Automatic Kicking Machine
Casey:
So you live in a affluent.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
No.
John:
Why do you?
John:
Damn it.
John:
Every time.
John:
There's only two ways to do it.
John:
Just do the opposite of what you think you're going to do.
Casey:
It's affluent?
John:
That just sounds wrong to me.
John:
That's how I'm going to pronounce the word.
John:
I didn't make it up.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Just think about it.
John:
Maybe think of like Affleck, the Affleck duck.
John:
Oh.
John:
Affluent.
John:
Affleck.
Casey:
That's a good mnemonic.
Casey:
It's a good what now?
Casey:
It was a joke.
Casey:
I know it's mnemonic.
Casey:
It was a joke.
John:
It was a joke.
Casey:
Everybody relax.
Casey:
Okay, so we should start right at the top of the show and remind everyone, I know I got really obnoxious about it last week.
Casey:
You're welcome, or I should say that Marco should say you're welcome, because I noticed he cut quite a bit of my lecturing, as he should have, about how now is the time, ladies and gentlemen...
Casey:
Now is the time, ladies and gentlemen, to go to ATP.FM slash store in order to find links to Cotton Bureau's website where we have all sorts of different merchandise up.
Casey:
Every year, somebody, actually usually many somebody says, oh, I meant to do it and I forgot.
Casey:
Is there any way?
Casey:
Is there any?
Casey:
No, there is no way.
Casey:
Pull the car over, stop your run, do whatever you need to do to safely equip yourself to go to atp.fm slash store, please, and buy yourself some delightful merch.
Casey:
And I'll just leave it at that this week.
Casey:
Moving on, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Rob McAlevey has written in to say that the Australia Post website Terms and Conditions have a whole section telling you what to do to get approval to link to their website.
Casey:
This came up within the context of, what is it, Luminary?
Casey:
Something like that?
Casey:
I already forgot the name of the stupid thing.
Casey:
Yeah, Luminary.
John:
It was telling them that you can't put my podcast in your feed.
Casey:
So Rob writes that, you know, in the context of us saying who's in control of, you know, whether or not a podcast ends up in Luminary, and we were joking about, well, who's in control of who links to your website?
Casey:
Well, apparently the Australia Post has some guidelines about how you can link to their website, which is something else.
Casey:
It's not that long, but it's surprising to me that this exists.
John:
Well, we're saying this is a thing the websites used to do before they understood the web.
John:
This is notable because this is a current website that is live right now that says if you want to establish a link to the website, you must first seek approval from Australia Post.
John:
And also, if the nature or content of your website changes in any different way, you must contact the Australia Post.
John:
Yeah, we'll get right on that.
Marco:
Well, this brings the obvious question of, are we allowed to link to this from our show notes?
Casey:
Yeah, that's a good point.
John:
That is a good point.
John:
Come and get us, Australia Post.
Casey:
Come at me, bro.
Casey:
Roger Allen Ford, who is an associate professor of law somewhere, writes – hey, whoever put this in the show notes didn't include the where.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Roger Allen Ford.
John:
I didn't want to nail it down too much.
John:
He did get the location of where he's an associate professor of law, but I don't know.
John:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
Alright, by providing an app that allows members of the public to receive transmissions of album art and podcast audio, Luminary could be said to perform or display those copyrighted works.
Casey:
By embedding a podcast copyrighted artwork within the app and playing copyrighted episodes, a podcast player app would be infringing on the exclusive rights to public performance or display.
Casey:
I don't know why The Times and others want to block Luminary, but they are essentially on solid legal ground doing so.
Casey:
I should have said context.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Whether or not it's even really possible for these podcasts and podcast hosts to block their shows from appearing in Luminary.
Casey:
And I think Roger wasn't necessarily saying that this was a slam dunk case, if I recall this email correctly.
Casey:
But I believe he was basically saying...
Casey:
It's possible, like it is certainly plausible in the Mythbusters canon, it is plausible that this could be enforced in American copyright law.
John:
Yeah, this was a very long email that I was trying to condense here, but this is another instance where just because something is legal doesn't mean it's not also stupid.
Yeah.
John:
Or reverse that because it really is very silly.
John:
But legally speaking, there are lots of legal arguments you can make in favor of the idea that law, what can you do?
John:
That's why we have lawyers.
Marco:
The thing with copyright law, too, is like much of law.
Marco:
If someone makes any kind of copyright legal claim against you, you can't really fight it.
Marco:
Because it's never going to get to a court.
Marco:
You're never going to get to argue with somebody, well, what I'm doing is fair use or what I'm doing does not constitute public performance.
Marco:
You're never going to get to argue that.
Marco:
What's going to happen is if somebody has a complaint that they want their stuff off your app or platform –
Marco:
They're going to complain to you.
Marco:
And if you don't respond, they're going to complain to Apple or Google, the App Store provider.
Marco:
And if they don't respond, they're going to complain to your web host.
Marco:
They can complain to different infrastructure providers up the chain until one of them doesn't want to deal with it and just kicks you off.
Marco:
So the reality is there is no copyright law defense online.
Marco:
If somebody wants to make a stink, they make a stink and you have to comply.
Marco:
So the reality here is this is not a legal problem.
Marco:
This is a market problem.
Marco:
that the only defense that anybody has against this kind of thing is making an app or service where it is not in anybody's best interest to opt out of your service.
Marco:
Or nobody would even think to do that because it seems so ridiculous to do that.
Marco:
And that's where most podcast apps land, in that kind of area.
Marco:
But Luminary, by angering everybody, everyone is looking for things they can do because they're mad.
Marco:
And I think that's what a lot of this stuff was.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Overcast has come out with a really frickin' cool new feature.
Casey:
And I'd like to lodge a complaint that hopefully we can rectify right now.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
I was listening to Under the Radar, which is an excellent podcast with Marco and our good friend Dave Smith.
Casey:
And you kind of fluffed over all the technical aspects of how this feature works.
Casey:
And we'll explain the feature momentarily.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I am here for the technical explanation of how this feature works to the degree that you are willing to share.
Casey:
Now, I should probably back up and explain what the hell I'm talking about, but I would like it to be on record that I am all about figuring out, or not figuring out, but hearing about how you did this, because this sounds fascinating to me, but what am I talking about?
Casey:
So, out of nowhere, and I did not know this was coming, I don't think John knew this was coming, and you had said...
Casey:
You had said maybe under the radar that only a couple of people did know it was coming.
Casey:
But all of a sudden in the last couple of days, Marco and his app Overcast have released this new Clips feature.
Casey:
And the idea is, and Marco, if I'm characterizing this unfairly, just feel free to cut me off.
Casey:
But the idea is, hey, you know, podcasts are not easy to share in the same way like a GIF or in some degree a YouTube video is.
Casey:
And Marco has for years and years had timestamp links where you can go to a, the overcast website and it will open to a specific time in the podcast, which works great except for all the big shows with dynamic ad insertion for all the reasons we already spoke about, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
Plus it's still hard to know, like, am I supposed to be listening to the last 45 minutes of this episode and I'm just starting in the middle or am I supposed to listen to 15 seconds or what, what's the deal here?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so, Marco, and perhaps you can discuss motivations in a second other than that, but it seemed like the idea was, hey, let's make it easy to share this stuff.
Casey:
And, you know, if they share it with Overcast's Clips feature, that's some, you know, kind of subliminal, that's not the right word for it, but kind of, you know, quiet marketing for Overcast.
Casey:
But then, because you're a good person...
Casey:
you decided to optionally allow people to remove the overcast branding or add branding for apple podcasts or even some of your competitors which i think is really tremendous and i and i hope i don't sound sarcastic because i really do mean that i really think that this is the right way to do it not the easy way not both in the literal sense of the word word but also in the like should i really be promoting my competitors kind of thing
Casey:
But I think this is the right way to do it.
Casey:
And you're a good man, Charlie Brown.
Casey:
And I used this feature for the first time a couple hours ago, and I loved it.
Casey:
I really want to know, even if it's privately, how you did all this, because I am neck deep in doing things that are considerably less complex and considerably less advanced.
Casey:
And so the thought of trying to implement this just makes me googly eyed.
Casey:
But one way or another, before we dive in, if we even do dive into implementation, I
Casey:
I just wanted to, first of all, publicly say I love this feature.
Casey:
I think it's great.
Casey:
I think you did it right by everyone, including listeners, including competitors, including podcasters.
Casey:
I really think this is a home run.
Casey:
But if you would like to revise anything I said or add any clarity, please feel free.
Marco:
No, you're just saying how awesome I am.
Marco:
I think I'm going to leave it at that.
John:
I have to say how awesome it is first, too, before Marco goes.
John:
I'll allow it.
John:
I think one of the parts that Casey might have left off, which I think is the most important part of this entire feature.
John:
Actually, before I get into that, I'll briefly touch on the links at the bottom where you can link to competitors and stuff like that.
John:
I feel like there's a little bit of the enemy of my enemy is my friend going on here because Marco does not link to Luminary in those links.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't care about Luminary.
Marco:
Luminary is not a threat to me.
Marco:
Spotify is a threat to all of us.
Marco:
But I don't know how to link to Spotify when what I have is an iTunes ID.
Marco:
Every app that I link to there has a way that I can generate a URL knowing the iTunes ID of the podcast.
Marco:
I don't know how to do that for some other services like Spotify.
Marco:
And so I don't do that.
Marco:
If Spotify had some way that I could say like, you know, Spotify.com slash podcast slash iTunes one, two, three, four, five.
Marco:
And I know that anybody I sent there would get redirected to whatever Spotify's giant garbage URL would be for that podcast.
John:
I would add them.
John:
Really?
John:
I always thought you were mostly linking to actual real podcast apps, as in they read RSS feeds.
Marco:
There's two sides of this.
Marco:
I do want to only support open-based podcast apps if I can, but also I want the share page to be so useful that big publishers will be tempted to use it.
Marco:
and if big publishers you know have a lot of their audience on spotify they're not going to even consider using a page like a you know a share page that has a bunch of other apps but not spotify now that being said this might be a a moot concern because big publishers would probably never use these at all anyway they're probably going to use only their own stuff because that's how this how they usually work so like
Marco:
This might be a moot argument, but ideally, I would like those pages to be as broad appeal on the client side as possible.
John:
Getting back to my original point, I think it's the most important feature of this, which may not have been clear in all of our descriptions.
John:
When you activate this feature,
John:
uh what you get in the end that you can stick in your tweet or wherever the hell is a video which is like you're sharing podcasts if i'm sharing podcasts why the hell do i get a video at the end of it it's not it's not a video medium it's audio and overcast already had audio share links granted without an ending timestamp but marco could have added an ending timestamp or a duration very easily as another query parameter or something but he didn't why is this feature video because
John:
The fact that it's video is, I think, the most important and most attractive thing about this feature for a couple of reasons.
John:
One, there's the obvious one of like when it makes the video, the content of the actual video includes like essentially the brand of the podcast, the album art or whatever the hell you want to call it of the podcast.
John:
Which is important for branding and recognition to know instead of just following an Overcast timestamp link.
John:
And I mean, you'd go to overcast.com and you'd see the thing or whatever.
John:
But like it's yeah.
John:
So there is a presentational detail there.
John:
But I think the most important reason is that people want something to look at.
John:
uh and it seems weird because it's like well isn't it all just about being in the headphones and just listening to the thing or whatever just and the only thing that happens on it is like there's a progress bar that progresses just being able to see a progress bar and to see how much longer there is in a clip individually to see the album art while you listen people like to look at videos and like
John:
I don't know if this was a conscious, like if you went through this whole thought process or decided this was important about it, but I think it is essential.
John:
I think part of the reason people share these is because all the social sharing services are optimized for sharing video.
John:
You can play it right in the thing.
John:
You don't get sent elsewhere.
John:
You don't get sent to a website.
John:
All social media sharing type things have to be good at sharing video because all the GIFs get turned into video and all the little, you know, when Vine was popular, that was out there.
John:
And just like,
John:
It's part of social media, part of good use of social media is to embed tiny videos.
John:
So even if you're sharing podcasts, if you do it as embedding tiny videos, that is the native lingua franca of the entire social networking world.
John:
And in practice, I think people love it because it's video.
John:
I like it because it's video.
John:
I find myself watching the little video of the thing, which has a tiny little progress bar that goes from left to right while I sort of see the album art out of my peripheral vision.
John:
It is a very simple feature, but I think it is the genius part of this feature that if you were just thinking about how to do this in a straightforward way, you would have found a way to share audio and then you would have found out how bad tiny audio clips are handled by most social media networks.
Marco:
is the entire feature.
Marco:
The entire feature is generating video for social network sharing.
Marco:
That is the whole point.
Marco:
I basically wrote the feature for Instagram.
Marco:
Everything else has been like, oh, it's nice to also do these other things, but the very first layout I made was the portrait layout for Instagram Stories.
Marco:
The reason why the videos are 16x9 or 9x16 or square is
Marco:
is because those are the exact dimensions of what Instagram is optimized for.
Marco:
I even looked up some of the first questions I had were like, what is the ideal resolution that you can submit to Instagram for a video?
Marco:
Like the pixel resolution and stuff.
Marco:
And by the way, there's no information about most of this out there.
