Giant Buffers of Floats
John:
Take two showers tomorrow.
John:
Shower is the ultimate idea place.
Casey:
Yeah, Marco's a little grumbly tonight, but I can understand.
Marco:
Yeah, C is kicking my butt right now.
Marco:
And audio math is kicking my butt right now.
Casey:
So what are you trying to accomplish?
Casey:
And use very small words because I am not familiar with audio stuff at all.
Marco:
Okay, so in audio terms, I'm trying to implement a look-ahead limiter.
Marco:
You know, you probably know as a podcaster and as a video person that clipping is real bad.
Marco:
I've heard this.
Marco:
When your audio level goes above the maximum input level of a digital input device, it sounds really bad.
Marco:
It sounds like a scratchy, loud kind of like kind of thing.
Marco:
Like it sounds awful.
Marco:
So it's very important when you're dealing with audio amplification, when you're trying to make, you know, make volume levels out or whatever else, it's very important to have a limiter in front of it.
Marco:
And the point of the limiter is to catch those like very loud signals that would clip before they clip and to apply gain downwards on them.
Casey:
So hold on.
Casey:
So hold on.
Casey:
So to use kind of a really crummy analogy.
Casey:
So this is like I have my finger on the volume dial.
Casey:
I know it's not quite volume, but for the sake of the analogy, I have my finger or my hand on the volume dial and I see the person in front of the microphone take a real deep breath and like get ready to shout.
Casey:
And I go, oh, crap.
Casey:
And I turn the volume down because I know they're about to shout.
Marco:
Well, that's the look-ahead part, but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Marco:
So the main part is they start shouting, and as they get really close to the top, you very quickly go, oh, crap, this is going to clip, and you turn the volume down.
Marco:
Now, you might think the naive way to try to implement this is...
Marco:
basically you just look at every sample and the ones that are above one in the floating point domain.
Marco:
So like the ones that are above 1.0, which is like the ceiling, you just like compress those down by a certain multiplier or you just make them 1.0.
Marco:
You might think to do it that way, but that ends up sounding awful because of the way signals work that basically introduces a bunch of frequencies and distortion that weren't there before.
Marco:
And so the right way to do it,
Marco:
is to catch it well in advance of it actually clipping.
Marco:
Like enough samples in advance that you can actually do almost like a gradual volume ramp downwards.
Marco:
And if you're ever using an audio editing program and you're playing with the controls of either a compressor, which is basically a limiter with some extra stuff, or a limiter, then you will see something called attack time and release time.
Marco:
And these are literally like the amount of time usually measured in like tens of milliseconds or maybe hundreds of milliseconds at worst.
Marco:
The amount of time that it will take to turn the volume down to prevent clipping.
Marco:
And then that's the attack time.
Marco:
And the release time is the amount of time it takes to go back to normal to basically turn the volume back to normal after it thinks that the clipping sound is over.
Marco:
What you want to do is, ideally, to really prevent something from clipping, you need to have look ahead, which means you need to be able to look to see what's coming in the stream before you apply the volume dip to limit it from clipping.
Marco:
So, what I've been doing, and programmers, you can figure out, when you're dealing with some kind of rolling buffer with look-ahead functionality, but you can't modify the stuff in the look-ahead buffer yet, it's kind of awkward.
Marco:
And so, I basically spent yesterday building the framework to do look-ahead processing.
Marco:
And then I spent today trying and largely failing to write the gain processing that will gradually, in response to what's coming up ahead, will gradually raise and lower the volume in a way that doesn't sound horrible and that actually works to prevent clipping.
Marco:
And I've just been having a terrible time.
Marco:
My brain is melted right now.
Marco:
It takes me a long time to understand complex math, like anything involving signal processing, filters.
Marco:
I barely understand that stuff because I'm really not good at that kind of advanced math.
Marco:
I have very little knowledge of it and very little background in it.
Marco:
But the limiter I thought would be easy because I thought like, oh, it's just like you basically ramp up and down the gain in response to what you see ahead of you.
Marco:
And yeah, it's kicking my butt.
Marco:
It's not easy at all.
Marco:
And of course, because I'm working in C,
Marco:
I am frequently having these comical errors where... I love working in C. C was kind of like my programming youth, and I really enjoyed it.
Marco:
My first job was all in C. So I do love C on a very intellectual level.
Marco:
But it is awfully funny when...
Marco:
you know you get a you get an error where like oh the thing i thing that works like last build in this build it's making random noise all over the place well i screwed up on memory somewhere and you just gotta find like where is the somewhere like somewhere i made a mistake and i'm writing all over garbage somewhere and yeah it's oh boy so i've had a number of those times and i've had a lot of terrible luck trying to implement my limiter uh but uh getting there slowly
Casey:
Now, why C?
Casey:
Speed, because the API you're using is C, all of the above, some of the above?
Marco:
The API, I'm actually not dealing directly with core audio at this level.
Marco:
I'm dealing just with, like, float arrays, just like giant buffers of floats that are sample data.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I could be writing this in pretty much anything that can operate on raw buffers.
Marco:
When I write code at this level, I make extensive use of the Accelerate framework with all the VDSP functions.
Marco:
This is basically Apple's wrapper functions around highly vectorized optimizations for common math operations and this kind of thing.
Marco:
So if you want to take an array of 500 numbers and multiply them all by the same value or multiply two giant arrays of 500 numbers by each other and put the result in a third array of 500 numbers...
Marco:
using these functions in the accelerate framework are way way way faster because they use vector operations on the processor uh it's way faster than like going through one by one and doing these operations so so basically i'm dealing with a whole bunch of raw float arrays and a whole bunch of calls to these low-level functions and everything and so you can do this in swift but swift is such a royal pain in the butt doing things like this sure and why not why not objective c then
Marco:
um this library i really just write and see for speed like this is so in this audio pipeline is the only time i have ever had a measurable improvement by removing an objective c message send wow like i actually like back back when i was doing that battery testing when i was like running out the batteries on my devices seeing like oh does the speaker use all the battery does the bluetooth use all the battery um
Marco:
So I discovered this optimization where like there was like there was this one call that basically renders out a block of like 500 samples of audio in the audio pipeline.
Marco:
And so it's called, you know, there's 44,100 samples per second.
Marco:
So the block that renders 500 at a time is called many times per second.
Marco:
And by removing an obviously message send from that, I was able to actually speed up the processing by some amount, like, you know, a couple percent.
Marco:
But it was like it was measurable and it was reliably measurable.
Casey:
That's surprising.
Casey:
So what is the ultimate driving motivation behind this, if you're willing to share?
Marco:
So I'm working on Voice Boost 2.
Marco:
I've talked about this a few times here and there, like you're kind of mentioning here and there.
Marco:
Basically, I'm trying to do Voice Boost, but better.
Marco:
One of the reasons I'm doing it now is because I really... If I want to support AirPlay 2 in a way that isn't horrible...
Marco:
I really need to write my own voice boost code.
Marco:
Instead of right now, voice boost is implemented as a combination of legacy AU graph nodes, like audio graph nodes from Core Audio.
Marco:
And that API seems to... It's very discouraged to use that now.
Marco:
And it seems like Apple is slowly showing at the door.
Marco:
And using those to supply an AirPlay 2 stream...
Marco:
is possible, but it would be very clumsy.
Marco:
I'd basically have to create a whole audiograph off to the side that isn't connected to the hardware, render with it into an AirPlay 2 style renderer.
Marco:
It's just a lot of overhead, it's a lot of extra work, and that would probably have a noticeable battery cost.
Marco:
So I don't want to do it that way if I don't have to.
Marco:
So the way I want to do it is by not needing those old AUGraph processing nodes anymore, which means that I have to write my own compressor.
Marco:
And the way you write a compressor is you write a limiter first.
Marco:
And so I need the limiter for lots of different things in audio processing things.
Marco:
But the very first thing I need it for is the voice boost to compressor that I'm writing from scratch.
Marco:
and this is probably not wise uh but i just spent like a month dealing with just like pain in the butt watch things like not the fun part of app development but just like pain in the butt like oh this this watch transfer just failed for no reason how do i fix that how do i try to work around that and going through like so overcast um
Marco:
503 just came out a couple days ago, and this included basically what I'm talking about, the fix for watch transfers.
Marco:
This was a grueling process where to figure out why standalone watch podcast transfers were so unreliable
Marco:
I basically spent the last few weeks shipping a beta build almost every day with different tweaks and changes.
Marco:
I built a whole logging framework so the watch would log what it's doing and coordinate it with the phone app and log what it's doing.
Marco:
And then people in the beta could then send me those logs so I could look at them and make tweaks and send out new builds the next day or later that same day.
Marco:
And it was just a grueling, long process of trying to finally figure out how to make watch transfers even remotely reliable.
Marco:
And so I'm rewarding myself with that long slog of doing something I really didn't want to do that's very boring.
Marco:
With a bunch of C. Well, yeah, because it's different.
Marco:
I know it sounds crazy.
Marco:
It does sound crazy, but I get it.
Marco:
This is something I've been putting off for a year.
Marco:
And parts of it have taken me a year to figure out even how to do.
Marco:
Because, as I mentioned, this involves a lot of DSP stuff that I do not have a background in, that I mostly don't know.
Marco:
Whenever I stumble upon an academic paper online that tells me how to do something, and it starts putting in the big Greek sigma symbols and everything, I don't know how to do even that stuff.
Marco:
I don't know how to even read mathematic notation beyond basic stuff.
Marco:
And
Marco:
when they start talking about things like, like, you know, FIR filters and everything, I have, I don't have any clue about that stuff.
Marco:
Like I, that's way above my head.
Marco:
And so it's taken me a very long time to figure out how to do this kind of stuff, but I have figured out enough of it to get by on some low levels that,
Marco:
And so I actually find this really fascinating and interesting, and it's a very good intellectual challenge, and it's working towards something I really, really want to get done that will be very satisfying to me that most people won't care about at all.
Marco:
All of this is going to go into a little checkbox that says AirPlay 2, like a little bullet point feature on one release now supports AirPlay 2.
Marco:
But if I can get this down, I can then also use this to build more interesting stuff.
Marco:
So that's my main goal here.
Marco:
I couldn't care less about your HomePod.
Marco:
I want to build more interesting stuff.
Marco:
So I want to do AirPlay 2 first to get me to build the building blocks.
Marco:
And then I can do interesting stuff with that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that's that's where i am now and i actually find this to be a wonderful change of pace from fighting watch connectivity and transfers this actually feels even though this is way like harder math wise and way lower level this feels more satisfying to me because i feel like i'm not cleaning up some mess i feel like i'm actually building something and that's something you don't get very often in programming and you gotta you know really enjoy it when you do
John:
Not to spoil your fun, but did you check to see if there are any libraries that already do this?
John:
Like open source libraries?
Marco:
There might be some that are really part of something bigger, like the... What's that audio program?
Marco:
Not Audacity.
Marco:
Yeah, Audacity.
Marco:
Audacity is an open source audio editor that has things like limiters and compressors in it.
Marco:
I could look at their code and, I don't know, steal it.
Marco:
I don't want to do that, though.
Marco:
And it's probably hard to port some of that stuff over.
Marco:
What I'm really looking for is...
Marco:
descriptions of like algorithms to do these kinds of things.
Marco:
And those are actually few and far between.
Marco:
Most online code that you would find would do this either as like a MATLAB function, which I don't know what to do with, or they're doing it.
Marco:
They're just like, you know, going to call the core audio units that at least I know how to use audio units already.
Marco:
I'm trying to do this without using audio units.
Marco:
So here we are.
Casey:
To go back a half step, do you have any findings that you're willing to share with regard to watch related things?
Casey:
Like, was there some head slapping moment where you were doing something silly and that that's what caused the problems?
Casey:
Or is this considered trade information?
Marco:
The main problem I had with the watch, so the watch app can wake up the phone app in the background whenever it wants.
Marco:
Like whenever the watch app is running or is updating itself, if the watch app is running, it can send a message to the phone app and the phone app will wake up if it's in the background.
Marco:
But it doesn't work the other way around.
Marco:
The phone app cannot wake up the watch app on demand.
Marco:
So the phone app, like if you get a new download into your phone, the phone can't send that immediately to the watch.
Marco:
It has to wait for the next time the watch app checks in.
Marco:
And the watch app can check in pretty rarely.
Marco:
If you have it configured as a complication, it gets maybe every 15 minutes worth of check-ins.
Marco:
If it's not a complication and you just have it on the watch, it gets a lot less time than that.
Marco:
Each one of those check-ins, it can only be alive for like two seconds before the system puts it back in the background.
Marco:
And if at any point you violate any of these limits from the watch app side, your app gets killed and then it doesn't come back for a while.
Marco:
So I had many problems.
Marco:
Part of my problems were I was exhausting some of these resource limits because some things in the watch were just taking too much computation that I was doing.
Marco:
And so it was getting killed in the background a lot.
Marco:
So it was not refreshing very often.
Marco:
More problems.
Marco:
There were so many problems.
Marco:
Like there were a couple of race conditions with like the watch app would start up and send a sync message to the phone app.
Marco:
And then receive some files the phone app had sent in the background because watch connectivity does not guarantee the order of things you send, whether some of them are background or not.
Marco:
It's very, very weird.
Marco:
And so there were some weird race conditions.
Marco:
There were some concurrency bugs.
Marco:
There were some crashes that were sometimes my fault, sometimes being related to resource terminations.
Marco:
And I had a system before where the phone app would try to communicate with the watch app proactively.
Marco:
So even if the watch app wasn't running, and I said earlier, the phone app can't wake it up.
Marco:
The phone app was trying to say, you know what?
Marco:
This episode just came in.
Marco:
Let me just create a watch file transfer and just tell it to start.
Marco:
And then next time the watch comes around or next time the systems feel like it, it can maybe get that transfer.
Marco:
And hopefully sometime the watch app will be woken up and it can receive that.
Marco:
So I was basically proactively creating transfers on the phone.
Marco:
This meant the phone had to keep track of what the watch had.
Marco:
So the phone would know what was new and what needed to be sent to the watch.
Marco:
This worked somewhat.
Marco:
but created a bunch of weird edge case problems.
Marco:
Problem number one was if you have more than one watch, this totally breaks.
Marco:
Because if you have more than one watch, then every time a watch checks in with the phone, first of all, if you have just changed watches, all background transfers get killed and invalidated, and you have to start them over.
Marco:
So if you wear multiple watches, this is one thing that suffers.
