics you can fire.
And they have semantic meanings attached to them.
Like the API, it's things like notification haptic.
It's things like impact, where like one view slides up and hits another one, like when a screen slides into place and locks into place.
There's one for selection changed.
And you're supposed to use these semantically.
You're supposed to like, you know, not use the wrong...
you know, named haptic, even though it might feel better for what you think you're doing.
And so I thought by following these guidelines and by, you know, by using them semantically and everything else that people would like it, and a lot of people love it, but enough people don't love it that I need a preference.
Well, they're all wrong because I love it.
I like it too a lot, whatever that's worth.
What about Watch Playback?
That's back.
That's exciting.
Yeah, that's really exciting.
I almost have forgotten about it because it was the first thing I did this summer and that seems like forever ago now.
But I'm so freaking happy.
Overcast's history with Watch standalone playback is long and colorful and mostly awful because it's a feature that I tried to do a long time ago.
I don't know, watchOS 3.
When I was doing the watchOS 3 version, I tried to do it.
I don't think I ever said this anywhere.
The reason I tried to do it was because somebody at Apple had asked me to do it.
When somebody from Apple asks you to do something, you say yes.
That's generally good for your app.
You probably should say yes to that.
And so I thought, well, if they're asking, I'll prioritize this.
So I spent like three months on it.
I discovered during the course of that three months that the API was just totally impossible to make this good or functional.
It was especially frustrating because somebody there had asked me to do it, so I assumed they had probably checked with someone and they knew it was possible, and it just wasn't.
And I was just battling the API for months, and I lost a good three months on this, and it was very demoralizing and very frustrating.
Later on in watchOS 3, a couple apps came out that offered this, and they used a trick where they basically identified themselves as a certain type of workout monitoring app, but without actually needing to use HealthKit for anything.
There was just some kind of fluke where if you put the certain key in your P-list or your watch app...
you could use a much better API.
You could use AV audio file player instead of WK audio file player, which is terrible.
You could use this much better in-process API.
I think I've talked about this before, but like in-process versus out-of-process.
At least I have it under the radar.
And so this became possible.
So I decided, you know what?
I already built almost everything else for this feature with minimal effort.
I can use this workaround and ship this feature like today.
So I did.
Then...
overcast or then watch os 4 was slated to come out and i got a phone call from some friends who said hey uh this is gonna stop working the reason it worked was a bug we fixed the bug
That's not a fun phone call.
Nope.
And they were very nice and apologetic about it, but it was clear that they were not going to unfix the bug just for me.
And so I had to remove this feature.
Because I had this feature at one time, there are articles out there on the web that say, use Overcast to have offline watch playback.
Okay?
And they, of course, weren't updated after I removed it.
So...
I have gotten an email every two days for the last year or so from somebody saying, I can't figure out how to send to my Apple Watch.
This option is not showing up.
I can't figure it out.
What's going on?
The real killer is at least half of those emails say...
I even paid for the premium version and now I can't find this feature.
I want a refund.
This feature was never behind the premium paywall.
This is just like what people do.
It's like it's a common failing of like they look for a feature that they heard was in an app.
It's not there and they see an option to pay for a premium thing in the app.
No one ever reads anything in text in apps.
You can put whatever text you want in the app.
They're not going to read it.
They see, oh, I got to pay for something and I'm not finding this feature.
Okay, I'll pay.
And now I get the feature, obviously, even though it never says that anywhere.
But again, no one reads text in apps.
So they would pay for it, still not find it, and get really mad that they just got ripped off, even though I never promised it.
But that doesn't matter what I promised.
It matters what's in their head.
It was just a bad situation to be in, but I couldn't really do much about it.
The only thing I could do is offer that feature again.
And so when watchOS 5 came out, or when it was announced in June, and Apple actually made a lot of meaningful improvements and changes to the way watch background audio playback works, I could finally actually offer this feature well.
