Morale-Sucking Maple Syrup Fires
Casey:
Actually, you know what?
Casey:
I have a bone to pick with you, it just occurred to me.
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
I want you to fix a problem you're not going to fix because you shouldn't.
Marco:
You're really making a good case for yourself there.
Casey:
I wanted to listen under the radar when I went out for my run earlier today.
Casey:
And if you recall, I run with watch and AirPods only.
Casey:
And I went to run overcast on my watch, which worked.
Casey:
But the episode wasn't there because you had just released it like four and a half minutes prior.
Okay.
Casey:
I want streaming or some sort of manual, please, sir, can I have it updated now button.
Casey:
And you're not going to do it, and you're probably right not to do it, but I want it.
Marco:
I would love to offer that.
Marco:
I would love if there was a way that I could reliably initiate a transfer that would happen immediately to the watch.
Marco:
There isn't.
Casey:
No, but it's a cellular watch, man.
Casey:
Go to the internets.
Marco:
Well, okay.
Marco:
I could do that.
Marco:
It would basically require a significantly different pipeline for that file to get into the watch for it to be processed and synced.
Marco:
You would be dependent on whatever the bit rate and format of the audio would be, which could be awfully large and complicated for the watch to handle.
Casey:
Oh, and I wouldn't get smart speed, would I?
Marco:
You definitely wouldn't get smart speed.
Marco:
The watch is not fast enough to pre-process it and the API doesn't exist to do it live.
Marco:
It would basically be a really terrible experience.
Marco:
Now, that being said, if there's something you want to listen to that isn't already on your watch and you want to sync it over immediately and watchOS just isn't syncing it, that's also a terrible experience.
Marco:
But that's the kind of thing that I assume...
Marco:
And maybe after this many years, this might be a bad assumption, but I assume that that's the kind of thing that Apple's likely to fix sometime, whereas the complexity of having these two different ways for a file to get on the watch and having to sync things between them, having to manage the different experiences that you get between them –
Marco:
that like complexity is forever shortcomings are usually temporary so I decided to just kind of wait and see like right now the auto syncing in the background is good enough for most people most of the time including me for the record right and so like it's mostly fine and so I'd rather not rapidly increase the complexity in order to improve that a little bit
Marco:
Especially since most people don't have cellular watches.
Marco:
And even those who do, oftentimes it isn't activated because cellular Apple watches generally are very disappointing.
Marco:
The cellular service is not good and very unreliable.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Also, I'd be concerned about Apple rejecting the app for using the cellular data too aggressively if it happened during their testing and maybe they downloaded a large file and then they would reject the app for using too much cell data.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of risks and problems with doing that, not to mention the fact that working on watchOS is incredibly painful.
Marco:
And so the process of developing all this complexity, this kind of stuff would be simpler to do on iOS.
Marco:
It wouldn't take as much effort on iOS, but everything on watchOS is like moving through maple syrup.
Marco:
And it's maple syrup that occasionally catches fire and burns you as you're in it.
Marco:
That's delightful.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
Working in WatchOS is terrible.
Marco:
It's time-consuming and morale-sucking and just terrible.
Marco:
So I'd like to do as little of it as possible.
Casey:
It's understandable.
Casey:
I don't know what the UI would look like for this, which is why I'm going to let it go, because I know you should not make this feature.
Casey:
But I really wish there was some way to be like, hey, I know that there is a specific podcast in
Casey:
And I want to listen to it right freaking now.
Casey:
I'm willing to trade off the lack of smart speed and, you know, the bit rate issues you were discussing.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
I want it now.
Casey:
It's my podcast and I need it now.
Marco:
Just run back to your house and grab your phone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, because here's the other problem with this is suppose I did all that work.
Marco:
this feature is still used by very few people.
Marco:
Like, actual, like, offline playback, like, playback on standalone watch without the phone.
Marco:
Every time you hit play on that, I record, like, you know, a user has done this.
Marco:
And it's part of my analytics that I report only to me, so don't worry.
Marco:
But, like, I can track, like, what percentage of the active user base uses feature X.
Marco:
And the percentage of people who use that is minuscule.
Marco:
And it's really unfortunate because it took me a lot of time and work and morale-sucking maple syrup fires.
Marco:
It took so much out of me to do that feature, and almost no one uses it.
Marco:
And part of it, I'm not mad at the public for not using it.
Marco:
It isn't that good.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I got it to a point where it's...
Marco:
usable after like three years but it's not great using your phone is better and the only reason to not have your phone usually is if you're running but runners usually want to listen to music and not podcasts so it's a very small percentage of people I think who really use this feature and so it's not worth massive investment and you could say maybe more people would use it if it was better and that's probably true but how many more
Marco:
Five times as many?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Is it maybe 50% more?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Probably not even that.
Marco:
So I think it would still be a very, very low percentage.
Marco:
By the way, even if five times as many people use it, that would still be embarrassingly low.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
There are dozens of us, Marco.
Casey:
Dozens.
Marco:
There are literally dozens of you, I think.
Marco:
I really don't think the number is that much.
Casey:
Is that something you could pull up easily, or is that the sort of thing?
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Even a broad order of magnitude, I would be very curious to hear exactly how minuscule it is.
Marco:
Most days, it's about 0.25% of active users.
Marco:
Now to give you some idea, that is about half as much usage as the web player gets from logged in users.
Marco:
And no one uses the web player.
Marco:
It's near the widget, no one uses the widget.
Marco:
Now to give you some idea, about 30% of users have an Apple Watch paired to their phone.
Marco:
And 0.25% use this feature.
Casey:
So not to put a terrible idea in your head, but why is it still there then?
Marco:
It's the kind of feature that people think they'll use.
Marco:
I thought people would use it when I was making it.
Marco:
And so it's the kind of feature that you might make a competitive decision of which podcast app to use based on whether this feature exists, even if you don't end up using it in practice.
Marco:
So I think it is important to offer it, but...
Marco:
If I was starting over from scratch, if I couldn't use any of my old code, if I had to rewrite my entire app from scratch, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't re-implement this feature.
Marco:
But because it's already there, and because it serves a decent role in competitive customer acquisition, then I'll keep it there.
Marco:
But it certainly is not worth the effort it took to build.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
And that bums me out.
Casey:
But I mean, the numbers tell you what the reality is.
Casey:
It's funny too, because when I was still a person with a job, there was a Oakland office that opened for about a year.
Casey:
And so we were an East Coast company.
Casey:
Then this Oakland office comes in and the product owner and project managers from Oakland, all they wanted to do was A-B test everything.
Casey:
The numbers will tell us all the answers.
Casey:
And I always found that very disheartening and disappointing because I felt like it was just punting on making difficult decisions.
Casey:
Oh, well, we'll just trust the users.
Casey:
The users will definitely know what they want.
Casey:
And that always seemed like a poor choice to me.
Casey:
however even i can agree that there are some numbers that are indisputable 0.25 that's some pretty big evidence that you should probably leave this crap alone or not worry too much about it right to give you some idea siri intense which like siri kit usage which i would think would be a very narrow feature five percent way way higher speaking of that
John:
I've been talking to my AirPods while playing Overcast, and the conversation has not been going well.
John:
I can ask my new fancy AirPods to start playing or to stop playing, which is convenient when my hands are all messy in the kitchen.
John:
And I can also ask for volume adjustments, and those happen.
John:
But anytime I want anything else to happen, I have a very one-sided conversation with Siri that always culminates in whatever audio was playing stopping.
John:
And then me waiting certain amount of time to see if whatever I asked for is going to happen and then me giving up and then saying, hey, dingus, play.
John:
And it picks up right where I left.
John:
Usually what I want to do is skip forward a certain amount of time, skip back a certain amount of time, go to the next track, go to the previous track.
John:
Every time I say, hey, dingus to my AirPods and issue one of those commands in any way I can possibly think of it, audio stops.
John:
And that's the end.
John:
And then I just say, hey, dingus, play, and it picks up right where the audio stopped previously.
John:
What can I say to my AirPods that Overcast will understand?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
I should probably get AirPod 2s and see.
Marco:
But, I mean, I assume I can do the same thing with Siri on the phone.
John:
Skip forward 30 seconds.
John:
Skip back 30 seconds.
John:
Next track, previous track.
John:
Skip to next track.
John:
Go to next track.
John:
Go to previous track.
John:
Like, I've tried every variation I could possibly think of.
John:
And I've tried pauses between Hey Dingus and issuing the command.
John:
That shouldn't matter.
John:
And no pause.
John:
And honestly, I don't know what it's doing.
John:
It obviously hears me say Hey Dingus because it stops playing the audio.
John:
And it still hears me when I give up and say, hey, dingus, play, and it starts playing it again.
Marco:
So, I mean, first of all, the Siri implementation in iOS 12 that I have right now, Siri does some weird things with audio.
Marco:
So, for instance, iOS has a concept of...
Marco:
There's an audio session that your app has, which is how your app audio interacts with the system audio and how it's managed with things like whether things are allowed to play at the same time as your app audio, whether things should duck your app's audio.
Marco:
And there's concepts with things like the active app, things like whether your audio session is active and whether it's currently being interrupted.
Marco:
So for instance, if you're playing a podcast and you get a phone call, your audio session gets automatically interrupted and paused.
Marco:
And then when the phone call ends, you get the interruption-ended message and you can resume your audio.
Marco:
Well, one of the things that also pauses your app's audio is Siri.
Marco:
When you've held on the Siri button and Siri goes boop-boop and it kicks on and starts listening, if you're playing anything, your session gets interrupted.
Marco:
And then it resumes afterwards.
Marco:
Also, if Siri has to respond to you, that maintains the interruption or starts when, if it isn't already interrupted.
Marco:
Now, if you ask Siri to do something in Overcast, right now, Siri does not, the iOS 12 Siri kit intents have only a very rudimentary idea of whether you're doing anything audio related.
Marco:
And they seem to have no bearing.
Marco:
They seem to not really change their behavior at all.
Marco:
If you, if using the play media intent,
Marco:
So when you get... One of the things I had to work around last summer when I was implementing this is that if you send basically the Siri command for overcast to start playing, Siri will respond in audio like, okay, done, or whatever it says.
Marco:
And that will interrupt the playback it just started by telling me to play.
Marco:
Yeah, right?
Marco:
Isn't it great?
Marco:
And because these things all happen kind of at the same time or in the same run loop iteration sometimes, because things are happening very quickly all at the same time, sometimes it gets things wrong and deactivates your audio session permanently or creates an interruption that it never ends.
Marco:
So you're just permanently interrupted and you never resume.
Marco:
And I've talked to people who make other podcast apps about this.
Marco:
We've all had to do things like add delays before we actually start playing to give Siri a chance to end its audio interruption that it's using to respond to you with before we start playing.
