Relive Your Calculator-Watch Dreams
John:
The power of JavaScript.
John:
I believe in you.
Casey:
I will put it on the to-do list for after I ship my app, which in turn is after I create a website for said app, and then fix all the hilarious bugs.
Casey:
You know, this is something I've been thinking about a lot, is that I have never written any code with regard to store kit.
Casey:
So this is anything to do with like in-app purchase or anything like that.
Casey:
and i've gotten the kind of happy path and and some of the more obvious not so happy paths uh coded and they're in the most recent tesla i build but i haven't done like some of the other stuff like restore and and whatnot but i have this like vision that or this like recurring worry that i'm going to release this app hopefully to some amount of fanfare only to find out that my in-app purchase code is all broken like hell
Casey:
And then either people won't be able to buy or it'll be free somehow or something like that, which I know should be controlled on the Apple side, but you never know.
Casey:
And so I have these recurring daymares.
Casey:
They're not nightmares because I think about it all the time during the day.
Casey:
So they're recurring daymares of...
Casey:
of i'm pretty sure that's not a word but you know what i mean of writing or releasing this app and hoping to just swim in money which of course wouldn't happen anyway because it's the app store but anyway to swim in some dollars only to find out that my iap code is totally broken i mean i'm obviously talking about step 305 and i'm on step like 10 but i don't know i just have this fear that i'm gonna release it and then everything's gonna break yeah
Casey:
Do you want me to do it?
Casey:
Can we shill for our shirt?
Casey:
I actually haven't bought shirts yet.
Casey:
I need to do that.
Casey:
I should listen to my own advice.
Marco:
You only have five days left, Casey.
Marco:
Seriously.
Marco:
Stop what you're doing right now.
Marco:
Pull over your motorcycle.
Marco:
Safely pull over.
Marco:
What else did you say?
John:
Safely put down your water glass and buy a t-shirt.
John:
But not too close to your computer.
Casey:
It is just a couple of days before we stop sales for the summer edition of ATP Shirts and Things.
Casey:
So as you're listening to me, make the same speech for the third consecutive week.
Casey:
Think to yourself, I don't want to be that person.
Casey:
I don't want to be that person that says, oh, Casey, I didn't listen to you.
Casey:
Can I please have a shirt?
Casey:
Please, please, please, please.
Casey:
No, you can't.
Casey:
Pull the car over.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Pull the car over.
Casey:
Stop running.
Casey:
Stop what you're doing safely, gracefully.
Casey:
Go to atp.fm slash store and just check out our wares.
Casey:
We have plenty of wares.
Casey:
We would like to share them with you.
Casey:
And by share, I mean sell them to you.
Casey:
So check it out.
Casey:
You are running out of time.
Casey:
You are running out of time.
Casey:
As we record this, it is the evening of May 8th.
Casey:
This episode will probably come out on the 9th or the 10th.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
At the end of the day, ATP time on Sunday, the 12th, that is your last chance.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store, if you please.
Casey:
Thank you, everyone who has already listened to me and have made your purchases.
Casey:
We all appreciate it.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow up MDM parental control apps conspiracy theory.
Casey:
So this is with regard to the New York Times article slash hit piece that we talked about last week.
Casey:
And we were talking about how we kind of thought it was silly and we didn't really see that much there.
Casey:
But we got a bit of feedback that we sort of kind of missed the conjecture that some of these apps were trying to put forth.
Casey:
John, can you explain this to me?
John:
Yeah, it was the most ridiculous theory presented in the article, which is probably why we didn't talk about it.
John:
But it was actually in the article.
John:
It was like, you know, some of the app makers that they interviewed said things directly, not just implying this, but saying it outright.
John:
The idea is that so screen time is the replacement for all these parental control MDM apps.
John:
And screen time is not as full featured as some of the third party apps.
John:
Uh, and so some of the third party app makers said, well, Apple's doing that on purpose because Apple doesn't want you to use your phone less.
John:
So what they want to do is introduce their own feature that does the same thing as our apps, get rid of all our apps.
John:
So the only game in town is theirs.
John:
And then screen time is bad at stopping you from using your phone because why would Apple ever want you to stop using your phone?
John:
Apple wants you to use your phone more, not less.
John:
So basically a screen time is intentionally bad.
John:
And that is very, very, very silly theory for many reasons.
John:
I mean, one is just the typical reason these theories are silly is that
John:
It's fun to think that a corporation is doing something evil, but if you can't think of a financial incentive for doing the evil thing, it's probably not really evil.
John:
It's tricky to talk about that because lots of big tech companies do evil things, but there's usually a very clear reason.
John:
Facebook does all sorts of evil stuff, but you can say, I see why they're doing this because how they make their money, this feeds into that.
John:
They want more information about more people,
John:
because they want to sell targeted ads and so on and so forth but like in the case of apple does apple you know does apple want you to use your phone more or less and because apple is a business model like there is something to say about like they want you to be on your phone and buying apps from the app store and stuff like that and you can kind of see that but on the flip side of it
John:
Apple's ideal customer, at least setting aside the services story, but for the rest of their revenue, if you look at the big pie chart of where they make their money, Apple's ideal customer would be buy a new iPhone every year and never use it.
John:
Because then you don't consume any of their resources.
John:
You don't get dissatisfied because you wear down your battery and whatever.
John:
You just...
John:
Give them the money, they get the profit margin, and then you never bother them again.
John:
Obviously, the server-serving story means they want you to use their services.
John:
But again, they would love for you to pay for all their services and then never use them because they get your money, but they don't have to pay to serve you.
John:
Apple is not in the business of watching every single thing you do and selling targeted ads against it.
John:
No, I don't think that Apple doesn't want you to use your phone less, and that's why screen time is bad at making you use your phone less.
John:
That is a silly reason, and the app developers that said that are way off base.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Some jury duty follow-up from Mr. Marco Armand.
Casey:
Can you tell me about this, if you please?
Casey:
I'm surprised we have any follow-up about this.
Marco:
I absolutely can.
Marco:
So I mentioned in last week's after show my various tech needs for bringing something into the jury duty waiting room because I was going to be bored and want to listen to podcasts.
Marco:
And I had suggested that the ideal device would be a fifth generation iPod Nano because it was the last Nano that had the iconic look of like the circular buttons below the screen that would be recognized by a security guard easily as like this is just an MP3 player, not a phone or a phone like device.
Marco:
And our friend Stephen Hackett over at Relay wrote in to say that the fifth-generation iPod Nano had a video camera on the back, which would have been prohibited in the courthouse, which I had totally forgotten about.
Marco:
This was released back in the early 2000s when I believe it was trying to compete with the flip camera at the time, and I don't think it ever went anywhere really.
Marco:
But yeah, the fifth-generation iPod Nano did indeed have a video camera, so I would have to go with a fourth-gen iPod Nano.
Marco:
to achieve what i wanted to achieve and still be permissible in a courthouse uh philip wrote in to suggest something that no one else i don't think suggested and i didn't even consider uh a game boy i had i've never owned a game boy the switch is my first portable console that we've ever had um which has wi-fi and microphones i think so that wouldn't fly but uh yeah so a game boy though i
Marco:
most of them i think or if not all of them would totally qualify as long as they don't have wi-fi or cameras or microphones um and he also pointed out he linked to me to uh the play yon mp3 player cartridge that has was i don't think ever released in america but it was like a game boy cartridge that you could stick an sd card into not on the original game boy but like on on like the game boy advance sp and some of the some other ones i don't understand um it would be able to play mp3s and some like built-in games and
Marco:
from this cartridge so that is an option i i didn't even know the mp3 player existed and i never even considered the possibility of game boys i just didn't even think about them uh because i've never really been in that world but uh thank you philip for that suggestion that's pretty cool yeah i kind of wish you had done this very cool to see you in the waiting room with a game boy that you like never touch or look at
John:
It would just be sitting there.
Marco:
And I would imagine the screen would probably have to be on.
Marco:
It would probably have to look visibly on.
Marco:
Yeah, it would look like you're just ignoring your Game Boy.
Marco:
Just burning its battery.
Marco:
All these possible alternatives.
Marco:
I felt weird enough.
Marco:
I did get some questions from some of the other nearby waiting jurors when they saw me take out what appeared to be an iPod with these white headphones.
Marco:
You can't really hide that.
Marco:
People were like,
Marco:
I thought you couldn't bring phones in here.
Marco:
I picked up the iPod, and they're like, oh, wow.
John:
Is that an iPod?
John:
No, it's much worse.
John:
Yeah, it's significantly worse.
Marco:
Do you remember the Game Boy camera for the original Game Boy?
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
I've never seen one.
Marco:
I remember it existed, but it's one of those many peripherals at the time, like the Game Gear TV tuner that I just would read about in a magazine and never in real life ever see one.
John:
Pretty sure the Game Boy camera was kind of like the BitCam, the Icon Factory app that we talked about on a past show, in that it was essentially a black and white camera.
John:
The only thing the screen could produce was a black or a white, quote-unquote white, pixel.
John:
And so the camera had to work with that, and it was just very dotty, to say the least.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
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Casey:
The one big thing I think we need to talk about today is, you know, friend of the show, Jeremy Rambo, has dropped a series of different blog posts over the last, well, it was a week or two ago, but, you know, he spent a few days revealing things that he has discovered about what he expects about WWDC.
Casey:
Well, then, you know, it turns out that Mark Gurman said, hold my beer.
Casey:
I have thoughts.
Casey:
And so there was a very large post a couple of days ago, as we record, that is to some degree, there is some prose here, but it is largely a bullet list of all the stuff that Gurman thinks is coming at Dub Dub.
John:
Before you dive in, before you dive into the list, I think this year is interesting in terms of everyone having all these leaks or rumors or whatever about what's going to be released and that it seems like there's a lot more info than there normally is.
John:
And yet I can't shake the feeling as we see these dueling rumors across sites that still any of the like...
John:
that these are like the, not the boring features, not the obvious features, not the easy features, but that there's always something that Apple's holding back related to something or other.
John:
Like very often that's software features related to hardware, right?
John:
Because like they'll be, say like after WWDC, we'll all be using betas for a while, but none of those betas will contain any trace of the features that are going to be added to serve some piece of hardware that's released like a month or two after WWDC, you know, that type of thing.
John:
So maybe I'm fooling myself, but I have to think that
John:
all the features listed are you know the ones that are in builds that somebody has access to but there's at least one or two more features that aren't in any of the builds because they're the super secret feature so that's not true and this is all the stuff it's still plenty i'm not saying there has to be a super secret feature but i'm getting that vibe from seeing these big lists that they're all proud that they have all these things but they have uh but they're missing something and of course none of them mention the mac pro or only mention in passing so that makes me sad too
Marco:
Well, I think one of the big things that they're missing is, like, some of the things, like, they've described features that sound a lot like, you know, multiple window management on iPads.
Marco:
But they don't have any idea, like, what does it look like?
Marco:
How does it work?
John:
like that it seems like so much of the info in these reports is gleaned from what seem like ways that are not actually seeing or playing with this software or they have screenshots if they saw them or they'd have they'd have sketches or they've loved you know there's no reason they wouldn't be drawing pictures but all they've got is a vague notion which is fine they're rumors like you know if there's something about windowing we'll say good you get credit for that one they just don't have a lot of info but yeah i don't expect them to post screenshots
Casey:
i don't know so let's let's go through this uh i will just start calling out things that i thought were interesting and whenever you two are ready to start interrupting me uh we start with ios and well it's kind of an amalgamation of ios and watch os and watch os gets split out later apple plans to add the app store directly on the watch so users can users can download apps on the go why like this does not sound compelling i've got i've got a use for this feature are you ready
John:
Uh, so one of the big complaints about the watch that Marco gets is that you just did it on the past show is like, I'm, I'm out of my watch and I want to download a single episode of a podcast right now.
John:
Um, but there's no API for like, please watch, do a download thing right now.
John:
You can just suggest it to the watch and the watch might get to it eventually.
John:
Right.
John:
So true.
John:
But I bet with the app store on the watch, if you go to the app store on the watch and download, it will download that app right then.
John:
Like surely that's how that feature works.
John:
Right.
John:
Do you remember when e-books were single-serving applications where you download an application and it was just one e-book?
John:
We need to make podcast episodes into apps.
John:
That way you can download your podcast immediately.
John:
So starting after WWDC, each episode of ATP will be released as a single application.
John:
Pretty soon we'll have hundreds of applications on the store.
John:
Apple will love us.
Marco:
See, I have some questions about the implementation details of this.
Marco:
Like, right now, apps are delivered as one iOS app that includes an embedded watchOS app component.
Marco:
So what happens if you download an app to your watch when your phone is not nearby that you don't have on your phone?
John:
that's a very astute point i hadn't considered that i'm assuming it would make you purchase the whole app pull out just the watch part i mean not that it's doing this but effectively logically speaking it would just send you the watch part but when you look on your phone it would be under your purchases that you had basically purchased the entire app it still wouldn't be on your phone to margo's point so that could be a problem for your watch app when it
John:
when you run it and it's like i'm looking for my partner phone app on the phone but that's always been true like you could always delete an app off your phone far away from the watch that still has the thing installed so i'm assuming that they're not changing that weird in my opinion model where the only way to get a watch app is to buy a phone app that comes with a watch app
Marco:
And also, as a developer, how do I test the case where the watch app is installed but the phone app isn't?
Marco:
Because there is no build and run directly to the watch.
Marco:
You cannot install from Xcode.
Marco:
You can't build an app from Xcode that installs only on the watch and skips the phone.
Marco:
We have TestFlight on the watch, too.
Interesting.
Marco:
Pull a new build of the watch.
Marco:
I have to imagine either this is wrong or misinterpreted or there's some major implementation details that maybe make this misleading or incomplete in some major way.
Marco:
It's just like the reality of what the watch is.
Marco:
By the way, an app store on the watch...
Marco:
Are you going to have to accept all input via Siri?
Marco:
When you start to think about the reality of this, what happens if your credit card gets, oh, you have to type in the verification code.
Marco:
There's all these different awkwardness things or methods of input.
Marco:
How would you find the app?
Marco:
Are you searching?
Marco:
Are you doing a search and scrolling through on the tiny little screen with the crown, scrolling past all the junk in the search results?
Marco:
Are there search ads on the watch?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
When you think about the realities of that, what that entails, it starts getting really messy really fast.