Marco:
And then also, then you have two different sets
Marco:
of what you might have and so the phone can get confused about what the watch has and it can send duplicate things some of those race conditions also resulted in duplicate sends where like the phone would tell or the watch would tell the phone all right i have numbers one two and three and the phone would say all right i'll send you number four
Marco:
And then right after the watch said, I have numbers 1, 2, and 3, Watch Connectivity delivered in the background number 4.
Marco:
That was sitting there waiting for it, but it just hadn't delivered it right on launch.
Marco:
So then it actually already had number 4, and then the phone is resending it because at the time the phone got the sync message, it thought it didn't have it.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of weird little race conditions and...
Marco:
various concurrency issues that just took me a very long time to figure out and fix.
Marco:
And my, my solution at the end was basically stop doing anything proactively on the phone.
Marco:
The phone no longer keeps track of what's on the watch except for a very basic display function of like displaying how much free space you have in the setting screen.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Um, now every time the watch syncs with the phone, it tells it I have, you know, episodes number one, two, and three or whatever.
Marco:
And the phone in response to that will create any necessary transfers to send new stuff to the watch.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
That way, you can have 10 watches paired and it'll basically work.
Marco:
It'll still suck for other reasons, but it'll basically work because then each watch is only getting what is sent in response to it.
Marco:
This ends up working way more reliably, and it eliminates duplicate transfers almost 100% of the time, which dramatically improves things.
Marco:
The only downside to it is that the delay between when your phone downloads a new episode and when that episode shows up on the watch...
Marco:
maybe longer in many cases because it has to wait like so the phone can download it and then it has to wait until next time the watch checks in before it even starts the transfer to the watch but every other way i tried doing things was very very buggy and very you know it would destroy people's batteries and everything and it was and it would make a lot of duplicates and it would transfers would get all bogged down and watch connectivity which is a
Marco:
because I was just sending too many messages proactively in the background, it would just take forever.
Marco:
It was so problematic to do the proactive method.
Marco:
So this way of basically doing everything in response to something is way more effective, way faster at the actual transfers, and then just has the downside of there's that latency between when new stuff arrives and when the watch can get it.
Marco:
sounds fun yeah so that in response to all that i needed to do something productive and that's why i'm writing my own look ahead limiter damn it whatever makes you happy by the way if anybody knows how to write a look ahead limiter let me know yeah that is intense oh geez i almost got it like i i have the look ahead part i have that done
Marco:
It's just a question of responding to the changes in attenuation in a smooth and also accurate way.
Marco:
Because in theory, if you have a look ahead of, say, 10 milliseconds, and your attack time is 10 milliseconds, in theory, it should be impossible to ever clip.
Marco:
The output should never be clipped then.
Marco:
But I'm not having that kind of outcome yet, so here we are.
Marco:
well good luck i'm sure that's just a boatload of fun honestly much of it is yesterday was a lot of fun like putting all the putting together all the look ahead stuff and doing some more voice boost coding like that yesterday i had a lot of fun and i got a lot done it was very productive today has been one of those like banging my head against the wall days do you have a separate little project where you're working on uh this part like are you you know doing the audio processing not in overcast but in like just a you know a separate framework project or like just off to the side
Marco:
I have a Mac command line utility that I develop all this in.
Marco:
So that way I just hit build and I don't have to wait for the simulator.
Marco:
I don't have to wait for any devices.
Marco:
I just hit build and I run it from the command line with command line arguments of files I have in my Mac to test with.
Marco:
And it's like, here's an input file, here's an output file.
Marco:
So not only is it way faster of like a build and run and debug cycle,
Marco:
but also then I can supply it whatever input file I want, and then I can open the result up in Adobe Audition, which is this very sophisticated wave editor, and I can look and see exactly what I output at the wave level, and just see, is this working right?
Marco:
I can listen to it, I can look on my big headphones and everything, so it's all to make it a lot easier.
Marco:
But I'm working on a framework that is shared with Overcast, and so that way, once I figure it out in this Mac utility, I can just bring it over.
John:
Just FYI, the faster code debug cycle is another reason a lot of people like unit tests when developing an isolated piece of functionality.
Casey:
I love you, John.
Casey:
Oh, my word, I love you.
Casey:
In this case, I don't know that at this moment.
John:
You can still do it.
John:
Testing could still be a part of it if you knew what the, for example, if you knew what the numbers were supposed to look like, if you knew what the samples, if you knew what you wanted the samples to look like in the stream, right?
John:
But you're doing it sort of the more visual way of like make a file, chuck it into an editor and look at it and, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Marco:
I also spend a lot of time in the debugger.
Marco:
Basically, the debugger is my test suite.
Marco:
I just hit a breakpoint right after.
John:
It's like, I know what this is supposed to be.
John:
That's an under-the-radar title if an under-the-radar had titles.
John:
The debugger is my test suite.
Casey:
Also, you can still run the debugger with unit tests.
Casey:
That's still a thing.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Marco:
Tell you what, though, as an iOS developer the vast majority of the time, doing something like this where it's just a Mac binary is so refreshing in a few ways.
Marco:
It's so damn easy and fast, and there's so much less to deal with.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
No, I feel like I don't want to pull on the unit testing thread anymore, but I feel like unit testing is one of those things that you're going to come to in your own time for some ridiculous reason.
Casey:
And then you're going to say to John and me, hopefully me, if not both of us, you know, unit testing is actually really convenient.
John:
That's a pretty long, infinite time I'm arguing it, given the current rate of change.
John:
Pretty optimistic.
Marco:
Yeah, I would not...
Marco:
bet that i would be arriving in that point anytime like i i think i will be retired from programming before i arrive at that point yeah you gotta work on start working on adam casey yeah there you go maybe you have a chance adam will be heavily into test driven development oh i didn't say test driven development i'm not a monster i mean come on
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Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
You're welcome, world.
Casey:
I think we can comfortably say that it was only the three of us that got Apple to update its bagel emoji.
Casey:
And now it mostly looks okay.
Casey:
There's still room, but it's better than it was.
John:
Oh, it's way better.
John:
Let's say this.
John:
Yeah, definitely.
John:
The main thing you can say about it is it is an improvement.
John:
I mean, how could it be worse, really?
John:
But it is an improvement for sure.
John:
uh there are things to be said about it but put it this way if i if i squint or move away from these big images or whatever one is immediately identifiable as that's supposed to be a bagel and the other one still looks vaguely donut like so success on if you look at this and tell me what it is you can say it's a bagel if you look at the details you can nitpick them but as other people have pointed out
John:
You look at the details of almost any emoji and there's some ridiculous stuff in there.
John:
But like the key thing test that it has to pass is what is this?
John:
And if you if some percentage of people say donut, it's a failure.
John:
So thumbs up.
John:
It now looks like it is now identifiable as a bagel, albeit a very strange pale bagel that's semi toasted with plastic cream cheese on it, whatever, whatever.
John:
It's going to be small.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
The point of emoji is not to look photorealistic.
Marco:
It's an art style that on some level, and this varies depending on the vendor, but it always looks a little bit cartoony because they're being displayed in text in very, very small sizes most of the time.
Marco:
And so to have something look totally photorealistic would just kind of look weird.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The style they're in is, and honestly, I think Apple's current style is actually more photorealistic than it needs to be.
John:
Yeah, for sure.
John:
I was going to say, it's very close to, again, potentially Uncanny Valley.
John:
It's stylized for sure, but it is very much more photorealistic than most other emoji I've seen.
Marco:
ultimately this is a much better bagel it is more realistic than i expected it to be and it's like i don't i don't have any more complaints about it basically like i i do think that i do well like so okay so like they they made like the little you know butt crack seem more prominent uh and so it's easier it's more easily identified as a bagel that way the the whole to circle ratio and shape are better they're more they better reflect the
Marco:
actual like you know New York style bagels and the cream cheese while I don't love the like you know perfect way it was applied there I do recognize this is like this is a cartoon right and so like it it is it is supposed to be that way and also the cream cheese hides the uh the texture of the of the you know the horrible bread texture it had before which appears to still be under it but uh but we don't really see it anymore
Marco:
So ultimately, oh, and the color of the dough has been tweaked to be, I think, a lot better, much closer to a real bagel.
Marco:
So ultimately, my main complaint about it, which admittedly is a very minor complaint, is that a plain bagel with plain cream cheese is such a waste.
Marco:
Like you have two opportunities there to have interesting flavors in the bagel and in the cream cheese.
Marco:
And I understand if maybe you want to just take one of those, like an everything bagel with plain cream cheese is really good or a plain bagel with like some kind of really outrageous cream cheese, like, you know, like a really strong vegetable or scallion or something like that can be good too.
Marco:
But to have a plain bagel and plain cream cheese is just, it's a waste of carbs.
John:
It's not a waste.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's like plain cheese pizza.
John:
Yep.
John:
It's not the thing you want all the time and other things can be more exciting.
John:
Plain cheese pizza is way better than a plain bagel or plain cream cheese.
John:
No.
John:
Not if it's done well.
John:
Oh, no, sir.
John:
I feel like not if it's done well.
John:
Like, simple, it can be done well.
John:
A couple of, you know, not that we're going to go through all this all again, but a couple of my complaints about this bagel.
John:
The bottom half, like, they hid the texture of the, you know, the cut inside, so they don't have to worry about that for the most part anymore.
John:
But it looks kind of like it's, like, toasted or stale.
John:
Like, it's the wrong, the parts that are sticking out are the wrong color.
John:
But the main thing you already touched on is the cream cheese.
John:
First of all, I think it looks like plastic or wall spackle or something.
John:
It doesn't read as cream cheese as well.
John:
second the way the way it's uh and again this is all ridiculous stuff that you could only see if it's giant size at small sizes it's fine but but even maybe at small sizes you can notice it's like the there is there is no bagel ever made in the history of the universe that had the cream cheese put on it so that there is a tiny thin rim of bagel visible uniformly around the outside like it's it's basically impossible to do that unless you custom made a machine if i saw a bagel like that i'd know i was in like dreamscape with dennis quaid like the
John:
This is not reality.
John:
Look at this cream cheese and this bagel.
John:
This would never exist in the real world.
John:
This must be a dream.
John:
It's bad.
John:
Anyway, it's vastly improved.
Marco:
If you scroll down in this article on Emojipedia about the bagel update, you can see the list of everyone else's bagel emoji, like Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter.
Marco:
what the heck flavor is the twitter bagel it looks like a hamburger that's not even a bagel seriously so the twitter bagel it has it looks like a sphere with a hole down the center yeah so like so shape wise i can kind of forgive the shape if that's their style i mean i can't it looks like the death star it does look like the death star it actually kind of does but and so it's like it's it's clearly illustrating a bagel with cream cheese and the bagel has
Marco:
five very large seeds on it and like they're like the size of like almonds and then the color of the bagel it's almost red it's like it's like a like a low saturation like dusty reddish brown and i have never seen i used to work in a bagel shop and i've eaten a lot of bagels since then i have never seen a bagel that was anywhere near this color in any flavor in any bagel shop anywhere
John:
you don't have red velvet bagels mixed with blueberry all the time or or shape like it's not even bagel shaped it is literally sphere shaped with with a cylindrical hole cut down the center of it it looks more like a weird cream-filled donut ball i don't yeah it really does it's by far the worst one
Casey:
I don't think Microsoft's or Google's are particularly good.
Casey:
In fact, I think outside of Apple's, I think Samsung's is actually my favorite of this batch.
John:
Yeah, Samsung's is the clear second place.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Google's isn't bad.
John:
I mean, it's identifiable as a bagel.
John:
They put the sesame seeds on it.
John:
What else?
John:
It's not a donut.
Marco:
Well, Google's has a couple of critical errors.
Marco:
So number one is like the perspective between the seam between the cream cheese and the top bagel half on the far left and right is weird.
Marco:
It has the wrong perspective.
Marco:
It's overflowing.
Marco:
That's what they're trying to get at.
Marco:
But the bagel is like weirdly behind it.
Marco:
It's not the right angle.
Marco:
And then second of all, the way the seeds are distributed, it's as if the side of the bagel that is not facing you has no seeds on it.
Marco:
yeah it's not it's nonsensical yeah like i i feel like yeah like apples looks pretty good now twitter's is good for comedy value i don't know what's going on in microsoft land with those black outlines it's probably just their style and samsung's looks like a legitimate lender's freezer bagel like that samsung did a really good job of showing what a lender's bagel looks like this looks a little donut like too apples is clearly the best in this bunch now yeah it's not even a contest all i know is you're welcome world
Casey:
John, tell me about screen time and how everyone's having problems with it.
John:
Yep, I complained about screen time as a feature I was using, and then it just stopped working.
John:
I could no longer see my kids' screen time reports on my phone.
John:
And a million people wrote in to say, yep, I'm having exactly the same problem.
John:
I tried...
John:
disabling screen time for the people and you know remove like the big the big reset which was a terrible mistake because apple and their infinite wisdom has decided if you turn it off for somebody and then turn it back on it has no recollection of what your settings were it's like so you're starting from scratch again and there are a lot of settings so once i did that once i'm like well
John:
Even if this fixed the problem, I wouldn't go through it again because it's ridiculous.
John:
So as a warning to anyone who's thinking of trying that, A, it didn't fix the problem, and B, it makes you redo all of the settings.
John:
I hope you remembered what they all were.
John:
But yeah, everyone's like, yeah, it was working for me, now it's not, or whatever.
John:
One person did say that supposedly in the 12.1 beta it's fixed.
John:
I'm not on the beta, so I'll just wait patiently for 12.1 to come out and hope it fixes my problem.
John:
But if it's happening to you, you are not alone.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
Let's see what's next.
Casey:
Tell me about emergency bypass.
John:
We talked about do not disturb.
John:
I was a big proponent of setting time.
John:
Do not disturb.
John:
And I said, don't worry.
John:
People can still get through if they need to because your VIPs and repeated messages will get through.
John:
There's one other thing I forgot to mention.
John:
All that is true.
John:
There are settings that allow people to get through when they need to.
John:
But you can also, within specific contacts, designate that that contact, that person, whoever it is,
John:
is able to bypass do not disturb with either sounds vibrations or both just straight up like they will just go straight through it um so if you're worried that your you know spouse or children won't be able to get in touch with you go to their contacts and flip the switches for uh their their ringtone and their vibrate settings and say that they will pierce the wall of do not disturb uh of course maybe you want to uh either
John:
I was going to say maybe you want to tell the person that it's on so they don't send you a message and expect to do not disturb to protect you.