Marco:
Anytime you introduce an intentional delay into your app, you're just asking for bugs at that point.
Marco:
That's a huge code smell.
Marco:
You never want to have dispatch after 0.25 seconds just to avoid some bug.
Marco:
That's never a good thing to have to do.
Marco:
But everyone I've known who's written a podcast app with SiriKit support has had to do things like that.
Marco:
Put in a small delay before we actually start playback.
Marco:
Otherwise, Siri will kill it in a way that we can't undo.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of...
Marco:
weird issues with the way siri handles audio interruptions and the way it responds to commands with siri kit that make it very hard to make a lot of these things reliable so it's possible that some of these things might just be like the the exact timing siri is having for you with a certain combination of commands and hardware and whatever might be wrong or might be hitting a bug with siri kit and it's really hard to diagnose those things
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Virtually tap one of those buttons on me now, but I can't get it to do what I want.
John:
Two other things.
Marco:
Number one, AirPods specifically, there's a lot of special case audio handling in the OS for AirPods.
Marco:
Whatever they do, and I haven't played with the second ones yet, but the first gen AirPods do a lot of crazy stuff with like Bluetooth recompression or transcoding or something.
Marco:
There's all sorts of weird overcast bugs that I've hit that only happen with AirPods.
Marco:
And sometimes weird system behaviors and things like that that basically only happen when you have AirPods connected with no other Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
However they handle the AirPods at the system level, there's some kind of special casing that breaks things sometimes.
Marco:
And then secondly, you have an issue where whatever phrase you use to do overcast Siri shortcuts...
Marco:
It's very hard to come up with phrases that the system, that Siri will not try to be smart about and take back the meaning of the shortcut to mean its own thing.
Marco:
So for instance, if you have a play shortcut for overcast and you call it play an overcast,
Marco:
that is very unlikely to work reliably because Siri sees play Overcast or whatever, and it'll start looking for an artist in Apple Music named Overcast.
Marco:
It tries to be smart when it sees phrasing that it thinks it recognizes.
Marco:
And that's why with all my example phrases in the SiriKit dialogue, I prefix them all with Overcast.
Marco:
So I suggest you use phrasing like overcast play.
Marco:
And the reason I do that is because when you begin the command with overcast, then you can use a phrase that Siri would normally pick up as a media phrase, and it seems not to do it.
Marco:
It seems to be able to keep those things separate if the first word is overcast.
Marco:
But it's so complicated, and it's hard to make a lot of it reliable.
John:
All right, I'll try addressing the application.
John:
I mean, I figured just because it was the current audio session that I was trying to essentially do the verbal equivalent of just like basic commands available to any playing audio stream, but I'll try issuing application commands.
Marco:
I mean, that should work.
Marco:
In theory, that should even work better because if you issue a command that it interprets the same way it would have interpreted you tapping the buttons and control center, that's a whole different mechanism of how it sends that command to the app that is way more reliable.
John:
But I don't know what to say to make that happen.
John:
Every combination of words I've tried has resulted in dead silence from the AirPods.
Marco:
I mean, normally you should be able to say things like skip forward 30 seconds.
Marco:
That should work just fine.
John:
It does not.
John:
Casey, you should try that when you get a chance because you've got the new...
John:
I don't know if it's different on the new or the old ones.
John:
The voice activation is the only difference.
John:
The thing is, I never used Hey Dingus on the tapping.
John:
The taps were always for play pause on my AirPod 1s.
John:
On the AirPod 2s, I just get the Hey Dingus for free, so I've been trying to use it and it doesn't want to listen to me.
Casey:
I do find that normally if I say, hey, dingus, you know, turn off Michaela lamp or something like that, it does take annoyingly long to come back to playing, but it does usually start playing again.
Casey:
And typically if I'm listening to something, it would be overcast.
Casey:
Overcast on the phone, you know, the AirPods are paired to the phone.
Casey:
And I say, hey, dingus, you know, turn off Michaela lamp.
Casey:
wait wait okay wait wait wait wait okay and there's my podcast again but i will say that there are definitely times that i have done the hey dingus dance and nothing has happened afterwards like it it will typically uh do whatever request i've asked for but then it will never restart uh audio again my audio never restarts when i issue one of those commands it's just
John:
It goes silent, and it still knows the playback position because I go, hey, dingus, play, and it starts playing right where it left off.
Marco:
So if you say skip forward 30 seconds, not only does it not skip forward 30 seconds, but it also doesn't resume playback?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
That's really weird.
John:
It is.
Marco:
It sounds like the way you're describing it takes a long time to resume, that sounds like just bad interruption handling by Siri.
Marco:
Uh, but I don't, and that's unfortunately, that's probably out of any apps control.
Marco:
Uh, but it's so, it's so hard to work with this stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The other problem, like I, I frequently have problems with Siri that I can't use Hey Dingus when I'm playing a podcast out loud because, or, or any Siri rather, like when, when I hit the button to start Siri or if I say Hey Dingus, but even if I, even if I hit the hardware button on the side of the phone,
Marco:
It will pause the podcast, but it will insert as my query the last few words that were spoken in the podcast.
Casey:
Yes!
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
I keep meaning to bring this up on the show.
Casey:
If you cut all the rest of the crap we've been talking about, that's fine.
Casey:
But you've got to leave this in because this has been driving me insane.
Casey:
That is exactly the behavior I've seen.
Casey:
So a lot of times I'll mash down on whatever the technical term is for the right side button on the phone, the sleep-wake button, or whatever it is.
Casey:
I'll mash down on it.
Casey:
And just like you said, the podcast pauses pretty darn quick.
Casey:
And before it appears that Siri is ready to listen, but the first three to five words of my request to the dingus are the last three to five words I've heard on the podcast.
Casey:
And it is driving me insane.
Casey:
Like I understand what they're doing and it does make sense, but oh my word, it is so frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I have no idea how to fix that.
Marco:
I mean, as far as I know, like, cause I can't, when, when the audio interruption happens, you don't get notified in advance and you have no control over it.
Marco:
It interrupts your session and it just says, Hey, you're interrupted now.
Marco:
Here's why.
Marco:
And it cuts off your audio at whatever time it wants to, and that's it.
Marco:
You lose complete control at that point.
Marco:
So I can't cut off the audio at a different time.
Marco:
I'm not cutting it off late.
Marco:
It's totally out of my control.
Marco:
So that's just iOS being iOS.
John:
Yeah, the OS should be able to do this, because the OS knows what sound it's putting out through the audio system, and if the sound that it was putting out is suspiciously similar to the sound that it was... I understand, like, the preload buffer, like, you want to start listening before, you know, have a little bit of the buffer of the thing that's always listening, like, it makes sense, but it should know.
John:
I just put out that audio around about the same time I was hearing it, so filter that out, kind of like echo cancellation and all sorts of other things, you know, that would help it not...
John:
uh you know be triggered by itself it probably wouldn't help with ambient noise like if you're playing the podcast on another speaker there's only so much you can do no but like but the device itself tricks itself via its own speaker which is yeah the internal speaker yeah or maybe you mean it was super clever it could maybe even do it if it was air playing obviously if the audio is from an entirely different source what can you do but it's coming from the phone in any fashion it would be nice that's another feature they can add to ios 13
Casey:
We should probably actually start the show and do a little bit of follow-up.
Casey:
And Anonymous writes, Yes, AirPower was always going to be a, quote, place the device anywhere, quote, product, with multiple overlapping coils.
Casey:
Early in the concept phase, it was going to be a much larger mat with a squared-off footprint and something like three times as many coils.
Casey:
But that was scrapped pretty quickly because using that much copper would have meant an astronomical retail price.
Casey:
Power by Proxy had zero involvement with the version of AirPower shown off on stage in the 2017 iPhone event.
Marco:
so in our continued air power news i love that we're still talking about this i love that we're still getting updates about this i wonder when do you think is the last time that we will get like tip info about air power do you think it's like do you think it's already happened where it's basically now or do you think it's like a week out a month out a year out how long do you think the air power tipster train will go
John:
I think this is probably the end of it because we have like the start off with the one story and this is refuting everything about that story.
John:
So I feel like they both balance each other out and it'll be a long time before the actual truth, like you said, is revealed because someone involved in the project writes about it in their memoirs or something.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to that time, though.
I'm not.
Casey:
I just couldn't possibly care less.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think it'll be fascinating seeing or hearing about what happened.
Casey:
Although, to be honest, the reality situation is it's probably like every other botched corporate product.
Casey:
Oh, hey, there's this great idea.
Casey:
Let's try it.
Casey:
Oh, it didn't work.
Casey:
Okay, let's kill it.
Casey:
Okay, good talk.
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
It still looks like a nice protected video playpen, and you can say that it's still a second screen experience.
Casey:
Big Corporation Cable killed Chromecast support for a similar reason.
John:
It's so weird to think of like when they say second screen, what they mean is like the primary screen of the device that Netflix app is on.
John:
But it's a second screen because it's not a television, right?
John:
The lingo is so television-centric.
John:
Television is the first screen.
John:
Any other screen is the second screen.
John:
Even if the Netflix app itself is running on the phone, the phone's screen is a second screen.
Casey:
moving on mark plus writes there's no quality loss when beaming full screen videos via airplay the raw mp4 data is sent directly recompression only happens when using airplay screen mirroring and no full screen videos playing is that true for airplay one as well because that was not my understanding but i could be wrong
John:
I mean, I suppose it depends on when you're AirPlaying 2.
John:
Maybe there's something in the specs.
John:
Obviously, it can't send the raw data stream if the raw data stream is in a codec or even in just a profile that the receiving device can't decode.
John:
So there would have to be recompression, but presumably that doesn't happen with the Netflix app.
John:
Presumably, it intentionally makes sure that it sends data that can go straight through to any existing AirPlay device without recompression.
Casey:
Finally, John, tell us about your fidget spinner.
John:
We're talking about the terrible clicking noise that some people's new AirPod cases make.
John:
I've heard from a few people who say their case doesn't make that sound, but I've heard from many more that it does.
John:
Anyway, I said they should have turned the case into a fidget spinner because it's kind of good for that.
John:
Lo and behold, someone actually has a product that turns your AirPod case into a fidget spinner.
John:
Um, it sort of like a sleeve that your air pod case goes into with a little thing on the front and back for you to put your fingers on a little ball bearings in it.
John:
So you just sort of pinch the case between your fingers and spin it.
John:
And there you go.
John:
AirPods as fidget spinner.
John:
That's the gods intended.
John:
This is a real product is $25 that you can buy right now.
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Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all of my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I would like to take a moment.
Casey:
I don't have a good link in the show notes as I sit here right now, but perhaps we can find one.
Casey:
I'd like to take a moment to comment on the recent goings on with the photo of the black hole and the lead architect.
Casey:
I don't think that's the title, the correct title, but for lack of a better one, lead architect behind this was a woman named Katie Bowman.