Marco:
That's why I got to figure this is odd, especially because
Marco:
watch apps have largely been such a failure and even like there's even barely even methods to manage apps on the watch like right now like one of the we'll get to this in a little bit but like you know some of the rumors are new first party apps from Apple for various health things
Marco:
We still can't hide or delete or bury in folders apps on the watch.
Marco:
So the watch home screen is already a mess of 60 apps you don't want plus the three that you use.
Marco:
And the entire watchOS environment is still just so primitive and so dependent on doing so many settings and things on the phone.
Marco:
And the apps themselves are dependent on companion phone apps so much of the time.
Marco:
I don't see, A, how they could really do this, and B, what problem it would really solve when they had, like, this is like solving problem 350, like Casey said, like, before you solve problems one through five.
John:
Does it make sense for many watch apps to be separate from the phone apps?
John:
Like, one way this could be more sensible is to say it used to be that the only way to distribute a watch app was to make it part of your phone app distribution.
John:
But now you can make a standalone watch app because maybe...
John:
You have an app that really doesn't need anything from its companion, and it's silly to make this shell iPhone app that just has like a splash screen that says, by the way, this is a watch app, and you should go use it on your, you know, I think I've had a couple apps that are like that that just basically contain instructions on how to launch Apple's Apple Watch app so you can transfer the app to the thing.
John:
Like just saying that there is an independent watch store only for apps that don't have a companion phone app.
John:
I don't know if that makes sense.
John:
I don't know what percentage you're like that, but it would certainly make this model make a little more sense.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to be a majority of watch apps.
Marco:
I think the number would be very small.
Marco:
That would really be the right move for it.
Marco:
But also just like so many apps still depend on their phone counterparts to do critical things.
Marco:
because watchOS is so incredibly limited.
Marco:
Not just the US stuff I was saying a minute ago, but the API layers, the power budget, the computational power available, the CPU time your app can take up before it gets killed without warning.
Marco:
It's a very...
Marco:
harsh, brutal environment.
Marco:
It's like the programming environment of Antarctica.
Marco:
You have very few resources here.
Marco:
Use them wisely, and if you make one little misstep, we're going to kill you.
Marco:
That's about what it's like running on watchOS.
Marco:
For instance, Overcast, my long-term idea, what I would like to do, since watch-to-phone communication or phone-to-watch communication is
Marco:
is so heavily throttled and out of my control.
Marco:
This is why, people, this is why your downloads don't transfer reliably from Overcast to your Apple Watch.
Marco:
Because the communication layer between the phone and the Watch app is...
Marco:
thoroughly and completely out of your control.
Marco:
I, as the programmer, give watch connectivity a list of transfers to make, and it makes them, when it damn well feels like it.
Marco:
And I have no insight into that process.
Marco:
I can't tell it, hey, can you make this one happen now?
Marco:
Or can you make this one go over Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth so it doesn't take a half hour?
Marco:
I have so little control over all that.
Marco:
My long-term goal...
Marco:
is to make the Watch app what you just said, John, to make it totally independent, where you literally can just log into your Overcast account on your Watch somehow.
Marco:
Maybe I just might sync it over via iCloud, but whatever.
Marco:
It would have its own login.
Marco:
It would have its own sync.
Marco:
It would have its own local data, and it would be totally independent from your phone app.
Marco:
You could not have the phone app installed, and that would still work that way.
Marco:
But for me to do that, I need a few things.
Marco:
I need, first of all,
Marco:
way more sophisticated audio APIs so I can do things like smart speed, voice boost, stuff like that.
Marco:
And I also just need better UI in a lot of ways.
Marco:
WatchKit is awful.
Marco:
We are still not using the same tools Apple is using for UI and it still shows.
Marco:
And more importantly, I need things like
Marco:
better support for background downloading, for background refresh, stuff like that.
Marco:
Just to make a reasonable experience if the app was totally separate from the phone.
Marco:
I need things that right now in watchOS are either missing or are too primitive or too limited to really make that good.
Marco:
And so that is my long-term goal.
Marco:
But right now...
Marco:
Not only can I not really reasonably build that, but also there just isn't that much demand for it because most of the time people are using the watch as a remote to their phone, not as an independent device.
Marco:
So what most people want most of the time is for it to just be a companion app to what they're doing on their phone, in which case everything I just said is unnecessary.
John:
So allowing for the normal game of telephone that's involved in these type of vague rumors, one way that this particular rumor could make a lot more sense is that the app store that they're referring to that you can use directly on the watch...
John:
exists solely so people can drumroll please make and sell third-party watch faces which only need to go on the watch don't need a companion phone app makes sense to download directly to the watch but you think if that was the actual story they would have just said third-party watch faces because that would be a way bigger story than app store on the watch but if you're just looking at headers and there's some kind of purchase api on the watch on watch os and you're wondering what the hell that's for i don't know we all want watch faces that's my uh silver lining to this one maybe it means third-party watch faces but probably not
Casey:
We made mention of this a moment ago.
Casey:
There will be new first-party health applications, a calculator, this is all for the watch still, and a books app for listening to audiobooks from your wrist.
Casey:
Sounds good.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
What about reading from your wrist?
Marco:
Didn't the watch first come with news?
Marco:
Wasn't that one of the things they demoed during 1.0?
Marco:
You could read news on your watch.
John:
The ergonomics and size obviously are silly for the watch, but I do think about technological progress, and I think I've mentioned this many times on many podcasts before, that I read the entire Lord of the Rings saga plus The Hobbit on a 160 by 160 pixel screen.
Marco:
Was that a Palm something?
John:
Yep, and the watch has way more pixels than that, I think.
John:
right yeah but it's also way more dense like like reading it on the 160 like i also read a lot of my palm pilot which is why instapaper exists hello avant go but it was you know it was like a three and a half inch or four inch wide screen right i said at the beginning size and the ergonomics of trying to read on your wrist make it ridiculous but technologically speaking that screen is so much more higher fidelity than screens that i did a heck of a lot of reading on um so yeah a books app a calculator
John:
Calculator lets you relive your calculator watch dreams from middle school or whenever when you had a calculator watch.
Marco:
I never had a calculator watch.
John:
And health apps, I think that's a good idea for Apple.
John:
I often forget that the health app, the one with the little...
John:
red heart and the white background thing is the clearinghouse for health data fed by other applications, but is not itself a full featured health application for the most part.
John:
So Apple should start filling these gaps.
John:
Hopefully the apps that we just listed will be decent, but not so good that they kill the entire third party market for similar apps.
Marco:
real-time follow-up the news app does exist on the watch right now yeah and i don't think that's recent like i i really think that was there in like 1.0 or close to it like i remember them showing off reading news somehow like in the watch that actually makes sense like it's not because you just just the headline
John:
Obviously, you're not going to read, read news, but news condenses down to a form that we accept as a thing.
John:
Headlines, just headlines only.
John:
And a headline will fit on the watch.
John:
And so presumably you see the headline on your watch and it's basically like a notification.
John:
Oh, here's the thing I didn't know was happening.
John:
And then to learn more, you go through.
Marco:
to your larger device so well it makes sense for me from a notification flow standpoint like you get notified you know tap tap hey look at some celebrity doing something stupid uh you know whereas well i think what they demoed which was like still trying to figure out like what the watch is for was more of like you'll go to your watch to browse things it's like nope you're that's that never panned out that way finally catch up on those new yorker articles that you hadn't been reading just turn that digital crown a lot
John:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
Dark mode, a black and gray heavy interface optimized for viewing at night that can be enabled in control center, the panel for quickly accessing settings.
Casey:
I don't feel like this is something I yearn for.
Casey:
But that being said, it is something I'm sure I would very much like once it showed up.
Casey:
And I'm assuming this is more iOS than watchOS.
John:
Didn't you just post a screenshot that you were using dark mode and overcast?
Casey:
Yeah, and Tweetbot, usually anyway.
John:
Yep, it's obvious.
John:
It's already on the Mac.
John:
It'll be on iOS.
John:
There'll be much celebrating, very much like dynamic text and lots of other features.
John:
Some developers will incorporate it, and everyone will be happy, and some developers will ignore it, and people will be sad.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
The company is testing a new keyboard option that allows users to swipe across letters on the keyboard in one motion to type out words.
Casey:
Apple could choose to keep this feature internal.
Casey:
This is similar to options on Android handsets where it would compete with third-party iPhone apps such as SwiftKey.
Casey:
I briefly, I shouldn't even say briefly, for about six months or a year, I used Gboard at Mike Hurley's recommendation.
Casey:
And I actually really liked it for the most part.
Casey:
And I don't remember what it was that made me go away from it.
Casey:
But one of the things I liked most about Gboard, which is Google's keyboard, is that it would let you do the swipe thing that is being discussed right here.
Casey:
And I actually quite liked that, particularly for one-handed use.
Casey:
So I'm really interested in this potentially showing up as a first-party solution.
John:
Wasn't this rumor, didn't this swipe keyboard rumor, isn't that a couple of years they've talked about that?
John:
Maybe even one of the years was the third-party keyboard year, like iOS 8 or whatever, and effectively did get it through third parties there.
John:
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what Apple's deal is there.
John:
I feel like by allowing third-party keyboards and eventually making them work in semi-reliable fashion, that this need is filled.
John:
I don't think Apple has to be all keyboardist to all people.
John:
But if they want to put it out, that's fine.
John:
um you mentioned the gboard which i think i use for a short period of time and it definitely wasn't for swipe i think i was using it for emoji search which by the way is a feature that i don't recall seeing on this list apple it's ridiculous the health app also includes more comprehensive menstrual cycle tracking and i believe there was something else that was more uh woman-oriented which i can't i don't see it here but i think there was something else somewhere in this list
Casey:
And I'm into that.
Casey:
I think that's really awesome.
Casey:
A new feature similar to popular third-party apps, Duet Display and Luna Display, which have they sponsored us?
Casey:
I believe they have.
Casey:
That will let users use their iPad as a second Mac screen with the ability to draw with an Apple Pencil, expand the viewing area, and get Mac notifications.
Casey:
This sounds freaking cool.
Casey:
I am really interested in this.
John:
Yeah, we talked about that on the last show.
John:
I feel kind of bad for the third parties that sort of pioneered in this area, but it is the type of feature that is probably better built into the OS because it's, you know, like multiple monitor support.
John:
You wouldn't want to come from a third party on your Mac.
John:
So similar deal with this.
John:
And if it works well, it will help Apple sell more hardware and it'll be cool.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the problem is, like, for the third-party things to work, it requires, you know, a certain degree of hacking.
Marco:
For instance, like Lunar Display, I'm pretty sure... I should have researched this.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that the hardware dongle that it requires is just like a display emulator.
Marco:
And then they have software on the Mac that interprets the things that should be shown on there and sends them over the network, over Wi-Fi or USB through a different port.
Marco:
If this was done in the OS, like officially supported, you wouldn't need a little dongle to be a hardware emulator.
Marco:
You could save a port then and not rely on like, oh, I forgot my little dongle at home or whatever.
Marco:
Apple's got plenty of ports on their machines.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about that.
Casey:
You're talking to a MacBook adorable owner.
Casey:
Come on, man.
Marco:
I've always been a little hesitant to install or to start relying on hardware that required kernel extensions or similar low-level kind of drivers.
Marco:
My computing happiness is optimized by not doing that.
Marco:
I have a Lunar Display because I backed the Kickstarter.
Marco:
I've never installed it because I keep putting it off because I don't really want to install software.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, they don't care, but I do care about that kind of thing.
Casey:
I actually just last week spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out a way to get my MacBook Adorable and my iPad Pro both working via Luna Display
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But it appears that something in my network somewhere, perhaps an Eero, perhaps the Synology, I don't know what, has decided that I cannot have two simultaneous connections to that VPN from the same NATed network.
Casey:
So I was sitting in a Wegmans trying to get both my iPad and my MacBook Adorable onto my in-home VPN.
Casey:
Couldn't figure it out, which led me down the path of, oh, I'm sure I can install OpenVPN or something like that.
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of.
Casey:
Um, and so I tried doing that and I've been trying to figure out a way to get this, this utopia of having my one and only port in my adorable plugged into the Luna display, which is a little frustrating, but be that as it may.
Casey:
And in my iPad pro all in a hostile wifi environment, all behind the VPN, all working with each other.
Casey:
And it's not particularly, it's not going well.
Casey:
And I think it's a network problem.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
or networking problem.
Casey:
So I would love for this to be first party because anytime I do go and work from like a Wegmans or a coffee shop or a library or what have you, I want to do the two screen dance with my iPad pro, but I don't want to be, I don't want to allow myself to just sit on this unsecured wifi.
Casey:
It just creeps me out.
Casey:
And so I haven't figured out a good solution to this problem and maybe this would help fix it.
Casey:
Who knows?
John:
I vaguely recall an ad in computer magazines or maybe the 80s and the slogan on the page, it was for some kind of network related product, product rather.
John:
The slogan was networking, not working.
John:
Question mark.
John:
And the idea is if your networking is not working, buy this product.
John:
And I can't remember what the product was.
John:
And I did a Google search, and guess what?
John:
A thousand people have used that similar slogan over the years.
John:
I'm never going to find it.
Casey:
Of course.
John:
Networking not working, Casey?
John:
Get out of a Wegmans.
John:
Go back to your house.
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's the thing is that occasionally I want to be somewhere else to help really juice my creativity.
Casey:
Try the library.
Casey:
I did, but it's still a hostile Wi-Fi environment, my friend.
Casey:
Come on, man.
Marco:
Well, the thing is, and if this was a built-in feature of the OS, they wouldn't even have to use Wi-Fi in infrastructure mode.
Marco:
They could actually use peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, like what AirDrop uses between the two devices.
Casey:
Oh, that's very good.
Marco:
And so they could totally bypass the need for both things to be on a solid Wi-Fi connection.
Casey:
That would be extremely cool.
Casey:
Man, I would love that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
An updated Reminders app that better competes with the several to-do list programs available on the App Store.
Casey:
The new app has a main screen with four default sections laid out in a grid.
Casey:
Speaking of seeing screenshots, gentlemen, tasks to be done today, all tasks, scheduled tasks, and flag tasks.
Casey:
Each section has its own different colored page that users can add items to.
Casey:
I don't use the Reminders app very often.
Casey:
I use the app DUE, which I would do, which I was browbeat by Mike Hurley into using, and now I can't live without.
Casey:
But I still think a more robust first-party app that is not a powerful, powerful app, but more powerful than just something super simple.
Casey:
This is the same thing that we went through with Notes.
Casey:
Notes used to be super simple and kind of not that useful.
Casey:
And then suddenly it became very useful when it gained just a little bit more functionality.