John:
Or maybe you don't want to tell those people that it's on and they'll just assume that they shouldn't text you late at night.
John:
Anyway, you figure that out yourself.
John:
But it's a good setting.
John:
You should know it exists.
Casey:
So I actually wrote a blog post about this in 2016 when it was new.
Casey:
And at the time, emergency bypass was one humongous switch for an entire contact.
Casey:
So what that meant was if I wanted to turn emergency bypass on for Erin, not only did it turn it on for the phone, but it turned it on for text messages, which is not advisable in my personal opinion, because sometimes she would be up late or get up early, either because she just happened to wake up or couldn't fall asleep, whatever, or maybe it was a baby-related thing at the time.
Casey:
And so if she tried to send me a text with the expectation that I wouldn't see it until I woke up,
Casey:
it would pass through and actually make noise even if I'm on do not disturb.
Casey:
Because like I said, it was all or nothing for emergency bypass.
Casey:
But I'm looking at this now in iOS 12, and you're right, John, what you just said is accurate, that in the ringtone section of a specific contact, there's a switch for emergency bypass.
Casey:
And in the text tone section for the same contact,
Casey:
There is a different switch for emergency bypass.
Casey:
So in my case, I have Erin's ringtone switch on because if she's calling me at like midnight, something's deeply broken.
Casey:
And the text tone, I have emergency bypass off because like I said, it is not unreasonable for her to send me a message either after I go to sleep or before I wake up or actually more often than not, it's me sending them to her, not the other way around.
Casey:
But either way, you get the idea.
Casey:
So that's good to know.
Casey:
I did not know that that was the case, that there are now two switches.
Casey:
So if you've looked at this early on when it first came out in like iOS 10, then maybe look again because it's gotten better now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have some feedback with regard to your contact syncing, John.
Casey:
Have you fixed it?
John:
I haven't actually even looked into it, but I did get this one piece of feedback that looked promising from Jordan McDonald.
John:
He said, I heard about my contact syncing issues, and he had a similar problem.
John:
He said, my syncing issue was due to one or more of the limits Apple places on sync, and he linked me to one of these Apple support articles.
John:
Here's a quote from it.
John:
To help iCloud keep your contacts, calendar, reminders, and bookmarks up to date, keep your information within these limits.
John:
Now, that text, I'm sure someone thinks is helpful, but I read that text, and it's like,
John:
I'm helping iCloud keep my stuff in sync by doing this.
John:
It's like, is this a requirement or is it not?
John:
Am I just like lightening the load?
John:
Like iCloud is really tired.
John:
My complaint about the language is it doesn't make it clear that like, look, if you don't stay within these limits, your stuff won't work.
John:
It's like, you can help it.
John:
But, you know, if you don't do it, it'll just be harder, but it'll still anyway.
John:
The limits is a whole bunch of limits listed, which some of them are, you know, it's like, oh, you can only have 50,000 contacts.
John:
Fine.
John:
Like, I'm OK with that.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, there's going to be limits.
John:
It's nice.
John:
They list them.
John:
Seems like that's what this support article is about.
John:
Then you get to the part about maximum size of a contact photo.
John:
And the maximum size of a contact photo is, you know, why, why is it this number?
John:
God knows.
John:
224 kilobytes, which is really, really small.
John:
That's, I mean, even in JPEG, like, cause I'm, I'm starting from, as I am starting from like photos, like, you know, whatever, 12 or 21 megapixels.
John:
I don't know what the hell my camera is.
John:
Anyway, they're big photos, even as JPEGs, they are not 200 kilobytes.
John:
I'm starting from that.
John:
And maybe even if I crop them, uh,
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
I'm going to look into this next time I go on a contact photo mission.
John:
First thing is I'm going to make sure whatever photos I'm trying to get to sync are below this size.
John:
And the second thing is I'm going to see if I can interrogate some of my existing photos and re-add them, but at smaller sizes.
John:
to see if that helps things go.
John:
A couple of people have had the feedback like, oh, I found one bad contact.
John:
And once I modified or deleted that contact, it stopped gumming up the works and everything synced.
John:
But the meta complaint is, if these are the limits,
John:
And your stuff just silently doesn't sync because it's above one limits.
John:
That is terrible.
John:
Like, fine.
John:
You have these limits.
John:
Fine.
John:
The limits are weird.
John:
You have to tell me, Apple.
John:
You have to say, I'm never going to sync your contacts because the photo you put on there is too big.
John:
And I think I actually have seen an error message that says, you know, sorry, that image is too big.
John:
If I accidentally, you know, drag like a giant ping image on there or something, it's like multi megabyte, right?
John:
So I think there is an error like that.
John:
So I'm hoping that this article is just old or...
John:
I'm hoping this can't possibly be true because if all my contacts have stopped syncing because I put some images in there that are too big and it just decided to never tell me that and just hope that I have a podcast that someone named Jordan McDonald listens to and they'll send me an email pointing me to this obscure support article.
John:
Boy, I'm going to be really depressed if that's true.
John:
But anyway, if you are having problems.
Casey:
uh you know maybe do that by the way the published date on this article is september 7th 2018 so it's not looking good for my hope that this is not true all righty what's next uh let's talk about the printer compatibility list which came up uh several episodes ago when um i got a new printer and was unreasonably excited about it and you had pointed me to i believe it was you john pointed me to the printer compatibility list which was me actually oh i'm sorry
Casey:
My apologies, Mark.
John:
John, I don't think John even knew about it.
John:
No, I knew about it.
John:
Oh.
John:
Of course you did.
John:
I thought I had that one.
John:
But I hadn't checked it in years.
John:
Like, I hadn't, like, I didn't even know it was still maintained, which leads us to today's follow-up.
John:
So why don't you continue in that vein?
John:
So, unfortunately, Apple is no longer maintaining this list.
John:
For, like...
John:
For, you know, because remember I said, oh, I'll just wait for the, you know, the thing to be updated for.
John:
And the thing I didn't know about also is that they'd start subdividing into printing versus scanning.
John:
You know, it's still just two check marks, but it's better than it was, you know, back in the day.
John:
but yeah so they're not going to maintain it anymore uh and it's mostly because of air print there the text from the thing is many vendors of printer scanners have adopted driverless technology such as air print driverless is basically where they you know they have an agreed upon interface and they push more logic onto the printer and they just say look printers you got to talk to us in this way otherwise we don't print that's part of the air print thing you know anyway uh and they are no longer providing drivers for new devices if your printer was made in the last several years it probably doesn't require a driver this list is provided for reference purposes and it's no longer being updated so basically they're saying
John:
printer drivers uh apple would like them to no longer be a thing it's like look if you want to print on one of our things do air print no drivers are required and if you're not you're probably already on one of these lists so in theory it's reasonable to stop updating it because people shouldn't be making printers that require drivers anymore i'm not sure if that's actually true enough and i kind of wish they would maintain that list but i don't know like for example the the like a a
John:
a more recent version of one of the hp things like the numbers were a little bit bigger than the ones that are on the list the last list that they have this latest i couldn't find an hp printer with that number i found one with like that number minus 10 and maybe it's the same and maybe it would work fine but then maybe it's totally different like you don't really know um so if they never update that list again i'm never going to see a list like for mojave to say
John:
does this hp12345 printer and scanner work with mojave with drivers or without drivers it's just like i guess i have to check whether it does air print does air print encompass scanning anyway i'm still not doing anything with my printers but it's apple is uh is out of the business of keeping track of this big long list of printers that work and they just want everyone to use air print so welcome to the future of printing
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Almost everyone takes and shares photos, obviously, today, but very few of those photos end up being printed, and even fewer of them end up being ever displayed anywhere.
Marco:
You see it in your social feeds, maybe, and then it's gone after a day, and you never see it again.
Marco:
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Marco:
So they make these Fracture prints.
Marco:
These are beautiful glass photo prints.
Marco:
There's this thin, very thin, very lightweight sheet of glass.
Marco:
And kind of behind it, you see the picture shining through it.
Marco:
So it's protected.
Marco:
It's not going to scratch off.
Marco:
And it's very lightweight, so it's not going to crash down off your wall.
Marco:
And there's this kind of thin foam core backing behind it that you don't see once it's hung, but it helps hang it up.
Marco:
These are wonderful, wonderful prints.
Marco:
It's a fantastic, both practical and beautiful way to have photos printed.
Marco:
We have them all over our house.
Marco:
They are awesome.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
These are thoughtful, unique gifts for almost anyone, anybody who your photo might be meaningful to.
Marco:
So, like, if it's a photo of your kid or your pet, maybe give one to your parents or, you know, their kids' grandparents, you know, whatever else.
Marco:
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Marco:
There's all sorts of great gift possibilities with Fracture for pretty much any occasion, pretty much any person in your life, and people love them.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So you can really feel good about this purchase, and they're just really, really nice photo prints.
Marco:
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Casey:
There's a new Palm Pilot, sort of, except not at all.
Casey:
So somebody has licensed the Palm name to make a little itty-bitty BB phone that is kind of the Apple Watch...
Casey:
To Android phones ish.
Casey:
So this is a little tiny phone that is a mostly full featured Android phone that you can only buy on Verizon and only as an accessory to a regular phone.
Casey:
And I guess the idea is much like the cellular Apple watch where you can walk away from your phone and even, you know, drive away from your phone and you can still get phone calls on your watch and you can still get text messages on your watch.
Casey:
Well, on this little BB phone, you can get text messages and make phone calls and whatnot.
Casey:
But so it's designed to be with you when you don't want to have your big, huge phone with you.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Like I, what?
John:
Yo dog.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
when you're talking about night and day phone that was the joke of like several years ago now it's like your phone needs a phone yeah i i don't i don't get this i don't like neither do i i think it's cool that that people are trying new ideas but not every new idea is a good one who wants to get away from their phone but bring another phone with them i don't i just don't get it i i'm not sure whether this will succeed obviously this you know it's 350 dollars like it's only from verizon it's a little android thing like it's a very limited scope for this and
John:
The fact that they bought the palm name and shoved it on the back means nothing.
John:
It's just an Android phone.
John:
But when I look at this, I think about like.
John:
And there's a kernel of a decent idea in there somewhere, which is as phones get bigger.
John:
Physically speaking, it is sometimes inconvenient to have your iPhone XS Max or your big phone with you.
John:
Particularly in places like in the summer, you just got shorts and a t-shirt on.
John:
It's a big thing.
John:
But people also don't want to be without their phones.
John:
We know the phone insecurity problem.
John:
It's like taking a pacifier away from a toddler.
John:
They need to have their phone with them at all times.
John:
And there is a tension there.
John:
I like to have my phone with me in all times.
John:
So I'm in touch.
John:
But these phones are so freaking huge.
John:
But I love my big phone.
John:
I love it to death.
John:
I want my phone to be even bigger.
John:
It's just humongous, right?
John:
But I'm going to go and just try to stick that in my shorts pocket.
John:
Or do I have to always bring like a bag or a backpack?
John:
It's just, it's kind of too much.
John:
And you're right that like the cellular Apple Watch is perhaps a thing there.
John:
But it's not like you're going to text people when you sell their Apple Watch.
John:
And you can't really watch a quick YouTube video or do an Instagram or like...
John:
So what this product points out to me is the potential, and I think it's a real potential, for a role that's not being filled.
John:
Phones used to be much smaller than they are now.
John:
They've gotten so big.
John:
That they sort of have, you know, priced themselves out.
John:
Price is the wrong word.
John:
They've removed themselves from a category of uses that they used to be able to fit into.
John:
Oh, a little thing you just chuck in your pocket and go, right?
John:
You don't do that anymore because they're so freaking big, right?
John:
So to me, this argues for a potential market for less humongous phones.
John:
Does it argue for people to buy a big phone and a tiny phone?
John:
Probably not, because that's kind of silly.
John:
And, you know, you got to who wants to deal with two phones.
John:
But that's what they're trying to do here to say.
John:
Sometimes you wish you had your phone with you and you wish you could do all the phone things, including texting people and doing a Snapchat or making a little video or like, you know, do all the phone things.
John:
But it's not so darn big.
John:
But you still love your big phone.
John:
So I wish that what actually happened instead of this silliness is that more phone makers, Android and Apple, decided to go back to selling some phones that are not so big that they limit the context in which they can be comfortably used.
Marco:
Good luck.
Marco:
This would have been a lot more interesting if the phone number sharing thing was optional.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
You got to have, don't you have to have a second number with it or something?
Marco:
Well, no, no, no.
Marco:
Like, so it does the same.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It does the same thing that the watch does, which is that it, it shares your number with your main phone, but,
John:
which also means though that like this can't be a device that like you buy for your kids to take to school with them like because it it is your number like they you can't call from it to you yeah i mean hardware wise they could sell it individually but how they're positioning now is as a phone for your phone or as a little thing right you know so i think again i think this there's a lot wrong with this product but the idea of market for a smaller phone i think is there
John:
Right.
Marco:
There's two separate things about this.
Marco:
There's the idea of a small, limited phone, and then the idea of a satellite phone that shares the same number as your main phone so you can take it with you when you don't want to take your main phone for some reason.
Marco:
I think that latter idea about having them both share the same number is...
John:
very limited in who actually would want that it's limited to people who have a day phone or a night phone or two apple watches like i bet there is a market for that it's probably not very big and also about this being limited it's not really it's not a limited phone it does all the phone things is limited because it's smaller and probably gets worse battery life and you know it's not doesn't have a fastest processor but there's nothing
John:
that you would... There's no category of thing that you want to do on a phone that this can't do.
John:
Like, this is bigger than the original iPhone, probably, right?
John:
Like, you can do all the things on it.
John:
It has a camera, it has video, and it's like, just the stuff isn't that good, but it's not even that limited, right?
John:
So that's why I feel like...
John:
someone might get one of these and come to the realization that most of the time all they need is this little dinky underpowered thing and that it feels so much better in their pocket than the giant thing but very few people will ever come to that realization because who the heck is gonna buy two phones and deal with all that like it's a you know a tech nerd thing or people with money to burn or whatever so but anyway i hope other you know phone makers look at this
John:
And the lesson they take from it is not, well, we'll never do that because look what a disaster that product was.
John:
The lesson they take with it is that there's enough interest in this that they should consider making one of their models not be the size of a dinner tray.
Marco:
I do think, though, this is one of those aspirational products, even for the people who buy it, that they might think is very similar to the cellular Apple Watch.