Not super well, because file transfers still suck, but well enough to be shippable and functional again, and even better than it was before, honestly.
And so I finally was able to do that, and that launched again two days ago with Overcast 5, and I'm just so freaking happy that this is finally done.
uh and and i and i've done a few changes for how it's done like one of the main things is i'm now automatically syncing your most recent x podcast to your watch um rather than making you send them individually um which kind of helps minimize the problem of transfers just taking forever because they're going over bluetooth uh but uh overall it's so nice it's you can finally like take only your watch out for a run with headphones and it works it's really nice
That's super awesome.
And I actually haven't had a chance to use this yet because I haven't gone for a run once I had the new beta installed and all that.
But it's super exciting and I'm really looking forward to trying it.
Oh, yeah.
And volume control.
This was fun, too.
So by far the most common feature request besides standalone watch playback, maybe even more common than that for the watch app has always been volume control in the watch app.
This wasn't possible in the API.
There was no API that I could use to programmatically control the volume of watch playback ever.
And there is one that you can use to programmatically control volume of the iPhone.
The API to do that on the phone is deprecated.
I didn't want to build a major feature against an API that's been deprecated for like five years because that means Apple could remove it at any time or I could start getting rejected for using it.
And so I had a watch app that didn't have volume control.
WatchOS 4 introduced a feature, which is nice when it's what you want, introduced a feature that by default, it's called something like audio apps, but you know, active audio apps, something like that.
It's in the watch settings.
The feature is that when you are playing an audio app on the phone and you glance at your watch and
That app, if it has a watch app that's installed, it will show up, even if it wasn't your last used watch app.
So it kind of like auto-launches your current phone audio app on your watch when it's playing, which is a nice feature.
The problem is that my app didn't have a volume control.
and air pods came out and air pods have no good way to control the volume on the air pods and so there was all of a sudden a very popular bluetooth headphone that had no volume control on it which is pretty unusual like almost every bluetooth headphone before it had volume control so this was like a new issue with air pods they were all of a sudden very popular had no volume control and there was a feature of watch os 4 that brought the audio app that was currently playing to the front automatically and
And most people left it on.
It was on by default.
So I got a lot of people saying the best way to use Overcast on your watch is to delete Overcast off your watch.
Because if you deleted it, then the now playing card from the system would show up and that had a volume control on it.
And I couldn't match that.
I couldn't do my own volume control because the API wasn't there for it.
And so the actual outcome was the best way to listen to Overcast with AirPods was to delete it off your watch.
That's a terrible outcome.
But that was the reality of all of watchOS 4.
WatchOS 5 finally gave me a freaking volume widget that I could put in my interface.
And they did it in the most bare bones way possible.
It is a pre-made widget.
The only thing I can customize about it is the color of the line that goes around it.
That's it.
And you can customize whether it's controlling the watch's volume or the phone's volume.
But you can't change it programmatically because the watch volume widget is a private class.
You can put it in a storyboard, but it is a private class that you can't call from your code.
Nice.
You can't assign it to an outlet.
You can't modify its properties at runtime.
So to offer a screen that has both local volume control in one mode and watch volume control in another mode, I have two of those widgets in that sorted board.
Just one of them is hidden at any given time.
It's the craziest hack that you have to do to make this work.
It's such a weird, like, bare bones thing.
But the fact is, it does work.
And it takes up a freaking third of the screen, but I don't care.
It's worth it because it's such an important feature.
So finally, I was able to offer offline playback and volume control on the watch.
And those are major, major feature requests that a lot of people had.
And the API was too limited before I couldn't offer either of them through no fault of my own.
And of course, people don't know that, you know, they still, you know, they still kind of blame me for it not being there.
And so, you know, to be able to finally offer these things is a pretty big deal.
Yeah, that's awesome.
I assume the next step is freshening up the rest of the UI?
Honestly, I'm not in a huge rush to do that.
I mean, any kind of major UI change to some of the basic screens of the app is a pretty big undertaking.