Marco:
Um, and there's things like, you know, with Instagram stories, um, there are, it overlays certain controls in certain parts of the video.
Marco:
So that's why I don't have anything in the very top or very bottom of an Instagram story video.
Marco:
Um, so anyway, yeah, this, this was built for social networks because the fact is like, you know, you said earlier, like audio is the format of podcasts, but video is the format of sharing.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And so if you want to share things socially, it needs to be a photo or a video.
Marco:
Uh, anything that like, if you try to put something that doesn't have those, it's very easy for people to skim over.
Marco:
And I think there's also, you know, like I think you mentioned this, but I think there's also a, uh, an appeal of like when you are playing one of these clips, uh,
Marco:
There is something for your eyes to do.
Marco:
Suppose the Twitter app or the Instagram app were really optimized for playing audio.
Marco:
They're not, but suppose they were.
Marco:
If you do that, you hit play, you keep scrolling, and you keep scrolling.
Marco:
You're reading things with your eyes and the linguistic parsing parts of your brain, and so you stop listening to what's being said if it's a talk segment of the audio.
Marco:
You need something visual to lock your eyes in place to give them something to do so that you pay attention instead of continuing to scroll through a visual format feed.
Marco:
Otherwise, you wouldn't hear what's being said.
Marco:
It wouldn't be very effective.
John:
And if you've ever seen a kid tap a YouTube video while it was playing, you're like, why are they tapping the screen?
John:
The video is playing.
John:
It's everything's fine.
John:
You know why they're tapping it?
John:
to find out how long this video is by seeing a progress bar you know how far along in the clip are you what am i signing up for if i just hit play and it starts playing i'm like is this going to be like 20 minutes of audio that i have to listen to am i expected to listen to 10 minutes how long is this thing
John:
There's a progress bar right there, and you can see very quickly, and also, you'll get to this in a second, that the actual maximum limit means that you're not going to be there for 20 minutes no matter what, which means that when the progress bar starts to move, you'll see, oh, this is going at a pretty good clip here, huh?
John:
It's going to be over pretty soon.
John:
I'm about halfway through.
John:
You know how close you're getting to the end.
John:
The second cool feature is that if in Twitterific anyway, and some other video players, when a large video starts to play, this, this looks for all the world, like, like a player animation in like overcast or podcast app.
John:
It has a progress bar.
John:
Let's say if like me, you briefly forget that this is a video playing and you think it's a, uh, a player app where you can just grab the, uh, the scrubber, like the little, you know, play head and the progress bar and drag it to, to fast forward to like three quarters of the way through, uh,
John:
Lots of video playing apps have a thing where when the video is playing, if you swipe your finger across the screen, it acts as sort of a virtual progress bar.
Casey:
Really?
John:
So you can actually grab the little thumb in the video and move your thumb like you're moving the progress bar, and it doesn't match one-to-one, but it will basically do what you mean.
Yeah.
John:
It's like you've made a fake interactive video that tricks you into things that's interactive, but it is not interactive.
John:
It is just a video and all you're doing is scrubbing.
John:
It's unintentional genius.
John:
Great.
John:
I'll take it.
Casey:
So we've kind of talked about what it is, the motivation.
Casey:
Again, I love this so much.
Casey:
To the extent you're willing to, can you pull back the curtain and tell us kind of how, at the very least, how did it go on a qualitative sense?
Casey:
Like, was this pretty easy sailing or were you fighting this every step of the way?
Casey:
And then I am happy to go as deep as you want into the actual implementation.
Casey:
I have a feeling that's not going to be very far, but how?
John:
Oh, can I make a guess of the implementation?
John:
Yeah, go for it.
John:
I know nothing about this.
John:
This is just a wild ass guess, right?
John:
Because if there's some easy API for doing it, I assume in case you wouldn't even be asking.
Casey:
Well, yes and no.
Casey:
I mean, I have a relatively okay idea of a lot of the surface area of the iOS API, but there's a lot particularly in media I don't know.
Casey:
And either way, I've only been doing this for real for a couple of years, whereas for Marco, it's been, what, 10 plus.
Casey:
So there is a lot I don't know.
Casey:
So I appreciate the compliment, but it's possible that it's easier than I thought.
Casey:
That being said, I bet you it's not as easy as I thought.
John:
So I have two guesses, the easy one and the hard one.
John:
The easy one is, if any of this is true.
John:
I'm pretty sure iOS has a screen recording API.
John:
And if you can get an off screen view and stick the existing screen recording API at your off screen view, you just go through the view and have the screen recording thing recorded.
John:
Right.
John:
But that might require it to be a real time.
John:
I don't know.
John:
So that would be the one where like, I didn't really, really have to do any work because iOS already knows how to record the screen.
John:
And I just have a record off screen screen and I just render the screen and that would work out.
John:
The hard one is, you know, it is a video is just a series of pictures.
John:
You can render a view that is in the state that you want.
John:
And the only thing that changes is the progress bar.
John:
So you can render a series of frames as individual states of views and capture the view as an image.
John:
And then surely there's some video API that says, hey, I've got 700 images, each of which is a frame of video.
John:
Construct a video out of these frames.
John:
That would be the hard way.
John:
And I imagine that would be very painful and take a really long time.
John:
But it could be done given the constraints of what we see.
John:
Probably neither one of those are right.
John:
But those are the two things that immediately sprung to mind.
John:
Both of those would have been too slow.
Marco:
So what I wanted to do, I wanted something, first of all, that I could render using UIKit style things.
Marco:
So I could use my fonts and my text rendering and have the artwork render with the shadow and the rounded corners and everything.
Marco:
Basically, using the tools I used to render the interface, I wanted to also render the video.
Marco:
I also critically wanted you to be able to preview it immediately upon generating the trimmed region for the audio.
Marco:
So when you trim the audio, it pushes, when you say next or preview, whatever, it pushes you to the preview screen and you can hit play and it renders it in real time.
Marco:
It plays it in real time.
Marco:
It doesn't have to render it to a video first.
Marco:
And the reason why is because what you're playing is not a video.
Marco:
what you're playing is a core animation stack, basically.
Marco:
All of it is rendered using core animation.
Marco:
And that makes it so you can scrub through it with that scrubber on the bottom, and when you hit the save thing in the corner to bring up the show sheet, that's when it encodes all that to a video.
Marco:
And I wanted to make sure also, I wanted the preview to be exactly right.
Marco:
I wanted exactly what you see in the preview to be what's rendered to the video.
Marco:
So I didn't want the video to be using a different kind of technology that would maybe have different text rendering or different anti-aliasing on edges or something like that.
Marco:
I wanted it to be exact.
Marco:
So I wanted instant previewing using core animation UI kit and stuff like that and having the video look identical.
Marco:
And there is a way to do this.
Marco:
I can tell you it's, I'm using AV export, AV asset export session.
Marco:
Oh God, these names are so long for all these APIs.
Marco:
So the, the preview video is a,
Marco:
It's not UI views.
Marco:
It's CA layers.
Marco:
The rendering is a AV asset export session that somewhere buried deep in the API, you can set something called an animation tool.
Marco:
And the animation tool is this weird API that lets you basically overlay onto a video a core animation composition.
Marco:
And the thing is, with this API, everything about AV Foundation is incredibly powerful, incredibly poorly documented, and has the worst error reporting of anything I've ever used.
Casey:
I have heard this many times and not just from you.
Marco:
The only documentation you'll find, you know, the headers are basically useless.
Marco:
The official documentation is basically useless.
Marco:
The only documentation that's any good is like Stack Overflow and blog posts, usually which are very old and sometimes out of date.
Marco:
And
Marco:
because not a lot of people are doing this kind of stuff, there really isn't that much help on Stack Overflow and places like that.
Marco:
Like there's some help, but it's not a lot.
Marco:
And sometimes you will find other people asking like, hey, I got, you know, error negative 319 when I did this.
Marco:
What does that mean?
Marco:
And it'll have responses, but there'll all just be other people saying, I got it too.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And occasionally somebody will be like, well, I rewrote the entire thing and it fixed it.
Marco:
So it's like, okay.
Right?
Marco:
And so you've run into all sorts of weird errors and failures.
Marco:
My favorite failure, astute users might have noticed that occasionally the progress circle during the export restarts at zero.
Marco:
have you have you guys caught this happening no i haven't yeah someone someone complained that it was taking like two progress bars and i guess it was just the same progress bar attempt number two yes it isn't it isn't uncommon i'd say it happens maybe one out of five times what happens is during the av asset export of the video as it's rendering the video which i have very little visibility into but i do have a progress value
Marco:
It's like 0.5, 0.6, whatever.
Marco:
During the export, sometimes, for reasons I have not been able to figure out and that are not reported to me at all, progress just stops.
Marco:
And it will never finish.
Marco:
When it gets to that state, when progress stops of an AV asset export session, it just never resumes.
Marco:
I have no idea why this happens.
Marco:
I found no documentation about it.
Marco:
I have found nobody reporting this elsewhere.
Marco:
And there's no error reported when it happens.
Marco:
It just stops.
Marco:
One time I tried, like I paused in the debugger and I basically, you know, I canceled it and restarted it manually.
Marco:
Basically, I kicked it.
Marco:
And that time it worked.
Marco:
And I kept developing it.
Marco:
And then, you know, the next time I noticed that happened in one of my test runs, I kicked it again.
Marco:
And it worked the second time.
Marco:
And I eventually realized that if it stopped working and I just kicked it, it would usually work the second try.
Marco:
So my solution to this problem was I filed a bug with Apple.
Marco:
Just kidding.
Marco:
You?
Marco:
No, I didn't.
Marco:
Because that would have taken a lot of time and not solved the problem.
Marco:
Because how do you file a bug on this?
John:
instead i built an automatic kicking machine every time it detects that it has stopped for more than a few seconds it automatically kicks it and it usually fixes it 50 of the time it works 100 of the time so uh this is the equivalent of this is the equivalent of when you added that delay for the resume after siri like the time delay this is exactly the same type of terrible solution to a problem which is like uh it
Marco:
Just try it again.
Marco:
It'll probably work the second time.
Marco:
Yeah, but this is how you have to ship things in iOS.
Marco:
Because you know what?
Marco:
The reality is I could have filed a bug and it would have taken five times longer.
Marco:
It would have gone back and forth with, can you provide a test project?
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
I can't even provide reliable reproduction steps.
Marco:
It happens sometimes, and this usually fixes it.
Marco:
That's a terrible bug report.
Marco:
And it's not like they're going to fix it immediately.
Marco:
They might fix it this fall, but even... It's May.
Marco:
Whatever is locked in for the WBDC release of these OSs is locked in.
Marco:
They're not doing bug fixes for unimportant stuff now.
Marco:
so I could either wait for Apple to fix this bug before I ship this because the feature was unshippable with this because, you know, if it, if one out of five exports just fails, that kind of sucks.
Marco:
Like you can't really ship that.
Marco:
I could have waited seven months for Apple to maybe fix this feature or I could build the automatic kicking machine and that worked within 10 minutes.
Marco:
so that's the solution i shipped and i would love to not eat it anymore i would love you know i'm still trying to figure out what caused this i'm trying a few things for the next version that maybe might avoid it uh but i still haven't quite nailed it down so that's that's how that if you ever see the uh the progress circle restart itself from zero you know what happened does it how many times will it retry
John:
as many as it takes so you could in theory be there and watch that progress bar go start and then restart and then restart and you'll just never leave until it succeeds the most i've ever seen is twice this is gonna be a new contest who can get the most restarts and if anybody if anybody can can reliably like have reproduction steps of like what makes it do that because i still can't figure it out so let me know
Casey:
This is a killer feature.
Casey:
I love that you're linking to all these other competing apps.
Casey:
Have you gotten feedback from like the Castro folks, which I know you're relatively close with the Castro folks.
John:
The feedback is they're all copying this feature now.
Casey:
Well, but I mean that's reasonable.
Marco:
They're all building their own automate kicking machines.
Casey:
No, but seriously, like, were they pleased with it?
Casey:
But or, you know, how was the reception?
Casey:
Not necessarily from Castro.
Casey:
I shouldn't single them out.
Casey:
I just know that you talk to those guys a fair bit.
Casey:
But like in a broad sense, did you speak to anyone about this after it released?
Casey:
And were they pleased?
Casey:
Were they kind of like, whoa, kind of whatever?
Marco:
Seems positive.
John:
good yeah no one seemed to have a problem with it yeah and we're all saying we like this feature or whatever but the real proof is that if you go on twitter right now at least in the circles of our followers uh lots of people are using this feature to share clips from podcasts which is exactly the whole point of the feature now maybe it's just a fad and people will stop but honestly i think we're just going to continue to see more and more of this at least among overcast users and when every other podcast
John:
client copies this feature then we'll see it more in general which is good because i have i have listened to more uh short clips of podcasts since you've introduced this feature than like the entire three years before that combined like they're everywhere um and that brings up another one of my questions like you you limited this to was it one minute maximum length yes how did you come up with that number
Marco:
I want it to have a limit for lots of reasons.
Marco:
There's fair use concerns, attention span concerns with people.
Marco:
If you post a 10-minute video on Twitter, no one's going to sit there and watch all 10 minutes of it.