Marco:
uh they might think oh i'm going to leave my my big phone behind during occasions or rolls x y and z and i'll bring this little satellite phone with me but then they can find it and by the way if you're an iphone user this doesn't have i message because it's android so that kind of sucks um so this is well i think this is mostly for android people um if you're an iphone user for the same money you could just buy an iphone se but
Marco:
anyway but like i think it's one of those things where you might think you would use this in a few contexts but in real life the first few times you did it you would miss things about your big phone number one frequently cited by apple watch people you miss the camera uh and you know this phone does have a camera but it's not going to be nearly as good as the ones that are in the flagship phones that you probably you know have access to otherwise if you're spending this kind of money frivolously on a phone so like
Marco:
And there's going to be a number of those things for everybody.
Marco:
There's going to be things like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
You think you want to leave your big phone at home, but once you're without it, there's a lot of things that you're going to miss and you're going to regret leaving it behind.
Marco:
And so this little phone is going to then go sit in a drawer somewhere for the rest of its life.
Marco:
I just see this as a problem that doesn't really...
Marco:
The issue of having a satellite phone that you sometimes take with you is not a thing.
Marco:
That is not a thing anybody really wants, or at least anybody wants in great numbers.
Marco:
And even if you give it to them, they will realize they won't actually use it shortly afterwards.
Marco:
So I don't see that at all.
Marco:
The idea of there being smaller phones as choices to buy for your main slash only phone, that idea has merit.
Marco:
I'm not sure how much the market supports that, but that idea has merit.
Marco:
But that's a very different thing than what they've shipped here.
John:
Yeah, this might be a little bit too down market because 350, like the quality of the camera and the CPU, it's got a, you know, it's probably too much of a downgrade, right?
John:
That's why everyone's saying like, just take an Apple Watch, right?
John:
But no one wants to text people on an Apple Watch.
John:
They're like, and who wants to text people on a screen this small?
John:
Just ask all the people who use the original iPhone.
John:
all the iPhones before they got tall with the five and before they got big with the six, like we did it.
John:
It was a thing that happened.
John:
So that's, it's viable, but the quality of this camera cannot be good.
John:
I mean, you can read the review to see what it looks like, but it's probably below the threshold where it's just going to annoy people.
John:
But most people don't have the newest, latest, greatest phone with an awesome camera.
John:
So I feel like you could make a cheaper, smaller phone as a standalone that would find a market.
John:
And the Palm stuff I just feel like is insulting because it's like they're the heritage of Palm.
John:
Like you just buy the name and you just stick it on the back of the thing in this weird thing where it's like P-A-L-M and like a square shape.
John:
I don't like it.
John:
It's upsetting.
Marco:
By the way, user Mike Yu in the chat points out that actually the Palm phone is way smaller than the original iPhone, which to me is like, that's a cool thing to have something that small, but you then pretty much won't be able to text on it.
Marco:
It has an on-screen keyboard like modern smartphones, but you're not going to be able to see that much on that tiny little screen.
Marco:
Typing is going to be really hard.
Marco:
What we do on phones today barely even fits on the iPhone SE, right?
Marco:
to make something that's even significantly smaller than that and to try to make it a useful thing like it's like if this phone was like 50 bucks that'd be a different story or if it was like really good and and a little bit bigger so it'd be a little more useful that'd be a different story but right now it's like it's too small to have general use and
Marco:
it's not a standalone product so you can't like bring it you can't like buy it for your kids or whatever and also it's too expensive to be like a kind of like disposable like you know keep it just in case you need it kind of thing like 350 is half the price of a really good phone so i i just i don't see what what this is going for
Marco:
It does have more RAM than an iPhone 7.
Marco:
Well, that's good.
Marco:
You won't be able to fit.
Marco:
I mean, you can fit as many apps as you want in them as long as they're crappy Android apps that you'll never want to use because they're so tiny.
John:
Yeah, I'm just saying like it's a it's well, that leads us into our next topic.
John:
But the most of the specs of this thing are ridiculous because it's a $350 phone, but it's actually got a surprising amount of RAM.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think it's that terrible device for the constraints it has.
Casey:
I just don't really understand what would make somebody purchase one.
Casey:
You know, like I understand the pitch, but realistically, nobody's going to do that.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
A bunch of people are going to do it because they'll be intrigued by the idea.
John:
But it's too much of a downgrade from their actual phone that I don't think there will be a viable substitute.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So you said that that was a segue into our next topic.
Casey:
Tell me more.
John:
Yeah, so this is about Adobe's announcements at their Adobe Max conference.
John:
There's a bunch of them.
John:
Maybe we'll talk about some of the other ones later.
John:
But today, the main one, the highlight is Photoshop CC is coming to the iPad in 2019.
John:
Uh, and this may not sound like much because like, hasn't there already been Photoshop for the iPad?
John:
Like who cares or whatever?
John:
Like, but the important part is that this is in Adobe's words and in all the PR things, this is real Photoshop on the iPad.
John:
It's not a new application.
John:
That's kind of like Photoshop.
John:
It's not a brand new application that can also read PSD files.
John:
Sometimes this is full fledged Photoshop, uh,
John:
uh on the ipad no ifs ands or buts about it and they they emphasize you know that it's the same code base and that it's fully compatible and obviously especially in the beginning there will be some features that are only on the desktop but i'm sure they'll shore up those gaps but this is sort of adobe finally
John:
you know i don't know jumping in like apple has wanted pro applications in the ipad for a long time and for the longest time adobe has been like yeah we'll make some apps for the ipad we have some ideas of cool things we can do but photoshop is a desktop app sorry it's you you can't have that on the ipad
John:
And now you can.
John:
And, you know, it's cross compatible.
John:
They have their, you know, cloud stuff where you can put the document in their creative cloud cloud.
John:
I don't know if they repeat cloud and work on it on your desktop and work on the same thing.
John:
You know, and it also reads from iCloud Drive and Dropbox.
John:
And it's just 100 percent compatible.
John:
You make a document on desktop.
John:
You can open it up in your iPad.
John:
You make a document on the iPad.
John:
You can open it on desktop.
John:
Just, you know.
John:
real photoshop and that's and obviously they adapted the interface it's not the same as it is on the desktop there's a bunch of things uh touch affordances and some interesting new tools in there um but i thought this was uh you know it's about time i'm sure all of adobe's competitors are a little bit scared because adobe
John:
You know, their application may or may not be as good as some of the existing stuff or may not be as you know, because most people who have had to do work on the iPad or like doing work on the iPad have already chosen a non Adobe application for the most part to do their stuff.
John:
And so they're they're late to the game.
John:
But Adobe has an existing subscription system.
John:
Uh, somehow they're going to work out the financials with the Apple stuff of like, if you, if you can subscribe through it, through Apple thing or whatever, but the current, the current workaround is that if you buy Photoshop CC, you just get the iPad app for free.
John:
Um, I'm sure they've all worked all this out with Apple.
John:
Uh, Adobe has tons of applications and lots of history and Photoshop is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of image processing.
John:
So I bet the competitors aren't particularly happy about Adobe finally doing this, but I think it's a good move for the iPad and hopefully it'll push Apple in the direction of making the iPad even more pro.
John:
But the reason I said that they are the end of that weird palm phone thing was a good transition to this is because
John:
There's a particular technical angle of this that I was thinking about when the announcement was made, and I have some musings based on it.
John:
And the technical angle is, how do you get Photoshop, a big fancy desktop application that historically has been a thing that you use to show off the power of your computer, particularly your Mac,
John:
How do you get that onto an iPad?
John:
And we've talked about how the iPad CPUs and GPUs are surprisingly powerful about the JavaScript benchmark being faster than the iMac Pro and just in general being, you know, sometimes just being straight up faster than a lot of Apple's laptops.
John:
Like that doesn't seem like a problem.
John:
CPU power seems like it's there.
John:
And, you know, storage for big images, don't they make like a 512 gig iPad or something, a 512 gig phone, like whatever, there's plenty of room to store giant files.
John:
And especially if they're in the cloud, it's not a big deal.
John:
But there is one aspect of iOS devices, even the big iPads.
John:
It doesn't seem like it's up to snuff to deal with something like Photoshop, and that's RAM.
John:
There hasn't been a Mac sold with four gigs of RAM in it for many, many years.
John:
You sure?
John:
Doesn't the Air still base itself at that?
John:
Oh, please don't say that.
John:
I really hope that's not true.
John:
That can't possibly be true.
John:
That's impossible.
Casey:
I thought it was true, but we can look it up.
John:
Nope, it's eight.
John:
Four gigs of RAM is not a lot for a Photoshop machine.
John:
Let's put it that way.
John:
Again, Photoshop always wanted the most RAM you can put in so you can have really big images.
John:
And why does Photoshop use a lot of RAM?
John:
I mean, the main answer is layers.
John:
Right.
John:
So most of the time you could have one image.
John:
It's probably not that high res, but, you know, maybe it's like 600 DPI for like print publishing a magazine cover or whatever.
John:
But imagine that document has 50 layers in it.
John:
You know, that stuff just eats memory.
Marco:
Also, like the way Photoshop deals with a lot of the images, it has to deal with them in uncompressed format.
Marco:
Like you think of a JPEG as being like, you know, it's like eight megs for this giant image.
Marco:
But like, no, actually, like if you deal with the raw pixels in an uncompressed format, like multiply the width by the height by four.
Marco:
And that's how many bytes it needs, at least, depending on what else.
Marco:
You could be doing more things.
Marco:
You could have more deep color.
Marco:
It's a lot of memory.
Marco:
A single one-screen large image off the top of my head is 20, 30 megs.
Marco:
It's a lot.
Marco:
It's way more data than the JPEG version is.
Marco:
And to do a lot of operations efficiently, that has to be in memory.
John:
yeah so you may be thinking okay well but that's that's the modern world wherever all the macs have tons of ram but max did ship with four gigs of ram we just talked about my mac pro that shipped with two gigs of ram and photoshop ran on those machines so it's obviously not a big deal uh photoshop can run in much less memory than we run it in today maybe it's not great but it can do it uh there's a second thing to think about though real-time follow-up there is indeed one mac that is still sold new oh the mac mini yeah
John:
updated 1 600 days ago the mac mini 500 configuration comes stock with four gigs of ram for mac mini probably not a photoshop powerhouse but the anyway so the other thing to be concerned about with ios devices is and you often hear this and this is not actually true people will say that ios devices don't have virtual memory that's not true ios devices have always had a virtual memory in that
John:
They have your program's address memory using virtual addresses that are then translated to physical addresses, right?
John:
So virtual memory has been in iOS from day one.
John:
What people mean when they say iOS doesn't have virtual memory is they mean that iOS doesn't use swap, will not page things to disk.
John:
So in a virtual memory system...
John:
When a program wants more memory and there's no more memory to give, the system will take something that is in memory, hopefully that hasn't been used recently or isn't being actively used, and it will swap it out to disk.
John:
It will say, I'm going to take this big chunk of RAM, I'm going to write it to a swap file, and I'll say, you stay there, and I'll give you this RAM that they were using before.
John:
And if they ever want that thing back, I'll go back to the disk and pull it out of the swap file and bring it back in.
John:
Obviously, going to disk and swap is...
John:
way slower than RAM, and you really don't want it to be in a situation where it's constantly shuffling things.
John:
Oh, I got to take this out of RAM, put it on disk, or I take this thing off the disk and put it back in RAM.
John:
That's called swapping, and then it'll make everything slow.
John:
That's called the 90s.
John:
Yeah.
John:
iOS has never had swap, because as you can imagine...
John:
Like, it was at the ragged edge of what was possible, like in the original iPhone.
John:
And if there's a possibility that by loading a big game or something, stuff can swap, and then you try to switch and swap it back in.
John:
You know, Flash wasn't always as fast as it is today, especially on iOS devices.
John:
And even if it's fast, it's way slower than having things in RAM.
John:
So...
John:
ios from from day one continuing today has said no swap so it has virtual memory but it doesn't have swap and what that means for ram limits is like your your two gig mac pro the two gig mac pro that i'm sitting next to we could run photoshop or or whatever uh maybe you have something that has too many layers doesn't fit in two gigs
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
You can always swap out portions of it.
John:
It'll make it slower, but at least you can do it.
John:
But in iOS, when RAM is exhausted and when the system has ejected every other application from the system and you ask for more RAM, the OS kills your program.
John:
There is no more to give.
John:
There's nothing like, oh, well, the OS never says, well, there's no more RAM.
John:
I've killed all the other programs.
John:
I'll just start swapping some stuff out to this.
John:
It doesn't do that.
John:
It says the RAM is all used up and you are the only program running.
John:
uh i'm gonna kill you now i think it gives you like low memory warnings but but eventually the os kills your program right and so what happens in photoshop it's just like the desktop if i make this awesome image in the desktop that's you know some 600 dpi magazine cover with 50 layers and then i try to open it on my ipad and i try to do some manipulation that requires it to load a bunch of stuff into memory to run some filter across seven layers and it keeps asking for more and more memory to perform that operation and then it runs out
John:
the os is going to kill the program but you can't you know how do they allow you to edit files that are too big to fit in ram and remember the biggest ios devices i think have four gigs of ram is that the the max now i think so on the on the uh the big ipad or on the iphone 10s max and all that stuff anyway it's not a lot of ram uh there is very easy to find a real world photoshop image that will happily eat up four gigs of ram while you're working on it and keep in mind that the os has to take some portion of that and so you don't even get all the four gigs to yourself
John:
So that's a little bit of a head scratcher, but obviously they did it.
John:
They demoed it, right?
John:
So how did they do it?
John:
I don't know the details of how they actually did it, but there are a bunch of possibilities, but one of them I find intriguing and delightful, which is rooted in the fact that Photoshop
John:
has already run in the past on a platform that did not have swap.
John:
In fact, Photoshop has run on a platform that did not have virtual memory.
John:
That platform is classic Mac OS.
John:
Classic Mac OS did not have virtual memory and did not have swap.
John:
Wait, what?
John:
And by the way,
John:
yeah like wait as in like not until mac os 10 uh the virtual memory part of it uh came into effect a little bit uh and towards the end of classic mac was his life but the original mac no virtual memory real addresses for everything single shared address space no swap no virtual memory no nothing
John:
right yeah the original one yeah but like in like by like the 90s they had to have had at least some of that please for the love of god i think i think they might well if you think about it if you got programs that expect a big shared memory space i think they they had some well there were there were third-party programs that could give you some of this and i think by mac os 9 or whatever they had some kind of virtual stuff
John:
uh maybe i don't think they ever had a real swap file um but anyway photoshop ran before all of that it ran like i don't know it didn't run on like the mac 128 but on the mac plus i believe which had one megabyte of ram i think photoshop 1.0 ran on the mac plus certainly the mac se uh photoshop would run could run on a machine with a monochrome display which is always fun um
John:
So how did it do it?