Casey:
And that's what I kind of see happening here.
Casey:
And again, I think that sounds good.
Marco:
Yeah, that honestly sounds great.
Marco:
I mean, what they did to Notes, it was fantastic.
Marco:
They took an app that was so basic and outdated that it was the butt of jokes, literally, and they made, to replace it, an incredibly good, versatile, highly featured app that yet is simple and is well-integrated.
Marco:
The current Notes app
Marco:
I would say is one of the best new apps Apple has made in the last decade.
Marco:
Because they haven't made a lot of new apps in that time, and many of them have not been incredibly great.
Marco:
They haven't walked that wonderful line of power versus ease of use versus integration and everything.
Marco:
Notes is one example where they absolutely have.
Marco:
The Notes app is fantastic on all the platforms.
Marco:
It's a pretty good Mac app.
Marco:
It's a great iPad app.
Marco:
It's a great iPhone app.
Marco:
It is wonderful.
Marco:
And they talked about this on Upgrade, I believe, this week, about how Notes didn't kill other Notes apps.
Marco:
No, no, it very much did.
Marco:
When Notes came out, a lot of other Notes apps became...
Marco:
fairly uncompetitive by comparison.
Marco:
It's that good.
Marco:
And so while I don't wish harm upon to-do app makers, to have another great option, if they're giving the Notes treatment to Reminders, which it badly needs, because Reminders is now in a similar state as Notes was before, of like, it's a pretty basic, pretty terrible, incredibly outdated app, and that is not anywhere near competitive with the rest of the market.
Marco:
So for Apple to give some attention to that and to bring it into this generation, this decade, and if they do a good job with that, that's awesome because the market's probably going to be okay because everyone has different needs for to-do apps.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons there's so many of them.
Marco:
But to have a solid first-party option again that isn't the butt of jokes, that is actually a good app, I'm very much looking forward to that.
Marco:
And I think they can do it based on how well they did Notes.
John:
I think notes might have been in a little bit different situation because notes than reminders is because notes was just really, just really bad.
John:
Like there's, there's simple and there's just like, it doesn't even have enough functionality and it didn't like, you know, it doesn't, doesn't do basic stuff that people want, like syncing between all the Mac stuff.
John:
And, you know, like it just, it was falling down on the basics.
John:
So I think it did really affect the market for note apps because once it went from incompetence to competence, then all of a sudden everybody had a competent note app.
John:
and that would hurt things.
John:
Now, I think Reminders is not incompetent, and I think Reminders has an advantage that other
John:
other reminder-type applications might not have is that you can say, hey, dingus, remind me to blah, blah, blah, and it gets added to reminders.
John:
You don't have to learn any weird Siri incantations.
John:
Remind me today in things to blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I use reminders, and not only does it not have a lot of features, but the features that it does have are frustratingly hidden behind sort of an
John:
an ios 4 style interface like i just i so want to be able to do what i do in like google like no matter how i type a reminder like sometimes i'll be typing a reminder in ios because i don't want to talk out loud or whatever and i'll just type like 1 p.m haircut and i'll just see it makes a reminder called 1 p.m haircut and i'll just be like come on apple come on the worst is sometimes i get the implementation like haircut at 1 p.m or something like that
John:
And it sets it to 1 p.m., but still leaves 1 p.m.
John:
in the title of the reminder.
John:
And you know I have to go edit that out.
John:
You pulled it out.
John:
You extracted it.
John:
You correctly surmised that I meant today at 1 p.m.
John:
And you made the time in the thing, but you didn't take it out of the title.
John:
That's terrible.
John:
And then the final thing is...
John:
if you actually have to manually set up the date and the time, because it's, you know, it's complicated using their date picker, like the little I for info, you know, remind me on a day going through the time.
John:
And there's just so many different controls and it's so just barbaric.
John:
Right.
John:
But all that said, I think,
John:
It does do reminders.
John:
They actually work.
John:
They have always more or less, you know, sync between systems like it.
John:
It's very basic, but it's easy to figure out.
John:
And when you say remind me, it does it.
John:
So I'm thinking that them making reminders more sophisticated.
John:
is not going to take reminders from incompetence to competence it's going to take it from borderline competence to into the realm of all the other reminder apps which is oh well this isn't how i want reminders to work because the current thing is like who can argue with it it's like a vertical list of little things and it's so simple that's like well it's not fancy but whatever but as soon as you start adding features to it now you're making a choice and in the reminder to do app space like those choices people like i don't want it arranged this way i don't want to see today and to
John:
whatever just bring back my regular list of reminders and off you are into the wild west of reminder applications and to do applications where you have a million different options so i think it will be less impactful than notes uh for that reason um and i think it might even be more controversial because i think a lot of people do like the reminders app for its simplicity and if the main screen is now like four panes that might be confusing to people people might go and seek out a simpler reminders app
John:
which would be a hell of a thing.
John:
But anyway, I commend Apple for improving its built-in applications.
John:
I hope I end up liking it because I use Reminders rarely, but often enough that I do want to have a Reminders app.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fracture, who prints photos in vivid color onto glass.
Marco:
Visit fractureme.com slash ATP for a special discount on your first order.
Marco:
Almost all of us take and share photos.
Marco:
But most of those photos just end up in online social feeds, and they're there for like two seconds, and they fall off the timeline, and you never see them again.
Marco:
Very few of those photos end up getting printed or put on display to enjoy.
Marco:
Focus on the moments that mean the most in your life by turning your favorite digital memories into actual photos that are printed that you can hang on the wall or put on your desk.
Marco:
Fracture is the best way to do this.
Marco:
Fracture prints are beautiful.
Marco:
They go edge to edge.
Marco:
It is literally printed on the rear surface of a piece of glass and it shines through the front.
Marco:
And so it looks like just like a square or a rectangle of just the image.
Marco:
It goes edge to edge.
Marco:
There's no like...
Marco:
added padding or anything like that, and they're very thin, so they're very close to the wall.
Marco:
It's just an edge-to-edge print.
Marco:
You don't put a frame around them or anything.
Marco:
You don't need it.
Marco:
They're their own objects, and they fit into any decor.
Marco:
They look fantastic.
Marco:
They make your photos look fantastic, and they can really fit in no matter where you want to put them.
Marco:
And whether it's for you or somebody else, they make fantastic gifts as well.
Marco:
We have fracture prints all over our house, and people come with them all the time.
Marco:
We also give them as gifts, and people love those too.
Marco:
So for whatever occasion you might want to celebrate, any kind of holidays or birthdays or anything else, fracture prints are amazing gifts for friends and family.
Marco:
And Fracture's a great company, too.
Marco:
These are all handmade in the U.S., in Gainesville, Florida, from U.S.
Marco:
source materials.
Marco:
They have a green company operating a carbon-neutral factory, and they are just wonderful to work with.
Marco:
So check out Fracture today at FractureMe.com slash ATP.
Marco:
and you can get a discount on your first Fracture order.
Marco:
They will ask you where you came from in a survey after checkout.
Marco:
Just make sure to tell them you came from ATP.
Marco:
So once again, FractureMe.com slash ATP for a special discount on your first order.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Fracture for making awesome photo prints and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
A new feature in screen time, Apple's tool for controlling device usage will let parents limit who their kids can and cannot contact at certain times.
Casey:
For example, a parent could make it so their kid can't contact anyone but them during the evenings.
Casey:
I am not in a position where I have turned on like screen time or parental controls or anything like that on any device that the kids would use because they're too young to really know what to do with them.
Casey:
But that being said, this does strike me as a really cool idea and a really good idea.
Casey:
If you're the kind of parent that wants to do that sort of thing, which I very well may be in my future, I think that's awesome to limit the kids so they don't stay up until 3 in the morning sending texts back and forth with their friends or something like that.
Casey:
So this sounds cool.
John:
Yeah, that's the this is a good idea because I do I do use this feature on my kids devices.
John:
And like my main usage of it is to shut everything down after a certain part of night, but to exclude all the applications that I think they might need sort of in an emergency.
John:
So they need like maps and they need phone and they need message and they need like all you know, you want to give them access like those are never banned.
John:
You can always use those applications.
John:
But, as you said, Casey, messages.
John:
Well, you want them to be able to message you, but if you say messages will never be banned, yes, they can text their friends all night long, right?
John:
So being able to say messages, the app isn't banned, but whitelist just these contacts is a welcome change to ensure that your kids can...
John:
you know do what they need to do with their phone if they find themselves stranded somewhere in an emergency while still basically making it so you have you know like i think we talked about this when screen time came out like
John:
It's not that you're delegating parenting to the thing.
John:
You still have to do parenting yourself, but it makes the confrontation a lot easier when the impersonal machine is the thing that's turning things off.
John:
Surprisingly, you would think it would make them angrier, but I think it just works out better.
John:
A, you can't forget to do it, and B...
John:
I think my kids anyway, accept it more as just a thing that happens in the world when it's not you saying, okay, it's X o'clock, no more texting.
John:
If the phone just does it, it, you know, I don't know.
John:
It's working out better for me anyway.
John:
So I'm going to use this feature when it comes out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
iMessage gets – oh, God, I forgot about this one.
Casey:
We talked about this on the forthcoming episode of Analog.
Casey:
If you'd like to hear more thoughts about this and you'll understand why I'm sighing momentarily.
Casey:
iMessage gets an upgrade with a WhatsApp-like enhancement that lets people set a profile picture and display name and choose who sees it.
Casey:
Super.
Casey:
There's also a dedicated menu in the conversation view to send sticker versions of Animojis, the virtual characters that users can control with the latest iPhone and iPad cameras, and Memojis, which are virtual representations of the users themselves.
Casey:
So, cool.
Casey:
Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
John:
I see.
John:
I'm not sure what you said in the analog episode, but I don't think this is as bad as you might think for your thing, because this is just talking about...
John:
the image that you present to the public through messages.
John:
Now, you might be thinking like, well, why is that a separate thing at all?
John:
I've often thought this because it works for my worldview, but I understand why it's not a feature.
John:
It's like...
John:
Apple's products very often prompt you in various ways to take a picture of yourself, to be associated with your contact that is yourself, your me contact or whatever.
John:
And once you do that, while you're setting up your Mac, it'll turn on your camera and do it, or you can pick a picture like...
John:
If everyone just did that for themselves, we wouldn't need an app like yours, Casey, because you could sync everyone's picture of themselves every time they talk to you, like it's a picture associated with your Apple ID.
John:
And that way, when you communicate with anybody over iMessage and they have an Apple ID, if you're communicating with them over iMessage, you can use their picture.
John:
But that's not how the world works.
John:
People don't always want their picture of themselves to be seen by everybody.
John:
So having a separate avatar or whatever for just for the messaging service
John:
is a thing that is so entrenched that it makes some kind of sense.
John:
But all that said, people like I have like my Skype icon is like link.
John:
I think my aim icon was a little link icon and stuff like that.
John:
That's not my contact picture.
John:
But an app like yours, even if people set their iMessage avatar picture to something,
John:
I might not want their iMessage avatar as the thing associated with their contacts.
John:
So I'm still in the same position where I want nice pictures associated to all my contacts.
John:
And I want to see those instead of the one that they set.
John:
And I hope that's an option to say, don't use, you know, if I have a contact picture set for this person, don't use whatever they said as their iMessage avatar thing.
John:
Use my picture instead.
John:
Like it's, it starts to get complicated allowing for this, you know, sort of dual face to the world.
John:
But I understand that's the thing that people want.
John:
I just hope I have the ability on my phone to see the pictures I want to see, and I would still use your application or similar to populate my contact pictures with nice pictures of people that remind me what the heck they look like and isn't just a picture of their favorite cartoon character.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's largely what the forthcoming episode of Analog discussed, was that, hey, this may not be as terrible as it seemed at first glance.
Casey:
But, man, I was really kind of depressed on Monday or whatever day it was that this came out because I –
Casey:
A quick app update.
Casey:
I'm getting pretty darn close, and I'm feeling actually fairly proud of it.
Casey:
I'm scared of a lot of things, as previously discussed, but I'm mostly proud of it.
Casey:
And so I'm really feeling, or was anyway, really feeling like the wind was taken out of my sails by this.
Casey:
So hopefully it'll be an issue.
Casey:
Otherwise, I'm sure...
Casey:
Everyone who loved making fun of my feet in my icon, I'm sure you will have plenty of ammunition now if I get Sherlocked within days or perhaps even before having released my app.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Apple's combining the Find My Friends and Find My iPhone services into a new single app internally known as Green Torch.
Casey:
This could go along with a physical beacon to attach to non-Apple devices like a backpack according to 9to5Mac.
Casey:
I don't really have any issue with the way Find My Friends and Find My iPhone works right now, but I think it was on upgrade, but it wasn't the most recent one.
Casey:
I think it was a week or two back that Jason had made the really good point that there are occasions when, say, one of either his wife's or his children's devices is in one place, but one of their other devices is in another place.
John:
That was me on this program.
Casey:
Was it?
Casey:
No, I thought that was Jason.
Yeah.
John:
You probably made the same point.
John:
It's an obvious point, but we discussed this feature in the past, and I made that point.
John:
And I think both of you will eventually be in that situation, because right now your kid's
John:
They have iOS devices that they use, but it's not quite the same.
John:
Eventually, if your kids get to – when they get older, they're wearing a hand-me-down Apple Watch, but they leave their phone at home, yada, yada, yada.
John:
So I think you will find the utility of this eventually.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The built-in mail app will be updated with the ability to mute individual threads, block incoming email from certain contacts, and will have simpler folder management.
Casey:
I am not really one to talk about this because I use the built-in mail app and I think it's just fine.
Casey:
I happen to think that if you need, well, for me anyway, I don't like relying on these kind of like snooze and other sorts of weird email features that typically were never first party.
Casey:
I would probably be more apt to use those sorts of things if it was first party.
Casey:
But then again, if I ever like use the Gmail web interface, then what happens?
Casey:
So,
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This doesn't really do much for me, but I know that some of our mutual friends, like Mike Hurley, for example, who loves to change email apps as frequently as he changes his underwear.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Is it pants?
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, he will, I'm sure, quite like this.
Marco:
See, this a little bit scares me or a little bit intrigues me.
Marco:
If you look at the first two things, the ability to mute threads and to block email from certain contacts is
Marco:
that is not very useful if it's only on your phone version of the mail app.
Marco:
And so it brings the question, well, is it going to sync?
Marco:
Are they going to sync this with iCloud maybe between all of your instances of your mail clients?