Marco:
It's just not the mode people are in.
Marco:
The progress bar is not that exciting.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And there were technical concerns also like that long of a video would take a lot longer to encode and that would just be tedious.
Marco:
And so there were a number of concerns like that, but what made me choose one minute specifically is because that is the limit of how long a video can be on Instagram
John:
might as well like i wanted to have a low limit anyway might as well match that one yeah my feature request is the minimum length should be shorter because i wanted to post a clip of someone snorting on a podcast but the snort was not short enough what is the minimum length one second two second
Marco:
i actually don't know it has to do with the width of the grab handles uh for the trimming thing because i have i have logic for the grab handles never to overlap each other or cross each other and this is currently why you also can't trim a podcast from zero zero like from the very beginning of it you can't actually clip that you have to like clip like one second in that's not a content decision that's a implementation detail that i'm hoping to fix in the next version
John:
Yeah.
John:
I guess the handles are like C shaped and not just like flappy is the, the little, the little branches on the C must be pretty long because it's a, it's a big gap.
John:
But yeah, I would, I would love to be able to, to clip it.
Marco:
The handle, the handle actually has a rectangular grab area that is about five times wider than the visual handle.
Marco:
Like it's like two and a half times on each side.
Marco:
Roughly it's, it's some, it's about, I think 50 pixels wide total is the, is the total grab area.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
And right now, those grab areas can't overlap.
Marco:
So the closest you can put the handles together is something like 100 pixels apart.
Marco:
It's something like that.
John:
That could be tighter.
John:
That could be better.
John:
And if you really want to go nuts, which you probably don't, but it would be good practice for your future audio editing application.
John:
One of the features that I always love, I would always love to have in, whether it's audio or video, but particular audio,
John:
when you're trying to do fine adjustments on a trim like i've more or less got the beginning and the end where i want them but i want to do fine adjustments being able to no longer touch the primary controls for touching the trim ends but to have a separate set of controls for the fine adjustments whatever those may be right either whether it's like a tiny bump thing or whatever because you usually especially with sort of quantized data you can know there's a minimum step that's reasonable to take for trimming right um
John:
So you could even have it be a digital thing to be bump it left, left, left, right, right, right.
John:
Lots of Photoshop-type applications or Mac Paint or whatever had a way to nudge the selection by single pixels at a time with the arrow keys and stuff like that.
John:
Something like that where you get it pretty close and then use a separate control with less pressure, especially on the touchscreen, trying to...
John:
move your thumb one retina pixel to try to get like a little bit it's just it's very difficult to do and there's no real zooming on that timeline i know it's not an audio editor it's just for trimming or whatever but um if you want to go whole hog when you're trying to make just that perfectly trimmed clip which you should be because a lot of people are getting pretty sloppy especially with the end while they're cut it off in the middle of someone's word or something that's no good you want to you want it to sort of begin and end exactly where you want it to fine controls would be great
Marco:
that's interesting yeah i mean if you if you use voiceover you can go plus or minus one second that's how i made it accessible but second is huge i'm talking about like one sample well that's yeah i i mean one thing i could do is which would be technically a pain in the butt but one thing i could do is like if you hold down on one of the drag handles maybe it would zoom in like the whole audio editor features you can do all sorts of fancy things
John:
Or like when you when you move the trim handles, you constantly rescale to like readjust the scale to say now that you've you've moved the drag handles now that is 100 percent and constant.
John:
But I think like that's that's too much probably just, you know, just being able to do gross adjustment and then fine adjustment.
John:
iMovie annoys me because as far as i'm aware iMovie is what i use for all my youtube videos it doesn't seem to have a great fine adjustment feature luckily on a 27 inch screen you make things pretty huge and set the zoom to max and get it in where you want it but i always i'm like just don't make me even with a mouse like don't make me try to move any control on the screen a single retina pixel or a single regular or a single point like
Marco:
give me a second set like mechanically speaking there's always like a second set of controls with like a different sort of gear ratio or mechanical advantage ratio where you can move huge gross movements that move the actual thing you want to move a tiny amount well it's funny like as I was developing the clip editor there I had to decide like what is the scale like what's the zoom level and I could make a dynamic but that would again a lot more work I didn't want to tackle that yet so you know what's the zoom level of that and overcast is a portrait app
Marco:
And this is a horizontal timeline.
Marco:
So it's like you only have the short side of the phone as the width of what you're dealing with here.
Marco:
As I was developing it, I actually slowly zoomed out from like I would think that I had a certain timescale that was right.
Marco:
And then as I would try to make clips with it, I'd be scrolling, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, trying to find like where I wanted the end.
Marco:
It was too many swipes to get like a like a 45 second long clip.
Marco:
And so I slowly zoomed out and out and out, and I basically solved the problem of imprecision by just adding crossfades to the beginning and end.
Marco:
So there's a very brief, I think it's about like 0.2 seconds crossfade on the audio, like fade in at the beginning, fade out at the end, because that way you can be a little bit sloppy and you don't hear like an abrupt transition.
John:
Yeah, you need that so you don't get the little pops anyway.
John:
right yeah i mean i could do like you know a zero crossing thing but that's that's just that's you know more trouble than it's worth and i don't i don't know that passing that level of precision to core media is is a great idea to rely on yeah these are all details like it's it totally passes the the basic test which is people are using it to share clips and the clips are good and enjoyable and people hear them and they understand what the person was trying to clip and they're funny and it's it's working the system is working
Marco:
yeah exactly so please everyone share whatever you want and like I don't want this feature you just like have a week of use and then die and it's the kind of thing like if you are seeing these clips on a regular basis you will then think when you come across a funny moment oh I can I can post a clip of that
Marco:
But if you never see any of these clips, you might never even go to this menu.
Marco:
You might never even know this feature is there.
Marco:
Yeah, I would not have known it was there.
John:
I never go to the share thing.
John:
Why would I ever even tap that button?
John:
But I only know about it because I saw the feature on Twitter.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I could put up a balloon or something in the app, but I hate doing that.
Marco:
I don't do that.
Marco:
So ideally, this is the kind of feature that people see around, and then they go, oh...
Marco:
I can do that with Overcast too.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
And then they would go and look for it and I assume they'd be able to find it pretty easily.
John:
Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest problem is I don't think people will.
John:
I mean, the nerdy people will know to use the share icon or whatever, but for a feature this good, it should be so much more prominent in the application.
John:
And I know now is not the time to totally redesign your UI to highlight this one feature, but I think people will have a little bit of difficulty finding it.
Marco:
Yeah, I'll play with it.
Marco:
Certainly, when I design the next version of the Now Playing screen, I will certainly consider, do I want to promote this further?
John:
What do you call this?
John:
We've been calling it Clips, but isn't that the name of Apple's app for making Instagram story things?
John:
You don't have a trademark name.
John:
It's not like...
John:
No, I just call it share clip.
John:
Smart clip.
John:
Smart clip.
John:
Insta clip.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Oh, there we go.
John:
Insta smart clip.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
All right, so... The feature.
John:
Wow.
John:
I'm trying to get into all the Marco name slams in one segment.
Casey:
It took me a minute.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So I would ask you, you know, how the new AirPlay 2 stuff is going.
Casey:
But I already know what you're going to be doing starting next month, and you're going to be using Marzipan to make Overcast for the Mac.
Casey:
Oh, wait, never mind.
Casey:
Steve Trout and Smith already did it.
John:
If you exclude the ability to play audio, but that's a minor feature.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Minor issue.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
So tell me about your side of the story.
Casey:
And I mean that in a good way.
Casey:
I hope that didn't sound nasty.
Casey:
But what's going on here?
Marco:
Yeah, so basically Steve Trattensmith has been playing with the Marzipan environment on Mojave for, I don't know, six months now, for a while.
Marco:
And he wrote a couple blog posts and has made some tools, one called Marzipanify, that basically allow you to take a simulator build, which is therefore an Intel build, of an iOS app, and if you're willing to disable...
Marco:
system integrity protection and some other thing about, I think, like, some kind of certificate validation on a Mac, and you run this tool on a simulator build, you can make it run in Marzipan on Mojave.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Those are two giant ifs, if you're willing to do this, that I'm not willing to do.
Marco:
But he is, and he wrote the tool.
Marco:
And he knows a lot more about getting this stuff to run than I do.
Marco:
And so I've been meaning for a while to send him a simulator build of Overcast.
Marco:
He's like, hey, can you just see if this runs and see what happens?
Marco:
Let me know if I need to do anything.
Marco:
and uh and so i finally got around to doing that um what is it a couple days ago now and we worked through there were a few frameworks that i had to if def out the use of things like um the media toolbox things for doing things like putting the playback controls and title information in control center like that api is not there in mojave marzipan
Marco:
And so I had to just like if def that out for this build.
Marco:
And then there were a couple other like small things I had to if def out that just weren't present.
Marco:
Things like the male compose sheet.
Marco:
There's a lot of frameworks that aren't there.
Marco:
There's a lot of frameworks that just don't make sense on the Mac.
Marco:
Things like that control center framework and car play like those frameworks were missing on the Mac probably for good because that doesn't make sense.
Marco:
But my app would launch and try to load them and it would crash.
Marco:
And so we went back and forth.
Marco:
I think six builds later, after I did a few more things, I think he got it running.
Marco:
And that was it.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
And it didn't take a lot, really, which was promising.
Marco:
Partly, I kind of won here in part because I am such a jerk and don't ever use anyone else's code in my app.
Marco:
My app contains almost entirely my code, and the little bits of it that aren't mine are very simple open source things that I can look at the source for.
Marco:
Anything that I need to change, I can change.
Marco:
And it isn't loading a whole bunch of crap to get there.
Marco:
And so I was able to fairly easily give him a version of the app that would run in...
Marco:
in mojave under the marzipan thing when it's hacked in this way um so i was very happy about that and it's really cool and you know it isn't mac like at all uh but that's because like he's written blog posts about like they have apis that you can generate to do things like add toolbars like add mac toolbars add mac split views add you know menu bar stuff apple script stuff touch bar integration like
Marco:
The basics of all this stuff are all there, but he doesn't have my source code, so he couldn't add those things.
Marco:
I don't want to take the time to do it yet, because I assume all that stuff is going to be more mature and maybe different in a month when the official tools presumably come out.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm really excited about the possibility of making this a Mac app, and I'm really happy that it mostly works as is.
Marco:
It's not going to require massive changes.
Marco:
One change it probably is going to require, though, is AirPlay 2.
Marco:
And as you mentioned, it works in the sense that the UI works.
Marco:
It does not, however, play audio, which for a podcast app is not great.
Marco:
Already established.
John:
Overcast is all about video now.
Marco:
Well, that feature works fine.
Marco:
You can watch the progress bar move from left to right in silence.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
The audio in the clip preview editor, that works because that doesn't use my audio stack.
Marco:
The audio playback in the preview editor for clips is just using AV player.
Marco:
That works fine under Mars or Panda Mojave.
Marco:
But my core audio based audio engine does not.
Marco:
And actually, I sent him my AirPlay 2 test harness app, which is like a very basic app that's running my very alpha AirPlay 2 engine, just to see like, does this play audio?
Marco:
And it did.
Marco:
So that is moving up my priority of like, I should probably switch to this sooner rather than later.
Marco:
So I'm going to finish that soon, I think.
Marco:
That's probably going to be the next major thing I tackle.
Casey:
Well, no, I don't think we really need to spend much more time on this.
Casey:
I just think it's extremely cool.
Casey:
And you had made mention of this kind of offhandedly a moment ago, but he did not have source code access.
Casey:
And even when he decided to make himself a three column version of the app, that was without source code access, which is just, if you follow Steve John Smith, this won't surprise you and shouldn't have surprised me.
Casey:
And yet I found it somewhat surprising that he could go in there and swizzle the snot out of your app in order to get
John:
a three column version out of thin air which is just incredible when marco's doing the actual uh marzipan version of overcast writing source code like a chump i know right you're thinking of steve troughton smith who added a third column just by shifting selectors around whatever the hell he's doing in there
Marco:
in like an hour too like it took him like no time like because i actually i do want to go to a three pane layout on ipads and max uh because it makes total sense like you know i have i already have three level navigation it makes complete sense like you know the leftmost pane would be the root screen it'd be like you know playlist podcasts and then you know the middle pane would be the currently selected playlist or podcast and the right pane would be now playing like that make that's of course what i'm going to do and i think modern ipads are now wide enough that i can do it there too uh so that's great so i i intend to do that but like
Marco:
for me to do it's going to take me like a week to get all that worked out like even with my current structure and he did it in like an hour with no code it is utterly preposterous it really really is but that's why we love him
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
There was an article in the New York Times where they said there used to be lots of apps that would allow parents to control slash restrict or at least have visibility into, if nothing else, what their children are doing on their phones.
Casey:
And a lot of these apps were using MDM, which is mobile device management.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
Which is a tool that Apple really developed in order for corporations to control their assets.
Casey:
So if your company issues you an iPhone, then you could use MDM in order to maintain that iPhone and make sure that only the right apps are being used and that you knew where the iPhone was physically on the planet and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But a lot of these companies that were doing
Casey:
the kind of stalker vision for your kids so you could see exactly what they're doing, where they are, and so on and so forth.
