Big Hole in the Middle
Casey:
What kind of asshole releases a Swift app without having asked me any questions about anything?
John:
You were in the same Slack where we were talking about this for like three days.
Marco:
So John, did you use Rick's Swift or Prescription Swift or whatever it is?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
How about did you use the Combine?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
I've been using Combine a little bit lately, and it's pretty good until it very, very, very much isn't.
Casey:
It's the story of Apple's everything these days.
Marco:
It's just like SwiftUI, right?
Marco:
It's like, oh yeah, this is pretty fun.
Casey:
And then you hit a wall, you're like, oh, this is really... I think CGP Grey has done the most perfect canonical version of... Oh.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
Oh.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So that is both Combine slash Combine, Yeehaw, and SwiftUI.
Casey:
But I'm jumping ahead.
Casey:
I'm jumping ahead.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
Yeehaw.
John:
Marco's doing City 17 Combine, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, John, did you use SwiftUI?
John:
No.
Casey:
Wait, we're jumping ahead, man.
John:
We'll talk about it, yeah.
John:
I intentionally shortened the follow-up so we can get to the topic, so we'll have plenty of time to talk about it.
Casey:
All right, tell me about Boot Camp.
John:
Boot Camp on external drives.
John:
I talked about my battles with that on a recent episode.
John:
A couple suggestions.
John:
Actually, this was something I discovered in my research, but maybe we forgot to talk about it.
John:
There's a program called Win to USB, W-I-N to USB, which, according to its website, is the best free Windows-to-Go creator, which allows you to install and run a fully functional Windows.
John:
Guy, I love this writing.
John:
It allows you to install and run a fully functional Windows on external hard drive.
John:
I mean, I get what they're saying.
John:
Like, do you have – my Windows is broken?
John:
Anyway, it's a utility that lets you make bootable USB things with Windows on them.
John:
And Alexei tweeted that he likes Rufus instead of Windows USB, which does a similar job.
John:
Yeah.
John:
where basically you give it a USB storage device and it can make it into a bootable thing, which used to be more complicated, but apparently it's less complicated with Windows 10.
John:
And Brad asked, once you have the boot thing enabled, like I talked about, you know, you go into that, you boot into recovery mode and you change the security setting to say, please let my Mac boot from external drives.
John:
Does that fix the boot camp utility?
John:
Maybe the issue all along was the boot camp utility saw that I had the security setting set and wouldn't let me install an external drive because I knew I couldn't boot from it.
John:
Answer to that is no, it does not fix boot camp.
John:
Even with the setting changed to allow booting from external drives, the boot camp setup assistant is like, nope, no can do with external drives.
Marco:
Fascinating.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
I'm so excited to know this bit of information.
John:
You want to learn about wind to USB and Rufus?
John:
Yay.
John:
Someday you're going to have to make a drive that lets you boot Windows on your Mac, and you're going to be glad that you know about Rufus.
Casey:
The sick thing is you're probably right.
Casey:
You really are.
Casey:
I can't imagine.
John:
I got a lot of tweets from people who were like, I heard your story, and coincidentally I had a time.
John:
I had occasion to do the same thing after hearing your story, and it still took me five hours, and I had to read 20 different instructions and tweak things.
John:
So it's apparently still not as easy as it should be.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
You know, you've got to have something that you're interested in talking about because that is the quickest we've blown through any follow-up item in at least months, but that's okay.
John:
Is there just traditional follow-up, which is like tidbits of information about past things, not entire topics smuggled into the follow-up section?
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
All right, tell me about Bluetooth and rebooting into different OSs.
John:
That was another one of my complaints, like I'd reboot into Windows, and I would not see my Bluetooth peripherals, and you'd have to turn them off and back on again, despite the fact that they had previously been paired with, you know, my Mac running Windows.
John:
And Robert Watkins wrote in to say, the secret to dual booting of Bluetooth is to shut down the computer, not just restart it.
John:
The Mac seems to tell devices to disconnect when it shuts down, but not on restarts.
John:
Without that, they attempt to reconnect for a couple of minutes.
John:
If you shut down, however, they'll pair with any previously paired device, including your rebooted into Windows Mac.
John:
So that makes sense, and that totally works, rather than restarting to shut down, because what you want is your peripherals to give up looking for your Mac that has gone away and has been replaced by a doppelganger running Windows.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell me about the Mac Pro speaker module.
Casey:
I believe the context for this was that there were no cables within the computer.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yep.
John:
And there's one buried in there.
John:
This is in the iFixit teardown.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to the exact step that shows it.
John:
I think it's alongside the RAM modules or these little covers they have over the little RAM shed.
John:
It's kind of like a carport for your RAM, like a little hood over it.
John:
In between the two of them is another little block that looks like the same size and shape.
John:
And if you pull that thing off, you see that is actually attached with the
John:
one tiny little like two inch long cable to the thing you can't see it when it's on there because it just looks like it's mounted flush but if you do pull it off underneath you see there's a cable attaching it so definitely at least one cable in the mac pro but very well hidden fair enough uh quinn nelson has some information about mac pro case removal while it's running can you tell me about that please
John:
Yeah, I'm talking about on the last show, I was very convinced that you could not take the case off of your Mac Pro because it would just shut off and it just doesn't want to have the case off when it's on.
John:
Well, Quinn Nelson is braver than I am and did a bunch of experiments where he would have his computer turned on and then say, you know what, I'm taking the case off.
John:
What's going to happen?
John:
Well, the first thing that happens, and you can watch in the video, is...
John:
When you twist that thing, the fans spin up to 100%.
John:
So if you want to hear what the fans are like, which, by the way, I still haven't heard in any real-time scenario, and I didn't try this experiment myself, so I still haven't heard my fans at full speed.
John:
But if you want to hear them, start to threaten to take that case off, and they go up to full speed.
John:
They're still pretty hushy.
John:
They're louder, but they sounded in the video the same kind of tone.
John:
But then once you do that, if you start trying to pull the case up, you can pull it up an inch or two and the computer doesn't turn off.
John:
So I guess that interconnect on top doesn't actually cut power to the machine.
John:
There's some other interconnect there that we'll get to in a second, but it doesn't actually cut power.
John:
So you pull the case up like an inch or two and the fans are still going crazy and your computer is still on.
John:
uh but of course you can't actually lift it off because of the things we talked about yesterday the little the little uh rim of the case on the bottom will hit the power cable uh and any other cables that are connected to your computer and you can't get past them so there you go uh it doesn't like its case to be off but it will continue running under protest with it lifted about an inch up and an anonymous apple genius wrote in to say that the mac pro has a bypass uh to be powered on without the case attached the round part on top of the frame has some sort of hall effect sensor he's assuming or she is assuming
John:
as we have a guide describing how to apply a magnet to that portion of the circle to bypass the case requirement to power the computer on so we can check diagnostic LEDs.
John:
So I don't have a guide with me right now, but as far as I know, the computer will power on normally for as long as you leave a strong enough magnet on that spot and they use one of those little square magnets used to magnetize a screwdriver.
John:
So that's pretty weird.
John:
Where there, you know, if you're working on it, you may have to futz with it when the case is off.
John:
And apparently you do need to sort of defeat the safety mechanism or whatever to allow that to happen.
Casey:
That's interesting.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
Marco, you have a few quick hits.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
yes um the ladybug that i killed with a 30 watt apple usbc power adapter speaking of quick hits uh was not actually a ladybug so that makes it okay now yes it was the uh it was an asian lady beetle uh which is apparently one of the more like nuisance types of things um and it's funny i i was able to so people kept telling me like oh yeah if it's ladybug you should never kill a ladybug and
Marco:
Some people said you should never kill any bugs in your house because if you put them outside, then birds can eat them, and that's nice.
Marco:
A number of people wrote in to say, well, if it's a ladybug, you shouldn't kill them because they're great and they eat aphids, but if it's an Asian lady beetle, then you should kill it because they're awful.
Marco:
As it turns out, it was still under the USB-C power brick on my desk.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
so i just looked up the power brick and looked at it and sure enough there is the characteristic black m on its head indicating it is an asian lady beetle and therefore it was if you're the type of person who thinks it's okay to kill any bugs in your house it is apparently one of the ones that you should do that for uh secondly i had made fun of john last week for the use of the verb wanging uh to describe a mag a mag safe cable wanging around it's
Marco:
And I had said that was not a real word.
Marco:
At least I couldn't find a verb definition of the word wang.
Marco:
I was spelling it without an H. It turns out there is a verb, W-H-A-N-G.
Marco:
You didn't hear the H when I said it?
Marco:
I still don't think it fits.
Marco:
So it's, according to the Apple Dictionary, to make or produce a resonant noise, as in the cheerleader wanged on a tambourine, or to strike or throw an object heavily and loudly, such as he wanged down the receiver
John:
the power brick yeah so i i wanged down the power brick onto the lady beetle uh but i don't think a magsafe cable is capable of weighing around uh so i stand by the fact that uh that use of the word was incorrect but it is in fact a verb what do you think of wanging around as in flopping around like a wang which is how i meant it that makes a lot more sense certainly certainly more poetic and apt because you know it's if you've seen the little thing it's kind of like springy and short wanging around over there right
Casey:
I think we definitely need to move on.
Casey:
So we got a little bit of feedback about sharing photos in full resolution.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Kyle's the Gray, had some information on this.
Casey:
Apparently, I'm still not entirely clear on what the story is here, but I guess if you share via iCloud doing like a quasi...
Casey:
Gallery sort of thing is not actually gallery, but there's some way you can do it via iCloud that will give you the option of sharing full res and even full metadata.
Casey:
And then Mario Panagetti, I hope I pronounced that right, also tweeted about this and conveniently included a series of screenshots on how he was able to make this work.
Casey:
and like a set of summary photos.
Casey:
So I will put in the KBase article about it, which is what Kyle sent, and also the series of photos in the tweet from Mario as well, if you would like to see more about that.
John:
It's a lot like the thing we did discuss, which is the thing where you can do a mail attachment and it doesn't actually attach the thing.
John:
It just attaches a link and puts them up in an iCloud link, right?
John:
This is exactly like that, and you might think it's the same thing, but apparently it's not.
John:
I've never actually done this, so I haven't seen this UI.
John:
But if you do that with a photo from within the Photos app or from iCloud.com, apparently...
John:
it will do the same thing and like you have to say copy icloud link or send icloud link or i don't know you do you do something it looks like you're about to mail somebody a link uh but instead it actually gets the photos directly on the server this is the whole thing we were talking before it doesn't pull them down to the local device it will copy them on the server from your photo lobby to theirs and i think it will also try to preserve like all like like this thing says all of the all the metadata all the edits like non-destructively save all of them like
John:
you know as as rich a copy as you can imagine not just like burn the thing down to a thumbnail or something and send it over to them so i'm kind of excited to try this because it has most of the features i want it's just obviously not exposed in a way that most people know about it but now that i do i'm going to hunt for it and give it a go obviously it only works if you're sending it to another person who has apple photos which is fine in my case but if not then you're left you know making an attachment or whatever so
Marco:
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Casey:
So we got a little bit of feedback about whether or not Swift is a dick.
Casey:
And Mark Sands wrote in saying it's totally a dick.
Casey:
Property wrappers muddy the waters with respect to Swift annotations.
Casey:
I'm not going to go into details about this because it will take me three hours.
Casey:
So if you're familiar with Swift, hopefully this will make sense.
Casey:
If not, don't worry about it.
Casey:
So anyway, property wrappers, muddy the water with respect to Swift annotations, which I think is somewhat true.
Casey:
Protocols with associated types requires type ratio for generic protocols.
Casey:
Oh, I could go on for hours about this, but I won't.
Casey:
You're welcome.
Casey:
Protocols with associated types are the bane of my existence and are so frustrating.
Casey:
But Mark continues, but SwiftUI really wants to use generic protocols.
Casey:
So language in the standard library had to do something to make the type system bearable.
Casey:
And this is where John gets all smug.
Casey:
Another example of this that I've run into recently, as I've been doing some combined slash combine work, is erasing to any publisher, which is kind of the same story all over again.
Casey:
Mark continues, opaque result types adds an additional definition to the sum keyword.
Casey:
And then finally, Mark says, Swift used to be a language that didn't have to be intimidating for new programmers.
Casey:
But if a junior programmer wants to jump into Swift UI while being forced to use combined with at state, at published, at observable object, etc., then the language becomes infinitely more intimidating because the advanced features of the language show themselves in ways that become very unattractive.
Casey:
I thought that was a pretty good summary.
Casey:
Now, again, I love Swift.
Casey:
I think Swift is great.
Casey:
I do not think Swift is perfect.
Casey:
But I thought this was a really, really good summary of why Swift is a big, fat jerk.
John:
I have two objections to that summary.
John:
The first is opaque result types are great.
John:
You actually dislike opaque result types?
John:
That's a perfect example of a pragmatic feature in response to actual programmer needs that I think is implemented in a fairly nice way.
Casey:
No, no, that's fair.
Casey:
I think I was – my agreement was more in the summary at the end.
John:
The summary at the end, like I think Swift is doing a pretty good job of adhering to the Pearl credo of – I heard this first in Pearl.
John:
I don't know if it came from Pearl, but –
John:
easy things should be easy hard things should be possible i think easy things in swift are easy now there's some valid complaint to say look you're gonna end up using the standard library and the standard library uses a lot of this stuff so it's to some degree you have to understand it kind of but you don't like all this stuff with like oh i need to everything needs to be done in a protocol and i have to use generics you don't you can like if easy things are easy if you have an easy program and you're a beginning programmer you don't have to make 20 different protocols and then type erasing protocol wrappers so you can use them through your you don't have to do that you can just
John:
write classes and hook them up, and it will work fine.
John:
But in Swift, hard things are possible, and all these really complicated features, although it can be argued that some of them do actually get a little bit ugly and complicated and hard to parse with your eyeballs, hard things are possible in Swift and becoming more possible all the time.
John:
So I get the sentiment.
John:
It's this thing that every language struggles with, but I still think Swift is...
John:
Doing a good job to wrangle the complexity that it necessarily has to take on for being what it is.
John:
I think you mean wangle.
John:
And I think it's going in the right direction.
Casey:
Well, funny you say that because Benjamin Mayo wrote in and said, it's totally getting better.
Casey:
Whilst the computer science bike shedding threads sure do exist on the forum, I'd point out that it is simply not representative of actual output of the evolution process and what is actually getting changed in the language.
Casey:
So if you just look at the most recent handful of proposals, you can see a much more real world story of Swift's lowercase e evolution.
Casey:
And Ben Shuman provided a screenshot, which we're not going to include, but suffice to say, yeah, that it backs up what he was saying.
Casey:
Swift definitely has its issues, but I think it's unfair to say that the direction of the language is on the wrong track, which is pretty much what you were just saying, John.
Marco:
you can say, yeah, make the easy things easy.
Marco:
You don't have to use the hard things.
Marco:
That's all true 90% of the time.