John:
How did Photoshop run on a machine with like a ridiculously small amount of RAM and no virtual memory system and no swap?
John:
They did it the only way you could possibly do it, which is within Photoshop.
John:
They wrote a system that said when you're using memory to do something and the OS says there's no more memory to give.
John:
you program implement your own little virtual memory system where you'll make your own little swap files off to the side and you will take portions of the image data and write it out to your own little you know photoshop swap files like a tiny miniature virtual memory system just for that program within that program so it can shuffle things off of disk into memory operate on them put the back on disk so on and so forth
John:
And so that's Photoshop's origins.
John:
It was originally a Mac program and it was born on a platform that didn't have this.
John:
It would be extremely delightful if the code to do that from original Photoshop suddenly came in super handy.
John:
If it once again finds itself on a system that has no swap.
John:
So it's like, well, we have our own swapping system written already.
John:
We can use that to take things out of memory and put them onto disk and pull them off of disk or whatever.
John:
I would love for that to be true.
John:
It's obviously potentially a competitive advantage over other image editors like, you know, Affinity and the other competitors to Photoshop, which must have to do something similar because, again, if you want to work with images that are too big to fit in memory and your operating system does not have swap, you need to do something like that yourself.
John:
And Photoshop, Adobe, in theory, has experience doing that very same thing.
John:
So...
John:
That, to me, is the most interesting and exciting part of Photoshop on the iPad, the idea that potentially code from classic Mac OS has risen from the grave, or perhaps it never even left Photoshop and is now potentially a competitive advantage to Adobe over other programs that did not have their origin on a system with no swap.
Marco:
Modern versions of Photoshop still have the swap disk options, swap folders.
Marco:
Scratch disk, yeah.
Marco:
It probably has the same system.
Marco:
Lots of high-end or high-performance apps will do things like write their own memory allocator because they can tailor it to exactly their use and they can get faster performance and more control than the system stuff.
Marco:
I don't know of a lot of programs that write their own swap file system, but...
Marco:
But I'm sure somebody does and, you know, beyond just Photoshop.
Marco:
And so it wouldn't surprise me if Adobe still uses that even on even like on Macs with, you know, 64 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
They might still use that kind of system just because they already had it and it's they can tweak it.
Marco:
They can tune it.
Marco:
And we know it still uses scratch disk for something.
Marco:
So that could be what they're for.
Marco:
And also, this is just one of those things that when you ask, oh, what do you need Photoshop on the iPad for?
Marco:
And somebody says, oh, you can use alternative X, Y, or Z. One of the things that really separates pro apps from more basic or consumer or prosumer ones is this ability to deal with extremes.
Marco:
And this is true even on the Mac, too.
Marco:
This is true everywhere.
Marco:
But what really separates pro apps from the rest is...
Marco:
You can do operations on a 300x300 clipart thing you found on the web, or you can do operations on an entire 600 DPI 11x17 page layout of something.
Marco:
And it'll be slower if it needs to be, but it won't crash.
Marco:
It'll still work.
Marco:
It'll let you do what you have to do.
Marco:
And I've never used any competitors to Photoshop, really, so I don't know how they handle these extremes.
Marco:
They might handle them just fine, as far as I know.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
As a customer of these things and a user of these things, if I were looking to change my workflow to a competitor, like everyone has had to do on the iPad up until this comes out, one of the things I'd be worried about is, can it really handle extremes or not?
Marco:
Because occasionally I need it to.
Marco:
To have something that is known to have extreme capability, like Photoshop, that is known to handle crazy things, and at least, even if it isn't fast, it will at least work, that's a really good selling point for them.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons why I think they're going to do well with this on the iPad.
Marco:
But one of the big ones to me is you're going to know that you can throw anything at this.
Marco:
And if you're patient enough, it will probably work.
Casey:
So what I can't help but wonder is if at one point in the past or perhaps in the present, they needed to create their own virtual memory system, what else do you think that they abstracted away about the underlying platform in order to make things easier?
Casey:
Since Photoshop runs on Windows, it runs on Mac OS, and soon will be running on iOS—
Casey:
how much do you think they're running against actual APIs or some sort of adapter layer or facade maybe that Adobe wrote themselves?
Casey:
And at what point are they creating an entire virtual machine within Photoshop just to kind of smooth all these rough edges out?
Casey:
I don't argue with what you're saying, John.
Casey:
I can't help but wonder, how far does this really go?
John:
It used to be that the Mac version of Photoshop and the Windows version of Photoshop had separate UIs.
John:
Like the Mac version certainly is the first one to exist and it had native Mac UI or as native as it could be.
John:
But at some point, due to someone's great idea about economies of scale and not repeating yourself or whatever...
John:
They made a unified user interface that was surely some underlying Adobe framework that rendered a Mac UI in the Mac and a Windows UI in Windows.
John:
And the way you could tell that was that the Mac UI suddenly became a lot less Mac-like.
John:
And you entered the era where Adobe apps had essentially Adobe interfaces.
John:
They weren't Mac interfaces.
John:
They weren't Windows interfaces.
John:
they were adobe interfaces and i think a lot of adobe apps are still like this where it's like they're pulling from an adobe suite of controls and their idea of what a window and a button and a control should look like is the adobe idea and it looks different on windows and the mac but it's clear that there's been some massive unification under this behind the scenes that oh you know hasn't always been beneficial but i'm sure that's the case and obviously their engines for dealing with images are mostly cross-platform at this part uh
John:
plus or minus the various use of the different acceleration frameworks on different platforms right so that's that's been a complaint about adobe in the past from a mac user perspective is that they don't feel like mac apps they feel like adobe apps obviously if you like adobe apps or you know if you move from platform to platform that's an advantage but sometimes i look at adobe apps most adobe apps and i think this is like a weird it's not an electron app but it's like it's like a weird kind of
John:
i don't know it doesn't it doesn't feel like a mac application and sometimes it's kind of ugly and sometimes i kind of wish the controls were the regular controls um but it's you know at a certain point adobe's like look apple you're lucky we still make most shot for a while they were like we're lucky you still make photoshop for your platform at all because windows has taken over the world obviously the that's less relevant today and the ipad is certainly uh the more popular uh
John:
tablet platform than android because they don't have that many great tablet apps but yeah i'm sure i'm sure there's a lot of that sharing going on behind the scenes i'm not sure that if they ever had to implement a virtual memory system for windows because i think the first version of windows they wrote it for had both virtual memory and swap
John:
But I'm not sure.
Marco:
I believe Windows got that in 3.1-ish, somewhere around that range.
Marco:
Because my Gateway 2000 computer had the ability to either enable or disable 386 enhanced mode, which I'm pretty sure was virtual memory.
Casey:
My word.
Casey:
So do we think this is going to be good?
Casey:
And I don't say that to snark and I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
It's just, I don't, it's hard for me to imagine that, that this is going to be without, um,
Casey:
Just look at file management on the iPad, which is something that's relatively new.
Casey:
File management is not easy on the iPad.
Casey:
What happens when you want to suck in something from an SD card?
Casey:
Do you still have to go through the Apple Photos app to suck in these photos from the SD card and then bring them into Photoshop and then back to your photo library or your camera roll or whatever?
Casey:
It just seems like this is still going to have...
Casey:
a lot of hurdles.
Casey:
Now, those hurdles are the sorts of hurdles that really make Mike and Federico happy, but to somebody like me, I find that to be infuriating.
Casey:
So is this going to be good, great?
Casey:
I mean, I guess the fact that Adobe has cloud, hence CC, because that's Creative Cloud, once you get a file, you can store it in Creative Cloud, I would assume, and then it just kind of appears everywhere, I would assume, kind of iCloud-like.
Casey:
But I don't know, don't you think that this is still going to be fairly clunky?
John:
i mean that's one of the one of the potential upsides of adobe ring photoshop to the ipad is hopefully it will push apple in the direction to make the ipad a better platform for pro applications um the file stuff i think actually we're probably mostly okay for the cloud options because it always got its thing but it also works with like icloud drive and dropbox
John:
And honestly, even if there was full file system access from every application, there was SD card slot in the side of the iPad, it's still probably more convenient to do the cloud stuff.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
You're not using Sneakernet to ship files around, even to another Mac.
John:
It's not like, yeah, Macs have great file system access, but the way two Macs would look at the same files, they would pull it up on a network share or something, right?
John:
So I think the cloud solution is probably mostly okay, but...
John:
the fact that some options are some doors are closed to you, hopefully it will make Apple consider, you know, especially when it's not just one file, but it's a whole bunch of files or like you're working on a project.
John:
That's a folder full of files.
John:
And you can do all this with a cloud drive as well, but there are some things that are a little bit easier locally, or there could be security sensitive things where you don't want to go across the network.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Um,
John:
So I hope Apple pays attention.
John:
There was interesting video.
John:
We'll put a link in the show.
John:
It's this verge review of Photoshop on the iPad.
John:
And they had a bunch of their artists who work for the verge, you know, mess with it and, and say what they think about using Photoshop on the iPad.
John:
Uh, they have some interesting things to say that you might not think of if you don't, you know, draw on a computer all day.
John:
Like one of the ones was a person talking about, uh, I mean, this is true of any iPad, not Photoshop, but, um,
John:
If you're drawing with the pencil on the iPad and you want to draw at a different angle, you can just rotate the iPad like you would a piece of paper, which is not true of a computer screen and is also not true, interestingly, of something like the Surface Studio, where the screen is like a big iMac-like screen and kind of folds down.
John:
You can't take that and easily like just twist it like you would twist a piece of paper to scribble at a different angle because it's just too big and it's not on a swivel thing.
John:
You'd have to like turn the whole computer and it would be awkward.
John:
Like it's more like a drafting table than a piece of paper on the drafting table, which is an interesting angle for people considering drawing on the iPad.
John:
But the other one that really stood out to me was the one artist who said she was doing, she did some, they all tried to do some like real non-trivial project on the thing.
John:
And she said by the end of it, her hand was hurting a little bit from gripping the Apple pencil.
John:
And she said her Wacom tablet that she normally uses has a pencil with a big, thick, ergonomic grip, the smooshy thing on the end.
John:
And if you look at the Apple Pencil, it's a beautiful, simple, elegant shape.
John:
There's nothing extraneous, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it's pretty darn skinny, right?
John:
It's pretty skinny.
John:
It certainly doesn't have one of those ergonomic grip things.
John:
And you could add one or whatever.
John:
But it goes to show how ill-suited... I don't want to get Mark on a rant, but how ill-suited so many aspects of modern Apple design are to demanding professional applications.
John:
Because if you are a professional using a stylus all day...
John:
just using the Apple Pencil the way it is, it's probably not great.
John:
Like you don't see a lot of styluses or other things used by artists for a long period of time, especially with a computer that don't look and aren't actually more ergonomic than a simple unadorned, fairly slippery, skinny cylinder.
John:
And there's a reason for that.
John:
There's a reason things that look ergonomic tend to look ugly and be shaped so that they're easy to comfortably grip and they reduce fatigue or whatever.
John:
And it's like, okay, well, you don't have to use the Apple Pencil.
John:
There is a wide variety of pressure-sensitive styluses.
John:
Oh, wait.
John:
Not really.
John:
So again, I hope bringing more artists to seriously consider the iPad because now quote unquote real Photoshop is there.
John:
Again, tons of artists have been using the iPad and Adobe has made applications.
John:
And by the way, Adobe is also making non Photoshop applications that are more of a green field.
John:
Let's reimagine what kind of illustration application we can make.
John:
I hope all of that and the influx of new creatives and all that stuff.
John:
leads apple down the same road that i got i hope that they're traveling for the mac pro which is what do professionals really need out of our platforms let's listen to them and make something for them even if that thing is not well suited to consumers consumers don't want a weird wacom tablet looking pencil thing if they want a pencil at all the simple apple one is probably the right thing although they really wish they had a place to stick it instead of it just being loose um so i hope
John:
I hope all of this is nudging Apple in the right direction.
John:
And by the way, at Adobe Max, Phil Schiller came on stage and and talked about Photoshop and how happy is it's coming to the iPad and how great the iPad is and so on and so forth.
John:
So Apple is in on this and they're working together.
John:
So things are trending in the right direction.
John:
Speaking of the Apple Pencil, I was thinking about this the other day.
John:
I don't know how many people listening to this actually have an Apple Pencil.
John:
If you do have it, you know where it is.
John:
There's lots of ways that you travel with it and little clip-on things and places to stick it and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
It's so bad.
John:
And the cap.
John:
Forget about the cap, right?
John:
I was thinking about this and I was like, well, that's true.
John:
But in the idealized world of Apple...
John:
uh many problems either don't exist in apple's idealized world or they they don't acknowledge them but this is a case where apple itself definitely acknowledges this issue and they acknowledge it with these weird little white trays in all the apple stores why do they have these weird little white trays where the pencils go it's not like at the bank where it's connected with a cable like there's no anti-theft device attached to it right and
John:
oh, the pencil's weighted.
John:
It will never roll off a table.
John:
Why are those little, you know, dugout canoes of plastic there?
John:
Because if they weren't, the pencils would be, no one would ever know where the freaking pencils are.
John:
Where do I put this when I'm done with it?
John:
How do I put it down?
John:
Will it roll off the table?
John:
Will someone step on it?
John:
You put it back in the little plastic canoe, right?
John:
Those little stupid little canoes are the greatest Apple admission that there is something missing from the workflow, as they would say, of the Apple pencil.
Marco:
Yeah, it's very frustrating to me.
Marco:
I have an Apple Pencil, I have an iPad Pro, and I have a smart keyboard.
Marco:
There is no way to have all three of those things with me that doesn't suck.
Marco:
It seems like these three products were never designed with the idea that somebody would actually have any two of them.
Marco:
like the smart keyboard and the ipad work together okay not it's still it isn't even great it's just merely okay the pencil and the ipad it seems like they were designed on different planets and it's just a coincidence they happen to work together but like no one ever thought you might want to carry an apple pencil while you carry an ipad like that seems to totally have been not considered at all
Marco:
And the idea that here you can get a smart keyboard, which is wonderful.
Marco:
I actually really enjoy having a smart keyboard on my iPad.