Casey:
We're using MDM.
Casey:
And Apple...
Casey:
Whether or not they did a good job of explaining, it seems to have come to the opinion that using MDM for some, if not all of these things, isn't really what it's meant for.
Casey:
And there's some amount of debate how they message this to these companies.
Casey:
But one way or another, they told the companies, hey, you're either not going to be able to do this anymore and thus your company will maybe go away.
Casey:
Or you really need to rethink the mechanism by which you're doing this, which may also make your company go away.
Casey:
But we're not cool with the way this works right now.
Casey:
And so this New York Times piece, which I really didn't care for, was basically a bunch of kvetching and moaning from these companies about why Apple is big and unfair and terrible.
Casey:
And there are a lot of reasons why Apple can be big and unfair and terrible.
Casey:
But this one...
Casey:
this didn't strike me as that unreasonable.
Casey:
And the response from Apple was basically, look, it's a privacy thing and this isn't how it was supposed to be used.
Casey:
And we're not comfortable with this.
Casey:
So we're not going to allow it anymore.
John:
Well, I think Apple did make a bunch of mistakes here, but first of all, we can start with this New York times article, which sort of, uh, kick this off.
John:
Uh,
John:
The angle in the article, the sort of sensational angle, and the story put forward by the software developers affected by this is like, well, isn't it convenient?
John:
Apple comes out with its own screen time feature for dealing with restrictions on family members or children's phones and stuff, and all of a sudden it doesn't want to let us, the third-party developers who have been offering the same functionality, doesn't want to let us sell our applications anymore.
John:
Isn't it nefarious and evil?
John:
Apple, once Apple enters the market, they want to kick everybody else out.
John:
And then Apple had, like, this PR thing that was partially quoted in the New York Times article saying that, you know, Apple treats third-party applications the same as it treats its own, yada, yada, which is not true in any way and is, like, the worst thing that Apple could have, you know, the one quote they could have pulled is the one that, you know, those in the know know it's not actually true.
John:
But that's not the issue.
John:
The whole point is the angle was kind of, like,
John:
Apple is doing this because they're mean slash evil and have their own interests at heart.
John:
But here are the mistakes that I feel like Apple made in this.
John:
And some of them are understandable and nobody's perfect, but there are mistakes that made the situation more fraught than it needed to be.
John:
The first one I feel like is letting third-party developers distribute parental control applications using MDM.
John:
Right.
John:
Because MDM, in case you described it well, it's like for companies who let their employees have iPhones who want to control what those employees put on their iPhones and want to be able to remote wipe them and stop people from using applications and like any kind of thing where if you're in a big company and they give you computer hardware to use, they have some degree of terrible evil control over it because that's how it works.
John:
Like it's the company's phone.
John:
It's not your phone.
John:
It's the company's laptop.
John:
It's not your laptop.
John:
You're just using it.
John:
And MDM gives the company control of your laptop.
John:
The MDM scenario for parental controls, like, the reason they use them is because it is literally the only way without jailbreaking to provide this functionality on iOS devices.
John:
But in the company scenario, the company is – I don't know the right terminology of this.
John:
The company is the thing that sort of is controlling the MDM thing and the employee has the phone.
John:
There's just two parties.
John:
It's the company and the employee.
John:
Well, actually, I suppose there's the vendor of the thing that uses MDM.
John:
But either way, when a parent buys this application and uses it to control their children's phone –
John:
And I may be wrong about this, but my impression is that, yes, the parent has the ability to control the child's phone, but also the vendor of the MDM application effectively has some control in this chain as well because they are the creators of the application.
John:
I may be wrong about that.
John:
No, that's correct.
John:
They have full control.
John:
Yeah, so it's a three-party scenario instead of two.
John:
And that third party is one that a parent downloading this application might not realize is in the mix here.
John:
A company surely knows that it is the one controlling the thing, yada, yada.
John:
But the parent might think, I'm just controlling my kid's phone, but the company that makes this software doesn't have any untoward access to my kid's phone, and they do.
John:
It's just not the right tool for the job.
John:
And it's on Apple that they allowed this entire...
John:
ecosystem of applications to flourish now i can kind of understand where apple's coming from they're like well there is no other way to do this and this is functionality people want and we don't have a solution for it so why shouldn't we let third parties do this so while we work on screen time or while we figure what we're going to do
John:
let's just allow these third-party applications to go on the store with MDM.
John:
In hindsight, that was a mistake because eventually when Apple comes out with a similar feature, and this is the kernel of truth in the story of the New York Times, when Apple comes out with a similar feature, they'd be like, all right, well, finally, we have screen time.
John:
Now we can get rid of all of those applications that use MDM and say, please stop doing that because it's really not great.
John:
And it's putting parents in a situation where they might not realize, but they're providing third parties with access to their phones.
John:
That is not great.
John:
And I know you're a good company, but really, this is not what MDM is for.
John:
MDM is for companies and their employees.
John:
So it's not for parents and their kids.
John:
So it's for the parental situation, use screen time.
John:
So on and so forth.
John:
That is a bad situation, though, because there remains no other way to provide this functionality and third party app, this extent of the functionality and third party app than using MDM.
John:
So if Apple says, please, company that's been in business for a long time and has lots of customers, stop using MDM in your app.
John:
And it's like, well, you're basically telling us to stop selling our app because there is no other way for us to do what we do on our app without using MDM.
John:
So and how did Apple get into the situation?
John:
They allowed these developers to sell their apps using MDM for a long time and be successful.
John:
And now they're saying you have to stop.
John:
Basically, it's a product killing decision.
John:
And the third mistake is when Apple has to communicate this.
John:
I don't know the right way to communicate this because it's a hard conversation to have to call up a developer and say, yeah, I know you've been selling this application for a long time and are very successful with it.
John:
But basically, you need to stop selling it because we're not going to let you use MDM anymore.
John:
And there's no other way for you to provide this functionality.
John:
So basically, your product is dead.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
our bad and by the way and by the way we have a screen time sorry yeah screen time is available but it's not as full featured as your application but it's built into the us and we control it and you know like that that is effectively what is happening to a lot of these uh people who make products like this
John:
But there's no good way to communicate that.
John:
It's you're going to be sad either way.
John:
But perhaps one of the worst ways to communicate that is the passive or aggressive app store rejection way, which is basically to just send terse responses that say something very sort of clinical that, you know, your use of API blah, blah is disallowed.
John:
Please remove the use of this application and resubmit.
John:
Something like that that doesn't like that just seems like it was from a machine that says MDM is not allowed, doesn't acknowledge that it was allowed before.
John:
It doesn't tell you that Apple understands what this means for your application.
John:
Right.
John:
And this is true of all the App Store frustrations.
John:
You'll do a thing in an app for years and years that Apple thinks is fine.
John:
Then you'll do a bug fix update and they'll reject your application for a feature that's been there for a year with a thing that says this application does X, please remove X and resubmit.
John:
With no acknowledgement, like, but I've been doing X for years.
John:
You've approved 100 versions that do X. Communicate to me as a human to tell me what's going on.
John:
It's just like mechanical rejections, right?
John:
Maybe that's the quote unquote right way to communicate from a legal perspective because it opens you up to less liability because it doesn't make you, but it's not the human way to communicate that.
John:
And again, maybe there's no right way.
John:
Maybe the wrong approach would try to be human because if you do that, you're opening yourself up to legal liability or who knows?
John:
I don't know what goes into the thinking behind this.
John:
And it's a difficult conversation to have, but the difficult conversation stems from earlier decisions that were Apple's decisions to make that I think they made the wrong call on.
John:
So they allowed these things to be in the store for a long time.
John:
Then when it came time to essentially kill a bunch of products, it seems like, at least in the few cases of people complaining, it was communicated in the most terse and sort of impersonal way possible.
John:
And it just makes everybody feel bad, right?
John:
So there is there is fault to go around here.
John:
But in the end, Apple is I think Apple is doing the right thing.
John:
MDM shouldn't be isn't the right tool for parents to do that.
John:
And there is no other better API.
John:
And yes, I understand these apps are potentially better and more full feature than screen time.
John:
And I know it looks like Apple is killing these things with screen time, but they kind of are.
John:
And that's just part of software.
John:
Like if you implement if you are a third party that implements a feature that.
John:
rightfully should be part of the os don't be surprised when eventually it does become part of the os and the app store era or in the not the app store but in the sort of the privacy focused security focused era of today don't be surprised also that not only does it get built into the os but that you are no longer allowed to use whatever weird side door you were using before because this is a security concern
John:
So I feel bad for these companies, and I also kind of feel bad for Apple, but there's a little bit of enough blame to go around.
John:
What I don't believe is that this is some nefarious scheme to say, ha-ha, finally we'll destroy all those companies with our amazing screen time that we bundle for free with our OS.
John:
This is not a massive money-making scheme.
John:
This is part of Apple's security focus.
John:
uh and it stems from an earlier mistake an earlier mistake by the way where apple was being if you want to look at it more magnanimous than they should be basically saying we don't have a solution to this why shouldn't we let third parties use mdm the answer is because someday you're gonna have to stop them and then everyone's gonna be sad but
John:
They made a bunch of money in the meantime that they wouldn't have made if Apple had said, you know what, we don't have the ability to provide this functionality and we're not going to let third parties provide it with MDM ever.
John:
And so we'll just all have to wait for iOS 12 or whatever screen time came in.
John:
Tough situation, but Apple is not being unnecessarily evil.
John:
They're all just reaping what they sow from past mistakes.
Casey:
I feel like this is an extension of what we went through a few months ago, or maybe even less than that, with the apps that allowed you to sideload stuff.
Casey:
Oh, using enterprise certificates, you mean?
Casey:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Casey:
I feel like the enterprise cert thing was far worse.
Casey:
It was both more nefarious on the vendors, so not Apple, but these other people.
Casey:
It was pretty clearly nefarious on their part and pretty clearly not in the spirit of what enterprise certs are for.
Casey:
This, I do think, is more gray, but I don't think it's that dissimilar an idea.
Casey:
It's that, hey, you're taking a technology that we really want to use for A, B, and C, and you're using it for...
Casey:
I was going to say XYZ, but maybe that's a bit aggressive.
Casey:
But you're using it for, I don't know, L&M, and that's not good.
Casey:
And this analogy is really falling apart.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is that it's using this MDM technology in a way that it's really not meant for.
Casey:
And just like John said, if you get burned for that, whose fault is that really?
Marco:
Yeah, I mostly agree with John and a little bit from Casey, except I think that I would be surprised if the development of screen time had anything at all to do with this.
Marco:
I think it's purely coincidental that it happened to be developed during this.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Apple has been cracking down on things like enterprise distribution, abuse, things like VPN apps that are using VPNs to do things that are not really what VPNs are for, apps that are using profiles like MDM to do things.
Marco:
This has been a crackdown that's been going on for a year or something like that.
Marco:
It's been over a while.
Marco:
And I think one thing that became apparent, I think we've seen signs of this here and there, but I think one thing that became apparent during the enterprise certificate kerfuffle from a few months back is that it doesn't seem like Apple has a great idea at decision-making levels of power how some of this stuff is being abused.
Marco:
It kind of seems like the app store is so big and the ecosystem is so big that sometimes stuff gets through and you don't have a super powerful person in the company making a policy decision on every one of these things because it's just too big to keep up with.
Marco:
I get the feeling.
Marco:
I think what happens is...
Marco:
At some point, something is brought to the attention of the higher-ups, whether it's through the press or through internal channels, whatever it is.
Marco:
And then decisions can be made, and then they're executed down below again at the lower levels of the company where more people are.
Marco:
That's kind of the impression I get.
Marco:
And so whenever there's like an app store policy change, I think it's something like that where like somebody in the press or somewhere like calls out, Hey, these apps are doing this thing.
Marco:
You know, why are they allowed to do that?
Marco:
And then someone who matters notices and they say, Hey, that's wrong.
Marco:
They shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Marco:
And they go tell app review, Hey, get rid of these things or, you know, enforce this policy or change this policy.
Marco:
That's what I think happens.
Marco:
And it's a big company.
Marco:
It's a really big company.
Marco:
The lower-level people are probably not empowered to be incredibly communicative and verbose with the outside world.
Marco:
So if the lower-level people get a directive like, hey, this app is doing this thing that we actually don't want to permit, all they can probably tell the developer is, you are being rejected for a rule 2.4 point whatever.
Marco:
They can only give those robotic responses probably because of that policy and, as John said, maybe legal concerns and everything.
Marco:
But what we see from the outside when this happens is you have an app in the store.
Marco:
Like if you're a developer, you have an app in the store.
Marco:
It's fine because it gets updated.
Marco:
It goes to the app review every couple of weeks when you change something and it's fine.
Marco:
Until it's not.
Marco:
And all you're getting from Apple is this kind of stonewall response of either no reason given or a very robotic minimal reason given that's not really helpful.
Marco:
And not really explaining why was this okay last month and now it's not.
Marco:
So it makes sense on both sides.
Marco:
I can totally see, I can understand why Apple's side of it is the way it is.
Marco:
But the developer side of it, what we see on the outside in this kind of situation is terrible.