Marco:
And then what about the Mac?
Yeah.
Marco:
you know is so i think if they're going to be putting significant effort into the mail app on the phone maybe this is the year when mail on the mac gets updated possibly via marzipan that would be a pretty big deal mail on the mac is a huge and very important and very complicated app so to replace it
Marco:
with a marzipan version or with any kind of significant rewrite is a pretty big job um i have heard rumblings here and there i think other podcasts that the that there is a male rewrite underway uh but i i don't know anything more about it than those rumblings uh so i don't know if i don't know if this is the right time for that or if it's even happening but
Marco:
the idea that mail could be getting significant attention would be very intriguing and very interesting because I too am a user of the Apple Mail app and I pretty much always have been since I switched to Macs like I briefly used Thunderbird when I was you know back in a mixed PC and Mac environment and now I'm all mail and it's great so I would love for this kind of thing but
Marco:
historically the updates to mail on iOS have been very minimal and on the Mac have been not only minimal but also like breaking like every other Mac OS release that breaks Gmail integration or something.
Marco:
So anyway, to have a major new mail app would be very interesting and I kind of hope it happens but I'm a little scared that they might do it badly or incompletely.
Marco:
And then the last part of this, the end of the sentence says, and we'll have simpler folder management.
Marco:
Simpler, with modern Apple doing it, sounds a lot like feature deletion.
Marco:
I don't want Apple to make certain things simpler.
Marco:
Things I use, it's almost like Apple has taken the thing you love and made it thinner.
Marco:
Well, what did that cost me?
Marco:
That's no longer a pure benefit thing.
Marco:
That has a cost.
Marco:
What did I lose?
Marco:
What am I now paying more for?
Marco:
What did I lose?
Marco:
And what is now worse by then making it thinner?
Marco:
You can say the exact same thing about simpler.
Marco:
If something has been made simpler, that probably means it's been rewritten and is more limited than it was before.
Marco:
And so if it will have simpler folder management, what exactly does that mean?
Marco:
I'm guessing that's not what people want in a mail app.
Marco:
Because if you think about the kind of users who use mail apps these days, what modern usage tends to be, you have the Gmail crowd, which is substantial, who largely don't use folders at all or use tags or whatever else.
Marco:
But most of the method for Gmail users is just archive everything and use search.
Marco:
And by the way, search in iOS mail is terrible and needs to be a lot better.
Marco:
And any major update to mail on iOS, I would hope would address search first before anything else.
Marco:
So you have search, and for search people, folders don't really matter.
Marco:
Apple can do whatever they want with folders, and those search people usually won't see the folders, so it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
No one's asking them to make that simpler.
Marco:
And for folders users, like I actually use folders, not extensively.
Marco:
I mostly throw everything into one big archive, but I have a couple folders I use also.
Marco:
For folders users, you probably don't want things to be made simpler.
Marco:
You probably are fine the way things are because it is already quite simple.
Marco:
It is a basic hierarchy of folders.
Marco:
it's kind of hard to make it simpler without losing critical functionality of like, can folders no longer be nested?
Marco:
Or can you still even make arbitrary numbers of folders?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
So yeah, in this context, simpler folder management, I consider a bit of a red flag.
John:
always kind of amazed at how many people use the apple mail app on ios because i always found it so under featured and so basic that it doesn't even come close to so i mean i'm a gmail person so gmail has all sorts of features and things but uh that's why i think any any story about them improving the ios app by adding features is good because it needs more features than it has it is it's very uh basic compared bones it has its strengths um
John:
In particular, the basic stuff like it's supporting dynamic type or whatever that feature is.
John:
I noticed that my mother, who has bad vision, uses different applications.
John:
Entire popular categories of applications or manufacturers of applications are just out because they don't allow her to make the text as big as she wants to make it.
John:
And Apple Mail, for all its simplicity and faults, does.
John:
It looks terrible, but when you make the text big, you can make the text really big.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I'm glad they're adding features to it.
John:
You mentioned the two features that potentially could be implemented, quote unquote, client side.
John:
Like you could mute things and you could have blocking and all sorts of stuff.
John:
And that could just happen in the app.
John:
I remember the bad old world before I went Gmail.
John:
I mean, it wasn't bad.
John:
I love some of the applications I use, but I had this struggle.
John:
I'm a big mail rules and mail filter type user.
John:
I would set up a bunch of mail rules for IMAP or POP or whatever for my 700 email accounts, and I'd set it up in Entourage or Outlook Express or whatever Mac client that I was using at the time.
John:
And then I would also get email one minute work.
John:
And especially if there was an IMAP backend behind them, if the work Mac didn't file stuff, the home Mac would never get a chance to file stuff.
John:
Or if you were doing pop, they need to be filed in both places and it wouldn't be reflected.
John:
And so you had to constantly try to like, make sure I have the same mail rules set up on my home Mac and my work Mac.
John:
Like doing things client side was a nightmare.
John:
But today in the world we live in today, when you said, what are they going to do?
John:
Sync the stuff between, I think that's the, that's the minimum bar.
John:
Any application, uh,
John:
that that you make that there's a mac version and ios version or whatever that has any kind of things like that even just preferences but maybe you can set it aside but things like mail rules absolutely all that stuff should sync like apple has their own you know in-house apis for all that type of stuff that's the whole point of having an app in both places not so you can maintain two entirely separate sets of rules with preferences it gets a little weird but sometimes you want different preferences but at least that should be the option so
John:
if i encounter an application that is on multiple apple platforms but has no way to synchronize any you know settings or rules between them that's terrible and so i really hope uh if and when they enhance the ios version of mail and replace the mac version of mail that the minimum bar is oh yeah and of course any kind of
John:
rules or muting or whatever sort of stuff we do client side of course that syncs instantly between all your copies of mail because it really doesn't make much sense to have different mail rules for the same mail back end like if you're using imap or something and if you get the mail on one client it sorts into one folder and if you get the mail on it like it doesn't make any sense it absolutely has to sync so i really hope that's what they're doing the mac version of mail is
John:
Not as simple, let's say, as the iOS version.
John:
I'm not sure it needs a bunch more features, but it sure is kind of old and crufty.
John:
And so I feel like at this point...
John:
The Apple Mail application on the Mac is about to get the iPhoto to Photos transition, where it's going to be a new application, and you might be excited until you see all the stuff that you used to be able to do in the old version that you can't do anymore.
John:
I think that's coming for Mail, and it's probably overdue, but I think a lot of Apple Mail users are going to be sad.
John:
But I'll be fine because I use Gmail, and I stay the hell away from Apple's Mail apps.
Okay.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just don't need much of my mail app, and I have eventually succumbed to the Marco approach of email, which is read everything.
Casey:
Well, I don't know if you read everything, but I read everything and ignore almost all of it.
Marco:
I mean, email is really a self-solving problem.
Marco:
If you just don't answer emails, usually the need for them goes away in a couple of weeks at most.
Casey:
It's very true.
Casey:
I still haven't quite shaken the guilt associated with that, though.
Casey:
I need to take a lesson in that.
Marco:
Just set it down and walk away.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Apple's also planning to let HomePod speakers respond to different users' voices, creating a much requested multi-user mode.
Casey:
I still do not have a HomePod in the house, although I'm sure if I did or two or like the TG8, then I'm sure I would like this.
Casey:
But I don't know, since I don't have any of these, it's not really doing much for me.
Casey:
Now, both of you guys have one, right?
John:
Google Home has this multi-voice thing, and I remember when it came out, I think I had my daughter add her voice to it because she was the other person who talked to the thing at that point.
John:
And by the way, speaking of home-cylindary things that you talk to, because I pay for whatever the maximum amount of storage that Google will sell you for their Google Drive thing,
John:
They sent a promotion presumably to all people who pay for this amount and said, hey, do you want a free Google Home Mini shipping included?
John:
And I said, yes.
John:
So they sent me a free one.
John:
It's like, because you subscribe to our two terabyte plan and we're overcharging you for it, we'll just give you this for free.
John:
So we got one for free and we put it in my daughter's room because she asks the weather every morning so she knows how to get dressed or whatever.
John:
And I recalled that like, oh, we did that thing a while ago where we trained it to know your voice.
John:
But because these cylinder things are just like faceless, like I was struck sitting there like, does it know your voice?
John:
How do you teach it another voice?
John:
What features are available with the voice?
John:
And
John:
You know, in the end, we just didn't do anything because she mostly just asked the weather and it's probably fine.
John:
But what I would have liked to say is, do you recognize my voice?
John:
Who am I?
John:
Can I add another voice?
John:
Like, again, every time this topic comes up, I want to have a very basic, simple conversation with where it understands something about the meaning of what I'm saying so we can go back and forth and arrive at a solution.
John:
Instead, I probably have to remember whatever incantation is.
John:
is required like for example if my daughter said do i have any new email not that she would ever say that because she does not check her email ever ever ever neither do any young children emails for old people um i would hope that it would know that it's her voice and know what email address is associated with her maybe that information is in there
John:
But I don't know how to verify that.
John:
I don't know how to access it.
John:
And I feel like the same challenge is going to be presented with a HomePod.
John:
Great.
John:
So you can distinguish voices.
John:
What does that mean practically for the user?
John:
And how do they get visibility into what HomePod thinks of the world?
John:
Like, does it recognize you as a separate person?
John:
Does it know what things are associated with you?
John:
If you have an Apple Music subscription but someone else doesn't, if you ask for a song, will it play it for you but the other person, it won't?
John:
Like...
John:
in this place where there's no screen and where sort of the thing inside the cylinder is just this sort of very terse monk that mostly just hits you with a bamboo switch on the back of your hand and and doesn't really give you much it's such a mystery what's going on in there um so for now i i assume mostly what i'll continue to do with my home pod is ask it to turn my lights on and off but uh
John:
I'm glad that they're getting multi-voice support because that's the first step towards it having a better understanding of what's actually going on around it.
John:
oh goodness all right uh more organized share sheet interface for sharing photos and web links the software will suggest people to send content to based on how frequently you interact with them cool what does more organized mean i mean it's not organized now you can drag the things around and sometimes it remembers what position you drag them to like what i what i thought they were going to say when it said how freak based on how frequently it's talking about like the airdrop contacts and blah blah blah i thought it already did that first of all but second of all
John:
A clever way to do the share sheet thing would be to have a mode where it starts bubbling up the ones you use more frequently.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not great because then things will move around and it's not as predictable.
John:
But I think the number the percentage of users that that actually rearrange their share icons is very, very low.
John:
I do, you know, but even though I try to do it in every single app and arrange the things just so I want, every once in a while, like a new share icon will appear because it's a new feature and I'll forget and it'll start pushing off my frequently used ones to the right and I'll realize I keep scrolling to the right to get to the copy link thing.
John:
I should move that.
John:
But I don't.
John:
I get lazy, so...
John:
I might even activate the mode that says just bubble up the ones I frequently use.
John:
I'll hunt for them every time because at this point, because the – is it per app?
John:
I don't know what it is.
John:
Is it per app?
John:
Is it per share sheet?
John:
Is it per data type?
John:
You have to arrange them multiple times in multiple places, and it gets a little bit tedious.
John:
So I would be all for arranging based on frequency of use.
John:
But that's not what they're talking about unless that's what more organized means.
Casey:
Yeah, who knows?
Casey:
The company is testing a downloads manager for its Safari web browser so users can access downloads in a single place like they can on a computer.
Casey:
An updated files app will work better with third-party software.
Casey:
Man, I am all in on improvements to the files app.
Casey:
Like the Safari download manager, yeah, I guess that's cool.
John:
Well, but I don't think you can skip over the downloader manager because the idea of downloading anything in Safari on iOS is like downloading it to where?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Where is it downloading it to?
John:
You can't download anywhere.
John:
Oh, maybe I can download to the Files app, which might actually be worth a damn in this version of the OS.
John:
Oh, that would be amazing.
John:
Because seriously, though, like, if they had a download manager, what would it show?
John:
Like, that you... It's very confusing to me.
John:
Like, what...
John:
Have you ever downloaded anything in Safari on iOS?
John:
As in, actually downloaded, not just displayed in a webpage that allowed you to play audio or video?
Casey:
No.
Marco:
I wouldn't download things mostly because I don't have anything to do with them in my iOS workflow.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
If I was doing all my work on iOS and I had a bunch of different tools to do various things, yeah, that might make some sense.
Marco:
I'm sure our friends, the iPad Power users, I'm sure would love this kind of thing.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't think most iPad users would use this because there's a huge question of like, where does the file go and why am I downloading it in the first place?
John:
And what people would expect in a download manager is finally when I...
John:
tap on something that safari can't display in ios whatever it is it's a zip file to whatever it would ask me hey where on your phone do you want me to put this and you'd have some kind of file hierarchy that would let you put stuff there and and that exists on the phone like that you could even if it just showed you the iCloud folders there's folders per file type there's folders per apps like there's places to put stuff but safari doesn't like there's no open save dialogue on ios and so with the interaction of a download manager i hope this is part and parcel to the entire like
John:
hopefully, revolution of file management in iOS, where finally they will allow some semblance of file system access in some controlled way in any application that wants it.
Marco:
I would hope so, but where do you even...
Marco:
I think on the Mac it makes more sense because the environment that you are using all the time, like the home screen of the Mac is the desktop and the dock which has the downloads folder right in it.
Marco:
The folders and folder locations on disk are integrated into the UI of everything you're doing on the Mac.
Marco:
Whereas in iOS, there is no desktop on iOS.
Marco:
Maybe that's the new feature of iOS 13.
Marco:
The desktop, you can litter this with files now.
John:
You're joking there, but we already talked about the iCloud folders.
John:
There are places in iCloud to put stuff, but
John:
You do actually need some representation in the UI of iOS of local only storage.
John:
Because, I mean, we're all talking about like, oh, if I plug in a USB thing or an SD card or whatever, like some large amount of storage.
John:
If your only option is put this into iCloud Drive, A, you're going to run out of iCloud space or Dropbox or whatever.
John:
Pick your cloud service.
John:
You'll run out of space.
John:
And B...
John:
what if you don't want to upload that 17 gig video file to a cloud service you just want to edit it on your ipad there has to be the concept of local storage and how you represent that in the sort of the files interface from the perspective of the application that's a difficult problem it could just be a free-for-all like the you know the mac file system is but apple's been fighting that so hard that i feel like they're
John:
They're not going to give up in its entirety.
John:
But that distinction is important.
John:
And it's important enough to surface in the UI.