Marco:
The problem is that in real-world use of a language, you do sometimes have to dive into other people's code, or you do have to sometimes look at the way some things are implemented in libraries or whatever else, or...
Marco:
the details or advanced features of a language are used in sample code or required to take advantage of certain APIs or what this happens all the time.
Marco:
Um, some compiler error is yelling at you for something that maybe you're kind of accidentally using an advanced feature or it thinks you're trying to use an advanced feature or, um,
Marco:
The thing that you really want to do that seems really obvious and would be easy in some of the language requires light usage of an advanced feature.
Marco:
And so the language designers can tell themselves, we're letting the easy things stay easy.
Marco:
And the language experts and fans and enthusiasts can tell themselves, oh, yeah, easy things are easy.
Marco:
But they know the hard things.
Marco:
So when they inadvertently run into one of the hard things or willfully take one on themselves –
Marco:
They kind of ignore that, or they forget, they don't realize.
Marco:
It's very different when you are the Swift novice, or the person just trying to get something done quickly and not trying to dive all the way into all this complicated stuff, or, hell, the person just trying to write simple code because, guess what, that's easier to read and maintain down the road by other people and your future self.
Marco:
For all of them, slash us, the language is not that clean.
Marco:
The abstractions always leak.
Marco:
Always.
Marco:
No abstraction is ever perfect.
Marco:
None of this complexity is ever 100% hidden from somebody.
Marco:
And so all this crap that is behind the scenes, that is really complicated and really intimidating and just impossible for anybody but the most advanced programmers to really understand...
Marco:
That does leak out, and that does impact the rest of us here and there, or frequently even.
Marco:
It's much better, in my opinion, and this is kind of why I don't love Swift so much.
Marco:
I much prefer languages where, yeah, maybe they don't look as pretty as Swift in the ideal case.
Marco:
Like, I write most of my code in Objective-C and PHP, and C, none of which are languages that look good on slides in presentations.
Marco:
but I care about, can I fit this whole thing in my head?
Marco:
Obviously, I've had time to become an expert in these languages, so it's kind of an unfair comparison of me to say this.
Marco:
But even when I was exploring new languages a few years ago, the one that kind of stuck with me was go.
Marco:
And I didn't get too far into it.
Marco:
I use it for my crawlers, but I don't use it for anything else.
Marco:
So I hardly ever actually write Go code, and I've actually forgotten most of what I learned to write my crawler in the first place.
Marco:
But Go felt small in a good way.
Marco:
It felt like the language itself was not that complicated.
Marco:
It was fairly trivial to fit most of it in my head.
Marco:
And I can't say that about Swift.
Marco:
And even now, I've actually used Swift way more than I've used Go.
Marco:
It's really hard for me to understand all this stuff.
Marco:
As I'm using it, I'm finding myself falling a bit behind in the regular practical knowledge of what people are supposed to know about the languages they're using because a lot of this stuff I just don't understand.
Marco:
And frankly, I don't really have the time or care to get to know it.
Marco:
Swift is a language that is supposed to be mass market and is supposed to be easy for people.
Marco:
it's very quickly becoming, if it wasn't already, and I would kind of argue it kind of always was this way, but it's very quickly becoming a language for language nerds.
Marco:
And that's a very different thing.
Marco:
Languages for language nerds don't usually become mainstream.
Marco:
I mean, and this has market reasons why it's kind of forced to be mainstream anyway, but, like, languages for language nerds are wonderful if you're a language nerd, but if you're not, they're usually pretty...
Marco:
hostile to everyone else and I think Swift is very much that way and the more complexity they layer onto it the harder it gets to actually really become an expert in it and to fully understand what you're doing in it whereas other languages make that a lot easier
John:
I think an example of the right direction that is heading in, you mentioned like, you know, trying to use the simple parts of the language and getting a weird error message, the work they've done to make the diagnostic stuff better.
John:
And all the things that you've said, I agree with them in like 50% as severe versions because I don't think it's that complicated.
John:
I don't think it's impossible for only experts to understand.
John:
But there's a kernel of truth in everything that you said.
John:
And it certainly is more complicated than Objective-C, which is what you're coming from.
John:
in most ways but i think easy things are easier in swift than they are in objective c maybe you're just not like you said for the people who are experts they don't realize where the pitfalls are i'll talk about that a little bit later when i talk about app development but uh it's every decision i see them make and every design change i see them make i think it's heading away from what you described and towards where you would want it to be there is like i said last episode no escaping the fact that
John:
It is wedded to its types and what I think is for efficiency reasons, but also because people who are working on Swift are really into types.
John:
But within those bounds, within those constraints, it is trying mightily and I think doing a pretty good job avoiding becoming C++, basically.
John:
It's never going to be Objective-C or Lua or anything like that because the problem space that it is addressing is so much bigger.
John:
And you could say that's a mistake.
John:
It shouldn't try to address such a big problem space.
John:
But if it's going to replace Objective-C even alone, that is a huge problem space because it needs interoperability with Objective-C and interoperability with all of Apple's APIs and everything, yada, yada, yada.
John:
So I am still much more optimistic about the language.
John:
And having limited experience with it now, I was even more pleasantly surprised using it that it did not drive me up a wall.
Casey:
Another thing that you're not considering, Marco, is how unfriendly Objective-C is from a syntactic or perhaps a visual level.
Casey:
I can only speak for myself, but coming from a C-sharp background at the time when I was starting to learn Objective-C, and I would even argue coming from a straight C background—
Casey:
But the way Objective-C looks with the brackets and message passing and all that is extremely off-putting and very, very unlike almost any other language.
Casey:
Now, yes, all the nerds are coming out and saying, what is it, Rust or something?
Casey:
No, not Rust.
Casey:
It was older than that.
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
A simple talk?
Casey:
Small talk.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
But I know that Objective-C wasn't the first one to do this, but it was the first one that I had run into in my life, and it looked nothing like anything else.
Casey:
And that was really off-putting, and I still don't think it looks particularly pretty.
Casey:
And that is a silly thing to be upset about.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But when something just looks really, really different than what you're used to,
Casey:
that's a pretty big hill to climb.
Casey:
And yeah, for you, Marco, and I think even for me or John, we are familiar enough with Objective-C that we can see the Matrix.
Casey:
We don't see the little characters.
Casey:
We can see the woman in the red dress or whatever.
Casey:
But when you can't yet see the Matrix, it is a very intimidating language.
Casey:
And I would argue that...
Casey:
Although the breadth of Objective-C is probably narrower than the breadth of Swift, at the same time, there's far more weird, odd, and interesting things.
Casey:
Now, that can be both good and bad interesting, but weird, odd, and interesting things that can be done in Objective-C by virtue of the way the Objective-C runtime works.
Casey:
Things like swizzling, for example, like, yes, you can sort of kind of do that in Swift, but that's...
Casey:
It feels like more of an Objective-C thing.
Casey:
What's swizzling?
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Like class clusters.
John:
Class clusters is a perfect example of a thing that you probably don't have to know about if you use Objective-C, but you're using them all the time whether you know them or not.
John:
And if you get an error message from them or you encounter behavior that has to do with class clusters, you're like, what the hell is a class cluster?
John:
Because it doesn't come up when you're writing your Objective-C, but they do use it and you do benefit from it.
John:
But still, Objective-C is so much smaller language than Swift.
John:
There's no debating that.
Casey:
No, I don't debate that.
Marco:
I agree with what you're saying, that the bracket syntax and everything is off-putting at first.
Marco:
And Swift is very clearly designed to look really nice...
Marco:
with Apple's current design aesthetic of hide everything in the junk drawer.
Marco:
Like, make the top really clean and bury everything.
Marco:
That's Apple's design.
Marco:
But there's not too much in the junk drawer in Swift.
John:
If you just do assignments to variables and conditionals and loops and objects and structures in Swift...
John:
There is no hidden junk there.
John:
The standard library does have some hidden junk, but if you're just doing basic programming, it is much simpler than Java, than C, than C++, and it's probably about as simple as Objective-C.
John:
It's just that there's so much more.
John:
As soon as you get into generics and protocols, that's where the lid comes off and you are well past the complexity of Objective-C immediately.
Marco:
When you're first learning something, usually in this context of programming language, this applies to lots of things, when you're first learning something,
Marco:
the way you start learning a language usually is basically copy and paste.
Marco:
You are looking at code samples or you're writing your own hello world kind of basic programs and you don't fully understand what everything does that you're typing.
Marco:
You don't fully understand what all the keywords mean or what all the operators are doing that you're typing.
Marco:
And then over time, you build an understanding of what you're doing.
Marco:
And so you go from kind of
Marco:
copy and paste or rigid steps that you're following to actually understanding what all these keywords are doing, actually understanding what the syntax is, actually understanding what the error message is saying.
Marco:
Swift seems optimized for that first stage of learning when you don't fully understand it yet and you're just looking at source code on slides or copying things down from Stack Overflow.
Marco:
But if you want to fully understand what's happening...
Marco:
that's when the depth and complexity of a language can either be a help or a hindrance.
Marco:
The C-based languages are actually really simple.
Marco:
There's not a lot of depth there to find because they're such smaller and simpler languages.
Marco:
Whereas something as complicated as Swift, if something is...
Marco:
going not quite the way you want, or if you have a weird error message from the compiler or something, it can often be really hard to figure out why is this happening or how do I fix this?
Marco:
Because there is so much depth past that surface.
Casey:
I think that's sort of true.
Casey:
I think like what John said a few minutes ago, like I agree to a point.
Casey:
First of all, C-based languages, is C++ not a C-based language?
Marco:
No, they're off on Mars.
Marco:
Screw them.
Casey:
I mean, I agree with your sentiment, although I do view it as a C-based language.
Casey:
I completely agree, though.
Casey:
They are way out in past Mars as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Be that as it may, I agree with you to a point about error messaging in Swift.
Casey:
As John already mentioned, it is getting better over time.
Casey:
Another thing that I've noticed the hard way is that the less... Well, let me rephrase that.
Casey:
If you choose to include types...
Casey:
and not rely on type inference in certain situations, that oftentimes will get you more explicit error messaging.
Casey:
Now, that shouldn't have to be the case.
Casey:
I should be able to use type inference always and forever, and I should still get good error messages.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I found if I split out like a kind of compound single line, so to speak, statement, or if I sprinkle in actual type declarations throughout something that's giving me a very weird error, typically I can get to an actual error relatively quickly.
Casey:
Not always.
Casey:
Your point is still fair.
Casey:
I just don't agree with quite the extent of what you're saying, even though I definitely agree with the spirit of what you're saying.
Casey:
We could probably go on about this for hours, but we have other things to talk about.
Casey:
So apparently all we need for John to actually write code in a language made more recently than what Vietnam was to get you a new Mac Pro.
John:
You joke, but that's actually kind of true.
John:
Not just the Mac Pro, but the monitor, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
John:
Having a big monitor and lots of space to do things really helped with...
John:
you know having the umpteen things that you need open during app development right and even more for me because i've got you know help windows and other stuff that you expect to be open so anyway uh context there is a post one of my at least one once or twice a year uh posts on hypercritical.co where i explain this at length i'm not going to go through the whole blog post uh but the the gist of it is that
John:
with the catalina transition which i was forced to undergo because my new mac pro does not boot any earlier operating system of course we lost all our 32-bit apps one of my 32-bit apps was drag thing which was an app that came from classic mac os and eventually was written in coco and coco didn't make it to 64-bit and to rewrite it in 64-bit would require basically rewriting the whole thing from scratch using a different api so drag thing didn't make it to catalina
John:
uh which is sad for me because i use drag thing uh for a couple it's like mixed floating palettes on your screen i use it for like a floating palette with a bunch of folders in it i use it for a floating application switcher which is also kind of like classic mac os and i also use this random obscure feature buried in the preferences of drag thing um and it was also in a bunch of other like
John:
Mac OS 10 utility apps back in the day but drag thing is the one that I've been using most recently that restores classic Mac OS window layering to modern Mac OS much easier when I could say restores it to Mac OS 10 but it's just called Mac OS now anyway what the hell classic Mac OS window window layering
John:
in classic mac os oh god i've had to try to describe this in help texts many times over and it never gets any easier despite the fact that we workshop this in a slack channel trying to come up with an explanation but it's easier on a podcast because i can ramble in classic mac os if you clicked on a window of some application that wasn't the current frontmost application not only would that window come to the front but every window belonging to that application would come to the front
John:
So if you're in terminal and you would click on the corner of a Safari window, oh, Safari didn't exist, whatever.
John:
Just follow me here.
John:
That window would come to the front and all the other Safari windows would come to the front.
John:
That's how classic Mac OS worked from the advent of its multitasking, right?
John:
And I used classic Mac OS for 17 years.
John:
And as I said in my post about it, those were 17 very formative years for me.
John:
So I really, really imprinted on that style of using it.
John:
discussed in the windows of Syracuse County and uh and other podcasts about my windowing that's how I basically that's how I organize my workspace I have a bunch of windows that are in these kind of you know clusters in certain positions and certain ones poke out from behind other ones and if I want to grab that switch to the other app I don't like alt tab my way over to it or any other all my habits are ingrained on snag a corner of the of that thing and even if that's not the window you want that'll bring all your terminal windows to the front and you know where they are so your mask can already be on its way to the window that you do want
John:
it's just the way I work macOS 10 of course changed that in macOS 10 you click a window just that window comes to the front now you can also click a dock icon and that will bring all the windows to the front but I don't want to have to go all the way down to the dock because the whole point of my layout is to have them arranged so the corners are near my card yada yada anyway point is drag thing had that feature as just a random preference in there because it was also made by a classic macOS nerd like me drag thing is gone I wanted that feature to come back
John:
And believe me, why don't you just get used to the new way to do it?
John:
I did.
John:
Mac OS X changed tons of things, and I eventually got used to almost all of them.
John:
But a few of them hung on stubbornly, and this is one of the ones that hung on.
John:
And in particular, DragThing, I think DragThing had this, if not the earlier utilities they used to do it, a feature where you could hold down the shift key when you clicked.
John:
to get the other behavior.
John:
So if you didn't want all of the terminal windows to come forward, you just wanted the one terminal window, you could shift click it and you just get that one terminal window to come forward.
John:
Right.
John:
Classic Mac OS didn't have that feature, but this was an enhancement that I enjoyed.
John:
So anyway, I wanted that back.
John:
So I talked to James Thompson, the author of drag thing.
John:
And I said, Hey, are you going to port drag thing?
John:
He said, no.
John:
I said, Hey, can you, can you just make a tiny app that just has that feature with the window switching?
John:
It was like one checkbox in your giant application.
John:
It's like, nah, that doesn't sound like a thing I want to do.
John:
Uh, so I talked to a bunch of other people like, well, can you, can you give me a hint on how that's done?
John:
Cause honestly, I had no idea like how any of that stuff works in Mac OS.
John:
This is the sort of the realm of what we used to call like, you know, system extensions or other things that modify the behavior of the system overall.
John:
You're like, can you even do that from an app?
John:
Like in the iOS world, you wouldn't think that you can write an iOS app.