Not as big as an app playing screen.
That was the biggest, I think.
But the app playing screen took me like two months.
That was a lot of time.
because it just it impacts so much other stuff and so there were so many other things that needed to be changed for it so like you know like all the card controllers like the effects controller the chapter control the chapter controller didn't exist before it was part of show notes the show notes control like all these things have to be modified to fit with it all the buttons i kind of modernized the the look of all the buttons to match the new style um you know like the stroke width is changing on lots of the icons it's getting thicker um some of them were restyled and
I totally rewrote the sleep timer because it sucked before and now it doesn't, or it sucks less at least.
There's all sorts of things that had to get updated or be modified in some way to work with the new layout.
So doing that to other screens, while not as big of a deal, is still a lot of work.
And at the end of it, what you get is something that a lot of users don't care about.
So it's a hard balance.
I have to balance between what I want to do as a developer of like, I want to make my app fresh and new.
That'll help get new customers and everything.
But also, my existing customers, a lot of them don't care about a redesign.
That's kind of an indulgent thing that I do for me and not for them so much.
They want features.
And so I have to balance how much time I spend.
If I do a whole bunch of redesign stuff and not enough feature stuff, I'm kind of neglecting my existing customer base, trying to get new customers.
But if I only get new customers by doing a bunch of redesign stuff, anyway, it's a balance you got to strike.
Well, I'm excited to try offline playback.
And in general, the app has been great.
It works really well.
I think it's very pretty, very well done.
I like it.
It's my podcast app of choice.
Thank you.
Oh, and search was a big thing.
It was bigger than I expected.
I'm going to do an entire episode of Under the Radar, I think, this week.
An entire episode of Under the Radar about implementing search.
It is surprisingly deep of a topic.
Yeah.
And so I'm not going to cover it here.
But see this week's Under the Radar for how to implement search.
All right.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Casper.
And we'll see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
So Casey, you have released sort of another video.
Indeed.
As we record this, the video is not out.
It is queued up and ready to rock, but I have not pushed the go button yet.
You have released to us a new video.
Yeah, I have released to the two of you and a couple of other friends a new video.
This video is of the 2018 Volkswagen GTI Autobahn.
So this is as close as one gets to a Golf R without actually being a Golf R. Additionally, this one had the direct shift gearbox, which I continually and will forever call a dual-clutch transmission because that's a BMW version of it, but basically the same idea.
But anyway, this is the latest episode of Casey on Cars.
There will be a text review, a blog post review that you guys have not seen but is written and queued up.
I will put a link to that in the show notes.
And, of course, there is a video which you guys have seen.
So, all right, do your worst.
Tell me what I did wrong.
Well, John didn't do his homework, so he can't tell you.
Ah, that's right.
I did like a quarter of my homework.
All right.
So I'm going to start with the negatives so I can end with the positives.
All right.
Number one negative I noticed, which you will hear from a lot of people, including John because that's the part he saw, is there is some jittery camera motion during some of your movement shots, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is.
If I had to guess, you were shooting that on a modern iPhone on a gimbal.
Is that right?
Well, so I used a gimbal only when I was doing moving shots of the car from the outside.
Right.
So you're like walking up to it or panning around it kind of things, right?
Yes, exactly.
So there's some jittery movement that happens during this.
And so what I'm pretty sure you're seeing, I'm not positive because I haven't looked at the DJI app that I haven't launched in a very long time for my gimbal that I haven't used in a very long time, but...
I think what you're seeing is the camera's image stabilization fighting the gimbal.
This is a thing that ever since the dawn of image stabilized cameras and lenses, you've had to disable image stabilization when using them on a tripod or another gimbal.
If you're doing like a panning mode on a tripod, because basically what happens is the image stabilizer doesn't know that it's being stabilized by something else.
And so if you're like doing a panning shot on a tripod...
the image stabilization in the lens will kind of like jump a little bit as like it'll try to correct the pan that you're doing, reach the end of what it can do and then jump back and then correct it again and then jump back.