Marco:
It totally changed how frequently I use the iPad greatly for the better.
Marco:
But the smart keyboard is a large cover that has lots of surface area and is willingly bulking it up.
Marco:
Maybe they could have put a spot there to store a pencil, but they didn't.
Marco:
They released a case that is like this big leather flap that has a slot for the iPad and a slot for the pencil.
Marco:
But if you have a smart keyboard, it won't fit in the case.
Marco:
It would be very awkward to get it out anyway.
Marco:
It's just like everything about it.
Marco:
It's just like one of the biggest things I want to see with the anticipated iPad event that's probably happening sometime soon.
Marco:
I really want to see how and if they have rethought
Marco:
how people actually use the apple pencil and if they can somehow make it easy to have it with you more often i would love that because i literally have all these things and i never use the pencil because as john alluded to like it's it's like you know off like in a cup or a drawer somewhere and it's and the battery's dead in it now because you haven't charged it forever because that's awkward too
Marco:
yeah like the battery is definitely dead because i have not charged it because i never have it with me and so i never use it and it's such a waste like i just please for the love of god apple like design these products together it charges in 30 seconds though and you can get too anyway there's all sorts of solutions to the charging thing that are part of the pitch yeah by the way
Marco:
When it's totally dead, it doesn't charge in 30 seconds.
John:
Well, you get like a minute out of it and five minutes out of it in 30 seconds.
John:
They had some pitch of like a very short charge time gives you a surprising amount of draw time, even if you're going from dead.
John:
I'm not sure how accurate this, but that was part of their original pitch, but just not supposed to be an admission that you're probably going to lose it and leave it uncharged, but...
John:
Anyway, there's one thing that Apple used to do better, probably not for great reasons and maybe not, like, as a conscious thing, but the 90s Apple, and, you know, Apple through the 90s, maybe into the 2000s, was very into making, like, a whole bunch of stuff that works together, even into the 2000s and the Mac OS X era, like, to give an example, you know, to a fault, all right?
John:
So, Apple, you know, on my original...
John:
i don't know what my power mac g3 maybe whatever they had the adc apple uh display connector remember that thing yeah it was like a single cable that drove a display with power and usb and video only work with mac stuff it was a proprietary thing that was like piggybacking dvi and a bunch of other stuff over a bunch of pins and a custom connector
John:
uh so that you could have a display that work with the monitor and then work with the keyboard that connected to the display and the power button on the old max was on the keyboard and that power button could turn on the mac that was connected with like systems that work together the g4 cube comes with little speakers that match the thing and then the thing connects with adc to the display by a single cable
John:
like match sets of stuff where if you buy all the things it's clear they work together buy your laptop the display has a little pigtail on it the pigtail has a magsafe connector and that goes into there and like like if you kept buying stuff the next piece of the app the very expensive apple stuff that you bought you're like oh this fits in here oh that fits in there and if i buy these things they fit in there and they match this thing like things aesthetically matched there was a there was a styling theme with them the connectors on them all matched um
John:
They all work together.
John:
If you bought just one of them, it worked fine.
John:
But as you bought more of them, you saw where they plugged in.
John:
Whereas with the iPad, the covers work with the iPad.
John:
And the keyboard works with the iPad.
John:
And the pencil works with the iPad.
John:
But the keyboard, pencil, covers, and iPad do not get along.
John:
Once you get more than... It's like the chicken and the wolf.
John:
Once you get more than two things in this boat, bad things happen.
John:
So that is a... I don't know.
John:
Again, I don't think it was a particularly conscious thing.
John:
But...
John:
the idea that you can uh that it is attractive making it attractive to buy all the things because every new thing you buy just fits in neatly and it feels like you're building like the whole package the ultimate setup like you got to have the g4 cube with the cinema display with the speakers with the apple keyboard that turns the thing on i think that wasn't on the cube but anyway like the whole setup was attractive even back to like the laser writer get a mac get a laser writer get the extended keyboard get the apple
John:
optical drive get the apple external hard drive get the apple printer now we're getting into wi-fi routers again right but that that whole motivation to buy all the things on in the history of this show my recollection is a lot of our complaints are have been have had an angle where if you are apple's best customer and you buy all the apple things you are punished for it in some subtle way like you know if you buy all you know lots of apple stuff if things work not as well as if you just had one of them
John:
And that's not the right cycle.
John:
Apple should make it attractive for people to spend all the money.
Casey:
And I remember that was the case, you know, for the first several years that I came to Apple platforms.
Casey:
This was roughly 2008.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The more Apple stuff I had, the better everything worked together and everything.
Casey:
You know what it did, guys?
Casey:
It just worked.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I shouldn't be encouraging this because we've made this speech every episode for the last hundred.
Casey:
And so we can we can hopefully let it go.
Casey:
But I echo what you're saying, John, that that.
Casey:
I admire Apple trailblazing in so many ways in so many categories, but I also wish I could have it both ways and have them not screw up what already exists in order to trailblaze.
Casey:
But you can't have it both ways.
John:
i just don't think it's that much to ask that when you buy an iphone or an apple watch and you also have a macbook that you can plug one into the other to charge it don't be ridiculous anything else about photoshop there's a lot more maybe i'll maybe i'll watch that video and gemini is their application that's like combines raster and vector stuff and it's like you know that new we talked about adomi xd a while back like there's a bunch of interesting stuff that uh
John:
they'll be thinking maybe i'll watch the video and bring in there's that that youtube premiere edition at the premiere rush oh yeah the rush rush uh cc for doing doing portrait video which everyone was very excited about because portrait video is definitely a thing but editing in a quote-unquote real video editing application where no one conceived of the idea that people might want portrait video is a little bit tricky uh so yeah there's a bunch of exciting hours they also had i think a pretty good joke uh when phil schiller was there i mean maybe it's a tech dad joke or whatever but i i give it a thumbs up
John:
phil shill came out and did his little spiel and everyone was happy to hear him say how great adobe is and how great apple is and so on and so forth and when they whisked him off stage they had a gift for him from the adobe people to thank him for coming there they gave him a jacket from the team that was making uh photoshop or whatever and it said content aware phil phil on the back of the jacket that's pretty good and they used the hyphen correctly oh even better i thought that was a good joke adobe
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Jake wants to know, in the age we currently live in, how do the three of us stay informed about non-tech news?
Casey:
Is it just Twitter?
Casey:
And if not, are there specific sites or voices that you would recommend?
Casey:
I don't have a terribly good answer for this.
Casey:
I do watch national news in the morning as I eat breakfast.
Casey:
I watch headline news, which I...
Casey:
personally find to be relatively center if you disagree with me that's fine i just just keep it to yourself it's good enough for me uh i do that most days of the week and then when i remember although i forgot this morning on wednesdays i turn on fox and friends because i'm an idiot but i also like to see how other idiots i mean wait what i like to see how the other side lives and so that's mostly it anything else that's national typically bubbles up via twitter or there marco what do you do
Marco:
very little because everything that's in the news for the last i don't know about two years uh has been so horrible that for my own mental health i know this is not the responsible thing to do as like a citizen of the universe but for my own mental health i try to block out as much of it as i possibly can
Marco:
So I mostly don't follow news sources regularly except for those that bubble up from links from friends and stuff.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That's mostly the same with me with the exception of TV in the morning for about 15 minutes.
Marco:
Also, for God's sakes, turn off Fox and Friends.
Casey:
it is all kidding aside it is truly and utterly heinous it is and you are contributing to it by watching it uh yeah but you are patronizing it you are a rating you are increasing its numbers you are hearing what they are saying he's not a nielsen family i don't know how the ratings work these days maybe the cable boxes all report back i don't know
Casey:
I understand that perspective, but to me, it's important for me to at least understand is too strong a word because I don't understand these maniacs, but to hear the other side.
Casey:
And again, like understand is the right word.
Casey:
Appreciate isn't the right word, but I guess just get exposed to the other side because it helps me to understand the victims of Fox News.
Casey:
And I use that word deliberately.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
But even because I am more worldly, I think, than your average Fox and Friends viewer, I understand when they're just lying to me, which is pretty much 99% of the time that they're talking.
Casey:
But it is interesting because I can understand better how people that I care deeply for can get hoodwinked by these lies and this propaganda.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I, I personally think it's useful for me, but I am not trying to say that it's useful for anyone else.
Casey:
And it is true, utter filth.
Casey:
It is garbage and it is it is a danger to our democracy.
Casey:
But it helps me to understand some of the people I care about to watch it.
Marco:
I find that reason unconvincing for the cost that it is incurring.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
John, how about you?
Casey:
What do you do?
John:
Not to Steve Harper and Casey, but I was actually surprised.
John:
I heard about the Fox and Friends thing before.
John:
You'd mentioned that.
John:
But what I was more surprised by is the fact that you voluntarily watch television news in any form because my experience of my peer group or anything close to it is that
John:
people our age or younger don't watch a lot of TV news.
John:
I would love to see the age demographics of who watches TV news.
John:
There's probably a lot of overlap with white car ownership.
John:
I find all TV news in all forms, in all venues, to just not... I find it... My brain rejects it.
John:
I cannot stand it.
John:
It doesn't... It's nothing to do with politics.
John:
It has to do with just...
John:
Now, I grew up with the form.
John:
It's not like I'm unfamiliar with it.
John:
I grew up with it, right?
John:
But from my modern sensibilities, I don't want what they're giving me.
John:
And again, the TV is just a mechanism by which the news gets here, but there is a form that has evolved over time to be like...
John:
their selection of what they want to report does not match what i want to hear like ever uh you know it's just too even local news maybe especially local news like i don't need to know about i don't need the human interest story i don't need to know about the kid who was hit by a car blocked down i don't need to know about the service level of some actors in a new movie like i
John:
i don't want tv news and i'm surprised casey's watching it but like you know you know my parents watch it and i encourage them heavily stop watching television because it might like putting aside fox right television news seems very much like the old snl skit where they're telling old people the robots are going to steal their medicine like
John:
it's all about what's going to kill you.
John:
What terrible thing is happening?
John:
What it's like, just so it's clickbait before there was clickbait.
John:
It is so incredibly hyped up and sensationalized telling you about all the things that you should be worried about.
John:
And it's not the things you should be worried about.
John:
It is a bunch of other crap.
John:
And it's just like, don't subject yourself to that.
John:
Don't, you don't need to know that.
John:
Don't get all hyped up about, uh, the killer bees that are coming into your neighborhood.
John:
Like,
John:
I always wonder if there was an actual story that people needed to know about.
John:
Like, it would just be mixed in with all the other crap on local news and given equal weight to, like, the dog that was loose that the police shot that had rabies, right?
John:
It's exactly the same.
John:
Like, you know.
John:
So anyway, I don't watch TV news.
John:
Conclusion.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, and a little bit on the Fox News things.
John:
I get where you're coming from, Casey.
John:
But my advice would be that even if you're watching it with that in mind,
John:
constant exposure to extreme propaganda can't help but shift your thinking merely through repetition like the overton window right like yeah you think it's all lies and it's all bs and you're not falling for it and so on and so forth but the constant repetition eventually gives the propaganda more weight than it deserves in your mind when you balance it against the truth right and
John:
Not much you can do to stop.
John:
It's just human nature.
John:
Like, it's not much you can do to stop that.
John:
You will come to think that the positions staked out there are slightly more reasonable than they are just by hearing it all the time.
John:
And it's the same stuff that all sorts of, you know...
John:
the personalities and the jokes and you come become familiar with the people and so on and so forth even if you're in your rational mind you're like well this is all bs and i'm learning about the enemy it does have an effect on you in that manner if you're aware of the effect you could probably counteract a little bit but it is a thing so i feel like you by now you should know all you need to know about how fox works and uh and be able to understand the people who are into it
John:
And I would encourage you to stop watching it as well.
John:
But that's what I do.
John:
You know, I would also encourage you to stop watching all the other TV news.
John:
Anyway, to answer the simple question, Twitter is still the main the main part place where I get all my news.
John:
I have a very carefully selected group of people that I follow.
John:
And, you know, I'm, you know, 20 degrees separated from the actual thing.
John:
But I trim that list to the point where the things that come through on my feed are the things that I actually want to hear about personally.
John:
And if someone is, you know, if I'm getting information that I don't want to hear about, I will trim that off.
John:
If I'm not getting information that I think is important or I'm getting it too late, I will add a follow by looking at a follow, follow, follow to see how something got to me.
John:
Twitter is how I do it.
John:
Before Twitter, I used RSS.
John:
Before RSS, I typed in the names of websites or used bookmarks.
John:
And before that, I guess we were back in the bad old days of TV news.
John:
But I never watched TV news as like, now it's time for me to watch the news.
John:
It was just that sometimes it was on in the house that I was in.
John:
That's as close as I got.
Marco:
Yeah, I saw a lot of TV news growing because I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house.
Marco:
they would always have news on every night.
Marco:
And you'd frequently see multiple news.
Marco:
Because you'd see first the local one, then the national one, whatever.
Marco:
So you'd see three or four news programs in a row sometimes.
Marco:
So I saw a lot of TV news growing up.
Marco:
And I totally stopped watching it after I stopped going over there as a kid all the time.
Marco:
And so now I only ever see it if if it's like, you know, on a TV somewhere that I have to wait, like, you know, an office somewhere like a doctor's office or something like that.
John:
It was the airport.
John:
Like when they have news on at the airport, I can't stand it because like you can't escape it.
John:
Like you just want to put a noise canceling headphones to not hear the news.
John:
Like exactly my hatred for television news in all forms, every station, everything like maybe it's not rational, but I really hate TV news.
John:
I really hate it.
Marco:
The few times I see it now, because I've been away from it for so long, but I had such a strong history of it before that, now when I see it, it's hitting a raw nerve.
Marco:
It's the same garbage now that it was 20 years ago.
John:
I feel like it's worse.
John:
In the days when I grew up, at least, the network news had a certain boring staidness that does not exist in any television news anymore.
John:
Like, they could get away with it because there were networks and there were monopolies and news was isolated from entertainment.
John:
And there was all sorts of factors allowing them to essentially not give in to market forces that inevitably lead them down to the television equivalent of clickbait.
John:
So that did exist.
John:
It is much worse now than it was.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But it's still, though, like, it was never good.
Marco:
It was just merely okay before.
Marco:
And now it's truly awful.
Marco:
And when you see it, when you're away from it for a while,
Marco:
And then you see it, you realize quite how horrendously bad it really is.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I strongly suggest, Casey, regardless of what viewpoints you want to develop or understand, TV news of any sort from any provider is horrible and is a bad way to get those viewpoints or any information whatsoever.