John:
ship it on the store, and then someone would launch your application, and it would change the way the multitasking switcher works in iOS.
John:
Like, that's not even conceivable.
John:
But on the Mac, that happens all the time.
John:
So I had him give me some pointers about possible APIs, and I'm talking with other developer friends I know, like, hey, do you want to make this app?
John:
It's a really simple app.
John:
All it needs to do is change the window layering behavior somehow.
John:
Uh, and eventually, uh, my friend, a friend of mine that I, uh, used to work with, uh, back in the day when I worked at ebook company, uh, Lee Fioc, uh, took me up on the offer and said, yeah, I think I can make an app that does that.
John:
And so he's like, here you go.
John:
What do you think of this?
John:
And he sent me the app and, uh, let me join the, the source code, uh, repo and GitHub.
John:
And it was an app that basically did what I described.
John:
Uh,
John:
uh you know it was just simple app you launch it and then all of a sudden this new window mode is in effect and that was back in the fall actually i was like oh this is cool like my problem is solved now he made this app for me i'll just launch it'll be fine but of course i couldn't really leave well enough alone like i really wanted to have a menu bar icon and not a dock icon because i hate dock icons for things that are just like running all the time but i'm never going to actually interact with the application i don't want it mucking up my dock
John:
And it didn't have the shift override, which meant that, like, if I wanted just one window to come to front, I basically had to quit the app.
John:
And that wasn't good either.
John:
So, eventually, I think it was, like, over holiday break, it was like, I can... This is a small, simple application.
John:
I understand most of the source code.
John:
I could probably...
John:
add those features right uh lee added the uh the menu bar thing for me so that gave me a start i'm like okay well we've got a menu bar icon and he added the hiding of a dock icon too i'm like well we're almost here like this is practically done all i gotta do is well i really want the menu bar icon to have a few other options in it and i want to be able to option click on the menu bar icon to make it toggle a thing and
John:
and i want the shift click override and so i spent some time mucking around with it and figuring out how to do those things doing them in terrible awful ways and then having my developer friends look at it and tell me that it's terrible and revising again and again and eventually i drew an icon for it for the the menu bar and eventually i got everything working the way i wanted and i was like all right well now i'm done with solving my problem but
John:
I'm really close to having an actual complete application, and he wrote it in Objective-C, getting back to what we were discussing before, and I found that I didn't particularly enjoy working in Objective-C.
John:
Not a big surprise to me, because my whole history is working in dynamic languages, but this is an example of a thing, like I talked last week about how I want to have nothing to do with the type system, and I don't find any interaction with the type system benefits me in any way, because
John:
problems with types are not a problem that i have which is totally true in dynamic languages uh they just that's the point of dynamic languages they just sort of like i'm used to an environment where for the most part sane things happen and reasonable things if you look at them happen and there's a there's a few edges but if you work in any dynamic language you learn those one or two edges and in general everything else works some languages have more edges than other javascript in particular has more
John:
edges than your average dynamic language but usually there's not that many and it just lets you forget about all that stuff so i'm like i don't why do i have to deal with types i just just do what i want objective c is this awkward mix of a language that's trying to be chill with you about types being like hey it's
John:
Just of type ID, man.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Just send the message.
John:
It might work.
John:
It might not.
John:
You can send a message to anything.
John:
I was like, you send a message to nil.
John:
It's cool.
John:
Everything's fine here in Objective-C.
John:
Well, I had a bug that I spent a long time on and a bunch of people looked at.
John:
I wish I had checked this in.
John:
This is my bad work habits.
John:
I had this buggy code sitting there and eventually I got it fixed and I just, I just committed the, the fix and I never committed the buggy one.
John:
So I can't find out exactly what my bug was, but I'm pretty sure it was something along these lines.
John:
I was doing some bit masking to detect whether the shift key was held down.
John:
And there's like umpteen different ways to do this.
John:
And if you like Google search for it, you find tons of bad, wrong, or very old answers because you know, this platform has a long history, but anyway, I was bit masking like to try to figure out the shift key is down.
John:
And I was going to use that in a conditional.
John:
So I was catching the result in a BOOL, all caps BOOL type.
John:
And no matter what happened, like when I looked at the event, the shift key was never down.
John:
I'm like, you're lying.
John:
I'm holding the shift key down.
John:
How is the shift key not down?
John:
So I ended up writing this whole other event handler that would just detect if the shift key was down.
John:
And that worked.
John:
I'm like, see, that event handler is catching the shift key down.
John:
Why aren't you catching if the shift key is down?
John:
And then I made this crazy solution where...
John:
The global event handler would detect that the shift keys down and throw a switch.
John:
And then the other event handler would notice that switch was thrown and say, oh, I noticed that that other thing noticed that the shift key was down.
John:
Therefore, this must have been a shift click.
John:
And that had terrible races, as you can imagine, because the events wouldn't necessarily fire in the order that you wanted them to.
John:
And I eventually did a bunch of hacks to get it to work.
John:
But it was awful.
John:
But I couldn't, you know, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.
John:
Everything that I looked up in the documentation was telling me that it should have been working.
John:
I'm pretty sure what was happening was I was doing a bit mask of this, you know, modifier bits thing.
John:
And I was catching the results in a bool.
John:
And the bool type is too short to hold the bit that was flipped on in the masked out thing.
John:
So, like, I was taking, I don't know what it is, 264 bit values.
John:
And the one was way out there in bit 38.
John:
And then I would catch the result in bool, which is like a, you know...
John:
define or whatever or type alias for like unsigned char or something right and it would just happily go do to do here you go oh i'm going to take that value and put into this one well it's all zeros and the first the first eight bits are all zeros and then i'd put it in a conditional and be like that bool is totally false and it would never see the shift key and it did this absolutely silently because
John:
objective c is trying to be chill but it is not a dynamic language and that language would be like you're doing a bit mask and are there any bits flipped in that bit mask or is it all zero if there are any bits flipped if i evaluated the results of that in boolean context of course it's going to be true because i'm a dynamic language and i'll just coerce things in the way that you think makes sense but a c-based language as objective c is like take value stick it into shorter thing don't complain i think that's what was going on certainly that matches the uh the results that i was getting
John:
If I had done that in Swift, Swift would have said, you can't catch the result of that bit mask in a Boolean.
John:
That doesn't make any sense.
John:
You fool you.
John:
If you want it to be a Boolean, check if the result of that bit mask is equal to zero or not equal to zero.
John:
Because that will do, you know, I'll do type inference and say, okay, well, the bit is this wide and I'm comparing it to zero.
John:
So it'll be like a long zero or an int zero.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I'll handle it for you.
John:
But the comparison, equal or not equal, is a Boolean result.
John:
And you can catch that in a Boolean or you can put that right into a conditional.
John:
right all this leads up to this app being written and you know for the longest time one of the barriers was we just didn't have an icon for it like we had a menu bar icon but i didn't have i didn't have a dock icon i'm like well that's the only barrier i just needed a dock icon and so i kept looking around for when i could reuse and i couldn't really find anything so i drew a dock icon and then i was like
John:
now everything's done right but i said no i don't want to deal with objective c so i started a new project next code and i rewrote the entire app in objective c you mean swift or swift yeah i rewrote it in swift sorry uh it's it's not a lot of code and it was just a straight port basically some parts got to be a little bit fun like the parts that were not just me calling a bunch of apple api like there was this very simple class that they made around the preferences thing and i got to rewrite that in swift and i got to actually use some swift features because i'm writing some of my own code but
John:
Honestly, it's not that complicated.
John:
So I rewrote it in Swift, which made the program smaller and I think made me feel more comfortable that I wasn't producing any of those kind of errors that I just described.
John:
And the process of porting into Swift was surprisingly pleasant.
John:
I thought it would be like, oh, I'm going to be going around putting type annotations on things and finding places where Objective-C didn't care.
John:
But now Swift does care and I have to add a bunch of types.
John:
And that was not what it was like at all.
John:
So first of all, calling into Apple's APIs from Swift,
John:
I know that Apple's gone through a bunch of rounds of changing their APIs, like work with Swift and changing how the words are renamed and everything.
John:
But me coming in at the end here after the last change, it was just blessed relief to see that they're less verbose and make more sense.
John:
And once you do two or three of them, you kind of know how they're going to autocomplete.
John:
I'm like, oh, I can just look at that.
John:
I know how it's going to be.
John:
I know they're not going to repeat that word twice.
John:
So it's just going to be whatever dot main or whatever dot standard instead of the whole big wordy thing.
John:
i know the half of that method half of that message name is going to be a parameter and the other half is going to be the name and and autocomplete really helps so when you're calling it to apple's apis it's fairly straightforward even when you have things like constants and stuff the fact that you can just do the dot thing and uh you know you begin your your enum or constant or whatever with dot and it will know from type inference that what the rest of it is you don't have to type it out
John:
and if you have the objective c code you can just look up the help on it and then in the help thing just switch from objective c to swift and it gives you the swift equivalent of it very straightforward very pleasant experience i had to do almost no mucking with types when dealing with any of apple's things it all just fit together perfectly and when i wrote sort of
John:
the one or two little bits that are, you know, my own code or, like, straightforward, like, not calling Apple's APIs, I got to use some fun Swift features and spend a little bit of time realizing how little I know about how this works.
John:
I look at it and I'm like, well, I would know how to do this in Perl or any other language that has, like, all the features that...
John:
every language could ever need and i had to see which one of these is swift implemented yet all right they've got property wrappers they've got did set they've got the the uh the set and get things they've got init methods they got convenience init then you got to do experiments oh when you're in the init method does the did set thing get called or not and you know like there's lots of different ways you can go with these things having done this a million times i knew the in other languages i knew the possible feature set that was out there and it was just fun seeing which parts are implemented in swift and which are not um
John:
So anyway, I had a pleasant experience with it.
John:
And the only weird part was that in Swift, as far as I've been able to determine, there is no way to disable warnings for a line of code or a block of code.
John:
You can either disable it for your whole project or just live with a little yellow triangle, which is insanity.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it comes up because I got some help from another developer friend, Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software.
John:
He came up with the fastest possible way to bring all the windows from an app to the front.
John:
Unfortunately, it uses a deprecated API.
John:
And you get a warning.
John:
You can't use a deprecated API.
John:
Which is fine in the Objective-C version.
John:
You just do pragma, clang, whatever, until I had no warnings here.
John:
And then, you know, the other pragma to pop that off of the thing.
John:
Anyway, but in Swift, it was just a warning.
John:
And I kept Googling around to find it.
John:
And I found a stack over a question that's like, as of like 2019, there is no way to do this.
John:
I'm like, oh, that's grim.
John:
So what I did was I took that one call and I threw it into an Objective-C file and then called into Objective-C from Swift for that one call.
John:
So we have like this Objective-C bridging header in there, the sole purpose of which is to get you to a file that has a single function that calls a single other function that does the thing I want.
John:
And that one is wrapped in the no warnings pragmas.
John:
So that was the only sort of ugly wart.
John:
I have a bunch of non-deprecated ways to do it as well, but they're all slower and laggier than the deprecated way.
John:
So I'm hoping Apple doesn't deprecate that API anytime soon.
John:
But yeah, that's the app.
John:
And so once I had the app in Swift and an icon and everything else, then I just wanted to put it up on the Mac App Store.
John:
Not because I think it's going to make any money, because honestly, who even wants an app that does this in the first place?
John:
Very few people.
John:
uh and you know the people who do want it uh you know they're probably all listening to the show uh but i wanted the experience of what it's like to do something on the mac app store or any app store that you know we talk about it all the time but i've never actually done it or dealt with it or experienced anything about that so this is kind of the the best and worst case and the app part of it is so trivial as i said in the thing i posted about it was so trivial i thought they were going to reject it for how trivial it was kind of like how they rejected my reload button extension because like
John:
This project has all the overhead associated with putting anything up in the App Store with almost none of the actual development work.
John:
So imagine the least development you could do and then have the overhead overwhelm it of making sure everything's set up and going through the App Store thing and doing all the signing stuff.
John:
You guys both know what it's like, but I had never actually experienced this stuff myself, so I wanted to do it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
um i did and i have to say like my decision to put this on the mac app store the discussions about it and saying okay this is the thing we're going to do and i'm going to put it on the mac app store that happened in the morning of a day and by the evening of that day it was available on the mac app store
John:
Which I think is miraculous.
John:
Not just for app review times, but for how long it took me to go through all of the things with the tax forms and setting everything up and making sure signing is done right and uploading and dealing with all the fields you have to fill in.
John:
One day from, I think I should put this in the App Store, to I can go to the App Store application and see my thing.
John:
I was flabbergasted by that.
John:
My app review time was measured in minutes.
John:
And...
John:
all the other stuff of it.
John:
It was annoying and there was lots of stuff to go through, but basically without any, without even having to Google anything, but just clicking around on the UI, I was able to figure it out.
John:
I was going to say that their web UI for App Store Connect is really good, except at one point I did the mistake, did make the mistake of trying to type something into one of the text fields and like...
John:
it just something happened and it ate it like it didn't reload the page but all of a sudden half of my text was gone i'm like okay well not typing anything into this web page anymore it did everything in a separate text file which is probably what i should have been doing uh in the first place but yeah i did all that uh i put it up in the app store i did want to make it a paid app because i want that part of the experience as well just the whole getting the payment stuff set up and dealing with all of that
John:
I debated, discussed with Lee how much we should charge for the app.
John:
I was thinking I should charge a lot to keep people away from it because I don't want people to download it and be like, oh, your app is stupid.
John:
It doesn't do anything.
John:
I'm like, yeah, you probably shouldn't download it.
John:
But for the people who want it, like me,
John:
like i wanted the app so much that i like willed it into existence right i would pay a huge amount of money to someone else i would pay ten dollars if someone put this app up and i didn't have to write it like i would pay a lot for it so i think and the people who use it it's not just like you take the app and you don't use it you run it all day long and use it hundreds of times a day as you click around in windows like it gets used a lot if you have it like it changes the way your mac works
John:
So I was in favor of a very high price, but on the other hand, this is literally the simplest app that Apple would probably ever allow on the App Store.
John:
It does like one thing, and it has like one window with a couple of checkboxes in it.
John:
It is incredibly simple, so it couldn't be too expensive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's $2.99.
John:
If you think you're interested in trying classic window mode, you should try this out.
John:
Even if you're not interested in trying it, you can just run it in the other mode, in modern mode, where it just works normally, but then you can still shift-click if you want to bring all the windows forward and don't want to go all the way down to the dock icon to do that.
John:
So...
John:
every listener to this show should obviously go and buy it.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
John:
You can buy it and then just throw it in the trash.
John:
That's fine with me.
John:
That's ideal actually.
John:
Or you can buy it and just run it all day long.
John:
I recommend, I recommend running it without the doc icon.
John:
Like honestly, the only reason it has a doc icon is like, cause I thought you had to get rejected if I automatically had the doc icon.
John:
Um,
John:
Yeah, run it without the dot icon.
John:
Run it with just the menu bar icon.