Casey:
And
Casey:
shortly after this momentous astrological thing, not astrological, that's very wrong, hello, this moment, momentous moment in astronomy happened.
Casey:
It seems like all the idiot boys had to come out of the woodwork to try to stir things up.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't know that we need to go into it that much, but I find it extraordinarily disappointing and gross and tacky and unnecessary and disgusting that a bunch of very insecure boys decided to go trolling through various GitHub repos to try to prove that Katie Bowman was taking credit for other people, particularly men's work.
Casey:
And as far as I understand, some of the co-authors of The Code and the...
Casey:
different papers that this work was based on, many of whom were men, have come out to say, no, no, no, this is her work.
Casey:
Like, this is really her.
Casey:
And I just wanted to publicly say that I think this is bullshit, and it really makes me sad.
Marco:
I admit I have not been following this incredibly closely.
Marco:
I just know the high-level overview that I think everyone knows at this point.
Marco:
But the reality is that, you know, this...
Marco:
Men have a really hard time when women get credit for anything because we are so used to getting all the credit ourselves.
Marco:
Like when you've been like the dominant class or whatever for so long –
Marco:
Sharing power or credit with anyone else feels like an attack on you because it was just you for so long that got all the credit.
Marco:
And so if anything starts moving towards equality or diversity –
Marco:
It's easy for a lot of people who were in the dominant class to feel like it's an attack on them and to get super defensive and try to discredit or do other horrible things.
Marco:
If you feel threatened by being in the dominant class and slowly losing that dominance towards something that's more equal and more diverse, that's a problem with you, not a problem with the results in the system.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm sorry, I'm probably butchering this because I'm not an expert in discussing things like this.
Marco:
So I apologize if I'm butchering this.
Marco:
But basically, anyone who feels threatened or angry about a woman getting credit for an important scientific achievement, you have to check yourself there.
Marco:
And secondly, I think it's worth pointing out that the reality of any kind of large project, whether it's a product being developed or a scientific achievement like this, is that there's a team of people who work on it.
Marco:
There's lots of people involved usually.
Marco:
But we still tend to give a lot of credit to the leaders.
Marco:
Like, Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone.
Marco:
He didn't invent it.
Marco:
He didn't manufacture it.
Marco:
He didn't write any of the software on it.
Marco:
He probably designed none of the hardware on it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
He gets a lot of credit for it because he was the leader of the company that made it at the time they made it.
Marco:
And forgive me, I'm not familiar with too many of the details of the various people's roles in this and we know what title or role Katie Bowman had, but it's totally in line with how people get credit for things usually in our society.
Marco:
to say that this is hers, that this was her project, that she led this, and they did this as a result of her.
Marco:
This seems like the way we credit things in our society.
Marco:
You have to really bend over backwards to suggest that she shouldn't get credit for this.
John:
I think if someone who's listening to this would probably, and who's on the other side of it, would probably find everything you said unconvincing because they would say, you're misunderstanding.
John:
That's not the situation at all.
John:
I'm not trying to discredit somebody.
John:
I'm not being a meanie.
John:
I'm not insecure.
John:
I'm not threatened.
John:
Really, all I'm doing is, you know, two things.
John:
One, I am...
John:
Being vigilant and skeptical against a trend I see in the world, which is that everyone is looking for a chance to raise up historically marginalized people and use them as examples of good.
John:
And I, as the rational skeptic internet person dude, obviously, I'm watching for that because I think it would be very unfair to
John:
to take somebody and hold them up as, uh, you know, a great champion or someone who's very successful just because they're from a traditionally marginalized group.
John:
I, you know, so let's, so anytime we see that happen, Oh, look at this.
John:
Someone's getting credit for a scientific discovery or achievement and it's not a white guy.
John:
We should check this out because we know how all those people out there are always just trying to, to, uh, you know,
John:
uh champion anybody they see for a marginalized group so let's let's check this out we're not not being mean or insecure we just got to check it out because it just seems unfair to uh to you know people should get credit when it's due to them but when it's not due i the internet skeptic i'm going to make sure that i'm on the prowl for that um and that happened a lot in you know the typical places you would imagine hacker news or reddit or whatever
John:
And during that process, the self-anointed, extremely non-experts in the field have examined it, and aside from the super-duper trolls, have basically come down, okay, we looked into it, we checked it out, and despite some early suspicions about some things and some confusion about lines of code when people check model files into GitHub and it ends up with
John:
almost a million lines of code and we're confused by that because we don't know anything but we you know give us some credit like let's sell self-appointed experts we sorted out and we eventually determined that yes she should get credit she was like her algorithm and her idea and she led the team and did all this important work and it's checked it out and everything's fine and those people would say this is the system working as designed we here as a self-appointed experts are ensuring that
John:
uh no one gets credit when they shouldn't because that actually would be counter to the idea of you know raising up marginalized people right so we want to make sure if they're getting credit they should and we looked into it and we checked out and we had a discussion a very rational discussion and we debated and aside from all the people who are currently downvoting who are super duper jerks and misogynists we determined it looks good she should get credit everything's great thank you and if you have some kind of super tunnel vision and you just look at it from that lens you're like
John:
show me where something was wrong there we were on the internet and we were just having discussion about a thing and there were some doubts and we looked into it and we used our awesome rational membranes and we came to what we think is the truth and it turns out in this case the truth is what everyone wanted it to be and it's a feel-good story and it's great everything's it's cool right and to the people who either participate in that or can identify with that or like hear that and think
John:
I mean, that makes sense.
John:
How can you argue with that?
John:
Like, show me the lie.
John:
What's wrong about that?
John:
It's the tunnel vision.
John:
You're missing the larger context.
John:
And the larger context is that every time anyone from a marginalized group gets outside of their pen or raises above their station or, like...
John:
becomes slightly less marginalized for even a moment.
John:
They are accosted by the entire universe of the status quo saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second.
John:
Let's examine everything about this.
John:
Can we get a DNA sample?
John:
Is that really you?
John:
Can we talk to everyone you ever knew?
John:
Did you steal a candy bar when you were in fifth grade?
John:
Because I might have to put you like...
John:
and that just doesn't happen when it's a white guy when it's a white guy no one goes and examines everything about their life and interrogates to make sure that they did everything they said and that that is the lesson here not the specifics of this story but the idea like put yourself in in the shoes of a marginalized person and see what it would be like that when you know even if you have any kind of 100 deserve success
John:
The main story will be everyone else trying to, even the best people, quote unquote, make sure that you really deserve it.
John:
And that just doesn't happen to other people.
John:
And they say, well, no, I do that for everybody.
John:
Every scientific paper, I just make sure that all the male credits get it.
John:
They don't.
John:
It's not the way, writ large, it's not the way the world works.
John:
That is the lesson here that you can't just look at the single case and say, everyone, the system worked the way it was supposed to.
John:
And we're just doing a job.
John:
You have to look at the larger context.
John:
You have to put yourself in the shoes of one of those people and say, what is it like when anytime anything goes well for you, the main thing you have to deal with is attacks and doubts systemically because of who you are.
John:
And that's, that's the disimporting part.
John:
And that's the part that you've never been able to argue with because you're trying to tell the people like, well,
John:
I don't know about the analogies.
John:
I was trying to explain water to a fish or whatever, that it's just the, it's the world they're living in.
John:
It's the world everyone's swimming in.
John:
And especially if they can't, can't relate or don't have enough, don't have enough experience being empathetic to that position or haven't heard enough, like haven't listened to enough people explaining, here's what it's like to be me.
John:
Like, I don't, I don't know how many ways we can get at like the idea of empathy, but like, it's, it's a difficult, you can't, you can't explain empathy to someone.
John:
I mean, you can intellectually, but it,
John:
you have to you know it's the point of empathy you have to you have to feel it to to make the connection to say what what would it be like to be a woman in science right what what does that entail and how is it different than being a man in science and you can't look at one single case and say well everything there was justified you have to look at the big picture and the big context and people as a group and understand the injustice and it's
John:
It's a difficult concept to get across, and I feel like sometimes it gets lost in any specific case of arguing over the details of, like, you know, GitHub source code and stuff.
John:
It's like, why are we even that far down the rabbit hole here?
John:
Think about why.
John:
Why is this even happening?
John:
Anyway, that's my angle on this whole story.
Casey:
John, I freaking love you.
Casey:
Thank you for that.
Casey:
And I really mean it.
Casey:
I hope I don't sound sarcastic.
Casey:
But especially when it comes to this sort of thing, you do such a good job of taking my jumbled thoughts and making them make sense.
Casey:
So I appreciate it.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really glad that you are here to speak for us.
Casey:
Marco and I are trying real hard.
Casey:
We really, really are.
Casey:
Doesn't mean we're succeeding, but we're trying.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, I'm afraid to talk about a lot of stuff like this because I'm not good at it.
Marco:
And I think if I talk about these kind of things poorly, I'm probably making things worse.
John:
Well, I mean, I think both of you and a lot of people, myself included, the first instinct is often...
John:
you feel the injustice.
John:
Like, you have enough empathy to understand, like, this seems, like, I can imagine what it might be like, and this feels unjust.
John:
And, like, and part of it is tribal and teams, and, like, if you are sort of for more equality for women or any other marginalized group...
John:
Yeah.
John:
the getting fighting the battles from that perspective like my side versus your side and us arguing or whatever can lead to the situation where everything gets settled as it happened as it mostly got settled in these threads that were not in the you know that are in the more reasonable parts of the internet
John:
And everyone thinks, okay, well, we worked it out.
John:
The system works.
John:
And I feel like, especially if the answer turns out your side is the one on the right, like, oh, it's great.
John:
And if you still disagree, you're a bad person, but all the other people agree.
John:
The trap is thinking that
John:
That that is the system working and not understanding that that whole debate is is regardless of how it turned out, even, you know, regardless of just the fact that we're discussing this at all.
John:
It's like all the things with like repeating lies.
John:
Like I'm hesitant to even have this topic in the show just because discussing it at all gives credence to the idea that that a woman was getting credit when she shouldn't, even though that is not the case.
John:
You know, studies have shown if you just repeat a lie over and over again.
John:
it gains more weight in people's minds despite how you know how wrong it might be despite everyone agreeing that it's wrong because they heard it so many times like it's wrong but it's probably a thing that probably happens a lot and it could have happened in this case it just happened to not happen and that's that's the worst part about it that is the the fact that it happens and that that's the systemic uh oppression that is difficult to explain but is probably more significant than the details of any individual case
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Preach.
Casey:
No, I just wanted to call it out because I really think it's too bad.
Casey:
And I'm glad that, John, you were there to clean up our beds.
John:
Yes, thank you.
John:
What we should really talk about is all the videos I saw explaining how cool, like why the image looks the way it does, I tweeted it.