Marco:
And you might occasionally, maybe if you're lucky, when you're on this side of a rule change or reinterpretation, if you're lucky, after a while, you might get a phone call, which I've always termed the Agent Smith phone calls.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
because you get a phone call from the Apple main switchboard number, so you can't call them back.
Marco:
You are not given a name, usually, if ever.
Marco:
You are given the bad news from this person, who usually, the conversation is usually quite civil, but they will then tell you, like...
Marco:
the reason basically during those phone calls but of course because it's a phone call you don't have a solid record of it really you can't really quote them very easily because it's a phone call you get this random phone call from Apple that's like a nice but terse person telling you really what you can't do and then that's it and you have no way to ever reach them again I actually I heard a rumor a while back that all of those phone calls were made by this one guy who was like the nicest guy in the world but was also ex-military and just had like it was an article about that I think
Marco:
oh really yeah i think it was yeah i heard he just he just had like you know like the like willpower of stone and he could just make these calls and get through them with people like probably giving him all sorts of crap on the other on the other end but he could just get through him and apparently he was super nice and apparently he he stopped doing that job like last year or something like that anyway i don't know that's true but i thought that was kind of funny that it's like this one super nice guy doing all this anyway you know apple has this problem of like
Marco:
They changed a policy.
Marco:
Something was allowed.
Marco:
Now they don't want to allow it anymore.
Marco:
That's going to be uncomfortable, as John said.
Marco:
Developers have this problem of Apple changes something right from under us, and we're getting terrible to no communication on it, and we seem to be powerless.
Marco:
Both sides of it suck.
Marco:
I think the solution here, it's never going to be problem-free.
Marco:
But Apple has to get way better at the communication when this kind of thing happens.
Marco:
They are just horrendous at it.
Marco:
I think their motivations here were fine.
Marco:
I don't think they were badly motivated.
Marco:
Again, I don't think this had anything to do with screen time at all.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
I don't think anybody at Apple at decision-making high-up levels knew about these apps using MDM for this purpose a year ago and said, we're going to wait until we launch screen time and then kick them out.
Marco:
I seriously doubt that.
John:
I think that's plausible, and I'll tell you why.
John:
Right.
John:
uh the only reason apple made screen time is because they think it's a feature that users want that there is something that people want to do with their phones that are not currently able to do we should make a feature that does that it's not like they frivolously add features to ios like it's filling a user need and whoever was on the team to to fulfill this need to say let's make let's add this feature to ios uh
John:
You have to figure out, okay, what should this feature do?
John:
What feature should it have?
John:
What functionality should it have?
John:
Surely you look at the space and you say, well, are there any other applications out there that already do something similar?
John:
In your exploration of the space, that's when you discover, hey, there's 75 applications that do this with millions of downloads and they all use MDM to do it.
John:
At that point, I feel like you now have the knowledge.
John:
Maybe it's a high enough level of the company.
John:
It's a big company.
John:
That's two different divisions.
John:
Right.
John:
I'm saying those people have the knowledge that there's a bunch of apps out there that are using MDM.
John:
And I feel like at that high enough level, team coming up with a feature that's on the slate for potentially being added to iOS 12 or whatever,
John:
At that level, I feel like that's enough to disseminate the information to the company at large at the very top.
John:
And I think at that point, you have the discussion as like, well, we're exploring this feature.
John:
We looked at the space.
John:
We think we're going to add... These are the bullet points we're going to have.
John:
These are the...
John:
the benefits and the, you know, functionality we're going to have.
John:
And also, we probably also think probably that, you know, that these apps are using MDM shouldn't do it.
John:
But let's not kill those apps yet.
John:
Let's wait until we get screen time out the door.
John:
Because the next consideration is that our users are, you know, this need that we think our users have, they're currently getting it filled by third parties.
John:
So let them continue to have the third party apps until we have some semblance of a replacement, then deliver the bad news.
John:
I'm not saying this is what happened.
John:
I'm saying it's a plausible scenario where Apple, what Apple's trying to do is provide a feature to its users in the safest way possible and also not screw all of its users.
John:
Remember, it's like what Apple users, developers, the three-level hierarchy of Apple's priorities, right?
John:
There's way more users than developers.
John:
So the calculus has to be not like, oh, let's sneakily wait until screen time's out and screw the developers.
John:
It's let's not screw our millions of users because our millions of users want this functionality.
John:
So until we deliver screen time,
John:
Let's just not do anything to that thing, but put it on the agenda for some point after screen time ships to eventually get those MDM apps out of there.
John:
I think that is a plausible scenario because I think there's no way Apple implemented this feature without looking at what exists in the space at a high enough level that the company might know.
John:
Again, I'm describing basically kind motivations to everything involved that Apple is looking at, trying to find features that are useful to its users, that's thinking of its users who are using the third-party apps, and then in third place, unfortunately, are the developers who...
John:
It's probably not thinking of that much.
John:
But again, the user priority wins.
John:
We don't want a parent putting an app on their kid's phone that unwittingly gives control to a to the third party developer without the parent understanding exactly what they've just given away.
Marco:
When I first read the story, I pretty much immediately started with Apple in my head with the decision side of it.
Marco:
The communication side, I think, was not great.
Marco:
But the decision side of it makes total sense to me because as an iOS developer, I didn't even know these apps existed.
Marco:
And if somebody would have asked me, hey, I have an idea for an app.
Marco:
It's a parental control app that limits how long you can run apps on your phone.
Marco:
Can I make this?
Marco:
I would have said, no, it's not possible.
Marco:
any iOS developer would know, like, there is no way for apps on your phone to look around in your phone and see what other apps are running or to have any control over that.
Marco:
Like, most developers would assume that's not possible.
Marco:
And if somebody would, if somebody, like, in the back of the room would raise their hand and be like, hey, what if we install an MDM profile on every user's device and we use that to control these apps?
Marco:
Any experienced iOS developer would be like, well, they're never going to allow that.
Like,
Marco:
That's definitely going to be against App Store policy.
Marco:
I think it's experienced iOS developer common sense that this kind of thing would probably not be allowed because that is clearly not what MDM is for.
Marco:
Similar thing with VPNs.
Marco:
There's a lot of apps that were using VPNs to do certain things, and Apple cracked down on them over the last year or so as well because that's a similar kind of tool where it's like,
Marco:
you're taking this tool that is intended for a relatively specific type of use, and if you make a VPN like Onavo, like Facebook's Onavo thing, that has pretty horrible privacy implications that most of its users are probably not really going to be aware of and maybe are installing for other reasons, a VPN is not a great tool to use for that job or to be permitted to be used that way because that's not really what it's for, and most users...
Marco:
don't realize all the power it gives the other party and things like that and so like for the same reasons that mdm profiles are i think common sense not like not allowed to be used in ways like this vpns also developer common sense are you know shouldn't be allowed to be doing this kind of stuff and and i think apple's policy on both of those things has been slowly tightening all
Marco:
but not outside of the realm of common sense.
Marco:
Clearly they are responding to the problems that we've seen over the App Store in recent years of like, wow, this large-scale thing is using this API in a way that we think is creepy.
Marco:
See also enterprise certificate abuse, stuff like that.
Marco:
Apple's finding ways that are being abused like this, and they're closing those loopholes.
Marco:
And I don't think that's the wrong decision.
Marco:
The only failures are that the loopholes were allowed to be exploited in the first place,
Marco:
And the policy change was so badly communicated almost every time.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP, starting with Keegan Sands, who writes, what naming convention do you use for directories and files on your Mac?
Casey:
Camel case, hyphen delimiter, underscore delimiter, et cetera.
Casey:
Underscores are good for many things.
Casey:
I'd just like to put that out there.
Casey:
For me, I generally just use like the Windows 95.
Casey:
Oh, my God, I can put spaces and capitals and whatever I want in my file name.
Casey:
I will do that.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
And so that's what I do.
Casey:
I use spaces.
Casey:
I don't have any particularly strong feelings about Camel or Pascal case or anything else.
Casey:
I name things in the most appropriate way I see possible because that's what the file system enables me to do.
Casey:
I'm going to assume that Marco is slightly more particular than me.
Casey:
So let me ask you first.
Marco:
Anything that's like me, like user-facing, I just use spaces and proper capitalization, and it's fine.
Marco:
I will use all lowercase, no spaces, using hyphens between words for things like developer directories.
Marco:
So things like my git checkouts.com.
Marco:
I have overcast-web and it's all lowercase.
Marco:
That's the git checkout.
Marco:
In the paths that will be used by developer stuff, there's no spaces.
Marco:
Just in case something weird happens, I don't want to deal with it.
Marco:
I do the same thing on my servers.
Marco:
The servers all have lowercase with dashes as the delimiters because it's easier on Linux to do things that way.
Marco:
but yeah anything like documents for myself that are just like in my home documents directory or anything that or stuff on my desktop that's all just with spaces and capital letters and stuff it's fine
Casey:
I think shell scripts are another good example of like all lowercase and hyphens.
Marco:
Yep, me too.
Casey:
Yep, so there are occasions that I'll be more particular, but not usually.
Casey:
All right, John, we only have but so much time, but please tell me your rules for file naming on your file system.
John:
Since more than a decade before Windows 95, I was naming all my files insane ways because that's what you can do on an app.
John:
And by the way, I was naming them whatever I wanted to name them, literally whatever I wanted to name them.
John:
There was no part of the file name that I was required to put any sort of secret code in there that the operating system would then interpret and try to take action based on.
John:
What about the colon?
John:
I could literally name my files whatever I wanted.
John:
No, that's a forbidden character, but there was no part that if you wrote it, the operating system would look at that part of the file name and interpret it in a weird-ass way that can break things.
John:
Okay.
John:
you are so i've never met a human being that is more angry about extensions than you are so angry forever anyway uh and and how did i choose how did i actually choose to name them mostly title case like you know my obsession with title case it was mostly title case um you don't say yeah because they were like the titles of folders and applications were named essentially in title case since the beginning of the mac so that's the way you know everything's named that way uh that said you know so the mac uh
John:
and now has unix to uh great taste it tastes great together uh i do sort of code switching uh to pull over to code switch slightly here code switching when i'm doing work uh if i am working let's say in a programming language that itself has some kind of strong cultural convention for what you name your source files or what you name your directories or sometimes a mandated convention like pearl where the
John:
package name corresponds to a directory path that has to exactly match the package name and the language has an informal convention for how packages should be named.
John:
I totally use those conventions.
John:
Sometimes it's hard to tell.
John:
If you asked a random person on the street what is Node's naming convention for JavaScript files,
John:
Some person might say hyphen separating words all lowercase.
John:
Some person might say underscores.
John:
In the end, it doesn't really matter that much, and it's a cultural thing, but certainly no one would say that the convention for Node.js is to generally do title cases with spaces between words.
John:
That's not the convention.
John:
You can do it, but it's not the convention.
John:
So I do code switch.
John:
My personal preference, in the absence of any other overriding culture or concern for a programming language or environment, what would I choose?
John:
But there is no context like that.
John:
In every context, whether it's Shell or Perl or C or whatever, there's some kind of cultural surrounding influence to suggest how you might consider naming your files.
John:
And I generally just tend to stick with whatever the dominant culture is within the thing.
John:
Which means that on my Mac, there are a bunch of files and folders and everything that look
John:
you know, that are named the way I want them to be named, especially with extensions hidden.
John:
But then there are whole directory trees that are in the sort of culture and parlance of whatever programming language or environment they're in.
Casey:
Patrick writes, with Apple willing to spend big money on controlling important pieces of tech, why are they paying so much for AWS instead of making their own cloud?
Casey:
It's an interesting question, but I don't think Apple has any interest in managing something like their cloud stuff.
Casey:
I mean, they have that huge data center in North Carolina, which is used for something.
Casey:
But by and large, I just don't think that them...
Casey:
Doing an AWS clone or an AWS alike, how does that help the user?
Casey:
Because AWS seems, by and large, to be pretty good at what it does.
Casey:
I don't know, John.
Casey:
Why am I wrong with this?
John:
This used to be a much less interesting question.
John:
If you were to ask the same question a couple decades ago, it would be like, well, duh.
John:
There are things that Apple does that are part of its core competency and value proposition, and there are things that it asks another company to do, right?
John:
It doesn't decide to run its own construction company to build its buildings.
John:
In the current Apple, every example I can think of is actually much more plausible than you might think, but let's say decades ago.
John:
Yeah.
John:
like there are certain things Johnny Ive builds the bulldozer yeah they're not like reinvents concrete right like it doesn't it doesn't make the machines that make its computers like it doesn't you know it doesn't make the bulldozers that mine for the chemicals that go into it's like that's not what the core competency of the company is it's like what is what should we put our effort and money behind um
John:
outsource things that are not part of your value proposition to a company that does them exclusively and does them better.
John:
That's the way you do things.
John:
And practically speaking, both decades ago and today, I'm going to say everybody uses AWS, but the public cloud writ large is extremely popular.
John:
If you don't work for a company that does things online, perhaps you don't realize how much of all the cool products you use are powered by AWS or to a lesser extent Azure or Google Cloud.
John:
uh the companies don't advertise that fact uh but that's how the world works today and it works that way like why does netflix use aws why don't they run all their own data centers netflix's core competency is these days making original content and doing content deals and delivering you uh video it is not
John:
writing cloud infrastructure to run servers and stuff.