John:
The secret that no one else knows except for listeners of the show is that you can option click on the dot icon to toggle the modes if that's what you want to do.
John:
And that's about it.
John:
I think I got to experience everything that you are supposed to experience about doing an app.
John:
on the mac app store all the rookie mistakes i think i made and then some my first submission was rejected like i got i passed this is like achievements you know and yeah right console game style achievement unlocked first submission rejected can you guess what my submission was rejected for metadata
John:
oh boy yeah metadata is a common one uh if you mentioned the price in the metadata that's a common one i was afraid of mentioning like mac os like get classic i was account like can i mention mac os like i'm aware of i mean i'm i'm less rookie than most people because i'm aware of many of the problems people encounter but you really got to think really rookie like think think of like it has never submitted an app i'll give you a hint it doesn't have to do with the app submission process has to do with the actual app what did i forget
Marco:
Did you leave it with like a 0.1 version number or something like that that suggested that it was a beta or incomplete?
Marco:
I didn't know that would get me rejected, but no.
Marco:
It does, yep.
John:
I did not do that.
John:
Hmm.
John:
This is probably something, well, I don't know.
John:
Marco doesn't do, maybe did you have, Marco might have had this happen to Forecast because that was your first Mac app, right?
Marco:
Forecast has never, I've never submitted a Mac app.
Marco:
It's not App Store.
John:
Then maybe you don't know.
John:
If you haven't submitted a Mac app, maybe this hasn't occurred to you, but I'll just save you from this working mistake.
John:
When you make a new Mac app project in Xcode, like I did making a new project in Swift, it gives you a whole bunch of crap.
John:
Like you don't just start off with nothing.
John:
Like it gives you like the skeleton of an app.
John:
right it even gives you like a window like it does a bunch of stuff for it yeah like the menu and about screen and everything right which is like great nice like we're using that about screen like that's that i didn't have to write the about screen it's like standard about screen you know i didn't even override the delegate method or whatever um
John:
What I forgot was it gives you a ton of other menus.
John:
And all the menus, they're like filled out.
John:
Like it gives you print and page setup and a help item.
Marco:
Yeah, the whole edit and view and everything.
John:
Yeah, tons of stuff that is not relevant at all to my application.
John:
And what does AppReview do?
John:
They go through every one of your menus and they try every function.
John:
And it's not like it crashes when you do them.
John:
When you go to print, it brings up a nice dialogue that says this application cannot print.
John:
but they rejected for that they're like you forgot that you didn't hook up any of these you know they basically said they called it an error i got an error you didn't get an error you got a beautiful dialog box that says this application cannot print uh yes so if you are submitting your first mac application go through your menus that that were given to you as part of the skeleton and delete all the items that are not relevant to your application i did actually hook up the help item it just takes you to the website but honestly there's not
John:
Much help for the app.
John:
All the help for the app is in the dialogue.
John:
So that was my rejection.
John:
And that was...
John:
happy to see that rejection rather than being rejected for having too simple functionality which would be crappy um what else did i do i immediately released the 1.0.1 version because i realized this is this is a super rookie mistake i realized after developing it for so long that on first run when you have no prefs file my code that was trying to set the prefs to default values wasn't working right because i didn't you know it was just a bug right but i never saw that myself because i always had a prefs file because i've been developing it right
John:
first run new user first run delete the container kill cfprefsd like simulate the experience of a computer that has literally never run this application because if you don't that's what they're going to do and that wasn't like it didn't cause a problem it's just that when you first launch it all the prefs were like off and that was the opposite of what they wanted the default values to be so i fixed that and then the final one is a tiny tiny sort of
John:
niggling ui issue that isn't worth releasing a new version for but they get seen immediately after the thing is up which uh you and brent just noticed in the slack um that one of my labels is not correctly aligned in in the one window that appears and i tell you it is not for lack of trying god that ui is killing me the fact that you can't zoom in that ui and there's so many things in there and the auto layout constraints and you're talking about like the xcode like auto layout
John:
Yeah, or just dragging the labors.
John:
You know how it snaps things in the storyboard interface?
John:
It snaps things to grid things, and there's so many things that it thinks it's snapping to, and there's the auto layout constraints, and I swear, I tried to align everything.
John:
My intentions, I know how they should be aligned, and I thought they were aligned, but...
John:
you know, retina screens are very small pixels and you can't zoom that interface at all.
John:
And so I shipped to the app store thing with a misaligned label.
John:
So I fixed that in, you know, in Xcode.
John:
It's committed to the repo, but am I going to release version 1.0.2 with a change that says label moved down one pixel?
John:
Because that's the change that I made.
John:
I figure I'll wait for more bug reports before I put out that release.
John:
So you can go to the app store now and get version 1.0.1.
John:
for the low, low price of $2.99, and then stare at the misaligned label and wait for me to release an update.
Casey:
Well, congratulations, John.
Casey:
I am excited that you are now officially a Swift developer.
John:
yeah like i said i enjoyed it and it's not really that fair because like this app is just calling a bunch of apple apis with like one new class defined right there's no business logic there's no data model there's no it's not really a fair assessment um but i did see and work with that code in objective c i did rewrite it all in swift so i feel like i can have a reasonable comparison of
John:
How nice is, A, how hard is it to port from Objective-C to Swift?
John:
And B, how nice is it to call into Apple's APIs in Swift?
John:
And I think the answer is surprisingly nice given where it came from and how kind of gross it used to be.
Casey:
Yeah, every time I look at Objective-C enumeration names that are 3,000 characters long, as is everything else in Objective-C, I just go, ugh.
John:
And Xcode with the fix-its, super impressed.
John:
Not only can you use type inference to make those shorter, but a lot of the names, they change the wording on them and stuff.
John:
And the Xcode thing would say...
John:
you know, this enumeration constant or whatever is not, it's unknown or whatever.
John:
And it would say, by the way, that was renamed from X to Y. Like they have some kind of metadata in their headers or whatever that says the old name for this was X. So if someone types X, don't just say unknown symbol or whatever.
John:
Tell them, oh, I see.
John:
Yeah, we renamed that.
John:
We changed the noun and the verb positions or we moved this around or whatever.
John:
And it knows what you were trying to type and you can just hit the fix and the fix it thing.
John:
Super impressed with Xcode.
John:
Oh, more beginner stuff.
John:
I did have to delete the drive data directory a few times, so I'm hitting all the milestones.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I'm proud of you, John.
Casey:
This is good times.
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Marco:
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Casey:
Marco, you have a new toy in your house.
Marco:
News broke a few weeks back that Swiss TV company Salt had made an alternative Apple TV remote for their customers in Switzerland.
Marco:
The reporting was like, oh, it was like with Apple's cooperation and it's fully compatible.
Marco:
It looks like a bigger Apple TV remote with regular buttons on it.
Marco:
And listener David Rosley actually sent me one.
Marco:
So thank you, David.
Marco:
That was awesome.
Marco:
I got to say, it's really nice, actually.
Marco:
It's not perfect, and I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it forever.
Marco:
First impressions, it's very big.
Marco:
It feels very light and feels very cheap.
Marco:
The plastic on the outside is a very cheap plastic.
Marco:
The top edge is kind of sharp, like the bezel edge around the top.
Marco:
It doesn't feel like a premium thing.
Marco:
uh the surface with the buttons on it though does feel nicer it feel it has that kind of like soft tuck silicone rubbery kind of feel that a lot of stuff has now it's a very like high contrast look there's no logo on it there's no like salt tv logo anywhere on it and it has like the big white circled menu button on top so it looks kind of like the apple tv style and then it feels you know it feels good like the buttons feel good and
Marco:
The only thing is that the buttons are very low.
Marco:
It's a very shallow depth, and having most of them have just like, it's mostly just black with white labels, and only the menu button has a circle around it.
Marco:
And so in practice, especially in a dark TV room, it's hard to see the edges of the buttons.
Marco:
And so you do have to do a little bit of feel, and the edges are so shallow on them that it's a little hard to feel around just based on feel alone.
Marco:
The iconography on it is nice and bold and high contrast.
Marco:
And there aren't that many buttons on it, so it's fairly easy to navigate.
Marco:
But it is a little hard to see in the dark.
Marco:
And where this is most clunky is operating the D-pad.
Marco:
Because it is also... The direction, up, down, left, and right buttons are just this one big round rect.
Marco:
They're not like four separate...
Marco:
ridges that you can feel just like this big round blob so it's a little bit hard to precisely navigate that but it is not a touch surface like the apple tv remote like it's it's actually just four buttons so that's great it actually works really well um where it falls down is text input because this remote
Marco:
It doesn't have that trackpad-like surface.
Marco:
So text input, if you're going to do it on here, you have to hit the left and right buttons over and over and over again to get over to the right letters.
Marco:
And there's no Siri on it.
Marco:
Because I assume the way this works...
Marco:
is I think it's just an infrared remote that comes pre-programmed to send the right codes to Apple.
Marco:
The reporting on it was kind of like, oh, Apple cooperated with them and let them do it.
Marco:
And I don't know how much cooperation there was.
Marco:
I think what really happened is they just shipped a remote that was compatible without pairing or anything because it sends the same infrared commands that the old Apple's IR remote sent.
Marco:
That's my best guess.
Marco:
But it does really work that way.
Marco:
There's no setup.
Marco:
There's no pairing.
Marco:
You just point it at the Apple TV and it just starts working.
Marco:
So that part is awesome.
Marco:
But not having Siri and having to move the text cursor back and forth by hitting the buttons over and over again...
Marco:
That is clunky and painful.
Marco:
If you're going to go this route, you're probably going to want to do all text input on your phone or keeping the Apple remote around and just using it for Siri.
Marco:
But otherwise, the rest of the operation of this is actually pretty nice.
Marco:
The buttons do click in nicely.
Marco:
I haven't had any accidental input.
Marco:
There are a few niceties like there's a power button.
Marco:
Now on the Apple TV remote, you can hold the home button down for a few seconds and it puts up like a sleep dialogue and you hit that and it turns off the TV and the Apple TV.
Marco:
This has a power button that doesn't do that.
Marco:
It seems to only turn off the TV.
Marco:
Oh, and it has a volume up and down button.
Marco:
That doesn't initially work unless you have, I think, a Samsung TV.
Marco:
It comes by default.
Marco:
But there's a little instruction sheet that comes with the remote.
Marco:
If you hold down a certain button combo, you can toggle it between different brands of TVs for universal IR compatibility.
Marco:
And once you find your TV, then volume up and down and power work.
Marco:
I have an LG.
Marco:
I hit the switch button one time and it went to the LG, so it's fine.
Marco:
So that part is great.
Marco:
So I have volume.
Marco:
I have power.
Marco:
There's no actual home button.
Marco:
There's menu, but there's no home button.
Marco:
If you hold down the menu button for a couple of seconds...
Marco:
it performs a single home button click, but you can't do the double click thing to bring up the app switcher to force quit Netflix when it breaks.
Marco:
So that's a little annoying.
Marco:
There's no way to go to the app switcher as far as I can find.
Marco:
What's nice, though, is that it has these dedicated buttons at the bottom for not only play pause, but also rewind, fast forward, jump back and jump forward 10 seconds.
Marco:
And these are all things you can do on the Apple remote with certain gestures and things, but I found them incredibly error prone and incredibly hard to do like reliably.
Marco:
And with this, just having those as buttons is actually really nice.
Marco:
So overall, it's pretty nice.
Marco:
Like I, I've been using it for a few days and so far I think I'm going to keep it out, but not having Siri or the home button is,
Marco:
will prevent me from putting my Apple remote away forever.
Casey:
So you're going to have two remotes.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
All the things that are wrong with this are ways in which it tried to copy the Apple remote.
John:
The shallow buttons are so clearly trying to imitate the very shallow button of the Apple remote right down to the ring around the menu thing.
John:
the general size and shape they know they want it to be larger but it's still basically a thin fairly narrow rectangle um i'm pretty sure this feature is still in the apple tv and this is what i suggest to people uh the apple tv has a feature where it will learn any ir remote that you happen to have like the apple tv will learn your remote and not the other way around
John:
uh and i for years used an old tivo remote with my apple tv i just put a little sticker on it that said apple tv so we know this is because we have another tivo remote that looks exactly the same right um and you just teach the tivo that and it has all the same features you just talked about it tivo has a skip forward and skip back and fast forward it has dedicated buttons for all that so you get all those features it doesn't have a siri thing so you're missing that uh the power and the volume work the same way on on uh tivo remotes it's it's ir as well even though tivo remotes also have bluetooth that
John:
I've never used it with Bluetooth with Apple TV.
John:
I don't think you even can.
John:
But if this feature still exists on Apple TV, and I think it does, and you have a remote that you like that you're not using anymore, maybe this is a rare scenario, but if you ever use TiVo, you probably accumulate these TiVo.
John:
TiVo remotes are amazing.
John:
The buttons are high.
John:
You can see them without ever looking at them.
John:
They have a distinctive size and shape and position.
John:
It's glorious.
John:
I found something today with the TiVo streaming box, which I'm assuming is terrible because TiVo software these days is terrible.
John:
But it comes with a tiny TiVo remote, like it's the same as the TiVo P-Note remote, but it's really, really small.
John:
I think this would be an ideal Apple TV remote because the Apple TV itself is small and so is the real remote for it.
John:
So it'd be nice to have...
John:
a sort of black sleek small Apple TV remote so the Apple the TiVo streaming box is like 70 bucks and it comes to the remote so just buy it throw away the streaming box and take that remote and use it with your Apple TV oh my word anyway thank you David Rosley for giving me this remote it's pretty awesome and yeah I'm gonna keep using I think
Casey:
John, on your birthday, you got very good news.
Casey:
And then several days later, you got another package.
John:
I did.
John:
Another two packages.
John:
I got a package with the stand and the display.
John:
The stand box is way bigger than I thought it would be.
John:
It's tremendous.
John:
I mean, the stand itself is also big, but like the boxes.
John:
huge all that money had to go somewhere yeah i've got the display and the stand they are connected to each other it is on my desk um first impression having set up and using it
John:
To give context before I go into that, I'm not using this monitor for its intended purpose.
John:
I don't need a reference monitor.
John:
I don't need excellent color fidelity beyond what the iMac offers, although I appreciate it because I do do photos on this thing or whatever.
John:
But there is no actual use case that requires this thing.
John:
But I did want a really big, nice Apple monitor.
John:
So if they had offered a 6K display,
John:
that was not a bazillion dollars and was just like the iMac display but bigger I would have got that and my first impression of using it was had to do with the size I was going to remember from a 23 inch monitor which is kind of small even by today's standards that was my old monitor and then I had a 24 temporarily on the desk not that much bigger and you know the resolution was only like it was only 4k
John:
I just felt overwhelmed by how big it was.
John:
I mentioned before my window arranging, where I have places where windows go, and my window arranging pattern has evolved, how screen sizes have changed.
John:
Obviously, I started my window arranging patterns on a 9-inch screen that was, whatever it is, 512x342, whatever the classic that was, and it's moved up from there.