So you have this kind of jumpy motions in the panning motion as it moves.
And similarly, when you're on a gimbal,
You know, the gimbal is doing the stabilization, but again, the phone doesn't know that.
And so phones that have optical image stabilization during video shots, which I believe is everything after the 7, I think.
But anyway, optical image stabilization during video now fights when you're on a gimbal.
It does the same thing where it kind of like jumps a little bit, like every bit of motion, like maybe every second or two, you'll have like a little bit like a correction where the stabilizers are kind of correct for the motion that just happened.
And so what you need to do, I'm not sure you can, but what you need to do is disable image stabilization in the phone when you're using it on a gimbal.
Somehow there is a, I think there's a way, if there isn't, you shouldn't use a modern iPhone on a gimbal like this.
You should use one up to a 7 that doesn't have stabilization.
you may want and this is this is more advanced you may want to learn how to use it without autofocus either you know like one of the biggest effects that video people try to avoid by usually not using autofocus or using it very carefully is what you don't want to see in a video is focus hunting yeah this is the thing where the camera like blurs in and blurs out because the camera itself is moving the focal point forward and back looking for the correct autofocus point
And the easiest way to not have that is to manually focus.
And that's hard.
You will get it wrong sometimes and just have blurry shots that you might not be able to use.
But generally, an occasional blurry shot that you may have to reshoot or not use or hope nobody notices is less noticeable and less bad than seeing focus hunting happening in a video.
So you may want to consider learning how to do this without autofocus.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was one shot toward the end where I kind of walked up to the GTI logo that you can very clearly see.
And I noticed it and I thought about cutting it, but I felt like it's okay enough to pass my test, at least for this video, and I didn't want to fight it anymore.
But I know exactly what you're saying.
And actually, for most of the tripod shots...
where i'm talking to the camera i did that with filmic pro and i did that in such a way that i locked the focus and locked the exposure because something i noticed as well in prior videos of my own is that there was some not only focus hunting but exposure hunting if you yeah yeah where where you know it's kind of trying to figure out is what what's what is the user focusing on here and how how how should i expose the entire image in order to get that thing exposed properly and
And so with Filmic, you can lock not only exposure, but lock focus.
And so I tried to do that for pretty much any of the shots, like I said, where I'm outside the car talking to the camera directly.
Yeah.
And so that's again, it's hard to solve that.
I actually find just when I shoot like, you know, casual video, I find the auto exposure on the iPhone during video is actually pretty good.
And I don't usually find myself fighting it.
Agreed, agreed.
In this particular case, I think it makes sense for me to exposure and focus lock.
Generally speaking, I completely agree with you that the focus, yeah, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not, but the exposure is usually very good.
But I noticed in prior videos of my own that sometimes it isn't.
So I should warn you with this next part.
I took one video production intro class in college.
So what I'm going to tell you is from like video 101, it's probably oversimplified and actual video people who are listening to this are going to want to kill me because it's probably going to be awful.
When you're doing a two camera setup.
There's this concept of the 180 line.
Are you familiar with this?
No, not at all.
So the idea basically, and again, people who know what they're talking about, I apologize.
I'm very, very sorry.
I'm probably going to butcher this and tell him all the wrong information, and I'm sure you're going to write in and tell us the right stuff.
The basic idea, as I remember it from College Film 101, is... So if you think about, like...
If you have a two-camera shot, think about filming two people sitting talking to each other.
The idea is you have a line that's kind of like the plane of what you're looking at, like the line between them.
And the whole idea of doing multi-camera with this rule, the 180 rule, is basically make a semicircle.
That comes from that line around them.
So you can kind of position the cameras any point around that line.
So you have half of a circle.
The people are in the flat line in the middle of that circle.
And the camera can go around the perimeter.
The idea is you only have that front half of that circle to put the cameras.