John:
We should put it in the link in the show notes.
John:
There was Veritasium, I think, at...
John:
When Interstellar came out, the same stuff went around.
John:
Why does the black hole in Interstellar look the way it does?
John:
Well, I didn't see it.
John:
We consulted scientists, and they told us it's the way it looks.
John:
It's all true, and there were explainer stories back then.
John:
It's all just come back around now.
John:
I thought that Varitasium thing with the model was a...
John:
Pretty concise way to explain it that had the advantage of glossing over the details that aren't that important.
John:
You basically just want to know why does it look like a black spot with a fuzzy ring around in this particular... Why does it look anything like that?
John:
You don't want to know the super-duper details of why the Interstellar one looks exactly like that.
John:
Or the Interstellar one...
John:
leaves out some details as well for cinematic reasons but we will put that link in the show notes to get something positive out of this if you're wondering why the hell does a picture of the black hole look like a coffee stain uh in the sky uh we have a video that will answer that question and the answer is cool like the answer is not oh it's just it's like black but with stuff around it the answer is cool because black holes are cool
Marco:
Also, if your coffee is that color, you're doing something wrong.
John:
It's not actually color.
John:
It's a false color image, Marco.
John:
They just assign colors to levels of... It's fine.
John:
You can make it any color you want.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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John:
uh apple and qualcomm have settled and and within hours of that intel has decided yeah maybe this 5g thing ain't for us after all i like this story because it's so neat uh you know so we we know that apple and qualcomm have been uh not friends for a long time uh qualcomm sells uh the modem chips let your phone talk to the cell network and it's a
John:
uh qualcomm has tons of patents there's all sorts of lawsuits about qualcomm not licensing those patents to people for reasonable rates and apple not wanting to pay license fees because they felt like they're already paid by the manufacturers and blah blah blah like big legal battle they're they're super not friends in the last uh round of iphones and maybe a little bit of the one before uh apple has been getting its cell modems from intel
John:
while it fights with Qualcomm, and as we've said many times in this program, Apple's solution to this problem long-term is, screw you, Qualcomm and Intel, we'll make our own modem chips.
John:
But that takes a long time.
John:
Apple is still pursuing that strategy, but in the meantime, it's got phones to make and phones to sell.
John:
And I haven't really been paying attention to this battle.
John:
I didn't know the first day of the court case between Apple and Qualcomm happened, and there's a separate thing where Qualcomm's being...
John:
in a thing with the FTC about licensing.
John:
Anyway,
John:
The situation came to a head for a variety of reasons.
John:
One, Intel is having, as we all know, having problems getting its 10 nanometer process online still.
John:
That's why we have 14 nanometer chips on all our Macs.
John:
And it's kind of important if Intel wants to continue to make these, you know, sell radio chips for phones, it has to be able to match the process that Qualcomm is going to be able to fab on with Taiwan Semiconductor or whatever.
John:
And Intel has seemed a little bit shaky about the idea of whether it really wanted to be in this business because it's kind of compared to giant server chips where it's the dominant force.
John:
It's a lower margin business and Apple is a difficult customer and all that stuff.
John:
So the way it came to head is, and I'm not sure about the order of events at the time we're recording this is still some speculation, but I assume the order of events is...
John:
So Apple's hanging out there.
John:
It's like Apple's fighting with Qualcomm, and Intel's supposed to be making its cell radio chips.
John:
In particular, Intel was going to make the 5G radio chips for not this phone maybe, but the next phone.
John:
And Intel's not doing too well.
John:
And Apple's like, we're kind of between a rock and a hard place.
John:
We're making our own chips, but we're not going to be ready in time for the next iPhone.
John:
Intel's making chips, but they might not be ready because we know they're having trouble with their process, and we don't want them to fab it on the bigger process.
John:
And Qualcomm, we're in a fight with.
John:
So what do we do?
John:
And sort of simultaneously, Intel says, you know what?
John:
Forget it.
John:
We're not making 5G cell modems.
John:
Right.
John:
Apple settles with Qualcomm.
John:
Basically, you know, they say Apple lost, but they basically lost.
John:
Apple settles with Qualcomm, makes nice with Qualcomm and does like a cross licensing agreement, which they need to be able to make their own.
John:
uh cell modem chips whose qualcomm has all the important patents and patents are evil um but also like agrees to pay them some huge amount of money that they supposedly owed them like because what choice do they have once intel stops it tell either can't or doesn't want to make 5g uh you know cell modems uh in time for apple apple has to make up with qualcomm because otherwise it would have no cell radios in its phones and that's really bad uh so this is all nice and neat where
John:
apple basically loses intel also kind of loses i feel like and qualcomm also kind of loses because you know so apple apple loses because they end up paying qualcomm but they didn't want to and that their whole idea of playing intel against qualcomm didn't work out intel loses i think because this is another situation where intel says well
John:
Yeah, we like our high margin businesses better.
John:
And Intel apparently can't get its act together to get its, you know, process shrink online.
John:
And they just, you know, remove the risk.
John:
Like, let's not deal with that whole Apple thing because Apple's a demanding customer and we're not even sure we want to be in this business.
John:
Yeah.
John:
whatever right but so but it's not a strength move for intel if intel was super duper awesome and had the best fab like it did many years ago it would be able to serve apple and sell tons of a chip and it would have been good for them so they lose and then qualcomm loses because regardless of the deal with apple they know that apple is making its own cell radio chips and they just gave apple the license the patent licenses that it needs so that in a year or two or three apple's not going to be buying chips from qualcomm anymore either so yeah
John:
Everybody loses in giant corporation courtroom, whatever the hell we're playing here.
John:
What do you guys think of the order of operations was here?
John:
Was it Intel voluntarily bailed or Apple knew that Intel wasn't going to be able to make it?
John:
bailed on intel it's kind of like who gets to announce first because i can imagine apple in their boardroom going who here who here is confident that intel is actually going to be able to give us our radio chips 5g radio chips and no one raises their hand like maybe we should just tell intel you know what forget it and we should settle with qualcomm and before they even tell intel that intel gets a wind of it and says you know what no we're out of the 5g business we weren't going to make you things anyway forget it
John:
You can't fire me.
Casey:
I quit.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, I have no idea what the order is there.
John:
And then Apple settling with Qualcomm, Qualcomm's lawyers would be more than happy to say, so, Apple, here you want to settle.
John:
Well, here's how much money we want.
John:
And we'll do that cross patent licensing.
John:
Like, depending on when those things happen, the negotiation between Apple and Qualcomm could have been, you know, more or less in Apple's favor.
John:
But I can't I can't tell exactly what other things happened here.
John:
But I just I really do feel like that everybody loses in some way.
Casey:
Yeah, if I were to wager a guess, I would say that Intel knew it was screwed.
Casey:
I don't know if that got messaged to Apple or not, but I think Intel knew it was screwed.
Casey:
Apple thus knew it was screwed.
Casey:
And I bet you Apple said to Intel, eh, never mind on this whole thing.
Casey:
And then Intel said, oh, thank God.
Casey:
I mean, I mean, I mean, oh, that's too bad.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
Yeah, the whole Qualcomm-Apple thing, this is two big companies that were fighting over a lot of money.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't think Apple had a leg to stand on.
Marco:
I'm not a legal expert, but it sure seemed like Apple just decided, we don't want to pay this anymore, so we're just going to stop, and you can sue us, and we'll see what happens.
Marco:
That's kind of how it seemed, and we were all willing to...
Marco:
kind of forgive that or through the way because anyone who looks into this at all learns quickly that qualcomm is like not a great actor most of the time like it is it it really uses like horrible like predatory licensing and and pricing and and they're they're really a big bully so
John:
Well, there is the other case involving like the FTC of saying it's not just like they're being mean.
John:
Like legally, Qualcomm is supposed to allow people to use its patents for some reasonable fee or whatever.
John:
Like there's some like that that case is ongoing.
John:
Right.
John:
So Apple's bet was I bet we can just not pay them because they're going to be so screwed because we know they're in the wrong with this FTC thing.
John:
And I bet they're going to lose that case.
John:
And let's our risk is let's just not pay them.
John:
Because they'll be distracted by that thing, and maybe if they lose that case, like, maybe we'll get, you know, and the gamble didn't pay off for Apple.
John:
Like, either the case took slowly, or maybe Qualcomm's gonna win that case after all, or whatever.
John:
Like, yeah, so it was kind of a... It's a thing companies do all the time, a game of chicken of, like...
John:
We have a lot of money and a lot of lawyers, so let's just not do a thing and, you know, come at me, right?
John:
And it could have been that at the time it worked out differently that Qualcomm might have been in hot water with its patent thing and been willing to overlook Apple doing that in exchange for some sort of deal for Apple to continue buying its cell loans or whatever.
John:
Anyway, like...
John:
Yeah, both Apple and Qualcomm were being big corporate jerks.
John:
But I feel like Qualcomm had sort of the original sin.
John:
Well, the patent system is the original sin of like of having these patents and hoarding them and charging a lot for them in a way that made everybody unhappy.
John:
And it is probably illegal, according to the letter of the already absurd patent law.
John:
Right.
John:
And then after that, it's like, well, Apple gets super cranky about that.
John:
And then it does something that is probably also illegal.
John:
And then, you know, he, you know, he, he started it as not a great argument, legally speaking, but it's the, it's the reason it's the reason I think that Qualcomm is the worst actor here.
Marco:
I honestly didn't like the way Apple handled this.
Marco:
It sure seemed like Apple was cutting off their money in order to hurt them financially fatally.
Marco:
I think Apple decided to stop paying them, hoping that
Marco:
that not only would they lose so much revenue that they would be forced to negotiate, but that their stock price, because they're a public company, that their stock price would go down so much that I think Apple was basically trying to strangle Qualcomm out of existence by just not paying something that by their contract, they clearly owed the money.
Marco:
And Apple decided, we're going to stop paying and see what happens.
Marco:
And that's kind of a big bully move right there.
Marco:
So I don't like the way Apple did this, even though I don't like Qualcomm either.
Marco:
I think Apple went about this in really a very big bully kind of way.
Marco:
But regardless...
Marco:
It seems to be over now for the time being because Intel can't get their crap together and that's not really news to anybody.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Long term, I think Apple will get their cell modem team going quickly enough that I think maybe in five years they won't need to deal with Qualcomm anymore.
Marco:
But we're not there yet.
John:
I don't know how long their patent license is, but I feel like with Qualcomm, it's short-sighted to take the giant bucket of money that Apple gave them.
John:
I mean, I guess Qualcomm has no choice.
John:
The point is they have to license them, and so now they have.
John:
But now that gives Apple the keys to be able to be the master of its own destiny and do its own chips.
John:
I feel like Apple's one to regret is probably we should have started that make your own modem thing two years ago, like two years earlier than we did, not two years ago.