John:
That's not where they want to be spending their money.
John:
And that's sort of the current business model.
John:
But today, with Apple today, it's a more difficult question because...
John:
there are very few companies that should be trying to run their own cloud but arguably apple might be one of them that should at least be considering it amazon runs its own cloud it's called aws google runs its own cloud microsoft runs its own cloud apple is kind of in that camp and services are a big part of apple things and yada yada yada you can still make a very strong argument that apple should absolutely not be running its own cloud and they should outsource this but
John:
Some of its competitors actually do derive advantage from running their own clouds.
John:
Google certainly does.
John:
Their entire business was founded on the fact that they would run their own data centers and design their own hardware and do their own machines and do a lot of stuff.
John:
And it gives them an advantage, both in terms of cost and innovation and lots of other areas.
John:
Amazon has an advantage because, you know, they...
John:
built aws is kind of this weird side business now it is a huge business because as i said every other freaking company in the world is using the public cloud to run their businesses on and that's a pretty darn good business look at like bezos's like the yearly report or whatever aws is a good business it's nice to have you know it's maybe it's not an iphone size business but it's a big business and it's nice to have that and by the way there's synergy between that business and what amazon does and all that other stuff
John:
Apple, a lot of those same things are true.
John:
It would gain both a cost and innovation advantage to running its own cloud.
John:
If they decided to ever sell their services like Google and Microsoft and Amazon do, that could be a big business.
John:
But on the other hand, it's also a crowded market, and Apple has not traditionally been particularly good at this.
John:
But on the other hand, maybe they should be good at it.
John:
So it is a way more complicated question today than it used to be.
John:
It used to be the answer was simple.
John:
Nobody should run their own cloud.
John:
It's stupid.
John:
Today the answer is nobody should run their own cloud except maybe Apple might think about it.
John:
There's like five companies in the world that should run their own cloud and Apple might be one of them.
John:
So I think this is an interesting question.
John:
I don't think it's a really good answer.
Marco:
I think it's even simpler than that.
Marco:
This is a role that is easily outsourced because it's easy to separate this role out of dumb server stuff or dumb online services.
Marco:
It's easy to outsource that to AWS or various companies like AWS.
Marco:
And it's hard for Apple to build that up to a large scale reasonably quickly.
Marco:
Apple's cloud needs and backend needs have grown a ton over the last decade.
Marco:
Apple itself seems to have a lot of trouble multitasking as a company in general.
Marco:
They seem to have a lot of trouble scaling their company, scaling their headcount in particular.
Marco:
They just seem like they don't do that very quickly or very easily.
Marco:
And when they try, it seems like they have trouble.
Marco:
This seems like an easy thing to take this big, boring, highly commoditized role
Marco:
and have someone else do it for us.
Marco:
Because not only can we then not build all that out ourselves and save some headcount and save some complexity there, it's also possible that Amazon can do it cheaper than we can.
John:
That's not... You're talking like someone who hasn't paid a big AWS bill lately.
John:
I mean, they certainly can do it cheaper, but it won't be cheaper to you because they charge a profit margin on those things.
Marco:
They do, but it's a highly commoditized market that's very competitive and easily switched between providers.
John:
It's not as commoditized as you would think it is.
John:
It really depends.
John:
You're making the argument for the old Apple, but I think what you're really saying is Apple is so late to the market that it's too late for them to be competitive, but...
Marco:
Well, both.
Marco:
I'm saying that they are pretty late to this market, especially as you mentioned.
Marco:
This is not historically an area where they've been incredibly competent or cared very strongly to become competent.
Marco:
So this is something that they don't really value much as a company.
Marco:
The whole thing of – I think the Tim Cook doctrine of we want to do things that we can add value to, they can't add value to data center stuff.
John:
But they could, like if they did what Google did, Google and Amazon both add value to that, but they add value to their own businesses and they add value in terms of they sell it to other people.
John:
Like it's a good business.
John:
And like what Google does, how they can make their data.
John:
If Google paid for AWS, it would cost them so much money.
John:
And by the way, they'd also be paying a potential competitor, right?
John:
Google does their own stuff.
John:
Because they're Google and they do it really, really well for their own purposes.
John:
Google Cloud is a good example.
John:
Google Cloud is the best example Apple should do.
John:
Google has their public cloud service.
John:
And even though I think Google has best in class, best in the entire world, data center management and systems for their own stuff like the Google search engine and all that other stuff.
John:
They are behind Amazon in terms of selling that to the public because they came in too late.
John:
And if Google's having trouble catching AWS, what chance does Apple have?
John:
Right.
John:
But that's kind of the pessimistic taste.
John:
And on the other hand, Apple was considering making a car.
John:
So, like, we live in a strange world.
John:
yeah good point yeah i think i think honestly i think apple should have already been in on the public cloud and many many years ago but they haven't so maybe it is too late but i think it is not it's not entirely slam dunk and depending on how this shakes out long term apple may seriously regret not getting into the space because i can tell you that
John:
There's a lot of money to be made selling these services to other people.
John:
AWS bills really add up.
John:
And no matter who you go to, who's Apple going to go to their public cloud?
John:
They're not going to run their own.
John:
They're either going to pay Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.
John:
That's not a great situation to be in.
John:
And they're going to pay them a lot of money.
John:
That's not a good situation to be in for Apple.
John:
It's kind of like Google paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search on iOS.
Yeah.
John:
You really don't want to be giving that much money to your competitors, especially when they know they kind of have you over a barrel because what are you going to do?
John:
Move all your crap from AWS into Azure.
John:
It's not an easy lift.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This next piece of Ask ATP has been lingering in our document for probably two or three months, and we keep just putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.
Casey:
But sometime forever ago, Paul Wood III wrote, hey, you know, John Roderick has, and Merlin, I guess, is what he was intending, have discussed their top 10 sports cars on Roderick Online.
Casey:
Can we get that list on ATP and hear from Marco and Casey as well?
Casey:
Oh, did you discuss this with Roderick, John?
John:
Yeah, when he was on REC Diffs a while back, I think we talked about it.
Casey:
Ah, okay, right, right.
Casey:
So anyway, so I put this in the show notes and then apparently John has added a tweet wherein this was already decided in 2016.
Casey:
So would you like to tell me about that, John?
John:
Yeah, I think that's when I had a Roderick on Reconcilable Differences with me and we discussed this and I think I tweeted about it.
John:
My list hasn't changed that much.
John:
This is the list I put in the tweet and it's tweet link so you can't go into super detail, but there are nuances to it.
John:
And it was like top 10.
John:
I don't think I came up to 10, but my list is basically...
John:
I'll describe it, and then we can fill in the variables later.
John:
Whatever the current mid-engine Ferrari V8 sports car is, whatever the latest model, that's usually on my list.
John:
At the time, it was a 488, but now it's the, what the hell is the thing called?
John:
Tributo, F8 Tributo, or something like that.
John:
Anyway, whatever that one is, the current one, that one keeps changing.
John:
Then the Ferrari 458, because it's the last naturally aspirated iteration of that model line.
John:
BMW M3, but I mean the M3 that was around in like the, what I always forget, is the E46 is the one that I like?
John:
The one that was around that was new in like 95, 96.
John:
I think it's... That's E36.
John:
No, I think it's the E46 is the one I like.
Casey:
No, E46 was early 2000s.
John:
Well, I like whatever the one is that has the little slats by the M3 badge.
Casey:
I don't know which one you're talking about.
Casey:
Are you talking about Rich Siegel's M3?
Casey:
Because that's an E46.
Casey:
If you're talking about a little boxier than that, it's E36.
John:
Yeah, it's Rich Siegel's E46.
Casey:
That's early 2000s.
John:
Yeah, that's the M3 that I'm talking about.
John:
Mercedes S600, which I didn't put a year on that, but it varies from years.
John:
Sometimes I like them and don't like them.
John:
But what I'm basically saying is the big V12 ridiculously huge Mercedes sedan.
John:
that's like driving a living room that one i had tesla model s on here in 2016 but honestly i think i would remove that now because i'm really down on tesla and i'm just angry and scared of the company and then of course mclaren f1 because why not
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
For me, I thought the, well, I have to explain pretty much all of these, uh, the C3 Corvette, which is like the mid to late seventies ish, uh, which by most standards is one of the worst, if not the worst Corvette of all time.
Casey:
However, my dad had a 77 vet for a long time when I was growing up, which I probably told that story about 15 times on the show and on neutral and
Casey:
But the C3 Corvette, I would love to have one of those.
Casey:
The Z32, so this is the Nissan 300ZX from the early 1990s.
Casey:
I had a 91 non-turbo many, many years ago.
Casey:
I love that car.
Casey:
I don't regret selling that car, but I regret selling that car.
Casey:
An Aston Martin DBS of pretty much any vintage, something modern, I should say, but be that brand new or five years old or 10 years old, whatever, I'd be fine with it.
Casey:
Lamborghini Diablo, I don't care what specific flavor of the Diablo, but that was my ultimate car when I was really coming of age when I was a little kid.
Casey:
and uh and i love that thing and i would even though i'm sure i would hate to drive it i would still love to have one e39 m5 because it's been one of my favorite cards of all time pretty much since the moment i laid eyes on it uh i echo your for you know v8 mid-engine ferrari so like the 488 or what have you i echo your mclaren f1 and i'd also i would love to you know have a bugatti veiron just because i think it would be a cool thing to have as puke
Casey:
oh come on so ugly so i'm not saying it's i'm not saying it's pretty i'm just saying cool in person i don't think i've ever seen one in person but i do not like that car i know i just feel like it's the we spared no expense version of the automobile and i and i kind of respect well they spared no pound that's for sure well they spared no expense brutal uh all right marco hit me
Marco:
You're going to hate my list.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
It's going to have an MR2 on it.
Marco:
One of the entries, I begin with, quote, Ferrari whatever.
Marco:
I don't know enough about Ferraris to say which one.
Marco:
You should get a Ferrari California.
Marco:
That's your punishment for putting that on the list.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah, because I know I should want them because they're like the driver enthusiast car, but I don't know anything about them.
Marco:
So I figured I'd let John pick my Ferrari.
John:
Yeah, current mid-engine.
John:
Actually, I would just wait or I would get the 458.
John:
Those are your two choices.
Marco:
Okay, whatever you said that.
Marco:
I also thought...
Marco:
in the like i i like my large fast electric cars like i like that and so i have model s model 3 the porsche take on or is that the mission wait why are you putting model 3 on the list why would you want you have a model s why would you want a model 3 which is just the worst model s
John:
I needed 10.
John:
No, you didn't.
John:
I didn't have 10.
John:
Don't worry about that.
Marco:
All right, so Model S, Porsche Taycan, and the M5.
Marco:
I thought I had one.
Marco:
It was great, and I haven't tried the new one yet.
Marco:
The new one's really good, they say.
Marco:
Right, and so that would be on the list to consider.
Marco:
I like large stands.
Marco:
In the smaller category, I'm very curious about the new Tesla Roadster.
Marco:
Not enough to buy one, but it looks pretty cool.
Marco:
Also, Aston Martin, whatever, you know, Casey can tell me which Aston Martin to get.
Marco:
And then also, I've never been in one.
Marco:
I'm not sure that I would actually enjoy it, but I find the BMW i8 very attractive in person.
Marco:
I think it looks striking, really, in person.
Casey:
I would agree with that.
Casey:
The other thing, and I've said this in other places, I think, but the other car that I think does not photograph terribly well, but I think is gorgeous in person, is the Audi R8.
Casey:
Yeah, I'll agree.
Casey:
I do not like the look of those on paper, but I think they are very pretty.
John:
They look better in person than they do in photos, but it is not to my taste.
John:
I can't handle the two-tone panel on the side.
John:
It's just... Yeah, I can understand that.
Marco:
It allows for some pretty ugly color combos.
Marco:
They aren't all ugly.
Marco:
And even when it's not, there's a texture difference there that bothers me.
Marco:
And then finally, in the small, fast, like kind of enthusiast category, I have the Porsche Cayman, which I've also never been in, but I've heard they're wonderful to drive and they're mid-engine, which I've never driven.
Marco:
And so I'm curious about that.
Marco:
The only downside with the Cayman is that you're basically sitting on the ground from what I can tell.
Marco:
And so my final pick is the BMW M2.
John:
I thought you were going to pick a Jeep Wrangler.
Marco:
No, because the M2, it seems very similar to the 1M that I had, and that was a really fun car.
Marco:
And what I especially liked about the 1M is that it was a small, fast, sporty car, but that you were sitting at regular sedan height, not sitting on the ground.
Marco:
And the M2 appears to basically be the next version of that.
Marco:
And so I'm very curious to possibly try one of those.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, I'm so converted to electric at this point.
Marco:
What I really want BMW to make is an electric 2 series.
Marco:
But they don't seem interested in doing that anytime soon.
Marco:
Well, thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Hover, Eero, and Clear.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
I was summoned to jury duty this week.
Marco:
I recognize this is not a popular opinion.
Marco:
I really hate jury duty.
Marco:
It makes me what some would call unreasonably angry.
Marco:
I call it perfectly reasonable.
Marco:
I really don't like jury duty.