John:
I think Apple has been for too long chasing the dream of transparent network storage where you don't have to worry about whether it's cloud or not.
John:
But you do.
John:
You do have to worry, especially with the prices Apple charges and the meager amount they give you.
John:
You absolutely have to worry.
John:
only you know the only company that could chase that is something somebody like google where they do like their photos like never run out of room because we'll accept your photos forever at a reduced quality because we recompress them but whatever like from a user perspective they can they can wave their hand and say oh it's fine and we you know we won't upload it if you're on and sell like they can make all the decisions for you and you never run out of space and it's weird and slow but it's it's transparent but apple is not following that path at all so apple has to distinguish cloud dropbox
John:
one drive google drive whatever and local and local with especially with the ipad pros is becoming increasingly important and so i hope really hope they have a representation and a clear distinction in the ui of what is local storage versus what is cloud yeah because it's one of those things like in like using old uh joel on software parlance it's a leaky abstraction
Marco:
Any kind of network file-based operation that you're trying to make appear local, that you're syncing to a network, you're syncing between computers via a network like Dropbox, it's a leaky abstraction because network conditions make everything complicated.
Marco:
And so, you know, you try to, like Apple would try to design things that appear very simple and work very simply to you and expose no controls to you and tell you no errors or anything.
Marco:
Like, just make it perfect and make it appear everywhere.
Marco:
But the reality is,
Marco:
it's really complicated.
Marco:
And there's all these complicated conditions that you can't paper over all the time.
Marco:
And you have to have some kind of UI for things like conflict resolution or error dialogues or trying to fix sync problems like re-syncing or force-syncing or pausing sync.
Marco:
There's all these things.
Marco:
And Apple has...
Marco:
mostly not been very good about dealing with that complexity from the user's perspective like they instead like it seems like the way they usually deal with it is fail silently and leave no error message anywhere leave nothing for the user to possibly do to control or fix or diagnose a problem and just tell people to like you know restore their phones if something goes wrong and and i hope they're getting better at that over time i think they might be
John:
Speaking of that, a brief aside, I finally have convinced my son to use Xcode instead of the terrible web application to do his Swift programming for his class in school.
John:
So now he's in Xcode, and he's constantly asking me a question about Xcode, and I have no idea how Xcode works.
John:
I know what features must exist, but I have no idea where they are.
Casey:
If only you knew two people who live and breathe it every single day.
Marco:
By the way, how are you not knowing about my favorite bit of wonderfulness in Xcode?
Marco:
It's the only app I've ever seen that assigns a really important action to right dragging.
John:
Right dragging.
John:
I can't get him to use the arrow keys.
John:
We're starting very... He's someone who did not grow up with personal computers, so he has no idea what he's doing.
John:
And he doesn't know what a debugger is, and so on and so forth.
John:
Anyway, setting that aside, he's been encountering issues.
John:
He'll go over to the computer and he will...
John:
I haven't seen him do it.
John:
I'm assuming he's double-clicking on the .xcode prod whatever file, but honestly, I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, what happens is Xcode launches, and he gets a spinner and then a beach ball, and then he comes and gets me.
John:
He finds me in the house and says, I'm trying to launch Xcode, and it's just sitting there.
John:
uh and like the first time it happened i'm like i don't know reboot whatever um but then it kept happening uh and i was like well why don't you just reboot it worked last time i was like actually it didn't last time i rebooted the whole computer and he said last time i rebooted and it's still beach balled i'm like
John:
when you say reboot he didn't mean reboot he meant he logged out so anyway i showed him what actual reboot is and then then i said oh it must be working now but then he came back and said no the reboot didn't fix it so basically every time he launches his xcode project he gets a beach ball i'm like well then if it didn't work last time you didn't come back and find me so how did you resolve that and he's like well eventually the beach ball went away after like 20 minutes which is typical teenage exaggeration like 20 seconds right
John:
yeah i so i tried it myself i launched his project on a freshly restarted 5k imac in xcode and sure enough the xcode window comes up a little uh indeterminate progress spinner goes in the window and then a couple seconds later we get the good old beach ball cursor and it's spent a while on that beach ball cursor and the reason this is relevant to this topic is you know what i thought of immediately i bet when we set up his account i foolishly enabled uh sync documents on the desktop document folder and desktop into icloud oh
John:
And I bet what's happening is these three freaking text files that constitute his Swift program that whatever the iCloud thing syncing them is having some sort of weird... He's never accessed them from another computer, right?
John:
And so I was like, I got to turn that feature off.
John:
But then I was terrified.
John:
I'm like, I can't turn that feature off because if I do, it's going to erase all of his files and I don't know what the hell to do.
John:
So...
John:
He's in this weird situation where he can never quit Xcode each time you launch it.
John:
And it's a while.
John:
It's not 20 minutes, but it's more than a minute.
John:
I have no idea what it's doing during that minute.
John:
This computer is connected to Ethernet.
John:
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
John:
But I wondered if you had any ideas besides deleting everything in my derived data folder.
Casey:
That is the one cure-all.
Casey:
That will fix all of your problems.
John:
There's literally four Swift files that are each a page long.
John:
This is not a sophisticated program.
John:
There is no UI.
John:
I mean, I think he imports foundation, but that's it.
Marco:
I mean, you wouldn't be the first person to have performance problems with Xcode using Swift.
John:
It's just launching it.
John:
You've got to the point where Swift doesn't even appear on the screen yet.
John:
It's just an empty window.
John:
It's trying to render it.
John:
it's it's all that syntactic complexity it's having trouble highlighting it such a cool project though i'm so jealous because i didn't have any literally any programming classes at all when i was in high school because i'm old um but his project is like uh it's like a game design class and they're doing like tank warfare and so there's you have to make a tank game with tanks on a grid and it's like rendered in ascii art like the grid is rendered with hyphens and stuff oh that's awesome thanks
John:
Tanks can shoot at each other, whatever.
John:
And it's a contest.
John:
So you do you do the game as the assignment, but then they have a battle at the end where you program your tank as like a class or something with rules about how it's supposed to battle.
John:
And then they I'm assuming they just copy and paste everybody's classes into one big project and run all the tanks against each other.
John:
That's fantastic.
Casey:
That is super cool.
Marco:
It'd be a lot less fun if it was in watchOS and the tanks would get killed after using two seconds of CPU usage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
He was asking me, how do I use machine learning to hone my tank strategy?
John:
I'm like, that is the thing that's possible.
John:
But you should probably start with just the basics.
John:
He wants to go for... He knows machine learning is a thing and he knows it might help him make his tank better, but he's at the point where...
John:
you know just learning the very basics of programming like conditionals and loops and functions and classes and structures and you know you can get surprisingly far without actually knowing anything which we all know from when we were beginning programmers like you can actually get pretty far without having any idea how like you know say structures actually work or knowing anything about you those whole sections of language that he has no idea about but like autocomplete saves him
John:
I already gave him the old man speech about that.
John:
I had to type my variables out.
John:
I couldn't autocomplete.
John:
How is that API spelled?
John:
I had to look it up in a book on paper.
John:
Like an animal.
John:
That's right.
John:
Everything is autocompleting.
John:
So spoiled, these children.
Casey:
I've made this speech before on this very program, but it's been a while.
Casey:
One of the funniest things about being a longtime Microsoft person is that when –
Casey:
I can't remember instances when it happened other than the occasional times I had the opportunity to watch a Microsoft person.
Casey:
And by that, I mean, somebody who's cut their teeth on like Microsoft Visual Studio jump into Xcode.
Casey:
And especially it's actually gotten the autocomplete has gotten pretty good in the last couple of versions of Xcode.
Casey:
But up until the last couple of versions, it was a disaster.
Casey:
and watching a Microsoft, like a C Sharp developer, try to get by an Xcode where there was no real autocomplete.
Casey:
That's how you write C Sharp.
Casey:
You just keep figuring things out by autocomplete and eventually you'll come up with something good.
Marco:
I never learned C Sharp.
Marco:
All I knew was if you started by typing system dot, you would be able to do everything.
Marco:
So I just type system dot and then I get a pop-up menu.
Marco:
Oh, I want, I don't know, how about IO?
Marco:
All right, dot.
Marco:
And then you just keep going until you find what you want.
Marco:
It basically is writing your code for you.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Basically.
Casey:
Anyway.
John:
I think Xcode's autocomplete is really good now because I'm watching him use it.
John:
It is.
John:
You know, they got rid of the things of like constantly giving you the alphabetical first one, even though you never want that one.
John:
What was the canonical example of that?
John:
I forget.
John:
It was like NS string versus NS.
John:
What was the...
Casey:
Stream?
John:
Yeah, I think that was it.
John:
Yeah, but it's alphabetically first.
John:
But anyway, that's all fixed, and it's fast, and he rides that autocomplete.
John:
That's how he gets anything done, because he doesn't know what these APIs are.
John:
For the arguments, half the time it's like, you watch kids and adults dismiss dialogue boxes without ever reading them.
John:
I feel like he autocompletes APIs without ever reading what they are.
John:
Yep, that's fine.
John:
No, whatever.
John:
You have to read what it says.
John:
If you actually wanted to subtract them, it said add.
John:
That makes a difference in your code.
John:
Anyway, he's learning.
Marco:
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Casey:
Finally rounding out the iOS section, the iPad is getting some unique features including an updated interface for multitasking, no details, tweaks to the home screen, no details, and the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app, no details.
John:
There were details in somebody's story.
John:
I forget which person's story these bullet points are from, but the story I read today had some more details, like about what is the tweaked home screen and what are the multitasking features, but it wasn't much more than like, you know,
John:
the home screen will basically look the same but have a few more places where you can customize stuff and the multitasking was like maybe the ability to juggle more apps at once and like it's still vague but i feel like more information is coming out about this kind of like the multiple window panel thing like it's less vague than it was before but it's still vague enough that their butts are covered if they show anything remotely related to windows but it kind of sounds like i'm not getting my desktop on my ipad huh
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
Stranger things have happened.
John:
Did you see the mock-up?
John:
A bunch of people had mock-ups.
John:
I already have a doc.
John:
Yeah, mock-ups of things that they would like in iOS, and one of them had Finder for iPad.
John:
And silly things like that, like the desktop on your iPad or Finder for iPad, what makes them silly or not is entirely dependent on how much sort of goodwill and marketing cachet Apple believes a particular word has.
John:
Because you can take almost anything you do to Springboard or anything you do to files or whatever and apply that label to it.
John:
So say iOS 13 has local storage to distinguish from remote storage and it's like a first-class citizen and the UI is built around it.
John:
If Apple thinks, if Apple's marketing department thinks that people like their desktops and have a good association with that word, it would be like, your desktop on iOS.
John:
And they could even sync the same contents from your Mac, you know, cloud desktop sync thing that I was just talking about.
John:
If they don't, they won't call it desktop.
John:
Same thing with the Finder.
John:
If they change the files application and greatly enhance it and make it better...
John:
and they think Finder has cache, it doesn't.
John:
But if they think Finder has cache, the marketing people think, they could say, now iOS has the Finder, and we would all cheer.
John:
But in reality, the only person who has any good feelings associated with that name is me and 10 other old people, so they're not going to do that.
John:
But that type of approach of taking a thing that really has no connection to the desktop or...
John:
the finder but it's like kind of performs a similar function in spirit and just applying a beloved name to it is totally a thing apple has done and would do so i wouldn't put desktop on ios past the marco your dream could come true one day maybe the thing that really bumps me out about this is that i have not heard any real commentary about the files app getting access to like sd cards and stuff like that because one thing i would all anyone wants
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm serious.
Casey:
All I want in the world is to be able to sit on the couch with an SD card plugged into my USB-C port and go through the pictures on my SD card and decide, oh, I want this one, I don't want this one, I don't want this one, I do want that one.
Casey:
And take care of them on the couch instead of like up here on my iMac.
Casey:
It would be so wonderful.
Casey:
And I can imagine that there would be plenty of amazing apps that would assist with that process.
Casey:
Like a friend of mine wrote an app.
Casey:
I believe it's called Best Photos.
Casey:
I'll try to link it in the show notes.
Casey:
That would be perfect for doing this kind of thing.
Casey:
And I, I would love to be able to do that on my iPad, but if I don't have, well, not me, but you know, if, if developers don't have file system access, it's a non-starter.
Casey:
So I am going to be, you know, John, you're going to be inconsolable if there's no mention of the Mac pro.
Casey:
And of course I'll be cackling, but you'll be inconsolable.
Casey:
I won't be inconsolable if I don't get file system access in like files or something or an API or something like that, but I'm going to be really fricking annoyed.
Marco:
Yeah, and I hope it's done in a... If they do this, I hope they do this in a general-purpose way.
Marco:
We already have areas of iOS, like SiriKit, that are very domain-specific.
Marco:
You can integrate with Siri as long as what you want to do is one of these 12 things that you're allowed to do.
Marco:
There are so many apps that you can come up with that could use something with Siri, but, oh, it doesn't fit within these 12 things, and so you just can't do it.
Marco:
If they do some kind of file, like third-party mass storage access API, but say it only works for photos, that's not very good because there's lots of reasons to use mass storage devices or storage cards, like SD cards, that are not for photos or video.
Marco:
Right now, you can import photos to the camera roll on the device using the camera connection kit or things like that.
Marco:
But there's problems.
Marco:
A, what if your camera or whatever is not supported by it or whatever it is?
Marco:
And then B, what if what you want to import is not photos or video?
Marco:
And C, what if you don't want what you're importing all being dumped into your iCloud photo library?
Marco:
if you deviate from the rails that they have set forward, you can import photos and videos to photos.app and nothing else.
Marco:
If what you want falls outside of that, you're just kind of out of luck.
Marco:
What I hope they do when they tackle this problem, because they inevitably have to tackle this problem, if you look at the iPad Pro reviews from this past fall,
Marco:
Every single review, even from mainstream press publications, every single review, when talking about the iPad Pro, dinged it for not having mass storage device support in files.
Marco:
Because it's, you know, as much as we want to pretend like we live in this world where you never need a thumb drive or whatever, the reality is sometimes you need a freaking thumb drive.
Marco:
Like, sometimes that is the best solution to a problem or the only solution to a problem that you have out there in the world.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
to have the ability to just plug in a thumb drive and copy files from or to it, from or to the iPad, that is a very common thing.
Marco:
And if you're going to say the iPad is a computer or a computer replacement, it needs to be able to do this sort of thing.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
That's why the reviews of these high-end, expensive devices that are marketed to be computer replacements dinged it for that.