John:
I haven't made a significant jump in sort of point size, like not pixels, you know, because it's retina versus non-retina, but just like how many computer points are on the screen, which used to be pixels, but now are little clusters of four actual pixels in retina mode.
John:
I haven't made a big jump like that for a while.
John:
I made a big jump from the CRT days to my 23-inch Apple Cinema display back in the day, which was what, 1900 by...
John:
1920 by 1200 i don't even remember anymore but that was a 23 inch lcd and i after that with my mac pro was also using a 23 inch lcd i think it had more pixels because it was taller right i'm not entirely sure but that was the last big jump i made and so the jump from crt to 23 inch lcd and then i'm with 23 inch lcd until 2019 wow and then i go up to 6k obviously i you know my wife has a 5k iMac and i use it all the time
John:
But it was something about sitting at my desk in my familiar place in this huge screen.
John:
And then like I launch my applications and they're all shoved into the upper left hand corner because it remembers the window positions.
John:
And I just see all the space around where, you know, like space that didn't exist before.
John:
So I started doing my window arranging and I realized my old patterns that were like anchored in the corners were like in the upper left.
John:
I have web browsers in the upper right.
John:
That's where, like, my Skype window goes when I'm podcasting.
John:
And the lower left is, like, Audio Hijack.
John:
And in the center is Skype.
John:
And, like, you know, my terminal windows are anchored at various places.
John:
I ended up with this giant hole in the middle of the monitor.
John:
Because when I did that sort of corner anchoring, there was this giant space in the middle where there was nothing in it.
John:
I was like, I've got all this extra space.
John:
I need to rethink everything.
John:
I need to rethink all my patterns.
John:
So I'm evolving how I'm going.
John:
You need to rethink cities.
John:
Yeah, there's just wide open spaces.
John:
And I also felt like the thing was looming over me.
John:
It was just like this huge wall in front of my eyes.
John:
I had to turn my head to take it all in.
John:
It was just unbelievable.
John:
And I don't have anything that I could show on this monitor to show off its capabilities.
John:
So I just started Googling for like,
John:
8k uh hdr content like demo reels that they show it like you know ces or whatever for your televisions and i found a bunch of them samsung has a bunch and so i got like this either 6k or 8k footage uh at 60 frames per second in hdr and then i tried to find an app to play it and by the way like this is you know when it's not in quick time compatible format you have to use the other things that one that we talked about in the last show with the optimist player you remember that app yep
John:
that was the winner like i tried a bunch of other apps i had to try like vlc i tried the iina whatever app and it was having some trouble with it i'm like is my computer too slow to play this no it's just like the particular codec that these demos had uh optimist player just did it fine and it it looks amazing it looks amazing in hdr and 60 frames per second at 8k it looks i'm not gonna say it looks better than my tv and i'll get to that in a little bit because in some respects it doesn't but it does look
John:
absolutely amazing like this is the first time i've seen first hdr display i have in the house besides i guess like the ipad pro one that's h i don't remember anyway or the phones i guess are hdr but this is you know has way more nits as they say on stage super impressive i can watch the demo reel i like the best was this person taking their golden retriever through italy and showing pictures of food and everything so i was predisposed to like it but looked amazing
John:
but I don't spend my day looking at HDR content.
John:
Uh, most of the time I'm just looking at regular computer screens.
John:
Um, I enjoyed editing my photos on it.
John:
I enjoyed making my photos window like three times as big because again, they launched photos and it's on the upper left hand corner.
John:
It's like, you can zoom that out now.
John:
God, I can see so many photos.
John:
Um,
John:
the magic part of it is that three days later now this is just my life now like the monitor does not feel bad it just feels like a computer monitor all i've rearranged everything and have new patterns when i was doing the development of my app and i had xcode open and i had you know my web browsers then i had the the help window that had photoshop open for doing all the icon work and had like icon slate open and candy bar looking at my old icons for to try to find things and
John:
what else did i i had so many apps open then when i brought up the app switcher it hit the edges of my monitor you know 6,000 16 pixel monitor the app switcher was going from edge because again 96 gigs of ram right i had so much going on and it could handle it because there was a place for everything to go why ever quit anything it was but like it's so it's so terrifying how quickly you get used to like you know like oh this monitor is so big and then you're just like
Marco:
you know as they say on television this is me now so i'm i'm curious like one one thing that i always tried to maintain i always tried to make sure that i was using the same monitor sizes and setup at work and at home because i hated the idea of having to switch and have like how like a nice big one in one of those places and have to go to a smaller one for the other place is that going to be a problem for you with this or are you going to somehow make work buy you one of these
John:
Oh, no, it's not going to be a problem.
John:
Because the things I'm doing at home and the things I'm doing at work are not the same at all.
John:
I love coming home to this big setup and this faster computer and all the other stuff.
John:
But I'm doing different things.
John:
At work, I do have the stupid laptop and I have the external 24-inch monitor.
John:
But it's fine for what I do at work.
John:
Remember, at work, I'm not running Photoshop and Xcode.
John:
uh and two web browsers at the same time like that's not what i'm doing like i'm not multitasking to that degree so it's you know i don't have as much ram either you know it's just it's not a problem for me uh let me talk about the stand a little bit the height adjustment is i didn't think i would use it i like the fact that it was there but i figured i'll find the height that's good for me and then that'll be that and i like that it's adjustable because who knows what the right height for me will be um
John:
And I did find it that the ride height for my particular setup actually is pretty low.
John:
It's not the bottom of the travel, but it's pretty low because my desk is high because I have a keyboard tray, yada, yada.
John:
But I did find that the height adjustment I do use more often than you might think because sometimes I have my work laptop at home open in front of the monitor.
John:
and the the rim of it can like block the bottom of my screen just take the bottom take my finger and move the bottom of the screen up an inch and now they you know don't block each other which is nice um i did try rotating it into portrait that i mean i just got through saying you get used to anything but i can't imagine getting used to it because in portrait it is so tall i have to like bend my neck to see the top of the monitor it is
John:
On my particular desk, even in the lowest position, it is so tall it is hilariously unpractical.
John:
I would spend my day, if I had to look at the menu bar, my neck would be strained from looking upwards.
John:
I need a standing desk or something else to deal with that.
John:
Even with a standing desk, I feel like even if it's correctly aligned with your eyeline, you're going to have to bend your head up and down to see the top and the bottom.
John:
And the way that you don't when you, I don't know, maybe my eyes move side to side better than they move up and down, but...
John:
Vertical, this monitor seems too big for vertical except for sort of like boutique applications like they had at the WWDC thing where they were showing like portraits on it or using it for display purposes.
John:
But if you're doing like text editing, like you can certainly see a lot of lines of code at nine point text, but it's just...
John:
It's too much, at least for me.
John:
So horizontal it is.
John:
One interesting thing about this is that the monitor rotation thing, like there's an unlock thing that lets you rotate it, right?
John:
But even when it's in locked mode, there's a little bit of play in the rotation.
John:
Like it doesn't lock into straight 90 degrees.
John:
which is bad and then it seems loosey-goosey and you're like but i just want you to lock into your regular landscape orientation but it's good in that if your desk isn't perfectly level you can still level the monitor my desk is perfectly level because i leveled it when i cleaned everything uh before naturally yeah um so for me it's mostly a downside but i did have to actually level the monitor with my little level uh
John:
after I got it back to the horizontal position.
John:
It stays there.
John:
It's not going to go anywhere.
John:
The stand does its job.
John:
It holds the monitor up.
John:
The motion of it is not as smooth or nice feeling as the flower iMac with the arm.
John:
That arm felt better than this monitor stand, which is kind of amazing.
John:
Again, kind of like the turning knob handle thing on the top of the Mac Pro.
John:
It feels a little like...
John:
scrapey aluminum turning and scrapey aluminum like it's precise and it's not crumbly but it's also not smooth like there are no there are no bearings in there it is like metal on metal very smooth precise metal on very smooth precise metal but there's no sort of bushings or slick plastic or other lubrication or ball bearings or anything else in there so yeah
John:
It's smooth and you can move it with one finger and it feels solid and doesn't wiggle and there's no play, but it's a little bit... It's not a particularly pleasant feeling to move up and down.
John:
It feels a little scrapey.
Marco:
That's a little... That's a little disappointing.
Marco:
Apple is the kind of company that would care a lot about making that feel really nice and...
Marco:
And for something that is so high-end, such a flagship product, and so expensive, you would think they... I mean, maybe it just wasn't possible compared to the old iMac.
Marco:
I know this is obviously a lot more weight.
John:
So it doesn't feel bad.
John:
And my thinking is that the things that might make it feel smoother also decrease durability.
John:
So maybe it's designed to be the same year after year being thrown into Pelican cases and moved in different places on a movie set or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know the thinking.
John:
It doesn't feel cheap.
John:
But it also doesn't... I don't know.
John:
You should go to an Apple store and move one and just see what it's like.
John:
Like, it's just... It feels very solid and sturdy, but there's a little bit of, you know, scrapiness you can feel in there.
Marco:
I don't even think there's any stores near me that are going to stock it.
Marco:
Because, like, the Mac Pro is only going to be, like, in select stores.
Marco:
So I don't even know if any of mine are going to have it.
Marco:
But, yeah.
Marco:
I think also, like...
Marco:
Apple really has to nail this stand because if they're going to have the sheer audacity to ship an optional $1,000 stand for their monitor, it has to be really awesome.
Marco:
It better be a damn nice stand and have no obvious problems.
Marco:
And so, yeah, all the details have to be really good.
John:
One thing it does impress with is the, I mean, I mentioned the size and it is fairly big, but the weight, it is so much more sort of substantial than even the little L-shaped tongue that's under an iMac.
John:
It's thicker all around.
John:
It doesn't taper.
John:
It is surprisingly heavy, which is nice for a bass for the monitor.
John:
You never feel like this thing is going to tip over.
John:
In particular, I appreciate...
John:
I don't know if this is just psychological or it's a real thing, but I appreciate the fact that it's not an L shape, that it's more of an eye beam that behind the monitor, like where the thing goes up, there's another little like inch of stuff that sticks out behind it.
John:
Oh, interesting.
John:
It just makes it feel even more sturdy, like that you feel like even if I just shove the top of this monitor, there's no way I could get it to tip over because of the extra little leg.
John:
It really solidly anchors the monitor.
John:
If you are the type of person who wants to move it around a lot, I think that's part of the thing that helps.
John:
Like if you move the monitor up, you're not going to lift the foot up off the thing because it just weighs so much.
John:
So it does the job.
John:
I don't think much about the stand.
John:
I try not to think about how much it costs.
John:
I wish I could see the back of the monitor more because now that these holes have grown on me, it's cool looking.
John:
There's a fan back there.
John:
And when I plugged it in and put my head behind the monitor, you could hear it.
John:
But kind of like we discussed with the iMac last time, because it's behind a solid thing,
John:
not audible like maybe it becomes audible if you run hdr content for a half an hour at a time but i haven't done that but it is not especially since if it's on my the mac pro next to it is on maybe it would be audible if the mac pro wasn't on but the fan of the monitors were on but it is very small and very quiet i'm assuming they're spinning now but i can't hear them so
John:
That's all good.
John:
I like the fact that it has a uniform bezel around it, which is the thing that we haven't had with an iMac in forever because it's always got the chin, right?
John:
It looks nice, and it looks nice and uniform.
John:
Some people have been complaining about the viewing angles.
John:
I'm coming from a monitor that's 10 years old, so as far as I'm concerned, it looks amazing.
John:
And, you know, I'm used to the 5 iMac, and it looks about the same.
John:
One thing about that is I didn't get the nanotexture ridiculous screen because I was terrified of it.
John:
But this does not look as glossy as the 5K iMac.
John:
I don't know if it's at a different place in the room, but it almost looks like a matte monitor.
John:
It looks pretty amazing.
John:
So I'm so happy that I chose this thing because it doesn't have the nano textured finish, which I thought like made it look a kind of misty.
John:
But I don't get any glare or reflections on it.
John:
Again, it could just be because it's in a different place in the room.
John:
But this basically looks like the miracle matte monitor of my dreams.
John:
Yeah, it's really nice, and I've immediately gotten used to it, and now I can never go back to anything else, which makes me hope that someday Apple doesn't make just a 5K monitor that's the iMac without the iMac behind it, but that they make a 6K monitor that is just not this fancy thing.
John:
One final bit on the actual supposed attributes of this monitor.
John:
Who was it this week?
John:
Juan Salvo put up on Twitter a thing about comparing this to actual reference monitors that cost...
John:
$40,000 or whatever.
John:
I kind of talked about this when we discussed the technology behind this monitor.
John:
The fact that it's a bunch of, it's basically a local dimming LCD, LED backlit LCD television, a technology with which I'm very familiar.
John:
There's a reason the best televisions in terms of picture qualities do not use, uh, you know, full array local dimming LED backlit LCDs.
John:
Uh, and that reason is bloom.
John:
If you have a giant, uh, star field, that's all black with pinpricks of, of white light at, at maximum brightness, uh,
John:
If you have a quote unquote full array local dimming backlight that turns on the backlight just behind the regions of the screen that have light in them, the regions are big.
John:
There are hundreds of regions, but there are millions of pixels.
John:
So if you have a star field where there's tiny pinpricks of really bright light, you have to turn on like a one inch by one inch bright white LED behind that.
John:
And when you do that, yeah, the bright LED light comes out the little pinprick hole.
John:
but it also bleeds through a little bit of all the region around the little star prick, and that's called bloom in the TV world.
John:
And so we'll link to the tweets that Juan did.
John:
You can see it compared to a reference monitor.
John:
One of the things reference monitors do is a lot of them have multiple layers of LCDs where the backlight is broken into regions, but then that backlight shines through a...
John:
exactly one-to-one pixel grid lcd whose only job is to filter the backlight and then in front of that there's the actual lcd that has the pixels on it right so it really does a good job of blocking out as much light as possible to try to give you maximum contrast between the tiny star that's supposed to be 100 bright white and the inky blackest space right next to it
John:
Technology like OLED and Plasma don't have this problem because they literally don't light up the pixels that are black.
John:
The pixels themselves are emissive.
John:
There is no backlight shining through a grid, right?
John:
So in this comparison, the XDR has way more bloom than a quote-unquote real reference monitor.
John:
So if you're thinking you're getting an XDR and you're going to pay $6,000 and get the same performance as a $40,000 reference monitor, surprise, you are not...
John:
And also surprise, full array local dimming is not the best technology for maximum contrast.
John:
OLED is better.
John:
Plasma was better.
John:
And the reference monitors that use LCDs with multiple layers of LCDs, which apparently the XDR does not, are also better.
John:
So, anyway...
Marco:
XDR no one should probably buy it but I'm super glad that I have it that's a great summary I'm glad I feel like after 10 years of using the same computer I feel like you've earned a totally ridiculous upgrade and this is that this is a totally ridiculous upgrade that is awesome in all the ways that you care about I don't know anybody else
Marco:
who should buy that monitor.
Marco:
But I'm glad you did.