Marco:
And I recognize why we do it the way we do.
Marco:
I think it's an incredibly broken, imperfect system and not the right solution.
Marco:
But that's just me.
Marco:
And everyone else seems to care about it a lot more than I do.
Marco:
So I'll just stop my complaining there.
Marco:
Going to jury duty makes me very angry.
Marco:
I don't like going.
Marco:
I don't like being there.
Marco:
I especially don't like how much they spend all this time showing you videos and stuff that thank you for going because I don't think it's dignified to be thanked for something you were forced to attend.
Marco:
That seems insulting at best to legally kidnap me, force me to be there, and then say thanks for coming.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
Last time I served jury duty, I never got to a trial.
Marco:
It just basically made me wait in a jury waiting room to be maybe called to a courtroom for a few days.
Marco:
Eventually, I believe I even talked about it on the show, eventually I was called up into a courtroom and I was kicked out during Vardir because I said I didn't trust authority.
Casey:
I'd forgotten about that.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, but the vast majority of the time was not even in a courtroom.
Marco:
It was sitting in a jury waiting room with other potential jurors with nothing to do, and these are federal courts that I get summoned to.
Marco:
This is the Southern District of New York Federal Court, and the federal courts are extremely strict.
Marco:
that you cannot bring any kind of electronics into the courtroom.
Marco:
And so last, or into the building even.
Marco:
And so as I was sitting there last time in this jury waiting room, I had nothing to do.
Marco:
Like I had printed out articles to read and I brought like a magazine or two and I had just totally under provisioned for like how much material I would need for the amount of time that I was going to be there.
Marco:
That's a good thing you're such an avid reader of novels so you have plenty to fill your time.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Anyway, so last time I was dramatically underprepared and I was bored out of my mind and I was super mad, which made it even worse.
Marco:
So this time I wanted to do it right.
Marco:
Now, as John mentioned, I think a normal person's solution to this would be to bring a book.
Marco:
And this time I did.
Marco:
I brought the Creativity Inc.
Marco:
book that John recommended because I said, I'm going to bring a book this time, damn it.
Marco:
But I don't like reading books very much.
Marco:
So I wanted more options than that.
Marco:
So for my mental health, I wanted a way to have my two favorite things, music and podcasts.
Marco:
Now, you might assume, as one would, that I was out of luck because you aren't allowed to bring electronic devices to jury duty.
Marco:
And that makes sense in people's picture of jury duty where they picture you immediately going to a courtroom and sitting and paying attention and you wouldn't want jurors using their phones during a trial.
Marco:
And that's all true.
Marco:
But that isn't what jury duty is.
Marco:
That's what jury duty really is, at least in this federal court I keep being summoned to because it's random law, is that you go and sit in this room for a long time, possibly for days, without going to a courtroom.
Marco:
So you're basically just sitting in a waiting room.
Marco:
I see no harm in having electronics in that room.
Marco:
So I decided to, this time, try to push the boundaries a little and see if I could bring something that could play music and podcasts while I was in this waiting room waiting around to do nothing.
Marco:
And ideally, I was even thinking like...
Marco:
It'd be nice if I could have an e-reader or something so I wouldn't have to carry around paper books.
Marco:
I have a few e-books I'd like to read.
Marco:
I didn't own any paper books that I really wanted to read that I haven't yet.
Marco:
So I don't want to just buy a paper book just to bring here if I have e-books that I can read.
Marco:
So I'd like to bring an e-reader if possible and something that can play MP3s and maybe one device that could do both would be ideal.
Marco:
I decided to be a lawyer about it.
Marco:
I looked at the exact wording of what the rule was.
Marco:
The summons that you get in the mail, it says, and I quote, do not bring electronic equipment, including cell phones, blackberries, PDAs, laptops, and the like to the courthouse.
Marco:
So of course, I mean, my first question is like, what's the last time somebody tried to bring a BlackBerry or a PDA in the courthouse?
Marco:
But like, so it says, do not bring electronic equipment, including blah, blah, blah, and the like.
Marco:
Electronic equipment is very broad, but there's a lot of it that is not like those things.
Marco:
Like, is a digital watch electronic equipment that's like PDAs, laptops, and BlackBerrys?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
What about a Fitbit?
Marco:
One question is, what about an e-reader?
Marco:
Is that like a cell phone, PDA, or laptop?
Marco:
Maybe, maybe not.
Marco:
So the good thing is that you have to call the night before to listen to a recording to see if you actually have to go in that day.
Marco:
And the phone message had different wording.
Marco:
It said, no pocket knives, cell phones, BlackBerrys, or internet-capable devices.
Marco:
are allowed in the court that last one that killed what i was going to say because you were mentioned digital watches and there is a kind of watch that you can use to listen to both music and podcasts but unfortunately it is internet capable right so i saw i don't i don't have a pocket knife that one's easy you don't have a pocket knife no i'm not a knife person uh no cell phones blackberries or internet capable devices okay now this is much more specific internet capable okay so nothing with cellular obviously probably
Marco:
probably nothing with wi-fi either it's questionable what they mean by internet capable but you know let's say nothing with wi-fi either now there's also a separate rule that you aren't allowed to have image or sound recording devices in a courtroom so nothing with a camera or microphones
Marco:
So before I move on, if you were in this position, what, if anything, would you bring?
Casey:
The obvious answer is some sort of portable turntable.
Marco:
Duh.
John:
No, you could bring a five-piece band.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
There's nothing about musical instruments.
John:
Nobody says you can't bring like a wedding band in with you and just entertain the entire waiting room.
John:
Can I bring like Mike and Jason to come like have a conversation in front of me about the Apple News of the week?
John:
Yeah, and then the podcasting, you just bring a bunch of people who will sit behind a table and talk.
Yeah.
John:
That's awesome.
Marco:
Casey, what would you bring?
Casey:
All kidding aside, I would certainly bring like a backpack full of magazines and novels and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Like if I couldn't bring a Kindle, then I would bring a series of novels or something like that.
Marco:
So e-reading was the first thing I tried to tackle.
Marco:
So an e-reader is probably the easiest thing to get away with.
Marco:
The problem is no Kindle has ever been made that doesn't have either Wi-Fi, cellular, or both.
Marco:
I was going to say, they were all internet capable.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Now, the old Sony readers were neither of those things.
Marco:
The old Sony readers would pass this test, but I believe I mailed mine to you, John, years ago as part of packing material with other Kindles around it.
Marco:
i had one sony reader like forever ago and you can't really buy them quickly these days so i thought me you know a kindle would probably not pass the test but what matters isn't whether something has wi-fi but whether a courtroom security guard is likely to know that it has wi-fi so i figured i could actually probably get away with a kindle
Marco:
But what I really wanted, ideally, I figured trying to carry a bunch of stuff in there was risky.
Marco:
I wanted to only try to get one thing past them that was a questionable electronic device.
Marco:
So I really wanted a Kindle with a headphone jack so I could also play music and podcasts from it.
Marco:
Now, the only problem is I gave all those to John, too.
Marco:
Many Kindles have headphone jacks.
Marco:
I don't own any of them right now.
Marco:
Right now, the only Kindle I own is a first-generation Oasis.
Marco:
Not the current.
Marco:
The current one's the second generation.
Marco:
And the first generation Oasis has no audio output at all.
Marco:
So if all it could do for me was the reading functions and just replace, like, a book, well, I could just bring a book.
Marco:
Like, that's not that big of a deal.
Marco:
If this device is only going to replace one book, it isn't worth the risk if it can't also be an audio player.
Marco:
Now, I looked.
Marco:
The newest Kindles all support Bluetooth audio output.
Marco:
That could be great, except that they only support this for Audible audiobooks bought in the Audible app on the Kindle.
Marco:
So previous Kindles, back when they had headphone jacks, you could sideload music onto its memory by just plugging it in through USB to your computer.
Marco:
You could put music in a folder and it could play it.
Marco:
modern kindles can't do that anymore apparently and i don't actually i didn't actually have one that could do this to test with but the information i could find basically said they will only play stuff from the audible app you can't load stuff on them anymore so i couldn't like load podcasts onto them so between that and you know the my situation here i figured e-readers were not going to work out they have too little upside for too much risk so i decided to stick with paper for my reading needs and only try to solve for music and podcasts electronically
Marco:
The correct modern solution, as John alluded to a minute ago, would probably be an Apple Watch with AirPods.
Marco:
But the Apple Watch has Wi-Fi, some of them have cellular, and they all have microphones.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch is instantly recognizable to most people.
Marco:
And most people know that Apple Watches are kind of like phones.
Marco:
And they have phone-like features.
Marco:
So I think any security guard, it would be a pretty high risk...
Marco:
They're probably not going to let an Apple Watch through because they know an Apple Watch is like a phone.
Marco:
And Bluetooth, again, I wasn't sure if I could really rely on that.
Marco:
It's not usually used to provide an internet service, although it can be.
Marco:
It is a wireless electronic communication method.
Marco:
And I figured the guards probably wouldn't be willing to debate this with me.
Marco:
So I actually thought a little music player would be ideal.
Marco:
I actually have a little Sony music player that is otherwise perfect, except that it's very obviously an audio recorder.
Marco:
That's what it really is.
Marco:
It has these two giant microphones on the top and it has a giant red record button on the front.
Marco:
So I figured that was too risky because you aren't allowed to record stuff.
Marco:
So clearly that was not a good idea.
Marco:
So what I needed really was an iPod.
Marco:
You know, something that looks old and basic enough that any security guard would recognize it as just a music player.
Marco:
And they would know this has no internet or phone capabilities whatsoever.
Casey:
I was hoping you were going to say a Rio PMP 300 like I had way back in the day.
Casey:
Or Nomad.
Casey:
Were you one of the Nomad people?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Marco:
No, I briefly had one of the ones that was a big hard drive, but it wasn't the Nomad brand.
Marco:
It was another brand.
Marco:
I forget which one it was, but it was some other brand.
Casey:
It was a Creative something something Nomad.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of, right?
Casey:
The one that looked like a Discman.
Marco:
Yeah, you're thinking of the Creative Nomad Jukebox, which is the one that looks like a fat Discman and it had like a 5 gig hard drive in it.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I had one that was by a different company that had a hard drive.
Marco:
Then I had one that played MP3 CD-Rs, which is much better.
Marco:
Anyway, I decided iPod is the way to go here.
Marco:
People recognize iPods, they know what they look like, they know what they are, and they know what they aren't.
Marco:
And they know it's clearly just an iPod, right?
Marco:
So that's what I wanted.
Marco:
Problem is, we don't have a working iPod.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
And most, yeah, like, Tiff has her own iPod Mini, but it's, I don't even think we have a 30-pin cable anymore.
Marco:
Like, I don't think I could plug it in if I wanted to, and I'm pretty sure the battery would be dead, because most iPods that are still around today have batteries that are like 10 or 15 years old, and so they can't hold a charge anymore.
Marco:
And you can actually still today buy new iPods that are refurbished with new batteries.
Marco:
The problem is these are like $200 and up.
Marco:
Like an iPod Nano refurbished with a new battery is like $180 for most places.
Marco:
A small price to pay.
Marco:
But they retailed for $150 when they were new.
Marco:
They're actually more than MSRP now.
Marco:
And iPod Classic, they're even more.
Marco:
iPod Classics are over $300 for one in good shape that has a new battery.
Marco:
And I also thought, looking at the iPod Nano availability, the seventh generation Nano, the latest one, is the one that looks like a tiny iPhone.
Marco:
It has the home button and a big touch screen.
Marco:
And so I figured the security guards might not let that one through because it was never very popular.
Marco:
Like by the time that came out, iPhones were taken over.
Marco:
So like it wasn't very popular and it looks like a small phone.
Marco:
So I figured there's actually a risk.
Marco:
So the one I really wanted was the fifth generation.
Marco:
That was the last one that had the iconic iPod Nano shape with the screen on top and the buttons in a circle below it.
Marco:
Like that's the last one that looks like, you know, the iPod shaped iPod was the seventh generation iPod Nano or the, sorry, the fifth generation iPod Nano.
Marco:
Problem is, those were, again, like $200 for a refurbished one with a new battery.
Marco:
And I also thought, like, am I going to spend $200 on something that the next time I need this thing, it's probably going to be when they call me back in another five years?
Marco:
And five years from now, will that battery still work?
Marco:
And more importantly, will I still be able to sync files to an iPod using iTunes in five years?
John:
probably not let's just all sit back and appreciate the fact that you are even considering making a one-time 200 purchase for a single day activity that may repeat every five years correct just appreciate that i it felt rich to me like i felt what it's like to be marco
Marco:
So honestly, the price really put me off.
Marco:
If it was like $50, I would have done it, no question.
Marco:
$200 felt a little ridiculous for this purpose.
Marco:
But the good thing is, I am not the first person to have ever wanted a cheap iPod.
Marco:
The iPod spawned a thousand clones, and many of them are still around today and still being made, still brand new, and because it is 2019, they cost basically nothing.
Marco:
So I will put in the show notes the one I chose.