You never cross over that line and go behind them.
What would be visually behind them?
Do you get what I'm saying?
I think so.
And so the idea is...
If you're alternating between shots and one of the cameras crosses over this windy line, it disorients the viewer.
It makes it hard to follow like what – wait, where am I?
What perspective am I seeing this from?
It's disorienting and it looks weird and it doesn't look good.
and there was a shot uh there were a set of shots you did with two gopros in the car and it was funny because you could see the other gopro yeah in the shot right and what and the angles that you had these set up i think it was getting a little too uncomfortably close to cross they were like they were almost 180 degrees from each other but you know like and so it kind of it felt like you were breaking this rule a few times where like there were a few cuts that you would do between those two cameras or i would think oh that i feel like i'm i'm backwards now like it it was it was a weird cut
Yeah, I can understand that.
Also, when you're doing two camera shots, or when you're doing even one camera shot, it helps when you're doing a cut to avoid the look of a jump cut.
You know what a jump cut is?
Yeah, yeah.
And it's a little different now because now jump cuts are kind of popular among the popular vloggers.
Mm-hmm.
But the idea of avoiding a jump cut where, like, it looks like the camera just, like... It looks like you just cut part of video out of it and, like, it just, like... The person just kind of jumps instead of looking like an intentional cut where, like, you change the angle, right?
Mm-hmm.
There were one or two jump cuts that I left...
Kind of deliberately, but there were actually quite a few that I masked by also simultaneously doing a camera cut as well.
So I would, you know, clip a bit of video and then at the moment where I went from, you know, the prior bit to the new bit, I would also switch cameras in order to mask that.
Right, and so one of the ways that when you're doing multicam like that, one of the ways it looks better, and you didn't have this issue so much, but I think it would be an improvement, is when you're doing a cut from one camera to another,
Not only should you vary it by not a small amount, because if the two cameras only vary by a small amount, it looks like a jump cut.
It looks kind of weird.
They should be noticeably different angles, but also, if possible, they should be noticeably different zoom perspective levels.
because then like basically when you're doing between two cameras the more different the two cameras look without being too disorienting like breaking the 180 line the more different they look generally the better and more professional it looks and the less it will ever look like a jump cut so again sorry film people i'm probably butchering this i apologize but this is what i remember from my 101 class you can write in if there's if there's a good resource for casey to look at that's better than me feel free
the two GoPros that you had in the car during those shots, not only were they basically 180 degrees from each other, but also, I felt like the angles, even though they were so different, like, the perspective I was getting, it was too similar, like, your framing between, like, where you appeared was so similar, like, I felt like,
those would have looked better if one of them had a more different perspective than the other one yeah and i never really was satisfied with any of the placement i had for the gopros any of the times i was in the car um well that's not fair the one that was basically you know a close shot of me i was fine with i mean it's it's i didn't have any particular issue with that but with the other one
I never, which happens to be the silver one because you can see it in some of these shots.
I was never particularly satisfied with where that was.
And in the R, I put that basically at my left ear, which I didn't mind so much because I felt like it was giving a nice perspective of what I was looking at.
But it seemed like I was that that I was alone in that opinion or maybe not literally alone.
But, you know, I feel like I got a lot of feedback that that people didn't particularly love seeing the side of my face like that.
And so I was trying to figure out something that was kind of a halfway where you can see my entire like face and some of my body, but also see what's going on in front of me.
And I agree that I was not in love with the placement I had for it, but I couldn't really come up with a better one.
And maybe the answer is I just give up on showing me at all.
And maybe I just have it, you know, pointing directly out the front of the car.
I'm not sure.
But this 180 thing, I'm not sure.
But this 180 thing you're talking about, that to some degree verbalizes or like personifies is the word I'm looking for.
But verbalizes, I guess, you know, the kind of icky feeling I had about it.