John:
Whenever they started it, starting it two years before that would have saved them from this whole mess.
John:
And Intel, I'd love to talk to Intel and say, guys, I know you're having trouble with your process thing, but this whole idea of let's stick to the high margin, multi-core, 58-core, $30,000 server thing because it's a better business, it kind of is.
John:
But how many times are you going to skip out on making the cheap consumer commodity part in large numbers because it's a low margin business?
John:
You can do that when, you know, if you're coming from a position of strength, but you're not anymore.
John:
Like, I'm not saying they have to take every single deal, but Intel has a history of, like, they passed on making the iPhone CPU.
John:
I'm sure they've passed on making stuff for game consoles.
John:
Like, all sorts of businesses that don't look as good to them as their high margin, multi-core x86 CPU business is.
John:
It's true.
John:
They're not as good businesses, but the volumes are high, and if you skip all of those, eventually the world just leaves you behind, and every device that matters is using something other than an Intel chip in it.
John:
I'm sure they have better reasons than I can think of right now, but it just seems like not a great thing for Intel to be constantly retrenching because eventually the only thing they're going to sell are the equivalent of mainframe chips, and there's not going to be a lot of them.
Marco:
Well, I think ultimately one reason that they might have had to retreat on this one is like Intel obviously has two big problems in this market.
Marco:
Number one is they can't get their crap together to even ship their existing products.
Marco:
They can't even keep their mainstream product line going at a healthy rate without massive problems.
Marco:
And so that's problem.
Marco:
Problem number two is that the right time to get into the cell modem business was 10 years ago.
Marco:
like they're a little late and so I imagine anyone who tries to enter this business now including Apple probably has a pretty serious set of problems on their hand that A they're starting from zero and B they have patent issues major major patent issues and that's just that's the kind of thing that does not get solved quickly or easily like if you wanted to start a cell modem business today as Apple apparently has is rumored to have done or has actually said they're doing whatever it is
Marco:
That's a massive undertaking that is going to take years and years and years before there's going to be any payoff whatsoever.
Marco:
And even then, as soon as you release something, Qualcomm is going to sue you, and that's going to take years and years to resolve, and you might be on the hook for lots of money after that.
Marco:
So there's just a lot of challenges in entering the market of cell modems now, today.
Marco:
And Intel started a few years ago, but they didn't start 10 years ago or 15 years ago when they probably should have.
John:
Well, I mean, we're all holding Intel cell modems on our phones right now, because we all have XS, right?
John:
And I think they did.
John:
Like, Intel has been Apple's supplier while they've been fighting with Qualcomm.
John:
So they've had some success in that area.
John:
Like, I don't think that any... You know, remember the year when they had the... You could get the Intel modem, and you could get the other modem, and there was debates about which was... Yep, that was the iPhone 7, and I had the Intel modem, and it sucked.
John:
Right.
John:
But since then, you know, it's been a non... Whatever...
John:
However good they might be compared to the Qualcomm ones, it's obvious the Intel's modems have been good enough that we have not had any discussions about the quality of the cell radios in our current iPhones or the previous gen or whatever.
John:
But I guess that business was not attractive to Intel.
John:
And the process issue comes to a head where eventually everybody else offers...
John:
you know, Taiwan Semiconductor 7 nanometer things and Intel can't match that, what does Intel do?
John:
Like, maybe it just has to...
John:
you know, concentrating, you know, so it's not, it's not like Intel starting from zero.
John:
They're already making some items.
John:
Just the question of, can you make a five G one?
John:
And it's a larger effort.
John:
And as for being sued by Qualcomm, like everybody has to license these patents and the whole idea is that Qualcomm is supposed to let people license them.
John:
And that's what that whole FTC argument is about.
John:
Uh, but Apple, Apple's a cell modem thing, I think started several years ago.
John:
So I think they're sort of on track to be in the 2020 or 2021 iPhone.
Um,
John:
which, you know, it's a reasonable timeline given how long things take.
John:
If they had started a year or two earlier, things would be better.
John:
But as things stand, you know, I was saying everybody loses in some way.
John:
Everybody does, but Apple probably loses at least because the main thing Apple lost is, you know, the public opinion, like they're the loser in this thing.
John:
And it's clear, right?
John:
You know, if you care about the horse race, like Apple versus Qualcomm, who won basically Qualcomm.
John:
But the main thing Qualcomm won is a bunch of money.
John:
And Apple has a lot of that.
John:
And long term, what Apple won is, you know, it's freedom eventually.
Marco:
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Casey:
It was a couple of weeks ago, maybe three or four weeks ago now, that Apple had three or four consecutive days of releases and embargoes and things of that nature.
Casey:
Well, friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, has decided to mimic that, but with leaks.
Casey:
So this has been the Week-O-Leaks, and we are recording on Wednesday the 17th.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know if more stuff is coming or not.
Casey:
But holy cow, it's been a busy last several days.
Casey:
So this started, I think, on the 13th, which is actually last week.
Casey:
That would be Saturday.
Casey:
With iOS 13 rumors, specifically dark mode, detachable panels, Safari and mail upgrades, an undo gesture, a new volume heads-up display, and more.
Casey:
So this starts with Guy Rambeau saying, long-awaited dark mode is finally coming to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 13.
Casey:
There'll be system-wide dark mode that can be enabled in settings, including a high-contrast version, similar to what's already available on macOS.
Casey:
And speaking of macOS, the iPad apps that run on the Mac using Marspan will be able to take advantage of dark mode on both platforms.
Casey:
I think I heard on Upgrade...
Casey:
That apparently the developer of panel kit now works for Apple, which I did not know.
Casey:
So that's kind of interesting as well.
Casey:
Anyway, these cards can also be stacked on top of each other and use a depth effect to indicate which cards are on top and which are on the bottom.
Casey:
Cards can be flung away to dismiss them.
Casey:
That's a lot, and that's just day one.
John:
All these things sound like, I mean, dark mode we more or less knew was coming.
John:
The volume HUD, as noted in the article, has been a joke for such a long time.
John:
It's one of those overdue things.
John:
The complaint about the volume HUD, in case you're new to iOS or don't see anything wrong with it, is that when you change the volume, a gigantic square comes in the middle of your screen and hides things that are behind it.
John:
lots of apps override that and we all love those apps where you can i mean instagram is example but basically any good player application or whatever replaces the volume hud with a tiny thing that is tucked into an unused portion of the screen due to like letterbox video or whatever or is it the very top at the very bottom and just shows like a line filling or whatever so the article doesn't say what it's going to be but anything other than a giant thing in the middle of the screen that obscures the video will be great
John:
The mail upgrade I thought was interesting because, I mean, the Safari mail stuff, they talk about those applications getting more features, which after yesterday's last week's show where we were worried about Marzipan apps coming to the Mac and just being like Macified equivalents of their iOS versions that don't have a lot of features.
Yeah.
John:
uh you know maybe it wasn't entirely clear in the last show or i think we mentioned a few times like we don't know what the marzipan apps that come to the mac are going to be like like we're worried that they might have far fewer features but we don't actually know so here is one of the first rumors that's not even about the mac it's about ios and saying hey the mail application on ios
John:
might get some new features added to it, which happens from time to time in small amounts, but it turns the knob slightly towards the possibility that Mars Band apps on the Mac might not be as feature poor as they are in iOS 12, especially if the iOS 13 incarnations have a bunch more features.
John:
Now, maybe they have a bunch more features because those features were added partially in service of the Mars Band version, which would be the advantage of Apple being able to put a single team on
John:
mail for all of its platforms so when they add features they don't need to add them to the ios version and to the mac version they just add it to one version i don't know but anyway that i found that uh you know encouraging and then the undo gesture uh what they say is like three fingers on the keyboard and a swipe i mean it's better than shaking the phone but it's still an awkward gesture and if the keyboard is up as gruber pointed out you've got undo and redo buttons right above the keyboard most of the time anyway
John:
So I'm not entirely sure how awesome that's going to be, except trying to explain to people how they accidentally, uh, they did a bunch of typing and then it all disappeared.
John:
And it's like, Oh, you accidentally three fingers swiped on your keyboard because you were typing really fast or something.
John:
But hopefully that gesture, like the other multitasking gestures will be able to be turned off or whatever.
John:
But anyway, all, all these things, uh,
John:
They sound good to me.
John:
These features sound good.
John:
None of them sound stupid or frivolous or, you know, particularly unexpected except for the addition of features to the applications.
Marco:
Yeah, this, I mean, the keyboard undo thing I don't really care about, honestly.
Marco:
That's yet another multi-finger, complex, undiscoverable gesture to fix keyboard navigation on iOS.
Marco:
Like, no one's going to find it.
John:
Assuming that even ships, by the way, because that type of feature is very easy to, like, play with and have experimentally in builds and say, you know what, never mind.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And I do think if you look at the information that they are reporting here in these various reports that we've gotten over the last few days, it sure seems like this is coming from a class dump.
Marco:
It seems like somebody has access to a build, but
Marco:
I don't think Guy Rambeau has a build.
Marco:
Because if he had a build, he could get things like resources and images and things out of that build that could probably be more newsworthy than the features that might exist.
Marco:
So I'm guessing this is reporting on somebody who has access to a class dump of the build.
Marco:
Because it's sounding like features that might exist in the SDK and that might have function names and class names that can be seen in the SDK.
Marco:
That's what this sounds like to me.
Marco:
um and based on that then that supports what you said john like that this might not ship like there might be a class called like you know keyboard multi-finger undo gesture or something like that but that might not be enabled at the end or you know whatever whatever build ships even if it's enabled like at the wc seed that still might not ship this fall uh so that's all that aside um
Marco:
The multi-window panel kit-like thing I think is very interesting.
Marco:
There's a lot of challenges with getting rich functionality in iOS.
Marco:
Initially, in the early days of iOS, there were hardware limitations, there were screen size limitations, there were limitations in the kind of sophistication that the software could even enable in any reasonable way.
Marco:
But over time...
Marco:
many of those limitations have gone away or have been significantly lifted.
Marco:
The hardware is now more powerful than many laptops, even many desktops like John's.
Marco:
The software is incredibly capable.
Marco:
There's tons of APIs.
Marco:
But one of the biggest challenges that we still have on iOS and in all touch-based OSs
Marco:
is how do they expose complex functionality in a way that is discoverable at all and that works with touch and that isn't hideously ugly or confusing.
Marco:
And those are really hard design challenges.
Marco:
One of the cool things about PanelKit is that it basically is like an extension of popovers.
Marco:
It basically treats popovers as detachable panes that you can then dock into a sidebar, is kind of how I can summarize this.
Marco:
And it does this with minimal new UI.
Marco:
And as we think about how to expand...