Marco:
i bought the agp tech mp3 player 8 gigabyte bluetooth 4.0 upgraded a02t lossless sport music player with fm radio voice recorder expandable up to 128 gigs black for kids and adult voice recorder so i selected this one in part because it looked very similar to an ipod nano also in part because i was ordering it on a saturday and it was guaranteed to arrive on sunday
Marco:
And in part because it was $26.
Marco:
And I should clarify the price has since gone up to $29.
Marco:
But when I bought it, it was $26.
Marco:
Now, John noticed a few problematic keywords.
Marco:
It does have Bluetooth, and it does include a little microphone to make voice recordings.
Marco:
But neither of those things were visually apparent.
Marco:
The microphone, I didn't even test where it was, but there's a small hole on the back of it.
Marco:
I think that's the microphone.
Marco:
It might not even be.
Marco:
It might just use a microphone that's on the earbuds if you happen to be using a TRS earbud set.
Marco:
So I don't know.
John:
I never tried the voice recorder.
John:
I assume it was recording everything and transmitting it back to a data center in China the whole time you were there.
John:
Maybe.
John:
So anyway... That's what Bloomberg said anyway.
Marco:
Right, yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So because the voice recorder aspect of it was not visually apparent at all, and I wasn't even sure it even had a microphone, I figured that would probably not be a problem.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
i loaded it up and you know it's there is no sync software to be had you just you plug it in and it's a usb device and you copy stuff over two folders on it it's great um i load it up with music i i put some podcasts on it and uh i wrapped an old wired pair of white apple earbuds around it like it's 2005 you know and i brought it to the courthouse
Marco:
Now, they were very, very clear in the instructions.
Marco:
Don't even bring your phone into the building.
Marco:
Just don't even bring it with you that day at all or leave it in your car.
Marco:
So I left it locked in my glove box because I wasn't going to not bring it, obviously.
Marco:
I got to get there somehow.
John:
Don't leave your phone in your car.
John:
I mean, you probably got away with it because, you know, whatever, and the Tesla is kind of climate controlled, but that's bad for your phone.
John:
Don't leave your phone in your car.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Anyway, so I left it in the glove box, locked up.
Marco:
The first thing I had to do was figure out where to park.
Marco:
I had to go into a big municipal city parking garage.
Marco:
And I had my phone until I parked, but then I had to leave my phone in the car.
Marco:
So the first thing I had to do was figure out how to pay for this parking.
Marco:
And there's signs up saying, remember your parking spot.
Marco:
my usual solution to this would be to take a picture of the parking spot.
Marco:
And if not that, I would at least usually take a picture of the sign by the elevator that told me what floor I was on and whether it's like East or North or whatever.
Marco:
And I couldn't do those things.
Marco:
So I had to like, I like my short term memory for these things is gone.
Marco:
Like I, the skill I have to remember parking spots is gone because I haven't used it in, you know, what, 10 years.
Marco:
So I, I, uh, took out a notebook and a pencil and,
John:
which i had to buy for this trip this is where you need the the mike hurley in your life you got a bunch of expensive hipster notebooks and a million pens yeah well fortunately i have tiff but i but our tastes aren't they don't overlap that much in this area a gigantic sparkly fountain pen to write down what parking spot you're in
Marco:
yeah so i took out a brand new notebook and a brand new mechanical pencil and i had to write down like my parking spot and everything could you just look for the big red tesla i mean how many other red teslas were there in the parking lot at the time i was it was i was lost man it was terrible like and so anyway so i i eventually found the pay station in the elevators and everything and i paid i couldn't use apple pay
Marco:
I had to use my credit card like an animal.
Marco:
And then I had to find the courthouse from the parking garage, which was about a block and a half or two away.
Marco:
And so I walked out of the parking garage and basically immediately got lost.
Marco:
I walked up and down the block, went different directions.
Marco:
I'm like, where the hell?
Marco:
I had already forgotten even the name of the street that the courtroom was on.
Yeah.
Marco:
you know you should have just printed map quest directions like we did back in that's what i used to do you just need a hagstrom is what you need you should you should have driven there without navigation too yeah right and so like eventually i found like somebody was walking by in a suit and i figured he probably knows where the courthouse is so he's wearing a suit on a weekday morning
Marco:
So I asked him, like, hey, you know where the courthouse is?
Marco:
And I couldn't have lucked out with a better guy.
Marco:
He points, like, across, like, diagonally across the street, and he's like, that one's county, that one's city, and around the corner from that one is federal.
Marco:
I'm like, great, all right, thanks.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
Yeah, so I went to the around the corner one, eventually found the federal.
Marco:
Like, thank God I never would have found it on my own.
Marco:
I was going to walk around a very long time before finding that.
Marco:
So it's like, finally, I'm a human.
Marco:
without a phone like i'm totally lost finally i find this place um i of course i i'm so mad when i get there that i have to do all this i immediately wanted to take a picture of myself outside the courtroom or outside the building like flipping it off and realized i had no camera with me and couldn't do that so i'm like oh here we go modern life strikes again you can still flip off the building even with there's no camera there to record it it's not the same um
Marco:
Anyway, so I get in, go through the security.
Marco:
The security guards seem pretty nice.
Marco:
And, you know, take everything out, take everything out, take everything out.
Marco:
And he glanced at the MP3 player.
Marco:
Initially, he gave it a quick glance, and he said, no electronics.
Marco:
But, of course, I was...
Marco:
trying to get i'm like it's just an mp3 player sir and and he stopped for a minute and he looked more closely at it because you could tell you know it's like like it's like tsa like they get they have to say the same thing a million times to everybody who comes in so they're sick of it then they're not really thinking when they first say it he actually took a look at it and he realized it looks like an ipod nano with white headphones wrapped around it and he he like asked the guard like in the next lane over like hey we allow these now right and so they mumble to each other and then he waved me through is that all right it's fine
Marco:
so i had it i got it through i was able to bring nice an ipod like mp3 player into the courthouse and uh it was fine so i can tell you finally with my day of using it in the uh in the waiting room which is fortunately they sent us home early and then we were done and i don't have to go back because it turns out this week there weren't a lot of cases needing juries in white planes
Marco:
So it was a short, I only actually needed it for like two thirds of a day.
Marco:
But in my two thirds of a day of using it, I can tell you my review of the AGP Tech A02T $26 MP3 player in 2019.
Casey:
Please carry on.
Marco:
It looks and feels like a $26 device.
Marco:
the body of it is that like that like cheap soft touch rubbery plastic you know i'm talking about yeah like it's like every every super cheap device is made from that now um the screen is horrendous looking like the resolution is terrible the viewing angle like i don't think there is a good angle to view it okay it's just if there is i couldn't find it um none of the buttons or switches feel remotely good to use um the buttons only work about two-thirds of the time
Marco:
uh and lots of navigation just requires like you know oh just push it again like my kicking machine like just push it again and it'll solve the problem it doesn't support the remote control clicker buttons on the ipod headphones for like volume up and down or play pause which i immediately missed for listening to podcast i had using a command line tool of course i had pre-processed the files to bake in smart speed oh
Marco:
of course you did but they were all still at 1x and there was no easy 30 second skip forward and back buttons so it wasn't really ideal uh for podcasts um the device has some other issues as well upon boot up about one out of five times it says no files found which is terrifying when you've loaded this up to go to jury duty and
Marco:
But then you just wait a second and they're all there.
Marco:
Sometimes it doesn't resume from sleep and needs to be power cycled.
Marco:
When you do this, this is one of many conditions I found where it will lose the position in whatever you were listening to.
Marco:
Which is another thing that made listening to podcasts fairly non-ideal on this device.
Marco:
It does support video playback.
Marco:
but it only plays 128 by 160 AMV files.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
If you look up AMV on Wikipedia, this is actually a format.
Marco:
Anime music video?
Marco:
No, it's actually a format that's like, it's made for like cell phones and like certain things that use a certain type of chipset that's optimized to play only that.
Marco:
And it came with a sample video.
Marco:
So I was able to look at that video like an FFmpeg.
Marco:
It's like, what is this?
Marco:
What are the specs in this?
Marco:
But I have been unable to encode any other videos that it'll actually play for whatever it's worth.
Marco:
If you play a video, normally to get out of what you're doing, you would hit the menu button, like the M button on top.
Marco:
If you do that, it shows you a menu, but none of the options are like quit.
Marco:
it took me a long time to figure out how to exit video playback mode.
Marco:
One of the options is update playlist.
Marco:
That's how you leave.
Casey:
Oh my goodness.
Marco:
So, you know, for video, not so good podcasts.
Marco:
Not so good for music.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
You know, not great, but fine.
Marco:
Um, to play or pause, you often need to wake it up first, which often involves multiple button presses that often get lost or ignored.
Um,
Marco:
And my favorite thing is adjusting volume to change the volume, which is a fairly common action that you often have to do quickly.
Marco:
You have to wake it up.
Marco:
So, you know, hit player pause, maybe one to five times over the course of a few seconds to wake it up.
Marco:
Then you have to, there's a volume button on the bottom.
Marco:
But if you push it, nothing happens.
Marco:
You have to hold it down for a few seconds to enter the volume menu.
Marco:
Oh, then you hit up or down a few times to your desired volume level.
Marco:
Then you like hit play to be like enter to set it.
Marco:
So this thing is pretty much a piece of garbage.
Marco:
But
Marco:
It worked.
Marco:
And I was able to slowly and clumsily listen to music and podcasts while I waited around all day to do nothing in jury duty.
Marco:
And that was totally worth $26 to me.
Marco:
So while this is a terrible product in absolute terms, I would actually say it's a
Marco:
And I still, I find it amazing, just like in modern life, that I decided I wanted an MP3 player.
Marco:
I found one in a few seconds.
Marco:
I ordered it on a Saturday, and it was delivered on Sunday for $26.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Marco:
That is pretty cool.
John:
I should have tried an iPod Shuffle because I know about the battery.
John:
I don't have one.
John:
It's really old and it won't hold a charge, but the Shuffle does everything you describe better.
John:
It retains your playback position, easy to change the volume, wakes up instantly, does all the things you're supposed to do, and is much less likely to be flagged as electronics by a random security guard.
John:
That's what I would have gone with.
Marco:
but i didn't have one you don't have a shuffle like in the house somewhere no the only ipod we own is tiff's old mini what happened to all the old other ones you sold them all i i never had that many i i had i think we had a total of two shuffles ever and one of them at least one of them died i don't know what happened to the other one um we had tiff's ipod mini and i had a ipod video the 5g i think whatever the first video one was i had that one and that's it i never owned a nano neither the tiff
Marco:
And I never owned any other classic one except for the video.
Marco:
And that was it.
Marco:
And that one, I think that one died like 10 years ago or something.
Marco:
It died not recently.
John:
Probably could have found a Chinese knockoff iPod shuffle, but then that wouldn't have actually worked.
John:
An actual Apple iPod shuffle would work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's kind of amazing they can screw that up that badly.
John:
And the volume changing thing, when you go into the volume menu and change it, do you get to hear what the new volume sounds like while you're changing it?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But you have to hit the enter play button to exit the volume menu.
Casey:
So are you holding on to this for the next jury duty experience?
Marco:
I might as well.
Marco:
I mean, it's more likely to work in five years than an ancient iPod.
Marco:
Well, we'll see.
John:
Put it in the box that says jury duty and you'll open it up and it'll just be an exploded battery.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
The plastic will all be, like, liquefied.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Now, I'm also wondering, if you were to do this again tomorrow for the sake of discussion, would you be spending any time splitting your podcast MP3s, like, in every minute so it's easier to seek effectively back to where you left off or, like, mark to yourself where you've left off?
Casey:
Because you say that it loses your place a lot and it's just not a very good music player.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
So that's something my dad used to do all the time with like audiobooks that he would download via MP3 or something like that, that he would slice them up so that instead of having each file be like, I don't know, a chapter or something like that, instead each file would be like 30 seconds or a minute or what have you so that it was easier for him to come back to where he was.
Marco:
That was going to be my next move.
Marco:
So I went to Zero Duty for one day and then was not needed after that.
Marco:
And so I had a very short term of using this.
Marco:
If I were going to be there longer, I think I would probably actually then at that point go buy an iPod Nano.
Marco:
Spend the $200.
Marco:
If I was going to be there for a long time and I would have an opportunity to use this more than once, I would probably go that route.
Marco:
I also think if I knew...
Marco:
If I go back and do it again and I didn't do that option, there's a Sony player that is basically the version of my little nice Sony recorder that isn't a recorder.
Marco:
It's like the iPod Nano version of my little audio recorder that I have.
Marco:
It's the same generation, has lots of the same parts.
Marco:
It's $75, so it's more, but I would probably try that first before I did this.
Marco:
Any crazy hacks to make my $26 one work that much better because it seems like it's a nicer built thing.
Marco:
The reviews are a little bit mixed.
Marco:
The problem is a new MP3 player in 2019, this is not a high-volume market.
Marco:
There are...
Marco:
digital audio players like there are like portable audio players that are for audio files like for high-end audio listeners that support like high bit rate stuff and everything but those all look like phones because they all have these like they're all like the size of phones and they have they have like a big touch screen on them there's actually very few that aren't touch screens but i i wanted something that looked more like an ipod because i figured it'd be more likely to get through whereas something that looks just like a phone which is all the high-end models i figured that was not likely to get through did you read any of your book nope