I just couldn't figure out how to make it better.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, thank you very much to Colby underscore underscore in the chat room who's linked to something I didn't know existed, the 30-degree rule, which is saying that basically when you're transitioning between two cameras and you're doing a cut, that the camera you're going to should be at least 30 degrees different in where it is oriented perspective-wise to the subject as the first cut was.
Does that make sense?
You should move at least 30 degrees with the position of the second camera from the first one.
Thank you, Colby underscore underscore for that.
I didn't know about that one.
Ultimately, though, you're getting really good at this.
You can see a progression of what you're doing and problems you're solving as you go.
When you watch your videos in order, you can see how you're getting better.
It's pretty noticeable.
I would say...
you have almost completely solved your in-car audio challenges good oh good and that's a big one that that's because like that was i know that was really hard and and and you know and that was that was an area that really needed it before and you're pretty good like like the in-car lavalier mic stuff you did was pretty good there were a few places where you clipped when like you know and you could hear the clipping distortion and there were i i would suggest doing some level compression and
and volume level matching there are ways to do this and various apps and things that uh i can maybe tell you about sometime i don't know uh but uh yeah so like there were there were a few issues of level matching where like you know one recording session would be much louder than the other one or whatever um but it was better on this one than it's been in the past videos for sure in that way and the in-car audio was way better with the lavalier mic
The other thing is the placement of it was such that when you would turn your head over the shoulder so that your mouth would get closer to the mic, it was way louder.
And that, you can play with the positioning of it and maybe the directionality of it.
You can play with that a little bit.
Ultimately, that always happens with lavaliers to some degree.
So what you should probably do there is look into level compression and volume normalization where you just compress your levels such that...
no matter where your head was turned, you sound roughly of similar loudness.
This is not an easy problem to solve, but it is solvable.
This is what people do.
But for the most part, pretty good.
Content-wise, I loved a lot of this.
I loved the part, especially about the transmission preference and how it made you so uncomfortable to admit.
That was really fun.
I really enjoyed that, actually.
And content-wise, I thought that was very interesting, very nice.
It was a good balance of...
nerd casey versus what the rest of the world wants to hear about because it's like like this is something that you wouldn't get this in like here's the review from you know edmunds for this car should you buy it details at 11 or whatever but like you know you wouldn't get it in like a video like you know for like every consumer you get it from a car nerd and it's like that's really nice like i actually really enjoyed that part
To fill in really quickly what Marco's referring to, a little bit of spoilers here, but, you know, I had this DSG gearbox and... No, it is DSG, not DCT.
I'm trying to train myself.
Anyways, the point is, I had a two-pedal manual transmission car and...
And the conclusion I came to was that I actually preferred the completely automatic ZF8 speed from the Giulia over the DSG and the GTI.
And I kind of talked about, and I won't totally spoil it and it'll take a while, but suffice to say, I talk about that a lot in the video because that was one of the big differences between the cars.
And again, it's an uncomfortable conclusion I came to, but I actually kind of preferred the automatic, which made me feel really gross and icky.
So that's what Marco's referring to is that whole...
kind of conversation i have with with the viewer as as this video is going on and then finally i would just say on the content uh there was never a point where i looked down at the time scrubber to see how much time was left ah that that is a flawless victory in my book and that's extremely good to hear
Yeah, when watching almost any video on YouTube, I almost always at some point end up moving the mouse up to the video screen to unhide the time slider and to see how much time is left because I'm getting a little bit bored.
And that didn't happen.
I've made it through the entire video not doing that once.
And that's unusual and that's commendable.
So good job.
Well, I appreciate it.
And John, I know you haven't watched much of it, but do you have any thoughts from the brief window of time that you did spend watching it?
I've been watching it without audio while you've been talking here, so I've seen it.
I want to applaud the banishment of the ugly parking garage in favor of the nice grassy places, although I feel bad for whoever's house that was that you caught in the shot at some point.
I don't know if they want their house to be in your video, but yeah, the car looks so much better on green grass with trees behind it.