Marco:
It's very important.
Marco:
So what I hope they do here is not try to define 12 domains that say, okay, for these 12 use cases, you can use this new API to have your app integrate with a plugged-in memory stick or something.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Just have file system access.
Marco:
Make it so that you can plug in mass storage devices and apps can copy files to or from them.
Marco:
That is what we want.
Marco:
I know it's hard if you want to access the files directly on it, then you have to deal with things like unmounting being potentially problematic.
Marco:
So just have a copy API.
Marco:
Copy files off of it, copy files onto it.
Marco:
or even if you allow writes, if you allow deletes, whatever it is, make it work so that apps can access the files and modify the files on mass storage devices.
Marco:
And I really hope they do it in a general purpose way, not defining these narrow domains that, of course, our needs are not going to be completely expressed by.
John:
And the other way they could screw it up, and I don't think they'll do this, but I'm reminded of it because this is a way people have been working around it, is make a bunch of APIs, but then say, and these are just APIs, it's up to you, third-party developers, to make applications that, when launched, can see mass storage through the USB-C port on an iPad Pro.
John:
And then it's up to those applications to put the thing somewhere.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Like, there was one that let you read USB-C sticks or something with some...
Marco:
hardware software synergy between the app and the thing yeah there have been things like this like where it's like somebody like sandisk or something will make their memory stick will have its own app that can read the files off of it and but like that's a terrible solution for general purpose is super terrible
John:
That would be the second worst way they can do it.
John:
Yours is probably the first worst, which is like we have a narrow set of APIs like Siri Intense and you can't deviate.
John:
The second worst is we didn't want to make an app like this and we sure as heck not going to expand the files app to do it because that would be too useful.
John:
So instead, here's a framework, here's some APIs, and it's a third-party opportunity.
John:
But honestly, I think, Casey, you will be satisfied.
John:
They are going to extend the files app to not be as dumb.
John:
They're just going to do it.
Casey:
Sure hope so.
Casey:
All right, let's move on to Mac OS.
Casey:
There's not that much here because Mac OS.
Casey:
There are only four bullets that I pulled.
Marco:
Well, hey, no, no, hold on.
Marco:
That's not fair.
Marco:
There's a really big thing here for Mac OS that I think is going to be the focus of most of our summer and fall.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
John:
That's not mentioned in these stories.
John:
Like Marzipan is a whole separate thing.
John:
Aside from Marzipan, what else is going on in macOS?
John:
And that's what they always mention in these articles.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, the very first bullet in my list, which I pulled from the article, is the biggest change coming to Mac this year is the ability for iPad apps to run on laptops and desktops.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
But they don't go into it.
John:
It's like, yeah, yeah, Marzipan.
John:
Like, we know.
Marco:
No, but that's huge.
Marco:
Like, I mean, we don't have to talk about it a lot today because we've already talked about it a lot and we don't know anything new yet.
Marco:
But Marzipan is massive.
Marco:
And if it happens at all the way that we think it's going to happen, I know a lot of people are not happy about Marzipan and are afraid of it.
Marco:
I will most likely very heartily embrace it.
Marco:
And so I'm very excited about it.
John:
Well, all are going to embrace it whether we like it or not.
Right.
John:
We're all going to be running a lot of iOS apps pretty soon.
John:
Yep.
John:
And it will mostly be good.
John:
I mean, we talked about it before.
John:
But, yeah, like, aside from Mars Band, which is, you know, kind of pre-announced by Apple because of what they talked about last year, although, of course, they didn't give deadlines.
John:
But that's the obvious one.
John:
I think the real question is, like, is there anything else going on in Mac OS besides Mars Bandification?
John:
And I think we might have – oh, maybe it's down this list or whatever.
John:
But, like, the other fun thing that's related to Mars Band is,
John:
how many Mac applications shipped by Apple will become Mars abanified.
John:
And there's lots of really good candidates that are almost sure to go.
John:
And then there's some questionable ones like mail.
John:
You're not sure.
John:
And then there's the iTunes question or whatever.
John:
That's a lot of these other features are actually that in disguise.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So let me run a few by you that Bloomberg cites.
Casey:
Apple is also planning to bring over a couple of its own iPad apps to the Mac this year, a podcast app, and the new merged Find My iPhone and Find My Friends app.
Casey:
There will also be a new Apple Music app, which is being developed as a standard Mac program.
Casey:
Actually, let's come back to that in a moment.
Marco:
I love that wording.
Casey:
Yeah, let's come back to it.
Casey:
Let's go back to it.
Casey:
Other in-house software coming to the Mac include Screen Time, Effects and Stickers for the Messages app, Yes Please,
Casey:
integration with the Siri Shortcuts app, the company's new service for writing your own Siri commands, the new Reminders app, and upgrades to Apple Books.
Casey:
So that all, I think, is exactly what you were talking about, John.
Casey:
It's a lot of iOS stuff coming to the Mac.
John:
Who was it who wrote this one?
John:
Because this is another one of those things where it's like, this is German.
Marco:
You could tell it was like the Bloomberg style guide interfering quite a bit here.
John:
but no but like it's also a typical german thing effects and stickers for the messages app what you mean surely is that messages is marzipanified why not just say that why not just say that instead of saying effects and stickers come to the app just say it's going to be the ios messages app running on your mac like that's one of the almost sure bets because the mac messages app has been so far behind the ios one for so long and there's nothing you know and it's so under featured that it's just a
John:
But to phrase that by saying that it will have effects and stickers, yeah, it will because those are things that are on the iOS app and not on the Mac.
John:
But why not just say it's the Marzipan version?
John:
We know about Marzipan.
John:
It drives me nuts.
John:
Anyway, messages, Marzipan for sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then the biggest thing for me in this list is the...
Marco:
Apple Music app, quote, which is being developed as a standard Mac program.
Marco:
Now, we discussed a few episodes ago, I was very concerned that they were going to Marzipanify the iOS Music app and replace iTunes with iOS Music on the Mac.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Even though iTunes gets a bunch of crap, I was concerned about that because iTunes actually, for just music, is a very full-featured and fairly advanced app, and the iOS Music app is not.
Marco:
And I really don't like the iOS Music app, and there's a lot of things that we would lose if that was the direction they took on the Mac.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
This certainly sounds from every possible way, from both Gurman and other rumblings, it sounds like the new Apple Music app on the Mac is not a Marzipan app.
Marco:
Which of course raises the question of what it is, and I think it's most likely to be one of the options we theorized earlier, which is it's just iTunes with some of the other stuff stripped out and renamed to Music.
Marco:
And that sounds exactly like what they should do.
Marco:
I really hope that's what they're doing, and it sure does sound like that's what they're doing, which is a very good sign.
Marco:
Because iTunes, the music part of iTunes, is not iTunes' problem.
Marco:
The reason why iTunes got so terrible and bloated and everything is all the other crap that got lumped into it.
Marco:
If they strip it down to just be music again, or if you never have any reason to go to any other parts of it and you just live in what is now what we have as a music app, that sounds fine.
Marco:
That's, I think, exactly what they should do, and I'm very happy to see that that's probably what they are doing.
Casey:
What if – what if it's not that?
Casey:
Just for the sake of discussion, what if it's some sort of Spotify-esque front end to the Apple Music service and nothing else and like maybe doesn't even touch local files?
John:
That would be – that's back to the bad scenario.
Marco:
I don't see why they would do that and not then just marsapanify the iOS app at that point.
Marco:
Like what's –
Marco:
What would they get by having this not be a Marzipan app, but still be a brand new app?
Marco:
I mean, it's possible that that was a separate team that started the app long ago before Marzipan was officially going to be the thing or whatever.
Marco:
That's possible, but I think it's unlikely that Apple would be devoting that much resources into a music app for the Mac that many years ago.
Marco:
That doesn't seem very likely.
John:
All right.
John:
Also, the iOS music app does play local files.
John:
So to make the Mac one not play local files would seem pretty mean.
John:
Of course, the fastest way to tell, or one of the ways to tell without actually having any technical knowledge, the provenance of the Mac music application will be launch it, launch preferences, and see if it's app modal.
John:
Because if it has an app modal preferences dialog box, guess what?
John:
It's iTunes under there.
John:
If it doesn't have an app model preference, it doesn't mean it's not iTunes under there.
John:
It just means they did such a comprehensive gut job that they finally changed the one defining characteristic of iTunes, which is when you bring up the preferences window, you're not doing anything else in that app.
Marco:
By the way, one little detail about local file playback.
Marco:
I don't think Apple wants to get rid of local file playback because...
Marco:
Local file playback saves them money.
Marco:
For the same reason that Spotify wants to buy podcasts, people, because every minute you spend listening to Spotify that you're not listening to a commercial music track, Spotify is saving money because they don't pay per play on podcasts, but they do pay per play for music.
Marco:
Similarly, Apple Music pays per play
Marco:
Apple has to pay the artists, or their labels more specifically, per play of a commercial music track, but if you play something out of your own purchased or imported library, they don't.
Marco:
This is why one of, I think, one of the worst features of the HomePod...
Marco:
it's kind of a good thing and a bad thing.
Marco:
The HomePod, I think, leans too heavily on your collection and doesn't frequently enough venture out to Apple Music when you ask it to play things that you aren't very specific about.
Marco:
So if you say, like, you know, if you say, hey, Cylinder, play some music that I like, or play something I might like, or just play some music, even if you just say things like that,
Marco:
it will almost always default to your library first, which in my opinion, if I'm giving a vague command like that, that's actually not what I want.
Marco:
I want it to go find new stuff for me.
Marco:
You mean you don't want to hear fish?
John:
Because percentage-wise, you're going to be hearing fish.
Marco:
No, and there's plenty of times where I want that, and when I want that, I just play it.
Marco:
I don't have to ask it.
Marco:
Usually, I go to my iPad, and I'll pick it right from the Terrell Music app, and I'll AirPlay it to the HomePods in that case.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
you could tell that they clearly are defaulting to your own library a lot from the HomePod.
Marco:
And I think there's probably a monetary reason there.
Marco:
It's probably because they can just save a bunch of money by not playing from Apple Music so often if they can use a library instead.
Marco:
So I think they have this strong incentive to maintain local library support in all these devices because it literally directly contributes to their profit margin on what is one of their very important services.
Casey:
Moving on to watchOS.
Casey:
Apple's bringing the voice memos app from the iPhone, iPad, and Mac so that users can record the voice memos from their wrist.
Casey:
I am super into this because there have been times that I've really wanted to record something, say, when I'm on a run.
Casey:
And the only real mechanism I have to do that is my watch.
Casey:
And I tried to do this with voice memos once just a few weeks ago, not realizing it wasn't already there, which was a total bummer.
Casey:
So I dig it.
John:
How did you try to do it?
John:
Like, are you going, hey, dingus, into your watch and then saying, take a memo?
Casey:
No, I think while I broke stride to some degree, but if I recall correctly, I went to the app launcher thing, which I keep in alphabetical mode, and I think I went down to V and was like, oh, that didn't work.
John:
That's a long way to go.
John:
It has to be somewhere where you can just raise your wrists and do something fairly simple without looking at it.
John:
If you have to search through the honeycomb or your alphabetical list or something...
John:
find the tiny voice memos thing launch it wait for it to launch press a record button and then talk into it that's not good no agreed but i mean i'd still prefer that over nothing though take a memo should work i wonder if that you should try the next time i bet that but directly on the watch like right now yeah like is i mean i i granted this is future voice memos doesn't exist yet but
John:
There's no facility for it to just listen to what you say and record it somewhere?
John:
Or I don't know.
John:
Seems like a thing the watch should already do.
Casey:
Hey, take a memo.
Casey:
I love ATP.
Casey:
Sorry, I can't help you with notes on Apple Watch.
John:
I tried to make a note out of it, I guess.
John:
Take a memo.
John:
It went to the notes thing.
John:
It was going to transcribe it, I suppose.
John:
Wait, why can't it do that?
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
It's amazing.
John:
They have these very specific messages that make it so clear that the watch knows what you want it to do and you know for a fact that the capability is there, but it's not going to do it.
John:
Siri and the watch both make me so sad.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Apple's also planning on to add Animoji and Memojis stickers to the device that's synchronized from an iPhone.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Because.
Casey:
Reasons.
Casey:
There will be two new health-related apps for the watch.
Casey:
One dubbed Dose inside Apple for pill reminders and another called Cycles to track menstrual cycles.
Casey:
We kind of touched on this earlier.
Casey:
I dig it.
Casey:
Apple's adding more watch face complications, which I like that there's scare quotes around that, which show additional snippets of information beyond just the time.
Casey:
There will be one that shows the status of audiobooks.
Casey:
Another showing the battery life of hearing aids.
Casey:
Okay, that's cool.
Casey:
And others that measure external noise and rain data.
Casey:
Whatever.
Marco:
I mean, again, that's cool, I guess.
Marco:
The complication API is yet another area where third parties can't do what Apple does.
Marco:
We have a much more restricted set of capabilities than what Apple has.
Marco:
In particular, watch apps can't update complications infinitely.
Marco:
We can only update them every so often, up to a certain limit per hour or per day or whatever.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Things like, they just said, like, you know, the status of audiobooks.
Marco:
That sounds like, you know, basically a now playing or a progress complication for audiobooks.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I wish I could offer that for my watch audio app, but I can't because I can't be sure that you're not going to, like, hit play or pause automatically
Marco:
less than 30 times in an hour and therefore like i'll start losing updates to it or they'll start being throttled like there's all sorts of problems like that basically make it so i can't do that uh so yeah i i the watch makes me sad but you
Casey:
know what would make you happy the company is also planning several new watch faces a gradient face that makes a gradient look out of a color that the user chooses at least two new extra large faces that show jumbo numbers and different fonts and colors a california dial that looks like a classic watch face and mixes roman numerals with arabic number numerals a redesigned solar analog watch face that looks like a sundial and a new infograph sub dial one that includes larger complication views like a stock market chart or the weather
Casey:
This actually sounds pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah, for the most part.
Marco:
I mean, again, I still think we need custom third-party watch faces for the Apple Watch.
Marco:
I think Apple's faces are underserved, under-maintained.
Marco:
Visually, I think they're fairly stale most of the time.
Marco:
There's very little movement there that I think is good or up-to-date or shows any level of maintenance.