Marco:
It is right that you have this monitor.
John:
Yeah, it's kind of like I talked about last time.
John:
The thing you notice is the removal limitation.
John:
So I used to be on the edge of my disk space all the time, which is a constant source of stress and not having enough RAM and things starting to thrash because you're opening too many applications or whatever.
John:
screen space is the same deal suddenly it's like all these windows used to be packed together like suddenly before i would not have considered running as many programs i was running at once not just because you know i'd be worried about them all fitting into ram but also because where the hell would i put them on the screen it eventually just becomes this mess and you can't find anything but having so much more screen space like i i can come up with new ways to arrange things and this is even with the size inflation because one of the things i did was i said like my default sort of
John:
I used to have kind of like 8.5 by 11-ish size piece of paper.
John:
That was my browser window, right?
John:
I was like, I can make all of my browser windows just bigger.
John:
Like just, you know, instead of keeping them the same size and having more of them, I can make them all bigger.
John:
Obviously, I can make them taller if I want so they can cover the same portion, but I can make them bigger.
John:
So every window got bigger.
John:
My Slack window got bigger.
John:
My terminal windows got bigger.
John:
I increased the font size in my terminal.
John:
Like all sorts of things that I couldn't do before.
John:
like it's you know having having those limits removed um and like i said for the screen it's a honeymoon period and then you're like oh i'm just used to it but i like being used to it i like thinking when i get home i'll have all my space and all my stuff and my computer will never break a sweat and i'll be able to do all the things that i want to do i've even started to come around appreciating the thing that you know we talked about how crappy my gpu is a little before and i do want to eventually get a new gpu but while i have the crappy one one of the benefits of the crappy gpu
John:
that we discussed before but i appreciate even more no fan there's no fan in the gpu like there's just the three fans in the front of the thing and then the blower fan in the back there is and the gpu like everything else inside this computer is entirely just passively cooled by the fans that are already in the case uh and so it's silent so if i got a gaming gpu it would have its own cooler and it would make more noise and i would not like that as much and might have to banish the computer to be under the desk so
John:
In summary, I am enjoying my new setup.
John:
I enjoyed putting it through its paces, doing probably the most complicated thing I've ever done, which was trying to learn how to use Xcode and program a Mac app at the same time as I'm doing umpteen other things on my computer.
John:
It handled it well, and I didn't have any hitches.
John:
I do want to talk about the peripherals next week, my mouse peripherals and some of the issues that I've been having with Catalina and one issue that I had with my hardware, which was really more of a software issue or a third-party hardware issue.
John:
But anyway, we'll save that for next week as a tease.
John:
More Mac Pro stuff to come, but monitor and the overall setup, thumbs up.
John:
Congratulations.
John:
You have earned it.
John:
Thank you.
John:
No, that is true.
John:
Oh, by the way, before we go into the after show, we'll just assume what we're about to do.
John:
I think I forgot to mention the name of my application that I want everyone to buy.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Thus completing my trip through the rookie mistakes that you make when talking about things.
John:
I mentioned it a lot in the blog posts and the show notes, but a lot of people don't know what the show notes are.
John:
Go to the app store and search for front and center.
John:
That's a name that Lee came up with this app, and I think it's great.
John:
Front and center.
Marco:
You can also search the app store for John Syracuse because that's under your name and it's your only app.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
You'll find it that way too.
John:
Front and center will be keyboard spammed by people buying ads against it, but I don't think anyone's buying ads against my name.
Marco:
Maybe we should.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Away.
Marco:
Everyone has a unique travel style.
Marco:
And so Away offers a range of suitcases made of different materials like polycarbonate, aluminum, and durable nylon, a huge variety of colors, and two carry-on sizes.
Marco:
So for whoever you are and whatever you need to pack, Away has luggage that works for how you travel.
Marco:
And Away, I gotta say, they just have good, smart design for their features and their luggage.
Marco:
So, for instance, all of Away's suitcases are also thoughtfully designed to last a lifetime, with durable exteriors that can withstand even the roughest of baggage handlers.
Marco:
You all know, you've seen the bags, like, get...
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And you can try it out because there's a 100-day trial on everything Away makes.
Marco:
So take the product out.
Marco:
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Marco:
Take it on the road.
Marco:
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Marco:
Travel with it.
Marco:
Get lost with it for 100 days.
Marco:
If you decide it isn't for you after that, of course, even if you've used it, you can return any non-personalized item for a full refund during that period.
Marco:
No ifs, ands, or asterisks.
Marco:
So Away also offers free shipping and free returns on any order within the contiguous U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia.
Marco:
So this is really risk-free.
Marco:
To get your suitcase and shop other travel essentials, visit awaytravel.com slash accidental tech.
Marco:
That's awaytravel.com slash accidental tech.
Marco:
Thank you to Away for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Well, I had an interesting vacation experience with my Apple products this past week.
Casey:
I forgot about this vacation experience.
Casey:
Ah, yes.
Casey:
I am anxious to hear the result of this.
Marco:
My wife and I, my wonderful wife and I, went to Cancun for after Christmas because we discovered that...
Marco:
All these years that I've been hating winter and being depressed all winter and trying to add light and warmth and humidity to my house artificially in the winter and getting all depressed about the darkness and the cold and the dryness and everything else.
Marco:
there's various ways you can you know light some wood on fire and make some warmth but if you light a big pile of money on fire you can actually create summer in the middle of winter oh my word i i had never yeah never anything like this before and oh man it was nice to have a week of summer oh and i went into another ocean john and and we took pictures for john to show that i went that i went to another ocean um with your hat on
Marco:
Well, I get a headburn otherwise.
Marco:
And your glasses.
Marco:
Well, it was bright.
Marco:
So a little while into the trip, there was this bar that started flickering on the screen of my 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
It was as if the screen is divided into six vertical stripes, like six vertical segments.
Marco:
Segment number two was flaking out like crazy.
Marco:
And at first, it seemed almost like analog interference.
Marco:
It was like smeary and blurry interference.
Marco:
It wasn't like...
Marco:
digital blocky artifacts like you'd expect.
Marco:
So at first I thought, oh, it must be like the display cable or something.
Marco:
That's annoying, but I'll make it through the rest of the trip and I'll bring it home and get it serviced or whatever.
Marco:
And then as the trip went on, it became...
Marco:
worse and more interesting.
Marco:
The interference started becoming blockier and more digital looking, so then I started respecting the GPU is going bad.
Marco:
The computer continued to work just fine.
Marco:
I would assume that if you have significant GPU issues, at some point the computer would lock up.
Marco:
But it didn't affect the computing part of the computer at all.
Marco:
What was also weird about it is that
Marco:
the glitching out area started having a memory of what was being shown below it.
Marco:
Like I would have like a window that was up for a while and then I would hide that window and bits of that window would still be showing in distorted, scrambled ways in the defective area.
Marco:
It even went as far as I rebooted the computer and ran Apple hardware diagnostic test at boot up.
Marco:
and window contents from the previous os session before the reboot were still displaying what in the stripe so what did the hardware diagnostics say it said everything was fine it seemed fine were you by any chance sitting in a chair with a hydraulic lift on it yeah
John:
did you see that yeah something that i don't i didn't look into that know whether it's bs or not but the idea was that hydraulic list chairs if you sit on them and compress the gases in them it lets out the equivalent of an emp they can mess with your display if your cable isn't shielded well sounded like bs to me but who knows stranger things yeah that that also doesn't sound right to me but anyway so
Marco:
anyway so so i have this weird gpu problem but the computer continues to work fine and like and i had to edit last week's episode of this show in this state we had tiff's laptop tiff has a early 2019 15 inch with the butterfly keyboard the very last 15 inch of the butterfly keyboard the new materials one
Marco:
So I transferred all the files to that as like, once I started glitching out, I figured like my laptop's about to die.
Marco:
So let me, let me move all my files over that I need to edit ATP just in case my laptop dies.
Marco:
Then I can edit it onto his computer.
Marco:
Just transferring the files over to her computer required me to type about five or six keystrokes on the butterfly keyboard.
Okay.
Marco:
and after typing those five years i'm like no no i can't i can't do this i can't go back there i'm just gonna do it on my computer even with a sixth of the screen having this giant stripe through it that's unusable oh my word so i would rather use my half broken computer
Marco:
to do work than to use a perfectly functioning butterfly keyboard macbook pro again so anyway so as the trip goes on the interference gets worse and worse and i start seeing a few little glitches where like the whole screen would have like a blip of color shifting or something and thought uh-oh
Marco:
It's no longer the stripe anymore that's causing the problem.
Marco:
Now the stripe is expanding and the whole screen is starting to have issues.
Marco:
Did you start to see glimpses of your future life?
John:
There's me as an old man.
John:
What am I doing?
Marco:
halfway through the flight home the entire screen scrambles and now it's totally unusable now you really have to see the matrix to use your computer yeah right unscramble it in your mind at least it waited till after i was on atp you know i was able to do the work on the computer the rest of the week and and you know use it occasionally so like that was fine i had i had posted about this on instagram stories and i had gotten an interesting tip from somebody
Marco:
My plan was to just bring it home and bring it to the Apple store and have them do the thing where they probably send it out and I'm without it for maybe a week, which I hate.
Marco:
And I'm so annoyed.
Marco:
This laptop, I just got this laptop a few months ago.
Marco:
It's brand new.
Marco:
It's the highest I want.
Marco:
Meanwhile, I'm also like, I'm hoping this is not a thing for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
I'm hoping this is not an actual issue that's widespread.
Marco:
I hope this is an isolated incident.
Marco:
I did hear from a couple of people when I posted on Instagram that they had similar problems, and so I'm a little concerned, but I'm going to set that aside for now.
Marco:
I hope this is not a thing.
Marco:
Please, Apple, don't let this product have a big defect.
Marco:
Please, for the love of God.
Marco:
Because otherwise, I love this computer.
Marco:
Besides this.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm thinking I've got to have this thing sent in and I'm going to be without it.
Marco:
And then I'm going to get it back and it's going to be serviced.
Marco:
John, you understand this completely.
Marco:
It's like somebody will have taken this apart and reassembled it.
Marco:
And what if it's not quite right after that?
Marco:
It's never the same again.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
What if it's a little unreliable?
John:
That is much less true of the unibodies, though, to be fair.
Marco:
that's yeah that's fair yeah like there's fewer like seams and everything right but like still like what if it's a little bit different you know like what what if it's like slightly unreliable forever like i don't what what if a surgeon left a sponge in there that's basically what you're worried about some little thing rattling around in there yeah like what it's just yeah what if there's like a rattle or or a new like you know pop or something who knows right like i'm like i just that sucks that it's brand new almost you know it's only a couple months old well
Marco:
I happened to have purchased this by walking into an Apple store and buying it on November 15th.
Marco:
November 15th is a special day for Apple retail this year.
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
Unbeknownst to me, at the time I was buying it on November 15th, November 15th was the first day of the Apple extended holiday return period.
Marco:
You jerk.
Casey:
Good for you.
Marco:
And the Apple extended holiday return period lasts until tomorrow.
Marco:
wow that's good timing on the trip like a day before i got home i had ordered myself a replacement by the way since this is just the high-end stock config that 2799 config other retailers stock it and it happened to be almost 300 cheaper because it was on sale at uh like everywhere like adorama bnh like all the all the retailers it was on sale so it was like
Marco:
$300 less money than what I had actually paid on November 15th.
Marco:
So I ordered myself a replacement.
Marco:
I got home.
Marco:
I did the transfer, transferred everything over.
Marco:
I put it back in the box.
Marco:
I brought it to the store.
Marco:
I'm like, let's return this, please.
Marco:
The screen doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
Were they like, what?
Marco:
yeah the guy was like all right and like because if you ever return anything in an apple store before it is one of the most nonchalant processes like you would expect if you're returning an almost three thousand dollar computer that's brand new and you say the screen doesn't work anymore like you would think they would like look at it maybe the guy didn't even open it up oh my word he was just like all right he's like do you want to order another one i'm like i already did he's like all right wow he took it back i got the money back on my car
Marco:
problem solved so anyway i i hope this is not a widespread issue and and thank you apple for your holiday extended return period so now i have another new 16 macbook pro that has never been opened and altered by anybody uh and and i hope this one does not have this issue i will say on the positive side on this trip i also brought only the airpods pro as my only headphones and
Marco:
And so I had to both edit ATP, which I knew there was like some latency with Bluetooth.
Marco:
So it's a little annoying to edit audio with Bluetooth latency, but it's possible.
Marco:
And, you know, so I was used to that.
Marco:
I really wanted to test out the AirPods Pro as my only headphones on air travel.
Marco:
And I was kicking myself as I listened earlier today to John Gruber do this exact same segment on the talk show this week, but I'm going to pretend like he didn't.
Marco:
So I brought the AirPods Pro instead of my Bose noise-canceling headphones, which I've only had for a few months that replaced my Sony noise-canceling headphones.
Marco:
And the Boses and the Sonys are really good noise-canceling over-ear Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
They're fantastic.
Marco:
You can't go wrong with either of them.
Marco:
The AirPods Pro, I thought, these are probably going to be not as good as those.
Marco:
But let's see how they go.
Marco:
And the AirPods Pro, as your only headphones for travel, are awesome.
Marco:
The noise cancellation for me, and this might depend on how they fit you, but the noise cancellation for me was pretty much exactly as good as the Bose and the Sony.
Marco:
They're all a little bit different in the way they sound with noise cancellation, but
Marco:
But I would say they're all pretty similar in the degree of noise cancellation that you get, like the severity or the strength of it.
Marco:
It's all pretty similar between them.
Marco:
So there is actually not much reason for me to bring the other headphones anymore because they were also comfortable for the entire flight.
Marco:
It was about three or four hours, and they were comfortable the whole time.
Marco:
The only downside to them is that they don't have enough battery life to make it through very long flights.
Marco:
um, the battery life of them when you're using them on a plane is something like four or five hours.
Marco:
And so if you're on like a six hour flight or something, you know, then you might have to take a break from them for a half hour, put them in the charger, you know, and then put them back in your reverse.
Marco:
And once, once they have enough charge to keep going, uh, so you might need like a short break of noise cancellation, uh, or you can just buy a second pair of them, keep them in your bag and still take up way less space in your bag.
Marco:
Cause that's the thing.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
All those noise-canceling headphones are huge.
Marco:
And they're all a pain in the butt with moving between multiple devices.
Marco:
The best ones for that are the Bose because they have multi-pairing and they'll announce through a voice in the ears which device they're connected to.
Marco:
So that's nice.
Marco:
The Sonys are garbage at dealing with multiple devices.
Marco:
But if you're frequently, like I do, move between a phone and a laptop on a flight, or especially a phone, a laptop, and an iPad, if you happen to have all three,
Marco:
That's always a very clunky thing with anything that's not based on Apple's AirPods chips, basically, like the W1 and H1 chips.
Marco:
And so to have this, have all those features... Oh, another thing.
Marco:
Tiff and I used to, a while back...