Marco:
And just ultimately, I would recommend, and maybe you don't want to do this, but I strongly encourage people who get a lot of anxiety or depression about everything horrible that's going on in the world, step back from it.
Marco:
It feels like you're giving up or it feels wrong in some way to take a break from it and ignore it or close yourself off from it.
Marco:
But the reality is that...
Marco:
There's always going to be – much of this applies to Twitter too.
Marco:
There's always going to be more to read.
Marco:
There's always going to be more news.
Marco:
There's always going to be various news publishers and various media trying to get your attention with new breaking developments of whatever, whatever, whatever.
Marco:
and most of it doesn't matter at all a day later.
Marco:
It's like junk food for information.
Marco:
You're just throwing junk food into your brain, and it feels like you're being useful or productive or a responsible citizen or informing yourself, but a very low percentage of that is actually...
Marco:
useful and necessary to know and has lasting value so number one thing is to cut out tv sources because they literally will just air constant updates to nothing all day long because they don't want you to tune out and there's always something to watch
Marco:
what you should do instead is more of like a like get away from like the the push models go to like a pull model where like you don't just sit there receiving what everyone's sending you like when you want to learn about something that you hear about through some other way that isn't a new show go try to learn about like if you hear about some new crisis or natural disaster that's happening go look it up and try to find information about it then but like
Marco:
Get yourself off the feed, off the constant cycle, whether that's a Twitter feed or constantly refreshing news websites, if anybody still does that, or a Facebook feed, if anybody, God forbid, still does that, or if it's watching cable news or even just, quote, having it on.
Marco:
That's still on.
Marco:
It's still pouring garbage into your brain constantly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
cut it off, actually step away from it.
Marco:
And you will find much like people find when they like take breaks from Twitter for a while, you'll find that you don't miss as much as you think you will miss like major events that happen.
Marco:
You still hear about major things that you need to know.
Marco:
You still learn about, uh,
Marco:
And you just remove this massive source of distraction and just constant anxiety and constant like because they're trying to rile you up.
Marco:
That's how they make more money from you.
Marco:
They rile you up so you keep watching and you stay engaged and you spread it around.
Marco:
Like if you just take yourself out of that system, it's way happier on the outside.
Marco:
And it's not the world doesn't become perfect, but you can at least have a better mental state about it.
John:
Plus, they have the ads, like because news tends to be less valuable if it's not live.
John:
So you actually have to allow the ads to play, which is a little bit, you know, in this ad, if you're like today, you have so many choices for news, say so much more than you did in the days when it was just newspapers and television and radio.
John:
Like the entire Internet is there is lots of places where you can get news stories in the form that you want them or
John:
if you like tv news some people and i'm just saying it's not for me some people like that type of thing and don't get anxiety from it but very often especially if you're the type of person who grew up watching television news or grew up having television news on you just continue to do it out of habit and like that's the thing to question um and to defend uh casey's fox news stuff for a second i think it actually is important to know what fox news is and how it works and not just take other people's words for it i just don't think
John:
you need to like for the rest of your life, watch one Fox news show a day or a week.
John:
Like, I think you can get it after a fairly short period of time, like, and check in every once in a while.
John:
Like, but it is important to know, to know the enemy, like to know what the hell's going on over there.
John:
It's not important to watch it every day for years and years and years.
John:
Like you'll get it pretty quickly.
John:
It's, you know, it's a hell of a thing.
Casey:
Are we satisfied now?
John:
As much as we will be.
John:
Probably won't be satisfied until television news is destroyed in all forms.
John:
Man.
John:
Just wait.
John:
It's aging out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Stephen Kim wants to say or wants to know, I'm in my final semester of college slash university and wanted to know if you guys had some sort of senior project.
Casey:
And if so, what was it?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
When I went to Virginia Tech, I did not have...
Casey:
Any sort of senior thesis project or anything like that.
Casey:
I did do some fun things, but no, I did not have a senior project.
Casey:
John, how about you?
John:
I did have a senior project.
John:
Everyone had to do one.
John:
It was in the engineering school.
John:
I majored in computer engineering, which is like a hybrid of electrical engineering with a
John:
um our my particular project was i don't remember how we came out with this but it was a local area paging system yes pagers were a thing yes i'm old local area paging system and software uh there was a contest they had at the school where you'd have to like kind of those things where you get like a bucket of parts and you have to build a vehicle and they have the vehicles have to compete like uh you've seen you guys know about i'm talking about those engineering contest stuff yeah
John:
a really cool nova episode about an mit hill climb competition it's like one of the favorite things i ever watched as a kid i should find the link for next week anyway they they have these contests um and the project it's contrived it's a senior project whatever was to make a system of pagers sort of like the restaurant pagers where each team would have a pager and it was when it was their turn to come and compete you would page them and then there was uh you know you do this through a piece of software and then the software also kept track of the matches and then they would compete and you would
John:
you know, start the timer for the match.
John:
Like the software ran the match, like the officiating for the match and recorded the results, right?
John:
So you'd basically run the competition sitting in front of a PC and the PC was connected through a parallel port to a radio transmitter and the radio transmitter would talk to the pagers.
John:
So the project was, we made the pagers, we made the radio transmitter and we made the software.
John:
and we had to like you know price out all the components and source them and like it was it was actually a pretty good product that spanned hardware and software in the end the part i did was the entire windows program written in mfc and c plus plus oh god i'm so sorry it's no wonder you hate windows so much and then i printed it at the end and handed it in
John:
Here's the software, here's a floppy disk, and here is a beautifully commented printout of the world's most heinous MFC code.
Casey:
How could you even tell it's the most heinous?
Casey:
All MFC code was heinous.
John:
It was the first and last time I ever did Windows development.
John:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Well, this ties around honestly to the beginning of the show.
Marco:
I did have a senior project.
Marco:
It was required by my colleagues for everybody.
Marco:
And it was, so I was in computer science.
Marco:
And what I chose to do was attempt to develop my own audio compression algorithm.
Marco:
Not dynamics compression.
Casey:
Oh, you've spoken about this.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
But compressing the way MP3 compresses to make files smaller.
Marco:
And the idea I had was you look at audio waveforms and you see basically a bunch of squiggly lines.
Marco:
And my idea was instead of storing every number on that line, maybe I can fit a least squares best fit line to it and then simply store the coefficients.
Marco:
of the least squares equation and have that represent like, you know, 20 audio samples with like four coefficients.
Marco:
And I, you know, I mentioned earlier, I don't really, I have a very limited understanding of things like digital signal processing and signal theory.
Marco:
Well, I had way less of an understanding of it, you know, 20 years ago or whatever that was.
Marco:
So, not 20, I guess 15 years ago.
Marco:
And so I, yeah, I was, I had very bad understanding of it then.
Marco:
And so my, my idea to make this, you know, best curve fit algorithm as audio compression was,
Marco:
Not only was hilariously slow to run on my Pentium 3 of the day, but was... Sorry, AMD Athlon of the day.
Marco:
So it was hilariously slow to run and also made the files larger.
Marco:
Because it was so bad at compressing.
Marco:
And first I tried lossy compression.
Marco:
That sounded so horrible compared to MP3 and made bigger files much more slowly.
Marco:
Then I tried lossless compression.
Marco:
Figuring, well, if I can at least store the coefficients, then I can just store the difference values between what my crazy equations predicted and the actual values.
Marco:
That's at least smaller numbers and they can take up less space.
Marco:
So I tried lossless compression then, and that was also horribly slow and also made the files larger than the input waves.
Marco:
And so what I ended up having to pivot to, since I was already deep into this project and couldn't really come up with a new thesis, was basically turn it into a survey of lossless audio compression algorithms.
Marco:
And it turned out all that crazy work I had done to generate best fit curves and with least squares algorithms and everything.
Marco:
Turns out if you just predict that one sample will be the same value as the one before it and then just store the difference as the smaller number.
Marco:
that is basically free to do on computers.
Marco:
It takes no time and compresses almost as well as flack because flack is doing things like that.
Marco:
And it turns out lossless audio compression is,
Marco:
basically always maxes out at around 50% compression for constant input types like music.
Marco:
And pretty much any predictor that you use to generate sample-to-sample data works at about the same accuracy.
Marco:
It's pretty hard to get it much worse than that.
Marco:
So that is what I did.
Marco:
I made a survey of audio compression algorithms to show how efficient all these much simpler methods were than the one that I tried first that took me months.
John:
You could have done your graduate thesis on run length encoding.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's too soon.
Casey:
He's still a little upset about his C code from earlier to this episode.
Casey:
Tobo Granite, I think, would like to know, John, what Destiny videos and specific YouTubers, perhaps, do you watch?
John:
This is short.
John:
I'm always on the lookout for new things.
John:
But I have two favorite YouTubers.
John:
My favorite YouTuber is named True Vanguard.
John:
I think his actual name is Ryan.
John:
I like him because he talks a lot about PvP, which is a type of Destiny game that I like.
John:
It's player versus player as opposed to player versus environment or player versus enemies.
John:
PVE talks about PvP a lot.
John:
And he is I don't know how to put this.
John:
He's a grown up.
John:
I mean, they're all adults on YouTube for the most part, but like he is a he doesn't describe it by what he's not.
John:
He's not he doesn't yell all the time, which is the thing the kids like.
John:
They like it when people react very dramatically to whatever is going on in the thing they're doing.
John:
So he's not a yeller.
John:
Um,
John:
I was going to say that he doesn't curse, but that's like, I don't care about cursing.
John:
Indicative of how sort of pleasant and mature and kind and not interested in sensationalism or getting super angry about things.
John:
Just...
John:
he's he just generally seems like a nice person he's also a dad right so i'm watching a dad video right he's really good at pvp uh and he explains what he's thinking how he does things stuff that he tried in a nice laid-back way that i find interesting so true vanguard on youtube my number one youtuber
John:
My second favorite one is named Datto.
John:
I don't actually know what his real name is.
John:
He is younger.
John:
He's a little bit more potentially prone to anger.
John:
He struggles with the fame that he has gotten by being a fairly popular Destiny YouTuber.
John:
But he does PVE a lot.
John:
And so I want to learn about all the PvE things and the intimate details and all sorts of stats about what's the best thing to bring into this.
John:
I tried out all these different techniques and hear all the numbers and the math and all that stuff.
John:
And I occasionally enjoy watching him struggle with himself and with the game and with all sorts of other things.
John:
To give an example, when they released a new raid recently, it's a race between all the players to see who can be the first one to finish it.
John:
right and uh data was right in there because you know he's pretty big uh youtuber in the destiny world and he's got a lot of friends and he's good at that part of the game and so are his friends so there is a you know six person thing of players versus you know computer enemies trying to finish the raid see who can be the world's first you get a big you know accolades from the game maker and you know and they all stream on twitch right uh data and his crew uh were not the world's first they came in third or fourth um
John:
They started playing when the raid was launched.
John:
There was a bunch of stuff for everyone who finishes the raid on the first day.
John:
You'll get this free jacket and all sorts of swag or whatever.
John:
Even if you're not the world's first, just everyone who finishes the raid on the first day, you get all this stuff.
John:
Datto and his crew played the raid for slightly over 24 hours straight.
John:
Oh my word.
John:
It was like two minutes and 30 seconds over the 24 hour mark.
John:
So basically they sat down there.
John:
They started playing the raid and they played it for 24 hours.
John:
I watched them on and off.
John:
I went to sleep.
John:
I woke up.
John:
They were still playing.
John:
This was like over the course of a weekend.
John:
I checked in an hour later.
John:
They were still playing.
John:
after the world's first had already completed many many hours after they were still going they knew they weren't going to be the world's first they were still going this is on twitch not on youtube but um and you're watching them and it's kind of like when you watch someone like doing something where you're like
John:
just go to sleep like you're not you're not going to get any better you're not going to get any sharper like i i continue to think that if they had taken a six hour break in the middle they would have finished the game they would have finished the raid faster like if they just gotten some sleep because after 24 hours of intense concentration on a game very difficult like it's not like they're just casually doing this is like the most difficult top level uh
John:
thing that you can do they were under leveled for it they're concentrating for 24 hours you are fried you're not doing they were making dumb mistakes and getting sloppy like they should have taken a six anyway that drama uh and just to see that person that i've known since destiny one days and and like struggle with that and be frustrated with their failures but eventually to overcome was an amazing dramatic moment in the world of destiny videos uh and i was glad i was there intermittently to witness it so those are my two ones uh
John:
True Vanguard, my number one.
John:
Datto, number two.
John:
There's a bunch of other ones.
John:
I look at Planet Destiny sometimes.
John:
Erex, Kakis, they all have these crazy names.
John:
But those are my top two.
John:
So I would highly recommend everyone check out True Vanguard and check out Datto if you're into PvE and you can handle his occasional outbursts.
Marco:
So, Casey, who are your favorite Destiny YouTubers?
Casey:
Oh, I love all the Marco.
Casey:
I can't choose just one.
Marco:
All the great YouTubers.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Away, Squarespace, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
Casey:
did we ever do the uh dark patterns in destiny we haven't right can you handle more destiny well do i have a choice do you guys know what a dark pattern is
John:
No.
John:
Like in UI design?
John:
That's the context usually comes up.
John:
And Marco, why don't you explain what a dark pattern is?
Marco:
So if we're talking about the same thing, a dark pattern like in UI design is basically, it's almost like designing something intentionally to trick or mislead the user into doing something that's kind of bad for them, but that benefits you as the designer or as the owner.
Marco:
So a good example of this would be like,
Marco:
like on a website, like really hiding like the way to delete your account or really hiding the way to call them on the phone if you need help with something.
Marco:
Like trying to make it really hard to do something that will, you know, that kind of costs you the owner money that by benefit people or like making it easy to like accidentally trick people into like giving up their email address to your mailing list or stuff like that.
John:
Yeah, and it's called a dark pattern because patterns in general is like, you know, a construct that you use in an interface, like, you know, sort of standard constructs, an arrangement of controls where you tend to see like a text box with a checkbox underneath it or like, you know, sort of those are patterns of just like familiar ways to present interfaces to people.
John:
A dark pattern is a pattern, as Marco said, that is nefarious purposes.
John:
A great example of this setting aside computers entirely, the concept of fine print.
John:
Fine print is a dark pattern.