Marco:
And this list looks like they're just continuing the same direction that they have been going in since the beginning with the Apple Watch.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
the gradient face is just the photo face it's the same thing sounds like like here's a new way to make like a basic clock with an image behind it great we already have like 40 of those no the gradient face is probably going to be some cool generated thing that you know remember they had like the ones last time it was like the particle effects one and then the ones they filmed in a giant tank like i'm sure right and that's those are cool for like five seconds and then you realize oh actually i need something with more functionality yeah
Marco:
but i think i think the gradient face is going to be one of those if it actually literally is like a graphical gradient that sounds like something android would do yeah well then like you know two new x large faces that you just have different fonts and colors great okay well we already had one and it's you know not incredibly useful for most people if the people who need it that's fine but that isn't that exciting uh california dial which is a term in the watch industry for watches that combine roman numerals with arabic numerals so
John:
I was going to say that's such a gross combination.
John:
I'm glad to hear that it's actually a term of art where the modifier California gets added something to make it grosser.
John:
California pizza, California dial, Ferrari California, all the bad variants of things.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm not personally a fan of California dials, but I know people are, so oh well.
Marco:
Maybe California people.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I'm interested in the solar analog watch face because I like the solar face a lot.
Marco:
The current solar face, which has been there since 1.0, is a digital face.
Marco:
So to see movement there sounds promising.
Marco:
Infograph sub-dial, that sounds like it just has larger complications.
Marco:
That's cool.
Marco:
Anything to do to Infograph, I think the Infograph faces need a lot of help.
Marco:
That's why I made that blog post a few months back about why Infograph has such poor legibility.
Marco:
Maybe they're working on that.
Marco:
Maybe this is a way to improve that.
Marco:
Maybe there's just another alternative that has a little bit better legibility.
Marco:
But ultimately, if we still can't do custom faces...
Marco:
they still have the same problems that we've had, which is there is not enough true variety, not enough true choice, and not enough faces that are really, truly general purpose useful.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch that are going to be like five minute novelties and like three that people will actually use.
Marco:
And that's been the status quo for a while now.
Marco:
And I hope they improve that somehow, but it doesn't sound like they are.
John:
I was just thinking about the third-party watch face marketplace and what that might look like.
John:
And an interesting test of Apple's will, Apple's value system, is to see if they allow third-party watch faces with the subscription pricing plan.
John:
So you can use this watch face as long as you pay $1.99 a month.
John:
Is that a thing that Apple would allow in the store?
Yeah.
Marco:
why or why not you know i i think like three years ago no but now that they are so dependent on pushing that services revenue up because every time they have a subscription that is sold by in-app purchase in an app apple counts that as an apple subscription so
Marco:
Which sounds ridiculous at first until you realize that when you subscribe to Overcast for $10 a year, you're really subscribing to Overcast for $7 a year and to Apple for $3 a year.
Marco:
And so it actually makes sense why they would count all of these subscriptions in the App Store as their subscriptions.
Marco:
Anyway, they make a lot of money from all those subscriptions.
Marco:
And they are pushing the services narrative and it's doing really well financially for them.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It actually wouldn't surprise me if today's Apple would allow that, whereas three years ago Apple probably would not.
Casey:
Also remember, it's not a direct comparison, but BMW now charges for car play after the first year, which I just find to be offensive and preposterous.
Casey:
But you get a year of car play, or maybe it's more than that, but you get some amount of time for free.
Casey:
I thought it was just a year.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
And then after that, it's like $100 or $200 a year to continue to use CarPlay, which is just asinine.
Casey:
So, yeah, I take your point, John.
Casey:
I don't think – I don't know if they would allow it, but it is an interesting thought exercise.
Casey:
I have to say, though, I have to go back just a half step.
Casey:
I didn't realize what a California dial was until you explained it, Marco.
Casey:
And I went to your beloved Nomos and found the club campus, which has – it has numerals for 12 to 4, 8, and 10 –
Casey:
And then just lines for all the other hours or other numerals.
Casey:
The 10, 12, and 2, so the stuff that is on the top half of the watch face are Arabic numbers.
Casey:
And then the 4 and the 8 are Roman numerals.
Casey:
And this looks frigging stupid to me.
John:
This looks worse than I thought it would.
John:
I was picturing it in my head as sort of like some kind of, I don't know what I was picturing.
John:
Maybe I was picturing an alternation, but I hadn't taken into account the variable lengths of Roman numerals and the fact that 10 and 2 are different.
John:
Like, oh, this is terrible.
John:
Why would anyone ever do this?
Casey:
Yeah, this is awful.
Marco:
Yeah, I am not a fan of the look.
Marco:
Panerai also has done a few that I think have a more balanced look.
Marco:
They have put the Roman numerals on the top half of the dial, so they're shorter.
Marco:
There's no 8 to deal with, basically.
Marco:
The 8 is really long.
Marco:
If you search for Panerai California dial, you see a bunch of images of them.
Marco:
They look a little bit better, I think.
Marco:
But it's still... California dials are...
Marco:
a rarity and an acquired taste in the watch fashion world some people enjoy them they're not for me but they uh fortunately it's not usually a thing that comes up because there aren't that many of them yeah i just no thank you all right tom bullock writes hey what do we listen to when we code i think we've talked about this before but it's the one of those questions we get asked constantly so i thought we could review it
Casey:
For me, if I'm doing something that's not terribly intense, I can listen to podcasts and often do.
Casey:
If I'm doing something that's mildly intense, I listen to just about any sort of music.
Casey:
Usually I'll start with my two weekly playlists on Spotify, my Discover Weekly and Release Radar.
Casey:
And then if I'm having a particularly intense coding session, I will either listen to like a movie soundtrack or equivalent.
Casey:
So like...
Casey:
Is it the Journey soundtrack that's by Austin something something, John?
John:
Wintry, yes.
Casey:
Yeah, Austin Wintry.
Casey:
That's really good.
Casey:
The Social Network soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is really good.
Casey:
And then I believe I've told the story at least a couple times on the show, but Tools 10,000 Days is my I am beating my head against the wall because I can't figure this out.
Casey:
I need my magical totem, my whatever, in order to get me through this.
Casey:
How do I do it?
Casey:
I use tools 10,000 days.
Casey:
And I have to deploy that extremely tactically because otherwise I don't want it to lose its charm.
Casey:
But basically, in short, podcasts for a lot of the time and music for the rest of the time.
Casey:
Marco, I'll fish all the time.
Marco:
Pretty much.
Marco:
Not 100%, but close.
Marco:
What's nice about Phish is I can't listen to podcasts at all.
Marco:
If I'm doing anything work-wise, I can't also listen to podcasts.
Marco:
I just won't listen.
Marco:
I won't pay attention.
Marco:
I'll miss 100% of what's said.
Marco:
So I want something that is music for sure.
Marco:
And what's great about Phish is that I don't have to – so I listen straight through.
Marco:
I don't listen on shuffle.
Marco:
I listen straight through.
Marco:
And when it's not Phish, I do the same thing with albums.
Marco:
And so what's nice about straight through listening is you don't have –
Marco:
per song decisions you have to make that distract you from what you're doing to say, oh, this one's not so good.
Marco:
I want to skip this.
Marco:
Skip, skip, skip.
Marco:
That I find distracting during work.
Marco:
So I want to be able to put on one good album or one good show and have it just play through.
Marco:
And the great thing about Phish is that not only are there a lot of them, and there's always... Every time they tour, they release new ones, and I pay for all the downloads from livephish.com.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I basically have like new shows to listen to pretty frequently.
Marco:
Like there's, they do something like 20 shows a year and then the shows each are so long, which everyone makes fun of, but they're so long that if I'm listening all the way through, like I don't have to make another decision about what to listen to for a long time.
Marco:
Whereas even if I'm listening to an album,
Marco:
Most albums from most bands for the last couple decades are maybe 45 minutes long, if you're lucky.
Marco:
Maybe an hour, if it's a very long album.
Marco:
So that means every 45 minutes, you have to make another decision about what to play next.
Marco:
Or something else starts playing next and it distracts you and it's not what you want and you've got to go fix that or whatever.
Marco:
So I find I want something optimized for long spans of stimulating my ears and my brain in this one way so I can focus on the other things I'm doing
Marco:
you know, on the computer that doesn't distract me by all of a sudden playing like dah, dah, dah.
Marco:
And you're like, where the hell did that come from?
Marco:
Like, I just, I want something that I can just focus on what I'm doing and not constantly be futzing with the music.
John:
John.
John:
If I'm not engaging my brain particularly hard, I can listen to music.
John:
But if I'm working on a hard programming problem, no music.
John:
Can't deal with it.
John:
I'm actually writing the code.
John:
And also, I can't listen to any music with words if I'm writing prose, which I think wouldn't apply to coding, but it does because there's a thing called comments and I write a lot of them.
John:
and you should too uh and so if i'm listening to music with words i find it difficult to write comments or i find myself stopping listening i'm an active music listener like i have to actually be listening to the music so if i can't actively listen to the music i don't want to be listening to music and it starts to bother me uh the only exception is occasionally inspirational debugging music but debugging is kind of not that it's it's not uh
John:
engaging my brain but there is a mechanical nature to debugging like you just start running the debugging algorithm if you've debugged enough you kind of know the series of steps you're going to do and you're narrowing it down and it's very mechanical you can kind of do it the same way you can you know drive to work on autopilot without thinking too hard about where you have to go I can debug like that sometimes too and so sometimes I'll listen to instrumental music when debugging but same deal if the debugging starts to get hard it's like oh now I thought I was going to immediately find where this problem is and fix it but now I can't and I'm stumped music goes off
John:
So in general, my answer is no with minor exceptions for when I'm doing like relaxing programming.
John:
It doesn't involve a lot of my brain.
Marco:
So I'm curious, John, and I think under the answer to this, are you a music person or a lyrics person?
John:
I don't know if we've talked about this before.
John:
I probably, if you had to like, you know,
John:
what is tips to one side or the other i probably tip towards music but it's a it's close to an even split because i do like my lyrics and i do enjoy it but when push comes to shove there are songs that i like that have garbage lyrics so i have to say but like you pay attention a lot to lyrics it seems i mean i know you like you know you ran your u2 site like you know like you have a history of caring a lot about lyrics
John:
I do care a lot about them.
John:
And that's why I know that a lot of the songs I like have dumb lyrics because I know the lyrics.
John:
Right.
John:
But I still like the song.
John:
So in the end, the music is the most important.
John:
It's the dominant factor.
John:
But it's important for me to also know what they're saying.
John:
And I can appreciate songs more based on it and so on and so forth.
John:
It's just it's not a deal breaker because let's face it, lots of pop songs have very simple or repetitive lyrics.
John:
But if the music's good, I still like it.
Marco:
So that's why I think whether you are a music person or a lyrics person, I think might affect whether you're able to listen to music while you do all kinds of work or only certain things or no things.
Marco:
Like Tiff is a lyrics person.
Marco:
I am very much not.
Marco:
I pay almost no attention to the lyrics of anything, which is why I can listen to Phish.
Marco:
And the music I really love, but...
Marco:
whenever there's lyrics, I zone out.
Marco:
I tune them out.
Marco:
So my brain is not... The linguistic processing parts of my brain are not engaged when listening to any music, even music with lyrics, because I'm not listening to them, really.
Marco:
I'm listening only to the music.
Marco:
And so I don't have restrictions like, oh, I can't write code comments while I hear music with lyrics.
Marco:
That doesn't matter to me.
Marco:
Whereas I hear lots of people that are like you, where they can't listen to music that...
Marco:
they know, or they can't listen to music that they don't know, or they can only listen to instrumental music when they're doing certain kinds of work.
Marco:
And I don't have that problem at all.
John:
But even for instrumental music, that's when I say when I'm an active listener, I'm sort of, I'm writing that, I'm mentally writing that music.
John:
I'm actively listening to that music.
John:
I'm actively engaged with just the music part, even for totally instrumental stuff, which is why if I come to like a hard part of programming and I have to start thinking about what I'm doing more and
John:
I feel like it's tearing me away from the music.
John:
And then it's like, well, then why is the music even on?
John:
And now it's just noise in the background that's bothering me.
John:
I have to be actively listening, which is the same way.
John:
Like you see this in cars a lot.
John:
Some people will turn on.
John:
I was going to say turn on the radio, but you know what I mean?
John:
We'll turn on the radio in their car.
John:
but then also have a conversation when the radio is on.
John:
And that makes no sense to me.
John:
We're either listening to music or we're talking.
John:
We're not doing both because it's impossible to do both.
John:
I mean, I can't be listening to music.
John:
And so, yeah, if we're talking in the car, if we're talking, all the music is doing is making it harder to understand the people talking.
John:
But I'm either actively listening to the music that's playing or I'm actively listening to the person I'm talking to, but I can't do both at once.
John:
That's what I mean when I'm active listening.
John:
And it's same for instrumental.
John:
It doesn't matter if the song has lyrics or not.
John:
That's what I mean by...
John:
active music listener.
John:
So what do you do?
John:
Are you a headphone person at work?
John:
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to work in a while.
John:
Everyone's a headphone person at work because we're all in stupid open offices and there's no... That's what I thought.
Marco:
So how do you operate as a programmer in the modern workplace where they're almost all working in open environments?
Marco:
Like, do you just put on headphones and not play anything sometimes and just have silence?
John:
Everybody has headphones.
John:
Yes.
John:
A lot of people do that.
John:
They get noise canceling headphones and they put them on and don't play music through them.
John:
That is extremely common.
John:
I tend not to do that, partly because our office, and I think this is common, has white noise machines throughout the entire office, like, spread throughout the ceiling, right?
John:
Like, it's just piped in everywhere.
John:
And it's kind of like you're wearing...
John:
Not noise canceling, but kind of like you're wearing earmuffs the entire time.
John:
So it makes it somewhat more tolerable.
John:
But of course, it's also just this giant oppressive hush noise like you're a baby trying to go to sleep or something.
John:
But yeah, I'll wear headphones sometimes.
John:
And sometimes, you know, I'll be listening to music doing a non-mentally taxing task.
John:
And then it will become mentally taxing and I will stop the music.
John:
But I'll leave the headphones on.
John:
I don't know how anybody gets any work done.
John:
It's a grim world out there in the open office.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Nick writes, how do we configure Macs used by other family members?
Casey:
I haven't really run into this yet because Erin has her laptop, the one that has been underwater a couple times, and I have my 44 computers, so I don't really have any input on this.
Casey:
I think the one who is most likely to have a story about this is probably John.
Casey:
So, John, how do you configure your Macs used by other family members?
John:
Very carefully.
John:
It's actually a difficult thing to do and there's no one policy you can apply.