Marco:
especially the ipad like on the phone you're kind of limited by screen size and you know oftentimes you need to operate things one-handed and so not needing controls to be very far away or near the corners or anything so like on the phone i don't think we have a lot of ui uh innovation left to do if with like multitasking and advanced operations because there just isn't space really
Marco:
But on the iPad is where things get really interesting.
Marco:
And especially as you think about now, combining iPad and Mac designs in the future, or having designs that can adapt to both very easily, the iPad suffers still so much from a lack of progressive disclosure of complexity and a lack of
Marco:
advanced functionality being present even in pro apps for things like customizing your workspace things like multitasking having multiple windows or multiple tabs or whatever open and various things and so to have strong rumors of significant progress in those areas
Marco:
is very exciting to me.
Marco:
Now, even though we don't really know much of anything about what any of these things mean, how they're actually implemented, things like that, I am extremely excited about the apparent amount of work going into this.
Marco:
Apple seems not to think that the iOS 11 version of multitasking is done.
Marco:
like it's like sometimes apple solves a problem and then they don't come back to it for years if ever and they kind of you can tell they kind of just think like well that's a solid problem check done and clearly ipad multitasking is not done clearly they have other plans and they have and they want to make things more advanced for both multitasking and for what you can do inside of one app uh and and that
Marco:
combined with marzipan and everything i i'm just i'm very excited even though we know so little i'm very excited to see where all this goes and i think again like it's hard to know for sure because there's so much that's still speculation uh optimistic predictions wish list type things but i think
Marco:
apple has their head on straight again after some years kind of in the wilderness with lots of different things regarding power users and pros and hardware and software it sure seems like they have their heads on straight again and that's why i'm optimistic that this is going to be good i think apple's still taking a pretty cautious approach here like and the main problem i feel like is that
John:
Nobody knows the answer yet, including Apple.
John:
So if you look at the sort of more complex applications in the iPad, they've all been experimenting with different ways that deal with complexity of user interface in their own way.
John:
um and none of them is so clearly the one and only way apple and none of them come from apple so if you are making a sort of professional complex ipad application you're kind of on your own you can look at your competitors and you can come up with some ideas on your own you can try some experiments but there's no there's no os framework level standard for the type of things that you need to do you need to invent it yourself so i feel like what apple is doing here is not like
John:
Yeah.
John:
You need some way to have some kind of panel card thingy that is not like a full-fledged window window.
John:
We're not turning into a multi-window interface where you have separate documents open in separate windows, but it's like you have bits of your user interface and you want to be able to break them out and arrange them.
John:
And so we're going to provide a system-level framework to do that one thing.
John:
Which doesn't seem like it's that significant.
John:
It's like, well, I could do that already if I rolled my own.
John:
It's true.
John:
But by Apple not really picking a winner, but by Apple sort of putting its foot down and saying this is an important enough need that there should be a system standard system control for it.
John:
And you won't have to write it.
John:
And we will hopefully make it good enough that we will encourage you to use it in your app.
John:
It will save you a lot of development time.
John:
And if a bunch of people use it and find it useful, their apps will work more like each other.
John:
It's the whole point of the GUI that if you learn one app, you can transfer those skills to another.
John:
But there are so many issues with dealing with complex operations on the iPad.
John:
This does not solve all of them.
John:
you know to your point marco it shows that they are going in the right direction but they're recognizing this need and they're not going to be like well we've done all that we need to do and people can just make their own custom apps with their own custom uis right like everything's going to be kai's power tools that may be a reference before your time but like do completely no i got it yeah like we don't provide controls for the giant scaly you know speckled orb uh but you can make one of your own and then you know anyway
John:
So I'm happy that they're doing this, but it's still very cautious.
John:
No one has the full sort of, here is a sort of regular toolkit for dealing with complexity, dealing with functional complexity.
John:
The Mac has a very regularized toolkit for dealing with functional complexity.
John:
It may not be the world's best toolkit, but it is eminently composable.
John:
It involves windows, resizable windows, menu bars, pallets.
John:
There's very few...
John:
sort of nouns and verbs but you can compose them on a very large screen to solve very complex problems it doesn't make for a particularly friendly interface but you can get the functionality out there and you can make an application that lets people create an on-screen environment where they can get their work done witness every pro application you could possibly imagine right you know photoshop and
John:
logic and cad applications and all you know like anything anything with a lots of menu commands and lots of floating windows and toolbars and pallets right simply porting that to the ipad is probably not the right thing to do but they've got to do something so and and keep in mind that everything we're seeing in ios 13 supposedly is stuff that might have been in ios 12 but they decided let's not ship it half-baked and saved it so hopefully when it comes in 13 it'll be nice and polished and
John:
But I still think even after 13, like we're on this sort of a two-year Vittici cycle where he has to wait around for enhancements of the iPad.
John:
And then he gets a huge amount of them.
John:
And then there's a quiet year.
John:
Then he gets another huge amount.
John:
I really hope this is a big year.
John:
Like, you know, obviously these are just...
John:
rumors and we have no idea what's really coming and it could be way more than even these rumors suggest but this seems like a year where the ipad's going to get a bunch of stuff but i still i mean we'll wait and see but i still feel like from the rumors so far there is not a grand unified vision of how to deal with functional complexity on the ipad but there is one more tool in the tool belt that seems to be mostly based on
John:
The sort of real-world research and development done by third-party developers coalesced into an Apple-blessed version, which is great.
John:
That's the way many things work in the Apple world, and it's fine.
John:
But I think there's also room for the other side of that, which is Apple coming up with a really good idea and rolling that out.
John:
And that might be coming, too.
John:
There's another rumor later on, if we get to it, from macOS that...
John:
potentially relates to some of Apple's ideas about how to deal with that.
John:
But in the meantime, I still feel like Apple is being cautious and that caution is probably warranted.
Casey:
You know, I'd be interested to see or try to discover how this is implemented on the iPad versus on the Mac.
Casey:
Like, let's say that we get panel kit.
Casey:
Obviously, it'd be different.
Casey:
But for the sake of conversation, we need a name for it.
Casey:
So let's say we get panel kit on the iPad on iOS.
Casey:
But then we also have to support that.
Casey:
Well, not we.
Casey:
Apple has to support that on macOS, potentially, because marzipan.
Casey:
I can't help but wonder if the under-the-hood implementation would be very different, even if the APIs would be the same.
Casey:
So what on the iPad is not a new window is actually like an NS window or something like that on macOS.
Casey:
And to be fair, I know very little about macOS programming, so I might have already butchered the idea here.
Casey:
But do you know what I mean?
Casey:
It would be fascinating to me
Casey:
if there was one API that was common between macOS and iOS, but the implementation was wildly different between the two.
John:
That's the old world.
John:
That's the old world of share sheets and extensions and things that are ostensibly the same and have very similar APIs but are implemented totally differently under the covers.
John:
I feel like the promise of Marzipan is...
John:
And actually, they're implemented the same way under the covers because it's all UIKit under there.
John:
I don't know if they're in a position to pull that off.
John:
And who knows how Marzipan is implemented under the covers, whether underneath that there is some AppKit stuff lurking.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Historically, we have Carbon and Cocoa as examples of two APIs that were separate but also had
John:
surprising amount of sharing uh where it was very difficult to make any mac application that was purely cocoa or purely carbon back when they were sort of mixed together in various bits under the covers but i think the promise of this new system is let's not do that anymore and let's literally have the same framework that runs on both platforms and granted with behavioral differences to your point casey that you can't actually make them the same because i mean
John:
The Mac just doesn't work like iOS.
John:
Everything's not trapped inside this one frame and having a panel.
John:
On the iPad, you can't really take a thing outside the bounds of the thing because some window is always filling up the whole screen.
John:
As far as I'm aware, no one has ever...
John:
uh there is no way in ios to peek out peek you know behind the currently running application like as if you could see like your springboard hiding behind there like i don't even think it is behind there right it's not like it is on the mac where your applications are floating on top of a bunch of other stuff but um that is the way it is on the mac so there's there's going to be different differences but i i really think the promise here is finally a unified code base underneath it all even if it is super awkward for the first few years because it's just going to look like phone stuff
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
We also heard that Apple is revamping Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into a unified app.
Casey:
And additionally, they're going to develop a tile-like personal item tracking device.
Casey:
So there's several things in one.
Casey:
It's merging Find My iPhone, Find My Friends, which is fairly self-explanatory.
Casey:
And it seems like it'll carry through most of the features you would expect between the two.
Casey:
So apparently the new app will create or will let you create your quote-unquote find network, which includes devices and family and friends and things of that nature.
Casey:
And then additionally, Apple also wants – this is reading from Guy now – Apple also wants users to be able to track any item, not just their Apple devices, using this new unified app.
Casey:
The company is working on a new hardware product known only as quote B389 by the people involved in its development.
Casey:
This new product will be a tag that can be attached to any item similar to other products like Tile.
Casey:
The tag will be paired to the user's iCloud account by proximity to an iPhone, like AirPods.
Casey:
Users will be able to receive notifications when their device gets too far away from the tag, preventing them from forgetting the item the tag is attached to.
Casey:
And then finally, you can put this tag thing in loss mode, and then apparently it will show your own contact information on other people's iPhones if they happen to be within range of it, which is not brand new ideas, but seems like a really, really solid implementation thereof.
Casey:
uh i do use find my friends particularly for aaron but occasionally for friends uh and i very rarely use find my iphone but man when i need it i am very happy to have it i don't have any tiles or tile like devices at the moment but i all this sounds really good i mean nothing again nothing earth shattering but all this sounds really good how do you feel about this marco
Marco:
I am really intrigued.
Marco:
It sounds like a good idea.
Marco:
I don't think there's that much to say yet.
Marco:
I am very curious to see if that dedicated hardware item ships that would basically be like a tile replacement.
Marco:
It just seems unlike the kind of thing Apple would do.
Marco:
So that just seems odd to me.
Marco:
So I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't ship.
Marco:
Or maybe it's some kind of
Marco:
odd, not really meant for mass consumers kind of thing, like Bluetooth LE tags and things.
Marco:
Maybe you're supposed to use these for other business-to-business uses or who knows what.
Marco:
But anyway, I do think it's smart to take advantage of the fact that Apple has a lot of access to Bluetooth proximity radios and things like that.
Marco:
The types of
Marco:
wireless communications, the kind of ad hoc communications that AirDrop is based on, where your phones don't have to know about each other to talk to each other.
Marco:
They don't have to be on the same network.
Marco:
They don't have to be on Wi-Fi at all, necessarily.
Marco:
And they can form their own little Wi-Fi network with a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi that coordinates things.
Marco:
So they have access to these radios.
Marco:
They started in, I think, the last or the one before that version of iOS, where if you do things like turn off Bluetooth,
Marco:
If you have an Apple Watch paired, which communicates over Bluetooth, it can still communicate with the phone.