John:
predating computers if you have something that you have to put like on a box or in a contract or whatever and you can make the text really really small because you really don't want the person like you have to put it there but you really don't want the person reading that so you make it really really small to try to discourage them from maybe they can't see it that well maybe it's so small they're squinting and it's annoying to read that's a dark pattern and in the computer there's another one that comes to mind as a sort of the canonical dark pattern is
John:
the uh please send me your newsletter checkbox that is checked by default that was like one of the the early dark patterns on the web right where you're going through some signup process and there's a checkbox that says yes please send me marketing material and it's checked by default 100 a dark pattern and by the way if you make an error in the form and like oh you're you know your email you forgot to enter your phone number and you uncheck that checkbox it's checked again when the form comes back that's also a dark pattern yep
John:
so now that we've established what a dark pattern is this is about dark patterns in destiny this was a very sad day for me in destiny this i don't think was intentional so maybe i can't list it as dark well actually it was intentional but yeah all right anyway destiny has vendors where you can buy things uh and the way the system has worked since destiny 1 destiny 2 is a bunch of squares on the screen you put your cursor over them you press a button and you buy it it's not like a cart you don't put things into a cart
John:
and there's no quantity like you can't say give me five of these ten of these like there's no place where you get to enter a number or hit an up and down arrow to put numbers if you want to buy something you hover over it and you hit the button and not only do you hit the button occasionally you have to hold down the button for a certain period of time because some things some actions have big consequences like maybe something is very expensive or like there's a button you hold down to dismantle items that you have and if it's a very valuable item
John:
You want to, they put in a delay so that, oh, you're going to disassemble this thing that took you a year to get.
John:
You have to hold down the button for like 60 seconds, like in this big progress bar fills, to make sure you don't accidentally delete it, right?
John:
Because lots of stuff you're deleting all the time.
John:
You get junk in the game and you're just like, oh, delete, delete, delete, delete, right?
John:
So those are short, but the more consequential the action, the more you hold it down.
John:
But anyway, for vendors, for buying things, for the most part...
John:
it's you know they're fairly fast you hold down the button a little bit sometimes you just tap it but it's just a single press because there is no quantities anywhere and sometimes you want to buy 50 of something because there are consumable items and you want to buy a bunch of these things you're going to trade for those things this whole whole economy uh you know economy of materials and and made up money and everything in the game and you you buy them in large quantities so the habit over the course of since destiny one you know four years now or whatever
John:
is you go to a vendor and you're like, okay, I'm going to buy five of these things and 10 of those and eight of those.
John:
And I'm going to go to this vendor and sell five of these and disassemble that and put these into the, you know.
John:
And so you get used to hitting the button in sequences.
John:
So you look at the price, you look at how much you have and you're like, oh, those are, those are, you know, 10, it's not, they don't use dollars, but those are $10 each.
John:
I've got 500 bucks.
John:
I'm going to buy five of those.
John:
You have one, two, three, four, five.
John:
And I'm like, all right, I got this much left.
John:
I'm going to buy two of those.
John:
They're 20 each one, two, three, you know, like that's what the game has trained us to do over the course of four years.
John:
If you played from the beginning of destiny, that's how everything works.
John:
In Destiny 2, in the latest expansion, there was a vendor who sold an item that is in incredibly short supply in the new economy, and they're probably going to patch the game to fix this.
John:
A material, a resource that is very rare, and there's no reliable way to get more.
John:
You get a little bit more randomly, but not enough to feed what you would want to use this item in.
John:
And a vendor would sell it and they sold it for 10 of a very fairly valuable other item.
John:
Like it's not currency, but like there's another resource that's pretty rare and hard to get, but there is at least a reliable way to get it.
John:
They sold it for 10 of those.
John:
And you're like, oh, you know, I'm not going to spend 10 of that very valuable resource for one of these things.
John:
That's not a good deal.
John:
But eventually, as it became clear in the economy that there was no other way to get them, you're like, well, I would love any opportunity to buy these.
John:
So I'm just going to farm that other material, come back here and buy, you know, I know they're 10 each.
John:
So fine, I'll get 100 and then I can buy 10 of those things.
John:
Right.
John:
So you go out, you farm that material, or maybe like me, you have a massive surplus because that material was in abundance before the expansion.
John:
I had a pretty big surplus in the attic.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like I've got this, this cash of stuff.
John:
I'm going to spend it, even though it's like 10 to one, it's not a good deal.
John:
It's the only way I have to get this stuff.
John:
So I need to buy some of this stuff.
John:
And so I go to the vendor and I buy a couple of them and I'm like, Oh, that really hurt.
John:
That sucks.
John:
And I wait for the next week for the reset, see if the price change.
John:
It didn't, it's still 10 of those things.
John:
I'm like,
John:
let me just bite the bullet let me go farm a whole bunch of this stuff and let me just go and just dump it all in i'll just buy i'll buy like you know 20 of those things right i'm just gonna do it like i i've resigned myself to my fate they're gonna they're not gonna fix the economy for a while so i go there and i buy like 20 of them and i go one two three four five six seven eight and i'm hitting the button right and eventually the button stops working the icon graze out
John:
I'm like, what the hell?
John:
I, I had like, I had literally a thousand of this thing and there were 10 each, right?
John:
I could have, I could have bought a ton of them.
John:
Like there are 10 each and I've got over a thousand.
John:
Why, why is the button disabled?
John:
Is there a limit that a number I can buy per week or something?
John:
And I realized the reason the thing was disabled is because every time I purchased one, the price doubled.
John:
oh no because the game had trained me when you want to buy 10 or something go one two three four five hit the button 10 times like you're not looking down at the price to see if the price is changing the price never changed on any other item when you bought it until this thing the reason i couldn't buy anymore is because i no longer had enough to buy a single one the next purchase was like 600 or something it was some huge amount right like i suppose it had to be a power of two right i didn't have that much left anymore
John:
But that's why it wasn't letting me purchase it.
John:
So essentially, I bought one of these consumables for like 512 of that other one before the thing stopped.
John:
So I burned through like a year's worth of this very valuable consumable that I had built up in like 30 seconds.
John:
No, there is no undo.
John:
There is no going back.
John:
There is no complaining to Bungie that you accidentally did a bad thing.
John:
There was no delay.
John:
An example of a dark pattern would be a price that doubles every time you buy one that is unprecedented in four years of the game and an interface that does not let you buy things in quantities and let you preview the price.
John:
The game had trained me, press the button a certain integer number of times and get your thing.
John:
I was sad for like four days about this because I mean, I know it's all just pretend stuff, but I literally spent a lot of my actual time building up the inventory of that other valuable item.
John:
Notice how I'm not using all the crazy destiny words here to help you people.
Casey:
Yeah, I appreciate that.
John:
it doesn't really help it was killer and and the thing is it it is a dark pattern because this vendor in the game is supposed to be like a gangster and like every time you do any kind of deal with him he always like welch is on his deal or he doesn't you know like in the game world it kind of makes sense but it is it was bad it was brutal and i complained about this on twitter and i got a whole bunch of people commiserating saying yep i did the same thing so i wasn't the only one who got nailed in some respects like that's pretty good game like you really felt like you were screwed by this criminal and
John:
It's like, yeah, but I did spend like a year of Destiny 2 building up that.
John:
And it's nothing compared to the people who play this game all day.
John:
Like the YouTube people all have so much of every resource that it's ridiculous.
John:
But I don't.
John:
I'm a casual player.
John:
I play every once in a while, like compared to the people who play like, you know, hours and hours a day.
John:
And this really hurt.
John:
And I said on Bungie on Twitter, like...
John:
Bad show, Bungie.
John:
Don't make the people who play your game feel bad.
John:
I see what you were going for, but I think you underestimated exactly how dark this dark pattern was and exactly how trained people are to just hit the button five times and not look at the price.
Casey:
To be fair, and just to show the listeners how annoyed you were by this, this topic has been sitting in the after show section of our show notes for like two months or something like that.
Casey:
And typically, if something sits for that long, John will just say, oh, it doesn't matter anymore and move along.
Casey:
But not this, my friends.
Casey:
And I don't blame you, to be honest.
Casey:
I would really chat my behind.
Casey:
So did the item or whatever that you bought, not as many as you expected of, was it worth it?
John:
No, no, it was not worth it.
John:
At 10 for one of these, it's not worth it.
John:
For like hundreds of that consumable item, for one of them, it's a terrible deal.
John:
It's like someone said you can buy a candy bar for $10.
John:
You're like, maybe it's for charity.
John:
But if we said, oh, and by the way...
John:
Go ahead and buy 20 candy bars and the price will double every time.
John:
By the time you're buying a candy bar for $1,000 and someone says, well, was it worth it?
John:
It was, you know, you got that candy bar for $1,000.
John:
No, it was not worth it at all.
John:
It was terrible.
John:
I'm still sad about it.
John:
I shouldn't have put this topic here and I'm sad all over again.
Casey:
All right, and just because people will ask, and this is the brief spoiler moment of the episode, what did you have to spend in order to purchase what, using the actual Destiny terminology?
John:
They were selling, this kind of sounds overdue, they were selling Masterwork Cores for Legendary Shards.
John:
Legendary Shards are for...
John:
legendary stars got it from disassembling legendary weapons and a bunch of other things masterwork cores used to randomly drop used to be able to get them from disassembling masterwork weapons which would randomly drop anyway yeah masterwork cores are incredibly rare in destiny 2 and the new in the forsaken expansion they changed the infusion economy to require all sorts of materials to do infusion so basically I mean they have the charts in this this is why they're going to adjust it
John:
They changed the infusion economy such that people used to do infusion all the time.
John:
And as soon as Forsaken came out, I bet the rate of infusion dropped off a cliff because it basically became nobody ever infused anything.
John:
It used to be a thing that you would do all day long and was like nobody infused anything because it uses so many resources, including Masterwork Cores, and there's no way to get more Masterwork Cores.
John:
So even if you had a cache built up, eventually you depleted it.
John:
i bet like infusion has dropped practically zero so they're going to fix this they're going to adjust it they they posted a bunch of stuff about it a couple weeks ago about how they're going to provide some reliable way to get masterworks course i still think it's kind of crappy i still think making infusion this expensive makes people run around with a bunch of hobo suits to use incredibles parlance when really i just want to use my good items but i can't afford to infuse them anyway all that made sense to destiny people rest assured
Marco:
Is this how our show sounds to non-programmers or non-nerds?
Marco:
When I was going through all my audio stuff earlier, I'm sure a lot of our audience zoned out or skipped the chapter.
Marco:
Consider myself appropriately gotten back at for that now.
John:
Legendary Shards and Masterwork Chorus are probably a little bit more ridiculous than Ring Buffers, but not much.
John:
I was asking in the chat room, would it have squared if you had bought it one at a time or one AA time?
John:
You could only buy one at a time.
John:
That's my point.
John:
You can only buy one at a time.
Marco:
So if you would like like left the store or something and come back.
John:
Yeah, no, it reset.
John:
I think I reset per day.
John:
So if you if you cranked up the price, if you went to sleep and came back the next day, it would be back down to 10.
John:
So you can buy one a day for 10.
John:
But it's ridiculous.
John:
Like that you need you need like three of them to do a single simple infusion and it cranks up from there.
John:
yeah i got lost again yeah it's a complicated game folks i can't believe we made it through that though this is this is a new record for us i think of how much destiny we can make it through at once all right well anyway all if that was your question yeah it resets on a daily basis which is way too slow like and i did i have been going back and buying one for ten but at a certain point like once they said they were going to change the economy i'm not even buying one for ten anymore
John:
Because one a day is ridiculous anyway, and I've got to travel all the way to the vendor, and I hate that guy now.
John:
Yeah, on principle.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Screwed me.
Marco:
I'm surprised you didn't do more pre-purchase research.
Marco:
You know, you researched every other purchase in your life to such a degree.
John:
Like, if you're making a large Destiny purchase... If I had... That's why I tweeted it.
John:
Like, don't make the same mistake that I did, right?
John:
I mean, because it was just so unprecedented.
John:
Like, I just...
John:
when would you ever need to look back at the price the price is the price and then you go buy buy buy buy buy like that's for four years we've been doing that never has something changed price when you bought one it's madness let alone doubling that's just so cruel
Marco:
i wonder if i could do a reverse ramp for the so i know what you've been doing while destiny chat was happening i haven't been programming but i've been thinking about it i've been like slowly like noodling on this throughout the entire show like whenever i wasn't busy talking or anything like i would like get an idea in my head like oh what if i what if i do it this way take two showers tomorrow
Marco:
yeah shower is the ultimate idea place nice yeah i think i might do a reverse buffer for the multiplier that might work better i continue to think that there are probably libraries in straight c that do this the thing is like to do it right it's probably only like 50 lines of code like like doing like a very simple limiter without look ahead is like 10 lines of code like this is not difficult stuff or it isn't uh it isn't complicated uh
Marco:
It's just really tricky, if that makes sense.
Marco:
There's a difference between tricky and complicated.
Marco:
It's not complicated.
Marco:
The solutions are very simple once you get them.
Marco:
But to figure out exactly what to do with these crazy numbers and how to do it is very tricky.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that I start out with a few lines of code.
Marco:
It doesn't work right.
Marco:
Then I slowly blow it up with a whole bunch of crazy crap.
Marco:
And then eventually I figure out something that works, and then I end up then pruning that back down, deleting all the stuff I didn't actually need.
Marco:
It's crazy.
Marco:
And none of it would be helped by test suites.
John:
Oh, a lot of it would be.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
You really would.
Casey:
Don't even try to talk s*** about stuff you don't understand.
John:
Because you'd break the problem down into easily testable functions, and you'd get each of those working so you didn't have to worry about them anymore.
John:
And then you'd build up, you know, like...
John:
That may not be your way of working, but rest assured, it is a way of working that does work for this specific case.
Marco:
What I am doing is one of those functions.
Marco:
Like, that's all it is.
Marco:
Like, it's a very, very small function.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you know what the output's supposed to look like, like making tests to show what the output is and like your aspirational state as your failing test, I'm not going to put you on your test.
John:
It would work okay for this.
John:
It's just not how you're working.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
The debugger works too.
John:
Use the debugger in the test.
John:
Forget it.
John:
This is killing me.
John:
I can't do this.
Casey:
If we're going to have this conversation, if we're going to have this conversation, I'm going downstairs and pouring a drink because I cannot have this conversation sober.
John:
We've covered these bases before.
John:
I'm not trying to convert you.
John:
You set a great point and you can see what all the values are.
Casey:
Oh, my God.