John:
And the main bit of knowledge I think you need is you need to know sort of a reliability score and a prognosis for features and
John:
Because for me, it's like I'm visiting a relative and setting up their computer for them.
John:
I might not be back for a long time.
John:
So if I enable some feature that's a turkey, I now have to explain how to carefully disable that feature or deal with the bugs or whatever over the phone or over FaceTime or whatever.
John:
And I don't want to do that.
John:
So I have to know, I want to set this up for you.
John:
And generally what I want to do is like get everybody's, you know, integrate, give them a system for everything.
John:
So,
John:
some kind of cloud file storage thing, whether that be Dropbox or iCloud Drive or, you know, insert whatever, Google Drive or whatever.
John:
Get your email set up, one system for email, hopefully with some kind of cloud component.
John:
Like, for all of their problems, they have to have a system.
John:
And the key is knowing...
John:
what's safe to set up it might not be the things that i use maybe the things i use are real fidgety and unreliable but i just deal with it because i need some sophisticated feature i have to know like what is the thing that's safe for them so it's important for me that they have systems for everything i don't do like a bare bones like no apps are installed just the apple stuff blah blah and let them figure it out i don't do that at all like i will install dropbox for them i will set it to launch on login and i will show them where it is and i will put it in their dock and i'll put all their files in it and i'll like you know i'll be like
John:
whether you like it or not guess what now you're using dropbox because it will solve more problems for you than if i just left you here where you just put everything on your desktop locally and then your hard drive crashes because you never did a backup i will set up their backups for them i will set up time machine i'll attach a drive i'll install super duper i'll put it on a schedule i would do like i want this thing to just run on autopilot with a set of reliable applications that i think will continue to work for a long time
John:
That's generally my goal.
John:
Also, setting up is a little bit different when you come cleaning up.
John:
Let's see what havoc they've wreaked on their computer in my absence.
John:
What kind of weird stuff have they installed?
John:
What's sitting in the downloads folder?
John:
Do they have three copies of Microsoft Office now because they duplicated the folder three times?
John:
Let's deal with that.
John:
Check their disk.
John:
What is taking up all their disk space?
John:
Do they have giant video files they don't need anymore?
John:
Did they accidentally download a YouTube video using some weird extension that's sitting on their desktop and it's three gigs?
John:
That's a whole process.
John:
It's time-consuming, it's difficult, and there's no real right answer.
John:
And the bottom line is you have to know, you have to be deep enough into the Mac world to know what's safe in the Mac world.
John:
Is Dropbox a safe thing to install or is it now a CPU pig?
John:
How is iCloud working these days?
John:
What email applications should people use?
John:
And then accounting for their special needs and yada yada.
John:
Like, do they need an application that has dynamic text and it syncs with their iOS devices?
John:
It's a surprisingly complicated problem.
John:
So there's no clear answer, but my particular technique is...
John:
Get them all set, essentially.
John:
And I feel like the other end of the spectrum is just give them a bare computer and then stand back.
John:
And I do not endorse that plan.
Casey:
Marco, any thoughts on this?
Marco:
No, I mean, Tiff sets up her own stuff and Adam doesn't have a Mac yet.
John:
Like Adam would let you set up his computer for him.
John:
Just wait.
John:
If he knows how to use it at all, which is still up for debate.
John:
It'll be interesting to see if either the two of you can actually successfully teach your children how to use computer because I have failed twice now.
John:
i mean for whatever it's worth he does use his ipad very well and without a lot of explanation all right but that's not a computer we already covered that oh shots fire i don't i don't mean that but yeah like my kids use their ios devices and they're they don't really know how to use them but they know so much more about how to use their ipads than they do about how to use a mac or god forbid a pc there's computers they're just not interested in them at all so
John:
they can take them to the watch too surprisingly well they can do more with their watch than i can like they know how to like text people from their watch and respond and like they just i never showed them any of this and they just use it and i think the watch is not intuitive at all so i'm glad to see they're figuring that out it's just that they just have no interest in computers or email or any of that old people stuff
Casey:
Finally, Bree McNish writes, and I'm paraphrasing here, what resources have helped us become slightly less ignorant white dudes?
Casey:
That was kind of the premise of what she was saying or what they were saying.
Casey:
It was not verbatim.
Casey:
So for me, it's just listening, particularly to John, but listening in general to not just John, but anyone who is not like me.
Casey:
and believing them when they say that my experience is the following.
Casey:
And that's the most obvious thing.
Casey:
I try to add and inject more and more voices into my, say, like Twitter timeline and stuff like that that are not like me, both in terms of interest, in terms of the way I look, etc.
Casey:
But I don't have any really awesome answers for this.
John:
I mean, we're on a streak of answering questions we've answered before.
John:
And yeah, so my whole pitch has always been find somebody talking about some issues that you're not familiar with but want to learn more about.
John:
and uh i mean i'm using the twitter thing of like follow them on twitter but whatever it may be if you're looking at them on facebook or any sort of social network or whatever and uh just be a receiver don't engage in conversation in the beginning anyway don't like don't take it as an opportunity to interact or ask questions or whatever just be just be there receiving what they're putting out um
John:
And do that for a long time.
John:
And you will... Because you take the pressure off yourself to have to respond or to view it from the beginning as an engagement with the person, you will prevent yourself from doing a lot of boneheaded things.
John:
You will prevent yourself from getting defensive because it'll be like TV.
John:
Like...
John:
You can yell back at the TV, but you know it's just a one-way experience.
John:
The picture comes to you, and you watch it, and either you like it or you don't.
John:
Just being exposed to different people's point of views and experiences in a situation where you do not expect – there's no expectation of yourself to engage or respond or debate or do anything like that, you will learn things that way.
John:
And I've said that same thing many times before.
John:
The one twist I'll add now – it's not really a twist, but it's a –
John:
project that i've been working on for a little while which is you know a more concrete version of this because that device is kind of vague so i follow people on twitter and i have i'm a completionist i read everyone's tweets and so i'm constantly trimming my follows if i feel like there are too many tweets going by somebody who's particularly verbose i'll unfollow again don't take it personally if i unfollow you it doesn't mean i'm not friends with you just means you're tweeting a lot like whatever that's how i manage my follower list and i've had a policy for several years now
John:
which is if you're adding someone to follow, prefer adding somebody who's not a white tech dude.
John:
Because for me, that's like 90% of the people who I follow, right?
John:
And I'm trying to alter the percentage.
John:
And on the flip side, if you're unfollowing somebody because they're verbose or because you feel like you're being overwhelmed by tweets, prefer to unfollow a white tech dude.
John:
And what I'm trying to do through these two simple rules of like, they're not hard and fast rules, they're just guidelines and just saying like, if you have a choice between them, maybe make that choice is over time, shift the percentage of people I follow to, to be like the percentage of white tech dudes that I follow to be lower than it was before.
John:
And this is a very slow process, and I didn't do some radical thing of like, I'm unfollowing everybody, and I'm just following, you know, different kinds of people.
John:
Didn't do that at all, because I feel like that wouldn't work for me.
John:
It's too radical.
John:
But this gradual thing of just two simple rules applied over time, and I don't follow and unfollow that often, but over the course of a year or two, I think I follow, you know,
John:
five or six new people who are not white tech dudes and unfollow five or six white tech dudes and it starts shifting the balance um again with the same rules about uh if you're following people and you're not familiar with their point of view or the things that they tweet about or whatever
John:
don't engage for the first year or two maybe just just read their tweets and maybe they infuriate you because you don't agree with it fine then unfollow them like don't make yourself sad but if there's something you want to learn more about just start exposing yourself to it because people have lots of things to say and if you prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy you can't help but broaden your worldview
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Fracture, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
Casey:
Tech Broadcast, so long.
Casey:
You can talk about Ronan if you'd like.
John:
Yeah, we're going to hear the report.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So to set some context, I asked Mike to do a Mike at the Movies with me of the something like late 90s.
Casey:
No, it was early 90s.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Something in the 1990s movie, Ronan.
Casey:
And I don't remember if this was spurned.
Casey:
I believe it was spurned by you talking about heist movies for top four.
Casey:
So I watched...
Casey:
Ronan again with Mike.
Casey:
And I've seen it many, many, many, many, many times.
Casey:
But I watched it and tried to come at it kind of honestly.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the right word for it.
Casey:
But I tried to imagine what it would be like to have watched this for the first time and not have all the baggage that I have of just freaking loving this movie.
Casey:
And the conclusion that I came to, spoiler alert, is that...
Casey:
I love Ronin, as I always have, but it's not a very good movie.
Casey:
So I had asked Marco to, ask is also being generous to myself.
Casey:
I basically told Marco he needs to include this on his list of heist movies, and he rightfully ignored me.
Casey:
But then you did end up watching it, and we didn't have a chance to discuss it.
Casey:
So I would love to know, Marco, what did you think of Ronin?
Marco:
I thought that your treatment of it on analog was pretty fair.
Marco:
Okay, good.
Marco:
With all the incredibly long car chase scenes, I thought, I can see why KC likes this movie.
Marco:
But I actually, I didn't think it was a fantastic movie, but it wasn't that bad.
Marco:
I overall thought it was a decent movie.
Marco:
I enjoyed watching it.
Marco:
One thing I liked a lot about it is...
Marco:
how little gets explained in dialogue or even in show even in like display like showing you so much of the movie is based on subtext or just figuring stuff out that happened off screen you know at a different time or that wasn't explicitly stated or explicitly shown and i found that interesting like it was in many ways it was kind of
Marco:
brave like a movie for grown-ups yeah like like to to assume you'll figure stuff out and not have to like hold your hand through the whole thing you should watch syriana okay i don't know i mean that's the joke that's like the ultimate movie that doesn't explain things to you and people hate it because you're like i don't know what's going on
Marco:
Yeah, this I think walked the line for me.
Marco:
This is just about as much of that as I can figure out.
Marco:
So anything that's more subtle than this, I probably would have a problem following.
Marco:
But this I actually followed pretty well.
Marco:
I think I got most of it.
Marco:
And as you mentioned, there are certain things, like movie tricks, like one of the things one of the times said, like, oh, you got your instructions from the man in the wheelchair.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so, and so like your, your movie watching brain thinks we're going to see this person later.
Marco:
You know, this is going to be a character that comes up and they just never come up again.
Marco:
Like, and like there's, there's references like that, like references to people and places and events that like, that the characters will use occasionally in dialogue that in any other movie that would be like, that was there for a reason.
Marco:
That reason will come up later.
Marco:
Like, it's like they, they drop these breadcrumbs and they go pick them all up.
Marco:
And this one like drops breadcrumbs that it never picks up.
Marco:
Because that's just how people talk sometimes.
Marco:
Sometimes you just don't get things resolved.
Marco:
You don't get things explained.
Marco:
You don't know what they're talking about sometimes and it just stays that way.
Marco:
And I found that pretty good.
Marco:
One of my favorite scenes is the make out in the car scene.
Marco:
interesting so he like he kisses her like as a cover for something and then like like you could tell like the decision process in her head of like she's like first she kind of like wipes her lips because they're you know wet and like you can tell she's like all right i'm gonna take more of this and just like take it into her own hands like and then two seconds and cut that's it and you never see any other part of that relationship in the in the romantic context all that stuff is like it's it's very subtle
Marco:
they give you like two thirds of what you would get of what you'd get in any other movie.
Marco:
Like they give you two thirds of the explanation that you would get or the elaboration in any other movie.
Marco:
But it's just enough that you, you, you get what's going on and it's actually kind of more intellectually fun to be a viewer of that kind of movie.
Casey:
I think John, I presume you've seen this a hundred times.
John:
I haven't seen it that much.
John:
And I think I haven't seen it in a long time.
John:
I mean, I think maybe only seen it two or three times.
John:
And I remember being middle of the road on it.
John:
Like I enjoyed it.
John:
I liked I liked the performances.
John:
I like the sort of tension in a lot of those sort of character driven scenes where they're, you know, these people are in a higher high pressure situation and have doubts about each other that I always go for that type of thing.
John:
I didn't think it was particularly, you know, sort of terse or subtle or difficult to follow, but I tend to like movies that are, you know, obnoxiously that way.
John:
Again, I'm a big fan of Siriana, but I understand why most people hate it.
John:
I tend not to recommend it to people because it's not everyone's cup of tea.
John:
You seem like you want to be like intellectually punished by a movie.
John:
It's like people who, you know, games like Myst, right?
John:
And that whole sort of puzzle solving type game.
John:
I've played a lot of those games, but I'm not that into them.
John:
Or some people are like, give me the hardest puzzle you have in the world.
John:
Like I just thought the more obscure and difficult it is, the more they like it.
John:
So I can, I can understand why people appreciate that, but I would not choose to play a game that, that would say mist is for babies.
John:
Try this one.
John:
Like a lot of people are trying to get me into the witness, right?
John:
Which I think is kind of a cool game.
John:
And I played a little bit of, but that's above my, I don't want to be, I don't want puzzles to be that integral to a game and to challenge me to that degree.
John:
So, but with movies, I tend to like all the things you just described are important aspects of movies that I like.
John:
um so i did like that aspect of ronan but on the other hand it also read to me in my recollection of it which is somewhat vague is a little bit kind of mainstream middle of the road action movie with a little bit of flair and that's not really my particular genre so i remember if here we can find out what did what did uh i think of ronan are you looking at letterboxd or whatever
John:
of course i rate every movie that i watch on letterboxd and when i first uh used the service i went through and tried to retroactively rate every movie i had ever seen in my entire life which is extremely difficult to do and if i re-watch a movie i adjust the rating so you know so i have a more up-to-date thing let's look for predictions before i find it
Casey:
What are we out of?
Casey:
Five?
Casey:
Ten?
Marco:
Yeah, five stars.
Casey:
Three.
Marco:
I think you probably liked it a little bit, but you're probably also very harsh with your ratings and very stingy with your stars.
Casey:
Oh, good point.
Casey:
Good point.
Marco:
I'm going to say two.
Casey:
I could go either way, but I'm sticking with my three.
John:
all right survey says three and a half oh all right oh look at me go all right so but that was not based on a rewatch that's like based on my memory of it so i bet if i watch it today i would probably downgrade to three or something but i don't know i haven't seen it in a long time so there's definitely aspects that i liked of it and that is that is pretty high for me i am very stingy with my stars he said surprising no one yeah exactly it's not that i'm stingy it's just that i i feel like i want to use the whole range although they don't let you give zero
John:
Which I tried to do recently after a movie that I watched that I do not recommend anyone else watch.