Marco:
if we were flying together somewhere and we would want to watch TV or movies that I brought on my laptop, we each had a pair of Sony noise-canceling headphones, which can be operated wireless or wired.
Marco:
And I would bring with me a wired headphone splitter cable, and then the two cables that would go to the headphones, and then whatever dongle I would need to plug in a headphone cable to a modern Apple device, to whatever I was playing it off of, and we could both listen to the same audio.
Marco:
On this trip, we both just had AirPods Pro and we used the new audio sharing feature in iOS 13 and had the movies playing to both of us using my iPad and that sharing feature.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Is that sharing feature on the Mac yet?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
That would be great if they ever do that.
Marco:
Apple, you know, remember the Mac, you know?
Marco:
So anyway, um, it was so, it's such a different thing to have, to go from two full size pairs of headphones between the two of us and like this, you know, big Y cable arrangement to try to listen to the same thing together.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
to two pairs of AirPod Pros that are so tiny that do everything wirelessly and switch between devices super easily and everything.
Marco:
It's like a revelation of going from that setup to this setup.
Marco:
And because headphones, like full-size headphones, are so large to pack in a travel bag, they take up a pretty big chunk of the backpack that you have on the plane with you.
Marco:
i don't think i'm ever going to use them again like i still love full-size headphones for my desk and for podcasting they're great for that but for bringing on a plane i don't think i have any reason to bring big headphones on a plane anymore because the airpods pro are just so damn good at that way better than i expected like i thought it would be a big compromise that the noise cancellation wouldn't be very good but
Marco:
it's not a compromise it's the real deal it's it is like first class in this way so if they fit you i would strongly recommend them if you're looking for airplane travel headphones because like you can use them everywhere you can use the exact same pair of headphones now almost everywhere the only thing i can't do with the airpods pro is podcast with them everything else i can do with them if i want to and that's pretty amazing and
Marco:
And then finally, the iPhone 11 camera system.
Marco:
Most vacations these days, we don't take big cameras anymore.
Marco:
We almost never use big cameras anymore for anything actually except like occasional nice pictures of our family here in the house at home or like taking with us for Christmas and we take nice pictures on Christmas.
Marco:
We had our iPhone 11s with us for this trip and we were like, you know, going to the beach and going in the pool and everything.
Marco:
And we just had our phones and the cameras are so good.
Marco:
We never felt for one moment, oh man, we wish we had our big camera with us right now so we could take, you know, X, Y, or Z picture because it would be way better.
Marco:
That moment never came.
Marco:
I think the iPhone 11 camera system has finally crossed a threshold where not only is it really good for a phone camera, it's just really good for a camera, period.
Marco:
And while big cameras will still always handily defeat it for resolution and like raw pixel gathering ability in different lighting conditions, if you have like a big sensor, there are things about the iPhone that are actually...
Marco:
not only like good enough in most of those ways, but are actually better than a lot of, or than all pro cameras.
Marco:
Like there were situations where I know if I had my big Sony camera with me, that I could try to take a low light picture, you know, crank the ISO up to like 25,000 and crank the aperture way down and try to get the, try to get like a low light picture.
Marco:
But the iPhone cameras night mode actually did a better job and actually produced better output than what I would have gotten out of that.
Marco:
Or I could have maybe gotten similar output out of the Sony with a ton of effort and a lot of like, you know, all right, try it this way and then pixel peep and see, oh, that's kind of crappy.
Marco:
Try it again, you know, re-expose it.
Marco:
And I didn't do any of that.
Marco:
And also the phone is water resistant and small and pocketable.
Marco:
And so we were able to like bring it...
Marco:
with us when we went to the beach and bring it with us when we went in the pool.
Marco:
We didn't submerge the phone, but we could hold it near the pool and operate it with wet hands and not worry about it because we knew it's designed for that.
Marco:
It was so good.
Marco:
And to do video and the HDR...
Marco:
The crazy pictures we were able to get that my regular camera wouldn't have the dynamic range to capture the screen on my laptop in the room as I edited this podcast from last week, while also not blowing out the ocean through the windows outside that's way brighter than it.
Marco:
It's just incredibly impressive camera performance to the point that it is actually better than good cameras in a lot of situations.
Marco:
And so this sounds like an Apple commercial besides my broken laptop, but like traveling with the AirPods Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro is just such an incredibly pleasant experience.
Marco:
And everything is so advanced and everything works so well in the hardware side of things.
Marco:
Software, I'm always going to have nitpicks, but the hardware side of things is amazing right now, especially AirPods and the iPhone cameras.
Marco:
Just incredible.
Marco:
It makes life simpler.
Marco:
Now, I'm going to downsize my camera gear because I almost never want to use it anymore.
Marco:
I'm going to downsize my headphone collection because I need almost none of these now.
Marco:
It allows me to simplify my life and that's really great.
Marco:
We have our nitpicks with Apple and things like software quality are still not where they should be, but the hardware stuff is solid.
Marco:
I'm very impressed by these products.
Casey:
I went to Disney recently, and we're going to talk about that at some point, maybe even later this evening.
Casey:
But one of the things I noticed was I did bring the big camera, and in certain occasions, I was glad I had it.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I could not agree with you more that for the most part, I was getting genuinely better photographs out of the iPhone than I was my Micro Four Thirds camera.
Casey:
Now, my Micro Four Thirds camera isn't as fancy as your Sony and isn't as nice as your Sony, and the glass may or may not be as nice, but... It isn't that different.
Marco:
In the way that you have to operate the camera, it's the same.
Marco:
In what it's good at and what it's not good at, it's about the same.
Marco:
You're dealing with the exact same issues with any mirrorless or SLR camera.
Marco:
The fancy ones, like the full-frame Sony's...
Marco:
they just have better specs.
Marco:
They can go to higher ISOs without a lot of noise, or they have more resolution, or the lenses are sharper.
Marco:
It's better specs, but it's all the same types of limitations, just like the numbers are a little bit different.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And the couple of occasions that I could think of when I really was glad I had the big camera with me, Aaron and Declan were on a ride where I could view them from a distance.
Casey:
And I have a zoom lens for my big camera that zooms quite a bit closer and works quite a bit better than the 2x telephoto lens on the iPhone.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I got some really great photos of the two of them on this ride because I had a zoom lens with me, like a proper zoom lens.
Casey:
And there was – actually, I'm not even sure I can think of any others.
Casey:
But there were one or two other occasions, I think, when I used the big camera and was happy to have had it.
Casey:
generally for 90% of the trip, particularly when I went to Galaxy's Edge at night, which is the new Star Wars land, I was so unbelievably happy to have had this iPhone 11 Pro with me.
Casey:
And I cannot say enough good things about the camera.
Casey:
I miss being able to have really good bokeh or bokeh.
Casey:
I can never get it right.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, everyone.
Marco:
But every way you say it is wrong.
Marco:
It's like ricotta cheese.
Marco:
It's like you're going to piss off somebody no matter what.
Casey:
Yeah, well, and a friend of the show, Will Haynes, tutored me on it, but it was like two months ago and I've already forgotten exactly what he said.
John:
But you forgot already, just like you forgot my middle name and how to pronounce affluent.
Casey:
Yeah, it's Charles.
Casey:
That's your middle name.
Marco:
Charles and affluent, right?
Casey:
Yeah, Charles and affluent.
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
Um, so anyways, so I, I, I miss having that really lovely background blur.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
Um, and the other thing I'm a little worried about is I tried to restrain myself with the ultra wide, but I'm a little worried that I'm gonna look back at the trip pictures from a few years, you know, a few years from now and be like, why is everything to store?
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
The ultra wide was brand new.
Casey:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Everything that has to do with computational photography, Apple is fairly far ahead of the big camera vendors.
John:
Anything that has to do with optical quality, obviously they can't compete because they don't have all the big glass.
John:
But you mentioned zoom, which is what I was thinking of because, again, physics and how much glass there is, you can't really get a good zoom out of it.
John:
The other one is – and this is actually kind of computational and I wonder how the iPhone deals with it, but it's related to zoom –
John:
catching fast moving things if you're trying to take action shots uh the computational part is sony cameras in particular especially the new ones are really good at finding the thing that's moving really quickly through your frame and grabbing focus quickly so you can fire off a couple of shots uh
John:
the iphone my impression at least based on the ui is that it takes a little bit longer to find the thing you want to focus on yeah you can tap on something but try doing that when you're trying to you know capture sports or kids running around or people crashing through the waves and the surf and stuff like it's that's an area where i don't think apple has concentrated too much mostly because without zoom you're not going to be doing that kind of action photography anyway like if you're two feet from the person then you know good luck getting that shot period right and if you're far away it's the motion is greatly diminished because it's all moving within this giant
John:
frame.
John:
So in a vacation photos with adults, there's probably not a lot of fast moving action, right?
John:
Maybe there were someone running down a beach towards you and that's pretty within the wheelhouse of an iPhone.
John:
But if you're trying to catch a bunch of kids in the surf or people playing a soccer game or
John:
race cars going around or a horse race or dogs running or something like that and you want pictures that are not sort of wide angle shots of just a bunch of dogs running around uh then yeah big cameras are going to win there but the but the computational photography is night mode there's no reason real cameras can't do better than that except that they're not as good as software like they don't have the software chops to make that happen they're they're behind apple right they they could put processors in close to as powerful as the one on the iphone for in their
John:
$3,000 cameras or whatever.
John:
And they could hire people to do all the math that Google and Apple and everybody are doing to make the nightmare shots, but they don't.
John:
That's why Margaret was talking about, yeah, you could do it, but you'd be sitting there sort of, you'd be in the computer yourself manually adjusting all the exposure and trying it and checking it out.
John:
um as for pixel peeping that i feel like it's the other area where even the iphone 11 camera falls down if you bring that thing on your big mac and in the monitor and look at it at native res you start seeing how it's denoising aggressively and you zoom in on the person's face and it's a little like you know you're not going to get a a nice crop of a thing and if you do a big print of it you might see that like it's there are still benefits if you care about things at that pixel level
Casey:
Overall, though, I was extraordinarily surprised how little I missed my big camera for most everything.
Casey:
And the other thing we haven't mentioned is that the iPhone, and some big cameras do this, but not many that I'm aware of, the iPhone has a GPS on it, and it has the ability to, by default, geotag every image you take.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think I'm extremely nerdy about this in a way pretty much nobody else in the world is, but I try my darndest to put geotags, you know, so put the location information in the metadata of every photograph I take, including in the big camera, which means I'm either using like...
Casey:
this Olympus really crummy app to track where the phone is and the timestamps of where the phone is and then correlate that with the pictures that were taken on the big camera and do their best job, which usually it does work to their credit, of like stamping, geotagging all the pictures on the big camera based on where the phone was.
Casey:
Or I'm going in after the fact, like days later and recreating in my mind, okay, I was standing right about here or I was roughly in Star Wars land at the very least when this picture was taken.
Casey:
And that's something that I like to do because occasionally I will search for photos based on where they happened, not necessarily a date or something like that.
Casey:
And Google Photos is really good about this.
Casey:
And I haven't really used Apple Photos for that, but maybe Apple does just as good a job.
Casey:
But one way or another, all of this is to say that the iPhone does that automatically for free every time I take a picture.
Casey:
And even video, I believe, at geotags, which is incredible and so nice because then it's one less thing I have to worry about.
Casey:
And also...
Casey:
I'm not one to really do a lot of edits to my pictures.
Casey:
The most I'll ever really do is white balance.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that's right.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's the best approach.
Casey:
But that's just the way I work.
Casey:
And I don't have a lot of interest in trying to tweak the pictures in my big camera to be just right.
Casey:
And more often than not, to my eye, what comes out of the iPhone is just right.
Casey:
And that is also extremely freeing and really lovely.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
It is not yet an outright replacement for my big camera, but to, to your point, Marco, it's becoming that just a couple of years ago with my iPhone 10, if I left the house for like a family event, like a birthday or something like that, without the big camera, I was really upset with myself, like really unnecessarily upset with myself and
Casey:
Now, I'll just be like, yeah, well, that stinks.
Casey:
Like, whatever.
Casey:
No big deal.
Marco:
The geotagging, that's one part of why, to me, using a standalone camera now feels incredibly clunky.
Marco:
Another thing is like,
Marco:
The standalone camera probably doesn't have exactly the right time set.
Marco:
Like, it might have, like, a slightly wrong clock.
Marco:
Or maybe you never changed it for daily saving time or something.
Marco:
And so, like, you'll import your pictures and there'll be an hour off as they interleave into your photo library with the iPhone pictures you also took.
Marco:
Or it'll be, like, you change your battery and the date will reset and it'll be, like, 1970 or whatever.
Yeah.
Marco:
like there that's that kind of stuff happens the standalone cameras and also just now like maybe i'm just getting lazier but having to import photos off of an sd card now feels like getting your film developed felt when digital first came out like like when digital cameras first came out you were like this is the most amazing thing in the world getting your film developed seems barbaric
Marco:
Now, having to import your pictures off the camera feels that same level of barbarism to me.
Marco:
It's like I can't believe I have to take this card out of this camera, plug it into a computer somehow, through a dongle maybe if it's a laptop,
Marco:
Or, you know, connected with a cable and, like, yeah, there's Wi-Fi transfer.
Marco:
It always sucks and rarely works and it's slow as hell.
Marco:
Like, that whole process is so clunky now that I hardly ever actually want to do it.
Marco:
And the cameras on the phones are so good.
Marco:
Yeah, you're right that, like, if you need high resolution, if you're going to look at it on a really big screen, yeah, you do start to see the edges.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Most of the time, I don't have those needs.
Marco:
And the convenience is so high.
Marco:
And you get all these benefits.
Marco:
Things like live photos.
Marco:
You get super easy.
Marco:
You never mis-expose it or it's really hard to mis-focus it.
Marco:
You get all the conveniences of the AI stuff and the auto-correction.
Marco:
And yeah, you know what?
Marco:
The rendered JPEGs by default are usually pretty good.
Marco:
They're usually well white-balanced and usually well-exposed and well-tone mapped and everything.
Marco:
hey you know what it's actually really really good with really little effort that I think for me has finally crossed the line where I no longer care about the benefits that a big camera gets me almost ever there's a couple times a year where I care and even then those are decreasing and there are newer cameras now like I no longer have the latest and greatest I think I'm at least one if not two model years behind now
Marco:
And I don't care.
Marco:
I have no desire to upgrade.
Marco:
And if my cameras broke or got stolen tomorrow, I don't think I'd replace them.
Marco:
That's how little I'm using them because the phone is just so good now.
Marco:
And the conveniences of it are so high compared to doing anything with a photo taken by a standalone camera.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Sony, Olympus, and Canon.
Marco:
No, just kidding.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Away, and Tech Meme Ride Home.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they did it
Marco:
so casey you also you just mentioned a few minutes ago you went to disney yes uh i've been i've had this in the show notes pretty much since we came back and i'm gonna try to keep it brief in part because i forgot all the things i wanted to talk about but in part because we're running a little long you gotta take notes yeah
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
The problem is, I thought we were, and it's not your guys' fault.