Marco:
Like when you hit the Bluetooth off thing in control center, it turns off most Bluetooth devices, but not all Bluetooth devices.
Marco:
It leaves the Apple Watch connected if you have one.
Marco:
And so they've already kind of like broken the seal on making those radio off toggles, not a hundred percent off and not for all things and not all the time.
Marco:
So if they were do something like this, where a phone that's been told to iCloud that it's lost, uh,
Marco:
maybe its radios get forced on, and then it can talk to other devices through this Bluetooth-based proximity system, and then it can be found better.
Marco:
And the thieves, if it's stolen, can't just turn the radios off.
Marco:
They have to actually power the whole phone down to prevent it from being found this way.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It seems like a cool idea.
Marco:
It's certainly probably going to be more useful to actually locate lost and stolen devices.
Marco:
So it sounds pretty cool.
Marco:
I don't necessarily think they're going to broaden it to other products with this weird hardware tag thing, but just as a way to improve Find My iPhone, that sounds awesome.
Marco:
And I also... I'm not entirely sure why...
Marco:
Find My iPhone would ever be in the same app as Find My Friends?
John:
I can tell you why.
John:
I'm so glad that they're combining these apps because there's a constant source of frustration for me.
John:
So I use Find My Friends, which is an inappropriately named application because I use it to find my family most of the time.
John:
I think Find My Friends tries to be smart
John:
It's trying to help you find a person.
John:
It's right there in the name of the application.
John:
But because we're a house full of multiple people and multiple devices, sometimes it's confused about what it wants to be doing.
John:
So I'll try to find out where my daughter is, and I'll go to find my friends, and I'll see her little icon on the overhead view of my house.
John:
But I know she's not in my house, but her phone is in the house, and it thinks by finding her phone, it has found her.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
and i don't you know having two different applications one that's like a limited sort of i'll guess which device you mean the other one which just gives you a big list of devices i want them combined it's basically like find like i i applaud the idea of helping me find the person and being smart about like whatever device the motion sensor says is moving or whatever you know i i think that's a good idea but i don't have to go to a different app if that thing gets it wrong and in the end
John:
the sort of very straightforward bottom level of like just find my devices i can use that to figure out what i want to do in the worst case so combining them into a new application that is not called find my friends that is also not called find my iphone
John:
will really help and history has shown that I am the only one in my family who understands this separation because very often they'll say I did I tried to find out where somebody was and it shows they're here but they're not really there and you know I'm like well you have to use to find my iPhone but I don't want to find an iPhone it's like I know just but it's not it's not my phone I want to find you know my daughter's it's like just it's in that app trust me just scroll yep keep scrolling there's more and see the list there it's there it's our daughter's devices and then pick her yeah
John:
So I think that unification is long overdue, and it's a great idea.
John:
As for the tile thing, I mean, I don't know anything about weird hardware rumors.
John:
Apple has all sorts of ideas that it doesn't ship.
John:
The thing that occurred to me when I saw this was, that could be a Logitech device, or, you know, Apple farms a lot of stuff out to other vendors these days, so...
John:
just because it has a code name and there's code supporting it in the os doesn't necessarily mean it's a first party apple product it could be something that they essentially build for a third party and a third party sells or whatever so anyway i can also see it being an apple thing because it would be a very small piece of white plastic and apple loves to sell us those very very true square even a white plastic square that is apple's core demo
Casey:
Oh, what if we did a rounded rect instead?
John:
No, it'd have to be, what is it called?
John:
The super ellipse?
John:
The Johnny Ive curve?
John:
Wouldn't that be great?
John:
Something shaped like an iOS app icon that's perfect for children to swallow?
John:
Can't go wrong.
John:
Kids love apps.
Casey:
We'll sell millions.
Casey:
All right, finally, or maybe not finally, but finally for tonight anyway, Mac OS 10.15 rumors.
Casey:
I'm happy to summarize this, but I have a feeling that, John, you and Marco are frothing at the mouth.
Casey:
John, do you want to take it away on this one?
John:
All right, to summarize?
John:
Oh, that's why I did all these things in bold.
John:
Okay, so this rumor is the ability to send any window of any app to an external display, which...
John:
A sentence that doesn't make much sense from a Mac user's perspective is you're like, if I have multiple displays on my Mac, I can quote unquote send any window there.
John:
I just drag it there.
John:
That's how windows work.
John:
Again, getting back to the fairly flexible, generic, composable UI paradigm that is the Mac with a bunch of resizable windows that you drag around and the multi-screen paradigm where you have screens that you arrange in relation to each other in 2D space and that you drag the windows between the screens and all that stuff.
John:
But the key part here is the external display can be an actual external display connected to the Mac or even an iPad.
John:
Now, before I get to the iPad part, the sending part is in the vocabulary of people who are not my people who full screen everything.
John:
And I can imagine if you have multiple monitors and full screening that it's still kind of a headache to get the things to display on the screens that you want and all that other stuff.
John:
So having either a better UI or a better API or both for sending a full screen window to the screen you want is great.
John:
But of course, when that other screen is an iPad...
John:
you know there what was that uh third-party product does that lunar display maybe there's a bunch of products to do that basically let you use your ipad your very expensive ipad with a very nice screen on it as essentially an external display for your mac even though it's not connected to your mac by a cable you can do it does it wirelessly right so yep yeah so that's cool that's a great idea um and this feature is called sidecar which makes some sense is like your ipad is like a sidecar to your mac uh
Casey:
Oh, I love that name.
Casey:
Don't even start.
Casey:
I love that name.
Casey:
I think it's delightful.
John:
And so it gives more details in the article about how you can move a window to an iPad in full screen mode or whatever.
John:
And apparently you can also, once you have that window on your iPad, again, it's just your Mac displaying a Mac application or whatever, Mars Band application, on your iPad as if it's an external display.
John:
But then you can take the pencil and draw on the iPad and it counts as input for the Mac, which is super neat.
John:
And so it basically turns your iPad into a little sort of Cintiq-style tablet for your Mac.
John:
Presumably the lag is acceptable and all that other stuff.
John:
And then there's some more info about snapping Windows to the side and doing all – you've seen in Microsoft Windows they have all sorts of features and keyboard commands that you accidentally hit that take Windows and, you know –
John:
like slamming the window against the right edge will make it fill the right third of your screen or the top half or the bottom half.
John:
There are tons of utilities for the Mac that do similar things.
John:
The Mac itself, the current version of Mac OS, has features vaguely related to this in terms of splitting the screen.
John:
Obviously, I'm not a fan of these features because I feel like that paradigm is...
John:
Not as pleasing to me as the paradigm of resizable windows, but lots of people do like to, they feel comforted by the simplicity of having either one application fill their entire screen or one application be on the right and one on the left or one on the top or one on the bottom or quadrants or all sorts of tiling window manager stuff.
John:
So this seems like more features to help those people.
John:
Now, all that said, in my experience watching
John:
People who are not like me use the Mac.
John:
Basically, most people.
John:
Most people using the Mac.
John:
I mentioned before that I see them all use full screen all the time, often because they're on laptops, and that maximizes the room you have for your content.
John:
I don't see a lot of people using tiling window managers.
John:
I don't see a lot of people using the existing features that were added in Sierra or whatever for splitting the screen.
John:
They're not particularly obvious.
John:
It's not particularly obvious how to trigger them, and most people don't know third-party Mac applications exist at all.
John:
So how would they know to go find something like Moom or whatever and use that?
John:
I think that on the...
John:
Of all the people I've seen use iOS devices, I've seen more of them use split screen just because it is literally the only way to get more than one thing on the screen at a time that people find themselves forced to learn it.
John:
Like if you want to be more productive than just seeing one whole application full whole screen at any time ever, ever, you have to learn this.
John:
Whereas on the Mac, you never have to learn those gestures.
John:
uh because you can just use regular resizable windows and you can just exit full screen mode and not again not an option on the ipad there is no exiting full screen mode on the ipad all you can do is split it and swipe it and do all that other stuff so these features are a little bit of a head scratcher for me because i feel like it's kind of adding enhancements to features that are not widely used anyway and that are generally uh
John:
both inferior and not as obvious as the existing features that the mac uses to deal with multiple windows essentially uh but i'm glad they're doing something having to do with window management and the sidecar thing sounds like a great way to sell more people ipads because if you can use your the ipad that you already bought as a really cool tablet for your mac especially if it has really good apple pencil support that's great like that's you know that's a big win for everybody if the lag is acceptable uh
John:
Like, you know, who wouldn't want that?
John:
I mean, Wacom or however you pronounce the name of that company probably doesn't like it.
John:
But I'm kind of looking forward to that.
John:
And I, you know, it may be a reason that we could end up with a new iPad mouse, which thus far we've avoided.
John:
But if we can do this cool thing, especially if it's only for iPad Pros or some other feature like that, we might end up with a new one.
Casey:
You know, as someone who does believe in full screening windows or split screening, I think this sounds really great.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
I think taking the Windows snapping, I can't remember the name of it, and I'm sorry, but whatever the snappy thing is that Windows does.
John:
Microsoft Windows has, you're talking about that feature?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, where you just, you know, as you had described it earlier, John, where you, let's say, drag a title bar to the very right extreme edge of the screen, and then it takes up the right hand.
Casey:
Then the Windows will resize that window to take up half of the screen.
Casey:
Jay Strach in the chat room is saying it's called Snap.
Casey:
That sounds right to me.
Casey:
But anyway, like that feature is super convenient.
Casey:
And pretty much everyone I've ever seen use Windows, even not power users, understand how that works and leverages it.
Casey:
I like having my Mac screen split up into tiles.
Casey:
I know that that drives you insane, John, but that's just the way I like to use my computer.
Casey:
And so anything that makes this better, I think, sounds great.
Casey:
And the idea of having a software-based...
Casey:
luna display also tentatively sounds good i don't recall if luna sponsored in the past i don't know if they're sponsoring in the future i paid my own money for one and i can tell you it is really freaking good and i do love this thing i love it even despite the fact that it takes up the one and only usbc port on my poor laptop but does it have does it have the pencil support too
Casey:
uh i i mean i guess i've never really tried it but i guess you can't really draw a pencil onto the mac no i see your point no then i guess i guess it doesn't but again i've never tried it so i'm not entirely i mean that would be the type of thing that would be you know easy for apple to add and difficult for a third party to add if the os didn't support sure because you have to get those input events efficiently to up to software running on the mac
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
Yeah, again, I've never tried it.
Casey:
But I mean, even just the quote unquote, regular Luna display, it works stunningly well.
Casey:
And I really do like it.
Casey:
And, and I and when I do travel with just the MacBook, and my iPad Pro, you know, say, if I'm going to the library to do work or something, it is very convenient to have that.
Casey:
So
Casey:
All this sounds great.
Casey:
Sidecar sounds great.
Casey:
The snappy thing sounds great.