One of your shots, I think your sunroof shot.
I love that, by the way.
The camera's not level, I think, by a little bit.
My bad.
You should get a little leveling.
You'll probably fix that in Final Cut.
That's all right.
Yeah, since I haven't heard all the content of it.
The other camera thing I want to add, Mark already covered the stabilization stuff, is some of the actual trajectories, like the actual moves, are weird.
Again, if you're looking up the 180 roll and stuff like that, you'll find...
the five basic camera moves or whatever in general, stick to the basic cameras and don't have like the one where you're like, uh, move to the side, then go over the railing and then go back down to the ground.
Like all the individual shots.
Oh, I like that one.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I liked it.
The individual components that are good.
It's good to be low to the ground when the car comes by because it loads dramatic.
It's good to go for, go to the side while the car is curving.
And it's good not to ram into the railing.
But when you combine that into one camera move, it's not a thing.
Yeah.
yeah so you have to you know less is more in terms of the camera moves like you know plot a trajectory and do it don't have too many lumps and bumps you know or split it up into two shots or whatever um yeah i'll watch the rest of it when i get a chance and actually hear what you have to say um i like the wheels on this one there's different wheels right
Yeah, these are very standard GTI wheels.
I think they've been roughly that look for at least a year or two now.
I like them.
I wouldn't say I love them, but I like them.
Better than Type R wheels is what I'm getting at.
Type R is Honda, John.
Whatever the hell.
The copycat Type R. The copycat.
I see how it is.
The Golf Type R. Speaking of Type R, it's got these black plastic vent things on the front bumpers.
It's kind of Type R-y.
Yeah.
i see i'm not familiar enough with the type r to know what's what's typical you know what i mean you know you're familiar enough to know that like uh contrasting uh like fake plastic short you know aero things that do nothing but poke out of your car but like if we were half of our current ages we would be too old to buy a civic r yeah someone's got one at work i see it driving around it's such a such a monstrosity
it really is i saw one yesterday i think it was maybe it was today i saw in the last 24 hours and it is hideous to look at maybe if i was 17 maybe i could make it work i don't think i was any stage in my life where i would have liked the car that was that busy busy busy is a very good word for it i very much like that because that's exactly what it is
It's interesting because the... What's the fancy Impreza?
The WRX?
Yeah, so the WRX is interesting in that it has the big hood scoop.
I think that kind of walks the line where...
Well, they calmed that down.
They calmed that down a lot in the last few years.
But the key is that all that crap on the Civic is fake.
Like, none of those vents lead anywhere.
None of that is functional.
Whereas at least the hood scoop on the Impreza was an actual hood scoop that, you know, led to the engine and wasn't just like a big black plastic thing.
And I think that kind of makes a difference.
Like, for all the ridiculousness, if it's functional, then it starts to be reasonable.
But if it looks ridiculous and is also non-functional, it's the worst of both worlds.
Anyway, the other comment on your video, the audio inside the car and when you're narrating is still too different.
I think you should not use your podcast mic when you do outside the car narration.
I think you should use the lab for the whole thing or whatever it takes to get them to sound the same.
I use the lab for the whole thing.
And in fact... Well, then it must be just your energy level.
Maybe.
Maybe that's it.
The only way to really make it sound that consistent is to read the entire script in one session.
Like, during one of your video shots.
Like, if every shot of you talking is, like, in one place, and you read it when filming all in one shot...
And then every shot of you not talking or every shot of different places is just video.
And you just use the sound from you talking over it the whole time.
That's the only way to do that.
But that's like it requires you to basically write the entire video script ahead of time.
That's just a lot of work.
For the place you are in how much time you can spend on this, how many videos you should be putting out per unit of time, you shouldn't be doing that amount of pre-prep.
You should just be making more and accepting that the audio will sound different between different sessions.
Try to minimize it if you can, but
To achieve what John wants, that's what you have to do.
Record the entire audio as one long stand-up shot.