Casey:
I hope I'm not implying or stating that it's your fault.
Casey:
It's just that we had other things to talk about.
Casey:
We really honestly did.
Casey:
And so it just kept getting pushed.
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
But we went for Declan's fifth birthday at the end of October.
Casey:
We were there from the 23rd through the 30th.
Casey:
And I've been asked somewhat consistently, you know, hey, I'm considering a Disney vacation.
Casey:
Like, what did you learn?
Casey:
What did you think?
Casey:
What should I do?
Casey:
Et cetera.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I wanted to very quickly, very, very quickly hit a few quick items that I think were interesting that I had either learned or done differently during this trip.
Casey:
And if you would like to know more, we can either, you know, ask me via Twitter or something and I'll either reply there.
Casey:
Maybe I'll talk about something in detail if there's that much interest on another show.
Casey:
But first and foremost...
Casey:
It was hilarious to me.
Casey:
I want to get the negative out of the way first.
Casey:
It was hilarious to me that while I was there, I would open up the Disney Parks app.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it's called.
Casey:
And the splash screen at the bottom would say, you know, the AT&T, the official wireless sponsor of Disney or something like that.
Casey:
And I cannot tell you how frigging terrible AT&T is there.
Casey:
It was like going back to like 2009, 2010.
Casey:
It wasn't as bad as like 2007, 2008, whatever it was when the iPhone first came out, when it was effectively useless.
Casey:
But oh gosh, it was rough.
Casey:
And then in the hotels, which have free Wi-Fi, and actually I think a lot of the park did as well, but anyways, the hotels, they're free Wi-Fi.
Casey:
I got to tell you, it turns out that when most people are at the hotel relaxing after their long day at the parks and the Florida sun, I'll give you one guess what they're all doing.
Casey:
They're messing around with their phones, doing stuff on the Internet.
Casey:
And so I was ecstatic.
Casey:
I was ecstatic if I could get five megabits per second down in the hotel room over the Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And this is why a little while ago, I don't think this bled too much into the show, but a little while ago I was asking about alternatives.
Casey:
You know, this is before I bought the iMac Pro.
Casey:
alternatives for plex servers and everyone was like oh just use infuse or oh just do this or just do that it's great it's great it's great but one of the things that not a lot of people realize is there are times that i will stream movies tv whatever from my house to a place with a really crummy internet connection and all week when we were at disney when the kids were in bed and we couldn't really go anywhere because what are we going to do leave the kids by themselves we would stay and we would watch movies or tv shows or whatever oftentimes from plex and
Casey:
It was important that I had Plex running on hardware that was fast enough to transcode stuff, because if I tried to run a 1080p movie through two megabits per second, which I often saw, it's just never going to work.
Casey:
And so that really stank and was frustrating.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
On to the good.
Casey:
First of all, I should state for the record, I love Disney.
Casey:
I enjoy Disney like films and properties and things like that.
Casey:
But Disney World, I just adore.
Casey:
I honeymooned there.
Casey:
I surprised Erin for her 30th there.
Casey:
I love Disney.
Casey:
And not everyone does.
Casey:
And that's okay.
Casey:
I kind of think if you haven't tried it, that you should try it.
Casey:
Even those of you who say that on paper, this is everything I hate, Marco.
Casey:
you're probably right you're probably right and i bet you marco you there's a pretty good shot you would hate it but really selling it i do think it is well i but i do think it's worth experiencing at least once and marco you have the advantage of the only person whose schedule gets ruined by you going at a time when no one else is there is adam because the rule of thumb is if you go when the kids are in school it's comparatively empty and if you go when the kids are out of school good luck
Casey:
So we were there at the end of October, which ran us into a little bit of the Halloween push.
Casey:
But generally speaking, it was not terribly busy, which was great as compared to the summers that we had gone for our anniversary and for her birthday.
Casey:
A couple of quick things that I wanted to bring up.
Casey:
We used, for the very first time, David's Vacation Club Rentals, and I will put a link in the show notes to this.
Casey:
This alone could take up 40 minutes of conversation, but the extraordinarily cut-down version is Disney has a timeshare program, and you can...
Casey:
take you rent a timeshare room just like any other hotel room but it's a fortune because they're typically bigger they have full kitchens etc etc or some of them have full kitchens anyway uh but i guess the way and the details don't really matter but the general gist of it is if you are a timeshare member and you get your allotment of points which is i guess their currency or what have you and you don't use them in a year i guess you lose them so you've paid a whole pile of money and you get nothing out of it
Casey:
Maybe you couldn't go on vacation that year for whatever reason.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
So there's third party brokers that if Marco is a vacation club owner, as they call them, you know, that he's Marco's in the timeshare program, but he can't go anywhere this year.
Casey:
Um, and I do want to go, but I am not a timeshare owner.
Casey:
Marco can put his points up for, I don't know, bid or whatever, um,
Casey:
put them up for somebody else to buy, and he'll have a relationship with this third-party broker.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I will go to the same third-party broker and say, I would like points so I could stay in a room, and they will arbitrate that whole process.
Casey:
It sounded kind of shady when I was looking at it, but I had heard a lot of people say that it works and it works great.
Casey:
And so what ended up happening was we were able to get a one-bedroom, I don't know if it was really a suite, but a one-bedroom room
Casey:
at uh the bay lake tower which if you're familiar with disney world is the uh vacation club resort that is adjacent to the contemporary the contemporary being the um the a-frame building that the monorail literally drives through so anyway so we got a one bedroom uh room at the bay lake tower adjacent to the contemporary for i did look this up for approximately half the cost it would have been if i just went to disney and said i would like that exact same room please
Casey:
So definitely recommend one of the two or three brokers we happen to use.
Casey:
I believe it's called David's Vacation Club Rentals.
Casey:
I promise I'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But I really recommend it.
Casey:
It seems shady as anything, but they're all Canadian.
Casey:
And as it turns out, they're super nice.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
And it worked out real well.
Casey:
Another thing to think about is although we did get the Disney meal plan – again, this is like a four-hour conversation.
Casey:
I'm cutting into four minutes or less.
Casey:
The Disney meal plan being like a cruise from my understanding where you pay a whole pile of money in advance and then you can eat quote-unquote for free.
Casey:
Gratuity is not included, but one alcoholic drink per meal is included.
Casey:
I personally like this because then I'm not nickel and diming myself the entire week that we're there.
Casey:
Not everyone will feel the same way.
Casey:
I do think if I didn't do the meal plan, we probably would have saved a little bit of money.
Casey:
But when you're talking about a Disney vacation, as John well knows, you're talking about just flushing piles of money down the drain.
Casey:
And so is saving a little bit really that big a deal?
Casey:
Probably not.
Casey:
All that said, if you want to save a little money on groceries and stuff or on food and stuff, you can get grocery delivery, which is not new to anyone in a metropolitan area.
Casey:
And it's not even that new to me here in Podunk, Richmond.
Casey:
But there are companies that are specifically oriented around delivering groceries to Disney hotels.
Casey:
And if you have a full kitchen in your fancy pants timeshare,
Casey:
That works out really well.
Casey:
So we did grocery delivery and we got basically breakfast food delivered to us and then bread and peanut butter so the kids could have sandwiches in the park if they wanted for lunch.
Casey:
And that was super convenient.
Casey:
You should check that out.
Casey:
And as it turns out, they'll deliver the food to you to the hotel before you even arrive.
Casey:
We were literally in the air somewhere between Virginia and Florida when our food arrived at the hotel and they put it in the refrigerator and a freezer at the hotel and it works out real well.
Casey:
Another thing is stroller rental.
Casey:
You can rent from third parties to save yourself a whole pile of money.
Casey:
One of the not so great experiences or parts of our Disney trip was that Michaela, who is turning to within a couple of days of this being aired, Michaela refused to ride in the stroller.
Casey:
Which was, oh, so super delightful.
Casey:
Just walk all day, right?
Casey:
She just wanted to walk her teeny, teeny little legs all day long.
Casey:
She won't get tired.
John:
That'll be fine.
Casey:
No, she won't get tired and cranky and upset at all.
Casey:
And she's not overwhelmed by all this at all.
Casey:
So that was a little bit delightful.
Casey:
But we did have a very nice side-by-side stroller that we rented for not all that much money, all told.
Casey:
But we didn't barely use it because of Michaela.
Casey:
So that was great.
Casey:
But you can rent a stroller from someone other than Disney, and they're much nicer, etc., etc.
Casey:
And all told, again, whether or not you're into Disney, this may not be the sort of thing you like.
Casey:
And if you're really, really, really turned off by crowds of any size, maybe this isn't going to be a thing you like.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
From the moment we gave the luggage to the airport in Richmond, it was basically a magical experience, Michaela's insistence on walking notwithstanding, until we arrived back in Richmond.
Casey:
We got to Richmond.
Casey:
We got to the airport.
Casey:
We gave them our luggage, which had been pre-tagged by us with the special tags that Disney sends you.
Casey:
The next time I saw our luggage was in our hotel room after we had gone into the park that very first day.
Casey:
Additionally, when we arrived in Orlando, we walked down to the special area.
Casey:
Got on what they call the Magical Express, which is to say a series of coach buses that will take you directly to your resort.
Casey:
You check into your resort.
Casey:
They say, okay, have fun.
Casey:
And then you go have fun.
Casey:
And by the time you're back from having fun, your luggage is in your room.
Casey:
It's not down at the front desk.
Casey:
It's not with the bellhop.
Casey:
It's in your room.
Casey:
And then the entire week, like everything is taken care of.
Casey:
Yes, you are paying an obscene amount of money for it.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that.
Casey:
Yes, it is busy and crowded and Florida is so hot and so wet.
Casey:
It is absurd, even in late October.
Casey:
But all told, it was amazing.
Casey:
And for me, I would have paid all of the money to see Declan's face when he saw Mickey Mouse at the little like meet and greet dinner that we did where, you know, they have the people dressed up as the characters walking around the restaurant saying hi to all the tables.
Casey:
I'm getting misty-eyed just thinking about how wide that little boy smile was and how unbelievably excited he was to meet Mickey Mouse and how excited he was to show Mickey Mouse his little stuffed animal Mickey Mouse that he had carried with him for most of the trip.
Casey:
It is...
Casey:
especially at about five years old and maybe Adam is too old.
Casey:
And certainly John, your kids are way too old for this kind of experience, but for, for Declan to see that and to believe in his heart that he was seeing the real Mickey mouse was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's exactly unique to Disney, but there's something magical about the way it happens at Disney that I can't recommend enough.
Casey:
And I,
Casey:
I could give you a million and ten reasons why Disney World is the worst place on earth, but I can give you 10 million and 500 trillion reasons why it's one of my favorite places in the world.
Casey:
And I love it so much.
Casey:
And I hope even those of you who think you wouldn't enjoy it, I hope that maybe you give it a try.
Casey:
Maybe not a full week, maybe only go for two or three nights or something like that, but I hope you give it a try at some point in your lives, especially if you have children in your life, because it is so, so cool.
John:
You're going to be sad for another reason when you realize Declan's not going to remember that.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But you will.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
John:
You'll remember it, and you're the one who paid for the vacation, so that's what's important.
Casey:
No, you're exactly right.
Casey:
And in some ways, that moment, that memory was for me.
Casey:
It was for him at the time, but it's for me now.
Casey:
And for me, it was worth every penny.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Casey:
It's so incredible, and I'm so lucky that we were able to do it.
Casey:
And I'm so thankful to the people that listen to the show, that bought Vignette, that bought Front and Center.
Casey:
I almost said Front to Back.
Casey:
I bought Front and Center.
Casey:
Front to Back by John Craig.
Casey:
But anyways, I'm so thankful for everyone that listens to the show and has ever bought anything from a sponsor and used our coupon code or whatever.
Casey:
So much of that was possible because of all of you listeners and because of the two of you gentlemen that I'm speaking to right now.
Casey:
And I'm so thankful for it.
Casey:
It was such an amazing trip.
Casey:
It's funny because in the heat of the trip when Michaela was screaming and yelling and refusing to ride in the stroller, I'm not sure I was as happy as I reflect on it now.
Casey:
But if nothing else, I have the rosiest of rose-colored glasses.
John:
Yeah, I remember being angry at my parents because they took me to Disney when I was around that age.
John:
And then later in life, my friends would be going there and we never went.
John:
And I was like, why don't you ever take us to Disney?
John:
They're like, we took you to Disney.
John:
I'm like, yeah, but I don't remember that one.
John:
It doesn't count.
John:
You need to take me again when I'm old enough to remember.
John:
We probably waited a little bit too long to take our kids.
John:
But when we took them, my daughter was just barely still young enough to enjoy the character dinners.
John:
And I'm glad that we got that in because now they'd be super jaded about the whole thing, obviously.
John:
It's too cool for school teens or tweens.
Casey:
I almost wonder, I have no experience with this, but I almost wonder if there's a real golden time that I suspect Adam is probably reaching the end of in the next year or two.
Casey:
Maybe he's already there, I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Reaching the end of if not already there.
Casey:
And then I think there's like a dark age, I suspect, when it's they probably wouldn't enjoy, you know, they being, you know, the royal child would probably not enjoy it.
Casey:
But then like I went the last time I went before my honeymoon was right after my freshman year of college.
Casey:
And I loved it.
Casey:
Uh, so I don't know if maybe I'm just a loser.
John:
You're a kid.
John:
You're a kid at heart.
John:
I think, I think, I think kids of all ages actually do enjoy it, but tweens and teens are going to moan about it the whole time because enjoying it would be uncool.
John:
Right.
John:
But I really do think that kids of any age and adults of any age can go there and enjoy it.
John:
And especially kids, despite how much they moan, they will just got fun rides and it's a cool place to be.
John:
And you're not in school.
John:
Like really, it doesn't take much to be enjoyable for kids.
Yeah.
Casey:
You should try it, Marco.
Casey:
I know it's probably not something you're even mildly enthusiastic about, but I really do believe that it's worth trying once.
Casey:
And if you hate it, you hate it.
Casey:
And you have to go in understanding what you're getting into.
Casey:
And I know you're not going to listen to me, but I really think you should try it once.
John:
He goes to Vegas all the time, which is so much worse.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
It's so – well, I don't know if worse is the right word.
Casey:
It's less of the happiest place on earth, I can tell you that.
Casey:
Well, that's very true.
John:
More people are unhappy in Vegas than are unhappy in Disney.
Well –
Casey:
hmm i don't know man i haven't been to vegas in a couple of years but you gotta you gotta remember the the alcoholics and the gambling addicts they're much more of them in vegas than in disney yeah but disney has a lot of really upset children yeah but even they're still having fun because they're gonna get candy later right generally speaking they're having fun and plus you forget how amazing it is not to be the parent of an upset child to look over there and be like ha ha that's not me yeah
John:
I didn't see too many upset children on our trip that we took with our kids.
John:
I don't remember seeing screaming children.
John:
Or maybe I have screaming children blindness from being a parent.
John:
I don't know.