Casey:
The Wacom thing, eh, whatever.
Casey:
I mean, it's not really for me, I don't think.
Casey:
But it's still cool.
Casey:
It's still very awesome if you're the kind of person that needs that sort of thing.
Casey:
So, yeah, this isn't maybe – except maybe Sidecar.
Casey:
I don't know if this is quite as sexy as the other things we've talked about.
Casey:
But I'm in.
Casey:
I'm excited about it.
John:
Real-time follow-up.
John:
The existing third-party app does it.
John:
It's called Astropad.
John:
Let's use the pencil.
John:
Turn your iPad into a professional graphics tablet.
John:
So this is another example of... Oh, and that's by Luna, actually.
John:
Of Apple seeing what third-party applications are doing and then coming up with the first-party implementation of it.
John:
But this is much more of a... I mean, this is a risk anytime you add something that...
John:
could be an os-level feature the risk is that apple will eventually make it an os-level feature in general users like it when that happened but the makers of the applications that are essentially sherlocked probably don't like it they can still exist because they can have features that apple is never going to add and yada yada and of course they got to make all that money before apple came out with this feature
John:
but Astropad folks are probably a little bit bummed if this room turns out to be true.
Marco:
Well, and I think it actually, I think it is likely to be true in part because it sounds like a really good idea.
Marco:
Also in part because we've been hearing about this for like two years.
Marco:
Like ATP Tipster told us about this back when he was still alive before he perished in a maple syrup fire.
Marco:
He, we, he, he was talking about this like two years ago.
Marco:
as like something that was about to ship for Mac OS.
Marco:
Uh, so we've been hearing this for a long time.
Marco:
They've probably been working, working on it for a long time since even before lunar display was a thing that we knew about.
Marco:
Um, so this might be like a simultaneous invention kind of thing, not like they saw the new display and had to ape it like six months later.
Marco:
I think they've been working on this for a while.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I guess the fact that third-party apps could exist probably means there was some amount of plumbing was already there in the OS that they were able to build on top of.
John:
Yeah, I think it's a type of feature that if you're Apple, it's easy to make an argument for.
John:
It makes our products more valuable.
John:
It makes you more likely to buy both a Mac and an iPad because they're great products separately, and there's also a synergy where they work together.
John:
And we know people like to use...
John:
tablets with screens on them like the the wacom cintiq thing like that that is a product that has proven its popularity uh but it's an extra purchase and those tablets are not cheap i i own one sitting right here and i think it was something like 800 like that's ipad level prices and that tablet is useless when not connected to a mac unlike an ipad which is not useless when not connected to a mac so this seems like a really good idea for everybody
John:
The sending windows and the splitting, though, I'm not sure.
John:
Casey, I'm curious.
John:
When you see other people using Macs, you like to use the split stuff that I added a couple of years back.
John:
Do you see other people use that?
Casey:
Well, it's hard to say because now the only people I see using a Mac is my coworker, and she generally uses her iPhone.
Casey:
So Erin isn't on her Mac very often.
Casey:
And in fact, her poor MacBook Air, the same one that's been in the drink a couple times, I haven't updated to.
Casey:
It's about as updated in terms of OS as your cheese grater is.
Casey:
But I'm trying to remember when I was at work.
Casey:
I don't remember one way or the other seeing a lot of full screen stuff.
Casey:
My inclination is to say no, I did not see a lot of
John:
full screen use or split screen use but not full screen but split screen specifically like full screen whatever but like saying for the people who were in full screen do they even know the the mac os splitting thing exists have you ever seen anyone use it besides yourself
Casey:
Uh, not to my recollection.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And to be honest, it's not terribly discoverable.
Casey:
Like what you have to do is you have to mash down on the green.
Casey:
I don't know what the technical term is, but the green light in the upper left of a window, you mash down on that and hold for a few seconds.
Casey:
And then it kind of like shrinks or it, it makes that take up half the, or cues it up to take up half the screen.
Casey:
And then you can, uh, make a selection of what you want the other half of the screen to be like.
Casey:
It is by no means perfect, but it, it is workable.
Casey:
And, uh,
Casey:
Again, I would love to have the arrow snap style thing out of Windows.
John:
Yeah, I think it is even less discoverable than the Microsoft Windows equivalent feature because, like I said, you could accidentally discover it on Windows pretty easily.
John:
I think more people would use it on the Mac if it was more discoverable or if there weren't other options.
John:
To be fair, I don't see a lot of people using the splits on the iPad either, but
John:
it's the same type of thing on windows i think you can accidentally discover that like i i know because i accidentally do whatever the slide in from the side what do they call that where you on ios where you swipe from the side yeah do it all the time so even if you didn't know that feature exists you may find yourself discovering it and once you do discovery like oh that's useful i can imagine that being useful and then you just get annoyed when you do it accidentally and that's not to complain about ios but like i
John:
I don't know how tenable it is.
John:
I was saying before that Apple is being cautious with iOS 13 with the rumored features that we think they're adding for panels or whatever.
John:
And the main thing that Apple has thus far not been willing to let go of, which I think is probably the right move, but it's limiting them, is...
John:
It's extending everything to the edge.
John:
The menu bar doesn't really exist as a system-level thing in iOS, despite the fact that various iOS applications have toyed with having their own menu bar.
John:
The edges of the screen, your thing always takes up the entire screen, which is a paradigm that was...
John:
introduced when it was absolutely the right thing to do on a tiny little phone screen but as like on the big ipad that's bigger than laptop screens used to be not being able to have any kind of margin or any kind of os level permanent thing whether it be a dock or a shelf or a menu bar or you know a toolbar or anything like that and having everything extend all the way to the edges means that you're fighting for like the reason you accidentally do that swipe over gesture because
John:
If that gesture didn't exist, how would you get that thing that's invisibly off to the side?
John:
How would you get it?
John:
Every pixel on the screen is owned by a single application that has no idea about like the thing over there.
John:
The only way you can get that is to come up with some kind of gesture because there's nothing on the screen.
John:
And no way to invoke a thing other than a gesture to say, application, this is not for you.
John:
I'm telling the OS, show me the little thing that's off to the side or whatever.
John:
If you didn't extend all the edges or any kind of OS-level UI or Chrome anywhere on the iPad, you would have some kind of escape hatch, porthole.
John:
Imagine if it was just one little square, like a tiny little Apple menu or something.
John:
Some part of the screen that is owned by the OS that you could use to...
John:
tell it the os to do something related to windowing but we don't have all we've got are gestures and you know swipes and used in the old days double tapping the home button like anything out of band anything that we can say application this is not for you and even with the gestures there's conflicts of like you know just fruit ninja or whatever that game was fighting with the multitasking gestures of the five finger swipe to go back to springboard and all that other stuff
John:
I'm not sure how long they can keep that up.
John:
Obviously, it's probably still absolutely the right thing to do on the phone and maybe even on smaller iPads, but as iPads become bigger and more capable,
John:
There's a war for the pixels on the screen on the iPad, and I think the OS has to win at least a pixel or two.
John:
Just two secret pixels up in the left-hand corner that if you can find a way to tap them with your fatty meat fingers, congratulations, you get an Apple menu or some kind of toolbar or popover or whatever.
John:
Because I don't think gestures, like gestures are great, but they're totally non-discoverable, they're easy to do accidentally, and when it comes to complex applications that people use that have lots of functionality,
John:
you know it's hard enough to get that functionality into the app and then to say oh by the way the os has a bunch of features too where do those get to go it's like those can only be invisible sorry i don't think that's sustainable long term they just need a little pi icon in the bottom right that'll solve they can't that those pixels are owned by the app sorry i get the reference i get it oh thanks marco
John:
come on we all get the reference you know sure you do casey makes a reference and we all don't say that's from the net doesn't mean we don't know it it just means that we're letting you like we're all we're all happy and proud of casey for making a reference and we're all smiling knowingly like when you did that what did you do the uh the song reference the other day that marco and i got but we had to hear everybody tell us that we didn't get it although i admit i was surprised that marco got it yes what was that
John:
It was the black curtains in the white room.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Cream.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Did you know The Net was filmed in San Francisco's Moscone Center and Macworld on January 5th, 1995?
Casey:
I didn't know that.
Marco:
Escape the system.
Marco:
Just think, their crew might have eaten the same box lunches that we ate.
Marco:
Literally the same.
Marco:
They've just been sitting there since then.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously, since 95.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Jamf Now, and Linode.
Marco:
And we will talk to 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 because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I finally finished watching Heat, and I did it off of your Plex, Casey.
Marco:
I mean, I bought it, of course, but I also watched it off of your Plex because the version I bought looked too good, and so I wanted a crappier version, so I streamed it off your Plex.
Casey:
I think that was a direct Blu-ray rip that I did myself.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
What was wrong?
Marco:
Streaming it off your Plex was challenging.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
That shouldn't have been.
Marco:
I watched it over the course of two nights, and in both cases, Plex had a very hard time streaming it consistently until I dropped the bandwidth down to 0.7 megabits, at which point that finally streamed reliably and looked horrible.
Casey:
That is insane.
Casey:
Really?
Marco:
That being said, it matched my opinion of the movie as well, so it was fine.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I can already tell.
John:
I'm going to dread this top four episode because I don't agree with any of your tastes in movies.
Casey:
Yeah, this episode of top four might be the new... You know what we should do, John, is we should rank the top four episodes of top four that have the worst conclusions.
Casey:
That's what we need to do.
Casey:
Do any of them have conclusions?
John:
That's...
John:
Well, whoever is, whoever's maintaining the top four wiki has their work cut out for them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, I mean, we're going to record the top four pretty soon.
Marco:
I will just say that, uh, I don't know why heat is on so many lists of top heist movies, because while I could appreciate parts of it as a decent movie, it is in no way a heist movie.
Marco:
Uh, and so it should not be on those lists.
Marco:
And that's, that's all I'll say for now.
Marco:
I will save the rest for top four.
Uh,
Casey:
Marco, it's – I can't.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I can't do this with you right now.
John:
Whatever they do categories on top four, it ends up being all about what is best fit for the category and they set aside like what is actually a good movie.
John:
So like I'm sure whatever they pick as their best heist movie is not going to be the best movie on the list.
Marco:
It's not that we set aside the quality movie.
Marco:
It's that how much it adheres to the quality we picked is a factor.
Marco:
It's a weight on its score.
Marco:
Often it is a very big factor.
Marco:
Yes, because if we say top heist movies,
Marco:
And then two of the movies on the list are really barely or not really heist movies.
John:
Well, I mean, I guess it just comes back to what I said before and how my taste in movies differs.
John:
So I often can't stomach the idea that because it fits with a heist movie and you like it, but I think it's like the worst movie on the list and I don't care how much of it.
John:
Anyway, we'll see.
John:
We'll see what you guys end up picking.