And that's not going to happen.
Well, I mean, I feel like it's also the energy level, like not being quiet to try not to wake up kids.
No, that wasn't at this time.
That was in the past.
I know, I know, but I'm saying it was closer this time, but there was still a difference in like maybe it felt more like you were reading something because you were versus when you're not.
I mean, the other way to go is you can embrace the difference and have the voiceover audio sound intentionally very different.
then the live audio a lot of a lot of videos do that where they're like they will insert like background white noise into the live video and then the voiceover video is usually like boomier and more distance and doesn't have background noise to just you know so it's like the live and then the voice of god then the live the voice of god like you can go that direction too to you know even out but now they're like
You can tell they're trying to be similar, but they're not.
And it might just be a performance thing.
But anyway, I think that's still a thing to work on.
I like your ATP shirt.
It looks very clean and neat.
Hey, thanks.
Yeah, I use that probably too much for these videos.
No, you should use it all the time.
It's great.
Yeah, you got to promote.
Exactly.
I'm glad that, Mark, that you enjoyed it.
And I think that my favorite piece of feedback that you've given me is that you didn't have to look at the scrubber because I definitely know what you're talking about.
That is a victory in my book.
And yeah, I think you nailed it with the GoPro positioning.
Like I said, I never quite was happy with it.
I'm still not sure...
and i would actually love particularly via twitter i'd love feedback on this like what is what are the right places maybe i just need to go back and look at top gear yeah exactly tons of in-car shots and like you don't think about where the cameras are but the fact that you don't think about it means they must have nailed some good angles so just watch some of your favorite car reviews and then back back solve and say where is the camera for this shot anyway
I agree.
And I think part of the problem is that I want to be able to do the multi-camera thing.
And so I think sometimes, certainly not always, but sometimes in Top Gear, I think what they do is they film, you know, a bunch of footage with the camera in one specific spot.
And then they film a separate batch of footage with a camera in a different spot.
Does that make sense?
Which means they're going through their spiel multiple times.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which is fine.
You maybe get alternate take on it, you know, the second time.
Yeah, but I don't know.
I really want to figure out a better one or two or three different setups that I can use.
And I have obviously mounted GoPros outside the car because some of the shots you've seen in this video and the one prior are GoPros mounted on the exterior of the car.
But it really, really freaks me out.
I really don't like doing that a lot.
And so I think in some cases, Top Gear will mount a GoPro on the hood.
And maybe I'm just being a big baby, but it just weirds me out, the idea of mounting something on the hood that could potentially fly off and injure somebody.
Leaving me out of it, leaving the car out of it, what if it flies off and hits a bystander or something like that?
I don't like the idea of that at all.
And maybe I just need to get over it, but I really want to find preferably in-car places that I can mount GoPros that really work well.
And so I'm going to have to look at this 180-degree rule and 30-degree rule and see what I can make work with that.
So, yeah, so by the time you've listened to this, the video should be out.
Links will be in the show notes.
And I appreciate Marco doing your homework because I know how much of a slog that is for you is doing any homework.
But I appreciate it.
And, John, I know you're a busy, busy bee, so I'll give you a pass this once.
like start a rotate chicken nuggets timer i have said that why are you rotating the chicken nuggets like is it essential i know you have uneven cooking in the oven but like is this the type of meal where you're like no they need to be super evenly cooked we got to rotate them like how uneven is the cooking in your oven
it's gonna ruin the chicken nuggets they're very delicate meals like souffles and chicken nuggets that's what they say both very very sensitive well like this from the guy who like the one time i tried to make kids macaroni and cheese in your kitchen i tried to like hand it off to you like halfway through and you're like well you've already ruined it but i guess i can take this over i didn't say you've ruined it it's not like me i'm sure i fixed it for you but i'm sure it wasn't right
word they're trying to cook they cook the noodles for the time they say on the box or something crazy like that no no i wasn't it wasn't that bad were they dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets yes